LEXINGTON, Ky. — University of Kentucky faculty will vote next week on whether to rename Dead Week — out of respect for those who may have lost someone to suicide.
Dead Week, the last week of every semester before the all-important Finals Week, is ubiquitous to the modern college experience and is generally meant to give students time to prepare for their end-of-semester exams. Under UK's rules, course instructors aren't allowed to schedule quizzes, exams or projects during the week if the class has a normally scheduled final exam the following week.
On Monday, UK's faculty senate is scheduled to consider a proposal to change the name of the week from "Dead Week" to "Prep Week" or some other, more positive alternative.
"As we are all aware, mental health has become a high priority for our university. The number of suicides is increasing and a number of these happen around finals week. Out of respect for the family members and university community members who are experiencing horrible grief due to the loss of someone, we are proposing that the name 'dead week' be changed to something more appropriate and more positive," stated the proposal submitted by Kimberly Anderson, a professor and the associate dean for administration and academic affairs in the College of Engineering.
Jana Kennelly, the college's senior director of philanthropy, told Anderson during a meeting that the University of Texas, San Antonio, where Kennelly worked previously, had made a similar decision to rename the week.
"When she said it, I'm going, 'boy, she's right on this,'" said Anderson, who has worked at UK for 31 years, in an interview. Anderson said she realized that the week could be insensitive to grieving families and moved to rename the week something more positive.
Before the pandemic, UK was publicly ramping up efforts to boost student mental health, by establishing a mental health task force and committed to making large investments to revamp its student support infrastructure on the heels of multiple reports of student suicides and after the campus had increasing year-over-year traffic to the university's counseling center.
Pandemic-related shifts to less-populated campuses and a focus on online classes has been detrimental to student mental health, multiple national studies have shown. A survey published Thursday of first-year students at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill — a similarly sized university compared to UK — found that many reported a marked increase in anxiety and depression during the pandemic.
UK's counseling center sees a slight, but not necessarily significant bump in traffic around midterms and finals weeks, said Corrine Williams, the acting associate vice president for student well being within the university's Office for Student Success. Student support services that offer tutoring and academic coaching naturally do see an increase in demand around those times, Williams said.
Williams said changing the name of the week will also likely better communicate to students what the actual purpose of the week is — It's not a few days off, but rather a time to prepare for finals.
Dead Week is actually a relatively recent addition to the university's academic calendar. Digitized archives of the student newspaper, the Kentucky Kernel, show that UK students were debating adding a "dead week" or "dead days" at least as early as the 1960s. But according to the paper, the week wasn't officially added until the late '80s.
Student leaders pushing for the week at the time were advocating for a "kind of cooling off period where we could use that time to prepare for finals," said Jay Blanton, who was a student at the time and was the editor-in-chief of the Kernel in the 1988-89 school year. Blanton is currently the university's spokesperson, but was speaking outside that capacity for this article.
Anderson said she hasn't gotten any push back on the proposed name change so far.
"I think it was just a real positive step and shows that, you know, UK is committed to, to really promoting health and wellness and making things, you know, positive for students," Anderson said.
