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Summer 2024

WSM Spring 2011

Spring 2011

Video: Gary Brinson’s advice for investors in the 2010s

Gary P. Brinson, nationally recognized investment fund manager and 1968 graduate of Washington State University, gives advice to investors and consumers in the 2010s. He describes the downturn in the economy and possible solutions for people who want to save and weather the storm.

Brinson managed a record trillion dollars in investments in the late ’90s, earned the highest honor of the Chartered Financial Analysts Institute (an award given to such notables as Warren Buffett), and is a lifetime member of the Horatio Alger Association. WSU honored Brinson with the Regents’ Distinguished Alumnus Award in fall 2010.

Spring 2011

Real investments return real experience

Stock symbols and percentages march across a long ticker screen, but it’s not a Wall Street brokerage firm. It’s the fourth floor of Todd Hall at WSU, and the eyes monitoring the stock market belong to undergraduates managing the Cougar Investment Fund.

The students invest $1 million of the university’s endowment—the Cougar Investment Fund—in a large capitalization equity portfolio. Under the supervision of Rick Sias, WSU finance professor and Gary P. Brinson Chair of Investment Management, the class has outperformed the S&P 500 since 2001.

Sias approached the WSU Foundation and suggested the program in 2000. “We wouldn’t charge any … » More …

Spring 2011

New threats, new science

Sure, Darwin had to battle seasickness aboard the HMS Beagle, and he spent nearly five years getting to and from the Galapagos Islands, and it took another 23 years to incorporate his findings into his seminal work on evolutionary biology.

But at least he lived in a slow-motion world of ship travel and isolated, slowly evolving species. Today, a scientist, or an exotic parasite for that matter, can get from London to the Galapagos in 24 hours. The parasite can start changing the biology of a place almost overnight. The scientist will have trouble keeping up.

Jeb Owen has seen as much, not by … » More …

Bob Brumblay (left) and Dave Fitzsimmons holding works by Griffin
Spring 2011

An art history

Worth D. Griffin stepped off the train in Pullman in the fall of 1924 to find Washington State College’s art department barely four years old and with just one other full-time faculty member. Prior to that, the only art instruction offered was painting lessons for students with the pocket money.

But Griffin had come to help teach design and creative composition and build a program. The Indiana native had studied commercial and fine art in Indianapolis and at the Art Institute in Chicago. In addition to working as a magazine illustrator, he trained among American realists, artists focused on rendering unidealized scenes of daily life. … » More …

Spring 2011

Mexican Women and the Other Side of Immigration: Engendering Transnational Ties

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Luz Maria Gordillo
University of Texas Press, 2010

There are communities of people who live their lives in two places at once. Residents of Detroit, Michigan, and the small town of San Ignacio, Mexico, for example. In her book, historian Luz Maria Gordillo sets out to explain the history of this phenomenon, which dates back to the 1940s when the Bracero Program started bringing temporary Mexican laborers into the Midwest.

She hones that focus to … » More …

Spring 2011

Black Leapt In

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Chris Forhan ’82
Barrow Street Books, 2009

In Chris Forhan’s latest collection of poems, Black Leapt In, the writer draws upon his childhood in Seattle, using striking natural images and startling honesty and insight. He balances straightforward description of the environment he grew up in with an older, wiser voice that recollects, sometimes sarcastically, that time in his life. Forhan dedicated Black Leapt In to his father, who died in 1973, and many of the … » More …

Spring 2011

A Marvelous Hundred Square Miles: Black Hills Tourism, 1880–1941

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Suzanne Barta Julin ’01 PhD
South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2010

The faces of four presidents gaze down on the Black Hills of South Dakota, a fitting vigil for a tourist destination carved, like Mount Rushmore itself, by public policy, political machinations, and private investments.

Historian Suzanne Barta Julin has documented the rise of the Black Hills tourism industry, which grew from the efforts of state and federal politicians at the shift to automobile-driven … » More …