One would be hard pressed to find a current Whitman student thinking about their future 25th college reunion. But as the Alumni Association discovered this past summer, if the Whitman College archives continue to be short on materials about student life over the past decades, future alumni events will prove more difficult to plan and will be far less enjoyable for all parties involved.
Junior history major Liam Nance spent her summer working in the archives as a student intern and research assistant, and she was crucial in making this discovery.
Nance worked closely with the Alumni Association and much of her summer work centered on surveying and organizing the materials in the archives so that they would be ready for use for future oral and written history projects.
To date, only two volumes of Whitman’s history have been written. Written by former Whitman professor G. Thomas Edwards, they cover the years from the college’s establishment in 1859 up to 1975. The second and most recent volume, Tradition in Turbulent Age: Whitman College 1925-1975, was published in 2001.
Nance’s work revealed that of the materials dating from 1975 to the present, little information exists about student and campus life.
“Given that the college no longer has a yearbook, there’s really no systematic way that the college preserves documents, especially those regarding student life,” said Nance. “For example, the files on the greek groups for these years are almost empty. There are no minutes from the Associated Students of Whitman College (ASWC) meetings since the early 1970s.”
Unlike other academic institutions, Whitman has no policy regarding what types of documents must be regularly submitted to the archives.
“What would be ideal would be to have regular deposits of materials such as minute books,” said Whitman Archivist and Special Collections Librarian Michael Paulus.
This is currently done with the college’s institutional and official records. Important minutes are printed and the copies are submitted to the archives for preservation, thus securing them for future use in case the originals are damaged or lost.
“Something similar could be done with records of student groups,” said Paulus. Such a system would guarantee that future members of these organizations as well as historians would have access to these materials.
The Alumni Association, under the leadership of Associate Director of Alumni Nancy Mitchell, is currently looking for other avenues of increasing student submissions to the archives. One such avenue that Mitchell has suggested is working with ASWC to encourage student clubs and organizations to regularly submit their minutes, newsletters, composites, and other materials to the archives. The Alumni Association is currently working with ASWC and President Elliott Okantey to discuss such an idea.
Nance echoed the benefit of Mitchell’s proposal. “All clubs on campus are supposedly required to submit their minutes to ASWC. It would be so easy for ASWC to take these minutes, make copies of them and submit them to the archives,” she said. “Then the archives would have this great documentation of student life.”
“In addition to that, college sports and intramural teams and the greek groups can easily submit pictures from their events,” Nance said.
The Alumni Association strongly encourages members of the Whitman community to begin submitting their materials to the archives on a more regular basis.
“Documenting student life is so important because it is constantly changing,” said Mitchell.
“When it comes time to write the next history of the college, which will cover your college years, we want the researcher to have adequate information to work with. Also, when you come back for your reunion (yes, that will happen some day!) there will be materials we can use to enhance your reunion experience,” Mitchell said in an email.
