As classes resume this week and students return to campus for Spring 2022, so arrives the WUmester topic: truth.

And who decides what’s true? Former Black Panther Party member Albert Woodfox will address that and recall his co-conviction in the murder case of a prison officer, and the unimaginable amount of solitary confinement he was sentenced to. In 2019, HarperCollins released a book Woodfox wrote called “Solitary.”

Woodfox will be at the Bradbury Thompson Alumni Center Tuesday, March 1st, 2022, beginning at 6 p.m. Along with several film screenings and an exhibit at Mulvane, this year’s spring WUmester has a lot more events, which can be viewed at www.washburn.edu/wumester.

“We had quite a bit of virtual programming last spring,” said Dr. Kelly Erby, assistant dean of arts and sciences and professor of history. “Because everybody gets bored of being on zoom, we’ve started these challenges that you can do either by yourself or as part of a team to meet the challenge.”

Each month’s challenge will have a theme about different sectors of veracity: truth telling and truth talk; unconscious bias; media-created bias; and speaking truth to power.

One of the films, a 2019 award-winning documentary about a Californian highschooler who works two jobs in the fruit farming industry while studying to be the first person in her family to go to college, will screen on campus in late March.

“When you think of truth, it’s not black and white,” said Isaiah Collier, director of student involvement and development. “So truth is open to everybody’s different interpretation.”

That is the importance of art; The Mulvane Museum Truth Exhibit will run from Feb. 4 to July 23, 2022. Curated from the permanent collection, the exhibition will particularly consider how distinct identities shape the perspectives and understandings of social and political issues.

Edited by: Alyssa Storm and Ellie Walker