Sebastien Angel | Leave cutting class to students

You're still here?

You shouldn't be. Look around - the campus is empty.

Supposedly, Thanksgiving break begins at the "close of classes" today. But if you're reading this at 10 or 11 a.m. today, chances are you could walk down Locust Walk and not bump into anyone you know. If it's later in the afternoon, you could walk down Locust and probably not see anyone at all.

It's not that nobody takes those Monday-Wednesday lecture classes anymore: It's that they've all been cancelled.

In my time at Penn, I have yet to have a lecture class the day before the start of break that wasn't cancelled. I could have been out of here on Monday evening, if only I'd found a flight in time. And in talking to other students - mostly from the College, but from other schools as well - I've learned that the chance any lecture class will be held today is close to zero.

The reason that my professors are giving is that no one would show up, and that's a common refrain.

To be fair, it's probably true. In a 250-student lecture, I would put the over-under for attendance at a day-before-Thanksgiving lecture at 100. (That's assuming that there are several dozen people in the class who live within city lines.) And, even after that, I'd probably take the under.

But since you're probably getting your Wednesday econ lesson, let's look at the problem from a money perspective.

Tuition at Penn is $15,299 for a semester. If you're taking four classes, that's about $3,825 per class. Let's say that a term is 14 weeks long, so you get 42 hours of instruction at $91.07 per hour. Or, put another way, you lose $91 every time the professor drops the old "nobody would come to a class before Thanksgiving" line. And, if you're the professor in my phantom 250-student lecture, your "money wasted" figure is up around $22,750. (Cut that down to $13,650 if we're only counting the 100 that show up.)

That's a fairly big chunk of change to pay for a few extra hours of vacation.

Maybe most people would skip the class, but why should that dictate professors' behavior? They take the time to order "recommended" readings for the bookstore, surely aware that a good number of their students wouldn't dream of spending money on an optional book. They schedule and show up for office hours even if no one comes to them.

They do these things because as employees of the University, they have an obligation to provide its paying customers, the students, with what they have already paid for. The student, in turn, can decide whether the benefit of a little more vacation is worth the cost of a missed lecture.

That situation is no different than a student opting not to take advantage of College House social events, the center for Counseling and Psychological Services or major-selection dinners.

Some might argue that students who don't turn up for such a lecture would fall behind. I, for one, wish professors would use that kind of logic all year long. That way, if I didn't want to take a test, I could organize a group of people and decide not to take it, at which point the professor would simply decide to postpone it for fear of letting us fall too far behind in the class.

The line of argument makes sense, but students who skip class in September and October are likely to fall behind, too. And professors, particularly in lecture classes, generally don't take any action when that happens.

Again, the decision ought to fall to the student: Do you want to be a little bit behind and possibly eat another home-cooked meal, or do you want to be ahead of the curve (literally) by showing up when most people aren't?

Penn students already pay a bulk of their tuition and a litany of mandatory fees for services they wouldn't even think of using. (If you don't believe me, try calling someone on their dorm phone, which costs a minimum of $8 a month.)

For once, it would be nice if students could make the choice for themselves.

Sebastien Angel is a College sophomore from Worcester, Mass. His e-mail address is angel@dailypennsylvanian.com. Overnight Celebrity appears on Wednesdays.

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