Reed College Magazine Winter 2009

‰ winter 2009

TO

Hell and back

Are you prepared to face Lord Yama in the Fifth Court of Hell?

Let religion professor Ken Brashier guide you through the afterlife of imperial China.

The Muses Are Calling You:

Reunions 2009

Defending the citadel | The black panthers

O N T H E ROA D T O R E E D ’ S C E N T E N N I A L

Get a seat at the table

YOU

1911

1920

1930

1940

1950

1960

1970

1980

1990

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2011

Anthropology professor David French ‘39 engages students in a 1947 conference. For more archival gems from a century of learning, visit centennial.reed.edu

EVENT DATES

For Love of Learning: Reed’s Centennial Conference President Colin S. Diver and the Reed Alumni Association invite you to join alumni, parents, and friends in a dynamic conversation about teaching and learning at Reed and the community that makes this passion for education possible.

Portland February 26, 2009 Seattle March 4, 2009 Los Angeles March 14, 2009 Boston March 16, 2009 New York City March 17, 2009

The program includes a reception, faculty panel, special guest speaker, and small-group discussion.

Washington, D.C. March 19, 2009

R.S.V.P. to alumni@reed.edu or 503/777-7589 with your name, event location, and the names of any guests.

Chicago April 1, 2009

For more information, visit centennial.reed.edu/events.

San Francisco April 15, 2009

‰ Winter 2009

F e at u r e s

in the eye of the media storm

12 During the 2008 presidential election, political science professor and early-voting expert Paul Gronke seemed to materialize on just about every media platform in the country. How does a conscientious scholar boil reams of data into a ten-second soundbite? By Zach Dundas

14 Religion professor Ken Brashier takes us on a macabre tour through the afterlife of imperial China, complete with gruesome torments, sinister magistrates, and an infernal bureaucracy run amok.

By Chris Lydgate ’90

TO HELL AND BACK

21 In the late 1960s, a bitter dispute over Reed’s core curriculum split the campus down the middle. The outcome would shape the college’s identity for decades to come.

By Laura Ross ’98

DEFENDING THE CITADEL

To Hell and Back, page 14

28 The Portland chapter of the Black Panthers struck a blow against a century of racism by starting their own heath and dental clinics— with the help of a handful of Reedies.

By Martha Gies

RADICAL TREATMENT

D e pa r t m e n ts

from the editor Letters eliot circular reed alumni Class Notes REEDIANA in memoriam apocrypha

2 3 6 34 36 52 55 60

Front cover: King Yama, chief of the Ten Magistrates of Hell, judges your karmic rapsheet in a hanging scroll painted in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century.

Back cover: Freshman Emily Lai ’12 flings a handful of snow at an innocent photographer outside Old Dorm Block during last winter’s big freeze.

Image by Molly Gingras ’09.

Defending the Citadel, page 21

Radical Treatment, page 28

FROM THE EDITOR

‰

Overtaken by Time and Chance “

Y

outh is wasted on the young,” my grandmother used to sigh, paraphrasing George Bernard Shaw. My brother and I, shoveling down our oatmeal at the kitchen table in the morning, were apt to greet this statement with downcast nods and skeptical grunting, but now that I’m back at Reed— more than two decades after my freshman year— I begin to see what she meant.

Like most alumni, I remember the canyon—that is, I have a dim recollection that there was a canyon, and that it contained trees and water and feathered life forms. What I somehow failed to notice is the sheer delight of wandering among the pine and fir on a January morning, as mergansers spread ripples across the glassy lake and geese vanish honking into a primeval mist.

I feel a similar sense of déjà non-vu whenever I step inside the Hauser Library. Goodness knows how many hours I logged in the stacks my senior year without exploring the passages to the thesis tower, or contemplating the grotesques who guard the reading room.

Why didn’t I pay more attention to these things when I was a student? It’s possible that the intervening years have washed away all trace of these impressions from my mind, but a more plausible explanation is that I was too preoccupied— with Plato’s Republic, the chaconne in D minor, the Fibonacci sequence, and the girl from Belgium—to spare a thought for geese and grotesques.

Now I can appreciate Reed from a different perspective. I see the enormous work, dedication, and sacrifice that make the institution thrive. I see passionate young scholars brimming with potential, diving into a world of opportunity.

Sometimes it’s hard not to be envious—surely there is no other time of life when so many possibilities beckon from so many directions. But I console myself with the thought that even if opportunities grow less abundant with the passage of time, we grow more likely to recognize them—and seize them— when they come our way.

This issue of Reed presents many opportunities for exploration and seizure (not, I hope, of the apoplectic variety). The old News of the College department has been reborn as Eliot Circular, with a stronger emphasis on the flavor of campus life (see page 8). A new column, titled Apocrypha, will investigate Reed myths and traditions—beginning with startling new revelations from coach Jack Scrivens on the infamous episode of the Half-Time Crucifixion (see page 60).

In Defending the Citadel (page 21), Laura Ross ’98 traces the origin and outcome of the “curriculum wars” of the late 1960s. This piece, the culmination of many months of research, kicks off a series of articles exploring Reed’s intellectual heritage—a discussion we invite you to join at Reunions 2009 (see insert).

In a similar vein, Reed is hosting a series of roundtable conferences across the country to celebrate our upcoming centennial—check out centennial.reed. edu for more information.

Finally, we have received several excellent letters on legendary dean Jack Dudman ’42. Keep them coming—if there was anyone who appreciated a good story, it was Jack.

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www.reed.edu/reed_magazine Reed (ISSN 0895-8564) is published quarterly, in February, May, August, and November, by the Office of Public Affairs, Reed College, 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd, Portland OR. Periodicals postage paid at Portland, Oregon.

Postmaster: Send address changes to Reed College, 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd., Portland OR 97202-8138.

Volume 88, No. 1, February 2009.

Editor Chris Lydgate ’90 Class Notes and Copy Editor Laurie Lindquist Graphic Designer Chris Michel Alumni News Editor Robin Tovey ’97 Development News Editor Matt Kelly Reed College Relations Hugh Porter Vice President, College Relations Jennifer Bates Director, Public Affairs Mike Teskey Director, Alumni & Parent Relations Jan Kurtz Director, Development Incorporated as the Reed Institute in 1908, Reed College is a private, independent, non-sectarian four-year college of liberal arts and sciences. Named for Portland pioneers Simeon and Amanda Reed, the college opened in 1911. Today Reed draws students from across the United States and around the world. Reed magazine is published quarterly to provide news of the college for alumni, parents, and friends.

Contributors and/or subjects are associated with the college or issues of concern to the Reed community. Feature articles are selected to reflect a range of ideas and activities of interest to readers. Essays and the letters section provide a forum for various viewpoints of general interest.

Opinions expressed in the magazine in no way represent the officers, trustees, faculty, alumni, students, or anyone else at Reed, most of whom are eminently capable of articulating their own beliefs.

Reed is printed with soy inks.

Letters

Remembering Jack Dudman I was saddened to read that Dean Dudman had passed away. I believe I can write on behalf of all the “troublemakers” of 1962–65 (and beyond), including one member of the board of trustees, in expressing our recognition of Jack’s remarkable independence, human warmth, and honesty throughout a period when the administration and part of the faculty were enraged by perfectly reasonable demands which now seem self-evident parts of Reed’s “culture.”

As student body president in 1963, and then as student senator through graduation (with various classic or outlandish titles when my successors gracefully withdrew in times of crisis), neither President Sullivan nor his faction within the faculty and administration treated those of us who represented the vast majority of students with any spirit of “fair play.”

Throughout, Jack and Vice President Dick Frost were the only members of the administration to advocate, usually in vain, for a political and personal dynamic based on the Honor Principle.

In fact, Jack never lost sight of his role as teacher, adviser, and, indeed, friend, despite the pressures we knew were brought to bear on him.

Every September, he would call me in to provide me with a matter-offact, confidential briefing on new or continuing students with a need for potential sensitivity to any stigma others might project on them (within and without the Reed community).

He did that with a justified confidence that the “radicals” were, if anything, more dedicated to revitalizing the Honor Principle than the top of the administration.

Jack surely played a key role as a faculty member (with Marvin Levich, Gail Kelly, Howard Jolly, Keith Baker, and others) in defending the college from disappearing into a university structure dear to President Sullivan’s heart.

With alumni, board members, and our adoption, however reluctant, of community government, this

the silence over “what happened at Reed in the ’60s.” Without Dean Dudman, and key faculty members, a sensitized board of trustees, and years of effort, Reed would have become the “brand name” for “Big State U.” —Tom Forstenzer ’65 Paris, France

unwelcome and well-prepared assault was defeated. At the same time, the college led the nation in recognizing that students were adults (24-hour intervisitation, complete authority over student disciplinary affairs vested in students, hiring and curricular oversight and participation in faculty evaluation). Similarly, Reed’s students set off a coast-to-coast wave of reform movements (first across small colleges and then among state and private universities) that created political “space” for student civil rights and anti-Vietnam War protests.

Reed’s community government, using student funds (including bookstore profits), sponsored the first debates—at the Portland Civic Auditorium—on the Vietnam War (Senator Wayne Morse vs., I recall, Senator Proxmire) and on Progressivism vs. “Conservatism” (the defeat by technical knock-out of William F. Buckley by our own Marvin Levich). Reed’s students played crucial roles in supporting a newspaper strike, as well as carrying out the first Draft Board sit-in in the country, eventually extending to an official role as adviser on negotiation to UC Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement and an unofficial role in the fall of several university administrations over students’ rights equal to the burden of military service: full citizens, no longer under in loco parentis.

The passing of Jack Dudman should, I hope, serve the Reed community as a chance to dissipate

I was deeply saddened by the news in the recent edition of Reed that former dean of students and math professor Jack Dudman has passed away. I’m sure many alumni remember him fondly, because he was such a helpful presence in the lives of Reed students during his long tenure at the college.

At a time when national events and cultural changes were driving students and their parents apart from each other, Dean Dudman was there for us, our wise, helpful and mostly nonjudgmental in loco parentis. When students “found themselves in a jam” (one of his favorite phrases), one could trust in his unfailing discretion, his ability to sort out complicated situations with utmost subtlety and respect for a student’s privacy.

In keeping with Reed’s character, Jack was not a typical dean of students. He often took unorthodox steps to help students who sought his assistance. He did not assume, for example, that it was the first duty of the dean to enforce the law, a position that sometimes brought him into conflict with local authorities as well as the college administration.

Whatever the “jam” happened to be— a drug bust, an unwanted pregnancy, a roommate talking about suicide, an eviction—Jack believed in being a student advocate and mentor, rather than the official enforcer of rules.

This way, he believed, he could make himself more useful to a student who might otherwise refuse to seek out help from an adult authority figure.

Dorm advisers took inspiration from his example and tried to provide the same sort of help to the students in our dorms.

A few years after graduating from Reed, I worked for him as his assistant (1970–73). I was privileged

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to learn about the inner workings of his office, and to watch him handle an endless stream of student problems, sometimes 24 hours a day. A native Portlander, Jack enjoyed friendly connections with people downtown in medicine, the courts, and law enforcement. When local authorities sometimes harassed countercultural and politically deviant Reedies, he could work minor miracles in his efforts to resolve the situation in a student’s favor.

The work took a lot out of him, but he was good at it. He obviously felt he was doing something vital, making Reed a better place for its students. In addition to his difficult work as dean, Jack also enjoyed teaching math, and was well regarded in that role. His legacy is an entire generation of students who loved and respected him. This came home to me a few days ago, when I mentioned his passing to a Reed graduate. “Oh, Dudman,” she said. “He just saved me.” Those of us who knew Jack are grateful that he was at Reed when we were.

—Gray Pedersen ’68 Seattle, Washington I am sad to learn of our loss of Dean Dudman. I was fortunate to know him in the early ’70s when I was at Reed.

More than anything, he was an icon of elegance at Reed. When I consulted him on personal issues I faced as a student, he presented the most thoughtful, caring, and clear solutions to difficulties that, to this day, inspire me with admiration for his contribution to my life. I will miss him dearly.

—Herb Dreyer ’74 Palm Desert, California Dean Jack Dudman was an invaluably kind and supportive force during my time at Reed. During my first fall break, one of my housemates had a health crisis that led him to call Dean Dudman at two in the morning.

“Where are you, John?” Dudman immediately asked, and then got up and dressed and drove to where John was and took him to the hospital.

Details of other specific instances have

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become fuzzy in my mind (or perhaps always were fuzzy—this was, after all, the ’70s), but I remember Jack Dudman as a peace-broker, troubledwater easer, compromise-finder.

Sometimes simply seeing him walk by on campus gave me a little boost of calm. I hope he knew how greatly he was appreciated.

—Stephen Lindsay ’81 Victoria, B.C. Last night, I opened the Reed magazine and read the editor’s letter—stunned and deeply saddened to learn that Jack Dudman had passed away this summer. Chris Lydgate did an excellent job describing the role that Jack played in countless students’ lives—during some very vulnerable years. Jack was a kind and caring and fair man, and a hero to the students. For those needing advice or guidance, his door in Eliot Hall was always open.

I was one of the many who stepped through that door, and if it were not for Jack I doubt I would have been financially able to stay at Reed. I treasure many fond memories of working during the summers with Jack while planning the yearly freshman backpacking trip. Last night, I was finally unable to hold my sorrow in, and my concerned husband came to check on me as I wept uncontrollably.

Al sat by me and listened as I described the role Jack had played in my life. “I wouldn’t be what I am today if it hadn’t been for Jack,” I said.

I am so glad I got in touch with Jack a few years ago; we passed a couple letters back and forth and caught up with one another. I wrote to tell him I finally published a book, and I wanted him to read it. Fortunately, it also gave me the opportunity to tell Jack what a great help he had been to me during my years at Reed.

I was so lucky to know you Jack, I will miss you deeply.

—Tara Meixsell ’83 New Castle, Colorado

The Staircase of Learning As an old ’54 graduate, I feel compelled to pass on to the younger Reed

community, faculty included, comments made by two of my physics professors, William Parker and Kenneth Davis, lest their words of wisdom be forgotten. Professor Parker would occasionally make philosophical remarks during his lectures. He once said, “the sign of an educated person is someone who knows, the more he knows, the less he knows.”

I have observed that many, if not most, self-proclaimed experts or knowledgeable individuals possessing college degrees, including doctorate degrees, often fail to meet Parker’s “sign of an educated person.” I have concluded that those who wear their egos on their sleeves tend to fall into the “uneducated” category. It is therefore reassuring to me to hear in these troubled times, “educated” economists explaining that the world is in an unprecedented financial crisis and that they do not know exactly how to deal with the problems or how much worse they will get.

