If you’re a current first-year student at Seattle University, you may be seeing a change in the academic calendar during your senior year.  

In fall quarter, Provost Shane Martin assembled a committee consisting of members of Seattle U’s faculty and staff. The committee, called the Academic Calendar Working Group, was given the task of reviewing the university’s current academic calendar to see how Seattle U can improve it to better support the student body. The announcement of this working group was the first that the Seattle U community heard about a possible switch to a semester system.  

In a May 12 email sent to the entirety of Seattle U, Martin gave an update regarding the Academic Calendar Working Group. The provost announced that the working group had shifted their work to exploring the possibility of unifying the university’s academic calendar for the 2027-28 academic year.  

“I recently redirected the Work Group to expand its scope and explore the unifying of Seattle University’s academic calendar for the 2027-28 academic year,” Martin said in his email. 

This means that the working group will be addressing what is needed for Seattle U to make the switch from the current quarter system to the more widely used semester system, the system that is currently used by nearly 95% of universities in the nation. Seattle U is also the last Jesuit university in the U.S. to still be on the quarter system, after Santa Clara University announced they are also currently considering the switch to semesters last year.  

Currently, the university is running on two separate academic calendars. The Seattle U School of Law runs on the semester system, while the rest of the institution is using quarters. Also, Cornish College of the Arts, which Seattle U is acquiring this year, also uses the semester system.  

If this news sounds familiar to you, that’s because Seattle U visited the idea of making the change to semesters just years ago, beginning in 2019. After the research of another similar working group, the university made the decision to continue with the quarter system in 2021, with faculty voting overwhelmingly against semesters.  

Kate Koppelman, the chair of the Seattle U English department and professor in the university’s honors program, was a member of the original Academic Calendar Review Working Group. 

 “[I’m] super frustrated…the last time we took this up, we had the university-wide referendum in 2021, and that was a result of this widely representative working group… We had worked an entire year on gathering data in subgroups and all that kind of stuff with the goal of having this campus wide referendum, which we had, and the faculty overwhelmingly did not approve of moving to semesters, staff did want to move to semesters, but the percentages were not as high as they were for faculty. So, I was really frustrated because I had been part of that work for a whole year,” Koppelman commented regarding her initial reaction to the announcement of the possible system change.  

The announcement of the possible shift has been a catalyst for discussion on campus. Though individuals support the system change, many are also opposed to the schedule unification.  

Iona Robinson is a second-year majoring in international studies. They explained they support Seattle U’s current quarter system. 

“I believe we should stay on the quarter system. I’m personally a really big fan of it, though I do see benefits to switching to a semester system. My biggest qualm with what’s happening right now is the lack of communication about everything, how fast it’s been going, and the fact that faculty hasn’t really been consulted, [and] neither have students,” Robinson said.  

As Robinson pointed out, for many, the issue isn’t the implications of semesters itself, but rather the process of which the university is handling the situation. Under the leadership of Koppelman, many faculty have come together to write and sign a letter objecting the calendar review process.  

The letter covers many different issues that certain faculty have with the review process, including the claims that the current process does not consider the 2021 referendum on the academic calendar and that the process does not allow faculty or staff enough time to give full responses or considerations, just to name a few.  

“Regardless of where you are on which you think is better, or prefer, the letter is really meant to be addressing what we, the writers of the letter, see as a failure in the process around generally accepted principles and practices of shared governance for faculty and staff,” Koppelman said.  

At the time of writing, the letter has 83 signatures from various members of the Seattle U faculty.  

In the community-wide email and during a May 15 town hall meeting hosted by the working group, Martin stated multiple reasons arguing why the semester system would benefit the university. One major reason is that, due to the acquisition of Cornish, the university will be unable to provide federal financial aid to students on two separate academic calendars. Also, other universities that are currently on semester systems are out-recruiting Seattle U, causing fewer students to attend the university. Other reasons include, but are not limited to, the lack of students coming to college with the necessary “readiness skills,” and recent policy changes with the Washington College Grant. 

“What that means is we think about our enrollment strategy and our survival as an institution, we have to think in new ways because of the challenges that we have,” Martin said during the town hall.   

Also, during the town hall, one of the working group co-chairs and the Vice Provost for Academic Programs, Charles Tung, presented models of what the semester system could look like. He gave examples of possibilities of the number of courses and credits that a student would take during one semester, such as models comparing the difference of four-credit courses and three-credit courses. 

“The same amount of course content that exists in that 10-week, five-credit course is stretched out over 14 or 15 weeks. The total number of students taught, the total number of courses annually remain the same,” Tung said during the town hall. 

Another possible benefit of the semester system that is often overlooked is the impact that the current quarter system has on many students with disabilities.  

Kim Thompson serves as the senior director of disability services at Seattle U.  

“As I said yesterday, students with disabilities are not a monolith; one solution isn’t going to work perfectly for all students with disabilities, but I do believe that the majority would benefit from the semester system as opposed to the quarter system,” Thompson said.  

As Thompson said, not all students benefit from the same things, and one solution isn’t going to work perfectly for all students with disabilities, but Thompson listed multiple reasons why semesters could benefit students with disabilities. 

Thompson pointed out that many students come into college from a high school that’s on a semester schedule, making it difficult to adjust. The quarter system also limits the ability to provide adequate accommodations to students that they previously had in high school, semesters allow for more time to absorb a topic and overall, the accelerated learning within the 10 week quarter is not enough time for students that need longer periods of time to process and absorb the material.

The slower movement of the semester system is one of the things that makes the semester system particularly attractive to many students on campus, such as Christopher Menjivar Cornejo, a first-year mechanical engineering student.

“Overall, I think it’ll be a good idea, especially because of that slower pace. It just gives students more time to actually learn stuff instead of just trying to memorize and then regurgitate,” Menjivar Cornejo said.  

Whether you’re in favor of the semester change, opposed or indifferent, the unification of the academic calendar would undoubtedly have a major impact on the university.  

The decision on whether or not the university will move on with the process of unifying the academic calendar will be determined within the next couple of weeks, as the working group will be sharing what they learned from their research with the provost and the president by the end of the month. The two will then present the data to the Board of Trustees during their regular meeting at the end of this month, who will then decide whether to unify the calendars or not.