Travis Stanford, Author at Oregon Stater

As they returned to sleepy Corvallis after winter break of 1967, the roughly 20 Oregon State students in instructor Charles Goetzinger’s basic speech persuasion class had no idea that what was about to happen in their class would draw international attention and become one of the oddest stories in university history.

There, at the back of the classroom, sat a person wearing a black fabric bag from the top of his head down to his bare ankles and feet. Goetzinger assured the class that “The Bag” was indeed an ordinary student who had asked to remain anonymous, but what happened over the next few months was far from ordinary. As word spread of The Bag, network television crews and other national media — including the Associated Press, United Press International, Life magazine and even Walter Cronkite’s “CBS Evening News” — descended on Corvallis in droves.

At first the attraction seemed to be the old “those wacky college kids and their harmless pranks” angle — quaintly reassuring, considering that this was the tumultuous ’60s and tensions were growing around the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement and what many Americans saw as an erosion of key values, especially on college campuses.

Photo by Robert W Kelley/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

But maybe it wasn’t just a prank. When the Oregon State Daily Barometer broke the story on Feb. 3, writer Jody Jaross noted the timing of The Bag’s classroom debut. It came the day after the Baro published a syndicated column by renowned San Francisco satirist Art Hoppe. It described a lone man wearing only a black fabric bag in London’s Trafalgar Square who maintained that the world’s problems might be solved if humans all looked alike. “So, the Black Bag Movement, once the ice is broken, is bound to sweep the world,” Hoppe wrote, tongue firmly in cheek. “And we can all look forward to a warm, secure, contemplative future without racial conflict, a war in Vietnam, a population explosion or topless dancers.”

The next day, OSU’s Bag Man appeared, and by late February, a UPI story published around the world reported that The Bag believed people tend to judge others by their clothes, skin color, features and expressions, and he wondered what their judgments would be when these factors were gone.

They had no idea that what was about to happen in their class would…become one of the oddest stories in university history.

At first, many of his classmates resented The Bag as a distraction. “One freshman followed The Bag as he walked from the classroom and tried to paste a ‘Kick Me’ label on him,” reported Life magazine. “In a later session, The Bag sat opposite the offending freshman and stared at him intently through the black cloth. In horror, the freshman screamed: ‘Get away from me!’ — and probed at The Bag with an umbrella.”

However, as the weeks passed, most of his classmates simply accepted The Bag and many became protective of him, shielding him from prying journalists. Parents and alumni wrote letters expressing emotions ranging from outrage at The Bag’s presence to pride at seeing OSU get attention for something other than athletics.

Today, this Oregon State story lives on in psychology and marketing lore as an example of the “mere exposure effect,” popularized in 1968 by University of Michigan scholar Robert Zajonc. He cited OSU’s Bag Man as a primary example of the idea that people will grow to like a thing they initially detest — even with no new information — if they are repeatedly exposed to it.

Jason Stornelli, an associate professor of marketing in OSU’s College of Business, studies how people make judgments and decisions. “We don’t necessarily have to commit to dress head-to-toe in unusual clothes for a term to see the influence of the mere exposure effect for ourselves,” Stornelli said. “We can probably all think about a song, a flavor of food or drink, innovative architecture or a design for a new model of car that was at first unusual and that we didn’t like much, but as it became more familiar, our liking for that thing grew.”

As for the fate of OSU’s Bag Man? Many on campus thought he would reveal his identity at term’s end, but when the day came, he quietly left class and was picked up by a waiting car. He was driven to a nearby building, entered it wearing the bag and was never seen again.

What is a veterinarian’s role in investigating animal cruelty cases? That’s the central question that Dr. Kris Otteman, ’82, DVM ’86, has sought to answer for the past two decades. A pioneer in the field of veterinary forensics, she co-wrote a practical guidebook to the subject that was recently adapted into an online certification course for veterinary professionals and students.

But the question wasn’t on her mind for the first 20 years of her career. After graduating from Oregon State University’s Carlson College of Veterinary Medicine, she practiced in her hometown of Klamath Falls for almost nine years before helping found Banfield Pet Hospital, which currently operates more than 1,000 veterinary clinics around the world.

“In both of those scenarios, the private practice or the Banfield practice, I didn’t ever really have animal cruelty on my radar,” Otteman said.

That all changed when she joined the Oregon Humane Society, the Northwest’s largest animal welfare organization.

In 2006, Otteman became its first veterinarian and helped establish a medical center in its Portland headquarters. (She also launched an enduring partnership. All fourth-year OSU veterinary students gain hands-on surgical skills there.)

As excited as she was to enter shelter medicine, in doing so she was also suddenly faced with a world of abuse and neglect.

“There’s a law enforcement team there,” Otteman said. “Within a week of working at Oregon Humane, I went out on my first search warrant case, and we brought in 148 rabbits.”

Cases continued to crop up. One day, a woman called to say she suspected that her neighbors were starving their dog. During a house call, an officer found Piper, an emaciated black Labrador retriever. They brought her into the hospital so Otteman and the veterinary team could determine what had caused her weight loss.

“The veterinarian’s role there was ruling out cancer, renal failure and other basic things,” Otteman said. “Without the veterinarian’s knowledge of how to do that and write it down, this could go by as: the dog wouldn’t eat, or it had cancer or something like that.”

The conclusion: Piper was indeed starving.

Piper’s plight revealed more abuse in the home. The OHS officer noticed that the couple’s nonverbal 12-year-old daughter also appeared underweight and called Child Protective Services (CPS).

Over the years, CPS had received numerous calls about the girl looking thin and having marks on her, but the conclusion had always been that these were symptoms of undiagnosed developmental disabilities.

After the officer shared the Labrador’s report, the CPS pediatrician saw the case in a new light: like Piper, the girl was starving due to abuse.

Within two days, both were removed from the home and put into foster care. They recovered physically within months.

The link between animal and human abuse became more apparent to Otteman the more she saw.

“Many times when there’s animal abuse, there’s also a family violence situation or some other criminal activity going on,” she said. “My hope is we bring a voice to animal victims of cruelty and neglect. And then that also supports all of the work of law enforcement and social workers that are dealing with complex issues.”

Within a week of working at Oregon Humane, I went out on my first search warrant case, and we brought in 148 rabbits.

Soon Otteman became the leader of the OHS investigations team, a role she served in until her retirement in 2021. The team includes veterinarians, law enforcement officers, legal experts and hospital and shelter staff with specialty training all working together.

Two of her partners were Emily Lewis, an attorney, and Linda Fielder, an expert in evidence collection and forensics. After investigating hundreds of cases, they decided to capture what they’d learned about the work in a book.

“The idea was to provide a really practical, hands-on guide for the collaborative response to an animal cruelty case,” she said.

Animal Cruelty Investigations: A Collaborative Approach from Victim to Verdict provides examples, forms, templates, checklists and advice on how to leverage team members’ expertise to successfully investigate animal crimes. All of this is vital guidance in a field that’s still establishing itself. The International Veterinary Forensic Sciences Association was founded as recently as 2008.

After publication, the three also started working on a pared-down course with real-world case studies. “We narrowed our focus to the foundational information that we felt all veterinary students and veterinarians could benefit from,” she said.

They developed the course as an online certificate program through Oregon State’s Professional and Continuing Education program. “The big dream is that all veterinary students … would graduate with the basics about investigations and the doctor’s role,” Otteman said. “By making this really affordable, we could remove a barrier to completing this.”

Since the course launched last fall, OSU veterinary students have been able to take it at a discounted rate, earning both a professional certificate and an elective academic credit for the Doctorate of Veterinary Medicine program.

The impact has been a new confidence for students preparing to face hard situations — from recognizing signs of neglect and abuse, to collecting and preserving evidence, to understanding the basics of animal criminal law.

“I’ve been involved in a few cases before, and I felt powerless to do anything in my role,” said Sierra Lepiane, a third-year veterinary student who recently completed the course. Now, she said, “I will be able to make a change for those vulnerable patients.”

Learn more about Dr. Otteman’s book and course.

In January 1969, 24 inches of snow fell on Corvallis, finally closing campus on Monday, Jan. 30. There was no Tuesday edition of the Daily Barometer, but the front page of Wednesday’s issue bore the headline “Snow Forces 1st Closure In 50 Years.”

“Students cavorted on the campus much of Monday, engaging in stupendous snowball fights and creating snow sculptures,” the Baro reported. “A minor discordant note occurred when Jefferson Way was temporarily blocked by huge snowballs rolled into the street.”

One student took the opportunity of a fresh layer of white to express their feelings in a big way, writing, “Glynnis Dickey, I love you” in huge letters across the baseball field bleachers.

Thursday’s edition featured a photo of a sculpted snow rabbit under a truly labored pun on “plenty of snow” –– “’Bunny’ Of Snow” –– but then somberly blamed the white stuff and the Monday without classes for an outbreak of broken bones at the Student Health Center, an uptick in on-campus skiing accidents and a rash of vandalism that left at least 50 windows broken by snowballs.

An editorial in the issue pleaded for rain, noting that students were “rapidly tiring of hard falls and harder snowballs.” A letter writer complained that marauding snowballers had scared his children as he drove past campus. He even cited the behavior as proof that 18-year-olds lacked the judgement to be allowed to vote. (As it turned out, the snowball argument was not persuasive enough to keep the nation from ratifying the 26th Amendment to the Constitution in 1971, lowering the voting age to 18.)

By Friday, the snow was a crisis. Campus doctor J.K. Garvey warned of eye injuries caused by ice balls made with slushy snow. “Snows Continues To Menace Campus,” shouted a front-page headline. Under a photo of the MU Quad with no snow, the Baro alliteratively assured students that “the fallen follicles of frozen water and the seemingly forever frozen Fahrenheit will soon be gone in lieu of, that’s right, rain.”

The editorial staff came out firmly in favor of more sand on sidewalks. And in a piece headlined “Birds Have Difficulties,” a writer urged students to have some compassion and perspective:

“So, while you’re making that relatively short (granted, hazardous) walk to class and wishing it would snow some more so they can close school again, count your blessings (i.e., jackets, gloves, knee socks, electric blankets, etc.) and consider those little creatures sitting in the trees with their feathers ruffled against the cold. They have to live in that cold; you just have to walk in it.”

Paper crinkles as Vanessa Schroeder unfolds a large map across the back of a dusty utility vehicle. Surrounded by an arid expanse of sagebrush, juniper and aspen on the western slope of massive Steens Mountain in southeastern Oregon, she traces a finger along her team’s route for the day. She describes her plan to a group of scientists, landowners and public land managers, most affiliated in some way with Oregon State.

All of them seek information to help manage public lands in ways that benefit ranchers and their livestock, protect wildlife and preserve the complex ecosystems of the region. In this case they’re particularly interested in whether removing juniper from aspen stands benefits key species and, if not, what are the trade-offs?

Schroeder is an OSU faculty research assistant in rangeland science with the Eastern Oregon Agricultural Research Center (EOARC) in Burns, population 2,800, about 260 highway miles east of Corvallis. To get to the research site from Burns, one drives an hour south to the hamlet of Frenchglen, bumps along a gravel road for half an hour and boards a utility vehicle for a two-hour, teeth-rattling ride along a rutted track.

It’s late October, which means snow might make this the last visit until spring thaw because it’s hard enough to get to the site without snow. “One of the challenges is accessing the study sites because, believe it or not, this is actually a good two-track road,” said Schroeder.

Steens Mountain is a fault block, an uplifted slab of a mountain reaching 9,700 feet in Harney County. Harney is Oregon’s largest county, encompassing 10,226 square miles, about the size of Maryland. It’s home to an estimated 500 ranches and farms, and 75% of the land is managed by the federal government. Cattle and calves are Oregon’s second largest agricultural commodity, with production valued at $652 million in 2018. The livelihood of the cattle ranches and much of eastern Oregon’s economy depends upon sustainable grazing on public lands, and therefore upon healthy ecosystems.

Research in the realm of science-meets-ecology-and-economy is central to much of OSU’s mission as Oregon’s land grant university. Projects like this occur across the state in forestry, fisheries, public health and agriculture, with an army of OSU-trained and/or affiliated scientists playing key roles.

This day’s trip — aimed at building an understanding of how deer and bird populations might be affected if humans remove water-hogging juniper trees from aspen stands — epitomizes the work of the EOARC, a collaboration between the OSU Extension Service and the federal Department of Agriculture. Schroeder and her colleagues seek pieces of an often-confounding puzzle of how different parts of the ecosystem interact.

While the approaches Schroeder and her colleagues take might be new, the overall effort isn’t. For decades researchers, ranchers and public land managers have worked together to answer key questions, and over time they’ve found some general truths. “It’s more of a sage-grouse term but there is a phrase, ‘What’s good for the bird is good for the herd,'” Schroeder said. “So often you find that what is good for wildlife is also going to be good for a rancher.”

“That’s because no one wants to have pasture or rangeland that is complete annual grasses or a dense, juniper-encroached area that has choked out all sagebrush and all grass.”

“It’s not going to be beneficial for (ranchers) if they don’t have forage for their cows and it’s not beneficial if they don’t have an ecosystem that is resilient.”

Researchers are convinced that juniper trees have encroached upon some areas due to human interventions, including decades of fire suppression and historical grazing practices.

It’s more of a sage-grouse term but there is a phrase, ‘What’s good for the bird is good for the herd.’ So often you find that what is good for wildlife is also going to be good for a rancher.

“We identified several aspen stands in the area that had been encroached by juniper at different rates,” said Holly Higgins ’11, a Bureau of Land Management wildlife biologist whose expertise and support are critical to the success of the project. Researchers found “some fairly new encroachment with small trees, and some (areas) have been encroached upon to the point where we couldn’t find a living aspen in there. We found shells, snags, and places where aspen had died. The juniper had gotten so thick the aspen were no longer even surviving.”

Local mule deer populations are declining and researchers want to know why. Some bird species appear to avoid encroached areas, and researchers think that’s because juniper can serve as a roost for larger predatory birds.

“Some folks call (juniper) a native invasive,” Schroeder said. “We’d like to see it at the levels of pre-European settlement, where it was more limited to rocky outcrops and not encroaching into grasslands and shrublands.”

It seems logical that removing some juniper trees will make key rangeland areas more diverse and healthy, and therefore better for species such as deer, birds and aspen. But no one is sure what the unintended consequences might be.

To try to figure this out, the team will use motion-sensor cameras to monitor deer and automatic audio recorders to identify songbirds. In the spring, they’ll return before the juniper are removed and install their equipment. The photos and recordings will provide a digital guestbook signed by individual animals as they visit the aspen stands. This should give Schroeder and the others a much better idea of which species are using the stands, for what and when. Then they’ll compare previously known and new information to assemble a piece of the intricate puzzle of multi-species interactions. After six years of similar field trips and patient, targeted research, they expect to be better able to provide science-based land management recommendations.

“We just want to have the full picture when we are doing land management,” said Schroeder, “so that we are not unintentionally harming one species to help the other.”

Discover the journey of innovation, inclusivity, and purpose in the world of snowboarding! In this revealing interview, SnoPlanks CEO Caitlin Colgin shares her insights into building a student-driven snowboard company that’s reimagining outdoor product design. Learn about navigating workplace challenges, creating healthy conflict, building inclusive teams, and developing products with meaningful values.

This summer, the Port of Portland unveiled its new main terminal at the Portland airport, featuring a stunning 9-acre mass timber roof made from 2.6 million board feet of locally sourced wood. Using mass timber for sustainable buildings was the vision of late dean of OSU’s College of Forestry, Thomas Maness. He helped create the TallWood Design Institute, a collaboration between Oregon State and the University of Oregon, which unites faculty across the disciplines of architecture, structural engineering and wood science to advance mass timber and other wood product building solutions. OSU and the Port of Portland are founding members of the Oregon Mass Timber Coalition, a partnership between Oregon’s leading research universities and government agencies.

Q: What’s the best (or worst) fictional depiction of your field that you’ve encountered?

Will Homer, ’91

Chief operating officer of Painted Hills Natural Beef

Yellowstone stands out as a fictional depiction of the ranching world. It skillfully resurrects the spirit of the Wild West, complete with more gun battles than Tombstone and The Magnificent Seven combined. However, while there may be guns in our pickup trucks, they’re typically drawn only to fend off the occasional four-legged predator, not for showdowns. But I believe the show’s creators have good intentions, highlighting the profound responsibility of land stewardship.

Matteo Bugatti

Assistant professor, School of Psychological Science

After years of providing loud commentary on countless TV shows depicting therapists (just ask my wife), I’d say Shrinking is definitely one of the worst. What made me stop watching was not the fact that the therapist crosses all sorts of boundaries, but that the underlying assumption is that therapists know what their clients need to fix their lives. The truth is we don’t — but we know how to help you figure it out.

Kagan Tumer

Professor, College of Engineering; director of the Collaborative Robotics and Intelligent Systems Institute

Robot and Frank might be the best robot movie you’ve never heard of. After some initial resistance, an aging Frank accepts a butler robot from his son (who rarely visits him), only
to realize the opportunities it provides may extend beyond helping with house chores. This movie explores ethical dilemmas in AI and robotics, including whether a robot should lie or break the law. Fair warning: Your reaction to what’s right and what’s legal may surprise you.

Alec Levin

Associate professor, College of Agricultural Sciences; viticulturist and director of Southern Oregon Research and Extension Center

The movie Sideways is the best fictional portrayal of the wine industry and left an enduring impact that’s still noticeable today. The main character’s famous line that he would under no circumstances drink any merlot (using more colorful language) simultaneously tanked demand for merlot and surged demand for pinot noir. Undoubtedly, this helped the Oregon wine industry flourish, given that pinot noir is our signature grape variety.

Researchers from Oregon State University are leading a groundbreaking study of the world’s largest dam removal project on the Klamath River, tracking the ecological transformation of a once-blocked waterway. As part of this $500 million restoration effort, salmon are already returning to spawning grounds they haven’t accessed in over a century, symbolizing hope for Indigenous communities and the river’s remarkable resilience.

Keeping Hope Alive

The fall “Optimism Issue” — complete with cover photo and Backstory tale of Oregon’s Smiley Face Hill — succeeded in inspiring some grins. One self-professed “smiley face nut” called in to ask how she could get a hold of our cover photo. However, it was “Behind the Band” — our insider’s look at what game day is like for marching band performers — that seemed to strike a chord with readers. Don’t miss the Stater’s companion video story about the band.

