“These Renn Fayre weekend excursions are an effort to provide an inclusive, celebratory space for students and staff to socialize and, in the spirit of Renn Fayre, to celebrate the culmination of another year at Reed,” Dayspring Mattole, Activities Coordinator at the Multicultural Resource Center, says. There are two options for those interested in taking part in an Alternative Renn Fayre, one that allows students to be off campus for nearly all of Renn Fayre, while the other incorporates both time on-campus and a respite away from the madness of the festivities.

The first option is a weekend trip to the central Oregon town of Sunriver. The group will depart after Thesis Parade on Friday and travel to a large house in that town. On Saturday, everyone will receive funds to pursue a number of fun activities, such as hiking, shopping, and yoga. At night, everyone will have an opportunity to bond with their fellow trippers over games, movies, and food back at the house. This trip will then head back to Reed mid-day on Sunday.

The other option is designed for people who want to experience Renn Fayre on campus, but also get off-campus at night, to get a breather from the bedlam of the festivities. In this Alternative Renn Fayre, a house in the Alberta Arts District in North Portland has been reserved for Friday and Saturday nights.  During the day, they can choose to come back to campus, or stay in the Alberta area and experience the sights and stores of that locale.

“Students might choose to sign up for these Renn Fayre activities for a variety of reasons, including a desire to be in a substance-free environment away from campus during the weekend, or interest in celebrating the weekend with a smaller group of friends,” Dayspring says. “We request that all participants respect the substance-free nature of these activities.”

To be involved in an alternative Renn Fayre, inquire at the Student Center for more details.

On March 26 Reed College offered admission to 1,356 of the 2,887 applicants for the class of 2017. The acceptance rate of 47 percent marks the class of 2017 as the least selective class since 2004 and comes on the heels of what had been an unprecedented period of increasing selectivity for the college.

From 2000 to 2008 Reed saw its applicant pool double and its admission rate plummet from 74 percent to an all-time low of 32 percent in 2008, as a result of the restructuring of the Admission Office under former Dean of Admission, Paul Marthers, as well as a nation-wide influx of Millennial applicants. According to current Dean of Admission, Keith Todd, a larger applicant pool has allowed the college to find students who are a better match for Reed, and notes that “faculty are more happy with the quality of students.”  Although the incoming Reedies of the past decade are more likely to graduate and have boasted higher GPAs and SAT scores compared to Reedies of the past decade, Todd cautions that a high test score is not a guarantee of admission. According to Todd, Reed’s unique and demanding classroom environment requires a student that will be engaged in the classroom: “Not every ‘A’ student is active in the classroom.” The admission committee also takes into consideration applicants with spotty academic records due to extenuating circumstances as well as students they consider “late bloomers.”

Despite the decrease in applicants this year, Todd acknowledges that increasing the applicant pool is a long-term goal of the administration. He points to an increase in applications at public universities, particularly the University of California system, as well as the tailwind of the recession, as potential causes of Reed’s shrinking applicant pool. In an attempt to grow the applicant pool, Todd says the Admission Office is promoting Reed more heavily in Asia, where the market for a liberal arts education is growing. However, he concedes that attracting international students who cannot afford to pay the entirety of their tuition is a challenge, as Reed has a limited amount of aid to offer to international students.

John Sheehy ’82, a member of Reed’s Board of Trustees, considers the goal of increasing the applicant pool “a big challenge.” Sheehy cites Reed’s high percentage of graduates who go on to earn PhDs as well as its large number of Rhodes Scholars, as selling points that are beginning to fatigue. “We are coasting on our earlier reputation in that aspect.”

Reed has produced a total of 30 Rhodes Scholars; however, of the 30 only 2 have been awarded in the past 30 years. The percentage of graduates who go on to earn PhDs has also shown a very slight downward trend – about one percentage point – over the last 30 years.

