January/February 2002  

Dear Colleagues,

We greet the first of the new year with a number of “firsts” here in the College of Liberal Arts. Many of you had the good fortune to join the piano faculty of the School of Music and Theatre Arts for the inaugural concert presented on our new 10.5-foot Fazioli grand piano in Kimbrough Auditorium on Jan. 23. The concert was arranged by Professor James Schoepflin, director of the School of Music and Theatre Arts, attended by the founder of the Fazioli piano company of Italy, and introduced by President Lane Rawlins, who remarked that the consummate playing of faculty members Gerald Berthiaume, Susan Chan and Michelle Mielke indeed exemplified the world-class accomplishments of our college faculty at Washington State University.

We also are pleased to open this new year with an announcement of the first winners of a new college-wide grant, the Departmental Innovation Award. This award of $5,000, gifted over a period of two years, is distributed in competition to departments that present a sustainable project for innovative curricular development. The funding for this award has been generated by the Dean’s Excellence Fund; this pool represents in part the donations of alumni who have not previously given gifts to the College of Liberal Arts and yet have chosen to contribute to this fund for special projects forwarded by the dean.

We have selected two winners this year. The Department of English will use the innovation award to fund release time for faculty who are renewing the creative writing curriculum, as well as a speaker series and student awards for that program. The Department of Psychology will use the award to inaugurate an undergraduate research program that encourages students to develop scholarly projects with faculty mentors and gives them the opportunity to present the results of their research in a public seminar. Students producing top projects also will earn scholarships under this program. Nine departments competed for the award, an impressive showing of the continuous quest of our departments to improve their programs.

Finally, we greet spring term with news of new faculty, staff and student accomplishments presented in this issue of our college Chronicle; particularly noteworthy are the numerous awards and honors received by our graduate and undergraduate students, recorded in the “Student Activities and Awards” section.

I hope that you will all join me this month in welcoming Provost Robert Bates to our campus, who officially occupies his new post on Feb. 1. Yes, this is a difficult year to begin a future at Washington State University, given the state of our state economy and projected reductions to our budget. Together, our Dean’s Office staff and I will work with our new provost, our outstanding chairs and directors, and our College Advisory Committee on Resource Allocation to assure that our budget is directed to activities that continue to enhance the productivity of our faculty and the quality of our face-to-face interactions with students. Through careful planning in support of our strategic plan, our college has made great progress over the last four years in retiring an overall debt, adding new positions in departments targeted for enhancement and developing an infrastructure that enables us to maximize funding received from outside donors and government and foundation grants.

We are in the process now of discussing our funding priorities for the coming year with department chairs and the college resource advisory committee. In addition to department priorities, we will continue to advocate for a Liberal Arts Advising Center to better direct “undecided” and general studies majors, to plan and seek funding for a Plateau Center for American Indian Studies, and to convert temporary funding to permanent funding to support graduate student recruitment and the growth of our faculty. We also will push to redirect funds to allow for development of an interactive online curriculum for our general studies distance degree.

I hope that you will join discussions in your departments as your department chairs and program directors discuss these and other initiatives with you. We welcome your input on all of our college-wide activities.

As always, I offer you my best wishes for continued success in your teaching, professional, scholarly and creative work.

Barbara Couture
Dean, College of Liberal Arts

Please join the Dean’s Office in welcoming Gary Lindsey as the college’s Senior Public Relations/Communications Coordinator. Gary comes to us with over 20 years experience in the news business, including five years as journalist, executive producer, reporter and anchor for KOMO-TV in Seattle. Gary will begin his appointment Feb. 11.

Gaylen Hansen (professor emeritus, Fine Arts) is one of six Northwest artists to receive the Flintridge Foundation’s 2001/2002 Awards for Visual Artists. The awards honor those “whose work demonstrates high artistic merit and a distinctive voice dating back 20 years or more.” Each artist receives an unrestricted grant of $25,000. Hansen taught at WSU from 1957 to 1982 and continues to live in Palouse. He recently had a show at the Linda Hodges Gallery in Seattle.

Jayanti Ray (Speech and Hearing Sciences) has been awarded a university PT3 (Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers to Use Technology) grant to develop a multimedia presentation for K-12 teachers on the identification of voice disorders in school children and appropriate referral procedures. This multimedia module will be available for use in various Speech and Hearing Sciences courses.