In Search of Optimism

The article “How to Keep Hope Alive” in the latest edition of Oregon Stater reminded me that, in 2017, I really needed to find more hope in the world. There was, and still is, so much to worry about locally and globally.

I decided to look for signs of hope. I asked myself: What has given me the most hope in the last year? My answer was the Oregon State University alumni magazine. I made a commitment to read every issue and have for the past seven years. I am grateful my hope keeps growing as I read about progress in so many areas. Thank you beyond measure.

— Margallee James, ‘71

I am grateful my hope keeps growing as I read about progress in so many areas.

Strike up the Band

I really enjoyed the article about the OSU Marching Band. It was thoughtful, exciting and complete. It’s amazing what the article shows about the band in general and the specific members, how they practice and how they perform.

I enjoyed my years as a member and then as an alumni member. We were under the direction of Dr. James Douglass. Thank you.

— John R. Barber, ’70

Your recent article on the OSU Marching Band was excellent! Oh, how I yearn for TV networks to show the halftime shows. Perhaps you could forward your article to the networks!

— Nancy Adams Layton, ’62

There are two memories every Beaver football player remembers: the first time and last time they ran down the ramp to the stadium with the Beaver Marching Band playing the fight song. A long overdue thank you for the memories.

—Jeff Kolberg, ’73

Oregon State Athletics Hall of Famer Tom Woodman, ’78, of the Beaver Rowing Club, wrote to let us know he was less than pleased that the article “What Now?” — about where each OSU team is competing this year — included an illustration that showed paddlers, facing forward, instead of rowers sitting backwards in their racing shells. We apologize for the mistake. Here’s a corrected version. Go Beavs! *Illustration by Davian-Lynn Hopkins*

Recipe Reactions

I’ve been loving the inclusion of food and recipes in the Oregon Stater recently. I noticed the obituary in the fall issue for Joan Ricketts Toole and am trying to locate some of her books. But intriguingly, her niece Susan Frost references her aunt’s chicken divan recipe. I’ll continue my hunt for the recipe books, but can you share that recipe in the meantime?

— Danette Heckenberg VanDomelen, ’87

Editor’s note: If you’re also interested in Toole’s bestselling microwave cookbooks — now out of print — you can still find used versions of Food for the Heart and Soul (1998) and Cooking En Concert with Microwave (1979) on Amazon.

The hazelnut article [“One Superlative Spread”] was interesting. I was surprised that filberts weren’t mentioned. How sad that Oregon’s filbert has lost its name to outsiders.

— Lillian Eaton Stewart, ’69

Editor’s note: We asked the Oregon Hazelnut Commission — known as the Oregon Filbert Commission until 1981 — why Oregon’s state nut has two names. They said the industry standardized on hazelnut in the 1980s because filbert was primarily used only in the Pacific Northwest. We think the nut by any name tastes just as delicious.

In regards to the recipe “One Superlative Spread”: Can the editor consider doing a future article about USDA researchers in hazelnut species studies at OSU? Specifically, I’d like to see what Jack Pinkerton worked on in the beginning when he started the hazelnut disease breeding program. Jack passed away far too early and left a large legacy in all that he accomplished for the hazelnut industry.

— Rana Foster, M.S. ’05

As Seen on TV!

While watching the game show Jeopardy this summer, Brent Macey, ’80, was surprised to see Oregon State flash on the screen after a challenger selected a question in the 1980s Amateur Wrestling category: “At the 1980 NCAA Championships, Oregon State’s Howard Harris won all 5 of his matches by ‘fall’ — doing this to opponents.” The answer? “What is: Pinning (all five of his opponents).” (TV frame: Adobe Stock, Illustration by Davian-Lynn Hopkins)

Marine Program Pride

I just wanted to congratulate Kevin Miller and thank him for the great article in the Stater about the marine studies undergraduate program [“For Love of the Sea”]. He did a fine job telling the students’ stories and using their voices. We are very proud of this new degree program that allows students from all sorts of backgrounds and with a wide range of interests to earn an OSU degree that will make a difference to our ocean and coasts and the people who live there.

— Professor Jack Barth

Send letters and comments by using this form or by mail to Oregon Stater, OSU Alumni Association, 204 CH2M HILL Alumni Center, Corvallis, OR 97331. We edit for clarity, brevity and factual accuracy. Please limit letters to 225 words or less.

Whether it’s a snack in the stands or ice cream from the iconic orange food truck, Beaver Classic’s student-made small-batch food products keep the Oregon State community satisfied. And ’tis the season to spread the love.

This year, Beaver Classic is selling Holiday Boxes, which feature a smorgasbord sampling of the brand’s offerings. The boxes are a tasty gift for hungry Beavers in your life, and each purchase supports the agricultural sciences students who craft the food inside. “It’s all the student-made goodness in one package,” said Dhaval Bhakta, business and student development manager with the College of Agricultural Sciences.

There are two varieties on offer: A smaller box, at $45, contains one Beaver Reserve aged cheddar, two flavored cheddars and a 2-ounce bottle of honey. A larger box, at $125, contains three aged cheddars, two flavored cheddars, an 8-ounce bottle of honey and a barley scone mix made from Streaker barley — a variety developed at OSU. Both boxes come with a College of Agricultural Sciences charcuterie board and branded stickers.

Holiday Boxes are available to order now at the online Beaver Classic store for shipping as well as on-campus pickup. (See page 14 for a coupon code.) If you’d like one to arrive before a particular date — say, Christmas or the first night of Hanukkah — Bhakta advises ordering no less than a week in advance.

Holiday boxes … feature a smorgasbord sampling of the brand’s offerings.

After treating your loved ones to Beaver Classic, you may be craving some. Don’t fret — plans for a physical Beaver Classic Store in Withycombe Hall are well underway, and Bhakta estimates the “scoop shop” will be ready to open in spring 2025.

This will be the perfect place to get a taste of the program’s less shippable products, like meats and ice cream (including a new marionberry flavor).

For Bhakta, this is a return to OSU’s roots. Referencing the Dairy Counter that sold ice cream in decades past, he said, “Reopening this venture again, and coming back with this, is a good invite to get together. A reunion, almost.”

A sweet treat just might be the perfect way to bring together Beavers old and new. The idea is to “bring those Oregon State memories back while showcasing our incredible, student-made products,” said Bhakta.

If there’s a third world war, the invasion of Ukraine, the first large-scale European war since 1945, gives us one possible preview of its horrifically inventive diversity of injuries, inflicted by everything from artillery along a 600-mile front line, to hypersonic cruise missiles fired from a thousand miles away, to new frontiers in drone warfare. A Ukrainian surgeon at a hospital in an obscure corner of the war-torn nation is often the last, best hope for wounded soldiers — and he often leans on the steadfast support of Corvallis doctor and 1972 OSU engineering graduate Dr. Mark Rampton. I am proud to call Dr. Rampton my friend.

He is a Beaver by birth. His father, Henry, M.S. ’33, was on the Farm Crops faculty, and his mother, Dorothea, ’31, worked for the Dean of Women, Jo Anne Trow. He grew up one block from Gilbert Hall. His degree was an unusual pre-med choice, but he loved the engineering program. “They prepared me for just about any future profession, as engineering has that classic problem-solving mentality,” he says.

Rampton credits his senior project, a prototype hydraulic lift for bedridden patients, for getting him accepted into medical school at Oregon Health & Science University. Around that time, he married Alice Henderson (who also grew up in Corvallis) and was accepted into the U.S. Army’s Health Professions Scholarship Program. After he graduated from OHSU and completed his military service, the couple returned to Corvallis and co-founded Corvallis Family Medicine in 1988.

Doctors…are resolved to keep matching calamity with better medical skills.

His interest in supporting doctors in Uzhhorod, a small regional capital in the far west of then-newly independent Ukraine, started with a Corvallis Sister Cities Association visit he made in 1993. Ukraine had just emerged from the Soviet Union’s collapse and its infrastructure was broken.

“I saw gauze being washed and reused in the hospital,” he recalls. “Surgical tables were moved next to a window for operations in case the electricity was turned off. The hospital kept a bathtub filled with water in case the water was shut off.”

Since then, his advocacy for Uzhhorod has been unrelenting. In just the first eight years, he and Alice organized six shipments, each consisting of two to four 40-foot containers filled with educational, medical and other supplies, including hospital beds, X-ray and ultrasound machines, medical lab equipment and surgical tools. “We also obtained a $1.5 million grant from USAID [the U.S. Agency for International Development] to help develop a rural primary care clinic, a women’s healthcare clinic and a program for preventative health education,” Rampton says.

Surgeon stands next to hospital bed. Patient's leg is held in metal bracing. — Ukrainian surgeon Dr. Andrii Buchok talks with a patient recovering from a Russian drone attack. The author, a courtesy professor in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, took this photo during a 2023 trip with the Corvallis Sister Cities Association. *Photo by Sean Fleming*

With Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion, the couple doubled down on their three decades of support for Ukraine, forming a working partnership with Dr. Andrii Buchok, an orthopedic surgeon at the Uzhhorod City Multidisciplinary Clinical Hospital’s Traumatology Department. Uzhhorod is separated from the rest of Ukraine by the Carpathian Mountains, with a unique blend of Ukrainian, Hungarian, Roma and Slovakian cultures. Though one of the country’s poorest regions, its isolation also means it’s been spared the worst of the war. That relative security makes Uzhhorod a somewhat safer haven for tens of thousands of refugees.

Buchok treats “dirty wounds” that combine trauma and infection. Patients often arrive in Uzhhorod following surgeries at hospitals nearer the front lines. Ukrainian experts like Buchok have become among the world’s best at healing such patients, saving limbs that Rampton says many American doctors would have amputated.

“They’ve earned my highest level of respect,” Rampton told me during our visit to the hospital last year. I’d joined a sister city delegation that traveled at our own expense to ferry cases of medical equipment, like surgical nails used to hold shattered bones together.

Rampton explored transferring patients to U.S. military hospitals in Germany, but NATO regulations prevented that. Plus, Ukrainian surgeons treating blast injuries in a real war setting turned out to have the best skills. “That was when we deci-ded to find the needed fracture pins and plates,” he says.

Some of the wounded have nowhere to go after release, so the hospital tries to give them a place to stay while they recover. How long that can continue is unclear.

“The war comes closer every day,” said Arpad Kron, an Uzhhorod National University scientist and volunteer who teamed up with the sister cities group to support orphanages, nursing homes and other facilities as refugees arrived.

Though Uzhhorod is far from the current front lines, bombing of Ukraine-wide civilian infrastructure means nowhere is truly safe. Air raid sirens sounded frequently during our visit, with missiles hitting Lviv, not far from where we were. The middle-of-the-night wail of the sirens was haunting, like a church bell tolling, in real-time, the deaths of nearby civilians.

But resilience is part of life in Ukraine, where doctors like Buchok are resolved to keep matching calamity with better medical skills. Meanwhile, in America, Dr. Mark Rampton is resolved to help.

This issue’s cover story is about the world’s largest dam removal project: Beavers unbuilding, instead of building, dams. How do you think this project showcases OSU’s strengths? That’s an interesting observation, building and unbuilding, but engineers build and unbuild all the time. You bring buildings down; you build new ones. Unbuilding is a kind of building, too. And our understanding of what dams do, good and bad, has gotten so much deeper.

I always see OSU’s role as being the truth tellers, the data gatherers, the creators of theory, providing the information that our society needs to make good decisions. If you look at OSU’s research role in this project, it’s about looking at the ecology, at salmon, and providing hard data on what it means to do dam removal.

We want to tell the whole story — the economic, sociological and other consequences that flow from these decisions. There are positive things you’re trying to do, and there are fallouts as a result. You have to tell that story truthfully, using data. I also want to recognize another responsibility we have, to Tribal nations and Indigenous communities — taking responsibility for some of the decisions that our country made in the past and trying to set things right.

I guess as new problems arise from what we thought were solutions, Beavers are in there fixing. Yes, they are always fixing. There’s humility in this — we don’t fully understand everything.

What do alumni need to know about the upcoming Oregon legislative session? We — all Oregon public universities, not just OSU — are asking for a $275 million increase in funding, for a total of $1.275 billion. This is not extravagant. This is basic funding for the public higher ed university system. Part of it is that we are looking for a $150 million increase to the Oregon Opportunity Grant, which funds need-based grants for Oregonians.

If alumni are looking for one thing to advocate for, I would say it’s the Oregon Opportunity Grant — get in there and get our students supported. [See thebeavercaucus.org.]

Exciting news broke recently about universities joining the Pac-12. Why did OSU choose this path? We wanted a home, and we wanted to be the ones writing our own story. If we allowed ourselves to simply be taken by a conference, it wouldn’t be on our terms. For us, having agency, having an ability to shape our future, was critical.

Now, why these universities? Of course there are the stats, but there’s also a cultural fit. Talking to the presidents, my sense was that they too were scrappy, like us. We all recognize this to be a singular moment, and we know that business as usual isn’t going to cut it. So there’s hunger, creativity and impatience there. I recognize that in ourselves and in them. And that’s what I mean by cultural fit. It’s not simply that we’ve got this many students and this many programs. It’s an attitude.

Is it possible to keep up with the college athletics money race? If you play the game on the terms of the Alabamas and Ohio States, then you can’t succeed. We are going to have to find new models, new kinds of competition, new sources of revenue. The athletic world may look very different. The Pac-12 may choose to do things that are quite creative and different. I feel like we’ve got the group that is capable of that.

What are the types of risks we’re willing to take to market athletics and by proxy the university? We’re planning very creative marketing, that’s for sure. We now have an identity with the rebuild of the Pac. This is a rebirth and a rebranding. There’s lots and lots of thought going into that. And I’m keenly aware that there’s no such thing as marketing athletics without really marketing the university. The university itself is thinking through what it means to market our strategic plan — everything that we are doing in the research space and toward every student graduating. You’ll see this rollout this year.

Is there anything else alumni should know about this winter?

What I want to say to our alumni is that I am so grateful — so grateful for their resilience, their toughness, their willingness to give us space to work it all out. I don’t know that I could have gotten it out of any other community, but this community gave us a little bit more grace and a little bit more space. We’ll come out of this just fine.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Beaver Brags

consecutive year OSU is the largest university in the state.

ranked Online Bachelor’s Program in the nation is what U.S. News & World Report ranked OSU’s Ecampus program — its 11th year in the top 10.

of OSU-Cascade’s Doctor of Physical Therapy program graduates passed their license exam on the first try in 2024, outstripping most of the nation’s top 10 programs, including USC and Duke.

is the new land speed record set by a student engineering team with their modifi ed Aprilia 50cc motorcycle (running on methanol) during Bonneville Speed Week at Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats. The previous record stood for 21 years.

More Brags

Oregon State University Professor Jonathan Hurst and spin-off company Agility Robotics were featured on the cover of Time magazine’s “Best Inventions of 2024” issue this November. Hurst co-founded the company and serves as its chief robot officer. This was the second Time cover in three months related to Oregon State, highlighting the university’s excellence in robotics and artificial intelligence. In September, OSU alumnus Jensen Huang, ’84, ’09 (Hon. Ph.D.), founder and CEO of NVIDIA, was featured on the cover of the “Most Influential People in AI” issue. Time also included Huang and alumna Suzanne Simard, M.S. ’89, Ph.D. ’96, a forest ecology professor and author of Finding the Mother Tree, in its 2024 “Most Influential People” issue last spring.

Briefs

Enrollment Goes Up, Up, Up

Among the 108 Public Research 1 universities in the U.S. — universities with the most research activity — only Oregon State has produced 28 consecutive years of fall-over-fall enrollment growth, according to analysis by Jon Boeckenstedt, the university’s vice provost of enrollment management. This school year, enrollment has reached 37,900 students, an increase of 3.5%. “Oregon State is not only the largest university in the state,” Boeckenstedt said, “but it also serves the most undergraduate, graduate, resident, nonresident, international and online students, as well as the most students on a single campus.”

West Coast Wind Energy Alliance

Oregon State, Cal Poly Humboldt and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo have teamed up to research the promise and potential pitfalls of offshore wind energy sites. The Pacific Offshore Wind Consortium will combine the resources and expertise of the three universities to bring in more funding and to undertake collaborative information sharing and research with state and federal agencies, tribes and towns on the West Coast.

New Student Housing in the Mix

Upper-division and graduate students have a new on-campus living option. The five-story building, dubbed the 1045 SW Madison Avenue Apartments, offers 221 residents an easy walk to most campus buildings and features study rooms, communal lounge spaces and a large community kitchen. An increasingly tight Corvallis rental market has fueled growing demand for more student housing.

On May 22, 1963, Oregon State professor Willi Unsoeld, ’51, clawed his way up the sheer cliffs of Mt. Everest’s West Ridge, buffeted by the jet stream. He and his partner, Dr. Tom Hornbein, members of the first American expedition to Everest, were doing what experts considered the impossible, shunning the standard South Col route to pioneer a bold new path to the summit.

When they reached the peak, nightfall was rapidly approaching, but Unsoeld had serious business to take care of. He reached into his pack, unfurled a large, triangular flag with the circular logo of the Oregon State College Mountain Club, and posed for a photo that would end up in National Geographic as well as the 1964 Beaver yearbook.

Willi Unsoeld planting the OSC Mountain Club flag at the summit of Mt. Everest. *Photo by Thomas Hornbein*

Soon enveloped in darkness, the climbers spent the night at 28,000 feet without sleeping bags or tents. They prepared to die, but the winds slowed, and when the sun crested five hours later, they were alive.

“I promise that this is my last big climb,” Unsoeld told his wife Jolene, ’53, by walkie-talkie as he descended with his team. “This time,” she replied, “I have a lot of witnesses.”

The triumph came with a cost. John Breitenbach, ’61, part of the same expedition, was killed by icefall. Unsoeld lost nine frostbitten toes — he proudly kept them in a jar of formaldehyde. And despite his promise, it wouldn’t be his last expedition. In 1979, he died in an avalanche on Mt. Rainier.

Willi and Jolene Unsoeld helped start the OSC Mountain Club student organization in 1947, even announcing their engagement at the top of Mt. Hood during an OSCMC outing. The club organized climbs and ski trips; offered classes to students; and more.

“Several organizations, including the OSU Outdoor Program, the OSU Ski Club, Corvallis Mountain Rescue Unit, Santiam Pass Ski Patrol, the Adventure Leadership Institute and the Adventure Club, grew out of what was known as the OSC Mountain Club,” says OSU’s Adventure Leadership Institute (ALI) Operations Manager Emily Abram. In a 2021 survey, half of new students said outdoor activities are the most appealing aspect of OSU.

