The suspension of fraternity Phi Delta Theta’s social functions due to an “abnormally large number of reports concerning sexual misconduct” was announced by women’s fraternity leaders and members of Phi Delta Theta in an e-mail sent to Greek-affiliated students on March 8. In the weeks since that email, confusion and misinformation about the social ban has pervaded campus, concurrent with rising frustration about sexual violence, which culminated with a demonstration at the April 29 Board of Trustees meeting.

Barbara Maxwell, who is both the Greek Advisor and Sexual Assault Victims’ Advocate, is the administrator who has worked most closely with the Greek Sexual Violence Prevention (SVP) representatives. Seven SVP representatives initially brought concerns  about Phi Delta Theta’s culture to Panhellenic and other women’s fraternity leaders. SVP representatives use dialogue, instead of punitive measures, as a preventative method for sexual misconduct. When inappropriate behavior is identified, representatives seek out opportunities for teaching moments, where the instigator is advised that such behavior will not be tolerated.

“Our hope was if we had these one-on-one conversations this behavior would not escalate or would not repeat,” said Maxwell. “We made it really clear that the minute it crossed the line into policy violation it was beyond the capabilities of an SVP rep and it had to be referred out.”

Although this semester has seen a jump in reported policy violations, administrators were concerned that SVP representatives were receiving reports of sexual misconduct that they were incapable of handling alone, but were unable to bring to the administration due to privacy concerns. SVP representatives are not mandatory reporters, nor do they have the same First Responder training that Resident Assistants receive. Vice President for Student Affairs/Dean of Students Chuck Cleveland has suspended the internal SVP reporting systems until new representatives are trained next fall.

“I don’t think what’s being said confidentially [in reports to SVP representatives] is being kept confidential and … we’re all just trying to keep each other safe and that’s where you start to get breaches in confidentiality,” said senior Jini Valence, who works as a Sexual Violence Intern (separate from Greek SVP) for Maxwell. “I think that is where I started to see issues, is burdening a group of eight to ten people with the information that there are people committing sexual violence amongst us and then just being like, ‘And you just have to sort of sit on that information,’ that’s where we got into a sticky situation.”

SVP representatives have no formal decision-making power when it comes to Greek membership or activities. When students created the structure with the support of Maxwell, the representatives were intended mainly to aid students in making reports to the administration. When the reports that SVP representatives received caused concern among women’s fraternity leaders about continuing to have functions with members of Phi Delta Theta, Panhellenic leaders and women’s fraternity presidents decided to end social functions with the fraternity indefinitely.

“Panhellenic leadership and female SVP representatives had separately decided to temporarily suspend social functions with Phi Delta Theta. This decision was made concurrently with Phi’s own internal decision to suspend their functions indefinitely,” said sophomore Molly Unsworth, the Vice President Judicial of Panhellenic and Greek SVP intern.

This decision was motivated by concerns about an unsafe culture, not just by isolated incidents.

“They decided to make across-the-board sanctions for their whole fraternity to deal with cultural issues and to help them realize that everyone plays a role in it, based on the ways that they talk to each other about hookups and they talk to each other about women generally, which I consider to be a really positive thing because I think every single person plays a role in rape culture regardless of if you’re in a Greek [organization] or not,” said senior Katy Wills, a member of Delta Gamma who organized the demonstration at the Board of Trustees meeting last Friday.

The indefinite social ban on Phi Delta Theta has underscored larger campus conversations about sexual violence prevention.

Photo by Anna Dawson

“I think the fraternities are seen as being one-dimensional organizations by most people on campus … when people think about fraternities they think about parties and that’s unfortunate, because they’re so much more complex than that. So for example, I think this year the Greek system has had some really tough conversations about sexual violence prevention,” said Maxwell, “And I don’t think any other organizations on campus have had that kind of ongoing … conversation.”

Both Wills and Valence identified the fraternities generally as a source of toxic attitudes. However, neither believe that the Greek system is entirely to blame for sexual violence on campus.

“The CLERY [campus crime disclosure] reports show that there are as many reports placed against independent students as there are against Greek [though only about 30 percent of male students are Greek],” said Valence. “It’s not something that simply getting rid of fraternities would solve–while I do think we need to get rid of fraternities for an onslaught of other reasons…It’s more just an issue of how do we reach independent students. and how do we insert them in a conversation that is about an organization they’re not a part of?”

For Unsworth, the issue is about more than just one fraternity.

“The focus now is on how we can continue these conversations in every house on campus, Greek and non-Greek. The dialogue now needs to focus on having people sit down and have hard conversations about how they themselves are actively perpetuating a culture that leads to these behaviors.”

Independent students were not directly informed about the social ban on Phi Delta Theta, nor have they received updates on ongoing efforts to improve safety in fraternities. Conversations have begun about the advisability of year- or semester-end fraternity trips, conversations that have, on the whole, been closed to independent students despite the likelihood that such students will be exposed to fraternity or fraternity-trip environments. These concerns, along with accusations of administrative apathy and an inappropriate merging of the Greek Advisor and Victims Advocate positions, brought Greek and independent student activists to the Board of Trustees meeting on Friday, April 29.

For now, the focal point of the conversation remains Phi Delta Theta, who has been conducting education and outreach programs in an effort to reframe their culture. Not all are satisfied with their approach.

“I’ve had some conversations with a couple of specific Phi members that have made me think that they are starting to understand this but … the seniors seemed to think that ‘this wasn’t a thing when we were first years, there’s been a culture shift in Phi’ … But what that ignored is that rape culture has been happening forever, and rape in that house has been happening forever and just because they didn’t necessarily hear about it doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen. And I know that it happened,” said Wills.

The Pioneer reached out to several members of Phi Delta Theta, all of whom declined to speak about the fraternity in response to this issue.

If you wander into Memorial 331 on a Sunday night, you’re likely to find a room full of student representatives deep in discussion over the minutia of college policy and current issues. If you take a good long look around that room, you will see a room that is fairly representative of Whitman’s campus: a majority of students who are white, and a smaller majority that are women.

This composition is new to the Associated Students of Whitman College (ASWC). As recently as a few years ago, ASWC was predominately men. Senior Anya Tudisco, current Finance Chair, who has been active in ASWC for her four years on campus, recalls the 2014 senate election as a watershed moment for women in ASWC.

Photo by Anna Dawson

“Seeing that this was something that girls were involved in was really exciting,” said Tudisco. “My first year we definitely had fewer women than men in the senate I think by a lot, but … [in 2014] when all the freshmen senators were girls, things kind of started to shift and now I think it’s 50/50 or more [women].”

Though an increase in the number of women senators has been hailed as a move towards a more representative body, concerns linger about women in Executive Council (EC) positions. Currently, ASWC’s elected positions in the EC are well-balanced, with men in the Presidency and Vice Presidency, and women as Nominations and Finance Chairs.

“[Women] may stay in Senate longer before considering themselves ready to move up to an Executive Council position,” said Director of Student Activities Leann Adams, who advises ASWC. “I think that has much more to do with the system and gender in general than an individual woman choosing not to run … Women [say], ‘I’ll be a senator for a few years,’ and a lot of my male senators [say], ‘I’ve done that I’m … moving up the ladder to the next leadership position.’ And so I have a lot of conversations that look different depending on whether I’m speaking with my men or my women.”

The prevalence of women in ASWC has not successfully solved gendered imbalances in the way most men and women present themselves and lead committees.

“I think [it] tends to be harder for women, that they feel they really need to balance their work and personal lives but for men I think they often have been taught that it’s okay to put those things in two separate boxes,” said sophomore Nominations Chair AnnaMarie McCorvie. “Often for the women on ASWC, it’s ‘I’m concerned my committee doesn’t like me, I’m concerned that by making this decision and this vote I have isolated myself from this friend’ and then [for] men it’s rarely those concerns.”

For some students, concerns about gender aren’t limited to a parity between men and women’s participation. People publicly identifying outside the gender binary are not often seen in ASWC, as members of senate or the Executive Council. Sophomore NoahLani Litwinsella, a member of the Oversight Committee, recognizes this absence, but believes ASWC is doing all it can to combat it.

Photo by Anna Dawson

“I think ASWC is becoming, especially since the enactment of the gender and pronoun resolution, a lot more aware of addressing parties that come to senate by their preferred pronoun,” said Litwinsella. “I think that there definitely is a deficit of different people on the gender spectrum within ASWC but I don’t particularly see that being a fault of ASWC so much as, if I had to hazard a guess, a lot of people who do identify differently than the normal binary [don’t] tend to run a whole lot. I know that we have had a lot of people who are very involved with LGBTQ and the queer community at Whitman.”

The Nominations Committee is often seen as one of the most inclusive pieces of ASWC’s network, and Adams hopes to look to nominations to find ways to improve ASWC’s inclusivity overall. Many place hope in Arthur Shemitz’s presidency to increase diversity and inclusion. Ultimately, members of ASWC aim to create an environment that is welcoming to Whitman students regardless of identity.

“Having so many women in Senate now is so awesome,” said Tudisco. “I just look around the room and see freshman, sophomores, juniors and seniors in all sorts of different positions and they’re some of the most powerful voices in the room … people are ready to do their jobs as student representatives and it’s not … that gender isn’t a present piece of the puzzle, but I do feel like having a majority of women in that room makes it a space where people can experiment with being leaders.”

Spring has come to Walla Walla, and with spring comes a mass movement of students to academic conferences all over the United States, with some even heading out of the country to present their research.

Students often have autonomy when it comes to conference travel. Senior Maya Volk, a sociology major whose presentation on changing conceptions of home during college took her to Oakland for the Pacific Sociological Association’s conference, was instrumental in planning the logistics of the trip.

