Board Minutes At its meetings held over the weekend of March 3, MHC’s board of trustees approved the tuition rate for 2001–2002 at $26,250 and the room and board rate at $7,720, for a total fee of $33,970, a 4.1 percent increase from last year; voted to tenure faculty members Awam Ampka, Sean Decatur, Charles Flachs, Rose Flachs, Sohail Hashmi, Anthony Lee, Craig Woodard, and Frederick McGinness; attended a plenary session on landscape planning recommendations with Jennifer Jones of Carol R. Johnson Associates; dined with members of the Student Conference Committee; celebrated the renovation of Pratt Hall and the dedication of McCulloch Auditorium; and approved the renovation to Wilder Hall in order to create a full kosher/halal kitchen.

Grand Finale Melinda Spratlan, professional singer and MHC professor of music, will mark her last full recital with “A Celebration and Finale of Forty Years of Recitals” Sunday, April 1, at 3 pm in McCulloch Auditorium in Pratt Hall. Spratlan invited five current and past music department pianists who have accompanied her in the past to join in the celebration and will sing four or five songs with each pianist. They are Allen Bonde, Carlyle Hodges, Eugenie Malek, Larry Schipull and Gary Steigerwalt. Spratlan has given at least one recital a year since 1962, and she says, “Over the years I have enjoyed the challenge of planning programs that educate, in the sense of presenting the widest possible range of composers and styles, as well as entertain. The list of composers whose songs I have sung in recitals is long, from Busnois, Monteverdi, and Bach to Mozart, Schubert, and Brahms, to Rachmaninoff, Debussy, and Vies. Although the April 1 program will mark my last full recital, I plan to continue singing until I retire in 2004 or until my voice gives me a clear signal that my season as a professional singer is over.” Spratlan began teaching pro rata voice at MHC in 1971 and became a full-time faculty member in 1975. “My students at MHC and my colleagues here and at the rest of the Five Colleges have made my years here tremendously rewarding, both personally and professionally,” she says. “My final years of teaching at MHC will be made especially memorable thanks to the marvelously renovated Pratt Music Building."

Let There Be Light On Friday, March 30, at 8 pm MHC music faculty members Allen Bonde and Larry Schipull, the Mount Holyoke College Chamber Singers, and student instrumentalists will perform a concert in Abbey Chapel to dedicate the lighting of the rose window. The lighting of the window has been made possible through the gift of Harold Buckingham and his family in honor of his wife Joyce Buckingham ’54 to honor her lifelong service to the College. The program will revolve around the theme of light, including the premiere of Allen Bonde’s Rose Window for Piano Four-Hands, performed by the composer and his wife, Maria. The musicians will use the entire chapel space, from front steps to the back balcony, including performances by Larry Schipull of Henri Mulet and J. S. Bach from the Skinner and Fisk organs. The Chamber Singers, directed by Christopher Aspaas, will perform works such as Gladsome Light by Pavel Chesnokov for eight-part women’s voices and Dirait-on by Morten Lauridsen. They will also sing Bonde’s To Walk Beyond Dream.

Body Image The Five College Eating Disorders Task Force, which includes representatives from multiple disciplines on each campus (therapists, nutritionists, health educators, nurse practitioners, and athletic trainers), has recently developed a Five College Positive Body Image Campaign. This education campaign focuses on providing positive body image messages in a variety of forms, including PVTA bus advertisements (in approximately fourteen buses traveling among the Five Colleges), postcards, table tents, and buttons. (These ads were paid for by Five Colleges, Inc.) In addition, a number of events have been planned to draw attention to the issue. In recognition of National Eating Disorder Awareness Week (February 28–March 2), the task force invited the theater troupe Tempest Productions to perform EAT! The show portrayed the culture of thinness and a young woman’s struggle with eating disorders. In addition, information booths were set up in Blanchard, the video Best Little Girl in the World was screened, and Leah Bernstein ’02 performed her one-woman monologue titled Your Weight or Fortune. For the past ten years, the task force has worked to provide consistent messages on all five campuses in an effort to counteract the vast number of negative messages and images students confront on a daily basis. The overall goal of the task force is to provide information and support in addressing the eating concerns of college students in the Five College area.

High-Tech Appointment Susan LeDuc has been promoted to the position of director of technical support and repair. She now oversees the unit within LITS that is responsible for the Help Desk, computer repair, public computer lab spaces, and hardware and software upgrades and installations.

What's new with you? Send news for “New & Notable” to Janet Tobin, Office of Communications, or email jtobin@mtholyoke.edu.