Reed College

Reed College

Reed Griffin
Type	Private Liberal Arts
Established	1908
Endowment	US$352 million
President	Colin Diver
Academic staff	132
Undergraduates	1,407
Postgraduates	29
Location	Portland , OR , USA
Campus	Residential, 98.52 acres (400,000 m²)
Mascot	Griffin
Website	web.reed.edu

Reed College is a liberal arts college located in Portland, Oregon in the Eastmoreland neighborhood. Founded in 1908, Reed is a highly selective four-year college with a reputation for delivering a strong academic experience, for attracting a highly intellectual student body, and for generating an unusually high percentage of graduates who go on to earn Doctoral degrees. Reed is a residential college with a campus located in a residential Portland neighborhood, featuring Ivy-League style Tudor architecture and a forested canyon wilderness preserve at its center.

History

Reed College's Eliot Hall on a snowy day.

The Reed Institute (the legal name of the College) was founded in 1908, and Reed College held its first classes in 1911. Reed is named for Oregon pioneers Simeon Gannett Reed and Amanda Reed. Simeon was an entrepreneur in trade on the Columbia River; in his will he suggested that his wife could "devote some portion of my estate to benevolent objects, or to the cultivation, illustration, or development of the fine arts in the city of Portland, or to some other suitable purpose, which shall be of permanent value and contribute to the beauty of the city and to the intelligence, prosperity, and happiness of the inhabitants". The first president of Reed (1910–1919) was William Trufant Foster, a former professor at Bates College and Bowdoin College in Maine.

Although it holds a reputation for the anti-authoritarian leanings of its students (and sometimes its faculty), the only connection between Reed College and the journalist John Reed is the similarity of their names and the fact that both were native to Portland.

Distinguishing features

Reed is one of the most unusual institutions of higher learning in the United States, featuring a traditional liberal arts and natural sciences curriculum. It requires freshmen to take Humanities 110 - an intensive introduction to the Classics, covering ancient Greece and Rome as well as the Bible and ancient Jewish history. Its program in the sciences is likewise unusual -- Reed's TRIGA research reactor makes it the only school in the US to have a nuclear reactor operated almost entirely by undergraduates. Reed also requires all students to complete a thesis (a two-semester-long research project conducted under the guidance of professors) during the senior year as a prerequisite of graduation, and passing a junior qualifying exam at the end of the junior year is a prerequisite of beginning the thesis. Upon completion of the senior thesis, students must also pass an oral exam that may encompass questions not only about the thesis, but also about any course previously taken.

The Old Dorm Block

Reed maintains a 10:1 student-to-faculty ratio, and its small classes emphasize a "conference" style, in which the teacher often acts as a mediator for discussion rather than a lecturer. While large lecture-style classes exist, Reed emphasizes its smaller lab and conference sections.

Reed has no fraternities, sororities, or NCAA sports teams, although physical education classes (which range from kayaking to juggling) are required for graduation. Reed also has several intercollegiate athletic teams, most notably the club Rugby, Fencing, and Ultimate Frisbee teams.

Reed operates under an Honor Principle. First introduced as an agreement to promote ethical academic behavior, with the explicit end of relieving the faculty of the burden of policing student behavior, the Honor Principle was extended to cover all aspects of student life. There are few codified rules governing behavior (thus distinguishing Reed from other institutions with an Honor Code); the onus is on students individually and as a community to define which behaviors are acceptable and which are not. "Honor Cases" (or discrete cases of grievance) are adjudicated by the "J-Board" (or Judicial Board), which consists of nine full-time students. There is also an "Honor Council" which consists of students, faculty, and staff, designed to educate the community and mediate conflict between individuals.

Academic program

Reed categorizes its academic program into five Divisions and the Humanities program. Overall, Reed offers five Humanities courses, twenty-six department majors, twelve interdisciplinary majors, six dual-degree programs with other colleges and universities, and special programs for pre-medical and pre-veterinary students.