Stephen Lakatos (Psychology, WSU Vancouver) and colleague Alexander Stevens, of Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland, have been awarded a four-year, $1.25 million grant by the National Institutes of Health to use fMRI to study auditory cortical expansion in the blind. Funding began Feb. 1.

Moon Lee and Paul Bolls (both Communication) received a grant from the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Program for their project “Effective Communication with Rebels for the Prevention of Binge Drinking.”

Lance T. LeLoup (Political Science) has recently been approved for the Fulbright Senior Specialists Roster. This is a new program that allows senior scholars to receive Fulbright grants for periods of two to six weeks rather than the traditional longer periods, allowing Fulbright to respond with more flexibility to incoming program needs. LeLoup is one of the first scholars around the country to be named to the program.

Lori Wiest (Music), director of the Spokane Symphony Chorale, conducted the Spokane Symphony Orchestra and Chorale in the annual Holiday Pops Concert in Spokane Dec. 15-16. Upcoming concerts include two performances of the complete Messiah by Handel March 1-2 at St. Al’s Church on the Gonzaga campus, and the Verdi Requiem on May 10 at the Opera House.

In October Buddy Levy’s (English) column Taking A Bearing debuted in Hooked on the Outdoors, a national sports glossy. His first article was “Adventure Racing Reaches Puberty.” In December Horizon Airlines Magazine published “Snowflake Sports,” Levy’s story on winter sports in and around Spokane and environs, and Hooked on the Outdoors published his article called “Gear Gluttons.”

Paula Coomer’s (English) short story “Hugging Robert Redford” has been accepted for publication by Talking River Review.

Bill Condon (Writing Program), on sabbatical this year, is Bush Visiting Professor of Rhetoric at Carleton College, where he is helping Carleton set up a writing requirement based on WSU’s Junior Writing Portfolio.

John Irby (Communication) was asked to join two statewide boards: the Washington News Council, which focuses on the performance of the news media in the state and attempts to help maintain public trust and confidence in the news media by promoting fairness, accuracy and balance, and by creating a forum where the public and the news media can engage each other in examining standards of journalistic fairness; and the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association, a 110-year-old trade association serving the community newspapers in Washington, offering training seminars and monitoring and informing members about industry trends.

Karen Weathermon (General Education) has accepted the position of book review editor for Issues in Writing, a semiannual scholarly journal devoted to multidisciplinary approaches to writing. Alumna Rebecca Stephens (PhD ’96, English) is also on the journal’s staff. She is a faculty member of the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point, which publishes the journal.

Carol Siegel (English, WSU Vancouver) will be the plenary speaker at the Youth Cultures conference at Bowling Green State University Feb. 8.

Marcel Wingate (Speech and Hearing Sciences) published a letter to the editor in the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) Leader offering his perspective on ethical issues involved in a late 1930s experiment with orphans, which was recently uncovered and reported in the San Jose Mercury News.

Faith Lutze (Criminal Justice) was interviewed by Dave Myer for NPR’s “Morning Edition” (KPLU, Seattle/Tacoma). Her interview aired Jan. 10 as part of a weeklong series that explored the difficulty in supervising repeat offenders living in the community. The series, including the interview with Lutze, is available online at www.kplu.org/news/onthestreet.html.

Ellen Gorsevski (English) has been awarded a CO-TEACH grant of $3,000 from a five-year federal grant to the College of Education, with a key portion for the College of Liberal Arts. Now in its third year, the grant aims to improve teacher education across colleges. Gorsevski will participate in professional development workshops to incorporate pedagogical and curricular innovations, including revising syllabi and teaching methods to integrate technology more effectively, promote critical thinking, address diversity issues, use performance-based assessment and formulate inquiry-based curricula.

Five faculty from the Department of History—Susan Armitage, Susan Peabody, Heather Streets, John E. Kicza and LeRoy Ashby—were on the program for the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in January. The department has never had as many faculty on the program at one time.

Amanda Espinosa-Aguilar is a new Tri-Cities faculty member in the Department of English. Her research and teaching focus on rhetoric, ethnic American literature, autobiography studies and writing program administration. Besides teaching, she will be developing a writing center on that campus, as well as directing the Electronic Media and Culture program.

