Olde Reed to Nü Reed: A Brief History
Why does Amanda Reed have to die? Why do we fight over a giant concrete owl? Why do we call something Renn Fayre that is very much not a Renaissance Fair? When was Olde Reed? Why do we have to take a mandatory humanities class? It’s been more than a century since Reed College opened its doors to the world, and each generation of students has left the college with new stories and traditions, while many presidents left it with bankruptcy and crises. From its half-baked conception to the Red Scare and from the tumultuous ‘60s and ‘70s to today’s issues, Reed is always evolving—sometimes devolving—and there’s always something going on. Join us, o frosh, on a winding journey through the history of your new home for the next four years (or less, depending on retention rates). You’re all alumni already, anyway, as they say.
Reed was founded under the last will and testament of Massachusetts-born Amanda Wood Reed, who died in 1904. She and her husband, Simeon, who died a decade prior, obtained their wealth from the lumber industry around Portland, where they settled and invested into other profitable enterprises. Reed was convinced by her friend Thomas Lamb Eliot to allocate a small fraction of her vast wealth to the foundation of some civic institution for higher learning after her death. Eliot himself was a Unitarian minister from Missouri who was responsible for founding many Portland institutions. He wished for some kind of secular private college for the advancement of both Portland and of Oregon as a whole, which lacked any institution of the kind. Reed was not yet cold in her grave when her and her husband’s various nephews (as the couple themselves were childless) came out of the woodwork to contest her will. For several years the money was in limbo, though one of the nephews, Martin Winch, who had been the executor of Reed’s will, joined Eliot in his project. Eliot scraped together a board of trustees, positioning himself as president, however, Amanda Reed’s will was vague, leading the board to debate whether the foundation (to take Simeon’s coat of arms, the griffin) would be a technical school, a liberal arts college, or something more like a museum. Winch advocated for a technical school, but ultimately became mortally ill, resigned, and then died, which allowed Eliot to found an “Ivy on the West Coast” (Eliot’s cousin was president of Harvard) which would serve the whole region. Initially unable to find suitable and cheap land in the city itself, a windfall came when William M. Ladd (a powerful local banker and landowner, and a friend of the Reeds) donated Crystal Springs Farm, which comprised the 40 acres where the college still stands. The board then selected a young, rising academic from New England, William Trufant Foster, to serve as the college’s first president, and an ambitious architect, A.E. Doyle, to design the campus. Plans to build a separate women’s college fell through due to lack of funding, subsequent efforts to build a separate women’s dorm met the same fate, and eventually the new dorm block (one of the two original constructions built before they ran out of money, along with the Arts Building, now called Eliot) was simply divided between genders at the Sallyport splitting in twain what is now Old Dorm Block (ODB).
In 1911, Reed finally opened as a college, with a miniscule and mostly local student body, and an even smaller faculty, who were met with half-finished buildings and frenetic administration. Faculty were hired (both men and women; for the time Foster was a progressive in his hiring), and the first was F.L. Griffin in math, who was an active member in faculty politics. Foster would often call friends of the college “comrades of the quest,” inspiring students to call their newspaper (which you are reading presently) the Quest. Foster pushed boundaries with the board, eked out nickels and dimes from what little of the trust was allotted to him, and imparted his own unique vision on the college. He originated the thesis as a graduating requirement, secretive grading, physical education requirements, and attempted to institute a reformed spelling system for the school at large which turned such words as photography into “fotografe” and building to “bildung.” The tradition of Canyon Days began, in these early years it was less about the preservation of the Canyon and more about its destruction. The lake was decimated in favor of a swimming pool and female students were given flamethrowers and set loose on the natural world. Foster would also invite speakers such as Booker T. Washington to the Chapel, where Eliot would also sometimes give sermons. Foster would also go on long trips to visit other colleges for conferences and fundraising, leaving the college to its own devices, guided by the vague Reed Honor Principle. His continual absences and problems with funding eventually attracted the ire of the student body and trustees.