In one of Professor Davis’ secondyear lectures, a student complained that the subject matter was too difficult to understand. I thought that Davis showed remarkable restraint and empathy when he replied, “learning science is like climbing a spiral staircase. If you drop a plumb as you ascend the stairs you will observe that it traces a circle.” He went on to explain that the circle represents the subject matter. As you climb farther you repeat again and again the subject matter, but it becomes more rigorous and difficult each time. Hence, a deep understanding of scientific knowledge is not something you easily achieve in a few college courses.

I mentioned Professor Davis’ analogy because the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution in high school biology classes is today, in Texas, for example, under assault by proponents of Creationism or Intelligent Design who want the idea of divine intervention taught as part of a “critical analysis” of evolution theory. What I have observed missing in the arguments that I have read from both sides is the issue of

Letters

whether high school students are intellectually mature enough to critically analyze current scientific theories. If they are, then would they not be qualified to review scientific manuscripts for publication?

I believe the Davis analogy of climbing a staircase to learn science discredits the belief that high school students, or anyone with meager science knowledge, is qualified to critically analyze scientific theories or review scientific manuscripts for publication. Therefore, state and local school boards, whose members are usually laypersons with a modicum of science knowledge, should not determine the content of high school science courses. That should be left up to the experts in the respective fields and to the science teachers to recommend which texts would be appropriate for their students.

—Marvin H. Lehr ’54 Austin, Texas

The Religion Issue I think the discussion about religion at Reed is a good thing, but would like to see it broadened. As much as Reed seems to be an ivory tower, it is very much immersed in, and a product of, American culture. Religion not only poses personal questions of the roles of faith and religion in personal life and in the questions of personal liberties and the value of reason and empirical science in the search for truth at Reed, but there are parallel issues for the nation as a whole. The rise of “alternative religions” and practices like tarot cards, belief in astrology and paranormal phenomena, plus the rise of fundamentalism in Christianity, Islam, and perhaps other religions, demands inquiry into the question “why are these happening, and what are the effects?” We’ve just had eight years of an administration that professes to be religious, and has done more than most to try to ignore or suppress scientific findings, and intimidate scientists into not reporting results the administration doesn’t like.

Ideology appears to be a belief system in politics that leads people to not

want to be bothered with the facts.

Europe and Australia have become much more secular than the United States, where religious practice has remained strong and moved toward the fundamentalist view that every word of the Bible is to be believed literally, and some passages that don’t fit current viewpoints are best forgotten, and evolution is totally wrong and a threat. A study found that among developed countries, those that are the most religious, like the U.S., are the most dysfunctional in things like infant mortality, education levels, violence, etc. Why is that? Surely these are important things to discuss and debate; what type of society do we want?

—Douglas Fenner ’71 Pago Pago, American Samoa I liked Arthur Lezin’s letter in the latest issue of Reed magazine. I did not like the quoted statements of President Diver that the reason religion was so absent at Reed was so many Jewish students and children of Godless professors (that’s me). Maybe I missed something at Reed, but I did not perceive an imbalance of any subgroup—I didn’t even know my boyfriend-husband was Jewish until several months into the relationship.

I went to church when I was a teenager but I thought that was something to leave behind at college.

I have never been religious as an adult and neither are my children. I do not think we have missed out at all—I really believe Reed should not go seeking religion.

—Ruth Cederstrom Wolfe ’50 Lake Oswego, Oregon Editor’s note: Ruth’s husband was William M. Wolfe ’51.

Of Time and Tidepools I shall never forget my first introduction to the Oregon beaches and tide pools in Dr. Ralph Macy’s Biology 101 class in 1953. I have returned many times and always feel as though the coast is a dynamic stage in the drama of existence.

So, as Emily Dickenson wrote: This is my letter to the world, That never wrote to me,— The simple news that Nature told, With tender majesty.

Her message is committed To hands I cannot see; For love of her, sweet countrymen, Judge tenderly of me!

—Christopher Ray ’57 Swarthmore, Pennsylvania Editor’s note: Ray enclosed a delightful poem, “Oregon Beach,” which is unfortunately too long to include here.

The Houses of Eliot The article, “A history of the trees of Reed,” inside the front cover of the calendar, refers to plantings by W.A. Eliot. The reference states that W.A. Eliot’s son (Craig P. Eliot ’24) and grandson attended Reed. You should know that his two daughters, Calista Eliot Causey ’20 and Mignon Eliot Eliot, attended as well; and there were two grandsons, Robert F. ’48 and myself.

Willard A. Eliot, the tree planter, was not related to the Thomas Lamb Eliot associated with the founding of Reed, but Willard’s daughter, Mignon, married another Reed graduate, Theodore S. Eliot ’21 (hence the seeming stutter of Mignon’s name above), who was the grandson of the founder, Thomas Lamb Eliot. So Willard did have an in-law connection to the founder, but that’s all.

—Warner A. Eliot ’46 Winchester, Virginia

Beat a Dead Horse Please please please please please enough with the Beat poets already.

They’re all lovely, especially Snyder, but for heaven’s sake there must be some other Reed grads in the last 50 years worthy of a feature literature article. While you’re at it, please give Lloyd Reynolds a break as well. The magazine seems stricken with glorydays syndrome.

—Julie Dugger ’91 Bellingham, Washington

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C i r c u l a r By Anna Mann

TEETERING ON THE EDGE The Student Union has attracted many bizarre and otherworldly phenomena over the years, but seldom has it witnessed anything quite like the see-saw couch. This marvel of engineering—part plaything, part furniture—materialized in the SU last fall and has quickly become a campus landmark.

The base of the enigmatic structure consists of brawny six-by-six timbers strapped together with Simpson brackets. This sturdy arrangement secures a hefty length of steel bar which serves as a fulcrum for a long pivoting arm, topped with a pair of battered couches that appear to date from the mid-70s. The see-saw is anchored by a skein of high-test bungees to prevent crash-landings and reassuringly buttressed by rubber tires for redundant shock absorption.

Diligent inquiries by your correspondent revealed that the artifact was constructed overnight in situ by a mysterious band of students known as the “Defenders of the Universe.” “We really didn’t have much of a design,” confesses sophomore Ian Falconer ’11, one of the project’s masterminds. “We just kind of winged it.” The see-saw can accommodate as many as a dozen students at a time, and has been

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employed for purposes as various as studying, dancing, napping, chess, and sheer amusement, as demonstrated here by freshmen Lyca Blume ’12 and Amandine Malkovich ’12. Sadly, a few days after this picture was taken, the see-saw was banished from the SU, officially to make room for a theatre production. Fortunately, it survived the move and now graces the Commons breezeway, where it continues to delight anyone brave enough to hop aboard.

TROLL HABITAT Last fall, after the customary incantations, inspectors for the City of Portland declared the new canyon footbridge (a.k.a. the “Bouncy Bridge”) fit for pedestrian traffic. But apparently some mischievous spirit slipped into the paperwork and made a few adjustments. When the official certificate from the city landed on the desk of facilities director Towny Angell, the span was described as “Pedestrian Bridge and Troll Habitat.”

The source of this bureaucratic legerdemain remains a mystery.

However, our intrepid campus photographer managed to capture this image, which suggests that the trolls themselves may have had a hand in the affair.

A BRIGHT ROOM CALLED DAY In the foreground, Rosalie Lowe ’12 applies makeup for her role as the communist artist Annabella Gotchling in A Bright Room Called Day, by prizewinning playwright Tony Kushner, directed by Kathleen Worley and staged in the Reed Theatre in November.

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Baby, It’s cold outside Undeterred by forecasts of winter weather, the alumni holiday party took place on campus on Saturday, December 13, 2008.

The celebration drew the largest crowd in a decade, with 278 alumni, faculty, parents, and friends of the college registered (including alumni spanning the years 1942 to 2009). All of the hallowed traditions were upheld, including the boar’s head procession, led by Virginia Oglesby Hancock ’62, professor of music. The yuletide custom may hearken back to Oxford, but the Reed version has developed its own unique pageantry, complete with a bagpipe introduction. Afterward, guests danced to the big-band tunes of the Pranksters, and sparkling memories were reflected off the crest of the new-fallen snow later that night. Visit www.reed.edu/alumni/holidayparty for more photos of the festivities and mark your calendar to attend this year’s party on Saturday, December 12, 2009. n ecial Editio

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All the News Hope to Print”

ALL THE NEWS Barely a week after President Obama’s historic election victory, thousands of commuters in New York City and Los Angeles were startled to read that the Troops to Return war in Iraq was over, universal health Immediately care was a reality, and George W. Bush had been imprisoned—all according to a “special edition” of the New York Times.

Distributed freely, the 14-page hoax was virtually indistinguishable from the real thing, except for its altered motto (“All the News We Hope to Print”).

Fans of political satire won’t be surprised to learn that provocateur Igor Vamos ’90 was behind the spoof. A leading member of the prank-pulling, left-leaning Yes Men, Vamos is also known for launching the Barbie Liberation Organization, the group ry ta re Ex-Sec that switched the voice boxes of hunApologizes for dreds of GI Joes and Barbies nationW.M.D. Scare er Faced wide. (Astounded shoppers listened 300,000 Troops Nev n iteratio Risk of Instant Obl to GI Joe giggle, “Math is hard!” and Barbie growl, “Vengeance is mine!”)

This latest caper united the Yes Men with like-minded organizations and volunteers to pose, as Vamos wrote in an email, “hopeful solutions geared towards making people ask ‘Why not? Why is this not real?’” l Nationalized Oi Answers forthcoming (we hope) e To Fund Climat from the Obama Administration.

Change Efforts —Cielo Lutino ’94 FREE

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Eliot Circular

In Economic Crisis, Stern Scholarship Lends Helping Hand

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ack in 1944, when dayBelarus in 1911. His father’s family dodger Jerry Stern ’48 remained in Eastern Europe, was a freshman, Reed’s then fled from the Germans into financial aid package was spartan, Central Russia. Later, they tried to to put it mildly. The college go back. “But the Soviets wouldn’t offered eight scholarship and loan let them out, and the Polish funds, delivering a combined total wouldn’t let them in,” he says. of just $13,800 in annual student Following the upheaval of aid. While tuition was a moderate WWII, Jerry’s father lost touch $350, students often struggled to with his family. After his father make ends meet. So every day died, Jerry continued the search, after class, Jerry headed down to finally finding them in 1989. The his job in the wartime shipyards, clan had settled in Saratov on the returning home after midnight.

Volga river. “[My wife] Helen and “I certainly wasn’t in the position I fought our way in; we were the to take advantage of the social first foreigners in 74 years to be activities at Reed,” says Jerry, allowed into Saratov because the “because I was too busy. Those Soviet city was half military, half were not the best of times, trying scientific.” to pay for the college education.”

After an 18-hour train ride Many decades later, as the from Moscow, Jerry found 37 economy enters another uncertain members of his family. He time, Jerry Stern has made a eventually brought 30 of them gift that helps Reed students in to Portland and helped them need and memorializes his older get settled, buying a total of six brother Sol Stern ’38, who died houses and ten vehicles. (The young. With a half-million-dollar other members of the family commitment, Jerry has created went to Israel.)

Sol Stern ’38 and Betty Jean McCaskill ’41 play Simeon the Sol Stern and Jerry Stern “This is the greatest country in and Amanda Reed in the 1936 Reed College Anniversary Scholarship.

Play, written by history professor Dorothy Johansen ’33. the world,” Jerry says, “and I love “I like to think that Sol will be sharing it with people in need, looking down and smiling to see that Tragically, while at Willamette, Sol family or otherwise, and that’s why I others who are in need are assisted injured his ankle playing softball and established a perpetual scholarship in with their college education,” says developed a blood clot that nearly my brother’s name.”

Jerry. killed him. The ensuing medication Today, thanks to gifts from alumni left him with a weak heart. In 1959, a such as Jerry and other donors, the Jerry wanted to go to Reed from the year after he won a $60,000 award for college is able to provide $16.25 time he was in grade school—because his client in what was then Oregon’s million in annual institutional that’s where Sol went. “As a kid, seven years old, I would make the trek from biggest personal injury case, Sol died support—approximately one thousand Southwest Portland to Reed probably of a heart attack in court at age 41. times more than it did in 1945. On three times a week to watch Sol play Jerry’s career took a different track. the other hand, many families still basketball,” he says. “Longtime P.E. He left Reed in 1945 to serve in the struggle to afford a Reed education.

Director Charles Botsford was coach. infantry, but a year later was given a “And you’re going to see a little more And we watched the plays they put on dependency discharge to care for his of that,” says Jerry. “Because the in the amphitheatre in the canyon.” parents. He took a job at a wholesale economy doesn’t look that good at In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Sol plumbing supply business, then the moment, and there might be a lot played Falstaff. In a play about the opened his own franchise (Familian more people in need in the future.” life of Simeon and Amanda Reed, Sol NW). At the end of his career, he sold played Simeon. “He was the star of the company to an international firm, You can help Reed offer opportunity every one of the performances, and having achieved a classic version and access during an economic crisis president of everything,” says Jerry, of the American dream. And he’s by making a gift of any size. Deploy the including student body president been helping others get a shot at that envelope inserted in this magazine or at Lincoln High, Reed College, and opportunity, too. give online at giving.reed.edu. To direct Willamette University law school, for Jerry’s parents, who were Jewish, your gift to financial aid, simply check starters. came to the U.S. from what is now the appropriate box.

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Eliot Circular

Recession Squeezes College Budget

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he instability of the stock market has sent portfolios and 401(k)’s falling like pebbles down a well, with anxious investors listening for a splash to signal that the market has finally hit bottom. Reed finds itself in a similar predicament. Fortunately, in December 2008, the endowment’s downward velocity seemed to slow—if only temporarily. By the year’s end it stood at $350 million, a decline of 24 percent from its peak of $461 million in December 2007.

Although no one is cracking open the champagne, the endowment’s apparent leveling brought the first glint of optimism after months of consternation and uncertainty in the budgeting process. President Colin Diver announced in the December 14 staff meeting that the 2009–10 academic year would bring a 5 percent cut in all non-personnel spending, but that faculty and staff layoffs were, for now, “off the table.”

Diver went on to echo a caveat he gave the Oregonian in a story about the economic downturn. “The thing that makes this so hard is that we just don’t know any more than anybody else how deep and how long this economic downturn is going to last,” he said. “If this recession turns into a depression, all bets are off.”

Diver has outlined nine potential steps to slim non-academic operations.

