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Reed College

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Reed College is a liberal arts college with 1341 students as of the fall of 2004 (45% men and 55% women), located in Portland, Oregon in the Eastmoreland neighborhood. In August of 2005, The Princeton Review ranked Reed number 1 in its category "Best Overall Academic Experience For Undergraduates."

Reed College

Reed Griffin

Established 1908
School type Private Liberal Arts
President Colin Diver
Location Portland, OR, USA
Enrollment 1,312 undergraduate,
29 graduate
Faculty 133
Endowment US$337 million
Campus Urban, 98.52 acres (400,000 m²)
Sports teams Berserk (men's ultimate), Booty (women's ultimate), men's and women's rugby
Website web.reed.edu

History

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 from Bates College in Maine.

Although holding a well-earned 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.

Distinguishing features

Reed is one of the most unusual institutions of higher learning in the United States[1], featuring a traditional liberal arts and natural sciences curriculum, requiring freshmen to take Humanities 110 - an intensive introduction to the Classics. Hum 110 (pronounced, "Hume"), as most students refer to it, covers 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 is also one of the few remaining schools that require 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.

Reed is considered a haven for intense intellectuals and idealists. It promotes its dedication to "the life of the mind" to a greater degree than other liberal-arts colleges, and emphasizes its differences -- in both pedagogy and student life -- from similar institutions[1]. 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 are required for graduation.

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; 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. Currently it only serves in the latter function.

Admissions and student demographics

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 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 2009's average SAT score was 1368 and high school GPA was 3.9, with 44% of applicants accepted.

Reed's Class of 2009 is 43% male and 57% female, and includes 23% minority students: 4% of freshmen self-report as Black (including African-American, African, and Afro-Caribbean); 6% as Hispanic; and 9% as Asian. Minority numbers include this class's 4% international citizens (13% of freshmen did not self-report their ethnicity). In this class, 43% of students are from the U.S. West Coast (CA, OR, WA), with the most coming from California.

Tuition and finances

For students entering in the Fall of 2005, the total tuition, fees and room-and-board cost for a year at Reed was $41,106, a cost comparable to Amherst, Swarthmore, Wellesley, and Pomona (which are considered to be peer or competitive institutions). In recent years between 50% and 60% of students have received financial aid from the college.

Reed's endowment as of June 30, 2004 was $335 million, below the median of about $500m for comparable schools, and well below Amherst and Swarthmore's approximately $1 billion endowments. However, on a per-student basis, Reed's $265,000 per student is only slightly below the median. Reed's endowment contributes 22% of its operating expenses (tuition contributes 72% and the balance is from grants and annual gifts).

Reed's reputation

Reed is a highly-regarded liberal arts college with an idiosyncratic reputation for academic conservatism and excellence together with a freewheeling campus environment. Reed students and alumni over the years have cultivated an image that includes an extreme academic workload, a sink-or-swim social ethic, and a reputation for heavy recreational drug use.

Academic

As stated above, The Princeton Review in its publication "The Best 361 Colleges," published in August 2005, ranked Reed number 1 in its category "Best Overall Academic Experience For Undergraduates." It also ranked number 1 in the "Students Never Stop Studying" category and in the category of "Students Ignore God On A Regular Basis."

Reed has also gained notice for refusing to participate in the annual US News & World Report college rankings. According to a statement on The Reed Web site the College has done this because they "actively questioned 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 In October 2005 Atlantic Monthly magazine defending his descision to refuse to participate in the rankings (Link).

Reed has produced the second-highest number of Rhodes scholars (31), for any liberal arts college, as well as over 50 Fulbright Scholars, over 60 Watson Fellows, and 2 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 PhDs 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: the freshman Humanities syllabus [2] lists over 500 pages of weekly reading.

Political

Reed has a reputation as politically left-wing [3]. 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 [4] and, combined with the freewheeling social environment, often leads to the appearance of radical leftism.

Drug use

Since the 1960s, Reed has had a reputation for tolerating open drug use among its students [5], and the 1998 Princeton Review listed Reed as the #3 school in the "reefer madness" category [6]. 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). Actual insiders of Reed, however, can cite many instances of students being busted simply for violating drug and alcohol laws too conspicuously.

The Reed Psychology Department has conducted an ongoing survey [7] 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 [8].

Campus

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 modelled 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 the campus.

The campus and buildings have undergone several phases of growth, and there are now 21 academic and administrative buildings and 18 residence halls (dorms).

Dorms

Reed houses about 800 students in 12 dorms on campus and several college-owned houses and aparment buildings on or adjacent to campus. Dorms on campus range from the traditional (the Gothic Old Dorm Block) to the eclectic (Anna Mann, formerly a faculty residence), and include themed dorms focused on various languages as well as substance-free living and The Simpsons. The college's least-loved dorm complex, MacNaugton and Foster-Scholz, is known on campus as "Asylum Block" because of its dated and unfriendly post-WWII modernist architecture.

The Reed College Co-op is a theme dorm located on the first floor of the MacNaughton building. This floor usually houses 12 to 14 students who purchase and prepare food together for all meals, and remain independent of the school's board plan, and is the only on-campus group to do this.

Reed Canyon

The Reed College Canyon—a natural wilderness area—bisects the campus, separating the academic buildings from many of the dormitories (the so called cross-canyon dorms). A hallmark of the campus, the Blue Bridge, spans the canyon. It appears on almost every viewbook that the college circulates.

Reed Community Garden

For over thirty years Reed has allowed the use of a 1.9-acre portion of its campus for use as an organic community garden. The Reed community garden is administered by the City of Portland's Parks and Recreation department and serves over 130 local residents and their families, including Reed students, faculty and staff. The Community Garden became controversial in 2005 when a campus planning exercise contemplated the future removal or relocation of the community garden.

Food services

The Reed College cafeteria, known simply as 'Commons,' has a reputation for fast, friendly, 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.

The 'Paradox', a coffee shop also on the campus, is famed for its individually sold cigarettes and hip music. It is open late nights seven days a week. In 2003 a second cafe, dubbed the 'Paradox Lost', was opened at the southern end of the biology building. It retains a tamer image than the original: It is exceptionally clean and closes early.

Trivia

The official mascot of Reed is the griffin (pictured above). 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, and Free Love," and can be found in the Reed College Bookstore on sweaters, t-shirts, etc. The motto arose on t-shirts made in the mid-70's in ironic testament to the passing values of the 1960's, and has persisted to this date. An alternative motto appeared on shirts in the late 1980s as "Capitalism, Avarism, and Free Beer", but never overtook the original in popularity.

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.

Famous 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.

Unique student organizations

  • C.H.V.N.K. DCLXVI - college branch of Portland-based bicycle modification club
  • MLLL (Comic Book Reading Room) - archive of comic books and graphic novels spanning four decades, owned by the student body and available to any student for on-site reading
  • Motorized Couch Collective - installs motors and wheels into furniture
  • Reed Kommunal Shit Kollektiv - organizes parties and provides free goods/services to the student body in the spirit of communism, including blankets, bicycles, pillows, haircuts, food, and (during exam week) chemical stimulants

Notable alumni

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

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.

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 proven invincible.

Renn Fayre commences with Thesis Parade, where graduating seniors make a symbolic march to deliver their theses to the registrar. The students gather at the entrance to the library where chaos, champagne, and fireworks get the party started. At the proper moment, the entire group 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, 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, often fueled by drugs and alcohol. 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 [9].

Student participation is essentially unanimous, and even faculty and staff attend some of the festivities. Alumni and authorized guests may also participate.

References

  1. ^ Burton Clark, The Distinctive College: Grinnell, Reed, Antioch (1970)
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