1919 was one of Reed’s first crisis years. Funding had been dwindling for years, as the expected donations from Portland’s upper crust were stymied by Foster’s ardent pacifism in the first half of World War I, drawing the first accusations of Reed being a den of communism (though it truly has never been). Foster then switched his stance as soon as the country joined the war, building barracks on the northern side of campus and personally traveling to the front lines. His entrenchment in the war (accompanied by many of the other faculty) left a power vacuum on campus, and the college’s financial situation only worsened. A student suicide led to further uproar among the student body and the faculty committee in charge of the college at the time did not handle it well, leading the student government to expand their powers over campus, such as expulsion of students for violation of the ill-defined Honor Principle. An example of the chaos of this year occurred in ODB, where the men in what is now Doyle (the ODB dorms were labeled alphabetically back then) had stolen a local lawn ornament, a stone owl, and perched it on their roof as a mascot (another section of ODB had stolen a crescent moon, and there were other mascots floating around for the other sections). The women in Westport stole the owl, and soon after the men in Quincy stole another owl lawn ornament for their own, leading to the first of many Owl Fights. Over the decades the number of owls would multiply dizzyingly, as imitations were made from molds, alleged fakes were smashed in public displays or thrown from dorms, and even some metal owls surfaced. At least one ended up below the shallow waters of the Canyon and the original is certainly long reduced to smithereens. However, in 1919, only Ladd and Eliot still supported Foster, while the rest of the board forced his resignation, causing the downtrodden Foster to flee to California.
After several years of governance by the faculty, a new president was chosen by the board in 1921: Richard F. Scholz, accompanied by his wife Cheryl, an accomplished administrator and instructor. One of the first Rhodes Scholars, he was a lifelong scholar, steeped in the classics and humanities, and sharply focused on the internal workings of Reed’s academics. Unlike the sometimes unlikeable Foster, Scholz was said to be charming, and despite his inward focus on the college, he seems to have inspired enough donations to keep the college afloat. On the academic side, his passion for the humanities inspired him to begin mandatory classes on the subject, and he demanded quals for each major’s students. Scholz bickered with the board, dominating their meetings, and started physical altercations with his own faculty, insistent as he was on the academic rigor of the college. He advanced the careers of male humanities professors, and not a single woman achieved tenure from then on until the ‘40s. However, despite his strong personality, Scholz’s health rapidly declined over his short presidency, and seemed to worsen as controversies bubbled up in 1924. He collapsed at a board meeting discussing sordid intermingling between the genders in ODB, and while he was in the hospital there was uproar by the student body (for whom Scholz was somewhat beloved, often advocating for their autonomy) for him to put a stop to a proposed ban on women smoking. Funding worsened when it came out that several Reed professors had been giving lectures at communist party meetings, and the phrase “atheism, communism, free love” started being thrown around. Consumed by the exhaustion of the presidency, Scholz succumbed to the pressures and stresses of the institution and died later that year. His death brought the first moans and groans that Reed had diminished in stature, with some students calling back to an imagined Olde Reed.
After Eliot’s resignation in the chaos of 1924, new president James Kerr made sure none of Scholz’s reforms would be stripped away. However, by the time they went to search for a new president, the faculty had already closed ranks and divided into separate camps. Fosterites were mainly those who had been hired by Foster in the sciences (such as F.L. Griffin in math) and were allied with the board, while Scholzeans were those hired under Scholz in the humanities (such as Charles McKinley in political science, and Benjamin Woodbridge and Victor Chittick in literature), along with the student body. Even after the board assigned a president, Reed’s flourishing during the ‘30s and ‘40s was due increasingly less to the machinations of its presidents, and more with the powers invested in the faculty and board, specifically Kerr and E.B. MacNaughton (a local businessman on the board), who negotiated a donation for the construction of a library (previously there was one on the first floor of the Arts Building) in 1930. Reed hired a student librarian, Dorothy Johansen, who would later become an accomplished historian and professor, and whose house is now the academic support services center, or DoJo. As the faculty seized more power, Reed became increasingly closed off from Portland, finally completing the formation of the Reed Bubble (though the student body remained mostly local, and mostly commuter). Campus life continued to evolve in this bubble: the practice of thesis burning started, visiting professor’s houses en masse became commonplace, and apathy toward the opinions of the local Portland residents encouraged students to invite leftist activists and speakers onto campus. A group of mostly female student poets grew around professors like Chittick, who then pressed their desire to reform the gender segregation in the dorms, convincing Cheryl Scholz to allow more intermingling. Reed gained its reputation for free love (a constant, as Reed seems to always be slightly more sexually deviant then the mainstream at any given time in history), as who was sleeping with who was common knowledge, though open queerness was still grounds for expulsion even as the student body became more accepting.
