Nearly a week after being deposed by the forces of Divestment in a bloodless coup, ASWC Senate will vote tonight on a resolution condemning the student government-in-exile’s imprisonment in Memorial Hall.

ASWC has been locked in their Senate meeting room on the second floor of Memorial Hall since early Saturday.  Sophomore Hana Duppi, ASWC’s sustainability coordinator and a Divest Whitman member, has served as a liaison between the two groups during the coup.

“It’s been kind of weird, you know, imprisoning my colleagues for days on end,” Duppi told the Pioneer.  “Still, I’m pretty proud of the work these two groups have accomplished.  ASWC’s been completely carbon-neutral all week!”

“It’s actually not so bad,” said sophomore senator Thurgood Arwitz.  “We’ve been able to get a lot of legislating done without distractions like schoolwork, food, sleep and showering.”

The products of that legislating session have primarily dealt with the coup. ASWC spent its first twenty hours of imprisonment on a resolution requesting that its rations be changed from organic, vegan granola twice a day to “something approaching a human diet,” and the next day yielded a plea to the Trustees to either remove the Divestment Liberation Army from campus or accede to their demands.

Trustee Brian McMoneybags, when asked about the resolution, expressed confusion.  “That was last week? I thought they were still talking about the last Divestment stunt,” McMoneybags said, referring to a 1986 incident in which members of Divest South Africa “imprisoned” themselves in solidarity with Nelson Mandela.  “This is news to me.”

ASWC also passed motions simultaneously supporting president Jorge Ponts’ suggestion of a komodo dragon to replace the missionaries as Whitman’s mascot and inquiring into the possibility that he might be a lizard person from outer space (SEE PAGE X).  This was followed by 46-hour debate on whether to “compel” or “impel” Divestment to release the Senate from captivity.

“I think we really got it figured out this time,” Arwitz said.  “I believe it really speaks to the willpower of ASWC that we spent this time hammering out one of our most contentious and lasting issues.”

Divestment Commander-in-Chief Smitty Collins has said that ASWC’s imprisonment is meant to be a temporary measure.

“We’re really just figuring out what to do with ASWC right now,” Collins said.  “Hopefully, when our new carbon-free, granola-powered student government is ready to roll, we’ll have some places for them.  Until then, they will remain in Memorial until every one of them has fulfilled all of their campaign promises. I’m looking at you, Katiana ‘Free Puppies’ Taylor.”

Student opinion is divided on the imprisonment of ASWC.  As with many aspects of the Divestment coup, the conversion of the senate chamber into a holding cell has been met largely with confusion and hesitance.

“This is an absolute outrage,” first-year Ann Duncan said.  “Our elected-unopposed representatives are entitled to at least as much respect as the Trustees give them.”

“Divestment locked ASWC up?” senior Brian Senser said.  “I figured they had just gotten a head start on next year’s budget.”

While outcry among the student population has lent force to ASWC’s proposed resolution, Collins says he isn’t concerned.

“I mean, if you lock ASWC in their council room for long enough, they’re going to start legislating,” Collins said.  “I’ve seen enough of these resolutions to know how they go.”

General Mattis began his lecture by discussing many of the current issues in the Middle East. Photo by Marra Clay.

Retired four-star general in the U.S. Central Command James Mattis spoke to a large group of Whitman and Walla Walla community members in Maxey Hall Tuesday night.  Mattis, who grew up in Pullman, WA, came to campus at the request of senior Bill Landefeld and with the help of the Whitman Events Board.

During a 40-minute lecture and 75-minute question-and-answer session, Mattis discussed foreign policy across the Middle East, which had been his primary area of operations during his military service.  Rather than focusing on any particular conflict, Mattis discussed various theaters in the Middle East separately, with a few overarching themes.  Perhaps most prominent among these was Mattis’ conception of the military’s role in foreign policy.

“Let me tell you what my real job was at CentComm,” Mattis said near the end of his speech.  “It was to try to keep the peace, or what passed for peace, for one more year, one more week, one more day, one more hour so that Secretary Clinton and the diplomats could try to work their magic and keep another catastrophic war from happening.”

Landefeld had met Mattis at a speaking engagement in Richland he attended with his father during his first year at Whitman.  He spoke with the general for several minutes, but it was not until his father sat with Mattis on a plane ride to Pasco last spring that the possibility of speaking at Whitman came up.  Landefeld and Mattis exchanged e-mails, and Landefeld enlisted the aid of WEB soon after.

