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English department chair hopes to advocate for faculty

Donna Potts.WSU English professor Donna Potts was selected to serve as chair of the English department in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Potts said she was encouraged to run for the open position because of her commitment to the department.

She said she wants the faculty in the department to have a voice and be able to design their course the way they want to. However, some courses, like English 101, already have a structured curriculum.

“I consider myself an advocate for the faculty. I represent the faculty,” Potts said. “What I’m trying to do is to have a committee of faculty that is advisory, so that it’s not me from top down, reviewing people.”

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Daily Evergreen

 

Dr. Universe: What are molecules?

Qiang Jack Zhang.A glass of water has more molecules than there are stars in the night sky. That’s what I found out from my friend Jack (Qiang) Zhang, an assistant professor of chemistry at Washington State University.

“Everything around us is made up of molecules,” he said. “And while these molecules may be different, they are all made of the same things.”

Those things are called atoms. Zhang told me we can think about atoms kind of like Lego blocks. Imagine that you have a pile of red Legos, yellow Legos, and blue Legos. Maybe you use them to build a tiny house, or you can use this same set of Legos to build something else like an airplane or a robot.

Just as you can arrange blocks in different ways, atoms arranged in different ways can make up different objects. There are a lot of atoms, but let’s talk about three of them. We can find their names on a big chart called the Periodic Table of Elements.

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Dr. Universe

Winners of 2019 Rosa Park Awards announced in Moscow

Ken Faunce.
Ken Faunce

WSU history professor Ken Faunce was among three people recognized for their service and dedication to human rights during the 26th annual Martin Luther King Human Rights Community Breakfast Saturday in Moscow.

Faunce received the 2019 Rosa Parks Human Rights Achievement Award award because of his commitment, investment, and dedication to the topic of human rights.

“Ken is truly a gifted and passionate leader… He is about making opportunities that speak to the widest range possible,” states his nomination letter.

Faunce led the move to rename Columbus Day to Indigenous People’s Day in Moscow. He works with high school and university students through the Human Rights Commission, and he’s a member of the Northwest Coalition of Human Rights.

To win an award, indivudals need to demonstrate a record of leadership and accomplishment, as well as “manifestations of special courage and commitment in opposing bigotry and celebrating diversity.”

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Moscow-Pullman Daily News

Women in wildlife: Managing critters from bugs to bears gains its own workforce diversity

Increasing numbers of women are moving into wildlife management positions in state and federal agencies as well as private companies, organizations, and universities.

While women make up about 30 percent of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Wildlife Program statewide and 40 percent in the Habitat Program, seven of the 14 wildlife staffers in the Spokane Region headquarters are women.

The trend is more obvious in the pipeline.

Lisa Shipley.In recent years, women have made up 60-70 percent of enrollment at Washington State University’s School of Environment, said Professor Lisa Shipley, who specializes in big-game forage and nutrition.

“It’s a full phenomenon in biology in general,” Shipley said. “Males are still the majority in fields like physics and engineering, but in biology and veterinary medicine it’s pretty much flipped.”

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Spokesman-Review
The Missoulian
Union-Bulletin

State of the State of the Union: Experts see erosion of decorum in Trump-Pelosi feud

President Donald Trump announced Wednesday he would postpone his State of the Union address until the end of the partial government shutdown, yielding to a request by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Pelosi had denied Trump access to the House chamber to deliver the address to a joint session of Congress, expressing it as a security concern.

Though this present instance was atypical, partisanship with the State of the Union is to be expected, said Cornell Clayton, director of Washington State University’s Thomas S. Foley Institute for Public Policy and Public Service.

“You’ll see this when the president announces his plan for a particular policy or he takes credit for a particular policy that the opposition party doesn’t approve of, then they won’t clap,” Clayton said. “His partisans will clap and stand up, and the other partisans will sit on their hands, and that’s become increasingly more frequent over the last 30 to 40 years as a result of political polarization and prolonged periods of divided government.”

But Clayton said the escalation between Pelosi and Trump is particularly juvenile. What the public sees between Pelosi and Trump is cause for worry, he said, because it signals the bigger problem: the erosion of decorum.

“It’s not just the State of the Union, you see the same thing with the filibuster in the Senate, the use of the ‘advise and consent’ power in the Senate,” Clayton said. Democracy does not rely solely upon constitutional rules, but also rules of decorum and reciprocity, he said.

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Spokesman-Review