Months and months

Patricia DeWitt makes a point which is entirely valid, at least if the expressions of a lot of staff folk at Greenback are to be believed. Twelve-month staff and 8- or 9-month faculty have entirely different peak demand periods.

I'm on the 12-month calendar, and for years -- working with the facilities crews -- the summer has been my biggest crunch period, trying to get buildings rehabilitated, improved and enhanced during the relatively short period theyre empty. Spring has been a near-peak (planning and preparation), as has early August/September (move-in and punch-out).

This past year, however, my traditional annual cycle has been overtaken to a great extent with the realities of the academic year. I'm not going to get the summer off -- making sustainability improvements to buildilngs is still best done when you don't have hundreds of faculty and staff in them at all hours of the day and night. But the efforts to get sustainability into the curriculum, the initiatives to get students to take ... well ... initiative, the co-curricular programs and honors projects and class assignments -- that work reaches its climax in April, just when I need to be making sure everything's lined up for the Monday after Commencement.

I hadn't really thought about it before, but being at the nexus between the academic side of Greenback and its administrative (facilities) side, I find myself dealing not only with two very different clienteles, but two very different calendars.

It would be easy to fall back into a purely staff-oriented perspective, griping about how easy the faculty have it, how few months they work, how spoiled they are, how running the university would be so much easier if it weren't for the damned teachers and ... say it softly ... students. But, of course, students are the reason why we're here. And I have a lot more sympathy with faculty members who have to coach and cajole and coordinate undergraduates year after year, now that I've had a small taste of that myself.

DeWitt's right, of course, the current academic calendar is an anachronism and not, in the long run, sustainable. I farm, and I'm glad that I have kids available to get things done during the relatively short local summer. But most students aren't from farming families, so summer is pretty much just another season for them. If Greenback were to go on a three-semester rotation, each student could still get one semester off a year, and we could increase our annual enrollment (in theory -- your results may differ) by 50% with no increase in facilities. Schedule classes on Fridays and Saturdays like we do Monday through Thursday, and there's another 50% enrollment increase. Put the two together (and allow for a little facility downtime for renovation, etc.), and you're talking a doubling of students with no increase in academic space. (Residence hall space, of course, is another question.) Be more aggressive with evening and early-morning classes, and there's yet another increase. Get radical, and you could even eliminate lecture sessions entirely by the appropriate use of recorded materials. Better use of facilities translates to more efficient use of energy, which means fewer tonnes of greenhouse gases per unit of whatever it is Greenback produces.

None of these changes can be made at present, though, without engendering tremendous resistance. The university culture isn't ready for them. Faculty aren't ready. Neither are students, nor even parents.

Timing is all. When the campus population is ready, the cultural change agent will appear. But, in the long run-up to that indefinite date, those of us on the ground have to figure out how to reconcile two inherently competing calendars. And nudge both major tribes on campus towards an increased, if implicit, state of readiness.