On Dec. 15, 2011, 27 Mount Holyoke students and faculty traveled to the Washington, D.C. launch of the Women in Public Service Project. The project is an initiative driven by the Seven Sisters colleges that remain single-sex in conjunction with the State Department to attract more women to careers “in public service and political leadership to forge global solutions to improve governance, expand civil rights, and combat corruption,” as the program’s mission statement explains.

This past fall the Mount Holyoke Board of Trustees voted to make the former International Relations program an official department. The International Relations major is a 40-credit interdisciplinary major that requires intermediate proficiency in a language and draws a large number of students each year. International Relations has also been among the top three or four most popular majors at Mount Holyoke in recent years.

On Jan. 19, the Mount Holyoke Campus Police moved its operations center to 1 Everett Road. For the past 50 years, Campus Police worked out of the Central Services building behind Blanchard Campus Center. It wasn’t until recently that a new building was discussed.

The 2012 Mount Holyoke College Studio Art Faculty Exhibition, titled “Artists and the Noble Profession,” opens this Friday. The exhibition features the work of nine artists, all members of the Studio Art faculty at Mount Holyoke. John Stomberg, director of the art museum, said that faculty exhibitions are a healthy part of most academic museums and that it is important to celebrate studio art teachers as productive and professional artists.

On December 15th, 2011, Mount Holyoke students attended the Public Service Project Colloquium, hearing from distinguished speakers Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton, Atifete Jahjaga, Christine Lagarde, Farah Pandith, Gloria Steinem, Melanne Verveer, and many others.

On Sunday, Nov. 27, an e-mail from Becky Wai-Ling Packard, Co-Director of the Weissman Center, invited all peer mentors of the Speaking, Arguing, and Writing program to meet the next day to discuss the departure of SAW program coordinator Dr. Laura Greenfield. Over Thanksgiving break, the former director of the SAW program left her position as both coordinator of SAW and Associate Director of the Weissman Center for Leadership and the Liberal Arts.

Starting this semester, Mount Holyoke will shift to online course evaluations from paper submissions. The change was announced in a recent e-mail to the college by Amy Berube, the Office Coordinator in the office of the Dean of Faculty, and later in another one by Cerri Banks, Dean of the College.

This week, the cultural house team is hosting an awareness week of the cultural houses on campus.

On Dec. 14, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the State Department will hold a “Women and Public Service” conference in Washington, D.C. for student representatives from the Seven Sister schools.

A new Student Conduct Process Revision Committee has been formed to review the processes surrounding the student conduct code. The committee will be led by Residential Life Director Jodie Castanza and will consist of five faculty and staff members and five students. The work group will review the different processes of student conduct on campus, a task which may take anywhere from a month to a year.