Sheehy worries that Reed will not be able to draw a larger applicant pool without first expanding financial aid, a prospect that he acknowledges is likely not in the cards in the near future. “We’re not in a good situation to attract more full-pay students and not in a position to expand financial aid.” Sheehy says that Reed, “while in the best shape it has ever been financially,” is still financially fragile and dependent on tuition to finance operating costs. According to Sheehy, 50% of Reed’s applicants need to be willing to pay in order to subsidize the already limited financial aid that Reed is able to give to students in need. Reed competes with top-tier liberal arts colleges that can either afford to be need-blind or are willing to offer merit aid to attract wealthy students to offset the cost of extending financial aid packages to students in need. Reed is currently unable to fully meet the financial needs of 10 percent of qualified applicants that request aid.

Student Body Vice-President Paul Messick ’15 warns that growing the applicant pool may result in the homogenization of the student body. He places blame on the Admission Office and Public Affairs for failing to separate Reed’s history of drug use from its “iconoclastic and counter culture” image. Messick argues that both offices are “not painting the fullest picture possible” by placing a singular emphasis on the academic rigor and prestige of the college, while neglecting to “give appropriate emphasis to the autonomy that students at Reed have to govern themselves as a body.” He says that the college’s marketing efforts are drawing students who are exclusively interested in the academic nature of the college and lack commitment to Reed’s community: “The marketing is more and more attracting students who like the marketing.”

Messick advises against “renegotiating” Reed’s values in an attempt to increase the applicant pool, instead suggesting that Reed look for input from students, faculty, and alumni to decide a way forward for the college that won’t compromise its ideals. He recommends that Reed focus on the unique qualities that have traditionally separated it from its peer intuitions. “We have to trust that if we create the field of dreams that people will come.”

This article has been updated to reflect the following correction: A previous version of this article stated that Reed is unable to fully meet the financial needs of 10 percent of students that request aid. Reed is actually unable to fully meet the financial needs of 10 percent of qualified applicants.

I knew nothing about birthday celebrations in my childhood, nor even of the concept of “birthday” itself. I only have one name, which is དཔའ་རྩེ་རྒྱལ in Tibetan, no middle name, and no last name. In fact, most of the ordinary Tibetans only have one name, and we don’t have a tradition of celebrating birthdays as many people do in other parts of the world, although we have a tradition of celebrating birthdays for high Lamas or Rinpoches.

I was born in a remote nomadic area in Amdo, Tibet, and my parents do not remember the exact date of my birth, but they do remember the month and the year—April 1989. Celebrating birthdays was a foreign concept for me when I was in elementary school because no kids around me celebrated their birthdays. At the age of 12, I was one of the six kids who graduated from the elementary school in my village for the first time, and proudly attended a middle school at a County town, which is located around 45 miles away from my home.

Right before I attended middle school, I had carved this beautiful image of my middle school as a place where kids wear clean uniforms, study in clean classrooms, respect one another, and study hard because I had learned from my elementary text books about how kids in cities keep them clean, keep their classrooms tidy, and respect their teachers and classmates. My classmates and I were oftentimes encouraged by our teachers to raise our qualities (Chi. 素质) to the same level as students in cities. As the start of my middle school approached, I imagined beautiful pictures of my school, my classmates; I daydreamed that I would greatly enjoy my life with studying many kids at the County. I was so happy that I had no longer need to herd naughty baby Yaks on the grassland.

My middle school as well as my classmates turned out to be not as nice as I had imaged. Since I was the only nomadic kid in a class of 47 students, it was very hard for me to integrate into the new social environment. My dark face, red cheeks, old clothes, and even my Tibetan nomadic accent became clear markers of my nomadic origin in the eyes and ears of kids who are from urban or semi urban areas. I still remember that I was bombarded by satirical jokes about “stupid” nomads by my classmates in the first few days of my school. For example, one of my classmates whimsically said, “One day, a nomad man (Tib: Aa khu ‘brog pa) comes down to the County town to run some errands. He wears a sheepskin Tibetan robe (Tib: rtshag pa) in a hot summer day. When he sees people at the county eating ice cream, he goes to a shop to buy a bar of ice cream. But then he mistakes ice cream for candles, so he buys a candle and starts munching on it.” People started bursting into laughter, my face turned red.