Cornell Clayton (Political Science) has been selected by the Northwest Consortium of Study Abroad to teach in Siena, Italy, this spring. He will be teaching courses on Italian political thought and the politics of food and wine in Italy.

Lori Wiest and Julie Wieck (both Music) traveled to Walla Walla, Vancouver and Auburn Jan. 9-12 as part of their annual recruiting tour. They did choral workshops with four various-level choirs at Walla Walla High School and held workshops and performed at seven high school choral programs in Vancouver. Wiest and Wieck hosted WSU Voice Discoveries West at Auburn High School, where they presented workshops in vocal technique, how to audition, stage deportment, WSU question and answers, and voice masterclasses for 16 students. They were assisted by WSU Music teaching assistants Ben Gudgeon and David Servias on the piano. They also presented a recital where Wiest, Wieck and Gudgeon sang for the masterclass students and their teachers.

Paige Ouimette (Psychology) received the fall 2001 Edward R. Meyer Grant Development Award for “Understanding the Role of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in the Health of Female and Male Primary Care Patients.”

Susan Swan (General Education) had several watercolor paintings displayed by Book People of Moscow in November and December.

Terrence Cook (Political Science) traveled to Tokyo’s Nihon University Jan. 9-14, where he spoke to a class of 200 students on the topic “Cultural Versus Structural Accounts of Economic Performance in Japan and the United States.” He then gave an invited address, “Of Markets and Democracies: Self-Regulating Systems?” to a Faculty of Law symposium.

LeRoy Ashby (History) chaired a session at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association on “Law, Sentiment, and the Family Ideal: The Multiple Meanings of Adoption, 1842-1973.”

Rachel Halverson (Foreign Languages) organized a special session for the Modern Language Association conference, held in New Orleans Dec. 27-30, entitled “Coming to Life in Post-Unification German Literature: Orgasm, Gender, and Identity,” in which she also presented the paper “Coming of Age: Sexuality, Maturity, and Identity in Autobiographies by Günter de Bruyn, Christoph Hein, and Stefan Heym.”

Stanton Linden (English) also presented a paper, “Alchemy and Epistemology in Seventeenth-Century Natural Philosophy: Bacon, Browne, and Boyle,” at the MLA conference.

The Solstice Wind Quintet will present a concert under the auspices of the Camerata Concert Series at Batelle Auditorium in Richland Feb. 23. They will also present recruitment school concerts in the Tri-Cities and in Spokane in March and April. The quintet is in the process of completing its first CD, expected to be released in mid-spring. Solstice members are Music faculty Ann Yasinitsky, flute; Gary Plowman, oboe; James Schoepflin, clarinet; Susan Hess, bassoon; and Roger Logan, horn.

The College of Liberal Arts awarded one of the first $5,000 Departmental Innovation Awards to the Department of English for development of studies in creative writing. The money will be used to strength-en the department’s visiting writers series and the student literary journal LandEscapes, and to develop the curriculum within the new creative writing option for English majors.

Gregory Yasinitsky (Music) will appear as a guest clinician and performer at the Casper College Jazz Festival in Wyoming. He will also appear as a guest artist with the USAF Commanders Jazz Band at Travis Air Force Base in California.

Additionally, Yasinitsky will be featured with his jazz quintet Crosscurrent at the Gene Harris Jazz Festival at Boise State University. Also performing with Crosscurrent will be Gus Kambeitz (Music) and Kelvin Monroe (MA candidate, Music).

Yasinitsky will be featured as an arranger and soloist with the Spokane Symphony for the orchestra’s Big Band Pops concert in April. In May 2003, he will conduct the All Montana Jazz Band.

Paul Hirt (History) will be a keynote speaker at the University of Oregon’s Journal of Environmental Law and Litigation’s 2002 symposium on public lands.

Gene Rosa (Sociology) has been appointed to the National Academies’ Board on Radioactive Waste Management for a three-year term beginning Jan. 1, 2002.

Marina Tolmacheva (Asia Program, Associate Dean of Liberal Arts) spoke at Columbia Basin College Jan. 30 on “The Complexity Behind the Crisis.” Her talk focused on recent political developments in Afghanistan and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. The talk was followed by a student-faculty forum. Tolmacheva was also interviewed by KEPR-TV in Tri-Cities. She was interviewed live on KUOW Dec. 4 regarding the planning steps for post-war Afghanistan. On Nov. 30, Tolma-cheva spoke at WSU Tri-Cities’ “Terror in Context” forum.

