This week, the Senate convened at Amherst’s shrouded paradise, the Humphries House, also known as the Zü. The Zü escapes the average student’s gaze, located beyond a wooded veil on Snell Street. It is often considered to have greater affinity with Hampshire than Amherst, but its residents captain our frisbee teams, direct our plays, burgeon our orchestra, and write our Pain in the AAS column.
In the latest of a series of Town Hall discussions held at our Monday night meetings, the AAS opened its doors this week to three members of the Mental Health Task Force — Denise McGoldrick, Director of Health Education at the College, Kate Turetsky ’12 and Gavin Front ’12. The Task Force has been charged with exploring and providing recommendations regarding existing mental health resources and determining what additional resources should be developed to ensure the best possible mental health for all students at the College.
First, I would like to thank those who voted in the school–wide referendum last week. The proposal to build a charging station and purchase a Chevy Volt for ACEMS passed with an overwhelming majority, with 82 percent of voters supporting the endeavor. Ian Hatch ’14 and I look forward to quickly finishing this project.
This will be a somewhat rambling piece about what was discussed at Monday’s AAS meeting, but if there is one thing to take out of the column it is this: the AAS has no intimate relationship with Program Board and should not be held responsible for the Spring Concert fiasco. The email that Program Board sent out to the student body about their failure to reach an agreement with an artist for Spring Concert was the first we had heard of it. Our own representative to the Program Board (Peter Crane ’15), was not updated about the progress of negotiations, nor was anyone else.
Monday night’s Senate meeting was kind of like a black and tan drink; it started out with some heavier discussion, but moved on to lighter topics later on. With Deans Boykin-East and Nascembeni, Gretchen Krull and quite a few student visitors, we began with a forum regarding disciplinary policy and the honor code as it relates to sexual assaults on campus. Tania Dias ’13 opened the discussion with an overview of the situation and critiques of several disciplinary procedures.
