Bok To Decide on Calendar Reform

Just one month after asking the Harvard community for input on overhauling Harvard’s calendar, Interim President Derek C. Bok said Friday that he will announce his decision on possible reforms this week.

Bok, responding to e-mailed questions from The Crimson, would not elaborate on the details of his announcement and declined to say whether he will propose a specific calendar or simply give his approval to the creation of a University-wide calendar.

Currently, many Harvard schools run on separate calendars, making cross-registration and collaboration more difficult between faculties.

Bok’s announcement comes after the idea of calendar reform was endorsed by the University’s deans and Undergraduate Council (UC) leaders this spring.

Both the UC and a 2003–2004 committee chaired by Pforzheimer University Professor Sidney Verba ’53 proposed a calendar that would move fall exams before break and end the academic year in May. But while the Verba report endorsed a January “J-term,” the UC report argued instead for a shorter period between semesters and an earlier end date in May.

If Bok does approve changes to the calendar, students would still have a long wait before they can enjoy stress-free winter breaks and easy cross-registration at the University’s other schools. Any large-scale changes to the calendar must be approved by the Harvard Corporation—the University’s executive governing body—which is set to meet on June 6. If the Corporation approves Bok’s recommendation, the changes will take at least two years to implement, according to Secretary of the Faculty David B. Fithian.

Although the calendar reforms proposed by the Verba committee have gained unanimous support from deans across the University, some members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences remain skeptical about the benefits and have voiced concern about Bok’s decision not to put changes to a vote by the University’s faculties.

“It seems to me likely that calendar change will involve a cost to the Faculty, for one reason because it is likely to involve a net lengthening of the academic year. But the University is not run for the convenience of the Faculty,” Alford Professor of Natural Religion Thomas M. Scanlon Jr. wrote in an e-mailed statement. “Given that the case for calendar change should be based on its academic advantages, it is the kind of thing that should be voted on by the faculties that would be affected by it,” he added.

Bok explained his decision not to submit changes to a vote by describing calendar reform as “a University-wide question which affects everyone at the University and not a single Faculty alone.”

“As a result, I invited everyone at Harvard, including faculty members from Arts and Sciences, to express their opinions,” he wrote in his statement to The Crimson.

Scanlon said that he would not support changing the calendar without first knowing what the specific proposed changes were.

“I think the case for doing it depends very much on what it is,” Scanlon said in a phone interview. “There would have to be a case for changing it in some particular way.”

Calendar reform has been a perennial issue at Harvard. In September 2003, then-University President Lawrence H. Summers, Provost Steven E. Hyman, and the University’s deans publicly supported a universal calendar for Harvard’s schools and announced the creation of Verba’s cross-school committee to “consider and propose calendar guidelines applicable to Harvard as a whole.”

Six months later, the committee published a report embracing a University-wide calendar with a “4-1-4” schedule—two four-month semesters, with a ‘J-term’ in between. The new calendar would begin after Labor Day and would end in late May, making it slightly longer than the current academic year. But in the last two years of Summers’ tenure, the conversation on calendar reform stalled as the Faculty of Arts and Sciences tackled the general education portion of the curricular review.

With the general education portion of the review closing in on its completion this spring, the UC released a 10,000 word position paper in early April documenting their proposed calendar configuration and arguing that the current calendar is harmful to students’ mental health. A UC-sponsored undergraduate referendum on calendar reform followed, in which 84 percent of the 3,467 students who participated voted in favor of the Council’s proposal. The UC plan drew heavily upon that of the Verba report, but it did not endorse a J-term, instead citing language from the earlier report providing for an alternate configuration.

UC President Ryan A. Petersen ’08 swiftly followed the referendum results with a letter to Bok demanding an audience with the Corporation at which council representatives planned to present their proposal. While Petersen’s demand was denied, Bok soon threw his hat into the ring. Citing Verba’s committee and the UC report, he wrote in a message to the Harvard community that “it seems only appropriate and fair to offer all interested parties an opportunity to be heard so that we may have a full range of arguments and views.”

Bok said on Friday that he waited until late in his tenure as interim president to discuss calendar reform because “several precipitating events occurred late in the year,” including the completion of the general education portion of the undergraduate curricular review.

“In light of these events, and the long history of debate on this issue, I felt that I could not simply do nothing but instead should actively consider the possibility,” Bok wrote in his statement.

It is unclear what specific changes to the calendar Bok would propose. In April, University deans voted unanimously in favor of the Verba report; they have not weighed in publicly on the UC’s recommendations.

For their part, UC officials appeared optimistic this week that Bok’s announcement would be favorable to their requests.

“We’re very hopeful that this will happen,” said UC Vice President Matthew L. Sundquist ’09. “We’ve been hearing positive things throughout the process.”

—Staff writer Christian B. Flow can be reached at cflow@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Claire M. Guehenno can be reached at guehenno@fas.harvard.edu