Announcing Working Differently Days

Dear students, faculty, and staff of Grinnell,

As we conclude our semester, we continue to experience and seek to acknowledge the many ways that the pandemic has placed sustained stress on the mental and physical health of our community. The intensity of our communal experience calls for action out of the ordinary to provide a change in pace and time for relief. Time is simultaneously among the most valued and the scarcest of elements of the academic experience, and the action detailed below seeks to institute a demonstrable change of pace for each of us to advance our well-being within our work — a moment to breathe in our hectic schedules.

We are instituting three days in the spring 2022 term on which no classes will meet and no standing meetings will be held. These Working Differently Days will be one in each full month of term: Monday, February 7; Tuesday, March 1; and Wednesday, April 27.

Likewise, no regular cocurricular activities (productions, ensembles, athletic practices, student organization meetings) will occur on these days. Prescheduled athletic contests or productions may occur, but a break should then be planned on a different date/time close to the planned break. For the small number of classes with multisection laboratories that repeat the same laboratory offering over the course of the week, labs can continue to meet; instead, one of the weeks containing a Working Differently Day should be chosen for a lab-free week so that faculty, support staff, and students may benefit from the same opportunity to work differently.

The motivation and the goal of this action is to positively disrupt one of the conditions — our intense time schedule — that has been registered repeatedly to us as causing stress. We acknowledge that these days will call for some rearranging of schedules to provide our community with the benefit of time. We are not closing the College or creating holidays for these days. We are trying to provide a little unscheduled time for students, faculty, and staff in spring term 2022.

We also invite staff to work with their supervisors to arrange for two additional hours of wellness release time the week of each Working Differently Day. Future institutional actions dedicated to wellness will continue as part of the strategic initiative dedicated to health and well-being and will be coordinated over time.

To recap: there will be no classes or standing meetings scheduled for the Working Differently Days of spring term 2022.

Our thanks to the Executive Council and senior staff for the conversations held about this action.

Wishing you well,

Elaine Marluzff, Interim Dean of the College
Anne F. Harris, President