The actions include a soft hiring freeze; a reduction in inflationary pay increases; deferring nonessential renovation and repair projects; and considering a temporary increase in the rate at which Reed spends from the endowment.

The endowment currently contributes 30 percent, or $19 million, to the college’s $64 million operating budget (tuition and fees account for 63 percent; gifts, grants and other sources make up the rest).

Next year’s budget was calculated with a projected freshman class of approximately 355 in addition to 40 transfer students. The good news is that Reed’s pool of early decision applications was slightly up over last year. The bad news is that admission

staff predict total applications will be down by 10 percent, coming in close to 2007, which produced a freshman class of 347.

Meeting the anticipated greater demand for financial aid has played a major factor in all calculations moving Reed 2008–09 Budget $64 million

Endowment 30% Tuition and Fees 63% Gifts 5% Grants 1% Other 1%

forward. For the 2008–09 academic year, 51 percent of students received financial aid; the average package (including grants, loans and work) totaled $32,154. Already this year, 15 students have asked for an increase in their aid due to changes in their economic standing. It had been Reed’s policy only to reevaluate students’ need on an annual basis, but exemptions were made for these requests.

The administration has been transparent in its reporting of endowment declines and budget concerns in its dealings with stakeholders, including prospective students and their parents.

Diver assured would-be students that his primary focus is maintaining Reed’s high academic standards and that the college’s financial aid policies “will continue to be formulated with the goal of making a Reed education accessible to the world’s brightest and most intellectually passionate students.”

REED

Annual Fund

What’s your reason? your gift makes a difference in the life of every reedie.

To share your reason and make your gift, visit giving.reed.edu.

Make your first gift

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Eliot Circular

FACULTY PUBLICATIONS Osher Foundation GIVES $1 million for Reentry

With a $1 million contribution to Reed, the Bernard Osher Foundation has endowed the Osher Reentry Scholarship. Reentry scholarships are awarded to talented students between the ages of 25 and 50 who are working to complete their first bachelor’s degree.

The Osher Foundation made successive $50,000 gifts, assisting six students in 2006–07 and eight in 2007–08. This year’s $1 million donation will endow the scholarship permanently and cut the amount of debt that students accrue on their way to a degree.

Scholarship recipients have been active on campus as peer mentors, in student government, and as tutors in the writing center. “Age and experience play an important role in creating a diverse community of learners,” said Lisa Moore, assistant dean of multicultural affairs. “As an institution, we believe the pursuit of Reed’s academic goals are advanced by ethnic, racial, and social diversity. This endowment will help us build on the advancements we have made in these areas in recent years.”

The scholarships are awarded by the admission staff based on academic performance and financial need, and have already helped several recipients obtain a degree. The scholarships replace existing student loans.

Reedies nab Honors at OHSU Foundation

Stephen W. Arch, Reed’s Laurens N. Ruben Professor of biology, won the 2008 Mentor Award from Oregon Health & Science University Medical Research Foundation. Arch was chosen by his peers in Oregon’s scientific research community for his essential contributions to the next generation of scientists. In 36 years at Reed, Arch has acted as thesis advisor to more than 170 biology majors, nearly a third of whom have gone on to earn a doctorate or medical degree.

“Professor Arch has demonstrated rigorous scientific practice while directly mentoring research students and providing leadership in the biology department’s educational mission,” the foundation declared.

The other Reedie to be honored by the foundation is Rosalie C. Sears ’86, associate professor in the department of molecular and medical genetics at the School of Medicine at OHSU. Sears won the 2008 Richard T. Jones New Investigator award for her important contributions to cancer research.

Sears’ groundbreaking research has helped identify c-Myc’s potential as a therapeutic target by shedding light on the role it plays in human cancer. The c-Myc oncogene codes for a protein that binds to the DNA of other genes. When c-Myc is mutated, the protein doesn’t bind correctly and often causes cancer.

100 Years of Subverting the Dominant Paradigm Tempus fugit. Hard as it is to believe, Reed’s 100th birthday is just around the corner. Brace yourself for epic and multidimensional festivities to ring in this momentous occasion. Learn more at centennial.reed.edu.

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Lena Lenček, Reed professor of Russian and humanities, has published her 12th book, How to Write Like Chekhov: Advice and Inspiration, Straight from His Own Letters and Work (Perseus, 2008), co-edited by Piero Brunello, professor of social history at the University of Venice in Italy. Lena spent a sabbatical year in Italy in 2006–07, translating and combining two separate Italian volumes, No Plot, No Ending and Good Shoes and a Notebook; as well as translating Chekhov’s plays, stories, letters, and a travel memoir, The Island of Sakhalin, which were excerpted for the publication.

In her introduction, she writes: “How relevant is the advice of someone writing over one hundred years ago—and, to make matters worse, in a place with cultural traditions, reading habits, and conventions seriously different from our own? His sublime stories are the best proof that, up against roughly the same pressures, distractions, impediments, and insecurities that we face today, he had a few tricks up his sleeve.”

Michael A. Faletra, assistant professor of English at Reed, has published his first full-length book, The History of the Kings of Britain (Broadview Editions, 2008). Michael’s translation of Historia Regum Britannie, by Geoffrey of Monmouth, is the first in over 40 years and the first to be based on the Bern Burgerbibliothek manuscript, a Norman source, considered the best single text of the work. “If the Middle Ages had a bestseller, surely Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain was it,” Michael notes. His research examined the relevance of the work in the Middle Ages and its ambiguity as a work of history and fiction. Appendices include historical sources employed by Geoffrey, early responses to his work, and medieval writings on King Arthur and Merlin.

Laura Arnold Leibman, associate professor of English and humanities, edited her first full-length book, Experience Mayhew’s Indian Converts: A Cultural Edition (University of Massachusetts Press, 2008). She has prepared a new scholarly version of Mayhew’s history of the Wampanoag Indians on Martha’s Vineyard, in New England, a work that has been out of print since the early 19th century. Puritan missionary Mayhew first published Indian Converts in 1727, as a compilation of 128 biographies documenting the lives and culture of four generations of Native Americans. Sources included text from his own association with the individuals, from transcriptions of oral testimony, and from his translations of Wampanoag texts.

Reed Stories is an online extension of Reed’s Oral History Project — an ever-growing compilation of recollections from alumni, faculty, and staff that is creating a community history for the college’s centennial in 2011. Visit the site and check out what we’ve already gathered.

Then, consider sharing your own stories. Whether they are memorable tales of politics or pranks, exuberant accounts of your initiation into Reed’s life of the mind, or examples of the Honor Principle put to the test, your memories will help us build a library we can all browse for the next 100 years.

Reed Stories

RE E D STOR I E S

reedstories.reed.edu

S U BM IT YO U R S TO R Y

S E ARCH FO R A S TO RY

ABO UT RE E D S TO RI E S .RE ED. EDU

“Canyon Day water fight” John Cushing ’67 “Nominations for the Best Entrance Ever” Dina Kempler ’89 “Don’t mess with women ruggers” Robin Woods ’08

“Turn, Turn, Turn” Cricket Parmalee ’67 “So it was a very nice evening, and after it was over, a whole bunch of us walked back towards the Old Dorm Block. There was this boy there that I really liked. He was tall and slender, with a sweet smile. And I had a suspicion that he liked me. And there’s all these sparks going, but what is going to happen, and is it ever going to happen? Is tonight — ? ...”

Read more >

Every Reedie has a story. What’s yours?

“Get the stories before they’re lost...” –Gary Snyder ’51

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In the Eye of the Media Storm Reed political science professor and early-voting expert Paul Gronke was asked to appear on dozens of news shows and answer questions for hundreds of articles during the 2008 presidential election. What does it take to make the transition from social scientist to talking head?

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he transformation of Paul Gronke’s career began with—of all excruciatingly dull life-change agents— a referendum on a state income-tax surcharge.

It was 2001. Gronke, a newly minted political science professor at Reed, was getting his Oregon bearings and found himself besieged by campaign propaganda from opposite sides of a tax ballot measure. He and his wife did the proper Oregonian thing and voted by mail well before the appointed Tuesday. Then he noticed something: the calls and mailings stopped cold.

Gronke mused aloud about this at school, and a student filled him in. “He told me: well, it’s because they know you already voted,” recalls Gronke. “I found that fascinating.

I started to think about how it must change campaigning.

And that made me think that looking at early voting would be an interesting academic exercise.”

Good call. Seven years later, early voting has changed the process of American politics—and, given the huge early turnout for Barack Obama, arguably at least one historic outcome. Gronke, a 47-year-old father of five who came to Reed from Duke University, has established himself as the nation’s most prominent expert on the subject. And that, in turn, has changed both the scope of Gronke’s job and his role as an academic.

Before early voting piqued his curiousity, Gronke wrote peer-reviewed articles with titles like “Concordance and Projection of Representatives’ Roll-Call Votes.” Now, in addition, he serves up interview quotes for All Things Considered, the New York Times, and the Guardian. Much of his writing has shifted from the scholarly realm to the mass media and political blogosphere; Gronke has drafted op/ed articles for the Los Angeles Times and posts for CNN star-host Anderson Cooper’s 360 blog and Portland’s own BlueOregon.

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For such a wonky subject, it’s a highly public role, pulling Gronke out of the thickets of raw data where social scientists thrive. He now must translate his academic work into sound bites simple enough for journalists and politicians to understand them. Given the tortured recent history of American elections, he also finds himself at the center of some of the nation’s most fundamental policy issues.

“I’ve gone from an academic to a reformer,” Gronke says. “I’m talking to secretaries of state or legislators. A public official is interested in how something changes how elections work tomorrow. They’re not very interested in the underlying theory or data. It’s intimidating. A lot of what I’ve learned is how to respond to this audience.”

The Early Voting Information Center (EVIC), a specialized research center that Gronke started at Reed, commands an awesome amount of information about how Americans go to the polls in the early 21st century.

Largely funded by grants from the Pew Charitable Trusts, EVIC tracks and dissects the ever-growing fraction of the electorate—over 30 percent in November ’08—that now skips the ritual of Election Day. Gronke founded EVIC because soon after he developed a fascination with early voting, he discovered that not many people knew much about it. “At the beginning, the problem was that the core information on this phenomenon didn’t really exist. So I had to consider, how do we position our– selves to get this data?”

It was the academic equivalent of a start-up company.

“At first,” Gronke says, “all we had was a business card, a letterhead, and a whole lot of chutzpah.” But Gronke, and the Reed students who assist him, picked the right subject at an auspicious moment. By the 2004 election, early voting was a significant strategic factor. EVIC, which had

By Zach Dundas

gotten some early funding from Carnegie Corporation of New York, began to attract serious outside support, particularly in the form of six-figure grants from Pew, part of the charity’s larger effort to improve America’s electoral system. As the 2008 campaign ran its course, it became clear that the question of when voters would turn

both a media platform and the credibility with policy­ makers to push for change. When Gronke talks about improving voter registration or ensuring that all voters have equal access to early voting facilities, whether they live in rich precincts or poor precincts, he knows reporters and politicians will pay attention.

“I’ve been drawn into a policyreform effort, and that doesn’t end EVIC provides an excellent, real-world lab for Reed students, with the election,” he says. “Ohio one where they grapple with live data and one of the country’s is talking about a top-to-bottom election reform. I’ve talked to most critical public-policy questions.

Maryland, I’ve talked to New York. out had become just as pivotal as that of whether they I expect to do more of that in the next couple of months.” would turn out at all.

It all adds up to an unusual role—of balancing academia “This year, you had enough overlap between early-voting and teaching with policy reform efforts—and Gronke states and battlegrounds, and the candidates were starkly appreciates its distinctiveness. “I think I have something different enough, that you could really start to draw some to contribute at Reed and something to contribute on the conclusions,” Gronke says. For example, on Election Day, policy side,” he says. “The Reed environment is really EVIC research director James Hicks ’08, a Reed political what makes this possible.” science graduate, was able to parse data to scrutinize media reports of a surge of early-voting young people in Florida. And in the waning days of the campaign, as the Scholarship, Teaching, and the Fourth Estate center’s website tracked phenomena such as the enormous early African-American turnout in the South, Gronke’s So you’re living a scholarly life, like Peter O’Toole in name popped up in the media on a daily basis.

Goodbye, Mr. Chips, when an international news story For an academic, a chat with the press can be a fraught breaks wide open and reporters come crashing into your experience, as delicately constructed research melts away office like a troupe of exuberant actresses, demanding in a wash of blunt-instrument sound bites. Gronke, a blueinstant soundbites to preposterous questions. This is the eyed man with a lean runner’s build whose manner may situation several Reed professors have found themselves evoke a skilled campaign operative—perhaps a fast-talking facing over the past year.

West Wing character—more than a tweedy academic, says Academic research serves an important role in the that over the years he’s adjusted. scholarship of professors and their students. Research “I would say you have to have a certain talent for it, keeps professors’ knowledge current in their field, leads but more importantly you have to have the willingness to to new areas of exploration, and prompts lively classroom do it,” he says. “You need to shave away nuances, and be discussions. And according to the Reed faculty handbook, willing to make a statement that has a degree of certainty. scholarship is one of the three most important criteria by You have to be able to take what you know about the which professors are evaluated. (In descending order of data and the philosophical issues, and make a gut-level importance, those criteria are effectiveness of teaching, statement about what you think. I don’t give reporters scholarship, and service to the Reed community.) all the details. I give them similes and metaphors. If I’m Reed professors who have recently been quoted in the talking to someone from the Midwest, it’s always the ‘100media (or sought after as lecturers) include: year flood’ of turn-out, you know?”

All the effort—the research, and the media exposure it Darius Rejali, political science: waterboarding, torture brings—pays off in a couple ways. For one, EVIC provides an scandals at Abu Ghraib and the Guantánamo Bay Detention excellent, real-world lab for Reed students, one where they Camp. grapple with live data and one of the country’s most critical Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, religion: the controversy over public-policy questions. “Usually, social sciences students Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West, a DVD don’t get into the lab until their junior year,” Gronke says. inserted in several American newspapers, including the “They don’t work with real data until they do their theses.

Oregonian.

By contrast, we’re seeing students go to grad school with two, three, and four publications already in hand.”

Kimberly Clausing, economics: the economic downturn.

Then, there are Gronke’s own policy concerns. He Nigel Nicholson, classics: athletics in the ancient world, believes the rise of early voting, along with ongoing the Olympics. attention to the electoral system’s various systemic woes, presents an opportunity to re-engineer a fundamental Paul A. Silverstein, anthropology: piracy and terrorism on mechanism of democracy. His work at EVIC gives him the North African frontier.

