Outgoing SGA President Lindsay Hills '04 and newly elected president Amanda Glendenning '05 discussed issues that face students at women's colleges with their counterparts from Wellesley and Barnard colleges at a retreat at Bryn Mawr on Saturday, April 24. The event was organized by Hills, who hopes to revive an annual conference of student-government leaders from Seven Sisters colleges.

"We tend to see each other as rivals," Hills said. "We compete for students, we compete academically, and we compete on the athletic playing field. But we all have a need to be part of a strong network of women, and we have a lot to learn from each other."

Hills met Jeeho Lee, the outgoing president of Barnard's SGA, at a conference at Barnard in October 2003, and the two decided to organize a meeting of Seven Sisters students that would allow them to share ideas and work toward revitalizing the Seven Sisters relationship. Representatives of Bryn Mawr, Barnard, Mt. Holyoke, Smith and Wellesley — all of the Seven Sisters colleges that remain women's colleges — were invited.

"Mt. Holyoke and Smith couldn’t make it because of scheduling conflicts," Hills said. "But we spent some time in the afternoon making plans to create a permanent structure so that plans for future meetings can be made well in advance. That's why we invited both outgoing and incoming presidents: to make sure that what we've started doesn't get lost in the transition."

Hills said the conversations among the six participants at the retreat were illuminating. "Because we hadn't met in several years, we spent a lot of the morning on a sort of institutional review, to give each other an idea of what kinds of populations, institutional structures and traditions we were dealing with," she said. "When we started talking about the issues that seemed most pressing at each school, we discovered a lot of common ground. One of us would start talking about an issue, and we'd realize that we were all facing it."

High on the list of priorities were issues related to diversity and multiculturalism, general student wellness and mental health, and explaining the value of an all-women's college to those outside the college communities. There are, Hills observed, some notable differences in approach to some issues.

"For instance, Wellesley has a dry campus, so their party- and social-policy issues are very different from ours," Hills said. "And Barnard's dormitories are basically high-rise apartment buildings in Manhattan, which makes some of their residential-life issues atypical of the Seven Sisters."

"There are also differences in student governance," Hills reports. "Of particular interest, coming out of our final run of elections, was Wellesley's election process and voting, which seem to be considerably more competitive than Bryn Mawr's and generate very active student engagement and a sense of investment in the elections process."

"Both the differences and the similarities were eye-opening," said Hills. "It got us to think a lot about how we could improve things at our own institutions and how we could learn from each other."

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