Students voted in a college-wide poll on whether or not to divest the college’s endowment holdings from the fossil fuel industry on Sunday, April 3. Out of the 627 respondents, which comprise more than a third of the student body, 73 percent voted in favor of divestment.
On April 4 the Office of Environmental Sustainability, the environmental studies department and the Green Amherst Project held a Power Dialog event in Paino Lecture Hall. The Power Dialog series, organized by Bard College’s center for environmental policy, aims to engage college students nationwide in discussions with state legislators about reducing carbon emissions.
Students in the “Imagining Education Studies” colloquium held an open forum to gather student feedback regarding a potential education studies major at the College on Monday, April 4.
The event began with students from the colloquium “Imagining Education Studies,” a course, briefly introducing its contents. The curriculum required students to examine the history, philosophies and institutions involved in education and schooling using community-based learning along with standard coursework.
Amherst admitted 1,149 of the 8,397 applicants this year for an acceptance rate of 13.7 percent, according to the office of admission. The applicant pool, which includes regular decision, early decision and Questbridge Match candidates, was smaller than last year’s record-breaking pool of 8,566.
The admissions office predicts that 40 percent of admittees will enroll at Amherst. This would allow the admission office to admit around 20 students from the waitlist to meet the total enrollment target of 472 students for the class.
On April 8, the Peer Advocates of Sexual Respect (PAs) will be hosting the third annual ConsentFest. In light of a recent article published in The Student, the Peer Advocates want to take the opportunity to reaffirm the mission of ConsentFest as well as our objectives and aims as a student group. When creating the event in 2013, the PAs were seeking a far-reaching, campus-wide initiative that would engage and educate the community about topics of consent and communication in relationships, modeled after similar events at schools like Bentley University.
The Campus Activities Board announced X Ambassadors and Kehlani as this year’s spring concert performers on April 2. The board put up a video at midnight to reveal the artists. Spring Concert will be held at 9 p.m. on April 22 in Coolidge Cage this year.
The widespread lack of awareness or enthusiasm across the student body regarding the Association of Amherst Students executive board election is alarming, but not new to our campus. There is a growing distance between AAS and the student body, with the latter seeing its student government as a failed bureaucracy primarily designed to create committees and to allocate money to different groups on campus. AAS is a flawed institution, inefficient in their governing process and still struggling to be inclusive of all student voices.
