University of Virginia Library

Letters To The Editor

As the undersigned first year
student of the College of Arts and
Sciences of the University of
Virginia, I am grateful to the
administrators for giving me the
right to schedule my own classes to
a particular degree.

However, there is one course
which I feel is a burden to us and
irrelevant to our academic advancement
at this University. The mandatory
requirement for the successful
completion of the Physical
Education course at our specific
College, I feel, hinders our schedule,
limiting our studying time,
and therefore wasting time.

Granted, there are some students
who would indeed desire a
physical recess from the mental
work load which will doubtless be
incurred by most students of the
College this fall. But a non-credit
course which must be scheduled in
the same general time period as the
academic subjects seems out of
place. A first year student will find
time for physical exercise not in the
Physical Education course, but in
walking to and from classes, lunch,
and extracurricular activities and
meetings. Any student who feels
that this is not sufficient exercise
for him is assumed to be mature
enough to set up his own program.

Why those first-year students in
the School of Engineering and the
School of Architecture, to name
two, are exempt from this requirement,
may be an irrelevant question
to pose. But the fact remains that
in the College of Arts and Sciences
we are, I feel, unjustly restrained by
this non-credit, academically inapplicable
Physical Education course.