News

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Oil opponents take to the bay

As the sun set on Bellingham Bay Thursday, May 21, the silhouettes of 10 kayaks, two rubber dinghies and a small sailboat headed out from Glass Beach at the south end of Cornwall Street. Many flew yellow jolly rogers with a Shell Oil Company logo in place of a skull, while others had Cascadia flags. The crafts headed for the Arctic Challenger, a 310-foot barge moored next to the Horizon Fairbanks on a Port of Bellingham dock.

Protesting for cost-of-living raise

Members of the Washington Federation of State Employees union held a demonstration in Red Square to raise awareness for the need of increased wages after seven years of no cost-of-living increases for state employees.

Job market strong for Woodring grads

In an annual report documenting the success of graduates, Western’s Career Services Center revealed 96 percent of graduates with a teaching certificate from Woodring College of Education were employed a year after graduation, and 84.5 percent had jobs in a related field.

Pro-life event hosts Martin Luther King Jr.'s niece

Dr. Alveda King, pro-life advocate and niece of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke to Western students about her experience with two abortions and her passion for the pro-life movement.

Chemistry professors win prestigious grant money for research

Two Western chemistry professors each received a $40,000 award to fund research toward their work modifying proteins and developing tools for solar energy conversion.

Former CIA analyst speaks on National Security

Former analyst for the CIA and a national security and intelligence expert, Mel Goodman, said there’s an overreliance on the military and their power. During the lecture Goodman gave entitled “The CIA and Presidency from Truman to Obama,” on Wednesday, May 21, talked about how the over reliance on military power isn’t in the interest of the United States. “We’ve put too much money into defense and because of that, there are too many things the United States can no longer do in terms of domestic politics, domestic economy and the infrastructure,” Goodman said. “And until we sort out this resource battle, we’re going to continue to be behind in important areas of the economy.” Goodman said it’s important to understand what the United States is doing overseas, because the U.S. is the largest and most powerful influence. “We can do a lot out there that’s going to have a negative effect in our standing and on our economy, and it’s important to understand that,” Goodman said. “You can’t say that this is someone else’s problem or concern, it’s your concern.” Goodman said generally, most students have lost interest in politics, and once interest is lost, it’s hard to catch up and know what you’re talking about. Goodman said it should be a natural interest to understand current issues involved with our politics. “People will have something to say about a domestic issue, but never an international issue,” he said. “So the congressmen feel they have a free vote; nobody’s monitoring what they do.” Goodman was invited to speak at Western and accepted the invitation due to Western’s outstanding reputation with the Peace Corps, he said. “I read that Western sends more people into the Peace Corps than any other university in the country,” Goodman said. “There must be some international element that’s working in the right direction that understands the importance of the Peace Corps, and I think that’s a healthy sign.”

Veterans share their stories of training, combat and coming home

Classes, intramurals to be affected with anticipated Carver construction

Western’s spring 2015 graduating class will experience the last commencement in Sam Carver Gymnasium’s current state before the building undergoes an 18-month construction and renovation project.

Candidate April Barker creates all-students team in hopes to win city council seat

 This June, Western alumna April Barker, along with her completely student-led campaign team, will be heading door-to-door in Bellingham in order to campaign and fundraise for her spot on the Bellingham City Council.

Divestment protest comes Back2Bellingham

Attendees at the Back2Bellingham festival were treated to an unlisted event when the Students for Renewable Energy Club (SRE) performed a demonstration calling for Western to divest from fossil fuels.

Students perform play exploring themes of sexuality

Western theater students pushed past the barrier that usually separates the audience from the cast in the play “Slipping,” by Daniel Talbott at the Performing Arts Center.

AS meeting discusses new fees

Students who rent space and kayaks from Western’s Lakewood location on Lake Whatcom will soon be paying more. Fees for renting event space on campus are also set to rise beginning fall 2015.

