Yale to Switch to Trimester Schedule

NEW HAVEN. Conn.--Yale College moved closer to adopting a full-year trimester calendar this weekend as the Yale Corporation approved schedule changes, including a new Summer term and an earlier start for the Fall and Spring terms.

Under the altered calendar, Yale's Fall term next year will begin on September 2, include an 8-day reading period beginning on December 5, and end after exams on December 22. The Spring term will begin in mid-January and end in early May.

Although the trustees approved the trimester schedule in principle, the Summer term is not yet definite. First the faculty and then the Yale Corporation must approve an ad hoc faculty committee's plans for a pilot summer term in 1974 and a regular third trimester in 1975. The Summer term would start in mid-May and finish in mid-August.

John Morton Blum, the Yale professor who co-chaired the committee that recommended the trimester year and a member of the Harvard Corporation, said yesterday that the proposals are designed in part to alleviate Yale's current financial problems. The trimester proposal would probably increase the student body from 4800 to about 5300, providing Yale with substantially more income from tuitions, he said.

Blum predicted that the pilot summer program next year will include several hundred students and should show "where the bugs are" in the three-term plan. 1500 undergraduates are expected to attend Yale during the summer term after 1975, Blum said.

The faculty will also consider a recommendation that undergraduates be required to spend at least one summer term at Yale. Blum said that this requirement would ensure that Yale has enough students for the summer term.

Yale undergraduates have generally supported a calendar change moving exams to before the Christmas vacation. The new schedule will present its problems too The Yale Daily News, in an editorial published January 26, complained that it is unrealistic to expect undergraduates to complete before Christmas the final exams and term papers for five courses."

The News recommended that the required course load per term be reduced from the courses to four adding. "This is one time when we should take a lesson from Harvard