I’m sitting in the Seattle airport as I begin to write this—my last letter for Whitman Magazine. This space, like so many others in the Pacific Northwest, has become very familiar over the course of these seven years. 

Someone once referred to Whitman College sociology professor Michelle Janning as an archaeologist of contemporary society—the kind of person who pokes around in your underwear drawer to figure out what’s going on with the world.

In the Fouts Center for the Visual Arts, the Ben G. Stone Studio Wing, houses two stories of art studios. These individual studios are reserved for senior art majors, offering each student a space of their own to create work for their thesis exhibition at Sheehan Gallery.

Inspired by the experiences and grit of her mother, Súeli B. Gwiazdowski says she’s known advocacy and the law would be a part of her future from a young age. 

“Your business here is to learn.” It’s a phrase so closely associated with President Kathleen Murray—since her first Whitman College Convocation address in 2015—that when campus closed due to COVID-19 in March 2020, students gave it a darkly comedic pandemic twist on social media: “Your business here is to leave.”

Jim Edmunds wasn’t sure what his next step would be after graduating from Whitman College. “Like a lot of students, I was sort of a blank slate as to what I was going to do,” he says. At the time, he didn’t see himself creating a company that would ultimately give back to both Whitman and to the greater Walla Walla business community.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the landmark gender equality legislation Title IX, which transformed women’s sports in high schools and colleges—including Whitman College. But the history of women’s athletics at Whitman goes back well before 1972.

As a student at Whitman College, HB Lozito majored in environmental studies and politics—but they also learned printmaking, helped run the campus garden, and studied tiger conservation and the international wildlife trade while studying abroad in India.