The Wellness Challenge is a four-week program aiming to promote mental health on campus from Feb. 1 to March 1. This is the program’s third year, with 465 students and 144 staff and faculty participating.
Donna Brazile, political strategist and the Vice Chair of Voter Registration and Participation of the Democratic National Committee, gave a talk titled “Race and Politics in America: The Past and 2016” in Stirn Auditorium on Feb. 18.
The event was funded by the Croxton Lecture Fund, which was established to bring renowned speakers to campus. The lecture was part of a series of events hosted by the college in honor of Black History Month.
Chair of the college council and professor Nicola Courtright introduced the proposal to shorten the college’s spring semester during the Association of Amherst Students meeting on Monday, Feb. 22.
The new proposed calendar would decrease the length of future spring semesters from 14 to 13 weeks, which would match the length of fall semester. The proposal includes an extension of reading period in the spring to a minimum of four days, three potential make-up days for weather emergencies or campus-wide events such as the day of dialogue and a full three-week interterm session.
French House will move from Newport House to the second floor of King Dormitory next year, and La Casa will move into Newport from the third floor of Moore.
According to associate director of residential life Corry Colonna, members of French House had been suggesting a move for a long time. Colonna said the Greenway dorms will increase the college’s total count of non-suite singles next year, which made it possible to allocate the singles in King Dormitory to a theme house. The Office of Student Affairs made the final decision to move the theme houses.
This March, the college will implement an overhaul of its annual housing application process. The application for students will take place through an online portal, which opened to students on Monday, Feb. 15.
The college purchased new software from the student housing solutions company StarRez in an effort to streamline the housing selection process for students and to keep track of the status of rooms and dormitories throughout the year. The process of implementing the new system began last July.
Sexual Respect Education and the Title IX teams are currently holding a climate survey on sexual respect. The survey is a shorter version of the one distributed in December 2014, and is part of a tentative plan to begin administering long- and short-form surveys in alternating years. Many survey questions were carried over from the 2014 version in order to measure change across time.
Students and campus resource center staff will publish Perspectives Magazine, a new annual publication sponsored by the Women’s and Gender Center, Queer Resource Center and Multicultural Resource Center. The magazine, expected to first be released in early March, will include both personal writing by Amherst community members and information relating to issues of identity.
