Reed College Magazine December 2012

‰ december 2012

CALLIGRAPHY’S COMEBACK Page 4

STATELESS WITH LENA Page 36 ATTACK OF THE VELOCIPEDES Page 24

ThE CEnTEnnial Campaign

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i n q u i ry

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community

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integrity

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Timê to step up!

We learned from the Spartans that 300 is simply not enough.

So 12,732 Reed alumni, parents, and friends have come together with $199 million toward a historic Centennial Campaign goal of $200 million.

We’re almost there.

Earn timê, increase financial aid, and strengthen the academic program.

Be counted in a catalog of supporters by making a gift using the enclosed envelope or by visiting campaign.reed.edu before the close of the campaign on December 31, 2012.

as may be burned on your brain from homer’s Iliad, timê /TEE-may/ is the ancient greek word for honor. it can be gained by performing great deeds, defeating enemies, and stretching to help one’s alma mater accomplish herculean feats in service of the life of the mind.

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REED december 2012

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illustrations by janice Wu

Features 12

Why We Give

Departments 30

Five alumni talk about giving back to Reed.

Losing Taiwan

Tonio Andrade ’92 looks at China’s first great victory over the West.

By Randall S. Barton

By Miles Bryan ’13 16

Plugging Into the Switchboard Reed Switchboard connects students and alumni for career advice.

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02 From the Editor 03 Letters 04 Eliot Circular Calligraphy makes a comeback “Libations!” they cried Kroger inaugurated—with Iliad Gift honors McFarlane Seats of power Reed nabs NSF grant The metaphysics of swimming

Snowbound

Peter Zuckerman ’03 tracks down the sherpas who survived K2.

By Randall S. Barton

by Romel Hernandez 18

Adventures in the First Person: Icons and Rollerblades

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Jan Powell MALS ’86 says literary editors dilute Shakespeare’s fury.

A dispatch from the Reed Russian tour 2012.

By Brad Wright ’61

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A Community in Progress Diversity and inclusion at Reed

By Laurie Lindquist 36

By Crystal A. Williams

Disappearing Trick

Graham Jones ’97 shows how magicians guard their craft in the internet age.

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From your Alumni Board President Beyond Reed Monograph Bookwerks Alumni Board Nominations ORGY Photo

44 Reediana

Rediscovering Reynolds

50 Class Notes

A long-lost calligraphy manual of Lloyd Reynolds is finally published.

Hoodwinked

By Charles Lehman MAT ’67

By Nadine Fiedler ’89

Connecting Reedies Across the Globe

By Romel Hernandez

By Bill Donahue

Amy Reading ’98 recounts a tale of swindling and vengeance.

09 Empire of the Griffin

The Uncharted Geography of Lena

Chekhov. Odysseus. Frankenstein.

Where will Prof. Lenček pop up next?

The books issue 26

Battle of the Bard

Books By Reedies

60 In Memoriam The Pursuit of Understanding: Carol Creedon [psychology 1957–91]

68 Apocrypha

Tradition, Myth, Legend

Attack of the Velocipedes

december 2012 Reed magazine

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Letter from the editor

leah nash

‰ december 2012

www.reed.edu/reed_magazine 3203 SE Woodstock Boulevard, Portland, Oregon 97202 503/777-7591 Volume 91, No. 4 Magazine editor Chris Lydgate ’90 503/777-7596 chris.lydgate@reed.edu class notes editor Laurie Lindquist 503/777-7591 reed.magazine@reed.edu graphic designer Tom Humphrey 503/459-4632 tom.humphrey@reed.edu

The Final Stretch It is a classic fall morning in Portland—50 degrees and a torrent of rain. The cherry trees in Eliot Circle are a soggy minuet of yellow, red, and brown. From my office window I can see freshmen hurrying to Hum 110 and demonstrating a wide variety of attitudes to precipitation. One is engulfed in a cavernous raincoat and clutches a giant umbrella. Another is clad in a white t-shirt, a red bandanna, and rather unseasonable shorts. A history professor makes a mad dash across the circle in shirt sleeves.

It is the time of year when darkness falls with sudden intensity, when the wind blows a tide of leaves across the Great Lawn, when a cup of coffee seems less like refreshment and more like sanctuary. It is the season for buckling down and digging in. The frolics of September are a memory. The surprises of October are past. January looms. It’s time to get serious.

These thoughts occur to me just as Reed is heading down the final stretch of its Centennial Campaign.

Launched in 2008, amid the deepest recession since World War II, it aimed at a goal that then seemed almost surreal—$200 million.

Four years later, after a stunning demonstration of generosity on the part of alumni and friends, the

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alumni news editor Robin Tovey ’97

campaign is just $1 million short, with barely a month left to go.

Of course, it’s important to meet the dollar goal. But, personally, I am more concerned with the overall level of participation among alumni. Some of us have more capacity than others.

But most of us can give something.

This issue is more than symbolic.

The proportion of alumni who give money to the college is a key indicator of institutional strength. Bond rating agencies look at it. Foundations look at it. Other donors look at it. All with good reason. After all, if alumni don’t support Reed’s mission, why should anyone else?

As I write, 9,081 alumni, or approximately 62% of us, have contributed to the campaign.

That’s pretty impressive, but I know we can do better. So I appeal to readers to push us over the top. Raid your piggy bank. Rip out the envelope in this magazine. Go to giving .reed.edu. We’ll take dimes. We’ll take nickels. Join in however you can—but please do it by December 31, 2012.

We’re counting on you.

Valiant Interns Miles Bryan ’13, Kim Durkin ’13, Daniel Ku ’13 ADVISORY BOARD Diane Morgan ’77, Matt Giraud ’85, Naomi McCoy ’94, Caitlin Baggott ’99 Reed College Relations vice president, college relations Hugh Porter director, public affairs Jennifer Bates director, alumni & parent relations Mike Teskey director, development Jan Kurtz Reed College is a private, independent, non-sectarian four-year college of liberal arts and sciences. Reed provides news of interest to alumni, parents, and friends. Views expressed in the magazine belong to their authors and do not necessarily represent officers, trustees, faculty, alumni, students, administrators, or anyone else at Reed, all of whom are eminently capable of articulating their own beliefs.

Reed (ISSN 0895-8564) is published quarterly, in March, June, September, and December, by the Office of Public Affairs at Reed College, 3203 SE Woodstock Boulevard, Portland, Oregon 97202.

Periodicals postage paid at Portland, Oregon.

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

—Chris Lydgate ’90

Letters to Reed Letters to Reed may be edited for clarity and length. For contact information, look to your left. Read more letters at www.reed.edu/reed_magazine

Memory and Murder

Thank you for your thoughtful article about Professor Daniel Reisberg’s role as an expert witness in the Samuel Lawson murder trial. I write with a correction: I am not one of Mr. Lawson’s attorneys. Rather, in his case I am the attorney for a group of college and university professors who have appeared as amici curiae to advise the Oregon Supreme Court on issues relating to eyewitness identification. Similarly, Bronson James ’94 is the attorney for another amicus curiae, the Oregon Criminal Defense Lawyers Association. As it happens, Bronson and I are cocounsel on another murder appeal, the death penalty case of Mike Washington Jr., which is currently being briefed in the Supreme Court. The criminal defense bar in Oregon is full of Reedies, who I think are drawn to this work because it demands skepticism, fearlessness of controversy, good research and writing skills, diligence, creativity, and compassion.

—Bear Wilner-Nugent ’95 Portland

Kroger and the Straw Men

Allow me to scold you for spinning controversies about the new president (“The Advocate,” September) into straw men under the title “The Kroger Conspiracy.” In addition to amusing them, why not also allow readers to consider serious efforts to help understand an unusual choice for Reed president?

Unusual? Kroger is the first Oregon resident to become Reed president since E.B. MacNaughton [1948–52] and the only elected politician from any state in its 100-year history.

Without quoting the many critical reviews of Kroger’s tenure as Oregon attorney general in the local press, it is not sufficient to dismiss them as just so many “ruffled feathers in Salem.” It was in the midst of political and legal actions against Kroger’s leadership of the Jusice Department, some of which were upheld in court, that he announced he was resigning for health reasons and became publicly incommunicado. You deny the speculation that he quit to avoid the need to defend his record in a reelection campaign, but since we were all relieved by your report that he has fully recovered, the question remains why he chose to seek another job rather than recover during medical leave and run for another term.

The “conspiracies” you ignore are an honest effort to understand why Reed chose a local political figure at a time when it might profit from mending fences or rebuilding bridges with Portland that had fallen into disrepair over the

decades as Reed developed from a local to a national institution. In recent years, Reed has had to confront local charges of having a lax drug policy. Could Kroger’s Oregon experience and connections run interference against such criticism and help fix the longer-term problem?

Perhaps significantly, his choice to succeed himself was a prominent prosecutor with almost unanimous support from the law enforcement establishment and who called Oregon’s medical marijuana law a “train wreck.” To the delight of many Oregonians, Kroger’s candidate was soundly defeated in the Democratic party primary by Ellen Rosenblum, the daughter of former Reed president Victor Rosenblum [1968–70], who considered the Oregon law just fine and declared that chasing after marijuana would not be her priority.

All this is not to prejudge Kroger’s prospects as Reed president. He deserves our best wishes.

Anyone who received the Leo Levinson award for teaching several times from graduating classes at Lewis and Clark Law School has earned himself some slack. Levinson was one of the courageous attorneys who represented Oregonians hostile to infamous HUAC’s infamous political interrogation in 1954. You know—the “Velde” hearings that got Professor Stanley Moore fired by the Reed trustees.

—Michael Munk ’56 Portland When one is being scolded by the likes of Mike Munk (a virtual institution unto himself), the prudent response is silence. But I will point out that the “Kroger Conspiracy” sidebar was intended to add a little levity and a few facts to the discussions, rather than ignoring them. As the profile noted, and as Mike now reiterates, some of Kroger’s decisions as AG drew criticism. I chose not to plunge into the minutiae of Oregon prosecutorial politics, with its cavalcade of rivalries, turf wars, and teapot tempests, because I felt that there were more important issues in Kroger’s background that clamored for our readers’ attention. To print the extra pages required by even a cursory glance at the squabbling would have condemned a forest to the axe. I invite readers to pursue their own research and suspect they’ll reach similar conclusions.

I don’t think the recent primary has much relevance to Reed, except that as loyal Reedies we naturally applaud Rosenblum’s victory. Nor do I subscribe to Mike’s conviction that the roads of human history invariably converge on the Stanley Moore affair. However, I do share his hope that Kroger can help Reed mend some fences in Portland.

Editor’s note:

Where is Shilo?

I was disheartened to read in your article “Reedies Reunite in Israel” the dismayingly disingenuous statement identifying Shilo as a place “where Jews lived for the first 300 years after leaving Egypt.” Choosing to reference Shilo as a place where Jews lived for 300 years after they left Egypt cloaks—or even falsifies—the identity of Shilo. Shilo is not even in Israel—it’s in the West Bank. Shilo was established in 1978 as a Jewish-only settlement under international law.

(It was even given as an example of an area to be returned to Palestinians by the Israelis negotiating the Oslo Peace Accords, due to its location in the midst of many Palestinian villages.) It is undisputed that Shilo is one of many new communities established in the West Bank by and solely for Jews since 1967. Israelis say that the land where Shilo is built is land that “reverted” to the state of Israel, or became the possession of the state of Israel, at the time of the 1967 war.

Palestinians and the Israeli organization Peace Now, which monitors settlement activity, say that many of the people residing in Shilo live on land privately owned by Palestinians. I realize that the point of this piece for the magazine was to highlight the fact that far-flung Reedies can get together for “emotional reunion(s)” around a common language. However, it seemed to me that the editor of a Reed magazine would be aware that the specifics of the piece exist in a context: visitors to Shilo “tour” an illegal settlement on disputed land enabled by military occupation— no Palestinian Reedie would be allowed on that tour except via subterfuge. And no Reedie from a Palestinian village in the West Bank would ever be allowed to settle in Israel, even if his or her family had lived in what is now Israel for not 300 but for 1,000 years. And, because Israel regularly denies entry to Palestinians, it is unlikely that a Palestinian Reedie would be able to “reunite in Israel” at all. Note: Is there such a thing as a Palestinian Reedie? Perhaps not.

Among other hurdles for a prospective student, Israel controls all movement by Palestinians and has denied students visas even when they have been admitted to foreign universities. I hope that you can clarify the identity of present-day Shilo in the next issue.

—Bethany Weidner ’69 Olympia, Washington

MORE LETTERS!

Read about Comrades of the Quest, diversity, Carol Creedon [psych 1957–91], and Darrell Jenks ’79 on our website, www.reed.edu/reed_magazine.

december 2012 Reed magazine

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Eliot Circular news from campus

Calligraphy Makes a Comeback p h o t o s b y m at t d ’a n n u n z i o

Breathe in. Hold your pen at an angle of 45 degrees. As you breathe out, grab the baseline with a downward stroke and finish with an exit serif.

Welcome to the letter L—and to the Reed Scriptorium. Twenty-eight years after the faculty voted to remove calligraphy from the curriculum, the art form is back at Reed in the form of the Calligraphy Initiative.

Next up is the letter O. “As the O goes, so goes the alphabet,” instructor Inga Dubay tells the class of nearly 30 students, faculty, and alumni. “You’ll be glad we didn’t start with the O, it’s not the easiest of letters. But it is a very lovely one in Italic. In handwriting we do the O all in one stroke, but in calligraphy we do a twostroke O. Please do not do more than three at one time. You will be ill if you do.”

The initiative was founded by Cooley Gallery director Stephanie Snyder ’91, who came to see how central calligraphy was to Reed’s living history when she and Gay Walker ’69 curated Lloyd Reynolds: A Life of Forms in Art at the gallery in

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conjunction with Reed’s Centennial.

During Reunions, former students of Lloyd Reynolds [art 1929–69] encouraged her to bring calligraphy back to campus.

In 1984, when calligraphy was removed from the curriculum, there was no Cooley Gallery, Educational Outreach Initiative, or independent department that could steward such an activity. Stephanie realized it was possible to revive the discipline— without making it part of the academic program—if funding and a sponsoring department could be found.

With a growing set of extracurricular educational programs, the Cooley Gallery emerged as an appropriate sponsor, but the initiative still needed money. After discussions with the college, Stephanie and her husband, Jonathan Snyder ’91, stepped forward to fund the initiative for the first few years. Jonathan is a senior manager at Adobe Systems, and his father David Snyder ’65 studied art history with Reynolds at Reed.

“We wanted to begin with the original vision of how calligraphy started at

Reed as a community endeavor,” she says.

“When Lloyd started learning calligraphy, he would teach anyone who was interested. I knew that with outreach specialist Gregory MacNaughton ’89 developing the program, it would work.”

The initiative takes a three-pronged approach. It begins with a weekly scriptorium, where students, faculty, alumni, and staff come together to practice their letters.

On alternate weeks they receive formal instruction by Dubay, a former student of Reynolds, or engage in critical practice with Gregory.

As part of the initiative, Gregory is incorporating paleography and calligraphy into the yearlong, K–12 teacher-training institute he conducts at the Cooley. The program provides continuing education credit to participating Portland Public School teachers.

The initiative will also conduct workshop-based, noncredit calligraphy instruction, which might, upon the request of faculty, support instruction in the religion and art departments. Professor Kambiz

chris lydgate

Libations! They Cried

GhaneaBassiri [religion 2002–] and Stephanie are working on an exhibition of Persian and Arabic calligraphy in 2014 to coincide with a residency by Persian calligraphy scholar Hamid Reza Ghelichkhani.

“ We wanted to begin with the original vision of how calligraphy started at Reed as a community endeavor.” —Stephanie Snyder ’91 Some question whether calligraphy is an anachronism in an age of digital communication, when people use opposable thumbs to text messages. Gregory says one might as well ask why in our vehicular age anyone would bother to walk.

“Sometimes walking, like handwriting, is more efficient and practical,” he says. “When we take a walk beside a dear friend, or down a trail into the wilderness, it takes on a significance that transcends transportation and takes us places that we can’t go in the car. The same is true of beautiful writing.” —Randall S. Barton

Monday morning, 8:45 a.m. First day of class. As the new crop of freshlings streamed towards Vollum for their first real Hum lecture, laden with backpacks and clutching coffee cups and water bottles, they were greeted by an unusual spectacle: a veritable pantheon of Greek gods hooting and hollering on the steps outside the lecture hall.

“Libations!” cried the gods.

“Libations to honor mighty Zeus!”

At some colleges, this would be frat-speak for beer or jello shots. At Reed, however, the gods (cunningly disguised as upperclassmen) were beseeching new students to re-enact an ancient ritual they’d been reading about in the Odyssey—namely, pouring a drink on the ground to honor the superhuman inhabitants of Mount Olympus.

Some had nothing to offer—or preferred to keep their drinks for themselves. (“Hubris!” sang the gods in mock consternation.) But many others poured out a few drops of water or coffee on the concrete steps, provoking bellows of gratitude.

President John Kroger, who has enrolled in Hum 110 as a student, initially seemed to be walking on a course to bypass the brouhaha, but then changed direction, marched back into the hurly-burly, and with a steady hand, poured a generous quantity of black coffee onto the steps. The gods erupted in howls of joy.

Inside, students were treated to a rare delight: singing the opening lines of the Odyssey with professor Wally Englert [classics 1981–].

—Chris Lydgate ’90

december 2012 Reed magazine

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Eliot Circular Kroger Inaugurated—with Iliad photos by leah nash

Amid the call of bagpipes and the flourish of horns, roughly 1,500 people descended on campus in September to welcome John Kroger as Reed’s 15th president.

Under the big top on the Great Lawn, Roger Perlmutter ’73, chair of the board of trustees, invested Kroger with the trappings of office—including a copy of the Iliad and a bottle of spring water drawn from the Reed canyon—in a grand inauguration ceremony.

Student body president Brian Moore ’13 hailed Kroger as “the ultimate prospie” for his infectious enthusiasm for all things Reed and for enrolling in Hum 110.

Delivering the keynote address, Bryn Mawr College President Jane McAuliffe called America’s elite liberal arts colleges a national treasure. “It is a rare privilege to attend a liberal arts college and be immersed

“ The world needs more people who can think outside the box” —President John Kroger in a collaborative learning experience with faculty,” McAuliffe said. “It is a sacred trust to sustain and enhance the qualities of such a place, and in John Kroger Reed has found a president worthy of that trust.”

In his inaugural address, Kroger took issue with the proposition that a liberal arts education isn’t practical. “At the end of the day the world needs more people who can think outside the box,” Kroger said. “The most practical education you can have is one that doesn’t prepare you for your first job. It prepares you for the next 60 years of your life.”

Kroger said that liberal arts colleges are coming under siege both from technology and from equality. The expense of such an education puts it out of reach of most American families, but thanks to the generosity of friends and alumni, 50% of Reed students receive financial aid, with the average award exceeding $36,000 a year. Roughly 19% of this year’s freshman class qualify for Pell Grants.

Concluding that much of American

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Board chair Roger Perlmutter ’73 hands President Kroger vial of Canyon water. Marie Perez ’13 emblazons Kroger’s name on her double-decker bus. Gargantuan griffin guards the Sallyport. Celebrants feast in Quad.

higher education is on a misguided trajectory, Kroger said he was thrilled to be at a college where people cared more about the physics department than the football team (a remark that provoked lusty cheers from the physics department).

Students and alumni welcomed Kroger as only Reedies can. A gargantuan rolling Griffin materialized in front of Old Dorm Block courtesy of master mechanic Rob Mack ’93. Senior Marie Perez ’13 drove

a homemade double-decker bus—a Blue Bird schoolbus with a VW Van welded on top of it—with a massive poster proclaiming “WELCOME KROGER!” New Orleans bluesman Davis Rogan ’90 played a blistering set in the Quad as students, alumni, and distinguished visitors generally made merry. Later in the evening students massed in front of Eliot chanting “KROGER! KRO-GER!” before a dazzling display of fireworks. —Randall S. Barton

Seats of Power Three professors have been named to prestigious chairs at Reed.

leah nash

Gift Honors McFarlane Philanthropist Sandy Mintz [trustee 2006–] has made a generous gift to Reed in honor of longtime treasurer Ed McFarlane, who has served the college for nearly four decades.

“It’s ver y nice of Sandy,” said McFarlane in a typically laconic piece of understatement.

Since arriving on campus in 1973, Ed has been one of the chief guardians of Reed’s endowment, which has grown from $4 million to $450 million. He has also managed the budget, devised innovative ways to save the college money, and overseen construction and maintenance.

Earlier this year, Ed won the distinguished business officer award from the National Association of College and University Business Officers. Dozens of Ed’s colleagues signed a nominating letter praising his “outstanding achievements” in the field of financial management and calling him “an inspirational leader, role model, and mentor.”

When people think about Reed, they usually think about its dedicated students and its distinctive curriculum, says Sandy. Seldom do they stop to consider the infrastructure that makes its academic mission possible in the first place—unglamorous stuff like plumbing, roofs, and wiring. That’s one reason why she decided to designate $500,000 to endow the Edwin O. McFarlane Campus Support Fund.

“I wanted to honor Ed and I couldn’t think of a better way to do it,” she says.

“He has been a pillar of Reed College.”

A small example of Ed’s knack for stretching a dollar: In the early ’90s, the roofs of Eliot Hall and the Old Dorm Block were in dire need of repair—many of their distinctive green clay tiles were cracked or broken. Unfortunately, the tiles were no longer being manufactured. Then Ed found an old house in Portland with the same kind of tiles and struck a bargain with the homeowner. Reed reroofed the house, trucked the precious tiles to campus, and used them to repair Eliot and ODB. Sandy’s gift honoring Ed is part of a $3 million commitment to Reed’s Centennial Campaign. Other designations for her support include a new professorship in computational biology, support for digital learning materials, the economics department, and Reed’s Technology Innovation Fund.

Sandy is a former magazine and book editor and the widow of hedge fund pioneer Walter Mintz ’50 [trustee 1971–2004]. Tireless champions of financial aid, they established two scholarships for needy students and contributed generously to many other projects. After Walter’s death, their friends in the investment community contributed $1.25 million to endow the Walter Mintz Chair in Classics.

“Walter admired Ed greatly,” she says. “Ed has stayed the course for Reed College for a long time.

He ’s a re m a r k a b le i nd i v id u a l .”

—Chris Lydgate ’9 Find the NACUBO letter about Ed on our website.

Mary James [physics 1988–] has been appointed A. A. Knowlton Chair in Physics. She earned her PhD in applied physics from Stanford University and her BA in physics from Hampshire College.

Maggie Geselbracht [chemistry 1993–] has been appointed John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Chemistry. She earned her PhD in chemistry from UC Berkeley and a BA in chemistry at the University of Notre Dame.

Dana Katz [art history 2005–] has been appointed to the Joshua C. Taylor Professorship in Art History. She earned a PhD in art history from the University of Chicago, an MA in art history from the University of Illinois, and a BA in economics and French from the University of Michigan and is the author of The Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance.

Mark Your Smartphone In a measure to cut expenses but not trees, Reed will no longer produce and mail an annual paper calendar.

“We loved doing the calendar,” said Jennifer Bates, director of public affairs. “But more and more people keep track of their appointments electronically, and printing costs continue to rise.”

Reed lovers need not despair, however: a dazzling array of tchotchkes can still be found at the Reed bookstore. See bookstore.reed.edu for more details.

december 2012 Reed magazine

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Eliot Circular Reed Nabs NSF Grant

The Metaphysics of Swimming

—Kevin Myers Shannon Hannon

John Gray at the Gray Fund Twentieth Anniversary event in April.

Reed Mourns Death of John Gray A wave of grief spread across campus in October when we learned that John D. Gray [trustee 1961–2006] had died of cancer at the age of 93. The news came too late to include an obituary in this issue of Reed; look for proper notice in March.

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jenn mcneil ’14

Reed won a $585,000 grant from the National Science Foundation’s Scholarships for Science Engineering Technology and Mathematics Program (S-STEM) in September. The money will support need-based scholarships to prepare talented students for work in STEM fields. “That Reed has been able to obtain two awards from this highly competitive NSF program speaks to our historical strength in producing mathematics and science majors and in sending Reed alumni to mathematics and science graduate programs,” said Patrick McDougal [chemistry 1990–], acting dean of the faculty.

The purpose of the five-year grant is to improve retention among mathematics and science majors. It will support three new cohorts of 12 to 13 students annually for a total of 38 STEM Scholars. The scholarships include funding for thesis research or conference travel.

With the new grant, Reed will continue to make a strong effort to award students who are the first generation in their family to attend college and those from groups currently underrepresented in the sciences.

(Meta)physical education: lifeguard Eliya Cohen ’15 (left) talks philosophy with Reed swimmers.

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger said the best place to think philosophy was in a hut deep in the Black Forest while a storm raged outside. That may have been true for Heidegger, but it is not necessarily true at Reed, where a robust metaphysical debate has broken out in an unlikely location—the swimming pool.

Instead of lap times and opening hours, the poolside whiteboard has sprouted a fascinating sequence of questions, claims, and rejoinders that have grown to fill every square inch.

The debate began when philosophy major Eliya Cohen ’15 asked fellow philosophy major Finn Terdal ’12 to jot down some problems to ponder during Eliya’s lifeguarding shifts. The questions soon provoked students, alumni, professors, philosophers, physicists, and other sentient life forms who frequent the pool.

The problem that sparked the most

Bio Major Breaks Record Kroger Gets Dunked The Pelting of the Freshlings Read all about it in . . . www.reed.edu/reed_magazine/sallyportal/

interest was a question of light and shadow: A perfectly round, homogenous disk is rotating at X rpm counterclockwise in suspension above a flat plane. A light source exactly overhead shines on the disc. Does the shadow cast by the disc rotate with the disc itself?

Respondents (some of whom scrawled their comments while dripping wet) have debated the nature of motion, the existence of “shadow particles,” and the question of whether perception constitutes reality. (For a transcript of the discussion, see www. reed.edu/reed_magazine.)

No word yet on whether the philosophical debate has improved the swimmers’ strokes or—more important—whether aqueous immersion has clarified the subject (this is Reed, after all.) Either way, we would like to propose a new term for this form of (meta)physical education: The Swymposium. —Miles Bryan ’13

Empire of the Griffin Connecting Reed alumni across the globe

Beyond Reed

leah nash

From the Alumni Board President

By Chantal Sudbrack ’97

Did you know that the alumni association includes nearly 17,000 living members spanning 80 years of the life of the college?

To tap into the incredible energy demonstrated on campus for Reed’s centennial year and Reedfayre Reunions celebration, the 25 members of the alumni board have been working on a broad base of initiatives that engage alumni with each other and the greater Reed community, including parents, staff, and faculty.

