Taking It Slow This Time

Last spring a proposal for a new academic calendar, with a first semester ending before Christmas, sailed through the Faculty Council and came before the Faculty for approval.

The Faculty usually follows the council's recommendations, but this time it did not. During the debate on the calendar change, several important drawbacks to the new calendar came up--its effect on fall term studying time, for instance--and the Faculty voted to recommit the issue to the council for further study.

Dean Rosovsky, who was on leave at the time, was at that Faculty meeting as a guest, and he now says he was disappointed at the way the issue was presented to the Faculty. The council, Rosovsky said last week, hadn't fully considered all the implications of the calendar change.

Rosovsky knew at the time that he would be dean of the Faculty, and therefore in charge of the council this year, and he told President Bok after the meeting that he intended to avoid having an issue come from the council to the Faculty in such an unprepared state.

Rosovsky's methodical council avoided another confused Faculty debate this week, giving the calendar issue kid-glove treatment on its second time around by deciding not to recommend a change in next year's academic calendar.

Calendar change would probably have had a better chance with the Faculty this year than it did last, because it now has a new selling point: the energy crisis. Under an early calendar, the University could virtually shut down for the month of January, thereby saving enormous amounts of heating oil and steam.

But the council found there is one big problem with using the energy issue in support of an early calendar. The University's allotments of heating oil and steam are on a monthly basis, so if there were energy shortages again, the University's savings in January would not affect its February and March problems.

Calendar change is by no means a dead issue. Even with the early calendar, Harvard could extend Christmas vacation a week into February and save fuel in each of three months. And there is still the matter of a unified all-University calendar--an idea Bok seems to support--and that is usually linked to an early first semester.