OUR VIEW: Common Hour not a common goal
When Jo Olsen stood before the Faculty Senate at the end of the spring 2011 semester to answer a barrage of questions regarding Common Hour, fired at him by a handful of still-skeptical faculty members, he seemed to roll with the punches quite well. Clearly this revamped version of a glorified campus-wide lunch hour was an idea Olsen and his fellow contributors had spent some time planning — the future of Common Hour was sealed. It’s going to happen whether we liked it or not.
To the relief of a university-wide course schedule — quite probably a logistical nightmare — that is already bursting at the seems due to shortages of funding, space, instructors and, of course, time, the original Tuesday and Thursday Common Hour block was moved to a single Wednesday installment. What does this mean? Fewer classes will be moved to that crack-of-dawn, bird-chirping, sun-not-even-shining 7:30 a.m. class period or that beyond-curable-by-a-shot-of-5-Hour-Energy 4:30 p.m. window.
The fact remains that more than 100 classes were moved to those times, which leaves some of us finagling work schedules, pleading with baby sitters, rearranging carpools and eating times, while juggling classes that all seem to be bottle-necked at the same time and day — all in the name of what? Being able to make it to the next installment of the insert-name-of-college-or-department-here lecture series?
When the group of people we’ll refer to as the Common Hour bandwagon sat in a circle and started rattling off the growing lists of reasons why this was a great idea, the longer that list got, the more it necessitated an answer to at least two questions. First: Is one designated communal block of time really going to make it possible for people to make it to more campus-oriented extracurricular events — thereby making them feel better about paying student fees? And second: Instead of dismissing it, shouldn’t we further research the reason(s) behind why the 1997 version of this didn’t work out?
You can spin the idyllic tale of future events unhindered by pesky college classes and over-attended by students with nothing better to do now that the university they chose to attend decided to stop having classes at certain times of the day, but just remember: There’s a reason it didn’t work before. But who knows? Maybe this time it will become another USU legacy.