“I coordinated the flights and found all the hotels and we had a Sociology department dinner with one alum and I basically found the restaurant and stuff. Whitman was basically mostly paying for it,” said Volk, “I felt like an adult completely. I’ve traveled abroad by myself, but in the U.S., checking into hotels and coordinating plane flights and booking cabs and all that was definitely more adult-like.”

Photographed (R-L) are Sam Starr, Anya Tudisco, Maya Volk, and Brianna Brown. Contributed by Maya Volk

Funding can be a contentious point for some students engaging in conference travel. Senior Vicky Su, whose research focuses on self-described “tiger mom” Amy Chua, has been to two academic conferences this semester to present her thesis research. Although the Dean of Students Office will often fund the full cost of the trip, the reimbursement policy created problems for Su.

“Normally students would pay first and then [receive] reimbursement, but because the conference I went to was in San Diego, the flight was fairly expensive and the hotel fee was expensive and I didn’t have enough money to pay ahead of time while paying my rent at the same time,” said Su, “In the end, they also spoke to my professor and my professor was willing to pay on my behalf first and then he got reimbursement later–that’s a very nice thing that he would do that for me.”

Not all Whitman students travel as representatives of the college. Junior Meghan Ash presented in late March on research conducted last summer through the University of North Carolina’s Field School. The Vancouver, B.C. conference was run by the Society for Applied Anthropology, and Ash presented on the ethnographic research she had conducted on indigenous perspectives on pregnancy in Guatemala.

“Vancouver was cool for me to go to other presentations and [get]  inspired by the work that’s going on in medical fields, in legal work, in social work, in gender studies, in everything,” Ash said.

A week later, Ash presented at Whitman’s Undergraduate Conference.

“[At] the Undergraduate Conference, the room was full. Olin 130 was full and so … it was definitely more of a presentation at the Undergraduate Conference. I feel like I got more experience with public speaking and a real presentation at the Undergraduate Conference, but I felt like the setting and the surroundings of the Society for Applied Anthropology conference was different and constructive in a different way.”

Despite the variety of conferences attended by students, most appreciate the opportunity. Su’s experiences, both at the San Diego conference and at a new conference hosted at University of Puget Sound, were overall positive. Although she completed her thesis and orals last semester, she took advantage of opportunity to experience a professional presentation setting.

“I just had such a good experience at both conferences, I really learned that academia does not have to be as competitive as I guess the stereotypes describe,” said Su, “It can be fairly collaborative and it’s more like a celebration of our intellectual work rather than trying to compete. It’s really more about curiosity.”

Public schools in Washington are underfunded, but at least one school in Walla Walla will see more money come next fall. On April 3 a bill that proposed funding Washington charter schools with state lottery revenue, including the Willow School in Walla Walla, became law.

Washington State’s charter school funding has been a hotly contested issue in recent years. Advocates argue charter schools offer unique opportunities and higher quality education; opponents point out that because public schools are underfunded, education dollars should not go to charter schools, which serve a small percentage of the total student population.

Last September, the Washington State Supreme Court ruled publicly-funded charter schools unconstitutional; in March, the state Senate passed a bill that would allow the state to fund charter schools through lottery revenue as opposed to the general fund. This avoided diverting existing funds away from public education to help charter schools, but lawmakers continue to avoid their constitutionally-required duty to adequately fund public education.

April 1, two days before the end of the governor’s window to act on the bill, Gov. Jay Inslee announced that he would neither sign nor veto the law. This marked the first time since 1985 that a governor has decided not to endorse or oppose legislation passed by the state Senate. Due to pressure from teachers union members and anti-charter school activists to veto, and from a well-funded pro-charter school campaign to support the measure, Inslee decided to to take no action.

Senior and Students for Education Reform (SFER) co-president Michael Augustine began working with Willow School founders last summer, and has continued his work as a Community Fellowship through the Student Engagement Center. Administrators worked to secure a charter, and are now in the process of finding a building for the school.

“Through my internship this summer, I got to see the Washington state commission and how that operates … and that certainly solidified my support for charter schools because Washington apparently has one of the strictest approval policies and so to see the process that the Willow School went through to get approved, I was very convinced that whoever was approving them had a pretty good idea that it was going to be a very high function[ing] school,” Augustine said.

Senior Catherine Bayer, Augustine’s SFER co-president, is watching the drama unfold from her perspective as a future charter school teacher. This fall, Bayer will begin work with Boston charter school consortium Match.

“I think sometimes charter schools provide an environment that public schools cannot,” Bayer said. “For instance, I’ve seen in the charter schools that I’m going to be working in, that it’s very much a loving, community environment, which is sometimes hard to establish in a  public schools just because they’re a lot larger, there’s less funding … and they can’t do things that a lot of charter schools put into place, like special field trips, and lots of family involvement and things that the public school structure restricts.”

