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From the General Secretary: Vacations
By Mary Burgan
Faculty members are blessed with an assortment of seasons in the cycles of the academic year. There is, for example, a plethora of beginnings. The academic year begins in September with the first term. And then it begins again in January with the second term. It begins yet again for the summer term. There are also more endings in academe than in the nonacademic world. Each term tends to have two endings—midterm and final. In many colleges and universities, the "regular" holidays play into the academic schedule in a fugue-like ornamentation of starts and finishes. Thanksgiving is a second midterm in the first semester that says "not too late, but almost." Easter and Passover are different markers in the second term; they may warn of a long spring left for redeeming the time, or they may prelude the May graduation just around the corner.
National holidays rarely interrupt the academic year. With the exceptions of Labor Day in the fall and Martin Luther King, Jr., Day in the winter, they tend to pass uncelebrated. Students and faculty rarely collect free time on the long weekends of Veterans’ Day or Presidents’ Day. But religious days can make a definite impression on some campuses. Yeshiva University dismisses classes for the fall observances of Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, and Simchat Torah, and students at Marquette find themselves free on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception in December as well as Good Friday in spring.
Midterm breaks are unique to higher education. The fall midterm frequently gets lost in Thanksgiving, but spring break is another matter altogether. It brings blessed days of winter release for faculty—time to repossess college towns or neighborhoods from the traffic and crowding of students. The antics of those students elsewhere are apt to antagonize the nonuniversity world, however. Those who have left the groves of academe recall such orgies of free time with a mixture of envy and nostalgia.
The most controversial time for faculty, and the most anxiety-ridden, is summer. Harboring mixed emotions about the liberties of spring break, the public tends to give a bad rap to the academic summer term—almost as bad as the rap against sabbaticals. There is an almost universal resentment of the imagined freedom of the faculty work force. Nonacademic workers imagine hordes of professors, unpent from muggy offices, traveling to rustic retreats or to "research" at some foreign locale. The normal trek to nine-to-five jobs, with only the brief respites of national holidays, seems especially unfair in contrast with faculty freedom.
In contesting this rosy view of the faculty’s vacations, it must be admitted that for those who can afford it, vacations are indeed special and wonderful gifts in the seasons of faculty life. But salaries may not be paid during the summer, and those who have not prepared for the season’s drought will find themselves teaching every day in a muggy classroom—or skimping through August. Further, for the growing number of adjunct and part-time faculty who make up the academic work force, there is never any sabbatical at all, though the demands for research are more insistent as a route to full-time work. If summer school or night courses are not available (and their availability often depends on one’s seniority), other work must be found to keep food on the table, health insurance current, and the a.c. running. For a lot of faculty members, in short, the end of a term is no vacation, but a mad scramble for survival.
Nevertheless, a vision of time’s highway lying open at some season of the year, promising a period of sustained reflection and research, should not be denied to a life of work and achievement. Marx has said that "time is the room of human development." Discovering new facts, creating new paradigms, transmitting knowledge and insight—these achievements don’t just come off some shelf somewhere, on demand. They depend upon the maturation of ideas and absorption of information over time. Microsoft and Silicon Valley understand that process, and thus have instituted breaks that mirror those of academe. They realize that when there is no mental relief from the press and swirl of insistent dailiness, creativity can evaporate. Problems can become impenetrable. Ingenuity and the zest of discovery give way to re-acted mistakes and routine. Understanding the importance of release to the work of the mind, major companies send their workers on retreats, to camps, to the mountains or the sea. Some faculty do have these "luxuries." Most faculty need more of them.
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