If you had planned on graduating in the morning and getting married in the evening, those arrangements may be out the window in light of NIU’s rescheduling.

NIU Vice Provost Earl Seaver said he has begun answering e-mails he has received from students concerned over the additional week of school conflicting with summer plans which, in the case of one student, he said, did in fact result in classes taking place during their wedding.

“The first thing we said to them was that you should realize that this was a real difficult decision to have to make. [When university officials] were talking about what we are going to do for the rest of the semester, there were any number of issues that had to be addressed,” Seaver said.

Seaver said university officials wondered how long the university would be closed, how much time was needed for students to feel comfortable returning to campus, and how long was needed to prepare faculty and staff for what to expect the first day students returned.

He said they sought to maintain the integrity of the semester and “under that pretext it was obvious there was not a simple solution … all numbers of kinds of variables came out, so it was real obvious that this was not an easy decision to make, but we decided to go with extending the semester and moving everything a week later.”

Seaver said NIU anticipated this being an inconvenience for some people and apologized, but said this was the best decision the university could make.

“What I’m telling students to do is talk to their faculty members, in some cases they don’t even have finals, and in others they can talk to their faculty,” he said.

“I would hope that our faculty will be flexible and work with the students.”

University officials had originally anticipated the briefing of staff and faculty to take two days, but it instead took four. Seaver also said the process of moving and rescheduling Cole Hall classes took two days.

Classrooms with seat capacities nearest the size of Cole lecture halls only hold three-fifths as many students at capacity, he said.

Spring Break

Despite classes being canceled for a full week just two weeks before the week off for spring break, additional scheduling difficulties dismissed the possibilities of rescheduling spring break, Seaver said.

Spring break was not moved because its original timing gave students two weeks to come back and get a feel for school again, and the same scheduling problems which have presented themselves from the additional week off would present themselves in regard to spring break as well, he said.

“I wish there was a way we could have found a good solution that had been beneficial for everybody, but I guess we’re going to have to say that ’07-08 was the year we had to go to extraordinary means to continue our students’ education,” he said. “I can’t think of any other way to describe it.”