May 2001

Academic Calendar Changes to Lengthen Certain Breaks By Robin Herron At its April meeting, the Faculty Senate passed two motions that will affect the academic calendar. The motions were proposed by the Academic Policies Committee to address the high absenteeism that occurs before Thanksgiving and the need for sufficient time to provide services to students between fall and spring semesters. The first motion creates a new recess day on the Wednesday preceding Thanksgiving Day by eliminating the Tuesday of the existing Columbus Day recess. This change will take effect in 2002. Being the busiest travel day of the year, the day before Thanksgiving has long resulted in high absenteeism, and in recent years, the governor has closed state offices beginning at noon that day. A major concern was to avoid reducing instructional time. The Academic Policies Committee looked at many options before proposing its solution, according to Esther Elstun, the committee chair and professor in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages. As a result of the change, during the week of the Columbus Day recess, Monday classes will now meet on Tuesday. "We're never going to satisfy everyone," Elstun admitted, "but we satisfied as many as we could here." The second motion provides an exception to the current policy that establishes the start date for spring semester. In the future, when Jan. 1 falls on a Saturday, Sunday, or Monday, the spring semester that year will begin on the fourth Monday in January (one week after Martin Luther King Jr. Day). The semester's classes will be followed by two reading days on Monday and Tuesday, and final exams will begin at 4:30 p.m. on that Tuesday. This motion was proposed so that university administrative offices have at least 10 working days to provide essential services to students in the transition from fall semester to spring semester. This year, offices such as the Registrar, Admissions, Financial Aid, and Student Accounts had only eight days to make the transition, which they found was not enough time to resolve issues related to billing, grades, and student suspensions and probations, and other status situations. No change to the existing three-year calendar is required; the new policy does not need to be implemented until 2005.