The Bellingham Herald

• WWU rowing to be on TV
  Highlights of Western Washington University's fifth consecutive NCAA Division II national championship in women's rowing can be seen Saturday, July 4, at 11 a.m. on KIRO TV (Ch. 7) as CBS presents the 2009 NCAA Championships Spring Highlight Show.
  
  The program includes footage of the national championship rowing races held May 31 at Cherry Hill, New Jersey, on the Cooper River.
  
  Western's accomplishment was the first time that a team in any NCAA rowing division has won five straight titles since the NCAA began a rowing championship in 1997.
  

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• Festival of Music again attracting top-notch talent
  The Bellingham Festival of Music, most of which takes place in the WWU Concert Hall, is celebrating its 16th season of orchestral and chamber concerts from Friday, July 3, to Sunday, July 19. Board member Herb Fine recently spoke about the upcoming festival.
  
  What's makes this festival special?
  
  "It's world class," Fine said. "While we use some local talent, most come from top orchestras from around the globe."
  
  Everyone should see cellist Joshua Roman who performs July 15," Fine said. "He's an amazing artist."
  
  Roman won the principal chair in the cello section of the Seattle Symphony at the age of 22.
  
  "He's like the next Yo-Yo Ma," Fine said. "He's got a rock star aura about him."

Physorg.com

• International team of students, scientists head to Siberian Arctic
  Scientists and undergraduate students from across the United States and Russia are departing July 2 for a month-long field course in the Russian Arctic. The program, known as The Polaris Project, is training future leaders in arctic research and education, and informing the public about the impacts of climate change.
  Participating institutions include The Woods Hole Research Center, Carleton College, Clark University, Holy Cross College, St. Olaf College, University of Nevada - Reno, Western Washington University, and Yakustk State University.
  Andy Bunn, a faculty member at Western Washington University, said "I did not appreciate the massive changes underway in the Arctic before traveling to Siberia last year. Yet, that change is just likely beginning. I'm excited to return this year and to see this anew with the fresh crop of students. They are the luckiest undergraduates in the country."

Washington Times

• A different time: Wright paved the way for Woods
  Bill Wright vividly remembers the feeling he had while he was flying to Denver for the 1959 U.S. Amateur Public Links Championship with a group of other golfers who were competing in the tournament at Wellshire Golf Course.
  
  "Here I am. I can't belong to any club, but I qualified for the tournament," Wright said. "The players didn't really want to even go on the same plane with me."
  
  Wright couldn't belong to any club, because this was 1959 and he was black. The players didn't want to go on the same plane with him because he was black, and in 1959 black players didn't compete with white players, particularly in a major USGA tournament.
  
  Wright, 73, had been a basketball star in his youth, all-city and all-state at Franklin High School in Seattle, and he went on to play at Western Washington University. But golf became his love, and it was a tough love for a black golfer. He tried to play in the Seattle city amateur championship but wasn't allowed, "because I did not belong to any golf club."

Los Angeles Times

• Economy, tuitions prompting students to transfer to closer to home
  A few months ago, Rebecca Gottlieb faced a difficult choice: continue on at her $50,000-a-year private school in Massachusetts, or leave her new friends and life and enroll at a cheaper school near home in Washington.
  
  Gottlieb, 19, decided to transfer, dumping Tufts University for Western Washington University and joining the growing numbers of college students realizing that attending their dream school was no longer financially sustainable.
  
  When she starts classes in the fall at Western's campus overlooking Bellingham Bay, Gottlieb will be paying about $15,000 a year and be in the company of plenty of other transfers.
  
  The public college had an unusually large number of transfer applications this year, said Admissions Director Karen Copetas. The school saw a 28.5 percent increase in the number of students who wanted to move from another four-year school.

The Boston Globe

• A nation of 'joiners'
  AMERICA IS OFTEN called a nation of joiners, and the landscape of any community testifies to our desire to belong - from the Masonic lodge to the city softball league to the suburban megachurch. This impulse spans the country, uniting citizens in a multitude of common purposes and communities to serve. Such civic engagement is seen as an obvious virtue.
  
  Western Washington University Associate Professor of History Johann N. Neem says that our current social and political landscape, composed of an entire alphabet of competing interest groups, was far from the society that our early political leaders hoped to build. They envisioned a country where citizens’ first sense of responsibility would be to the state itself, and thought that any group developed outside the government could become a threat to the republic’s stability.