On Nov. 30, Emmy Bouvier, Maxine Getz, Diane Kim, Jennifer Walsh and I, Carol Still, were invited to participate in the monthly White House Campus Engagement conference call. While we had heard about the experiences of Kiki Boyles, Susanna Labowitz and So Jin Lee, who had participated in an earlier call, we had few expectations as to what the call would entail. Ronnie Cho, a White House staffer who has been with Obama since his Senate 2004 campaign, moderated the call.

This past Tuesday, Nov. 15 the Senate meeting went through E-Board announcements swiftly to get to the main event of the evening: debriefing from last week’s meeting with Director of Residential Life, Jodie Castanza.

This past Tuesday night, President Lynn Pasquerella and Senior Advisor to the President Sally Sutherland attended the SGA Senate meeting to answer questions about the recently released Task Force Reports. Pasquerella and Sutherland opened the floor to any questions students had about the proposals. The conversation focused on credit-caps and a fee to prevent students from taking more than 18 credits per semester.

Interview with Cerri Banks, new Dean of the College.

At 11:30 a.m. on Oct. 5, an assembly of over 50 Mount Holyoke students walked out of class and occupied Skinner Green in accordance with a nation-wide college effort to demonstrate student solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street protest. “There are lots of dialogues here, which are fantastic for some things,” said student organizer Nerissa Sturrup ’12. “But I’m excited to stand up and do something.”

The Academic Priorities Committee (APC) has added a new course time slot on Tuesday evenings from 7-10 p.m. Starting in spring of 2012, this seminar time slot will be the only other official evening class time at Mount Holyoke besides Monday, which is already available.

Professor of Italian Ombretta Frau, the chair of the APC, explained that the new time slot was added in response to apparent preferences of both students and professors.

Earlier this month, Mount Holyoke’s Roosevelt Institute Campus Network Chapter received the Best Chapter Award at the Campus Network annual retreat in Hyde Park, Chicago. This is the second time in two years that the chapter has been recognized for its strength as an organization by The Roosevelt Institute Campus Network. Last year, the chapter won the award for Best New Chapter.

On Monday, April 25, the Miller Worley Center for the Environment hosted a lecture on the RIO+20 United Nations Conference on Development coming up in 2012. Michael Davidson, a China Climate Fellow at the National Resource Defense Council, spoke animatedly to a packed Dwight 202 on the urgency of environmental issues, the role of world leaders, the importance of youth organizing and grassroots campaigns and the evolving challenges of environmentalism over the past four decades.

Mallory Jane Roark ’13 stared longingly into the distance at Lower Lake while we sat in Blanchard, talking leisurely after our dinner. “Mashed potatoes,” she said with a sigh. “Those mashed potatoes.”

Although Gamble Auditorium was sparsely populated on Monday evening, the four women who participated in the panel on women and community organizing in the Pioneer Valley, organized by the Community Based Learning program, still had wonderful insights to share with Mount Holyoke students interested in volunteering in the Valley. The small audience may have been disappointing for the CBL, but it made for an intimate experience.