In 1934, the board found a very un-Scholzean force in Dexter Keezer, a bellicose economist and non-academic, who would hopefully mend the again precipitous financial situation (this was in the aftermath of the Great Depression, of course) and repair the relationship between town and gown. He began by renaming the buildings to appease the board. The Arts Building would now be Eliot Hall, after a recently deceased Eliot (who died thinking, as many did in Portland, that the college had failed to comply with Reed’s will), and he gave the sections of ODB their names. He had a distaste for academia, especially the high minded, theoretical, humanities professors, and pitted students against tenured faculty in attempts to retire them. This also inspired him to expand the arts departments at Reed. He tried to impose a fraternity, Phi Beta Kappa, onto the college, but this met with universal disapproval, and a compromise was reached wherein only graduated seniors were accepted into it. He tried to kickstart more athletics at Reed, recruiting Italian fascist Emilio Pucci to lead a ski team, and building a cabin on Mt. Hood. Most of Keezer’s schemes were, ultimately, foiled by the student government, faculty, or both, though he did succeed in implementing a primitive student night watch and driving MacNaughton (his chief opponent on the board) to resign and be replaced by uptight businessman Aubrey Watzek. In 1942, Keezer (who was now teaching one class, on fly fishing) attempted to stop elections to faculty government, and this was the last straw. Keezer was forced out, and he took Watzek with him, though it would not be the last the college would see of Watzek.
From the Great Depression onwards, the Reed student body became increasingly aware of the eroding state of global affairs, and protests against both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were held, encouraged by a growing number of German students and faculty who had fled the Nazis. Previously sympathetic to left wing ideas, the student body finally made the turn and became outspokenly socialist, only confirming the disapproval of the local Portland citizenry, such as Watzek. More conservative professors, like McKinley, would explicitly fail their left leaning students. But World War II loomed, the bombing of Pearl Harbor coinciding exactly with the date of an Owl Fight. The government summoned many faculty members to serve in bureaucratic and military positions, and interned the Japanese-American students at Reed. As in World War I, the college would accommodate the war effort, offering education to enlisted soldiers, packaging the mandatory humanities courses which President Scholz had pioneered into one, which would be Humanities 110, soon to be rolled out to the rest of the student body. Another holdover from the war would be some lackluster barracks on the south side of campus, which would be labeled after the college’s first two presidents and are now known as the Asylum Block (rumors of these dorms being a psychology experiment remain unproven). The end of the war brought more changes: an influx of veterans from the GI Bill, and an influx of students from across the country, bringing to an end the era of Reed as a local school (and the beginning of Reed’s notoriety as a strenuous academic institution with rock bottom retention rates).
