A Boring Issue Resolved

Calendar reform, as one Faculty member said after the meeting Tuesday, hits Faculty members where they live--in Maine, for example. Everytime the topic has come up in the past, conflicting interests--research time, vacation time, air rates and conferences in Europe--have forced the discussion to a stalemate, and the Faculty has never gotten anywhere.

But last Tuesday the discussion went differently. Dean Rosovsky, the Faculty Council and members of most of the science departments backed the proposal to move the College starting date up a week, bringing the different schools into closer alignment.

No one was really able to come up with arguments against the change, which the proposal's backers argue will facilitate cross-registration and reduce duplication of courses within the faculties.

But in the Faculty Council meeting the next day, Rosovsky asked the committee in charge of working out the calendar details to insure that the fall reading period includes a reasonable number of days, by compressing exam period or intersession.

Anyway, the Faculty passed the proposal, and school will begin on Sept. 19 instead of Sept. 26 next year.

Continuing the spirit of breaking with tradition, the Faculty also got rid of expungement--it was inconsistent with state laws to erase all trace of a student from the College records, and it hasn't been done in years anyway.

And in another novel move, the Faculty voted in closed session to expell a student for falsifying her admissions credentials on several different occasions, when she applied as a special student and later when she transferred to the regular degree program--the faculty's first expulsion in over a decade.

The Administrative Board decided that only barring the student from ever reapplying would fully express the University's distaste of such repeated fraud, sources said.