Not all Whitties support charter schools. Junior Kevin Miller, who has worked in Walla Walla’s public schools since arriving on campus, believes that charter schools take necessary funding from public schools. The 2012 State Supreme Court ruling “McCleary v. State” found that Washington had failed to adequately fund public schools and would have to increase funds by 2018.

“There is a limited educational budget,” Miller said. “Money is not infinite … The state is still in contempt of court. That’s symbolic, right, we’re never going to pay that fine, but they’re still in contempt of court and yet they somehow found money to fund charter schools … they could have put that money into the general public school education budget and be close to meeting the McCleary decision.”

For many, the conflict comes down to whether well-funded public schools and charter schools can co-exist. For Miller, at least, the answer is no.

“A better solution would be to properly fund public schools at large rather than having a whole bunch of different solutions and treating education like a business,” Miller said, “Because schools shouldn’t be looking at the bottom line all the time, they should be focusing on students’ needs.”

Due to low voter turn out for executive council positions, this year’s Associated Students of Whitman College (ASWC) elections will take place on an extended timeline and use strategically placed voting booths to incentivize ballot casting. ASWC’s Communications and Oversight Committees are collaborating on changes that they hope will increase participation in student government elections.

ASWC’s Executive Director of Communications, senior Abby Seethoff, is responsible for ASWC’s information and advertising strategies, which include ASWC emails and design or approval of poster and table topper campaigns.

“I joined ASWC on a whim because there was a position open that suited some of my interests. And I discovered that ASWC is actually a lot cooler than I thought it was, and there’s actually a lot going on…In my high school, ASB was glorified poster making and they couldn’t really make changes because there was no give and take with the administration,” Seethoff said. “But ASWC is actually a really dedicated group of individuals who put in a ton of time in to making this college that they attend better while they can, and I am invested with the duty of telling the student body about that.”

In an effort to involve and invest the student body, ASWC will be putting up voting booths for the April 10th-11th Executive Council elections and the April 20th-21st Senate elections. They will be located outside of Prentiss and Jewett dining halls, and Reid Campus Center during lunch and dinner and Penrose Library in the late evening.

“During an Oversight meeting someone came up with the idea to have voting booths to make it more of a spectacle and make it feel like it matters a little bit more, that it’s fun, that you’re participating in your civic duty,” Seethoff said. “And we’re also going to give out little I Voted stickers to the people that participate in voting booths.”

Although senate elections usually get half of more of the eligible voters to participate, elections for Executive Council positions such as President, Vice President and Nominations Chair can be ten to twenty points lower. Oversight Chair senior Jon Miranda was inspired to try new voting incentives after reviewing data from recent elections.

“The spring elections, it varies…quite a bit…people that are rising sophomores they vote pretty well, about 58% but then [rising] juniors, also in this case happened to do pretty well, 59%, but then it’s always the seniors that are older, are about 41%,” Miranda said, “And then if you go tot the EC elections, which are going to be the entire school voting, those are going to be somewhat lower…they’re all kind of in the 40s.”

Reasons for low turnout vary. For instance, graduating seniors may be unaware that they have the opportunity to vote for Executive Council positions. Also, unlike most Senate races, presidential and vice presidential elections tend to have few candidates in them. ASWC is pushing to end this trend of voter apathy.

“Honestly, I think that even when it comes to the real elections, with the President of the United States,…it’s necessary that everybody participates, because every single person has a voice and every vote counts. The one thing is if you don’t care, no change is going to happen,” said first year Communications Committee member Dorothy Mukasa. “As long as you want to see a leader and you want to see positive change on campus, you need to use your voice.”

The voting booths are one method ASWC will employ to increase voter enthusiasm. They are also making a practical change. Rather than leaving the polls open from midnight until 8 p.m., ASWC will allow voters to make their choice from midnight on the first day until 8 p.m. on the second. They also plan to send out reminder emails. All this, they hope, will result in the highest voter turnout in the modern ASWC era.

“I would love to see [Executive Council voting rates] at the 60% mark, to get those up to where they are for the individual class elections. I don’t know about whether the individual class races will increase in participation because they’re already very high, in some cases like 62%, but it would be great to see those increased as well,” Miranda said.

In the end, ASWC is trying to foster greater civic engagement among the campus community. And they need your help.

“In terms of voting, you can vote in five minutes,” Seethoff said. “It’s five minutes to make a whole bunch of people who spend a lot of time in Reid 210 very happy.”

President Murray visited ASWC’s Senate meeting to discuss her work this semester and her plans for next semester on Sunday, December 7. Her presence made that Senate meeting the first attended by a sitting president in over a decade.

Murray discussed several important issues, including those of diversity, strategic planning, transparency and potential changes in the College’s mascot. Her prepared remarks were similar to those presented at an open forum for staff and faculty on November 12^th, but she took impromptu questions from Senate members for about a half hour.

