WEB UPDATE 1:00 p.m. To accommodate a religious conflict, the date for the University's Commencement in 2010 will be changed, University President Lee Bollinger said in an interview on Friday morning. The actual date has yet to be announced.
Bollinger said the Board of Trustees approved the change on Thursday after receiving complaints about the date's conflict with a Jewish holiday, Shavuot, which would prevent a significant number of people from attending.
"When there are a substantial number of students who have a conflict of conscience, ... we want to do everything we can to accommodate that," Bollinger said. "We are a secular university," he said, which tries to accommodate religious groups with makeup exams and classes, but "this is one that you can't help people make up."
There is also a Commencement scheduling conflict in 2018 with Ramadan, but Bollinger, who was unaware of this until the interview, added that they had not resolved that one yet.
UPDATE 4:00 p.m. At a University Senate meeting later on Friday, a report from the Senate Education Committee said that it had disagreed with changing the time, since Columbia is a secular University whose calendar should not revolve around religious holidays. But Bollinger and the Trustees had already made the decision to reschedule.
Bollinger said that while he reserves the right to adjudicate about the Ramadan conflict later on, he assumes that Columbia will stay true to precedent--the date for Commencement has been changed twice in the past for similar reasons--in order to accommodate all students.