In the Media

When Cameron Whitley was diagnosed with kidney failure seven years ago, the news came as a shock. But the situation was about to get worse. His doctor decided the diagnosis meant Whitley’s hormone therapy had to stop.

As a transgender man, now 42, who had taken testosterone for 10 years, the impact was brutal.

“Not only was I struggling with this new diagnosis that I’m in stage four kidney failure, now I’m being told that I can no longer have hormones,” said Whitley, an associate professor in the department of sociology at Western Washington University. “I cannot describe how horrible that moment was.”

Michael Miller, Economics Visiting Assistant Professor, Western Washington University and Professor Emeritus at DePaul University, chats with John about disabled Americans being underutilized in the workforce, and why we should care about the decline of the U.S. dollar as reserve currency.

To Western Washington University students, Richard L. Hodges might be best known as the Director of Voice Studies — but to the rest of the U.S., he’s a versatile opera performer, writer, director and composer.

Described as a “powerhouse baritone” by the Wall Street Journal, Hodges’ career has taken him to cities including Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Detroit and, most recently, the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.

Now Hodges is gearing up to perform in the ensemble of “X: The Life & Times of Malcolm X,” the same show he performed at the Met in November 2023. A reboot of the 1986 opera by Anthony, Thulani and Christopher Davis, the production “imagines Malcolm as an Everyman whose story transcends time and space” according to the Met’s website.

We have all been told that going to college and earning a degree is a lucrative investment to make for your future. Although earning a degree in general can have positive effects on your annual income, other factors such as where you get your degree from and what field you received your degree in can also have an impact.

Kristen B. French is a professor of elementary education at Western Washington University who has been teaching a tribal-sovereignty course to future educators since before the new state law, and has worked with University of Washington faculty to develop their curriculum for future teachers.

Over the years, students called this curriculum transformative because they hadn’t learned the material in their own schooling.

French is a registered member of the Blackfeet tribe in Montana and a descendant of Gros Ventre in Montana and Eastern Band Cherokee in North Carolina. She works with other Indigenous professors in Washington to teach the course, which includes an exploration of issues like climate change and salmon restoration that are important to local Indigenous nations.

“Being in community together is also showing our students that this work has to be done in community with each other and we’re modeling working with tribal partners,” French said.

Michael Miller, Professor Emeritus at DePaul University (and now at WWU), joins John to talk about the disconnect between how the public perceives the economy and the statistical data that shows the economy doing fine.

The Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe is working with a diverse group of partners to learn more about the population structure of Puget Sound's Dungeness crab by studying the DNA of both larvae and adults.

(story behind a paywall, but features WWU's Jay Dimond)

Taken as a whole, Washington’s “labor market still tilts in favor of [job] seekers,” says James McCafferty, co-director at the Center for Economic & Business Research at Western Washington University. But in some sectors, McCafferty concedes, “it may not feel like it.” 

“When humans make changes, anything that kinda disturbs the watershed, those activities have the potential to release sediment, that can run off into the lake. That sediment often contains pretty high levels of phosphorus,” Angela Strecker, director of the Western Washington University Institute for Watershed Studies, told The Bellingham Herald. “There are potential other sources ... but human conversion of land is one of the main sources ... the lake sits at the lowest point of the watershed, so anything that happens in that watershed is gonna get funneled down to the lake. The lake takes the brunt of all the things that we do, all the actions that we take within the watershed.”