Last Wednesday, October 28, the next entry in a series of Reed Unions was held, centering around the topic of “Effective Influence: How do we create change?” Previous Unions held earlier in the month focused on topical issues at Reed, such as the recent ADL settlement and pro-Palestinian/anti-Zionist posters around campus. These Unions were covered in Quinn Hoop’s October 16 Quest article “Reed Union on Poster Dissent and ADL Settlement.” This series of meetings continues the longstanding tradition of the Reed Union, a public forum for faculty, students, and staff to discuss questions facing the community as a whole.
The most recent Union dealt more broadly with how to address problems and make changes as a community. After waiting for latecomers operating on Reed College time, Reed Union Committee member Gregory MacNaughton ‘89 began the session by introducing the idea of creating meaningful change at Reed and the obstacles that can prevent this endeavor from happening. In addition to the contentious recent developments of the ADL settlement and anti-Zionist posters, MacNaughton brought up ongoing enrollment and budget dilemmas that the college is facing. He added that Reed’s structure gives faculty and students important powers, but that he often sees a “culture of complaint” developing in place of concerted engagement to change the status quo. MacNaughton asked the attendees to consider “how we’re going to move forward together” and cautioned against “replicating the society we see around us and all its dysfunctions.”
After these short introductory remarks, the Union broke off into small group discussion. While I only participated in one group and don’t intend to report on the contents of the discussion as fact, the remarks that I heard floating around the room shared several common threads. Some staff members brought up the barriers to communication between faculty and staff, including the higher levels of administration. At the same time, people from different roles in the community shared similar thoughts about the difficulty of bringing everyone together or even just communicating with the whole community at once. As people shared, the particular concerns, responsibilities, and functions of each group contribute to the problem of connecting across these divisions to advocate for change. However, many people brought up that they felt it is important to bring together people from these different sides of Reed, even if it does not happen often. It is perhaps unsurprising that the Union’s attendees tended to express that they valued similar opportunities for discussion.
Multiple participants of this Union brought up the issue of a lack of student engagement with previous Unions and what this means for such attempts at connecting across the community. This particular Union was attended by somewhere between 15 and 20 people, with some arriving late or leaving early. Within this number, there were more staff members than any other group.
The comparatively limited number of students at this Union and other similar meetings (consider the historically small number of attendees at Senate Public, for example) may have something to do with the unique position of students. Students tend to spend a fixed and relatively short amount of time at Reed, compared to staff and faculty who may have been here for decades. Additionally, institutional memory is not transmitted to each new class of students in a coordinated way, as explained in Louis Chase’s 2024 article “Nostalgia is for Geeks: Institutional Memory at Reed.”
When considering the available avenues for change, it is important to note that the Reed Union may be an established tradition today, but it was only created in 1947. Moreover, the first Union was created by a freshman at the time and it was established as a public community forum through legislation from the Student Council. This inaugural Union dealt with the topic of labor relations amid contemporary challenges to the National Labor Relations Act, which protected workers’ rights to form unions and go on strike. Representatives from the National Association of Manufacturers and the Congress of Industrial Organizations attended the Union alongside professors, students, and College President Peter Odegard.
Furthermore, the Student Council voted in 1948 to make the Union “the only official organ of campus opinion on all matters of official campus political issues.” What this meant in practice was that people could present petitions to the Union which, if approved by more than 25% of the attendees, meant that the Union had to poll the student body and release the results. In his history of the Reed Union, Brian Radzinsky ‘09 explains that the Student Council appointed an Executive of the Reed Union from a pool of student applicants, which also included faculty advisers. A moderator was designated to lead every Union, and the Union Board submitted a yearly report. Early Unions included a shared meal in Commons together with all attendees and they often featured participants from outside of Reed.
Radzinsky describes a shift towards more Unions on Reed-specific, rather than nationwide, issues in the 1960s and ‘70s, with the Unions themselves going on hiatus between 1976 and 1996. In 1999, the Reed Union Committee (RUC) was created as a community committee and not just the responsibility of Student Council. The question of publicizing the purpose of the Reed Union has been around for a while, as Radzinsky notes that “[i]n 2007, the RUC realized that once again students were no longer familiar with what Reed Unions were” and made efforts to bring the Unions back to their origin.
Staff at last week’s Union remarked that the Union had been at least a yearly occurrence prior to COVID, but the pandemic caused challenges for the organization and cultural significance of the Union. The first Union after COVID was in March 2025 on the topic of the Honor Principle, and another Union on this topic was held in Fall 2025. These Unions have tended to focus more on small group conversation than moderated discussion like the early Unions, but they share a similar goal of bringing people together over current issues. Overall, the history of the Reed Union suggests that the ongoing question of how to make change can be informed by considering how students have advocated for themselves—and the community as a whole—in the past, by learning from Reed’s history and looking beyond this campus.
