May 2002

Dear Alumni, Parents, and Friends of Whitman College:

We are nearing the end of the 2001-2002 academic year, which is also the 120th year in the life of Whitman College.

We recently held our fourth Whitman Undergraduate Conference (which is highlighted in this issue of the Whitman magazine). Associate dean of the faculty Bob Tobin chaired the steering committee for this year’s conference, and it was a stunning success.

In April Whitman hosted well over a thousand visiting students, parents, and high school counsel-ors at our Spring Visitors Day and a series of other visits throughout the month. Dean of admission John Bogley and his staff are pleased by the record number of visits, tours, and “fly-ins.”

As we look back over the past decade, a number of developments are worth noting:

• Admission applications have increased by nearly 75 percent.
  
  
• Fund raising has increased by about 80 percent over the previous decade.
  
  
• The College has built, acquired, or remodeled over a dozen buildings (most notably Bratton, Hunter, Penrose Library, the Reid Campus Center, and a new science building).
  
  
• The faculty and academic programs have been strengthened by more than a dozen new positions.
  
  
• Athletic facilities have been greatly expanded.
  
  
• Many more students are studying abroad (42 percent of this year’s junior class) than in the past.
  
  
• We have more than doubled the number of endowed lectures and visiting speakers and cultural events (additions include the annual Walt Whitman, William O. Douglas, Robert Hosokawa, Judd Kimball, David and Madeleine Maxwell, Genevieve Perry, and William Allen lectureships).
  

Especially noteworthy visiting speakers this year have included poets Robert Pinsky and Marvin Bell, historian Howard Zinn, Nobel Prize-winning economist Douglas North, New York Times national reporter Richard Berke, pianists David Porter and Craig Sheppard, Ralph Nader, scientists Stephen Jay Gould and Jared Diamond, business leaders John Warner from The Boeing Company and Howard Harris from McKinsey & Company, Ohio governor Robert Taft, and dozens of additional writers, artists, playwrights, musicians, and other professionals.

Many seniors have already been notified of fellowship prizes. Mark Lanning has won a Woodrow Wilson Pickering Fellowship for his graduate studies at Princeton; Toby Campbell has won a Watson Fellowship for a self-designed year of study and travel in Argentina, Ireland, and the Netherlands; and James Lee, Katherine Leitzell, and Ben Maes have been awarded Fulbright Scholarships for studies in South Korea, Germany, and Sri Lanka, respectively. Jason Bazzano, class of 2001, also won a Fulbright for study in Sri Lanka. Other senior scholarship winners include Eric Pfeifer, who received the prestigious Udall Scholarship for environmental studies last year.

This 2001-2002 year was an especially robust one for Whitman. We had our highest enrollment and more admission applications than ever. The Reid Campus Center was opened and dedicated. A new science building is nearing completion, and a small seminar complex at the Johnston Wilderness Center was completed.

Yet this was a year of national recession, and we did everything we could to manage the budgets and endowments to minimize any disruptions or shortfalls. We have succeeded in several ways in making the College more efficient. Generous alumni and foundation gifts have also helped us sustain and continue the investment in the College we have been making in recent years. We are particularly grateful for the $1 million gifts from both the Gates Foundation and the Murdock Charitable Trust — both for our science building campaign.

Heartfelt thanks to everyone who has made a gift to the College in the recent past. We are grateful for your affirmation and help in strengthening this very special place of learning.

Sincerely,

President Tom Cronin