Education: Reed Saved

At 8:30 every weekday morning, a 70-year-old gentleman whom all Portland, Ore. knows as Mr. Mac marches into the First National Bank, seats himself at the desk tagged Chairman of the Board and settles to work. At 10:30, Chairman Ernest Boyd MacNaughton marches out again and takes over his second desk as president of the Portland Oregonian (circ. 224,314). Finally, after a quick lunch at “a grab and grunt stand,” Mr. Mac heads for his third and favorite job—president of Reed College (enrollment: 585).

At first glance, Mr. Mac is no man to be a college president, and Reed is the last place that should have him. The MacNaughton administration is the marriage of a blustery, conservative Scot (“I’m a Republican with a move on”) and a stiffly intellectual campus with a reputation for lively, even leftish,* political liberalism.

No Cheers. Portlanders have been wondering about Reed for a long time. It was founded (in 1911) with money left by a Portland steamboat and mining tycoon named Simeon Gannett Reed. Its first president, William T. Foster, had a knack for gathering bright scholars, and soon such men as Economist Paul Douglas, now U.S. Senator from Illinois, and Physicist Karl T. Compton, later president of M.I.T., were teaching there.

Reed banned fraternities and sororities, scorned football and outside athletics. There were no roll calls, no proctors, no cheerleader atmosphere. Students stuck close to their books. Today Reed can boast as many physicists listed in American Men of Science as Johns Hopkins.

No Tampering. Despite its academic prestige, Reed’s money-raising problems became so acute that Political Scientist Peter H. Odegard, its fifth president, resigned in disgust. Reed went looking for a savior, and the man it got was Mr. Mac.

Serving without pay, Mr. Mac proved to be just what the college had hoped for. He liked Reed’s twelve-man classes (“We don’t want to water down our professors with students”), refused to tamper with the faculty (“The function of a college is to search for truth”).

He drew his big bead on the college balance sheet. He slashed expenses, symbolically went about switching off lights. To wealthy Portlanders he became a pest. He buttonholed them in the Arlington Club, badgered them with photographs of needy students, demanded contributions to his scholarship fund. He begged from businessmen all over the state. When they gave him their stock answer—”Dammit, Mac, I’ll kick in for you, but why do I have to do this for Reed?”—he delivered them a stern lecture on the values of a liberal education.

For the first time in years, MacNaughton got Reed in the black. Last week, figuring on an enrollment drop of about 30%, he was out to raise an extra $85,000. For Portland’s biggest citizen—the most effective champion Reed has ever had—the campaign will be a pleasure. “The liberal ideals of Reed are worth fighting for at any time,” says Mr. Mac, “and by God, I’m a fighter.”

* For a while, people said that the college was somehow connected with Oregon-born John Reed, who so admired the Bolshevik revolution that he was buried in the Kremlin.