Five questions with Alisa Kessel, professor of politics and government

Under ordinary circumstances, Dana Levy ’21 has a lot going on. 

Levy is double majoring in English and gender and queer studies (GQS) with a minor in music. He’s also a violinist and active member of the Puget Sound LGBTQ community. (Levy identifies as transmasculine.) 

Last summer, however, looked like it would be pretty quiet. The coronavirus had nixed any prospects for a summer job, and by early June, the California native was, he says, “sitting around, twiddling my thumbs.” 

When retired Boeing executive John Monroe ’79 talks with high school students about careers in aerospace, he enjoys telling them he started at $1.92 an hour. “Their jaws kind of drop,” says Monroe. He goes on to tell them that, 37 years later, he was in charge of Boeing’s 777 airliner program. 

Until 2020, T’wina Nobles had no intention of running for the state Senate. She was doing work she loved as president and CEO of the Tacoma Urban League, and had just been re-elected to the University Place School Board. Community members and legislators had occasionally suggested she run for state office, and she would say, “Nope. It’s not my time.” 

When David Moore was a grad student at the University of Utah, his advisor, Paul Florsheim, invited Moore to help him develop an ambitious study of 1,000 young unwed parents. The researchers were especially interested in young fathers: “We explored what kind of fathers they hoped to be, what they were concerned about, what they were excited about,” says Moore, 49, a father of two who has taught at Puget Sound since 2002. They’ve turned their research into a book, Lost and Found: Young Fathers in the Age of Unwed Parenthood (Oxford University Press, 2020).

Five questions with Dan Sherman, professor of environmental policy and decision making

Artist, mom, and adventurer Abby Williams Hill paints a portrait of the American West in journals

As a political scientist who studies war and international conflicts, Seth Weinberger often finds his research intersecting with current events. As the U.S. was deploying troops to the Middle East after 9/11, he was researching war powers and the constitutional balancing act between the executive branch and Congress. Now, the professor of politics and government is asking big questions about domestic extremism and how to define a shared national identity in the midst of deep political division.

When Serena Sevasin ’22, Mimi Duncan ’22, and Jaylen Antoine ’22 stepped up into the bed of a pickup truck in the parking lot next to Memorial Fieldhouse and prepared to address the crowd of thousands of people, they knew they were experiencing a once-in-a-lifetime moment. Despite having never planned a protest before, these rising juniors and members of the Black Student Union (BSU) struck a chord with the community, organizing the largest Black Lives Matter protest in Tacoma during the summer of 2020.
 

Over the years, Lynnette Claire has observed a fundamental shift in the economy. Claire notes, “In business, we used to say, ‘Once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur.’ Now, we see people move in and out of entrepreneurship throughout their careers.” Now teaching courses in entrepreneurship, management, and strategic consulting as professor and director of Puget Sound’s School of Business and Leadership, Claire believes that anyone can benefit from learning to think like an entrepreneur.