When, in the fall of 2009, Harvard students take their final exams before winter recess, Princeton students will be the only undergraduates enrolled at one of the country's top institutions of higher education who will return home with the end of the semester still looming more than a month in the future. While some may take pride in the unique academic calendar the faculty recently decided to retain, there are several issues that must be addressed regarding both the calendar itself and how decisions about the calendar have been made.
As this newspaper has previously stated, there are multiple advantages to be gained from reforming the University's academic calendar. The rejected proposals have included schedules that would, in addition to placing fall term exams before winter recess to avoid undue stress over the holiday, provide a full week of vacation at Thanksgiving and eliminate classes during midterms. Furthermore, reforming the calendar would place Princeton students seeking summer educational and employment opportunities in a better place to compete for positions that are arranged for college students who end their academic year earlier.
Given these advantages to reforming the calendar, it is lamentable that the administration has opted for the status quo without providing a clear explanation for how this decision was made and how student opinion influenced the choice. The USG conducted a referendum last April in which the plurality of students selected a calendar calling for final exams before an extended five-week winter break. A full statistical analysis of this referendum, including indications of students' second-choice calendars, has not been made publicly available. The USG should take the steps necessary to make this data widely available in order to facilitate a continued dialogue on this subject.
In the absence of this data, however, students still deserve to be made aware of whether any information regarding their opinions was provided to faculty members prior to their voting on calendar options. They also deserve to know whether proposals to reform the calendar were rejected, despite clear student opinion, for reasons other than the educational benefits to the undergraduate population, such as faculty members not wanting to start teaching before their children start the new academic year in Princeton Regional Schools. Such conclusions may only be reached once the administration has released a full account of the information prior to voting on calendar options and on the procedures that governed the voting process. This information should be provided to the student body as quickly and in as detailed a format as possible.
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