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Higher education has a unique capacity to address national priorities, confront global challenges, and improve outcomes for humanity. Many of our most important medical, technological, and social advancements have been driven by academic researchers who dedicate their careers to furthering our collective knowledge.

Our society benefits from the rigorous work accomplished at U.S. colleges and universities—not just at large research institutions but at small liberal arts colleges such as Occidental.

From art to history to politics, the �������� calendar has been top-heavy with visitors who had plenty to say this semester. �������� Live! welcomed visual artist Ed Ruscha to Thorne Hall on February 4. On February 18 and 19, historian and reproductive justice advocate Deirdre Cooper Owens visited Occidental as the 2025 Stafford Ellison Wright Scholar-in-Residence. On April 8, Atlantic staff writer Tom Nichols delivered the 2025 Jack Kemp ’57 Distinguished Lecture in Choi Auditorium.

When South Carolina resident Julian Washington enlisted in the Army in 1966, he expected to be deployed to Vietnam for his service. Instead, he was sent to learn photography during basic training in New Jersey. After that, he did public relations and photojournalism while stationed in Germany, and he continued to pursue photography professionally after his discharge in 1969. “I grew up with my dad taking pictures and with cameras and lights being around,” says his daughter, Janna Ireland.

Mira Hart ’26 enjoyed science in high school and assumed she would major in chemistry, although as a self-described “outdoorsy person,” she had a hard time imagining herself working with molecules in a lab as a career. But when she joined the Geology Club in her first semester at Occidental, the Seattle resident found her passion—a field of study that combined her existing love for the outdoors and chemistry with her newfound interests.

“Politics was something my family never shied away from talking about within our household,” Samantha Acuña says. “My parents have had very different trajectories in terms of their life and immigration experiences because of the political histories of their respective countries. All the work I do is inspired by my family and our own history.”

It’s a meet-cute story that bears repeating: Anne Marie Kurtz ’57 met her future husband, George Novinger ’54, in a bedroom of the ATO house. “George had been injured in a football game against Pomona, and he was sitting on the bed, with his leg in a cast, where the girls put their coats and purses,” she recalls. “I immediately fell for him because he was very good-looking. George said he’d been smiling and waving at me on the Quad for weeks, but I would look the other way because I was very nearsighted.

Professor of Classics William D. Ward is a seminal figure in the early development of ��������. He arrived at Occidental in 1906 as dean of faculty, having previously served as president of the College of Emporia in Kansas (which closed its doors in 1972). Ward pivoted to the classroom in 1909, brought about the revival of Greek drama on campus, and personally discovered the site of Remsen Bird Hillside Theater when surveying the property that would become Occidental’s third and permanent home in Eagle Rock.

At the height of his officiating career in the 1970s, Jim Tunney ’51 was the embodiment of the football referee—so much so “that he was chosen by the editors of the NFL’s Pro magazine to model the referee signs that are shown in the game program each week,” Bob Oates wrote in a 1978 Los Angeles Times profile of Tunney.

Before a group of middle and high school teachers in Cushman Boardroom, Associate Professor of History Jane Hong introduces the story of Chol Soo Lee, a Korean American immigrant who spent 10 years on Death Row after being wrongfully convicted in 1974 of murdering a Chinatown gang leader in San Francisco. “This is about the carceral system and what it does to people over time,” she says. “This is ultimately not a triumphal story. It takes a really long time, and he does get his conviction overturned. But spending years in jail is not something he just got over.