Those Evil January-in-the-Caribbean Profs

To the Editors of the Crimson:

I greatly enjoyed Eric Pulier's op-ed piece, "The Reading Period Blues". Certainly all undergraduates agree that the Harvard academic calendar, which Grinch-like steals the joy from our holidays then welcomes us back with two weeks in a pressure cooker as we try to do special Reading Period reading assignments, write term papers and prepare for exams all at once, seems to be the offspring of sadism and dementia, kept alive by tradition. I know I did, until I learned The One True Reason the academic calendar will never be changed to put finals before Christmas.

I'm on the six-year undergraduate plan, and last year I married one of the members of my original class, long since graduated. She is now on the Harvard Faculty. While Harvard's academic calendar makes life hellish for us undergraduates, it makes life heavenly for my wife and the rest of the faculty, to such an extent that I would not have believed it if I hadn't seen it in my own home.

If the calendar were changed to push finals before Christmas break, those luscious weeks of September, when the crowds have left the Cape, the Vineyard, Nantucket and the Hamptons would be pushed out of the lives of the faculty. In addition many faculty members have vacation from mid-December till February under the current calendar. Putting finals before Christmas would erase this six-week, hiatus, and although certainly not all faculty members are of the "January-in-the-Caribbean" set, all of them are of the "Let's-dream-about-doing the Netherlands-Antilles-next-winter-maybe" set.

These same faculty members, remember, are the people who would have to vote to change the calendar for that change to occur. They would have to be super-humanly altruistic to do so. And they can tell themselves, if their consciences nag, that perhaps in a larger sense changing the system would be wrong: great teachers, not students, are what Harvard should work hardest to attract and the current academic calendar, although it is unfair to students. acts as an unbelievable perk for current and future faculty members, thus benefitting students in the long run.

Pulier is right: that Reading Period now exists for students is a myth, and it would be good to see this time period better protected from encroaching classes and special additional assignments. But because the current calendar is so great for the faculty, it is never, I mean never, going to change. Mark P. Hanson '86-89