Reed College

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 Philosophy, Religion, Psychology, and Linguistics Departments.

Reed President Richard Scholz in 1922 called the educational program as a whole "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".[42] The Humanities program, which came into being in 1943 (as the union of two year-long courses, one in "world" literature, the other in "world" history) is one manifestation of this effort. One change to the program was the addition of a course in Chinese Civilization in 1995. The faculty has also recently approved several significant changes to the introductory syllabus. These changes include expanding the parameters of the course to include more material regarding urban and cultural environments.[43]

Reed's Humanities program includes the mandatory freshman course Introduction to Western Humanities covering ancient Greek and Roman literature, history, art, religion, and philosophy. Sophomores, juniors, and seniors 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 Foundations of Chinese Civilization. There is also a Humanities Senior Symposium.[44]

Reed also offers interdisciplinary programs in American studies,[45] Environmental Studies,[46] Biochemistry and Molecular Biology,[47] Chemistry-Physics,[48] Classics-Religion,[49] Dance/Theatre,[50] History-Literature,[51] International and Comparative Policy Studies (ICPS),[52] Literature-Theatre,[53] Mathematics-Economics,[54] and Mathematics-Physics.[55]

Reed offers dual-degree programs in Computer Science (with University of Washington), Engineering (with Caltech, Columbia University, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), Forestry or Environmental Management (with Duke University), and Fine Art (with the Pacific Northwest College of Art).[56]

In 1995, Reed College refused to participate in the U.S. News & World Report "best colleges" rankings, making it the first educational institution in the United States to refuse to participate in college rankings. According to Reed's Office of Admissions the school's refusal to participate is based in 1994 disclosures by The Wall Street Journal about institutions flagrantly manipulating data in order to move up in the rankings in U.S. News and other popular college guides.[61] U.S. News maintains that their rankings are "a very legitimate tool for getting at a certain level of knowledge about colleges."[62] In 2019, a team of statistics students recreated the formula used by U.S. News and were able to identify and quantify the penalty imposed on Reed. The students found the college to be ranked an estimated 52 places below an unbiased application of the U.S. News scoring rubric.[63]

Money magazine ranked Reed 512th in the U.S. out of 623 schools evaluated for its 2022 "Best Colleges for Your Money" edition.[64]

Reed is ranked as tied for the 72nd best liberal arts college by U.S. News & World Report in its 2022 rankings, and tied for 16th in "Best Undergraduate Teaching", tied for 13th in "Most Innovative Schools", and tied for 185th in "Top Performers on Social Mobility".[65]

In 2006, Newsweek magazine named Reed as one of twenty-five "New Ivies",[66] listing it among "the nation's elite colleges". In 2012, Newsweek ranked Reed the 15th "most rigorous" college in the nation.[67]

Reed College ranked in the bottom 6% of four year colleges nationwide in the Brookings Institution's rating of U.S. colleges by incremental impact on alumni earnings 10 years post-enrollment.[68]

An episode of Malcolm Gladwell's podcast Revisionist History examines the flaws in the U.S. News system of university rankings.[69] The episode features a project done by a Reed professor of statistics and her students to investigate the mechanics of the ranking algorithm, attempting to see if Reed's ranking had been purposefully devalued because the school refused to submit its information to U.S. News.[70] Previous investigations by Reed students to re-create U.S. News's statistical ranking algorithm found that Reed's correct 2019 rank was #38 instead of its assigned rank of #90.[71][72]

Eliot Hall in 2007

The Class of 2026 had 394 students.[73] Median SAT scores were 690 math and 720 reading. The class was drawn from the largest pool ever— 9,023 applicants—and was the most selective in Reed's history, with an admittance rate of 30.8%.[73] As of 2018, to increase student enrollment from historically underrepresented minorities, Reed encourages application to the college's "Discover Reed Fly-In Program", an all-inclusive, all-expenses-paid, multi-day campus tour and open to all high school seniors who are US citizens or permanent residents, regardless of race or ethnicity.[74]

The total direct cost for the 2022–23 academic year, including tuition, fees and room-and-board, was $80,710.[75] Indirect costs (books, supplies, transportation, personal expenses) could be another $3,950.[76] For the 2022–23 academic year, the average financial aid package was $52,284.[75] In 2022–23 over half of students received financial aid from the college.[75] In 2004, 1.4% of Reed graduates defaulted on their student loans[77] – below the national Cohort Default Rate average of 5.1%.[78]

