Students and members of the public may be wondering why their university is not open. Easter is an issue for the academic planner. A university that has moved to modules, whether in terms or semesters, has to cope with Easter. At the start of the Pandemic, the different patterns of teaching and assessment that happen after Easter caused issues. Although there’s a fuss about the naming of terms (why name a term that starts in October Michaelmas, or one that starts in January Lent?), there’s a forced break at Easter with the bank holidays.
However, at many universities, there’s another thing to contend with in the ‘closure day’. Universities have added to the normal bank holidays a range of additional closure days. These can take different forms in staff contracts (there are complexities for staff on different forms of contract) but they present themselves as a day on which the university is ‘closed’. What’s clear, however, is that this closure takes different forms. In many cases students are now present on campuses in vacations and are therefore around when the university is ‘closed’. ‘Closed’ can therefore take many different forms and attempts to clarify this are many and various. There’s the concept of ‘Minimal Service’, to describe that while buildings might be open, or open to those with a card, services within them will not be open.
Libraries are a key example – the building may be open 24 hours a day, but it’s only security staff that are in during the closure. Online services continue to work and chatbots pop up on university websittes.
The following are examples of the closure days at 20 English universities. The sample is entirely based on their placing in a search on google. Four universities have three extra closure days, meaning that the university is ‘shut’ for seven days. Five have two days and three one extra day. Seven are just closed for the long weekend.
There’s a combination of issues at play here. In many semester-based academic year structures Easter creates a break in teaching, in some cases what comes after is revision sessions for exams or just assessment. Courses running on traditional terms may also be focused on forthcoming assessments. One reason for avoiding closure of library and learning resources are final year project or dissertation deadlines.
The other issue is the cumulative effect of staff contracts and terms and conditions. Different groups of staff have had different holidays, with a distinction between academic and professional services staff but also between those who work in a university or college that had a public sector heritage, where the local authority once set the contract. A longitudinal study may throw up whether a particular closure day is part of a tradition that came from a LEA. Now, as autonomous bodies, there may be divergence (as we see at Easter) but there may also be increasing conformity. It has become common for universities to ‘close’ from Christmas Eve until after the New Year bank holiday, but this is comparatively new. A combination of staff reward and an opportunity to avoid heating buildings for a few staff not taking leave are probably the drivers here. As at Easter, services remain for students and staff come in to secure and maintain buildings and look after research (including watering plants and feeding animals).
The university never fully closes, but at a seemingly random selection of places there will be people pushing at doors that are firmly locked this morning.
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