$10.5 million gift to university from Peter and Judith Hallson establishes endowed deanship
Western Washington University has announced a $10.5 million gift commitment from Peter Hallson, a 1958 graduate, and his wife Judith Hallson, marking the largest planned gift in the university’s 125-year history and establishing its first-ever endowed deanship.
The commitment will create the Peter & Judith Hallson Endowed Deanship in the College of Science & Engineering, anchored by an $8 million endowment that permanently secures the college’s top academic leadership post with flexible, discretionary funding for generations of deans to come.
The endowed deanship represents a structural shift in how Western can support its science and engineering programs.
Rather than funding a single initiative or building, the gift creates a renewable resource that each future dean can direct toward the college’s most pressing needs — whether that means seeding faculty-led research pilots, expanding student professional development, launching new support programs, or responding to opportunities that arise unexpectedly.
University leaders describe endowed positions like this as a rare form of philanthropy because they insulate academic priorities from the volatility of annual fundraising and state budget cycles, giving deans room to make longer-term bets on people and ideas.
“We are truly grateful to Peter and Judith Hallson for this remarkable generosity, a gift that creates the first endowed deanship at Western,” said WWU President Sabah Randhawa.
“This investment will strengthen the capacity of our College of Science and Engineering to educate future generations of students and advance research and innovation. Thank you, Peter and Judith, for believing in the mission of Western and in the excellence of our faculty and talent of our students.”
Beyond the deanship, the Hallsons’ gift fans out across four additional endowments, each aimed at a different corner of the university the couple has come to know well over decades of engagement.
It establishes the Hallson Endowed Research Fund in Biology and the Hallson Endowed Fund for Excellence in the College of the Environment, both designed to give faculty and students working capital for research that might otherwise go unfunded. It also creates the Hallson Endowed Scholarship for graduates of Blaine High School — Peter Hallson’s hometown school — tying the gift directly back to the small Whatcom County community where his philanthropic instincts were first formed.
Rounding out the commitment is a contribution toward an endowed professorship supporting the Salish Sea Institute, Western’s research center focused on the ecological health of the regional waterway that borders the university’s home in Bellingham.
The scope of the gift reflects a relationship with Western that has deepened steadily since Peter Hallson’s own undergraduate years.
He grew up in Blaine, where he has said his mother instilled in him an early sense that community obligation and generosity were inseparable from personal success.
“Charity-wise I was given a lot and helped a lot and probably would not have been successful without the support of lots of people,” he has said, recalling that several of his Western professors became like surrogate parents during his studies.
He graduated in 1958, then served in the U.S. Marine Corps before building a long career in industrial water treatment, eventually rising to division president of Nalco Water, an Ecolab company, before retiring.
Retirement did not end his ties to Western — it redirected them. Hallson returned to the university hoping to put his industry experience to use on its behalf, meeting with Arlan Norman, then dean of what was known as the College of Science & Technology, and joining the college’s advisory board.
That entry point grew into more than a decade of service on the College of Science and Engineering’s Advancement Board, a role that put him alongside a succession of deans and gave him an unusually granular understanding of the college’s operational needs, financial pressure points, and ambitions.
“I made important friendships, and people would let me know when they needed something and I would help,” he has said of that period.
“The important thing to me is that people are being helped.”
That sustained, hands-on involvement — rather than a single large check written from a distance — appears to be the throughline of the Hallsons’ giving.
University records show the couple has already contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Western across several decades before this latest commitment, a pattern of steady, compounding support that predates and now culminates in the $10.5 million pledge.
Judith Hallson, herself a non-degreed alumna of Western’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences, has shared in that decades-long commitment alongside her husband, and both names are now permanently attached to the university’s academic infrastructure through the deanship and the accompanying endowments.
Peter Hallson’s contributions to Western have already been formally recognized through the university’s Lifetime Achievement Award and the College of Science and Engineering’s Distinguished Alumni Award, honors that predate this gift but that now read as markers along the way to it.
With the deanship and the four affiliated funds structured as permanent endowments, the Hallsons’ commitment is designed to outlast any single dean, faculty cohort, or scholarship class — a deliberate bet, university officials say, on Western’s capacity to keep producing the kind of talent and research that shaped Peter Hallson’s own trajectory nearly seven decades ago, and that he and Judith are now working to extend well into the university’s future.