No one seemed to listen.
On Tuesday, the students couldn't help but notice.
On that day, the 46-year-old Change calmly walked to a large metallic peace symbol in the heart of the campus, doused herself with gasoline and set herself on fire.
The suicide, carried out in front of 50 people, was meticulously planned as a final, last-gasp attempt to draw attention to her beliefs.
"My real intention is to spark a discussion of how we can peacefully transform our world," Change wrote in a statement she delivered beforehand. "I offer myself as an alarm against Armageddon and a torch for liberty."
Students who for years had walked by her with indifference or vague unease as she ranted on couldn't stop talking yesterday about her spectacular suicide. They remembered little of her message, though.
"It's a tragedy," said Justin Piergross, 22, as he sat a few feet from the shiny peace sculpture. "I think a lot of people just didn't give her any respect because she was a bit different."
To 21-year-old Kate Saliba, a Penn junior, the almost daily performances were like a "show." "People would be sitting by the library and just cringe," she said.
"What was she against? Everything," said Kyle Bartlett, a graduate student from Little Rock, Ark. "Destruction of the rain forest. Government with a capital G."
Throughout yesterday morning, people made their way across the College Green and paused before a shrine of sunflowers, purple lilies, burning candles and colored beads left at the 15-foot-high peace sign along with a balloon with the message: "In memory of one who lived and died in pain."
Change was something of a mystery. About the only thing anyone knew about her is that she listed an address in the city's depressed Powelton section in West Philadelphia and that police said she was from Springfield, Ohio.
It wasn't clear how she supported herself or whether she had any family, though in a radio interview she once said that her father was an engineer and her grandfather a Harvard professor.
She had no connection to Penn. The extent of her education was unknown. But Brendan McGeever, a student who interviewed Change recently on his campus radio show, said: "When you talked to her she was just so articulate and normal. She could be a professor, a grad student."
A woman who only gave her first name, Jessie, stood with tears in her eyes at the makeshift shrine. She said she had lived near Change for 17 years.
"I'm going through feelings like I could have prevented something," she said. "She was a very cheerful, very friendly, very lovely woman."
Change, who changed her name from Chang to reflect her commitment, danced and displayed flags for 15 years to promote her belief in a "Transformation" - a crash of the world economy that would force everyone to come together to work out an answer.
A year ago fliers announcing Change's impending self-immolation began circulating among the tight family of protesters in West Philadelphia.
"We can all kind of take the blame for this together," McGeever said. "She saw this as a necessary step because she had exhausted the other avenues."