The University of Massachusetts Amherst went into lockdown after a reported sighting of a handgun on Thursday, Feb 18. All students, staff and faculty at UMass were instructed to keep indoors for the duration of the incident.
Around 5:17 p.m. Thursday, two men assaulted a student near Pierpont Hall, in UMass’s southwest residential area. The student suffered a minor head wound and was later hospitalized.
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.
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.
The Presidential Task Force on Diversity and Inclusion held its inaugural meeting on Friday, Feb. 5. President Biddy Martin created the task force to review and help implement the diversity initiatives recommended by the strategic plan, Amherst Uprising and other sources.
President Biddy Martin announced at the Dec. 15 faculty meeting that the college will create the equivalent of five new tenure-track faculty positions.
The Social Project Work Group is preparing a plan to introduce social clubs for a trial period next semester, following an information session at the Powerhouse on Thursday, Nov. 19 in which the group solicited possible themes for social clubs from students. The work group plans to release a poll to the student body this week to determine which clubs will make the final cut for the trial period.
The student body voted in favor of reserving two student seats on College Council for Association of Amherst Students senators in a poll conducted Nov. 11. The poll results have the potential to inform the Committee of Six’s revisions to the faculty handbook, which are set to take place in the spring.