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religion professor Ken Brashier explores the afterlife of imperial China through A Collection of “hell scrolls” —macabre paintings that depict an underworld of gruesome torments, merciless demons, and an infernal bureaucracy run amok.

B y Ch r i s L y d g a te

The Fourth Court of Hell, overseen by King Wu Guan.

This scroll shows the king, assisted by a horse-faced court official, administering the bureaucratic machinery of his realm. Here thieves and arsonists are crucified; false merchants impaled on hooks; adulterers sawn in two; sinners cast off the Bridge of No Alternative into a foaming river where they drown, savaged by dogs and snakes; and gluttons transformed into animals and beaten in the Transmogrification Enclosure.

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n the shadow of the sinister Mountain of Perpetual Shade, knots of sinners weep and moan. Black mist rises from the stony ground, stirred by a bitter, howling wind.

Fearsome demons bind these unfortunate souls hand and foot and impale them on a wicked hook suspended from a gargantuan scale. After they bleed to death, they are revived and the torture is repeated.

The crime they committed to earn this horrible punishment?

They cheated customers in the market by tampering with weights and measures.

Welcome to the hell of imperial China. This particular torment— the Hell of Weights and Measures— is just one of several levels of the underworld overseen by the Ten Kings, or magistrates, who hold sway over the immense and multitudinous territories of the afterlife. If the sheer ghastliness of this penalty seems at odds with the common (Western) conception of Chinese Buddhism as a laidback, anything-goes affair, prepare yourself for a nasty shock.

According to this tradition, the unrighteous must also pass through

the Hell of the Thousand Blades, the Hell of Flowing Fire, the Hell of Molten Brass, the Hell of Dung and Urine, the Hell of Quarrelling, the Hell of Much Hatred, the Hell of Brazen Locks, the Hell of Head Chopping, the Hell of Plowing Tongues, the Hell of Sawing Teeth, the Hell of Flaying Skin, the Hell of Vertical Rending, and many other unpleasant locations. Charting the geography of the underworld is an uncertain business, for obvious reasons, but one authority hints darkly of hundreds of thousands of hells, each bristling with torments for the unworthy.

The general idea of damnation as a “supernatural compensator” whereby the wicked are punished for their misdeeds is a recurring theme in many of the world’s religions. Hell enjoys considerable prominence in both Christianity and Islam (despite scant mention in the Old Testament), and civilizations as diverse as the Greeks, the Maya, the Britons, and the Sumerians all subscribed to some form of post-mortem punishment.

But for sheer diabolical ingenuity, it is hard to rival the traditional hell of China. With its labyrinthine divisions and subdivisions, hairsplitting

exactitude, and ghoulish extravagance, it resembles nothing so much as a monstrous bureaucracy run by infernal apparatchiks.

This should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the history of the Middle Kingdom. Hell is, after all, a reflection of the society that creates it—in this case, a vast empire administered by an endless tangle of civil servants (as many as 43,000 Chinese government officials were on the payroll in 1196) who maintained the machinery of government despite an endless succession of wars, famines, earthquakes, and other natural disasters.

If hell exists in anything more than a metaphorical sense, it is located by definition in an ethereal realm. But as Reed religion professor Ken Brashier points out, the hell of imperial China served several crucial functions right here on earth.

It promoted traditional virtues; reinforced social hierarchy; valorized the clergy; propagated the sutras; and offered the soothing consolation that no matter what tribulations one might face in this life, no matter how unfair things might seem, in the end the wicked would get what they deserve.

The Hell of Weights and Measures

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Hell scrolls reflect a bewildering array of influences: traditional ancestral cults, Confucian ideas about moral conduct, Taoist concepts of order and balance, and Buddhist sutras, themselves heavily indebted to Hindu teachings.

Ken Brashier

As soon as I saw them, I was fascinated.

It’s a morbid delight.

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t first glance, Brashier seems an unlikely ambassador to the underworld. Forty-four years old, with warm green eyes and a pious haircut, he exudes a boyish charm. Born and raised in a Lutheran household in a small town in the South Dakota prairie, his first career interest was journalism, but a Rhodes scholarship gave him the chance to switch to the history of China. He subsequently earned a bachelor’s degree from Oxford, a master’s from Harvard, and a doctoral degree from Cambridge, where he focused on the ancestral cult of the Qin and Han dynasties. He arrived at Reed in 1998, and now chairs the religion department.

Three years ago, he won the U.S. Professor of the Year Award from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education and The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Like most people, Brashier always maintained a passing

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curiosity in what lies beyond the grave, but his professional interest in hell was sparked by a random coincidence. One day in 1995, tired of translating epitaphs, he wandered through the stacks of the university library at Cambridge, and stumbled across an exhibition catalog that reproduced several “hell scrolls.” What he found particularly intriguing were not simply the gruesome torments and the ruthless efficiency, but the cartoonish style in which they were depicted, suggestive of a sort of metaphysical carnival of horrors. “As soon as I saw them, I was fascinated,” he says. “It’s a morbid delight.”

The practice of portraying hell on large, illustrated scrolls goes back many centuries. Typically, the scrolls were produced in sets of ten—one scroll for each of the Ten Kings of hell. Some were intended to accompany sutras and other holy texts, others were simply put on display in temples and other public places as stark warnings of the dangers of sin.

Hell scrolls should be understood as popular art, intended for mass consumption. By and large, they reflect folk tradition rather than official Buddhist doctrine—the cultural equivalent of the cartoon gospel tracts you used to find in phone booths.

Paradoxically, because hell scrolls were generally massproduced, almost no one bothered to preserve them. The few scrolls that have survived the twin ravages of time and Maoist prohibition date mostly from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and reflect a bewildering array of influences:

traditional ancestral cults, which have flourished throughout Chinese history; Confucian ideas about moral conduct; Taoist concepts of order and balance; and Buddhist sutras, which are themselves heavily indebted to Hindu teachings.

Brashier is one of very few Western scholars to explore the genre. Thanks in part to the money he won from the Carnegie Foundation, he has amassed an impressive collection—he now owns more than seventy scrolls— which he uses as a primary resource for a course he teaches at Reed on death and remembrance in Chinese culture.

Brashier’s course also draws on several other sources, three of the most important being the Sutra of the Past Vows of Earth Store Bodhisattva, a Buddhist text dating from roughly 700; the Transformation Text on Mahamaudgalyayana Rescuing His Mother from the Underworld, a Buddhist manuscript dated 921; and Journey to the West, an ancient legend that was set down by Wu Chen-en in the sixteenth century, during the Ming dynasty.

Journey to the West (also known as Monkey) relates the story of the Tang Emperor Taizong (reigned 627–650), who is summoned to the Courts of Hell on a grave charge: that he permitted one of his officers to execute the Dragon King of the Jing River, despite having promised to spare the dragon’s life. Demonic constables arrest Taizong in his dreams and escort him through the desolate plains of the Region of Darkness until they arrive at the gargantuan Central Gate of Hell, where the Ten Kings of the underworld gather to hear

Emperor Taizong permitted one of his officers to execute the Dragon King of the Jing River

the case against him. After hearing the charge, Taizong pleads his innocence. He explains that his officer beheaded the dragon in a dream, while dozing off during a game of chess, and that no one could reasonably have prevented this. Furthermore, he argues, the dragon was guilty of a mortal offense, having deliberately altered a command from the Jade Emperor of the Heavens, the supreme being, which is why he was given the death sentence. In fact, Taizong concludes, the case against him is a frivolous diversion, concocted by the dragon in an effort to obscure his own guilt.

The Ten Kings then render their verdict. They had, in fact, known all along that the dragon was guilty, but were bound by protocol to hear the case. Taizong may return to the World of Light, but unfortunately he cannot go back the way he came. Instead, he must go through

hell in all its splendid horror, following the path that sinners take through its various levels and torments. Fortunately, Taizong is granted safe passage and does not have to undergo those torments.

After witnessing unspeakable suffering, he brings back to earth a vivid description so that in future, men may know the full price of their wickedness.

The Transformation Text similarly involves an innocent observer who through extraordinary circumstances lands in hell but is allowed to return to earth. In this case, the protagonist is a monk named Mahamaudgalyayana, or Mulian, who is so devout in his prayers that he gains the status of arhat, or sainthood, which endows him with supernatural powers.

Mulian is shocked to learn that his mother, Lady Niladhi, who died when he was young, was sent to Hell for her sins, and vows

to release her. He descends the “infernal paths” where he encounters hungry ghosts and lost souls who were mistakenly summoned to hell because of bureaucratic error—they had the same name as a real sinner (overlapping names are more common in China than in the West.) Finally he arrives at the gate of Hell proper, and confronts its sinister overlord, King Yama.

King Yama warns Mulian that it will be difficult to locate Lady Niladhi, let alone alter her fate.

At this point, however, a powerful Buddhist angel intervenes.

Summoning the proper fiendish bureaucrats, the angel inspects the records and pinpoints Lady Niladhi’s whereabouts. Mulian wends his way though the Bureau of the Underworld, encountering recorders, bookkeepers, karma investigators, wardens, and the fearsome General of the Five Ways. He finally finds his mother, who is nailed to an iron bed with 49 spikes. She confesses that while she was alive, she committed numerous sins and failed to perform meritorious deeds—notably, copying the sutras.

The warden will not release her, so Mulian goes to the Buddha himself to plead for her freedom.

In an act of mercy, Buddha releases Lady Niladhi and all the other souls in hell. Sadly, this does not result in their return to earth. Rather, they become hungry ghosts, condemned to wander through a sort of eternal limbo. Through proper ritual and incantation, Mulian is able to have his mother reincarnated, and once her karmic debt has been discharged, she is allowed to ascend to heaven.

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he hell scrolls borrow from all these sources and attempt to formalize them into a coherent system.

The First Court, ruled by King Qin Guang, is usually presented as a sort of processing center. In this scroll to the right, the newly deceased are arrested by infernal bailiffs, or beadles (often portrayed with dangling tongues) and dragged down to the underworld.

Demons force the dead souls to face the karma mirror, which replays the sins committed in life. After careful inspection of all records, King Qin Guang tallies misdeeds and assigns punishments. These unfortunate souls have committed a number of shocking crimes. One fellow defaced books; another was disrespectful to his in-laws. A third neglected his crops.

(To learn their awful punishment, read on.)

On the right, Taizong stands watching, next to the Dragon King, who holds his head in his hands (literally). These characters appear as a sort of seal of approval, validating the authenticity of the scroll. Finally, toward the bottom, virtuous souls (or “goody two-shoes,” as Brashier calls them) are being led off along the Bridge of Seven Treasures toward the Pure Land of the Western Heaven. Having performed good deeds such as propagating Daoism, building temples, being respectful of ancestors, and so on, they now escape the cycle of reincarnation and will live in a sort of antechamber to heaven to await the next Buddha. In the Chinese tradition, however, heaven is notoriously difficult to enter; most people are headed the other way.

The torments begin in earnest in the Second Court, ruled by King Chi Jiang. Given the scrolls’ obsession with hierarchy, one might expect that the descending levels of hell would contain increasingly wicked sinners, or at least gang together like-minded punishments, but that is not necessarily the case. Nor is there agreement on the precise location of particular torments, which appear to wander from one court to another depending on the artist’s imagination.

The First Court of Hell, overseen by King Qin Guang. Demonic constables arrest mortals and drag them down to hell, where a karmic mirror reveals misdeeds they committed. After Qin Guang has checked the records, he assigns punishments in the center of the image. Below, the righteous are led along the Bridge of Seven Treasures to the Western Heaven.

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The Third Court, ruled by the clean-shaven King Song Di, features an impressive arsenal of pain: adulterers have their hands chopped off and are led by a horse-faced demon towards further punishment. A neighborhood gossip has her tongue ploughed. Sinners who were disrespectful to their parents have their heads chopped off. A corrupt official is packed up in a crate and carted off to prison. (Buddhist teachings invariably condemn corruption, Brashier says, but there are many suggestions that the Ten Kings and their infernal underlings dabble in bribery from time to time.)

Of all the kings of the underworld, the most fearsome is King Yama, who holds sway over the Fifth Court (see cover and below). Originally the Hindu Lord of the Dead, Yama was exported to China through Buddhism and transformed into a terrifying bureaucrat, invariably depicted with dark skin and stern expression. Although he is described as chief of the Ten Kings, he is not aloof from the karmic system, and cannot alter a person’s destiny.

Indeed, some accounts hold that Yama himself is a damned soul who must periodically undergo horrific retribution; demons lay him flat on a metal bed and pour molten copper down his throat. Properly chastened, he then returns to his throne to mete out justice to earthly sinners; after his court adjourns, he cavorts with female demons until duty calls again.

In this scroll, an adulterer is cast head-first into a circular mill and ground into pulp.

Robbers are flung into the Tree of Swords, murderers impaled on the Hill of Knives, while demons chop off the arms and King Yama legs of those who were disrespectful to their parents and in-laws.

Despite a certain amount of jurisdictional overlap (will a man who commits adultery have his arms hacked off in the Third Court or be ground up in the Fifth Court—or both?) sinners must pass through each of the ten courts, and can therefore expect to be punished for every single one of their sins.

Thus sinners descend from one level to the next, suffering horrible torments at each stage. Fortunately, the amount of time that souls spend in any particular level is limited; seven days in each of the first seven courts, followed by longer, more flexible periods for the final three. In this sense, the scrolls also function as calendars, allowing mourners to track the progress of the deceased, and to offer sacrifices (that is, metaphysical bribes) to the appropriate magistrates in the hope that they show lenience to the dearly departed.

The Ten Courts of Hell First Court: King Qin Guang. Generally portrayed as an ethereal antechamber where worthy souls are separated from their less fortunate colleagues, thanks in part to a karmic mirror that reveals past misdeeds. The king’s name can be read as “the Great King of Ch’in,” referring to the name of the Chinese state since the Western Chou dynasty.

Second Court: King Chu Jiang. Here the torments begin in earnest. In one set of scrolls, licentious women are punished here by being bound to a metal chimney, while demons tie gossips to a post and throw knives at them.

Third Court: King Song Di. Usually depicted as beardless, this king’s name translates to “King Emperor Song,” referring to an eastern state. He typically oversees many unpleasant torments: gossips have their tongues plowed; adulterers have their hands chopped off; rude teenagers lose their heads.

Fourth Court: King Wu Guan. Depictions vary, but in some scrolls this king administers punishment for deceit: dodgy merchants are impaled on a massive hook; adulterers are sawn in two; thieves are crucified.

