Some readers may know about the recent controversy over the registrar's proposal to change Stanford's academic course schedule. Perplexingly, Stanford invited me—a professor of music composition—to comment on the situation. I took this invitation to mean that I should propose my own schedule. (I also hope one day to have my own line of designer kitchen appliances, to add purple to stoplights, to peg the euro to the Pop-Tart, and to become a "peaceful" nuclear power. For now, I'll limit myself to overhauling Stanford's academic schedule for everyone's edification.)
Before I share my superior plan—one that will solve all the logistical problems, improve culture and fix our dependence on fossil fuels—I should weigh in on the recent proposal: I'm not a fan. It fixes some things, but it creates new problems. In that regard it is like diet soda.
One problem is it pushes the start time of morning classes even earlier. Composers have shown that scientists have shown that undergraduate students need more sleep, not less. The desire to protect early-morning sleep is not an impulse to mollycoddle our already entitled Stanford students. It is simply a commonsense response to a scientific fact asserted by a composer without citation. So, to make students wake up earlier for academic enterprise seems like a bad idea. And I don't want to teach then anyway. Ante meridiem sucks.
Another problem is it forces faculty to abide by a very limited number of templates—classes all need to start and end at a few particular times. These are lackluster start times such as 10:30 a.m. and 3 p.m. They egregiously neglect more inspiring times, like 12:34 and 3:14+pi. As such, this initiative is insensitive to Stanford's commitment to diversity. And the end times are equally restricted. Consider: If we dispatch only one class at a time (e.g., Sociology 103 ends at 1:17 p.m.; Art History 36 gets out at 1:19 p.m.) there will be fewer bicycle collisions during the otherwise coordinated interclass fracas. I was going to say synchronized intercourse orgy but something seems wrong about that formulation.
Third, can someone please be straight with me—is this about athletics? Word on the street is that the new schedule is being driven by athletes' needs for more early-morning classes. Or is this a response to runaway curricula, those option-squashing majors requiring so many credit units that scheduling becomes impossibly gridlocked?
But before I alienate everybody with a cranky screed on the inappropriateness of NCAA sports in academia, or a polemic about how the major is intrinsically the enemy of liberal arts education (depth always comes at a cost), let me tell you about my first job.
I taught at Mississippi State University for three years before joining the Stanford faculty in 2000. I found MSU to be an organization dedicated to intercollegiate athletics, but sometimes less inspired when it came to academic and scholarly attainment. One of the things that irked me was the idea that you had to account for your time but not your achievement.
At the start of each semester we found blank schedules tacked to cork bulletin boards on our office doors. I filled mine out on my first day. I had an enormous course load, abundant office hours, copious committee meetings, rehearsals, a bevy of independent studies and a weekly faculty meeting. The generic sheet only accommodated Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. even though, as music professors, we had ensemble rehearsals in the evenings and on weekends, not to mention concerts by our students almost every night of the week. I figured that people understood that we were working more than 60 hours a week, so surely we wouldn't need to account for every minute of our time.
Upon completion, my schedule looked very thick to me—and this was without any reference to time for composing music, recording CDs, writing articles, designing and constructing new instruments, practicing the piano, writing grants, attending professional conferences, giving guest lectures and all the other enterprises that characterize my research. It didn't account for course design, class preparation or grading. It made no mention of the student electronic music studio I maintained. So, naïvely, I sat back with a feeling that this schedule conveyed that I was fully committed to my new job.
But my department chair immediately informed me that I must complete my schedule—there couldn't be any empty spaces left on my sheet. I thought he was joking. With a look of compassionate embarrassment, a "welcome to Mississippi State University" glance, he apologized. Still, he insisted I fill in every blank lest the dean wander down the hall and see that someone had free time.
Shocked, and a bit miffed, I put "lunch" down from noon to 1 as I was told to do. (In Mississippi, everyone eats from noon to 1; if you enter a restaurant at 1:05 you can have your pick of any table.) Even so, I still had four empty spaces: 90 minutes on Monday, an hour on Tuesday, an hour on Thursday and a three-hour block on Friday. I filled them in as follows: Barry Manilow Research Project; Office Nap; Eating Bugs; and, for the three-hour block, Stapling.
My chair never asked me to "complete" my schedule again.
So, having established my expertise on such matters, I offer the above schedule for your consideration.
Mark Applebaum is an associate professor of music composition.
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