Reed’s countercultural reputation continued, and did it increasingly little favors. At a football game (one of the few of its kind at Reed) against a Christian college, a group of students interrupted the game with a mock passion play, and this rude surprise won Reed the game. Protests against the Korean War and nearly every other contemporary issue were constant, and suspicions of leftism were so high that the FBI started to keep an eye on the school. Now they had Lewis and Clark across the river to compete with, and funding and donations were once again faltering due to more rumors of communism on campus. MacNaughton (now married to Cheryl Scholz) was called back by a frustrated board and pushed reluctantly (without pay) into the college’s presidency in 1948, and immediately tried to heal rifts on campus by leaving his door open to anyone who would wish to speak with him (though only in the afternoon, as in the mornings he was still in charge of the banks in Portland). His begging around to country clubs did wonders and attracted suitable donations, and he would steer the ship until 1952. Life on campus became more divisive as the Cold War began, with professors arguing in Commons over socialism versus conservatism, and half-succeeding attempts began on campus to discourage racism and anti-semitism as more Black, Asian-American, and Jewish students enrolled. At the same time, the old Fosterite and Scholzean faculty were aging out and retiring, leading to the hiring of fresh young professors who shared many of their student’s political leanings. It was only a matter of time before HUAC got their hands on Reed, accusing three professors (including Lloyd Reynolds, of calligraphy, who had produced some calligraphy for socialist publications and gotten union men to inscribe the names of buildings) of communist sympathies in 1954. Reynolds refused to testify, another professor was fired, and there was outcry from alumni, faculty, and students. The current administration was deposed and conservative, yet still outraged professor Griffin (who had in fact retired in 1952) took the presidency.
Griffin would only be president until 1956, when he returned back to peaceful retirement when the board found Richard H. Sullivan. Sullivan was an expansive administrator who took risks with the budget, funneling federal money into building more academic and dorm buildings, and constructing the nuclear reactor. Reed still holds the distinction of being the only liberal arts college to have a nuclear reactor, and Sullivan wished for the school to be a scientific research institution, the likes of which were especially prized in the arms race of the Cold War (J. Robert Oppenheimer would even visit Reed in 1955). It was the right time to be looking for funding, as Reed had produced many successful alumni who could be persuaded to give back, such as tech businessman Howard Vollum and Portland redesigner Bill Naito. Reed was still a cultural bubble, scratching calligraphy, and listening to folk music, with KRRC, the student radio station, beginning at this time, in the basement of Doyle next to the washing machines. The old term Reedite fell out of use for the much more appreciated Reedie. Never on good terms, the suited administrator Sullivan came into conflict with the student body at the opening of the new Sports Center, financed by Watzek, who had been donating to local colleges. He gave Lewis and Clark their library and gave Reed its Sports Center. Watzek was invited for the grand opening, but was shocked when a legion of Reedies jumped into the pool naked right in front of him. Infuriated, Watzek demanded from Sullivan that his name be removed from the building, and upon his death much of his fortune went to Lewis and Clark, and none to Reed. Coupled with a failure to establish a successful graduate program (though MALS is still chugging along to this day), Sullivan resigned in 1966 amid financial difficulties.
Sullivan’s resignation ushered in administrative freefall. Unsupervised, and with the tide of ‘60s counterculture around them, the Reed Bubble deepened. Scrounging began, nudity became commonplace, and the last vestiges of bans on intervisitation between men and women were gone. Free love was there to stay, yet still quite heterosexual free love, and weed and psychedelics finally hit campus. As Gary Snyder had graduated from Reed a decade earlier, the college became a hub for the beat poets. When the draft began for the Vietnam War, Reedies refused it. New faculty, called the Young Turks, argued constantly with their elders, especially the young eccentric Jim Webb, nicknamed the Spider God, who held classes in a cage in his attic, and upon the resignation of a particularly hated president, set up a billboard in Portland asking “Would you buy a used college from this man?” The older faculty would dismiss many of these Young Turk professors, including Webb, who would continue to deliver lectures via megaphone on the Great Lawn. For some years there had been vague end of year pagan celebrations, but a student, Linda Howard, was the first to throw a Renn Fayre in 1969, which quickly strayed away from being a renaissance fair. Howard was also involved in the Black Student Union, who protested the eurocentrism inherent in the Hum 110 curriculum, demanding a Black Studies program. Sit-ins were held in Eliot, which attracted support from much of the student body, and eventually a Black Studies program was started, with Reed hiring its first Black faculty. Another push against the administration was Paideia, unstructured time students could use for independent study and receive credit for, and despised by much of the older faculty. Now during Paideia students teach students, and no credit is received. It goes without saying that when most people picture Olde Reed, it is these ‘60s and ‘70s.
