The University’s initiative to expand public health programs, which began several years ago, has culminated in an undergraduate minor, which graduated its first class last spring; a master’s degree in public health, which enrolled its first class this year; and the Institute for Public Health, which began operation last September.

Strategic planning

Plans for the implementation of the public health department were drawn up at the University four years ago, when school representatives gathered to discuss where they wanted to be in 20 years. Many of the schools, particularly the social work school and the medical school, included elements of public health in their plans.

Even before the creation of the institute or master’s degree, the campus had already seen a great deal of public health research, with 12 research centers involved in related research.

“There is public health all over the place, frankly. [The University was] really pretty strong already in public health,” said Timothy McBride, associate dean of public health at the Brown School.

While outcroppings of public health were scattered around campus, leaders on campus saw the lack of an overarching structure as a problem.

“Washington University has been pretty distinctive among our peers in not having a major public health emphasis,” said Edward Lawlor, director of the Institute for Public Health. “In some ways, I think this was kind of a glaring omission in the portfolio of programs we have.”

Starting from scratch

Creating a new public health program gave the University an opportunity to implement an unprecedented vision. Under Chancellor Mark Wrighton’s leadership, University trustees, deans and faculty weighed the pros and cons of various public-health education models.

“This is a really special opportunity just from a university perspective because you get to invent your public health structure in 2009,” Lawlor said.

The University is now implementing what it calls an “independent bubbles” structure for public health, which consists of master’s degrees scattered throughout various schools—a Master of Public Health in the social work school, several master’s degrees in the medical school, and an MBA concentration in the business of health care—as well as the undergraduate minor in Arts & Sciences.

The actions of the institute are therefore varied, broken up into “work groups” with different agendas. At the institute’s core, however, is the concept of a “trans-disciplinary” approach to public health.

“I think the more interesting challenge for us is to do things that are innovative and distinctive to our university in the field of public health,” Lawlor said.

Trans-disciplinary learning

McBride and Bradley Stoner, director of the public health minor, also see their respective programs—the master’s in Public Health through the social work school and the undergraduate minor in public health—as standouts against a backdrop of growing public health education.

While most graduate public health programs are centered around five core areas, the social work school curriculum has come to view public health through a kaleidoscope of multiple disciplines.

“What students do is they take a public health issue, like obesity or tobacco, and they’ll attack it from beginning to end, from problem solution, using all sorts of disciplinary tools,” McBride said. “We think this is the future of public health, and it already is the recommended way of doing research, but we believe we’re the only curricular program that’s actually teaching students how to do this.”

Stoner also sees the public health minor in Arts & Sciences as ahead of the curve. “When we looked around, we realized we were really ahead of most other places. There are other places that are interested in this, but they’re asking questions that we asked eight or 10 years ago,” he said.

Looking forward

As both the graduate and undergraduate programs take off, plans for the future include a doctorate in population health sciences through the medical school, a degree through the engineering school in environmental health, and a potential undergraduate major.

The undergraduate minor and the MPH program are also expected to grow. The master’s program, which enrolled its first class this year, has 44 students now and expects eventually to have about 150.

The size of the undergraduate minor is in flux, with about 50 declared minors and more enrolled in classes. Based on the number of applications to the master’s program this year, the next class could be bigger than 150 students.

But the expansion of both programs is limited by the current economic climate.

“That might compromise our quality, and we’d need more space and more faculty,” McBride said.

Also on the table is a program uniting the undergraduate minor and the social work school master’s degree in which students would have the ability to obtain both degrees in five years rather than six.

“Open” is a small discussion group focused on helping LGBT students go through the process of coming out to their friends and family. Open, which began this fall, is led by Kline and Bailey Brenton, both of whom are undergraduate students. Open is also assisted by Katie Garcia, graduate social work advisor.

“First and foremost, it’s a safe space for people to go and speak openly and honestly,” said Kline, a sophomore. “We want to encourage people to move forward with their lives, to move through the coming out process to the extent to which they feel comfortable. But by no means would we tell anybody to come out to people if they don’t feel comfortable or if they feel like they’re in some kind of danger.”

Inspiration for the group came after Kline attended a Safe Zones meeting last fall centered on sharing coming out experiences. Safe Zones is an LGBT peer-educating group on campus. Kline, who came out in high school, said the meeting made him feel welcome. He realized the experience might be even more helpful for those who had yet to come out.

“I started bringing it up at Pride meetings because I’m on Pride Exec,” he explained. “People thought it was a good idea, but no one seemed willing to take the reins. So toward the end of last year, I was realizing that if it was going to happen, I had to be the one to start it.”

