It’s Labor Day today in the US, which means it’s a day off from work for everybody who isn’t in academia. Our fall classes start Wednesday, though, so I’m going to spend Labor Day, well, laboring. This is nothing new, but at least it’s better than my first year, when classes started on Labor Day.
Anyway, I know that in the current Gilded Age, we’re supposed to regard labor unions as just this side of Pure Evil for their interference with the joys of unfettered capitalism, but if you’re lucky enough to have the day off, take a few minutes to reflect on the good things organized labor has given us. Things like moderately safe working conditions, the 40-hour work week, and, well, Labor Day.
Enjoy the extended weekend. I’ll be in my office, prepping for classes.
Isn’t Union College private? Of course, a colleged called “Union College” can hardly take labor day off..
My experience at every private college so far, including Vanderbilt, is that the dot product of college holdays and official civil holidays is approximately zero. At Caltech, we had “Murph Day,” a random Monday in the winter quarter that was never on President’s Day or MLK day. At Vanderbilt, we have no truck with any of those single-day holdays; there will be a “fall break” in October.
Often, the only way I know that it’s a holiday is that I go into work and get no mail….
Anyway, I have to go finish prepping for my class that starts in a few hours.
-Rob
We also have a week-long fall break, and thus work through Labor Day. Though I only had one class to teach and one committee meeting to run.
The places I’ve been affiliated with have all started late enough that we usually didn’t have class on Labor Day, and there was enough griping the one year it did happen here that they’ve avoided it since. It’s always been the case that “the dot product of college holdays and official civil holidays is approximately zero,” though, even at the public institution (University of Maryland).
It was particularly annoying at Maryland, because the staff got civil holidays off, even though classes weren’t cancelled. So I’d have classes, but the secretaries would all have the day off, so there was no way to get anything else done.
It was particularly annoying at Maryland, because the staff got civil holidays off, even though classes weren’t cancelled. So I’d have classes, but the secretaries would all have the day off, so there was no way to get anything else done.
****************************************************************
Yale is the same way. The stockroom is closed, the business office for the Dept. is closed, no administrative assistants, no custodial staff and no techs. The garbage overflows by the end of the day when classes are in session and everyone is in lab. We have to remind ourselves to wash our own glassware. If there was a Happy Hour the Friday before, the trash for it is still there all day Monday. The doors to the buildings are locked like they are on the weekends because security is on the holiday schedule. One friend in a humanities dept. went to teach her class and could not get in because the door was locked. The security officer she called to let her in couldn’t understand why the door had to be unlocked.
Trying to get those days included in the academic schedule is a royal pain at Yale. For MLK Jr. Day they finally took the day off but did it in one convoluted way. The Monday classes that would have met on MLK Jr Day instead meet the Friday before. The Friday classes then meet on the last Monday of the spring term to make up the day. It creates all sorts of problems when you have Friday lunch seminars scheduled in the same rooms that some of the M/W classes meet in at the same time of day.