The ranks of former Mountain Clubbers include many notable alumni, but it was Stacy Allison who cemented OSU’s storied history in mountaineering. During the 1976-77 academic year, Allison attended a talk by Unsoeld. He spoke about climbing Everest, and she was sold.

This photograph of Oregon State College Mountain Club members climbing Mt. Rainier appeared on the cover of the December 1950 *Oregon Stater.* *Photo by Paul Hosmer*

“I learned how to rappel on the Douglas fir trees on campus at night,” she says. After climbing and cross-country skiing across Oregon with her OSU friends, she left school to pursue climbing seriously.

On Sept. 29, 1988, she found herself near the summit of Mt. Everest. It was her second attempt at the mountain. Facing a shortage of oxygen tanks, members of her expedition drew lots to see who would go on. Allison’s luck held and she became the first U.S. woman to reach the summit of Mt. Everest.

“There was nowhere else to climb,” she wrote in her book Beyond the Limits. “I was standing on the top of the world.”

Empower OSU Students

We need you to help OSU achieve its goal of giving all students direct access to alumni for their career needs. Through OSU Connections, our exclusive networking platform, you can share your insights and guide students as they navigate their career paths.

Thank you, Beavs!

This season, Beaver Nation’s passion and energy at football games created an electrifying atmosphere of support for our student-athletes. Whether at OSUAA Tailgate Town pregame events or cheering from afar, the camaraderie was unmatched. Together, we showed what it means to stand behind our Beavers! View photos of Tailgate Town.

Alumni gathered at the Dam Good Connections event in Bend last March. *Photo by Joe Kline*

It’s a Dam Good Time to Reconnect!

The OSU Alumni Association’s Dam Good Connections networking events return in 2025, bringing Beaver spirit to Oregon, California and Washington. Join us to grow your professional network and meet other Beavs in your city. Mark your calendar for these upcoming gatherings: March 6: Seattle; March 7: Los Angeles; March 8: San Diego; April 3: Salem; April 4: Beaverton; April 10: Bend; May 19: Sacramento; May 21: San Francisco Bay Area.

Oregon State alumni and friends pause in front of Duomo di Orvieto on the 2024 Portrait of Italy tour. *Photo by Lisbeth Goddik*

Journey Around the Globe

Sit back, relax and get ready to explore the world from wherever you are! Tune in to upcoming Travel Talks webcasts online to hear about upcoming alumni group travel trips, from Australia to Egypt and more. Register for upcoming Travel Talks webcasts this winter and spring.

Beaver fans gathered for the Black Alumni and Friends Alumni Network reunion tailgate event at the CH2M HILL Alumni Center during the Sept. 14 home tailgate. *Photo by Heather Doherty*

Foster a Vibrant Network

Join an alumni network that matches your field, affinity, identity or sector to unlock new opportunities. Connecting with peers fosters community and opens doors to collaboration and mentorship. Together, we can share experiences and support each other in achieving our goals — let’s build a thriving network!

Save the Date

43rd Annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Commemoration Week

Jan. 18–24

Ask Alumni: The Transition from College to Health Careers

Jan. 22

Ask Alumni: Build Your Roadmap to Success

Jan. 23

Ask Alumni: College of Science

Jan. 28

43rd Annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Keynote

Jan. 30

Our Health & Webcast

Feb. 4

Surprise, Arizona, Baseball Tailgate

Feb. 15

Ask Alumni: College of Agricultural Sciences

March 5

Ask Alumni: Affinity Network

March 5

For more events and details visit the OSU Foundation and Alumni Association.

1960s

Wayne Chambers, ’63, owner of W&J Orchards, Inc., was featured in the Corvallis Gazette-Times in a story about his decades as a hazelnut grower and his role helping OSU researchers develop trees that could resist eastern filbert blight.

1970s

Dean Fassnidge, ’76, retired after 24 years of teaching science in the Beaverton School District. During his tenure, he was honored as a state finalist for the Presidential Award in Teaching (2014) and received certification to borrow lunar samples from NASA to share with his students.

1980s

Diane Braun Brown, ’80, recently retired and returned to Oregon after 23 years as a clinical pharmacist at Wellstar Spalding Regional Hospital in Griffin, Georgia, where she managed their ambulatory anticoagulation clinic. Prior to moving to Georgia, she spent 20 years as a director of pharmacy in Madras, Oregon.

Jeff Clawson, ’88, M.S. ’94, brewery pilot plant manager for the College of Agricultural Sciences, and LaRae Wallace, ’92, fiscal coordinator for the Division of Research and Innovation, were both honored with OSU’s Exemplary Employee Award.

Suzanne Simard, M.S. ’89, Ph.D. ’95, author and professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia, received the 2024 Canadian Institute of Forestry award for her groundbreaking research on forest ecosystems, particularly mycorrhizal networks.

Howard C. Yang, M.S. ’87, Ph.D. ’89, chairman, CEO and chief scientist of Montage Technology Company, was inducted into Oregon State’s Engineering Hall of Fame. Yang was among the first integrated circuit designers to return to his native country from Silicon Valley when China’s high-tech industry was still in its infancy. He co-founded China’s first venture capital-funded company, later co-founding Montage Technology.

Adam D. Smith, ’00

Brigadier General Adam D. Smith (at center, with his family) was appointed the adjutant general — or chief administrative officer — of the U.S. Army. As the nation’s 64th adjutant general, he now oversees human resources policies, programs and services to maintain Army readiness. He also assumes the roles of the Military Postal Service Agency executive director and commanding general of the U.S. Army Physical Disability Agency.

Courtesy of Adam Smith

1990s

Dr. Scott Bender, ’92, D.V.M. ’95, published a chapter in the book Wild Carnivores of New Mexico, published by University of New Mexico Press.

Barbara Lagerquist, M.S. ’98, research coordinator at the Marine Mammal Institute, was awarded OSU’s Exceptional Leadership in Safety Award.

Toby Luther, ’96, CEO of Lone Rock Resources, and Camille Palmer, ’97, associate professor and associate school head of the School of Nuclear Science and Engineering, were selected by Governor Tina Kotek for service on the Oregon State University Board of Trustees, with formal confirmation by the Oregon Senate in October.

Susan Shaw, MAIS ’97, professor of women, gender and sexuality, was honored with OSU’s 2024 International Service Award for expanding Oregon State’s global reach and reputation through teaching, research and service.

Seth Warren, ’98, published his second collection of poetry, Road Sodas: Evocative and Obscure, available through Amazon and at Powell’s Books.

2000s

Derek Anderson, ’05, Darwin Barney, ’08, Jacoby Ellsbury, ’07, Robbie Findley, ’07, Joey Hansen, ’02, Saori Haruguchi, ’10, Leslie Mak, ’12, Cambria Miranda, ’11, Jacquizz Rodgers, ’21, and Kathy Weston, along with baseball coach Pat Casey, were inducted into the Oregon State Athletics 2024 Hall of Fame. The inductees were recognized on the field during the Oregon State-Oregon football game on Sept. 14 at Reser Stadium.

Dana Howe, M.S. ’07, senior faculty research assistant in integrative biology, received OSU’s Outstanding Faculty Research Assistant Award.

Larry O’Neill, Ph.D. ’07, associate professor and director of Oregon Climate Service, was awarded OSU’s Extension and Engagement Award for his work presenting easy-to-understand scientific information through media outlets and podcasts.

Arijit Sinha, M.S. ’07, Ph.D. ’10, professor and JELD-WEN Chair of Wood-based Composites Science and director of NSF Industry University Cooperative Research Center for Wood-Based Composites, received OSU’s Excellence in Postdoctoral Mentoring Award.

Shannon Wanless, Ph.D. ’09, executive director of the Office of Child Development and associate professor for University of Pittsburgh’s School of Education, was named a 2024 Aspen Institute Ascend 2024 fellow.

2010s

Dan Gibson, ’10, returned to Oregon to become CEO of Visit McMinnville. Previously, he was senior director of communications for Visit Tucson.

Janell Johnson, M.Ag. ’11, senior instructor and head academic advisor for animal and rangeland sciences, received OSU’s Dar Reese Excellence in Advising Award.

Erica Liu, ’10, MBA ’12, was promoted from senior account supervisor to vice president for integrated marketing for Anthology FINN Partners, an integrated marketing and communications company in Honolulu.

Dr. Lane Martin, DVM ’11, joined CodaPet, a network of veterinarians dedicated to providing compassionate end-of-life care for pets in their homes.

Arien Muzacz, Ph.D. ’15, associate clinical professor in the College of Education, received OSU’s Faculty Affordability Award for her work to make course materials accessible to students.

Lily Ranjbar, Ph.D. ’16, director of online programs and senior instructor at Oregon State, was honored with the College of Engineering’s Online Teaching Award.

Justin Read, ’12, bought Garland Nursery, a family-owned retail nursery in Corvallis owned by generations of Beavers and most recently by Lee, Brenda, ’85, and Erica Powell, ’95.

Sydney Wiese, ’17

After five seasons in the WNBA with the Washington Mystics and Los Angeles Sparks, Sydney Wiese has returned to OSU as a women’s basketball assistant coach. Wiese is one of the most decorated players in Beaver women’s basketball history. She is a four-time All-Pac-12 Team point guard and third-team All American. She holds school records for career assists and career and single-season three-pointers.

2020s

Hannah Briggs, ’22, MPH ’23, secured a grant from Healthy Rural Oregon to enhance maternal healthcare access in the most remote regions of Eastern Oregon. Briggs will lead recruitment, training, curriculum and certification for a cohort of state-certified birth doulas.

Everardo Gonzalez, M.S. ’24, a doctoral student in robotics, received OSU’s Excellence in Undergraduate Research Mentoring by a Graduate Student Award.

Taylor Krueger, M.S. ’21, Ph.D. ’23, a postdoctoral scholar in chemistry, received OSU’s 2024 Postdoctoral Excellence Award.

Joe K. Page, MPH ’24, began a position as a healthcare policy intern in the office of U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse in Washington, D.C.

Kelly Shannon, ’20, M.S. ’23, published his first first-author paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research. An article about the paper appeared in the science news magazine Eos.

Steven Tran, M.S. ’24, a doctoral student in chemistry, received OSU’s Herbert F. Frolander Graduate Teaching Assistant Award.

Connect with us to share your good news with the Oregon State community.

Karie Fugett, MFA ’18, knows that publishing doesn’t normally work out this way, so please suspend your disbelief for just a moment.

The year after she completed her graduate degree in creative writing at Oregon State, she published an essay in the Washington Post entitled “Love and War.” Her husband, a U.S. Marine, had been wounded in Iraq. After his return, he became addicted to opioids; he died of an overdose when she was 24.

The essay charts this experience and how, in the aftermath, she was able to buy a house, attend college and go to grad school: “From his ashes, I built myself into something beautiful and new,” she writes. “When I meditate on the sacrifice it took to get there, guilt and anger burn deep.”

Three months later, Fugett’s memoir, which traces her experiences as a military widow, was the subject of a 15-editor auction. “I had people from every major publishing house bidding on it for three days,” says Fugett, now 39. “And then I sold it, for a lot of money.”

Alive Day comes out in May through the Penguin-Random House imprint The Dial Press. “What the story is about is sad and terrible, but the book part — although long, and it’s required patience and whatnot — everything’s just slid into place,” she says.

Fugett began plotting the memoir as her graduate thesis at Oregon State, where she was a student in the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program in creative writing. With just a 3.76% acceptance rate, it’s one of OSU’s most competitive programs — and perhaps its most unexpected, given the university’s roots in science, agriculture and engineering.

We knew that we could make a family out of our program.

Yet for more than two decades, the MFA has provided time and, importantly, funding to its student artists, preparing them for careers as writers and communicators. All students receive graduate assistantships, which waive tuition and provide a stipend for living expenses. Alumni have gone on to win state and national awards; just this year, Steven Moore, MFA ’16, was nominated for an Oregon Book Award for his essay collection, The Distance From Slaughter County.

“For two years, you get to find your voice and discover your territory, and no one’s going to be breathing down your neck just yet,” says Marjorie Sandor, the former director of the program and, along with Professor Emeritus Tracy Daugherty, one of its original architects.

For Fugett, the MFA allowed her to focus wholly on the project she came to write — “to play and do weird things and see if they work,” she says. “I loved that.”

But the program’s real magic — beyond publishing deals and accolades — might just be its tight-knit camaraderie, both among students and between students and their faculty mentors. “You find your readers,” says Lanesha Reagan, MFA ’18. The philosophy implicit in these relationships: an MFA does not need to be cutthroat in order to set its students up for success.

On a clear, crisp Sunday afternoon in September, a few dozen current MFA students, alumni and faculty members scattered across the wide sloping lawn at Remy Wines in Dayton, Oregon. A few sat on the chairs arrayed in front of a microphone where, soon, three alumni would read their work: Jesse Donaldson, MFA ’14; Loretta Rod-riguez, MFA ’23; and Nola Iwasaki, MFA ’23. The atmosphere was languid. Tor Strand, a current MFA student in poetry who previously worked at the winery, poured glasses of dolcetto. (He read a poem, too.)

In some ways it felt like a reunion — and this is the point where I should make an admission: I attended OSU as a student in the MFA program’s nonfiction track. I finished my degree this past June.

Just a tiny sampling of the dozens of titles by MFA graduates.

And so when I talk about the community and mentorship, my perspective is a little skewed. I hope you won’t hold it against me. To balance the scales, I did my homework: This story draws on interviews with nearly a dozen people affiliated with the program.

The MFA’s emphasis on community was baked into its very foundation. When Sandor joined the faculty in 1994, Daugherty — a Pulitzer Prize finalist this year for his biography of the writer Larry McMurtry — had already been working for nearly 10 years to bring an MFA program into being.

It took nearly another 10 to make it a reality: OSU awarded its first MFAs in fiction in 2002 and then added tracks in poetry (2006) and nonfiction (2012). “We knew that we could make a family out of our program,” Sandor says. “We really saw ourselves as the literal mom and pop.”

The groundwork had been laid decades earlier, by the writer Bernard Malamud — a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner who taught at Oregon State from 1949 to 1961. (Earlier in 2024, Malamud’s daughter, Janna Malamud Smith, organized an $850,000 gift to the School of Writing, Literature, and Film from her late brother’s estate. It will fund a visiting writer and an endowed faculty position.) Malamud also tried to establish a creative community among the faculty at Oregon State, organizing foreign film screenings and a reader’s theater.

There are material consequences to creating an academic environment rooted in as intangible a quality as community. “The best things that came out of grad school for me were the people I met,” says Associate Professor Elena Passarello, the current program director (and my former thesis advisor).

Each faculty thesis advisor normally works with only one or two students per year; the two-year program has 24 students total. These close relationships help steer students’ thesis projects and model “editorial attention,” Passarello says, with the goal of preparing them for future conversations with agents and publishers.

The core of the MFA is the workshop, a genre-specific class in which students submit their works-in-progress for feedback. Strong cohort bonds make for more constructive workshop conversations. But don’t think that this means everyone is simply nice; the sense of community creates a level of trust that allows students to provide meaningful feedback. Some students continue exchanging work even after completing their degrees; I’m part of a workshop group that includes graduates from five different classes.

“The writing life is really hard to keep up without a community,” Zoë Bossiere, MFA ’17, recalls undergraduate professors warning them before they began applying to grad school. Bossiere still remembers receiving the call that they had been admitted to OSU. They were standing in their family’s Airstream trailer, where they’d grown up. A photo of that trailer now illustrates the cover of their memoir, Cactus Country, which came out this year.

Additional reporting by Molly Rosbach

The signs are everywhere. You start to notice them — blue and white and printed with the words “Tsunami Evacuation Route,” alongside an illustration of a cresting wave — after crossing Newport’s Yaquina Bay Bridge. Follow them, and you might reach Oregon State’s Gladys Valley Marine Studies Building, which is not only a space for learning and research, but also a vertical evacuation structure.

The vertical evacuation structure — the 47-foot-high roof of the building — is a necessary adaptation to new research on the Cascadia Subduction Zone. Scientists say that this fault line, just off the coast of Newport, is overdue for an earthquake of magnitude 8.0 or greater (aka “The Big One”), which could summon a mighty tsunami. To make matters more precarious, the spit of land where the building is located lies close to sea level and is composed primarily of soft, unstable dredge spoils.

As a result, architects engineered the building, which was funded by a lead grant from the Wayne and Gladys Valley Foundation and opened in the fall of 2021, for the worst-case Cascadia rupture. They drew inspiration from disaster-proof structures around the world, including foreign embassies designed to withstand bomb strikes and other earthquake- and tsunami-resilient structures.

As someone who works on the coast, Cinamon Moffett, the Hatfield Marine Science Center’s associate director for research and marine support, says that the risk of natural disaster is always on her mind. “OSU does an amazing job about putting this forward and saying, ‘OK, this is real; there’s a problem, this is going to happen,’” she says. “For those of us that already chose to work here, I was like, ‘Thank you.’”

These key features make this state-of-the-art building ready for what’s to come.

Key Features

An Extra-Deep Foundation

Dredged land beneath the building will liquefy after a major earthquake. For stability, the Marine Studies building sits atop a nearly 100-foot-deep, honeycomb-shaped foundation made of soil mixed with concrete and then secured to the foundation by 50-foot bolts. This means the foundation is roughly two times as deep as the building is tall. “We’re kind of an iceberg,” Moffett says.

Breakaway Walls

The building may be tsunami-proof, but that doesn’t mean that the building itself will survive. It won’t. “The only safe place in this building when the water comes is the roof,” Moffett says. In the event of a tsunami, the building’s exterior walls have been designed to collapse so water can rush through, leaving the roof — held up by sturdy structural steel I-beams and concrete shear walls — safe and stable. (In fact, a few of those I-beams can even be compromised without affecting the structural integrity of the roof.)

A Really Big Ramp

To accommodate the largest possible number of evacuees, there are three ways to access the roof: the elevator, the stairs and the massive ramp wrapping around the structure’s exterior. As you ascend the ramp — which is steep, its incline too sharp for wheelchair users to navigate on their own — you pass markers estimating how high the water will rise in case of “medium,” “large” and “xl” events.

