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.”
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