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Keenan Yoshizawa (’27) recently spent a semester abroad at the University of Galway in Ireland last spring. While there, the program took excursions around the island from North to South and East to West. This is a small collection of Yoshizawa's photos from the many sites around the Emerald Isle. O'Brien's Tower on the Cliffs of Moher, the highest point on the cliffs. Photo taken on Feb. 8, 2026. Ella Allen (’27) looks out over the water at An Cheathrú Rua, the village of Ca

The rise of ChatGPT. Art by Addie Martin. Generative AI is rapidly changing our society in ways we can’t fully understand. Young and old people alike are becoming increasingly dependent on an unreliable and ethically questionable technology. Its sycophantic nature combined with its lack of empathy or critical thinking often enables or encourages dangerous behavior, especially in younger people with more vulnerabilities than experience. In response to this problem, OpenAI is r

Dolly Parton during her visit to Willamette University in September 1989. Photo from Willamette Archives. Across Willamette’s campus, a culture of civic engagement—actions that individuals or groups take to address the concerns and well-being of their communities—drives students to step up, get involved and apply their skills to improve the public life of the greater Salem community. Especially now, that drive is taking a page out of Dolly Parton’s book. Parton’s impact on t

This robot has a question. Art by Basil Allen. Starting this semester, two new interdisciplinary minors are introduced at the Salem campus, combining engineering and ethics surrounding artificial intelligence. These minors include engineering AI, with the described curriculum including Python, data science, machine learning and neural networks, and understanding AI, taught through courses in math, philosophy, psychology, anthropology and music. Both minors were announced thi