Calendar Chaos: New Schedule Changes Spark Outrage

On October 1st, there was a special meeting held in Heth Hall about changing the calendar schedule. Now, you may not have heard about it because the meeting was sent out to only faculty, even though the calendar schedule affects all of us. It seems as though Administration decided to try and keep this meeting under wraps, then why were some students able to hear about this news? It’s because there were many brave faculty members who leaked the meeting’s time and place to students. Although it was held at an inconvenient time for both students and faculty, October 1st, 1:00 PM in Heth 043.

Upon arriving, I saw my fellow colleague, PERSON,  with a video camera recording the event so he could post it on social media for those who couldn’t go to the event in person. We were quickly approached by Bethany Usher and Karen Montgomery, telling us we cannot record this event because we needed to get permission from them first. We hastily put up the camera and took out our notebooks and pen to take notes. There was a Zoom call that was put up on the TV and to our knowledge this Zoom call was not open to the public and only to faculty members.

Karen Montgomery said she had several priorities for this schedule change to lessen the burden on faculty members, such as maintaining the fall and spring faculty breaks of the three 15-week semesters within the nine-month contracts. Bethany Usher said some interesting things throughout the meeting, for example, how 10% of freshman and transfer students drop out after the fall semester. By shortening the winter break to two weeks, she believes this could decrease the dropout rate. Now, they have devised three calendar models: Option 1: 2 weeks of winter break, Option 2: 3 weeks of winter break, and Option 3: 4 weeks of winter break.

Usher states, “ They don’t want to eliminate [winter] break; we want to shorten [winter] break.” They also want to make some changes to the Thanksgiving break and the Final Exam schedule. The proposed idea for Thanksgiving break would be instead of the full week break to have classes on Monday and Tuesday then have the Thanksgiving break, so that’s something. They also wanted to change the Final Exam schedule blocks because not all faculty give out exams; instead, some of them give out projects, essays, or presentations instead of exams.

The feedback portion of the meeting was quite unproductive. We saw Usher deflect and pivot away from every question that came her way. There were many faculty members visibly upset, and several brought up these changes should not be made without them being able to see the data that was not available to them, especially when this data was available to Usher. Another faculty member brought up the fact that these changes would mess up the students who had a teacher education internship by shortening them to 2 months instead of the 4-month long internship. Usher was also questioned if parents could provide feedback, Usher said,

 “No, we want feedback from the Radford community.”

When another person suggested that parent feedback was important because many parents are paying for their kid(s) to go to Radford University; therefore, their input is important, too. She said the students were adults and didn’t want to hear from the parents. Quite oddly, Usher also mentioned that she has kids in college and that she doesn’t involve herself in her kids’ college affairs.

This schedule change could dramatically negatively affect Radford University with the prospect of a 2-week winter break. Students who would have enrolled at Radford will just go to another college with a longer winter break. We could also have an increase in dropout rates after the fall semester from students or students that are already at Radford transferring out to another college. This would mean a massive hit to Radford’s revenue stream, and generally colleges have a hard time lowering certain expenses as many are fixed. This means things like building maintenance, debt services, and tenured faculty could not be lowered. In the worst-case scenario, it could be the end of Radford University.

According to the JLARC report, Radford University has had a 29% decline in enrollment since 2014, the highest out of VA Colleges. This year, Radford President Bret S. Danilowicz was able to reverse that into a positive outcome because of the substantially higher enrollment this year with the addition of a brand-new building, the Artis Center, and raising over a million dollars in fundraising. Stuff like this was good for Radford, but now people like Bethany Usher have put Radford’s fate in jeopardy with their schedule changes.

If you would like to send constructive criticism about the calendar change to Bethany Usher, her email is usher@radford.edu. If you can’t get into contact with her, you can also email Karen Montgomery kmontgome11@radford.edu she is the Executive Assistant to the Provost.