Lazy Fridays may be a thing of the past at St. Lawrence University. SLU will be offering and encouraging more Friday classes in the upcoming semesters to even out the academic week for students and make better use of the five-day week.
The decision to add more Friday classes was made to increase student satisfaction, according to SLU Registrar Lorie MacKenzie. “Ultimately, we’re doing this for students,” she says. “We want you to have the most selection and the most opportunities to really take advantage of the liberal arts education that we’re trying to provide here. We have to use this campus efficiently.”
One issue Friday classes will solve is the lack of room availability in prime time blocks. “There were a lot of bottlenecks in terms of courses being offered, particularly on Monday and Wednesday at 10:30 a.m. to noon,” says member of the Academic Planning Committee Professor Matthew Carotenuto. “I think spreading out the classes across the Monday through Friday spot just gives a lot more options for students and faculty to use the full campus space.”
Another issue that will be solved is the overlapping class times. “It is better for the students to have classes spread more broadly and evenly across the course calendar so that so many courses aren’t on top of each other in the same slot,” says Chair of the English Department Professor Sarah Gates.
This pursuit of a five-day school week has its issues, though. It will affect professors just as much as it will affect students — although perhaps in the opposite way. As this decision is meant to make life easier for students by allowing them to take the courses that will earn them their degree, it may actually end up making the lives of the professors a bit harder by taking away the most popular day for research — Friday.
“It is going to be very hard on some faculty members who count on Friday or Monday to get research done,” Gates says. This will only be the case for a few teachers at a time, though. “It isn’t that we’ve said everybody now has to teach on Fridays,” MacKenzie says. “Any absolute edict would just shift the problem from where it is to somewhere else.” She says that there needs to be a mix in each department of those who teach on Fridays and those who do not. “It would be most equitable if people took turns.”
Although it may be a difficult switch for faculty, that does not mean they have been forgotten altogether. “Departments are still trying to allow faculty that space to build in some research time during the week,” says Carotenuto. He says there are ways of finding blocks of time for research and any other work that do not necessarily have to include Fridays.
Another issue with mandatory Friday classes is the possible attendance rate drop. As of now, many students miss Friday class. “Most of the absences are on Friday,” says Gates. “That’s been a clear pattern every week this semester. The class is missing usually three to four people every Friday, and it’s a small class so that makes a huge difference.”
“I think over the years, there were fewer and fewer courses actually scheduled for Fridays, which does change the culture on campus,” says MacKenzie, speaking of SLU’s party culture. Attending class is the students’ responsibility though. “College is your job, so it’s five days a week and you need to go to class,” says MacKenzie.
The new course calendar will affect students and professors alike, but nothing is set in stone. “This next semester is sort of a pilot in how to spread out the courses,” says Carotenuto. “We’ll be continuing to take feedback from students and faculty and making sure that we find the right balance.”