WSU Provost Helped School Get Wired

Washington State University Provost Tom George listed impressive accomplishments in his unsuccessful bid to be chancellor of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, but he may have overlooked his greatest feat.

Creating teaching portfolios? An academic trend.

Helping launch a high-tech, cyber-wired “virtual” university? WSU already is virtually a university.

No, while George shirks the credit for it, his most tangible, day-to-day improvement to campus life may well be asking several years ago for an automated coffee machine in the French Administration Building. Instead, the building got an espresso bar.

Think of the increased productivity, the workplace morale, the shorter administrative meetings, not to mention the contribution to the town’s burgeoning coffee culture.

This is a coffee-fueled town. That status was confirmed this week with the arrival of a Starbucks coffee bar - just in time for finals week - but the evidence has been building for years.

While there was only a handful of espresso machines to choose from five years ago, the town’s coffee stops now outnumber its 18 traffic lights.

Pullman’s 23,000 or so residents can shop with a cup in hand at the Dissmore’s supermarket and Safeway, grab a cup at the drive-through west of town, or choose from half a dozen places on Main Street. On just one corner at the edge of campus, there are machines in the Cougar Sun Shop tanning salon, Mikey’s Greek Gyros and the newly reopened Burger King.

On campus, there’s the Bookie, Carpenter Hall, a cart that occasionally appears outside Todd Hall, the French Ad stand and a particularly prolific coffee stand in the student union.

One might be led to think there is no end to the demand for coffee here.

“So far we’ve found that to be true,” said Keith McIvor, who oversees the WSU Bookie espresso bar.

“I mean, we do between 500 and 600 cups a day.”

“Right now, this is a huge market,” Jeff Wilson, a business management major, said between sips from a non-fat, double-tall vanilla and caramel latte at the Bookie.

“You’ll probably find 80 percent of the students on this campus drink coffee.”

“It’s big,” said Dave W.R. Jones, a senior from Bothell who insists his jittery leg is not from the three to five cups - drip and Americano - he drinks a day.

“It’s definitely big enough to support Starbucks.”

Jones was sitting in the student union cafeteria with four friends, most of them hunched over tall coffee cups.

While they acknowledged caffeine is a form of fuel for WSU students who make up three-fourth’s of the town’s population - they said coffee drinking has become more than that.

“It’s coffee culture,” said Jones.

“The younger generation is more into coffee now,” said Brian Seng, a senior from Michigan.

“It’s part of their life.”

Typically, they drink two cups a day, said Kelly Jensen, manager of the Dissmore’s espresso bar, where a bank of Rolodexes holds more than 1,500 punch cards for a free cup after seven purchases.

“I have regular customers that will come in at breakfast, lunch and dinner, after work and lunch hour,” Jensen said.

“I have people who are pretty addicted.”

With the arrival of finals week, the Bookie’s McIvor predicted the number of customers won’t go up, but consumption will.

“They may go from a single to a double or trade up from a double to triple shots,” he said.

The Fine Art Coffee and Tea gallery on Main Street plans to be open 24 hours a day during the week.

“We’re throwing people out of here at 2:30 in the morning now,” said Rick Hanson, one of the gallery’s owners.

“We’re like, ‘Go home.”’

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo