To the Editor:

The article (“In forum, Levin answers,” 4/4) reports that “Yale College faculty members will vote at a Thursday meeting on the proposal to cancel classes on MLK Day.” The proposal before the faculty is indeed a proposal that involves cancelation of classes — that is, the reduction of the number of days of instruction by one from 65 to 64.

Some members of the faculty who are not opposed to Martin Luther King Day nonetheless believe that nothing should cause further abbreviation of the calendar and that any proposal for a day without classes must contain a provision for lengthening the semester proportionally at one end or the other.

I myself will oppose any tinkering with the calendar that does not retain the integrity of a full 13 weeks of instruction. In addition, we should restore the missing two days of instruction to the fall semester, which is currently 63 days.

I call upon my colleagues who value the essential enterprise in which we are engaged above local convenience or political expediency to vote likewise and not to compromise the calendar of instruction.

Leslie Brisman

April 4, 2001

The writer is a professor in the English department.