Whitman Stories

For more than 20 years, the David Nord Award has been presented to Whitman students, faculty and staff to support scholarly projects on issues facing the LGBTQIA+ community. The Intercultural Center looks for on-campus projects that engage with important issues through a variety of creative mediums. Over the years, the award has supported everything from plays to research projects.

In a special virtual event for the Whitman community, Washington State Senator Patty Murray took part in a panel discussion. The discourse centered on a report authored by Murray’s office titled “COVID-19 & Achieving Health Equity: Congressional Action Is Necessary To Address Racism And Inequality In The U.S. Health Care System.”

Baker Boyer Bank's Chief Credit Officer Rosendo Guizar ’94 credits his success to the encouragement and guidance he received from his high school librarian, Darcy Judd Wyant Ahlquist ’54.

Whitman College has a new interfaith outdoor space on campus. In early March, the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life led the installation of a labyrinth behind Marcus House and the campus bike shop on Shady Rill Street.

After earning a Ph.D. from John Hopkins University and taking a job as a senior data scientist at Amazon, Wallace returned to his roots on the family potato farm, applying his tech expertise to irrigation.

Winning the prestigious fellowship is a watershed moment in the senior’s study of rivers and their connection to food production.

His six-part HBO docuseries, Q: Into the Storm, explores the intersections between the QAnon conspiracy theory QAnon, former president Donald Trump and the domestic terror attack on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. It streams on HBO Max this weekend.

Politics major Kaitlynne Jensen ’23 of Milton-Freewater, Oregon, has received the prestigious Newman Civic Fellowship from Campus Compact.

Whitman College proudly recognizes Kynde Kiefel, co-director of the Donald H. Sheehan Gallery, with the Pete and Hedda Reid Service Award as part of the Walla Walla Valley Chamber of Commerce’s Higher Education Community Service Award. The 2020 Annual Community Awards banquet, hosted by the Walla Walla Valley Chamber of Commerce, was held virtually this year throughout the month of February.

He writes, "Borders cannot be truly fixed. Our preoccupation with the need to 'control' the border neglects the fact that the landscape makes a mockery of such attempts. Instead, seeing the border as provisional and fluid might help us soften the binary distinctions between 'us' and 'them' that a wall tempts us to make."

After two semesters of remote learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Whitman welcomed students back to campus late last month, with a raft of safety procedures in place to keep the community healthy.

In a statement to the Whitman College community on Feb. 22, 2021, Kathleen M. Murray, the college’s 14th president, announced her plans to retire at the end of the 2021-2022 school year.