Born of unrest, Fall Break legacy lives on

In this environment, Fall Break was born.

In an era of violence, distrust and activism, and in the wake of a University-wide strike against the Vietnam War, Fall Break emerged as a student- and faculty-led initiative to allow students to take time off to work for political campaigns.

On May 7, 1970, The New York Times editorial board lauded the Princeton Plan for Fall Break, calling it a process to “translate personal idealism into systematic political action.”

Today, and especially in this election season, the break continues to serve as a crucial time for students to participate in the electoral process and have a breather after midterms.

That the University’s Fall Break system persists, though, was the result of a turbulent process. Just one year after its inception, faculty members voted to eliminate the pre-election respite from the calendar.

Thanks to the actions of the members of a UGA Ad Hoc Committee at the time, however, a decision by the University administration to eliminate Fall Break in its nascent years was reversed, and Fall Break still remains a hallmark of the Princeton experience.

Chaos and change: the University during the Vietnam War

On Thursday, May 1, 1970, a provisional strike was called on campus after the Nixon administration expanded the Vietnam War into Cambodia.

Support nonprofit student journalism. Donate to the ‘Prince’. Donate now »

The next day, 80 percent of students stayed out of classes, and the following day, several eating clubs cancelled their Houseparties, The Daily Princetonian reported at the time.

“There was nothing like it before in Princeton history and nothing like it since,” Greg Conderacci ’71, who was editor-in-chief at the ‘Prince’ at the time, said in an interview. “It was absolutely the peak of student unrest about the war.”

On the Friday of the strike, the Stevenson Hall resolution, which called for the modification of the academic calendar to include a two-week recess prior to election day in November, was proposed.

Luther Munford ’71, who was the chairman of the ‘Prince,’ said that history professor S. Frederick Starr was one of the first individuals to publicly propose the idea of a fall recess at the University to give students an opportunity to participate positively in the political process.

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

The day after the Stevenson Hall proposal and a speech by Starr, the ‘Prince’ published a special Saturday one-page edition endorsing the plan, Munford said.

The editorial in this special edition said that the proposal had “one chief merit.”

“It can work,” it declared. “The university and every other American college must schedule a campaign recess, turn our manpower loose on Congress, and let us throw the real ‘bums’ out of office.”

Starr wrote in an Oct. 6, 1970 New York Times op-ed that the plan to enact fall break at Princeton “enables individuals to direct their political energy constructively into public life rather than negatively against academic institutions.”

There was a call for more immediate action as well. The Undergraduate Assembly (UGA) and the University Council scheduled special weekend sessions, and the UGA was strongly in favor of an official University strike that spring. A UGA resolution demanded that then-President Robert Goheen ’40 take a public stance on the strike.

On Sunday, May 3, 1970, just three days after the announcement of the Cambodian invasion, the University Council and Goheen met in a seven-hour session to discuss both the strike and the election break. They decided to issue a proposal to officially come out against the Vietnam War.

The next day — the day before the infamous Kent State shootings — roughly 5,000 members of the University community gathered in Jadwin Gymnasium to vote on “the Cambodian invasion, U.S. foreign policy and domestic oppression,” the ‘Prince’ reported May 5, 1970.

The measure passed, so the University officially condemned the actions of the Nixon administration and urged a strike against the war. To allow students to strike, the University adopted provisions to extend exams and paper deadlines. The University Council also recommended to the Committee on Schedule that it modify the 1970-71 academic calendar to allow for a fall break. This proposal was called the Princeton Plan.

Munford explained that during spring 1970, the University was essentially shut down. Students did not take exams, and they handed in papers in the fall.

“It was an exciting and challenging time because the students were right in the middle of the national political scene,” Munford said.

“We probably didn’t get as rigorous of an academic education as we would have otherwise,” he noted. “Politics became more important than studying.”

Monday, May 4, 1970, a ‘Prince’ editorial supported the University Council’s recommendation for an election recess, stating that “what Princeton needs — and hopefully what will emerge at this afternoon’s meeting — is a system for mobilizing the community, identifying the marginal campaigns, and defeating Nixon’s allies at the polls.”