Fifth Court: King Yama. Originally a Hindu deity, King Yama is usually depicted as the most senior of the Ten Kings. However, he is not all-powerful and cannot circumvent the karmic system. Typical torments include impaling murderers on the Hill of Knives, hanging robbers on the Tree of Knives, and dismembering rebellious teenagers, Sixth Court: King Bian Cheng. The origin of this king’s name remains obscure. In one scroll, he makes sure that murderers and arsonists are properly crushed by a rice-husking hammer.

Seventh Court: The King of Tai Mountain. Tai Mountain, located in the province of Shandong, has been associated with the dead since the Han Dynasty. This court is often equipped with a terrace where sinners can look back at their home village to see if their children and grandchildren are mourning. Meanwhile, bullies are hurled into cauldrons of boiling oil, and the obstinate are chopped in half.

Eighth Court: King Ping Deng. Also known as the King of Balance, this magistrate oversees more karmic retribution: those who hunted animals are mauled by tigers; backstabbers and buck-passers are trampled by cattle.

Ninth Court: King Du Shi. The torments are drawing to a close.

This court is sometimes depicted as the place where liars and chatterers are forced to swallow pellets of superheated iron; plotters and turncoats are eviscerated; and hustlers are bound to a pillar of heated brass.

Tenth Court: The Wheel-turning King. After their long and unpleasant journey, sinners finally enter the court of this king, also known as Zhun Lun, where they drink the tea of forgettery and are subsequently reborn.

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I

n the Christian tradition, hell is generally seen as a place of eternal torment—once having arrived, there is no way out. The demons who operate it are honest, hardworking types who accept no bribes, and chances for reprieve are nil. Hence, the best strategy is to avoid it at all costs.

The hell of imperial China is quite different.

Despite its elaborate structure, its punishments are imposed for no more than a year or two. It is administered by a complex bureaucracy that is prone to error and receptive to the donations of relatives. Most of us are headed there.

Perhaps the single most important difference is that this hell is not all doom and gloom. Having suffered through all their torments, and having thereby discharged their karmic debts, souls finally arrive at the Tenth Court, ruled by the Wheel-Turning King (see scroll on right). Here they drink the tea of forgettery, which wipes all memory of their past lives from their minds, and then join one of the six streams of rebirth—here depicted as insect, bird, human, noble, animal, or fish.

To describe Hell in words is to describe unspeakable brutality. But the scrolls do not come across as merely vicious or sadistic; rather, there is an element of the comic, even the absurd about them. As Brashier points out, they belong to a genre whose purpose is not simply to inform, but also to entertain, and even in some strange way to reassure. Yes, the wicked will be punished. But cheer up. So long as you lead a reasonably decent life, support your local monastery, propagate the sutras, and raise filial children, the Ten Kings will probably go easy on you, and after all the suffering, you will be reborn with a fresh slate. A chance to start over—what could be more comforting than that?

Further Readings n Taizong’s Hell, by Ken Brashier. See academic. reed.edu/hellscrolls n Sutra of the Past Vows of Earth-store Bodhisattva: the Collected Lectures of Tripitaka Master Hsüan Hua. Translated by Bhiksu Heng Ching (NY: Buddhist Text Translation Society, 1974) n Transformation Text on Mahamaudgalyayana Rescuing His Mother from the Underworld.

Translated by Victor H. Mair, The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature.

(NY: Columbia University Press, 1994) n The Journey to the West, by Wu Cheng’en. Translated

by Anthony C. Yu. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977) n The Bureaucracy of Hell, by Lothar Ledderose, in Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art. (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000)

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The Tenth Court of Hell, overseen by the WheelTurning King. Having endured horrific torments, sinners arrive at the court of King Zhuan Lun. Here they form queues, drink the tea of forgettery, and are ushered into the cycle of rebirth, emerging as insects, birds, nobles, commoners, animals, or fish.

by laura ross

Defending the Citadel In the late 1960s, Reed was embroiled in an intense debate over the core curriculum.

The struggle polarized the campus, split the faculty, and shaped the college’s identity for decades to come.

President Victor Rosenblum (1968–70) was unable to heal the deepening rifts over the curriculum.

In late November 1969, assistant professor of English

Jon Roush headed to Eliot Hall for a meeting of the Faculty Advisory Committee—the key committee that made all faculty personnel decisions. At that particular meeting, the ten elected members of the FAC would vote whether to grant tenure to his friend Kirk Thompson, assistant professor of political science.

Several of Roush’s friends had been denied tenure or a contract renewal in recent weeks, and in every case, the vote was 9–1. Roush understood that some of them did not get tenure because they were not suitable for Reed. “But some of these people were tremendously qualified,” he says. “It was highly political. I just got home and felt like throwing up, meeting after meeting.”

Roush felt that Thompson was the most promising of them all. A slender young man with thick black hair and a black beard, Thompson held a doctorate in political science from UC Berkeley.

Roush was convinced that Thompson’s grounding in classical political philosophy, combined with his strong teaching ability, was a good match for Reed, and he was determined to make sure Thompson got a fair hearing.

But more was at stake in the fall of 1969 than academic politics. Reed was in crisis. The attrition rate was an astonishing 50 percent. The student health center was flooded with complaints of “Reed Syndrome,” a combination of depression and fatigue. Many students felt stifled by the college’s classical curriculum. The college was running a budget deficit of $400,000. The new president, Victor Rosenblum, was popular, but was also seen as averse to confrontation and unable to halt the maelstrom. A small cadre of senior professors had guided the college through previous crises, but some people on campus believed those professors were woefully out of touch with the times.

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the young turks

Jon Roush

Kirk Thompson

The Reed faculty was increasingly split between two rival camps: the Young Turks and the Old Guard. Both felt that the college had reached a critical point. The progressives believed Reed must make painful, even radical changes in order to survive. The traditionalists believed those changes would destroy the very things that made Reed worth saving.

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n 1964, about two dozen new faculty members had arrived on campus, bringing with them the burgeoning social unrest of the era. Four of them became vocal advocates for change: Mason Drukman and Kirk Thompson in political science, and Howard Waskow and Jon Roush in English.

A recent Ph.D. in English from UC Berkeley, Roush moved with his wife and two young boys into one of the faculty houses on the southeast edge of campus, next door to the Drukmans. At first, Roush was thrilled by the freedom to develop upper-division courses. One of his earliest Reed memories is walking home from a class in medieval literature and marveling that he was being paid to do something so wonderful. “I remember talking to Mason early on in that first fall, standing out in the quad or something,” he reminisces, “and Mason looking around and saying, ‘You know, I could get used to spending the rest of my life here.’

That hadn’t occurred to me—that I might be there for the rest of my life—but then I thought yes, maybe. It’s a very strong, very attractive place.”

And yet, the Young Turks soon grew disillusioned.

What struck them first was the high drop-out rate. “A lot of the faculty members saw [the attrition rate] as a badge of honor,” says Roush. “It showed what a rigorous, tough school it was; you really had to have a lot of mettle to stay, to make it through. We saw that as a problem. . . we knew that half those freshman students were not losers. We knew that the school was failing them.”

The conflict between the Foster camp and the Scholz camp, first ignited in the 1920s, would flare up periodically, with slight variations, in the decades to come. The debate between the Old Guard and Young Turks was, in a sense, a resumption of this struggle.

It seemed to Drukman that many students left Reed because “they felt somewhat constricted here, or unsatisfied here, or at sea here.” As Roush explains, “It’s not that they were looking for some kind of paternalistic institution,

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but they were certainly looking for a richer life than they were finding at Reed.”

The focus of a Reed education, it seemed to Roush, was to prepare students for graduate school. In this, it succeeded mightily: Reed students were accepted for graduate study, with scholarships and fellowships, at a higher rate than virtually any other college in the country. But the Young Turks felt it was a mistake to treat students as apprentice academics rather than developing human beings. Their view of intellectual life was more holistic; they wanted to prepare students not only for academia, but also for the world.

Reed alumna Betsy Dearborn ‘68, who arrived in 1964 and left after her sophomore year, recognized the profound value of developing skills in critical thinking. But she was uncomfortable in some of her classes. “The dialogue that we were all being taught to have was like piranhas. We were all being taught to eat up the other people in our seminars, to prove that they were wrong and to obliterate them in some way—which is one form of academic inquiry, but I had no heart for it.”

The boot camp mentality of freshman humanities was to blame, according to the Young Turks, for much of the student discontent. Roush went so far as to call its relentless syllabus “a pedagogical disaster.”

“To read Aeschylus in one week, then go on to Sophocles the next week, is to do a real disservice to both Aeschylus and Sophocles,” he says. “I kept thinking that this is some of the most exciting, passionate literature and philosophy, and interesting art, that anybody’s ever produced, and nobody has the time to get interested in or passionate about it.”

In spring 1965, several new professors began meeting informally as CRAP, the Committee to Reform Academic Practice. “We gave ourselves that name as a kind of selfdeprecating notion of what we were doing,” Drukman recalls. Hip, confident, and fresh out of graduate school, they didn’t think twice before suggesting changes to the college’s most significant curricular elements. Drukman says they “didn’t realize that junior faculty are expected to keep their mouths shut for the first year or so. We just didn’t know that, and maybe had a slightly starry-eyed view of what it was going to be like at a small school.”

“Even if we had known, we would have thought, ‘Why not anyway? What the hell? Let’s give it a try,’” Roush says.

“This is the academy. We challenge ideas here. That’s what this is all about.”

But they did not comprehend exactly what—or whom— they were challenging.

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he story of Reed is in large part the story of successive generations who shared a conviction, mixed into the mortar of Eliot Hall, that Reed is an exceptional institution where intellectual rigor and academic freedom are the true leaders, and administrators and professors merely the ambassadors. This idea animated Reed’s first two presidents, who were both passionate intellectuals but whose visions of Reed could not have been more different.

Reed’s first president, William Trufant Foster (1910–19),

the old guard was disillusioned with American higher education, and with Ivy League universities in particular. He saw them as places burdened by “harassing traditions,” where students in starched shirts and ties frittered away their time in sports and socializing, and were granted gentlemen’s C’s.

Foster jumped at the chance to build a first-rate college where intellectual pursuit was paramount. “Only those who want to work, and work hard, and who are determined to gain the greatest possible benefits from their studies, are welcomed,” early admission publications asserted.

“Others will be disappointed, for the scholarship demands will leave little time for outside activities, other than those which are necessary for the maintenance of health.”

Foster believed students should be able to determine their own course of study, and that the curriculum should eschew tradition, emphasize vocation, and promote specialization. He also stressed community involvement, encouraging faculty and students to get involved in civic affairs.

The honor principle, the senior thesis, and the lack of grade reporting were all Foster ideas. He also initiated Reed’s tradition of faculty participation in college governance.

Reed’s second president, Richard Scholz (1921–24), shared the ideal of academic rigor, but disapproved of Foster’s loose system of electives. In its place, Scholz constructed a core curriculum that emphasized the study of Western culture. Through this immersion, as historian Richard Jones explained in his unpublished History of the Reed Curriculum, “Reed students were expected to acquire a common mode of discourse and a common intellectual framework derived from inquiry into the human condition, human achievement and the physical circumstances of the universe in which humanity must live and work. To leave the process of integration to the student would be to shirk a major responsibility of education.”

Scholz’s tenure at Reed was brief (he died suddenly in 1924), but his influence was enormous. Over time, the humanities became central to the college’s identity, thanks to a succession of professors who guided and guarded his vision. These legendary figures, whose photos still line the halls of Vollum College Center, are familiar to Reedies even today: Frank Loxley Griffin (mathematics, 1911–56), Charles McKinley (political science, 1918–60), Reginald Francis Arragon (history, 1923–62), and Maure Goldschmidt (political science, 1935–81).

By the 1960s, Reed’s curriculum was widely hailed as a model of excellence. As Burton Clark wrote in his 1970 book The Distinctive College: “The [Reed] curriculum was exceedingly lean in the traditional disciplines of the liberal arts, strongly structured with requirements, and firmly muscled with hard grading. It became an operative definition of academic purity and toughness. . . Because the curriculum was also an expression of the understanding among the faculty members that in the classroom, they knew what was best for students, it became a powerful instrument of faculty control over student effort. The Reed classroom became a site of intellectual challenge and logical reasoning. Curriculum and classroom became the

Marvin Levich

Richard “Dick” Jones

components into which the faculty, having won control, poured their heart and soul.”

At this time, the two most influential members of the Old Guard were Richard Jones (history, 1941–86), and Marvin Levich (philosophy, 1953–94). Both were exceptional professors who commanded wide respect on campus; Levich, in particular, was an iconic figure. Wreathed in a perennial cloud of smoke from an endless stream of cigarettes, he spoke in elaborate sentences of Cartesian complexity. His fierce intellect, wry humor, and marvelous debating skills had earned him a reputation as a force to be reckoned with.

The Ivory Tower was an unlikely home for Levich.

The son of Russian-Lithuanian immigrants, he grew up in a poverty-stricken household in Iowa during the Great Depression; his first language was Yiddish. After graduation from high school, he spent three years in the 36th Infantry Division of the U.S. Army, saw action at the battle of Anzio, and ultimately was discharged after contracting malaria. At one point he worked in a meat-packing plant.

Thanks to the G.I. Bill, however, Levich was able to attend Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa, earning—in two and a half years—four bachelor’s degrees: psychology, history, sociology, and philosophy. A fellowship enabled him to pursue graduate work at Columbia University, where he made the decision to teach. “No other career seemed to me to be a valuable one or worth pursuing,” he recalls.

Levich arrived at Reed just in time for one of the darkest chapters in the college’s history. In 1954, during the heyday of McCarthyism, Reed came under the scrutiny of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which dispatched a tribunal to the campus, holding nationally televised hearings during which three Reed professors were questioned about alleged Communist sympathies. All three refused to answer. One of them, tenured philosophy professor Stanley Moore, refused to cooperate with a subsequent investigation by the board of trustees. In response, the board fired him—over the vehement protests of the faculty.

This tragedy took a terrible toll on Reed. Those who survived vowed to never let it happen again—in part by trying, as far as possible, to maintain the political neutrality of the college.

Levich never forgot the lessons of the Moore affair. It took him a few years to figure out what he termed “the privacies of Reed life”—exactly who and what made the

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The progressives believed Reed must make painful, even radical changes in order to survive.

The traditionalists believed those changes would destroy the very things that made Reed worth saving. college tick. Over time, Levich became convinced that the true calling of a Reed professor was not only to teach, but also to protect the college from forces that could destroy it.

