Following freshman year, Jordan Upmalis decided permanent three-day weekends would be a necessity in college life.

Upmalis, a junior broadcast journalism major at Syracuse University, made it her mission to avoid Friday classes after previously having the misfortune of waking up for an acting class. Just one semester in 2005 proved a five-day week was too demanding.

‘I’ve definitely piled up my Monday-Wednesdays and Tuesday-Thursdays to the extent of starting at 9:30 a.m. and ending at 7:00 p.m.,’ Upmalis said. And while she does manage a break during her long school days, she admits to cramming her schedule into a four-day span.

‘For me, it’s worth it to have the extra day to recover from it all,’ she said.

Friday classes, more specifically the lack thereof, are an issue at universities across the nation.

At Syracuse, the issue was last addressed in 2004 and led to the implementation of the current master schedule. But the problems still exist: Another ‘classroom availability and optimization’ study is under way as the campus continues to burst at the seams.

‘We have virtually no available space from 9:30 to about five every day,’ said University Registrar Maureen Breed. ‘All of that space is full. All of our classrooms are full, except on Friday. And we’ve got more demand for (space) than we can meet.’

This fall, there were more than 1,900 class meetings each day, Monday through Thursday. But come Friday, there were 1,069 meetings – 12 percent of total classes per week. In comparison, the most popular day, Wednesday, had 2,247 classes meet – nearly a quarter of the week’s classes.

‘Historically and currently, classes are not offered on Fridays to the same extent as they are on other days of the week,’ Breed said. ‘Have we added Friday classes? Yes, but not a huge amount of Friday classes.’

An independent count of classes meeting on Fridays next semester totaled about 737 meetings on MySlice, though fewer classes are offered in the spring because of the exodus of students studying abroad.

Utilizing space is not the only issue surrounding the complex Friday class issue facing academia. This summer, faculty in the University of Missouri’s psychology department published a report that found a direct correlation to the number of classes a student took Friday morning and their participation in binge drinking behaviors Thursday nights: The academic study equivalent proving the existence of a ‘Thirsty Thursday’ phenomena.

For junior Upmalis, drinking is not the primary reason for avoiding Friday classes – she cites travel flexibility and the need for a ‘catch up’ day as her reasoning – but admits drinking does play a role.

‘Everyone likes going out on Thursday,’ she said, ‘not having to get up, hung over or whatever.’

It is the sense of entitlement that many students feel toward having scheduled long weekends that worries Vice Chancellor Eric Spina, who spoke on the university’s philosophy concerning the four-day school week trend.

‘Given the breadth of our university, given the real physical restraints of our classrooms…I think it behooves us as a university, just based on those principles, that we use all five days,’ Spina said.

He added that he thinks of a student’s academic work as their primary job on campus and said that students who don’t take classes five days a week are missing out on experiences they would otherwise have.

‘If you are optimizing your four years at Syracuse around having a three-day weekend, I think the ramifications are huge,’ he said. ‘And if you’re getting that day off for partying, then I think you are here for the wrong reasons.’

The last look

Professor Ernest Hemphill insists it was a ‘tail wags dog’ situation in the early 2000s.

It was during that time that Hemphill, a biology professor and then-chair of the University Senate Committee on Instruction, and his colleagues were instructed by then-Provost Ron Cavanagh to look into the use of classroom space on campus.

He traces the issue back to the 1980s when the system of 80-minute classes Tuesdays and Thursdays, with 55-minute classes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays was established.

Along the way, ‘not only did the faculty think that teaching twice a week was a good idea, but it should never be on Friday,’ Hemphill said.

This led to a situation where a few professors began to schedule 80-minute classes Mondays and Wednesdays. And when the practice gained popularity, students increasingly found themselves locked out of overlapped classes.

Professors had usurped the schedule.

‘There would never have been a problem if the administration had been paying attention and said, ‘No, you can’t do that,” Hemphill said. ‘It accelerated and accelerated. It got to a point where we were out of classes, and students, rightfully, were complaining that they couldn’t get into the classes they needed because they were meeting at the same time.’

Overlap was the problem Hemphill’s committee stepped in to address, but the tradition of quiet Fridays at SU had become more entrenched than anyone, including the administration, had realized.

Originally, Hemphill said, the committee would support returning to the schedule with no 80-minute classes Mondays or Wednesdays. But, the reaction was intense.

Prominent faculty members were ‘hiding behind students who had no great interest in the academics’ in order to present a unified front against the possibility of reinstating Friday classes, Hemphill said. And then the president of the Student Association made it public that he scheduled his classes based on whether or not they met Friday.

Students and faculty members were not going to take away their coveted three-day weekends without a fight.

‘You had some strange bedfellows in this situation,’ Hemphill recalled.

‘At no point was the intent to focus on Friday classes. The Friday issue was the tail that wagged the dog. That’s what people got up in arms about. Suddenly, the tail was wagging the dog, and people weren’t looking at the broader issue.’

