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Winter 2013

Watching the sea

The paint has barely dried at the new Salish Sea Research Center near Bellingham, but the $2.2 million facility is already in use. Student scientists dip into a freezer full of recently collected shellfish, a Zodiac boat and a collection of waders are drying in the back mud room, and several projects to study acidity in the water and the health of the aquatic organisms are already underway.

The Northwest Indian College was established in 1973 to train technicians who would work in Indian-run fish and shellfish hatcheries throughout the region. More recently it has expanded to include two- and four-year college degrees. And today … » More …

Winter 2013

Tiny seed, big prospects

As small, relatively obscure seeds go, quinoa has a lot riding on it.

It measures about 3 millimeters across, and its worldwide production is about 1/20,000th of wheat, but foodies, researchers, farmers, grocers, and food policy experts can’t get enough of it. Packed with protein, adaptable, and hardy, it’s an emerging option in the quest to improve farm incomes while feeding a growing planet with impoverished soils and warming temperatures. The United Nations General Assembly has even given it its own year: 2013, the “International Year of Quinoa.” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon last February said it is “truly a food for the Millennium Development Goals,” … » More …

First Words
Winter 2013

The Community of the Oyster

On a Saturday night in late August, the oyster community of Willapa Bay has gathered in the Raymond Theater to watch themselves on the screen. Local boy Keith Cox had gone off to Hollywood, but then returned to document his home and the life of Willapa Bay and its oystering.

Every seat in the elegant old theater is full, and the room is buzzing.

Cox is premiering the eighth in a series of documentaries on the bay, on oyster farming, on the oystermen themselves. What started out as an innocent project intended to summarize the industry has led to over 130 interviews, over 350 hours … » More …

Fall 2013

A small discovery

The giant limestone statue fondly nicknamed “Nature Boy” by Washington State students in the late 1940s was recently reunited with his four-foot-tall scale model.

The plaster maquette was created by sculptor Dudley Pratt as a preliminary step in carving the larger, 25-ton limestone statue that has hung on the west wall of the library since 1949. The model had been at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist in Spokane almost since the late 1940s when it was given to WSU Board of Regents member Charles McAllister. He was dean to the cathedral at the time and hung it on the wall of the library … » More …

Charles Argersinger
Fall 2013

Charles Argersinger 1951–2013:  Equilibrium

Charles Edward Argersinger, emeritus professor of music at Washington State University and a resident of the Palouse area since 1988, died April 16, 2013, in Pullman, after a long illness. He was 61.

Charles was born October 15, 1951, in Schenectady, New York, and his family traded snow for sun a few years later, moving to Phoenix, Arizona. After graduating from Central High School, he attended Arizona State University, earning his bachelor’s and then, in 1977, his master’s degree in music. During his college years, he played saxophone in a rock band called Christopher Blue. In 1977, Jana Jennison, who fell in love with him … » More …

Fall 2013

Kathleen McChesney ’71—Agent of change

One day during Kathleen McChesney’s senior year, an FBI recruiter came to campus. Everyone was impressed with the smart looking fellow in the three piece suit. His pitch dazzled the class. “We all wanted to apply,” says McChesney. “But then he passed out the applications. He gave one to each student until he got to me. Then he said, ‘I can’t give you one. The FBI doesn’t have women as agents.’”

It was an inauspicious beginning for the girl from Auburn who would eventually become the highest ranking woman in the agency. The next year J. Edgar Hoover died and the policy was changed. But … » More …

Summer 2013

Waiting for the Rain

In the impenetrable Dogon highlands of Mali, the storm of war is coming.

An excerpt from We Never Knew Exactly Where: Dispatches from the Lost Country of Mali

Washington State University English Professor Peter Chilson happened to be in Mali in March 2012 when a military coup ended the country’s two decades as a model democracy. Within days, the Malian army in the troublesome northern part of the country collapsed. As a result, Tuareg and Islamist fighters claimed 60 percent of the country, creating a safe haven for al Qaeda and other Islamist forces and threatening West African stability and European security.

… » More …

Gun show
Summer 2013

Gun Show Nation—a conversation with Joan Burbick

While researching her book Gun Show Nation, WSU English Professor Joan Burbick joined the National Rifle Association, visited gun shows around the country, and steeped herself in the history of American gun culture. Looking beyond the romance of the West, of Buffalo Bill and the magazine American Rifleman, she found issues of race, gender relations, moral crusades, and political and financial concerns.

As someone who writes nonfiction exploring the character and culture of America, Burbick has studied rodeo queens, examined Henry David Thoreau’s efforts to integrate natural history with human history, and looked into the American national culture of the 1900s. Now a professor emeritus, … » More …

Bryan Vila (second row) joins police officers—his trainees—in a 1979 ceremony to celebrate Kosrae’s status as a state in the newly formed Federated States of Micronesia. Courtesy Bryan Vila
Summer 2013

Training the island police

When he learned about a job training police in the Pacific islands of Micronesia in 1978, former Los Angeles police officer Bryan Vila seized the opportunity to work in paradise. Little did he know that the hard lessons of teaching police officers from 2,000 different islands over six years would make him an expert on training in other cultures.

Vila, now a Washington State University professor of criminal justice and criminology at the Spokane campus, had been a Marine in Vietnam as well as a member of the sheriff’s department in Los Angeles, when he landed with a bang on an unpaved runway in Saipan.

… » More …