In particular, he believed that it was the faculty’s duty to defend Reed’s academic program—one that was rigorous, traditional, and clearly demarcated from politics.

and write, how to analyze and sequence, and he did it with extraordinary care. I felt respected and challenged and supported by him.” She says of Howard Waskow, “He was a person who evoked enormous inquiry of the heart and mind simultaneously,” and of the Young Turks collectively, “Each of these guys had qualities of heart and mind that invited my wholeness to come forward, whereas in the presence ut in the late 1960s, neither the Young Turks nor of people like Levich, I just kept my mouth shut.” their student protégés were familiar with this backLevich may have intimidated some students, but he ground. They just considered Reed an insular place, inspired many others. “I had more than a few outstand­ing where students were immersed in a dusty curriculum that teachers at Reed,” Tom Shapiro ’63 recently wrote to the had little bearing on their lives. The war in Vietnam was college. “None is more memorable or had a more lasting raging. The civil rights movement was well underway. influence on my ability to think logically, analyze an Astronauts had taken their first steps on the moon. The argument and reason to a justifiable conclusion, than call of the outside world was deafening, as was the call Mr. Levich. After 50 years, the Humanities 11. . . and to some undefined larger purpose. “I came in with a life Mr. Levich remain in my memory the definition of my inquiry: how do I make a difference?” Dearborn recalls. freshman year at Reed.” In 1969, Levich was named “The school didn’t seem to have much to offer someone one of the top ten scholar-teachers in the country by the like me, as it turned out.”

Danforth Foundation.

Dearborn was not the only student expressing such The Young Turks tried their best to shake things up.

Drukman introduced Reed to the Free Speech Movement. Waskow taught Upward Bound classes on campus in the summers. They got the faculty to pass an unprecedented resolution protesting police presence at UC Berkeley.

But after a while, they began to believe the Old Guard was threatened by their efforts.

“I think [the Old Guard] identified with the college, and what happened here was what happened in their lives—was their life,” Drukman recalls. “It felt as though there hadn’t been new ideas for a long time. It felt kind of stuck where it was. Some of where they were stuck was a very nice place. But some of it felt kind of stultifying.”

In a sense, Drukman was right—Reed was at the core of the Old Guard’s identity. “The things that went on at Reed were part and English professor Howard Waskow received tenure, but left Reed in frustration. parcel of what I thought about as a person,” concerns. “I feel there is not a great community feeling at says Levich. “They were the things that mattered most to Reed because Reed does not offer individuals an opporme in my life.” tunity to really be alive,” student Peter Shefler wrote in a It would be unfair to suggest that the traditionalists 1968 Quest article. “I’d like to see Reed change from a place were insulated from the outside world; several of them of petty constraints and official inhibitions to a place where were passionately involved in current events. Levich, for there are people and warmth and love and life.” example, served as state chairman for Senator Eugene For these students, the Young Turks were an important McCarthy’s 1968 presidential campaign, and was bitterly source of guidance and affirmation. Dearborn recalls Kirk opposed to the war in Vietnam.

Thompson as the one who “taught me how to think But the Old Guard was genuinely concerned about the

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future of Reed and, indeed, the future of higher education itself. They watched with rising alarm as confrontation between police and protestors turned violent and sometimes deadly at Columbia University and UC Berkeley.

Across the nation, it seemed, students were venting their frustrations about Vietnam, racial inequality, police brutality, the military-industrial complex—and everything else that was wrong with America on their own colleges and universities—and many of these institutions were retaliating with force. California Governor Ronald Reagan called out the National Guard to put down unrest at Berkeley; the shootings at Kent State were just around the corner.

Meanwhile, counterculture prophets such as Timothy Leary were exhorting an entire generation to turn on, tune in, and drop out. As tensions mounted and bomb threats became commonplace, “There really was a question about whether colleges in any recognizable form could continue,” says Levich.

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gainst this backdrop of political and social turmoil, the debate over Reed’s curriculum—and, indeed, its mission—grew increasingly contentious. As the faculty struggled over the humanities program and the requirement structure, however, a new battle erupted.

Echoing demands at other institutions, Reed students— particularly members of the Black Student Union—had begun calling for a Black Studies program. The Young Turks supported the idea. The Old Guard opposed it.

The issue for Levich was not whether the new field of Black Studies was academically valid—he believed that it was. But he opposed the program for several reasons. First, the discipline was as yet unformed, and was defined by shifting political notions of what constituted Blackness, which he believed violated the college’s commitment to political neutrality. Second, the Black Student Union wanted complete control over the content of the courses and the hiring of faculty—conditions that would prevent the program from being integrated into Reed’s academic system. Third, Black Studies professors were in high demand and short supply in those years. Reed had no hope of winning excellent faculty members away from Ivy League institutions and historically black colleges and universities. Therefore, Levich felt that adding Black Studies to the curriculum—at that time—would jeopardize Reed’s academic integrity.

Matters came to a head in December 1968, when the Black Student Union barricaded Eliot Hall, plunging the campus into disarray. The faculty, which had been meeting frequently, began meeting even more frequently. An emergency meeting in the sports center drew as many as 800 student observers. Emotion—and frustration—ran high. “I reached a point where it was feeling dismal,” Drukman recalls. “The faculty meetings felt like death to me. It felt like death walking in there.”

On March 3, 1969, the faculty finally held a vote on the proposed Black Studies program. Each side rallied all the support they could muster. Professors who were on leave flew back to Portland to vote. Several emeritus

faculty—who retained voting rights but seldom attended meetings—made a special effort to attend. When the final vote was tallied, the program was approved, 57–55. The Turks had won.

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nfortunately, the vote did little to relieve the tensions among the faculty. While the Old Guard had lost the battle on Black Studies, they still dominated the Faculty Advisory Committee, which decided matters of tenure.

As the only Turk on the FAC, Jon Roush was increasingly dismayed by the committee’s decisions in November 1969, denying tenure to several of his friends, but he hoped the decision would be different for Kirk Thompson. With calm determination he walked towards Eliot Hall for the meeting that would decide Thompson’s career at Reed.

Thompson had recently published a paper on Rousseau’s Social Contract—which is, coincidentally, about the need to reconcile personal liberty with the general welfare—and Roush had agreed to debate the paper with Levich during the meeting.

Levich’s debating skills were legendary. Five years before, he had demolished William F. Buckley in a debate over civil liberties at Cleveland High School (Levich attacked Buckley as being a radical in conservative’s clothing; Buckley never recovered from the shock.) As Roush jousted with Levich over Thompson’s paper, he believed he was holding his own. “I think I made a very persuasive case in that debate,” he says.

But when the committee finally came to a vote on Thompson’s tenure, Roush was the only one in favor. “I think it was a show trial,” he says.

Levich disagrees vigorously. “Every case was evaluated by the committee in light of the standard criteria,” he says.

“While there’s always some degree of flabbiness in any such decision, to my knowledge the end result was always based on the teaching effectiveness, publications, and research of the people in question.”

The decision not to award tenure to Thompson was the final straw for the Young Turks. The atmosphere had become so poisonous that Roush, Drukman and Waskow decided to resign from their posts. Waskow would write later in his book Becoming Brothers: “Years of struggling for reform at Reed had gone for naught. Reed was intractable—no room for me there. . . I would spend my whole professional life fighting this man [Levich], I realized, and even if I won, the victories would be small. In a dream I heard a powerful voice instructing me—‘You must leave Reed.’”

Roush, Drukman and Waskow eventually departed academia altogether, as did others in the progressive camp.

“I think it’s really systematic that so many of us left the academic life,” Roush recalls. “It wasn’t that we wanted to be in some other college. It’s that, in various ways, we were all traumatized.” A year after resigning, Roush visited Reed, and spotted Jones walking across campus in his general direction. Roush actually hid behind a tree to avoid facing him.

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The Ideology of Relevance

By Marvin Levich Condensed from a speech to the Association of American Colleges in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1969

The question is . . . “What should be the impact of the ideology of relevance on humanistic studies?”

Let me first address the nature of the ideology, the first trait of which I shall call that of “external justification.” It is expressed in the currently voguish question, “What is the relevance of a liberal arts education, what is the relevance of this or that course in the curriculum, what is the relevance of teaching this or that course in this or that way?”

In the context of its asking, the question requires that courses be justified in the light of some showing to the effect that the giving of them will contribute to the amelioration or elimination of political and social evil. I call it “external justification” because it requires that what is done in a college is to be judged in respect of its effect upon the social order and, further, in respect of those effects that are external to, or independent of, the properties of education or learning, per se.

There are, of course, some things the doing of which we justify in this way. We take a bus because it gets us somewhere, not because of any value in the bus ride itself.

(At least, that is why I take a bus). We take an aspirin because it reduces our fever, not because the taking of it has any merit, per se. That is another way of saying that if aspirins did not succeed in reducing our fever, we would stop manufacturing and taking them.

The anti-intellectualism of the view at issue lies in the fact that it leads us to talk about education as we do buses and aspirins, to try to find the cultural Florida which will justify the trip, the social fever which will justify swallowing the pill.

But, of course, the pursuit of learning is not at all like this. The properties which make it what it is are identical with those which make it of value to the society in which it is pursued. If it is successful, the students who pursue it learn what is true and what is not, and how to find it out, and learn further that there are different ways of finding it out according to subject-matter, and different degrees of certainty which, depending upon the subject-matter, they can attach to their findings. If we think that society is the better for having in it people who have learned these things, then education is relevant to society. If we don’t, we talk of destinations and fevers.

This is why I find the question about the relevance of education to be so clearly antiintellectual. There is an answer to the question. I have just given it. And the answer will be rejected as unresponsive exactly to the extent that knowledge and understanding, per se, are rejected as valueless. Since those who pose the question do find this answer unresponsive. I have no doubt that the asking of it already reflects a repudiation of the intellectual life. One particularly good way of finding out what a person means by a question is to find out what he will be prepared to accept as appropriate answer.

This is why I maintain that what I have called the “trait of external justification” relegates intellectual inquiry, and therefore its institutional setting, to the role of morally neutral instrument to be used, modified or rejected, as we do any instrument, according to the purpose for which we take it up and of which it is the logical servant.

To the question of what is to be done about this, I will give you an answer that I am absolutely certain you will regard as being silly as it is drab. The answer is “Nothing.”

Let me explain. I do not mean to suggest by it that what is now being done within humanistic studies is perfect, that there are no new topics to be considered, no new problems to be investigated, no new methods to be contrived which refine, supplement or replace what is already being done. Nor do I think it a necessary evil to have courses in black history or the literature of revolution. What I do think is that there are no changes of this kind, large or small, that can at once satisfy what is demanded by the ideology of relevance and preserve the intellectual integrity of the material presented.

These are strong words. I am afraid that some may find them offensive. But I say them because I think them to be true. I say them because I think that those of us who value humanistic studies, and indeed all of higher education, now have something to fight for, and against, and that unless we are clear about what is involved in the fight and respond with honor, we will be aiding those think rather less of the academy than do we in the business of its dismantling.  

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Reed was traumatized as well. “Good, open discussion wasn’t the habit any more,” Jones recalled in a 1990 interview. “The habit was confrontation.

What was needed, of course, if we were to restore the old traditional institution, was a great deal of emphasis on open discussion of all kinds of issues in the faculty—getting the faculty to work together again. . . But for twenty years [afterwards] there were no open discussions in the faculty, and none in which the administration ever participated at all, with faculty or students.”

These four Young Turks all went on to distinguished careers. Thompson and Waskow declined to be interviewed for this article. But time has softened the views of Roush and Drukman. Neither regrets resigning: Drukman jokes that he only wishes that he had stuck around long enough for his sabbatical; Roush says Reed’s lasting influence was to cure him of academic aspirations. If he had the good fortune now to see Jones coming down the sidewalk, Roush says, he’d shake his hand. “I loved teaching at Reed. I loved the students. Everything that went on in classrooms was just spectacular. . . I think it’s really a tragedy that we could not meld those two forces. It wasn’t black and white. It was just that we made it black and white.

We insisted that it be black and white.

That was, for me, the real tragedy.”

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orty years after the fact, the curricular battles of the late 1960s are still a controversial subject. The years of constant stress and conflict left permanent, if fading, scars on some who lived through them. To this day there are people who believe that the tenure decisions of the late sixties represented an attempt by the Old Guard to push the Turks out of the college—an understandable view, especially considering that the faculty voted in 1970, by a substantial majority, to “restore and give adherence to the traditional

college program and the traditional way of operating it.”

And yet there are problems with this interpretation. Two of the most prominent Turks, Drukman and Waskow, had in fact received tenure; it is quite possible that Roush would eventually have received tenure as well, had he not resigned first. Further, it is not unusual for tenure decisions, even under the best of circumstances, to generate controversy and hard feelings.

Aside from personnel issues, the curricular wars had several other lasting effects. The Black Studies Program, which was never fully integrated into the curriculum, vanished—some would argue, was starved out—in 1976, and its absence complicated Reed’s efforts to recruit minority students to campus, a problem that continued for decades.

(Minority enrollment has since climbed to a respectable 26 percent).

One can only speculate as to what might have happened if Reed had followed the curricular path laid out by Foster, and to some extent resurrected by the Young Turks. Antioch College, which was defined by its progressive and experimental pedagogical methods, took that path by combining practical with academic learning and emphasizing community involvement, and thrived in the 1960s and 1970s. Last year, however, the main liberal arts college of Antioch closed its doors due to insufficient enrollment and funding. Perhaps a more progressive and experimental version of Reed would have suffered a similar fate.

Instead the faculty leaders of the 1960s held fast to Scholz’s vision, upheld Reed’s tradition of academic rigor, and steered the college through a time of profound upheaval. Their decisions weren’t always popular, and perhaps weren’t always right. But they were always based in the absolute conviction that Reed’s intellectual legacy was worth fighting for.

Laura Ross ’98 MALS ’06 is a faculty interviewer and excerpting editor for Reed’s Oral History Project, which she joined in 2004.

This is her first article for the magazine.

What Will Become of the Past?

By Jon Roush Excerpted from Daedalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1969

…The objective of a humanistic education is competence in the judgment of human creations, with that judgment informed by an awareness of pertinent historical contexts. It is, however, becoming increasingly difficult to achieve that objective for two reasons.

First, the problem of obsolescence is impinging on the humanities in some special ways, and conventional humanistic pedagogy is not designed to meet that problem. Second, it is likely that our man-made environment is the most significant human creation of all time, in that it has the most immediate effect on men’s lives and souls, and yet the traditional humanistic education provides little guidance for anyone who would evaluate that complex, changing environment.

The problem of obsolescence and the problem of dealing with our present environment both pose questions about the contemporary relevance of the past and of history itself.

It is important that we understand what is at issue. The question is not whether we can still profitably read The Oresteia or Il Principe; the question is whether we owe them the automatic allegiance due to forebears or whether we are somebody else’s children…

The difficulty is revealed clearly in undergraduate education in the humanistic disciplines, which is rarely based on any cogent idea of tradition. Nor is that surprising when one considers that the culture that the conventional course in the humanities “transmits” is in many ways not the one that the students have actually inherited.

The problem is not simply that most of the students are being introduced to most of the materials for the first time. The real problem is that the typical curriculum in the humanities, no matter what its official rationale may be, has as its organizing objective the presentation of objects with which “any educated man should be familiar.” It is intended as an initiation into the living mysteries, and perhaps it really worked out that way when the humanities were the province of an elite, self-conscious class. For most undergraduates now, however, the house of the humanities seems not a sacred temple but a museum. …Traditionally, the studia humanitatis have been the concern of a select group within the society. It was possible to maintain that situation until after World War II, but the situation has changed with the expansion of education and leisure. In the past, the values of the many seemed inimical to the best judgment of the few in matters intellectual and artistic. We have no assumed responsibility for democratizing that judgment, and it seems unlikely that we can do so without changing the nature of the values… …In a democracy, conflict and diversity should be a sine qua non of education…

I It may seem strange that anyone feels the need to stand up for diversity and conflict when humanism has always been characterized by a tolerance for differences of opinion, but to take this idea seriously in education could seem threatening to many people. I confess that it sometimes is to me. It suggests that the function of teachers and scholars is not to transmit, but to challenge and be challenged. It suggests that their ultimate objective is not a better understanding of their material, but a better understanding of one another, of their students, and of themselves…. it would produce educational imperatives for giving students power over matters pertinent to their education. … As humanists, we may be good at teaching and even… good at relating, but we tend to be poor at listening and responding. We do not often hear ourselves being questioned, much less contradicted, by our students and our society; when we do, we generally do not answer, unless with a shrug… The humanist’s concern should be not simply objects and events of the past, but equally his society’s perception of those objects and events.

As a teacher and scholar, he should be building utopias, real and imaginary, that are specific responses to the world in which he lives. Consider the man who lives in a modern city and understands what Chaucer has to say on the subject of love. If he is not moved to challenge those aspects of his environment that prohibit love, he is not a humanist but a pedant, and he should not be surprised if his society considers him expendable.

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by Martha Gies

RADICAL TREA MENT

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In the late ’60s, the Black Panthers set up free medical and dental clinics in cities across the country; in Portland, these “survival programs” were helped by a handful of Reedies.

he Portland chapter of the Black Panther Party was launched in 1969 when Kent Ford decided the community had had enough.

Beaten by the police and arrested for inciting to riot, Ford was awaiting trial in the old Rocky Butte Jail with little hope of raising bail. Ten days later, someone miraculously posted the full amount: $80,000.

Ford was brought downtown for processing to the old police station at Southwest Third Avenue and Oak Street; right there on the steps, he held a press conference. “I said, ‘If they keep coming in with these fascist tactics, we’re going to defend ourselves.’”

The story of Reed’s connection to the Panthers also begins at that moment: the exorbitant bail—nearly a quarter of a million dollars in today’s currency—was raised by Don Hamerquist ’62, a man Ford had only just met. “It was some Communists that got me out,” says Ford, who was eager to get to know his benefactor. “I went over to his house and found out he was at Reed.”

Not exactly. Hamerquist, originally from Clallam Bay, Washington, had enrolled at Reed back in 1957. He had been a history major, studying for five years on a full scholarship with professors like Howard Jolly and John Pock in sociology, and Smith Fussner in history. The completion of his thesis—on the foreign policy of the 1948 Progressive Party platform—was all he lacked for graduation.

“There was a lot of social disruption in those years,” says Hamerquist, “and I didn’t study a lot.

Essentially I was looking for leftists to recruit. I

managed to get thrown out of most classes because I had a problem with the politics of my professors.”

In 1969, when he met Ford, Hamerquist was neither a student nor a member of the Communist Party. “By then, I’d been out working as a truck driver for some years and I’d been expelled from the party for factional behavior— essentially opposing the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia,” he says.

But he still knew plenty of people on the left in Portland, among them Morris Malbin, a radiologist who put up a $40,000 for Ford’s bail, and Penny Sabin, who contributed $40,000 in Blue Bell Potato Chip stocks.

For Ford, who had graduated from high school in 1961 and turned down a college scholarship in order to support his mother and siblings, meeting Hamerquist was not his first exposure to Reed.

He had often browsed the campus bookstore in the late ’60s, buying Ho Chi Minh’s On Revolution, the works of Mao Tse-Tung, and some rare English-language pamphlets produced by the Viet Cong.

Hamerquist was also able to help Ford find a lawyer, Nick Chaivoe, who not only got Ford acquitted on the riot charges, but successfully sued the Portland Police in federal court for brutal treatment at the time of the arrest.

Meanwhile, Ford and a handful of others— Tommy Mills, Percy Hampton, Oscar Johnson, and Tom Venters—had started talking to people on the street about police brutality, lack of job opportunities, the economic disparity between the races, the role blacks were forced to play in fighting the war in Vietnam—and what the Panthers could do about it.

Willamette Bridge cover announcing the opening of the Fred Hampton Memorial People’s Clinic in January 1970

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Women saluting, 1968, photo by Ruth Marion Baruch and Pirkle Jones

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he original chapter of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, California, in 1966.

Their first document, a list of demands for human rights called the Ten-Point Platform and Program, cited the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence in support of its points. The Party’s first actions included patrolling the city streets, armed, in an effort to silently monitor Oakland police, a precaution meant to ensure that black citizens were either arrested or let go—but not beaten or waylaid on the way to the station, as had happened all too often.

The following year, in 1967, members of the party— wearing black jackets and sunglasses—appeared at the California State Legislature with guns to protest a bill intended to ban the display of loaded weapons. That same year, Huey Newton was critically wounded and arrested following a shoot-out on an Oakland street that left a police officer dead. These events, especially as they involved weapons, were well documented by an astonished press.

What never got as much attention were the Panther social programs—the clinics; the breakfast programs; the testing for sickle cell anemia, high blood pressure, and lead poisoning; and the community outreach and education on the legal rights of the individual.

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he Portland chapter got its free children’s breakfast program up and running in fall 1969.

Every school day for five years, the Panthers provided breakfast for up to 125 children in the dining room of Highland United Church of Christ. (To this day, it is not unusual in Portland for one of the former Panthers, now in their 60s and 70s, to have some 40-year-old come up to them and say, “Do you remember me? You used to give me pancakes in the morning before I went to school.”)

Also that fall, Kent Ford got a call at the new Party office on Union Avenue (renamed Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in 1989), which would lead to Hamerquist’s third big favor for the fledgling chapter. “I hear you guys are thinking about opening up a health clinic,” he said. “I got just the guy you need to talk to.”

That was how the Party came to work with Jon Moscow ’69.

A Long Island native, Moscow had joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) after studying a front-page story in Newsday about a group of people who got arrested while demonstrating against school segregation. “I just thought it was something I wanted to be involved in,” Moscow recalls. He was 13 at the time.

The Oregonian

Father and child, 1968, photo by Ruth Marion Baruch and Pirkle Jones

He chose Reed for two reasons: he had fallen in love with the Pacific Northwest from listening to Woody Guthrie songs, and he wanted to get as far away from home as he could. “I didn’t even think about Hawaii,” he realizes today.

Reed accepted him as a freshman in 1965, when activism was still attractive to schools. “They hadn’t yet experienced students taking over their buildings,” Moscow points out. (The Columbia University uprising didn’t occur until 1968.)

He turned 18 in October of his sophomore year. It was 1966 and troop levels in Vietnam were inching up toward 400,000, but, in order to register as a conscientious objector, Moscow refused the 2S deferment he would have received automatically as a full-time student. His C.O. status denied, he eventually reported to Fort Hamilton, where he failed his physical Jon Moscow, c.1969 because of asthma. “I didn’t

want to get out that way,” Moscow says, “so I burned my draft card in Grant Park during the ’68 Democratic Convention and sent the ashes to the draft board.”

Moscow spent his junior year in Hyderabad, doing research on an experiment in village-level democracy— his thesis was called “Inequality and status in Indian rural development”—and returned to Reed in 1968.

That winter, he went back to New York for winter break and got work with the Urban Coalition writing a report on the city’s hospital system. In the process, he discovered Health/ PAC, the policy advisory center started by activist Robb Burlage. “I fell in love with them,” Moscow says. In his final semester at Reed, he started his own research and action project, Health/RAP, along with roommate Robert Spindel ’70. Together they researched healthcare options in Portland.

“I had been involved in Portland from as soon as I arrived at Reed,” recalls Moscow, who participated in the DiGiorgio grape boycott in 1966. “I had no desire to be an island. There was a small group of us political people who did things off campus.”

After graduation, Moscow stayed in town, immersing himself in anti-war activities, getting arrested during the Fry Roofing strike, and launching Health/RAP. “I thought it would be really exciting to see how it carried over in Portland,” says Moscow, whose sights were set first on the Multnomah County Hospital, where it was hard to get an

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Jon Moscow ’69 (left) and Kent Ford in 2008, on the street corner where the Fred Hampton Memorial People’s Clinic once stood.

appointment and waiting room delays were endless. The need for clinics in the community was also clear to him; at the time, the sole county clinic was in the hospital itself, way up on “pill hill.”

To support himself, Moscow got a $20-a-week job writing for the Willamette Bridge, Portland’s alternative newspaper, and an indispensable venue for his own Health/RAP press releases.

When he got a call from Kent Ford, who contacted him at Hamerquist’s suggestion, the timing could not have been more perfect. Given the higher infant mortality rates among blacks, and shorter life expectancies, a collaboration with the Panthers was right there on Health/RAP’s platform.

Moscow soon had a space picked out: Dr. Webster Brown’s former clinic, at 109 N. Russell St., was available for $100 a month. The next step was to recruit some doctors.

Neurosurgeon George Barton ’55 was Moscow’s first volunteer. (There is more than one theory about how the two met. Sandra Ford, then married to Kent Ford, insists that Moscow went down the Oregon Medical Board list, calling Portland doctors until he finally found one—he’d reached the B’s—who was interested in helping the Panthers start a clinic. Barton, on the other hand, thinks they met at the Unitarian Church.)

Barton had worked in Tunisia from 1966 to 1968, serving in the Peace Corps with his wife and five children. “I worked in a neurosurgery ward, where I accomplished nothing,” he says. “But it was worth it to see an Arab society and experience the warmth and kindness of those people.”

After the Peace Corps, Barton volunteered with Outside In, a street clinic started in 1968 in response to the spreading use of drugs in Portland. He didn’t last long. “Because I told them the truth,” he says. “‘These are a bunch of rich kids pretending to be hippies.’ They fired me.”

He was still looking to make a contribution when he met Moscow. “I just regretted missing all the action in the States,” say Barton, whose brother, Lane, had gone to Selma. “But I wouldn’t have gone to the South on a bus. I

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was scared of those lynchings and those people with baseball bats.”

Moscow, Barton, and the Fords went to look at the space. “There was a bar on the right and a men’s store on the left,” Ford recalls. “It was a rowdy area. It would have been considered the ghetto, back then.”

“The four of us kept dither­ ing around,” Sandra recalls, “thinking of reasons why we couldn’t start right away— all kinds of problems, all the stuff we’d need. But Dr. Barton Sandra Ford, 1970s said, ‘Oh hell, let’s just do it!’”

They rented the space and went to work: Panthers cleaned and painted the clinic, a friend of Moscow’s built shelves, and Moscow and Sandra made contacts in town, asking for money, equipment, and volunteers.

The Fords were in awe of what Moscow could accomplish.

Sandra was stunned that so many white people invited her and Moscow into their homes and wrote them checks.

“We went up on Mt. Tabor, the West Hills, Council Crest, Marine Drive. It was a real eye opener to me, because I’d been brought up in the projects. I lived in Columbia Villa until I graduated from high school.”

Kent had only read about organizers like Moscow.

“Like the SNCC people and the CORE people and the Peace and Freedom Party people. I’d never met one. My only organizing experience personally was street corner organizing.”

They named the clinic after a 21-year-old Panther leader who had been murdered by Chicago police on December 4, 1969. “We had decided it was going to be the People’s Health Clinic,” Moscow says, “but then Fred Hampton was killed.” Though officials would claim the deaths of Hampton and colleague Mark Clark had occurred as a result of a gun battle, ballistic evidence showed that the bullets were all incoming—the people in the apartment where they were killed, including Hampton’s pregnant girlfriend, were asleep. The raid was one of several on Panther offices and homes; in September 1968, J. Edgar Hoover had declared open season on the Party, calling it the “greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”

In Portland, the Panther free clinic opened its doors as the Fred Hampton Memorial People’s Health Clinic. In the cover story for the Bridge, Moscow wrote: “We now have 27 doctors, plus nurses and medical students. Our X-ray diagnosis is done free for us and the lab work that we can’t do in the clinic is sent out for free.

We have specialty referrals to private offices on a free basis in surgery, internal medicine, dermatology, hematology, neurology, pediatrics and cancer therapy. We also have a small but growing lab of our own, and we have been

offered a portable X-ray machine and its accessories.”

In the same article, Moscow made a call to readers. “If you happen to have an autoclave on hand,” he wrote, “we can use it.” He also invited them to support the clinic by sending a check, giving his home address, and ended the article with “All Power to the People!”

Shortly after the article appeared, the postman came to his door. “‘I just want to let you know that there’s a mail cover on all your mail.’ he told us. ‘I can’t do anything about it, but I just wanted you to know that they’re checking all your envelopes.’”

The health clinic was open weeknights, from 7 to 10 p.m.

Serving 25 to 50 patients a night, it provided free care to anyone who walked through the doors. Cathy Traylor, a successful businesswoman with Forte Marketing who travels across the country to organize the sales of Yamahas and Steinways, visited the clinic in 1972. Just out of college and new to Portland, she had a job making celery boxes and couldn’t afford a doctor.

“I can’t remember how I heard about it, but clearly it was a Panther clinic,” says Traylor, who is white. “I was seen right away and everybody was so nice. It was totally free, and I wasn’t asked any questions about whether I’d be able to pay.”

