Editorial: Class flexibility increases

At the request of Provost Peter Lange, a new task force will begin meeting this month to consider the distribution of classes throughout the day and the week for undergraduates.

The task force, spurred by faculty and student interest in adding more 75-minute Monday/Wednesday blocks, will debate the weekly schedule that has been in place at the University since the 1960s.

Currently, a number of factors have made the master class schedule a mess. Because students prefer midday classes in the middle of the week, a disproportionate number of classes are scheduled from 11:55 a.m. through 3:30 p.m. Tuesday and Thursday, resulting in bottlenecks for dining and transportation services and fewer class options for students.

Providing more options for students as well as instructors should be the primary motivation for any recommendations the task force makes to the provost. Some members of the task force have suggested that the current schedule, by allowing clever students to schedule four-day weekends and avoid Friday, early Monday and morning classes tacitly endorses an irresponsible alcohol-lubricated party culture.

Although that is likely true, many students have incentives for scheduling a day off into their schedule for extracurricular obligations or job and school interviews. It is that flexibility students should continue to have and that the task force should seek to maximize by distributing the classtime load more equitably across the week. Certainly the group should look at more Monday/Wednesday blocks, but it should also consider Wednesday/Friday blocks as well.

It is doubtful that students, faculty members or prospective applicants would enjoy the spectre of Saturday classes and the task force should not seriously consider them.

Students should not have to expect classes to start after noon every day, and departments should be more willing to schedule classes in the morning, so as to alleviate the burdens of classes during the afternoon. Evening classes, too, remain an attractive option. Graduate students, whose parking woes are well-documented, may prefer teaching and taking classesduring the evening, and undergraduates with activities and jobs during the day may prefer to attend classes then. The group should gauge both student and instructor enthusiasm for more evening classes.

The task force's existence is a step in the right direction; as it proceeds, it should seek to take into account every aspect possible--including the Graduate School, when instructors want to teach, when students want to learn and even the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's schedule to more closely align the two institutions' classes. Hopefully, the recommendations that emerge will provide both students and faculty at Duke more flexibility in scheduling, one of the University's most central functions, and lessen the burdens that the current schedule forces.