Colleges: A Thinking Reed

The story is wrong—and it infuriates Reed College all the more because Reed, a place that goes for beards, guitars and sandals, is just unconventional enough that the yarn sounds as though it might be true. The story is often cited in two cities: in Portland, Ore., Reed’s home town, and Moscow. In the Russian capital, not long ago, a Kremlin guide halted some U.S. professors at the tomb of U.S.

Communist John Reed and repeated the legend once more. “Here,” he said, “is the founder of one of your colleges.” John Reed, a rich boy from Portland, had nothing to do with Reed College. He went to Harvard and loved it. William T.

Foster, a poor boy from Boston, had everything to do with Reed. He went to Harvard and hated it. Foster in 1911 became the first president of Reed, which had been founded with $1,500,000 left by the widow of Simeon G. Reed (no kin of John), a Columbia River shipping magnate. Foster deliberately made Reed the informal, freewheeling opposite of then snooty, monolithic Harvard.

Top 2%. Now. at least in scholarship, the two schools are more alike than different. With its 23 buildings on 92 acres, Reed is a tiny college of 789 coed students. With its low faculty pay and paltry endowment of $4,500,000, it is among the respectable poor of U.S. education. Yet by stern resolve and heroic dispensing of scholarship money ($250,000 a year), Reed is intellectually one of the nation’s richest campuses. Reed has no other reason for being. “The only attraction here is intellectual activity,” says one professor. “There is no other way to lead a satisfactory existence at Reed.”

As one result. Reed is often said to have the “smartest body of undergraduates in America.” This year’s average Reed freshman ranked in the top 4% of all U.S. students taking college board exams; one-third of the class was in the top 2%. Reed leads the country in ratio of Rhodes scholarships to male graduates (1 to 71), in percentage of graduates winning Woodrow Wilson fellowships, and in percentage of graduates who have gone on to become college and university teachers, notably in science. Just for variety, Reed also lists such odd alumni as a talented writer who became a convicted stickup artist, a union organizer who went on to translate the Iliad, and the Zen-loving model for one of Novelist Jack Kerouac’s chief characters.

Most Reed students come from California, followed by Oregon, Washington and New York. The universal lure is Reed’s blend of social and academic freedom. “Dad dreamed of Caltech,” says one boy from Los Angeles. “I didn’t want to leave out the humanities, and Portland is a convenient 1,000 miles from home.” The dominance of outsiders is one of Reed’s chief problems with Portland. Harvard-trained President Richard H. Sullivan on the one hand exults in his students’ hot loyalty to “the Reed community,” and on the other laments their disdain for Portland. “We’re snobs,” says one girl.

Fighting Injustis. In conservative Portland, Reed was suspect from the day President Foster descended on it with his pacifism, social conscience and simplified spelling (dout, injustis). His students were soon questioning everything from the effect of vaudeville on children to anti-German hysteria in World War I. Reed is still that way. Portland cops once jailed a Reed student for reading Shelley by moonlight on campus; next night 20 Reed students did the same on a Portland street corner. Hardly a strike goes by in Portland without some Reed student getting involved and even arrested.

Reed is so free that it runs completely on the honor system, from exams to evening “intervisitation” between boys and girls in the dormitories. Reed is so anti-organization that it has no fraternities and only the most tepid intercollegiate athletics—a dart competition with a Catholic seminary, a basketball game with the University of Oregon’s dental school. The usual weekend diet is study, study, study.

Needed: Cash. Reed students get no grades until graduation; the faculty of 96 meets quarterly to review students’ work and report the credit hours they deserve. Classes are small; electives are few. Science and humanities get equal stress in such ways as a senior seminar that attempts a whole vision of learning. Under a new plan, students can sail through in three years or plod through in five. They still face stiff junior-year qualifying exams, must write senior theses. Recent titles range from “Metal Ion Inhibition of Ribonuclease” to “Gerard Manley Hopkins: Instressing His Inscape.”

Last year Reed was one of eight liberal arts colleges, and the only one in the West, to get a 2-for-1 matching grant from the Ford Foundation, giving it a $1,400,000 start toward an ambitious ten-year drive for $20 million. Having just put up several science buildings, it has work ahead to meet its goals. If this requires a figurative shave and haircut to impress donors, Reed students want none of it, and President Sullivan jealously guards their freedom to be both different and excellent.