Divisions

The Reed College campus

• Division of Arts: includes the Art (Art History and Studio Art), Dance, Music, and Theatre Departments;
• Division of History and Social Sciences: includes the History, Anthropology, Economics, Political Science, and Sociology Departments, as well as the International and Comparative Policy Studies Program;
• Division of Literature and Languages: includes the Classics, Chinese, English, French, German, Russian, and Spanish Departments, as well as the Creative Writing and General Literature Programs;
• Division of Mathematics and Natural Sciences: includes the Mathematics, Biology, Chemistry, and Physics Departments, and
• Division of Philosophy, Religion, Psychology, and Linguistics: includes the Psychology, Philosophy, Religion, and Linguistics Departments.

Humanities program

Reed President Richard Scholz in 1922 called the Humanities program "an honest effort to disregard old historic rivalries and hostilities between the sciences and the arts, between professional and cultural subjects, and, ... the formal chronological cleavage between the graduate and the undergraduate attitude of mind." Reed formally combined its Humanities classes into a program in 1943, and added the Chinese Civilization course in 1995.

Reed's Humanities program includes the mandatory freshman course Introduction to Western Humanities covering ancient Greek and Roman literature, art and philosophy. Sophomores may take Early Modern Europe covering Renaissance thought and literature; Modern Humanities covering the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and Modernism, and/or Chinese Civilization. There is also a Humanities Senior Symposium.

Interdisciplinary and Dual-degree programs

Reed also offers interdisciplinary programs in American studies, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Chemistry/Physics, Classics/Religion, Dance/Theatre, History/Literature, International and Comparative Policy Studies (ICPS), Literature/Theatre, Mathematics/Economics, and Mathematics/Physics.

Reed offers dual-degree programs in Applied Physics (with OHSU/OGI), Computer Science (with University of Washington), Engineering (with Caltech and others), Environmental Science (with Duke University), and Fine Art (with the Pacific Northwest College of Art).

Admissions and student demographics

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Eliot Hall

Until the late 1990s, Reed accepted a larger percentage of total applicants than peer institutions — 76% in 1996. This led to high levels of attrition (drop-outs) during that period. Since then the number of applicants for freshman admission has increased sharply — by 76% between 2001/2002 and 2005/2006. Since 2002, Reed's attrition rate has moved toward that of peer institutions, and the five-year graduation rate (72% for the 2000/2001 entering class) now exceeds the national average. The class of 2010's average combined Math and Verbal SAT scores were 1375 and high school GPA was 3.9, with 40% of applicants accepted.

Reed's Class of 2010 is 45% male and 55% female, and includes 26% minority students: 4% of freshmen self-report as Black (including African-American, African, and Afro-Caribbean); 7% as Hispanic; 11% as Asian, 2% Native American, and 2% Mixed/Other. Minority numbers include some of the 7% international citizens (13% of freshmen did not self-report their ethnicity). In this class, 38% of students are from the U.S. West Coast (CA, OR, WA), with the most coming from California.

In the Fall of 2006, Reed enrolled 376 incoming freshmen and 47 transfer students, its largest entering class in many years. listing it among "the nation's elite colleges."

Reed has also gained notice for refusing to participate in the annual U.S. News and World Report College Rankings, because Reed "actively questions the methodology and usefulness of college rankings." Reed further claims that US News has depended on limited data provided on the College's web site to rank Reed, a practice which Reed claims is incomplete and has caused it to be ranked lower than it would be otherwise. Reed President Colin Diver wrote a piece in the October 2005 issue of Atlantic Monthly magazine defending the decision to refuse to participate in the rankings.