Since my parents were busy with herding sheep and yaks back in the village, I did not have anyone to lament my classmates’ discriminations against nomads and me, so I had to live with it. It was also this period of my life when I actually heard (oftentimes not invited) a few of my classmates celebrating their birthdays. I was curious about celebrating birthdays, but not really envious of it. Month by month, semester by semester, year by year, I finished three years of middle school with good grades and got into a very good high school in a nearby town. More kids in my high school celebrate their birthdays, but I never really went to anyone’s birthday parties. Honestly speaking, I just thought it was a Chinese thing to do.

In 2008, I was accepted into a well-known English language associate degree program at Qinghai Normal University in Xining, where some of my male friends celebrate the birthdays of their sweetheart. Out of peer pressure and mostly out of my affection for a girl in my class whom I was falling in love with, I celebrated her birthday with some other friends. I really enjoyed it. There was a lot of care and love. In 2009, I came to study at Reed College in the U.S with fully funded by Reed’s financial aid program. Although I have many good friends here at my school, I had never really celebrated my birthday during my school years till yesterday, when my amazing neighbors Molly and Laramie, and my best housemate, Kaatje celebrated my birthday with some of my best friends—it was a surprise, the best surprise!! I genuinely felt their love and friendship for me.

I wrote this story with the aim of genuinely showing my gratitude and appreciation for the affection, kindness, and care of Molly, Laramie, Kaatje, and my other best friends at Reed by reflecting on my life trajectories. I also wish this story has some value in bridging cultural misunderstandings, although it sounds like somewhat a self-congratulatory story mostly about myself.

With a lots of love,
Huazejia

I want to share some thoughts I have about honor and how it applies to my attendance at Reed in a broad sense. Because everyone has a different interpretation of the honor principle, I speak only for myself – but for the sake of encouraging others to have new thoughts because I have benefited from others doing so for me. I hear and think much about honor’s role in more specific issues on campus, but for me, the most profound and complex engagement with the honor principle has thus far presented itself in one of the biggest and most constant questions that I wrestle with at this school: Why am I at Reed, and why should I continue attending?

In many ways, I think that my attendance at Reed is dishonorable. There are probably a lot of people who could utilize my place at this school better than I can, and there are definitely many things I could be doing that would be much more immediately beneficial for other people and for the rest of the world. I know that a lot of us grapple with these thoughts every day, and I’m really thankful for those who help me look beyond the book in my face and consider the big world that contains my little life. This broadened perspective – which seems to me to be the point of the liberal arts – also encourages me to develop my application of the honor principle beyond issues internal to Reed (if you’ll permit me to imagine such an absolute distinction between our campus and the world of which it is a small part).

That’s why I question whether my attendance at Reed is dishonorable, and to seek answers I look in the only place that I can: other people. I continue embracing the privilege of being a student of my fellow students, professors, and community members. I don’t assume that I deserve it, and I shouldn’t assume that I don’t, but rather I learn from the people of Reed to constantly question the relevance, efficiency, and productivity of my actions. I carry on every day despite my confusion (to various degrees of self-satisfaction and to an unknowable level of success) so that I can continue educating myself by picking the brains that comprise this community.

Earlier this semester, Senate approved a proposal from the Art Collection Management Committee (ACMC, chaired by Dean of Faculty Pat McDougal and comprised of students, faculty, and staff) to change the on-campus murals process such that it is a more collaborative endeavor between the ACMC and the Senate mural reps. At the Senate meeting on Friday, April 5th, Senators David Azrael and Mathew Olson announced the approval of three new murals on campus—two new murals that will replace long-standing works, and one new mural in a previously unutilized space. These developments deserve a clear articulation of the new process, the new murals (and the artists behind them) and a description of what the new process means for on-campus murals in years to come. The new murals guidelines are posted on the Student Activities website.

