Dear Colleagues,
We write to inform you that at UCOP’s request, the Academic Planning Council (APC) has convened a joint Senate-Administration workgroup focused on the possibility of a common systemwide semester calendar. You can see its charge, composition, and plans here. The workgroup aims to issue its report in Spring 2025.
While the charge refers to a “common” calendar, UCOP’s background paper makes clear that the impetus behind this initiative is to make seven campuses that teach on a quarter system shift to the semester system adopted by two. Systemwide Senate leadership has further confirmed that the workgroup’s report and recommendations will not be put to a vote by each divisional Senate. Rather, each division will be invited to provide comments that the systemwide Senate will then share with the APC and UCOP, as well as the Board of Regents, who are the ultimate decision-making body.
Needless to say, the impacts of such a change—logistically, administratively, financially, on student learning outcomes and faculty/staff working conditions—are potentially massive. As we currently understand the process, there is no guaranteed opportunity for faculty to accept or reject these changes; instead, we can only provide comments and input via the workgroup. CUCFA is very concerned about how meaningful this opportunity for comment or input will be and whether UC leadership will abide by any resulting faculty input.
CUCFA calls on all UC faculty to mobilize and demand the right to study, discuss, and vote on this initiative. To that end, we provide you with some initial information to evaluate the situation (see below).We also ask you to fill out a survey, giving us permission to use your words as testimonials in the fight for faculty’s right to be heard:
The background paper provided at UCOP’s website contains no evidence-based data in support of this initiative and mentions neither shared governance, nor the right of faculty to be involved in all aspects of the decision-making process, nor the California Public Education Relation Board (PERB)’s explicit provision that higher education employers negotiate with the interested parties any matter related to “work hours.”
We strongly encourage all faculty to read both the APC Workgroup statement on systemwide calendar change as well as its background paper, which cites “increasing research productivity” as “an important potential outcome of semester transitions” (p.1), providing no evidence to support this claim. Nor is any evidence provided for the claims that a semester calendar could “promote academic excellence, reduce gaps that arise from inequalities…support timely graduation, and enable fulsome preparation for post-graduation life” (Workgroup statement, p.1). On the contrary, this peer-reviewed research article demonstrates that switching from a quarter to a semester calendar negatively impacts students’ on-time graduation rates, potentially leading to poorer academic performance, lower grades, and decreasing the probability of enrolling in a full course load.[1]
Moreover, in none of the meetings of the Academic Council (on July 24, September 25, October 23, and November 20, 2024) or the Committee on Educational Policy (October 7 and November 4, 2024) was any evidence presented in support of the conversion. In fact, the little information provided was critical of the move. Additionally, as the APC Workgroup documents themselves acknowledge, many prior attempts at conversion to semester calendars have been resoundingly rejected by divisional Senates in the past, including at UCLA, UCI, and UCSB, where students also voted by a large majority to retain the quarter system. Finally, no mention is made in any of the above documents of who precisely will bear the burden of this massive transition or how faculty and staff will be compensated for the additional workloads and costs stemming from this transition.
We now invite faculty to offer their input on what our collective next steps should be. We strongly urge you to complete our survey, where we seek to gather information on faculty needs and concerns, as well as further research and evidence to support any arguments regarding the costs and/or benefits of a common semester calendar. Additionally, you may provide input directly to the APC workgroup at calendar@ucop.edu. Both CUCFA and your individual campus Faculty Associations are closely monitoring the situation. They are working hard to ensure faculty will have a meaningful opportunity to engage in shared governance on this crucial issue.
We look forward to working with you to protect the interests of faculty, students, and staff across the system.
CUCFA Board
[1] This research, published in the American Economic Journal (2022), analyzed data from hundreds of institutions, finding that such transitions reduce four-year graduation rates by an average of 3.7 percentage points. The study highlights mechanisms such as lowered first-year grades, decreased likelihood of enrolling in a full course load, and delays in major selection as significant contributors to these outcomes. Furthermore, it demonstrates that the adverse effects are not temporary but persist well beyond the initial cohorts affected by the change.