A Ship-Proof “Crumple Zone”

Though the likelihood that large pieces of debris — like the ships moored in the harbor — will travel as far inland as the Marine Studies Building is low, the building’s architecture is nevertheless prepared for this worst-case scenario. On the roof, metal barricades and a rock garden mark the “crumple zone,” an area (10-feet wide at its widest point) that will sustain the impact of objects tossed ashore without harming either the people who’ve sought refuge on the roof or the I-beams holding it up.

Supplies for Days

The tsunami won’t simply wash in and recede, Moffett says. Waves created by the earthquake will slosh to and fro, oscillating as if in a bathtub, for up to two days. On the roof, a cache contains enough food, water and first-aid supplies for up to 920 people (and pets!) to survive for that period. (“Remember, I said ‘survival,’ not ‘happy,’” Moffett says of the 800 calories and gallon of water allotted to each person per day.) In the cache, a binder labeled “Open Me First” outlines protocol and includes tasks, like portioning out food rations, designed to keep survivors occupied.

A Disaster-Proof Elevator

The Marine Studies Building is the only Americans with Disabilities Act-approved vertical evacuation site in the country, and it’s all because of the elevator. It looks just like a regular elevator — so much so, in fact, that one of the architects’ challenges was how to represent its role in evacuation to people taught to avoid elevators in disasters. A reinforced elevator shaft makes it sturdy enough to operate during an earthquake, allowing people with limited mobility to access the roof.

1. One Wild Word Away

By Geffrey Davis, ’06

This poetry collection from 2024 Pushcart Prize winner Geffrey Davis confronts the realities of loss and violence with the realities of love and light. With striking imagery and sonics, Davis composes a song to chase away the monsters under the bed, both imagined and real. Davis’ many accolades include the Anne Halley Poetry Prize, the Dogwood Prize in Poetry, the Porter Fund Literary Prize and the Wabash Prize for Poetry. Learn more.

2. The Ancients

By John Larison, MFA ’07

Set in a not-so-distant post-apocalyptic future, The Ancients weaves together three narrative journeys to create a sweeping and ultimately hopeful epic about human resilience in a precarious world. Learn more.

3. The Spirit of 1889

By Samuel Western, ’81

Western thoughtfully reviews the sociopolitical history of North and South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana and Idaho and calls for a return to the progressive values these “89ers” were founded on. Learn more.

4. Cactus Country: A Boyhood Memoir

By Zoë Bossiere, MFA ’14

In this tough and tender debut memoir about queer boyhood in an Arizona trailer park, Bossiere invites us to consider how we find our place in a world that insists on stark binaries. It was selected as an Indies Introduce and an Indie NEXT book. Learn more.

The future of Oregon State’s athletic conference has started to come into focus. What’s certain: The Beavers’ home will continue to be the Pac-12.

Between mid-September and early October, the conference announced that six universities will join OSU and WSU starting in the summer of 2026: Boise State University, Colorado State University, Fresno State University, San Diego State University, Utah State University and Gonzaga University.

After the announcement of the first four, OSU President Jayathi Murthy wrote, “These are universities that share our values, prioritizing the holistic health and well-being of student athletes and providing opportunities for them to compete at the highest levels. While plans for 2026 and beyond are still taking shape, there is so much to look forward to.”

What’s uncertain: Who’s next, and when?

Though the addition of Gonzaga University brings the Pac-12 one of the nation’s most successful and best-known men’s basketball programs of the past 25 years, Gonzaga does not have a football program. That means the rebuilt conference is one short of the eight football-playing members it needs — by, at latest, the summer of 2026 — to be eligible for a berth in the College Football Playoff.

More additions and alignments are certain to come.

Likewise, though most women’s team sports — from soccer to softball — meet the NCAA’s minimum of six teams to earn an automatic berth in postseason competition, at press time the rebuilt conference had only five of the six baseball-playing members necessary and men’s soccer had only three. The path to postseason for other sports will be determined in the months ahead. In other words, more additions and alignments are certain to come.

Plus, one twist: legal issues.

When the Pac-12 signed a football scheduling agreement with the Mountain West Conference for this year, the agreement included “poaching penalties” should any of the MWC schools leave for the Pac-12. But on Sept. 25, the Pac-12 sued the MWC, asserting that this violated antitrust law. So while there’s been some movement toward a complete Pac-12 picture, there’s still more off-the-field action to come.

Growing up in Corvallis, Joth Ricci joined the crowds packing Gill Coliseum during the ’70s and ’80s. Basketball made a slam dunk into his heart, and so did Oregon State University. After graduating in 1990, Ricci channeled his passion for coaching into leadership positions with companies such as Dutch Bros and, most recently, Burgerville, while also staying active with the university, including as chair of the OSU Alumni Association board.

Now Ricci; his wife, Robin Ricci; and their family have given back in another way, with a $3 million gift that creates two $1.5 million endowments for men’s and women’s basketball. “With this gift, we want to give a shout-out to all the basketball players who have competed at Oregon State, specifically the teams under coach Ralph Miller,” he said. “I’ve had success leading companies because of their inspiration and everything I learned from basketball and coaching.”  

The two Ricci Family Endowed Funds will provide steady, reliable funding for recruitment, travel, training tools and more, supporting long-term stability and growth for Beaver basketball.

The announcement of the family’s gift coincided with news this fall that basketball powerhouse Gonzaga is joining the Pac-12.

“I don’t think there’s ever been a better time to invest in OSU Athletics,” Ricci said. “Any time you are in an uncertain situation, you have a choice to make; you can wait and see what happens to you, or you can get engaged and build your narrative. As intercollegiate athletics continue to change, at Oregon State we have the chance to build and make our program even stronger. 

“We don’t want to let off the gas. This is the time to prepare for the future, and everyone can be part of it.”

The Riccis are the parents of two recent OSU graduates, and Joth’s parents and grandfather are also alumni.  He currently serves as executive in residence for the College of Business and chairs the board for SnoPlanks Academy, the student-led snowboard production company based at OSU-Cascades.

When Casey Anderson, ’14, was a new OSU graduate in merchandising management, she wasn’t sure how to start her job search. Friends invited her to an OSU Innovation and Design Network event, where she met Beaver alumnae from employers like Nike and Kroger. They helped her land some interviews, and that launched her career at Nike.

Leslie Avila, ’25, is entering her final year as an OSU marketing major. She’s leaning on the alumni career networking platform to gain advice and connections for planning what’s next.

“OSU Connections has taught me networking skills, helped me build relationships with peers and professionals, and given me the chance to be mentored,” she said.

Early in my own career, I expected law school to immediately follow college. To get experience, I found a part-time job at a law firm, which helped me discover, to my surprise, that law was not my preferred path. Learning what I did not want to do was critical yet scary. Perplexed but not dismayed, I pivoted to grad school, community volunteering and building a professional network. It was my network that introduced me to my current field, which I love.

I was helped along each of these journeys by others, and I think that’s true of most people who succeed in the world of work. Yet not everyone has direct access to relevant advice, a built-in professional network or the gumption to leverage entry-level opportunities.

This is where the Beaver network — more specifically, you — can help.

Oregon State University has revamped its core curriculum requirements to include career exploratory courses for all undergraduate students. Research shows that students with access to career advisors or mentors perform better academically, while job shadowing and internships build crucial insights and experience that help students and new graduates develop the talents employers seek.

Each year, many of you provide valuable career assistance to our students and alumni. The OSU Alumni Association wants those numbers to grow. Join us to translate the lessons you’ve learned into valuable insights for today’s Beavers.

Many of us remember how a simple act of kindness helped our career. Today’s OSU students could greatly benefit from yours. Go Beavs!

At the foot of the Cascade mountains, a 20-minute drive from Mt. Bachelor, 27 engineering, outdoor products, and art, media and technology students are managing a snowboard company. The students are stoked, but this is more than fun and games. SnoPlanks, based at Oregon State University – Cascades, is a real-world company gifted to the campus in 2023 by founders Ryan Holmes and James Nicol. The two had been popular guest lecturers in instructor Todd Laurence’s entrepreneurship classes. When they decided to move on to new ventures, they remembered the students’ excitement, and the path for the company became clear. It’s now embedded in academic curriculum, in a program called SnoPlanks Academy. Students tackle tasks — like contract negotiations and customer relations — that most people don’t encounter until later in a career. They’ve also done their fair share of high-fiving — and nail-biting, too — especially in the run-up to the first student-led product line launch this October. “This is not simulated, experiential learning,” said Laurence, now executive director of SnoPlanks. “Students are making decisions and managing business functions just like they will in their careers.” Learn more about SnoPlanks Academy.

Last winter, I visited my high school for the first time in nearly 30 years. It fills an entire city block of downtown Nashville — a four-story limestone castle among high-rises and honky-tonks. Walking in the doors, I was hit by the familiar smell of worn floorboards and a century’s worth of dust. Locker doors clanged shut just out of sight.

And then, like a series of camera flashes popping: There was the staircase where I timed classmates with a stopwatch as they raced up and down the steps for a physics project. There was the office where I’d been summoned by the secretary, cradling the receiver to my face as my boyfriend, calling from college, told me a classmate had died. There was the corner where my girlfriends and I spent every lunch hour, cross-legged with half-eaten sandwiches in hand, laughing and singing Beatles tunes. The happy, painful and mundane crowded in — all of it forgotten until I walked those halls.

It’s a particular magic trick of place that a building can hold our memories — fragments of our past selves. And for 75 years, Gill Coliseum has done just that for generations of Beavers.

Since it opened in November 1949, it’s hosted graduation ceremonies; concerts and dances; registration (back when it was done with physical cards); lectures and memorial services; a turtle race or two; and athletics events aplenty, from the stands-shaking mayhem of Orange Express games to last year’s unforgettable women’s basketball buzzer beater.

Records have been broken, friendships forged and minds changed, all in the shadow of its steel girders. As former Beaver gymnast Mary (Ayotte) Law, ’82, says: “When I walk into Gill Coliseum — and it can be empty — I hear people cheering for me. … There’s something about the way the sound of that happy cheering just kind of remains in there.”

Though we can’t quite summon the smell of Gill’s particular mix of floor wax and popcorn in these pages, I hope you enjoy the memories in “Where Beavers Gather” And please write in to share your own.

For Mary (Ayotte) Law, ’82, it’s a sensation she can’t shake. “When I walk into Gill Coliseum — and it can be empty — I hear people cheering for me,” said Law, a national champion OSU gymnast from 1978 to 1982. “I just have this vivid memory of hearing people cheering and clapping and being happy, and it rings in my ears.

“There’s something about the way the sound of that happy cheering just kind of remains in there. It lives in there.”

The silent shouts lingering amid steel girders could be for hundreds of Oregon State athletes throughout the decades, or for the wide range of events that have populated Gill Coliseum’s 75 years. If the Memorial Union lounge is Oregon State’s living room, then Gill Coliseum — or simply “Gill” to many — is its rumpus room. From basketball to bachelor’s degrees, turtle races to takedowns, dismounts to duets, the venerable arena has seen it all. This winter marks the diamond anniversary of the building’s opening in November 1949.

“If other buildings have produced the same kind of usage that building has over 75 years, let’s bring them on,” said Erin Haynes, ’72. A football player in his student days, Haynes witnessed more than 30 years’ worth of the coliseum’s activities, as he remained on campus until 2005, working in the OSU athletics department, admissions office, OSU Foundation and OSU Alumni Association.

Gill Coliseum under construction in 1949. *Courtesy of OSU Special Collections & Archives*

Building Bigger and Better

Oregon State broke ground in June 1948 for the $1.8 million, 10,200-seat building. At the time, it was unusual for a structure of that size to have no interior posts blocking spectator views. The coliseum took over the role of Beaver gathering place from the old Men’s Gymnasium (now Langton Hall), which could seat only about 2,500. From the start, the building, officially known as the OSC Coliseum, was commonly referred to as Gill Coliseum in tribute to alumnus (class of 1924) and longtime men’s basketball coach Amory “Slats” Gill. It was his popular winning teams, after all, that helped spur the need for a larger arena.

The coliseum’s first event, a concert by the Vienna Boys Choir, was on Nov. 18, 1949, when the building was still under construction. The first athletic event was Oregon State’s 53-41 win over Utah in men’s basketball on Dec. 16, 1949. “Those who were here for the dedication game were astonished by the size and comfort of this massive arena,” wrote Don McLeod of The Oregonian, noting it compared favorably with the “ultra-modern emporiums” Madison Square Garden and the Kansas City Municipal Auditorium.

8 Quick Facts:

Groundbreaking Date:

June 5, 1948

Construction Completed:

June 1950

Cost:

$1,800,000 ($23,800,000 in 2024 dollars)

Capacities:

10,200 (when it opened); 9,301 (now)

First Athletic Event:

Men’s basketball game (Oregon State 53, Utah 41) on Dec. 16, 1949

First Event:

Vienna Boys Choir concert on Nov. 18, 1949

Biggest Crowd:

11,709 for men’s basketball (Oregon State 82, Oregon 66) on Feb. 3, 1962

Namesake:

Amory T. “Slats” Gill was an Oregon State men’s basketball player from 1922 to 1924, men’s basketball head coach from 1928 to 1964 and Oregon State’s athletic director from 1964 until his death in 1966

The Scene of the Action

The initial events foreshadowed the wide variety of athletic and non-athletic events that would soon be available for Oregon State students, the Corvallis community and even wider audiences. Gill was the spot for Oregon State graduations from 1950 through 2000, as well as the annual Beta Theta Pi Turtle Derby from the 1960s into the 1980s. In 1957, the university constructed KOAC’s first TV studios in the building. The Horner Museum, a collection of curiosities from around the world, was housed in Gill’s basement from 1950 until 1995. The Oregon State Junior-Senior Prom was held there during the 1950s and 1960s.

It was [Coach Gill’s] popular winning teams, after all, that helped spur the need for a larger arena.

Native American students organize an annual powwow — now in its 45th year — at the site. It’s been host to concerts ranging from Marian Anderson to the Grateful Dead to Garth Brooks to military bands; a Model United Nations convention; interfraternity/sorority and all-campus group singing competitions; high school graduations; Corvallis-OSU Symphony performances; high school state tournaments in basketball, wrestling and volleyball; and speakers including Richard Nixon, Robert Kennedy, Jesse Jackson, Alex Haley and Ogden Nash.

Gill has provided a forum for not just speeches but also social change and awareness. On Feb. 25, 1969, at a time of racial tension on campus and around the nation, Oregon State alumnus and two-time Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling was delivering an OSU Centennial Lecture in Gill when OSU’s Black Student Union staged a “walk-in.” With Pauling and OSU President James Jensen on the dais, approximately 70 students approached the stage. Eventually, football player Rich Harr and BSU President Mike Smith were allowed to speak to a crowd estimated at 6,000 about discrimination in student rights, housing and social activities, according to the next day’s Daily Barometer.

In December 1970, Oregon State students took to the court during a basketball game against the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints-affiliated Brigham Young University. The protesters urged OSU to join other schools in stopping competition with BYU because of the church’s policy of not allowing Black men into the priesthood. In 2015, a Students of Color Speak Out event invited students, faculty and community members to share their experiences with racism on campus and in Corvallis.

A contestant prepares for the 1974 Turtle Derby. *Courtesy of OSU Special Collections & Archives*

Big and Little OSU Moments

Other visits to Gill were for reasons more mundane. Until class registration became computer-based, it was held in Gill Coliseum, with students scurrying from instructor to instructor to secure their classes.

Sometimes academics took over the coliseum at the end of a term: Tony Vandermeer, ’82, remembers the sections of his freshman chemistry class being so large that the final exam was held in Gill.

“I remember the basketball team coming out in the middle of our finals to practice,” Vandermeer said. “I could have sworn I saw Ray Blume sitting down there laughing at us getting stuck taking the final while he got to go play basketball.”

Most Beavers have more than one vivid memory from Gill. Larry Landis, former director of OSU’s Special Collections and Archives Research Center, remembers when OSU men’s basketball player Earnest Killum Jr., a highly regarded sophomore guard, died suddenly on Jan. 20, 1992, from a stroke. His memorial service was held in Gill a few days later and, according to the Daily Barometer, was attended by about 1,500 people. “It was a very moving service,” Landis said, “and having only been at OSU for a year, I was very impressed with this outpouring of both sympathy and support.”

TURN UP THE VOLUME

Here’s a partial list of entertainers who performed at Gill Coliseum over the years, from crooners to comics.

1950: Marian Anderson, Nelson Eddy	1971: The Constellations, Dionne Warwick, The Temptations	1990: Clint Black, Lorrie Morgan
1953: Spike Jones, Arthur Rubinstein, Woody Herman	1972: Rare Earth, Manassas, Little River Band	1991: Alabama
1957: Mantovani	1973: Blood, Sweat & Tears	1992: Kenny Rogers, Garth Brooks, George Strait
1958: Les Elgart	1974: B.B. King, Fleetwood Mac, Triumvirat	1994: Sawyer Brown, Diamond Rio
1963: Victor Borge	1975: Gordon Lightfoot, Country Joe McDonald, Loggins and Messina, Stephen Stills	1998: Meredith Brooks, Floater
1964: The Smothers Brothers, Henry Mancini, Johnny Mathis	1977: Wendy Waldman, Al Stewart, Jimmy Buffett	1999: Sugar Ray, Orgy
1965: New Christy Minstrels	1978: Eddie Money, Heart, Pablo Cruise, Darryl Hall & John Oates	2000: Ani DiFranco, Greg Brown, Bill Cosby, Jeff Foxworthy, Bill Engvall
1966: The Beach Boys	1979: Little River Band, The Knack	2001: The Wallflowers, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Bob Dylan
1967: The Doors, Bob Hope	1983: Willie Nelson, The Tubes	2002: Wayne Brady
1968: Mint Tattoo, The Grateful Dead, Simon & Garfunkel, Lou Rawls	1985: Huey Lewis and The News, Toto, Howard Jones	2003: Jay Leno, David Spade
1969: Peter, Paul and Mary, The 5th Dimension	1987: Gordon Lightfoot, Jay Leno	2004: Rita Rudner, Drew Carey’s Improv All-Stars
1970: The Grateful Dead, Neil Diamond, Country Joe and the Fish, The Youngbloods, Steve Miller Band, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Jethro Tull, The 5th Dimension	1989: Nu Shooz

In the mid-2000s, OSU organizations that had brought big-name entertainers to Gill began focusing their resources on other activities, and the heyday of Gill performances came to an end.