Reed has produced the second-highest number of Rhodes scholars for any liberal arts college—31—as well as over 50 Fulbright Scholars, over sixty Watson Fellows, and two MacArthur ("Genius") Award winners. A very high proportion of Reed graduates go on to earn Ph.D.s, particularly in the sciences, history, political science, and philosophy. Reed is third in percentage of its graduates who go on to earn Ph.D.s in all disciplines, after only Caltech and Harvey Mudd. Reed is first in this percentage in biology.

Reed's debating team, which had existed for only two years at the time, was awarded the first place sweepstakes trophy for Division Two schools at the final tournament of the Northwest Forensics Conference in February 2004.

Loren Pope, former education editor for The New York Times, called Reed "the most intellectual college in the country." Reed's academic workload for freshmen can be especially daunting to the unprepared.

Political

Reed has a reputation as politically left-wing. Whether in fact Reed's student body is more leftist than similar colleges is difficult to determine, but Reed's academic tradition of open and passionate debate often spills into the off-campus political arena and, combined with the freewheeling social environment, often leads to the appearance of radical leftism.

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Old Dorm Block

During the McCarthy era of the 1950s, then-President Duncan Ballantine fired Marxist philosopher Stanley Moore, a tenured professor, for his failure to cooperate with the HUAC investigation. According to an article in the college's alumni magazine, "because of the decisive support expressed by Reed's faculty, students, and alumni for the three besieged teachers and for the principle of academic freedom, Reed College's experience with McCarthyism stands apart from that of most other American colleges and universities. Elsewhere in the academic world both tenured and untenured professors with alleged or admitted communist party ties were fired with relatively little fuss or protest. At Reed, however, opposition to the political interrogations of the teachers was so strong that some believed the campus was in danger of closure." A statement of "regret" by the Reed administration and Board of Trustees was published in 1981, formally revising the judgment of the 1954 trustees. In 1993, then-President Steve Koblik invited Moore to visit the College, and in 1995 the last surviving member of the Board that fired Stanley expressed his regret and apologized to him.

Drug use

Since the 1960s, Reed has had a reputation for tolerating open drug use among its students, and the 1998 Princeton Review listed Reed as the number-three school in the "reefer madness" category. The Yale Daily News Insider's Guide to Colleges also notes an impression among students of institutional permissiveness: "according to students, the school does not bust students for drug or alcohol use unless they cause harm or embarrassment to another student". (2006 edition, p. 771). A new Drug and Alcohol Policy Enforcement was introduced in Fall of 2005.

The Reed Psychology Department has conducted an ongoing survey since 1999 regarding both drug use and perceptions of drug use on the Reed campus. The study found that the perceived level of drug use was exaggerated: in particular, the perceived use of marijuana at Reed is once a week while the actual reported use is 50% once a month or more often. Meanwhile, on average only 21% of the overall college student population report having used the drug within the last month.

Campus

A. E. Doyle's 1920 Master Plan

The Reed College campus was established on a southeast Portland tract of land known in 1910 as Crystal Springs Farm, a part of the Ladd Estate, formed in the 1870s from original land claims. The college's grounds include 98.52 contiguous acres, including a wooded wetland known as Reed canyon (see below).

Portland architect Albert E. Doyle developed a plan modeled on Oxford University's St. John's College that was never implemented in full. The original campus buildings (including the Library, the Old Dorm Block, and what is now the primary administration building, Eliot Hall) are brick Tudor gothic buildings in a style that lends an Ivy League feel to much of the campus. In contrast, the science section of campus, including the physics, biology, and psychology (originally chemistry) buildings, were designed in the Modernist style. The Psychology Building, completed in 1949, was designed by famed Modernist architect Pietro Belluschi at the same time as his celebrated Equitable Building.

The campus and buildings have undergone several phases of growth, and there are now 21 academic and administrative buildings and 18 residence halls (dorms). Since 2004, Reed's campus has expanded to include adjacent properties beyond its historic boundaries, such as the Birchwood Apartments complex and the Parker House. At the same time the Willard House (donated to Reed in 1964), across from the college's main entrance, was converted from faculty housing to administrative use. Reed also owns more than a dozen homes adjacent to the campus that are used to house new and visiting faculty.