Reed's endowment as of June 30, 2021, was $726 million.[79] In the economic downturn that began in late 2007, Reed's total endowment had declined from $455 million in June 2007 to $311 million in June 2009.[80] By the end of 2013, however, the endowment surpassed the $500 million mark.[81]

Reed has produced the second-highest number of Rhodes scholars for any liberal arts college—32—as well as over fifty Fulbright Scholars, over sixty Watson Fellows, and two MacArthur ("Genius") Award winners.[8][82] A very high proportion of Reed graduates go on to earn PhDs, particularly in the natural sciences, history, political science, and philosophy. Reed is ranked third in the percentage of graduates who go on to earn PhDs in all disciplines, after only Caltech and Harvey Mudd.[9] In 1961, Scientific American declared that second only to Caltech, "This small college in Oregon has been far and away more productive of future scientists than any other institution in the U.S."[83][84] Reed is ranked first in producing PhDs in biology, second in chemistry and humanities, third in history, foreign languages, and political science, fourth in science and mathematics, fifth in physics and social sciences, sixth in anthropology, seventh in area and ethnic studies and linguistics, and eighth in English literature and medicine.[9]

Reed's debating team was awarded the first place sweepstakes trophy for Division II schools at the final tournament of the Northwest Forensics Conference in February 2004.[85]

Loren Pope, former education editor for The New York Times, writes about Reed in Colleges That Change Lives, saying, "If you're a genuine intellectual, love the life of the mind, and want to learn for the sake of learning, the place most likely to empower you is not Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Chicago, or Stanford. It is the most intellectual college in the country — Reed in Portland, Oregon."[6]

On September 26, 2016, students organized a boycott of all college operations in participation with the National Day of Boycott, a national day of protest which was proposed by actor Isaiah Washington on Twitter in response to the issue of police brutality against African-Americans.[100] Following the boycott, students created an activist group called Reedies Against Racism (RAR) and presented a list of demands for the college purportedly on behalf of students from marginalized backgrounds. The primary demand concerned Reed's mandatory freshman Humanities course, proposing that the course either be changed to be more inclusive of world literature and classics or to be made not mandatory. One element of the class deemed racist by the protestors was the use of the 1978 Steve Martin song "King Tut" in a discussion about cultural appropriation.[101] Students began a protest campaign against the curriculum by sitting in during lectures with signs with quotations from various African-American and non-white academics.[102] Other protests separate from the Humanities course also included efforts to shout down speakers, including Kimberly Peirce after she was accused of profiting from transphobia while making the film Boys Don't Cry.[103] The group eventually focused on Reed's banking relationship with Wells Fargo, based on allegations that the bank had invested in the Dakota Access Pipeline project and the private prison industry, and staged an occupation of Reed's Eliot Hall.[104]

There was some opposition to the lecture protests, notably by Reed professor of English Lucía Martínez Valdivia, who stated that a protest during her lecture on Sappho would amplify her pre-existing case of PTSD.[105] In November 2017, Chris Bodenner of The Atlantic wrote about growing student resentment toward the tactics of RAR.[101] In response to protests the faculty decided to undergo the decennial review process a year early, as well as to complete the process in three months instead of the usual year. In January 2018, Humanities 110 Chair professor Libby Drumm announced in a campus-wide email that the course curriculum would be restructured after years of faculty discussion and in response to student feedback as well as input from an external review committee composed of humanities faculty from other institutes, adopting a "four-module structure" that would include texts from the Americas and allow greater flexibility in the curriculum which would be integrated beginning fall 2018. The external review had not in fact been completed nor reviewed at the time of the announcement.[106]

Following "a contentious year of protests, including an anti-racism sit-in in Kroger's office", college president John Kroger resigned, effective June 2018.[107]

The Old Dorm Block

Reed houses 945 students in 18 residence halls on campus and several college-owned houses and apartment buildings on or adjacent to campus.[109][110] Residence halls on campus range from the traditional (i.e., Gothic Old Dorm Block, referred to as "ODB") to the eclectic (e.g., Anna Mann, a Tudor-style cottage built in the 1920s by Reed's founding architect A. E. Doyle, originally used as a women's hall[111]), language houses (Spanish, Russian, French, German, and Chinese), "temporary" housing, built in the 1960s (Cross Canyon – Chittick, Woodbridge, McKinley, Griffin), to more recently built dorms (Bragdon, Naito, Sullivan). There are also theme residence halls including everything from substance-free living to Japanese culture to music to a dorm for students interested in outdoors activities (hiking, climbing, bicycling, kayaking, skiing, etc.).[112] The college's least-loved 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-World War II modernist architecture and interior spaces dominated by long, straight corridors lined with identical doors, said by students to resemble that of an insane asylum.[113] Until 2006, it was thought that these residence halls had been designed by architect Pietro Belluschi.