Kline approached Brenton to co-lead the group, and together they approached Michael Brown, former program director for LGBT student leadership and involvement. Brown directed the two to ASQ, a flexible 10-week, 10-step group training program on which Open is now loosely based.

Open is not the first organization formed to support students coming out on campus. But past groups, mostly from Mental Health and Student Health Services, have fallen flat, according to Garcia.

“I think students kind of know what they need and it wasn’t quite that,” she said.

Both Garcia and Kline said they see the fledgling group, which has now had three meetings, as distinct from any other services provided on campus. Pride Alliance focuses on fostering an extended LGBT community—planning social events, sponsoring health-related events and political activism—but in Kline’s view it “didn’t have the capacity or it wasn’t making the capacity to facilitate small group discussions.”

“Plus,” he added, “I felt like somebody who is not comfortable about coming out at all might not feel comfortable going to an organization called ‘Pride.’”

While Open brings students who are “out” to their friends and family together with students who have never told anybody about their sexuality, the leaders of the group emphasized that coming out is a process for all.

“It’s not something that happens in a mass e-mail,” Kline said. “No matter where you go, if you choose to be out you will have to continue coming out in some capacity. Even if it is a smooth transition to college—it was for me; this is a pretty accepting school. But it still happens again, and it’s still something you have to do again and continuing. It doesn’t stop.”

Photographer Ansel Adams, famous for his iconic images of Yosemite Valley and the Sierra Nevada mountains, documented the Japanese internment at the Manzanar Relocation Center in northern California.

Japanese painter Chiura Obata depicted life in Topaz War Relocation Center from the inside, when he was interned there with his family.

The two artists were friends and colleagues in life, hiking and teaching together during the summers at Adams’ studio in Yosemite. Now their respective work on the internment hangs side by side in the exhibition in the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum.

Adams and Obata’s sons will join forces for a presentation on Friday called “Remembering the Internment: A Conversation by the Sons of Chiura Obata and Ansel Adams” to discuss the problem of ethnic profiling today and on the home front during World War II.

This weekend’s events also include two performances of the play “Dust Storm: Art and Survival in a Time of Paranoia” and a biographical presentation of Obata’s work by his granddaughter, Kimi Kodani Hill.

Student Life reporter Dana Glaser sat down with Michael Adams and Gyo Obata, alumni of the Washington University School of Medicine and Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts, respectively, to discuss their fathers’ legacies and their own experiences while observing the fate of Japanese Americans.

Michael Adams

Student Life: What was the relationship like between your father and Chiura Obata?

Michael Adams: I was pretty small, but they were very good friends. They’d been friends in the art world in San Francisco and Bay area. They had also been friends in the Sierra area in hiking and taking trips into the backcountry of Yosemite and into King’s Canyon.

SL: Do you know why he originally decided to document the Japanese internment?

MA: He was too old and had children, so he couldn’t be in the military, and I think he felt a little guilty that he wasn’t doing his share. Then he was contacted by a fellow by the name of Ralph Merritt, who was an old friend from the Sierra Club and who had been appointed administrator of the camp Manzanar and was told there was a unique situation that probably would benefit from documentation. My dad jumped at the opportunity and went to Manzanar.

SL: Since he was originally asked to go by the government, were there rules about what he could or could not photograph?

MA: He agreed to do it, but on the stipulation that it would not be paid for. He did this on his own, and the supervision, I think, was very minimal.

SL: What were his artistic or political goals in going to Manzanar?

MA: He was trying to document a life that was sort of a forced exodus that as it turns out is an embarrassment to us today. It was, in all respects, illegal—these were American citizens that had been pulled out of their homes. I think he felt strongly that these were citizens who had been displaced, whether at the time they felt the illegality of it was that strong.

Gyo Obata

SL: Can you tell us a little about your father?

Gyo Obata: My father was a landscape painter, a painter of nature. But when he was in the internment camp, he painted what he saw. There was always an artistry in his paintings. Poetry, let’s say. But he was also trying to depict what it was like there.

SL: And what was it like?

GO: It was terrible! These families were put in these tar paper shacks, each family had 15 by 15 space, they all had to go out to the bathroom, the shower and another barrack to eat. It was prison in a sense.

SL: Did you also go to Topaz Moon?

GO: No, I didn’t. I heard if you got permission from a university east of the three coastal states, they might let you leave. As soon as these notices were attached to the telephone poles in Berkeley—I was going to Cal—my father said, “This is crazy. You ought to try to get out.” I went to my professors at Cal and asked them what would be the closest good architectural school east of California, and they said, ‘Well, Washington University in St. Louis.’ I applied there, and after a series of telegraphs and so forth, they sent me an acceptance. I left Berkeley the night before my family was sent to the camp.

