Students stumbling into class five minutes late sweating and out of breath may be a thing of the past if the university takes on the decade-old issue of extending the travel time between Monday, Wednesday and Friday classes.
With a university standard of 10 minutes between classes, many students just don’t have enough time to get from one place to another punctually, sociology professor and University Senate representative John Pease said. In order to better the quality of everyone’s experience, he said this should be changed.
And 10 years after the university first began looking into extending the time allotted between 50-minute classes, Pease put the issue of time back on university officials’ radar. He held a meeting with University Senate Chair Kenneth Holum, and he sent out informational packets and copies of the numerous relevant reports to university officials and the Student Government Association. By turning the issue over to activists on the campus, he said he hopes the issue will be brought to light again.
According to a 1998 report published by the Center for Teaching Excellence – a group of faculty members that take on issues relating to improving undergraduate experience and education on the campus – 76 percent of students who had back-to-back classes said they left class early to make it to their next one, 19 percent said they left on time but arrived late and more than 50 percent reported having trouble completing in-class exams while still making it to their next class on time.
Pease, who was a member of the original CTE Lilly fellows and has been pushing the issue for nearly a decade, said the difficulties have continued, and have even worsened over the last decade due to classes being held in newly constructed buildings all over the campus.
“Back in 2004, there were something like 270 buildings on this campus,” Pease said. “In the last four years, we’ve built new buildings, brought in more students and everyone is still expected to get to class in 10 minutes. How can that be?”
In response to the CTE’s report, the senate – the university’s most powerful legislative body – created a Time Between Classes Task Force in 2000 to look into the problem. Senate representatives presented their findings to then-Provost Gregory Geoffroy and recommended time between classes be extended and the change take effect “no later than fall 2004.” Geoffroy accepted the recommendation and pledged to enact a policy that would help mitigate the problem; he never did before leaving the position.
There has been no action taken since.
“As far as I know, this issue was just lost,” Holum said. “The senate approved it, and then it got lost in transition between provosts. It happens all the time. It’s kind of discouraging.”
In response to the recommendations of the task force a decade ago, the university enacted a policy to let students know on Testudo if time might prove to be an obstacle in getting to class on time. But often, especially with required courses, students have little say in when and where their classes are, Pease said.
Longer time slots between classes are not uncommon and would not impact classes much, he said. Compared to other universities, Pease pointed out that 10 minutes is one of the smallest amounts of time allocated between classes, despite the university having one of the largest campuses of the group – Rutgers and Michigan State universities allow 20 minutes between classes, while Indiana, Penn State and Wisconsin universities allow 15 minutes.
Holum said when students cannot make their time commitments promptly, they are not the only ones impacted.
“My constant experience as a teacher is that students simply can’t get there on time,” Holum said. “It’s not just a few students, but entire discussion sections are impacted because they’re in a building on the other side of the mall. And when it comes time for class to start, no one is there.”
Even though Holum said the time issue is very important, he doesn’t think the senate will be able to address the issue any time soon, as the committees are dealing with many other issues, such as the Good Samaritan policy, which would eliminate penalties against students who call for help for their dangerously intoxicated friends, and trying to fix a library system suffering from a lack of resources and permanent leadership.
“It’s not something that’s going to happen overnight,” Holum said. “It’s normal to have that bureaucratic lag, but this is obviously an issue that affects everyone at the university and is certainly worth doing something about.”
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