In the Media

by Johann N. Neem

In the fall term, I often teach an introductory, general education course called “Going to College in America.” Although grounded in my discipline—history—the assigned readings draw from economics, philosophy, sociology, and other fields. My goal is to allow students, often in their first term in college, to reflect on why they’re in college and what they want out of their four years on campus. Students have been told again and again—by parents, by teachers and counselors, by political and business leaders—that they must go to college. And my students have followed that advice. They have done what they’ve been asked to do. They are here. But they don’t know why.

I teach at a regional public comprehensive university, the workhorse of public four-year education. My students come from diverse backgrounds. Many are first generation. They’ve been told that a college degree is essential to succeed in today’s workforce. Their goal is to get a degree, often in a major that is directly tied to a job. And yet they find themselves spending the bulk of their first two years taking general education courses in subjects like history, political science, geology, and biology. I hear them complain. I hear them wonder why they need humanities or science if they don’t intend to do anything with them.

My goal in the class is not to brainwash my students into agreeing with me. I teach readings that I disagree with, and I do my best to help students understand authors’ arguments on the authors’ terms. I also make sure to assign readings that contradict each other. But both through the readings and by modeling intellectual curiosity in the classroom, I want my students to see that there are purposes to their education that are not just instrumental. I want them to at least be aware that there are internal goods to a college education if they choose to pursue them. I want to open them up to the idea that a good college education can matter on its own terms, and not just for the piece of paper at the end or the job that you get.

“In the Republican Party primary, the base tends to be more conservative, and we know that those voters tend to have gender and racial stereotypes that paint women candidates, and people of color, as more liberal,” said Catherine Wineinger, an expert on gender and politics at Western Washington University who has studied women in the Republican Party. “They’re really having to work harder to prove their conservative credentials to their party.”

If there are any leaks in the pipes, the substance leaking out is simply water or steam, and there is no hazardous waste, Jackie Caplan-Auerbach, a professor of geology at Western Washington University, told ABC News.

Other than the land use and the environmental damage done by the initial construction, there are no other hazards, Caplan-Auerbach.

"There are no refineries that need to be built or shipped to," she said. "There's no gas station on the corner that you need to develop to sell the product."

The plants sterilize sewage and remove solids and organic materials from it. But they were never designed to remove things like antibiotics, cosmetics, hormones, pharmaceuticals, and other consumer products that wash down household drains.

“The latest estimate of the number of chemicals that are used in commerce is 350,000. That doesn't include degradation products and metabolites that may also be in the environment,” said Western Washington University environmental toxicologist Ruth Sofield.

“The work that we're doing, we're looking at chemicals in the low hundreds,” she told the Puget Sound Partnership’s Science Panel on Wednesday.

Sofield and other scientists are trying to help the state agency identify and prioritize the most harmful substances in the dilute chemical broth that is wastewater.

“We know that we're missing the large universe of chemicals,” Sofield said.

"I would say the number of chemicals that are in the environment are of concern," said Ruth Sofield, a professor of environmental toxicology at Western Washington University.

The Puget Sound is too often a dumping ground for hundreds of chemicals, according to researchers like Sofield.

Chemicals are making their way, "into wildlife, whether it's orcas or lower-trophic level organisms," Sofield said.

Click the link at right to read the entire story.

“I think that Mace is right that the Republican Party right now as it stands, their anti-abortion stances, are not in line with Republican women and Republican-leaning independent women,” said Catherine Wineinger, an expert on gender and politics at Western Washington University. “And, I also think that she’s right that in the current climate, the continual push by the Republican Party on these anti-abortion measures could definitely turn off [these women voters], and they also will mobilize Democratic women and women on the left.”

When Katryne Potts was 10 years old she knew she wanted to either be an astronaut or a police officer. Then, she watched the space shuttle Challenger explode.

Years later, she walked into her hometown police department in Elgin, Illinois, and applied to be a police officer. Twenty years later, she retired and moved to Augusta University in Augusta, Georgia, where she served as a training lieutenant and a captain. Now, Potts is continuing her career at Western Washington University as chief of the university police. 

One never knows how simple acts can shape a life.

Trumpet and flugelhorn player Kevin Woods, who’s been director of jazz studies at Western Washington University since 2015, remembers making family road trips with music as an important passenger. 

“We only owned two cassette tapes,” he said, “and both were compilation recordings of Louis Armstrong. My dad would buy us Dubble Bubble bubble gum, then he’d give me his comb and I’d make a makeshift kazoo out of the Dubble Bubble wax paper wrapper and the comb. I’d sing and play along to all of the melodies and solos on those tapes.” 

(click the link at right to read the story)

The Salish Sea is truly a wonder. On a daily basis, we see orcas, salmon, eagles and many other species travel up and down its coasts, taking advantage of the remaining healthy habitats for feeding and refuge. None of them take notice of the international boundary running through the middle of the sea and the different governments managing these waters. Just as these species travel freely across the border, so does the water and any pollutants they may be carrying.

(op-ed co-written by Ginny Broadhurst, director of WWU's Salish Sean Institute; click the link at right to read the entire article)

Fossilized bones help tell the story of what human beings and our predecessors were doing hundreds of thousands of years ago. But how can you learn about important parts of our ancestors’ life cycle – like pregnancy or gestation – that leave no obvious trace in the fossil record?

The large brains, relative to overall body size, that are a defining characteristic of our species make pregnancy and gestation particularly interesting to paleoanthropologists like me. Homo sapiens’ big skulls contribute to our difficult labor and delivery. But the big brains inside are what let our species really take off.

My colleagues and I especially wanted to know how fast our ancestors’ brains grew before birth. Was it comparable to fetal brain growth today? Investigating when prenatal growth and pregnancy became humanlike can help reveal when and how our ancestors’ brains became more like ours than like our ape relatives’.

(click the link at right to read the entire article in The Conversation written by WWU's Tesla Monson)