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Crisis in constitutional democracy focus of WSU Foley Institute distinguished lecture series

Four of the nation’s leading experts on constitutional democracy will discuss current crises in the U.S. and abroad in a series of free, online events beginning Wednesday, Feb. 16.

The noon-hour events are hosted by the Thomas S. Foley Institute for Public and Public Service at Washington State University, whose mission is to educate the public about American government and democratic institutions, encourage public service and to promote scholarly research on public policy and political institutions.

Cornell Clayton.
Clayton

“In recent years hyper-partisanship and polarization has severely tested America’s constitutional structures and democratic norms. In the past year alone, we witnessed two impeachments of a sitting president and an insurrection that desecrated the nation’s Capitol,” said Cornell Clayton, C.O. Johnson distinguished professor of political science and director of the Foley Institute. “We are living in a time of almost unparalleled threat to democratic governance here and elsewhere in the world.”

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WSU Insider

 

Jennifer Lopez bridges gap between Puerto Rico and Washington

Jennifer Lopez finished her performance of Woody Guthrie’s protest anthem “This Land is Your Land” Wednesday morning by paying homage to her Hispanic identity. “One nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all,” Lopez said in Spanish to the small crowd gathered on the west side of the Capitol to witness President Joe Biden take the oath of office.

Carmen Lugo-Lugo.
Lugo-Lugo

Many politicians in Washington still need to be educated on Puerto Rican demands, said Carmen Lugo-Lugo, a professor of comparative ethnic studies at Washington State University who is Puerto Rican. After years of researching congressional hearings on Puerto Rico, she found that the island “was invisible to those who were directly and indirectly making decisions about it and on its behalf.”

“If people in Congress have no idea what Puerto Rico is in relation to them, or the U.S., we can’t expect the general population to know any better,” Lugo-Lugo said. “So any time anyone raises awareness about Puerto Rico… it is a good thing. The medium is irrelevant.”

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UPI
Medill News Service

 

Art for Social Change Competition welcomes community’s creative work

Recognizing the important role of art in advancing social justice, the School of Languages, Cultures, and Race (SLCR) in the College of Arts and Sciences at Washington State University is seeking submissions for its annual Art for Social Change Competition.

Carmen Lugo-Lugo.
Lugo-Lugo

The competition and later exhibition encourage creation and sharing of art that provokes, challenges and inspires, said SLCR director Carmen Lugo-Lugo. “Art can simultaneously expose and contest social inequalities while compelling those who are looking at, experiencing and/or enjoying it to reflect on and even work on changing those conditions,” she said.

Art for Social Change organizers welcome work from WSU students, faculty and staff as well as students and educators in the broader community before midnight on Friday, Jan. 29. “It is a significant way for people within WSU and the surrounding community to talk to each other about these difficult topics,” Lugo-Lugo said.

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WSU Insider

Cool baths help bears adapt to warmer summers

Bears need baths too, but not to wash dirt from between their hairy toes. Instead, taking a dip in a cool pool of water helps the large, furry mammals reduce their body temperature.

Turns out, a cool dip in a pool of mountain spring water is the perfect solution during hot summer days. As the climate warms, temperature-controlling plunges may be especially important for females with cubs and those that are pregnant. That’s because when pregnant or lactating, female bears generate more heat.

The work involved a couple of unusual scenarios. One part of the study required shaving a 2-inch square clump of hair off the grizzlies to measure the amount and density of their fur.

The animals also walked on treadmills to measure their oxygen consumption.

Charles Robbins.
Robbins

Here’s how you get a bear to walk on a treadmill. Charles Robbins, a professor of Biological Sciences at Washington State University, trains them to stay on the treadmill by constantly feeding them honey water.

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Billings Gazette

Beyond Tenure Clock Management

Todd Butler.
Butler

In the era of COVID, too few institutions have been considering changes to policies and procedures that could support a wide range of researchers, writes Todd Butler, interim dean of the WSU College of Arts & Sciences.

As we begin the spring semester, the coronavirus pandemic continues to rage and worsen. It’s thus time for higher education to stop treating COVID-19’s impact on faculty careers as primarily a time-management problem, one that can be handled through clock extensions and other short-term interventions. Especially at research-oriented universities, responding effectively to the upheaval resulting from COVID-19 will instead require both institutions and faculty members to reimagine long-term policies and structures that define productivity, tenure and promotion. How institutions of higher education respond to this upheaval is crucial for their futures.

Organizational change is challenging even in nonpandemic times. Institutional policies reflect structures designed at the time of their founding, and change can imply that long-standing practices — and the faculty who have followed them successfully — are in some way “wrong.” Yet none of the suggestions above abandons our research mission. Rather, they widen and update it, disentangling stress-inducing and time-bound measures of “productivity” from the foundational intellectual ambitions that drive faculty members — to inquire, to create and to make a difference with what we learn.

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Inside Higher Ed