Governance Colleagues:

For over a year now, our campus has, in any number of forums, been discussing alternatives to the current academic calendar. Those considerations have gained momentum this winter with a survey, requests to the governance organizations for advice, and various presentations including the presentation and extensive discussion at yesterday's Faculty Forum.

I came away from yesterday's discussion with several conclusions:

1. All academic calendars are compromises, each differentially serving or impeding the curricular approaches of particular programs. This was also clear in the comments portion of the recently reported survey of faculty and staff.

2. That any calendar is a compromise among program-level consideration is also true, as we may sometimes forget, of the status quo calendar.

3. Overall and convincingly, majority faculty sentiment favors moving to the 14-week calendar. Student and staff sentiments, I understand, similarly favor converting.

4. However, it is reason and academic considerations that should drive the decision, not simply votes. There are plausible academic reasons for converting and for not converting and a number of these are related to program-level consequences. That takes us back to points 1 and 2: particular calendars, including the current one, both help and hinder.

5. It is time to make a decision one way or the other.

Given the last point in particular but also because it seems to me that there were very plausible reasons for converting that were, on academic grounds, at least as significant as those supporting the status quo and, on top of that necessary condition, that majority sentiment among faculty, staff, and students favor converting, I asked that a Draft Timeline and Process be prepared. That is attached.

Transition Plan for Adopting a 14-Week Class Schedule

Your ideas about how to improve the draft are genuinely needed.

I also asked that the draft push the final "go/no go" decision point out as far as possible in order to allow the possibility of further Faculty Senate consideration. That "go/no go" date for establishing a 14-week calendar effective AY 2008-09 is March 1st. That does allow for the matter to be further considered at the February Faculty Senate meeting should the Faculty Senate desire to do so.

While the advice and counsel of the staff and students is essential to assure an effective calendar, academic considerations must, in the end, be determinative as regards our academic calendar, and it is our faculty upon whom we rely for those judgments. So, we will proceed to establish a 14-week academic calendar for AY 2008-09 unless, by March 1st, a majority vote of the Faculty Senate should advise against such a step.

Conversion is a lot of work. Whatever your sentiments on 14- vs. 15-week calendars, please look carefully at the draft attached and help us improve it. Advice, comments, critiques on the draft could be shared directly with Dr. Sewall.

Thanks,
Bruce