Though Reed produces some of the highest percentages of graduates with PhDs, the majority of our alumni do not go on to pursue careers in academia. Not surprisingly, many alumni have successful careers Lab, where teams of students presented www.reed.edu/career/alumni. in jobs seemingly unrelated to their under- and marketed their original ideas to potenThe outreach committee of the alumgraduate major. Such nonacademic career tial investors. ni board develops initiatives that help paths are often not linear; and in today’s The second Working Weekend and Reed strengthen the connection between alumworkplace climate, they may have slow StartUp Lab will be February 1–3, 2013, ni and the college. The committee also entry and frequent transitions. which coincides with meetings of the works closely with local chapter leadership Recognizing these challenges, the alum- board of trustees and the alumni board. to improve volunteer opportunities and ni board began work in the spring of 2011 During these few days, alumni will organize events in chapter cities. This year, expect with Reed’s career services and alumni workshops for students and recent gradu- to hear more about an online book club for & parent relations on the “Life Beyond ates, meet with students one-on-one or in Reedies everywhere, a community-focused Reed” (LBR) initiative. Conceptually, LBR groups, sit on industry or expertise panels volunteer program in Portland, and a proembraces the successes and pitfalls along that address specific topics, and share job gram to connect underrepresented stuone’s career path. The LBR committee and internship opportunities. Some areas dents with underrepresented alumni menof the alumni board is working toward a of focus for the panels include fine arts, tors. We welcome your thoughts on these broad platform that supports the career law, media, diplomacy, medicine, education, and other ideas for programming. If you development of current students, recent consulting, physical sciences, and business. are interested, email the outreach comgraduates, and midcareer graduates If you are interested in volunteering as a mittee chairperson, Beverly Lau ’06, at through mentoring and experiential learn- panelist, a StartUp Lab mentor, or for one- beverly@alumni.reed.edu. ing opportunities like formal internships on-one meetings with students, submit The alumni association itself will soon and shadowing experiences. We welcome an inquiry online at www.reed.edu/career be celebrating a milestone: it will turn your ideas and thoughts on this effort. If /alumni.

100 in 2015. The alumni board is assistyou are interested, send email to the chair In the spirit of LBR, I invite you to ing alumni & parent relations in develof the LBR committee, Tony Fisher ’80, consider joining the Reed Career Network, oping programming that celebrates this at tfisherlakeo@gmail.com. an online network where you can provide momentous occasion. In the meantime, I A short nine months after its incep- valuable information, advice, and refer- hope you’ll make your plans to join us for tion, LBR brought to campus Reed’s first rals to Reedies as they pursue career goals, Reedfayre ’13, June 12–16, 2013. No matstudent-focused Working Weekend event, graduate school, or professional school. ter whether or not it is your reunion year, with nearly 200 students participating. The Your participation helps enrich our com- all are invited to partake in the festivities! weekend also included a three-day StartUp munity. For more information, visit Contact Chantal at chantal.sudbrack@gmail.com.

december 2012 Reed magazine

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Empire of the Griffin Next Time You’re on Alberta Street . . . jenn mcneil ’14

Alumni Board Nominations The nominating committee of the alumni board proposes the following nominees to fill five at-large positions on the Alumni Board for terms beginning July 1, 2013, and ending June 30, 2016.

Forrest Alogna ’95 [philosophy] practices corporate law in Paris, France, primarily focusing on major cross-border transactions. He was a sounding board for Adam Riggs ’95 in the planning of Reed’s first Working Weekend, and may hold the record as the person who traveled the farthest to attend the event.

Monograph Bookwerks Imagine a bookstore as a curated space, where visitors engage in a rigorous dialogue about art, make discoveries, and find inspiration.

Now step into Monograph Bookwerks on Northeast 27th Avenue off Alberta, run by artists Blair SaxonHill ’02 and John Brodie since 2010.

“One of the things that becomes very exciting is how dialogues inspire and forward work and may not be necessarily one that I’m having with someone else, but one that jumps out of the experience of being there,” says Blair.

Art was integral to Blair’s childhood and a direction she took early on. At Reed, she studied studio art with Gerri Ondrizek [art 1994–], Michael Knutson [art 1982–], and Geoffrey Pagen [ceramics 1987–].

Ethan Jackson [art 2001–05] served as adviser for her thesis on installations. “Part of what was so wonderful about going to Reed was the mix of really critical readings and having a conceptually driven studio practice that allowed me to explore a variety of approaches,” she says. “That kind of

10 Reed magazine december 2012

integrative thinking is something that I brought to the bookstore.”

Monograph is a serene and elegant space where rare, uncommon, and new and used books on contemporary art and artists, architecture, graphic design, fashion, photography, and art criticism share space with original prints and oil paintings, studio pottery, vintage art, and a curio or two, such as a hefty pair of tailor shears.

This fall, Blair taught members of Reed’s Scriptorium how to make ink, and her handmade walnut ink is also available at the shop. Everything is for sale—though not online.

Skirting cyber sales promotes the experience of engagement, Blair says.

Hands on, conversation, and engagement all contradict the experience of viewing art online. “It goes back to the sense of it being present, of having a work with you when it’s held in a book, that is really different than needing to recall the artist or work using a computer.” —Laurie Lindquist For more about Monograph Bookwerks, see www. monographbookwerks.com

Cindy Joe ’08 [physics] is an accelerator operator at Fermilab, the U.S.’s flagship research facility for high-energy physics. Her official roles at Reed included astronomy club founder, nuclear reactor operator, and dorm host for prospies. As Chicago’s chapter representative, she enjoys organizing fun events for local Reedies; giving tours of her workplace; and working with admission and career services to talk to future and former Reed students. When not smashing protons, she enjoys creative endeavors and personal challenges, and so has calligraphed her Christmas cards, taken up Argentine tango, and tried rock climbing and flying trapeze.

Beverly Lau ’06 [physics] just earned a PhD in medical physics from the University of Chicago. She will start a post-doctoral fellowship in physics and biomedical engineering at the University of Houston, where she will study breast cancer detection. She got involved with the alumni association as the Chicago chapter representative in 2010, and served as the chapter’s chairperson in 2011. Beverly spearheaded the successful board game nights for the Chicago chapter. At Reed, she operated the nuclear reactor and sang in the chorus. She also was a dorm hostess for the admission office.

Richard Thomason ’84 [history] wrote his thesis with Professor Ed Segel on the decline of the British Liberal Party 1914–24.

After Reed, he was staff to U.S. senator Bill Bradley before getting a master’s degree in public affairs from Princeton. Richard has held a variety of positions developing state health policy with the California Legislature, Kaiser Permanente, and the Service Employees International Union. He is currently a program officer with Blue Shield of California Foundation. Richard is a longtime member of the Reed Career Network and served for five years as Bay Area chapter chair and chapter representative to the alumni board.

Additional nominations may be submitted by petition. Said petitions must contain the name and a biographical sketch of the nominee, the office to be filled, and the signatures of 50 or more members of the alumni association.

Petitions must be received in the alumni relations office on or before February 15. Contact Mike Teskey, director of alumni relations, at teskeym@reed.edu for details.

The nominating committee includes Sheldon Hochheiser ’73, Jay Hubert ’66, Willie Koo ’83, Melina Martinez ’04, Chantal Sudbrack ’97, and Mike Teskey.

O.R.G.Y. (Offspring of Reed Generations of Yesteryear) New Reedies with alumni parents (or other relatives) qualify as members of a prestigious organization fondly referred to as O.R.G.Y. (Offspring of Reed Generations of Yesteryear). They, along with family members, were invited to join other Reed legacies for a group photo in August during new student orientation. Gorgeous weather graced this photo shoot on the chapel steps, and everyone received an O.R.G.Y. button to wear proudly! leah nash

Michael Stapleton ’10 [English] is the director of marketing at Gild, a San Francisco startup that develops recruiting technologies. He also serves as an admission volunteer and is on the steering committee of Alumni Fundraising for Reed, where he focuses on young alumni giving. During his senior year at Reed, Michael and three of his classmates started the first student-funded scholarship, which continues today as the Reedies for Reedies initiative. He lives in San Francisco.

Reed alumni and their excited/nervous/nonplussed Reedie progeny (future alumni!) represent O.R.G.Y. 2012: Left to right (back) Jazz Weisman, Anthony Leong, Rose Gittel, Jody Hoffer-Gittel ’85, Galen Blair, Kurt Blair ’92; (middle) Joe Weisman ’65, Keith Allen ’83, Sarah Allen, Darryl Leong ’72, Ruben de la Huerga, Lafcadio Flint, Maria Blair ’91, Gavin Flint ’82; (front) Anne Gendler ’81, Naomi Gendler, Sandra Moffet ’79, Millie Dunn, Corinna Jackson, Holly Hurwitz ’79.

Download a hi-res version at: blogs.reed.edu/reed_blogs/the_riffin_griffin/2012/10/offspring-at-orientation.html.

“ Let us servire cantico” Attend the alumni holiday party on Saturday, December 8! Reed’s own boar’s head procession is still observed with accustomed ceremony; please help us keep this beloved tradition alive by joining the Boar’s Head Ensemble Singers (origins at www.reed.edu/reed _magazine/december2010/columns /apocrypha).

For more information, contact alumni @reed.edu or 503/777-7589. (If you did not receive a party invitation in the mail, please see the details and register online at www.reed.edu/alumni/holidayparty. )

december 2012 Reed magazine 11

Why We Give

By Randall S. Barton

As the Centennial Campaign enters the final stretch, we found ourselves pondering a fundamental issue—why do alumni give to Reed?

We decided to interview five radically different alumni and ask some personal questions. (We also asked for permission to print their giving totals.)

We hope their answers—and their stories—will inspire readers to join the quest to make sure that Reed’s next hundred years are as incredible as its first hundred years.

Find out more about the campaign (which ends on December 31, 2012)— and how you can contribute—at campaign.reed.edu.

12 Reed magazine december 2012

Smashing Atoms and Supporting Reed Smashing atoms to study physics is an extension of the work Cindy Joe ’08 did on the nuclear reactor as a physics major at Reed. She operates an accelerator at Fermilab, a high-energy particle physics research facility run by the Department of Energy in Batavia, Illinois.

As a student at the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts in Hot Springs, Cindy became intrigued with Reed after reading about it in Cool Colleges for the Hyper-Intelligent, Self-Directed, Late Blooming, and Just Plain Different by Don Asher ’83.

“Everything I read about the college continued to make it sound more and more awesome,” she says.

Her parents were immigrants who owned a restaurant. Though they didn’t have a lot of money, they helped Cindy achieve her dream. Now with Reed in her rear view mirror, she has been able to put the experience into perspective.

“Reed is a special place because we all agree it’s a special place,” Cindy says. “We give ourselves permission to make it incredible. Nearly everyone infuses the place with enthusiasm and earnestness, the professors really care about the job they’re doing, and I love how intensely and unapologetically academic it is. We all sort of gloried in that.”

Cindy connects with other Reedies as a representative for the alumni chapter in Chicago and as a volunteer for the alumni admission and career network.

“Reed’s not the only place where people think critically and deeply and well, but it’s the one that I picked,” she says. “Reedies are largely selfchosen, self-recruiting. There’s something about us that reaches out to

each and says, ‘Hey, this is a member of my tribe.’”

Recently Cindy began giving to the Annual Fund, despite the fact both she and her parents are still paying off loans that financed her education.

“At first I thought, ‘Didn’t they get enough while I was there?’” she says.

“But then I realized that a Reed education costs much more than is actually asked from any particular student.

They make up the difference with alumni contributions and gifts to the endowment.”

Cindy is grateful for the place the college holds in her life, and her gifts enable others to choose Reed.

WHO:

Cindy Joe ’08

MAJOR: Physics WHY: Gratitude HOW MUCH: $30 STAT:

Cindy is one of 889 young alumni who gave to Reed last year.

Reed Love Story Christopher Visher ’65 and Suzanne Bletterman Cassidy ’65 became a couple their sophomore year at Reed.

She was a self-described “blabbermouth” from Southern California, studying to become the scientist her father always wanted to be. He was the son of a diplomat, and though he had been president of his high school class in Greece, felt like he was barely keeping his head above water at Reed.

After graduating, they drifted apart. During her first year at Brandeis, Suzanne realized that pure science lacked the social interactions she craved. She decided medicine would combine both science and people and applied to medical school at Vanderbilt. Waiting for classes to begin, she worked in a lab studying genetic disorders, igniting her life’s ambition.

She taught medicine at a series of universities, and using patient care as her laboratory, continued her work on genetic disorders. Suzanne became the go-to specialist on a rare disorder called Prader-Willi syndrome and currently serves as president of the International Prader-Willi Syndrome Organisation and on the scientific advisory board of the Prader-Willi Syndrome Association.

She edited Management of Genetic Syndromes, in which 60 experts share information on care for patients with rare genetic disorders. The New England Journal of Medicine said the book “should certainly be on the shelf of every clinical geneticist and in the library of every pediatric tertiary care facility.”

After getting a degree in English literature at Reed, Chris went on to Columbia Law School. He worked as a legislative assistant for Hawaiian Senator Daniel Inouye, as general

WHO: Chris Visher ’65 and Suzanne Cassidy ’65 MAJORS: English,

Chemistry

WHY: Love HOW MUCH: $119,157 STAT:

95 donors have made their first major gift (100k+) to Reed during this campaign.

counsel and chief operating officer of Inheritance Funding Company and as general counsel for the estate finance division of LawFinance Group, a leading provider of financial solutions in the field of litigation finance.

Suzanne and Chris married other people, started families, and divorced. Thirty-five years later they drifted back together. Chris lived in the Bay Area, and when Suzanne was in town on business she invited him for a cup of coffee. They had spoken to each other only twice in the intervening years—to see if the other was going back to Reed for Reunions. In 2005 they exchanged vows atop San Francisco’s Wells Fargo Bank building with many Reedies in attendance.

“It’s been fabulous, probably better than it would have been if we had stayed together when we were young,” Suzanne says of their marriage.

Among the first alumni to pledge money for Reed’s new performing arts building, they are generous supporters of the Annual Fund and members of the Eliot Society—having named Reed as a beneficiary in their estate plans.

“We believe in Reed,” Suzanne says. “It’s a fabulous education; a

very special place that is well worth supporting.”

Chris is glad that the college now focuses time and resources on helping students with both academic and socialization issues.

“When I was there, it was sink or swim,” he says. “It was a difficult situation. You were at the top of your class in high school and then got to Reed and felt you must be right down there at the bottom.”

At Reed Suzanne’s favorite class was Senior Symposium, where students from different disciplines got together once a week to discuss a book they were reading, usually at a professor’s house.

“I was thrilled with the fact that one’s study so influenced the perception of these books,” she says. “This idea of multidisciplinary approaches being so much richer than a single discipline approach stuck with me.”

The couple credits Reed with teaching them not only how to think, but how to put those thoughts on paper in a coherent way. The education they received at Reed has enabled each of them to maneuver through a variety of careers. Their marriage might be termed a fringe benefit of having been comrades of the quest.

december 2012 Reed magazine 13

Why We Give

Capitalizing on Reed A Reed education provides a lens through which all of the rest of life’s experiences can be viewed, says Gary Rieschel ’79.

Having been a shining star in the Reed biology department, Gary streaked like a comet across the high tech firmament. Acting on a tip from Paul DeYoung, director of international programs, who was then advising seniors on career options, Gary landed his first job in the semiconductor industry at Intel. Like a knight on a chessboard, he leaped to Sequent Computer Systems and then to Cisco. Changing games, he took on the world of venture capitalism—not for the faint of heart.

He held key executive positions at Softbank Venture Capital, Mobius Venture Capital, SAIF Partners (China), and Ignition Partners (U.S.), before he moved to Shanghai with his wife, Yucca Wong Rieschel, and their two children.

After talking with entrepreneurs and other VCs, Gary realized that very few people in China had his experience adding value to earlystage companies. With Duane Kuang and friends from Ignition Partners, he launched Qiming Venture Partners in 2005. With more than a billion dollars under management, the company is regarded as one of the best venture capital funds in China, particularly in the internet, health care, and cleantech sectors.

“Technology is the great leveler,” Gary says, “and access to it is going to be as necessary for success to an individual and society in the 21st century as access to electricity and water were in the 20th century.”

Gary learned early that the early bird catches the worm. As a boy he rose at 5:30 in the morning to pick strawberries, beans, and other crops

14 Reed magazine december 2012

near his home on the outskirts of Portland. He was fascinated with science, collecting insects and dreaming of lunar landings.

There wasn’t enough money to fund his goal of studying premed at Johns Hopkins. At his father’s insistence, Gary went to Reed and lived at home. He has been eternally grateful for the twist of fate that delivered him into the hands of Laurens Ruben [biology 1955–92] and the Reed biology department.

Ruben remembers Gary as a social being who got on well with other students and was quick to comprehend the research. A conscientious and enthusiastic investigator, Gary learned to synthesize different pieces of data into a coherent explanation.

In the field of venture capitalism, this has served him well.

“We have to be able to look around corners and see where technology is going to be several years down the road,” Gary says. “It is rare that an individual has this ability on more than an occasional basis. But at Reed I learned that I could multiply my chances for success by seeking out

other’s opinions and viewpoints and challenging my assumptions. That is one of the key reasons I’ve been successful as a venture capitalist.”

Gary and Yucca are thoughtful in their charitable giving. They believe strongly in cross-disciplinary studies and have given more than a half million dollars to support Reed’s environmental studies program.

They established the Wong DeYoung Scholarship, which honors Paul DeYoung and provides financial assistance for students born in Mainland China to attend Reed. Last year Gary pledged $100,000 annually for five years to inspire young alumni giving to the Annual Fund.

WHO:

Gary Rieschel ’79

MAJOR: Biology WHY:

Reed’s mission.

HOW MUCH: STAT:

$1.675 million

So far, 40 donors have given Reed gifts totaling $1 M or more during this campaign.

Keeper of the Flame In the summer of 1932, Harris Dusenbery ’36 purchased his first car for $15. That 1923 Ford coupe got him to his uncle’s Montana ranch where he earned money to pay his annual college tuition, which was $200.

Like many of the nearly 400 students attending Reed at the time, Harris was a day dodger, living at home and commuting to school. In their study of humanities, first-year students were schooled in ancient Greek literature and history, which taught that despite an ever-changing world, the problems in society are basically the same.

However, even without factoring in the Great Depression, things were unusually grim worldwide. Il Duce ruled Italy, Japan had invaded Manchuria, and Adolf Hitler was a year away from launching the Third Reich.

As a political science major, Harris studied the differences between fascism, nazism, and communism with George Bernard Noble [political science 1922–47]. The flurry of programs spearheaded by the newly elected Franklin Roosevelt became a keen topic of discussion at Reed.

When he wasn’t verbally scaling the empyrean heights in conference, Harris took to the mountains for recreation. It was on a climb up Mount Hood with other Reedies that he met his future wife, Evelyn Shields ’37.

After graduating from Reed, H a r r i s b e ga n w orki ng f or t he newly created Social Security Administration. He worked there until he retired in 1969, with one interruption: serving in the army during World War II. Harris’ unit­—the 10th Mountain Division—was the last one sent to Italy. He has written three books about his war experiences,

remembering them as the most frightening and exciting of his life.

That trip to Italy only whetted his appetite for travel. He and Evelyn eventually made 52 trips abroad, visiting 82 different countries.

“Travel made me realize that humanity is really one community on the surface of the earth, and it’s a community of equals, at least in terms of who we are as human beings,” Harris says. “Even if your own country is a big one, like the United States, it’s still a relatively small part of the world.”

Reed has been a central part of Harris’ life. Both of his children, David Dusenbery ’64 and Diane Waggoner ’68, attended. In 1985, Harris and Evelyn established the Verne and Elizabeth Dusenbery Memorial Scholarship to honor his parents’ memory, and, in 2002, they funded the Harris and Evelyn Dusenbery Gift Annuity. Evelyn passed away in 2008.

Harris continues to be a generous

supporter of the Annual Fund and the endowment. As a member of the Eliot Society, he has named Reed as a beneficiary of his estate.

“I adopted my wife’s philosophy that it is important to live frugally and to give generously,” Harris says.

“Our society has gotten the idea that it’s important to live the big life, the affluent life. The really important thing is to live the good life.”

Giving makes him feel good, he says, and fosters relationships, which are more important than things. He gives to the college to keep illuminated “the liberal light that is Reed.”

WHO:

Harris Dusenbery ’36

MAJOR: Political Science WHY:

“The good life.”

HOW MUCH: $151,271.63 STAT:

Harris and 303 other donors have given faithfully to Reed every year since 1989.

december 2012 Reed magazine 15

Plugging Into the Switchboard Reed Switchboard connects students to alumni for career advice.

By Randall S. Barton

Alex Arpaia ’14

Reed students have always focused like lasers on what they know. Now a grassroots alumni initiative is helping them think about who they know.

The Reed Switchboard is the brainchild of a network of alumni of the Greg Borenstein Anarchist Collective, a Reed house that flourished circa 2000–04. Last year, freelance reporter Mara Zepeda ’02 and New York University researcher Greg Borenstein ’02 began strategizing how they might begin sharing their career advice and their contacts with Reed stu-

The system works. Karen Silbert ’13 wanted to explore a career in the film industry when she happened to run into Mara, who was on the Reed campus in February to promote the Switchboard.

Mara put Karen in contact with freelance television producer Sonya Masinovsky ’04. During their first conversation— which lasted an hour and a half—Sonya helped Karen formulate a plan for getting a foothold in Hollywood. That plan eventually led to a summer internship for Karen at a Los Angeles film-production company. “Karen was passionate, organized, and respectful, and did all the work,”

“ The Switchboard allows us to support someone with a name, a story, and a struggle.” —Mara Zepeda ’02

Mara Zepada ’02

Sonya Masinovsky ’04

Greg Borenstein ’02

16 Reed magazine december 2012

dents and recent graduates, and how to help students overcome the shyness they feel about contacting alumni.

Greg came up with the idea of small incentives. Switchboard members donate $40 to Reed every time they hear from a new Reed student. So far, 19 other alumni have joined Greg and Mara as mentors, each pledging to give up to $200 a year over the next five years.

“We are most inclined to give when we hear the voice of someone 10 years younger than us who is about to embark on the journey that we embarked on and is asking us to light the path,” Mara says. “The Switchboard allows us to support someone with a name, a story, and a struggle— someone who will call on us for years.”

The Switchboard operates on the principle that relationships are the foundation of a successful career. Students browse areas of interest on the Switchboard’s website (built by Sean Lerner ’10), which provides contact information and lists cities where members are willing to host students.

[Member profiles include lists of “awesome Reedies” they know.] After contact is established by phone or by email, students can pose questions ranging from what to ask in an interview to where to walk a dog in the city they have moved to.

Sonya says. “But I was able to make an introduction.”

Last summer the Switchboard created the Summer Money Scholarship, which allowed one student to take advantage of an unpaid internship by giving him $2,000. Two other students received $150 towards their internships. In one week, 17 students completed the simple application process.

Alumni are invited to participate by posting under “Other Alumni Offers” or guesttweeting on the Switchboard’s Twitter account. For example, Thomas Burns ’98 is on the Fulbright committee and has offered to help shepherd Reedies through the foundation’s application process.

Walking the Talk “Reedies are strong, capable people, but it is hard to market those skills when you’re trying to find a job,” says Alex Arpaia ’14, who was hired to answer students’ questions about how the Switchboard works.

“Contacting people who have already had that experience makes it seem less intimidating. You get your foot in the door and a feel for what’s out there.”

She posts student interests and passions on the Switchboard’s social media platforms and says students are surprised

Partnering with Career Services The Switchboard complements the work of Reed’s career services office, which maintains an alumni directory within the IRIS portal that provides contacts for students

photos courtesy of reed switchboard

to discover the process is quick, even if results aren’t immediate.

Alumni who graduated more than 15 years ago may have conceptions of job and career that are nearly irrelevant in today’s market, Mara says. Career paths are not as clear for today’s graduates, who are likely to hold more jobs than their predecessors.

“The average life of a career for a male is now 4.4 years,” Paul Messick ’15 says.

“In 1986, it was 10 years. Many people on the Switchboard have had two or three successful careers and they’re only 30. That’s a nugget of hope for a lot of people who come to Reed and who like a lot of things, but don’t know what to do with them.”

After graduation, many Reedies take time to travel and explore their options.

Switchboard member Noah Rindos ’02 spent two years traveling, working construction, fixing up an old house in the Bay Area, and applying to medical schools. Now an ob-gyn resident in his fourth year at Boston University, Noah thinks that the interim experience was valuable. Speaking of his time at Reed, he says, “they were some of the greatest years of my life, but it’s not the real world. Going out and seeing other parts of the world is really valuable. A lot of people took time off in our core group of friends, and almost all of them returned to academics and obtained the highest degrees available in their fields.”

However, there is the danger that one year will lead to five, Mara says, languishing in menial, dead-end jobs. Switchboard’s goal is to create a breadcrumb trail that connects a student’s passions to an eventual career.

“When a physics major calls me and says, ‘I’m interested in photography, but I also enjoy sci-fi and really want to make a film using Claymation,’ I don’t think he’s crazy,” Mara says. “I totally get it and can give him resources for every one of those interests.”

Karen Silbert ’13

Sean Lerner ’10

Kieran Hanrahan ’15 tags incoming freshman Emma Miller ’16 with heart photo

interested in career networking. Career Services also works with students to craft resumes and cover letters, connects them with internships and job openings, and hones their interview skills.

Paul, who is considering a major in political science, established connections with several alumni through IRIS that helped him sort out ideas about his future.

He thinks students can benefit from both Reed Career Services and the Switchboard.

“Switchboard is definitely filling a significant gap,” he says.

Kieran Hanrahan ’15 was hired to coordinate the Switchboard’s social media and post informal offers from alumni.

“The Switchboard offers a social network that makes a site like LinkedIn seem pretty sterile in comparison,” he says. “We rely almost entirely on our website, Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr to connect with students.”

Switchboard members agree that Reed is an amazing place that changed their lives, and they feel a responsibility to give back and to support the institution on an individual level. More than anything, they enjoy talking with younger versions of themselves.

“The young alumni on the Switchboard don’t have a lot of money,” says Noah, “but we do have a lot of interesting experiences that we want to share with those students who are coming up behind us.”

Regardless of age, Reedies have much in common. By sharing stories, they open not only doors, but also the minds of those who are considering their next steps into a brave new world.

GET INVOLVED Switchboard: www.reedswitchboard.com Switchboard Hearts: switchboardhearts2012.tumblr.com Reed Career Services: www.reed.edu/career Volunteer for the Reed Career Network at: www.reed. edu/career/alumni LIFE BEYOND REED: www.reed.edu/reed_magazine/ december2011/empire_of_the_griffin.html Tony Fisher Charm School for Future Professionals: www. reed.edu/career/calendar/archive/2011/October

december 2012 Reed magazine 17

Adventures in the First Person

Icons and Rollerblades A dispatch from the Reed Russian tour 2012

By Brad Wright ’61

It was totally unexpected.

We and other visitors were milling about the rear of the vast interior of the Kazan Orthodox church in St. Petersburg, admiring the magnificent walls—covered with holy images—and all that gold. Up at the front, a service was in progress. A priest was chanting. Except for some restless children, everyone was quiet. And then, high behind us, the choir exploded with a full-throated polyphonic response that reverberated wonderfully in that complicated space. So that’s what the walls are for—the icons, yes, but also the sound.

And that’s why we visited Russia—to see, yes, but also to experience.

My wife Rozelle (class of ’61) and I were on this year’s Reed Russian tour, a program of the college’s Russian department organized and led by former Reed professor Judson Rosengrant [Russian 1979–90]. The itinerary, though anchored at Moscow and St. Petersburg, included side trips to Novgorod and to Tolstoy’s estate at Yasnaya Polyana. Joining us were other Reed alumni and friends.

For Rozelle, who plans all our trips, it was a new and exciting project. She tackled the reading list by listening to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina on tape and diving into O. Figes’ Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia for background on other Russian writers. We learned about the influential 20th century poet Anna Akhmatova, and became fans of Mikhail Bulgakov after reading his serious satire The Master and Margarita. A copy of G. Hosking’s Russia and the Russians: A History provided a fine background on geography, society, and politics.

The focus of the trip, however, was art and architecture—and it is hard to imagine two cities looming larger in this regard than Moscow and St. Petersburg.