“I’d helped run the Syria teach-in [of fall 2013], so I already kind of understood how lectures and stuff worked,” Landefeld said, but because the technical aspects of hosting lectures fell outside his expertise, “I hit up [Senior and WEB co-director] Nate [Higby] and [said] ‘Nate, help me out, I’ve got the general who wants to come, I just don’t know how to do the logistics and stuff.”

The crowd was heavy on Walla Walla community members, including a vocal group of past and present servicemen.  Community member Robert Frank came with his son, a Marine.  He said that he came to the lecture because of “an alignment of interests,” but was not entirely sure what to expect.   Mattis’ attempt to cover several topics meant that some of the details Frank had hoped to hear about were glossed over.

“It would have been interesting to hear, for example, [about] the action in Tikrit, and what can be learned from that, and how it might be applied to Mosul, and whether he thinks that Tikrit actually should be considered a success, but those were maybe just too tactical,” Frank said (Tikrit is a city in Iraq recently retaken from ISIS by Iraqi forces with U.S. air support). “I wasn’t sure what level he was going to talk about when I came in.”

Mattis was received pleasantly, even enthusiastically.  Prior to the lecture, Landefeld expressed that while he didn’t expect the Whitman community to agree with Mattis on all fronts, he hoped they would consider his views seriously and respectfully, a sentiment which Mattis echoed.

“It can be easy to come in with…criticisms, and stuff like that, but until you really listen and hear someone out…I think that taking the time to see the other side of the picture, even if you don’t agree with it, is really beneficial to a learning environment,” Landefeld said.  “ I know it’ll probably cause some friction with some people, but I think it’s good.  Where is education without a little friction?”

General Mattis spoke at Whitman College the night of March 31, 2015. Photo by Marra Clay.

Whitman fraternity Sigma Chi held an open forum on Greek Life in Olin Hall on the night of Tuesday, March 10. The event, intended originally as a panel-based discussion touching on a variety of issues facing the Greek community, shifted due to low turnout to a largely crowd-sourced discussion focused predominantly on issues of sexual assault prevention and prosecution.

Junior Nick Hochfeld, who organized the event, originally conceived the forum as a discussion of the Greek system through the lens of Sigma Chi members. Six panelists answered questions and participated in discussion, all of which were moderated by junior Allison Kelly. After some delays and debates over the location and format of the event, Hochfeld moved it from Sigma Chi’s house to Maxey Hall and finally to Olin Hall. He also elected to preserve the event’s original format, with the explicit caveat that the Sigs on the panel intended to speak only as Sigs, and not as representatives of the Greek system as a whole.

“We realized that something all-encompassing, with all of Greek life and with independent representatives, too, would just not be feasible right now,” said Hochfeld the day before the event. “This is meant to be the start of something, rather than the end-all, be-all. We wanted to inspire others, both Greeks and independents, to have their own discussions and to possibly host more events like this, and maybe eventually … host a bigger one, which I would love to see happen.”

While the event was in large part precipitated by the response to an opinion piece on the Greek system by junior Katy Wills in Issue 5 of The Pioneer, Hochfeld says he had already been looking for a way to foster discussion of Greek life.

“There are very different sects at this school … Greek life is just one of many spheres. And I feel like they don’t communicate well enough,” said Hochfeld. “[The event] was something I had wanted to do for a while, and this was a good time to do it.”

Initial predictions for attendance (based on the event’s Facebook page) sat at around 100, but actual attendance was much lower, with just over 20 attendees, most with Greek affiliations. As a result, the 90-minute event adopted the format of a discussion rather than a question-and-answer session.

In the first 15 minutes of discussion, attendees and panelists worked over the costs and benefits of national affiliation for Greek organizations before the conversation turned to sexual assault, where it stayed for the remainder of the night.

“I think that was kind of the impression that I had going in about what we were going to talk about,” said junior Meredith Ruff, because “one of the biggest problems that the Greek system is facing — even though it’s all of campus that is really involved in this, and everyone is implicated in this — is the issue of alcohol and sexual assault.”

The discussion ranged from inquiry into Sigma Chi’s role in reporting and disciplining members accused of sexual assault to brainstorming ways for both men’s and women’s fraternities to proactively combat rape culture at Greek functions.

