Vassar Approves New Time Zone for Campus
Vassar Approves New Time Zone for Campus
President Elizabeth H. Bradley today announced that the College had created its own time zone. “Our Board of Trustees has just approved our proposal to establish Vassar Standard Time (VST),” the President said in a televised press conference on the Vassar campus. “Time has always been a bit of a fluid concept at Vassar, and no longer will our students, faculty, and staff be encumbered by the strictures of traditional time zones.”
Asked why her announcement had been made on April 1 instead of March 14, when most of the rest of the country switched from Standard Time to Daylight Savings Time, Bradley explained that the decision had to make its way through an exhausting, excruciating committee process.
“It’s a very Vassar idea,” Bradley said. “We had to go to the source, which sometimes was over 150 years in the past. Once we had reckoned with the history of time at Vassar, then the proposal had to go to the Committee on Committees, which established a new committee, the Time Zone Committee, to explore the idea. They needed to develop a charge and be voted into the Governance. In just a few months, the committee was able to send its proposal to faculty, the senior leadership team, and finally the Board of Trustees—who voted unanimously for VST to become a reality as of April 1.”
Most experts in the field were reserving judgement on Vassar’s idea, pending inclusive and scholarly dialogue. Dr. April Fule, senior time management analyst at the Yale University School of Anachronistic Studies, said she and several other distinguished scholars would be discussing the issue ad nauseum at the Vassar Summer Institute. Dr. Fule added, however, that no date had been set for the event. “It’s still too early to determine how Vassar Standard Time will affect scheduling of this and other events on the Vassar campus,” she said. “We are told President Bradley is planning to establish a new committee to assess the issue.”
Some details about the effect of VST were being worked out, however. Dean of the College Carlos Alamo-Pastrana said the new time zone would enable Gordon Commons to unveil a new 24-hour dining schedule. “Gordon Commons will now be open 24 hours—but not in a row,” Alamo-Pastrana said.
Carlos Garcia, Vice President for Technology and Human Resources, said his office would soon be rolling out a mobile app that will help everyone in the Vassar community adjust to the new time zone. The app, “Clocking Out,” uses geolocation to determine which time zone it’s in and displays a notification when entering or leaving Vassar Standard Time. Asked when the app would be ready, Garcia said, “That all depends on what time zone you’re in. We’re still working out the math.”
There was some pushback to the idea from Vassar Farm officials, who noted that Daylight Savings Time was invented to help farmers capture more daylight during the harvest and other key times in the growing cycle. In a controversial statement captured on a microphone that was left on inadvertently following the press conference, Dean Marianne Begemann, who oversees the Farm, was heard challenging the move to VST. “These meat-eaters have gone too far,” said the noted vegan. “But just wait until I outlaw all vehicular traffic within a 50-mile radius of campus—then they’ll be begging to have EST back so they are on the same time zone as the County buses!”
In a related development, womp womps were said to be meeting in an undisclosed location on campus to discuss a controversial proposal of their own. “There’s talk among this group,” a source close to the womp womps revealed, “of completely abolishing Groundhog Day.”