A rough transition to a new computer scheduling system in the registrar’s office left several courses without classroom assignments for the first week of classes.
While some professors accommodated the problem by teaching in makeshift spaces like offices or department lounges, others reported that they had to cancel or reschedule their first day of class for lack of rooms. Professors said this was the first time they had ever encountered such problems and criticized officials for allowing the delay to happen.
“As of this minute, I still have one course ... and seven discussion sections for my large course on Contemporary Islamic Civilization, all without rooms,” Middle East and Asian languages and cultures professor George Saliba said.
“I had to dismiss the discussion sections for this week because I had no idea where to send the students,” he said. “The room that was assigned for the Science course [another class Saliba teaches], [at] the last minute on Tuesday could take only 10 seated students for a class that has now 16 registered students and four more to come,” he added. “I had to sit on the heater, literally so.”
Columbia Registrar John Carter and Associate Registrar Brady Sloan attributed the complication to a technology switch the office mounted at the start of this semester. After years of assigning classrooms manually, the office changed to “Resource 25,” a computer program, and the transition did not go as smoothly as planned, according to Carter and Sloan.
“Unfortunately, we ran into some combinations of procedural and technical issues, which delayed us kind of grievously,” Carter said. “We scrambled over the weekend and every day since in order to resolve things.”
When classes began Tuesday, seven professors in the French department lacked an assigned room for at least one of their courses, according to Director of the French Language Program Pascale Hubert-Leibler.
“I was assigned a classroom by the registrar at the last moment but did not find out until after I had taught my class in the conference room of Buell Hall, courtesy of the Maison Francaise,” Hubert-Leibler said. “Our department manager spent hours calling other departments to find unused sequestered classrooms or largish spaces that could be used as classrooms.”
Saliba said that as of Thursday evening, the register still had not assigned him the necessary classrooms, and Hubert-Liebler said that one French professor is in the same situation.
“If no other solution can be found, all the small classes—under 7 students—will be housed in the office of a professor who is currently on leave ... and the larger ones in the East Gallery of Buell Hall, which is not ideal as a teaching space,” Hubert-Liebler said.
Carter insisted that the worst of the problem is over, however, and that the only lingering issues are normal for the beginning of the semester. The biggest issue, they said, is finding rooms for recitations and discussion sections, which usually work on a different time frame and are being employed with more frequency.
But, in the past, “Even when we had to open new sections during the first week of classes, we were always able to find classrooms if we did not request the most popular times,” Hubert-Leibler said.
Despite the rough start, Carter believes the new scheduling system will allow them to do their jobs more efficiently in the future.
“It should improve our ability to know where we are [in terms of room space] and to address substantively things that we’ve always known intuitively,” Carter said.
“We’re working through this, and we’ve got it mostly resolved,” he added. “We certainly regret this episode and have no intention of repeating it.”