Biography|Michelle Johnston Holthaus — The Pioneer Hall Campus Where She Took a Finance Degree

People treat Intel's later product chief as a Silicon Valley lifer.

The degree that trained her was taken on this McMinnville campus.

Michelle Johnston Holthaus grew up in Dundee, Oregon, a few miles northwest of the quad.

Her parents were already Linfield alumni: Ron Johnston, class of 1968, and Kathryn DeVore Johnston, class of 1969.

She had planned to leave the valley for college.

A few days before classes began she stayed instead, and later told the college paper that the campus felt like home.

She finished a bachelor of arts in finance in 1995.

The school was still named Linfield College. It became Linfield University in 2020.

Pioneer Hall is the oldest building on the grounds.

The Italianate brick pile, topped with a white belfry, opened in 1883 as the entire college under one roof.

It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on 23 February 1978.

When she studied here the hall still mixed classrooms, offices, and residences.

The business program that awarded the finance degree now sits in later buildings on the same campus.

Linfield named her Outstanding Young Alumna in 2009, during Homecoming that October.

That return visit is a separate pin on this map.

This one is the campus where the degree was completed.

A visitor standing under the oaks in front of Pioneer Hall is looking at the building that already anchored the quad when she arrived.

The childhood house in Dundee is not on this map.

Photo: M.O. Stevens, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons