Fall break: Could it actually happen?

Ask any IU student if he or she wants a fall break, and nine out of 10 respond with an emphatic yes, said IU Student Association President Peter SerVaas at Tuesday’s Bloomington Faculty Council meeting.

After all, Purdue University has a fall break, as does IU-Purdue University Indianapolis. The long haul from the end of August to Thanksgiving break is a grinding marathon for all involved.

But adding two days of vacation in mid-October will take more than an IUSA task force and invocations of Purdue luxury.

It will take the “political will of the BFC” to craft a calendar that would “set in motion hundreds, if not thousands of changes in the routine procedures and practices throughout the campus,” said Tom Gieryn, vice provost for faculty and academic affairs and chairman of BFC’s the Calendar Committee.

“Do we want to really get started on that process?” Gieryn asked the council. “Is it worth the candle?”

It must be. Provost Karen Hanson convened the calendar committee last November and asked it to examine making Labor Day a Bloomington campus holiday and instituting a fall break.

The calendar committee released its proposal to revise the campus calendar and opened the council floor for discussion on the proposal’s four recommendations, one of which was a two-day, mid-October fall break.

Proposal to revise IUB campus calendar

The new calendar would take effect in fall 2011 if approved by the Bloomington Faculty Council and campus administrators this spring.

-Labor Day becomes a University holiday

-Two-day fall break instituted for the Monday and Tuesday of the seventh academic week (mid-October)

-Fall classes start three weekdays earlier, on the Wednesday of Welcome Week

-Summer Sessions shortened from 14 total weeks to 12 total weeks, with individual departments deciding the duration of courses.

Calendar committee chairman Tom Gieryn listed major concerns and questions about the proposal at Tuesday’s BFC meeting.

SUPPORT FOR PROPOSAL

Labor Day a must

No one on the council objected to making Labor Day a University holiday.

“It is incongruous for a federal holiday not to be celebrated,” Gieryn said. “It’s a family gathering; it punctuates the end of the summer; most of our peer institutions observe Labor Day — we seem to be out-of-synch with them.”

Presently, IU support staff do not work on Labor Day, but faculty must work and classes meet.

Students, faculty need a breather

The council recognized the psychological value in a mid-term break.

Whereas spring semester has a full-week break after nine weeks, the fall semester currently has no break until more than 12 weeks in.

“For me, it’s really about the rhythm of the year,” Dean of Students Pete Goldsmith said. “It’s a very, very long run to go from August to November. We think that for everybody’s mental health, it might be useful to have those couple of days off.”

Boosting enthusiasm for summer sessions

The proposal would allow departments to determine the length of summer courses — two, four, six, eight, 10 or 12 weeks — rather than the current summer sessions schedule that dictates a six-week Session I and eight-week Session II.

“Because the summer sessions are so long ... they bleed too much into summer research time, and most faculty refuse to teach them,” said Diane Reilly, a College of Arts and Sciences representative on the BFC Calendar Committee.

She said by giving departments more freedom to design summer sessions and even limit summer courses to four or eight weeks, top research faculty would be more inclined to teach the summer courses because they could still meet their research goals.

Syncing with IUPUI

One major argument in favor of adding a fall break to IU-Bloomington’s academic calendar is that IUPUI has already accomplished the feat.

The IUPUI faculty council approved an October fall break for its campus, beginning in fall 2010. A priority for the calendar committee is to better align the academic schedules of IUPUI and IU-Bloomington.

CRITIQUES OF PROPOSAL

Student “mischief” during breaks

A critique of the proposal is that a Labor Day break (a three-day weekend) and fall break (a four-day weekend) would create more opportunities for “mischief” — namely, alcohol-based partying. One respondent said, “the new fall break could become the second world’s greatest college weekend.”

Cutting classroom time

Although the proposal does not decrease the number of instructional days — the three break days are balanced by starting fall classes three days earlier — there is the perception by faculty that adding vacation days will lower student and professor interaction.

One council member shared his experience at a different university that tried a two-day, Monday and Tuesday October break.

“Attendance plummeted that week — the Wednesday, the Thursday and the Friday,” he said. “It essentially became a full-week break.”

Less time between move-in and classes

Students would move in the weekend before classes start on Wednesday, allowing only two or three days for traditional Welcome Week activities and orientation programs. The shortened transition time would be especially problematic for international students and graduate students who have more pre-semester meetings than undergraduates.

“Broken Weeks”

These are school weeks that are not five days. The new calendar would create three additional broken weeks in the fall semester in addition to Thanksgiving week.

Broken weeks are most problematic for lab courses in chemistry, physics and biology because the labs are set up to facilitate the same experiment all five days of the week.

“It’s really difficult for us to teach the labs any other way than to teach the same lab Monday through Friday,” said Randy Arnold, a member of the chemistry department and the non-tenure track researchers representative on the council.

“Bureaucratic inertia”

The new calendar would implicate hundreds of department deadlines that would need to be tweaked. Gieryn cited a few: Drop/Add, Waitlist, Financial Aid forms, fee refunds and the plethora of IU Bursar and IU Registrar scheduled items. Intensive Freshman Seminars would be affected, as would global language training institutes, New Student Orientation, GROUPS programs and summer music clinics at Jacobs School of Music.