Forget about the holidays
But please enjoy a random mid-week “break”

SUNY Brockport’s academic calendar is in need of a major makeover. If you skipped class last Friday to drive the two or three hours home for the Easter holiday or spent the weekend alone on campus because you didn’t have time to relax with family and friends between classes, work and presentation preparation, then you know what we’re talking about.

We’re talking about Brockport’s inane scheduling — that is, the fact that classes aren’t suspended for either the Passover or Easter holidays each spring, but today, a random Wednesday in April, we have a “break.”

Get Drunk and Play Video Games Day, err, Scholars Day rather, is a fantastic opportunity for students to show off their semester of hard work. We applaud the 349 of you (including three of our staff) who are presenting today, and kudos for you attendees too. This year’s scholars should offer interesting perspectives on everything from “Time Perception and Procrastination in College Students” (Nicol Cross) to “Pablo Picasso and His Work” (Megan Patrick).

But we’ll bet anyone $100 in EZ money that the majority of Brockport students are either passed out in their dorm rooms right now or dragging themselves to the library as they curse the lack of even one travel day following the holiday weekend.

If Scholars Day must be scheduled on a Wednesday in early April, as it has been for at least the last eight academic years, then why not suspend classes on Monday and Tuesday as well? At least plan it in conjunction with the Easter holiday, when many students take their own four-day weekends regardless of professor’s endless lesson plans. They may suffer to make up the work on their own time, but some times (read: holidays) are just better spent celebrating unhurriedly with the ones you love. And frantically skipping through a few hours of egg-hunting, dinner and goodbyes in order to make it back to campus by 8:15 Monday morning is not the same thing as celebrating unhurriedly.       

We won’t even mention the fact that at least five of SUNY Brockport’s neighbors, including Canisus College, St. John Fisher, Nazareth, Buffalo State and SUNY Oswego, enjoyed three and four-day weekends over the Easter holiday; suffice it to say we’re feeling unsatisfied in general with the academic calendar.

Brockport gets six weeks of winter vacation — why not cut that down to five and use the rest of the free time observing the legal U.S. holidays (Martin Luther King Jr. Day and President’s Day)  and the religious holidays (Passover, Good Friday and Easter Sunday), that many students do celebrate, but that the administration blatantly ignores?

C’mon, let us have our Peeps and eat ’em too.