SL: Did you ever visit your family in the camp?

GO: Yes, I did. I came to St. Louis in the spring of ’42, and that Christmas of ’42 they let me visit my family over the break. I was a free person, and here my whole family was incarcerated. It was really a strange deal.

SL: Do you think ethnic profiling is still a problem today?

GO: It’s not so much against Asians now but against African Americans, certainly, and anyone who looks like they are from the Middle East are discriminated against.

The Washington University League of Freethinkers (WULF), brought back last semester by now-seniors Eddy Lazzarin, Mark Povich and Laura Kelly, is gathering members and working toward official recognition as a Student Union group.

WULF’s reorganization reflects a rising number of secular humanist student groups on college campuses across the nation.

The Secular Student Alliance (SSA), a national organization that supports humanist student movements, announced in a recent press release an increase in secular student associations. The SSA cites a 2009 Labor Day count of 159 campus-affiliated groups—up from 100 last year and almost doubling the count from 2007, which consisted of 80 groups.

WULF was founded several years ago by University alumnus D.J. Grothe, now vice president and director of outreach programs for the secular nonprofit organization Center for Inquiry, which supports the new generation of WULF.

“When I was a freshman, there wasn’t really any place to discuss these things—except if you are actually religious and went to a religious group,” Kelly said.

Increased attention in the media recently has made secularism a more commonly discussed topic around campus, according to Kelly. Two years ago, another student group focused on the discussion of science and religion sprang up. This group inspired Kelly, Povich and Lazzarin to look into initiating a group of their own specifically geared toward secularism.

When the three heard on Grothe’s podcast “Point of Inquiry” that the Center for Inquiry offers support for student groups, they decided to contact the organization.

Aid came in the form of a box full of fliers and pamphlets. Soon enough, WULF began to hold meetings to gauge interest from the student body. The three founding members called on friends from the philosophy department who shared their interests, they and used Facebook as a tool to find potential members.

“I was Facebook friends with another freshman who was humanist and then Eddy must have heard about me and friended me,” said freshman Derek Sun, who just joined WULF for its first meeting this year. “I was looking for clubs that interested me. Eddy invited me way before school started and I decided, ‘I’ll give this a shot.’”

The number of students in attendance at the meetings has been growing since the group’s formation last year.

“Every meeting there have been more,” Lazzarin said. “The first meeting [last year] I’d say there were probably 15, second meeting there were like 20, third meeting about 25 people. And if we do the stuff that we want to do—go to Skepticon 2, do the community service that we want, get an opportunity to go tabling—it can’t do any more but grow.”

Last Wednesday, 21 students gathered in a philosophy classroom for the first WULF meeting of the semester to hash out plans for the group. Getting the group’s message out played a key role during the hour.

“I personally think there’s a lurking humanist population on campus,” Lazzarin said.

To bring WULF out of the woodwork, Lazzarin considered setting up a “de-baptism” table on campus. The table would call on doubting students to declare their skepticism of religious belief by being squirted with a water gun or—as one member suggested—dunked in an inflatable kiddie pool. Joking in response to the suggestion, Lazzarin said he didn’t “want this to be the Inquisition or anything.”

Another item on the meeting’s agenda was the idea that later in the year the group could adopt the theme “An Atheist Loves You,” with the aim of dispelling some of the stigmas that can surround atheists.

“It’s like that Woody Allen joke,” Lazzarin said. “He tells his mom he’s an atheist and his mom is like ‘Woody, an atheist? You don’t have to believe in God, but do you have to be an atheist?’”

While activism is a draw for many of WULF’s members, some are looking for a community similar to the kinds found in church or religious gatherings, Kelly said. Kelly cites secular fellowships as a growing trend among atheists nationally.

Sun said he believes the predominance in number of religious groups on campus calls for the formation of a group specifically for atheists and non-theists.

“[Atheists and non-theists] deserve a group of their own to voice their own concerns about the role religion has in our government and in education,” he said.

In Lazzarin’s opinion, students are joining WULF for a wide variety of reasons.

“What attracts people to the group can really range from downright frustration with religious dogmatism all the way to curiosity to meet people with the same beliefs,” he said. “I’d be lying if I didn’t say there were some people who were like, ‘My God, I’m sick of crazy religious people.’ I mean, there are definitely those.”

At the moment, the fact that WULF is not formally recognized by SU poses problems for the budding organization, such as difficulty in getting funds to attend conferences and bringing in guest lecturers. The Center for Inquiry, however, has offered to help contact and even fund speakers.

“It just makes it hard when you don’t have money or a space. Fortunately, thanks to the philosophy department, we have space,” Lazzarin said, laughing. “And thanks to my parents, we have money.”