After months of committee meetings -- and strong resistance from faculty and students -- the change began last fall. With a few exceptions, departments are now allowed to schedule only half their classes in prime time, leading to a 20 percent increase in Friday offerings. And where there were once 14 classes before 9 a.m. there are now 138, a shift that ignores students' biorhythms, the campus newspaper complained. Many popular or required classes also now meet Wednesday and Friday, leaving students with little alternative but to sign up.

"I'm not sure it's a solution to Thursday night drinking problems, although I'm sure it has some effect," Dr. Lange says. Duke has been working for several years to crack down on drinking on campus. Now students refer to the Old Duke, where three-day fraternity keggers on the quads were common, and the New Duke, where serving alcohol is regulated and the campus pub is no more.

Mostly the parties have moved off campus. Thomas Adelman, a 20-year-old sophomore, is the social chairman responsible for one surviving event, Malt Liquor Thursdays, a celebration of the brew open to the entire university. Wayne Manor, a selective on-campus housing group with a community service emphasis, has played host to M.L.T. since 1994. This semester, Mr. Adelman has cultural anthropology and Italian classes on Fridays. He says he never cuts. "My parents don't pay $40,000 a year for me to skip class," he says. "If they thought that I did cut classes frequently they probably wouldn't be paying that bill."

Duke students, he insists, have a five-day workweek. Mr. Adelman turns his mind back to academics on Sunday: "Right after the games are over, I'm doing homework."

Like Duke, Syracuse had the bulk of its classes bunched up between 10 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. in the middle of the week. By moving courses to Friday, it opened up classroom space throughout the rest of the week. Syracuse now has nearly 200 more classes on Friday than it did two years ago. "We think we're changing the whole academic culture," says Deborah Freund, vice chancellor and provost at Syracuse. "If you want a campus to be a serious academic environment that provokes free and open inquiry, you don't want to except one day from that inquiry."

Getting students to show up is another matter. It is not unusual for college class attendance to languish at about 60 percent. Faculty members at Syracuse are telling administrators that students are coming on Fridays. At Duke, Judith Ruderman, vice provost for academic and administrative services, observes, "I see lots of students around campus as of 8 a.m. or so, which I never saw before."

Some educators point out that if a course engages students, they will take it no matter when it occurs. "There's a very popular drawing class that meets 3 to 5 Friday afternoon, and it's always oversubscribed," says Alexander M. Thompson III, dean of studies at Vassar.