University President Henry Bienen said Wednesday that Northwestern would not cancel classes on Oct. 11 despite a joint student and faculty movement to commemorate the one-month anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“We have had and will continue to have both commemorative and informative events,” Bienen wrote in an e-mail to The Daily. “We will not cancel classes.”

Associate Provost Stephen Fisher said NU’s quarter system works against canceling classes for a full day because classes work on 10-week schedules instead of the 15-week schedules of semester systems.

“(Administrators) felt that a full day off from classes would be extremely detrimental to classes, especially those that meet one day a week,” he said. “Even if the class meets 20 times a quarter, that’s still 5 percent of all the classes. The decision to cancel a full day of classes, albeit for a good reason, is a hard one to justify.”

Fisher pointed to the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and Martin Luther King Jr. Day as other days for which students often have asked that classes be canceled, but administrators can’t comply because of scheduling concerns.

Spearheaded by Art History Prof. Lyle Massey, the Oct. 11 Coalition had asked administrators to cancel classes in order to program a day full of seminars, panels and discussions on a broad range of topics connected to terrorism.

Weinberg junior Howard Lien, a coalition member, said he was disappointed in the administration’s decision.

“The initial idea of this day of education came from the faculty themselves,” he said. “If they think we should do it, then the administration should try to do something to make this happen.”

Lien said the coalition will continue to lobby administrators to have an officially sanctioned university action.

“We’re gonna work to get the administration to provide some sort of official acknowledgement of the day, ” he said. “It’s not over yet — we’re still gonna push ahead with the activities and events that are scheduled.”

The movement began at a Sept. 26 meeting, a few days after Massey had circulated an e-mail with the idea.

“The events of Sept. 11 posed an unprecedented crisis for the United States,” Massey wrote in an e-mail to The Daily. “This day is meant to make the university relevant again … to engage the resources that we have here on campus to enlarge upon the difficult and complex issues pertaining to our collective future.”