L&C in the News

Oregon Public Broadcasting profiles Alicia Ouellette, the incoming dean of Lewis & Clark’s Law School. Dean Jennifer Johnson, who is stepping down after a decade leading our Law School, increased the school’s endowment by more than 52%. Ouellette, the former president and dean of Albany Law School in New York, looks forward to building on this success. As OPB reports, she is “excited to see how the law school engages with the city and the community and to grow those connections.”

World renowned artists Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle spent ten days in residence at Lewis & Clark’s EAR (Experimental Art Research) Forest. The resulting work leaves audiences “full of admiration for Sprinkle and Stephens and the Lewis & Clark Faculty who work as both artists and academics, making space to be in life-changing relation to students,” according to art critic Hannah Krafcik. “Amidst the pressure cooker of the brewing climate crisis, this whole experience at EAR Forest offered a breath of fresh air.” 

As the affordable housing crisis takes hold across large cities, small towns, suburban areas, and rural counties, some communities are imposing penalties on people who are living outside. The Supreme Court is currently considering a challenge to the way Grants Pass, a town in southern Oregon, is penalizing unhoused people. Lewis & Clark Professor Tung Yin explains the Constitutional issues at the heart of the case.

Scientists are increasingly finding evidence of sentience – conscious thought or experience – among insects, fish, and other creatures. This understanding of consciousness across species has important legal implications, notes Lewis & Clark Professor Raj Reedy. Currently, federal law does not classify animals as sentient, according to Reddy. Instead, laws pertaining to animals focus primarily on conservation, agriculture or their treatment by zoos, research laboratories, and pet retailers. Recognizing sentience might lead to different judicial opinions in cases that involve or effect these creatures.

Colleges and universities rely on the returns from investing their endowments. But many schools make those investments without addressing the issues that will shape students’ lives for decades to come. That’s why the Intentional Endowments Network created their new Endowment Impact Benchmark to gauge institutions’ progress on social and environmental objectives. Using the EIB, they gave the highest marks to Lewis & Clark, the only institution to achieve a platinum award. Earning the platinum rating “is a gratifying validation of Lewis & Clark College’s dedication to sustainability and principled action in our investing approach,” says Andrea Dooley, L&C’s chief financial officer and vice president of operations.

Every year, policy experts from around the world debate in person at Lewis & Clark’s International Affairs Symposium. But it’s not just the students who learn from these events. As civil discourse deteriorates in many places across our country and the world, IAS provides a space in which even those with drastically opposing views can engage, as Todd Miller notes. “I enjoyed my time with the students and professors and sensed genuine engagement and curiosity about the issues, including the ever-polemic border.” He even credited listening to John Bolton, someone with whom he vehemently disagrees, as providing him the insights he will weave into the conclusion of his next book. Miller credits his time at L&C with imbuing him with “an ability to courageously look across borders and actually be curious and engaged, and to listen to what people are saying. That was my indirect lesson from Bolton: maybe it is by listening, rather than talking, that debates are actually won.”

Native American women are overrepresented in U.S. prisons, and among “juvenile” prisoners, Native American girls are incarcerated at a rate more than four times that of their white girls. Lewis & Clark Professor Carma Corcoran (Cree), director of the Indian Law Program, explains the structural factors leading to these disparities, and what should be done to address them.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is open about his admiration of the late-ninteenth-century Mexican revolutionary Catarino Erasmo Garza. Lewis & Clark Professor Elliott Young, who wrote a biography about Garza, argues that if López Obrador wants to emulate his hero, he should remember that Garza fought for a democratic Mexico, one in which people would not be subject to state violence, and journalists and citizens would be free to criticize their government.