Lack of Classroom Space Means More Friday Classes, Shorter Weekends

Students who once enjoyed three-day weekends might soon find themselves spending even more Thursday nights in Butler.

This semester, the number of foreign language courses meeting on Fridays has taken an upward turn, as growing demands for space have prompted the administration to schedule classes on the one weekday when many of Columbia’s classrooms are empty.

Language classes in particular are prone to this scheduling change because they meet in different time slots from most other courses. In the past, language classes have met either five times a week for fifty minutes or, like other classes, Mondays and Wednesdays or Tuesdays and Thursdays for an hour and fifteen minutes.

Over the last several years, however, the number of five-point language classes has increased. Some language classes have been meeting three times a week for an hour and fifteen minutes in order to immerse students in the language consistently.

But the problem with this pattern is that each of these classes uses two sets of a classroom’s available time slots, while leaving the room empty for half of one pair. The nontraditional use of classrooms three times a week decreases classroom availability for other courses that meet on more common schedules.

For instance, a class that meets on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays must leave its classroom empty for the Tuesday slots that would correspond to their meeting times on Thursday.

“We had been dealing with the situation for two or three years, but it was becoming untenable,” said Carlos Alonso, chair of the Spanish and Portuguese department at Columbia. Some classes had resorted to meeting in different classrooms on different days of the week in order to leave each classroom empty on days when another class needed to meet there.

The registrar, the dean of Academic Affairs, and the faculty of the foreign language departments have been contemplating scheduling more classes on Friday since last spring. For language courses that meet more than twice a week, meeting on Friday has proved the easiest way to ensure that a room is available for each class every time it meets.

Inevitably, this shift gives rise to a number of objections from the people it affects. Some students complain about having their weekends cut short, and note that their Friday classes feel like more of an inconvenience than others do because so few of their friends have Friday classes.

Many students and faculty members also have obligations on Fridays that make coming to class difficult or even impossible. For example, graduate students who teach introductory-level language classes often have jobs that prevent them from teaching on Fridays, while some students have sports practices and other activities.

“We’re going to be traveling for races, so they encourage us not to take classes on Friday,” said Louisa Mink, CC ’12, a member of the crew team. Still, she pointed out, Friday classes pose no significant problem to people who are not obligated to be anywhere else on Fridays. “Most people, if they didn’t have class on Friday, would just be asleep, so it’s not taking away from their experience of school and the city,” she said.

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