Design Days encourages students to go beyond the classroom to succeed

“Exceptional work requires exceptional people.” That is the adversary statement Toby Grubb, senior designer at Instrument, gave to the classroom filled of Western Washington University students he spoke to during Design Days on Thursday, May 14. Design Days is an annual event that takes place during Scholars Week on Western’s campus and is a student run event that explores the impact of design on the global market. “The week consists of student presentations about various topics in design. The subjects ranged this year from Designing for Recreational Cannabis an Emerging Market to Designing For Film and UX and Interaction Design to Designing Your Life,” Kacey Morrow, a member of the design faculty, said. These campus wide events that take the form of student gallery showings, presentations, guest speakers and a collaborative event with Iron Street Printing in Red Square spread awareness and creativity for not only the design major, but also the role design takes in our daily lives. As the week draws to a close each year, the students choose to invite a keynote speaker, and this year’s selection was Toby Grubb, of the digital creative agency, Instrument, located out of Portland, Oregon. Grubb is currently the creative director at Instrument that handles major clients such as Google, Nike, Stumptown Coffee Roasters, Red Bull, Amazon, YouTube and Patagonia, just to name a few. Grubb got his start working for the popular snowboarding brand, Burton, acquiring over eight years of design experience with the company. Grubb started his presentation with a video of him cascading, head over heels down a mountain in attempts to follow the line of one of the professional snowboarders he was working with. “It was a moment of elation, to know that I had mastered so many things, ranging from InDesign to Typography, only to fall in front of a bunch of pro snowboarders,” Grubb joked. “The industry is supposed to be fun […] design is supposed to be fun.” The high level of enjoyment and tenacity is obvious as Grubb described to students his career path and went in depth about his current projects, ranging from a motorcycle he hand built using LED technology and old Apple computers to creating a news app that personalizes the world’s most prominent stories to your own personal preferences to working with Levis for a personalized campaign. Grubb draws inspiration and guidance from such industry titans such as Warren Buffet. He even encouraged student interaction after briefly describing Warren Buffet’s “Two List System,” which is similar to a bucket list in terms of prioritizing goals and using personal fears as a strength. Grubb asked all of the students to write one of their own personal bucket list items on a notecard, a goal that they wanted to achieve now that graduation is approaching. These goals ranged from places the students wanted to go to social boundaries they wanted to break. On the back of the card, Grubb asked the students to write the top four steps they needed to take in order to achieve this goal. Throughout the presentation, Grubb asked the students to cross off these four steps, until only the most important one remained as a stepping-stone and an obstruction to them achieving their goal. “Expose yourself to things that scare the shit out of you, and then figure out why those things scare you,” Grubb said. Grubb’s advice to the students of Western is just as adventurous, driven and innovative as Grubb’s own work. He placed heavy importance on self-realization and knowing both your strengths and weaknesses equally, and applying them both to your advantage. This self-realization can come before graduation, but in every day classes as well, he said. “If you want to succeed, assignments are not guidelines,” Grubb said. “Do something rad.” Grubb concluded his presentation with the fact that the most sought after jobs in 2015 did not exist in 2005. His last piece of advice for students was to break the mold, immerse themselves in everything they could and to collaborate with as many people and places as possible. “Get out, go left, seek the exceptional” Grubb said. “College is not the time to be told what to do.”

Hawaiian club annual luau sells out

Western Washington University Hawaiian club, Hui 'o Hawai'i, performed a wide variety of Polynesian dances at their annual luau on Saturday, May 16. Hui 'o Hawai'i is the group of students who are either originally from Hawaii or simply interested in Hawaiian culture. The luau is one of the biggest annual events hosted by the club throughout the year. Rachel Umetsu, Hui 'o Hawai'i president, said all of their club members start teaching and learning basic hula dance, which is Hawaiian traditional dance, and other Polynesian ethnic dances during the beginning of winter quarter to prepare for the show in May every year. For this year, the theme of the luau was “Journey to the Polynesian Islands,” Umetsu said. The sub-region of Polynesia includes Samoa, Tahiti, New Zealand, Hawaii and over 1000 of small islands that are located in the central southern Pacific Ocean. From Hawaii, they performed both traditional hula dances and more modern-style dancing that was similar to hula but with modern reggae music. Tahitian, another type of dance in the show that originates in Tahiti, was dramatically faster than Hawaiian hula, and the performers were shaking hips as fast as possible. Two of Samoan dances are both like modern-style hula played with pop, cheerful melody, that the audience seemed to enjoy. Haka, the ancestral war chant from New Zealand, was another part of the program at the luau. All the male, half-naked performers had their bodies oiled were hitting their chests and showing off aggressiveness. “I loved seeing Haka,” Cole Kirkpatrick, brother of one of the performers in the show, said. “I’m from Hawaii, they represented everything really well.” The audience filled all the seats in the Viking Union Multipurpose Room before the show started. People at the luau were enjoying the Hawaiian atmosphere, music and performers with Hawaiian-style dresses. “I loved watching all the different dances,” freshman Adriana Boulos said. “I wish I could be a part of something like this.” The show started with the playing of Hawaii Ponoi'i, the state song of Hawaii, and the audience joined together to sing it. During the middle of the show, they also served dinner to audience, provided by a local Hawaiian restaurant. People enjoyed Hawaiian food while watching the show as if they had been actually in Hawaii even only for a couple hours. “[Luau] was just awesome and so attractive,” Abel Nakao, an exchange student from Asia University in Japan, said. Umetsu said tickets for the luau were sold out quickly this year. “It was all sold out less than a week and a half,” she said. “It was good thing to sell out, but it was too fast.” She said they have recognized that the event is getting more and more popular, since tickets are sold out every year. Many people who couldn’t get a ticket last year were over compensating and purchased it much earlier this year, and that made tickets sold out unbelievably fast, she said. Because the luau is the same weekend as Back2Belingham every year, many alumni also come to see the show, she said. “We have a kind of extra publicity because of Back2Bellingham,” Umetsu said. “But our luau is not for Back2Bellingham.” “Next year, we are probably going to get a bigger space,” she said. “[The current venue] is just multipurpose room now. It’s just too small.”