“Everyone wants to improve the system,” said junior Katie Gillespie. “I don’t think there’s anyone who thinks that their system can’t be improved. I don’t think there’s any fraternity or sorority on campus who isn’t willing to hear ideas about how to change, and I think opening that dialogue and making people feel comfortable recommending these strategies is really great.”

While Hochfeld hopes that the event will inspire others like it, he has no plans to organize another such discussion.

“I doubt I would take the reins on something like this again, just because it was pretty stressful,” said Hochfeld. “I would love to be involved in something similar to this, but I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Members of Sigma Chi speak at the Greek Meeting. Photo by Anna von Clemm.

Applications closed this week for the Ben Rabinowitz Campus Improvement Award, which is granted to students for use on charitable projects of their own devising. The SEC, which collects applications for submission to the Deans’ Council, reported the submission of five applications before the deadline at 4:00 p.m. on March 2 — a high over the past four years.

The Rabinowitz Award is a 2,500 dollar grant given to students for use on projects that, in the words of the Whitman website, “promote compassion in medicine or politics and enrich the campus community.”  While named for the philanthropist whose endowment funds it, the award was established to honor former Whitman President Tom Cronin.

“When [Cronin] was president, he was very concerned with helping Whitman students understand leadership and how they think about intentionally striving for positions of leadership and challenge,” said Associate Dean for Student Engagement Noah Leavitt.

Last year the award went to junior Sam Curtis, who filed it on behalf of the then-nascent Glean Team. The team, which collects leftover crops from farms to donate to the Blue Mountain Action Council food shelf, has used the grant money to send students to 90 gleaning events over the past two years.

Because the award also requires recipients to present the achievements of their projects within a year of receiving the award, the Glean Team is producing a documentary directed by junior Meg Logue.  The documentary is expected to be finished this week and shown before the end of the semester.

“Part of the reason [for the documentary] is to share this story with Whitman students,” said Curtis, but “another large part of it is that it can be shared with other colleges that are … surrounded by a lot of agriculture, where gleaning could be done.”

Curtis hopes that since the Glean Team’s expenses are relatively low, the Rabinowitz Award will be able to finance it for another couple of years.

“[The Rabinowitz award] was just one of the best options because it was a large sum of money — enough money that it could sustain our club for the next several years,” said Curtis. By the end of this year we’ll have used about a fifth of it, and so now it’s sort of a contingency fund for the following years, just in case we end up spending a lot more than we thought we would have to.”

Still, the team is looking toward the future: It hopes to work with the administration to make the Glean Team a permanent fixture at Whitman, with dedicated interns and consistent funding from the college.
Both Curtis and Buddy Program founder and 2011 Rabinowitz recipient Michaela Lambert ‘14 applied for the Rabinowitz Award in part because their projects did not involve taking in any revenue. Other options for financing such projects exist at Whitman, but many ask that at least part be paid back after a given period, according to Curtis. The Rabinowitz award has no such provision. As long as a project meets its standards, the only follow-up required is the presentation on its impact.

The Buddy Program, which has since become a permanent fixture at Whitman through the SEC in the same way the Glean Team hopes to, pairs students with mentally challenged community members.  Buddies take part in activities such as bowling and going to the movies together in pursuit of building meaningful relationships.

“We work with the goal of creating one-to-one friendships that defy the norm, and are not mentorships, but are really friendships in their purest form,” said Lambert.

Like the Glean Team, the Buddy Program is not particularly conducive to fundraising, so Lambert turned to the Rabinowitz award to get it started until it received a more permanent source of funding.

“I’m just very thankful that this grant is in existence because the Buddy program would almost certainly not exist without it,” said Lambert.

Heritage Square Park, the small park near the corner of Main Street and Colville Street, has long been maligned as a center for street crime and a spot for Walla Walla’s homeless to crash. This summer a number of Walla Walla community members, including some Whitman students and faculty, looked more closely at the park’s regulars and their relationship to the outside community.

Photo by Hayley Turner.

The study, published on Jan. 12, was conducted throughout the summer and early fall by Duane Wollmuth of the Walla Walla Valley Wine Alliance and Elio Agostini of the Downtown Walla Walla Foundation. Wollmuth and Agostini enlisted the help of other interested Walla Walla organizations as well as three Whitman sociology students supervised by Peterson Endowed Chair of Social Sciences Keith Farrington. It examined both the demographics of the park’s various occupants and the reactions of tourists, residents and business owners to their presence.

