USC students’ bid for an autumn break fails again
The dream of fall break for USC students has died. Again.
Undergraduates have been requesting a few days off during the fall semester for years. Many schools, including Occidental College and Princeton and Duke universities, have vacations in the middle of the first semester. (UCLA, which is on the quarter system, does not have an autumn break.)
USC student leaders said the proposed vacation wasn’t meant to give undergraduates a chance to just blow off steam. Instead, it would have let students prepare for upcoming finals or midterms, do short internships or just take a break from the academic grind.
“It’s really a mental health issue,” said Rini Sampath, USC’s student body president, who made advocating for a fall break one of her campaign promises.
The proposed fall break would have been two days long, preferably on a Monday and Tuesday, according to student government records. USC’s spring break is about a week.
In a poll conducted by the student government, about 96% of undergraduates said they were in favor of a break during the semester.
Sampath isn’t the first student body leader to call for such a break. In 2013, the student government sent a proposal to the administration to eliminate two academic days in the middle of the semester and to add two days to the beginning of the school year. The plan was not approved.
This year, USC’s faculty senate also did not approve the student proposal, although it was unclear why. While only school administrators can make changes to the Trojan academic schedule, Sampath said students wanted the professors’ blessing since any changes would affect their curriculum.
Faculty senate members did not respond to requests for comment.
In a letter to the editor of the Daily Trojan, Sampath and other student leaders acknowledged that not everyone at USC was in favor of a few days off.
“Members of our university administration have expressed their concern regarding the impact of a fall break on our university’s academic integrity and standing,” they wrote.
Other schools have changed their schedules out of concern for student well-being. After several attempts by undergraduates, Yale University adopted a five-day fall break in 2012.
“It has long been a concern at Yale that, particularly for freshmen, the unbroken period of 11 or 12 weeks of classes between the start of the fall semester and the Thanksgiving recess can be challenging,” wrote then-President Richard C. Levin and Mary Miller, a dean, in a letter.
College students’ mental health has been a growing concern for counselors over the last decade, said Ben Locke, who directs the Center for Collegiate Mental Health at Penn State University, a consortium of counseling centers.
Between 2010 and 2013, the percentage of students who were hospitalized for mental health concerns grew by three percentage points to about 10%, according to statistics compiled by the center. And about 30% of students who sought counseling have seriously considered suicide at some point, a 6% increase.
“Those who have worked in counseling centers for the last decade have been consistently ringing a bell saying something is wrong and things are getting worse,” Locke said. “It’s open for debate whether students have less coping skills or resilience than earlier generations.”
Faculty at other schools have thwarted proposed fall breaks over academic concerns.
Students at the University of Texas at Austin in 2013 had proposed a four-day weekend at the end of autumn.
“As students, we like the idea of a fall break, which we believe would alleviate stress in the middle of the semester,” editorialized the student newspaper.
But nearly 40 professors petitioned against the proposed change, with many saying it would cut back the amount of time students could spend in lab, according to media reports. Faculty later voted against the proposed break at a special meeting.
Sampath and other student leaders said they would meet with faculty members and the administration to try to drum up support for an autumn break.
“It’s disheartening to be turned down,” Sampath said. “But we’ll keep trying.”
Twitter: @byjsong
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