Lecture on cultural development hosted by Center for Cross-Cultural Research

Disability Awareness Week encourages conversations

This week marked the eighth annual Disability Awareness Week held by the AS Disability Outreach Center. Mirabelle Blech, coordinator for the center, said the week created a chance for students and members of the community to come together and have conversations they normally wouldn’t have about disabilities and the issues facing students that experience them. “Until spaces are created where people are willing to talk about disability, or anything having to do with marginalized identity, they won’t,” Blech said. “There’s so much stigma around disability.” Blech said awareness is necessary both because of the lack of services available to students and underuse of the services that do exist. According to the US Census Bureau, almost one in five American adults have a disability. Only about 700 of 15,000 students use disability services at Western, meaning that there are potentially thousands of disabled students receiving no assistance from the university, Blech said. Part of the reason so few students use services, Blech said, is the university's failure to adequately provide them. “[Western] doesn’t have enough of the resources to be able to take care of everything,” Blech said. “This very specific, very important service, isn’t able to fulfill the needs of students right on this campus.” Disability Awareness Week stretched five events over four days, beginning Monday, May 11, and culminating on Thursday, May 14, with a headlining performance in Old Main Theater. The first event was a workshop entitled Disability 101 which was organized by Blech, disability-activist Kyan Furlong and Western Professor James Fortney. The workshop started with a discussion led by Professor Fortney and concluded with a game in which participants connected seemingly separate issues related to various disabilities and attempted to create solutions. Tuesday’s event began with a speech by University of Washington Disability Studies Program Director José Alaniz about his book "Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond.” Also on Tuesday was an art-therapy social event in which participants received a free journal and learned about the benefits of self-therapy through art and journaling. Students did not have to identify as being disabled to attend, Blech said. “You could just be stressed out because it’s week seven of the quarter,” Blech said. “We want everyone to be involved in this.” Wednesday evening, local band Out of The Ashes performed at Fraser Hall. Out of the Ashes is a group led by Jon Dalgarn and consists mostly of teens and adults who identify as developmentally disabled. Apart from playing music almost his entire life, Dalgarn works in human services and said the the idea for starting the band came to him after he played music at the center for disabled individuals he worked at. Dalgarn said he immediately saw a raw reaction in the kids, something that was rare for children who have been diagnosed as being non-verbal and have very few activities they can participate in. Soon he introduced rhythm instruments and microphones. “When that happened, it just blew the doors off,” Dalgarn said. “Mom and dad who never thought Tommy was going to have anything, now they’re in a band.” Disability Awareness Week concluded on Thursday evening with its largest event, a performance by nationally recognized poet Clementine von Radics. Radics, who deals with chronic pain, read several pieces from her various books and answered questions from the audience on topics ranging from her international success to managing life with chronic illness. Radics touched on the idea that stimulating conversation of disability in society and removing stigma is an important part of tackling issues pertaining to people who deal with disability. “A lot of the barriers for disabled people are not about their bodies but about societal restrictions,” Radics said. “Removing the stigma of disability can make a lot of the things that significantly change how difficult it is to be disabled.” The Disability Outreach Center is located in the Viking Union 513 and anyone who is interested, identifying as disabled or not, is encouraged to stop in.

Students and faculty ask, "Why is tuition so high?"

