The first annual Vet-Pharmic football game is played. The event becomes a major campus attraction until 1957 when concerns for student safety saw the contest end. The Pharmics are said to have won only three to four games over the years. For a time basketball games take the place of the football game but lack of interest causes them to disappear in the 1960s. The annual football game is followed each year by the Hobo Dance. For the dance, male students and faculty grow their beards out in honor of the vagrant namesake of the dance. Dancing, drink, and merriment often flow into the following morning. It too, is done away with in 1957 after a particularly raucous occasion also raises concerns for student safety.
The $39 million, 145,000 square-foot Health Science Building was the third building opened on the WSU Spokane campus and houses pharmacy, speech and hearing sciences, exercise science, health policy and administration, and food sciences and human nutrition. Other WSU programs inside include the Health Research and Education Center, Area Health Education Center, Washington Institute for Mental Illness Research and Training (WIMIRT), and the Institutional Review Board-Spokane.
Eastern Washington University programs in physical therapy, occupational therapy, and dental hygiene are also housed here. The Health Science Building adds to Spokane’s status as an important regional medical community, the largest between Seattle, Salt Lake City, and Minneapolis-St. Paul.
The first group of WWAMI (Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, Idaho) medical program students began classes at a new site, WSU Spokane, in 2008. WSU Pullman first had WWAMI students in 1972.
Patricia G. Butterfield became dean of the WSU Intercollegiate College of Nursing. She had been a professor and chair of the Department of Psychosocial and Community Health Nursing at the University of Washington.
At age 102, Dorothy Otto Kennedy, the oldest living graduate of the WSU College of Pharmacy, died in Everett. She earned her degree in 1916 and went on to practice pharmacy in Reardan in eastern Washington and Everett in western Washington.
Michael Utley, former student and 1989 All-American offensive guard, injures his spinal cord and is paralyzed during a Detroit Lions football game. Utley establishes the Mike Utley Foundation to help those with spinal cord injuries and Utley became known for the “thumbs up” he flashed fans after being carried off the field when he was injured in 1991. In 2008 the NFL established a scholarship at WSU in Utley’s name for students studying sports medicine.
1993 Flyer for Mike Utley Foundation and appearance at WSU Homecoming
The Washington, Alaska, Montana, Idaho (WAMI) program is established in 1971 to create a cooperative agreement among the aforementioned states, and WSU becomes part of it in 1972. The program provides access to medical school to state residents of Alaska, Montana, and Idaho — states without medical schools — and also brings medical education into these states.
WAMI students are admitted to the University of Washington Medical School. They initially spent their first year at satellite universities including Washington State University, the University of Idaho, the University of Alaska-Fairbanks (later the University of Alaska-Anchorage), and Montana State University. During their first year, all students of the UW Medical School, including WAMI students, were registered for the same first-year course. Consequently course topics, materials, evaluations, and exams were similar at all five sites.
In 2015, WSU left the WWAMI partnership in favor of forming its own medical school.
In 1969, the program that is today known as the WSU College of Nursing accepted its first class of 37 students. The WSU campus is rife with Vietnam war protests and student unrest.
In June 1917, President Holland announces that the institution will reorganize into 5 colleges (Agriculture, Mechanical Arts and Engineering, Science and Arts, Veterinary Science, and Home Economics) and 4 schools (Mines, Education, Pharmacy, and Music and Applied Design), with deans as administrative heads. The College of Home Economics is to be one of the first of its kind in the nation. However, World War I interrupts these plans, delaying implementation of the new structure to the 1919-1920 school year.
