Starting in the 2027–28 academic year, winter break may be four weeks instead of five, with the spring term beginning a week earlier, on the first Tuesday after Jan. 16. The proposed changes to the academic calendar follow the 2025 cancellation of the Wintersession program due to budget cuts. The proposal will require approval at a second faculty meeting in April before it is formally passed.
The Faculty Committee on Classrooms and Schedule presented the proposal at the faculty meeting on March 2 after it was unanimously approved by the Faculty Advisory Committee on Policy on Feb. 11. Members of the faculty vote on who in the faculty they want to be part of various committees that meet for monthly meetings.
The proposal was written by Dean of the Faculty Gene Jarrett ’97 and shared at the faculty meeting by Dean of the College Michael Gordin, who represented the proposal on behalf of the Faculty Committee on Classrooms and Schedule.
“The decision to end Wintersession prompted the Committee to carefully reexamine the spring term,” Gordin wrote in a letter shared with meeting attendees. “We have concluded that, without the benefits of Wintersession, the spring term calendar presents more challenges than it offers advantages.”
The letter stated that the current five-week break between the fall and spring terms will, without Winterssion, “negatively impact student learning, especially in departments with highly sequential curricula.”
The new term dates would mean a shorter winter break and less conflict with the National Collegiate Athletic Association championships over the final assessment period.
Gordin also emphasized how changes to the spring term schedule would prevent “requiring a large portion of staff to work nearly nonstop over a holiday weekend” due to Class Day and Commencement falling on Memorial Day weekend. The new schedule would allow Class Day and Commencement to be the week prior.
The proposed calendar will be more closely aligned with peer institutions such as Yale and Brown, which currently start summer holidays roughly a week earlier than Princeton.
The meeting also included the approval of curricular changes to the Department of African American Studies (AAS) and the Program in European Cultural Studies (ECS).
The AAS department will add two new courses: AAS 336: Racial Histories of Gender and Sexuality and AAS 433: Black Worldmaking — Freedom Movements Then and Now. ECS will offer ECS 301: Rethinking European Culture in the Present, ECS 362: Opera — Culture and Politics, and ECS 376: The Body in Space — Art, Architecture, and Performance. No information was provided on when these courses will be offered.
Faculty also approved a new minor in Quantum Science and Engineering. This was proposed by the Princeton Quantum Initiative (PQI), which was launched in 2019 and has “initiated many programs including a Ph.D. program in Quantum Science and Engineering in 2024.” The program will be led by Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Nathalie de Leon and the PQI executive committee, which includes faculty members across scientific departments.
Current juniors in the Class of 2027 will be able to declare a minor in Quantum Science and Engineering. Currently, there are no prerequisite courses necessary to declare the minor beyond those required by the minor’s required ECE courses, which themselves include prerequisite courses in 100-level physics and 200-level math.
The proposal for the minor emphasizes training “at the intersection of quantum physics and quantum information” to prepare students for professional careers in information science.
“Princeton is also planning a dedicated quantum science and engineering institute and facility to further these efforts,” the proposal stated.
The faculty also voted unanimously to decommission the certificate in Geological Engineering. Following a vote by Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) faculty in March 2024, the certificate was phased out: its current cohort of students in the Class of 2025 will be its last, as no students in the class of 2026 enrolled in the program. The department chose not to convert the program into a minor due to a lack of interested students outside of those already in the CEE program.
The meeting also included memorial resolutions commemorating recently deceased professors David Bellos of the French and Italian department, Alison Isenberg of History, and Edmund Valentine White III of Creative Writing, which were delivered by professors in their respective departments. The minutes of the previous Faculty meeting on Feb. 2 were also approved.
The next faculty meeting will be on April 6 at 4:30 p.m. in Nassau Hall.
Serin Kayserilioglu is a News contributor and Data contributor for the ‘Prince.’ She is from Nicosia, Cyprus and can be reached at sk2637[at]princeton.edu.
Meghana Veldhuis is a senior News writer for the ‘Prince.’ She is from Bergen County, N.J., and typically covers graduate students, postdocs, faculty, and campus unions and labor. She can be reached at mv4991[at]princeton.edu.
Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.
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