Old School
Happy 100th birthday to Reed-America's last great conservative college.
TO MANY A PORTLANDER, Reed College stands as the central tent pole in the circus of Portland Weird. From giving the city its first glimpse of the Beats in the 1950s to the more recent fire-breathing bikes of Chunk 666, the leafy Southeast Portland campus produces a parade of freethinkers and malcontents. (To meet a few, See Perfect Party)
But as Reed celebrates its centennial, it’s worth examining this tiny school’s profound influence here. A list of its prominent alums might begin with poets, artists, and environmentalists, but would soon extend to financial executives, political operatives, and the former chief cryptographer for Apple. (And Apple’s founder, Steve Jobs, is one of Reed’s many illustrious dropouts.)
As a Reedie, I long ago accepted that most Portlanders consider my alma mater a hybrid of Haight-Ashbury and Keith Richards’s medicine cabinet. This reputation, sadly, ignores what makes Reed truly countercultural. Reed, you see, is actually a conservative stronghold. In crucial ways, the place is far more rigid than most Bible colleges. And yes, that’s a good thing.
Of course, Reed’s conservativism has nothing to do with tax rates. This microscopic redoubt of braininess—with about 1,300 students, smaller than Grant High School—owes its outsize role in Portland to demanding values that have little to do with its “radical” trappings. In its stubborn devotion to teaching kids “the best which has been thought and said” (as 19th-century poet Matthew Arnold would put it), Reed takes a lonely, possibly doomed stand in an era when most people think of college as glorified job training.
For Reedies, the conservative rebellion begins on day one. Every freshman takes Humanities 110 (“Hum 110”), a yearlong plunge into ancient Greece and Rome and Testaments Old and New. “Our primary goal is to teach students how to make good arguments,” says Anne Delehanty, a professor of French and humanities. “And by questioning whether the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians were ‘just like us,’ ‘utterly unlike us,’ or something in between, students get a richer understanding of the past.”
This march through antiquity definitely shapes a Reedie’s worldview. “Society must have shared values,” says Chana Cox, a 1964 Reed graduate and recently retired Lewis & Clark College lecturer. “Exposure to the classics is one way to create that kinship.”
Every college pays lip service to “well-rounded” students—often while funding tutoring services for football players. Reed’s requirements leave no choice. Wordsmiths find themselves taking calculus; computer science savants face Euripides. And, yes, everybody must take a year and a half of PE. (Thank you, badminton.) The nation’s only nuclear reactor in undergraduate hands symbolizes the school’s rigorous science programs. To top it off, every senior must write and defend an ambitious research thesis.
Reed takes a lonely, possibly doomed stand in an era when most people think of college as glorified job training.
Those demands might explain the protean flexibility that allowed Reedies of different eras to found both Tektronix and New Deal Vodka, and why the alumni roster includes both the author of Geek Love and the inventor of Zoloft. Certainly, Reed’s stringent (“onerous,” some have said) graduation requirements set it apart, even in elite academia. Brown, an Ivy League school in Providence, Rhode Island, attracts a similar student body, but since the early 1970s has imposed no multidisciplinary requirements at all. Amherst College boasts of its “open curriculum” (i.e., no requirements). Vassar, Wesleyan, Grinnell, Yale—all similarly malleable.
Reed is even more out of step with the nation as a whole. Business has become the no. 1 major in the country. The for-profit University of Phoenix (also founded by a Reed grad, incredibly) has become the nation’s single biggest college. Even President Obama seems to regard the higher-ed system as a network of trade schools.
In that context, the future can look ominous for Reed’s ideals. “Unfortunately, I think the traditional humanities-based curriculum is doomed,” says Frank Donoghue, an Ohio State professor and author of The Last Professors. “It simply costs too much, and entails a tremendous leap of faith, with highly unpredictable results.”
I hope Donoghue is wrong. At Reed, I read a lot and learned an astonishing amount. And for now, Reed ensures that Portland remains home to a tribe of people who have thought hard about Western civilization’s greatest achievements, and who have grappled with problems far outside of their personal expertise.
