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  • College Break-Creep

    By Oronte November 26, 2007 10:42 pm

    No, not the guy standing in front of the toilet door on the charter bus from Michigan State to Daytona who demands you do a JELL-O shot with him before he’ll let you pass and then when you do the shot he adds the stipulation that you also have to show him your hidden tattoo.

    I mean something akin to what Chip, a midlevel manager I know, meant when he used the term “project creep” to describe his corporate difficulties to me. After I’d hung up on him for violating the no-jargon rule, I realized it was a useful term.

    We’re experiencing break-creep here, where every holiday gets longer, no matter how much scheduled time administrators throw at it. (A phenomenon acknowledged last week in this article in Inside Higher Ed.) At Hinterland, Thanksgiving Break used to be the Thursday of Thanksgiving and the day after it. So many students were taking off earlier in the week that the university finally said, “Okay, look: Take the week. We know you’re taking most of the week anyway; just take the week off, officially, and we’ll call it good.” But the break continued to creep. This year some of my students began ducking out as early as the Tuesday of the week before Thanksgiving week.

    Not all break-creep is perpetrated by students. Today I got an e-mail from the dean, forwarded by the department, saying that all those instructors planning to give final exams during the last week of scheduled classes (instead of during finals week proper) were wrong, and she didn’t care if the majority of students in each of those classes had voted for it. (I’ve never done this, mostly for one of the reasons stated by the dean: Students could wind up with three or four finals on a single day.)

    Still, imagine the possibilities if the trend continues—a week off for Presidents Day, two-week spring and Thanksgiving breaks, eight-week winter breaks, six-month summers. It’ll be hard to teach a semester’s material in what’s left, but I’m working on a 10-minute lecture on the novels of Henry James, just in case.

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Comments on College Break-Creep

  • Posted by Oronte on November 27, 2007 at 5:40am EST

  • My deepest regret is that I cannot get the picture in this post to display large enough to be visible. Take my word, it's comic gold: A satyr leads boys, girls, and a teddy bear to "Vacationland," where a fairy awaits their arrival.

  • Posted by Aaron on November 27, 2007 at 9:10am EST

  • It'd be like going to college in Europe...or so I've heard.

  • Posted by Noah on November 27, 2007 at 12:05pm EST

  • Pretty soon you're going to be able to upload a semester's worth of material in a couple of hours once my iBrain patent gets approved by the FDA, FCC, ABC, NBC, NBA, NAACP, and NAFTA. Also, I'm going to need $3,285.36 for a new computer to develop such a device.

  • The Break-Creep
  • Posted by Caeli Finn on December 4, 2007 at 6:50am EST

  • When I began reading this article, I did not know what direction it was going. Now I see the parallelism between the eager shot-giver and the eager students and faculty of the colleges and universities today. I found this argument to be absolutely true. College students are given well-over the appropriate amount of time off for holidays (major and minor). Sitting in my classes and hearing the excuses for why students have to miss class as we approach the holidays astounds me. I feel like students, like the shot-giver, keep trying to push the envelope, seeing how far it will let them go. But when I think about it, in society today that's what were all about. We push every thing as far as we can, just look at the televsion. Commercials and primetime programming has gone way past the limits but thats what everyone wants, so the companies give in. Why wouldn't we "protest" for less school and see what it gets us? We do it in every other aspect of our lives.

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