Taking a week out of Winter Break is not the solution

It’s a pain for Jewish students and families to have to worry about the chaos of move-in and orientation during a major religious holiday, but shortening everyone’s winter break is not the answer. There are other solutions that could have solved this issue, and it’s concerning that such a decision appears to have been made with virtually no student input.

The charter for the calendar shakeup is actually a 2007 UC-wide policy change that mandates that the university change move-in dates that coincide with religious holidays. In response to concerns raised by Jewish advocacy groups about the issue in 2006, the UC system enacted the Policy for Addressing Religious Holiday Conflicts with Residence Hall Move-In Days. It was last put to use in 2009 when UC Berkeley and UC Merced’s move-in dates were shifted to accommodate Muslim students who celebrate Ramadan.

We think it’s great that the UC system wants to be considerate of religious observances, but they should offer these special accommodations for students on an individual basis, rather than make a multiple campus-wide change that creates more problems.

The simplest solution would be to grant exceptions allowing students to move into campus housing a day earlier or later than the holiday in question, free-of-charge. The 2007 policy actually holds campuses responsible for making these special arrangements for students if a move-in or orientation date falls on a religious holiday. With other options available, it seems bizarre and extreme to take a stab at our already short winter break.

While the policy may be beneficial for a very select few of students, it is a considerable inconvenience for just about everyone else. International students from Europe or Asia, for example, will now only have two weeks to fly home, shake off their jetlag and spend time with their families. Given the costs and time associated with traveling, two weeks is simply not enough. And it’s not like the extra week tacked on to an already lengthy summer is very useful; most summer jobs and internships are shaped toward semester system schools, leaving us to spend September lying around with nothing to do. If the administration is bent on a radical calendar change, starting the school year earlier, rather than later, could prevent cutting a week from our winter break.

This rather impulsive move is also indicative of the UC system’s tendency to keep students out of the loop on major changes in our schools. In 2011, for example, the Universities of California made a top-down decision to overhaul the health insurance system, taking no student voices into account. The third-party management firm that the UC system hired to calculate the per-student cost of healthcare under-budgeted the cost, plunging the nine campuses into $57 million of debt in a mere three years. UCSD alone carries $21 million of that amount. This indicates a clear pattern of administration making rash decisions with harsh consequences, and it’s becoming a pattern we’re worryingly familiar with seeing.

The academic calendar change is no different from the SHIP disaster. Though the two-week break is an anomaly for Winter Break 2014 (since the Jewish calendar is different every year) and will not necessarily be implemented in each year to follow, we wish that there could have been more student input before the decision was made. Even a representative of the Union of Jewish Students at UCSD told the UCSD Guardian that Jewish students were neither asked about nor informed of the change until the news was released.

Although we appreciate administrators’ efforts to accommodate students with religious conflicts, there are better, less disruptive ways for the UC system to do so. Cutting short the precious days of winter break for thousands of students across the Universities of California never should have been an option.