Calendar changes benefit students

Midway through last week, the Hopkins administration announced several changes to the academic calendar. Beginning in the 2014-2015 academic year, Thanksgiving Break will be extended to a full week, and to make up the days lost, classes will begin two days earlier at the start of the fall semester. Furthermore, during Thanksgiving and Spring Breaks, undergraduate residence halls will remain open. Previously, Thanksgiving Break began the Wednesday before the holiday, and all residence halls except for Homewood and Bradford shut down during the two mid-semester breaks. The Editorial Board would like to applaud the University for these decisions.

Firstly, the shorter Thanksgiving Break has always been strange and hard to coordinate for travelling. It is expensive for those who do not live within easy driving distance to fly home at their leisure, and a three-to-five day trip is sometimes tough to justify. However, if they cannot afford the flight home or do not want to spend hours on a plane both ways, they need to find somewhere else to live for the week. That brings about the second reason the new system will be better: It benefits international students. Hopkins prides itself on its strong community of international students, but while celebrating an American holiday, it tossed them out of their dorms. Needless to say, the changes will be much to the benefit of students for whom flying home may mean being in transit upwards of 10 hours or more. All those problems aside, it still remains that students pay more for campus housing than some private apartments, and private housing wouldn’t ask them to leave during holidays. 

Finally, as much as some may complain about classes encroaching upon the final days of summer, we believe that the schedule change is a wise choice. The class days before Thanksgiving were placed there to make up for days missed due to a slew of Monday national holidays and the like. Obviously, it would be detrimental to eliminate those days entirely from the schedule because there are already few enough class days in a semester, a point driven home with every once-per-week course. Putting those days at the end of the year would mean either fewer days in reading period, which is nearly impossible, or more days of slogging to class through bitter weather. One could complain that they don’t want to stop the all-day/all-night party that is the summer, but let’s be real. If there is anyone out there who doesn’t spend at least a few days in the summer sitting on a couch doing nothing, then we at the Editorial Board humbly ask you to take us with you.