In that, Reed’s true contribution to Portland is far more radical than most people suspect.
Published: September 2011
As another Reedie who found Reed’s counterculture paradoxically conservative and liberal (and liberating), this article is a refreshing breath of air after teaching at universities that call students “patrons” or even “customers.” The only sentiment with which I take issue: criticizing “funding tutoring services for football players.” At Northwestern University and University of Illinois Chicago students on athletic scholarships of all stripes were often my most-motivated students and their funding was the only way out of an otherwise dire financial future. The multi-million dollar business of college sports is ripe for criticism, but the athletes themselves surprised my prejudices and, in my experience, should be applauded for their dedication to self-improvement both on and off the field.
Jacob—
Thanks for your comment. I’m the editor of the piece, and take full responsibility for the football tutoring comment. We were trying to say something about the disproportionate investment in athletics at many major universities, but I realize the line in the story paints with a brush too broad.
Thanks again.
ZD
Of course. Absolutely right. The great gift Reed gave to us “Sixties radicals” was a solid grounding in the best of classic and western thought — however we chose to apply it later on. Sarah Palin, Rick Perry, Michelle Bachmann even Mitt Romney (the alleged smart one) — please do tell me what you think Thucydides might have to teach us today about international relations in our own era?
Excellent article! It makes me even prouder of being a Reedie.
Cosine, tangent, secant, sine!
Come on Reed, hold that line!
Yes, how true this article is! In the staid fifties, we laughed about “Communism, Atheism and Free Love” and the banner my class marches behind in the current reunions repeats that infamous slogan, but most of us did not experience any of it. We were too busy studying in the library, or maybe arguing about whether Kafka’s anti-hero really turned into a cockroach, or just felt and was therefore treated like one. My Reed education has nurtured me all my life. It has meant that, as a major in Medieval German Literature, I have not only studied as a graduate at the University of Munich, but been a documents librarian in New York, a delegate to the neighborhood council on urban renewal there, founded the Reed Education Project for adult literacy in Portland, trained Peace Corps Volunteers in Community Organization, taught every subject in Middle School from cooking to German, to a special class for children with learning disabilities, to gifted classes in English and Social Studies, founded a Cultural Center, served as a founding school board member in Irvine, California, and as a city commissioner there, run three businesses, and now serve on many state and one national committee dealing with access for persons with disabilities, and as a consultant and author on the subject of signage and communications for people with disabilities. Where else but at Reed, in Hum 11, as it was then known, could I have learned to do all those things? Thank you, educationally conservative Reed!
As a faculty member (just recently retired), I can attest to the intellectual broadening I experienced at Reed, especially through the second-year Humanities course (now 220) that goes from the Enlightenment (John Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau) through the mid-20th century (Nazism and related ills). Not to mention the effect of having stimulating colleagues committed to their academic endeavor, and students equally committed to wrestling with vicarious mentors from Rousseau and Nietzsche to (in my Diplomatic History courses) Henry Kissinger and Cold War revisionists. Reed really is a remarkable place, and I count myself very lucky to have been able to spend thirty-eight years there. I often say that while I’m always happy if my students go on to graduate school and become Ph.D.s in their turn, what I really want them to do is to go out and take over the world. I’m still waiting, folks!
The thesis of this article is overstated to the point of absurdity. Many colleges have requirements for graduation that include reading in the classics. Great books schools, such as Shimer and St. John’s college, have programs that are solely focused on western literature, history, and philosophy. The requirements of these programs are much more stringent than Reed’s. Reed only requires one year of reading—in English—of the “great books”. And the course in question is intended not so much to educate students in the classics and the bible as it is to teach them, as is noted here, “how to make good arguments.” This is a very different goal from the kind of conservative education imagined that attributes intrinsic value to the western classics. And even if the curriculum of Reed College is conservative in the context of small, leftist colleges in the northwest, it is certainly not the last great conservative college in America.
