Editorial: Dead Days Needed

Administrators have devised a new student calendar to squeeze in one more summer session. To keep the two semesters as even as possible, they tacked another school day to the fall semester and slashed dead days. While another summer session may be helpful to some students, leaving us with only one weekday to prepare a semester's worth of material negatively affects far more students than a session will help.

To add insult to academic injury, the architects of this plan decided that Saturday would be considered one of the two remaining dead days. In stark contrast to this year's grand total of three days to study, students last year were blessed with three dead days and a weekend-nearly twice the time we now have. Now Saturday is considered a dead day-this cheats students and is highly disrespectful to Jewish students on campus who observe the Sabbath.

The university also fails to comprehend how difficult it is for UC Berkeley students to compete when other comparable universities-such as Harvard and Princeton-give their students a whole week to study. Such generosity isn't a problem because instructional days are limited to 130, while UC sets the bar at 146. Why are we burdened with three more weeks of school? There seems to be little rationale for this other than tradition. Remaining faithful to one's predecessors has a time and place. Academic calendars are not one of them.

All of the issues the university was trying to address when they mapped out the academic year-the summer session, the imbalance in semesters, the dead days-stem from the fact that our school year is far too long.

Were UC to align itself with other universities, UC Berkeley would have enough time for the extra summer session, a decent amount of dead days, and even enough wiggle room to adjust fall and spring semesters. But until they make these long-term changes to our school year, administrators' priority should be the whole student body, not a fraction of it.