The Wednesday before Thanksgiving will no longer be a class day at this university starting this year, after requests from parents and students.
Stakeholder offices on the campus that draft the calendar — including the Department of Resident Life, Student Affairs and the Office of the Provost — took these requests into consideration and determined the change was possible after consulting the deans of the academic colleges, Betsy Beise, the associate provost for academic planning and program, wrote in an email.
This change required an earlier start day for the fall semester in August to maintain the same number of class days, Beise wrote. The university will still adhere to normal business hours on Wednesday, she added.
“This schedule is helpful to students who have to travel a distance for the Thanksgiving holiday, and it also better aligns us with our sister schools within the [University System of Maryland], many of whom had been doing this already,” Beise wrote.
The system requests drafts of future academic calendars every five years. The current set of calendars was drafted during the 2013-14 academic year and approved by the system in 2014, Beise said.
This change will put this university in line with the Thanksgiving breaks at nine other Big Ten schools that also start their breaks Wednesday or earlier, The Diamondback reported in November 2015.
Junior computer science and math major Gwen McGuirk acknowledged many of her professors had canceled the classes that had fallen on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving in past years, but said she was still “really excited” to learn about the extra day off.
“I’m hoping that my professors will give me off Tuesday now as well, but it’ll be good because I can have my parents come get me a day before on Tuesday night instead of having to take off work on Wednesday as well,” she said.
The additional day may also help facilitate student travel, said Anna Weinrich, a German exchange student in her fifth semester.
“I have American roommates, so I don’t know what they do, so I wanted to check what’s common here for Thanksgiving,” said Weinrich, who is studying international management. “I plan to somehow spend it abroad and not on campus.”
In addition to the Thanksgiving break change, fall and spring semester reading days will no longer fall on a weekend starting this academic year and continuing through 2021, according to the academic calendars.
For the past three fall semesters, reading days — days designated for students to study for final exams — have fallen on Saturdays.