The new murals process begins when a student contacts the Senate mural reps to submit their proposal. At this stage, Senate contacts the ACMC to learn the status of the desired space (there are some reasonable restrictions about where murals can be painted) and/or past ACMC decisions relevant to a given proposal. To ensure inclusivity, Senate mural reps then put out a public call for additional proposals for the same space, with a solicitation deadline. Once the solicitation period has ended, the reps evaluate the proposals and rank them in order of preference before attending a meeting of the ACMC where they present all of the proposals and advocate for their preferences. After the Senate mural reps advocate for their choices, the entire group—ACMC and senators—vote together to accept or reject proposals for each space by majority vote (the group can also vote to request that proposals be revised for reconsideration at a later meeting). It is the understanding of the ACMC that the student Senate mural reps’ preferences will be given preference and due consideration. Once a mural has been approved, the Cooley Gallery director, Senate mural reps, and the artist, work with Student Activities to coordinate and the implementation of the mural. Sanctioned murals will not be painted over for a three-year period unless damaged, or by vote of the ACMC and mural reps.

The three murals are all quite different but reflect unique qualities of the Reed experience. Santiago Leyba will be installing a dynamic abstract mural in the Gray Campus Center (replacing the large wall painting by Tessa Hulls). Leyba’s mural interrogates the liminal omnipresent space of mutual interconnectivity via the information superspeedway. From the artist’s statement: “The mural is a visually stimulating juxtaposition of abstract form, line, and color that is meant to reflect the structural components of the internet and other electronic devices.” Maria Maita-Keppeler will paint a mural in the lower level of the Gray Campus Center near the bookstore (replacing the Ben Linder mural also painted about seven years ago) Maita-Keppeler’s mural is a beautiful figurative panorama intended to “encompass the idea of metamorphosis and the human mind’s power of creation.” The theme of the piece is especially appropriate for the lower floor of the GCCs, a hub of student creativity home to the Print Shoppe, student publications office, and infoshop. The final mural will be painted by Austen Weymueller in Cafe Paradiso. Weymuller’s mural will draw on imagery of street scenes in Florence, Italy. Hopefully the murals will be completed during the summer.

It can be difficult to witness the departure of familiar things, and it’s important to the ACMC and the Senate mural reps that the Reed community understands that both parties are compassionate and aware of this. The reason that murals are given a “life span” is to ensure that multiple students are given the opportunity to create them over the life of the college. We don’t have a large pool of spaces, so rotating murals every three years is critical. Some extant murals have been up for much longer. Such is the case with Tessa Hull’s wonderful painting in the Gray Campus Center, part of her 2006 Studio Art thesis. When the mural was painted seven years ago, the ACMC guidelines guaranteed that it would remain in situ for one year. It has been a long time since it was painted; and now, with the acceptance of Santiago Leyba’s proposal, it’s time to bid Tessa’s mural a very, very fond farewell.

If you have more questions or would like to see images of the forthcoming murals, please come to the senate meeting this Friday at 4pm in the Student Union for a brief discussion. Cooley Gallery curator Stephanie Snyder will be joining us.

“In December 2010, anonymous students made up a poster of me and put it up around campus,” Granger says. “It was one of several satirical posters of me that year and I took it as both a caution about students who were not happy with changes in how we engaged AOD issues on campus, and as an opportunity for me to reach out.”

Granger took advantage of the attention he was being given to advertise the new event.

“It took me about two months of thinking and talking with staff and students about the poster, what it meant, and what I could do when 4/20 rolled around. I was talking about it at the end of a meeting one day when a staff member mentioned that Voodoo makes a maple blazer blunt. That was the spark I needed and the rest fell into place. I had CSO TallPawl O’Connor make a satire of the satire, I pre-paid for a few hundred donuts, and when I showed up at 4:20 a.m. on 4/20 in 2011 there were a couple dozen students waiting who thought I was actually not going to show up.”

After reading reports of Reed students smoking marijuana on 4/20 in the SU, Granger considered it necessary to create an environment that all students would feel comfortable in.

“I had several goals around 4/20,” Granger says. “One was to let students know that it is possible to simultaneously do my work responsibly and not take myself too seriously. I wanted to show that students making fun of me was okay and that I had no intention of backing off reasonable AOD engagement just because of a satirical poster.  I also wanted to help the community reclaim the SU and the campus…and do it without ‘law-enforcement style’ enforcement.”

Granger says the event shows him that individuals in the community do not have to agree on everything to be supportive of one another.

Community Safety Officers, according to Granger, work as they normally do on weekends.

