We discussed at length the impact of reduced teaching days on the component departments (Music, Dance and Theater). We felt unable to move forward in distributing teaching days for next year since none of the faculty from these departments sit on our committee. We are inviting the faculty group chairs to attend a meeting soon and send us comments by e-mail in the mean time. There is a lot to address in regards to resources, limits, and student registrations when looking at these departments, and we need more information before we can move forward.
Secondly, we realized to comply with Federal and New York State law we must be in session (study days and federal holidays not included) for at least 15 weeks per semester. Our plan for Spring registration would violate this statute as we would only be in session for 14 weeks, 15 weeks if a “registration week” as planned counted as an ‘in session’ week, but it doesn’t. In order to move forward, we have re-drafted our proposal to general committee to shorten spring break by one week. The text appears below.
Thanks,
Vera.
February 26, 2009
From: Curriculum Committee
To: General Committee
Re: Proposal to move Spring Registration in 2009-2010
It has become clear that conducting registration for Spring Semester right before Thanksgiving is not working for any constituency of the college. The details of all the problems are listed below in Part I, as are the benefits of moving registration to January.
The situation is so untenable that we strongly recommend moving Spring registration for the 09-10 academic year. We recommend that our proposed changes be done for one year, to see how they work, and to allow time for more thoughtful long term planning for curriculum (structure and content,) and the college calendar, in strategic planning. This is a matter of great urgency, as we are required to inform students of next year’s calendar by March 13th.
State and Federal laws require us to have a fifteen week semester. Those fifteen weeks may include reading periods and examinations, but not registration. We propose, then, that we have a one week Spring break in 2010 in order to comply with the fifteen week rule. We also recommend that the last week of Spring semester be a ‘conference week.’ During that week there would be no classes, students could meet with faculty if necessary. We recommend that, during that week, we instigate college wide sharing of student work in the forms of shows, concerts and academic panels of conference work moderated by faculty. We hope, too, that this would give faculty an opportunity to begin to gather their work together to write evaluations.
PART I: REGISTRATION
Our rationale for moving Spring registration is as follows: The current arrangement has interviews for second semester being conducted the Friday, Monday and Tuesday before the Thanksgiving break, which is Wednesday through Sunday. All registration materials are turned in by the end of the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. There is a second round in early December, for which there are no official designated times, and the add/drop period is at the start of Spring semester. But this timing results in many difficulties:
Multiple Obligations of Faculty and Students
Although there are no conferences in Thanksgiving week, faculty and students are still in classes, and faculty are frequently both donning, and being interviewed for classes. Meanwhile many students are both interviewing and being donned as well as attending classes. It is impossible for the faculty and students to meet all their obligations simultaneously, which leads to frustration and hasty, uninformed decision making.
Registration Materials Lacking Don’s Signature
Some students want to hurry through registration, or fail to do registration, because they leave early for the Thanksgiving break. If they cannot locate their dons immediately they present to the Dean of Studies Office for a signature. The Deans of Studies and of College, and their administrative assistants, then try to establish the whereabouts of the dons. Sometimes the student did not in fact try to find them; sometimes the don is nowhere to be found. This creates great pressure on the offices of Dean of Studies and Dean of College.
Impact on Year Long Courses
If a student wants to switch out a year long class for second semester, they must officially ‘drop’ in order to register for something else. This means they are choosing to drop the class at a particularly stressful time in the course of the work, when they might have decided to stay in had the choice been made later. The teacher of a year long class is not obliged to add students to replace those dropping, thus leaving ‘dead’ spaces in their classes. It can be discouraging for the teacher suddenly to lose students’ commitment twelve weeks into a thirty week course.
Off Campus Faculty and Students
New Faculty and Students due to start at the College in January, and extant Faculty and Students who are off campus in the Fall, are rarely able to do interviews in person. This leads to many off campus students emailing the faculty about their courses. The faculty are overwhelmed, and the students may or may not receive a reply. (In the latter case they then approach offices of Deans of Studies and Deans of College.) Where an off campus faculty member cannot make it to Bronxville for registration, interviews have to be conducted by phone or with a stand in colleague.
If registration were at the beginning of Spring Semester, before classes begin, there are the following advantages:
* Students in Year Long courses would already have first semester evaluations and could make a more informed decision about whether to change classes. * With no classes there would be more time for donning and interviewing. * There should be many fewer students bringing registration materials to Westlands without the don’s signature. * Students would not be trying to leave campus. * New students and students returning from leaves or Study Abroad would be able to interview in person. * New faculty, or faculty returning from leaves would all be here, and would not have to come in specially in November (which they cannot always do.) * Faculty would be in their assigned offices, making it less difficult for Dean of College staff to find places for all the faculty to do their interviews. * Faculty and students would be able to stay focused on their academic work right through the Tuesday of Thanksgiving week.We see no significant disadvantages.
PART II: THE CALENDAR
The college needs to review the calendar if we wish to move Spring registration permanently. The working groups out of Strategic Planning that will address curriculum, and working at the college, will be productive sites for some of this work. Rather than simply thinking about registration when we review the calendar, it will be useful, concomitantly, for the college to consider other academic and co-curricular activities that can be enhanced with a redesigned calendar, such as donning, college wide intellectual activities, interviewing.