Enough is enough

The University of South Carolina sent a group of 105 students to work toward the Hurricane Katrina relief effort last week during their fall break. Students at Purdue went home to visit their families. Some students at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., decided to stay on campus to unwind. Across the nation, college students are escaping from the stress of midterms. But IU-Bloomington students are once again in the pressure cooker this week. And they'll stay there until Thanksgiving.\nTelling the trustees we want it hasn't been enough. Placing it on the calendar committee's docket year after year hasn't been enough. Years of news articles, columns and complaints of high stress levels with little relief hasn't been enough. The overwhelming national trend of American universities establishing a fall break hasn't been enough, either. So how exactly does a student body in desperate need of a timely fall break convince its administration to make the switch? \nA shortened school week's potential to interfere with lab research has been the crux of the University calendar committee's argument against a fall break. Purdue has a fall break, however, instituted more than a half century ago. Adding a fall break in the 1950s obviously didn't sabotage Purdue's ambitions as a research university. \nPurdue is ranked higher than IU-Bloomington, according to the Lombardi Program of Measuring University Performance, as a public research university. Other schools at the top of the list -- University of Michigan and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for example -- have fall breaks as well. Purdue and other schools focusing on research have side-stepped obstacles to satisfy student demand for a fall hiatus. Surely IU-Bloomington could do the same. \nHow did other schools get the job done? Students at high profile schools like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology joke that suicides among the student body earn them a few long weekends each semester and a fall break in the bargain. IU's Counseling and Psychological Services is already well frequented during midterm weeks. Does IU need more students to crumble under the unrelenting pressure of midterms, exams and papers before it will take their request seriously? \nIU-Bloomington could feasibly adjust its fall schedule to accommodate a fall break. But in 2004, once again the University calendar committee voted against both a fall break and a Labor Day break, justifying its decision with protests from science departments and other administrators. Giving those concerns thoughtful consideration, IU-Bloomington must develop a compromise that allows us to jump on this bandwagon, at last.\nThe time is long passed when instituting a fall break would have been an act of generosity on the part of the administration. Students have made the request before. We'll make it again, continuing to demand what is now the standard for university academic calendars. IU is the only public school in Indiana, and one of the few schools in America, without a fall break. We deserve it. Let's keep pushing until we get it.