In Moscow, the Tretyakov Gallery features Russian art before the Soviet era, and the Pushkin Museum’s special collection of impressionist and post-impressionist

18 Reed magazine december 2012

paintings was especially rewarding and relaxing (with no other tour groups in sight). In St. Petersburg there was the Russian Museum at the Mikhailovsky Palace and, of course, the Hermitage complex. Rozelle and I had prepared for the latter by watching The Russian Ark, an incredible achievement in film production (it was recorded in a single take) in which the building itself is the principal character and the historical setting literally changes from room to room. So it was exciting to see the Hermitage in the flesh, as it were.

Not to mention the thrill of walking right up to the works of Rembrandt, Matisse, Van Gogh, etc. At Jud’s suggestion we also explored the Hermitage’s remarkable collection of Roman portrait sculpture.

As with any group of Reedies, we all had different backgrounds and interests.

In my case, I wanted to see how Russia had changed since my visit in 1975, when I represented Los Alamos National Laboratory’s program in (hot) fusion energy. In those days, technical exchange visits were part of confidence-building

The choir exploded with a full-throated polyphonic response. measures intended to ease the cold war.

A later example was the Threshold Test Ban Treaty, which allowed the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. to verify, with onsite measurements, the energy release of each other’s underground nuclear explosions.

Under that program, I served as a technical liaison to the Russian delegation that witnessed our JUNCTION shot at the Nevada Test Site. All of which gave me pause when I came to this question on the Russian visa application: “Do you have any specialized skills, training or experience related to fire-arms and explosives or to nuclear matters . . . ?”

Our group visited about a dozen Russian Orthodox churches that, though sharing the common Byzantine plan, presented unique architectural, historical,

and artistic features. These ranged from the house-sized structure in the Peryn Cloister on Lake Ilmen near Novgorod to St. Petersburg’s truly impressive Church of the Savior on Blood, covered entirely with mosaics inside and out. In 1975, Russian churches were not on the must-see list.

St. Basil’s near Red Square was sooty outside and off-limits inside. Indeed, given the realities of the mid-20th century, the churches and palaces we see today are mostly restored, reassembled, or completely reconstructed. For example, the monumental Church of Christ the Savior (of Pussy Riot fame) was originally constructed under Tsar Nicholas I but demolished by Stalin and ended up as a swimming pool. Not until 1990 was the church reconstructed in all its splendor. Especially

Clockwise from left: Kremlin cathedrals; Brad and Rozelle perched on swing near the Tolstoy Estate; Matryoshka Dolls featuring Lenin, Obama, and Harry Potter.

appreciated, therefore, was our quiet visit to the Church of the Transfiguration (1374) in Novgorod. Its subdued, peaceful interior is adorned only by the remains of its original frescoes that, though muted, have not lost their power.

Nobody visits Russia merely to see artifacts, structures, and points of interest.

They come to see Russia, and, so far as possible, the Russian people—the setting of the thing, as well as the thing. Indeed, in many instances, Tolstoy’s estate for example, the setting is the thing. So we looked out the windows: of the hotel, the plane, the bullet train, the hydrofoil, the Metro, the bus, and the taxi. From the walkway around St. Isaac’s dome, we felt that we were seeing all of St. Petersburg. From the hotel, looking across the low profile of the city, we could easily make out the incipient glow of the sun below the northern horizon at midnight. From the air, we became all too aware of the legendary, flat

sameness of Russia’s landscape and the geographical isolation of its northern former capital.

But let’s not forget the sounds. Like the dawn chorus of birds waking us at 3:30 a.m. at Yasnaya Polyana. Or a low roar, a whirring, clickity-snickity noise mixed with a general murmur of unconstrained glee, the sound of thousands of young inline roller skaters cruising up Nevsky Prospect, completely shutting down midafternoon traffic in the heart of St. Petersburg. Yes, it was a city-sponsored event (something about honored citizens), but what fun!

Credit for a truly rewarding adventure belongs to our leader, Jud. Besides being a distinguished scholar and translator, he proved thoroughly invaluable and was engaged in all aspects of the trip, assuring that our individual needs were met in a way that interfered minimally with the activities of the group as a whole. It was

through Jud’s help that Rozelle and I were able to visit, on our own, the shrines of our new-found writer heroes Akhmatova and Bulgakov. And it was thanks to his considerable experience that two serious passport emergencies affecting our group (a Metro pickpocket and a bumbling hotel clerk) were successfully resolved. It’s not that such incidents are common, but it’s good to have an uncommon person in charge.

Though we absorbed a lot of Russia in two weeks, we did miss one essential experience: the famous Russian winter. Jud says the view of the frozen Neva from the Fortress of Peter and Paul is quite peaceful in January. Paideia in St. Petersburg?

Maybe not this time. But a postgraduation (think White Nights) trip is on the books for next spring. Check it out.

GO FURTHER

Check out the full itinerary of the Reed Russia tour at www.reed.edu/reed_magazine.

december 2012 Reed magazine 19

A Community in Progress: Diversity & Inclusion at Reed

By Crystal Ann Williams

“Our learning is impoverished when we are in a homogeneous group of like-minded individuals who share the same kinds of experiences, beliefs, and aspirations.”

—Tori Harding-Smith, president of Washington & Jefferson College “Throughout its history, Reed College has been dedicated to the notion that liberal education must free us from the constraints of ignorance and intolerance and lack of mutual understanding. This is possible only if we learn from each other, and we learn best when we encounter and embrace differences: differences of culture, background, life experience, capacity, affinity group, and viewpoint. Diversity and inclusion have never been merely slogans or add-ons at Reed.”

—Colin Diver, president emeritus, Reed College

20 Reed magazine december 2012

Two weeks into classes in the fall of 2007, Anna Coleman [not her real name] found her way to my office.

Her multicolored hair was crashing into her face, and her hands moved anxiously from her lap to the desk and back as she sobbed over making “the biggest mistake” of her life. Reed was not for her. She felt acutely different, isolated, as if everyone was speaking another language—and everyone was wealthy! These were people unlike the people she loved and understood in her small, rural hometown in southern Oregon. She was here on significant financial aid; no one in her family had attended college, so she had no family member from whom to gain insight into how to integrate herself, much less thrive.

She was not and would never be a Reedie, she declared, waving her arms and jamming a strand of hair behind her ear. She wanted to transfer out. But her financial aid package required that she remain at Reed for the rest of the semester. If she could just have one thing that made sense to her, something creative, until she could transfer to a different school, she’d be forever grateful. Please, please, would I admit her into my creative writing class? Please?!

So I admitted her—two weeks into the semester, something I almost never do—because I understood her despair.

Differences between us abound. Most immediately, she is white and I am black.

I am not the first in my family to graduate from college, or even the first in my family with a graduate degree. I was raised in urban environments, traveled extensively, and was a bilingual child. I am, for lack of a better phrase, the child of privilege. But during my academic career, I, too, have felt alienated, isolated, and as if I am “the only one,” which informs my deep respect for and appreciation of how valuable are the experiences, ideas, perceptions, and values of nondominant group members to any conversation, particularly the kind of conversations we engage in Reed’s venerable conference method.

In fact, Anna’s poetry continues to stand among the most powerful I have seen. Her ability and willingness to use the lenses of class, educational attainment,

and geographic identity to create and investigate poetry deepened our conference discussions. She opened the door for all students to bring to the conference table their many lenses, experiences, and perceptions as valued and—importantly— openly identified components of the classroom endeavor.

I begin with a single student’s story for two reasons: (1) because like many students, staff, and faculty, Anna’s Reed experience was shaped by multiple conjoined identities that informed her sense of belonging, possibility, and her own capacity to thrive; and (2) I believe an individual’s success is inextricably linked to her or his community’s support. And at Reed, the Honor Principle overtly charges us with the care and welfare of our fellow community members. Indeed, as a professor, I have found time and again that

I believe an individual’s success is inextricably linked to her or his community’s support. our students have an exquisite penchant for looking after their peers that extends into the classroom, where I have watched them be generous beyond words with each other’s poetry, ways of thinking, modes of expression, and passions. Perhaps I have seen this development of community more acutely because of the nature of the courses I teach. But I don’t think so. The mother of a former student once told me that what she most admired about Reed is the profound “presence” or attentiveness everyone exhibited towards her child. This attentiveness is a rarity in higher education and something most Reed community members value.

But that profound attentiveness is not just fashioned upon individuals. We also interrogate intensely, sometimes tenaciously, the very philosophies, rules, and traditions by which we coexist. The emphasis on creating a community as something with which each of us is charged is so strong that it should come as no surprise

leah nash

When it came time to get a photo for Reed’s website, Crystal Williams, Reed’s Dean for Institutional Diversity, invited students, faculty, and staff members engaged in diversity efforts across campus to join her in representing this community endeavor.

that the goals of inclusion and diversity have largely been driven by students, staff, and faculty.

In 2008, students drafted a preliminary version of the Reed College Diversity Statement (see www.reed.edu/diversity) because they believed that the college needed to articulate a formal position on the importance of diversity in relation to Reed’s institutional values. As with most endeavors of such import at Reed, the development of the statement was a robust community affair—at varying stages it was edited and/or reviewed by the student senate, the student body (via the Quest and public forums), the community affairs committee, the committee on diversity, the faculty, and finally, the board of trustees—and was adopted in November 2009. In part it reads: “Reed College is a community dedicated to serious and open intellectual inquiry, one in which students, faculty, and staff can fully participate, regardless of ethnicity, race, religion, age, gender identity, sexual orientation, nationality, socio-economic status, or disabilities. Reed embraces the inherent value of diversity. It is committed to attracting the best and brightest from

every group, including those who have historically experienced discrimination and prejudice, for it recognizes that dialogue between people with different perspectives, values, and backgrounds enhances the possibilities for serious intellectual inquiry. The College is also committed to creating an environment that respects the dignity and civil rights of all persons, particularly those from groups that have experienced discrimination and persecution, for it recognizes that intolerance and prejudice diminish those possibilities.”

In 2011, Reed created an Office for Institutional Diversity with two central missions: to oversee the college’s commitment to being a diverse and inclusive environment for learning, teaching, and working; and to ensure that all aspects of college life reflect the fundamental principles of openness and equality espoused in the college’s founding documents, which over the years have been broadened to include people of many protected classes.

As dean for institutional diversity, I am asked to support, empower, inform, and challenge my colleagues to ensure that we recruit and retain intellectually talented members from a multiplicity of

communities, and that once here, all members of the Reed community can thrive. In addition to providing strategic vision and leadership, we seek to develop guidelines, procedures, and recommendations to tackle aspects of the status quo which do not serve the college’s goal of becoming a more diverse and inclusive institution. Diversity includes not only people from historically underrepresented groups and/or protected classes, but also people from majority groups who add to and benefit from an inclusive campus climate. Diversity, in the modern sense, suggests that our identities are not static, nor are they singular.

If you are a white female philosophy student from Port Harbor, an Asian faculty member from Chicago, a first-generationto-college student, a Muslim, a Nepali theatre student, a person with an invisible disability or multiple disabilities, a gender-identity minority staff member, or a heterosexual, wealthy white male student from California, my office is charged with supporting your success and wellbeing at Reed. Simply put: we are responsible for helping create and perpetuate a healthy, inclusive, and vibrant campus climate— for every single Reed community member.

Like many elite liberal arts colleges, achieving racial/ethnic diversity continues to be one of our greatest challenges and therefore requires our consistent and careful attention. In this regard, we’ve been more successful in recruiting students than faculty and staff. While data show that all students who apply to Reed identify as intellectual and independent-minded, students from historically underrepresented racial/ethnic groups who meet our holistic and rigorous admission guidelines are also greatly sought out by other elite colleges and universities that offer many of them merit aid regardless of need—a practice Reed has historically rejected. This fact, coupled with our geographic region, small student body, liberal arts status, and reputation for being socially liberal, further complicates the undertaking, though ours is not a wholly insurmountable task.

Indeed, the very challenge we experience because we are a small school may be what ultimately allows us to achieve success, which might be what one faculty member described as developing a critical mass of people such that a member of any group in the minority—people from underrepresented ethnic groups or

december 2012 Reed magazine 21

1450 1440 1430 1420 1410 1400 1390 1380 1370 1360 1350 1340 1330 1320 1310 1300 300 1290 1280 1270 1260 1250 1240 1230 1220 1210 1200 1190 1180 1170 1160 1150 1140 1130 1120 1110 1000 990 980 970 960 950 940 930 920 910 900 890 880 870 860 850 840 830 820 810 800

total enrollment

student enrollment

Reed’s strong community ethos, that charge that fuels so many of us to work so intensively, is our greatest strength.

1470 1460 1450 1440 1430 1420 1410 1400 1390 1380 1370 1360 1350 1340 1330 1320 1310 1300 300 1290 1280

Total Enrollment

Caucasian

300 290 280 270 260 250 240 230 220 210 200 190 180 170 160 150 140 130 120 110 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10

900 890 880 870 860 850 840 830 820 810 800

Unknown*

Asian Hispanic

International Black Native American 2010–11

2009–10

2008–09

2007–08

2006–07

2005–06

2004–05

2003–04

2002–03

2001–02

2010-2011

2009-2010

2008-2009

2007-2008

2006-2007

2005-2006

2004-2005

tors, principal among them campus clicaucasian mate. In the spring we began developing a campus climate survey, which will seek to measure how students, staff, and faculty experience the social, academic, and unknown working climate at Reed.

Its results will provide us a baseline understanding of what we’re doing well and what can be improved upon. These data, along with other campus-wide assessments, will provide us with a great deal of evidence that will guide our work in diversity and inclusivity in the coming years.

In all, there is much work ahead. In many ways, Reed’s strong community asian ethos, that charge that fuels so many of hispanic us to work so intensively, is our greatest strength. I count myself very fortunate to international be in a community where so many believe in and work towards ensuring that we black have fewer and fewer Annas.

Anna graduated from native american Reed speaking several languages and having spent time abroad; she is a young woman driven by her intellectual passions and moral compass. She is currently teaching lowincome students in Teach for America and is applying to graduate school. Just before she left Portland, we met over coffee. During that going-away chat, she

2003-2004

22 Reed magazine december 2012

2002-2003

2001-2002

Approximately 50% of our students are on financial aid. And our average aid package exceeds $36,000 a year. Further, in any year, an average of 10% of our students 300 290 are first in their family to attend a 4-year 280 270sigcollege. In this realm, we have made 260 nificant progress.

250 Yet however successful we have 240 been 230 at recruiting students from low-income 220 210 backgrounds, we’ve still a good deal of 200 work to do to ensure that students190feel 180 entirely included and valued as equal 170 members of the community once 160 they 150 arrive. This is something we failed 140 to do early on with Anna, who stepped 130 onto 120 110 our campus and felt immediately—via 100 the multitude of social cues she received— 90 80 that not only was Reed not for her, but its 70 campus culture was actively shunning60her.

50 Everyone, she surmised, looking at 40 how 30 readily people bought books, food, items 20 for their dorm rooms, and essentials, 10 must be wealthy. But given our admission data, there are many Annas. What we do to support them can make a tremendous difference to their academic success and the confidence with which they enter the world beyond Reed. So we are helping to develop programs to assist them, increasing faculty and staff awareness of the

A Decade of Reed Student Demographics

NOTES: Unknown students have chosen not to identify their race or ethnicity. International students can be of any race or ethnicity; they are not included in the totals for other categories. Asian students include Pacific Islanders.

Source: Institutional Research, Reed College.

students enrolled

women in certain fields, for example—is not the only person in the room with that identity. In support of that desire is social science research that suggests when critical mass is achieved, the members of the underrepresented group are more engaged, perform better, and are better able to voice their opinions as individuals as opposed to being cast as representatives of their group. Research finds that a critical mass of underrepresented populations stimulates and enhances critical thinking for all students.

That said, we have been more successful at achieving certain kinds of diversity than others. For example, Reed admits a higher percentage of students from low-income backgrounds than many of our wealthier comparator schools.

challenges that face working Reedies, and are working to develop additional financial support for high-need students who struggle with things as simple as printing fees or bus passes. The same is true for supporting sexual orientation and gender-identity minorities, students from underrepresented ethnic/racial groups, and students who are first in their family to attend college.

Here, our collaborative work with individual faculty and staff is critically important.

Equally important is the work we have undertaken to create programming to spark the adoption of more inclusive pedagogies, and to support faculty members from underrepresented groups who often move to Portland and find it intellectually and/or culturally isolating.

The way a person feels while at Reed— the exact “thing” my poetry student couldn’t name—is related to many fac-

students enrolled

Diversity & Inclusion

Welcome President

Underrepresented Students and Faculty at Reed and Peer Institutions minority student % minority faculty %

total student enrollment total faculty

Wellesley College

41%

2546

20%

261

Amherst College

40%

1794

18%

189

Mills College

39%

1589

18%

93

Occidental

38%

2102

30%

169

Swarthmore College

38%

1524

15%

197

Pomona

35%

1560

26%

178

Williams College

31%

2101

21%

275

Bowdoin College

31%

1762

17%

198

Haverford College

29% 24%

1177 127

Reed College

12%

145

Grinnell College

23%

1447

23% 20%

1655 189

Oberlin College

22% 17%

3000 312

Carleton College

21% 23%

2020 222

Whitman College

12%

151

Hamilton College

20%

1555

19% 18%

1861 191

Hampshire College

1529

Davidson College

1742

18% 22%

100

164

Colorado College

18% 13%

2091 163

Lewis & Clark College 3584 203

18% 19% 16%

9%

NOTES: Chart is based on data from Fall 2009, specifically the race and ethnicity of enrolled students and full-time faculty.

Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education 9/30/11 using Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), 2009.

described her drive to be of service to others and give back to her community.

It did not escape me that Anna’s definition of “her” community is based on her commonalities with people, not her differences, which tells me that we did something right in relation to how Anna thinks about community. Although we may not have anticipated all of the ways in which she needed our support, ultimately we supported, stretched, and challenged her enough that she is thriving today.

But to my way of thinking, hers was too bumpy a start. I don’t want other Reed students, faculty, or staff members to feel that Reed isn’t the place for them or that their ability to participate in the academic endeavor is hampered by their social identity. As we increase the numbers of gender, class, ethnic, racial, religious, sexual orientation, gender-identity, and national minorities among us, we must make sure that we have fewer and fewer people who feel isolated, alienated, and as if they— with their beautiful, complicated, multifaceted identities—aren’t imperative to the excellence of this institution. They are.

Crystal Ann Williams is dean for institutional diversity and professor of creative writing at Reed.

Go FURTHER Steele, Claude. (2010). Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. (esp. Chapter 8: “The Strength of Stereotype Threat: The Role of Cues”) “Does Diversity at Undergraduate Institutions Influence Student Outcomes?” Nisha C. Gottfredson, A.T. Panter, Charles E. Daye, Linda F. Wightman, Walter A. Allen, and Meera E. Deo. Journal of Diversity in Higher Education. Vol. 1., No. 2, 80-94 (2008) “Student Experiences with Diversity at Liberal Arts Colleges: Another Claim for Distinctiveness.” Paul D. Umback and George D. Kuh. The Journal of Higher Education. Vol. 77, No. 1, (Jan/Feb 2006), pp 169-192 “The Educational Benefits of Sustaining Cross-Racial Interaction among Undergraduates.” Mitchell J. Chang, Nida Denson, Victor Sáenz and Kimberly Misa, The Journal of Higher Education. Vol. 77, No. 3 (May - Jun., 2006), pp. 430-455. Published by: Ohio State University Press

John R. Kroger and join us as we celebrate the culmination of Reed’s Centennial Campaign, a milestone achievement by alumni on behalf of the college.

Hear how the campaign’s success is changing the lives of current students and lend your voice to the vision for Reed’s next century.

Seattle, WA February 20 San Francisco, CA February 27 Washington, DC March 6 Los Angeles, CA March 16 Boston, MA March 18 New York , NY March 19 Chicago, IL March 21 Portland, OR April 4 Event details can be found at www.reed.edu/alumni/rotr.

There is still time to make your gift to the campaign.

giving.reed.edu

“Diversity and Higher Education: Theory and Impact on Educational Outcomes.” Patricia Gurin, Eric L. Dey, Sylvia Hurtado, and Gerald Gurin. Harvard Educational Review.

Vol. 72, No. 3 (Sept., 2002) pp. 330-367 Hurtado, Sylvia. (2001). “Linking Diversity and Educational Purpose: How Diversity Affects the Classroom Environment and Student Development.” In G. Orfield & M. Kurlaender (Eds.), Diversity Challenged: Evidence on the Impact of Affirmative Action (pp.187–203).

Cambridge, MA: Harvard Civil Rights Project.

“Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Classroom: Does It Promote Student Learning?” Patrick T. Terenzini, Alberto F. Cabrera, Carol L. Colbeck, Stefani A. Bjorklund and John M. Parente. The Journal of Higher Education. Vol. 72, No. 5 (Sep. - Oct., 2001), pp. 509-531. Published by: Ohio State University Press

inquiry . community . integrity

A Century of Great Books Reed’s proud tradition of publishing took root almost as soon as the foundation was poured. We here present a brief and idiosyncratic selection from this epic body of work.

24 Reed magazine december 2012

1913

Everywoman’s Road: a Morality of Woman Creator Worker Waster Joy-giver and Keeper of the Flame.

by Josephine Hammond [English 1913-16] This play, written in “free-running iambics,” was produced at Reed in 1915 and included no fewer than 150 parts.

Our obsession with the written word has never been stronger. From the art of the swindle to the letters of Cicero, Reed authors are burning the midnight oil.

Last month, Reed’s Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program hosted a national conference whose title, The Crisis of the Book, neatly captures the popular notion that the publishing industry is in a hopeless muddle.

But in our view, the subtitle of the conference—Worlds of Opportunity, Worlds of Change— is a more perceptive observation, if the prodigious output of Reed writers is any guide. Reedies have published more than 100 books this year alone, and show no sign of slowing down. In fact, the Hauser Library currently owns 5,373 books and articles by (or about) Reedies and Reed professors, a catalogue that is doubtless incomplete.

In this, our first books issue, we sought to convey the

depth of this monumental literary landscape. We invite you to take a peek at the anthropology of magic, explore the art of the swindle, and find out how the Dutch lost Taiwan.

Venture into the philosophy of history with Marvin Levich [philosophy 1953–94], meet a brilliant Soviet exile with Lena Lencek [Russian 1977–], and rediscover a longlost manuscr ipt of Lloyd Reynolds [English and art 1929–69].

From the diaries of Doris Bailey Murphy ’38 to the poems of Lew Welch ’51, Reed writers show that no force—not even death—is stronger than their love for words.

illustration by janice wu

1913

1915

The Quest Reed’s indomitable student newspaper published its first issue Jan 16, 1913, and, defying all rules of common sense, has continued more or less weekly ever since. Next year will mark its 100th anniversary in print—take that, Newsweek!

1917

The Nature of the Ultimate Magnetic Particle

by Karl Compton [physics 1911–15] & Everett Trousdale ’15 Article disproving molecular theory of magnetism was published in Physical Review. Compton founded Reed’s physics department, served as football coach, and later became president of MIT.

Should Students Study?

by William Trufant Foster [president 1910–19] Typically provocative title from Reed’s iconoclastic first president, who scorned the “sheep-dip” approach to higher education.

december 2012 Reed magazine 25

The Disappearing Trick

Anthropologist Graham Jones ’97 reveals how magicians guard their craft in the internet age.

When a magician pulls a rabbit out of his hat, most people just want to know how he did it. Was there a hole under the table?

Was the guy somehow hiding a small, squirming herbivore inside his waistcoat?

Graham Jones asks deeper questions—the sort of questions you might expect from an anthropology professor at MIT. How, he wonders, did the magician learn the trick? With whom does he share his secret knowledge? How does he create an abracadabra stage persona that we can actually believe in, even though we live in a cynical age where anything magical is instantly presumed to be phony?

To research his first book, Trade of the Tricks, Jones spent a year inhabiting the bustling magician subculture of Paris. He hung out on street corners, watching the maestros at work. He frequented a smoky, cavernous bar as magicians grumbled about pay rates and boorish spectators.

He learned how to pull a rabbit out of a hat, how to saw a lady in half, and how to conjure a pastry out of thin air.

But you will not find any how-to diagrams in his book. Trade of the Tricks does not come with a DVD walking amateurs through the basics. It is not, he writes, a book of secrets, but rather “a book about secrets . . . . The dynamism of magic depends on robust social networks and the sharing of intellectual resources. The magic scene, as I encountered it in Paris, takes shape through perpetually unfolding exchanges of knowledge and skill.”

Jones is intent on asking a question that has wide application in today’s knowledge economy: How do we strategically manipulate knowledge?

In one scene, he tells how a street per- colleague and then insists, “Keep this to former, a magical éminence grise known as yourself. It mustn’t be disseminated too Bébel, explains what makes magic sing. quickly because that lets us have something It’s about style, not tricks, he says. “Magic that other magicians don’t have.” A month requires mystery,” Bébel tells him. “You later, he calls Coco to ask if he can share the have to be magical. Every gesture and trick with a friend. “No problem,” Coco tells every utterance has to emanate magic.” him. “Share, share, share. But just as long as To demonstrate, Bébel shows how he it comes out slowly so that not too many of inveigles a spectator’s playing card to the us will know how to do it at first.” top of the deck. “He rotated his palms Later, as he takes a private magic lesson, upward and wiggled his fingers in a rhyth- Jones learns more about secret sharing: mical, rising motion,” Jones writes.

His instructor, Stefan, shows him a new A craftsman like Bébel trick, but only after he gives would despise Jones if he pubStefan one first. “You just lished shop secrets. Indeed, traded me a beautiful one,” when magicians enter the preStefan reasons, demonstrateminent French trade group, ing that trick sharing among Fédération Française des Artistes magicians is not about money, Prestidigitateurs, they take an but is rooted in trust and venoath “neither to divulge any eration of craft. One of the secrets that are part of illusioninteresting questions raised ists’ cultural patrimony, nor to

by Trade of the Tricks is whethdescribe them in written or er this dynamic also applies to audiovisual materials intended performers like classical viofor laymen.” linists or skateboarders.

Graham Jones ’97 This oath is needed, for in Trade of the Tricks: Inside Unfortunately, Jones never the information age a magi- the Magician’s Craft shines as a magician. He University of cian’s secrets are a precious California Press, 2011 admits, “I’m a C- or D-list percommodity. A few years ago, former at best.” After he left for example, the French television net- Paris in 2005 to write his dissertation, he work FR3 produced the program Breaking ceased practicing magic. He retained the the Magician’s Code: Magic’s Biggest Secrets deepest respect for the art, though, and his Finally Revealed. The nation’s illusionists book invokes Jean Cocteau’s description protested, en masse. In vain, they wrote of magic as “more real than the reality we to media outlets and politicians, urging dream.” Likewise, he nods to the German that Breaking be squelched, to protect the philosopher Hegel, a magic connoisseur public’s “right to dream.” who, as Jones describes it, distinguished But of course magicians have to share between “conjuring tricks” and “true works secrets. The progress of their art depends of art, which put expressive techniques in on dialogue. Visiting a performer named the service of transcendent truths.”

Coco, Jones learns how nuanced the sharTrade of the Tricks is cerebral, but niming can be. Coco reveals a new trick to a ble in its erudite musings. Jones says he

1922

1927

By Bill Donahue

Under The Green Tiles

by Beatrice Olson ’24 This piece in the 1922 Griffin is a delightful guide to the architecture of Reed’s first buildings, complete with marvelous descriptions of grotesques, spandrels, coats-of-arms, etc.

