Prof. Robert Tobin on the David Nord Award

"David Nord... was one of the alumni that briefly got very interested in the institution ....  He was ill with AIDS and this was before there was good medication and so he was thinking about what might happen after he passed away and he definitely wanted to do something to help the community at Whitman and to help gay people at Whitman. I think his initial idea was a speaker series and I do think I helped change it to the Nord Award... 'Let's do something that incorporates the students into the research and gets them motivated.' .... What I mean by that is that you don't have to be queer to win the Nord Award, but assumption is that the research that you're doing is going to interest the queer community and probably, there's a pretty good chance, that you're queer in some way if you are interested in doing that research, but it's certainly not an obligation." - Robert Tobin, August 16, 2019, transcript page 10.