Faculty members at Cornell University are preparing to take an official stand against the assigning of last minute homework over student breaks, saying that such a policy could improve students’ mental health.
The Faculty Senate at Cornell University is expected to vote on a resolution this month that would “strongly discourage” faculty members from “framing assignments in such a way that necessitates academic work for students” over breaks in the academic calendar.
Bruce A. Levitt, chair of the Faculty Senate’s education-policies committee and a theater professor, helped write the resolution. It’s time, he said, to send the “message that breaks are meant to be used as breaks.”
The resolution would encourage faculty members to make clear at the start of the term the workload they planned to assign to students, allowing them to better pace themselves, he says. “The idea was not to forbid homework over break, but to make academic work over break the choice of the student.”
A proposal to discourage homework assignments over breaks was tabled at a Faculty Senate meeting last month after some professors asked that its wording be revised. Mr. Levitt says the proposal’s language is being changed to make it clear that the senate is discouraging faculty members from assigning “surprise” work, homework that is assigned a day or two before a break and is due a day or two after classes resume. Faculty members did not want the resolution to apply to work assigned on syllabi at the start of the term.
William E. Fry, dean of the university faculty at Cornell and a professor in the plant-pathology department, says the language of the resolution allows faculty members to still have control over their actions. “We don’t want to absolutely legislate,” he says. “We want to suggest best practices.”
He says that since the end of fall break this academic year, his office has received more than 250 requests from students requesting no homework over break. Mr. Fry hopes the resolution will help more faculty members embrace the idea that breaks should be “renovating and refreshing” and serve as a means to “relieve student stress.”
Though the resolution is specifically tailored to discourage the “increasing encroachment on break of academic work,” Mr. Levitt says the proposal speaks to broader goals, too, as part of a campuswide discussion of how to help students deal with academic pressure.
“Student workloads have become an increasing cause of concern in relation to student mental health,” part of the original resolution he drafted read.
Cornell has been considered among the most active campuses in trying to identify and support troubled students, and the campus intensified its efforts a year ago, after several students died in apparent suicides over a short period of time.
The resolution, Mr. Levitt acknowledges, doesn’t get at the root of much of the stress students encounter. But for now, Mr. Levitt believes, the senate should focus on “specific and targeted ways” to reduce some of the stress.
Getting at the root of the stress, he adds, “seems be a larger discussion that needs to take place at the administrative level.”
Not a ‘Central Concern’
Vincent P. Andrews, president of the Student Assembly at Cornell, says the faculty as a whole, compared with the administration, has been slow to act on concerns about student mental health on campus. “It is nice to see them starting to respond,” he says, “but they need to do more.”
While he considers any step to help alleviate student stress “important and useful,” Mr. Andrews says that homework over breaks is not “a central concern of students.”
“I don’t want to diminish the initiative, but it is going to have a small effect,” he adds.
An editorial that ran last month in The Cornell Daily Sun, the student newspaper, echoed Mr. Andrews’s sentiment. The proposal “misses the mark, failing to truly address the root of the problem” of stressed students, which is unmanageable workloads, the editorial said.
Professors, if they followed the resolution’s guidance, probably would not drop the assignments they had previously scheduled over breaks, the student editorial said, but would instead just cram them into the weeks before and after break. That would have the effect of creating even higher stress levels for students when they are not on break, the editorial said.
Mr. Andrews says he would rather have the faculty reduce the existing buildup of large assignments during short periods of time during the academic year than discourage homework over breaks. He would also like to see faculty within individual colleges work together to spread out the dates for midterm tests and papers because, at Cornell, the dates for midterms, unlike finals, are left to the discretion of professors.
“Students will benefit” from the Faculty Senate proposal, Mr. Andrews says. “But there are larger concerns.”