The study came in response to ongoing business owner complaints and residents about the park’s regulars. Some believed their presence negatively impacted business in the area; others felt threatened by or uncomfortable with some park visitors.

“I supervised a thesis over 10 years ago on this very same issue. I’m supervising a thesis now on it,” said Farrington. “So it’s been an issue that’s been around for at least a decade, and it was every bit as politically charged … back in that earlier period [as] it is now. It’s been going off and on in that same park for quite some time.”

Senior Alex Kempler is the author of that thesis. She worked on the study in September and is now interviewing business owners on the topic as a part of her related but unaffiliated thesis. Kempler worked largely on merchant surveys.

“We asked questions like ‘Do you think Heritage Park is creating a negative image for Walla Walla?’ or ‘Do you think there’s a financial impact of Heritage Park on your business?’ — things like that,” said Kempler. “It’s a lot of work doing those kinds of surveys because you’re trying to reach a lot of people, and it’s not the easiest thing in the world. You have to be really persistent.”

Homelessness

While the park’s occupants are frequently referred to as homeless or transient, the study paints a more complicated picture. While many of the park’s frequenters have no fixed address, some live on their own or with family members.

“It’s really kind of a combination of folks. It’s not just homeless people, or at least homeless people as we typically think about them,” said Farrington. “It’s an interesting conglomeration of a lot of different folks who seem to share in common the fact that some of the ‘respectable’ people in town, and some of the business owners in particular, are really bothered by their presence.”

The 24 occupants interviewed included 10 minors who were given separate sets of questions. Perhaps the most notable difference is that the minors surveyed were asked if they used the park to charge cell phones, while adult occupants were not. All 10 cited cell-phone charging among the reasons they used the park. Teenage occupants were also less likely to be homeless than their adult counterparts: 40 percent reported living with a parent or guardian and 20 percent regularly slept at the homes of friends, while only 21.4 percent of adult occupants reported living either in their own house or apartment or with friends or family.

Crime

The study also examined crime in the area of the park. By consulting incident reports from the Walla Walla Police Department, the authors discovered that Heritage Square saw several times as many police actions as the two locations they sought to compare it with: Crawford Park (on Main Street and 4th Avenue, next to the farmer’s market) and the intersection of 1st Avenue and Main Street. Observers also documented crime they noticed in the park, which often exceeded police reports by a wide margin. The study reports 47 instances of drug and alcohol use, for example, while only three police reports were filed in the same period.

Still, many other perceived criminal activities are shown in the survey to be practically nonexistent. Neither the police nor those working on the study, for instance, noted any instances of verbal or physical intimidation or harassment. Brooke Bouchey, who worked on the study on behalf of the Blue Mountain Action Council, says that unfamiliarity creates an incorrect perception of hostility between occupants and passerby.

“I don’t really like … the gap between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ in this community, and I feel like we had a lot of ‘haves’ that were imparting their fears and their perceptions that weren’t accurate,” said Bouchey. “I think that this research … really showed that it wasn’t accurate, that there are still things that happen down there that are illegal, but that they also happen all over town and it’s not just isolated to that area.”

Bouchey also notes that while some drugs were generally given a pass in the park, notably marijuana, others, such as methamphetamines, were highly discouraged by occupants.

“The two times that I witnessed [methamphetamine use], people in the park walked up and said, ‘Not here, man’ … So I did get the sense that at least that was not a publicly accepted act,” said Bouchey. “It’s funny to me that this has come up because it seems to me that about five, six years ago it was worse. I remember taking my kids and there being syringes on the actual slides. I didn’t see any of that … this last summer when I spent time there.”

Photo by Hayley Turner.

What’s next

Heritage Park has already seen some changes in the past several months. Its playground was removed in late January in response to one of many recommendations made in the study. These recommendations also included ideas to widen the park’s use, deter crime and provide services to occupants in need of them.

In Bouchey’s view, the study has already begun to create positive change as dialogue surrounding its findings spreads.

“This is a pretty rich town. It really is, and I think that a lot of people in the community suddenly saw that our priorities are pretty screwed up,” said Bouchey. “That’s a good thing to me. I mean, even though it hasn’t been resolved, it’s out there at least, and people are starting to think about it and finding different ways to get involved.”

Whitman students and faculty held a vigil in the Amphitheatre on Monday, Feb. 17th for the late Pasco, Wash. resident and police shooting victim Antonio Zambrano-Montes and for Chapel Hill shooting victims Deah Barakat, Yusor Abu-Salha and Razan Abu-Salha.

