Dry Ice Factory

I'm doing statistics for the International Student Services office, and I'm always fascinated by where our international students come from. We have students from 112 different countries. The top countries are all Asian, except for Canada:

1. People's Republic of China (3324)
2. Republic of Korea (630)
3. Taiwan (ROC) (426)
4. India (354)
5. Hong Kong (209)
6. Indonesia (196)
7. Japan (154)
8. Canada (141)
9. Thailand (123)
10. Vietnam (88)
11. Malaysia (86)

Singapore comes in 13th at 59 students, but what's also interesting is that there are two Middle Eastern countries before we get to our first European country: Saudi Arabia (85) and Iran (55). Then we get to Germany (48) and the UK (46).

We don't seem to draw very strongly from Latin America, with Mexico being the top one at 21 students, and then Chile at 19 and Brazil at 18. Only 27 from Australia and 19 from New Zealand.

Countries that have only sent us one student: Albania, Botswana, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Haiti, Iraq, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Moldova, Mozambique, Rwanda, Syria, Trinidad & Tobago, and Yugoslavia.

Early in 1861 Arthur and Mary Denny, Charles and Mary Terry, and Edward Lander donated land on a forested 10-acre knoll overlooking Elliott Bay. The University was established there, on the site of what is now the Fairmont Olympic Hotel on University Street in downtown Seattle.

The Territorial University of Washington opened November 4, 1861. The fledgling University was little more than a backwoods school, which closed for lack of funds several times during its earliest years. The first faculty consisted of one professor who taught a curriculum that included Latin, Greek, English, history, algebra, and physiology.

-- Historic Overview - University of Washington

Today we're celebrating the 150th birthday of the University of Washington. 1861 was also the year the U.S. Civil War began, and on Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog they've been discussing how "two old ladies back-to-back" gets you back to an era when it was legal to own a human being in this country. In a similar vein, we were talking at a meeting yesterday about how somebody who has worked at the UW for thirty years (there were two at the table) has worked here for a fifth of the existence of the university. So I guess we're still young, and the history is still fresh. It only took 150 years to evolve from a backwoods school with a single professor to a world class research university.

Happy birthday, University of Washington!

Update: Good stuff from the Seattle Times, "UW began 150 years ago in audacious manner":

"Education throughout the Sound district is in an extremely backward condition," wrote William Barnard, the second president of the university, shortly after he resigned from his post in 1866.

"As an illustration: Not one of the misses attending the university, the first quarter after our arrival, could accurately repeat the multiplication table," Barnard wrote.

"Society is also greatly disorganized; drunkenness, licentiousness, profanity, and Sabbath desecration are the striking characteristics of our people," said Barnard, who counted "two distilleries, 11 drinking establishments, one bawdy house (brothel)" — and gambling going on just about everywhere.

It's worth remembering that the first settlers arrived in Seattle in 1851, and there were only 250 settlers and no high schools in the settlement when the UW was founded ten years later. Why build up to a university? Full speed ahead.

'Over the past three years, the amount of money the UW receives from the state has fallen 50 percent. ... In the early 1990s, the state Legislature picked up about 80 percent of the cost of educating each student; in 2011, the state will pick up about 30 percent.'

-- Seattle Times, "UW regents set to approve biggest-ever tuition increase"

On Sunday the Seattle Times published a story with the provocative headline, "Why straight-A's may not get you into UW this year". I haven't read the story, but the gist of it, as far as I can tell, is that the UW is cutting the number of freshman slots reserved for in-state students by 150 this year. They admitted 4017 in-state freshmen last year and have a goal of 3850 this year, increasing the out-of-state/international students from 1480 to 1800. The UW says they will cut the number of in-state freshman slots by 500 next year. The reason is the budget crisis. Non-resident students pay around $25,000 in tuition as compared to around $9,000 for resident students plus a state subsidy of $7,000. More out-of-state and international students means more money for the budget.

In today's Seattle Times Danny Westneat has a good response to those folks who are understandably angry that it has gotten even tougher for their children to get into the UW: "UW gives us what we asked for". The nut of the argument is that 25 years ago the state subsidized in-state students by 85%. Today the state subsidy is only 45%. Less state support is leading directly to fewer state students. It's really that simple. The UW is in the process of becoming a private school with no responsibility to cater to local students.

I think it's a crying shame that tax-payers aren't willing to subsidize higher education to a greater degree, but that's the way it is. I haven't been able to find the article since I read it, but the Seattle Times also published a story in the past year about local business leaders becoming concerned about the budget-cuts being imposed on the UW and looking at ways to create a trust fund or some other funding source outside the state-funding structure. This seems utterly bass-ackwards to me (why not fight to increase the state-subsidy?), but if that's the way we're really going, then it really is another sign of impending privatization.

I'm not clear on what's going on at the other state schools. A co-worker who went to WSU said they are increasing the number of in-state students to compensate for the budget cuts, but that doesn't make sense to me, since the state caps the number of slots it will subsidize at each school.

In any event, the privatization of the UW long predates the current budget crisis. It's been an ongoing trend since at least the '90s and Tim Eyman's first initiatives to reduce taxes. It's simply being accelerated now.

One of the cynical jokes in our office for the past decade or so has been that every department on campus wants to put "environment" or "information" in their names in order to sound modern and relevant. The most recent example of this is the School of Marine Affairs, which just changed its name to the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs.

In fact, the SMEA is these days part of a new college called the College of the Environment that was formed within the university in Autumn 2009. This was a merger of the College of Forest Resources and the College of Ocean and Fishery Sciences (of which the School of Marine Affairs was part) with several other departments, including Atmospheric Sciences, Earth and Space Sciences (formerly Geology and Geophysics), and the interdisciplinary Program on the Environment. "Spanning the forests to the seas, from the depths of the earth to the edges of the solar system, the College is an unrivaled constellation of environmental research, education, and application." At the time the college was proposed, it was claimed that it was the first of its kind nationally, although Google tells me that other universities have similar colleges, including Western Washington University, Wesleyan University, and University or Rhode Island (where it's called the College of the Environment and Life Sciences). I don't know who really started the trend.

One of the things I find interesting about the College of the Environment is that it folds in two programs that began as adjuncts of extractive industries: Forest Resources and Fishery Science. The fact that these programs are now finding shelter under the environmental umbrella is an indicator of how much those industries have shrunk in importance in the Pacific Northwest economy, I think. I am reminded of my cousin's husband -- the CEO of a large lumber company -- who commented that the UW's forest resources program no longer produces people of any use to his company. On the other hand, one of the other changes within the School of Forest Resources (as it is now called) is that the Paper Science and Engineering program changed its name to the Bioresource Science and Engineering program, which I assume is a reflection of the interest in products such as biofuels these days, so it still isn't all tree-hugging down there. Then again, I notice my cousin's husband's company's webpage touts "Sustainability" first thing upon arrival, and goes on to tell us that wood sequesters carbon.

Well, it's been longer ago than all this that the School of Library and Information Science became the zippy Information School offering a zippy new Bachelor of Science in Informatics as well as the more traditional Master of Library and Information Science. Stay tuned for further mergers. The College of Environmental Informatics is still a possibility. It might even actually make sense in these changing times.

There was a shooting on campus earlier this morning. Looks like a guy was stalking his ex-girlfriend who had gone through a number of maneuvers, both logistical and legal, to keep him away from her. She was, rightly, afraid for her life. He killed her and then killed himself. Why don't these asshole losers just kill themselves? It makes me sick to my stomach.