Letters to the Editor

Everywhere but here To the Editor:

In mid-October, across the Ivy League and in most private northeastern colleges, "fall break" takes place, usually after six or seven weeks of instruction. Fall break got its start at Princeton in 1971, when the faculty decided to cancel a week's classes so that students could go home and work on a political campaign if they wished. It was a sound educational decision which most eastern, private universities have imitated. But not Penn.

Here, "fall break" has never been genuinely serious; throughout the 1980s and '90s, it consisted of a Monday and Tuesday around Columbus Day. It wasn't much -- nothing like that at schools that take education seriously -- but it was something. However, sometime in 1999 or 2000, abruptly and without notice, Penn's fall break vanished -- in its place was a one-day so-called fall break that covers a Friday (last Friday, in fact), a day when there are almost no classes at Penn anyway.

At best, Friday is a day when five percent of classes take place. In my department, English, for example, we have only seven scheduled hours of instruction on Friday out of a total of 291 hours in a given week -- 2 1/2 percent. Some departments appear to have no classes at all on Fridays. So Penn has a one-day fall break, but it's virtually meaningless.

Harvard has a three week reading period, and Dartmouth operates on a quarter system, so neither really needs a fall break. Brown has three days and Cornell and Columbia two. Princeton and Yale each have a full week.

The other schools in the Quaker Consortium -- Bryn Mawr, Haverford and Swarthmore -- each have a full five-day week. And our Connecticut Valley peers -- Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, Smith and Williams -- each have two or three days.

A meaningful fall break can be found at almost every other private college in the northeast that has two 14-week semesters. But not Penn.

The provost's office is responsible for the academic calendar, but the provost and his deputy have evaded all of my questions about who did this, whom they consulted and what educational purpose the change had.

There is no evidence that student or faculty groups were consulted. There was no announcement that the matter was under consideration. The first anyone heard of a possible change was the publication of a new calendar in May 2000.

The first of President Woodrow Wilson's famous "Fourteen Points" was this: "open covenants openly arrived at." Wilson wished to overcome the long-held belief that diplomacy consisted of "secret deals secretly connived at." Penn has always been proud of its openness on important educational issues. But in this matter of the cancellation of fall break, we are very far from President Wilson's noble ideal.

Paul Korshin Professor of English

Margin of error To the Editor:

I am dismayed that The Daily Pennsylvanian chose to publish the results of a poll on graduate student unionization ("Most grad students unsure on union," The Daily Pennsylvanian, 10/9/02) that was conducted without regard for social scientific method and without any attempt to restrict the survey to people who might actually vote in a union election.

This is troublesome for two reasons: it means the poll is a misrepresentation of attitudes toward unionization and it undermines the DP's stance as an objective observer of campus affairs.

First, the poll falls well short of academic and popular polling standards. By the DP's own admission, there was only a 32 percent response rate, which is well below the commonly accepted bare minimum of 50 or 60 percent. As the response rate from the random sample declines, so do the odds that the sample is a fair representation of the population.

In other words, the poll has no scientific claim to truth.

This grievous error would be bad enough if it were the only problem. But unfortunately, the DP chose a sample of all graduate students, rather than only those students who are eligible to vote in a union election, thus including a vast number of people who will not be voting at all! The pie chart might look pretty, but the results tell us nothing.

In the future, it would be helpful if the DP observed some minimal scientific standards if it chooses to conduct polls. Better yet, the paper could stick to reporting the stories rather than using shoddy polling methods to create the impression that Graduate Employees Together-University of Pennsylvania -- which brings in new members every day with its positive agenda for change -- has much less support than it actually does.

Jennifer Coleman Political Science Ph.D. student

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