Where is Pope Gregory when you need him?
This University has a calendar problem. We start later than almost every other university in the country, we end later, and our fall term exams are separated from the end of classes by a month and several major holidays. To be clear, let's list just some of the problems.
Anyone who thinks they'll remember the French literary subjunctive or how to balance a redox reaction after winter break has a superlative faculty for information retention for which I heartily congratulate them. The rest of us mortals must either review the information frequently between Christmas, Chanukah and New Year's or cram during reading period. (I realize that not every undergraduate at this university celebrates even two of the above three, but most of us do.) Cramming, as the education theorists love to tell us, is not the proper way to facilitate long-term memory. And I'm not keen on nipping back to the books for a little review between shots of eggnog and rocking around the Festivus Bush. Nor do I think it likely to happen.
We start later than almost every other university. There is little point to staying out of session when friends are already at other universities and Princeton friends all live out of town. What exactly does the administration think we do in the two to three weeks after Yale, U.VA. and Georgetown return to classes? We also end later than almost every other school. Because, foreign language institutes and the like tend to base their schedules on the average schedule, with some leeway allowed, Princeton students often find themselves rushed straight from spring finals to summer jobs with scarcely any time to rest. If one stays for Reunions the problem is only compounded.
There are definite advantages to our system: the bizarre non-month of January, when one can drop in on other colleges - Harvard soon to be among them - and catch up with friends while arousing barely smothered jealousy. But this is not so much because our year is off-kilter as because we have short terms: 12-week semesters, as opposed to 14 or higher at other schools. Many students and faculty quite reasonably want to keep our system, as it allows for more unstructured time. We also get off early for winter break, which is useful because - for the majority of us who celebrate Christmas, and the rest of you who come to our parties - it leaves a healthy buffer between the end of classes and one of the two main events of the season. Last year a friend of mine from Yale had an econ final at dusk on the Friday night before a Tuesday Christmas. I wouldn't want that refined bit of torture transplanted here.
But while he had to keep studying right up to the last night of the very week before one of the most popular holidays of the year, we have to keep studying right through the whole gamut of celebrations at the end of December or cram during reading period. Plus, there's the added complication of worrying about impending finals when one would much rather be trimming the tree, ringing in the New Year or just calling on friends and relatives. Sorry, Mariah Carey: All I want for Christmas is an A.
Previous plans to reform the calendar have stalled largely because they focus on give-and-takes: Drop Fall Break to get early exams, or push them up to Christmas Eve and keep reading period, or drop reading period and lengthen Thanksgiving... (There is, by the way, an argument to be made that reading period could be considerably shortened if our exams followed close on the heels of our last class. Who needs a full 10 days to review if we were doing these problems sets just yesterday?)
So I would suggest that instead of reforming the calendar we just shunt the thing. Focus on position, not composition: The calendar is in the right shape, it's merely in the wrong place. There's no need to fiddle with its internals if one simply moves the end points. Start school in late August - like everyone else - and we can keep our cherished Fall Break, Thanksgiving long weekend, stop a week before Christmas and still fit in exams. Reading period might have to drop by a few days, and exams could become a little more crowded, but that seems a small price to pay - if, indeed, we have to pay it at all - for the sanity of a worry-free holiday season. Then classes could kick back into gear in mid or late January, and we'd get out earlier than we do now.
Now if only someone in Old Nassau would start acting a little more papal and start issuing some calendrical bulls.
Brendan Carroll is a sophomore from New York, N.Y. He can be reached at btcarrol@princeton.edu.
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