Paul Castleberry was a faculty member in the WSU Department of Political Science from 1949 to 1983. He taught courses in American government, international law and organization, and American foreign policy for 34 years at WSU and taught overseas in Egypt and Turkey under Fulbright scholarships and in Paris and London as part of a study abroad program. Castleberry was acting chair of WSU’s political science department in 1957 and 1961-62, and chair from 1964 to 1968. He was also active in the University Senate and as chair of the International Education Committee, directed two Institutes of World Affairs, and was co-founder of the Northwest Inter-Institutional Study Abroad Program.
Faculty members Thomas Besser, School for Global Animal Health; Don Dillman, Department of Sociology and Community and Rural Sociology; and B.W. Poovaiah, Department of Horticulture are elected to the Washington State Academy of Sciences.
WSU ranks among the nation’s top 15 percent of colleges, universities, and trade schools providing the most opportunities and support to American veterans pursuing their education, according to G.I. Jobs magazine.
WSU electrical engineering and computer science professor Diane Cook and psychology professor Maureen Schmitter-Edgecombe receive a National Institutes of Health grant funding for smart adaptive technology research. The smart adaptive technology helps people with memory loss manage everyday tasks, allowing them to live independently in their homes for as long as possible.
The WSU Regents renamed two Pullman campus buildings. Wilson Hall became Wilson-Short Hall, honoring James F. Short, Jr., influential WSU sociology professor. This building was first named for James Wilson, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture from 1897 to 1913. The Plant Biosciences Facility I, part of a multi-building bioscience complex, became the Orville A. Vogel Plant Biosciences Building, named for one of WSU’s great agricultural researchers and wheat breeders.
Frances K. McSweeney, professor of psychology and vice provost for faculty affairs, was honored as the fourth recipient of the 2004 Eminent Faculty Award.
WSU named Don A. Dillman the second recipient of the WSU Eminent Faculty Award. Dillman was the Thomas S. Foley Distinguished Professor of Government and Public Policy and a social scientist in the Departments of Sociology and Rural Sociology.
WSU graduate and sociologist James E. Blackwell received the 31st Regents Distinguished Alumnus Award. Blackwell is a leading scholar in the areas of minorities in higher education and social movement in black communities. Blackwell received his Ph.D. in Sociology from WSU in 1959 and worked during the turbulent early 1960s as the president of the San Jose NAACP and as a teacher at San Jose State University. In 1970 the University of Massachusetts hired Blackwell to build its fledgling Department of Sociology and Anthropology at its five-year-old Boston campus where he stayed for 20 years. Blackwell remained passionately dedicated to teaching, not for the sake of knowledge alone, but to help students ” go on to graduate and professional schools and becoming important, contributing citizens.”
Built by the Works Progress Administration in 1937 with a knotty pine interior, it was operated as a cooperative house, independent of the university’s housing system. In 1963, fire safety concerns brought an end to its use as a dormitory. WSU purchased it and renovated it into headquarters for an internationally recognized anthropology program, the Center for Northwest Archeology.
Mary Turner DeGarmo, known for her work in transcribing musical compositions into braille, and William Julius Wilson, sociologist, receive the Regents 21st and 22nd Distinguished Alumnus Awards. DeGarmo, who graduated in 1926 with a B.A. in Education, developed the first and only detailed, comprehensive teaching text on transcribing musical compositions into Braille for blind musicians, a volume used worldwide. DeGarmo, the second woman honored with the Regents Distinguished Alumnus Award, passed away in 1995. Wilson received his Ph.D. in Sociology in 1966 and is known for his research and scholarship on the black underclass. He authored articles and books including, “The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass and Public Policy” and “The Declining Significance of Race.”
Geologist Roald Fryxell examines lunar rocks in Houston after all six manned moon landings. Fryxell was initially asked simply to present to the lunar teams on core-sample analysis, but so impressed NASA that he was asked to join the analysis team. A leader in the field of geoarchaeology, Fryxell was the co-principal investigator with Dr. Richard Daugherty of the Marmes Rockshelter site and designed the apparatus used for collecting the lunar rocks. A lunar crater is named Fryxell in his honor.
Gerry Lindgren, WSU track All-American, wins 11 NCAA titles during his time at WSU. He never loses any NCAA event he enters during the four years he attended the university. Lindgren majored in political science with a minor in Russian.
Marshall Allen Neill, future Justice of the Washington State Supreme Court, graduates with a B.A. in Political Science. In 1938, Neill received his law degree from the University of Idaho. He engaged in private practice in Pullman from 1938 to 1967, and during this time he also served as Pullman City attorney, assistant attorney general for Washington State University, part-time assistant professor at WSU, state representative (1949-1956) and state senator (1956-1967). In 1967 Neill was appointed to Associate Justice in the Supreme Court of Washington, and in 1972, President Nixon appointed him to the prestigious U.S. District Court in Spokane, a post he held until his death on October 6, 1979.
Marshall Neill in 1955, while serving as a special assistant AG for WSC
Timothy Leary, a troubled psychologist and popular counterculture figure of the 1960s, who coined the phrase “think for yourself and question authority” and was once called “the most dangerous man in America” by Richard Nixon, graduates with a master’s of science in psychology from WSC. Leary only attends WSC for about a year, moving to Pullman in early 1946, gaining admittance in March of that year, and graduating in June of 1947. He and his wife Marianne lived in a house at the corner of C Street and Alpha Road, enjoying what one biographer would later call “the only uneventful period of their life together.”
In 1962, WSU archeologists Richard Daugherty and Roald Fryxell began excavating the Marmes Rockshelter, near where the Snake and Palouse rivers meet. During the excavation, they found what was then the oldest human remains in the western hemisphere at approximately 12,000 years old.
The site was scheduled to be flooded during the construction of the Lower Monumental Dam, but thanks to the discovery President Lyndon Johnson authorized the construction of a coffer dam to protect it. Unfortunately, in 1969, the site was flooded anyway because of leaks under the dam. It had only been partially excavated.
Soon after Pearl Harbor is attacked, the college began training soldiers to meet the challenges of World War II. Aviation, Japanese language, signal corps, radio, and gunnery are taught under government contract.
Two-thirds of the student body has disappeared from campus following the country’s entry into World War I in April 1917. More than 700 students and alumni are in the military or naval service or working to produce food and war materials for American military forces, allies, and the home front.
The federal government and the college sign a contract in May which converts considerable portions of the campus and educational facilities to military instruction. The Army begins sending units of 300 recruits to the campus for training every 2 months, beginning June 15. Shortly after the Armistice ending the war is signed on November 11, the Army cancels the contract.
Pull-Men was the newspaper of the student military during WW I.
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.
The coursework is introduced with the arrival of Alfred A. Cleveland, assistant professor of psychology. The 1909-1911 course catalog describes the purpose of the education program as training physical science teachers who will further the application of science to industrial pursuits.
