WashU’s Danforth Campus and surrounding areas were in the direct path of a tornado which touched down early in the afternoon of May 16. Radar from The Weather Channel confirmed the tornado struck the suburb of Clayton, where the Danforth Campus is located. 

WashU announced plans to rename the Robert J. Terry endowed Professorship in the School of Medicine and the annual Robert J. Terry Lecture Series in the Neuroscience Department, following a recommendation made by the University’s Naming Review Board (NRB). The removal request was submitted to the NRB in fall of 2024 by then-senior Paul Scott, with support from 11 student co-signers and a letter from the WashU Native American Students Association.

Simone Biles sat down for an interview with Student Life following her speech at Monday’s commencement ceremony, where she spoke about leadership, managing pressure, and the importance of being the “greatest you of all time.” The following Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. 

On May 7, WashU announced the formation of a University-wide committee tasked with reviewing and recommending changes to the school’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and activities. The announcement emphasized that the creation of the committee is the latest step in the University’s ongoing evaluation of its DEI efforts. 

WashU’s Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing has ended its postgraduate fellowship, a one-year program where students in the MFA program had the opportunity to teach classes as a postgraduate fellow for a year following the completion of their two-year degree.

Eve — a pseudonym that is being used for her safety — is now an undergraduate at a U.S. university who has endured about 10 years of hardship as an undocumented person in the country. 

Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson spoke about death, climate change, and its political and economic dimensions in Graham Chapel on April 17. This talk comes following what Robinson called “attacks on human health” and a “destruction of science” imposed by the Trump administration.

Four postdoctoral researchers — Marc Blanc, Jessica Samuel, Jesse J. Lee, and Danielle Williams — spoke in a panel titled “Humanities Politicized” on April 17 to address the status of humanities research in academia amid funding cuts and restrictions to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) by the Trump administration that began in early April. 

Less than four months into 2025, WashU has seen five reports of trespassing in student dorms and residential buildings on the Danforth Campus — up from three reports in all of 2024, and one break-in in all of 2023 — according to a Student Life analysis of the crime log updated by the Washington University Police Department (WUPD) every 48 hours. 

First-year Arianna Zeldin recently started a new conservative podcast titled Beyond the Ballot and invited sophomore Ella Bruno, the current president of the WashU Republicans, to be a co-host. The podcast, which intends to host Chancellor Andrew Martin in its forthcoming second episode, explains that it will provide “Conservative views, Bold discussions, unfiltered takes on today’s political climate.”