Under the 10-year Campus Master Plan adopted in 2006, Foster-Scholz is scheduled to be demolished and replaced, and MacNaughton to be remodeled.[109] According to the master plan, "The College's goal is to provide housing on or adjacent to the campus that accommodates 75% of the [full-time] student population. At present, the College provides on-campus housing for 838 students".[109]

In Spring 2007, the college broke ground on the construction of a new quadrangle called the Grove, with four new Leed certified residence halls (Aspen, Sequoia, Sitka, Bidwell). They opened on the northwest side of campus in Fall 2008. A new Spanish House residence was completed. Together, the five new residences added 142 new beds.[111]

Reed also has off-campus housing. Many houses in the Woodstock and Eastmoreland Portland neighborhoods are traditionally rented to Reed students.

On February 21, 2018, Reed announced the construction of the "largest residence hall in its history".[110] Completed in Fall 2019, Trillium houses an additional 180 students, boosting Reed's housing capacity to nearly 80% of the student body, up from 68%.[110][114] The addition of Trillium guarantees housing for both freshman and sophomores, as students were formerly subjected to a housing lottery after freshman year.[110][115] The new building is also designed to meet "LEED Platinum standards", and Reed is currently evaluating proposals to put solar panels on the roof.[110]

The eastern half of the Canyon, visible from Blue Bridge

The Reed College Canyon, a natural area and national wildlife preserve, bisects the campus, separating the academic buildings from many of the residence halls (the so-called cross-canyon halls). The canyon is filled by Crystal Creek Springs, a natural spring that drains into Johnson Creek.[116]

Canyon Day, a tradition dating back to 1915, is held twice a year. On Canyon Day students and Reed neighbors join canyon crew workers to spend a day helping with restoration efforts.[117]

A landmark of the campus, the Blue Bridge, spans the canyon. This bridge replaced the unique cantilevered bridge that served in that spot between 1959 and 1991, which "featured stressed plywood girders – the first time this construction had been used on a span of this size: a straight bridge 132 feet (40 m) long and 15 feet (4.6 m) high. It attracted great architectural interest during its lifetime".[118]

A new pedestrian and bicycle bridge spanning the canyon was opened in Fall 2008. This bridge, dubbed the "Bouncy Bridge", "Orange Bridge", and in some cases the "Amber Bridge" by students, is 370 feet (110 m) long, about a third longer than the Blue Bridge, and "connect[s] the new north campus quad to Gray Campus Center, the student union, the library, and academic buildings on the south side of campus".[111]

Reed's Cooley Gallery is an internationally recognized contemporary art space located at the entrance to the Eric V. Hauser Memorial Library. It was established in 1988 as the result of a gift from Susan and Edward Cooley in honor of their late son.[119] The Cooley Gallery has exhibited international artists such as Mona Hatoum, Al Held, David Reed and Gregory Crewdson as well as the contemporary art collection of Michael Ovitz.[120] In pursuit of its mission to support the curriculum of the art, art history, and humanities programs at Reed, the gallery produces three or four exhibitions each year, along with lectures, colloquia, and artist visits. The gallery is currently under the directorship of Stephanie Snyder,[121] who succeeded founding director Susan Fillin-Yeh in 2004.

The cafeteria, known simply as "Commons", has a reputation for ecologically sustainable food services. The commons dining hall is operated by Bon Appétit, and food is purchased on an item-by-item basis. Suiting the student body, vegan and vegetarian dishes feature heavily on the menu. It is currently the only cafeteria on the small campus, with the exception of Canyon Cafe (formerly Caffe Circo and Caffe Paradiso), a small cafe on the other side of campus which also operated by board points. Scrounging is a long tradition at Reed College allowing students to offer unfinished Commons' food to students without board points from their trays as they are returned to be washed.[122]

The Reed College Co-ops are a theme community that reside in the Farm and Garden Houses, after many years on the first floor of MacNaughton Hall. These are the only campus dorms that are independent of the school's board plan. They traditionally throw an alternative "Thanksgiving" celebration that has sometimes included a square-dance. The Co-ops house students who purchase and prepare food together, sharing chores and conducting weekly, consensus-based meetings. It is a close community valuing sustainability, organic food, consensus-based decisions, self-government, music, and plants.[123]

The Aubrey R. Watzek Sports Center the day following its collapse.

