A school calendar stuck in the past?

In 1938, soon-to-be Dean of the College Francis Godolphin announced a new academic calendar which would place fall term exams immediately after the winter break. At the time, the University’s new schedule aligned more closely with its peer institutions in the Ivy League. Today, it’s the last of its kind.

Of national universities and liberal arts colleges ranked within the top 100 by US News and World Report, Princeton is one of a small few to administer final exams in January. The timing of the end of the fall semester, coupled with the recent push to alter the Thanksgiving break schedule, have attracted scrutiny to the University’s idiosyncratic academic calendar.

Both scheduling peculiarities fit into a larger pattern of exceptionalism. With 12-week semesters and a mid-September start, Princeton’s schedule differs substantially not only from its peer schools, but from nearly every educational institution in the United States. University President Shirley Tilghman last month called the fall calendar “incoherent,” saying there were “too many interruptions.”

But it wasn’t always this way. Prior to the 2009-10 school year, Harvard’s academic calendar closely mirrored Princeton’s, with exams in January.

Former Harvard President Lawrence Summers made the first call to alter Harvard’s calendar in early 2003, citing the need to align the calendars of Harvard’s various schools. However, it was not until 2007, when Harvard’s Undergraduate Council sent a letter in support of calendar reform to then-president Derek Bok, that the project again gained momentum.

Soon thereafter, in January of 2008, Bok announced a new academic calendar that synchronized the calendars of Harvard’s schools and brought final exams forward from January to December.

Harvard junior Luke Sundquist, whose high school administered finals after winter break, said he greatly preferred Harvard’s revised calendar.

“Whenever I had finals to take after winter break, there always seemed to be some black cloud looming on the horizon,” he explained. “Although the week before break is pretty intense, now I get to enjoy my time off stress-free.”

Sundquist’s brother, Matt, a 2009 Harvard graduate who served as vice president of Harvard’s Undergraduate Council, lobbied Bok to implement the calendar change.

“I know he had a pretty difficult time getting it past the administration,” Luke Sundquist said. “It’s a pretty big change in the way we do things, but I think nearly everyone has been pleased with the results.”

USG president-elect Shawon Jackson ’15 indicated that the academic calendar will be featured on his administration’s agenda.

“My personal opinion is that I would like exams to be before break. That way you can go home and not worry about anything,” Jackson explained. “However, we need to present what the overall student opinion is. If you get the student opinion, and talk to the Dean of the College, ODUS, etc., to understand the faculty perspective, that might be an opportunity for compromise.”

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Faculty input also proved pivotal in the framing of the University’s modern schedule, first implemented in the 1939-40 school year. In years past, the fall semester had previously extended into January, with finals taking place the last week of the month.

Administrators made the change, which switched the last day of classes to December, to “concentrate [formal instruction] in an uninterrupted period,” according to a 1939 copy of the Nassau Sovereign, a now-defunct University publication.

Students were afforded only one week, from Jan. 3-8, which the Nassau Sovereign article said was for “review and synthesis” of course material prior to examination.

Contrary to its modern function, reading period — which used to follow final exams — was intended to allow students of all years to perform independent work.

Concluding his announcement of the schedule change, Godolphin noted that the new schedule had been adopted “first to help develop the capacity to think independently and second, to aid in forming maturity of judgment, two aims which have always been among the basic objectives of a Princeton education.”

In 1970, administrators ascribed a third aim when passing a schedule change: encouraging political activism. When President Richard Nixon announced an increased military presence in Cambodia, the University community responded by voting overwhelmingly to create a two-week fall recess preceding congressional elections in November. The goal was to allow students to participate in the political process.

Some in Washington questioned the decision, most notably then-senator Strom Thurmond, who argued that the University was in effect violating its status as a non-profit organization. But objections proved unnecessary, as, in the following year, politicking fell out of practice among the student body, and the faculty voted 97 to 36 to eliminate fall break.

But only two years later, in an apparent change of heart, fall break was reestablished by a vote of 89 to 87, primarily to serve as an academic break in the wake of midterm exams.

This vote, which established the week-long fall break in its modern form, was the last major change made to the academic calendar to this day.

But while Princeton’s schedule remained fixed, other universities considered reform. By the late 1970s, most American schools had begun holding fall term final exams before winter break. Brown University was the one of the last to make the transition in the 1983-84 school year, leaving Princeton and Harvard as the only schools to continue the older practice.

