The calendar committee was charged with an eye toward synchronizing calendars across the University’s schools.

“The more voices we can get in favor of a coordinated calendar, the better,” University Provost Steven E. Hyman told a meeting of graduate student government leaders two weeks ago.

He added that facilitating enrollment across schools was the driving goal of reexamining the calendar.

“The whole thing driving the common calendar is cross-registration,” he also told them. “Without the calendar as the backbone of cross-registration, it will be very difficult to do anything else that’s meaningful.”

In this year’s annual letter to the Faculty, Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby wrote that increased interaction with other faculties would serve all the students of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS).

“Since our sister Faculties include scholars in core FAS disciplines, from cell biology to sociology, our students may benefit by increased educational cooperation across the University,” Kirby wrote. “Such efforts could be enhanced by better coordination of our Schools’ academic calendars.”

Kirby could not be reached for comment last night.

Calling January a “stressed out period,” Gross said moving exams before winter break was a significant improvement for undergraduates.

“Exams before Christmas offer students a real break,” he said. “Whether or not we adopt a J-term, I’m convinced that finishing the first term in December will be a great plus for everyone’s mental health.”

But Mahan had a less rosy view of the J-term proposal.

“I suspect the majority of students across the University would prefer a three or four-week winter break and an end date in early May,” Mahan said.

He added that the calendar committee’s focus on facilitating cross-registration might not benefit undergraduates.

“The issue of cross-registration is tricky. On the one hand, I appreciate the administrative ease and the fact that many students want to take classes at various graduate schools in the University,” he said. “On the other hand, I would strongly caution the administration against making any changes that further ‘pre-professionalize’ the Harvard academic experience. We get enough pre-professionalism in our extracurriculars and I worry that with this change students would start competing on the basis of how many classes they were taking at the Medical School, for example.”

Kirby also noted in his annual letter that the bureaucratic challenge of matching up calendars shouldn’t be insurmountable.

“One wonders: if all of China can exist in one time zone, might we not imagine that Harvard’s calendars could manage greater symmetry?” Kirby wrote.