Hurry up and graduate. (Controversy).

COLLEGE TOWNS ARE MECCAS. And that is bothering officials at the University of Georgia, in Athens.

Concerned that a sluggish graduation rate has exacerbated congestion on its 605-acre campus, they have taken action to discourage dawdlers. In a June 3 e-mail, circulated throughout the university, UGA Provost Karen Holbrook announced that in order to embarrass undergraduates into finishing in four years, they will no longer be designated freshman, sophomore, junior, or senior, but rather, by the year of their enrollment.

"We hope that students will not feel comfortable using fifth- (or sixth-) year senior," Holbrook wrote. As further incentive for timely departure, officials announced, fifth-year students will cease to enjoy the same privileges for football tickets and parking places as those who have not yet worn out their matriculational welcome.

Soaring enrollments at colleges throughout the United States strain facilities, At the University of Georgia, which is very close to its cap of 32,500 students, lines are often Long and classes often closed. Although the average Georgia Bulldog takes 4.3 years to graduate (well below the national average of 5.3 years), a quest for efficiency is responsible for measures designed to transform applicants into alumni in exactly four years.

But if graduation rates were the mark of excellence, Cleary College, a business school in Michigan that processes 94 percent of its students in four years, would be the finest academic institution in the U.S., instead of merely the least wasteful. Of course, the NCAA is right to regard Low graduation rates among student athletes as a symptom of exploitation, Recruited by Division I schools solely in order to produce winning seasons for their football or basketball teams, marly of these athletes never receive a diploma, or genuine college education.

However, not all students who fail to graduate in four years represent an institutional or personal failure. The alma mater must not become a ruthless mother impatient to cast its children out as soon as they have learned to walk across a stage, Colleges are chartered to educate their students, not process them. Campuses should not be burger stands, designed to rush their customers in and out, but rather intellectual banquets. Undue emphasis on graduation rate impedes the digestion.

A friend of mine, known (with slight hyperbole) a "the oldest living undergraduate," deliberately kept few incompletes on his academic transcript in order to delay graduation. Remaining an undergraduate into his late 30s, my friend Hal postponed having to return to his family's business in a corner of the South that lacked the rich array of concerts, plays, films, lectures, bookstores, and even classes available to him in Berkeley, California. Other college towns, including Amherst, Ann Arbor, Bloomington, Boulder, Chapel Hill, Charlottesville, Iowa City, Ithaca, and Madison, are filled with slackers--men and women reluctant to end their education. Like Prince Hal, they might seem malingerers, but Shakespeare's Henry V suggests that wise dallying befits--and outfits--a future king. And Walt Whitman wrote, "I loaf and invite my soul." What if the soul, is a tardy guest?

At urban universities, working-class students forced to balance classes with jobs and families, drive up the average time required for graduation. Drive-in diploma mills substitute rapid certification for higher education. Older students return to school eager to expand their knowledge and indifferent to the loony four-year calendar. Pace the provost, the true student is the eternal, one.

As a professor, I have never really left college, though I raced to graduate in only three years. I now give--rather than get--grades, but still loiter in classrooms in the hope of coming across a bright idea, and other minds willing to entertain one. The mind, as someone said, is a terrible thing to waste, and it is a misplaced exercise in reducing institutional waste to insist that college be limited to four years. Lifetime learning is the only learning worthy of our fleeting terms of life. If someone wants to Label me a 38th-year senior, I proudly accept the epithet, and the assignment.

Steven Kellman is also author of The Translingual Imagination.

Steven G. Kellman, Professor of Comparative Literature, the University of Texas at San Antonio