Judgment Daze

President Neil L. Rudenstine and Provost Jerry R. Green effectively declared calendar reform dead last week--at least for the near future. Both questioned the merits of the proposed new schedule and predicted change would not come anytime soon. Hooray! Hopefully, one of the campus's silliest debates has finally come to an end.

Members of the Undergraduate Council, who have been working on this project for months, nonetheless vow to fight no. Could this be an attempt at political resurrection on the heels of student discontent with the council's latest fee hike proposal? Most likely it is.

Yet the council's quixotic crusade for exams before winter break is misguided. In fact, it fails to accomplish some of the council's own stated goals.

Michael P. Beys '94, a former council chair and out-spoken advocate of the council's proposed calendar, has framed the debate over reform as a "single tradeoff" for students. The choice, Beys says, is between a stressful or carefree winter break.

But reform involves much more than a single tradeoff. The council's suggested calendar would detract from the current schedule in several ways:

The post Labor Day myth. The council's plan calls for registration and classes to begin the day after Labor Day. This idea gives the illusion that students can quietly enjoy the last true weekend of summer, as friends struggle to write their first papers.

But anyone with any extracurricular interest will have to arrive earlier, not to mention all of the first-years who will begin Freshman Week in August.

Three months of hell. How does twelve straight weeks of school without a single day off sound to you? Well, that's one of the wonderful features of the new plan. Currently students enjoy Columbus and Veterans Days, welcome respites from the monotony of the fall term. These islands of sanity amid a sea of midterm exams allow students to catch up on a problem set or a paper, or just catch their breath. The new calendar would bring no vacation until Thanksgiving, which would remain a two-day recess. Yale and Penn at least have either a week off for Thanksgiving or two days of fall break in October.

Shorter Reading Periods. The council's proposal shortens Fall Reading Period by three days. A minor point, but would we still have time to go sledding on the steps of Widener?

The lingering summer job problem. One of the most convincing reasons for changing Harvard's calendar pertains to summer employment for students. Since employers have tailored many of their job programs to the schedule of most colleges around the country, undergraduates here often feel at a disadvantage in the summer job market. Critics of the current system advocate pushing the entire year back about three weeks for this reason.

But the council's proposal fails to address this most compelling concern. Since Harvard's commencement is fixed by charter, much more than a student referendum would be required to move graduation into May. Therefore, the new calendar would leave the spring semester virtually untouched, ending exam period a mere three days earlier than it currently does. Change of this sort hardly seems worth the hassle.

The council's plan may be severely flawed, but administrators' arguments against it are equally specious. President Rudenstine claims that having exams before break would be an academically inferior situation. Professors, he claims, would be more hesitant to assign challenging assignments and papers without a longer reading period.

Please, enough of the Harvard attitude. Harvard may be one of the best undergraduate institutions in the country, but it's not the only fine college around. Bright and productive individuals actually do hail from other schools (including Princeton), incredible as that may seem. And one would hope that an institution is defined by more than the number of classes squeezed in before the fall equinox.

Opponents of reform also rally around the problem of child care that would arise from an earlier start. Provost Green argues that faculty members with young children would have difficulty finding child care anytime before Labor Day. Thumbs down to that excuse. Are faculty members at nearly every other college in the country all sterilized or impotent?

The administrators and the council share a common blind spot when it comes to the issue of calendar reform: it's a bogus issue. Only an increased emphasis on teaching will really improve the lives of undergraduates at Harvard. Juggling vacation dates is merely a convenient way to hide from dealing with the real issues at stake. The council is excited about the wrong cause; the administration is entirely too smug.

The University must translate its fondness for uniqueness into a desire for excellence. A recent article in the Independent pointed out that of the 11 junior faculty members who have received the Levenson Teaching Prize, an accolade awarded to students' favorite teachers, not a single one has been granted tenure. It seems Harvard does not care about those who teach, the very people that assure the academic excellence Rudenstine is concerned about protecting.

We should keep the current calendar because the weather in September is nicer than in May. We need a breather during the fall term, and we don't need a calender that simply replaces summer vacation days with winter ones. Those reasons are good enough to forestall change. But more importantly, we need administrators that see Harvard's potential for unmatched excellence as a function of more than the number of its reading days.