Petition Regarding Space Allocation for CAS Workshops

Dear Sian and Members of the Council on Advanced Studies:

We write to you as faculty advisors and participants in CAS workshops at the University of Chicago. Proposed changes in the Registrar’s classroom scheduling policies, announced to staff on October 24 without wide faculty consultation or knowledge, will create serious obstacles to the workshops’ continued vitality. 

We believe, as we hope you do, that the workshops are one of the most integral elements in the University’s graduate education and intellectual life. They are critical to our students’ development as scholars and professionals; they create vital links between faculty and students; they give students at every stage a sense of community and continuity. The workshops are the envy of many of our peer institutions and the fondest touchstone for our alumni. They are among the reasons our best students choose to join us, and are essential to our reputation as a place where critical engagement flourishes. 

The proposed changes suggest a seemingly simple restructuring. In the present system, classroom space for workshops can be scheduled very early, before classes are in the system, and for an entire year. In the new proposal, workshops and other regular meetings (including many departmental and center-related events) will only be scheduled after classes are assigned rooms.  This will mean that workshops will no longer be able to claim attachment to particular spaces, and may find themselves having to move from one space to another to maintain the same meeting time over the course of the year. 

We feel that this is highly problematic on two counts. 

First, it sends the message that the workshops are not a high priority within the university. A section for any large undergraduate course will have scheduling priority over a workshop that has been at the center of intellectual life for a generation. And second, it creates discontinuities that will erode the development of a sense of community rooted in place, something that is especially important to many of our graduate students. Whatever stage they are at in the program, however their work is going, there is a place they can briefly consider their own intellectual space for their entire tenure here. 

In light of those doubts, we have two concrete proposals. 

First, we ask that the draft proposal be altered so that CAS workshops and other Center or departmental seminars with regular meeting times be allowed to reserve yearly space before the beginning of course scheduling if they so choose. 

Second, we ask that departmental chairs and directors of centers and institutes be directly consulted about changes in classroom use policies, so that their views about other potential problems that might be generated by the new policies be taken into account before they go into effect.

We recognize that space is an enormous problem across the university, and that changes need to be made in our allocation policies. We simply ask that those changes be made in a consultative fashion, so that they can better reflect the core values of our university.