Zambrano-Montes, a young farm worker and Mexican national, was shot and killed while fleeing police in Pasco on Tuesday, Feb. 10. Police had been called to a storefront where Zambrano-Montes was throwing rocks at cars.  Zambrano-Montes threw rocks at the officers when they arrived, hitting two.  The officers tried to tase him, whereupon he turned and ran, putting his hands up.  The officers chased Zambrano across an intersection before shooting him several times.

The shooting has drawn national scrutiny as a Latino parallel to the shooting of black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. last year. Protests and vigils have sprung up around the country, and investigations are being undertaken by the Franklin County Coroner, the Tri-City Special Investigations Unit (an independent unit from the Pasco police force) and the FBI.

The other three victims, all college students, were killed in an unrelated shooting that many have characterized as a hate crime related to their Muslim faith. The official police report states that the shooting was the result of a parking dispute, but the FBI has opened an inquiry to determine whether it merits hate crime status.

While the vigil included a few mentions of Barakat and the Abu-Salha sisters, it focused primarily on the death of Zambrano-Montes and others at the hands of police.

Rough estimates place attendance for the vigil at around 100.  Attendees, which included students, faculty and administrators, held candles and wrote messages for the victims’ families on index cards to be posted on the event’s Facebook page.  The event featured a speech by Visiting Assistant Professor of Rhetoric Studies Andrew Culp, as well as speeches and poems by students.

The organizers of the vigil took inspiration from a protest march which they attended in Pasco earlier that weekend.  Junior Theo Ciszewski, who attended the march and hosted the vigil, said that in the early stages of planning the vigil was meant to serve as a sort of surrogate to the march.

“Originally I wasn’t sure that I was going to able to go to Pasco, and I knew that a lot of other students probably wouldn’t make it either.  So this was about providing a forum for that event here, a way to acknowledge it,” Ciszewski said. “Once I ended up going, it became a way to share what happened there here.”

The vigil featured speeches from Culp, Ciszewski, senior Marga deJong and senior Alisha Agard as well as a poem from sophomore Annie Want. The speeches, especially Culp’s, focused largely on the use of the language of security to over-police communities of color.

“What’s interesting is that after Ferguson, we no longer see police officers in the midst of crises trying to defend their own behavior on behalf of the whole community,” said Culp in his speech. “In fact, they no longer imagine themselves representing the community at all. You can see statistics of this; they’re fairly simple. The majority of police officers in hotspot areas don’t even live in the county in which they police.”

Junior Nick Hochfeld, who attended the event, said that he was generally impressed with its execution.

“I thought it was really good,” he said.  It was “definitely warranted, a really powerful speech, and I’m pleasantly surprised at the turnout.”

Hochfeld added that while the turnout was higher than he expected, he wishes that more students would take the time to attend events such as this one.  He also remarked on the bittersweet nature of such programs.

“I try to make it whenever I can,” he said of the vigil and its recent predecessors in response to the Ferguson shooting, adding wryly that “it’s not a good thing that there could be a pattern of how often you go to these sort of events.”

The Beyond Borders Club partnered with the Intercultural Center and ASWC to host the fourth-annual InterNation Celebration in the Reid Young Ballroom on Saturday, Feb. 7. The celebration, preceded by an international dinner in Prentiss Dining Hall, featured a series of performances inspired by various cultures around the world.

The celebration, emceed by seniors Mcebo “MC” Maziya and BBC member Lydia Loopesko, included an international fashion show as well as 15 other performances, largely songs and dances, that ranged in tone from campy to awe-inspiring. Students from 12 different countries (including the United States) performed.

The InterNation Celebration emerged four years ago from an “International Feast” in Jewett Hall which combined dinner and a show into a single event. Since then it has quickly established itself as a major part of the Whitman calendar, and not only for students. Adult community members and their families made up a major portion of attendance at this year’s event.

Preparations for the Celebration begin early in the school year for BBC.

“We start thinking about it at the beginning of first semester, and then we start planning towards the end of the semester,” sophomore BBC Secretary Yuridia Ramos said. “Usually we have a list by the end of the semester, and then by the beginning of the second semester we confirm with them if they want to participate.”

Sophomore BBC President Wenjun Gao first joined the club in the wake of last year’s celebration. This year she served as director for the event. She ran into a few hitches in planning, most notably a constantly-shifting roster of performers.

