PIONEER Board sets lowest tuition increase in past decade News Editor
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hitman recently sent out letters to parents, announcing that tuition is set for $43,150 for the 2013-2014 academic year. This marks an increase of 3.25 percent, the lowest increase in the past decade, down from last year’s increase of 4 percent. This increase is consistent with tuition increases at similar institutions, if not slightly smaller. Carleton College, for example, increased its tuition 3.8 percent in the past year, and Oberlin saw an increase of 3.9 percent. On the high-
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er end of the scale, Reed College increased tuition by 7.5 percent. Current trends also show that tuition increases have been gradually less drastic in recent years for institutions of higher education. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the median tuition increase for other Washington nonprofit private four-year institutions was 4.4 percent in 2011. Whitman’s 2011 increase was 4.5 percent. Within a struggling economy, small increases can have a large impact on families with less income. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the national unemployment rate for March was 7.6 percent, bet-
ter than the low point of 10 percent in October 2009, but still struggling to recover to the average annual rate of 5.1 percent between 2003 and 2007. Whitman’s Treasurer and Chief Financial Officer Peter Harvey said that the Board of Trustees hoped to take the state of the economy into account when proposing the increase. “Whitman was intentionally trying to keep the increase lower, given the difficult economic times and the inability of many families to pay,” said Harvey. Such limited tuition growth was partially possible because of fundraising revenue from the Now is the Time campaign. Addition-
Issue 10 | April 11, 2013 | Whitman news since 1896
ally, the College’s endowment is generating more income than it has in previous years as it recovers from the 2008 economic downturn. In 2013, it should generate 5 percent more than it did in 2012. According to The College Board, the national average cost of tuition and fees increased by 2.4 percent for private nonprofit four-year colleges and 5.2 percent for public four-year colleges in 2012. After the economic downturn in 2008, the national average increases in the cost of tuition and fees were 5.9 percent for private nonprofit four-year institutions and 9.2 percent for public four-year institutions.
Though glad that tuition growth wasn’t extreme, some parents would have liked to see more information in the letter sent out by the college to inform those financially responsible for tuition. “We’re pretty pleased, but surprised that they didn’t include the percentage [increase] in the letter. That’s kind of a benchmark people use when looking at tuition ... It’s not that they were trying to be covert, but it would have been more transparent if they had included that information,” said Julie Lombardo, mother of a Whitman junior. Karah Kemmerly contributed reporting to this article.
‘Chernobyl’ blends wit with disaster by EMMA DAHL Staff Reporter
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arper Joy Theatre’s latest production will be Aaron Bushkowsky’s “My Chernobyl,” a play that Whitman’s website describes as “a quirky romance, both touching and hilarious.” The plot follows “a naïve Canadian [who] travels to Belarus to give an inheritance to his father’s last remaining relative. While there he meets his long-lost cousin, a Russian woman who sees him as her ticket out of the radiation-blasted country.” The play has been touted by critics as a “fiercely funny satire” and as a play that “radiates toxic wit.” Jessica Cerullo, the director of “My Chernobyl,” answered
some questions via email regarding bringing the play to life: Why did you choose to produce “My Chernobyl”? What drew you to this play? In NYC there is a wonderful store called the Drama Bookshop and it is filled with aisles and aisles of plays. It happened to be the one-year anniversary of the Fukushima disaster the day that I went there in search of something for the Harper Joy season, and so the title “My Chernobyl” caught my attention. I had never heard of the play or the playwright before, but the writing stood out as both smart and funny. The play deals with the coexistence of comedy and tragedy.
Photos by Bernstein
It contains wonderful, colorful characters and a plot that takes surprising and theatrical twists. What are some artistic decisions specific to this play? I am working with [junior] Will Ekstrom, a music composition student at Whitman. He has created original music for the play, and I have cast four students from the music department to play band members from Belarus. The contaminated land around Chernobyl will not be safe for another 24,000 years. The set designer, [senior] Ryan Campeau, and I decided to take this as our point of departure. Our set is conceived as a moveable dirt floor. see MY CHERNOBYL, page 8
Inmates collaborate with students on publication by DYLAN TULL Staff Reporter
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Pullout section inside!
ow would your perspective on the inmates in the penitentiary change if you could read the creative writing and poetry that they produced? Undeniably, a passionate poem or creative story would give new depth and humanness to prisoners that are often regarded as violent and cold. A group of Whitman students spearheaded by junior Cameron Young are hoping to instigate this opportunity by offering a creative voice through which inmates at the penitentiary can express themselves to the surrounding community. Despite its close proximity to Whitman, the Washington State Penitentiary remains something of an enigma to most students. In order to evolve the community’s relationship with the prison, Young has worked with the penitentiary staff to design a course where a group of Whitman students will go teach inmates about creative writing with a focus on poetry and creative fiction. They hope that eventually they will be able to work with the inmates to create a literary publication similar to quarterlife. “We’re looking to do a kind of community outreach to prison inmates. For our first programming, we’re going to do a fine arts focus and teach prisoners basics such as symbolism, metaphor, simile and ask them to create work where it would display their prison experience,” said Young. There are currently about 15 Whitman students involved in the project, many of whom are in Sociology 269: Prisons and Punishment, taught by Peterson Endowed
Chair of Social Sciences Keith Farrington. Young and sophomore Alisha Agard were inspired to develop the program when they visited the penitentiary on a field trip for the class. The class was introduced to a panel of three inmates who were excited to share their prison experiences openly. “I feel like some of these guys deserve a second chance, because it’s really easy to slip up in life. I think that was evident in one of the inmates who was there for only a year and was going to be a student at UW the following fall, who got convicted of a drunken assault,” said Young. First-year Noel O’Shea, another student involved with the project, also spoke to the rehabilitative aspects of the creative writing course, and how others might gain a new perspective on inmates after they have been given a chance to express themselves. “I think the big thing for me is giving people a chance who didn’t have a first chance. A lot of people think of prison as a place to rehabilitate and get a second chance, but what we forget is a lot of these people haven’t been given a first one,” said O’Shea. Agard said that she hopes the creative expression will help to break down the barriers and stigmas surrounding the inmates. “I guess that I hope to gain an understanding of the inmates, because society has a picture of them as these criminal, horrible, hard people and I’m pretty sure that’s not what they are,” Agard said. “So giving them an outlet to kind of share their story is important because I feel like so many people misconstrue who they are based on what they’ve done in the past.”
Once the class begins, a group of the students will go to the penitentiary to teach sessions lasting between one-and-a-half and three hours, where they will work with a classroom of minimum security and close custody prisoners. Young expects to start teaching there within the next couple of weeks. Since students are still finalizing communication with the staff at the penitentiary, however, final dates for the classes haven’t been set. Young stressed that opening up dialogue with the surrounding community through creative works could seriously reduce the stigma surrounding the prison and possibly encourage prison reform. “I don’t know if anyone would read it, but I think the idea is what we need, because as much as you want to talk about prison reform, a large step needs to be taken by the greater society [to] ask ourselves why we put felons in a caste system. It’s not necessarily fair, and from my perspective, it only perpetuates crime. These guys get out of the walls and really there’s no life for them,” he said. In addition, the group wants to stress that the classroom experience will be a collaborative one, where the nine Whitman students will be learning as much from the prisoners as the prisoners are from them. “It won’t be like the students are coming and teaching the inmates. It’ll be a collaborative [experience]: Everyone’s learning and everyone’s working together. So it’s not like a hierarchy of ‘we are the educated people coming to school you on how to do this.’ It’s more of ‘let’s experience this together and let’s learn together,’” said Agard. see PRISON, page 2