Haynes participated in IFC Sings at Gill and camped out for tickets to a Peter, Paul and Mary concert in 1969. Later, as senior class president in 1972, he got to introduce singer and actress Helen Reddy to the crowd. “I saw Karen Carpenter when the Carpenters came,” Haynes said. “I saw the Temptations. All those things you can go back to in your mind.”

Marc Andresen, who attended OSU from 1967-69, remembers that after the Peter, Paul and Mary concert, the singing trio sat in the bleachers to talk with students. This wasn’t long after the group’s Paul Stookey had embraced Christianity, “so when he comes out and he’s talking about that with the students,” Andresen said, “it shocked the heck out of us because it hadn’t gone public … that was pretty cool.”

Andresen, later a pastor of Calvin Presbyterian Church in Corvallis, recalled 27 local churches combining to rent Gill for a service on Easter Sunday in 2000; they estimated the attendance at about 10,000 and the offering collection of approximately $60,000 went to local charities. “I was profoundly moved to watch the place fill up,” Andresen said.

GAME ON

Here are some of Gill Coliseum’s most memorable moments in athletics.

1949–50
Men’s Basketball

On Dec. 16, Oregon State defeats Utah 53-41 in the first-ever game at Gill Coliseum. The Beavs take the win in front of 5,694 fans in the still-unfinished building.

1954–55
Men’s Basketball

San Francisco beats Oregon State 57-56 in the NCAA West Regional final as a last-second shot by the Beavs misses in front of 11,206 fans. The Dons go on to win the NCAA title. (See a video of the game.)

1960–61
Wrestling

Oregon State hosts the NCAA Wrestling Championships —the first school west of the Rockies to do so — and OSU 167-pounder Don Conway wins a national title. OSU places fourth.

1961–62
Men’s Basketball

The largest crowd in Gill Coliseum history — 11,709 — wedges itself into the building to watch Oregon State beat Oregon 82-66.

1963–64
Men’s Basketball

Oregon State pounds two-time defending NCAA champion Cincinnati 82-61, toppling the nation’s No. 4-ranked team before a crowd of 10,597.

1971–72
Wrestling

Oregon State heavyweight Jim Hagen takes on Iowa State’s Chris Taylor, a 400-pounder who
would be that summer’s Olympic bronze medalist. Hagen is beaten in a match that attracts nearly 10,000 fans.

1973–74
Men’s Basketball

Oregon State ends No. 1 UCLA’s 59-game Pacific-8 win streak with a 61-57 win in front of 10,376 fans. Later that season, Oregon Head Coach Dick Harter trips OSU cheerleader Rick Coutin as he carries the Chancellor’s Trophy past Oregon’s bench near the end of the Beavers’ 81-74 win. (The coach later wrote Coutin an apology.)

1979–80
Men’s Basketball

Oregon State overcomes an 8-point deficit in the final two minutes — with no shot clock or 3-point shot at that time — to beat Arizona State 82-74 in overtime. It’s a key victory in OSU taking the first of three straight Pac-10 titles and ending UCLA’s string of 13 consecutive crowns.

1979–80
Wrestling

Oregon State again hosts the NCAA Championships. Beaver heavyweight Howard Harris wins the national title, earning a 46-0 record with 40 pins for the season. Harris wins the meet’s Most Outstanding Wrestler award, having pinned all his opponents in the national meet. OSU places ninth.

1989–90
Men’s Basketball

Gary Payton scores 58 points against Southern California in a 98-94 double-overtime win — one of wildest games ever at Gill. The Beavers trailed by 22 points in the first half. Two days later, OSU beats UCLA 83-74 in Payton’s home finale.

1990
Gymnastics

Oregon State hosts the NCAA Championships, and Joy Selig wins national titles in both the balance beam and floor exercise. OSU places seventh.

1991–92
Women’s Basketball

Oregon State upsets No. 3 Stanford 75-69 in front of an audience of 572.

1993
Gymnastics

Oregon State again hosts the NCAA Championship and Amy Durham wins the floor exercise national title. The Beavers place fourth.

2000
Football

In January 2001, a rally celebrating Oregon State’s Pac-10 co-champion and Fiesta Bowl champion football team draws a near-capacity crowd to Gill.

2009
Volleyball

Oregon State beats No. 7-ranked Oregon in five sets — 25-21, 21-25, 10-25, 25-22, 16-14 — in front of a record crowd of 3,576.

2017
Volleyball

Oregon State upsets No. 10-ranked Washington 26-24, 25-20, 21-25, 19-25, 15-13.

2018–19
Women’s Basketball

No.12 Oregon State knocks off No. 2 Oregon 67-62 in front of record crowd of 9,301 and a national television audience, snapping a 17-game Duck winning streak that was the longest in the nation.

2022–23
Wrestling

With the lure of a strong team and a big-name opponent, Oregon State Wrestling attracts its largest crowd in decades, drawing 6,764 for a dual meet with No. 12 Oklahoma State, losing 20-12. It starts a trend: The next year, 8,540 show up to watch the Beavers fall 36-3 to No. 1 Penn State.

2023
Gymnastics

No. 13 Oregon State upsets No. 4 Utah in front of a record crowd of 8,859, posting the second-highest score in program history at 197.950 as it ties for the Pac-12 regular season championship.

2023–24
Women’s Basketball

No. 11 Oregon State beats No. 9 UCLA 79-77 in a buzzer-beater as the teams trade the lead four times in the final seven seconds in front of a crowd of 8,525.

A member of OSU’s pep band, Andresen said Gill’s architecture facilitated one of the band’s routines. The group split in half, with one group going upstairs and one downstairs. Playing, one half entered single file through one tunnel and exited through another; as soon as the last member left, the other half would enter through another tunnel, continuing the tune.

Filling Gill

That was still part of the band’s antics in the late 1970s and early 1980s — the heyday of the Orange Express. There were 71 straight regular season crowds of at least 10,000 from the 1978-79 season into the 1984-85 season. With their seating limited to the north balcony, students camped on the ramps to get the best seats. (See a 1981 Ralph Miller Show clip about the ramps below.)

Video by News and Communication Services Motion Picture Films and Videotapes (FV 057:174), Special Collections and Archives Research Center, Oregon State University Libraries

Once inside, those 10,000-plus people made their presence felt.

“The volume of the fans during that era of men’s basketball — it was loud, it was so loud,” Law said. “It was just so much fun. And, of course, the basketball was so phenomenal and fun to watch.” (Get a taste of the sensory overload in a video from 1982.)

Law compared it to the current atmosphere at Beaver women’s basketball games. Gill, she said, plays a big part in that: “When you walk in Gill, it’s like it’s a family. There’s people [seated] on the floor. You walk in and it’s just this kind of warm family feeling that we’re in this together,” she said. “If you’re a fan, you’re a competitor, whatever — you’re part of this.”

A basketball game at Gill in 1949 or early 1950. *Courtesy of OSU Special Collections & Archives*

Gill’s appeal goes beyond Oregon Staters. After OSU beat Oregon in a nationally televised women’s basketball game in 2019, broadcaster Kara Lawson tweeted, “Gill, you stole my ❤! If you’re a fan of hoop, you HAVE to check out that place.”

After 75 years, Oregon Staters’ rumpus room remains a classic.

“I’m really glad that it’s still there,” Law said. “And I hope it will always be.”

Email to share your Gill memories.

A nearly 20-year effort to map the electrical properties of Earth’s crust and mantle across the contiguous United States, viewed as critical to protecting the electrical grid during extreme solar storms and against damage from electromagnetic pulses used as weapons, is now complete. “Before, we had a patchwork quilt of information, but we could not connect the dots,” said Professor Adam Schultz, the project’s principal investigator. “Now we can see the entire picture.” The 3-D geoelectric map provides vital information to scientists and power companies and helps them understand how geomagnetic currents under the surface interface with the power grid. The map could also be used to identify geohazards and potential natural resources. OSU’s National Geoelectromagnetic Facility is the largest facility for this type of measurement in the world.

In the summer of 2023, Desirée Tullos and two students from her engineering lab finished an eight-hour day of field work. Midday temperatures approached 100 degrees along the Klamath River in northern California. They returned to the Tree of Heaven campground and walked to the boat ramp to take a swim in the cool, clear river.

A year later, she and her team found themselves once again camping at Tree of Heaven and looking to cool off, but the river had changed. Water the color of chocolate milk lapped against a boat ramp covered with sun-cracked sediment up to a foot thick. And when they stepped into the river, they sank two feet in quick‑sand-like mud strong enough to suck a sandal off a foot.

The Iron Gate Dam before removal.

“The models predicted there’d be a lot of piles of sediment, and it made sense from a physics perspective,” said Tullos, a river engineering professor at Oregon State, sitting at a picnic table next to the boat ramp this June. “But seeing it — somehow it is still a surprise. Somehow, I guess in my mind I thought it was going to flush out into the ocean.”

Surprises are expected when you’re working at this scale. Tullos and her team, alongside other Oregon State researchers, are studying the impacts of the removal of four dams on the Klamath River and the restoration of almost 2,500 acres of land about 15 miles upriver from the campground.

This $500 million project — led by an Oregon State alumnus — is, according to the nonprofit American Rivers, the largest dam removal project in the world.

“The Klamath is just one example of this big broader story of ‘Wow, we’ve got all these big, old dams; what are we doing with them? Are we handing this all off to our kids to figure out, and the grandkids to pay for?’” Tullos said. “I think we don’t pay enough attention to dams as infrastructure and it’s all old, and there’s a reckoning coming.”

Looming over the group’s work, and indeed everything on the Klamath, is the plight of the salmon.

The Klamath runs more than 250 miles along the Oregon-California border, through desert, rainforest and redwoods, to reach the Pacific Ocean. What Tullos and other Oregon State scientists learn here will guide river restoration and dam removal projects to come. But it wasn’t a given that the dam removal and restoration project would happen at all.

The Path of the Klamath

The Klamath River runs more than 250 miles along the Oregon-California border, through desert, rainforest and redwoods, to reach the Pacific Ocean. The removal of the four dams (shown here), completed in October, restored almost 400 miles of salmon spawning grounds. As part of the process, water from three reservoirs once used for recreation was drained; the 2,500 acres of formerly submerged lands are the focus of a massive native revegetation project.

Map illustration by Elsa Jenna

It took decades of starts and stops because the people involved — lakefront property owners, whitewater rafters, farmers, Tribes, the utility company that managed the dams, state and federal regulators — often had vested interests in the river that didn’t align.

Once the third-largest salmon producing river in the country, the Klamath’s salmon counts dropped more than 90% over the past century. The dams cut this keystone species off from cool tributaries where the fish used to lay their eggs, creating stagnant zones and allowing fish diseases to thrive. Over the past two years, salmon fishing has been banned in California because of poor river and ocean conditions.

Brook Thompson, a Yurok and Karuk Native American and doctoral student at UC Santa Cruz who is working with Tullos, has had a close-up view of those changes.

“For us, salmon is culture. Salmon is our food source. Salmon is our exercise,” she said, sitting on an island in the river after kayaking with the team. “You just can’t separate our culture from the salmon… without the salmon, we aren’t Yurok. And that’s why it’s everything.”

Thompson is proud of the Tribes’ leadership in the campaign to restore the river. For decades, local Tribes and others found that their interests often clashed with those of people wanting water for farmlands or wetlands.

But calls for the dams’ removal gained urgency after a 2002 decision to limit water released downriver from the Upper Klamath Lake resulted in the death of tens of thousands of Klamath Basin fish, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. It was the largest ever salmon die-off recorded on the West Coast. Thompson witnessed it at 7 years old.

Without the salmon, we aren’t Yurok. And that’s why it’s everything.

“People who were actually organizing protests and rallies and actions and conversations and meetings, they were told initially that [the dam removal] would never happen, and that this was a pipe dream,” she said.

“And yet to see this thing we were told was never going to happen, actually be done, is so inspiring to me when it comes to all these other climate change issues.”

After a night at the Tree of Heaven campground in the summer of 2024, Tullos and the two students set out at 7:30 a.m. and drove a few miles along Highway 96 to a put-in spot. They were making their first kayak trip of the season to scout sites where they can get a better picture of the dam removal’s impact. They were downriver from the 173- foot earthen structure of Iron Gate Dam, the last in the process of being deconstructed. The river runs mostly east-west in this stretch, so the canyon walls were no match for the bright, rising sun.

Tullos and other Oregon State project leaders were about halfway through a three-year project funded by Oregon Sea Grant. It braids Western science with traditional and Indigenous knowledge to clarify how water quality management affects everything from recreation to tribal fishing. The framework they develop will inform future water management decisions.

Desirée Tullos, an Oregon State professor of biological and ecological engineering, and her students are studying how sediment released from the dams’ removal aﬀects the Klamath’s plants and algae. Bottom two images by Sean Nealon

The team inflated their kayaks, loaded them with gear and set off. About 30 minutes later, they spotted a patch of aquatic plants, or macrophytes, and pulled over to take samples. The macrophytes stretched out for about 100 feet, creating a long, string-like layer of green and yellow that swayed in the current.

Tullos walked through sludge-like sediment. Soon she was up to her shoulders in the water, surrounded by macrophytes. “You look like you are taking a swamp bath,” Issi Tang, a master’s student in water resources engineering, said from the shore.

A few minutes later, the team identified a sample location. They pulled out a 1.5-foot square sampling frame made of PVC pipe. The area inside the pipe is the sample zone.

They recorded GPS coordinates. Tullos used a ski pole to measure water depth. Then, with help of printouts of different macrophytes, she identified the type and amount of each in the sample zone. Lily Bell, an undergraduate ecological engineering student, measured water velocity. Tang recorded the numbers on a clipboard. They repeated this process dozens of times.

There’s not much data about what happens to water quality after dams come down. The team’s exacting work aims to remedy that.

“Water quality changes impact aquatic plants and algae, and those are important because they impact things we care about, like fish and fishing,” Tullos said. “There’s a sort of scientific gap around how water quality and these algae and plants are connected. We have this opportunity to learn as the system is undergoing big changes, and that will help us understand these same dynamics in other rivers.”

The importance of water quality is “really underappreciated,” Tullos said. “Part of the reason people ignore it is because it’s really complicated — it’s really complex.”

She and her team were already finding that some of their assumptions were wrong.

This a test bed for how we deal with aging infrastructure in a way that is socially and environmentally responsible.

They understood murky water would impact the growth of aquatic plants, because light can’t penetrate the water deeply. So they were surprised to find plants thriving in dark waters early in the season.

The dam removal demonstrated that another important factor — the elimination of spring floods — may allow aquatic plants to get an earlier start in summer. This is relevant to rivers across the West where flood regulation has resulted in fewer high flow events and aquatic plants appear to be gaining ground.

During much of the 20th century, river engineering meant building dams to generate power, control floods, store water or make passage easier. Dams brought cheap electricity, opened agricultural opportunities and drove regional growth.

The 1935 Beaver yearbook, dedicated to the construction of the Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River, summed up the pride felt then: “No matter what the potentialities of nature, man alone has been able to gain the knowledge necessary to harness the natural power sources of the world and to make possible a new age of industrial development for civilization.”

A River Rediscovered: The dam infrastructure flooded and rerouted the Klamath River for a century. But once the dams were breached, the old river suddenly and dramatically re-emerged. At the former J.C. Boyle Reservoir, the transformation revealed a meandering river valley unlike any other landscape along the Klamath’s winding path from high desert to coastal rainforest, a reminder that the flowing pulse of the river was never truly drowned, just waiting to return.

Today, river engineering focuses on rivers as systems and often involves undoing what was done in an attempt to restore more natural conditions. Building has made way for unbuilding.

The four dams affected by this project were constructed between 1918 and 1962. They electrified the region for the first time and allowed for economic development and growth. Two of the main reasons they were targeted for removal were to improve water quality and establish better fish passage.

But economics are also critical. As with many aging dams, the cost to improve them was no longer justified by the financial return of operating them. In recent years, the dams made up less than 2% of the power generated by PacifiCorp, the utility that operated them.

“This is a test bed for how we deal with aging infrastructure in a way that is socially and environmentally responsible,” Tullos said. “In that way, it is a profound example.”

Mark Bransom, ’91, M.S. ’94, Ph.D. ’97, the CEO of the Klamath River Renewal Corporation, has been working on the Klamath project since 2017. His company is in charge of the demolition of the dams as well as the acres that surround them, which will eventually be transferred to the states of California and Oregon, or another designee, after the restoration is complete.

“I really do consider this the capstone of an amazing career that started at Oregon State,” he said.

Bransom became familiar with the Klamath River area in the 1980s, when he worked in Northern California as a soil scientist.

“I always had a sense that I might make my way back to the Klamath at some point to make a professional contribution to restore balance.”

On Aug. 28, excavators notched a passage through the remains of the Iron Gate Dam, and the Klamath River flowed along its historic path for the first time in 100 years. Chants of “Un-dam the Klamath! Bring the salmon home!” went up as onlookers embraced. The group included Tribal members whose activism resulted in the dams’ removal,as well as Oregon State alumnus Mark Bransom, CEO of the company managing the project (top left, at right).

Standing on a bluff above Iron Gate Dam in the summer of 2023 as workers below prepared for its demolition, Bransom acknowledged the project’s challenges. With so many groups involved, negotiations were sometimes complicated. But tackling this opened the way for positive developments, he said — in particular, restoration efforts that combine traditional ecological knowledge and Western thinking.

Work to remove the dams started in 2023. About a year later, at the end of August, as Tribal partners watched and many embraced, excavators opened a passage through the remains of the Iron Gate Dam, and the river flowed freely along its historic path for the first time in a hundred years.

In all, the project involved moving about 1.3 million cubic yards of material. But it also includes a restoration effort focused primarily on the land once covered by reservoirs.

Crews collected three million native seeds from the project area starting in 2019, according to Dave Meurer, director of community affairs for RES, which is overseeing the effort in partnership with the Yurok Tribe.

Nurseries propagated the seeds until they numbered 20 billion. Mixtures of these were scattered by helicopter and hand to renew the uncovered lands. Yurok revegetation crews sowed more than 27,000 acorns; more than 72,000 live plants were planted. Soon, cracked sediment along the Klamath’s banks began to blush green. The work will continue for several years.

“While it is the largest dam removal and environmental salmon restoration project in the world, I tend to think of it as a resiliency project,” Bransom said. “And a resiliency project not only for these amazing fish, but also for communities who rely on a balanced and healthy Klamath River.