One of Murray’s biggest priorities was to begin the strategic planning process this summer.

“What’s important is that we, A. get a new Provost here, and B. by the summer be launching a strategic planning process that allows us, in a collaborative fashion, to answer…questions of where we should focus our attention…but those are not for me to decide. Those [answers] are for the community to decide together,” Murray said.

Murray emphasized that this strategic planning process would include considerations of both diversity and inclusion. That work has already begun with Whitman Inclusion, Diversity and Equity (WIDE) working on a strategic plan solely concerned with diversity. The upcoming campus climate survey will be another important step in this process. Senate members share Murray’s interest in beginning the strategic planning process.

“Certainly diversity in the strategic plan was a big one,” senior ASWC President Jack Percival said, “The strategic plan broadly was a big one and I think that is clearly crucial because that will determine the direction of the college for the next…ten [or] fifteen years.”

Murray also touched upon student concerns about transparency in administrative decision-making processes, a topic that is being considered at this week’s Town Hall and in a survey sent out by the Transparency at Whitman Working Group.

“This is probably one of the most inclusive places I’ve ever been in terms of student engagement in the budgeting process,” Murray said. “There are students on the budget advisory committee. [Chief Financial Officer] Peter Harvey shares the budget planning documents on the website…anybody in the Whitman community can watch that process evolve. And so I’m not sure what transparency would look like beyond what’s already there.”

One other issue addressed was Whitman’s mascot, which is currently the Fighting Missionaries. Students and faculty have made the mascot a topic of conversation on campus, and Murray is working to address concerns. She informed the Senate of her plan to create a working group with at least three student representatives who will research the issue over break and present a recommendation next semester.

Student guests asked the President whether she had plans to address other issues related to Whitman’s colonial past, to which she responded that focusing on the mascot in isolation would increase the chances of progress being made. Percival cautiously agreed with Murray.

“In terms of the mascot, I think we need to have a broader conversation about the relationship we want to have with our past,” Percival said. “And I agree that the mascot is the place to start, but I think that it can expand into a larger conversation about what role the Whitmans played in Western expansion in the United States and how we can come to terms with that as 21^st century Whitties.”

Murray’s overall emphasis was on the role that ASWC played on campus as a representative of student opinion. Deepraj Pawar, a sophomore senator, commented that Murray’s presence alone was important to ASWC.

“It was really, really nice to know that she’s listening….She said she wanted to use us as [a] sounding board, and that just makes it even more significant—what we do and that we represent students–because she is going to be there to bounce ideas off of us,” Pawar said.

There is much work to be done, by the administration as well as by ASWC. Murray believes that all of that work is best done together.

“I think…we do our best work when we are able to sit face-to-face and talk through something,” Murray said. “Step up and ask about [issues important to you] and let us either say, ‘This is why this is the way it is,’ or ‘Oh, gosh, I guess we could do something to make that better.’ But that’s the only way change happens. It won’t happen if we’re kind of sitting quietly in a room stewing about it.”

Editor’s Note: This article has updated to reflect that budget information can be found online without a password. A previous version contained a quotation stating that budget information used password protection.

Where does your money go? To Google or Monsanto? Whitman students have never had a firm grasp on where the college’s money is invested, much less any say in the College’s financial practices. That may be about to change.

A group of students, composed of members of Divest Whitman, the Whitman Investment Company (WIC), and the Associated Students of Whitman College (ASWC), met with President Kathy Murray and CFO and Treasurer Peter Harvey on Oct. 22 to discuss Whitman’s adoption of a socially responsible investment framework. If Whitman had one of these frameworks, managers of the college’s investments would have to meet some basic ethical standards, or risk losing their business with the college.

The proposal process came out of conversations between students and administrators regarding divesting from fossil fuels. Junior Dani Hupper, ASWC Sustainability Director and an active member of Divest Whitman, has been one of the major drivers behind this proposed change.

“In reference to divestment, most administrators have said, ‘We’re not in support, not ready to divest from fossil fuels in the way that you propose at this time, but we are willing to create a socially responsible [investment] framework.’ And we saw that momentum, and we saw that ability or potential of collaborating with the administrators and decided to run with it,” Hupper said.

Socially responsible divestment frameworks can take a variety of forms. At the meeting with Murray and Harvey, the students proposed three different options. The Whitman Investment Company representatives, senior Phil Chircu, and  junior Kincaid Hoffman, pitched a framework based on Environment, Social, Governance (ESG) criteria, a metric used by Goldman Sachs to determine a company’s level of ethics. This framework could be implemented by outside managers, or by using the ratings generated by Goldman Sachs based on a holistic appraisal of a company’s ethical practices. The model proposed would set aside a percentage of the College’s endowment to be managed by ESG investors.

