Not sure I quite understand the math that permits the disappearance of two entire weeks at the end of the academic year. But any way you slice it, how do you do that without creating more rather than less stress? Someone must think so, but I don’t quite get it.
I don’t like the S-term for a different reason: it sets up a period during which only a portion of the student body will be in attendance. I always experienced the arrival at school and beginning of the fall term as a grand communal gathering of the tribe, an embarking en masse on the school year. Now the embarkation will come in two tranches. The drama of setting out is weakened accordingly. The summer session seems adequate to me for anyone who needs a fix of study between the end of one school year and the beginning of another. All hands should be on deck for the main event.
Finally, I liked the out-of-synchness of the UChicago year with that of most other Institutions - the feeling of still being out of school during the month of September when everyone else was in it and then the finishing it all up when you were still in school at a time when all others were out of it but with the freedom to desert the library and your room for the breezes of the Point or the shade of a tree on the Midway. You could feel half in school and half out of it. Those last weeks had a reflective summery quality about them that somehow tamped down the harriedness that was also part of the conclusion of the year.
The proposed arrangement is neither perfectly in synch with other schools nor quite so flagrantly out of synch; it dilutes the communal spirit; and it is hardly clear that it relieves stress. Write me down as a skeptic.