Less is Less

It WAS ONCE the antidote to post-Christmas exams, the only friend more reliable than the family dog: the fourteen magical days that made all that procrastination possible, Reading Period. And now, it becomes painfully clear, there will be only eleven. During no other now-missing three days will more Tolstoy not be read, more papers not get written, more drawn-out two hour lunches never take place. It may not be dying yet, but Reading Period is becoming only a shadow of its former frenzied self.

The present assault seems easy enough to explain away. Martin Luther King's birthday takes a whole day out of exam period: Christmas and New Years fall on Tuesday: and in the thirty-eight weeks between the third Monday in September and thirty-eighth Thursday after that, called Commencement, must fit two exam periods, 166 or 167 teaching days, and holidays for assorted national holidays.

Harvard calendar tradition has struck again. Last year, seemingly more worshipful of tradition than even Zero Mostel, the University simply could not uproot Commencement from the 38th Thursday to accomodate its conflict with a Jewish religious holiday. Move Commencement? Start the year earlier to afford a longer Reading Period? Would such radicalism really send John Harvard's statue racing around the Yard?

The three-day emasculation seems an unnecessary blow to a failing institution; extra lectures, labs and reading assignments already threaten to obliterate the distinction between Reading Period and any ten days in October. Explaining the demise of the once sacred fourteen days, officials can only shrug and point to a capricious calendar. "The fall term" Registrar Margaret E. Law said this week, "is a real mess because of Christmas and New Year's. If the term starts late in September, then technically reading period should start before New Year's but Christmas is Christmas and New Year's is New Year's."

And Reading Period should be Reading Period, this year and always. Maybe the term could start early in September so that exams and Reading Period could come before vacation. But that is the stuff of dreams, almost as unthinkable as actually working over vacation.