The two weeks after Thanksgiving is often one of the toughest academic stretches of the year. Thanksgiving is a holiday of such traditional family significance that almost everyone travels home, and reunites not only with their families but friends from home and from high school. Then, shortly thereafter, those on Oregon’s quarter system are catapulted back into school for two academically stressful weeks: dead week and finals.
With a sympathetic finals schedule, an Oregon student can find themselves back home in less than a week, perhaps finishing final papers early and, lacking any exam finals, take off before dead week is over. Lucky bastards. Most have to remain until sometime in the middle or toward the end of finals week, when the two-week college return comes to its eventual stressful end.
I cannot speak for other students, but fall term is often my worst academic term. This could be credited to the difficulty in adjusting from the summer at the beginning, but many times summer carries with it regular work as well and often isn’t too much more relaxed than the school year. The truth is, for many students, it’s hard to come back from Thanksgiving just to do finals work.
The funny thing is about this complaint, trivial though it may be, is that it is quite easily fixed. Oregon already starts pretty late in the fall: nearly the beginning of October, as opposed to many schools on the semester system that start much earlier. And I’m not recommending we switch to the semester system, as frankly, it kind of sucks.
But at Oregon we could start two weeks earlier in the summer, while keeping the quarter system the same. This way, finals week would happen the week before Thanksgiving, and Winter Break would be extended by two weeks to essentially begin before Thanksgiving and end after New Year’s. This would also make the class schedule more balanced, as most every week would be a complete one, unlike the Thanksgiving break where two days are removed from the end of the week. There would also be plenty of time to get back to Portland, California, or wherever one is from before the holiday, instead of tearing up I-5 or braving the airport on Wednesday night with the rest of West Coast traffic. The change would reduce travel in general, as we’d only be compelled to travel home once, at the end of the term, rather than home, back, and home again.
This new calendar would not come without downsides. We would no longer get a break from classes or teaching during the term. However, given the removal of Thanksgiving break, we would now be able to observe Veterans Day with a net increase in teaching days. This would provide a break toward the end of the term, but it would be much shorter and less disruptive than Thanksgiving.
So why not?
The key challenges facing this new schedule are administrative. Changes to our schedule must be approved at the state level by the Oregon University System, which would be difficult to achieve with a change of this magnitude. It’s better to have the calendar standardized across all state institutions for a variety of reasons, so such a change would most likely have to be statewide.
The new calendar would require changes to registration, orientation, contracts, scheduling, and application deadlines – all of which would require an inordinate amount of work and, therefore, money. The current schedule is planned out by the OUS for five years, and is coordinated with other state institutions to maintain some uniformity. This makes the change much more difficult than simply rewriting the calendar. Difficult, but not impossible.
Maybe some of our precious OSPIRG money could go toward this otherwise minor cause. Think of the environmental benefits! The schedule has been changed numerous times before, and other colleges have already adopted a schedule like this, so it’s not unprecedented. The Carleton College in Minnesota, for example, uses a calendar where classes begin mid-September and ended this quarter on Nov. 20. But being a smaller, private institution, and having used the calendar for years, they face fewer bureaucratic challenges than we do. Nonetheless, I think the idea is worthy of at least brief consideration, even if it does get smacked down in the end by administrative concerns.
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