“I don’t expect my event to prevent any particular students from smoking pot on 4/20, rather I wanted to redirect the energy of the day from possible conflict and tension to laughter and Reed-like irony.”

According to Dean of Students Mike Brody, the 4/20 donut giveaway event was successful.

“There were hundreds of smiling students taking a break from studies to eat some donuts and just hang out with each other and some Community Safety and Student Services staff for a bit,” Brody says.

Brody knows that students across the country see 4/20 as an excuse to smoke weed publicly, but “Reed’s AOD Policy is in full effect 365 days a year, so in that way today was no different than any other day on campus. The event is a way to connect with students on 4/20 that is neither a hard-core enforcement statement, nor a blind eye, benign neglect.”

He sees it as, “a balance. Yes, the AOD Policy remains in effect and the college will respond according to our policies to any students smoking weed on that day, just as we do on any other day. And on the other hand, there’s no need for this to be an acrimonious relationship. Let’s have some donuts and some fun together, as members of one community devoted to Reed College.”

The first biannual bioinformatics and genomics workshop took place at Reed from April 13 to 14. A slate of specialists was invited to lead modules on a wide-array of key topics in whole genome analysis. More than two dozen undergraduates from Reed and Lewis and Clark College had the opportunity to study bioinformatic and genomic analysis at the cutting edge of the field.  The workshop consisted of two nine-hour training days in bioinformatics and genomics tools, techniques, and analysis.

The workshop kicked off Friday evening, April 12, with a keynote address from Penn State’s Associate Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Anton Nekrutenko. Nekrutenko is a pioneering bioinformaticist and talked about the importance of accessibility and reproducibility in scientific research, especially in the information age. His talk was free and open to the public, and over 100 people attended from institutions across the city of Portland and the state of Oregon.

The workshop was organized by Assistant Professor of Biology Sarah Schaack and was sponsored and funded by the Reed College Department of Biology, Lewis & Clark College, the National Science Foundation, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Workshops of this nature can cost participants many hundreds of dollars, but here participation was free. Undergraduates from Reed and Lewis & Clark College were given early registration access and all the spots were filled. In total, people from 11 institutions participated in the weekend, including students, recent grads, and faculty from five universities.

Bioinformatics in a relatively new field and rapid advances in technology means that there are very few texts to teach from. Pedagogically, bioinformatics must be learned through practice. “The workshop was a really great experience. The lectures and the modules were very interesting. We all left with many more practical skills relating to our shared interest, ” says Joshua Gancher ’16.

The spaceship, which is Edmondson’s design, is one of the almost fifty projects that will be featured in this year’s Renn Fayre. This is a great improvement from last year when, due to students dropping out at the last minute, there was a dearth of projects. However, with one week to May 3, students still seem to be going strong.

Edmondson’s spaceship is, “based on a seminal Russian dystopian novel called We.” In the novel the population of a futuristic society attempts to build a spaceship. That spaceship will crash land on Eliot Circle Friday night.

Edmondson teamed up with the Russian house to build the spaceship. She says, “I had a plan, and no people and the Russian department had people but no time.” Edmondson also cites the physics and math departments for being extremely helpful. She has wanted to do a Renn Fayre project since working with “Metal Arts” in Northern California over the summer, saying that she loves working with metal but it’s too expensive to do big projects on her own. Edmondson was given 700 dollars by the Renn Fayre Czars to build her spaceship and says that it will definitely cost every cent of that, even with budgeting.

The structure will be the broken off nose of the spaceship, jutting into Eliot Circle. Edmondson’s spaceship is about 300 square feet, will seat 15 to 20 people, and will be full of pillows and music. She’s planning on bringing in ambient and experimental DJs from around Portland as she wants “people to chill” inside. She does have a warning for those more adventurous Reedies seeking some nonconventional fun about the aircraft. “Please don’t climb on it. It’s not going to be easy to climb on, and while it won’t collapse right away, it wasn’t built to withstand that kind of weight and will get very dangerous very quickly.”

Book collecting made its way out of the depths of the library archives when nine students entered the contest. The Himes & Duniway Society, a Portland book collecting group, co-sponsored the event. Librarian Gay Walker, the first female member of the Himes & Duniway Society, spearheaded the effort to bring the contest to Reed.