Dorms

Reed houses about 800 students in 12 dorms on campus and several college-owned houses and apartment buildings on or adjacent to campus. Dorms on campus range from the traditional (the Gothic Old Dorm Block , referred to as 'ODB') to the eclectic (Anna Mann, a 1920s-style cottage originally used as a women's dormitory), language houses (Spanish, Russian, French, German, and Chinese), 'temporary' housing, built in the '60s (Cross Canyon - Chittick, McKinley, Griffin, Woodbridge) to theme dorms including everything from substance-free living to a cat dorm. The college's least-loved dorm complex (as measured by applications to the College's housing lottery), MacNaughton and Foster-Scholz, is known on campus as "Asylum Block" because of its post-WWII modernist architecture and interior spaces dominated by long, straight corridors lined with identical doors, said by students to resemble that of an insane asylum[1]. Until 2006, it was thought that these dorms had been designed by architect Pietro Belluschi. MacNaughton houses Reed's Co-op floor, a 16-member food cooperative. Under the 10-year Campus Master Plan adopted in 2006, Foster-Scholz is scheduled to be demolished and replaced, and MacNaughton to be remodeled.

Reed also plans to raise the number of students it can house on campus to 900 or 950, while maintaining the overall student body at approximately its current size. According to the new master plan, “The College’s goal is to provide housing on or adjacent to the campus that accommodates 75% of the [full time equivalent] student population. At present, the College provides on-campus housing for 838 students.”[2] At the 2006-7 enrollment level of about 1400 students, meeting the master plan’s goal would require in all about 1050 spaces on campus -- approximately 200 more spaces than the College currently provides.

Reed Canyon

The Blue Bridge

The Reed College Canyon, a natural wilderness area and national wildlife preserve, bisects the campus, separating the academic buildings from many of the dormitories (the so called cross-canyon dorms.) Canyon Day, a tradition spanning more than 90 years, is held once a semester. On Canyon Day students and Reed neighbors join canyon crew workers to spend a day helping with restoration efforts. A hallmark of the campus, the Blue Bridge, spans the canyon. It appears on almost every viewbook that the college circulates.

This bridge replaced the unique cantilevered bridge that served in that spot between 1959 and 1991. "It featured stressed plywood girders—the first time this construction had been used on a span of this size: a straight bridge 132 feet long and 15 feet high. It attracted great architectural interest during its lifetime."

Food services

The Reed College cafeteria, known simply as 'Commons,' has a reputation for ecologically sustainable food services. Due to the nature of the student body, vegan and vegetarian dishes feature heavily on the menu. It is currently the only cafeteria on the small campus. Off-campus students and others who choose not to purchase a meal plan are seen at mealtimes scrounging for free food from on-campus students and their leftovers, a practice that has persisted (despite periodic complaints) for decades.

The Reed College Co-op is a theme dorm located on the first floor of the MacNaughton building, and is the only campus residence that is independent of the school's board plan. This floor usually houses 12 to 16 students who purchase and prepare food together for all meals, sharing weekly chores. Reed's administration plans to move the Co-op to to a dedicated residence in the fall of 2007.

The Paradox is a cooperative student-run coffee shop also on the campus. In 2003 a second cafe, dubbed the 'Paradox Lost' (an allusion to Milton's Paradise Lost), opened at the southern end of the biology building.

Trivia

The official mascot of Reed is the griffin (pictured below). In mythology, the griffin often pulled the chariot of the sun, making the griffin the symbolic "protector of knowledge and bane of ignorance". The griffin was featured on the coat-of-arms of founder Simeon Reed and is now on the official seal of Reed College.

The official school color of Reed is called richmond rose, possibly in part because Portland is the City of Roses. Over the years, institutional memory of this fact has faded and the color appearing on the school's publications and merchandise has darkened to a shade of maroon, which many people now consider the de facto school color.