“I had 18 groups of people sign up at the end of last semester, and at the start of this semester people [told] me that they couldn’t do it anymore because of academic struggles or because of their partner not doing it anymore,” Gao said. “We were really stressed out.”

Two performers dropped out the day of the event due to illness, and Gao, Loopesko and other members of BBC found themselves scrambling to adjust. Still, the event itself went off largely without a hitch.

“I was totally not sure what it was going to be like, but I’m really glad I came,” first-year Megan Gleason said. “It was pretty amazing.”

The event was also well-attended, which pleasantly surprised Gao.

“I was amazed, actually, because there were 300 seats and they were all taken,” she said. “People were even standing at the back.”

Loopesko, who spoke in an exaggerated French accent throughout the celebration, said that the emcee duties she shared with Maziya were largely unaffected by last-minute change-ups.

“Very little of [the emcee banter]” was scripted, she said. “MC and I met half an hour before the show and had some bare-bones ideas. Those ideas were basically the extent of it that was scripted, nothing else.”

Loopesko was also pleased with the event’s execution, saying that it follows a trend of improvement over the past four years.

“It’s kind of had an upward curve,” she said. “Our freshman year… wasn’t very organized because it was the first time we were doing it and we didn’t know what we were doing, and it’s just gotten a lot better since then. More people are involved, more people show up, and people kind of know about it, know what to expect.”

State Supreme Court Justice Mary Yu visited campus for a speech and a conversation with President George Bridges and the student body on Tuesday, Jan. 29. As this year’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day speaker, Justice Yu spoke on race, poverty and the criminal justice system to a crowd of students, faculty members and community members.

Justice Yu opened the session with a speech and then took a few questions from President Bridges before handing the microphone to the audience. She emphasized a perspective on race and the legal system garnered from her experience as a trial judge rather than from her more publicized position as the state’s first LGBTQ or Asian-American Supreme Court Justice.

“I don’t decide cases based on race but I understand race when it’s on the table,” said Yu in her speech. “I can ask a different question because of my life experience. But I do want to assure you that all of the individuals sitting at that table do the same thing: They bring a perspective.”

Despite this disclaimer, Yu vocally discussed racial divides in income, sentencing and policing. The police shooting of Michael Brown and subsequent protests in Ferguson, Mo. loomed particularly large in Yu’s speech.

“In Ferguson the explosion over the incident has been bubbling for the last 20 to 25 years in that town,” said Yu. “It has a lot to do with economics and poverty, it has a lot to do with disenfranchisement, and people losing the right to participate, and I’ll … acknowledge that the court systems have contributed to the problem in Ferguson.”

Whitman hosts a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day speaker annually to discuss race and other social justice issues with the community. Yu’s decision to come to Whitman was spurred by alum Sydney Conway ’13, a University of Washington law student who worked as a judicial extern in Yu’s office this summer. The topic came up in a conversation Conway had with Yu’s assistant, and soon Conway and Yu got into contact with Student Engagement Center Director Noah Leavitt.

Leavitt and the SEC had initially planned to bring Yu in on their own and not as the MLK speaker. But growing discussions of race and justice following the Ferguson shooting and the police killing of Eric Garner in New York brought MLK organizers to approach the SEC about sponsoring the event and making Yu the MLK speaker.

“I had just happened to reserve that date,” said Leavitt. “It was a great coincidence.”

“[The arrangement] was perfect — perfect for Whitman and for Justice Yu,” said Conway. “And I’m very excited that this happened.”

The decision to put Yu in conversation with Bridges was motivated by Bridges’s experience in criminology.

“[Bridges] has 30 years of experience in criminology — research and working with the attorney general of the United States,” said Matthew Ozuna, interim director of the Intercultural Center.

Yu was also impressed with Bridges’ experience in the field.

“Dr. Bridges is a nationally known individual for knowing what he speaks about in this area,” she said.

Once hosted entirely by the Intercultural Center, for the past several years the MLK speaker has been chosen and accommodated by an advisory group comprised of delegates from relevant student groups and administrative offices. These include the Intercultural Center, Black Student Union (BSU), the Student Engagement Center, the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life, ASWC, Whitman Events Board and Whitman Teaches the Movement.

Organizations closely affiliated with the topic, such as BSU, were given larger amounts of influence on the choice of speaker.