26 Reed magazine december 2012

1927

The Sacrifice of Spring : A Masque of Queens

The Congressional Conference Committee

by Loyd Haberly ’18

by Ada Chenoweth McCown ’15 [sociology and dean 1929-31]

After Reed, Loyd went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, became a letterpress printer, biographer, and translator, and published more than 20 volumes of poetry.

Based on Ada’s PhD thesis, this book became an important text for American political scientists; ten editions were published between 1927 and 1967.

kelly creedon

felt his thesis adviser, Bill Ray [French 1972–], looking over his shoulder as he wrote. Ray, he says, “taught me to take pride and pleasure in the scholar’s craft.

He showed me that one can always strive for greater clarity in writing and greater depth in analysis. He is one of the most meticulous scholars I have ever met.”

At Reed, Jones was a lit major concentrating on French writers. Postgraduation, he enrolled at NYU and came across his thesis topic by chance. It was 2001. The Twin Towers had just fallen. He was writing a small paper on magic, and he realized that “In the face of a nightmarish world, magic is beautiful.”

He focused his sights on Paris because at the time France was marking the

bicentennial birthday of Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, the French aristocrat who brought what was once a lowbrow carnie pastime into the silky salon. “The French magic world was taking stock of itself,” he says. “It was asking, ‘Have we progressed?’”

The answer he heard most often was no. French illusionists tend to think that magic has cheapened of late, now that the internet has made its secrets readily available. Still, he came away seeing one subdiscipline—“close-up magic,” performed for small groups—as a salve to modern alienation. “It’s like slow food,” he says. “The magicians are independent artisans. They don’t have anyone writing their scripts. No one tells them how to dress. They’re vulnerable and human, and the spectators can

1928

1934

look right into their eyes and touch their hands. They’re able to see magic made just for them.”

Since finishing his book, he has published an article in Cultural Anthropology on America’s “gospel magicians”—that is, evangelical Christians who entice prospective converts by dazzling them with stage tricks. He has also written an article about how adolescents gossip online. Still, old habits die hard. Delivering a lecture at MIT last year, he picked up a book which then burst into flames.

Wait, did he have a match up his sleeve?

A small blowtorch, perhaps?

Don’t go there. Don’t even ask.

Bill Donahue is a frequent producer of millinery rodents.

1936

A Theory of Production

They Built the West

Paul H. Douglas [econ 1917–18]

by Glenn Chesney Quiett ’20

This article in American Economic Review heralded the appearance of the celebrated Cobb-Douglas function, a significant achievement in the field of economics. Douglas went on to further fame as a U.S. Senator for Illinois 1949–67.

A vivid history of the land barons, railroad tycoons, engineers, surveyors, lumberjacks, pile-drivers, and workers whose determination, sweat, and muscle forever changed the Western states.

Trail Smoke

By Ernest Haycox ’23 “Morgantown was at war, cattleman against sheepherder.” Ernest wrote two dozen novels, mostly Westerns, and over 300 short stories.

december 2012 Reed magazine 27

Hoodwinked

Historian Amy Reading ’98 recounts a provocative tale of chicanery and vengeance.

They saw him coming.

J. Frank Norfleet was a hardworking, salt-of-the-earth rancher from the Texas panhandle who rode into Dallas in 1919 hoping to sell his farm so he could buy more land. Although respected and successful back home, Norfleet might as well have worn a “Kick Me” sign on his back when he got to the big city. With his homespun clothes, his bandy legs, and his country twang, he was the perfect mark.

And so he was taken, for all he was worth and more, by a smooth-talking swindler named Big Joe Furey, who sucked Norfleet into “the Big Con”—a perfectly executed nine-act charade, with Furey and his accomplices acting out a drama of which Norfleet was painfully oblivious. Every move they made was designed to build his confidence, from the first “accidental” meetings to the tragic climax, where they fled with $45,000 of his money—and then duped him a second time with the same script.

But Furey and his con men underestimated Norfleet. Schooled in the cowboy code of justice, where a deal was sealed by a handshake, Norfleet let nothing stand in his way in his quest to find the swindlers and see them convicted of their crimes. He crisscrossed the country on the flimsiest of leads for years until he found them and made damned sure they paid—every last one.

Amy Reading tells this story with gusto and glee in her book The Mark Inside: A Perfect Swindle, a Cunning Revenge, and a Small History of the Big Con. Her work is based on extensive research, with sources

that include J. Frank Norfleet’s autobiogra- swindles, lies, and hoaxes. I was very interphy itself. Her powers of observation and ested in autobiographies that are hoaxes, imagination, with a precise eye for detail, like when the author is passing for somemake her narrative of Norfleet and his one else, and ones that dared the reader quest for vengeance irresistible. to look behind the scene. I do a literaryThe book is about more than a single critical type of reading where I don’t take individual, however. It is also a history anything at face value. I’m always looking of American swindling, with reflections and seeing if I can trust the author’s intenon the moral shift in the American char- tion. I like that kind of interplay with the acter from thrift and savings text.” She credits Reed with to speculation and personalnourishing those literar y ity. Reading takes us along impulses. “Reed was just what on a compelling tour of humI needed, given the way my buggery, P.T. Barnum, counbrain is designed. I was always terfeiting, the shady side of a reader. At Reed I was given Benjamin Franklin, and the the tools and vocabulary to undoing of Denver’s most analyze what I am reading.” notorious kingpin. “I looked Part of what makes The at magazines and the rise of Mark Inside so compelling the American middle class. is Reading ’s postmodern There was a larger transforstance on the literary text. mation over 100 years,” she Her book plays on several Amy Reading ’98 says. “Gambling was immoral, The Mark Inside: A Perfect levels: she tells the story of and it was a vice the lower Swindle, a Cunning Norfleet, she carries it into classes engaged in. Over time, Revenge, and a Small the history of the dark side History of the Big Con a special definition was carved Knopf, 2012. of America, and she brings out for speculation, because herself into the story as a it benefited progress. It was a brand-new doubter of Norfleet’s self-narrative: “I’m idea. It was the Big Shift that capitalism kind of conning the reader. I wanted the scored on the American psyche.” reader to feel brought along, though, and Reading majored in English at Reed, not duped,” she says. With an eyebrow and went on to earn a doctorate in the lifted, she points out Norfleet’s incessant literary side of American studies at Yale, and never-ending urge to tell his story and where she ran across Norfleet’s mem- sell himself, the almost desperate bravado oir while researching her dissertation on and braggadocio with which he portrays swindling. Her fascination with hoaxes is himself, and the frankly unbelievable way intricately connected with her love of the the story plays out, with coincidences pilinstabilities inherent in literature. ing on serendipities.

“Why did I do my dissertation on swin“What I wanted to do was create creative dling? I don’t know,” she says. “The answer nonfiction to encapsulate both narrative keeps receding. I was always interested in and analysis. It’s an experimental form in

1937

1950

By Nadine Fiedler ’89

1954

Brain Tumors Always Die

How Long, Oh Lord

by Arthur John McLean ’21

by Jacob Avshalomov ’43

The Concept of Culture-Bondage

Arthur was a prominent neurosurgeon and researcher who published more than two dozen articles on subjects from paraphysical cysts to intractable pain. This one was considered so influential it was reprinted in Surgical Neurology 40 years later.

A distinguished composer and conductor, Jacob wrote this cantata for mixed chorus, contralto solo, and orchestra, compiling the words from the books of Habakkuk, Isaiah, and Psalms.

Iconic anthro professor examines the countercultural spirit of college students several years before the counterculture takes off.

28 Reed magazine december 2012

by David French ’39 [anthro 1947–88]

Ed Dittenhoefer

Through a glass, darkly. Amy Reading ’98 has always been fascinated by swindles, lies, and hoaxes.

the small genre of narrative history,” she says, citing authors such as Erik Larson (The Devil in the White City), Simon Schama, and Jonathan Raban (Bad Land: An American Romance). “There’s a hunger for it,” she says.

Reading now lives in upstate New York with her husband, Jay Farmer ’94, and their children Lucy and Jasper, ages 8 and 5. They first moved to Ithaca when Farmer went to Cornell, and they returned with an infant daughter in tow after Reading worked in publishing in New York and earned her PhD at Yale. Then, she says, “in one spectacular year I finished my dissertation, had my son, and sold my book.”

Ithaca was also where Reading herself was swindled. While she was writing about con artists in the rare book room at Yale, she and Farmer rented their apartment in Ithaca to what seemed like a trustworthy family, one just like hers. It turned out they were con artists, moving on after cheating their landlords and leaving a trail of judgments and debts. Reading and Farmer moved to evict them, but it took time. “During those two months it became the same kind of game of false fronts that I played with them as what I saw in my research. I didn’t let them know that we knew they were defrauding us,” says

Reading. She had the same overwhelming reactions Norfleet had, which made her relate to him even more strongly: “Before, I had walked around saying, ‘I’d love to meet a con artist,’ and here I didn’t realize I was being conned. It was puzzling and nauseating. I felt the full range of emotions: befuddlement, anger, outrage, and the righteous need to right injustice.”

In the final analysis, she says, it is a “fragile bubble of hope and optimism” that defines the mark inside—the very requirement for both a life lived to the full and a narrative that keeps readers turning the pages.

1954

1957

1957

Highland Rebel

Empire of the Columbia

by Sally Watson ’50

by Dorothy Johansen ’33 [history 1934–84]

Scottish lass yearns to fight with Bonnie Prince Charlie against the English. Disguised as a boy, she is captured by the hated enemy and must find a way to escape. Sally wrote several historical novels for young adults, all with strong female leads.

A definitive study of the Pacific Northwest, from Indian tribes to Spanish explorers to swashbuckling shipping merchants (yes, that means you, Simeon).

Sappho: A New Translation

by Mary Barnard ’32 This spare, lucid translation of one of western literature’s earliest women poets became an instant classic of poetry both ancient and modern. Mary wrote about the numerous challenges of the project in Assault on Mount Helicon.

december 2012 Reed magazine 29

How the Dutch Lost Taiwan

Tonio Andrade ’92 examines China’s first great military victory over the West.

Dutch general Thomas Pedel was brimming with confidence as he led his troops out of Zeelandia Castle on Taiwan to battle the Chinese warlord Koxinga in the spring of 1661. The Dutch had been fending off attacks by Taiwanese natives and Chinese settlers since they established a colony on the coast of Taiwan a few decades before.

These raids posed no serious threat: Dutch muskets were the best in the world, while Chinese arrows and cannons seemed like a relic from Europe’s Middle Ages. Although Pedel’s son had been maimed by Koxinga’s troops earlier in the day, Pedel was certain his 250 crack sharpshooters would be more than enough to dispatch Koxinga’s force of a few thousand. He was wrong.

Just 80 Dutch musketeers limped back to their castle after the skirmish, a crushing defeat for the Europeans. Yet this loss was not decisive: it took another year before the Dutch colony surrendered to Koxinga’s fearsome army.

The Sino-Dutch war for Taiwan raises some tantalizing questions: how did the Chinese defeat the Dutch, with their superior military technology and organization? Conversely, how did a few hundred Dutch manage to hold out against Koxinga’s huge army for as long as they did? These puzzles are what historian Tonio Andrade seeks to explore in Lost Colony: The Untold Story of China’s First Great Victory over the West.

Tonio concludes that a host of ecological, technological, and personal factors contributed to Koxinga’s dramatic victory. In taking such a multifaceted approach he breaks with the binaries—orthodox or revisionist, Eurocentric or Asiacentric—traditionally used by historians to understand early

modern European-Asian interaction. Such Dutch withstood Chinese attacks for so an eclectic approach is nothing new to long because of two factors: their warships Tonio, who has been defying tradition since and their fortresses. he was inspired by seeing the Reed docuDutch ships were larger and heavier and mentary, A Different Drummer, on one of his carried more cannons than Chinese junks, first days on campus. which gave them the upper hand in open In his first two years at Reed, Tonio’s water and clear conditions. Fortunately quest for truth played out in the halls for the Chinese, these conditions were of the biology building. He rare. The Dutch ships often wanted to be a biologist or struggled in the violent monneurophysiologist, but had soons and shallow waters of a change of heart when he Taiwan, while Koxinga’s junks had to kill and dissect a rat. used their superior speed and He took a year and a half off familiarity with the coastline to reorient himself, spendto launch surprise attacks. In ing time in his hometown of this war, however, agility matSalt Lake City and in Taiwan, tered more than firepower. where he studied Chinese The sophisticated rigging and language and history. multiple sails of Dutch ships Although he eventually allowed them to sail against graduated from Reed as an the wind—a crucial advananthropology major, Tonio tage over the single-sailed was most inspired by the Chinese junks. intellectual history classes The second, and most of Malachi Hacohen [hisimpor tant, Dutch advantory 1989–93], now tenured tage lay in the design of their at Duke. In Hacohen’s class fortresses. The Renaissance on the German impact on fortress developed in Italy in French culture, Tonio learned the 15th century, when the to look for cross-pollination, Tonio Andrade ’92. increasing number and firethe connections that form Lost Colony: The Untold power of cannons used in a the deep roots of history. He Story of China’s First Great siege began to overwhelm traVictory over the West was drawn back to the ivory Princeton University ditional castles. In response, tower soon after his thesis Press, 2011 nervous lords developed a new was bound, earning master’s kind of fort; their key innovadegrees at the University of Illinois and a tion was an angled bastion thrusting out PhD from Yale. He taught history at SUNY from each corner and at intervals along the and then at Emory University, where he fort’s walls. These bastions allowed defendhas been ever since. ers to keep the entirety of the fort’s walls in Tonio’s curiosity is reflected in his their line of fire, thus eliminating the dead self-description as a world historian and spaces—areas along the fort’s walls that is manifest in Lost Colony. With a scien- are difficult or impossible to cover—that tist’s attention to detail, he shows how the besieging armies traditionally focused on

1958

1959

By Miles Bryan ’13

Trask

by Don Berry ’53 Set in 1848 on the wild edge of the continent, in the rain forests and rugged headlands of the Oregon coast, Trask follows a mountain man’s quest for new opportunities and new land.

Widely considered one of the finest historical novels of the American West.

30 Reed magazine december 2012

1965

The Nature of Frontiers and Boundaries

Spiders, Snakes, and Other Outcasts

by Ladis K. Kristof ’55

Robert Froman ’39

Author, professor, logger, aristocrat, prisoner, refugee, and everything in between, Kris was also a political scientist of wide renown.

Describes the attributes of such unpopular creatures as worms, spiders, octopuses, bats, snakes, vultures, cockroaches, and toads that have made them some of the most successful life forms on earth.

Sketch of Zeelandia Fortress (to the right) from 1652 clearly shows angled bastions protruding from castle walls. These bastions eliminated “dead spaces” and allowed Dutch defenders to repel Koxinga’s forces—until the Chinese general figured out how to neutralize this technological advantage.

climbing up or blowing apart. This in turn led to an arms race of bigger and better siege technology. Attacking a fort in Europe became a prolonged and elaborate affair of siegeworks and counter siegeworks.

Chinese fortresses evolved differently.

While they dwarfed their European counterparts, their design was simple: thick, flat walls set at right angles. Some of these forts did have fortified outposts extending from the walls, but these provided only limited cover. Koxinga had overwhelmed many of these forts in his battles on mainland China simply by rushing them with his huge and well-trained army. He was dismayed when his first attempt to storm Zeelandia Castle resulted in miserable defeat.

After his first rush resulted in catastrophe, Koxinga set up cannons behind a hill and tried to shell the fort into submission. The Dutch built a new fortification to provide counterfire, but Koxinga knew he was onto something with his primitive

1965

siegeworks. Next, he constructed a coastal fort, with elements of Renaissance design, to try and cut Zeelandia off from seaborne provisions. The Dutch once again built a counter-fortification and staved off the threat.

Koxinga finally captured Zeelandia thanks to crucial intelligence, courtesy of a hard-drinking European turncoat named Hans Radis, who told Koxinga that he needed a more elaborate set of siegeworks to win—and Koxinga listened.

For Tonio, Koxinga serves as something of a parable for why the Chinese were ultimately able to defeat the Dutch on Taiwan. Koxinga overcame Dutch technological advantages because he was creative and adaptive. He gained in a year a rudimentary understanding of the Renaissance technology that Europeans had taken centuries to develop. Dutch leadership does not stand up so well to historical scrutiny. Fredrick Coyet,

Koxinga’s counterpart, was haughty and inflexible: his quarrels with top officers and regional generals resulted in crucial losses of supplies and support, and his quickness to put lower-ranked men in their place made a tense situation (they were cooped up in the castle for months) often unbearable. Pedel and his musketeers lost the battle because he was too arrogant to heed warning signs that the Chinese, led by the seasoned general Chen Ze, were encircling them in a pincer attack.

These findings led Tonio to conclude that although technology, the environment, and chance all played important roles in the Dutch-Sino war, in the end the most decisive factor was the human one.

Writing a history that makes human decisions paramount is unorthodox and risky.

But sometimes you just have to march to the beat of a different drummer.

1962

1964

History major Miles Bryan ’13 is writing a thesis on radical environmentalism.

The Impoverished Students’ Book of Cookery, Drinkery, & Housekeepery

Two in the Far North

by Jay Rosenberg ’63

by Margaret Thomas Murie ’23

by James Beard ’24

Mardy describes life in the Alaskan wilderness with her husband, Olaus Murie. Their determination to protect the Alaskan landscape led to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Mardy was given the Presidental Medal of Freedom

by Bill Clinton in 1998.

Gastronomic memoir paints a vivid portrait of Jim’s childhood in Portland, early days in New York, and career as a food writer. Although a student at Reed only for his freshman year, he received an honorary degree from Reed in 1976 and left much of his estate to the college.

Based on Jay’s experiences living offcampus, this book is still in print. Jay donated all royalties to the Rosenberg Cookbook Fund Scholarship at Reed and went on to write many books as a noted philosopher.

Delights & Prejudices

december 2012 Reed magazine 31

Snowbound

Peter Zuckerman ’03 and the sherpas who survived K2 The authors anchor their account on two Sherpas—Chhiring Dorje Sherpa He trekked for hundreds of miles on and Pasang Lama—who played critical treacherous mountain passes and switch- roles in the drama. Historically, Sherpas, backs through Nepal and Pakistan, where the Nepalese people renowned as mounhe ran the risk of running into Maoist or taineering guides, have been relegated to Taliban insurgents. the background in books about the epic He took another sort of trip after eating exploits of great climbers. Peter felt it a psychedelic Himalayan caterpillar mush- was vital to center his book around these room that made his travel unsung heroes, who rose up companions so sick they had from poverty and hardship in to be airlifted to the nearest remote villages to the top of hospital by helicopter. the world—literally.

And, as he held on for dear “When your life hangs from life aboard the Soviet-era chopa knot, you need to know who per lurching over the mountied it—your life may depend tains toward Kathmandu, on it,” he says. “Sherpas are the Peter Zuckerman could have ones who establish the camps, been forgiven for quitting the scout the routes, set the ropes, whole book thing right there escort the clients to the sumand then. mit and take the photo that But no. “I felt really good, runs in the newspapers.”

Peter Zuckerman ’03 actually,” he remembers. and Amanda Padoan Known by locals as Chogori, “I’d been uncer tain about Buried in the Sky: The meaning “doorway to heaven,” whether this crazy project Extraordinary Story of the K2 is referred to by climbers Sherpa Climbers on K2’s was going to work out up to Deadliest Day as “the savage mountain.” The that point, and now I had a W. W. Norton & Co., 2012 book explains why that name strange sense of purpose . . is so fitting: “K2’s glaciers are . I was going all out on this book; I was riddled with fissures concealed by layers going to make it happen.” of snow; climbers step on these crevasses, Buried in the Sky, the recent bestsell- punch through, and, if unroped, disappear. er coauthored by Peter and his cousin, Blocks of ice cleave off overhanging glaciers; Amanda Padoan, tells the breathtaking avalanches roar down icy flanks. And then story of a mountaineering disaster on there’s the altitude. No human, plant, or K2, the world’s second highest peak, that animal can tolerate such harsh conditions claimed 11 lives in August 2008. The for more than a few days.”

Wall Street Journal praised the book’s Yet adventurers from across the globe “phenomenal research and vivid writing” vie every year to climb K2, which stradand Men’s Journal called it a “a narrative dles Pakistan and China. Some 300 have that is hair-raising and moving, but also reached the peak, compared to 3,000 for precise.” The book also won a prestigious Everest. On the fateful climb recounted Orwell Award, given by the National in Buried in the Sky, alpinists from across Council of Teachers of English. the world were scrambling for the summit,

by Romel Hernandez

1965

1966

Guests of the Sheik

by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea ’49 BJ wrote this groundbreaking study after living in an Iraqi village with husband Bob Fernea ’54 for two years; she wore a veil and talked to locals on their own terms.

She went on to a distinguished career in women’s studies, wrote several acclaimed books, and produced a half-dozen films.

32 Reed magazine december 2012

with the support of dozens of Sherpas. The authors do an outstanding job of braiding together the strands of the complex story and its characters, while providing just the right amount of historical and cultural context for nonaficionados.

Peter himself has traveled a fascinating path. Growing up in Southern California, he was teased for having a learning disability and for being gay (at the time he was struggling with his sexual orientation). At Reed he thrived. He majored in biology and edited the Quest. He still recalls many of the articles he published, including a controversial piece about student tattoos. Along the way, he interned for Just Out (a local gay and lesbian paper) and the Associated Press.

In many ways, Reed’s rigors, particularly his thesis on piscine sex (“Female Sexual

1969

Is Compulsory Arbitration Compatible with Bargaining?

Riprap, & Cold Mountain Poems

by Carl Stevens ’42 [econ 1954–90]

Probably the best known of Reed’s poets, Gary was also one of the first to be identified as part of the Beat movement. He was strongly influenced

by Lloyd Reynolds [English and art 1929–69] and David French ’39 [anthro 1947–88].

This landmark article led to baseball’s current system of salary arbitration, a considerable source of amusement to Carl, who was a lifelong Red Sox fan.

by Gary Snyder ’51

Ornaments and Operational Sex Ratio in Pelvicachromis pulcher”), prepared him for the challenges he has faced in his career.

“Doing a hardcore thesis really prepared me well for doing difficult, very deeply researched projects,” he says. “I remember my thesis adviser telling me, if I didn’t know something, ‘You need to find this out. You don’t get to skip over this or do a half-assed job.’”

After Reed, he got a journalism fellowship with the Poynter Institute and a job as a reporter for the Idaho Falls Post Register.

It was there that he followed up a confidential tip that led to a series of investigative articles exposing child molestation cases involving the Boy Scouts. He was relentless in reporting the story, despite the controversy that erupted and the

personal attacks against him that ensued.

The “Scouts’ Honor” series earned him several journalism honors, including the Livingston Award. His efforts to uncover the story were also the subject of an Emmy-winning documentary on PBS. Peter returned to Portland in 2007 to take a reporting job at the Oregonian. A couple of years later, he received a call from his cousin. A lawyer in California and avid mountain climber, she had known one of the men killed on K2. She had an idea for a book, but she was also nursing a newborn. She needed a collaborator, and Peter was the obvious candidate.

“I had no choice,” he writes in the introduction to Buried in the Sky, “but to quit my job, grab a notebook, and head to the Himalaya. The characters were too

inspiring, the goal too important, and the journey too compelling to resist.”

Although he had never climbed a mountain (and still hasn’t), Peter undertook his own two-year odyssey, traveling numerous times to the region and spending nearly six months doing research in Nepal and Pakistan. Tracking down key figures in remote villages was neither simple nor safe. To begin with, Sherpa naming conventions are such that thousands of people share the same name. And once he tracked the subjects down, conducting interviews through interpreters was painstaking work.

It was during one of these treks near Pasang’s village that local villagers offered him the yarsagumba—a tiny mummified caterpillar with a mushroom growing out of its head that is supposed to be a natural energy booster. Anxious to please his hosts, he ate the caterpillar, but soon found himself hallucinating. In fact, the yarsagumba made everyone else in the party deathly sick, prompting an emergency evacuation.

Fortunately, everyone survived.

The authors’ dogged pursuit of the story behind the story pays off in meticulous reportage: the rock music on a climber’s iPod (Coldplay, The White Stripes), the Buddhist good-luck charms another carries around his neck with a red string called a bhuti, the ominous “zoing” sound an ice formation called a serac makes just before it collapses..

Peter has now settled down to a calmer existence in Portland, where he lives with his partner, Mayor Sam Adams, works parttime for Basic Rights Oregon, a GLBT civil rights organization, and contemplates his next book project. Just before Buried in the Sky was published last June, he made one more trip back to Nepal to hand-deliver a copy of the book to Chhiring.

“The book shows that we all have mountains to climb,” he says. “We all have knots that we hang from, we are all surrounded by people we rarely notice . . . even though our lives may depend on them.”

1980

1982

1983

Annapurna: A Woman’s Place

Pawn of Prophecy

by Arlene Blum ’66

by David Eddings ’54

This gripping literary memoir relates the story of the American Women’s Himalayan Expedition Arlene led in 1978. National Geographic Adventure Magazine ranked it one of the top 100 adventure books of all time.

This novel of orbs and sorcerers was a runaway hit and propelled David from grocery store clerk to bestselling fantasy author. Dozens of titles followed. After his death, he left a gift to Reed of $20 million.

The Heat Bird Mei-mei Berssenbrugge ’69 “A canticle of visually stunning observations . . . meaning arrives through sensation, the surprised juxtaposition of moment upon moment.”—Poetics Journal.

Mei-mei won the American Book Award for these poems; she has written many others and won numerous awards.

december 2012 Reed magazine 33

The Battle of the Bard

Jan Powell MALS ’86 says literary editors have diluted Shakespeare’s fury.

John Reed

By Laurie Lindquist

The real Shakespeare debate is not who wrote the plays, says Jan Powell, but who reads them—and how they have been edited.

“Shakespeare didn’t just tell stories,” says Jan, who founded the Tygres Heart Shakespeare Company in Portland. “He used language to textualize what it is to be human, to fall in love, to die.” While Shakespeare’s language is dense, emotional, and epic in every way, it is not always easy to interpret—leading to the longstanding battle between readers and performers, in whose camp Jan now stands.

Shakespeare’s plays, initially written for performance, made their way onto the printed page on the sly, handed over by an actor or hand scribed during a performance in the interest of capitalizing on a play’s success. The first editions, in a quarto format, introduced typesetting or copy errors into the scripts, further compounding errors made by earlier scribes.

Only with the publication in 1623 of Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories & Tragedies, known as the First Folio, did the performer and the reader have access to an authentic collection—but without the authoritative overview of William, who had died seven years earlier.

Subsequent editions were subject to modernization—spelling and punctuation current at the time—and emendation reflecting editorial interpretation. Jan is comfortable with the eccentricities in the language—often interpreted as errors by editors—and punctuation that brings the language to life, facilitating an immediate engagement between actor and audience during performance.

Shakespeare’s scripts have weathered the editing of the centuries, and continue to be subject to changes, interpretations, cuts, and additions, she says. But while editing is inevitable, modern editions tend to favor the reader and “scrub out the lifeblood” for actor and director. Jan laments that there is no published edition of Shakespeare’s work dedicated to the specific challenges involved in producing Shakespeare. “There is no starting place—and there are hundreds of text differences between one printed edition or another. Each published play is essentially a new text, created according to the editor’s individual taste, bias, knowledge, and intuition.”

The textual choices made by literary editors are analogous to the choices made by directors preparing for a production. Each identifies themes and motifs, interprets archaisms, clarifies complex character

relationships, and reinterprets the behavior and manners of the Elizabethans.

