By Ashley C. Killough

It's that time of year. Higher-ed administrators are holding orientations, scrubbing down dorms, and—at a liberal-arts institution in Washington State, anyhow—sending each incoming freshman a box of sweet onions.

Officials at Whitman College, in Walla Walla, Wash., say they're reasonably sure that theirs is the only American college that mails onions to its first-year students.

More than 20 years ago, Carl Schmitt, a trustee and local businessman who has since died, proposed that Whitman send the flavor of Walla Walla as a welcoming gesture to freshmen. The college has been shipping boxes every summer since.

The vegetable, known for its unusually sweet taste, is considered a local treasure and was recently extolled in The Washington Post by Tracy Dahl, a Whitman alumna. "An onion's pungency," her article explains, "is dictated by its pyruvic-acid content, which is a byproduct of cutting into an onion and releasing its volatile sulfur compounds." Walla Walla sweets, low in pyruvic acid, lack the sting of most other onion varieties.

Lily S. Idle, 18, was one of 425 freshmen to receive the aromatic gifts this month, cushioned in straw. "I had absolutely no idea that there were six onions in a box with my name on it heading my way," she says. It didn't take long for her to put them to use, making onion soup and a mushroom-and-onion chicken Parmesan.