A proposal to require use of classrooms on Fridays has been approved for a two-year trial period

The “Monday through Thursday mentality” on campus will be interrupted next fall.  

A compromise between Academic Senate and administration will allow for a two-year pilot program that will push departments to offer Friday classes.

As of next fall, California State University, Long Beach will have the largest number of students on campus since 2008. The scheduling for fall 2016 is happening now, so the administration needs to come up with a solution now, said Dhushy Sathianathan, Interim Vice President of Academic Planning.

“The focus is not how faculty teach the class or how students take the class, it’s basically saying how we use the rooms,” Sathianathan said. “So you could have a schedule … that says we can have a two-day class on Monday and Wednesday, we can have a one-day class on a Friday, or  you can have a Monday, Wednesday, Friday class. But we’re not saying that all classes have to be Monday, Wednesday, Friday. We’re saying the rooms have to be used for all three days in the time frame.”

Currently, classroom facilities are at nearly full capacity Mondays through Thursdays and at 30 percent capacity on Fridays, Sathianathan said. He aims to better utilize classroom space by enforcing use on Fridays if a department is using a particular space on Mondays and Wednesdays during the 8-11 a.m. time block. Administration allocates classrooms to the colleges. The colleges then divvy the rooms to their departments, and the departments then schedules the classes.

“Trying to use three days of the week is very difficult to implement, because now a scheduler really has to be mindful about two days and a third day,” Sathianathan said.

The original proposal Sathianathan brought to the Academic Senate said that if a class was scheduled Mondays and Wednesdays in the time block of 8-11 a.m., it would be required to have class scheduled for Fridays as well. When Academic Senate did not agree with that, Sathianathan came back with the current proposal.

“It seems like a reasonable thing to try, but … nobody knows if students actually want this,” Norbert Schürer, Vice Chair of Academic Senate, said. “In the last 20 years, we’ve tried this twice, both both times it did not work mostly because students did not enroll in those classes. So it’s a solution that on paper, if your main criteria is efficiency, looks fantastic … but if students don’t sign up for the classes, it’s completely pointless.”

The Chancellor’s office is pushing California State Universities to better utilize facilities. To the Chancellor’s office, it looks like CSULB has plenty of classroom space and is underutilizing it, and they will not approve more rooms or buildings until there is a need, Sathianathan said. He also noted that the utilities are still running and the staff is still working even if students are not there on Fridays.

“It prevents me from asking for more space, asking to put more rooms into the general classroom circulations,” Sathianathan said.

Many faculty are concerned that the administration did not consider the culture of CSULB as a “Monday through Thursday campus.” The current scheduling allows a majority of the tenured faculty to teach Monday through Thursday and conduct their research and meetings on Fridays.

“We’re trying to move the cheese, so people are upset we’re moving the cheese,” Sathianathan said. “But I think there’s a new normal we need to get on. The one we are on is not the optimal normal.”

Sathianathan said that about 300 of 4,000 lecture sections will be impacted by the policy change, and that they will mostly be lower division lecture classes. He mentioned that students are the ones who chose their classes and that they might not realize the difference like a department scheduler might.

“I don’t want to make it a bigger issue than it really is,” Sathianathan said. “It’s important to understand the context in which this is being done. It’s really about the utilization and that’s the focus. We need to be more efficient as a campus.”

Associated Students, Inc. has been receiving a lot of concerns from College of the Arts students. Jeff Jarvis, faculty representative on the ASI Senate, presented many of COTA’s concerns at the Oct. 14 Senate meeting, one of which being concerns for rehearsal time that takes place on Fridays for many of the arts.

“Professors campus-wide would have to redesign their courses to accommodate the new schedule for the additional contact time,” Jarvis said. “I think [the trial period] will fail, but I think the real damage will occur when we’re trying to put humpty-dumpty back together again after it fails.”

After the two-year trial period, the Academic Senate will reevaluate the policy with data and feedback from students and faculty, Schürer said.

Schürer and Jarvis both said they are also concerned that the administration did not seek out ASI or other student input before presenting the original proposal. It was not until after the first proposal that ASI’s opinion was sought out.

“At this point, they have consulted [with ASI], but that seemed like kind of an afterthought rather than actually incorporating student input,” Schürer said.

ASI President Jose Salazar said that he invited Sathianathan to present to the ASI Senate after he had presented to the Academic Senate. He said he also fielded opinions from his constituents on the topic.

“I voiced my opinion to Academic Senate and I told them what my input was from the students, but I also understand that there is a problem that needs to be addressed, and that’s one of the things that I got from Senate the first time I presented it to them,” Salazar said. “I truly understand the necessity of this and we need to do something about it, this is a problem we need to fix and there might have to be sacrifices we might have to make.”

The matter has been moved to the Curriculum and Education Policy Council, who will be responsible for deciding how to collect data and feedback during the trial period and help enforce the policy.