The Paradox ("Est. in the 80s") is a student-run coffee shop located on campus. In 2003 the Paradox opened a second coffee shop, dubbing it the "Paradox Lost" (an allusion to John Milton's Paradise Lost,) at the southern end of the biology building, in the space commonly called the "Bio Fishbowl". The new north-campus dorms, which opened in Fall 2008, feature yet another small cafe, originally dubbed "Cafe Paradiso", thereby providing three coffee shops within a 116-acre (0.47 km²) campus. The recent addition of a circus-themed mural to the cafe prompted a name change, and it now operates as Caffe Circo. This third shop is not student-run, but is operated by Bon Appétit. Bon Appétit has a monopoly on the food services at Reed as they are the only ones who accept board points; written into their contract is the prohibition of food carts on campus.

On February 15, 2021, the Aubrey R. Watzek Sports Center, collapsed during Winter Storm Uri.[124] Both gyms that were part of the sports center collapsed.[125] The collapse was attributed to excess snow piling up on the roof of the building causing a support truss to fracture, and strained several others, causing the roof to collapse.[124][125] The sports center was serving as a COVID-19 testing center,[126] and the destruction of the testing center resulted in the loss of testing kits and other medical supplies needed for COVID-19 testing.[127]

The official mascot of Reed is the griffin. In mythology, the griffin often pulled the chariot of the sun; in canto 32 of Dante's Commedia the griffin is associated with the Tree of Knowledge. The griffin was featured on the coat-of-arms of founder Simeon Reed[5] and is now on the official seal of Reed College. Though the school does not have varsity sports, the mascot features prominently throughout campus iconography outside of an athletic context.

The official school color of Reed is Richmond Rose.[128] 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. The most common examples of "Richmond Rose" are the satin tapes securing the degree certificate inside a Reed College diploma.

The school song, "Fair Reed", is sung to the tune of the 1912 popular song "Believe Me, if All Those Endearing Young Charms". It may be imitative of the Harvard anthem "Fair Harvard", which is also sung to the tune of "Believe Me, if All Those Endearing Young Charms". It was composed by former president William Trufant Foster shortly after Reed's founding, and is rarely heard today.[129]

An unofficial Reed Alma Mater, "Epistemology Forever", sung to the tune of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic", has been sung by Reed students since the 1950s.[130]

Reed students and alumni referred to themselves as "Reedites" in the early years of the college. This term faded out in favor of the now ubiquitous "Reedie" after World War II.[131] Around campus, prospective students are called "prospies".

An unofficial motto of Reed is "Communism, Atheism, Free Love", and can be found in the Reed College Bookstore on sweaters, T-shirts, etc. It was a label that the Reed community claimed from critics during the 1920s as a "tongue-in-cheek slogan" in reference to Reed's nonconformism. Reed's founding president William T. Foster's outspoken opposition against the entrance of the United States into World War I, as well as the college's support for feminism, its adherence to academic freedom (i.e., inviting a leader of the Socialist Party of America to speak on campus about the Russian Revolution’s potential effect on militarism, emancipation of women, and ending the persecution of Jews), and its nonsectarian status made the college a natural target for what was originally meant to be a pejorative slur.[132][133]

Faux Reed Seal

The faux Reed Seal has changed over the years. In its original form the griffin was holding a hammer and sickle in its paws. Later versions had the griffin wearing boxing gloves.

One of the unofficial symbols of Reed is the Doyle Owl, a roughly 280-pound (130 kg) concrete statue that has been continuously stolen and re-stolen since about 1919. The original Doyle Owl (originally "House F Owl" after the dormitory named House F that later became Doyle dormitory) was a garden sculpture from the neighborhood stolen by House F residents as a prank (there is a photo of House F residents around the original owl that has been made into a T-shirt). 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 destroyed many years ago; the current avatar is Doyle Owl number 13, plus or minus 11.[134] At the present time only one Owl is being shown.[135][136]

Each January, before the beginning of second-semester classes, the campus holds an interim period called Paideia (drawn from the Greek, meaning 'education').[137] Originally conceived and approved by the faculty in 1968 for unstructured independent study, or "UIS", Paideia ran for the full month of January from 1969 to 1981, supervised by a committee of faculty, staff and students.[138] This festival of learning takes the form 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. The classes are intended to be informal, yet intellectual activities free of the usual academic pressure endemic to Reed.[137] Many such classes are explicitly trivial (one long-running tradition is to hold an underwater basket weaving class), while others are trivially academic (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). More structured classes (such as martial arts seminars and mini-classes on obscure academic topics), tournaments, and film festivals round out the schedule, 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 Inc. founder and Reed dropout Steve Jobs credited a Reed calligraphy class taught by Robert Palladino for his focus on choosing quality typefaces for the Macintosh.[139] While the full calligraphy course[140] is no longer taught at Reed, Paideia usually features a short course on the subject in addition to the informal, weekly gatherings (currently held every Thursday night) of aspiring calligraphy enthusiasts.

