The Justice

Media Credit: Rishika Assomull

I love Brandeis Fridays; I really do.

That last class of the week, Sherman chicken wings, catching up on those shows you missed on Thursday night after your 12:10 to 1:30 p.m. class-it's a delightful little way to end the week.

But I've come to recognize that perhaps Fridays as I know and love them ought to maybe change for the benefit of the University at large.

At one of the recent budget cut brainstorming forums, one participant raised the prospect of switching from a five-day to a four-day workweek.

Switching the way we operate relative to time in order to save some money?

Seems a little bit crazy-in the United States, hearing about something other than a five-day workweek evokes a certain sense of unnatural disorder.

But shifting from the five-day workweek to a largely, yet not completely, four-day one (as I'll explain) presents possibly significant and sustained financial savings, which seem to be the precise type of economic BandAid the University has been seeking.

Even though our strangely standard Monday-Wednesday-Thursday and Tuesday-Friday classes may have some nostalgic appeal, just as the Curriculum and Academic Restructuring Steering committee noted in its report last spring, weaning off such a system is probably in the University's best interest. But that CARS committee suggestion doesn't go nearly far enough.

I'm not sure exactly how the individual that spoke up at the forum envisioned a Brandeisian four-day workweek, but my vision looks something like a more radical version of the current model employed by schools like Columbia University. There, most classes occur in Monday-Wednesday and Tuesday-Thursday pairs, with some longer seminars at various blocks throughout the week. Fridays are much emptier than other days, reserved only for a handful of language classes, seminars and lab courses.

We could use a similar system-obviously by pushing most courses to fit a more limited range of time slots, it would be beneficial to use the Columbia-style idea of pushing at least some of the lab classes to Friday.

But aside from those and the low-level language courses, there would be no need for classes on Fridays.

However, so long as individual department offices remain operational on Fridays, it'd be tough to reap in the real financial gains that could materialize from completely closing down a number of University buildings an extra day of the week.

Continued...

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