Unofficial mottos and folklore

An unofficial motto of Reed is "Communism, Atheism, Free Love," and can be found in the Reed College Bookstore on sweaters, t-shirts, etc. The motto purportedly was a comment of some outside person, known in the 50's and possibly made much earlier. An alternative motto appeared on shirts in the late 1980s as "Capitalism, Avarism, and Free Beer", but never overtook the original in popularity. A small group of students has recently been petitioning the bookstore to update the shirts' text to read, "Socialism, Agnosticism, Safe Sex," a comment on the increasingly moderate (though still quite radical) predominating values of the student body. Additionally, the punning "Reed: You Might Learn Something" was a popular slogan in the mid-1980s.

Faux Reed Seal

Another popular characterization was from a letter to the local newspaper, in which Reed students were said to resemble "unmade beds" which provided a subject for creating special Reed occasion costumes.

Every year's Reed College Student Handbook (a manual on student life written by students, not to be confused with the College Handbook, which is written by college officials) contains a test called the "Reed College Immorality Quotient" that tests an individual's immorality on topics such as sex, theft, and drug use.

One of the unofficial symbols of Reed is the Doyle Owl, a roughly 280 pound (127 kg) concrete statue that has been continuously stolen and re-stolen since 1913. The on-campus folklore of events surrounding the Doyle Owl is sufficiently large that, in 1983, a senior thesis was written on the topic of the Owl's oral history. The original Doyle Owl was almost certainly destroyed many years ago, but a number of replicas (of varying degrees of quality) remain in circulation, contributing to the frequency of its appearance.

Well-known on-campus myths claim there exist an intact MG under the concrete foundation of the college library, an underground primate lab working exclusively with snow monkeys under the Psychology building (the legend states that the presence of this lab was discovered when a snow monkey escaped into the Canyon and necessitated the closing of the facility), and a four-story lab/habitation arcology under the Physics building. There are many other such stories, often referred to as Reed legends.

Student organizations

Student body funds are distributed semiannually to groups that place among the top 40 organizations in the semester funding poll (in Reed-speak, top 40ed). Most organizations are highly informal, although some that partner with outside groups such as Oxfam or Planned Parenthood are more structured. The Reed archive of comic books and graphic novels, the MLLL (Comic Book Reading Room) has existed for at least 40 years, and Beer Nation, the student group that organizes and manages various beer gardens throughout the year and during Renn Fayre, has existed for many years. Some organizations, such as the Motorized Couch Collective -- dedicated to installing motors and wheels into furniture -- have become more Reed myth than reality in recent years.

Notable alumni

Reed considers any student who attended a semester or more at the college to be an alumnus or alumna, as applicable. Reed's notable alumni include:

Doon Arbus – 1967 (writer and journalist) James Beard – 1924 (chef) Don Berry - 1931 (writer) Lee Blessing – 1971 (playwright) Arlene Blum – 1966 (mountaineer) Alafair Burke - 1991 (author, Court TV commentator) Ry Cooder – 1971 (singer, songwriter) attended Reed for one semester. Richard Danzig – 1965 (71st Secretary of the Navy) Mike Davis – (social theorist) attended Reed for one semester. Katherine Dunn – 1969 (author) David Eddings – 1954 (writer) Barbara Ehrenreich – 1963 (scientist, writer and social critic) Janet Fitch – 1978 (author of White Oleander) David H. French – 1939 (anthropologist and linguist) Max Gordon – 1924 (founder, Village Vanguard) Barret Hansen – 1963 (the radio personality also known as Dr. Demento) Steve Jobs – 1976 (co-founder of Apple Computer) attended Reed for one semester. Dale W. Jorgenson – 1955 (economist, Samuel W. Morris University Professor at Harvard, past president of the AEA and the Econometric Society) Steven McGeady – 1980 (technologist) Peter Norton – 1965 (creator of the Norton Utilities)