“[The group] is the first of its kind,” said Ozuna. “It was comprised of students, staff and faculty, which is key. That’s hard to do on this campus.”

Apart from deciding the speaker, the coalition served largely to ensure that the various groups could put on MLK programs without interfering with each other.

“Everyone represented a separate entity, with their own programming,” said Ozuna. “So this group just helped [them] to … counsel each other, more for logistical and communication purposes.”

Speaking before the event, Yu said she had high hopes for the conversation.

“I’m hoping that we’re going to have the opportunity to talk about race and poverty because I think they’re so intertwined,” she said. “I would like the energy to be positive. I would like people to feel energized by the conversation where they’re feeling, at the end of the night, compelled to do something.”

Colorfully lit floats, cars, bikes and horses lined up along Boyer Avenue on Saturday in preparation for Walla Walla’s 19th-annual holiday Macy’s Parade of Lights. Put on each year by the Downtown Walla Walla foundation, the parade starts just west of the Whitman campus at the intersection of Boyer and Palouse, making it a popular study break for Whitman students.

The parade featured 60 moving entries from various businesses and organizations around Walla Walla. Organizers awarded prizes for the best floats in six categories as well as a Mayor’s Choice award, a Best Lighted Entry award and a Holiday Spirit award that serves as a catch-all for entries that do not fit into any particular category. This year, those awards went to

“The Holiday Spirit award is just for someone who shows holiday spirit and comes regardless of category,” said Gina Grant Bull, Events and Public Relations Manager for the Downtown Walla Walla Foundation. Grant has run the parade for the past two years.

Photo by Annabelle Marcovici

The Parade of Lights began in 1996, and at the time was sponsored by College Place’s Inland Cellular. Macy’s took the lead in sponsoring the parade in the early 2000’s, and has sponsored it ever since. At the time, the parade had two notable rules: participants could hand out candy or other favors but not throw it, and no float could feature Santa Claus.

Since then, the rule on distributing candy and trinkets has tightened for safety reasons. The crowds and darkness of the parade make it too easy for marchers to get lost in the crowds or accidentally injure others.

“It’s 100% a safety issue,” Bull said. “It’s the only nighttime parade, everything’s with lights, it’s hard to see spectators, so there’s no handing out of any kind.”

The Santa rule came into existence because the parade organizers placed Santa on the final float in the parade, a practice that continues today. Bull says that the rule is intended to keep Santa novel and build suspense.

“There can be references to Santa– Macy’s this year had Mrs. Claus waiting for Santa to return– but there can be no Santa on your float,” Bull said.

Senior Laura Neff has gone to the parade every year since she came to Whitman. This year, she and two friends went downtown to get coffee and dinner before camping out on Main Street to wait for the parade. She has a few favorites, including the Baker Boyer Ducky Derby’s distinctive duck float.

“There’s this really big inflatable duck wearing sunglasses, and if I remember correctly, its first appearance was last year, so I definitely looked for it this year,” Neff said. “Which is funny, because it’s one of the only things not holiday- or Christmas-related in the parade, and I can’t even tell you what it’s an advertisement for.”

Neff, who grew up near Sacramento, enjoys the parade’s small-town charm.

“I just love it because I didn’t grow up in a small town, and so I didn’t really experience small-town traditions when I grew up,” Neff said. “It’s just another reason I love Walla Walla. It’s the small-town community; everybody goes out to see it, everyone knows it’s kind of hokey and kitschy, but it’s a really…fun tradition that I have enjoyed taking part in.”

Bull enjoys running the parade for many of the same reasons, but notes that people from outside of Walla Walla also come to town for the parade.

“People come for [the Walla Walla Wine Alliance’s] holiday barrel tasting, so it’s a big thing for people from out of town as well,” Bull said. “It’s really a cool, family-friendly tradition. We’ve got people who come from the tri-cities, who come from Pullman– it’s just a great small-town tradition. I love it.”

In the past, the parade has drawn Whitman volunteers to help with setup, and Bull hopes to revive that tradition. She had help this year from two Whitman students: senior Ashley Hansack and junior Josephine Adamski. Both work with the foundation. In earlier years, the parade’s volunteer base also benefited from a close connection to the school: Bull’s predecessor was the women’s tennis coach at Whitman, and would often recruit volunteers. In recent years, that has declined.

Bull is hopeful that Whitman students might become more involved in the parade in other ways as well.

