UNC removes wellness day; campus community voices frustrations

Provost Chris Clemens announced earlier this month that there will now be two well-being days each semester, starting in spring 2025. 

For the last two years, there were two well-being days in the fall semester and three in the spring. The University used a committee chaired by Vice Provost Leah Cox and made up of students, faculty and staff to make the decision to remove one day. 

UNC Media Relations wrote in a statement that the Well-being Day Committee was established by the provost in March 2024 with the goal to analyze the impact of well-being days on the campus community and provide recommendations for their inclusion in the academic calendar.

The change in well-being days allows the University to provide time for well-being in the campus community while also meeting academic calendar requirements and the needs of students, faculty andstaff, they wrote.

Media Relations said that well-being days were first introduced in the fall 2021 semester to address concerns over student mental health. This decision came after exceptions were made to federal credit hour rules, due to the pandemic. 

“Changes to the well-being days were driven by a review process to align with the University’s academic and operational needs,” Media Relations said in their statement.  

Removing a well-being day from the calendar will allocate more time between the end of final exams and spring 2025 commencement. 

Sonyia Richardson, an assistant professor in the School of Social Work, studies mental health promotion and suicide prevention among Black populations. She said wellness days are important to students because high levels of stress and academic pressure can often be placed on top of current events such as natural disasters and politics. 

“I think when you take all of those different stressors and put them together, and then put it within an academic setting or institution that already has a lot of high stress because of the academic rigor, it requires students to have time away and breaks,” Richardson said. 

Tj Ewool, a second-year graduate student in the School of Social Work, said she felt very frustrated by the change to the academic calendar. 

“Anytime you're taking away a dedicated day for people to hopefully not be focusing on how stressed they are about school or deadlines or projects, I think that's only going to contribute negatively to people's well-being,” Ewool said. 

Ewool said that although well-being days don’t solve all the problems related to student’s mental health, their implementation into the calendar is a good place to start. 

Maggie Nail, another graduate student in the School of Social Work, said she felt frustrated by the change. She said that it's not necessarily the loss of the well-being day that's the issue, but the overall feeling of discouragement from knowing that the University removed one from the calendar in the first place.

“UNC said that they were going to prioritize wellness and then they took a day away,” Nail said.  “What does that mean for us?” 

Both Ewool and Nail appreciated the intention behind well-being days but thought  they fell short when it came to their actual execution. Nail said that there is a lack of intentionality from the school to truly emphasize wellness. 

In order to improve the day’s effectiveness, Nail suggested that professors should be required to lighten workloads leading up to or after the breaks. She also said that students could receive time in class to create a plan as to how they will spend their well-being days. 

“I think there's just things with the implementation that could be bolstered to really enforce the wellness days,” Nail said. “I think having them is great and wonderful, and I've heard so many good things about people being able to catch up on work, but if we really want people to take it seriously and engage in wellness, we have to plan and we have to make it as easy as possible for them.”

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