In December Don A. Dillman (Sociology) was appointed to the National Science Foundation’s Advisory Panel for the Survey of Scientific Engineering Research Facilities.

In February, Jazz Northwest, the WSU faculty jazz sextet, will present an invited performance at the Washington Music Educators Association conference. The group includes WSU faculty members Gregory Yasinitsky, Geoffrey Bradfield, David Turnbull, Charles Argersinger, Gus Kambeitz and David Jarvis.

The Spokesman-Review will run an article about Paul Brians’ (English) Web site “Common Errors in English” in February. Brians was also interviewed by the Chronicle of Higher Education for a story about electronic publication and annual review, which should appear shortly. In January, he was interviewed for a Moscow-Pullman Daily News article about films on the Palouse and film studies at WSU.

In recognition of the superior quality of its undergraduate students, the Department of Sociology has reactivated its chapter of Alpha Kappa Delta, the international sociological honor society, and initiated 22 student members in December.

Joey Reagan’s (Communication) book Communication Research Primer will be published in February by the International Association of Business Communicators.

Lance T. LeLoup (Political Science) published an article entitled “Have Parliaments Influenced Budget Policy During Democratization?” in the fall 2001 issue of Public Administration.

The Department of History’s two French historians, Steven Kale and Susan Peabody, both have articles forthcoming in the winter issue of French Historical Studies, the premier journal for French history in this country.

Elizabeth Siler (English) has just finished editing the translation of and writing the introduction to The Tale of the Phoenix, a novel by the Punjabi writer Dalip Kaur Tiwana. Published by Ajanta Press, Delhi, this is Tiwana’s third major novel to be translated into English.

In September, Harvard University Press published Matthew Guterl’s (Comparative American Cultures) book The Color of Race in America, 1900-1940. He is currently on leave and a fellow at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University.

Jeannette Mageo (Anthropology) recently published a major article in Ethos, “Dream Play and Discovering Cultural Psychology”; a book with Cambridge University Press, Power and the Self, an edited volume; and a commentary in the American Anthropologist.

Susan Dente Ross (Communication) signed a contract to edit a second edition of a reader on media visual stereotypes, Images That Injure, with Paul Lester. Her proposal for a graduate text in media law, Deciding Communication Law: Key Supreme Court Cases in Context, is under review by Lawrence Erlbaum.

Ross also has two articles forthcoming. The first, a study of the legal authority of public schools to control student expression, will appear in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly and is titled “Silenced Students: The Uncertain but Extensive Power of School Officials to Control Student Expression.” Her analysis of shifting Supreme Court standards in First Amendment cases will appear in Comm/Ent: Hastings Communication and Entertainment Law Journal and will be titled “Reconstructing First Amendment Doctrine: The 1990s [R]Evolution of the Central Hudson and O’Brien Tests.”

Don A. Dillman (Sociology) is coeditor of a new book, Survey Nonresponse, recently published by Wiley-Interscience. He also coauthored Chapter 1, “Survey Nonresponse in Design Data Collection and Analysis,” and Chapter 13, “The Influence of Alternative Visual Designs on Respondent’s Performance with Branching Instructions in Self-Administered Questionnaires.”

Phuong Nguyen (Fine Arts) is presenting an exhibition titled “‘Catalog’: Recent Paintings” at the Turner Art Gallery at Centenary College in Shreveport, La. Jan. 12 through Feb. 9.

Stanton Linden (English) has published an invited essay, “Margaret Cavendish and Robert Hooke: Optics and Scientific Fantasy in The Blazing World,” in Ésotérisme, Gnoses & Imaginaire Symbolique: Mélanges offerts à Antoine Faivre, a Festschrift for a professor at the Sorbonne.

Theresa Schenck (Comparative American Cultures) is co-author of an article, “Metis, Mixed Bloods and Mestizos,” in the new Blackwell Companion to American Indian History. Her edited book, My First Years in the Fur Trade: The Journals of 1802-1804 by George Nelson, has just been published by Minnesota Historical Society Press.