Each entry included a short essay musing on the significance of the book collection to the collector and an annotated list of the books included, with short notes explaining their inclusion.

Sullivan’s collection is entitled, “How to Be Alone” after a book he once read. His essay begins: “I was deeply troubled by the questions it raised, and since then I have read widely and eclectically in the hopes of finding an answer to them,” Sullivan said. “The books in this collection have been chosen on the basis of their contributing to the answer I’ve finally come to.”

Aldersley, who is writing his thesis on Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories, entitled his collection “Ernest Hemingway: A Writer’s Education.”

“I entered the book collecting contest because over the past few years I have accrued a substantial number of primarily rare and uncommon books by or about Ernest Hemingway that, I thought, make a comprehensive and valuable collection of artifacts rather than a mere compilation of books,” Aldersley said.

A panel consisting of Walker, Professor of History and Humanities David Garrett, and Himes & Duniway member Scott Howard judged the entries. The winners were announced on April 15 at a small ceremony attended by President John Kroger, members of the Himes & Duniway Society, faculty, and administration. “Kroger became very interested in it,” Librarian Gay Walker said.

“In this day and age of electronics, some people will ask what relevance there is… I think maintaining that physical connection with the book is important,” Walker said. “It would be very sad for people to lose that connection to the book.”

As the student body enjoyed a six-week break this winter, members of the mathematics department were busy looking over the hundreds of applications, paring the list down, and meeting the top 35 candidates for 20-minute interviews. The selection process continued over this semester, and six candidates were invited for a campus visit to give a talk and meet with faculty and students.

Typically a search committee for a new faculty member in a particular department is made up of five professors; three from the department that is conducting the search, one from an allied field, and another from the Committee for Advancement and Tenure (CAT). “Professors serve on many different search committees representing the school as a control,” says Jones. “Departments don’t make decisions,” says Jones, “but give recommendations to CAT for approval.”

Reading more than 700 files takes a lot of time. Even with a fourth member from the Mathematics Department serving on the committee, there were so many applications that the committee solicited help from other members of the department to make sure all applications received adequate attention. All six members of the committee then reviewed around 40 applications that were considered to be the most exceptional. Ann Delehanty, a professor from the French Department, served on the committee as the member of CAT.  “She was very helpful in assessing how candidates might fulfill their teaching role, how their scholarship would fit in the department and the college, and she was very involved throughout the process,” says Mathematics Professor Irena Swanson. “There was one candidate in particular that all the mathematics professors thought would be spectacular, but Ann saw something that made her say ‘you’re going to be disappointed.’ She was right.”

Members of the committee were looking for particular attributes that would have better prepared the candidates for teaching at Reed. “Not every Ph.D. can teach the Math 112 course,” says Swanson, “and some might not be used to the rigor of Reed or prepared for Reed students’ outside-the-box questions.” Ability to advise theses also comes into account, as all professors should be able to “be part of the creative process and bring students to the level they are capable of,” says Swanson.  In all searches, the emphasis is on the ability to teach, although professors’ scholarly research is important as well. “We want new members to genuinely care about teaching, but to continue to pursue further scholarship,” says Swanson.

Candidates are assessed through campus visits, during which the candidates meet with students, all members of the department, all committee members, the Dean of Faculty, and the President. “At the end of all visits we solicit opinions from all students and faculty that interacted with the candidates,” says Swanson, “and assess how they interact with the community, and we value student input very highly in that regard.” Following campus visits, the committee makes final assessments and recommends candidates to the Committee on Advancement and Tenure. In the case of the pure mathematics search, CAT approved the two choices by the search committee, and both candidates have accepted. Angélica Osorno, who received her Ph.D. from MIT and currently teaches at University of Chicago, will teach at Reed in the fall semester, and in the spring of 2014 she will participate in a semester-long program in algebraic topology, her specialty, at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) in Berkeley, California. Kyle Ormsby, who received is Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and currently teaches at MIT, will join the Mathematics faculty in the 2014-2015 school year after completing work from previous research grants and at MSRI.