Except for Bill Davis, a pathologist (and brother of the late Ossie Davis), the doctors were white. Sandra makes the point that the four black doctors in town—Drs. Unthank, Reynolds, Marshall, and Brown—already did a lot of pro bono work just by virtue of working in the community.

Barton’s wife remembers that her husband used to bicycle to the clinic for his Wednesday night shift, and the Panthers always offered him an escort out of the area, a precaution that he rejected.

“My experience with the Panthers was nothing but positive,” says Barton, who was then establishing a practice as a neurologist. In contrast to the patients he’d had at Outside In, Barton found his patients at the Panther clinic to be very much in need of his services. Ford remembers Barton making home visits to a few elderly men, including a neighborhood character called Governor Coleman.

“When his apartment building ran out of oil,” Barton remembers, “Governor used his cook stove for heat.”

Once Moscow got a project up and running, he had a way of disappearing, in true community organizer fashion.

“He’s such a smart guy!” Sandra says. “He’d get another idea and start another project.”

In 1970, Moscow helped open the Panther Dental Clinic.

He recruited Gerry Morrell, a dentist who was also in charge of community outreach for the Multnomah Dental Society. Morrell, in turn, brought in most of the other dentists. Like the health clinic, the dental clinic remained in operation by the Panthers throughout the 1970s.

For Morrell, who had grown up in small Washington towns, working with the Black Panthers was a revelation.

“I went to Oregon State in the ’50s and they never even had a black basketball player until the ’60s. I remember seeing Kent and thinking, he’s not that scary.

“Kent and Sandra always stressed you can like or dislike

Jon Moscow (left) and Sandra Ford share memories and a laugh in 2008.

people, but do so on the basis of who they are, not on the basis of their race.”

Sandra Ford, too, was changed by the clinics. “I just got more and more involved,” she says. She did all the scheduling for the medical clinic, and took on the dental scheduling, too. She even did some dental assisting. “Which was mostly closing my eyes and holding out the instruments,” Sandra laughs. “But I did learn to sterilize things.”

She also found her niche. In 1977, she went through a University of Washington program and today, with 40 years in healthcare, works at Garlington Center as a physician’s assistant in community mental health.

Don Hamerquist is back on the Olympic Peninsula, where he describes his work as “fighting the timber companies.”

Jon Moscow works in New York as an educational consultant and grant writer, and continues to be an activist for racial and economic justice.

George Barton retired after 24 years as a neurosurgeon at Kaiser. He lives in Vancouver, Washington, and is still a champion of universal health care.

Recently, former Panthers Percy Hampton, Oscar Johnson, and Kent Ford took a tour of North and Northeast Portland. Only the dental clinic, which they ran for a decade, is still open, now operated by the OHSU Dental School. The health clinic is gone, and both of the Union Avenue buildings that housed the Panther offices have been torn down. “Boy, they just completely erased us,” Oscar Johnson observed.

But their gratitude—to Don Hamerquist and Jon Moscow, to Dr. George Barton and Dr. Gerry Morrell, and to all the doctors and dentists who helped them back in the day— will never be erased.

Martha Gies is the author of Up All Night, a portrait of Portland told through the stories of 23 people who work graveyard shift. In Veracruz, Gies leads an annual writing workshop called Traveler’s Mind; at home in Portland, she teaches at the Attic Writers’ Workshop.

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Reed Alumni

The Alumni Association: What’s In It for You?

By Rachel Adrienne Hall Luft ’95, alumni board president

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used this space in the last issue musicians were such a to encourage Reed alumni to huge hit that the alumni volunteer for the college, and in and parent relations staff doing so listed some of the benefits of is hoping to make live volunteerism. But there are plenty of music a regular feature at bonuses out there for the pickin’ for reunions. Those musicians alumni, even if you don’t volunteer. were alumni, doing what Even if your level of participation they love. And who doesn’t Rachel Luft and her son, Konrad stops at the annual donation, or enjoy those chapter events even just a general lack of animosity toward the college where a Reedie in the know leads an insider’s tour, such experience you have achieved after years of therapy. as Stephen McCarthy ’66’s popular tours of his Clear Creek Since the alumni association’s main purpose is to Distillery, or the Portland chapter’s recent tour of the bring you closer to other alumni and to the college, the Portland Art Museum led by docent Nancy Johannsen benefits are what one would expect: social and intellectual Morrice ’76? Even common interests such as reading and opportunities offered locally and online. The alumni cooking hold the potential for drawing alumni together, so board, the college staff, and the local chapters work hard don’t think you need to hold the key to the White House to anticipate the types of lectures, clubs, tours, plays, and to interest anyone. parties you might enjoy, hoping many of you will see an If you’re saying to yourself, “Nope. I’m sticking with invitation and think to yourself, “Well, that sounds more the poke in the eye tonight,” then speak up and let us fun than a poke in the eye.” know what kind of cool thing is going to draw you in. The The great thing about participating in Reed events is chances are good that what appeals to you would appeal to that the more you join in, the more the college has to a lot of other people. Better yet, organize or host an event offer everyone else. I must say that the best Reed reunion yourself! It’s really not a lot of work.

I have attended so far was so great because there were So, what’s in it for you? Just everything that everyone so many alumni there, telling funny stories on the front else has put in. Grab your share; that’s what it’s there for. lawn and watching the fireworks together. The Krispy And if there is something you’re passionate about, don’t be Kremes at the Southern California Chapter picnic didn’t shy. Find a way to share it with your fellow Reedies! bring themselves. And would my three-year-old son have enjoyed the Portland Chapter picnic nearly as much if the alumni playing croquet had not simply declared him a Insurance Available natural hazard and continued on with their game? I think Discounted short-term medical insurance is available not. to Reed alumni who need temporary coverage.

Your part in enriching the alumni program can go far Contact Meyer and Associates, 800/635-7801, beyond just showing up (which is significant; don’t get www.meyerandassoc.com. me wrong). At Reed-A-Palooza, last year’s music-themed reunions, the performing classical, jazz, folk, and rock

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Reed Alumni

Regional Gatherings

BOSTON

In October, we engaged in a strange New England tradition known as candlepin bowling at WASHINGTON, D.C. Milky Way Lounge & Lanes. We In October we held a Segway ate pizza and had a good time, tour of downtown DC, led by and afterwards people went back Mike Teskey, director of alumni to Heinrich’s house around the relations, who flew in for the corner to continue the festivities. occasion, and nobody fell off.

In November we had “Dim Sum Also, a good-sized group gathered Sunday” at Hei La Moon. This for what we hope will be the first was a well-attended and fun of many dim sum brunches at lunch. In December, Boston the China Garden in Rosslyn, Reedies attended a holiday open Virginia (another dim sum brunch house at the home of Rachel is planned for the spring). We are Dorr ’76. Our chapter steering also planning bicycle and kayak committee is now collectively trips as well as another school run and consists of Greg Lam gardening volunteer project for ’96, Jessica Stern Benjamin the spring. Find out more at www. ’93, Eve Lyons ’95, Heinreich reed.edu/alumni/chapters/dc.

Gompf ’93 and Rachel Dorr SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA ’76. Perhaps because we have We celebrated solstice 2008 with a large number of graduate our first “Hands-On-Art” event— students and underemployed raku pottery—on December 13 and people out here, we’ve deter­ it was generally agreed that the mined that attendance is higher event “rawked.” Upcoming events Daniel Wolf ’82 contemplates the glow at the raku when we don’t have more than pottery firing organized by the Southern California include our second-annual career one event a month—so we have chapter. Also pictured are his daughter Victoria (left) networking event on February 28 and raku artist Michelle Dilley (center). decided that any month we don’t in Santa Monica, a “writing for the have an event scheduled, we year! In November, Barbara Smithsenses” workshop with bestselling will be doing a Thirsty Third Thomas ’64 hosted a tasting of author Janet Fitch ’78 on April 4, and Thursday at various local restaurants, French Burgundies, and other reds, our second port and chocolate tasting but not routinely on a monthly at Burdigala Wines in Sellwood. Also on May 3. Our book group is still going basis. Check out the venue and other in November, Nancy Johannsen strong, as are Thirsty Third Thursdays activities at www.reed.edu/alumni/ Morrice ’76, a docent at the Portland in La Jolla and Santa Barbara. Plans chapters/boston.

Art Museum, led a tour of the “Wild are in the works for more Thirsty Beauty” exhibit showcasing a history RAINIER Third Thursdays in the Orange County of Columbia Gorge photography. After On October 29, about 15 Rainier and greater LA areas. For further the spectacular tour, we migrated to Reedies had the pleasure of attending information about these and other the BridgePort Ale House for more a happy hour with Robin Tovey ’97, chapter activities or to get involved in talk of history and art. In December, assistant director of alumni relations, hosting an event, please visit www.

Ron Sato ’68 coordinated the Feeding which doubled as an open steering reed.edu/alumni/chapters/so_cal.

Frenzy on campus, where alumni committee meeting. Good thoughts, PORTLAND bring and serve nourishment to ideas, appetizers and drink were Despite the challenge of getting into exam-crazed students on the Sunday shared all around. Thirsty Third camp with high tides in the estuary, night before finals. Our Thirsty Third Thursdays continue to be fun and the annual Westwind weekend for Thursday venue has shifted back lively, as are our monthly(ish) board alumni, friends, and family at the to the Lucky Lab on Hawthorne, game days. As always, the reading Oregon Coast was a fun and relaxing but we are always looking for new group meets on the third Wednesday success. Gorgeous ocean beaches, places that have a big table for great of the month. Check for more coastal mountain hiking trails, conversations. Send email to Nancy information, including upcoming warm cabins and delicious meals Johannsen Morrice ’76 at NLMorrice@ book selections, and other activities all included. Mark your calendars aol.com. See other activities at www. at www.reed.edu/alumni/chapters/ for October 2009 to join us this reed.edu/alumni/chapters/portland. rainier.

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Apocrypha

T r a di t io n s , My t h s , a n d L e g e n d s

The Half-Time Crucifiction Legendary prank, divine retribution? By Chris Lydgate

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or sheer chutzpah, few chapters of Reed folklore rival the infamous Half-Time Crucifixion. Sometime in the early ’60s, so the legend goes, the Reed football team played a series of games against a local Christian college whose cheerleading squad mocked Reed with chants such as, “Beat those beatniks!” As the season wore on, these taunts gnawed at the restraint of the usually implacable Reed fans. One day, a ragtag band of Reed “cheerleaders” retaliated with a half-time reënactment of Jesus’ procession to Golgotha, complete with an enormous wooden cross lugged through the goalposts. Tradition has it that Reed triumphed on the field but was forever banished from the league.

Until now, details of this episode were fragmentary at best, but new information has recently come to light courtesy of professor emeritus and football coach Jack B. Scrivens of the physical education department, who served at Reed for 38 years, from 1961 to 1999, and who observed the proceedings from the sidelines.

According to Coach Scrivens, the episode took place on October 12, 1962, at the old Reed football field, which is now occupied by the tennis courts. It was a gorgeous Friday afternoon, and the Reed squad was playing a sixman football game against Columbian Christian College (sadly no longer with us).

By halftime, Reed was trailing 0–7. Scrivens was huddling with his team, going over strategy for the second half, when he noticed a commotion coming from the woods across what is now Botsford Drive.

“There was a Reed student riding his motorcycle and a female student sitting on the back, clanging together two garbage lids,” Scrivens recalls. Behind them came a procession of roughly 20 students, one of whom sported a wreath around his head and dragged an enormous wooden cross over his shoulder while the rest sang “Onward Christian Soldiers,” as they marched down the field.

The visitors were thunderstruck—“stunned” is the word Scrivens prefers. “I felt really bad about what had happened,” he says. “But it sure didn’t bother our team.” In fact, Reed surged from behind to score a dramatic upset, thumping Columbia 19–7. Impish irreverence, it seemed, had triumphed over pom-pom piety.

Or had it? After the game, as he was collecting equipment from the field, Scrivens noticed a strange red glow in the sky over the golf course. A fierce wind came up from the south, scattering leaves and blowing towels around. In the locker room, one of his players came up to him and said, “Hey, Coach, maybe we shouldn’t have beaten the Christians so bad, because I think the wrath of God is coming down on us.”

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At first, Scrivens chuckled. “Then I saw the tops of the fir trees breaking off,” he says, “And I knew it was going to be bad.”

Soon a howling storm tore through campus, knocking down power lines and snapping trees in half. The gale shattered the skylight in Eliot Hall and tore giant chunks of copper from the chattering roof, threatening to ruin thousands of books shelved in the mathematics library on the fourth floor.

Scrivens and fellow coach Jerry Barta anchored a human chain to pass books from hand to hand down to the relative safety of the faculty lounge. Rooms on the exposed southern sides of the dorms had to be evacuated. A tree fell on Sisson, smashing a balcony and shattering a dorm room window; another destroyed the president’s garage (fortunately, injuries were minimal). Students studied by candlelight in commons.

When he finally headed home, Scrivens couldn’t drive his car off campus because every road was blocked by downed trees.

The meteorological event known to posterity as the Columbus Day Storm is generally reckoned to be the most powerful extratropical cyclone to hit the United States in the 20th century. With peak gusts of 100 miles per hour, it rampaged through California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, killing 23 people, destroying 84 homes, severely damaging 5,000 more, and wreaking overall havoc estimated at $170 million.

Divine retribution? Hard to say. As far as earthly forgiveness goes, however, Columbia continued to play football with Reed and Concordia College, the only other local college that fielded a six-man team, until 1965, when interest appears to have waned. “Reed was not kicked out of the football league,” Scrivens says. “Actually, there wasn’t a football league. Just three schools who enjoyed playing the six-man football game.”

For more apocrypha about Reed football cheers and the Columbus Day Storm, visit the Reed Stories website at reedstories.reed.edu.

iverse n u g n i v i -l ure youth p “The ever f o t i r dent spi n e p e d delight d n n a i , n o and s a that se t a e m h my steps t d n u o r a were wi d ces sprea a l elds.” p i f l l e a h t n i n o was grass up e h t s a nt as consta orth —Wordsw

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t Reed, from the classroom to the rugby field, competition and collaboration meet to inspire delight. If it was just about the P.E. credit, you could have run from the swans at the local golf course.* When you make a gift to Reed through your will, name Reed as a beneficiary, or create a life-income gift, you foster the delight of independent thinking. *As did Elizabeth Tabor Mullady ’38—a story documented by the Reed Oral History Project.

Contact Becky Corcoran at 503/777-7573 or Becky.Corcoran@reed.edu to find out which way of giving works best with your estate plans.

http://plannedgiving.reed.edu

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