Mitchell Cutter, ASWC Ombudsperson and member of Divest Whitman, proposed a more binding alternative, which could draw on ESG or similar triple bottom line standards, but would still allow the college to design its own framework. This model would require that all non-blind funds, that is all funds in the hands of managers that disclose their investing practices to Whitman, be evaluated by a committee whose job would be to determine whether or not to divest from companies who violate the framework. Three of Whitman’s peer institutions, Macalester, Rhodes, and Dickinson, have subcommittees or task forces whose job it is to evaluate. However, neither of these two more radical approaches seem likely at this point.

“The idea isn’t so much to follow the triple-bottom line [or] the ESG approach, more to design our own framework, to have considerations for social responsibility,” Chircu said.

Since the plan is still in the early stages, there is no definite idea of what the framework might look like. Hupper’s pitch, which was the least restrictive, met with the most support from administrators. She suggested a definition of social responsibility be crafted in-house by a committee, which would likely be chaired by Peter Harvey and contain students representing a variety of environmental and social justice issues and Board of Trustees. The new restrictions would only apply to new investments, and a process would be put in place to judge options. Students would need to prove that divesting from a company would have a “meaningful impact.” All final decisions will still need to be approved by the Board of Trustees.

If Hupper’s suggestions are adopted, the framework could set up future conflict over what “meaningful impact” looks like. Chircu maintains that divestment, from fossil fuels or other industrial players whose operations are incompatible with Whitman’s ethics, is not always about making economic waves.

“Now, is any one particular investment on the part of Whitman and its endowment going to change the operations of a huge multi-million, multi-billion dollar company?” Chircu asks, “No. But, I think that was never the point.”

Meaningful impact could be ethically incompatibility with Whitman’s professed commitment to citizenship and social responsibility, or it could mean having a literal financial impact on a company. If financial impact is the standard, it may prove impossible for any investments to meet the framework’s requirements, as individual institutions’ divestments are rarely enough to influence large corporations’ overall holdings. The fossil fuel divestment movement is built on the idea of divestment damaging fossil fuel companies’ public image so that politicians are more likely to take political action to curb emissions.

Seven of Whitman’s 13 peer institutions have socially responsible investment frameworks. Most of them resemble the flexible model proposed by Hupper. This is largely due to practical considerations. Whitman’s investment committee chooses managers to invest and reinvest their funds. Peter Harvey explains that Whitman administrators have very little control over the process.

“We cannot tell [managers] what companies to invest in, or not,” Harvey said, “and we are a small piece of any manager’s funds. Many of these are billion dollar plus managers and we maybe have 15 or 20 million dollars so we don’t have that control.”

Moving forward, the students are awaiting the outcome of the November Board of Trustees meeting, where President Kathy Murray will present this iteration of a socially responsible investment framework to the Trustees.

The administration is certainly entertaining the idea, partially because it does not require completely reallocating the College’s investments.

“It … meets administrative needs if it gives a framework so that we all know how decisions are made, and that provides transparency and while people may not like the decisions that are made, for example a number of colleges that have such a framework have considered divestment and haven’t done it,” said Peter Harvey, “but at least there’s a process [students] can understand and participate in.”

Barbara Maxwell, the Associate Dean of Students and Student Life, has hired six student interns to work on the issue of sexual violence prevention on campus. The interns, who started working at the beginning of the semester, have different focuses, from Greek life to first-year students to multimedia campaigns.

This group differs from existing student organizations, such as All Students for Consent (ASC), Feminists Advocating for Change and Empowerment (FACE) and Greek anti-sexual violence coalitions. Maxwell is adamant that the interns’ projects be seen as student-driven, and not part of a larger organization.

“I don’t want us to necessarily own these activities, my hope is that these 5 or 6 students are out here making a difference, empowering students,” said Maxwell, “I want everyone to feel like they’re a part of this effort.”

Sophomore Catherine Fisher is one of Barbara’s interns. She is responsible for the programming around issues of sexual violence prevention; she also acts as a liaison between ASC, FACE and Maxwell.

“What we don’t want to do is be stepping on each other’s toes and duplicating each others’ efforts,” said Fisher.

Although Maxwell is working to avoid overlapping projects, Fisher is motivated by the commonalities that she sees.

“The more people working on the issue of preventing sexual assault, the better,” said Fisher, “I’m kind of focused on always doing more, not kind of saying ‘we’ve done enough’…There’s always more to be done, it’s not a process that ends.”

Beyond the efforts of Maxwell’s interns, which include designing Reid coffee sleeves listing the signs of Intimate Partner Violence and organizing tours of the fraternities for new sorority members, Maxwell is using prior relationships to get the word out. Sigma Chi used an endowed lecture fund to bring Dr. David Lisak, a researcher and expert on non-stranger rapists, to Whitman last Thursday, Oct. 22.

Students who attended the lecture or spoke with Dr. Lisak seemed willing to engage with the topics that he brought up, which included institutional betrayal, rape myths and current efforts to combat sexual violence. Katie Steen, ASWC’s Sexual Misconduct Prevention Advocate, commented on the insight his visit provided.