By 1971, Reed was once again facing bankruptcy, and the board called on noted academic administrator Paul E. Bragdon to be president, who was naturally disliked for his cold image. Bragdon was successful in raising money for the school, and cut and refurbished many programs, including calligraphy and Black Studies, dismissing its professors, and the amount of Reedies of color began to decline. Though he always saw himself as upholding Reed’s traditions, he reduced student autonomy, and his time saw further sit-ins, this time concerning divestment from apartheid South Africa, which Reed never fully did. It was around this time that Steve Jobs very briefly attended the college, where he picked up a passion for calligraphy and then dropped out. If you last longer than a semester, you’ll last longer than he did. Queer students became increasingly more accepted and prominent at Reed by the ‘80s, a vibrant subculture forming around Gay and Lesbian Student Union cocktail parties. By this time, the dorms were almost entirely mixed gender. New campus spaces emerged, like Paradox Cafe. Bragdon left the presidency in 1988 after raising oodles of money unimaginable to his predecessors, saving Reed from financial ruin one last time. The ‘90s were consumed by social turmoil, with fights over drug policy, backlash to feminist activism, further divides in the faculty, and student activism took a new turn with guerilla theatre. The first HVM PLAY was held in 1994. In 1997, the college was convinced by professor (and one-time president) Peter Steinberger to pull out of college rankings, and now we are punished with a much lower spot than perhaps we deserve (or so they say).
Emerging from the rough ‘90s, the early 2000s saw drug policy tighten as student deaths and government investigations put pressure on the administration, who hired a new community safety staff. The Canyon, long hazardous and full of invasive species, was completely renewed by Zach Perry of facilities, and now Canyon Days are more for weeding out invasive species and planting new growth instead of the destruction of the previous century. A renewed effort (headed by Reedies Against Racism) in 2018 pushed for a less eurocentric approach to HUM 110, and this time hopefully it sticks, with Romans being changed out for Mexico City and the Harlem Renaissance. These protests also caused the president at the time to step down, and now we have Audrey Bilger. Actor John Malkovich (whose son went here for a brief time) sponsored the construction of a performing arts building, and now we have the PAB. Some years back, the old Sports Center collapsed, and a new one has just been completed, though the flat roof through which the piled up snow broke through on that winter day has remained (and, for whatever reason, Watzek’s name is back up there). The largest dorm on campus, Trillium, launched with black mold in its walls due to unvarnished wood. COVID still casts a shadow on campus, as much institutional memory (that valuable currency of collegiate tradition) was seemingly lost over the pandemic, with upperclassmen finding it difficult to pass traditions down to lowerclassmen, and attendance at any given event dramatically reduced. Calls for divestment from Israel harken back to those for divestment from South Africa, with the administration refusing to divest after sit-ins in Eliot. Though, looking back at the past century, Reed is doing fine. At least there is no looming financial crisis, which is more than can be said for most of the college’s history. For further history, see Noize Parade.
Sources: Comrades of the Quest (official Reed College history book), History of Reed College to 1920 (unfinished Dorothy Johansen piece), The Doyle Owl: A Study of Ritual at Reed (very long thesis), Milestones in Black History at Reed, The Half-Time Crucifixion (both in Reed Magazine), and many stories from various professors and students.
Buildings Timeline
1912 - Eliot, ODB
1920 - Anna Mann, Language Houses
1921 - SU
1930 - Library
1936 - Amphitheatre
1938 - HCC
1949 - Psych
1955 - Asylum Block
1959 - Bio
1962 - Cross Canyons
1965 - GCC, Sports Center
1967 - Physics
1980 - Studio Art, Vollum
1992 - Chem
1997 - Naito, Sully
1998 - Bragdon, Kaul
2002 - ETC
2007 - Grove Houses
2013 - PAB
2019 - Trillium