Fall break at last?

You are your own most effective representative. So if you find yourself routinely exhausted between late August and the end of November as a result of the academic marathon that is an IU fall semester, you should make your support known for a current initiative that would give Bloomington students a fall break.

Before students can count on a fall break being added to the fall 2011 calendar, the Bloomington Faculty Council — as well as campus administrators — must approve the measure. For that reason, you should consider writing to the BFC and Provost Karen Hanson in the next few days. They can be contacted at bfcoff@indiana.edu and provost@indiana.edu, respectively.

True, IUSA executives routinely promise to advocate for students by pressing relevant authorities to grant us the fall break that seems standard at so many other universities. Yet the annual nature of that campaign promise provides some indication of how successfully IUSA has been able to operate alone.

A deluge of student support for the initiative could go a long way toward changing that. At the very least, it would mark a significant change in lobbying strategies.

In some ways, adopting a fall break is unambiguously the correct step. The mental and physical exhaustion caused by the long, unbroken academic haul of the fall semester are without a doubt detrimental to student performance and, more importantly, morale.

What’s more, finding time for fall break should not be a challenge. Our extensive four-month summer vacation can surely conclude two days earlier in the interest of breaking the three vacation-free months of classes sometime in mid-October.

The marginal benefit of two days of vacation after weeks of class rather than months of summer relaxation clearly favors this schedule reorganization.

Yet, in other ways, the issue is more complex. There are, of course, concerns about how this would affect classroom schedules, particularly science classes with labs. And if Thanksgiving break is any indication of students’ tendencies during weeks divided between vacation and class meetings, the remainder of a fall break week might be accompanied by high attrition rates.

Reasonable people will anticipate no shortage of scheduling problems that may very well arise from introducing a fall break. Yet it is impossible to address them all before the fall break is even instituted.

The best step to take at this moment is improving the well-being of Bloomington students by instituting a fall break. Improving its scheduling will be a process for future years.