Whitman Magazine: Whitman College's Flagship Magazine from Walla Walla, Washington
Whitman Magazine is the flagship magazine of Whitman College, the private, non-sectarian liberal arts college in Walla Walla, Washington. Published four times a year, in the description used for the magazine, it carries stories on alumni, students and faculty for a readership of graduates and friends spread far beyond the Walla Walla Valley. The magazine is produced within the college's alumni and communications operation, heir to an alumni publishing tradition that began with a publication called The Whitman Alumnus.
The college behind the magazine is one of the oldest institutions of higher learning in the Pacific Northwest. Founded under a territorial charter in 1859 as Whitman Seminary, it became a four-year college in the early 1880s, and its campus — about 117 acres in downtown Walla Walla — sits in a farming valley to which the college has been tied since its founder gifted part of his farm at Waiilatpu to support the new school. Whitman Magazine tells the continuing story of that college to the people who know it best.
Overview
Whitman Magazine is a general alumni magazine: feature stories about faculty scholarship and student experience, profiles of graduates at work in the world, college news, and the honours, reunions and class connections that structure alumni life. The college presents it as its flagship magazine, and its web home sits within Whitman Stories, the college's storytelling site, where magazine features sit alongside other college narratives.
The audience's affectionate shorthand tells much of the story. Whitman graduates are Whitties, and the Alumni Office's communications family — which Archives West records alongside the magazine — has included Fifty-Plus News for alumni who graduated more than fifty years ago, Livewire for young alumni, and a monthly e-newsletter called Whittie News. The magazine is the substantial, quarterly centre of that family: the publication in which a long feature can explore, for example, the college's deep historical bond with the farmland of the Walla Walla Valley, its farms and the wheat economy around it.
History and Founding
Whitman's alumni publishing began with The Whitman Alumnus, produced by the college's Alumni Office, and the present Whitman Magazine is its successor. A surviving issue of The Whitman Alumnus from July 1961 — Volume 45, Number 5 — shows a mature periodical: edited by Sherman R. Mitchell, published at Walla Walla in February, April, July, October and December, with second-class postage paid and membership in the American Alumni Council. Its pages mixed alumni association business — the Alumni Fund's first year, a new alumni director's get-acquainted year — with campus reporting on football drills, theatre performances and reunion weekends of 37 programmed events.
The college whose alumni it served was founded in 1859 by the Reverend Cushing Eells, a missionary colleague of Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, who resolved at the Whitmans' grave site at Waiilatpu to honour their memory with a school rather than a monument of marble. Eells received a charter that year for Whitman Seminary — seminary then being a broad term for an academy — and the school was deliberately non-sectarian from its formation. In 1882, facing financial trouble, it transformed into a college; its first class, two men and two women, graduated in 1886. Under President Stephen B. L. Penrose, who took office before turning thirty, the college survived its difficult 1890s and grew into the institution the magazine now covers.
Publisher and Ownership
Whitman Magazine is published by Whitman College. The Archives West finding aid for the Whitman College Alumni Office records states that the Alumni Office has produced many of the college's publications, originally The Whitman Alumnus — now the Whitman magazine. The office also runs the services that surround the magazine: alumni education programmes and faculty lectures in cities where alumni live, faculty-led trips, alumni recognition awards, reunion support, and career networking that is now housed in the Whitman Career Center.
That structure means the magazine is governed as an institutional publication, accountable to the college rather than to advertisers or newsstand buyers. Its distribution follows the alumni record, and its content decisions are made by college staff working with the alumni community the office serves daily — through reunions, awards chosen by the Alumni Board, and programmes for alumni at every stage, from young graduates to the Fifty-Plus cohort.
Editorial Content and Sections
Feature content in Whitman Magazine draws on the college's academic life: more than forty majors and thirty minors in the liberal arts and sciences, a student-faculty ratio around 9 to 1, comprehensive examinations, and a faculty of whom the overwhelming majority hold doctorates. A documented magazine feature on Whitman's farms explored how students have studied the economics of the college's farm properties, how faculty once took second jobs on farms in hard times, and how farm gifts became some of the college's largest donations — in 2006 its fifteen farm properties generated significant income, and the college's land stewardship in the valley continues as a theme only a Walla Walla magazine could own.
