While the University Senate Education Committee may continue to dismiss a proposal that would start school before Labor Day, some student councils won’t let go so easily.
The Columbia College Student Council approved the proposal Sunday night, and the Engineering Student Council voted unanimously in favor of it Monday night.
The General Studies Student Council will vote on the proposal Tuesday night. Barnard’s Student Government Association is also planning a vote in the near future.
The proposal itself is the joint product of the four undergraduate councils in anticipation of the University Senate’s plenary meeting on Friday, where a formal vote to resolve the issue may take place.
“More than any other year that at least I can remember, all four councils are working on this. And that’s not something that’s easy to do,” CCSC president Sue Yang, CC ’10, said.
“This time around we ensured there were enough people involved in the formulation, that we were looking at data, reaching out to the administrators, looking at other Ivies… really doing the most detailed proposal possible,” ESC president-elect Chris Elizondo, SEAS ’11, said.
The document, posted on the CCSC website Monday morning, proposes shifting the fall calendar to begin one week earlier on the four years when Labor Day is late, or on September 5, 6, or 7 in 2011, 2015, 2016, and 2020. According to the proposal, this would “alleviate the compression that would otherwise be experienced at the end of these 4 fall terms,” where finals would end on Dec. 23.
The proposal comes two weeks after co-chair Jim Applegate, speaking on behalf of the Education Committee of the University Senate, dismissed the option of starting a week before Labor Day.
Since New York City public schools begin after Labor Day, faculty members voiced concern that the need to provide day care would be compromising to professors with young children.
In crafting the student council proposal, Yang and current ESC president Whitney Green, SEAS ’11, said their committees reached out to various stakeholders within the faculty and administration, including department chairs and the Office of Work/Life.
“From the Senate perspective, it seems that all faculty are against the proposal. However, the faculty we’ve surveyed—I’ve spoken to all the SEAS departments—it’s not 100 percent against this proposal,” Green said.
“We’re not going to be so naïve that [students] should be the only audience they should serve,” Yang said. “We have really genuinely tried to understand the other components, and yet we don’t sense that anyone up there in those murky echelons are trying to understand where we’re coming from.”
Columbia provides a back-up care program to subsidize up to 100 hours of family care each year beginning on July 1. According to the council’s proposal, starting a week early would require more funding for this program or the creation of a day camp or child care program for that week.
“The back-up care program is there, and people use it and exhaust it already,” Applegate said. “People want to spend time with their kids. And since NYC public schools run right up to Christmas anyway, ending earlier does nothing. For me, starting a week before Labor Day is an exchange of time that’s very valuable for time that’s virtually useless.”
Since mid-April, the Education Committee had been formulating a proposal to hold school on the Monday before Election Day and finals on the weekend. Yang and Green remarked that both options were undesirable for student constituency, and said they have been in conversations with the Education Committee to voice these concerns.
“The faculty don’t want to start before Labor Day because they want time with their families. Well, fall break is a time when a lot of students go home to visit their families and friends. It’s the same argument, but I think its being weighed a lot differently because we’re students, and I don’t think that’s fair,” Green said.
Elizondo voiced a similar point. “I’m concerned that, in the event students lose their holiday, that might in fact be detrimental to student life and individual student health. We’re here at CU to learn, not to learn how to go crazy.”
Applegate said the plan to eliminate Election Day Monday has stalled in light of the proposal and recent conversations with student council members. He admitted surprise at the high value being placed on the Election Day Monday.
“If the maintenance of the Election Day holiday is the highest priority on the student end, then it’s likely we’re back to the status quo,” he said. “There’s no way I’m talking to the faculty about starting before Labor Day.”
Green did not consider maintaining the Election Day Monday the highest student priority necessarily, but stressed its relative importance. “Within the context of this discussion when we’re looking at possible options, the idea of taking out Election Day Monday is not met with enthusiasm or interest by the students,” she said.
Applegate anticipates that discussion of both faculty and student concerns will be furthered at the Executive Committee meeting on Wednesday and brought up at the Senate’s plenary meeting on Friday.
Yang and Green are currently reaching out to faculty for feedback.
“A lot of it seems very gray. … We’re trying to distinguish what are people’s personal opinions versus what are the actual opinions back from the Education Committee, what are the actual opinions back from faculty members, because as it currently stands, they’re two different things,” Green said. “And people are acting as if they are one.”
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