The Thanksgiving-Winter Break Boomerang: Is All That Travel Really Necessary?

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To get home for Thanksgiving, Eli Yadidi, a freshman at Colgate University, drove an hour to Syracuse, N.Y., flew to Chicago, hopped a connecting flight to Los Angeles, and then battled traffic all the way to West Hollywood. A week later, he did it all in reverse.

With some 20 million college students in the United States, that’s a lot of potential holiday travelers. Yadidi’s flights alone, round trip, released 1.4 tons of carbon into the atmosphere, according to myclimate’s carbon-footprint calculator. In another week, he’ll repeat the trip home for winter break, releasing 0.7 tons more of carbon. In total, those three trips produce more carbon than a Brazilian does in a year.

With increased scrutiny on how global travel habits contribute to climate change, a movement largely led by the 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, students and some colleges have started looking at their own part in carbon release. What if an easy solution was to simply combine the Thanksgiving and winter breaks, finishing exams before the holidays and saving the carbon emissions of the extra travel?

It’s certainly possible. Dartmouth College, which operates on a quarter schedule, holds all of its exams before the Thanksgiving break, giving its students the entire month of December off. The college switched to that model from the traditional December-exams model in 2012, citing a “lack of academic continuity” as the reason for the change.

Students would “return to campus after Thanksgiving break for just two days of classes, have two pre-examination study days, take finals, and then depart again for winter break,” wrote Carol L. Folt, Dartmouth’s provost at the time. “The financial and logistical challenges of this schedule also meant that many students have been unable to travel home to spend the holidays with their families.”

Meredith Braz, the college’s current registrar, said that the new calendar has been working well and that students seem to appreciate the advantages Folt described. For Dartmouth, it’s worked, even if the climate wasn’t the foremost driver of the change. But most colleges operate on a semester schedule, not a quarter one. Could the same model work elsewhere?

Paul Thompson, a professor at Michigan State University who researches ethics in food and agriculture, gamely considered the idea when a reporter floated it past him. “As a college professor, I agree that Thanksgiving is a pain from my work perspective,” Thompson responded by email. “But we are talking the environment here. This is just the kind of bogus proposal that gets made because people are unwilling to face up to the many ways in which deeper aspects of our society need to be rethought in light of sustainability.”

Maybe not, then. He did, however, list other, grander ways universities could lessen their impact, suggesting that larger institutions could run their own recycling operations, reduce food waste, and increase on-campus housing to lower the number of students who drive to class.

“When you’re thinking about climate, it’s important to think about it in a larger context of sustainability,” Thompson said in a follow-up interview. “It is possible to be pennywise and pound foolish in the way that you think about emissions.”

Other experts also had ideas. Arielle Helmick, managing director of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, suggested institutions evaluate how they’re enabling climate change and then take steps like divesting from fossil-fuel companies. Kevin Dettmar, director of the humanities center at Pomona College, started purchasing carbon offsets from the National Forest Foundation to balance out the emissions produced by visiting speakers. And Karl Coplan, director of environmental litigation at Pace University’s law school, went one step further, suggesting that faculty members could teleconference instead of traveling long distances for conferences or speaking engagements.

All agreed that the role for higher education might not be in vastly reducing carbon emissions but in setting an example. “There’s no magic bullet for climate change,” Thompson said. “It’s going to require lots of people to do things that require people to solve the problem. Whatever contribution universities can make, needs to be made.”

That said, Thompson believes changing the break schedule could cause more harm than good. Nearly 40 percent of all freshmen already live within 50 miles of home, according to a 2016 survey by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute. That distance poses no significant environmental burden, according to Thompson. Also, maintaining “calendar-based traditions” helps people to live ethically and sustainably, he said, as family ties and expectations of seasonal events are important for emotional well-being.

Yadidi’s extreme travel for the break supports Thompson’s idea. Despite the headache of traveling cross-country multiple times in a month, Yadidi said he still prefers having multiple breaks. He used the time to mentally decompress before finals and start studying in a more familiar environment.

And even though a snowstorm delayed his flight back to Syracuse until 4 a.m. on the day that classes resumed, Yadidi said it was all worth it to spend time at home.

Wesley Jenkins is an editorial intern at The Chronicle. Follow him on Twitter @_wesjenks, or email him at wjenkins@chronicle.com.