Along with Vice Chancellor Eric F. Spina, Chief Financial Officer Louis Marcoccia decides when classes should be canceled due to inclement weather or other circumstances at Syracuse University.

Marcoccia heads the SU Logistics Committee, which makes the ultimate decision.

During the past 10 years, he was charged with this responsibility and hadn’t exercised his authority – until this week.

On Wednesday, for the first time in almost 14 years, SU closed its doors to students and faculty by canceling all classes meeting after 12:45 p.m. The university sent home faculty and staff on a staggered basis beginning at 1 p.m.

Two years ago, Marcoccia said in an interview with The Daily Orange that he finds it difficult to shut down the university because of a certain responsibility to the number of students that matriculate here.

‘You can’t shut down,’ he said at the time. ‘Even if you wanted to, you can’t shut down.’

He also said he couldn’t ever imagine himself canceling classes due to snow, unless the Syracuse area would be forced to bear a storm even larger than the one that rocked the campus with almost 43 inches of snow back in March of 1993.

Local television station WSYR reported that Wednesday’s storm dumped about 16 inches of snow on the East Syracuse area, with the Hancock International Airport reporting a little more than 13 inches, according to the station’s meteorologist Mark Chapin.

Even so, Marcoccia said he and Spina made the correct decision to cancel classes.

‘Based on the facts we had at that time, we feel comfortable with the decision we made,’ he said. ‘We had information, certain responsibility and had to make a decision. It’s the type of thing where you consider all the information that you can obtain, you talk to people who can help you in giving you information and then you have to make a decision.’

Marcoccia said he based his decision on a number of factors, including an examination of weather forecasts. Since conditions were changing negatively and at an order of magnitude that he thought justified a cancellation, he and Spina agreed it was what had to be done.

Sophomore Kate Boccio said she agrees with their decisions, that classes should have been canceled because of the difficulty the snow caused in walking to various buildings on campus.

‘My sister goes to the University of Delaware and they had classes canceled,’ said Boccio, a television, radio and film major. ‘And she told me they had an inch of snow.’

For freshman Nick McGowan, it wasn’t so much an issue of whether the cancellation was justified, but rather in its timing. Because all of his Wednesday classes are scheduled before 12:45 p.m., Wednesday was just like any other day.

‘They should have canceled all classes or no classes,’ said McGowan, an undecided major in the Martin J. Whitman School of Management. ‘It created an imbalance in people’s schedules.’

Published on February 15, 2007 at 12:00 pm