Alumni achievement is the other great subject. The magazine reports the Alumni Office's recognition programme, which began with the Alumnus of Merit Award in 1968 and grew to four annual awards for alumni exemplifying outstanding achievement in their careers, their communities or service to the college, plus an award for service by a faculty member, all chosen by the thirteen-member Alumni Board. Profiles of working graduates span fields from national journalism to public-interest law and data projects — college stories cite Whitman Magazine pieces such as a December 2013 feature titled Easy Rider and reporting on an alumna honoured at the Women in Leadership Symposium.
Audience and Circulation
The magazine's readers are Whitman alumni, parents, faculty, staff and friends — about fifteen hundred current undergraduates' families plus generations of graduates. Whitman enrols roughly 1,500 students, so, as with other small-college magazines, the readership is a genuine community: reunion coverage, award citations and class news concern people readers know, or know of, personally.
Geography shapes the audience. Walla Walla is a small city in southeastern Washington, and most Whitties leave the valley after graduation, settling disproportionately in the Pacific Northwest's cities and across the country. The quarterly magazine, supplemented by the Whittie News e-newsletter and targeted publications for young and Fifty-Plus alumni, is how the college maintains a single conversation across that dispersion — and how alumni who return for reunions arrive already caught up on the college's news.
Print and Digital Editions
Print has deep roots here: The Whitman Alumnus was a mailed periodical by 1961, published five times a year from Walla Walla, and the modern magazine continues as a printed quarterly mailed to the alumni community. Archived magazine content also survives in the college's own digital collections; the farm feature, for instance, is preserved as a PDF in the college's document repository, credited to Whitman Magazine.
Digitally, the magazine lives within Whitman Stories on whitman.edu, at the magazine address the college publishes for it, where features are presented as web stories rather than page images. That placement matters: magazine journalism is integrated with the college's wider storytelling, so a feature written for the quarterly can be found by prospective students researching Whitman, by journalists, and by alumni searching for a classmate's name. The magazine's four-times-a-year print cadence is thus extended by a permanent, searchable online presence.
Notable Editors and Contributors
The historical record names Sherman R. Mitchell as editor of The Whitman Alumnus in 1961, working alongside the Alumni Association's officers — President Earl B. Dusenbery and Secretary Jerry L. Hillis, the latter newly arrived as alumni director. Those names mark the era when alumni publishing was run directly from the Alumni Office by the people who also ran reunions and the Alumni Fund, a model whose traces remain in the magazine's close tie to alumni programming.
Modern contributors include college staff writers and alumni authors. Keith Raether is credited as the writer of the magazine's farm feature, and Whitman Magazine stories are cited across the college's website and in reference works — a December 2013 piece by Edward Weinman, for example, and college reporting drawing on magazine coverage of alumni honourees and student achievements. Faculty and administrators contribute as subjects and essayists, keeping the magazine's voice close to the campus it describes.
Awards and Recognition
Whitman Magazine's pages serve as the record of the college's own honours system. The alumni recognition programme it covers — Alumnus of Merit, dating to 1968, and the companion annual awards for career achievement, community contribution and service to Whitman, plus a faculty service award — is selected by the Alumni Board, and the magazine presents those honourees to the full community. For an alumni magazine, that publication-of-record role is a form of standing in itself.
Beyond campus, the magazine's features are picked up and cited by outside reference sources; Whitman Magazine articles appear in the bibliographies of the college's notable-people records, and its farm feature is preserved by the college as a signature piece of institutional storytelling. This profile makes no claim of specific industry competition awards for the magazine, since none are documented in the sources consulted; its verified recognition is the durable one of being Whitman's flagship publication and the cited chronicler of its alumni.
Recent Developments
In recent years Whitman Magazine has operated within a college actively reckoning with its own history — context its pages cannot avoid and its features help readers understand. The college dropped its longtime Missionaries mascot name in 2016 after students and others argued it was non-inclusive, and the student newspaper changed its name from The Pioneer to The Whitman Wire in the same spirit. The reassessment of Marcus Whitman's legacy in the Northwest, including Washington State's decision to replace his statue in the U.S. Capitol, has been national news, and the college founded to memorialise him has been part of that story.
The magazine's continuing task is the steadier one: reporting a small, residential, academically demanding college — the first in the Pacific Northwest to install a Phi Beta Kappa chapter, and an early adopter of comprehensive graduation examinations — to alumni whose memories span the Penrose era's retellings to the present campus. Published four times a year from Walla Walla in print and continuously online through Whitman Stories, Whitman Magazine remains the flagship record of what Whitties do next, and of the valley college that set them going.
