Outstanding senior in criminal justice and criminology Jordan Sykes will carry the gonfalon for the College of Arts and Sciences during Washington State University graduation ceremonies on Saturday, May 4, in Beasley Coliseum.

The honor of being selected gonfalon bearer recognizes Sykes’s outstanding achievement during his undergraduate career.

In four years at WSU, he maintained a perfect 4.0 grade point average and participated in significant criminology research.

His extensive leadership experience during that time includes serving as president for both the Criminal Justice Club and the Alpha Phi Sigma Criminal Justice Honor Society, as vice president of scholarship for Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity, as a judicial board member for the Associated Students of WSU, as vice president of Hillel, the WSU Jewish Students Organization, and as founder and president of the WSU Roller Hockey Club.

“When I arrived at WSU, I made it my mission to make a meaningful impact,” Sykes said. “While I have attempted to accomplish this mission, I feel that, in turn, the University and the Pullman community have had such a profound impact on me that I will be forever indebted to this amazing community.”

Find out more

WSU Insider

Three Southwest Washington women were honored with Distinguished Woman of the Year awards for making a difference in the lives of others at Washington State University Vancouver’s 11th annual Women of Distinction celebration. Held March 28, the event wrapped up Women’s History Month at the university.

2019 awardees include Ana Betancourt Macias, a junior majoring in sociology. She is the director of legislative affairs, president of WSU Vancouver Collegiate LULAC, and a member of the WSU Vancouver Council on Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. She inspires Latinas to use their struggles as strengths. Betancourt Macias is positively changing lives through her message and her work.

Find out more

WSU Insider
The Colombian

The second annual Healthiest Communities rankings, compiled in collaboration with the Aetna Foundation, offer insight into how dozens of factors come together to shape health across the country. By providing a diagnostic scan of the nation, Healthiest Communities aims to draw a clear link between where people live and how well they live—and for how long.

“There’s something about the places where we spend time that influence our health and well-being,” says Justin Denney, an associate professor of sociology and a health disparities researcher at Washington State University. “Is there access to safe housing, opportunities for employment or to get fresh foods—or are you bound by convenience stores that are around?”

Like many of the top counties in the Healthiest Communities rankings, Douglas County, Colorado, is well-educated and wealthy, with a median household income of about $111,000 in recent years.

Last August, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine issued a report on the U.S. Department of Commerce’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census. Prepared by some of the nation’s leading statisticians, including two former U.S. Census Bureau directors, the report concluded that the decision was “inconsistent with” what the Bureau is supposed to be doing.

Continuing with the 2020 census as planned “would be like creating a population registry without asking everyone if it was okay,” said Don Dillman, a member of the National Academies committee, regents professor of sociology, deputy director for research and development in the Social and Economic Sciences Research Center at Washington State University, and a founder of one of the first university-based telephone survey research centers. The impact of doing so “worries me a lot,” he added.

As the committee reviewed many of the materials that recent lawsuits have turned up, Dillman “really started wondering if the citizen question was put there to identify people.” Not knowing what would be done with information gathered from answers to the question and administrative sources, as well as being unsure about the real motivation behind adding the question, also made him anxious about the scope of its impact. “If it’s really a registry,” Dillman said, “I don’t know where it would start — and where it would end.”

Find out more

Undark