For all that, the literary editor’s staging remains “conceptual” rather than “material,” relying on hearing voices rather than hearing language voiced.

As a case in point, Jan cites the “gripping” punctuation in Orlando’s opening speech as it was rendered in the First Folio edition of As You Like It—the play she examined in detail in her doctoral dissertation, Mind’s Eye: Theatrical Editing of Shakespearean Text.

Some editors have chosen to break up the speech by replacing the “Folio colons” with punctuation suited to reading, such as commas and periods. But Jan suggests that the colons strengthen the connection of one phrase to another and build intensity; substituting commas changes the intent and dilutes the energy and emotion on which a performer must draw. “The theatrical editor

1986

1989

1990

Jan Powell (center) in rehearsal for Othello with Tygres Heart Shakespeare Company, 1996.

A Walk in the Woods

Geek Love

Lee Blessing ’71

By Katherine Dunn ’69

By Robert Chesley ’65

Two diplomats, an American and a Soviet, try to break their nations’ nuclear deadlock face to face in an elegant drama that was nominated for both a Tony Award and a Pulitzer Prize—and was loosely based on a real episode.

This powerful, darkly comic novel about carnival misfits is an underground classic and was a National Book Award finalist. Begins with a line from The Tempest: “This thing of Darkness I Acknowledge mine.” Katherine has also written Attic, Truck, Guyana, and Why do Men have Nipples?

This book of homoerotic plays includes Night Sweat, Jerker, and Dog Plays. One of the best known playwrights of the San Francisco gay scene, Robert wrote some 26 plays, many of which are still being staged today. He was also a theatre critic and composer.

34 Reed magazine december 2012

Hard Plays: Stiff Parts

should assume that everything about the way text is laid out on the page will matter to practitioners, who will pay attention to capitalization, blank spaces, pauses, rhythm, meter, punctuation, and the overall shape of the text, and will find interpretive meaning in them.”

ORLANDO’S SPEECH: TWO VERSIONS

As You Like It, Act 1, Scene 1

As I remember, Adam, it was upon this fashion bequeathed me by will but poor a thousand crowns, and, as thou sayest, charged my brother, on his blessing to breed me well—and there begins my sadness. My brother Jaques he keeps at school, and report speaks goldenly of his profit. For my part, he keeps me rustically at home—or, to speak more properly, stays me here at home unkept; for call you that keeping for a gentleman of my birth, that differs not from the stalling of an ox? His horses are bred better, for, besides that they are fair with their feeding, they are taught their manège, and to that end riders dearly hired. But I, his brother, gain nothing under him but growth, for the which his animals on his dunghills are as much bound to him as I. Besides this nothing that he so plentifully gives me, the something that nature gave me his countenance seems to take from me. He lets me feed with his hinds, bars me the place of a brother, and as much as in him lies, mines my gentility with my education.

This is it, Adam, that grieves me; and the spirit of my father, which I think is within me, begins to mutiny against this servitude. I will no longer endure it, though yet I know no wise remedy how to avoid it.

Jan abhorred Shakespeare’s plays until she attended a performance at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland and experienced the energy of the spoken word. In the Reed MALS program, she focused on theatre and textual analysis. “Reed opened the world of the mind,” she says, and helped her undertake the challenge of directing: diving into script and text, and learning the intent of the playwright. Shortly thereafter, she cofounded Tygres Heart, whose name— drawn from a line in Henry VI—symbolized her commitment to her art. Combining a “ferocious, muscular, and aggressive” style and an intimacy of space, production, and language, she has continued to engage audiences, actors, and students for decades.

Her work in Shakespeare falls under the category of American performance, “a wonderful merging of English language and American physical spontaneity,” that she was introduced to decades ago by a Wisconsin theatre company and through her study with John Barton at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.

Barton gave her permission, she says, to unleash her innovative, risk-taking approach to Shakespeare, which is not unlike the “full-body commitment” the Bard employed.

Brimming with energy, Jan intends to publish theatrical editions that actors and directors can go to when they begin work on a production. She envisions editing that will support staging, inspire creativity for the director and actor, and ultimately delight the audience.

(1986 Oxford Shakespeare: Wells & Taylor, eds.)

As I remember Adam, it was upon this fashion bequeathed me by will, but poor a thousand crowns, and as thou say’st, charged my brother on his blessing to breed me well: and there begins my sadness: my brother Jaques he keeps at School, and report speaks goldenly of his profit: for my part, he keeps me rustically at home, or (to speak more properly) stays me here at home unkept: for call you that keeping for a gentleman of my birth, that differs not from the stalling of an ox?—his horses are bred better, for besides that they are fair with their feeding, they are taught their manage, and to that end riders dearly hir’d: but I (his brother) gain nothing under him but growth, for the which his animals on his dunghills are as much bound to him as I: besides this nothing that he so plentifully gives me, the something that nature gave me, his countenance seems to take from me: he lets me feed with his hinds, bars me the place of a brother, and as much as in him lies, mines my gentility with my education.

This is it Adam that grieves me, and the spirit of my Father, which I think is within me, begins to mutiny against this servitude. I will no longer endure it, though yet I know no wise remedy how to avoid it. (theatrically edited by Jan in 2011)

See more at www.janpowell.us.

1991

1992

1992

The Virtual Community

The Trail Home

by Howard Rheingold ’68

by John Daniel ’70

Jaydium

by Deborah Ross ’68

Howard was among the first writers to recognize the social implications of the internet and explore its myriad subcultures. This book chronicles his odyssey from simulated battlefields in Hawaii to robotics labs in Tokyo.

This book of essays won the Oregon Book Award. “I should take Mr. Daniel to court for overstressing my emotional stability by revealing, in matchless prose, what a desert is all about,” wrote David Brower. “It hurts to hold back tears when they have no place else to go.”

Far in the future, an interplanetary war has ground to an uneasy halt. A freak accident sends two characters back to a time when their desert world was lush and green and an alien civilization stands on the brink of destruction.

december 2012 Reed magazine 35

The Uncharted Geography of Lena Chekhov. Odysseus. Frankenstein. Swimsuits. You just never know where Professor Lena Lenček will turn up next.

By Romel Hernandez

Fifteen freshlings sit around a square table in a Vollum classroom improvising a symphony of anxiety—cracking knuckles, clicking pens, flipping pages in their copies of the Odyssey—awaiting the arrival of the professor and the beginning of their very first conference of Hum 110. “I guess she’s going to make us squirm a bit,” someone mutters with an uneasy glance at the clock on the wall, and a few students snicker.

At precisely 10:33 a.m., Professor Lena Lenček [Russian 1977–] materializes in the doorway, a vision in ivory down to her fishnet stockings, eyes round and bright behind the oversized frames of her chic eyeglasses.

Three minutes late, her timing allows her to make a grand entrance. “Good morning,” she announces, a trace of Slovenia in her accent. She drops her books on the table and grins. “I believe you are my class!”

Convinced that a classroom is a community, Lenček begins with what she calls “rituals of welcome and hospitality.” She asks the students to take turns introducing themselves (or rather, to answer the deeper question: “Who are you?”) and to describe their expectations of the course.

She scribbles her own name on the blackboard. “The mark above the c is called a haček—sounds like ‘hot chick.’” And about the course she says, “I’m excited, I’m nervous, and I’m willing to trust that somehow we will all work it out.”

Next she asks students to rise and promenade clockwise around the room,

1993

making eye contact, shaking hands, and greeting each other in an adaptation of a traditional Native American greeting circle.

She reminds them of the importance of using both the left and right sides of their brains, of listening to their guts as well as their minds. By the time they get around to Homer, the students are primed to talk about Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus.

For the next hour, Lenček runs the conference with virtuosic enthusiasm, throwing out questions, urging students for “more, more.” As students make their points, some confident, some tentative, she jots them down on the blackboard, editing as she goes, clarifying and sharpening, making connections, spinning the observations into a tapestry of ideas—a narrative. “Let’s see,” she says, “if we can make what we’re saying into a story.”

Since 1977 Lenček has written her own extraordinary story at Reed. She has built the Russian department into one of the most rigorous and respected undergraduate programs in the country. She has also made her mark as a prolific author, penning critically acclaimed books on a vast and idiosyncratic range of subjects, from a cultural history of beaches, to a survey of Portland architecture, to How To Write Like Chekhov.

She has spanned the globe with her voyages, sailed the Nile on a felucca, and chronicled spring break in Panama City, Florida. She is a painter, pianist, epicure,

1995

1999

The Ear, the Eye and the Arm

Loving Wanda Beaver

White Oleander

Three kids acquire superhuman abilities as the result of a nuclear meltdown in 2194 and encounter a ragtag assortment of criminals in the underbelly of Harare. This book won a Newbery Honor in 1994; Nancy has written several other well-received novels for young adults.

Alison won an O. Henry Award for the title story in this collection, described by one reviewer as “juggling quirky compassion, delicate observations, and surprising truths.”

Astrid’s mother murders her ex-lover through a diabolical method. Astrid survives a hellish succession of foster homes only to confront a stark choice: should she testify against her mother?

This bestseller was adapted for the screen in 2002.

by Nancy Coe Farmer ’63

36 Reed magazine december 2012

by Alison Baker ‘75

By Janet Fitch ’78

leah nash

equestrian, and connoisseur of kitsch. She speaks Slovene, Russian, Italian, French, German, and Serbo-Croatian (“The number contracts or expands,” she notes, “depending on fatigue and alcohol consumption”) and is proficient in both Latin and Old Church Slavonic.

“She is so brilliant and worldly, and she has such a generosity of spirit,” says former student Mara Zepeda ’02. “Her passion and personality really are a model for how to live life.”

Famed for her style—designer dresses and scarves, glittering silver jewelry—she adds a dash of glamour to a campus better known for jeans and flip-flops. “Lena doesn’t just come into a room,” says her longtime colleague Evgenii Bershtein [Russian 1999–]. “Lena enters a room.”

Alenka Helena Maria Lenček entered the world in 1948, born in Italy to Slovene parents who had fled the civil war in what was then Tito’s Yugoslavia. She was born on February 29—Leap Day, her excuse for being what she calls “dyschronic.”

While she was still an infant, the family moved to Trieste. Her father taught at a Slovene gymnasium and moonlighted as a radio commentator; her mother hosted a children’s radio program while raising Lena and her older sister, Bibi. In her book The Beach: The History of Paradise on Earth, she writes about those idyllic days swimming in the sapphire waters of the Adriatic: “Almost every day of summer during my childhood in sunsplashed Trieste, we made a pilgrimage from our urban apartment to the beach . . . . Virtually every phase of those endless days—especially, the shifting temperament of the beach, the tides, and the moods of the sea, sequentially unfolding from dawn to nightfall— remains indelibly fixed in my mind.”

At the time, however, the family was effectively stateless (Trieste was then a Professor, author, translator, traveler, collector, mentor, and—yes, artist. Welcome to the protean career of Lena Lenˇcek, pictured here at home with a series of watercolors she painted on a sabbatical visit to Tuscany.

1999

2000

Overtime

by Philip Whalen ’51

A quintessential Beat poet, Philip displays humor, intelligence, and honesty in this collection, which demonstrates what he called “continuous nerve movie.”

2001

The Girl Pretending to Read Rilke

Nickel and Dimed

Summer intern Bronwen McCuddhy must prove herself worthy to join a team probing the mysteries of genetics, when an unexpected telegram makes her question who she really is and what she wants from life.

In this classic piece of undercover reportage, Barbara worked as a waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, and Wal-Mart clerk, chronicling what life is really like in America when you make $6 to $7 an hour.

by Barbara Riddle-Dvorak ’64

by Barbara Ehrenreich ’63

december 2012 Reed magazine 37

Lenček divided “Free Territory” similar to Berlin), and the political and economic uncertainty prompted the family to set sail across the Atlantic. Lenček was 8 years old. That journey was, in many ways, the most pivotal trip in a life shaped by travel. She vividly recalls a moment on that voyage—aboard the U.S.S. Independence, no less—when the ship set off a jaw-dropping fireworks display midocean on the Fourth of July.

“That experience of being an immigrant, the instability of those years—there’s a sense of insecurity,” she says. “That’s why I’ve always felt like an outsider, someone distrustful of institutions.”

Once in America, the family lived a peripatetic life, moving between Illinois, Massachusetts, and New York. Lenček’s

“It was a big adventure,” she says. “I expected Reed to be in the middle of the woods!”

At Reed, she found the opportunity to create a Russian program almost from scratch. The department had just undergone a complete turnover, so she and colleague Asya Pekurovskaya [Russian 1980–81] revamped the program, with an intensive emphasis on language and linguistics, plus a unique three-semester overview of Russian letters from the medieval period to the present. That framework is still in place today, more than three decades later.

“She brings a sense of intellectual excitement to everything she does,” says her colleague Bershtein. “She understands that to ask a good question is more important than the answer.”

,which she wrote with emergency room physician and entrepreneur Gideon Bosker, whom she met at a Reed party in the early 1980s. The dynamic couple share authorship of their daughter, Bianca, now in her 20s and working as a writer and editor in New York City, as well as a string of books on a dazzling range of subjects. The pair are now separated personally and professionally, but remain good friends.

Frozen Music is written in a precise style that is at once erudite, with its descriptions of “machicolated parapets” and “delicate quoining,” yet expressive and accessible in its prose: “As an art form, architecture has much that it holds in common with sculpture, but even more that is shared with music: a structure that intelligently apportions light through a threedimensional space can radiate all the magic

“What I love about Reed students is their willingness to take chances.” —Lena Lenˇcek father, Rado, earned degrees from the University of Chicago and Har vard and went on to teach Slavic studies at Columbia University, where her mother, Nina, worked as a librarian. The family home was always open to intellectuals and artists, and Lenček was mesmerized by what she describes as a “relentless seminar” around the dinner table.

Lenček attended Barnard in the late ’60s, when the campus and the country was in upheaval—Vietnam, civil rights, feminism.

Although she was by no means a radical activist, she honed a distrust of institutions which often put her at odds with her conservative father. She considered anthropology and oceanography, but her love of literature—Crime and Punishment, in particular—led her to Russian. After Barnard, she went to graduate school at Harvard. When she went on the job market, she looked to the West Coast, in part to explore a new part of the world, but also to escape the shadow of her formidable father.

Lenček’s first venture into popular culture was Frozen Music, a critical analysis of Portland’s architecture and architects

and passion of the perfect musical phrase.”

From that point on, the pair just kept writing. Lenček says her approach was more academic and Bosker’s was “more rock and roll,” which made for excellent chemistry. “One of the great joys of our relationship was our ability to collaborate—there were always creative sparks flying,” Lenček says. The pace was remarkable, considering that she was also teaching fulltime and raising their daughter (she reckons she was among the first women faculty members to take a maternity leave).

Although the subjects sometimes seem obscure—salt and pepper shakers, wallpaper, swimsuits—the books are always intelligent and insightful. Of her obsession with kitsch, she explains, “It’s a miniaturization of the world you see in salt and pepper shakers, in drinking glasses, in snow domes [all of which she’s collected at one time or another]. It’s about the ways we package this bewildering, massive world and bring it indoors, take it and hold

2002

2002

2002

Creations of Fire

by Cathy Cobb ’81 et al.

Meet the hedonists and swindlers, monks, and heretics who sweated in garages and over kitchen sinks to discover substances such as plastic, rubber, and aspirin in this engaging history of chemistry.

38 Reed magazine december 2012

Lenček is firmly fixed in the pantheon of the greatest professors at Reed, says former student Michael Kunichika ’99, now a Russian and Slavic studies assistant professor at New York University. “Lena has this capacity to push you to these ideas you didn’t realize you could have.” She cares about her students as people, encouraging them to pursue their passions wherever they might lead. “She was so incredibly supportive and helpful,” he notes, “regardless of whether you wanted to become an academic or a fashion designer or anything else.”

“My conviction is that we all actually have a sense of what we need to be doing in life, but too often we obscure or deny that consciousness,” Lenček says. “My job as a teacher is to help my students tune into their passion—why they’re here in the world.”

It’s go in quiet illumined grass land.

by Leslie Scalapino ’66

“An enlightened work singing of death, physical pain, social fearfulness, and where when or whether one is,” wrote Alice Notley. “You can’t stop.”

Leslie was a leading experimentalist poet, publishing some 30 books of poetry.

Chicken: Self-Portrait of a Young Man for Rent

by David Henry Sterry ’78

David was a wide-eyed son of 1970s suburbia until he was lured into a much darker world—servicing the lonely women of Hollywood by night.

The package from Italy has finally arrived.

Lenček grabs a kitchen knife to slice through tape and starts unwrapping dozens of watercolors she painted during the sabbatical she spent in Tuscany last year.

Her toothless toy poodle, Dylan, scampers about the living room in her home in northwest Portland, where landscapes

by the acclaimed Oregon painter Harry Wentz and his students, Arthur and Albert Runquist, gaze upon whimsical sculptures by her friend, Margarita Leon, and childhood artwork by her daughter, Bianca.

Lenček unrolls the striking watercolors of olive orchards, the head of a pig at a butcher shop, the marbled ruins of Pompeii. “Ah,” she says, clapping her hands together. “I’m so happy!”

The paintings set the scene for one of her most ambitious projects yet: the translation of Pavel Muratov’s epic The Forms of Italy. Muratov (1881–1950) was a modernist polymath—a writer, intellectual, art historian, journalist, soldier, and ladies’ man. The British social critic Clive James wrote that Muratov “shows just how brilliant somebody can be and still be a forgotten man.” Exiled after the Revolution, Muratov spent the rest of his life wandering Europe. He wrote novels, essays, and plays, but his exhilarating travelogue of Italy—banned in the Soviet Union and rediscovered only recently—is considered a masterpiece.

According to Lenček, Muratov was a master of sprezzatura, a term coined by Renaissance writer Baldassare Castiglione (1476–1529), which she defines as “the art of artless artfulness”—a studied nonchalance that masks one’s true feelings.

The project is a perfect fit. Muratov’s interests mirror many of her own: travel, architecture, art. “It seemed like a good way to synthesize the two branches of my work—my writing on cultural phenomena, and my teaching on the literary heritage of Russia,” she says.

The project will also serve as an intellectual bookend for her story at Reed. She calls it “the long goodbye.” She is not certain exactly when she will retire, but she is committed to teaching two more years.

There’s no doubt, however, that she will leave an indelible mark on Reed.

“Lena has an imagination that allows her to be inquisitive about virtually everything,

2003

2003

Traveling companions: Lencek and her toy poodle, Dylan.

and she’s full of surprises,” says her longtime friend and colleague Roger Porter [English 1961–]. “She is dazzlingly brilliant, but she has an inspired outrageousness about her, and she doesn’t take herself too seriously.”

If “life is handed to us as an empty vessel,” Bosker says, “hers is a vessel wellfilled, with an overflow she has shared so graciously and generously to nurture others who eventually take their own path.”

Lenček certainly has taken her own path. Like Muratov, she is a perpetual traveler, both geographically and intellectually, chasing her passions to remote corners of the map. The thread that binds everything and everyone together is her passion for stories—the stories of Homer, Dostoevsky, and her own students.

“Stories are the most intimate way in which we as a species can leave our mark in the universe,” she says. “They do so much work—they delight, they stimulate, they teach, they provoke, and . . . what’s the word? Ah, yes—they enchant.”

2004

West of Kabul, East of New York: An Afghan American Story

Magnificent Failure: Free Fall from the Edge of Space

The day after 9/11, Tamim sent an anguished email to 20 friends, discussing the attack as an Afghan American. The message reached millions and led to this book about his struggle to unite the two halves of his identity.

In 1966, former truck driver and pet store owner Nick Piantanida set a new record for manned balloon altitude, parachuted, and survived a free fall of 23 miles—just.

This book is a real-life tale of adventure, space history, and a plummeting pioneer.

by Tamim Ansary ’70

bob libby • Citrine & Blue photography

it and control it. We’re creating these tiny shrines to our vision of the world.”

Lenček chose these projects with a maverick disregard for what her academic colleagues might think. She writes about what excites her: “You know how it is— you get an idea, you start a project, and you’re like, Wow! Yes!” “Lena’s such an original thinker,” says Bosker. “She has a passion for research and discovery, for seeing the world in novel ways—and that’s all part of her work in the humanities.”

Her signature book with Bosker, published in 1998, is The Beach, which the New York Times Book Review praised as “engagingly eccentric.” The authors are pictured in swimsuits on the back cover in a photo taken by their daughter. The Beach is both a scholarly history and a philosophical meditation on the myriad ways beaches have shaped human experience over millennia. Moving at a breathless pace, diving from idea to idea, the book covers subjects from swimwear to spirituality to sex.

It comes as no surprise that Lenček’s favorite place in the world is her cottage near Neakahnie Mountain on the Oregon coast—a cozy place with knotty pine walls and an ocean view. She makes the drive west most weekends to escape the city and recharge her mind and spirit in solitude. “I feel I’m at the place where the elements come together, forever changing,” she says.

“There’s so much drama going on—the surf, the sun, the rain, the wind, the fog, the mountain itself—that it makes me feel quite at peace.”

by Craig Ryan ’77

Close Case

by Alafair Burke ’91

Investigating the brutal murder of a hotshot journalist, Samantha Kincaid finds herself caught in the middle of a personal—and potentially dangerous— struggle between the Portland police and the DA’s office. Third title in Alafair’s acclaimed Samantha Kincaid series.

december 2012 Reed magazine 39

Rediscovering Lloyd Reynolds A long-lost calligraphy manual of Lloyd Reynolds is finally published.

By Charles Lehman MAT ’67

After he began teaching at Reed in 1929, Lloyd J. Reynolds privately studied paleography “with pen in hand” and continued to do so for many years thereafter, laying solid historic groundwork for his own calligraphy and teaching of his specialty, italic handwriting. Then in 1954, the scholarteacher Reynolds revealed himself as a master scribe, publishing his first handwriting manual, Edged Pen Alphabets, a small scholarly booklet including a handlettered portfolio of historic and modern letterforms.

In response to the increasing instructional needs of his students, Reynolds then hand lettered a comprehensive set of instructional exercises for italic handwriting and calligraphy for students “of all ages,” Italic Lettering & Handwriting Exercise Book.

According to Richard Abel ’48, then manager of the Reed College bookstore, the exercise manual was produced by Reynolds one page at a time on a mimeograph machine in the faculty room for his students at Reed and the Portland Art Museum. When the pages were made available in the student bookstore, Abel saw sales increasing and even becoming a wholesale item for other bookstores. He and Reynolds then published the exercise manual, the internationally famous “puptent,” in 1956 through Lawton-Kennedy in San Francisco.

While drafting a third handwriting manual dealing not only with details of producing italic letter forms but also substantially with the psychology of the scribe at work, Reynolds anticipated its

2004

publication in an article, “Free Rhythm and Speed,” published in the Bulletin of the Society for Italic Handwriting (No. 21, Winter 1959–60). In attempting to explain a new exercise to students, which would help provide a rapid transition from set italic to free italic, Reynolds used six folksy expressions, such as “You are trying too hard,” “Get the feel of it,” and “Let go,” to help them adjust their work. Reynolds reported in the article, “I find that it is requiring a booklength exposition to present my method of producing these six attitudes which are necessary to any apprentice to a craft. I am almost through with the first draft, and the book should be off the press by the summer of 1960.”

In spite of the enormous amount of work spent on what is easily his most significant writing, Reynolds chose not to publish his third manual, Italic Lettering, Handwriting & Calligraphy, apparently due to the lukewarm reception given it in private reviews by three scribes/scholars he respected.

The manuscript consists of 102 numbered typescript pages with occasional copy changes pasted into place, numerous handwritten illustrations pasted in place, and many others pasted separately on 13 white boards. It was left upstairs in Reynolds’ desk at the art studio office and discovered after his death in 1978.

In the introduction to his new work, Reynolds explains that his writing is a “text book or craft manual to be used in training teachers and subsequently as a reference and source book by those same teachers in college or high school classes.”

Drafted as a companion for use with the highly successful exercise manual, the

2004

The Moment’s Equation

by Vern Rutsala ’56 “This wonderful book of poetry, which was a 2005 National Book Award finalist, is filled with scintillating visions of life, home, work, and family expressed in accessible language through which the poet magnifies daily events into art.”

—National Book Award Judge

40 Reed magazine december 2012

new book has two major parts. Part one systematically leads the student with thorough commentary and diagrams through the process of learning to write a basic Set italic with an edged pen. Part two leads the learner through various exercises to develop a kind of “thinking and feeling within his hand,” to write with rhythm that will “gain power, grace and expressive potentialities,” and to develop “a feeling for form.”

Part two begins with a quote from the British scribe Alfred Fairbank, “The line and shape of Italic is an expression of movement,” and then presents Reynolds’ profound teaching about italic handwriting and calligraphy as vital rhythmic movement. As in part one, Reynolds’ running commentary addresses his readers, the teachers, as though he is present preparing them gently but thoroughly to work with their students.

The manuscript was finally published

by Alcuin Press in 2011. We here present some excerpts.

2005

The Great Divide

by John Sperling ’48 et al.

Forget red state/blue state. The real divide in U.S. politics is Retro America (the South, Plains, Mountain West, and Appalachia) vs. Metro America (the coasts and the Great Lakes). John founded the University of Phoenix.

Prime Numbers: A Computational Perspective

by Richard Crandall ’69 et al.

“It’s rare to say this of a math book, but open Prime Numbers to a random page and it’s hard to put down. Crandall and Pomerance have written a terrific book.”

—Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society

On Free Hand In making the transition from set hand to free hand it is of the utmost importance that the student have the proper understanding of what is involved. If he concentrates upon speed, he will waste time and effort. Two other considerations are much more effective: (1) the student must persist at all times in writing Italic, and (2) he must concentrate on making the elliptical shoulders to h,m, and n. If he writes only Italic, the pressure of circumstances will force him to write as fast as the limit which is safe for h,m, and n.

At the beginning of the transition the teacher’s main concern is with three psychological impediments: (1) the student’s fear of losing the letter-form when he accelerates, (2) his growing lack of self-confidence and his discouragement, and (3) the spasm, or cramping of the fingers and hand, which is intensified during this period.

The student who can write Italic rather well with his eyes

closed (except for connections in two-stroke letters, unevenness of line, etc.) has demonstrated something far more important than he realizes. He has advanced considerably in the craft by showing that he is beginning to ‘get the feel of it.’

This is of basic importance . . .

It is a kind of knowledge which his body and especially his hand is acquiring Peripheral vision The purpose of training one’s awareness of peripheral vision, at this time, is to develop kinetic imagery, so that the hand may be freed from the strict supervision of the mind and of central vision. The next exercises are designed to accustom one to a reliance on kinetic imagery . . .

One’s natural writing size will be revealed by blind writing. Lay most stress, however, on the student’s watching the sensation in his own hand.

This will improve his feeling for the tools and materials and his feeling for the movement which creates good form.

2007

2007

2008

The Great Man

The Portland Red Guide

by Kate Christensen ’86

by Michael Munk ’56

When noted painter Oscar Feldman dies, he leaves behind a wife, a son, and a sister—all duly noted in his New York Times obit. He also leaves a mistress and their twin daughters. Now two rival biographers are circling around the survivors. This novel won the 2008 PEN/ Faulkner award.

Subtitled Sites and Stories from Our Radical Past, this book offers a glimpse into Portland’s rich radical heritage.

“Sat down on my sofa and couldn’t put it down until I finished,” wrote former Portland Mayor Tom Potter.

“Fascinating!”

Pig Candy: Taking My Father South, Taking My Father Home Lise Funderburg ’82 Pig Candy could fit into several genres— including narrative nonfiction, memoir, travelogue, and biography—but essentially, it’s a book about life, death, and barbecue.

december 2012 Reed magazine 41

Lloyd Reynolds How Fast is Too Fast?

The musician or athlete just does what he has to do without special thought or eye-control. He experiences a ‘mass of undifferentiated sensations that make one aware of the body and its condition’, an experience called ‘coenesthesis’ by the psychologist.

This general awareness, with the writer thinking only of the words, is the integrated state which is our goal.

Let it be stressed: the purpose is to build better kinetic images; speed must be looked upon as incidental. The student is to develop his maximum safe-writing speed, not just speed.

When the student hears the word he is to visualize it as a form. He should make the joins as a continuous gesture.

Rhythm Before he can go ahead he needs further discipline.

First he must learn to write at a regular, even pace, in a rhythm with a regular beat . . . if he is to write with ease any passage of poetry or prose that requires a little sustained effort.

In writing a long prose quotation, the work is less tiring and proceeds more rapidly if the pen moves in a sustained regular beat. The pen movement is, in effect, continuous, flowing rather than metronymic.

Chancery & Free Calligraphy No one should try Chancery Cursive capitals who still has difficulty with the proportions of the set capitals . . . Not only must the proportions be inoffensive, but the curves full, the straights really straight and the horizontals firm. Swash (flourished) capitals demand split-second timing by the writer. Balanced constructions are absolutely imperative.

Once the student has thoroughly learned all these safe constructions— learned them so well that he has them ‘in his fist’, and can produce them rapidly and spontaneously without prior deliberation, he is prepared to make his first attempts at free calligraphy.

The quintessence of free calligraphy is its swift, spontaneous rhythmical movement, which builds a single vigorous form out of a word or phrase.

Free rhythm Take a few minutes to speak of movement as gestures . . .

Crystals, fir trees, volcanic peas, stream courses, reeds – each has a form, a direction of movement, a particular kind of thrust into space, which is the visible and distinguishable manifestation of an impulse. . . . As in earlier dictation exercises, the student learned to experience joined sequences of letters as continuous, unified rhythmical impulses, he now can try seeing the word and phrase as a total, unified gesture. Watch the impulse coming to the hand—the impulse that is both the meaning of the word or phrase and at the same time its unified graphic shape.

2008

2008

2009

American Nerd: The Story of My People

Hinduism: A Reader

by Benjamin Nugent ’99

Deepak juxtaposes classic Hindu scriptures with works of reformers and radicals to illuminate the new face of contemporary Hinduism.

He has also written Classical Indian Philosophy and An Introduction to Madhva Vedanta.

An engaging look at the history of nerds and nerdiness. What makes Dr. Frankenstein the archetypal nerd?

Where did jocks come from? Can nerds be cool? If not, why is America obsessed with them?

42 Reed magazine december 2012

edited by Deepak Sarma ’93

Past Due: The End of Easy Money and the Renewal of the American Economy

by Peter S. Goodman ’89 New York Times business reporter traces the root cause of the Great Recession— the gargantuan loads of debt that Americans took on to pursue their dreams, abetted by a complicit banking industry.

Letters as expressive forms Any page of printing has a gesture, a stance. The stance of each letter is in harmony with the stance of the page. Most of us never see it consciously, but students of the letter-arts must learn to look closely and to be aware of what they are seeing. A letter form is always more than an abstract symbol for a sound, it is also an expressive gesture.

Typography A skilled typographer also knows how to arrange the type he has chosen in an appropriate total design (layout) so that this gesture will have its maximum effect. Type face and layout, integrated, are a total form, a complex harmonious gesture that has meaning in itself.

The student of the letter arts must pursue the question of how the form (gesture) of a particular type face relates historically to the culture which produced it.

As craftsmen, we must learn to look kinetically and to see intuitively. Just as important, we must make the study of cultural history one of our favorite preoccupations.

Italic as expressive form What can be said of the gesture of Italic? First, I shall risk an incomplete and overly simplified summary of the positive characteristics of the Renaissance humanists: a love of classicism, of order, proportion, symmetry, and harmony and interest in humanity and faith in its potentialities, a devotion to

ideals of scholarship, a respect for calligraphy, a feeling for tools and materials and an insistence on proper technique in using them, and an intense interest in the problem of how to lead the good life . . . But what of our modernized form of Chancery Cursive, the Italic: does it express in its gestures any qualities of human dignity and grace? Unquestionably it does have dignity, proportion, harmony, human warmth, and a beauty surpassing that of any other cursive handwriting style.

I believe that it is something of this feeling about Italic that draws people to it today.

Rhythm and meaning If one is acutely aware of word meanings, of their denotations and connotations, and is responsive to nuances of rhythmical movement, he is often able to interpret a particular word or phrase by the rhythmical movement of his pen, provided he has the technical training and the experience. As the inflections, tone, pitch, speed, volume, emphasis, etc., of a living voice make a word a vital expression, so may rhythmical movement of the pen provide an equivalent when the word is committed to a writing surface . . . .

If written skillfully in free rhythm, words look like what they say. It is far more important, however, that they move in the manner signified by the words.

A letter is a letter, not a picture of anything. It is not a picture of rhythmic movement; it is rhythmic movement.

2010

2011

2012

The Age of Orphans

Zazen

by Laleh Khadivi ’98

by Vanessa Veselka ’10

Comrades of the Quest

by John Sheehy ’82

A Kurdish boy is orphaned in a massacre and then raised by one of the Iranian soldiers who killed his parents. The Independent called this novel “remarkable for its beautiful and brutal poetry.” Winner of a Whiting Writers Award.

In a dystopian America on the verge of war, Della makes hoax calls about false bomb threats, but realizes too late that she may be part of something bigger when her phony targets go up in flames. Won the PEN/ Robert Bingham Prize.

The raw, dramatic, underground history of America’s most distinctive college—yes, Reed!—as told by the people who know it from the inside.

—Compiled by Chris Lydgate ’90, Jim Kahan ’64, Gay Walker ’69, John Sheehy ’82, Kim Durkin ’13, Daniel Ku ’13, and Laurie Lindquist. Blame errors, omissions, and howlers on Lydgate.

Reediana Books by Reedies

Lew Welch ’50 Ring of Bone

(city lights, 2012)

“I want the whole thing,” wrote poet Lew Welch: the moment when what we thought was rock, or sea became clear Mind.

Lew was on the ultimate beatnik quest, searching for Zen unity and for clarity of vision, and he spent his entire life, all 45 restless years, chasing after his elusive Grail. A lean and graceful ladykiller, a rangy redhead and one-time track star, Welch did LSD on Stinson Beach with Gary Snyder ’51. He road-tripped with Kerouac. After a brief, disastrous stint as an advertising copywriter, he drove taxis and school buses and found himself, over and over, lonesome and drunk, trying to remake himself as he wandered, sadhu-like, from a hermit’s cabin in the Trinity Alps of California, to San Francisco, to a job on the docks in Vancouver, Washington. Finally, in 1971, depressed and visiting Snyder’s northern California home, he wrote a suicide note and retreated to the woods with a revolver.

He left behind just three slim volumes of poetry, a few scattered songs, some essays, some drawings, and a mishmash of unfinished work.

Luckily, City Lights Books has just published Ring of Bone, a thick collection of Lew’s work. The book is a feast of lucid language and holy insight, even if it is at times sloppy in the way of beatnik bacchanals. Consider “I Saw Myself,” in which the poet stoops over a glassy mountain creek, to behold his own angular face: I saw myself a ring of bone in the clear stream of all of it and vowed, always to be open to it that all of it might flow through.

44 Reed magazine december 2012

Wo n d e r p r e v a i l s h e r e , even when life stings. In “Anecdote of Tangerines,” Lew decides to spend his last 15 cents on eight tangerines—a gift for the young lady he’ll see that evening.

But then, once he visits the fruit stand, things sour: “the son of a bitch slipped 4 spoiled ones in/and the girl phoned up/breaking the date.” Lew eats the tangerines himself: alone in my room spitting the seeds into a dish.

They were sweet.

Another poem, 19 words long and called “The First Warm Day of The Year,” is meanwhile a happy riff that ends with a wise, painacquainted moment of revelation: Hundreds of us, haunch to haunch on every bench in Central Park eyes closed, faces pointing at the Sun, we’re turning as the Sun turns.

The words here are never fancy. Lew didn’t see poetry as a rarefied venture; it was, rather, about grabbing words out of the American air. In one late essay, he calls language “the din of a Tribe doing its business. You can’t control it,” he says,” you can’t correct it, you can only use it as it is.” The art comes in the listening, and when cabbie Lew drives a contented postman home from a parade, his ear is spoton. “I carried/the American Flag,” the poem ends. “It looked real/nice.”

Ring of Bone goes astray when it endeavors, as so many admiring posthumous collections do, to include almost every scrap Lew ever wrote, including, as

editor Donald Allen describes it, “fragments cannibalized from long philosophical poems . . . never completed to [Lew’s] satisfaction.” These bits beg to be skimmed, and Lew’s songs, rendered here in the poet’s own cramped handwriting, are likewise not destined for the next Reed College sing-along.

Still, there is something behind Allen’s inclusion of 50-odd uncollected poems, for they show Lew’s great, troubled mind at work, and here and there they give off flashes of brilliance. In one of the last poems— “The Wanderer,” written in 1970—Welch frets over his own waywardness and then essays a diagnosis: “Perhaps he was only born/upside down, or with eyes turned in the wrong/direction.” He wrings his hands with self-reproach, but then in just two tiny words he apprehends the focus and purpose he carried through his short, ragged life. The final stanza reads: Forgive me for being so stupid for taking too much time to see.

—Bill Donahue

Defending the Citadel Marvin Levich [philosophy 1953–94] Marvin Levich, celebrated professor of philosophy and humanities at Reed for nearly 60 years, has produced (with publisher Richard Crandall ’69) an entertaining retrospective of his work in a remarkable range of fields: philosophy, history, classics, poetry, computers, and education.

First, as reviewer and former student of Professor Levich, I must confess to suffering from both bias and nostalgia. It was hard to read these 12 essays without constantly imagining how his written words, with unashamedly long sentences and advanced vocabulary, would sound uttered in his gruff cadence and punctuated by his hand gestures. The first three selections are humanities lectures (I seem to remember them), truly excellent examples of the genre, apt to make you imagine sitting in Vollum and scribbling furiously as you try to keep up.

Levich’s style owes less to Strunk and White than to Hume and Moore. Yet these essays are readable and enjoyable in a way that so many other academic productions are not—and that is because they apply the tools of scholarly analysis, with his trademark no-nonsense attitude, to issues larger than ordinarily taken up by academics. He confronts such questions as: Does Herodotus or Thucydides have the better claim to being a modern historian? What is

(Perfectly Scientific Press, 2012)

historical interpretation? What should be the impact of the ideology of relevance on humanistic studies? What role should computer technology have in liberal education?

Most of these essays do not explicitly “defend the citadel” of the liberal arts, but rather illustrate how they are practiced.

There are, however, a few that specifically address the philosophy of education. The 1969 essay, “What is the Impact of the Social Revolution on Humanistic Studies?” is an attack on the “ideology of relevance” in education. This movement of the 1960s and ’70s, that the curriculum should pass a bar of relevance to the here-andnow preoccupations of students, Levich finds to be fundamentally anti-intellectual, however much he agrees with the goals of the ideologues.

Levich qua intellectual warrior is also a stalwart defender of what I might call critical empiricism, of the strict application of reason to the facts as we observe them in nature or in texts. That, I suspect, is part of the citadel he defends. He takes curmudgeonly delight in demolishing the dogma of theorists and technophiles when it runs counter to reason and observation.

This challenging approach can be found throughout these essays, but nowhere more strikingly than in “Interpretation in History.”

This persuasive essay takes philosophers of

history to task for oversimplifying the craft of history, pretending that historical interpretation is no more than a special case of scientific explanation. Levich demonstrates that historical interpretation has many more varieties than just causal explanation of the sort analyzed by philosophers of science. He also plausibly argues that philosophers engage in this oversimplification because philosophers need bite-sized chunks of text to analyze, while historiography by its nature is complex and long form.

As his former students will remember well, Levich’s stock in trade is Socratic dialogue; in writing, he clearly enjoys skewering sacred cows and indulging a Socratic taste for irony. It is not surprising, therefore, that in one of the lectures here he challenges students to prove that some paradoxes of Socrates’ behavior and trial were not merely inconsistencies, but reflected some principled thinking.

Not surprisingly, Levich’s work has its own ironies: while he purportedly composed the first philosophy paper written on a Macintosh and championed an innovative master plan for the use of computers at Reed, he also gave a speech highly skeptical of “The Role, If Any, of Computer Technology in Liberal Education.” This reviewer—an educational technologist—also finds his verdict of “not proven” to be well argued, as far as it goes. —Larry Sanger ’93

I’ve Got Some Lovin’ to Do: The Diaries of a Roaring Twenties Teen (Vol 1) Doris Bailey Murphy ’38 [edited by Julia Park Tracey] (iUniverse, 2012) It’s 1925 and Doris, age 15, has chopped off her hair, raised her skirts, climbed out a window, and driven after a cute boy.

Seldom have the roaring ’20s had a more engaging chronicler than the late community activist Doris Bailey Murphy, who died last year at the age of 101.

Fortunately, she left behind extensive diaries that provide a vivid window into the Jazz Age and the Depression era, including her time at Reed. Thanks to her great-niece, writer Julia Park Tracey, the diaries have now found a wider audience.

In the first volume, we find Doris as an angst-ridden, independent teen

looking for kicks, innocently oblivious of the imminent economic collapse that the Depression would bring. Tracey has been promoting the book by tweeting as her great-aunt, who says things like “We had a party after school to get acquainted. I was introduced to a number of girls but I just can’t be natural. I hate to meet people.” Tracey calls Doris “an aspiring artiste and romantic . . . whose rebellious nature led her to become a young social worker, literary publisher, and arts champion.”

Sounds like a lot of students at a certain college in the Pacific Northwest. Doris was radical even by Reed standards—she

caused a scandal at the college when she chose to interview prostitutes for her sociology thesis. But she was no dilettante college rebel; she maintained her devotion to social issues throughout her long life, which included marriage to labor leader Joe Murphy, who was prominent in the Industrial Workers of the World, aka the Wobblies. What’s refreshing about her diaries, however, is her wit and her heart.

One entry reads: “Last Sunday I would have been willing to go to the end of the world with him. Today I wouldn’t go to a dog-fight with him. That’s why I’m never going to get married. Opinions change too quickly.” See TheDorisDiaries.com for more.

—Mary Emily O’Hara ’12 december 2012 Reed magazine 45

Bay Area Birds David Lukas ’93

(Lukas Guides, 2012)

Did you realize that wild turkeys can occasionally turn so aggressive they’ll chase down joggers? That pied-billed grebes are known to lurk beneath the water and peck the feet of unsuspecting intruders? That the elegant great blue heron is not above gobbling up a gopher?

This delightful guide takes a biographical approach to the wealth of fascinating fowl that inhabit the Bay Area from Sonoma County to Monterey Bay, providing enthusiastic life stories of 221 species most relevant to the area, with notes on a further 99. Along with careful definitions and distinctions, and tips on where and how to find these birds, David—an English major who worked with Gary Snyder ’51 in the Sierra Nevada—explains who they really are. —Stephanie Gustafson ’12

Cartoon Introduction to Economics, Volumes I and II Yoram Bauman ’95 (Hill and Wang, 2010 & 2011) Ever since the historian Thomas Carlyle lumbered it with the tagline “the dismal science,” economics has had a reputation for the unpleasant, which is why creating cartoons about the subject seems like a crazy idea. Yet, this is what Yoram Bauman has done. Yoram, who has a PhD in economics from the University of Washington and performs around the world as a standup economist, has written a two-part textbook on economics that will make you chuckle as well as contemplate. The book is unique because it translates economic gibberish into plain English, along with zany illustrations to help the reader grasp basic economic concepts. As a former economics tutor, I know many intro econ students who would have loved to have a text like this to guide them as they explored a whole new way of thinking about the world.

The first part of the series, which is on microeconomics, tackles every economist’s favourite guinea pig, the optimizing individual (as we all try to maximize our preferences), or, as Yoram puts it, “the selfish jerk.” The text explores whether Adam Smith’s invisible hand leads to the good of the group as a whole, game theory strategies, and how the lack of money is the root 46 Reed magazine december 2012

of all evil. And in case you ever win the $20 million lottery, there’s an entire section on whether the smarter move is to take $10 million out right now or a $1 million annuity for the next 20 years.

What’s commendable is that Yoram does not hold market forces to be the solution to everything. He demonstrates how competitive forces in the market can cause huge turmoil—like monopoly prices, inequalities, and pollution. However, he also shows how each of these problems can be solved, by taxing polluters or forming antitrust policies, which can be implemented only after understanding the limitations of the free market.

The second part of the series covers macroeconomics, which builds on

the foundations of microeconomics but attempts to answer completely different questions. Macroeconomics struggles with the two-headed beast of trying to maintain short-term stability while promoting longterm growth. The key differences of looking at the economy as an organized family (the classical view) versus a dysfunctional family (the Keynesian view) are explained to noneconomists to help them understand these two conflicting goals and issues such as the Great Depression. The phrase “too big to fail” is also explained, this time in the context of the Great Recession. This text manages to break down other important concepts, such as the working of the foreign currency market, why outsourcing is a good thing, and why economists are worried about not running out of fossil fuels. While accessible, the book is clever in the way it introduces a variety of economic fundamentals to the uninitiated.

If you’re still unsure about the difference between micro and macroeconomics, here’s a one-liner: “Microeconomists are wrong about specific things, and macroeconomists are wrong about things in general.” —NISMA ELIAS ’12

alanna hale

Karen Leibowitz ’99 with her husband Anthony Wyint.

Mission Street Food: Recipes and Ideas from an Improbable Restaurant Karen Leibowitz ’99 and Anthony Myint (McSweeney’s, 2011)

Revolutionizing the way we look at the politics of fat and food, Karen Leibowitz and husband Anthony Myint provide a thoughtful, down-toearth perspective from the forefront of the San Francisco food cart and pop-up restaurant movement, weaving together comic strips, photos, recipes, maps, and autobiography.

Dreaming to make upscale food affordable and benevolent, Myint began Mission Street Food (MSF) in a rented Guatemalan taco truck, which became an underground sensation. However, a nearby shop owner’s temper tantrum prompted the duo to reincarnate MSF twice a week as a “restaurant-insidea-restaurant,” offering diners “counterculture capital” by pairing innovative, refined dishes with trippy Chinese Communist décor. After two years of culinary imagination, the restaurant splintered into less demanding restaurants— Commonwealth and Mission Chinese Food—and the authors adapted its history, philosophies, and recipes into the book.

Mission Street Food includes recipes and insider tips on how to bring your own creations to the next level, replete with mouth-watering photos of seared pork bellies and the pioneering marrowstuffed squid. Need another reason to buy the book? A portion of sales goes to activist organization Slow Food USA. —Jennifer McNeal ’13

Virtually True Adam Penenberg ’86 (Wayzgoose Press, 2012)

Award- winning journalist and technology writer Adam Penenberg turns his considerable imagination to the challenge of creating a fictional world, a violently dystopian Southeast Asian nation in the indeter minate future.

Virtually True is the chaotic story of True Ailey, a talented journalist and recovering virtual reality addict searching for clues to a double murder. Hunted by everything from DNA-coded missiles to motorcycle gangs, True navigates the dangers of the virtual world, a brutal urban survival race, and even

a Japanese karaoke bar in a storyline as artfully fragmented as the world it takes place in. As the plot twists and turns, the reader is confronted with an atmosphere of corporate control and corruption, where anything is possible but nothing is necessarily real, and no one seems likely to live very long. At once a page-turner and a mind-bender, this novel is a thrilling and disturbing exploration of the possibilities of technology and what it might mean for the human experience, personal identity, and our grasp of what is true.

—Stephanie Gustafson ’12

Stars Above, Earth Below: A Guide to Astronomy in the National Parks Tyler Nordgren ’91 (Springer/Praxis, 2010) Astronomer Tyler Nordgren was taking a vacation in Yosemite when he first noticed it: how many visitors oohed and ahhed at their first glimpse of truly dark skies. For these visitors, the great sweep of the Milky Way was as strange and exotic a sight as the geysers of Yellowstone, the desolation of Death Valley, or the depths of the Grand Canyon.

In response, he wrote Stars Above, Earth Below, a charming guide to stargazing in America’s national parks. Each chapter is a meditation that ties a park to an astronomical body or phenomenon. A visit to Yellowstone, for example, touches on Western explorers and local Indian tribes,

dwelling momentarily on the geology of terrestrial geysers before circumambulating to the Cold Faithfuls o f S atur n’s mo on Enceladus, with water’s triple point illustrated by a photo of Saturn framed in the boiling , f lashfreezing vapors of Old Faithful on a snowy Yellowstone night. Along the way, Tyler deftly explains our evolving understanding of the cosmos with geology, ethno-graphy, travelogue, and memoir, sprinkling his own photography and whimsical astronomical artwork alongside park maps and star charts. The result is a quirky, enjoyable guide that deserves a spot in your camping box.

—William Abernathy ’88 december 2012 Reed magazine 47

Reediana Cosmosis, by Mara Manly Stahl ’59 (Limited edition, 2012). Cosmosis is a palimpsest of a life lived as a theatre and visual artist. Thus, a limited edition shares the roots of journey over time and through space, following a cartography of telling images and poetic lines. From the work’s conceptual opening, archival binding unfolding to broadsides of peril and peace, we inhabit the world that inhabits her. As we circle her concerted continents, sentient seas, revolving Venn diagrams, we are led to the wonder that is ourselves. Contact Mara at storymap12@gmail.com.

Jumna: Sacred River: An American Childhood in India,

by Charlotte Gould Warren ’59 (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2012). This memoir chronicles Charlotte’s first 11 years as the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries in India during its fight for independence and follows her coming of age in America during the turbulent ’60s. Charlotte won the Washington Prize for a previous book of poetry, Gandhi’s Lap. A Desire Path, by Jan Conway Shapin ’65 (Cambridge Books, 2012). Novelist and playwright Jan Conway Shapin researched the past to find the outlines of character and a setting for her latest novel.

“My parents went to college in the ’30s and told me tales that made me long for that intense fusion of self and history. I am drawn to stories that highlight that deep desire for meaning.” Set in the era of the Great Depression, the novel introduces readers to three exceptional individuals, whose choices in love and politics lead to tragic results. Jan reminds readers that a desire path is one of convenience and not a shortcut. See more about her work at www.janshapin.com.

Acting Obsessed, by Peter Silverman ’65 (Create Space, 2012). A thin line divides obsession from passion, and in Ginger Brossard’s life in Acting Obsessed the line seems especially thin. Ginger is a young and talented actress with a burning ambition to be on the stage. She embarks on a career with a Shakespearean theatre company in Philadelphia, but soon a rival bent on destroying her begins to stalk her. When she meets an intriguing new man, and then receives in the mail a precious gift from an anonymous admirer, Ginger becomes entangled in a

48 Reed magazine december 2012

web of lethal danger, unanswered questions from the past, and the obsession of the anonymous admirer who may have the power to devastate her life. In the end she faces a choice between security and a risky chance for happiness. The book is available in paperback and Kindle editions on Amazon, or visit ActingObsessed.com. (See Class Notes.)

Explorations in Transactional Analysis: The Meech Lake Papers,

by Bill Cornell ’69 (International Transactional Analysis Association, 2008).

This book brings together many of Bill’s articles on transactional analysis written over 20 years in his career as a psychotherapist.

Called an “intimate collection of lovingly crafted scholarly papers,” Bill’s work has been praised by scholars for the insightful questions it raises and for the unusual use of the personal voice.

“Few books on psychotherapy are as original as this one.” The papers reflect Bill’s ongoing exploration of the interfaces among transactional analysis, body-centered therapies, and contemporary psychoanalysis. Bill also served as coeditor of From Transactions to Relations: The Emergence of a Relational Tradition in Transactional Analysis (Haddon Press, 2005) and edited James T. McLaughlin’s book The Healer’s Bent: Solitude and Dialogue in the Clinical Encounter.

Photography and poetry by Karen GreenbaumMaya ’73 have been published this past year in such venues as The Centrifugal Eye, Word Gumbo, Waccamaw, poemeleon, Literary Bohemian, qarrtsiluni, and Right Hand Pointing, among others. Check out www.cloudslikemountains.blogspot.com. (See Class Notes.)

New-Media Survival Guide: For Journalists and Other Print-Era Refugees, by John Bethune ’77 (CreateSpace, 2012). John personally witnessed the rise of new media and its empowering effects, and created this highly readable guide to explain the key ideas behind online and social media. The guide covers blogging, content aggregation and curation, content marketing, eBooks, multimedia tools, and ethics in six concise chapters; a longer chapter on social networks includes helpful advice on using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and Google+. It also provides extensive footnotes and resource lists, as well as eight profiles of leading new-media journalists, marketers, and thought leaders. Whether you are currently working in a traditional media operation, looking for work, or freelancing, NewMedia Survival Guide will help position you not only to survive, but also to flourish, in the new-media revolution. Learn more at www.newmediasurvivalguide.com. (See Class Notes.)

Maverick Screenwriting: A Manual for the Adventurous Screenwriter, by Josh Golding ’82 (Bloomsbury, 2012). This book teaches screenwriters how to use the advanced narrative techniques—time, logic, and reality—that change the way we look at the world. For those who want to break the mold, as well as those who want to make mainstream films with a twist, like The Matrix, The Truman Show, or Avatar, Josh encourages writers to adopt innovative approaches which express their own unique way of looking at the world. (See Class Notes.)

“Reinventing the Song As an Artform,” by Peter Herb ’83, appeared in the online music magazine Perfect Sound Forever in October 2011. Peter explores the work of composer and pianist Ed Pastorini. (See www.furious.com/perfect /edpastorini.html and Class Notes.)

The Billionaires’ Manifesto, by Kurt Opprecht ’85 (Smashwords and Babylon Moon, 2012).

For the first time in print: the secret agenda of the 1%. An indignant smackdown to the unwashed audacity of the Occupy movement, The Billionaires’ Manifesto is the revolutionary gambit of shipping mogul Thurston H. to create a New Plutocracy and put the 99% forever in their place. (Bleeding hearts, be aware: this book contains harsh reality.)

Answers May Vary, by Dorothy Zemach ’85 (Wayzgoose Press, 2012). Twenty-five essays on teaching English as a second language were written by Dorothy, a renowned writer, teacher, and textbook author. The wide variety of topics includes classroom management, testing and assessment, teaching reading strategies, coping with cheating and plagiarism, teaching visual learners, culture shock, the value of a nonnative teacher, and recognizing and overcoming teacher burnout. This volume contains the complete collection of Dorothy’s “From A to Z” columns originally published in TESOL’s Essential Teacher magazine (2003–09).

Trial and Terror, by Adam Penenberg ’86 (Wayzgoose Press, 2012). The good news is that public defender Summer Neuwirth just won her first case, which involved a brutal rape and kidnapping. The bad news? Her client was guilty. What’s more, he knows all about Summer’s past. As Summer pursues her next

case, this time to keep an innocent woman off death row, elements of that past—a mysterious case of childhood amnesia, her police officer father’s involvement with a serial killer, a terrifying attack she survived just months earlier— entwine with her legal work, her missing mother, and her rocky relationship with a private investigator, all of which culminate in a thrilling trial . . . and terror. Wayzgoose has also published Adam’s novel Virtually True (see above).

Race After the Internet, edited

by Lisa Nakamura ’87 (Routledge, 2011). This collection of interdisciplinary essays explores the complex role that digital media technologies play in shaping our ideas about race. Contributors examine the race-based digital divide, the establishment and reinforcement of digital segregation and “ghettos,” digital codes, and biotechnology. Other examples include World of Warcraft, Native American use of digital technology, President Obama’s inauguration, and MySpace. (See Class Notes.)

Death Valley National Park Wilderness and Backcountry Stewardship Plan, edited by Candace Schaffer Lieber ’96. The plan was released to the general public for comment in August 2012.

Candace’s wilderness team in Death Valley National Park won the Wes Henry National Wilderness Stewardship Award from the National Park Service. She is also editing a volume of history papers for a small press.

The Modernity Bluff: Crime, Consumption, and Citizenship in Côte d’Ivoire, by Sasha Newell ’96 (University of Chicago Press, 2012).

In Côte d’Ivoire, appearing modern is so important for success that many young men, called bluffeurs, deplete their already meager resources to project an illusion of wealth in a fantastic display of Western imitation, spending far more than they can afford on brand-name clothing, accessories, technology, and a robust nightlife.

Such imitation, however, is not meant to deceive— rather, as Sasha argues, it is an explicit performance so valued in Côte d’Ivoire that it has become a matter of national pride. Using the consumption of Western goods to express cultural mastery over Western taste, bluffeurs engage a global hierarchy that is profoundly modern, one that values performance over authenticity—highlighting the counterfeit nature of modernity itself.

One critic calls The Modernity Bluff “a stunning exploration of the power of fakery, masking, and performance, set against larger themes of postcoloniality and modernity.” (See Class Notes.)

The Gift of Correspondence in Classical Rome: Friendship in Cicero’s Ad Familiares and Seneca’s Moral Epistles, by Amanda Wilcox ’96 (Wisconsin Studies in Classics, 2012). Amanda takes an innovative approach to two major collections of Roman letters, informed by modern cross-cultural theories of gift giving. By viewing letters and the practice of correspondence as a species of gift exchange, she provides a nuanced analysis of neglected and misunderstood aspects of Roman epistolary rhetoric and the social dynamics of friendship in Cicero’s correspondence. She also shows that Seneca both inherited and reacted against Cicero’s euphemistic rhetoric and social practices, and she analyzes how Seneca transformed the rhetoric of his own letters from an instrument of social negotiation into an idiom for ethical philosophy and self-reflection. Amanda is assistant professor of classics at Williams College.

Activities for Teaching Positive Psychology: A Guide for Instructors, by Acacia Parks ’03 (American Psychological Association Press, 2012).

Positive psychology is a rapidly expanding area of study that is of great interest to students at the graduate, undergraduate, and high school levels. But the field is so broad that those who have an interest in teaching it also encounter difficulties in locating and selecting materials. Activities for Teaching Positive Psychology, coedited by Acacia and Jeffrey Froh, addresses this problem by presenting a comprehensive set of fun, interactive classroom activities devised by contributors who are experienced teachers as well as leading scholars in their areas. The book is a rich source of ideas for all teachers of psychology, from novice to experienced instructors. (See Class Notes.)

A Penance. Poems by CJ Evans ’03 (New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2012). “Evans’ debut connects his own sense of the visible world, with all its plants and animals, its ‘cruel devices,’ to metaphors and examples drawn from an underworld of prisons and mean streets . . . his depth of emotion is real, and rare.”—Publishers Weekly.

Everyday Bicycling: How to Ride a Bike for Transportation (Whatever Your Lifestyle), by Elly Blue ’05 (Cantankerous Titles, 2012). Getting on a bike for the first time can be daunting. In

this engaging guide, Elly takes the hand of novice bicyclists and leads them through everything from choosing the right bike and wardrobe to working with city hall to make a neighborhood more bike friendly. If you haven’t pedaled a bike since Mom sold your Coast King Sting-Ray, this book can prevent you from making costly mistakes as it builds up your confidence and gives you a quick primer in bicycle safety and maintenance.

Kate Rutledge Jaffe ’06, writer, editor, and arts organizer, published two poems in the June 2012 issue of PANK magazine, “Hinterland” and “Made.” Read more about her poetry and fiction at katerutledgejaffe.tumblr.com.

“This Ain’t Yo Momma’s Muktuk: Fermented Seal Flipper, Botulism & Other Joys of Arctic Living,” by Rebecca Kreston ’07, was published in The Best Science Writing Online 2012 (Scientific American, 2012). Check out Rebecca’s blog, “Body Horrors” (bodyhorrors.wordpress.com), where she examines interactions of local geography, cultural and social behaviors, and religion upon communicable diseases. “‘I Got Next’—A New Arrival Explores New York through Pickup Basketball” by Isaac Eger ’11 was published in the New York Times in July. The article told the story of Isaac’s move from Sarasota, Florida, to New York City. He contributes regularly to the blogs The Pickup: Liberating Sports from the Heathens, at www.the-pick-up.com, and Not a Pro Team: The Blog of a Reed College Basketball Player, at notaproteam.blogspot.com.

The Ghostman, by Roger Hobbs ’11 (Knopf Doubleday, 2013). When a casino robbery in Atlantic City goes horribly awry, the man who orchestrated it is obliged to call in a favor from “Jack.”

Only 30 or so people are sure this man exists, some believe he’s dead, and none know anything at all about his true identity. Those are closely guarded trade secrets for an exceptionally talented criminal.

But as he struggles to clean up the mess left in the wake of the bungled heist, he finds himself pursued simultaneously by the FBI and other parties—a situation that requires every gram of his ingenuity, especially when offense and defense become meaningless terms. Roger’s debut novel, begun while he was a senior at Reed, set off a spectacular bidding war in the publishing world. Warner Brothers studio reportedly paid six figures for the rights to make a thriller based on the book.

december 2012 Reed magazine 49

In Memoriam The Pursuit of Understanding Carol Creedon [psychology 1957–91]

By Lauren Rusk ’80

Carol Creedon was a woman of vast, unflinching understanding, who lived with great gusto, warmth, and love. A psychology professor from the 1940s to the 1990s, she spent her life seeking to increase her understanding of how people act and finding ways to help them.

After a decade of teaching at Vassar, Swarthmore, and Bard, and doing research in New York hospitals, Carol joined the faculty at Reed, where she’d wanted to work all along. For many people at Reed she became, in varying mixes, an influential teacher and counselor, a mentor and lifelong model, and, as in my case, an irreplaceable friend.

Initially her wide array of courses in human psychology drew students in, especially those eager to branch out after an introductory grounding in animal research. Examples of her many offerings were courses in abnormal, developmental, educational, and social psychology; personality; motivation; and the creative process. When I first studied with Carol in 1976, the fact that she taught human-centered courses had given her a reputation among students for being “the one who’s not a behaviorist.” Privately, Carol chuckled at this idea. After all, in conference, she insisted on the value of describing people’s behaviors rather than their “so-called character traits.” At home, she used operant conditioning to teach her Siamese cat to fetch, a game he then demanded at all hours.

She also conditioned herself, indulging in pleasure reading only after reaching a milestone in some professional (or aversively domestic) task.

Her areas of expertise included behaviorism— and much more.

Carol’s eclectic interests in psychology all stemmed, I believe, from the desire to develop knowledge that could measurably improve lives.

Evidence was, for Carol, the sine qua non. Steve Lindsay ’81 has never forgotten the session in which he “asserted that love cannot be quantified, and she nailed me by asking, ‘Why not?’”

As an undergraduate at UCLA, Carol aspired to become a labor organizer and then, finding that public speaking was not her forte, looked forward to “an academic job in which I would be paid for doing what I like most, which is reading and thinking.” For Carol, however, the two spheres of action and contemplation were 60 Reed magazine december 2012

July 5, 2012, in Portland.

one. Majoring first in political science, then economics, and ultimately psychology, she thought about ways to make a difference.

This pragmatic idealism informed Carol’s teaching. In the late 1970s she was particularly excited about a course she’d just designed, Community Psychology and Social Change, which “applies psychological principles to the analysis of a wide range of community problems” such as “poverty, racism, drug addiction, juvenile delinquency, and adult crime.” Her enthusiasm persuaded a number of students to abandon the societal isolation then common at Reed and plunge into the course. With mixed emotions we received her customary half-inch-thick syllabus, including pages of optional extra readings and a long list of community agencies to choose from in carrying out a fieldwork project. We could either serve at an agency while analyzing its “structure, function, and ideology” or perform a systematic evaluation—one of Carol’s passions—to discover “the degree to which a social program is achieving its objectives.”

Most of Carol’s courses had a “real-world” component, “one of the few opportunities at Reed,” Gena Anderson ’99 recalls, to “see how theory and practice collide.” Placements included crisis centers, a suicide hotline, a short-stay psychiatric hospital, a drug-detox facility, homeless shelters with children’s programs, and, of course, schools. Rosanne Kermoian [psychology 1987–90] marvels at how well Carol prepared both the agencies and the undergraduates and hence how many organizations seemed eager to employ the talents of Reed students. Clearly Carol enhanced Reed’s town-gown relations. Her students moved back and forth between the campus and the community, got a feel for the profession they were considering, and gained experience that would make them attractive to top graduate programs.

Similarly, Carol’s educational psychology course helped make students who earned a Master’s of Arts in Teaching at Reed [1959–79] especially desirable to schools across the nation.

In her oral history interview with Jim Kahan ’64, Carol attributes her succession of majors at UCLA to a series of dynamic professors. “It’s sort of embarrassing, I know. It should [have been] the subject matter which grabbed me,” she confesses. “But I think the

initial interest had to do with marvelous teaching, which I later on tried to emulate but never quite managed, in my view at least.”

Generations of devoted Reedies would beg to differ.

Carol embraced Reed’s conference style of teaching even though “it could be a little scary.” Steve Lindsay remembers her having “the patience and courage to just sit there looking engaged and mildly expectant if discussion lagged.” Carol “rarely leapt in, but she somehow inspired us to dig in” to complex issues. Myron Rothbart ’62 writes that she had “an uncanny ability to paraphrase the most confused, inarticulate comment, in a way that made it sound like a major contribution to the discussion, and to the field of psychology! At base, it conveyed a respect for the student, and a focus on—above all else—the ideas.”

In a similar vein, Dell Rhodes [psychology 1975–2006] recalls how gracefully Carol would steer department meetings back on course. “She would sit quietly while others arm wrestled, then calmly begin, ‘Have we considered . . .’ or ‘Didn’t we previously agree to . . . .’”

In tumultuous times she’d also calm the waters by “arriv[ing] with a bottle of sherry.”

Carol’s most profound effects, however, generally took place one to one. For many people, the process began in her office in the basement of Eliot Hall. Carol’s desk, a table for provisions, and a visitor’s chair clustered by the door; at the other end, a high window faced the duck pond. In between, a maze of bookshelves, files, and “boxes of who-knows-what” crowded the space, scattered with “flotillas of yellow sticky notes,” Dell remembers. “Finding something in Carol’s office”—a library for the entire department—“meant negotiating narrow passageways through her holdings.”

Many former students report feeling intimidated in Carol’s presence at first, then quickly being set at ease, which was my experience as well. This tailored woman in her 50s, who had just asked some question about why I was there, gave me a long, searching look through large-framed glasses. What could she discern?

Whatever my excuse, I’d probably come to try and imagine changing my major from painting to psychology. More deeply, what I wanted was a friend. Groping about for a coherent answer, I looked up and saw her generous mouth stretch

into a smile and her eyes glint with pleasure.

From the clutter around her desk emerged the wherewithal to make hot chocolate and various sorts of tea. Before long I was airing a tangle of excitements and self-doubts, and feeling, most of all, appreciated, fortified.

After such encouraging beginnings, numerous students modeled themselves after Carol, becoming professors, researchers, and clinicians. In some cases, without her aid at crucial times, this might not have happened.

Anne Dickerson Riley ’79 writes that Carol’s “unwavering faith in my ability to succeed at Reed inspired me to stay when my personal life was in chaos, to complete my thesis when I wanted to quit, and to submit it for publishing when I didn’t believe it was worthwhile.”

Carol helped many students devise compelling research, write about it, and present and publish their findings. Contributing her credentials as coauthor—never first author—often smoothed the way forward. She urged those who doubted themselves to apply to graduate schools “just to keep your options open.”

Carol counseled these students academically and personally. “I went to her with my fears, anxieties, and heartbreaks,” Steve Lindsay writes, “and she responded with compassion, dry humor, and sound, practical advice that made a real difference.” Later, beginning to write up his thesis results, Steve found himself “completely blocked; Carol helped me break through by advising me to start the first draft as a letter to my mom.” He has since “repeated this advice to many students.” Carol “was also a black-belt editor,” according to Tim Pantages ’75. Having confidently turned in his first chapter, he “was appalled when she handed it back” to see “so many penciled-in comments and corrections that it was difficult to read the original.

To add insult to injury, every one of her comments was inarguably better than what I had written.” Further, Tim continues, “no matter what arcane subject . . . I was researching,” Carol “would pull out an armful of seminal books for me to read and invite me back the next week to discuss them.” In all, he writes, “she was a powerful mentor who still has an impact on me almost 40 years later.” “She set the bar high,” and then “higher still,” Holly Page Bryant ’91 declares, “trusting you until you could trust yourself to reach even that higher ground.”

Carol’s influence has continued to resound through the lives of her protégés, sometimes from one generation to another. For example, Carol’s student and colleague Barbara Hort ’74 [psychology 1990–92] found her “favorite professors and best friends” in grad school to be Mick Rothbart ’62 and Mary Klevjord Rothbart ’62, who had studied with Carol earlier. Likewise, after Carol recommended to David Sears ’98 a book about cooperative learning, based on research by Robert Slavin ’72 and Nancy Madden ’73, he wrote his own

Carol, with students, 1978

thesis in that area and then “headed off to work [with] Nancy and Bob.” Younger psychology professors at Reed also resorted to Carol’s office to get their bearings.

Marion Underwood [psychology 1991–98] remembers Carol’s encouragement in setting boundaries, her bracing empathy—along with an occasional “airplane-sized bottle of hard liquor”—and her sometimes unprintable humor. “I sometimes felt quite ‘at sea’ after Carol retired,” Dell writes. Fortunately, though, she “continued to be a presence . . . for years after her formal retirement, coadvising thesis students and raising our spirits with her laughter.”

Carol’s laugh . . . her admirers all remember that loud, almost raucous explosion of delight.

Sometimes we were left in its wake to ponder just what was so darn funny. If the door to her office or classroom were open, Carol’s laughter would echo down the hall. Her colleague Allen Neuringer [psychology 1970–2008] still cherishes that echo. And “one always felt special,” Dell observes, “when successful at eliciting a full-throated Creedon laugh.” Or else you felt, as I often did, that things must be better than you’d thought.

Carol’s restorative effects were not limited to her department. Bruce Auerbach ’69 remembers that in the ’60s Carol “served as unofficial psychotherapist to a sizeable portion of the student body. . . . There was always a line outside Carol’s door of people . . . looking for someone who would listen and help them talk through their problems. Carol did her best to keep her students and their friends sane and grounded.”

Indeed, as her son, Jonathan Creedon ’77, recounts, Carol sometimes even “care[d] for drug-stricken students at her home. She would dry them out and nurse them back to full function, all the time collecting their assignments at school and ensuring their completion so they would not fail or drop out.”

The point at which I turned to Carol for help was less dramatic but nonetheless pivotal. We

had already begun a friendship as I took her courses. One night I invited her to the movies: it was the only chance to see both Harold and Maude and Annie Hall at the Clinton Street Theater. Breaking her rule about not going out on “school nights,” Carol smiled broadly through both films—this was her kind of humor. Maybe becoming friends was simpler because I wouldn’t, after all, need a mentor in psychology. I’d decided to major in English and write a collection of poems as a thesis, choices Carol applauded. She was, of course, a scintillating—and probing—examiner at my orals. But like many other students, I might not have gotten that far without her. Plagued by anxieties, I’d flee around the city trying to write papers, and call Carol every few days from a pay phone.

She always sounded miraculously glad to talk, and amused by my latest location. Hearing her voice, I felt as if I were sitting by a great, wide river—so empathically did she practice the Rogerian technique (which had become second nature) of mirroring back one’s emotions. When Carol reflected your feelings, she did so as if they were her own. After a while she’d change the subject to what was going on with her, a gentle reminder that she needed me too. Eventually, one confessional night I described my house of cards of “incompletes,” which seemed about to fall, and I with it. Carol immediately invited me to her house—greeting me in curlers, with strawberries—and the next morning referred me to an understanding dean and a short-term therapist. When I protested embarrassment at all she’d done, Carol simply said, “Our friendship is the silver lining, isn’t it?”

Carol didn’t dwell on her own hardships, though she acknowledged having had her share.

She’d grown up as a foster child, which must have been lonely, although her father visited and kept an eye on her schooling. She’d come to Reed when there were only three other tenure-track women at the college, and was mistaken for a secretary at the psych department’s opening picnic. (Carol actually found that december 2012 Reed magazine 61

In Memoriam episode amusing and felt rather sorry for her embarrassed colleague.) With two young boys, as a mother permanently separated from her husband, Carol struggled to attend impromptu meetings when no one thought to consider child care. She smoked a great deal and finally stopped, all at once, after seeing her younger son watching her with tears in his eyes. Where, one has to wonder, did her strength come from? I think she must have found it in coming to understand human complexity. We used to joke that her favorite films were full of angst, despair, anger, and embarrassment. They rang true; that was the joy.

At any rate, Carol enjoyed herself tremendously. She relished physical and aesthetic pleasures, and had a fine sense of nuance, especially regarding people’s inconsistency. Once when I wanted something—or was it somebody?—very much, she said, “Maybe we should get someone who believes in God to pray for it, just in case,” and flashed me a sidelong smile.

When it came to sabbaticals, Carol believed in adventure. In 1970 she worked in the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania. Each day, she and a student assistant lay with binoculars atop a Land Rover, researching aggression in baboons. In the evenings, they were invited to the tribal ceremonies of the Maasai. For her next sabbatical, Carol studied the psychological and social aspects of aging in the new China.

She also hiked the Great Wall, became the only one in her tour group to use Eastern toilets, and watched a throat operation performed with no anesthesia but acupuncture, while the psychiatrist in her group fainted away.

Carol found time to make her impact felt more broadly as well. She collaborated with scholars nationwide, and in particular coedited the anthology Children and Poverty: Some Sociological and Psychological Perspectives. She held office in many organizations, in areas such as alternative education, racial equality, adult literacy, abuse prevention, and civil liberties. In addition, she reviewed educational films for the American Association for the Advancement of Science and grant proposals for the NSF. What Carol couldn’t spare the time for was cultivating “visibility.” Walking across campus, she didn’t think to schmooze, not when there were books on tape! From the advent of cassette players to their lamented (by her) demise, Carol was hardly to be seen without one buckled around her waist. Work and pleasure, closely allied, were all.

Now and then she’d play for an advisee the revival hymn “Work, for the Night Is Coming.”

“That’s the ticket! Marvelous, isn’t it?” she’d say.

“Just marvelous!”

Poet and critic Lauren Rusk ’80 teaches at Stanford University; her work appears at www.stanford.edu/~rusk.

See more letters about Carol at www.reed.edu/reed_magazine.

62 Reed magazine december 2012

Roland Radford Johnsrud ’34

August 2, 2012, in Santa Rosa, California, at age 99, from complications resulting from a fall.

Roland spent his early years in Portland and in Grants Pass, Oregon, and earned a BA from Reed in political science, writing his thesis on “Administrative Justice and the Courts of Law” with professor Charles McKinley [political science 1918–60]. After Reed, he enrolled at the University of Oregon, where he studied law and public administration before working in personnel administration with the city of Portland, the U.S. Treasury, and the Bonneville Power Administration. In 1940, he married Martha E. Maize, a native of Willits, California. They reunited in Willits following his service in the naval reserve during World War II. For nine years Roland worked in the family business, E.H. Maize and Sons, providing services in real estate, insurance, and building material sales. In 1956 he realized his dream of publishing a newspaper when he purchased two weeklies, the Lakeport Press and Record and the Lakeport County Bee. He merged the papers into one daily, the Lake County Record Bee, which he managed for 25 years. Roland was president of the board of directors for Lakeside Community Hospital and president of Rotary clubs in Willits and Lakeport. He served on the planning commission for Willits and the board of directors for the Carnegie Library in Lakeport.

He also enjoyed fishing and boating, “weekend farming,” and golfing. Roland kept a connection to Oregon, where he had a summer cabin, and chose Oregon as the setting for a short story he wrote in retirement. In 2001 Roland and Martha moved to Santa Rosa to be nearer to family; Martha died in 2011. “He remained independent, sharp-minded, dry-witted, and tuned into the events of the day, especially sports, until shortly before his death.” Survivors include two daughters and one son.

Virginia Belle Richards Corrigall ’39 June 2, 2012, in Vale, Oregon.

A passion for the landscape of eastern Oregon, acquired on childhood trips with her father, led Virginia to a job as a teacher in Har per, Oregon, after earning a BA from Reed in biology.

In Harper, she taught biology, typing, P.E., and music. She also met James Corrigall, whose family owned a ranch in Westfall. In 1945, after James completed his military service, they married and moved to the Westfall ranch, where they raised three children and Virginia learned to cook, ride horses, and drive a tractor. She clerked for the school district, taught classes, directed school plays, performed on the piano, and volunteered with the

PTA. She was president of the Westfall Mystery Club and volunteered for the Malheur County Home Extension Program. Following her husband’s death in 1995, Virginia stayed on at the ranch for many years. She was good-spirited and congenial to the end of her life. Survivors include two sons and a daughter, four grandchildren, three great-grandchildren, and her brother, Oren R. Richards ’45.

Mahlon Brewster Smith ’39

August 4, 2012, in Santa Cruz, California.

Prominent social scientist Brewster Smith reported that he arrived at Reed “an all too proper kid from Corvallis” and two years too young for his class. He was the only child of an English professor from Syracuse, New York, who had been appointed dean at Oregon State. Brewster joined the Young Communist League at Reed, using the pseudonym Stephen Daedalus on his membership card. Poor class attendance in his junior year led to his leaving Reed. “I was well launched in psychology by Monty Griffith [1926–54], but I was otherwise an academic basket case, having also majored in adolescent identity turmoil, radical politics, and the lure of the Skidmore Fountain.” He found the study of psychology to be beneficial in his search for selfknowledge. He transferred to Stanford, where he earned both undergraduate and master’s degrees. “Though I didn’t graduate from Reed, I’ve always been grateful to Reed as the place that let me become who I am.” He and roommate Pete Stratton ’38 reminisced often about Reed, providing fodder for a friend’s limerick: Two students, their minds not too stable, Have a fondness for myth and for fable.

They go on without heed Babbling fondly of Reed While their friends go to sleep at the table.

Shortly after he began his doctoral studies at Harvard, Brewster was drafted into the army.

During World War II, he developed tests to classify prospective aircrew members and later did psychological research in the U.S. and overseas, contributing his findings to The American Soldier: Combat and Its Aftermath (1949). Back at Harvard, he completed a thesis in social psychology and later published Opinions and Personality based on his project. In 1947, Brewster and Deborah Anderson were married. They raised a daughter

and three sons, including Torquil Smith ’78.

Brewster taught at Harvard, Vassar, New York University, UC Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and UC Santa Cruz, where he was vice chancellor for social sciences. He also worked at the Social Science Research Council in New York City for several years. During his career, he served as editor of the Journal of Social Issues and the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. He was a member of the American Psychological Association (APA), fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and chair of advisory committees for the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Mental Health.

Brewster thought of himself as a generalist, based in social and personality psychology, and he played an active role in the humanistic division of the APA. He wrote more than 300 publications, including his collected writings, For a Significant Social Psychology. Among his many honors, he received the Kurt Lewin Memorial Award, the most prestigious honor in social psychology; the Harold Lasswell Award for scholarly contributions to political psychology; the APA award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest; and the Western Psychological Association’s Lifetime Service Award. He was exceptionally proud of the testimony he gave in a case before a federal appeals court in Richmond, Virginia—a case that led to the Supreme Court’s decision to ban school desegregation in Brown vs.

Board of Education. “My politics as a Reed student got me hauled up before the Jenner Committee during the episode of McCarthyism, and kept me blacklisted for a decade at NIMH, but I have continued my Reed commitments to active concern with social problems, including race and student protest in the ’60s, and war and peace.”

Survivors include Brewster’s wife, children, and five grandchildren.

Margaret Joyce Bailey Pancoast ’41

June 11, 2012, in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Margaret grew up in R ainier and Salem, Oregon, and completed a BA from Reed in sociology. She served as president of the Reed Wo m e n ’s A t h l e t i c Association and played extramural volleyball, basketball, and badminton. Upon graduation, she won a fellowship in sociology from Western Reserve in Cleveland, earning an MS in social work in 1943. She later wrote about the early years of her life in great detail, and her daughter, Louise Smith, who provided the details for this memorial, has donated Margaret’s memoirs to Reed. Margaret met Ross Pancoast in Ohio during World War II. They married in 1944 and moved to Washington, D.C., when he was

assigned to the Pentagon. Margaret volunteered in schools in Montgomery County, Maryland, for the Girl Scouts, and for the National Women’s Party. She worked as a media assistant in Montgomery County school libraries, then substituted as a special education assistant in elementary school until her complete retirement at the age of 81. She enjoyed working with children and found special education particularly rewarding. She and Ross traveled extensively. She also enjoyed gardening, square dancing, line dancing, and handiwork. Says Louise, “Although my mother spent most of her life after college on the East Coast, she remained proud to be from Oregon and to be a Reed graduate. She always remembered her years at Reed and the friends she made there with great fondness and kept in touch with some of her Reed friends throughout their lives.”

In addition to Louise, survivors include Margaret’s son, Jim, and granddaughter, Nicola.

College, Alexandria campus. Peggy volunteered for numerous arts and environmental groups, including the Washington Metropolitan Chorus, the Arlington Symphony, the Virginia Watercolor Society, the Goose Creek Scenic River Advisory Board, and Goodwin House Bailey’s Crossroads, where she lived in her later years.

National affiliations included Planned Parenthood, Future Homemakers of America, the League of Women Voters, the National Federation of Democratic Women, the National League of American Penwomen, and the Democratic Party. She established the Margaret W. Fisher Scholarship to support financial aid at Reed. She was predeceased by her husband in 1992 and by a son in 2011. Survivors include three daughters and three sons; 17 grandchildren; 16 great-grandchildren; and her partner and companion, Frank Barsalou.

Margaret Saunders Winslow Fisher ’43

August 12, 2012, in Palo Alto, California.

June 7, 2012, in Arlington, Virginia, from complications of lung cancer.

Margaret Winslow Fisher ’43 and Joseph Fisher in 1985.

Peggy studied at Wellesley for two years before marrying Joseph L. Fisher in 1942. His service in the army brought them west, and Peggy enrolled at Reed, where she completed a BA in French. In 1947, the couple made their home in northern Virginia. Peggy continued her education at George Washington University, earning an MA in education, and at Virginia Commonwealth University, earning a BFA in painting and printmaking. Joe was an economist and served three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives. The couple were founding members of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Arlington. Peggy gave a copy of their book Living Religion to the Hauser Library, dedicating it to “the intellectual and spiritual growth of all who are fortunate enough to study and think at Reed College.” The book also features some of her poetry. For more than 50 years, Peggy enjoyed creating and teaching studio art and sculpture. Her work was shown in colleges, libraries, and galleries in northern Virginia. The Margaret W. and Joseph L. Fisher Art Gallery, dedicated in 2001, resides in the Schlesinger Center at the Northern Virginia Community

Richard M. Hoffman AMP ’44

Richard studied at Reed in the premeteorology program during World War II and served in the army as a communications officer. After the war, he went home to Minneapolis and completed a BS in mechanical engineering at the University of Minnesota. “I feel very fortunate to have spent one year at Reed,” Richard wrote. “That, plus my two and half years at the University of Minnesota, gave me a diversified educational experience in preparation for a successful life.