It is true that higher education is becoming increasingly professionalized and mercenary, emphasizing the instrumental rather than the intrinsic value of the service it provides. But Reed’s “countercultural” response ought to be glossed neither as a conservative backlash against the market economy (after all a Reed education is an expensive commodity) nor as a radical revolt against mainstream academia. Reed, like other top liberal arts schools, has a curriculum focused in the liberal arts. That such a curriculum has persisted does not indicate a “conservative rebellion” but rather a consistency of aim and method that ought to be lauded for pedagogical rather than for political reasons.
I don’t know why Portland Monthly crossed out my “in English.” I meant it in all sincerity…
Hi Justin, it looks like you may have wrapped “in English” in hyphens which caused it to render as a strikethrough. I removed the hyphens so it should render properly now. Thanks for your thoughtful comments!
It was at Reed that I learned to write well and develop a solid argument, and I credit Hum 110 and the brilliant Simon Friedman with starting that process. Most of my Reed courses were similarly challenging and set the bar high—so high that both graduate programs that followed my time at Reed were intellectually disappointing. However, in the 34 years after leaving Reed, it has been my experience that most people who know of Reed know it mostly for it’s liberal social atmosphere rather than its academic conservatism.
One of my favorite stories happened during the fall of freshman year, while I was waiting on a platform at the train station. I spent a few minutes chatting with an elderly couple, who eventually asked me where I went to school. When I said Reed, looks of horror appeared on their faces. “What’s a nice girl like you doing at a place like that?” they asked. Clearly their impression of Reed was that it was a hotbed of communism, atheism and free love (to quote my favorite Reed t-shirt)! I explained how much reading and writing i was doing, and that I spent every free moment in the library, but I don’t think I changed their minds.
Liz Gray, Class of 1977 & proud Reedie
I appreciate the intellectual challenges I encountered at Reed, but I do not share the author’s contempt for “glorified job training.” Very few college students these days have the luxury of not hustling for a job after graduation, and companies willing to invest in training a bright, well-rounded young person without specialized skills are increasingly rare. I believe Reedies (and indeed, all college students) would be well served by a blunt conversation freshman year about the realities of the job market, and encouraged to acquire vocational skills that will help them in the short term in addition to the liberal arts base that will enrich their lives in the long term. The two types of learning should not be viewed in opposition to each other, but as complements. Gary Snyder, another famous Reedie, encouraged aspiring poets to learn a trade.
Without such an approach, liberal arts education will return to its historical roots – as the exclusive privilege of the wealthy and connected.
I would like to endorse the comments of Ms. Stephan above. John Hancock, one of my favorite chemistry professors at Reed, was a good musician, but his interests in classic woodwinds would never have provided him a living wage. That came from his brilliance as a chemist and a teacher. Better living through chemistry indeed.
@Justin Humphreys. It behooves you to know what you are talking about if you post on a topic. Your characterization of the Humanities curriculum demonstrates that you neither know what it is all about, nor what Ethan Epstein meant when he talked about conservativism.
@Ed Segel – I’m working on it.
I’ve had a conference or two with Ethan and have read many of his articles he wrote for the Quest my decided judgment is that Ethan seems to be incapable of making coherent or correct arguments. He just wants to stir the chamber pot.
“Reality has a well-known liberal bias.”
-Stephen Colbert@Sharon Chapin Toji:" In the staid fifties, we laughed about “Communism, Atheism and Free Love”…, but most of us did not experience any of it. We were too busy studying in the library, or maybe arguing about whether Kafka’s anti-hero really turned into a cockroach, or just felt and was therefore treated like one.
Speak for yourself, Sharon, but some of us (‘56) in your “quiet generation” were radicalized by McCarthyism’s visit in 1954 and its devastation of Reed’s claim to champion academic freedom. The trustees, as owners of the college, asserted their legal authority over irs academic components by firing its (arguably) best tenured professor, suspending the iconic Lloyd Reynolds and capitulating to that era’s tea party nut jobs. Check out that history in the Oregon Historical Quarterly (Fall, 1996).
@jim kahan: As a former colleague of Mr. Humphreys at Reed, I can assure you that he took HUM110 just like everyone else and graduated as a classics major. You are welcome to disagree with his characterization of HUM110 and the Reed classics curriculum, but he is far from ignorant of it.