TWhitten Maher Memorial Scholarship Honors Life of Breeze Writer/Editor/Designer

WRTC
 

 

Whitten Maher

Whitten Maher “was a student, writer, and artist with a prescient understanding of the power of communication…. His outstanding work sought to build connections and bring light.” This remembrance from author and former JMU professor Eleanor Henderson is one of many on a new JMU scholarship website commemorating the life of alum Whitten Maher, who died on December 20, 2012, at the age of 25, prematurely ending a promising future in writing and design.

While a student at JMU, Maher double-majored in Political Science and Writing, Rhetoric and Technical Communication. He also worked as Design Editor and as a Senior Writer/Columnist for The Breeze. He won awards from the Virginia Press Association for his design and writing, including praise for an opinion column he penned called “Gadfly” admired for “putting a local face on topics with national importance.”

After graduating from JMU, Maher joined Demos, a public policy organization based in New York City, which advocates political and economic equality for all Americans. A colleague at Demos recalls that “Whitten possessed a focused energy and a clear-headed optimism. He truly believed in structural change, both in the fabric of our society, and in the processes and systems of communication that move forward the work of an organization such as Demos.”

Brad Jenkins, general manager of The Breeze, also remembers the communicative power of Maher’s design work: “The point of design is not necessarily to make something look pretty; it’s to communicate something…. Whitten had a strong ability to communicate his ideas through his words and through design. He understood that the two work together to tell a story.”

“When Whitten wrote,” former professor Erin Lambert-Hartman recalls, “he was able to voice ideas that humanized those who, for whatever reasons, are not fully represented”—even those who expressed ideas that Maher found deeply offensive. “As tragic as Whitten’s death will always be,” she says, “he has given us an opportunity to create something that honors the great potential he had, a potential that lives in others.”

Thanks to the generosity of the Maher family, the Whitten Maher Memorial Scholarship for Writing and Design was established to honor the memory of its namesake. Now in its second year, this competitive $1000 scholarship applied to tuition is open to all JMU undergraduates across academic disciplines. The scholarship acknowledges and supports academic and nonacademic writing or design that conveys the kind of compassion, intensity, and well-informed reasoning that were so much a part of Whitten Maher’s character.

Eligible written- or design-based works should: 1) engage and educate audiences through a civic purpose, 2) promote empathy rather than derision, or 3) encourage populations who feel unrecognized or misunderstood.

The scholarship selection committee has just announced a call for submissions. For more information, please go to http://www.jmu.edu/wrtc/scholarships/whitten-maher-memorial-scholarship.shtml.

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Published: Monday, September 1, 2014

Last Updated: Wednesday, February 21, 2024

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