The four-day workweek at URI

Can a four day work week be present on campus? Graphic by: Maddie Bataille | Photo Editor

As workplaces all over the country discuss implementing four-day workweeks for their employees, there is little talk about this transition into college classes.

According to an article titled “Is a Four-Day Week the Future of Work?” from The Wall Street Journal, the pandemic left many businesses and organizations questioning the “tradition of the five-day, 40-hour week.” This questioning includes talks of remote options, hybrid work schedules and the four-day workweek. 

Direct mentions of the four-day work or school week have never been explicitly mentioned at the University, but informal implementations of this idea can be seen through the course schedules.

On e-Campus, a website that many universities, including URI, use as a virtual campus hub, the Spring 2023 undergraduate enrollment shopping cart and course catalog show over 3,600 courses offered at the University this semester. Of these classes, there were 105 different departments used in the Cigar’s data collection and analysis, which didn’t include categories that don’t belong to college categories, such as Community Service (CVS), University College for Academic Success (UCS) and other similar departments.

To better manage and understand the data from the 105 departments, each department was placed into 12 categories, including Arts, Languages, Education, Sciences and Mathematics, Business, Social Sciences, Communication & Media, Engineering, Humanities, Health, Nursing & Pharmacy and Environment & Life Sciences.

The total number of courses and the total number of courses held on Fridays were found through e-Campus and calculated to determine the percentage of courses held on Fridays in all 12 categories, which can be seen in graph 1 below.

In collecting the data from e-Campus, it was also found that some departments have surplus amounts of independent courses that could skew/alter the data and percentages.

These classes include ones labeled as “Independent Study, Internship, Special Projects, Undergraduate Teaching Experience, Special Problems, Applied Music and Recital,” all of which are seen as outliers because of their “To Be Determined” status on e-Campus because the student and professor determine the meeting time themselves, if one is even needed.

A new total number of courses was found, this time without the inclusion of independent courses, and the original total number of courses held on Fridays was again used to calculate the percentage of courses held on Fridays in all 12 categories without the inclusion of independent courses, which can be seen in graph 2 below.

Comparing the percentage including the independent courses and the percentage not including the independent courses shows that the independent courses do have an impact on the data, as much as 9.1% in the Languages and Health categories.

The data gathered from e-Campus reflects the totals and percentages for each department, but for how these courses are made and why there are variations between departments, John Humphrey, senior associate director of registration and records, said “all departments and colleges work closely with Enrollment Services to schedule all courses.”

Danielle Dennis is dean of the Alan Shawn Feinstein College of Education and Professional Studies, which has the least amount of courses offered on Fridays between departments, with 2.9% of total classes on Fridays (or 4.7% of classes on Fridays, excluding independent courses.)

Dennis said that although she does approve the final schedule, the faculty are who determine what days and times work best based on student feedback.

She said that the College of Education and Professional Studies is unique compared to other colleges because they have to take into account student teaching and experiences in schools across the state, which impacts what days classes are available. 

“Usually what happens is in each program, so let’s say elementary education,” Dennis said. “They have a group of faculty who work specifically with that program. They talk together, they figure out how many students we have in junior year and senior year. And then that helps us figure out exactly how many sections we need of each class. And then once we figure out the kind of those sections, we try to offer them at various times so that it’s convenient for students.”

Dennis also said another reason for the lack of Friday classes in the college are because the department has meetings on Fridays.

Another benefit to this, according to Dennis, is that students can be reassured that they have Fridays off for schoolwork, jobs, student teaching or just unwinding.

“For the most part, I think students really appreciate not having classes on Friday,” Dennis said. “I think the same thing works for faculty, it’s good for them to know that they’ve got kind of this one day that you know, they can get things done, I’ve really not encountered many complaints about this approach. And we do have a few classes on Friday, if students really need one.”

While the college only offers four total classes on Fridays, there are also 3 classes offered on Saturdays and Sundays. 

“[The] classes that we offer on the weekends are [EDC 203:] Mental Health First Aid and those aren’t all semester long,” Dennis said. “So that’s like one of those things that you might take two Saturdays and you’ve completed it. So it’s a little bit different than the rest of our courses, but it’s not like they’re not a required course in the program.”

One common reason for instating a four day workweek is that it can cut costs in terms of payroll, according to an article from Investopedia, but Dennis says that staff and faculty are not impacted by this reasoning.

“It’s a salary,” Dennis said. “You have to teach a certain number of credit hours a semester, is how it works. So it doesn’t matter if it’s spread across three days or two. It’s just your teaching credits.”

Dennis said the College of Education and Professional Studies is able to hold fewer classes on Fridays because of its size but encourages other departments and colleges to consider the idea. 

“I think it [a four-day work and class week] is definitely worth at least considering across the board,” Dennis said. “But, you know, I do think that because of our size, we do have a little bit more flexibility with scheduling and how we can go about doing that.”

On the opposite side of the spectrum is the French department in the Languages category, which has 64.7% of total classes on Fridays (or 78.6% of classes on Fridays, excluding independent courses.)

Leslie Kealhofer-Kemp, associate professor of French and film, associate chair and French section head, said that the Monday, Wednesday and Friday (MWF) schedule works especially well for 100-level and 200-level French courses because meeting regularly helps develop language proficiency.

Kealhofer-Kemp said that the same isn’t necessarily true for upper-level classes.

“It kind of depends on the instructor for the 300 and 400-level classes and also the type of class,” Kealhofer-Kemp said. “For some professors, it works well for the kind of topics that they’re teaching.”

Kealhofer-Kemp used a class she’s taught in the past as an example.

“I would have a 400-level class maybe once a week,” Kealhofer-Kemp said. “I taught French film, so that worked well because sometimes I could show movies in class and we could talk about it.”

“So 100 and 200 is really kind of pedagogically motivated,” Kealhofer-Kemp said. “And then there’s more flexibility at the upper level where it’s more content-based and students have more experience with the language.”

Kealhofer-Kemp said that having most courses meet three times a week gives instructors and students time off in the middle of the week on Tuesday and Thursday.

“We [the French department] have three credit classes, and teach typically three classes per semester and so I think that’s another reason we don’t offer a lot of Tuesday, Thursday classes,” Kealhofer-Kemp said. “Because if your three classes [meet every day] then you end up on campus five days a week. So we try and make it so if you’re doing research or something else, it’s helpful to at least have some days that are flexible.”

In terms of the creation of classes, Kealhofer-Kemp said professors make their schedules, which Kealhofer-Kemp approves as section head, that get once again approved by the language department chair before getting sent to the Dean’s office.

“Oftentimes, the Fall semesters are typically pretty similar, and the Spring semesters,” Kealhofer-Kemp said. “Once in a while there’s a class that we might substitute or something like that, but it’s usually modeled on the previous year… Basically, we kind of get the template of what we offered the previous year.”

Kealhofer-Kemp said that another benefit of having courses on MWF, especially for lower-level courses, is the community building it fosters for newer students.

“For students to get to know each other, it [meeting MWF] works well in those initial classes where there’s a lot of new information,” Kealhofer-Kemp said.”We teach all of our classes in French even from the 100 level, so we try and keep things interesting and keep it moving, but it is it does demand a lot of mental energy from students and so, to keep the classes shorter makes sense, pedagogically, with those levels.”

While MWF works well for many French courses, Kealhofer-Kemp said that she sees the advantages of having a shorter workweek as well.

“Then the kind of higher levels it may make more sense for students that have a higher proficiency level who can maintain their kind of focus for longer, because they have had more practice with the language and it’s [meeting fewer times a week] may be less of a struggle in some ways that might make sense in terms of when we get more into content-based classes,” Kealhofer-Kemp said. “So more content, discussion-based classes, I think can work very well having the two days a week. So it kind of depends on the class.”

Although the four-day workweek has its advantages for some departments, it’s clear that others work well with a longer week and that URI hasn’t unanimously adopted this method on its campuses.