George F. Whitworth Honors Program

Student Spotlight

Wahiawā Botanical Gardens: The Art and Tradition of Lei Making

At the Wahiawā Botanical Gardens, the practice of lei making is taught to visitors, both to carry on the tradition and teach the significance of the weave to visitors, but also to aid in the onerous task of weaving approximately 53,000 lei for Memorial Day. The Wahiawā Botanical Gardens contributes 7,000 natural lei every year to the project. In the hour and a half the Whitworth students were there, we made one hundred woven Ti lei. Hundreds of organizations run similar lei making sessions for the five months leading up to Memorial Day, freezing the lei braids to keep them until May.

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January 29, 2026

Haoles in Hawaii: Trip to the Polynesian Culture Center

On the 5th day of the First Year Honors group’s stay in Hawaii, we visited the Polynesian Cultural Center. After a long, sun drenched day full of information, performances, and beautiful scenery, most of us came away with a deeper understanding of Polynesian culture and the complex traditions preserved in places like the PCC (Polynesian Cultural Center).

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January 25, 2026

Beach Cleanup on Mokulē‘ia Army Beach: A Jan Term in Hawai’i

To end our first week on the island of O’ahu, Hawai’i, the 2026 Jan term Honors class went down to Mokulē‘ia Army Beach, a 2-minute drive from our camp, to clean up trash from the beach for an hour. We split up into groups of 3 to 6, turning our project into a little competition of which group could collect the most trash.

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January 25, 2026

Restoring Language

The prospect of entire languages going extinct, however, introduces questions: What is lost when a language dies? How do we revive a dying language?

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January 25, 2026

Green World Coffee Farm

Every day, an average of 2.25 billion cups of coffee are consumed across the world, and while Hawaiian grown coffee beans account for less than 1 percent of annual United States coffee consumption, the state still takes great pride in their coffee production.

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January 25, 2026

Fall 25 Wrap Up

This Fall semester went by fast! With many speakers on campus, a new Democracy Lab, Honors Lunches galore, a new Co-Director Joy York, Banned Books week, many literary journals, and mentorship opportunities it’s no surprise we lost track of time!

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December 9, 2025

Collecting Dust

Elizabeth Atwood is published in WSU’s The Palouse Review, an Honors Literary Journal, for her art piece “Collecting Dust.”

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December 9, 2025

Jubilation Dance Ministry

Whitworth’s primary goal as an institution is to educate the ‘Mind and Heart’ of its students, but further than that, the Honors Program wants students to thrive in the world they are stepping into. A crucial part of that is in movement and education of the body, in addition to the trademarked ‘mind and heart.’

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December 1, 2025

Honors Peer Mentorship

There has been a new initiative within the Honors Program to emphasize peer mentorship. Within the last few weeks, Honors Junior and Senior mentors met with their underclassmen mentees.

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December 1, 2025

Script Literary Journal

Whitworth is the proud host of a literary journal called Script. Script is a completely student-run journal that has been producing editions since 1987, and this year’s edition is collecting submissions from several new categories.

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October 31, 2025

Banned Books Week 2025

The Whitworth Democracy Lab’s Banned Book Club hosted our 2025 Banned Books Week. Banned Books Week ran from Oct 5-11 this year. The Banned Book Club finished reading 1984 by George Orwell and initiated several projects on campus.

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October 22, 2025