“Actually, based a little bit on conversations I had with Dr. David Lisak,” said Steen, “I was thinking a lot about how one thing we don’t do a really good job about is creating a culture where perpetrators, especially serial perpetrators, are not allowed to be within the norm.”

Part of the explanation is a certain amount of apathy on campus when it comes to issues of consent and violence prevention.

“Especially to first-year students, it may seem like everyone cares about this issue because you get so much talk about it during orientation,” said Steen, “It’s important that we remember that even with that visibility, there’s still a lot of issues, and we should be thinking about those issues critically on an everyday basis.”

Although consent has been a prevalent topic on campus for the last two years, Maxwell hopes to diversify people’s awareness of sexual violence issues. She believes that Intimate Partner Violence and male victimization are underreported and rarely heard beyond anonymous surveys.

“Based on our statistics, we have more men experiencing either sexual violence or intimate partner violence,” said Maxwell, “but my sense is that there’s a lot of things that keep men from coming forward. And it’s not the policy, and it’s not the reporting process, it’s things like rape myths that exist for men as well as women.”

It is destroying dangerous myths, and the cultures that produce them, that students as well as administrators have made the subject of their mission.

“Even more so that trying to be the police, and find those people we really need to disrupt the culture. And that’s where we maybe aren’t doing a good job, because there are plenty of people who are really educated on consent, and who are really big proponents of this sort of initiative, but then there are also people who just let it happen, and who support their friends and their other peers because they think that they’re really great people, and they don’t really…act in a more critical way,” said Steen.

Key to this process is having students start conversations with each other. Senior Sam Crosby is another one of Barbara’s interns, whose focus on off-campus students has led him to consider how much impact he can have on Whitman’s culture as a whole.

“I feel like there are people who I just can’t reach…you might end up talking to the same people over and over again but some of those people will talk to people that haven’t been talked to before,” said Crosby, “It’s hard because you can’t, as one person, change everything, but still talking to the same people over and over again helps spread it further.”

Maxwell’s interns came onto a well-populated scene of student groups and leaders, who had achieved recognition from the administration and their fellow students. The addition of more voices doesn’t seem to have hurt the cause. If anything, it has increased visibility. There is danger, however, in complacency.

“I think there are some really great things that have happened recently however I think it’s a really problematic thing that many of us think, ‘Well, we do so much about consent, we do so much about sexual violence prevention, therefore it must not be an issue anymore.’ That’s absolutely not true,” said Steen, “[Sexual violence] is definitely an issue on our campus.”

The Alpha Phi sorority in front of Prentiss hall.

Alpha Phi’s third annual Red Dress Gala, a silent auction and social event, will take place this Friday at Main Street Studios. Half of the proceeds of the evening will go to the Alpha Phi Foundation, which supports women’s heart health and women’s leadership, while the other half will go to Trilogy, a local organization that supports children whose lives are affected by substance abuse.

Alpha Phi is Whitman’s newest female fraternity on campus; the chapter was started by Alpha Phi International in the spring of 2012. Caitlin Mahan, a senior and former president of Alpha Phi, is currently the Vice President of Recruitment and Membership as well as a member of the first formal pledge class. Her involvement has taught her how difficult planning new events on campus can be.

“[Because] everything we do [is new], it’s hard to know what to expect from it, and it’s just kind of challenging to get the word out that we do it,” Mahan said. “Some of the other groups on campus have things that they do every year, that they’ve been having for 30 years, so it’s just harder to start something and get people pumped about it.”

However, she also sees Alpha Phi’s novelty as an opportunity; they aren’t locked in by tradition.

“Being new has allowed us to have total control over what events we have,” Mahan said.

The Red Dress Gala has seen its fair share of transformation since it began in 2013. It has moved from the Elkhorn Lodge, to the Charles Smith Winery, and finally to this year’s location: Main Street Studios. And the success has varied as well. Most members seemed to think of the first year as a trial run. Last year’s event saw a significant increase in donations and earned Whitman’s chapter the Most Improved Philanthropy Award from Alpha Phi International.

“Kappa’s Mr. Whitman…raised [29,038 dollars], which I think is really cool, and…Theta’s…[Walla Walla’s] Best Dance Crew made 16,000 dollars last year,” said sophomore Liz Chenok, who is the Director of Marketing for the Gala. “I think the Red Dress Gala is getting there and that’s really exciting.”

The Gala itself consists of an open bar, a silent auction, and heart healthy food. This year, ticket prices have been lowered for students. For Whitman students and people under the age of 18, the cost is 15 dollars. For others, the cost of attendance is 35 dollars. Alpha Phis and their families have made up the majority of attendees in the past, and Alpha Phi is counting on that trend to continue.

“There’s definitely things geared towards parents because we are trying to raise money for our philanthropy, and … it’s easier for a [parent] to donate money than a student,” said Liz Chenok.

