 "Photo: Jodi Bosin / Tufts Daily")
Classes will be held on Veterans Day next week, after Tufts officials found the academic calendar one day shy of the required number of school days for this semester.
Staff will have off for the Nov. 11 federal holiday, but faculty and students must attend class.
After the discovery that another day of classes would be needed, “the choice was between the 11th and the day before Thanksgiving,” Dean of Undergraduate Education James Glaser said in an e-mail. The faculty decided on Veterans Day in a vote in the spring, according to Glaser.
Some see the university’s decision to hold classes on the day as showing disregard for the holiday’s message. Veterans Day honors all who have served in the military, whether in peace or in wartime.
Tufts Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) member and squad leader Sean O’Loughlin, a junior, was among several who felt that Veterans Day has a greater significance than simply being a day off from school. He said that the calendar mix-up should have been resolved in a way that avoided holding class on Veterans Day, suggesting that an alternate solution would have been to hold class on Columbus Day.
“I think that I understand the administration was put under pressure in one way or another to eliminate a day of vacation from the schedule, but I think that they were shortsighted in choosing Veterans Day rather than Columbus Day because of the relative importance of those two holidays,” O’Loughlin said.
Though schools, local governments and businesses are not required to close on the holiday, many do, leaving some Tufts faculty who have to come to the university in a tight spot. For professors with young children, holding classes on a federal holiday forces them to make alternative arrangements for child care.
“The Tufts Educational Day Care Center is open [on Veterans Day], but Tufts doesn’t have any child care for children under 2 years 9 months old, so that only will help people who have children in preschool,” political science Associate Professor Elizabeth Remick said.
Remick is one of a number of professors with young children who fall outside of this age range, and she must rely on external sources for day care. Many such facilities are closed for the holiday.
“It means that I have to scramble to find some kind of a backup care arrangement,” Remick said.
Though they are not required to do so, staff members who elect to work on Veterans Day will receive additional compensation, according to Vice President of Human Resources Kathe Cronin.
O’Loughlin finds the decision to hold classes on Veterans Day to be indicative of general apathy toward ROTC members.
“[There] seems to be an alarming pattern at Tufts of, at best, an indifference to ROTC and, at worst, an antagonization,” O’Loughlin said. “I don’t think that the administration is intentionally doing it, but I think that it has the potential of coming across [that way].”
ROTC members routinely participate in a memorial service on Veterans Day. The timing of this year’s service was changed to accommodate those who are attending class.
“We had to move the time of the Veterans Day service,” O’Loughlin said. “Usually it’s in the morning, but we moved it to the open block.”
In a September opinion piece in the Daily, O’Loughlin proposed a boycott of classes on Veterans Day. Although there is no official boycott, “I’ve had a number of people approach me to say that they supported it,” he said.
