Finals Week is like a temporal black hole, a glitch in the space-time continuum. Time, as you know it, no longer exists. Morning arrives entirely too soon and unexpectedly, even after you’ve spent the whole night studying. Two hours is suddenly too short, whereas a week ago you were itching to get out of class after 15 minutes. And even at the butt crack of dawn, Cornerstone is bustling with bleary-eyed zombies whom you kind of recognize as your classmates, half-crazed and functioning on little more than Red Bull and desperation.
How very anti-intuitive, then, is the administration’s decision to begin Finals Week one weekday earlier, on the Friday of Week 10.
You might remember getting an e-mail at the end of fall quarter from Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs Manuel Gomez that read, ‘The University of California has adopted Cesar Chavez Day as a holiday to be observed on the last Friday in March. In winter quarter 2005 the holiday will be observed on [March 25] and replaces Spring Holiday.’
While it’s about time that the UC recognized Cesar Chavez, if the administration really meant to replace the spring administrative holiday with Cesar Chavez Day, why not do so on the Monday after Finals Week (which is, in fact, the day that the administrative holiday is usually held)?
Moreover, why not hold Cesar Chavez Day on his birthday, March 31, like other institutions do? What’s with all this seemingly arbitrary scheduling?
Let’s take some time
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