Students Look Ahead to 2009 Calendar Change

This time next year Lamont Library will be overflowing with students chugging Red Bull and obsessing over the “production possibilities frontier.” Some Harvard undergraduates just can’t wait.

Starting in the 2009-2010 academic year, fall examinations at Harvard will take place before winter break, leaving Princeton as the only Ivy League university with exams in January. To accommodate this change, classes will start two weeks earlier in September and end three days earlier in April.

As undergraduates enter their last exam-free December, many students on campus are enthusiastic about the calendar reform.

“It’s better because we won’t have to worry about exams over winter break. We get to have closure before break,” said Anna J. Murphy ’12.

Bonnie Cao ’12, echoed this sentiment.

“Then winter break will actually be a break,” she said. “Now, I’m going to go home and see all my friends and they’ll say ‘I’m so happy it’s all over!’ But for us it’s not really over.”

However, Brittney R. Lind ’11 was more skeptical about the change.

While she said she likes the idea of “having a longer break around the holidays,” she described herself as “an incorrigible procrastinator” who gets most of her work done during winter break.

Though as a current senior she won’t be affected by the changes, Dana A. Stern ’09 also said that she liked Harvard’s current calendar.

“I’d be under a lot more stress if I had to take finals right now,” she said.

She also mentioned that in years when she had less work for finals she was able to stay home and “have a really long break anyway.”

The calendar reform, which was passed by Former Interim President Derek C. Bok in June of 2007, was endorsed by the university deans and the Undergraduate Council earlier that spring.

Jon T. Staff V ’10, a former UC representative who worked on the issue, said that calendar reform was “always a longshot” and would not have happened without “tremendous effort from UC representatives and other hard-working students.”

Staff said that the new calendar had “a number of key advantages,” which were not limited to students’ mental health.

He noted that having a longer winter break would cut energy costs, as well as coordinate academic calendars throughout the University so that cross registration would be easier.

Staff added that the new calendar would also allow athletes to be in sync with the rest of their league.

Staff credited Bok heavily with the reform, saying that his position as interim president allowed him to make this change with “minimal political fall-out.”

“Derek Bok recognized the significant hindrance of our nonsensical calendar and gave students the gift of a modern schedule,” Staff said.

A previous attempt at changing the calendar had failed under Bok’s first term as University president in 1974.

Nicholas Lemann ’76, president of The Harvard Crimson in 1975 and current dean of Columbia’s School of Journalism, who reported on that failed endeavor, said it was “a trial balloon that got floated for a minute and never went anywhere.”