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Too cool for school

The decision to cancel classes during hurricane Sandy assured students were safe and did not carry any significant detriment

Last Monday I got to sleep until 10:30 a.m. because of President Sullivan’s decision to cancel classes in response to Hurricane Sandy. Late Monday night, I thought I received a spoof email saying that there would also be no class on Tuesday, but after instantly checking the Virginia homepage, I saw it was not a hoax. The storm turned out to be relatively gentle to the Charlottesville area throughout both days, but, as it is much easier to predict the weather once it has come and gone, I do not hold it against President Sullivan for the decision.

If you examine closely the consequences of not having class for two days, versus the ramifications of what could have happened if we had a devastating storm and normal operation of classes, the two days of missed class are not that detrimental. For professors, the missed class time means that they will have to squeeze in makeup material throughout the semester. For students, the consequence is that they might have less time to learn the material, as class time was clipped. In the worst case, the missed material is not made up in lecture, and needs to be learned on the students’ own time.

Relative to one’s peers, there was neither an advantage nor disadvantage toward missing class, because everyone had the opportunity to use the found time to catch up on work. Had class not been cancelled and some students who lived further away were not able to get to class, then there would be an unfair advantage afforded to those with housing conveniently located near Grounds.

I heard a friend say that the University should not have cancelled classes because they could have just sent out an alert if the storm did indeed get too bad to handle. This would not have been a viable option because the rate at which the storm would have hit was unknown. If flash flooding were to have occurred, it would have been hard to drive safely out of the city, especially given the fact that traffic problems exist even on days with perfect weather.

There are also some who argue that class should not have been cancelled because of our tradition of rarely ever cancelling due to inclement weather. While it is true that the University had only cancelled class twice in the past thirty years before Monday, this alone should not be reason to put the University community in danger. Cancelled class statistics are useful in showing consistency and dependency in the University’s operations, but I doubt that employers will deem the quality of our education reduced because of a couple extra days without classes.

Since the missed classes are not made up at the end of the semester, perhaps it angers some that the tuition spent on these classes is wasted. I roughly calculated that each class missed — based on an out-of-state student taking 15 credits — is $76. One could look at these two cancelled days as a few hundred dollars of lost education, but given that the tuition is a sunk cost, this would be irrational.

Conversely, one could also argue that the money spent on tuition is mostly for education, not just class time. With my found time on Monday and Tuesday, I was able to get caught up on some work, which I otherwise would have shoved into a huge pile labelled “Later.” Since I was up to date before class on Wednesday, I was able to get more out of the new material taught in classes this week.

Given that the University did not announce the two days of cancelled class synchronously, there was the option to have class on Tuesday having seen the mild weather on Monday. Based on the information available at the time, the University made a smart decision to cancel class on Tuesday. One day’s cancelled class should not affect the decision making for cancelling another day of classes. Had there been class on Tuesday because of reservations from cancelling class on Monday and Sandy struck Charlottesville as severely as it did in New Jersey, students may have been unnecessarily injured.

As President Sullivan wrote in her email to the University, “I don’t make this decision lightly, but this is in the best interest of everyone’s safety.” Given the information available at the time, cancelling class was indeed in the best interest of everyone at the University.

Andrew Kouri’s column usually appears biweekly on Thursdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at a.kouri@cavalierdaily.com.

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