A panel of four sat in front of nearly an empty room with eight students present to learn and discuss the issue of high tuition costs. ASURT, Autonomous Students United to Reduce Tuition, held this meeting on Thursday, May 14, in Academic West 210. Jordan Quinn, ASURT organizer, lead the conversation along side fellow member Brenda McGarrity, Associate Professor Chuck Lambert and Chad Acosta-Elbangadi, a Socialist Alternative member and organizer of Seattle’s Home Care Workers Union. Quinn’s first question at the discussion was simple, “Why is tuition so high?” Acosta-Elbandagi answered with a rhetorical statement, “Does their even need to be a tuition, period?” Paul Cocke, Western’s Office of Communications director, explained in an email that six years ago the state paid most of the university’s operating budget, which paid for the salaries of Western’s faculty and staff. Times are different now. “Because of the recession, the state deeply cut funding to Western, and tuition went up sharply,” Cocke said. “Now tuition pays about 70 percent of the budget with state funding at about 30 percent.” Education should be available to students who are planning on being in the workforce, Acosta-Elbandagi said. “There is a link between university students and the work force.” McGarrity, ASURT’s student organizer, explained how corporations are responsible for Washington education cuts. “People who have interests in corporations like Costco, Starbucks, and Boeing don’t have to pay taxes,” McGarrity said. A student in the audience, Ciara Stewart, pointed out a fact she thought was ironic. To work in corporations like Boeing, you have to get an education, but if you can’t afford an education than you won’t be able to do so. “There is an aspect of who are the one’s making decisions, we need to put pressure on them,” Acosta-Elbandagi said. Pressure means raising our voices, and working together, he said. Students are busy working and trying to get into their next class, Acosta-Elbandagi pointed out. “You are so busy chasing your own tails, you’re not in the streets kicking these guys’ asses,” Acosta-Elbandagi said. Acosta-Elbandagi expressed passion telling the audience that students need to work together and build relationships for change to happen. Quinn and McGarrity both expressed annoyance toward the fact that the Administration and the Board of Trustees aren’t affected by the budget cuts. “Bruce Shepard makes $312,000 per year, lives in a rent-free mansion meanwhile, the Board of Trustees voted to raise housing and meal prices by 3 percent next year,” Quinn said. Quinn explained that Western’s faculty is being paid terrible wages while teaching hundreds of students. Western does support low tuition costs for students, Cocke said. “We strongly feel that the state must increase funding to Western and the other state universities,” Cocke said.

Plastic pollution movie and director come to campus

Angela Sun an award-winning journalist, sports broadcaster, television host and documentary filmmaker spoke at Western Washington University on Tuesday, May 12, after a viewing of her movie “Plastic Paradise: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” The documentary about plastic pollution in the Pacific Ocean has won 11 awards. The movie has inspired celebrities such as Al Gore, Bette Midler and Forest Whitaker to get activated and want to make changes. Michael Hatcher, Geoffrey Mosher, Josh McMinn and Luigi Di Nardo are students from a sustainability marketing class who organized the event. The group members watched the documentary for a class project and became interested in the topic of pollution in the Pacific Ocean. They chose to contact the movie director, Sun, to see if she would be able to come speak about this topic. "We're just trying to spread the awareness of pollution in the Pacific Ocean," Di Nardo said. The group members contacted the Office of Sustainability on campus. The Office of Sustainability is a program where students can apply for funds to do sustainability projects on campus. Students can access grants anywhere from $500 to $5,000. The Green Energy Fee Grant Program Coordinator Nate White was able to assist the students in getting them a grant so Sun could travel to Western. "I helped them set up securing the film rights and contacting the director," White said. "The grant [for this event] was a little over a $1000." Sun was able to visit Western's campus for the movie screening and lead a discussion afterward about plastic pollution. She brought ideas and helpful tips about how students can make a difference. "Putting the fourth R first, which is refuse before you reduce, reuse and recycle," Sun said. "Refuse that single use disposable plastic, the straws, the lids, the to-go ware, and start bringing your own." Sun challenged all the students to a two-week pledge to say no to single-use plastics. For those students who chose to accept the challenge and post about it on social media she handed out a prize of a reusable bamboo straw. "Media is so influential to evoke change and has the ability to evoke change and influence," Sun said. Dennis Henderson a student from Whatcom Community College attended the event. He chose to take the two-week challenge because he felt a personal liability. "I wouldn’t have believed how much plastic debris affected natural life if it wouldn’t have been filmed," Henderson said. Henderson said the main thing he learned is that plastic never goes away and that less of it gets recycled than he thought prior to the event. "There are plenty of environmental issues that need to be addressed and I think events like this do good job doing so," Henderson said.

Rec Center hosts meeting to discuss budget

Take Back The Night aims to end street violence and harrassment