That idea of resiliency resonates with Jerri Bartholomew, a retired Oregon State microbiologist. She and her research team worked for more than 20 years to unravel how a single parasite became responsible for devastating losses of salmon on the Klamath River, as well as how the dams contributed to that.

Bartholomew is also an artist, and her time spent on the Klamath led her to combine science and art in a project called “And the Dams Come Down.” It will be displayed starting this January at the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts in Beaverton.

The 6-foot-by-8-foot piece features an outline of the Klamath River in the background, lines marking the locations of the former dams, and 35 glass salmon — coho and Chinook — that she cast individually.

It’s a dynamic piece created to change as the river changes.

Now that the dams are gone, she has switched their color in the piece from black to white, to symbolize ghost dams.

A similar change will happen to the glass salmon. As time passes and salmon return to points upriver from where the dams once stood, Bartholomew will swap out the white ghost salmon and replace them with naturally colored ones.

“The salmon are extremely resilient,” she said. “If they find that there’s a way to move further upriver now that it’s unblocked, they will do it.”

Back on the river, Tullos and her students navigated sections of Class 2 rapids in their kayaks. They spotted a deer drinking from shore, a turtle sunning itself on a rock and a pelican flying overhead.

Vegetation on the canyon walls was already dry, and fire scars lined the walls just downriver. Every few minutes, the quiet was punctuated by a car passing on the highway.

Though the water was thick and turbid, Tullos saw signs of change. She didn’t anticipate finding aquatic plants, but they persevered, forming large carpets in spots. Diving into the water, she found mussels scattered across the river bottom.

As for the salmon, she doesn’t expect them to recover right away. The fish face too many obstacles, particularly around water quality and water management. These, Tullos said, require a “slow grind” — time — to work out. Still, she is hopeful.

“To me, the source of hope is the strong sense of community and care for the river that exists in the Klamath basin,” she said. “I think there is something unique that is happening here.”

Chinook salmon navigating the waters of the Klamath. (Photo by David Herasimtschuk/Freshwaters Illustrated.)

As it turned out, the Klamath’s salmon were all too eager to play their part in the newest chapter of their story. Just weeks after the removal project was deemed officially complete, salmon were spotted in waters upriver from the former dams — swimming free toward habitat that has been inaccessible for more than a century.

Thrilling. Stunning. Nonstop. On Friday, Feb. 16, an 8,525-strong crowd at Gill Coliseum — including a record 2,369 students — got a vivid demonstration of the kind of over-the-top action that made the last season of Pac-12 women’s basketball as we know it the most exciting in decades. The Beavs rallied from seven points down in the final two and a half minutes of the game to defeat No. 9 UCLA with a last-second, buzzer-beating shot by junior Talia von Oelhoffen. The fateful three-pointer from the top of the key helped catapult the Beavers, then ranked No. 11 nationally, into the top 10 for the first time since Feb. 11, 2020. This despite the team playing much of the game without sophomore star and leading scorer Raegan Beers, after an early second-quarter foul fractured her nose. “Who would ever count this team out now?” Head Coach Scott Rueck, ’92, MAT ’93, told the press after the ear-splitting cheers finally faded and happy throngs left for celebrations beyond the stadium. “I just couldn’t be more proud of them. Tonight was just pure fun.”

Darius Northern didn’t know quite what he was getting into when he enrolled at OSU to complete his college education.

“I was born in Nashville, Tennessee, and raised in Duluth, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta,” said the 2019 graduate of the College of Public Health and Human Sciences.

Northern founded and is main production worker at People of Colour Clothing, which makes and sells apparel bearing messages intended to turn racism, sexism and prejudice on their heads.

His story is similar to those of generations of Oregon State entrepreneurs who confronted a problem, were initially stymied by it and then, in a moment of inspiration, saw a possible solution that would evolve into a way to make a living.

“I moved to Corvallis in 2016,” Northern said. “I was experiencing the South becoming more overtly prejudiced and racist … and I decided I wanted to experience something different.”

He went on a cross-country trip to choose a college but never made it to Oregon.

“But when I was in Washington, I saw Oregon license plates and I was like, ‘Oh, Oregon exists.’” He did some research on OSU when he got home.

“I was like, ‘You know what? I think that’s going to be the move.’ Corvallis sits in the middle of everything, which I thought was really cool. I had never been this close to the coast before. I intended to study horticulture, and they have a great ag program here. Everything checked. I came out here sight unseen.”

He thought he would earn his Oregon State degree and return to the South to create green spaces in communities of color to encourage healthier lifestyles. After trying a few majors, he settled on public health.

As Generation Z, or Millennials, we’ve been trained to have a short attention span, so I want the content we use to be concise. I want you to see it, be aware of it, feel it and I want to plant a seed in your brain.

Meanwhile, he realized that he hadn’t left racism behind in Tennessee.

“Oregon has that perception of just being tree huggers. It’s like, you’ll come to Oregon and it’s super liberal and super free. You can come as you are. Transitioning from Nashville to Oregon, I think I thought I would have a break from being Black. I know — now, that sounds like ‘What was he thinking?!’ But I thought then that I would come to Oregon and feel a sense of freedom and relief. I did not know the history here.

“I get here and I’m like, ‘Where are the Black people?’ I’d never seen so many white people in my life. I didn’t anticipate the covert racism that exists here, and it sent me into a tumble.”

He felt isolated and alone.

“W. E. B. Du Bois talked about it in The Souls of Black Folk. He wrote about how we have to kind of dance between two worlds, and I was dancing in a world I was not used to, changing the way I shook hands, the way I talked, even the way I played basketball. Everything had to change.

“It really took a toll on me. I had depression. I had anxiety. I stopped going to class. I stopped going out to eat. I was just tired of being the only regular Black person in the room. People would ask, ‘Are you on the football team? Are you on the basketball team?

“There were definitely bits of overt racism — people saying outlandish stuff to me, or me seeing outlandish stuff being done to others. I was in Portland crossing the street and somebody yelled, ‘Cross the street, n-word!’ I was at a Starbucks in Salem, drinking coffee outside, and this lady stopped, thought about it and then just started telling me how Barack Obama and Black people ruined this country.

“On campus, I saw a person driving this big-ass truck, and there was a Black woman standing at the corner, and even though the truck had the green light, the driver stopped, put it in neutral and revved the engine so that all this smoke rolled out and covered her. She was coughing. That hurt my soul.

“Then, finally — and it wasn’t even that big of a deal — I was in a restaurant in Corvallis to pick up a to-go order and there was this white family in there, just staring at me. The wife was looking at me. The dad was trying not to look at me. The kid was all turned around in his chair staring at me, as if they had never seen a Black person before.

“In that moment, I was like, ‘I really wish I could give them something to look at. … I’m going to start putting thoughtful, thought-provoking statements and questions on my shirts. If they’re going to stare at me, they can learn something.’”

That was in September 2017. It turned out that wearing his messages on his back lifted Northern’s spirits right away. At first he kept the shirts’ origin secret.

“I would wear them in Dixon, playing basketball, and I would always lie about how I got them. I would be, ‘Naw, I didn’t make this, my friend from New York made it and sent it to me.’

“But this one guy, an OSU athlete, was like, ‘Yo! What’s your friend’s number? What’s his website?’ and I was like ‘Damn! He got me.’ I told him, ‘Look man, I lied. I make these in my room,’ and he was like, ‘You make these in your room?! Can I buy one? You got any extras? How much?’ I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to charge. I was like, ‘Uh, $30?’ and he said, ‘OK cool, I’ll be by tonight to pick it up.’

“I was excited when I got home. I made a video of me making it and walking it to his house. He wore it all weekend and put it on his Instagram.” The result was dozens of orders.

“It was cool. It was manageable,” Northern said. “I’d do it on the weekend. It kept on growing, and I got more serious about it and bought some good equipment.”

I think it’s so important because it’s saying the things we are all thinking and won’t verbalize.

His fellow students took notice. A fundamentally quiet person, he was modest about the growing brand when Jada Krening ’20 of The Daily Barometer wrote a feature story about him in 2018.

“A lot of people think that it’s this big, extravagant process,” he told her. “I tell people, as I’m making your shirt, I’m probably watching Netflix, just chilling in front of the TV.”

Caleb Michael ’19, then a senior majoring in speech communication, told Krening of growing excitement for the brand among Northern’s fellow students, especially those of color.

“I think it’s so important because it’s saying the things we are all thinking and won’t verbalize,” Michael said.

Christopher Wilson ’20, then a junior studying supply chain and logistics management, was involved in Northern’s early photo shoots. He too talked to Krening about the brand’s local impact:

“It’s important because it empowers students not only through their identities, but through a clothing brand where we can support each other as well as our demographic here at Oregon State.”

Here, from the firm’s website, peopleofcolourclothing.com, is a sampling of what one might read on the back of a current People of Colour shirt:

“I reside in the type of city that’ll gentrify an entire community of African Americans and proceed to replace them with Black Lives Matter signs.”

“End rape culture. Stand firmly against all acts of sexual harassment & assault.”

“I acknowledge my inherited privilege based on the construct of whiteness. I am fully committed to educating myself on social inequality and advocating in white spaces.”

“They’re all inspired from people living life,” Northern said. “I write a lot of stuff down … on napkins, envelopes, miscellaneous pieces of paper and on my phone. I’ll marinate on an idea for a while and see if something sparks.

“I stay in my lane. Other people contribute a lot. Say it’s something about the empowerment of women who wear hijabs. I don’t know anything about that lifestyle. If I want to do something with that, I might take two women who wear hijabs out to lunch, and ask them to write the caption.”

He maintains tight control over the exact wording.

“As Generation Z, or Millennials, we’ve been trained to have a short attention span, so I want the content we use to be concise. I want you to see it, be aware of it, feel it and I want to plant a seed in your brain.

“Three of the things I look for are creating awareness, generating productive discourse and ultimately providing the opportunity for people to examine their conscious behavior. If it checks all of those boxes, it’s a go.”

Northern relies on graphic designers and photographers to make the shirts and other apparel look right, always with the focus on the words.

“As long as the logo’s on the front and the message is captured, I’m good,” he said.

“Let’s say we’re in line at American Dream Pizza here in Corvallis. I’m ordering my meal and you’re standing behind me. I want you, during that 30-second transaction, to read what’s on the back of my shirt, feel it, marinate on it, actually forget for a moment that you’re in American Dream Pizza, and think, ‘Wow, he’s talking about this? On a shirt?’

“I want you to tap the person with you on the shoulder and say, ‘This shirt right here is making me uncomfortable, but it’s a discussion I’m willing to have.’ You might go home and tell your wife about it. You might take a picture.”

As enthusiasm grew for People of Colour and its messages, so did Northern’s confidence. That’s what he wants for all who wear the brand.

“On every shirt I make, it says somewhere on it, ‘Confidence, Community, Culture.’ When you put on a POC shirt, even if you’re the only person in the room who talks like you, looks like you, has the hair you have, I want you to feel confident. When I put on a POC shirt, I walk differently, with a little more gusto.”

He seeks to alienate no one, he said. The goal is to spur productive conversations.

“I want to include allies who are about the cause, white people who are woke, so I have an ally edition shirt. But it’s not like I want you to get the shirt and run to your Black friend or your Hispanic friend or your Asian friend and say, ‘Hey, look what I learned!’

“I want you to advocate at the Thanksgiving table, I want you to advocate at Christmas, I want you to advocate when you have a family member who says something outlandish.

“You can activate your allyship and say, ‘I don’t think that’s right. I’ve educated myself, and I want to have some discourse about this.’”

When he was getting started, Northern raised about $2,500 through crowdfunding to buy what he needed to meet early demand. By the time he graduated in mid-2019, he was ready to bet his economic future on People of Colour. Now he runs a small but well-outfitted apparel-printing and order fulfillment operation in the basement of a house in Corvallis.

The business has steadily grown, he said. The COVID-19 quarantine didn’t make much of a dent in his sales. Then came a resurgence of awareness after the George Floyd killing, and orders quadrupled.

Northern lives upstairs from the shirt-making operation, which makes for an easy commute. “I try to come down here between eight and nine every morning,” he said. “I love it. I play music, and I have my lights, everything I need. I don’t leave until 11, 12 or maybe one in the morning. And I’m excited to wake up, come down here and do it all over again.”

When you’re one of the top colleges of forestry in the world and nearly a million acres of your state are burning, with more than 4,000 homes destroyed, multiple lives lost and cities stopped in their tracks by toxic smoke, it stands to reason that people will turn to you with questions.

The OSU College of Forestry is ready for that, said Tom DeLuca, Cheryl Ramberg Ford and Allyn C. Ford Dean of the College of Forestry, but its answers aren’t simple and they come with a heavy dose of reality and historical perspective.

“We know we’re in a period of shifting climate and subsequent shifting of fire regimes, but the fires themselves are not unprecedented,” he said. Large fires west of the Cascades have tended to occur every 150 to 500 years and burn 100,000 to 1 million acres. What’s different now is that they occur in a warming, drying climate, on human-altered landscapes with more people and more of their property threatened.

Forestry Dean Tom DeLuca. *Photo by Karl Maasdam, ’93*

“Now, with managed forests, and managed-then-not-managed forests, as well as all the human infrastructure that’s built into the forests, we have completely different fuel loading across the landscape than we did 150 years ago.

“But the forests will still burn. All forests burn. All biomass has the potential to burn and under the right conditions it will.”

The realities are that we have to learn to live with fire, just like people learned to live with hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, but that doesn’t mean we have to roll over and play dead.

DeLuca and his colleagues agree that while it’s understandable to want a simple solution to fire concerns, the fire equation is too complicated for one-size-fits-all answers. From ignition to suppression, the variables constantly shift.

“A couple of years back during another bad fire season, about 65% of the wildfires in Oregon were related to human activity — a cigarette in the backcountry, a downed power line, fireworks, you name it,” DeLuca said. “Humans have increased the ignitions. Normally, our firefighters have put out about 97% of the fire starts; the remaining 3% account for the large fires in the U.S.”

People must do what they can to build fire-resistant communities, say the college’s scientists. Public and private landowners must manage forests to make them less susceptible to giant conflagrations, and the methods must be tailored to widely varying fire regimes across the state. Reducing the amount and types of fuel is usually the goal, but techniques vary from intentional burning to letting some small wildfires burn, to having work crews remove woody debris. On range- and grasslands, the answer is often to return vegetation to more natural, fire-resistant patterns.

Associate Dean Katy Kavanagh. *Photo by Karl Maasdam, 93′*

Doing that, noted Katy Kavanagh, the college’s associate dean for research, would show that modern Oregonians can learn from Indigenous Peoples, who routinely set fires to restart natural growth patterns and clear land to increase their food supply. (See the college’s work with tribal land managers.)

Since the wildfire outbreak in late summer, OSU fire experts have been all over national, state and local media outlets, and have advised many government officials. Sometimes that advice differs, colleague to colleague.

“Dueling experts is the definition of science,” Kavanagh said. “We test and refine our thinking. That is frustrating to politicians, I think, because they want an answer and there really isn’t one answer to a lot of these questions. It took centuries to create these conditions, and it will take decades of coordinated effort to address the challenges we face.”

Meanwhile, to help get the researchers’ most applicable solutions into use, the college is collaborating with OSU Extension’s expansion of its fire program, which it proactively launched before the Labor Day fires and includes hiring fire extension agents to work across Oregon.

Meg Krawchuk, associate professor of pyrogeography says of wildfires: “The key part of the problem is that it’s complicated, there is no one single fix that we can invest in for success. The solution portfolios need to be tailored to particular landscapes.” *Courtesy of Oregon State University*

Kavanagh noted that the Labor Day fires — which consumed entire towns as they raced down river drainages, pushed by unusual winds that roared out of the east — offered an important reminder that even doing everything right can’t always protect people and property from fires. She told of a couple of fellow scientists who lived in the woods and followed all the best science in making their property fire-resistant.

When one of the Labor Day fires came roaring toward them, “they had time to grab their laptops and go. The fires we just experienced were humbling. We are not in control when they’re racing like that. And that’s part of this lesson. The likelihood of controlling a fire event like we just experienced is very low.”

DeLuca said experts from the College of Forestry and other colleges at Oregon State remain eager to help managers tailor their land stewardship to particular topographies and fire regimes, to help communities become fire-adapted, and to integrate emerging research with traditional ecological knowledge.

“The realities are that we have to learn to live with fire, just like people learned to live with hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, but that doesn’t mean we have to roll over and play dead,” he said. “The fire management practices of Indigenous Peoples evolved in this region over 15,000 years.

“Whether people want to listen to the realities we can share is another matter, but there’s a lot that can be done.”

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Laura Plomer’s classroom for the pandemic is her family’s air hockey table. Her loyal teaching assistant is Luna, the family’s vizsla pointer-retriever.

Plomer is a second-grade Spanish/English dual-language teacher at Mooberry Elementary School in Hillsboro, and she’s working her way through a showcase OSU program that uses a powerful mix of academic rigor and classroom experience to help aspiring educators turn their passion for teaching into a life’s vocation.

It’s called the Master of Arts in Teaching in Clinically Based Elementary (MAT-CBE) program. Anchored in a strong commitment to social justice and equitable, research-supported, field-tested teaching strategies, it provides effective mentorship and leverages the teaching power of OSU’s highly-ranked Ecampus program, supplemented by occasional in-person classes at OSU’s Portland Center (which temporarily moved to remote instruction during the pandemic).

“High levels of teacher turnover in the profession mean that universities must change how they prepare teacher candidates,” said Amanda Kibler, associate professor and teaching program chair in the College of Education.

“In response, our MAT-CBE program was developed around a clinically-based model. Much like a doctor going through a medical residency, our candidates have hands-on, ‘clinical’ opportunities to learn while doing.”

Staffed by program lead Justin Roach and lead instructor René Pyatt, the MAT-CBE program provides a broadly accessible pathway for students who are passionate about teaching and want to jump-start a career in elementary education.

Working toward his master’s in teaching from home, Daniel Dai teaches kindergartners in his Vietnamese-English class about the Asian New Year. *Photo courtesy Daniel Dai*

“Research suggests that clinically-based models such as ours, with intensive supports and strong district relationships, lead to fewer teachers leaving the profession in the first five years and teachers feeling more effective and supported in their districts,” Kibler said.

The program is a great fit for Plomer. She taught special education for 14 years in her native Argentina. When her husband’s career took the family to Idaho and then to the Portland area, she saw a great need for bilingual Spanish-English teachers as she worked as a classroom assistant.