“We would love a Whitman float,” she said. “Walla Walla Community College has a float, and we would love to have a Whitman College float.”

The Student Engagement Center (SEC) recently opened up applications for its summer internship grants. The grants, at 2,500 dollars each, are a core part of the SEC’s rapidly expanding internship program. The program more than quadrupled in size, from 30 grants to 130, between 2011 and 2014.

Whitman and the SEC have begun increasing their focus on internships. This summer, Internship Coordinator Victoria Wolff and Director for Business Engagement Kim Rolfe were hired by the SEC to help increase focus on its internship program. The growth in Whitman-funded internships also benefits from a 1.25 million dollar endowment established with the purpose of increasing students’ internship opportunities. The endowment pays out five percent annually, about $62,000. The program also benefits from a number of non-endowment donors who ask that their donations be made immediately payable.

“There’s just been a lot of interest from the college,” said Wolff. “President [George Bridges’] vision is that every student that goes to Whitman has a chance to do an internship [or research opportunity].”

Whitman’s increased focus on internships in recent years stems from the fact that employers are giving more importance to internship experiences when they make hiring decisions, according to Leavitt.

“We know that [internships are] where incredible learning happens, and we also know that that’s what employers are expecting students coming out of undergraduate experiences to have … because [employers are] not doing the training anymore on their end, like they used to do five or ten years ago,” said Associate Dean for Student Engagement Noah Leavitt. “The whole world of work has changed so that things that used to happen at the employer are now having to happen during college.”

Demand for internship grants among students has risen dramatically in the past several years. Only 29 students applied for grants in 2006, and 21 of them were accepted In 2010 and 2011 the SEC fielded 71 applications, and fewer than half of applicants in those years received grants. This spurred a dramatic expansion, and in 2012 the SEC was able to offer grants to 76 of 84 applicants.

These rises in interest and funding have provided the motivation and resources for the SEC to experiment with its programs. This summer, three students took internships at ProtoParadigm, a Walla Walla-based company that produces 3D printers and composites used in them. This led to a cost-sharing arrangement between the SEC and ProtoParadigm, hitherto unprecedented at Whitman. The SEC agreed to foot a part of the bill for those students’ internships, while ProtoParadigm covered the rest.

“At the same time that we want to be incredibly frugal about the way we spend our internship grant dollars … We’re looking to figure out ways to make [opportunities] available,” said Leavitt. “We’re just kind of experimenting.”

Also new to the grant program is an optional budget statement, which allows students to document internship-related expenses and apply for a refund from the college. The statement is intended to help increase the accessibility of internships to students with high financial need by ensuring that they can meet their obligations to the Department of Financial Aid.

“In the past it’s been hard for us to say if we’re giving out these 2,500 dollar grants, that we can assure that you’ll come out of the summer with … whatever the college’s requirement is,” said Leavitt. “We don’t want people to miss out on [internships] because their financial aid package says that they need to finish their summer with 2,400 dollars or 2,500 dollars.”

This year, applications for summer internship grants will be accepted in two waves, with a new deadline in March for earlier submission, as well as the traditional deadline in April. Wolff hopes that the addition of a March deadline will help students and their potential supervisors make decisions regarding their internships earlier.

“In the past, there was one deadline right after spring break, and we’ve gotten feedback from students that said, ‘Well, I need to know earlier on, or my employer needs to know earlier on, whether I’ll get the grant,’” said Wolff. “Those that need to know earlier on can now apply earlier and then get back to their supervisor … and those who are applying for different programs can…use the second deadline.”

Senior Katie Myers, who held an internship with Idaho Representative Mike Simpson two summers ago, is a particular supporter of the internship grant program. It helped her out of a tight spot in the months leading up to her internship.

“Originally, it was going to be a paid internship … but then the government shutdown happened,” she said. “The first thing I did was run over to the SEC, and luckily the deadline hadn’t passed yet. It was about two days away … It’s really expensive to live [in Washington, D.C.], so without the grant, it probably wouldn’t have been possible.”

Myers now plans to join the cohort of donors to the internship grant program some day.

“I used to work at the office of annual giving,” she said. “And so I have thought that, in the future, when I’m in a position to give, I would really like to give to the internship grants because it was something that will propel me into the career that I want.”

At the time of writing, Leavitt and Wolff could offer no estimates for the number of grants offered this year. Budgeting decisions are usually put off until the spring semester because donors tend to make their contributions late in the fiscal year for tax filing purposes.