Each initiated member is responsible for helping  make one basket, with items donated by family members, local businesses, or by the member herself. New members are obligated to perform tasks the night of the event.

Annalise Bond, the sophomore planning the event, is responsible for the changes to cost and venue this year. She has also made the decision to contribute half the proceeds to Trilogy instead of STEP women’s shelter, which was the original intended recipient. Since STEP is closing at the end of this year, Bond decided that Trilogy was a better choice.

“[W]e already have a partnership with Trilogy and our spring Philanthropy event … donated its proceeds to Trilogy, and I’m still waiting to hear back from them, but they will most likely [be] who we donate to,” Bond said. “That’s a really great cause as well.”

Although the philanthropy aspect of the Red Dress Gala is difficult to overlook, Bond wants to keep people conscious of the other important parts of the event.

“The event is to raise money,” Bond said. “But also to raise awareness about heart health.”

A recent decision by the Washington Supreme Court may cause trouble for the Willow School, a Walla Walla charter school that was approved by the Washington State Charter Commission on August 13th and slated to open in 2016. The Court effectively banned public funding of charter schools, with their September 5th ruling that a 2012 law approved by voters that intended to fund up to 40 charter schools over a 5-year period was unconstitutional. This ruling came in response to a suit brought by several nonprofits and private citizens, and it affects the 1,200 children currently enrolled in Washington charter schools as well as proposed charter schools, such as the Willow School. Unless a change is made soon, the opening date will have to be pushed back, likely for a year or two, perhaps permanently.

The Court found that charter schools do not fit into the 1909 definition of “common schools,” mainly because neither the schools nor their funding decisions are governed by local elected school board officials.  Dan Calzaretta, the Executive Director of the Willow School team, was shaken by the ruling. He has faith in the charter school as public school model and worries that the decision may harm other supplemental programs administered by unelected officials, which include Running Start, Skills Centers, and some tribal schools, not just charter schools.

“Everybody knows … no one system can meet the needs of every kid,” said Calzaretta during a phone interview. 

Michael Augustine ’16

Michael Augustine is a senior at Whitman and one of the Willow School’s summer interns, who is continuing his involvement with the school through a Community Fellowship funded by the Student Engagement Center. He looks on the decision with a similar disfavor.

“A big question mark is surrounding Washington public education right now,” said Augustine.

Despite the confusion, the Willow School remains hopeful, mostly due to the outpouring of support in Walla Walla and across the state. Augustine and Calzaretta were both cheered by the community response to the ruling. At the Willow School’s September 10th rally protesting the Court’s decision, Calzaretta attested that more than 70 people attended. On the statewide level, Washington’s attorney general is one of several prominent voices pushing back against the decision.

“The outcry has been amazing from both sides of the political spectrum,” said Calzaretta. 

And so, the Willow School is moving ahead with its plans to open an innovative school that they hope will be responsive to community needs. In the year since the school was proposed, Willow’s team has hosted a number of bilingual community meetings in conjunction with local organizer Commitment to Community. Those meetings, according to Augustine, really enhanced the community’s relationship with the Willow School.

“When I look at [Willow’s] connection to the community, I’m floored … the community sees them as a resource,” said Augustine.

The Willow School would offer a solution to what Calzaretta sees as a system replete with great educators but lacking alternative programs during the formative middle school years.

“At the middle level there isn’t a whole lot for kids as far as different approaches,” said Calzaretta, “there aren’t any, I should say.”

According to Calzaretta and Augustine, Willow aims to employ project-based learning, cultural competency through bilingual education, and a truly collaborative educational program, with group study time and administrative focus on fostering a supportive campus culture.

Willow’s message, however, has not made it to all corners of Walla Walla. Lydia McDermott, an Assistant Professor of Composition and the Director of the Center for Writing and Speaking at Whitman, who has children in Walla Walla’s public school system is uncertain about the school, but not necessarily opposed to it.

“I like the idea of the Willow School as far as I understand what it is,” said McDermott.

That being said, she has reservations.

“The educational mission, I agree with; whether or not it should be happening as a charter school, I have mixed feelings about,” she said. “I would be just as happy if one of the middle schools that currently exists were to extend the project based learning…to all students.”

McDermott did identify the lack of a bilingual education program at the middle school level as a major gap in Walla Walla’s schools. This ambivalence among members of the community who have not been exposed to Willow’s educational paradigm, or who are hesitant to speak out in support of charter schools, may hurt Willow’s efforts to come back from the Supreme Court ruling.

Although the future remains uncertain, with the Court having extended its deadline for Motions for Reconsideration to October 23rd, the Willow School remains optimistic.

“I’m very optimistic that a fix will be found and hopefully it will be found soon so that we can again fulfill the promise to the families and children not only of Walla Walla, but also Washington State … an excellent public … education for all kids,” said Calzaretta.