At the first sign of wintry weather, students across campus begin their not-so-secret pleas to Mother Nature. Let there be sleet. Let there be freezing rain. Let there be just one more snow day.
Meanwhile, faculty and administrators hope they will not have to deal with the headache of another round of canceled classes--missed labs, missed lectures and missed assignments that must be rescheduled or squeezed into an already compressed semester.
Such was the situation late Feb. 15, as a Sunday evening snowstorm tested the sagacity of Provost Peter Lange, the administrator responsible for the decisions to hold or cancel classes during periods of inclement weather. In the end, the University canceled only some of the next day's classes, going ahead with the regular Monday schedule after 10 a.m.
"We only missed a couple hours of classes, so I hope there won't be difficulty in making up the lost time," Lange said. "It's always an inconvenience, though. There's no question about it."
Now it is up to the University's deans to determine whether the missed classes need to be rescheduled and, if so, when. Lange said that after a winter storm prompted him to cancel two consecutive days of classes in late January, the deans started planning for the make-ups immediately, setting out a policy by which professors could hold classes during the first two days of the reading period at the end of the semester.
Making up for Monday's cancellations, however, may not be so easy.
"When would you make the classes up? There's no time somebody won't potentially have difficulties with," said Robert Thompson, dean of Trinity College. "We've already taken two out of four reading days, plus on weekends there is always the potential of running into religious conflicts."
Thompson said Monday that he would postpone a decision on rescheduling missed classes until he knew what the rest of the week would bring in terms of cancellations. "I'm just wishing for something definitive with the weather," he said. "It's this in-between that's causing all this angst."
Although more snow was forecasted for the week, the weather seemed to be on relatively good behavior Tuesday. Little snow accumulated on campus during the day, and, for the most part, it was business as usual.
Lange noted that class cancellations have become more common over the last two decades, as the University has grown to include more professors living over a wider area and more students who choose to live off campus. "We have a lot more people traveling to campus to take classes than we did 20 years ago, and this has certainly changed some of the considerations in our decision-making," he said.
Thompson said the University has been especially attentive to weather-related safety concerns since Hurricane Fran, which hit the region September 1996. The hurricane caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to the region and killed more than 20 people, mostly by falling trees, flooding and automobile accidents. After Fran, the Federal Emergency Management Agency declared 34 North Carolina counties disaster areas.
"For a long time, we prided ourselves on not canceling classes," Thompson said. "We didn't cancel classes for Hurricane Fran, and it ended up that many faculty members couldn't make it. It made us rethink our willingness to cancel."
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