“I really loved special ed, but I saw this great need in my Hispanic community, and I fell in love with bilingualism,” she said. “My supervisors at the school realized that I was very eager to have my own class and they told me I should get a degree (and a teaching certificate) here.”

“I said, ‘Oh, wow. English is my second language. I don’t know if I could do that.”

Then she found OSU’S MAT-CBE.

“This is big for me,” she said. “While I am learning, I am teaching, and I have a clinical supervisor who is helping me improve.”

Kibler sees Plomer as a great example of one of MAT-CBE’s most important goals — to produce more multilingual and multicultural teachers for Oregon and the nation’s increasingly diverse schools.

According to a report by the Council of Chief State School Officers (2018), about 50% of students but only 20% of teachers in America’s schools are persons of color, she said. In the MAT-CBE program, over 50% of teacher candidates self-identify as persons of color, and over 40% teach in dual-language settings. The program graduates approximately 20 students per year and is growing.

Madeline Elmer found her way to MAT-CBE after she realized she wanted a re-do on her career choice. Growing up in Portland, she always wanted to be a teacher, but she second-guessed herself and went to Colorado State to earn a bachelor’s in marketing.

“I didn’t quite know if I had what it takes to be a teacher,” she said. “Am I patient enough, bubbly enough, energetic enough to do that every single day as a career?”

Business degree in hand, she tried marketing as a career but her urge to teach remained strong. Soon she was shopping for a teacher-training program that wouldn’t require her to physically return to college. Now MAT-CBE has her teaching and learning in her childhood bedroom in her parents’ Portland home, where she presides over a Zoom-roomful of second-graders from Beaverton’s Barnes Elementary School.

With a broad smile, she confirms that she was right about two things: Teaching is her calling, and it is extremely challenging to be an effective teacher.

A 2020 graduate of OSU’s MAT-CBE program, Kimberly Skinner teaches her kindergartners from the classroom they’ll use once her school returns to in-person learning. *Photo by Autumn McConnell*

“You are performing,” she said. “You are up there in front of them, and you have to be engaging. Meanwhile you’re scanning the room, trying to watch all of them at once. Is one of them staring off into space? Are you losing them? You have to find a way to pull them back without embarrassing that student in front of the rest of the class. And then, at night, you’re up late, planning for the next day.”

Daniel Dai is a math whiz with a bachelor’s degree from Portland State, but before he graduated, he volunteered to teach his native Vietnamese language and traditions to grade-school children on Sundays at his church, where parents were worried that their Vietnamese-American children were losing touch with the culture of their ancestors.

“Teaching them, I learned that I liked to teach, and I got a lot more confident,” Dai said. “They inspired me.” He knew he’d found his career path. His shortest route to a teaching certificate would have been to become a high school math teacher.

You’re getting the coursework and you’re also getting the hands-on teaching experience.

“But at church I had learned that I really liked teaching younger students,” he said. “So I kept working on my math degree, and I found the MAT program at OSU.”

Now, as he earns a master’s through the MAT-CBE program, he remotely teaches kindergarten in Vietnamese and English at Rose City Park Elementary School, as part of Portland Public Schools’ dual-language immersion program. His OSU instructors and mentors are always there with advice and resources, he said, and his love for teaching grows with his expertise.

Kimberly Skinner, a June 2020 graduate of the MAT-CBE program, teaches kindergarten from her classroom at Sexton Mountain Elementary School in Beaverton. Child-sized desks and chairs are arrayed in circles in front of her, but the children are all on Zoom.

Madeline Elmer uses large flash cards to remind her students about the keys to a productive day at Zoom school. *Photo by Karl Maasdam*

She grew up in Maryland and aspired to be a potter. Teaching ceramics at a community art center, she discovered that she loved teaching.

“I thought, ‘I could do this for a living,’ but at the same time, I knew teaching pottery part-time wasn’t enough to make a living.”

Thus began a search that would take her across the country to OSU’s MAT program.

“I wanted to be able to work while I was learning, and OSU really one-upped that, because you’re getting the coursework and you’re also getting the hands-on teaching experience.”

The MAT-CBE program began in 2016 as a partnership between OSU and the Beaverton School District and has since expanded to partner with Portland Public Schools’ Dual Language Teacher Residency Program and the Hillsboro School District, among others. It continues to expand to additional districts in or near Portland and the Willamette Valley.

A recent infusion of state money, earned in competition with other programs around Oregon, will help expand the concept to smaller school districts and will also support a new, undergraduate Clinically Based Elementary Education program. Launching this fall, it will serve those without a bachelor’s degree, including many teaching assistants, who want to earn one and become certified teachers.

Designing the specific partnerships can get complicated because school districts can vary widely in local processes and needs, Kibler said. But several key, research-based principles drive the program no matter where it operates.

OSU and its partner districts collaboratively recruit and interview candidates for the MAT-CBE program. District partners devote considerable resources to the program, including funded positions for management and coordination of the program within the district. This includes responsibilities such as arranging pre-service teacher placements and collaboratively supporting the clinical teacher mentors.

For Plomer, Elmer, Dai and Skinner, it all adds up to a chance to fulfill their calling to teach as they help meet a national need for committed, highly skilled teachers.

“As soon as I saw it, I knew it was for me,” Skinner said of the program. “It was exactly what I was looking for.”

Learn more about Oregon State’s MAT-CBE program.

Before he could earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees in math at Oregon State and head off to become one of the most brilliant thinkers of his time, Michael Waterman had to get outside.

In the remote coastal valley where he grew up, “outside” meant anywhere else. It was a place eyed with suspicion, as was anyone who wanted to go there.

His ancestors had settled along Four Mile Creek in the southwestern corner of the state in 1911, having traversed hundreds of unforgiving miles from Eastern Oregon in 45 days in a covered wagon. Motorized transport was available but expensive, so they journeyed the hard way.

The hard way was how Waterman’s father did pretty much everything on the family sheep and cattle ranch, and as soon as his oldest son could work, the boy became his main laborer and a frequent target of physical threats and profane tirades.

“I cannot recall a time as a child when I did not deeply hate him,” Waterman wrote in his 2016 autobiography, Getting Outside: A Far-Western Childhood. “I was like a shovel or an axe, a tool to get the job done.” His father often called him stupid, and routinely harangued him with detailed instructions on how to do simple tasks, then sent him up the valley to work all day on his own.

Neither the father nor the son could know that young Michael was destined for greatness. He would grow up to found the fields of bioinformatics and quantitative biology; be elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering; and receive a Guggenheim Fellowship. Working at the outer edge of human knowledge, he and his colleagues would invent formulas to help microbiologists analyze complex structures and begin to predict what might happen as they changed. To the wizards of the Human Genome Project, Waterman would be what he smilingly calls “their math guy.” In 2020, he would receive the $100,000 William Benter Prize for “outstanding mathematical contributions that have had a direct and fundamental impact on scientific, business, finance and engineering applications.”

I was like a shovel or an axe, a tool to get the job done.

But on those grueling mornings back on the farm, his father delivered Michael’s marching orders as if addressing an idiot, and the boy feigned rapt attention lest he be punished on the spot.

“One of the turning points was when I stopped paying any attention to him after I’d listened long enough to know what I had to accomplish,” Waterman recalled. “I could figure it out on my own, do it smarter and faster and have time to explore.”

He was sustained by those glorious hours when, chores done, he’d hike up to where the creek formed crystalline pools, sometimes getting down on his belly to watch tiny fish dart to and fro.

At 79, Waterman still loves to watch fish flit about in a mountain stream, and sometimes he catches a few on well-presented flies. Semiretired in Pasadena, California, he is a university professor emeritus at the University of Southern California and distinguished research professor at the University of Virginia.

Waterman, who still loves to teach, revels in a meeting with students at the University of Southern California. *Photo by Leah Lee*

He followed his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Oregon State in 1964 and 1966 with a doctorate in statistics and probability from Michigan State University in 1969, then worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and at Idaho State University. His fame grew as he met and exchanged theories and formulas with legendary mathematicians. Always seeking to test his mind, he kept an eye on the elite microbiologists who worked with DNA and RNA structures in living cells.

“For me, it wasn’t necessarily that I wanted to go help the biologists,” he recalled with a mischievous smile. “It was more like, ‘Ooh, they have some really cool problems over there,’ and it pleased me to work on them.”

Work on them he did, and soon he was the acknowledged leader of a new field, quantitative biology, and also its chief promoter.

I wonder, if there wasn’t somewhere like Oregon State for me to go to when I was ready to get outside, what would have happened to me.

“I guess you could say I engaged in a little branding, because what we were doing needed an identity. I looked for opportunities for the area to grow and to bring people in who would make great contributions.” He co-edited the field’s main journal for decades and helped convene annual meetings to share ideas.

“There are thousands of people in it now,” he said.

Thinking back, Waterman marvels at the unlikely progression of his life. In his memoir, he describes what happened after he showed up for first grade at the tiny local schoolhouse:

“In a few weeks, my teacher sent a message home that I was far behind the class. An ex-teacher, my mother was upset and set out to make things right. Amazing to me now, she had not read to me as a child so I had no introduction to reading, nor to arithmetic. She made cards for the letters and sounds, and for arithmetic, and drilled me each night. Apparently I did not learn my sums properly, and in frustration she made me eat one of those flash cards. … Full of flash card, I did learn my letters and sums.”

Published in 2016, Waterman’s autobiography tells the story of how he transcended an isolated and often brutal childhood in a remote coastal Oregon valley where the rest of the world was known, simply, as “outside.”

In third grade he read a biography of frontiersman Daniel Boone that triggered a lifelong devotion to reading as fuel for his imagination. “I quickly read all the books that my schools had in their libraries that were of any interest to me. … My family possessed only a few books, and I suffered from not enough to read. I worried that there might be too few books in the world.”

In high school, a few teachers and counselors told Waterman he had the talent for college. Both his desire to leave the tiny valley and his trepidation about doing so led him to consider Oregon State College, which was, maybe, not impossibly far away. He received little or no encouragement from his family for his desire to better himself, but he would flourish in Corvallis.

His college classwork made it increasingly obvious that he had a gift for sophisticated math, while his summer job in the coastal mountains reminded him of what he was escaping.

“In the logging woods where I worked setting chokers, the cables and winches created dangers which were beyond my experience and intuition,” he wrote. “Limbs and logs flew in every direction and I was often paralyzed by indecision as to which way to run.” Two men were killed on the logging site one year, one decapitated when a steel cable snapped, the other crushed “when a log fell off a truck onto him, the log rolling up the hill a bit before it came back down onto his already-dead body.”

The beat-up old loggers he worked with — men his family looked down upon for their itinerant, rough-hewn lives — tried to keep him alive and admired how hard he worked. As he writes in his book, they urged him to “get that ed-a-cation and don’t spend your life doin’ this. Find yourself a better way to make a living.”

Today Waterman sponsors a scholarship fund to help first-generation students at OSU, and he is on the OSU College of Science Board of Advisors. He said he will always be grateful that the university was there for him when he needed it.

“I wonder, if there wasn’t somewhere like Oregon State for me to go to when I was ready to get outside, what would have happened to me.”

The concept is so well-established that it’s almost cliché: The most important thing humans know about ecosystems is that everything in them is connected. Case in point: Gray whales in Oregon’s ocean eat small animals classified as zooplankton. Zooplankton often eat tiny microplastics or other debris from the human environment.

Ergo, that wayward plastic bag blowing down the beach, or those tiny bits of thread shed by your clothes in the wash, can eventually end up in a whale.

Or maybe in you.

While the cogs in an ecosystem’s machinery are connected, scientists who study these things often are not, instead operating in separate disciplinary silos. Effective study of such interconnected problems requires egoless ecosystems of interconnected scientists.

Just such an ecosystem has emerged at Oregon State, where a partnership of four extraordinary early-career scientists from four different academic homes has developed a project to investigate connections between human-made debris, zooplankton and whales.

Termed COZI, for Coastal Oregon Zooplankton Investigation, the effort started in the whale corner of the food web. Associate Professor Leigh Torres of the Marine Mammal Institute in the College of Agricultural Sciences was studying the small subset of local gray whales that do not migrate to the Arctic to feed but stay in Northwest waters — the so-called Pacific Coast Feeding Group.

Why do they stay? Is the menu better here than there? She and her students began collecting zooplankton near actively feeding whales to see what they were eating.

Imagine a six-foot-tall person with two feet of rope coiled in their stomach.

“I had a lot of questions,” Torres recalled. “Do these predators prioritize one type of prey over another? What is the variation in caloric value of what they’re eating? The more we know about their food choices, the closer we get to understanding why animals show up where they do.”

Torres freely admits she is not a zooplankton expert. Luckily, she knew two at Oregon State, each with complementary expertise that could help answer her questions. First was invertebrate ecologist Sarah Henkel of the Department of Integrative Biology, whose lab is near Torres’ at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport. Henkel and a student began identifying species of zooplankton collected by the Torres lab at whale feeding locations. They had five years of data to work with.

“The local zooplankton communities didn’t show any differences between sites — there was no spatial pattern,” Henkel notes. “So now we’re looking to see if we can relate the communities to larger oceanographic or climate factors over time,” like climate-related ocean warming.

Torres had already observed differences in whale condition over the course of years — she has developed a method that uses drone photography to essentially determine their body mass index (BMI) — and those differences seem tied to climate variability. Henkel said it seems likely that these results mean that climate variability is impacting the whales’ zooplankton prey, a correlation that has been observed elsewhere in the ocean off Oregon.

The four researchers that formed the Coastal Oregon Zooplankton Investigation are, from right to left, Kim Bernard, zooplankton expert, College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences; Leigh Torres, whale expert, OSU Marine Mammal Institute; Sarah Henkel, invertebrate ecologist, College of Science, and Susanne Brander, ecotoxicologist, College of Agricultural Sciences. Photo by Mark Farley

While Henkel and her students described which zooplankton species were present, they also wanted to know about the nutritional value of the whales’ meals. Enter Kim Bernard, also a zooplankton expert and an oceanographer in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. Bernard’s usual field sites are polar — she spent the six months of austral winter at a research station in the Antarctic to study krill a few years ago — but she was curious about the zooplankton closer to home. She brought to the project a wealth of knowledge about collecting zooplankton, helping Torres rig sampling equipment in her small boat. She also knew how to determine caloric content of the zooplankton by using an instrument called a bomb calorimeter, which determines the energy available in an item by burning it under pressure in a highly controlled environment.

Torres and her graduate student, Lisa Hildebrand, M.S. ’21, identified six species of zooplankton in the prey samples they collected near feeding whales. Bernard’s calorimeter data revealed that the most nutritious item on the menu, which might be a factor in keeping those whales from migrating all the way to the Arctic, is Dungeness crab larvae. Uncountable zillions of the tiny proto-crabs swarm in Oregon’s coastal waters in the spring and early summer. Many end up as food for whales.

The final piece of this ecological puzzle clicked because Torres, Bernard and Henkel were curious about microplastics and other debris in the zooplankton. Just as this question loomed large, along came the ideal expert: ecotoxicologist Susanne Brander, from OSU’s Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences in the College of Agricultural Sciences.

Microplastics and other tiny debris have been found in marine species from salmon to mussels, but would they be found in Oregon zooplankton? Answering such a question is painstaking work, involving liquefying each tiny critter and examining what is left behind, much of which is of human origin — tiny pieces of plastic, fibers from clothes. Each particle is then analyzed to reveal its source material.

The chain of evidence.

On the bottom, a 6 mm human-created fiber extracted from sampled zooplankton like the baby crab shown above. Researchers found bits of humanity’s debris in each piece of zooplankton they sampled.

Much caution is required to keep the samples from being contaminated: In Brander’s lab, the lab coats are a cheerful shade of tangerine (the closest they could get to Beaver orange) to help investigators determine whether the particles they find were shed from their own lab clothes, rather than ingested in the environment.

So far, every zooplankton sample Brander and her students have examined has contained human-produced debris of some kind, including microplastics from a variety of sources and tiny cellulose fibers from woven fabrics. From a fraction of a millimeter to several millimeters in length, the foreign particles are often huge in comparison to the size of the tiny organisms that have ingested them.

“Imagine a six-foot-tall person with two feet of rope coiled in their stomach,” Brander said.

What are the implications of this? “If you have a piece of debris in your stomach, that’s going to mean less room for food,” Brander explained. “It also may mean there’s a false sense of satiation, so that animal is less likely to go after food.”

Stuffed with plastic and fibers from our laundry, these tiny animals may starve, or at least provide less nutrition for other animals in the food web.

As is so often the case in science, answers lead to more questions. Henkel points out that now there may be multiple explanations for any observed change in caloric value of whale prey over time.

“If we see a decline over time in caloric density in the zooplankton, we need to ask, is it because of environmental conditions, or because more and more of their body weight is plastic?” she said.

The implications are not yet clear for the whales.

But the researchers emphasize that it’s not just whales that eat zooplankton. “Rockfish also eat zooplankton, and so do lingcod and other important fish in the area,” Torres said. This interconnected food web includes humans, too.

The four scientists have lots of ideas for what to do next with COZI. They may undertake additional work on the effects of climate change on zooplankton caloric value, or perhaps they’ll look more closely at microplastics in the whale poop Torres has collected, or maybe conduct lab work to look at effects of low oxygen on zooplankton. Whatever they do, they want to do it together. It’s clear that the success of this project is partially attributable to the fact that the four scientists truly enjoy working together.

“We all know that we have something unique and valuable to bring to the table, and there’s no pushing or posturing,” Bernard said. “It’s just so easy to work with all three of them.”

BE THE CHANGE:

How you can reduce microdebris in the environment.

The microplastics and other foreign particles that Susanne Brander’s lab is finding in Oregon zooplankton guts are worrisome and widespread. Microplastics have been found from the deep oceans to Antarctic ice, drifting in the air and even in human organs. While a global and corporate commitment to reducing the use of plastics is central to solving this problem, there are steps each of us can take to make a difference.
Minimize your reliance on single-use plastics, meant to be thrown away after only one use. Many microplastics come from the breakdown of larger plastic items, so using fewer of those items can help. Reusable water bottles and shopping bags are no-brainers at this point. Want to go further? Carry a set of utensils with you for takeout food, and try reusable beeswax wraps rather than plastic wrap or sandwich bags at home.
One of the biggest sources of microparticles is fibers from synthetic clothing. While it may be difficult to eliminate microfleece or polyester from your wardrobe, you could install a filter on your washing machine that captures these fibers.
Another huge source of microplastics is the wear of tire treads. Minimize driving by taking public transportation, which has the added benefit of reducing your carbon footprint.