Eric Overmyer – 1973 (screenwriter, producer, playwright) Keith Packard – 1986 (X Window System) Norman Packard – 1977 (chaos theory physicist) Emilio Pucci – 1937 (fashion designer) Steven Raichlen – 1975 (TV chef, cookbook author) Howard Rheingold – 1968 (writer) James Russell – 1953 (inventor of the compact disc) Larry Sanger – 1991 (co-founder of Wikipedia) John Sperling – 1948 (founder of the University of Phoenix) Gary Snyder – 1951 (poet) C. Howard Vollum - 1936 (founder of Tektronix, inventor of the oscilloscope) Philip Whalen – 1951 (poet) Lew Welch – 1950 (poet) Howard Wolpe – 1960 (former Congressman)

Paideia

During the week before the beginning of second-semester classes, the campus undergoes Paideia (drawn from the Greek). This "festival of learning" takes the form of a week (although originally a whole month) of classes and seminars put on by anyone who wishes to teach, including students, professors, staff members, and outside educators invited on-campus by members of the Reed Community. Many such classes are explicitly silly (one long-running tradition is to hold an "Underwater Basket Weaving" class), while others are trivially educational (such as "Giant Concrete Gnome Construction," a class that, incidental to building monolithic gnomes, includes some content relating to the construction of pre-Christian monoliths). Genuine classes (such as martial arts seminars and mini-classes on obscure academic topics), tournaments, and film festivals round out the "class" list, which is different every year. The objective of Paideia is not only to learn new (possibly non-useful) things, but to turn the tables on students and encourage them to teach.

In his 2005 Stanford commencement lecture, Apple Computer founder and Reed alumnus Steve Jobs credited a Reed calligraphy class for his focus on choosing quality typefaces for the Macintosh. While the full calligraphy course is no longer taught at Reed, Paideia usually features a short course on the subject.

Renn Fayre

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A student-made katamari at the 2006 Renn Fayre

Renn Fayre is an annual three-day celebration at Reed with a different theme each year. Born in the 1960s as an actual renaissance fair, it has long since lost all connection to anachronism and the Renaissance, although its name has persisted.

Renn Fayre commences with the Thesis Parade, where graduating seniors make a symbolic march to deliver their theses to the registrar. Students, faculty, and staff gather at the entrance to the library where chaos, champagne, and fireworks get the party started. The parade commences when the senior class moves through the library and out through what was the library's original front entrance (now an emergency exit).

The Fayre runs from Friday to Sunday, beginning on the last day of classes for the spring semester. The week after Renn Fayre is Reading Week, in which no classes are held; final examinations are held in the following week.

Renn Fayre is often called the metaphorical explosion of the student body after a year of intense pressure. Traditions include bizarre art installations, insect-eating contests, occasional motorized couches, a swimsuit Slip 'N Slide, naked people painting themselves blue (a vague tribute to the ancient Picts), a beer garden, the Glo Opera (performed at night by actors in lightstick-covered suits) and a general sense of mayhem. Serious injuries are rare, thanks in part to the presence of vigilant student volunteers (known as "Karma Patrol" and "Border Patrol", who ensure guest wellness and the exclusion of unauthorized visitors, respectively) and the non-profit White Bird Clinic.

Student participation is almost unanimous; faculty and staff also attend some of the festivities. Alumni and authorized guests may also participate.

External links

• Reed College - official website
• Virtual Tour of Reed
• The Reed Nuclear Reactor website
• Reed College Library home page
• Reed College Institutional Research
• Common Data Set (CDS), 2006-2007
• Reed College Canyon website
• Reed College LiveJournal Community
• Rennfayre.com Student-run Renn Fayre website.
• 10-Year Campus Master Plan, adopted August 31, 2006
• Distinctively American: The Residential Liberal Arts Colleges