University of Virginia Library

Get Us To Class On Time

You have a nine o'clock class in Gilmer
Hall. You have a ten o'clock in Cabell.
Your instructor in Gilmer religiously dismisses
the class at 9:50, and you have
timed your walk from there to your next
class at seven and a half minutes—plenty
of time to get to your next class and get a
good seat.

No wander that you think it strange
to find that upon arrival at Cabell Hall
the class to which you are going has been in
session for five minutes. You feel foolish
and wonder how your seemingly foolproof
schedule could have gone wrong.

This is of course a hypothetical case,
but it is not an unusual occurrence. Our
student should not blame his sense of
timing. Rather he might take a good long
look at the widely divergent times shown by
the various clocks in University classroom
buildings.

In an academic community where time,
and being on time, is most important, we
cannot understand the almost oriental concept
which seems to prevail. It is almost
as if each department keeps its own
time, blissfully unaware of Greenwich or
the Bureau of Standards.

The fault is not of course in the departments
themselves. We suspect that the
culprits are to be found in the Department of
Buildings and Grounds, who keep watch
over such things.

It would not be difficult to keep the University's
clocks synchronized. A check once
a week would keep things pretty much in
order. Or, if no one is willing to travel to
each building that often to check the clocks,
the University might well invest in a system
by which a master clock located in the
Buildings and Grounds office could be used
to set all the University clocks simultaneously.

As to the possibility of having all clocks
on the Grounds reading the same at all
times, we are reminded of the American
railroads, who manage to maintain accurate
time in stations clocks across the continent.
The University is hardly too large to synchronize
its clocks, and the importance of
accuracy is just as great.

The Student Council has appointed a
committee to investigate the situation. We
await their findings with interest and hope
that they will come up with a workable
solution to the problem.

DKS