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WSU Writing Program ranks among top in nation

The Writing Program at Washington State University again has been named among the 21 best in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. WSU is the only institution in the Northwest to “typically make the writing process a priority at all levels of instruction and across the curriculum,” according to the rankings criteria.

Victor Villanueva
Victor Villanueva

“It is a great honor to be recognized publicly for the positive affect we have on students and their academic programs,” said Victor Villanueva, Writing Program director and WSU Regents professor of English. “To be on this list of top programs means we are on the radar of university officers and administrators across the U.S.”

Of the seven institutions on the list west of the Mississippi River, those closest to WSU are Stanford and the University of California-Davis. Other top schools across the nation include Brown, Cornell, Duke, Harvard and Princeton.

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WSU News

Why These U.S. College Students Are Carrying Sex Toys On Campus

University of Texas students protesting the state’s new gun law—which allows anyone over 21 with a state-issued handgun license to carry a concealed gun on public school campuses—are using sex toys to make their point.

TV Reed
TV Reed

TV Reed, a WSU professor of English and American Studies who has studied culture in protest movements, said that while the protest effort “will be ridiculed by some,” it’s important to remember that “now-revered figures like Gandhi and Martin Luther King were also ridiculed for their symbolic protests.” And the approach is creating an easy entry point for students to get involved, he said.

“The protest is already successful because the amusing, theatrical plan has drawn far more attention to the issue of open carry than any letter to the editor or more conventional demonstration ever would,” Reed said.

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Refinery 29

Gun views fractious even as fewer bear arms

Today, in a country of hundreds of millions of guns, public opinion and interpretation of the law have shifted so much that outright gun bans are unthinkable. It’s true that large segments of the public have expressed support for some aspects of gun regulation — but when Americans have been asked to say which is more important, gun control or gun rights, they trend toward the latter.

Joan Burbick
Joan Burbick

“Institutions have repeated, ‘More guns, less crime. More guns, less crime,’ over and over again for almost 40 years, and it’s hard to turn that belief around in any easy way,” said Joan Burbick, an emeritus professor of English at Washington State University who wrote Gun Show Nation: Gun Culture and American Democracy and who owns a gun for hobby shooting.

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Effingham Daily News

Prince: Unreconstructed and Free Artist

By Thabiti Lewis, Associate Professor of English, WSU Vancouver

Thabiti Lewis
Thabiti Lewis

I liked Prince as a teen but I grew to really appreciate him even more for his music, fashion, business sense, and artistic creativity, as I became an adult. He is without a doubt a heroic role model of our era. He never stopped trying new things and challenging “tradition.” Undaunted by norms, he was willing to be a daring, inventive, radical, free, and unreconstructed human being. » More …

Eight CAS seniors among WSU’s Top 10 for 2016

Eight of the Top Ten Senior Awards presented recently by the WSU Student Alumni Ambassadors and Alumni Association went to students in the College of Arts and Sciences. Two graduating seniors were named award winners in each of five categories for 2016.   » More …