In the Media

Friday, March 1, 2024 - WGN Radio (Chicago)

Michael Miller, Economics Visiting Assistant Professor, Western Washington University and Professor Emeritus at DePaul University, chats with John about disabled Americans being underutilized in the workforce, and why we should care about the decline of the U.S. dollar as reserve currency.

Friday, February 23, 2024 - Cascadia Daily News

To Western Washington University students, Richard L. Hodges might be best known as the Director of Voice Studies — but to the rest of the U.S., he’s a versatile opera performer, writer, director and composer.

Described as a “powerhouse baritone” by the Wall Street Journal, Hodges’ career has taken him to cities including Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Detroit and, most recently, the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.

Now Hodges is gearing up to perform in the ensemble of “X: The Life & Times of Malcolm X,” the same show he performed at the Met in November 2023. A reboot of the 1986 opera by Anthony, Thulani and Christopher Davis, the production “imagines Malcolm as an Everyman whose story transcends time and space” according to the Met’s website.

Wednesday, February 7, 2024 - Bellingham Herald

We have all been told that going to college and earning a degree is a lucrative investment to make for your future. Although earning a degree in general can have positive effects on your annual income, other factors such as where you get your degree from and what field you received your degree in can also have an impact.

Wednesday, January 31, 2024 - Crosscut

Kristen B. French is a professor of elementary education at Western Washington University who has been teaching a tribal-sovereignty course to future educators since before the new state law, and has worked with University of Washington faculty to develop their curriculum for future teachers.

Over the years, students called this curriculum transformative because they hadn’t learned the material in their own schooling.

French is a registered member of the Blackfeet tribe in Montana and a descendant of Gros Ventre in Montana and Eastern Band Cherokee in North Carolina. She works with other Indigenous professors in Washington to teach the course, which includes an exploration of issues like climate change and salmon restoration that are important to local Indigenous nations.

“Being in community together is also showing our students that this work has to be done in community with each other and we’re modeling working with tribal partners,” French said.

Wednesday, January 24, 2024 - WGN Radio (Chicago)

Michael Miller, Professor Emeritus at DePaul University (and now at WWU), joins John to talk about the disconnect between how the public perceives the economy and the statistical data that shows the economy doing fine.

Wednesday, January 24, 2024 - Peninsula Daily News

The Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe is working with a diverse group of partners to learn more about the population structure of Puget Sound's Dungeness crab by studying the DNA of both larvae and adults.

(story behind a paywall, but features WWU's Jay Dimond)

Wednesday, January 3, 2024 - Seattle Times

Taken as a whole, Washington’s “labor market still tilts in favor of [job] seekers,” says James McCafferty, co-director at the Center for Economic & Business Research at Western Washington University. But in some sectors, McCafferty concedes, “it may not feel like it.” 

Monday, December 18, 2023 - Bellingham Herald

“When humans make changes, anything that kinda disturbs the watershed, those activities have the potential to release sediment, that can run off into the lake. That sediment often contains pretty high levels of phosphorus,” Angela Strecker, director of the Western Washington University Institute for Watershed Studies, told The Bellingham Herald. “There are potential other sources ... but human conversion of land is one of the main sources ... the lake sits at the lowest point of the watershed, so anything that happens in that watershed is gonna get funneled down to the lake. The lake takes the brunt of all the things that we do, all the actions that we take within the watershed.”

Thursday, December 14, 2023 - The Economist

The well-situated seismometer first came to public attention in January 2011, when it recorded the response of fans of the Seattle Seahawks, an American football team, to a magnificent touchdown by Marshawn Lynch, a running back known as “Beast Mode”. The “Beast Quake” went down in local sporting history. When Ms Swift came to town for two nights of her Eras tour, Jacqueline Caplan-Auerbach, a geology professor at Western Washington University, used the opportunity to learn more about how events in the stadium shake its surroundings. On December 11th she presented some of her conclusions at the American Geophysical Union’s autumn meeting in San Francisco.