Let them be late. Better safe than sorry!

 My letter to the USF Police Records Department after experiencing an accident on campus yesterday:

Dear USF Police Colleagues,

I teach at the Patel College of Global Sustainability where I have worked for the past 8 years.

I write to you today, after a nice conversation with USF Police dispatch and with Nakera in Police records, to see if I can get some statistics or records to help me advise other faculty to be more generous with admitting students into class late so we can avoid what I am learning may be a major source of preventable accidents!

Yesterday my wife, a recently matriculated USF grad student who also  recently got her drivers license, drove our toddler and me to campus so she could attend her first class of the semester.  For my own job as a graduate school professor I rarely need to be campus before 1 pm so I hadn't really seen what the first week of early classes looks like from an undergrad or early morning grad students' perspective.  It seemed like a bit of chaos and mayhem.

My wife  was being super careful and at times felt scared by the amount of traffic and tension she had to confront as crowds of students scrambled to make it to their classes on time while navigating  various construction and parking and detour and traffic issues. Many times we saw students accelerate dangerously  to get through yellow lights.  The trip took much longer than the GPS estimate as she got snarled in lines of students weaving around one another, racing lights, taking sudden detours and trying to get to parking in the library area. 

 I suggested she just relax and drive as safely and cautiously  as possible and told her that she could explain to her professor that her husband, a fellow professor, counseled her that it was better to be a little late  than to have  any possible accident.  

Ironically, after she left for class, when I took over the car  to leisurely take my toddler to my office just down the road, my vehicle was suddenly struck at the intersection of LeRoy Collins and Alumni drive by a student who was  trying anxiously to get across alumni drive get to his class on time.   He seemed to come out of nowhere.

The collision fortunately didn't cause any personal injury, and thank God the student and my 4 year old and I are fine, but the crash so damaged my new car that replacing the right passenger door is going to cost me an estimated $8000 and the car is undriveable for the week until the suspension is repaired. 

The conversations that ensued with the student and with my insurance company and with our friend, Officer Forbes at the PCGS building, suggested to me that WE professors need to change the conditions we are subjecting many of our students to.  I am seeing now that we set conditions that can impair the safety of our campus by causing unneccesary mental stress to our students. 

Officer Forbes said mine was one of many accidents that occurred yesterday morning, and students have expressed to me that they often feel terrible anxiety about getting to class on time without suffering bad consequences (being locked out of the class, being dropped from the class,  getting points taken off or grades docked, possibly being humiliated etc.) and that this can cloud their judgement.

Now that I am personally affected in a negative way that impairs my ability to get to the college and that is costing me so much (thankful that there was no injury other than financial and time loss) I feel I should raise this issue faculty wide and see what we can do to create a safer atmosphere for our students.

I was hoping I could get some records from you that I might use to make the case that we faculty should be much more forgiving of student lateness during times of high volume traffic (particularly for morning classes when traffic outside of USF is also heavy and factors in to student lateness) so that nobody feels the need to rush.

In this post covid world when so much can be done on-line and we can use portfolio assessment to demonstrate student mastery of material, I question why having a "seat in a chair" by a certain time should be the criteria for student success.
I know our students are asking the same question.

Perhaps we can change overall school policy so that nobody is put in the situation where they have an accident rushing to get to class "on time" during these congested hours?

To do that we of course need statistics, records, information, and the opinions of your team in our police department who deal with the reality and the  aftermath of these situations first-hand. Do we have any records that we can use to correlate congestion times, early classes, traffic volume and accidents?  Are there any police reports wherein students express that the accident occurred in part  because they were afraid of being marked late? 

Anything you can do to help would be very much appreciated!

Sincerely yours,

Professor Thomas H. Culhane
Patel College of Global Sustainability