The University of Utah is roiled by a controversy surrounding two of the more-contentious aspects of campus life: course scheduling and parking.
Starting in the spring, fewer courses will be offered during what is considered prime time, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., as well as on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The proposed changes have sparked a petition and protest by students, and worries from faculty members who are concerned about how the new schedule might affect course enrollments and therefore the viability of programs under a new state law.
Mitzi M. Montoya, the university’s provost, announced the course-scheduling change in July, saying it was intended to reduce bottlenecks in required courses, provide more flexibility to students managing work and child-care obligations, and relieve overcrowded classrooms and parking.
“Put simply,” she wrote, “smarter scheduling supports student success, strengthens academic outcomes, and helps us use our resources more wisely. That’s why we’re making changes.” Montoya didn’t respond to The Chronicle’s request for an interview.
The current “stacked schedule,” as Montoya described it, makes it harder for students to graduate on time because required courses are often held around the same time. The university hopes fewer overlapping course times will help it increase its six-year graduation rate of 65 percent to be more on par with the 83-percent rate of its peer institutions in the Association of American Universities. The Utah System of Higher Education has also set a goal for the University of Utah to increase its students’ six-year graduation rate by 3 percent.
Space problems were also a factor in the course-scheduling change, Montoya wrote. During peak hours, there are not enough classrooms for lectures or parking spots for those teaching and taking courses.
Under the new rules, next spring, departments won’t be allowed to schedule more than half of their courses between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. And next fall, departments must schedule no more than 30 percent of their courses on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
The target for prime-time courses isn’t far off of recent trends, according to data provided by the university. During the spring of 2025 semester, the university offered 1,900 of its 3,500 courses, or 54 percent, during prime-time hours. For the spring of 2026, the university has scheduled 49 percent of its courses during those times.
Senior leadership is trying to spin it as if they’re doing it in the interest of the students in a way that’s sort of paternalistic and morally gross.
It’s still unclear how many courses will need to be shifted to accommodate the 30-percent cap on those offered on Tuesdays and Thursdays, said Rebecca Walsh, the university’s director of communications. She said this figure should become clearer as the university gets closer to scheduling for next fall.
Montoya’s message to the campus provided a sense of the challenge: “Monday/Wednesday/Friday course formats are often bypassed altogether,” she wrote.
Pressures on the Faculty
Faculty members worry that classes during off-peak times won’t work for students’ schedules, which could create even more significant issues.
For Chapman Waters, an assistant professor of philosophy, the stakes of attracting students are particularly high because, starting this fall, as a part of the university’s plan to cut costs due to pressure from state lawmakers, his department is required to cancel courses with fewer than 15 enrolled students, Waters said.
But if his department schedules more early-morning and evening classes, he’s worried students won’t sign up. Pressuring the department to improve student enrollment while requiring them to schedule more courses outside peak hours is “like kneecapping us before a marathon,” Waters said.
The scheduling changes also come after new statewide legislation was passed that faculty said limited their power within the university’s shared-governance structure, making some faculty feel like they’re being silenced.
“Senior leadership is trying to spin it as if they’re doing it in the interest of the students in a way that’s sort of paternalistic and morally gross,” Waters told The Chronicle.
Montoya and other administrators plan to hold a town hall today to field questions about the course-schedule changes.
Sarah Creem-Regehr, chair of the psychology department, which is one of the largest at the university, sees the potential benefits of spreading out courses. She said the university has sometimes not had enough large classrooms available at peak hours for the department’s most popular courses.
Adapting the psychology department’s course offerings for the spring was tough on short notice, but ultimately it was not very disruptive, Creem-Regehr said. Of the roughly 50 courses her department is offering next semester, about five had to be moved from the prime-time window. Adjusting course scheduling for next fall will be more challenging, she said, because a lot of her department’s classes are scheduled for Tuesdays and Thursdays.
But the scheduling changes could cause yet other problems. Having more undergraduate classes later in the day might create scheduling conflicts for graduate students, who work as teaching assistants for undergraduate classes but also have their own classes to take in the evenings. “Many departments have these ways of managing graduate and undergraduate classes so that we can fit everything in our schedules,” she said.
‘You’re Not Listening’
But it’s the implications of the new schedule for parking that have particularly inflamed student opinion.
Debates about parking, of course, have long been frequent and contentious on college campuses. Clark Kerr, who led the University of California system in the 1950s and ’60s, once described colleges as “a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking.”
At Utah, an online petition that has received over 7,000 signatures says that “parking congestion is undeniably a concern that needs addressing, but the solution should not compromise educational quality or student well-being.”
The university, which has 36,881 students and 18,300 full- and part-time employees on the main campus, had a combined 9,314 parking spots in 2024, according to commuter-services data. But the ratio of parking spots to parking permits sold is not one to one. Knowing that not all permit owners will park on campus at the same time, the university sells more permits than they have spots, which aggravates many students. For example, though the campus last year had 5,843 parking spots in “U” spaces that are farther from campus, it sold over 12,000 permits for those spaces, at a price of $345 for the year.
Still, the lots are never at full capacity, said Collin Simmons, executive director of auxiliary services. While spaces in the “A” lots, near the center of campus, are usually full every day, spots can be found on the outskirts of campus, or within a 10- to 15-minute walk to the campus’ center, he said. But these spots can also be scarce, especially between 10 a.m. and just before 2 p.m., when fewer than 10 percent of the U spots are available, leaving parking-permit owners to circle the lots across campus before they can find a spot.
An Instagram post in August on the university’s account that explains the course-scheduling changes generated thousands of comments, many of them from students who see the move as an ineffective strategy that is really aimed at reducing parking congestion.
“By trying to save yourselves from this PR disaster, you’ve only proved you’re not listening,” one user wrote. “Offering more sections doesn’t help if they’re at times students can’t take.”
Another user’s comment recommending parking solutions received more than 1,000 likes: “Build a parking garage instead of new housing, stop admitting more students when you don’t have space for them, don’t let freshmen have cars on campus, convert A lots to U lots.”
For one student, who spoke at a protest earlier this month, the idea that the revised schedule would give students more flexibility to fulfill their work obligations was unlikely. In fact, it would probably do the opposite.
“I can’t take late-afternoon or night classes,” said Eric Sheffer, a senior who works most afternoons as a referee for intramural sports, “because they interfere with when I do my job.”
He was skeptical that adjusting course timing would fix the parking problem, and he thought it might even make things worse. “Instead of leaving in the early afternoon,” he said, “students are just going to stay parked on campus all day.”