Camille Roman (English) recently published an essay on the poet Elizabeth Bishop, “Bishop’s Washington D.C.: Sites of Gore & Glory,” in a book-length collection of essays entitled The Art of Place and Memory. She presented an earlier version of the essay as an invited speaker at the Raddall Symposium at Acadia University, Nova Scotia; her presentation was funded by a grant from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Carol Ivory’s (Fine Arts) essay “Marquesan Sculpture: Tiki,” which originally appeared in French in the catalog accompanying the Louvre’s first exhibition of non-Western art, has just been republished in an English version in Sculptures: Africa, Asia, Oceania, Americas.

Gregory Yasinitsky’s (Music) new publications include “Blue Yonder” for jazz band and “Nocturne and Steam Train” for saxophone (or viola) and piano.

John Irby (Communication) wrote an article in the January issue of the Washington Newspaper titled “Journalists’ opinion divided about front-page ads.” The article focused on the state of Washington but came from a larger 30-page nationwide report he wrote after conducting a national e-mail survey on the topic.

Alice Fairbanks (MFA ’88, Ceramics) is providing a guest artist residency and workshop in figurative ceramics March 18-22 at the Southwest School of Art and Craft in San Antonio, Texas.

Michael Holloman (MFA ‘93) is director of the Center for Plateau Cultures at the new Museum of Arts and Culture in Spokane, Wash. He is only the second director appointed since the center’s creation. Holloman was associate professor of fine arts at Seattle University for nine years. The museum, located in Browne’s Addition at 2116 W. First, reopened Dec. 5 after a $28 million, two-year expansion project.

Diana Kersey (MFA ’97, Ceramics) teaches at the Southwest School of Art and Craft in San Antonio, Texas. She recently exhibited 22 of her ceramic pieces at the Goldesberry Gallery in Houston, Texas.

John Jenkins (MFA ’00, Painting) is the assistant curator of education and the education coordinator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Dane Webster (MFA ’00, Photography) has just been appointed assistant professor of photography/computer animation at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kan.

Carolyn Ford (MFA ’00, Ceramics) was recently appointed adjunct professor of art education and ceramics at the University of South Carolina in Spartanburg.

A manuscript based on the study and Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication presentation by students in Erica Austin’s (Communication) spring 2000 Com 580 course has been accepted for publication in Communication Research. The article, “The Effects of Increased Cognitive Involvement on College Students’ Interpretations of Magazine Advertisements for Alcohol,” was written by Amber Coral-Reaume Miller (MA ’01), John Silva (MA candidate), Petra Guerra (PhD candidate), Neva Geisler, Luxelvira Gamboa (MA candidate), Orlalak Phakakayai (MA ’00) and Bryant Kuechle.

Naomi Chaytor (PhD candidate, Psychology) will receive the Rennick Award at the February meeting of the International Neuropsychological Society for her thesis project entitled “Working Memory and Aging: A Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Analysis.” This prestigious award is given to one pre-doctoral candidate each year.

The American Psychological Association just completed a press release about Heather Nissley’s (PhD candidate, Psychology) thesis project entitled “Perceptually-Based Implicit Learning Following Severe Closed-Head Injury.” The manuscript on which the release is based is scheduled to appear in the January issue of Neuropsychology.

Both students work in Maureen Schmitter-Edgecombe’s neuropsychology lab and are studying severe closed-head injury.

Phillip Vannini (PhD candidate, Sociology) has been invited to present his paper titled “Postmodern Vagabonds: Searching for Authentic Apple Pie in the Himalayas” at the Image of the Outsider in Literature, Media, and Society conference organized by the Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery in Colorado Springs Feb. 28 to March 2. His work is a set of recollections and observations related to his recent travel through Nepal.

Heidi Steinkraus (undergraduate, Fine Arts) won first place in the WSU holiday card contest, with her design featured as the official WSU card sent by President Rawlins’ office. The prize included 100 of the cards for her own use and $200 cash. The second prize winner was Brandi Peetsch (undergraduate, Fine Arts), receiving a cash award of $100. Third prize was awarded to Emily Denis (undergraduate, Communication), who won $50 cash. All three were students of David Overstreet (Fine Arts), who included the WSU holiday card contest as a project for F A 332, Introduction to Electronic Imaging.

Two papers by graduate students in Communication have been accepted for presentation in the Mass Communication Competitive Paper Sessions of the International Communication Association: “Social Movement Organization’s Internet Use and Access to the Media: Case Study of Two Midwestern SMOs and Newspapers,” by Tae-hyun Kim, in Media and Activism; and “An Examination of Factors Affecting News Content in Newspapers: An Ideological and Social-structural Approach,” by Kim and Tien-tsung Lee, in Understanding Media Coverage: A Structural Approach.

