Proposal could shorten Welcome Week next year
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A proposal to reduce Welcome Week beginning next year has been restored to keep finals week intact.
Provost Kim Wilcox and June Youatt, senior associate provost, met with officials from ASMSU on Thursday to address concerns about proposed changes to the fall exam schedule.
ASMSU is MSU’s undergraduate student government.
The proposal to push the beginning of the academic year to Wednesday resulted in a loss of two fall instructional days, which raised concerns from students and faculty, Wilcox said.
In response, Wilcox offered a separate proposal to condense finals week into a four-day period extending into Saturday as an option for retaining the lost days.
“There are lots of different people with a lot of different perspectives,” Wilcox said. “Overall, the support is for leaving finals week as it is.”
Although the fall finals schedule isn’t expected to be included in future proposals, plans to change the academic calendar for next fall are moving ahead.
Under the newest proposal, freshmen will move in Sunday, with everyone else slated to move back to campus Monday.
A goal of the proposal is to curb the number of alcohol-related incidents during Welcome Week and out-of-town partygoers, but this year’s Welcome Week had fewer arrests and citations than in recent years, East Lansing police Chief Tom Wibert said.
From Wednesday evening to Sunday morning, East Lansing police officers issued 424 alcohol-related citations and made 100 arrests — 153 fewer citations and six fewer arrests than in 2007.
The meeting, originally scheduled for today, was moved to last week because ASMSU officials wanted to make sure they could relay student concerns, including a weekday move-in date, before the Tuesday deadline, Student Assembly Chairperson Michael Webber said.
Webber, Academic Assembly Chairperson Chris Kulesza, Chief of Staff Kara Spencer and Kyle Dysarz, Student Assembly vice chairperson for external affairs, spent about two hours asking for reasons behind the proposal and its goals.
“It was a good discussion,” Webber said. “We didn’t get what we wanted in terms of this proposal going away totally, but at least he’s not favorable to having finals week screwed up.”
Despite officials dropping the finals week changes from the proposed alterations to the academic calendar, Kulesza said ASMSU’s efforts to save Welcome Week won’t end.
“It will not stop Sept. 23,” Kulesza said. “I will tell you that.”
Commentary
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Joe
(09/22/08 3:07pm)Report
Why is it that they try and do things like this behind closed doors and ram it through before students and faculty know about it? This is a major proposal and needs to be properly vetted and discussed. There are many potential problems that have not been addressed.
Jeff
(09/22/08 4:26pm)Report
The University Committee on Academic Policy (UCAP) — which includes over a dozen faculty representatives AND representatives from ASMSU — discussed this issue in multiple meetings since last spring. Faculty and students have known about this for months.
Besides, this change is being implemented on a TRIAL basis. They’ll be keeping careful tabs on what the effects are.
Green ALUM
(09/22/08 10:25pm)Report
Something your reporters might want to examine is MSU’s endowment. How is the fall of Lehman hitting home? MSU’s $1.2 billion-plus fund is limping along like a bleeding Spartan. It grew through June 08’ at its worst annual rate in at least 10 years, losing 3.5 percentage points to inflation.
Yikes. We can’t expect it to be a superstar endowment like Harvard’s, which made it through this mess UP 8%. And it’s good to end the year positive when the S&P drops 13%. But you should ask Cambridge Associates —- managers of our money —- what they’re up to these next couple years. It would be interesting to hear.