Everyone Should Have Class on Friday (But Not on Monday)

Harvard’s academic calendar has an equity problem: the inherent privilege of Tuesday-Thursday classes over their Monday-Wednesday counterparts.

The Harvard schedule follows a predictable rhythm. Most classes meet twice weekly — either Monday-Wednesday or Tuesday-Thursday — plus a discussion section. Consequently, with minimal finagling, most students can arrange to have a three-day weekend.

But this schedule has a huge drawback. Because University holidays commonly fall on Mondays, courses that take place on Monday and Wednesday have fewer meetings than those scheduled for Tuesday and Thursday.

Unfortunately, this problem isn’t easily solvable. After all, Havard can’t do anything about the fact that Labor Day, Indigenous Peoples’ Day, Veterans Day, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, and Presidents’ Day always happen on a Monday.

Or can it?

The solution becomes straightforward if you’re willing to think outside the box (and bite the bullet): Have classes on Friday! Now, Monday-Wednesday classes would meet on Wednesday and Friday instead. In exchange, the three-day weekend would effectively be shifted back a day to Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. Everyone who wants a three-day weekend can still have one; students can arrange their schedules to avoid Monday sections, if they so choose.

Essentially, Monday just becomes the new Friday — an eye for an eye, a day for a day, and a tooth for a tooth.

This new schedule would solve Harvard’s lesson equity problems. Holidays would fall on already-designated weekends, so professors wouldn’t have to forfeit multiple of their valuable lesson slots like they currently do, since most courses would never meet on Mondays anyway.

But isn’t the whole point of holidays to take a break from classes, to provide some respite for the endless slog that is the Harvard semester? If holidays are folded into the weekends, they aren’t really holidays, are they?

Precisely. Which is why the second part of this modest proposal is to reallocate the holidays to occur when they are more advantageous to Harvard students.

There is a practical limit to how many University holidays there can be — we have to have at least a few lessons, don’t we? — and we’re currently spending them all on these Mondays. But there are multiple suggestions floating around for important days that the University should consider paramount.

You want Election Day to be a holiday? You got it. Jealous that other schools get a Fall break? Consider the Monday and Tuesday between Harvard-Yale and Thanksgiving gone.

After all, what could be more important than voting and football?

There are admittedly a few downsides. Having Friday off isn’t quite the same as having Monday off. The present system means that Thursday is the de facto Friday. The new system would mean that Friday is actually still Friday, but Monday is the new Sunday.

Maybe this would affect nightlife. Students wouldn’t be able to party on a Thursday night — what a grave injustice! But perhaps the culture would shift and Harvard students would start partying on Sunday nights and sleeping in on Mondays instead.

The Sunday Scaries would disappear and be replaced by the Monday Scaries — does the lack of alliteration make it less alarming?

Harvard’s weekend might not completely overlap with other schools’ weekends if they have classless Fridays. Yet, everyone’s official weekend — Saturday and Sunday — would still overlap, so not all would be lost.

Harvard students may scoff with indignation at the idea of having classes on Fridays. I can only imagine how they would feel talking to 99 percent of the working population.

Matthew R. Tobin ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a double concentrator in Government and Economics in Winthrop House.