Illustration by Joaquin Kunkel/The Gazelle

When Qin Shihuang, literally the first of the Qin, ascended the Chinese imperial throne, he inaugurated the eponymous Qin calendar. Time would henceforth be measured in relation to the Emperor’s coronation, on a lunar basis. Viewed retrospectively, it appears that Qin Shihuang — also known by the presumptuous epithet “progenitor of ten thousand generations” — should perhaps have chosen a more apotropaic designation, for it was only one and a half decades later that the Qin dynasty collapsed and with it, its triumphalist and teleological legitimations epitomized by the Qin calendar.

To be sure, the reference to Oriental despotisms as an authoritarian inverse to liberal societies is a cheap and time-honoured trick. But the aforementioned comparison is neither intended as an invective against poor Qin Shihuang nor does it necessarily posit the construct of Classical China as an asymptote, the avoidance of which affirms our values as a Liberal Arts College. What can be gleaned, however, with greater transparency from this analogy — between the Qin calendar and its academic counterpart — is the relationship between models of time and authority.

The NYU Abu Dhabi Academic Calendar, which appears under the Academics section of the NYUAD webpage, reads like a register, listing events including Final Exams and withdrawal deadlines in a chronological succession. In the center of the list, a caesura appears: Spring Break, which divides the semester — itself a subdivision of the academic year — into Spring 1 and Spring 2. The academic calendar is a melange between familiar and unfamiliar elements, where seemingly idiosyncratic events like Legislative Day are superimposed onto the familiar Gregorian calendar. The academic calendar splits the year in half, introducing a model of time which runs counterclockwise to the Christian calendar year. The conception of time proposed by the academic calendar finds a parallel in the cadastral land survey, which aggregates spaces into systems of taxation, insofar as a series of rigid events, i.e. deadlines, are mapped onto points in time in the calendar which, in turn, regulate academic production. The temporal axes of the Gregorian calendar are invested with a productive function; learning and academic development are confined between the opposite poles: Beginning of Classes and End of Classes.

I am undecided with regards to the etiology behind the organization of time in the academic calendar. Notwithstanding this ambiguity, the framework of the academic calendar has clear consequences for the way in which life at NYUAD is organized, both academically and socially. A quick survey of the register reveals that the frequency of events increases around the calendar’s two extremes: the end and the beginning of the semester. The rigidity of these dates, which inform our chronologically structured syllabi, creates nodes of pressure, particularly around mid-term and final exams.

There is a lingering sense of disjunction between the abstract list-view proposed by the academic calendar and the ways in which I perceive these events as a subject of NYUAD’s division of time. Those vectors of sensibility which I experience most acutely are omitted from its purview: the calendar gives no indication of these factors, apart from the nodes of increased density of events, which appear at either of the aforementioned poles of the calendar. As the semester draws to a close, sleep is neglected, hedonistic pursuits are discontinued and the coffee outlets on campus are perpetually enveloped in the din of formulaic small talk, peppered with references to work and anxiety. Academic time advances with eschatological momentum as the frequency of deadlines increases — the apocalypse is nigh. I begin to think of time asymptotically and become aware of the imminent end of the academic year — the anxiety increases exponentially and a paucity of time is compensated for by making adjustments to the non-temporal aspects that remain: sleep and nutrition.

Standing on her balcony, Juliet admonishes her paramour for his provocative oath, based on an analogy between his love and the moon: “O swear not by the moon, th’inconstant moon. That monthly changes in her circle orb.” Juliet’s call echoes through the regimented columns and rows of the academic calendar: swear not by the unreliable moon — irrelevant as a measure of love, and of time? — “but by thy gracious self,” Romeo. Our calendar divorces those dates which are measured in lunar time and implicates them instead in the framework of the semester, in Gregorian solar time and beyond that, the confines of academic deadlines. And yet, I increasingly find myself marvelling at the moon; its crimson glare barely perceptible behind the grimy glass panes that structure the perimeter of the Highline as it hovers inconspicuously above the wooden boards and plastic bags left behind by ongoing construction in the surrounding desert. The moon casts its ethereal light onto my bloodshot eyes; it is not the temporary aberration of our romantic hero but the werewolf of the gothic novel who is called to mind, that sinister monster which is compelled towards lunar time in a world structured by a perennial and circadian routine. The moon and its leisurely disregard for the academic calendar allude to a much-needed solace: the subversive possibility of time beyond deadlines and semesters.