Apathy and resistance: Controversy over the change

At first, the plan seemed to be a success. Three dozen other universities across the United States adopted what came to be known as the Princeton Plan and shifted their fall breaks to the two weeks prior to the election of 1970.

The tide changed quickly, however.

The inaugural election break did not have quite the political impact that it was expected to, Munford said.

The University administration proposed a referendum to cancel election break — as it was then called — after the fall of 1970.

Several political maneuvers by the Nixon administration mitigated protests, especially among students. Munford explained that Nixon instituted a draft lottery, which determined the order of draftees according to birth date. Those men whose birthdates were at the end of list, then, would have little incentive to mobilize. This strategy, Conderacci added, “took a lot of the juice out of the movement.”

On Oct. 20, 1970, the ‘Prince’ published a column explaining the decline in the sense of activist fervor among students. It stated that “apathy is the attitude of the moment,” citing, the emotional drain of the previous spring and the burden of postponed exams as additional factors.

Despite these changes, 24 percent of students participated in some type of campaigning activity over the first election break in 1970, according to a report issued by the UGA Ad Hoc Committee in 1972 and obtained from the University Archives at Mudd Library.

“Certainly,” Conderacci said, “the unrest from spring 1970 was never replicated.”

After one test year, it seemed like Fall Break was no more than a fleeting fad. There was no Fall Break in 1971. On Jan. 3, 1972, the faculty voted 97-36 in favor of eliminating the Princeton Plan, the ‘Prince’ reported.

Saving Fall Break

Though the anti-war zeal was tapering off and election recess seemed like a lost cause, some students marched on.

On Oct. 6, 1971, ‘Prince’ associate editor Gil Serota ’73 called for retaining the election break.

It was an environment where “misunderstandings of students and the society they interact within continues at a dangerous level, and when young people are increasingly disenchanted within the offerings and responsiveness of too-rigid political and social systems,” he said in his editorial.

The primary motivator of this campaign to revive election recess, though, was an informal branch of the UGA that formed in early 1972 for this express purpose.

The UGA Ad Hoc Committee was led by committee chairman Andrew Strenio ’74.

The fall election recess was important, Strenio explained, because it provided an opportunity for students who were passionate about politics to be “helpful for the country” and participate in constructive activism.

The first step in reviving Fall Break was to create a report compiling the benefits and costs of the recess, including the academic and political purposes for which it had been used, the level of student support for the break and associated costs.

Strenio said he recalled presenting this document before the “imposing set of folks” that comprised the University Council.

“The [University Council’s] support was contingent upon faculty support,” he explained. To gain this support, the UGA Ad Hoc Committee sent letters to all faculty members urging them to vote in favor of keeping Fall Break in the academic calendar.

“There is a tendency … to underplay the benefits of an election recess,” the letter read. “To refuse or neglect to take full account of such positive effects is to seriously undermine the humanistic and rational character that is so essential to the meaningful existence of Princeton University.”

Strenio noted that the Council was very “fair” and “reasonable” but added that there was some “inertia” in making a change because the faculty had already voted to eliminate the break.

The faculty scheduled a revote for March 6, 1972, two months after it had voted to abolish Fall Break. The outcome was extremely close. Those in favor of keeping election recess emerged victorious, 89-87, reversing the January decision.

“What I consider to be the best part of Princeton is that is it possible to have civil dialogue from all perspectives,” Strenio said. “We faced several setbacks where it seemed like we were having doors shut,” he said, “[but we] kept pounding on it and it opened.”

Looking forward, Strenio had some advice for proponents of academic calendar reform today.

The Committee on the Course of Study, chaired by Dean of the College Nancy Malkiel, began its detailed investigation of academic calendar reform in fall 2005. After soliciting opinions from undergraduates, graduate students, faculty and administrators, the Committee determined in November 2007 that in the absence of a consensus, no revisions can currently be implemented. The proposal has since been tabled.

“Stick to it and stay in it for the long haul,” Strenio said.