Nancy Steinberg is a science communicator in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. Her prize-winning story, “Fishing for data,” appeared in the winter 2021 Oregon Stater.

As a teen, Rebecca “Becky” Niemi longed to compete, but her 1960s Tigard High School didn’t offer team sports for girls. Then, at 30, a mother of two, Niemi enrolled at Oregon State University and suddenly participating became a possibility.

But was it too late? She approached the track coach. “I asked, ‘Does age count? Can I still get in at age 30?’ She said, ‘I don’t know why not.’”

A year later in 1976, Niemi earned a spot on the first cross country team to represent Oregon State at the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women nationals. “My four years of running meant a lot to me,” Niemi, ’79, said. “Just having been able to be on a team. I never thought that would ever happen.”

It was all thanks to Title IX, legislation enacted by Congress in June 1972 that prohibits sexual discrimination in any educational program or activity receiving federal financial aid.

Prior to Title IX, women athletes made the best of what they had and did what they could without the rest.

While men were provided uniforms, equipment, airfare and prime practice times, women generally took care of themselves. If they needed safety gear, they provided it. Transportation to an event? They drove. Gender-specific equipment? Not likely. And practice? Set the alarm for dawn.

While the act made no mention of athletics, in few fields has the impact been greater.

The landmark legislation, an amendment to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, opened up new opportunities for scholarships and increased participation, as well as access to better equipment, premium venues and countless other resources men’s teams took for granted.

She didn’t question why the only sports available to high school girls in the early 1960s were cheerleading, pep squad and the annual powder puﬀ derby.

Last month, Oregon State celebrated the 50th anniversary of Title IX with the induction of the all-women 2022 Hall of Fame class. The Nov. 5 ceremony at Reser Stadium also honored a group of “Title IX Trailblazers” for their role in paving the way for current and future generations of Oregon State athletes. (See all the Hall of Fame honorees and the list of Trailblazers.)

“Title IX changed my life,” said Niemi, inducted as an individual and as part of the 1977 cross country team. In the early 1960s, she didn’t question why the only sports available to high school girls were cheerleading, pep squad and the annual powder puff derby (when they were given the chance to suit up in football gear for fun). “It was never something that was put out there. It was kind of like, ‘No, girls don’t do that kind of stuff.’ This was my chance to be able to do something I always wanted to do.”

Yet, when Niemi qualified for the nationals in Madison, Wisconsin, her coach didn’t think the department had the money to send her. Niemi’s husband, Larry, a high school teacher and coach, thought otherwise.

Lady Beavers Through the Years

Becky Niemi (center) competed on the first cross country team to represent Oregon State at the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women nationals. Photo from the 1978 OSU yearbook

Mary Ayotte-Law earned All-American status in 1981 and 1982 and was the second OSU gymnast to win a national championship in 1982. Photo from the Oregon Stater

The 1981 softball team placed fi fth in the National Women’s World Series. Mary Newman (bottom left) earned a spot on the all-tourney team along with Lori Davis (top right). Photo from the 1981 OSU yearbook

Donna (Southwick) Alarcon Elizondo was the first woman to receive an athletic scholarship from Oregon State and the university’s first gymnastics All-American. Photo from the 1978 OSU yearbook

On a foggy morning in 1977, the women’s rowing team starts practice. Photo from the 1977 OSU yearbook

Rise Alexander (shown here) and partner Mary Budke led the 1974 women’s golf team to a third place finish nationally. Rise coached at OSU from 1990 to 2014. Photo from OSU Special Collections

Vintage image of a female basketball player shooing a basketball

Carol Menken-Schaudt takes a shot in 1981. Menken-Schaudt still holds Oregon State career records for points, rebounds and fi eld goal percentage. Photo by Mike Shields

Pathbreaker Sylvia Moore served as an OSU coach and in multiple administrative positions. She was the first woman to act as interim director of intercollegiate athletics. Photo from OSU Special Collections

Vintage image of OSU women's basketball team

The storied 1979-1980 Oregon State women’s basketball team pose with their Women’s National Invitation Tournament trophy in 1980. Photo from OSU Special Collections

Vintage image of OSU volleyball players and their coach

Coach Aki Hill with players Jan Martin and Robyn Clark at a game in 1980. Hill remains the winningest coach in OSU women’s basketball history. Photo from the Oregon Stater

“He was very vocal about it,” Niemi said. “He wanted to be sure she knew they would not be in compliance with Title IX.” In the end, Niemi, another runner and the coach were able to go.

“As a result of that, I was able to do something I really enjoyed,” she said. “It got me out, got me focused on doing something I always wanted to do. It gave me the opportunity to meet new people, see how hard I could push myself, learn to make decisions, deal with failure, accept criticism, and there’s the work ethic that comes out of that. The girls up and coming saw me and said ‘If she can do it, I can too.’”

Title IX also changed Donna (Southwick) Alarcon Elizondo’s life, though in the mid-1970s, she knew nothing about the new legislation. In 1976, she led the Linn-Benton Community College gymnastics team to the National Junior College Athletic Association championship and was named all-around individual champ. But that was to be the end of her college career. There was no money to go further. While her husband would continue his education on the GI Bill, Alarcon Elizondo resigned herself to a future in a low-paying job.

“Next thing you know I’m getting a call from Ron Ludwig, the coach, saying OSU is offering me an athletic scholarship based on Title IX,” Alarcon Elizondo recalled. She was the first woman to receive an athletic scholarship from Oregon State.

“There were more opportunities. There was more recruiting. They were now able to give opportunities to women that were before just for men,” said Alarcon Elizondo, who was recognized at the November celebration. “It made it so girls felt like now they had a chance for an athletic scholarship and would be able to continue their sport of choice. That was very big.”

Alarcon Elizondo went on to become the first Oregon State All-American in women’s athletics. Instead of toiling away in a minimum wage job as she’d feared, she opened her own gymnastics school.

One of the main disparities that stands out for many women student-athletes from the years before Title IX was in equipment. Mary Newman, ’81, recognized at the Hall of Fame ceremony as a Title IX trailblazer and inducted as part of the 1980 and 1981 softball teams, remembers women buying their own safety equipment, practicing in the Women’s Building gym and having to take their uniforms home to be laundered.

“It was so goofy,” Newman said. “Men had the best of everything. We were just the siblings that were little and disadvantaged. We did not have safety equipment. So, if you were a catcher, your catcher’s gear was either self-supplied or inherited, passed down from generation to generation. We knew the men’s baseball team was not like that. They had all kinds of practice gear and safety gear provided. They had the big face mask, the chest protector, shin guards and whatnot. I don’t think there even was a training program for the women.”

Swimming and rowing coach Astrid Hancock — the only coach inducted this year into the Hall of Fame — also remembers the lack of appropriate equipment. While she coached at OSU from 1964-1973, women rowers used the men’s boats, which were designed to the scale of a man’s body. They showered and changed in an old house while the men had a new locker room, and the women rowers trained with a male coxswain.

When they traveled to meets, they used the equipment available at the meet, equipment that wasn’t adjusted to them, equipment they didn’t know. The odds were against them before the starting gun went off. Team members began raising money to buy their own equipment by taking on odd jobs on campus and around town. They cleaned up the stadium and painted address numbers on the front of people’s houses.

Despite the inequities, the men and women got along well, even competing together in mixed events.

“Since we didn’t own any of our equipment, we used the men’s boats,” Hancock said. “They weren’t always too happy about that. One time they got a new racing shell, and we finally convinced them we could use that. The women ended up landing up on the docks and got a crack in it. That wasn’t so good.”

Like the equipment, travel was also different for women. Most of the men’s teams flew to games out of state. Save for the occasional national event, the women drove. Sharing the long miles in the vans made for some memories, but also some difficult times. Women’s basketball coach Aki Hill remembered her assistant coach sleeping in the car on recruiting trips, and Hill’s husband picking up the dinner tab for the team on the road. “We had a great time anyway,” said Hill. “We didn’t want to complain.”

Complaining would have meant using energy and time that could have been better spent playing ball and producing a good team, she said. “It was my privilege to go step by step. Luckily, in 1995, finally we packed the gym. I think we sometimes outdrew the men’s game. It took a long time. But we did it.”

Hill, who coached OSU Women’s Basketball from 1978-1995, is the winningest coach in Oregon State Women’s Basketball history. Her 1979 National Women’s Invitational Tournament finalist and 1980 NWIT champion teams were recognized in this year’s Hall of Fame ceremony as trailblazers.

Carol Menken-Schaudt, ’81, was a member of both the 1979 and 1980 teams, but had it not been for Title IX, a four-year college would not have been an option. She was a student at Linn-Benton Community College when she was recruited to play for Oregon State’s newly formed women’s basketball team. That led to a partial scholarship and then two full-year scholarships.

It was her time playing under Hill that led to her place on the U.S. women’s 1984 gold-medal Olympic basketball team. She ended up playing professionally for eight seasons, including six years in Italy and two in Japan. She still holds Oregon State’s career records for points (2,243), rebounds (901) and field goal percentage (.692).

“I really grew under her leadership,” Menken said of Hill. “I really became a national player through those three years.”

Change in women’s sports did come, though it didn’t happen overnight, said Sylvia Moore, who served as director of Women’s Athletics, after Pat Ingram, during implementation of Title IX.

In 1995, finally we packed the gym. I think we sometimes outdrew the men’s game. It took a long time. But we did it.

Prior to the legislation, women’s sports had to borrow equipment from the physical education department. “It was probably the late ’70s before we began getting equipment that was just used by the athletic program,” she said. “We worked with [OSU presidents] Dr. MacVicar and then Dr. Byrne after that. It just gradually grew over time. That was due to the support of the university presidents because they recognized they couldn’t treat women students differently than male. It wasn’t a rapid progress; it was an evolution.”

The evolution led to safety equipment and gear designed specifically for a woman’s body. Players no longer had to practice at dawn and had access to the weight rooms and better gym times.

There was also more money for recruitment and outreach. “Once Title IX came in, there was lots of interest in women’s athletics,” Hancock said. “By 1974, there were so many people coming out for rowing, they had to cut people. In 1970 and ’71, we had only eight people on the team. That doubled in ’72 and ’73 to 14 or 15 and then by ’74, I can’t even count how many people were going out for the team.”

There’s no doubt Title IX changed the world of sports and continues to do so. The Women’s Sports Foundation reports that girls’ participation in high school sports is 12 times higher than it was in 1972 with 3 million more sports activities available for high school girls. Likewise, in collegiate sports, women now make up 44% of all NCAA student-athletes, compared to 15% pre-Title IX.

“It essentially put women’s sports on the map and provided the framework for opportunities and resources to flow to young female athletes who wanted equal footing to compete and perform at the same high level as men,” Newman said.

“Looking back at the fact that there are now professional leagues for women’s basketball and soccer and intercollegiate competition in so many sports that attract multimillions in attendance and revenue dollars – that didn’t happen by accident. It was Title IX opening the doors to resources and recognition that was key to attracting athletes, sponsors and the public supporting that women are phenomenal athletes and worth watching. It has been wonderful to see.”

But, she said, “The work to bring equality to women’s sports is not done and still needs care and attention to ensure we do not go backwards and that the gains made over time do not reverse.”

So far, most agree the movement continues to move forward. Not only has the playing environment improved dramatically, but – not surprisingly – so too have the players.

“The product on the court is a much better product than the three years I was at Oregon State. There’s certainly a bigger fan base,” Menken said. “You learn so much through sports. You develop so many skills that just change the trajectory of your life. I’m encouraged by the opportunities the women have today.”

Learn more about today’s efforts to increase scholarships, improve facilities and more for Oregon State University women’s sports.

The story of OSU’s 4-H program and the ways it reaches nearly 75,000 children across Oregon has so many important parts that it almost defies telling.

In and around John Day, in remote Grant County, 4-H is Tate Waddel, born with cerebral palsy, and his mom Simmie Waddel or one of his siblings — all 4-H members — rising early on a frigid morning to help Tate care for Bam Bam the half-ton steer.

Bam Bam was destined to be sold at the 4-H auction so Tate could give the proceeds to the local physical therapy team that cares for him. It was a good deed that would trigger a cascade of generosity that will impact John Day and the surrounding area for years to come, but more on that later.

Oregon 4-H is also Maureen Hosty, 4-H director in Multnomah County, teaching unforgettable lessons about endangered wildlife and indigenous culture as she takes a pair of live lampreys on a tour of pandemic-bored Portland schools. The slimy fish with their scary-looking sucker mouths provide a compelling way to tell an impactful tale.

Tate Waddel shows his steer, Bam Bam, with help from his mom, Simmie Waddel, raising $33,000 for charity at the Grant County 4-H auction. Photo by Steven Mitchell

“I never thought walking into a school with a couple of eels splashing in a tub would make me feel like Mick Jagger,” Hosty said. As OSU’s Leonard and Brenda Aplet Financial Literacy Professor, she also teaches 4-Hers how to manage money.

And 4-H is Mario Magaña Álvarez, ’97, M.A.I.S. ’99, state 4-H outreach specialist, sorting through college and high school graduation invitations from multiple generations of Latinx students whose lives he has altered with programs that reach into communities to show students how to rise from humble beginnings and earn their way to an education. His personal story is their story, and he shares it with fierce joy and encouraging candor. There’s no telling how many generation-changing transformations his work has ignited.

4-H in Oregon is also excited kids learning to swim in the pool (the one with the familiar 4-H green shamrock painted on the bottom) at the Oregon 4-H Center north of Salem.

I never thought walking into a school with a couple of eels splashing in a tub would make me feel like Mick Jagger.

It’s children who might never have considered flying for a living, or maybe even designing airplanes or spaceships, sitting in a cockpit as a whole new ambition takes root during a 4-H aviation club field trip to the local airport.

It’s a city kid who’d never visited the Oregon on the other side of the Cascades getting a chance to try ranch life as part of a 4-H exchange, discovering he’s a cowboy (a real one, not the movie kind) at heart, and going on to become a well-paid, expert ranch hand. And it’s a country kid going the other direction in the same exchange program, spending time with a Portland surgeon and realizing that’s exactly what she wants to be and going on to accomplish that.

Among myriad other opportunities, OSU 4-H participants can master sewing skills, learn how to harvest salmon eggs and get them fertilized and hatched and then, after tending them, release the babies to swim toward the ocean. Photos courtesy Oregon 4-H

Or how’s this: At a time when civil discourse can seem imperiled from top to bottom in our democracy, 4-H is thousands of young people sitting in mandatory business meetings for 4-H clubs that offer their favorite subject — maybe sewing or canning or dog training or entrepreneurship or robotics or raising bunnies or long-distance fitness running — and learning to conduct their business and speak clearly in public and make progress on their issues with respect for everyone’s opinion.

A 2019 impact statement provided data-driven insight into the scale of the program, using pre-pandemic numbers.

Across the U.S., more than 6 million children are involved, making 4-H the nation’s largest out-of-school program for children (notwithstanding that many of its programs reach into schools).

About 75,000 young people across Oregon participate, with 9% living on farms, 36% in towns with a population of 10,000 or less, 24% in cities between 10,000 and 50,000, and 30% in urban areas (including suburbs) larger than 50,000.

More than 6,000 adult and youth volunteers across the state make it all possible by leading clubs and teaching skills.

At Oregon State, 4-H is one of several programs under the umbrella of the OSU Extension Service, which in turn is part of the Division of Extension and Engagement. A stated goal of OSU 4-H is to have a person from the OSU faculty, with an appropriate master’s degree, in charge of 4-H in each of Oregon’s 36 counties.

It’s all part of the university’s time-honored, land-grant commitment to spread practical knowledge wherever it’s needed.

In all but one county (Multnomah), 4-H is funded partially by a locally imposed extension tax. Other support comes from government appropriations, from fees charged to the children who participate and from philanthropy.

Oregon 4-H is supported by the Oregon 4-H Foundation, a group of impassioned volunteers that operates as part of the OSU Foundation. Its members are tasked with lofty fundraising goals to maintain and expand 4-H across the state, while keeping it affordable for children from cash-strapped families.

And while 4-H has proven over the years that it will evolve and offer almost any type of knowledge-based, practical content for young people that’s needed, it has never turned its back on its roots — the cooking, canning, sewing and livestock raising that many envision when they see the familiar green shamrock.

And that brings us back to 10-year-old Tate Waddel and his 4-H story. Tate was born with a life-threatening disorder that got worse and left him with cerebral palsy. He was life-flighted out of John Day and spent his first 61 days at Doernbecher Children’s Hospital in Portland.

An Oregon 4-H outreach program brings children who might not be thinking about college careers to campuses to get a sense of what it might be like to be a scientist. Animals from frogs to horses and beyond are frequently part of the 4-H experience. Photos courtesy of Oregon 4-H

“We drove one to two times a month to Portland or Bend for the first five years of Tate’s life,” recalled his mom Simmie. She and Tate’s dad, Wade, who is a sheriff’s deputy, have huge extended families in the area, so large that their 4-H kitchen skills club is called the “Cookin’ Cousins.”

Tate is “about as upbeat as they come,” his mom said. “He’s not a big complainer. Everybody knows him. He has absolutely no filter, says hello to everyone he sees and gives them a high five.”

She seemed surprised when asked how old Tate was when he showed an interest in 4-H.

“Around here, it’s not really a decision. 4-H is a way of life for us,” she said. For years, Tate raised a calf and took it to the 4-H auction, but in 2021 he decided he wanted to raise a full-sized steer and give the profits to the local rehab unit that cared for him. Here’s what happened next:

Tate named the steer Bam Bam. Simmie asked the local feed store if she could buy Bam Bam’s feed at cost. A national feed supplier offered it for free. Local businesses reimbursed the family for the original cost of Bam Bam. Steven Mitchell of the Blue Mountain Eagle wrote a great story about Tate’s plan. Someone from the Sisters-based Roundhouse Foundation, on the lookout for ways to help organizations in rural Oregon, saw the story and donated warm coats for the 4-H Tree of Joy and enough money to help with 4-H fees for any youngster in Grant County.

Bam Bam sold for an astonishing $33,000 at the auction. None of it would have happened, said Simmie Waddel, without the support of 4-H.

“Community involvement, citizenship, running a business, running a meeting, public speaking, raising and caring for an animal, hard work, responsibility and making good choices,” she said. “It’s all in there. That’s what 4-H does.”

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