The current way of doing things

University Registrar Breed agrees that under the new system, every student, at some point in his or her academic career, will have to take either an early morning class or a Friday class.

This is because of the scheduling paradigm implemented in spring 2005. There are still 55-minute courses offered Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings and 80-minute courses offered Tuesdays and Thursdays. But it also allows for 80-minute sections at 8 a.m. Monday and Wednesday mornings with an additional 80-minute block in the afternoon, including a relatively unpopular Wednesday-Friday afternoon slot.

When Hemphill’s committee was looking at the issue in the 2000s, it continually heard from faculty that they taught better in 80-minute slots. Hemphill, the academic scientist, asked for some evidence.

The evidence he found – from a military branch, used to make decisions on teaching life and death skills – stated that an audience’s attention tails off significantly after 25 minutes.

‘For the standard lecture course, 80-minute courses are too long,’ Hemphill said. ‘Pedagogically, there is very little reason not to go back to the traditional one-hour class.’

When the committee asked students if they would prefer 80- or 55-minute classes, the responses were uniformly that the shorter classes were preferred. Yet when the questions were rephrased and 55-minute classes meant meeting on Friday, respondents were more content with hour-plus sections, Hemphill said.

This is how Upmalis, the junior who avoids Friday classes, sees it.

‘If I have the choice of taking a longer class Monday-Wednesday or a shorter one on Monday-Wednesday-Friday, I’m still getting my money’s worth,’ she said. ‘If I have that option, I’m going to take it.’

To cement her long weekends during her sophomore year, Upmalis took two history classes that met once a week for three hours.

‘Of course it’s my right if I don’t schedule Friday classes,’ said Upmalis, adding that under the current schedule structure, there is no reason to sacrifice her traveling freedom.

Paying the price in Iowa

The University of Iowa has a serious problem with binge drinking, said Tom Rocklin, the school’s vice provost, in a phone interview.

So, Rocklin and the Iowa administration developed a solution to get more classes offered Fridays: paying faculty for holding class on the last day of the week.

Every student that signs up for a Friday class earns his or her professor’s department $20. The program was met with little criticism from faculty and students.

Similar to SU, Iowa offers 2,400 sections per day Monday through Thursday and only 1,400 Fridays, according to The Associated Press.

The plan was implemented to cut down binge drinking at the school, especially on Thursday nights when students would get a head start on their weekend activities.

Rocklin also said the school decided to go with the monetary plan to remind students of the serious endeavor that is a college education.

‘We tell students that if they are in class 15 hours a week, they should be studying 30 hours a week to really excel,’ he said. ‘That makes it a full-time job.’

And Rocklin maintains that the faculty are not upset because, while they may not have been teaching on Fridays, they are working. Iowa’s faculty members report working 56 hours per week.

Asked if he would consider a similar incentive at SU, Vice Chancellor Spina said he would think about it, but didn’t think it was likely.

But Spina agrees with his Mid-Western colleague that a lack of Friday classes does not mean a shorter work week for faculty.

‘Students here may not fully appreciate that the faculty here, and at most universities, work very, very hard,’ he said. ‘This is not a 9-5 job.’

And the favorable binge drinking conditions created by a drop off in Friday classes is not ignored at SU either.

Hemphill’s committee initiated discussions with Judicial Affairs to help examine what role Friday classes could play in reducing the amount of Thursday night binge drinking.

‘We were not unaware that there was also a social issue,’ Hemphill said. ‘You only had to make a cruise of the local bars to realize that the students thought the weekend began Thursday night.’

Carrying on, at least Monday through Thursday

Despite the attempts to spread out classes across the week, the resistance to change has proved strong.

In spring 2004 – one of the last semesters before the suggestions of Hemphill’s committee were put into place – SU offered 6,680 class meetings during the week. Only 734, or 11 percent, were offered Fridays. A year later, 810 Friday classes were offered for 12 percent of each week’s 6,833 class meetings.

In short, a 1 percent increase after about half a decade’s work on better utilizing space.

Administrators agree that more strategies will be needed to lessen the load during the prime time school hours: Monday through Thursday from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.

‘This is a time when we certainly don’t have a glut of classrooms, and chairs are feeling kind of boxed in to certain times and certain days,’ Spina said.

He added that one of the biggest concerns he hears from department chairs is the availability of classrooms – especially those equipped with specific technology – and how they get scheduled.

For the old-school professor Hemphill – who started teaching at SU when Saturday morning classes where still offered – schools not only need to move back to having more Friday classes, but he thinks longer semesters should also be reinstated.

‘Students don’t have enough time to think,’ he said, ‘even if they wanted to.’

But for the students, it just comes back to their coveted long weekends, where they can utilize the rather unique campus practice of only working four days a week.

‘Who doesn’t want to go out on Thursday night?’ Upmalis said.

Published on December 6, 2007 at 12:00 pm