Renn Fayre is an annual three-day celebration 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. The event is initiated by a procession of seniors throwing their thesis notes in a large bonfire after the completed theses are submitted.

Reed Arts Week is a week-long celebration of the arts at Reed. It features music, dance, film, creative writing, and the visual arts.

According to Reed's website, each semester, a $130 student body fee "is collected from each full-time student by the business office, acting as agent for the student senate. The fee underwrites publication of the student newspaper and extracurricular activities, and partially supports the student union and ski cabin."[141] Student body funds (totaling roughly $370,000 annually) are distributed each semester to groups that place among the top 40 organizations in the semester's funding poll. The funding poll uses a voting system in which each organization provides a description that is ranked by each member of the student body with either 'top six,' 'approve,' 'no opinion,' 'disapprove.' A former 'deep six' was eliminated from the system in 2019. These ranks are then tabulated by assigning numbers to each rank and summing across all voters.[142] Afterwards, the top forty organizations present their budgets to the student body senate during Funding Circus. The following day the senate makes decisions about each budget in a process called Funding Hell.

The school's student-run newspaper, The Reed College Quest or simply the Quest, has been published since 1913, and its radio station KRRC had been broadcasting, with a few interruptions, from 1955[143][144] The station now broadcasts online only at krrc.fm.[145]

Although some student organizations partnered with outside groups such as Oxfam or Planned Parenthood are more structured, most student organizations are highly informal. There is no formal process for forming a student organization at Reed; a group of students (or a single student) announcing themselves as or just considering themselves a student organization is enough, but groups that desire funding from the school's Student Activities office or Student Body Fees must register with Student Activities or through the Student Senate. The Reed archive of comic books and graphic novels, the MLLL (Comic Book Reading Room), is well into its fourth decade, 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.[146]

Reed has ample recreational facilities on campus, a ski cabin on Mount Hood, recreational clubs such as the Reed Outing Club (ROC), and Club Sports (with college-paid coaches), including ultimate frisbee, co-ed soccer, rugby, basketball, and squash.[147]

According to a Washington Post analysis of federal campus safety data from 2014, Reed College had 12.9 reports of rape per 1,000 students, the "highest total of reports of rape" per 1,000 students of any college in the nation on its main campus.[148]

In 2012, Reed College had the third highest reported sexual assault rate among U.S. colleges and universities. It is unclear whether this high reporting rate arises from the college and student body fostering an environment that is more supportive of reporting sexual assault or due to a higher offending pattern by students.[149] in 2013 there were 19 reported forcible sexual offenses among the approximately 1,400 students at the college.[150] In 2011, a student member of Reed's Judicial Board resigned over the college's handling of sexual assault cases. An investigation by the Center for Public Integrity found that those found responsible in cases of sexual assault frequently faced few consequences, while the lives of the victims were left in turmoil.[151]

• Blue Like Jazz (2003) by Donald Miller is a semi-autobiographical account of the author's life, and details the author's encounters with other Reed students while auditing classes there in the early 2000s.[152]
• The Other (2008) by David Guterson depicts a Reed College student who drops out after his freshman year to live a solitary life in the Olympic Mountains.[153][154]
• Steve Jobs (2011) by Walter Isaacson is a biography commissioned by Steve Jobs, a Reed College alumnus, and contains a chapter on Jobs's experience attending Reed College.[155]

The Reed College campus has been the set of several motion pictures since 1977.[156]

• The Possessed (1977) is a made-for-television horror film that follows an undead priest who fights demonic forces at a women's college in Salem, Oregon.[157]
• First Love (1977) depicts a love story between a male college soccer player and an attractive female student who is loved by another man.[156]
• Feast of Love (2007) depicts the story of a group of friends who live in Portland, Oregon, the film is composed of vignettes, some of which were filmed on the Reed College campus.[156][158]
• Into the Wild (2007) is an adaptation of the Jon Krakauer book of the same name published in 1996, Reed College was used as a stand in during some scenes for Emory University.[159]
• Blue Like Jazz (2012) is the film adaptation of the book by Donald Miller; the film is set and filmed at Reed College and follows the story of a religiously disillusioned Texan native who moves to the progressive Pacific Northwest to attend Reed College.[160]