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Fall 2024

Politicians

Tom Foley
Spring 2024

Ask the Authors: John Pierce and Kenton Bird, authors of Tom  Foley: The Man in the Middle

John Pierce and R. Kenton Bird were fellows in the same program nearly 20 years apart.

Pierce served as an American Political Science Congressional Fellow from 1970 to 1971, working part of that time in Tom Foley’s congressional office. Bird was a fellow from 1988 to 1989. Ten years later, he wrote his WSU dissertation on Foley’s congressional career. Pierce, chair of the Department of Political Science for eight years and dean of the College of Liberal Arts for eleven years, was on the committee for his doctoral degree. They spent nearly eight years working on their 2023 biography of Foley, which was … » More …

Fall 2016

Staying a jump ahead

Long before he was elected to the New Zealand Parliament, served as immigration minister, and held other national cabinet positions, Tuariki “John” Delamere ’74 was a long jumper with an attention-grabbing technique.

Delamere, a fixture on Washington State’s track team in the early 1970s, didn’t invent The Flip. But he so excelled at the leaping mid-air forward somersault it sometimes seemed as if he had.

His style was so gravity-defyingly smooth that when Sports Illustrated wanted to learn more about The Flip, and the debate that would eventually lead to the technique’s prohibition, the magazine sent a crew to the 1974 … » More …

Civility and Democracy in America
Spring 2014

Civility and Democracy in America: A Reasonable Understanding

Civility-and-Democracy-in-America-A-Reasonable-Understanding-Paperback-P9780874223125

Cornell W. Clayton and Richard Elgar

WSU Press, 2012

 

This collection of essays from WSU professors and other scholars takes a hard look at the historical and contemporary state of civility in the country, probing the complexities and the causes of the current “crisis.”

The articles cover not just history, but religion, architecture, ethics, philosophy, and media studies, as the writers discuss the context of incivility and heated rhetoric surrounding major issues of social movements, civil rights, immigration, and other matters long affecting American democracy.

The collection of essays emerged from a 2011 conference on civility … » More …