Laurie Carlson’s (PhD candidate, History) interview on “The Social History of Cattle,” done for the “Dialogue” radio program at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., aired on NPR. Also, her book Cattle: An Informal Social History was reviewed in the January issue of Harper’s Magazine.

Michael Egan (PhD candidate, History) had an article published in the journal Call to Earth titled “Off the Trail: Wilderness Cognition and Arcadian Landscapes.” The article is derived from his MA research and from a paper he presented at the American Society for Environmental History conference in 2000.

Paul Dean (PhD candidate, History) will present a paper, “Crusaders: Woodrow Wilson, Roy Blanchard, and the Average Doughboy in WWI,” at the Center for the Study of the Korean War’s annual symposium on war and memory.

Carol Ann Scally (PhD candidate, History) will present a paper, “Varieties of Religious Experiences in Restoration Spain: Encounters with Protestantism,” at the Society for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies conference in April.

Laurie Whitcomb-Norden (PhD candidate, History) has received a full scholarship to the Jewish Studies Program at Oxford. She will study there fall and spring 2002-03 and return home with a master’s in Jewish studies. This year she will present a paper on modern European history at an international conference meeting at the Imperial War Museum in London.

Senior Alice Chavez (Foreign Languages) was honored with a WSU Martin Luther King Jr. Distinguished Service Award during WSU’s 15th annual celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Jan. 22. Chavez is chair of the Native American Women’s Association and active in planning for Native American cultural events.

Lin Xu (MFA candidate, Fine Arts) exhibited her porcelain art in January at the Christensen Heller Gallery in Oakland, Calif. It was part of the “SOS Save Our Star” exhibit.

Marta María Maldonado’s (PhD candidate, Sociology) review of Peter Redfield’s book Space in the Tropics has been published in the most recent issue of Contemporary Sociology.

Stacy Kowtko (PhD candidate, History) has had a paper accepted for the First International African Film and History Conference at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, this summer. Her proposed paper is titled “From an ‘African Dream’ to an ‘African Queen’: Films of Africa and Their Influence on American Tourism Since the 1950s.” Kowtko was also accepted to the Keeping It Real conference in Dublin, Ireland, April 19-22.

Keith Monaghan (professor emeritus, Fine Arts) passed away Nov. 6 at his home in Marin County, Calif. A member of the Fine Arts faculty since 1947, Monaghan served as chair from 1951-72 and designed the Fine Arts Center. Memorials may be made to the Keith Monaghan Fine Arts Advancement Fund through the College of Liberal Arts.

Charles O. Cole, a former journalism professor at Washington State University, died of degenerative heart disease Nov. 15 at his home in Sequim. He was 77.

Cole began teaching at WSU in 1956 and was known as a demanding instructor who held students to the highest standards of accuracy and clarity. He also had a keen mind and an irreverent sense of humor; he liked to edit memos, returning them to the sender with a grade—including those written by deans. His wit remained as sharp as his skills, which he practiced in summers and during school breaks by working for area newspapers. Cole retired in 1986.

In his free time, he enjoyed square dancing with his wife, Ann, and he loved to repair lawnmowers and small appliances.

A gala recital in Kimbrough Concert Hall Jan. 23 showcased the School of Music and Theatre Arts’ newest acquisition, a 10-foot, 2-inch Concert Grand Fazioli piano worth $160,000.

Paolo Fazioli, the Italian craftsman of the piano, and President Lane Rawlins were on hand to hear performances by Music faculty Michelle Mielke, Susan Chan, Charles Argersinger, Gus Kambeitz and Gerald Berthiaume.

WSU is the only university in the United States to own a Fazioli Concert Grand, considered by many to be the finest piano in the world. Despite the cold and snow, the inaugural recital drew such a large audience that some had to be turned away at the door.

Photo: Paolo Fazioli sits at the piano with (from left) Cindy and Rick Baldassin of Baldassin Performance Pianos (a Fazioli dealer); Michelle Mielke and Gerald Berthiaume, WSU piano faculty; James Schoepflin, director of the School of Music and Theatre Arts; and Mary Jo and President Lane Rawlins.