Nonetheless, sustained calls for change have been scarce among the University community, perhaps due to faculty support for the current system.

Wilson School professor Stanley Katz said he sees the modern manifestation of the calendar as emblematic of Princeton’s emphasis on independent work and research, a similar sentiment to the one Godolphin expressed in his remarks 70 years ago.

“The rationale is that for a place that has as much emphasis as we do on independent work, there is a tremendous advantage in giving students the time to do research and write in a way that they can’t if everything is squeezed in before the Christmas break,” he explained.

Katz also noted a correlation between the length of winter break and the quality of academic work.

“From a teacher’s point of view, I love the schedule we’ve got. The best written work I get comes in the fall term, and I think it’s a function of the calendar,” he said.

Wilson School professor Nannerl Keohane — a former president of Duke University and Wellesley College and who also serves on the Harvard Corporation — said that many members of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences had been similarly wedded to the old calendar.

“The main opposition to the new calendar came from the faculty of arts and sciences, who basically said no for the same reasons that some of our faculty are opposed,” she explained.

While she said the desire to regularize the calendars of Harvard’s various schools — which allowed students to cross-enlist — played some role, Keohane identified student activism as a central driving force in the 2009 change.

“A lot of Harvard students were making this their biggest issue, whereas some Princeton students seem to be quite happy with what we have,” she said. “There were petitions and visits to the President’s office. No one was being unpleasant, but everyone was saying that this really mattered.”

The recommendation of Harvard’s administration to alter the calendar was confirmed by a university-wide referendum that preceded Bok’s decision.

Maureen Brown, an executive director at Challenge Success, suggested that empirical data supported Harvard’s decision to reform.

Challenge Success is a non-profit affiliated with Stanford’s School of Education that focuses on the mental and physical well-being of students.

“Most of the information we have is on high school students, but there’s no reason not to suggest that that information translates to college students. The bottom line is: Students don’t get a break when they have exams to worry about,” Brown said.

“Finals are at the forefront of your mind, and you don’t get any downtime or rest, which even college students need. Moving exams before winter break improves both mental health and sleeping patterns,” she said.

At present, some University students appear not be losing any sleep over the issue.

“I think after three years of it, I feel a little indifferent,” explained Ryan Chiu ’13.

Nonetheless, there are those who feel that the University’s schedule — specifically the placement of exams — poses a legitimate disadvantage.

“Having finals after winter break would be a fine thing if professors actually treated it like a break,” said David Byler ’14. “When professors feel like they can assign assignments here and there over break, that’s what makes it ineffective.”

While many students attribute increased stress levels during winter break to the imminence of final exams, there are others who believe that reading period provides sufficient time for preparation.

“I feel like [having finals after winter break] is a good thing, because I would just be really, really stressed out if I had exams before winter break,” Angie Chiraz ’16 explained. “I think for some people, it’s probably not even necessary to study over winter break. Depending on how much you stayed on top of things during the semester, I think it could work.”

Lack of consensus has silenced proposals to dramatically reshape the University’s calendar in the not-so-distant past. In November of 2006, the Committee on the Course of Study, led by Dean of the College Nancy Malkiel, brought two proposals to department heads. The second of these proposals entertained the possibilities of moving forward the start of the school year to transplant final exams from January to December. This change would have brought the University’s calendar more in line with those of its peer institutions.

But after a year of debate, the program was scrapped. Upon announcing her retirement in 2011, Malkiel said she regretted the proposal’s defeat.

“I wish we could have changed the academic calendar,” she told the ‘Prince’ at the time. “Putting exams before Christmas ... we couldn’t figure out how to get traction on that.”

Two years later, it seems unlikely that change is imminent. Representatives of the Office of the Registrar declined to comment, deferring to University Spokesperson Martin Mbugua.

Mbugua said that while reform was never out of the question, change on the magnitude of the academic calendar would require a substantial amount of time to implement.

Tilghman noted that it made more sense for the University to focus on modifying the timing of fall and Thanksgiving breaks — which has been discussed in the focus groups — rather than the winter break and fall exam schedule.

“I’m saying to start modestly, not take on big kahuna,” Tilghman said. “Let’s just start with the other part of fall semester, which seems to me broken up too much.”

News Editor Teddy Schleifer contributed reporting.