Bok To Decide on Calendar Reform

Just one month after asking the Harvard community for input on overhauling Harvard's calendar, Interim President Derek C. Bok said he will announce his decision on possible reform this week.

Bok, responding to e-mailed questions from The Crimson, would not elaborate on the details of his announcement and declined to say whether he will propose a specific calendar or simply give his approval to the creation of a University-wide calendar. Currently, many Harvard schools run on separate calendars, making cross-registration and collaboration more difficult between faculties.

Bok's announcement comes after the idea of calendar reform was endorsed by the University's deans and Undergraduate Council (UC) leaders this spring. The UC argued that the current academic calendar is harmful to students' mental health and proposed a calendar that would move exams before winter break and end the school year earlier in May.

If Bok does approve a change to the calendar, students might still have a long wait before stress-free winter breaks and easier enrollment at other schools. Any large-scale changes to the calendar must be approved by the Harvard Corporation, the University's executive governing body, which is set to meet on June 6. If the Corporation approves Bok's decision, the changes will likely take several years to implement.

Though calendar reform has gained unanimous support from deans across the University, some members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences remain skeptical about its benefits and have voiced concern over Bok’s decision not to put it to a vote by the University’s faculties.

“It seems to me likely that calendar change will involve a cost to the faculty, for one reason because it is likely to involve a net lengthening of the academic year,” Alford Professor of Natural Religion Thomas M. Scanlon Jr. wrote in an e-mailed statement. “Given that the case for calendar change should be based on its academic advantages, it is the kind of thing that should be voted on by the faculties that would be affected by it.”

Bok explained his decision not to submit the issue to a vote by describing calendar reform as “a University-wide question which affects everyone at the University and not a single Faculty alone.”

“As a result, I invited everyone at Harvard, including faculty members from Arts and Sciences, to express their opinions,” he wrote in his statement to The Crimson.

Scanlon said that he would not support changing the calendar without first knowing what the specific changes were.

"I think the case for doing it depends very much on what it is," Scanlon said in a phone interview. "There would have to be a case for changing it in some particular way."

Calendar reform has been a perennial issue at Harvard but has not reached fruition in recent years. In September 2003, then-University President Lawrence H. Summers, Provost Steven E. Hyman, and the University's deans publicly supported a universal calendar for Harvard's schools and announced the creation of a cross-school committee to “consider and propose calendar guidelines applicable to Harvard as a whole.”

Six months later, the committee, chaired by Pforzheimer University Professor Sidney Verba '53, published a report embracing a University-wide calendar with a "4-1-4" schedule—two four-month semesters and a January term in the middle. But in the last two years of Summers’ tenure, the conversation on calendar reform stalled as the Faculty of Arts and Sciences tackled a curricular review.

This spring, the UC organized an undergraduate referendum on calendar reform. Of the 3,467 students who participated, 84 percent voted in favor of the UC's proposal. Unlike the Verba report, the UC did not endorse a one-month term in the middle of the year.

A few weeks later, Bok threw his hat into the ring. Citing Verba’s committee and the UC report, he wrote in a message to the Harvard community that “it seems only appropriate and fair to offer all interested parties an opportunity to be heard so that we may have a full range of arguments and views.”

Bok said on Friday that he waited until late in his tenure as president to discuss calendar reform because “several precipitating events occurred late in the year,” including the completion of the general education portion of the undergraduate curricular review.

“In light of these events, and the long history of debate on this issue, I felt that I could not simply do nothing but instead should actively consider the possibility,” Bok wrote in his statement.

If Bok does propose a specific calendar, it is likely to be inspired by the Verba report, which received approval from the University's deans in April.

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dean Theda Skocpol said in a phone interview on Saturday that calendar reform could benefit both graduates and undergraduates.

"I can see why a University calendar makes a lot of sense," Skocpol said. "It will enable all kinds of teaching and learning across school lines."

"We're very hopeful that this will happen," Undergraduate Council Vice President Matthew L. Sundquist ’09 said. "We've been hearing positive things throughout the process."

—Christian B. Flow contributed to the reporting of this story.
—Staff writer Claire M. Guehenno can be reached at guehenno@fas.harvard.edu.