A column published in the Guardian this week mourns the death of office hours—scheduled times when professors meet with students in person. Devi Sridhar, a professor at Oxford, remembers 2005: students came to her door, sat down, talked face to face. She uses this specific moment to argue that in-person interaction was the standard before digital communication became dominant, making her nostalgia about that era particularly influential. Now they send emails at midnight. She frames this shift as damage. The phone, even without social media, has made us “always on,” she writes. The old way was better. Synchronous. Present. Human.
I read this and I thought about a seminar room in Utrecht, June 2017. I should clarify that I am Deaf, which is why the following experience matters to my argument about communication access. A lecturer spoke for ninety minutes. I sat in the second row with a sign language interpreter beside me. The interpreter was good. But the lecturer moved while talking, turned to the whiteboard, turned back, made a joke I caught three seconds after everyone else laughed. The room was synchronous. I was not in it.
That room is the gold standard Sridhar is defending. The one where you show up, sit down, and communicate in real time. She describes it as though real time were neutral ground, as though presence were a condition everyone meets equally. It isn’t. It never was.
Here is what actually happened when universities moved communication onto screens. For the first time, I could read a message, think about it, and respond in my own time. No lag. No interpreter. No guessing what someone said from the shape of their mouth. An email does not turn away from you mid-sentence. A message thread does not require you to process speech in a language your body does not receive. The shift Sridhar calls a loss was, for me, the first time I arrived at the same moment as everyone else.
I am not romanticising email. I know what inbox overload feels like. I know the 2am message from a supervisor that sits in your chest like a stone. But the discomfort Sridhar describes — the feeling of being always reachable, always expected to respond — is a specific discomfort. It belongs to people for whom the old system worked. For those of us the old system locked out, the “always on” era was the door opening.
William Stokoe, an American linguist, proved in 1960 that American Sign Language was a complete language with its own grammar. This discovery was revolutionary because it challenged the widespread belief that signing was not a real language. Before that, most hearing educators treated signing as broken English performed with hands. The ban held for over a century, from the 1880 Milan conference onward. At that conference, a global gathering of hearing educators voted to remove sign language from schools for the Deaf, requiring that Deaf children learn through spoken language and lip-reading alone. This decision shaped Deaf education globally for generations. Deaf children were forced into oral education, made to lip-read and speak, punished for signing. The logic was simple: the synchronous hearing world was the real world, and you had to meet it on its terms or not at all. Sridhar’s nostalgia carries the same shape. Not the same cruelty. The same shape.
She writes that digital messaging “generates feelings of exclusion or rejection.” I believe her. I also know that a seminar room with no interpreter generates those feelings too, and nobody writes a column about it in a national newspaper.
Christine Sun Kim is a Deaf artist and sound artist whose work explores how Deaf people engage with sound and acoustics in unexpected ways. Her work is relevant to this argument because it challenges assumptions about whose experiences matter in shared spaces. In 2013, she made a piece called The Enchanting Music of Sign Language. She talked about how she had been taught that sound did not belong to her. Then she took it. She used musical notation to score social dynamics—the way a hearing person raises their voice to end a conversation, the way volume functions as power. What she showed was that synchronous communication is not just a format; it is a power structure. Who controls the tempo controls the room.
Office hours control the tempo. The professor sets the time. The student arrives. The exchange happens in spoken language, at spoken-language speed. If you process differently, if you communicate in a different modality, if you need three seconds of lag that the social contract of face-to-face conversation does not permit — you are not there. You are going through the motions.
I sat in a procurement meeting in Rotterdam, November 2018. A project manager explained a new wayfinding system for a public building. Every sign was text-based. I asked about visual icons. He said icons were “add-ons.” I asked what the main system was. He said: “speech and text.” I asked who decided speech came first. He looked at me like I had asked why the sky was blue.
That look is the thing Sridhar’s column cannot see. The assumption that synchronous spoken exchange is the default, and everything else is a deviation from it. Asynchronous messaging is not a corruption of communication. It is a different architecture. One that happens to work for people the old architecture forgot.
I want to be fair. Sridhar is right that something real is lost when students never sit across from a teacher and talk. Presence matters. The body in the room matters. I would never deny that. I have felt it — in the rare rooms where everyone signs, where the lag disappears, where I am not translating but thinking. Those rooms are extraordinary.
They are also rooms I had to build myself. Nobody handed them to me. The university system never built them as standard. What the university system did build, starting in the 2010s, was email, then messaging platforms, then asynchronous discussion boards. Not for me. For efficiency, for scale, for administrative convenience. But the effect was that I could finally join the conversation without asking permission to join it differently.
Real Life Magazine published a piece on industry standards that named this precisely: the standard becomes more real than the thing it was supposed to measure. “Accessible” office hours that require you to book an interpreter two weeks in advance, fill out a form, wait for approval, then show up and hope the interpreter understood your field’s vocabulary. The standard was met. The person was not.
Sridhar’s 2005 office is a room I was never in. Not because I didn’t want to be. Because the room was built for one kind of body and one kind of language, and when I showed up, the room didn’t change — I did.
The fire alarm in my fourth-grade classroom was synchronous too.