Thank you, Reed College.” Richard operated the R.M. Hoffman Company, a business for mechanical power transmission components, for over 30 years, and he also published books about the mobile home industry through his company, Hoffman Books. He and his wife, Caroline, who were married for 62 years, raised a daughter and two sons. Richard’s lifelong passion for learning and libraries directed the couple’s successful efforts to establish two significant libraries within their communities. Survivors include his wife and children, seven grandchildren, and one great-granddaughter.

Jacqueline Cecile Jump Kolb ’45 July 16, 2012, in Seattle, Washington, from heart disease.

Jacques grew up in Montana, speaking French ahead of English. Her father had been a medical corpsman during World War I in France and met her mother there. Language fascinated Jacques, who refined her French and gained proficiency in German in high school. On a trip to France, with a layover in London, she met two Portlanders who raved about Reed, she said in an interview in 2004. “When we returned to Montana, I was at the point of trying to decide what to do next. I remembered what the Portland ladies in London had told me about Reed.” Highlights of her time at Reed included a humanities conference with Dorothy Johansen ’33 [history 1934–84]; attending teas in Anna Mann; listening to music in Capehart; december 2012 Reed magazine 63

In Memoriam and meeting Béla Bartók, who gave a lecture on his method of composing. At Reed, “everything was intellectually exciting.” Her friends included Arthur Church ’45, Don Leonard ’45, and Lois Dobbie Sigeti ’46. Jacques’ interest in Russian, which Reed did not offer at the time, led her to the University of Michigan and to Barnard College, where she completed a degree in international studies. She worked for the Army Map Services in Washington, D.C., in 1946, transliterating Russian maps into English.

After the war, she worked as a clerk-typist in Seattle. Jacques was married to architect and University of Washington professor Keith R. Kolb. Her husband and two sons survive her.

Bryce Elliot McMurry, premedical training 1945–47

April 27, 2012, in Lake Forest Park, Washington.

Bryce graduated from University of Washington in 1941 and went directly into military service at the U.S. Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida. After flight training, he was transferred to Washington, D.C., where he served as a pilot for various officials—including one who would become a good friend, Admiral Richard Byrd. Bryce retired from active duty in 1945 and came to Reed to prepare for medical school at the University of Oregon. He did an internship and residency at Doctors Hospital in Seattle and served on the Hope Ship in Peru. Wanting to assist his patients in recovering from psychological trauma, he completed a residency in psychiatry at Northwestern Medical School and the University of Washington. He practiced psychiatry at Northwest Hospital until retiring in 1990 and was recognized as a Life Fellow and Diplomate in his field. Bryce and Ellen Loomis married in 1942 and raised a daughter and three sons, including Kevin McMurry ’77 (spouse Diane Freeman Siegel McMurry ’79). In retirement, the couple lived in Ocean Park, Washington. Bryce was a charter member of the Long Beach Peninsula Rotary Club and a member of St. Peter Episcopal Church. He also enjoyed sports and climbed Mount Rainier in his 50s. “Bryce loved life and was grateful for every opportunity to serve others.” Survivors include his wife and children, nine grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren.

Christoph Mathew Heinicke ’48 June 17, 2012, in Santa Monica, California.

B or n in Ger many, Christoph and his mother and stepfather fled the Nazi regime and settled in Portland in 1936. His brother, Thomas L. Frazier [né Ulrich Heinicke] ’42, followed later. Christoph earned a 64 Reed magazine december 2012

BA from Reed in sociology, an MA from Northwestern, and a PhD in social psychology from Harvard, graduating summa cum laude. On a four-year Commonwealth Fund Fellowship, he did child analytic training in London with Anna Freud and British psychologist John Bowlby.

Christoph was a pioneer in mother-infant attachment research and was highly regarded as a teacher and supervisor; he was noted for his sensitivity to the therapeutic relationship and his commitment to teaching. In 1972, he joined the faculty at UCLA; he never retired. Christoph coordinated UCLA’s clinical practicum for child psychiatry fellows and codirected the resident child psychotherapy clinic. His studies of mothers and young children, done in order to determine the essential features of a preventive, relation-based therapeutic intervention to help foster child development, became the foundation of the UCLA Family Development Project, which he directed for over 25 years. He received the Lester Hofheimer Prize for best research in psychiatry from the American Psychiatric Association, the departmental teaching award from the UCLA psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences department, and the Bowlby-Ainsworth Award from the New York Attachment Consortium, among others.

Christoph and Sally R. Ritchie married in 1958.

They had three sons, including Andrew M. Heinicke ’83. In 1979, Christoph wrote, “From the vantage point of a full professor in a medical school, as well as a practicing psychoanalyst in the Los Angeles community, I do feel that Reed was the most important educational experience in what is, I hope, a creative career.” Survivors include his wife, sons, and three grandchildren.

Mary Kriger Struve ’48 June 17, 2012, in Berkeley, California.

Mary grew up in a Russian émigré community in Harbin, China, and in the French Concession of Shanghai. Her family arrived in the U.S. in 1938.

She attended Black Mountain College and studied a year at Reed, and then completed undergraduate and master’s degrees at UC Berkeley.

She and her husband, Glen Struve, collaborated on translations of Russian literature and traveled extensively in the U.S. and Europe. Mary enjoyed walking her dogs in the Berkeley hills and photographing birds, flowers, and landscapes. Survivors include a daughter and son, six grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.

Her husband died in 1985.

Montana Elma Sands Bryant ’49 May 23, 2012, in Oceanside, California.

A Canadian by birth, Montana was raised in Montana state and moved with her family to Seattle in 1940. She attended Reed for a little more than a year. She worked for the Boeing Company and RCA, and enjoyed traveling, square dancing, and outdoor sports. Montana was predeceased by her husband, Harry E. Bryant, and is survived by two brothers.

Alan Maier Gittelsohn ’50 May 13, 2012, in Berkeley, California.

A native of San Francisco, Alan was among the first pedestrians to cross the Golden Gate Bridge on opening day in 1937. He followed his brother, William A. Gittelsohn ’48, to Reed, where he was elected class president in his first year.

Military duty interrupted his studies at the college, and he later completed undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of California, Berkeley. He was the first to earn a doctorate in biostatics from Berkeley. He reconnected with Sharonn J. Goodman’48 when she moved to San Francisco for work after graduating from Reed. They raised a daughter and two sons, including Michael A. Gittelsohn ’77. Alan became director of biostatistics at the state health department in Albany, New York, before joining the faculty as a professor of biostatistics at Johns Hopkins in 1964. With one of his first students at the university, John Wennberg, he later codirected the Cooperative Health Information Center of Vermont. Developing the method of small area analysis, their research discovered variations in rates for the utilization and distribution of health care services and common medical practices. First published in 1973 in Science, their method had a broad influence in health reform throughout the world. Through the years, statistical projects took Alan to places like Yugoslavia, the Philippines, and Peru. Travel was a happy part of the couple’s years together and their family life. Alan also enjoyed woodworking and was particularly adept at making cabinets and furniture. After retiring in 1992, Alan and Sharonn moved to Hanover, New Hampshire, where Alan continued his work at Dartmouth. In 1995, they returned to their roots, settling in at the top of the Berkeley hills.

Alan plunged into researching and writing a book, Doctor Caused Death, which was nearly completed at the time of his own death. Survivors include his children, six grandchildren, two great-grandchildren, and a brother. Sharonn died in 2011.

Peter Mortan Ralph Jacobsohn ’50

July 16, 2012, in Fremont, California, from injuries sustained during an elephant ride.

Peter was born in Berlin, Germany, and left the country in 1933, serving as an escort to his brother, Ulrich B. Jacobsohn ’50, and sister Lillian, and guiding them safely into Ethiopia.

The family lived in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, for two years before war broke out. They moved to Thailand, where Peter developed a love of the Thai culture, language, and people. Not yet 20, Peter became a surveyor and a foreman for construction projects on the Bangkok docks. His fluency in several languages led to

a position as an interpreter and guide for Allied Headquarters and a ticket to the U.S. after the war. He was “self-schooled and paperless” when he applied for admission to Reed, but his scores on entrance examinations earned him sophPeter, by portrait artist omore standing. “Reed George Stratton, 1968 was my first study experience bypassing high school. It was also my first getting to know a lot of friends, particularly President Odegard [1945–48], who helped me immeasurably, and Ernie Bonyhadi ’48.”

At Reed, Peter pursued water polo, tennis, skiing, bridge, and chess. He launched a lecture program that invited speakers, such as Eleanor Roosevelt, to campus. He studied with A.A. Knowlton [physics 1915–48], intending to major in theoretical physics, but after two years transferred to UC Berkeley to study architecture and environmental design.

He earned both a BA and an MA from Berkeley, and worked with the internationally recognized architect Eric Mendelsohn. He also met Nina Belogolovy, a Russian immigrant from Korea who was a graduate student. They were married in 1949 and raised two daughters and a son. Peter was project architect with Bechtel Corporation for a few years, managing large-scale projects for local industry and for the navy, and he taught evening courses at Heald College in San Francisco. He eventually started his own architecture firm in Fremont, California, in 1955. “Fremont is the most gracious city in the world,” he said in an interview in 1966. “I wouldn’t exchange it for any other.” Peter was instrumental in planning, preserving, and beautifying the city, and completed more than 1,000 projects during his career. In his public obituary, we read that his commitment to the community was a hallmark of his life. “Peter designed buildings that reflected his love of the community, its varied ethnicities and cultures of the region.” He served as director of the Fremont Chamber of Commerce for 11 years, and he was a city commissioner. He was a member of the American Institute of Architects and the Historical Architectural Review Board, and an active member of Rotary for over 50 years. He also taught architecture at Ohlone College and sat on its advisory council for interior design.

Peter fostered education and the development of young artists. His death at age 88 came as the result of an injury sustained during an elephant ride in Thailand. Survivors include his wife, two daughters, son, nine grandchildren, his brother, and his sister.

Loretta Catherine Murchland Freepons ’51

August 9, 2012, in Prosser, Washington.

Loretta hailed from Ellensburg, Washington, and attended Reed for a year. She left the college and joined her parents to become a pioneer farmer north of Prosser in Washington’s Roza Irrigation Project. In 1949, she married a young Roza farmer, Gaylord Freepons, and they raised seven children. Loretta was a voracious reader, and a seamstress, gardener, tractor driver, and bookkeeper. She enjoyed Lower Valley Community Concerts, Capital Theatre events, and the Seattle Opera. Survivors include her children, 15 grandchildren, and four greatgrandchildren. Her husband died in 2004.

Lester James Lindberg ’60 June 24, 2012, in McMinnville, Oregon, as a result of a traffic accident.

Jim shows his Viking spirit by taking a morning dip in the Pacific at Newport, Oregon, in 2009.

Jim earned a BA from Reed in physics and did graduate work at the University of Maryland and at Portland State University. He enlisted in the army in the early ’60s and served for three years, including a year in Germany. During that time, he and Lucie M. Fischer began corresponding, which led to their marriage in 1965. Jim was an excellent electrician and a master at repairs, though unconventional (yet successful) in his approach. In 1972, the family, which by then included a daughter and son, moved to Valley Junction, Oregon, where Jim became co-owner, with his brother-in-law, of S&C Lumber; he operated the business for 25 years. Jim also built a home, raised farm animals, gardened, picked wild berries, hiked, hunted, swam, and mined for gold. He was a cook at Spirit Mountain Casino in Grand Ronde, Oregon, for nine years, and, at age 71, mastered a new career, handling finances for his daughter and son-in-law’s home medical equipment company. Jim was proud of his Swedish ancestry and made strong coffee (“mud”) in the same drip coffee pot for 47 years. He also had a great sense of humor and entertained others with his stories.

He loved the challenge of complicated mathematics problems, ones that appeared “unsolvable,” and would work out the problems on a paper napkin while sitting at the kitchen table.

He tutored his children and six grandchildren in mathematics and science, and taught a niece chemistry and physics via the telephone—all excelled in their academic endeavors. Jim’s sister, Suzanne, who provided the details for this memorial, wrote, “My brother was a marvelous individual, with emphasis on the individual. He was very proud of his Reed education, as was his whole family.” Jim’s wife, children, and grandchildren also survive him.

John Garvin Helmick ’62 January 6, 2012, in Vallejo, California, from complications of lung cancer.

John came to Reed from Boise, Idaho, where he was a violinist and concertmaster in his high school orchestra and with the Boise Symphony Orchestra.

He was also a champion tennis player and a National Merit Scholar. David C. Newell ’62 recalled playing music with John at Reed: “He would get his violin and we would go over to the president’s house and, with me at the piano, play through some Mozart and Beethoven violin sonatas.” John earned a BA from Reed in physics and then entered the Peace Corps in Ghana, where he taught mathematics and science. Back in the U.S., he briefly worked in nuclear physics, but found the field philosophically challenging to his pacifist ideals. He attended San Francisco State University and lived in Eugene, Oregon, before returning to Boise to assist his aging parents. Primarily self-taught, John mastered several languages and worked as a translator of Greek and German. Survivors include three siblings. “Those who would like to honor John’s memory will do something, large or small, in the cause of world peace and justice.”

Casper F. Paulson Jr. MA ’62

April 29, 2012, in Independence, Oregon, from multiple myeloma and renal failure.

Bud earned a BA in secondary education at Augustana College, an MA from Reed in psychology, and an EdD in educational psychology from the University of Oregon. At Reed he organized an intramural wrestling team. Bud wrote, “I was challenged intellectually at Reed, as never before, and learned to cope with the intellectual demands of rigorous scholarship and inquiry.

It helped me expect, look for, and discover the depth and complexity in the nature of all things encountered in my life.” He taught for 10 years in the Portland public schools and then accepted an offer to join the teaching research division at Western Oregon University, a position he held december 2012 Reed magazine 65

In Memoriam for 23 years. In retirement, he volunteered in a reading program for second grade students.

He and Marilyn-Jane Nelson were married for 58 years and raised two sons and a daughter.

The couple had a longstanding connection to the Lutheran church and served as volunteers in their congregations and as delegates to church conventions. Bud also had a lifelong interest in radio, which he developed as a boy while spending months in bed rest recovering from rheumatic fever. Survivors include his wife and children, three grandchildren, and two brothers.

Herbert E. Smith ’62

April 14, 2012, in Richland, Washington.

Herbert grew up in Seattle and attended Reed, later graduating from the University of Washington with a degree in chemistry. He moved to Richland in 1965 to work as principal scientist for Westinghouse Hanford Company, and lived in the Tri-Cities for 47 years. Herbert enjoyed sports cars, hot-air ballooning, and travel. His photographs were included in exhibitions in Seattle and Richland. Survivors include his partner, Sue Fritts; her grandchildren and greatgrandchildren; and his two sisters.

Joseph Aaron Rosenbaum ’66 May 31, 2012, in New York City, unexpectedly from a heart attack.

Joe grew up on East 12th Street in New York City and lived in the same apartment near Union Square throughout his life. Visitors to the city always received a kind welcome from Joe, who was a great tour guide to all things New York. He was an astute student of the political left, and he was funny, wry, warm, and observant of life around him. He left New York to attend Reed for two years, and he loved talking about the experience, especially the people he met there. He also attended SUNY, Stony Brook, and studied film briefly at New York University. Joe was a voluminous reader who loved music. Friends remember well this verse

by Charles Wesley that Joe sang a capella when he was at Reed: And am I born to die?

To lay this body down?

And must my trembling spirit fly Into a world unknown— Details for this memorial were provided by Chuck Bigelow ’67, Leon Cantor ’66, Elizabeth Shaw Cronbach ’66, Michael Cronbach ’65, Larry Glickman ’65, Bob Gottlieb ’65, Tom Roeper ’66, and Tom Rossen ’68.

Barbara Alison Brownell D’Angelo ’66

August 9, 2012, after two and a half years of living with cancer.

The oldest of seven children, Barbara lived her early years in Milwaukie and Carver and 66 Reed magazine december 2012

graduated from Clackamas High School before joining a proud family tradition of going to Reed, as did her parents Gloria Mierow Misar’45 and Barry C. Brownell ’43, her grandparents, Ambrose Brownell ’17 and Helen Phillips Brownell ’19, and 12 other relatives, including aunt and uncle Patricia Brownell Lee ’43 and Robert P. Brownell ’46. She graduated in psychology and earned a PhD in clinical psychology from Washington State University in 1970. That same year, while traveling in Italy, she met her husband of 40 years, Severino D’Angelo, who composed this memorial piece. Barbara’s career included teaching psychology at San Jose State University and at Fullerton State University.

Later she opened a private clinical practice in Orange County. Her students and patients remember her as inspiring, young, beautiful, and energetic. Most recently she finished a novel she started 20 years ago. She lived long enough to see Bitter Vendetta in print. She also played piano from her heart. “Barbara was brilliant, fun, and always open to new ideas. She spoke several languages and read extensively. She had true empathy for people and animals and was one of the most selfless, generous people in existence,” Severino wrote. Barbara is survived by her loving husband; her daughters Sandra and Danielle; grandchildren Sophia, Carter, Liam, and Calia; and siblings Charles, Janice, Marilyn, Curtis, Roger, and Marcia. “Barbara will be greatly missed for her incredible sense of humor, her generous and loving spirit, her love of life and people, her appreciation of the world and the environment. The world will never be the same.”

Gregory Wayne Pierce ’70

July 8, 2012, in Seattle, Washington, from cancer.

The son of Samuel Pierce ’43 and Lucille Harris Pierce ’43, Gre g g re w up in Eastmoreland and graduated from Cleveland High School. He began his undergraduate work at Willamette University before transferring to Reed, where he learned to kayak, gained an appreciation for the work of Joseph Conrad, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa

with a degree in economics. After Reed he went to the British Isles and worked on a farm in Scotland. In the spirit of Conrad, he traveled to Africa, taking passage on a barge on the Congo River. Throughout his life, a sense of adventure led him to further travels, many with his family, in Africa, Europe, and South America. He kayaked, rafted, and hiked in some of the most beautiful wilderness in North America. He competed in marathons, including two Boston Marathon events, even while undergoing treatment for the 12 years of cancer that eventually ended his life.

Greg began his career as an economic analyst with the Oregon legislature and then worked for the Oregon Department of Revenue. He went on to earn an MA in economics from Tufts and worked for the Washington state legislature as a staff member for the state committee on ways and means—three years as staff director of the committee. He then served as deputy director for tax policy and administration with the Department of Revenue. In 1996, Greg signed on as a contract lobbyist for the Washington Roundtable. His public obituary reported: “Despite years spent working in a political environment, he eschewed partisanship as detrimental to the best interests of the state. As a result, he earned respect from members of both parties for his honesty, integrity, and ability to help bring together those with disparate points of view.” Hundreds gathered at his memorial service in Washington in July, including former governor, now Ambassador Gary Locke. Senate Minority Leader Mike Hewitt said of Greg, “He was a true professional. He was very, very good at what he did. His word was as good as gold.” Greg and Ann Knowles, a native of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, were married in 1974 and had two daughters, Alison VanDis and Kelsey. In 1995 he married Susan Nakagawa and had a son, Max. Other survivors include his mother, Lucille; a brother, Sam; and two sisters, Nancy Hogan and Julie Huisman. A particular joy was his one grandchild, two-year-old Olivia Lucille VanDis. The family requests that memorial gifts be made to Reed in Greg’s name.

Lee Frances Sahlins Sherry ’70

August 13, 2012, in New York.

Born in Chicago to Bernard and Fritzie Sahlins, cofounders of the Second City improvisational comedy enterprise, Lee earned her degree in general literature, writing a thesis on James Joyce, “The Ineluctable Modality of the Verbial.”

She began her career as an abstract painter in 1970 and studied art at the Art Students’ League and the New York Studio School for Painting, Drawing, and Sculpture. She traveled to Europe and North Africa, and her work was shown in a number of exhibitions, beginning in the mid-’70s. She was art editor and cover designer for ROOF, a magazine created by poet James Sherry ’68. Lee and James married and had one son. Survivors include her father and stepmother.

Carl Christopher Biehl ’76

August 5, 2012, in Cardiff, California.

Born in Berkeley and raised in Diablo, California, Carl came to Reed from the Athena School and majored in biology, writing his thesis on “Resilience, Stability, and Complexity in Real and Model Ecosystems” with Frank Gwilliam [biology 1957–96]. Carl also completed a PhD in biology at UCLA. In 1985, he moved to Cardiff and served as an adjunct professor of biology at UC San Diego before becoming an investor. He lived a very full life, surfing, cycling, mountain climbing, flying, and sailing, and traveled extensively around the world with his wife, Janice Win Biehl, whom he married in 2000. “He was most well known for his keen intellect, sharp wit and humor, adventurous spirit, and unending generosity.” His endeavors helped create the San Elijo Lagoon Conservancy in Cardiff to protect, preserve, and acquire land for preservation and for the enjoyment of all inhabitants—mammals, birds, insects, and plants. Survivors include his wife, mother, and three stepsons.

Brian Lowell Hanna ’83

June 13, 2012, in Fargo, North Dakota, from cardiac arrest.

Brian attended Reed for a year as a transfer student and went on to the Juilliard School on a full scholarship in dance. He joined the Bauhaus dancers and did international tours with the company until injuries ended his career. He then worked for the Red Hot Organization, producing records and CDs to fund AIDS charities. He also worked for a law firm in New York. “Brian touched many lives with his intelligence, wit, and kind nature.” Survivors include his mother and two sisters.

William C. Mithoefer ’89

August 12, 2012, in Portland.

Bill was born in Ogbomosho, Nigeria, during the Biafran civil war; his father was a U.S. diplomat, his mother an Australian nurse who was later trained as a psychologist. He grew up in Washington, D.C., Cameroon, and Ghana before coming to Reed, where his outsized personality, exuberant thatch of sun-bleached hair, and free spirit earned him the nickname “Surfer Bill.” He earned his BA in American studies and wrote his thesis on the Kefauver Committee. After Reed, Bill lived in Berkeley, California; Australia; and Maui, working construction and chasing waves. He returned to Portland, where he married Corby Watkins; together they ran Hexafoo, a home-furnishings business. Their son, Roscoe, was born in 2007.

Bill enrolled at law school at Lewis & Clark in 2009, intending to become a patent attorney.

Unfortunately, Bill suffered from depression, whose true depth was unknown to his friends and family. He killed himself by jumping off the St. Johns Bridge. More than 200 friends and family gathered for a memorial in Cerf amphitheatre. Sam Hagerman ’88, JJ Haapala ’88,

Io McNaughton ’90, Chris Lydgate ’90, and Robert Klonoff, dean of Lewis & Clark Law School, delivered eulogies; his sister Sarah sang and performed Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” on the ukulele. Afterwards mourners lit candles on one of Bill’s surfboards and launched it into the canyon under the watchful gaze of a blue heron. Bill was an avid reader and an accomplished saxophone player. He also possessed that whimsical brand of humor that is practically the hallmark of Reedies. On paperwork that asked him to list his religion, he wrote “anarcho-syndicalist.” He is survived by his mother, father, sister, wife, son, and two stepchildren. Contributions for Roscoe can be made to Rivermark Community Credit Union (www .rivermarkcu.org) 1252210-29.

Staff, Faculty, and Friends

Hugo Adam Bedau [philosophy 1962–66]

August 13, 2012, in Concord, Massachusetts, from complications related to Parkinson’s disease.

A pioneer of applied ethics, Hugo Bedau framed the national debate on capital punishment thorugh a series of influential books, starting with The Death Penalty in America (1964), which has since become a standard work in the field. Professor William Schabas of Middlesex University in England called him “one of the great scholars of capital punishment.”

Born in Portland in 1926, Bedau grew up in the San Francisco area. He earned his BA from the University of Redlands and a PhD in philosophy from Harvard. His interest in the death penalty was sparked by an episode in the ’50s, when he was teaching at Princeton. The state legislature was then considering whether to abolish the death penalty; his (then) wife, Jan, went to a hearing at the statehouse at

which a representative argued that if New Jersey abolished the death penalty, “murderers would swarm across the Delaware and Hudson rivers.” Stunned that no one stood up to rebut the statement, Bedau decided that, as a philosopher, he had a duty to contribute to the public debate.

After two years at Reed, Bedau published The Death Penalty in America, a seminal book that Professor Norman Daniels of Tufts University called “a watershed in Anglo-American philosophy. It is the premier example in this century of the systematic application of academic philosophical skills to a practical issue, and the flood of work in practical ethics that has followed can rightfully cite Hugo’s work as its starting point.”

Although Bedau only taught at Reed for four years, his impact on campus was considerable; in addition to the students he mentored, he served on the faculty committee that ultimately endorsed President Richard Sullivan’s proposal to make Reed into a university [see “Reed U,” Reed, December 2010].

(He later he said he was glad the proposal went nowhere.) His son, Mark Bedau ’76, has taught philosophy at Reed since 1991; his second wife, medical historian Constance Putnam ’65, is an active alumna who received the Foster-Scholz Award in 2010.

After Reed, Bedau moved to Tufts University, where he became chair of the department and continued his work on the death penalty. He wrote 14 books and over 150 articles in journals, newspapers, and magazines, and testified before the U.S. Congress. “We called him the dean of death penalty scholarship,” Professor Michael Radelet of the University of Colorado told the New York Times. “Bedau was the first guy to put it all together and the first to make the general empirical argument against the death penalty—that is, a little race, a little deterrent, a little innocence.”

In 1992, Bedau wrote In Spite of Innocence, coauthored with Radelet and Constance, the first in what has become a veritable library of books exploring the deadly potential of capital punishment being inflicted on innocent people. Other books include Making Mortal Choices, Thinking and Writing about Philosophy, and Current Issues and Enduring Questions, coauthored with Tufts English professor Sylvan Barnet.

He is survived by Constance; his children Lauren, Mark, Paul, and Guy; five grandchildren; two sisters; and his former wife, Jan Mastin.

Pending:

LuAnn Williams Darling ’42, John Babala AMP ’44, Roland Dexter AMP ’44, Barbara Crowley Davis ’50, Margaret Rhoads Kendon ’60, Carolyn Bullard ’63, Jack Huhtala ’68, Janet Russell ’68, Robert Millikan ’79, Raymond Kreth ’84, and Alex Botero-Lowry ‘09

december 2012 Reed magazine 67

Apocrypha

tradition • myth • legend

Attack of the Velocipedes Sunday of Renn Fayre, 1993. Somebody set up a barrel fire in the Quad and started riding a bizarre contraption around it. An easy-riding, chopper-style pedaler with an extra-long fork joined in the roundabout action. Then a couple more revelers, on mutant tricycles that had certainly never seen a Toys“R”Us showroom, wound through the ankles of a gathering crowd.

Loudspeakers ground out a menacing beat supplied by KRRC. A piece of cardboard discarded from the shambles of a Great Lawn sculpture at thesis parade allowed riders to surf across the concrete when they slammed on their brakes. Their performance art piece or collective emotional release (no one ever figured out which) reached its apotheosis that day when the riders decided that an even more striking effect might be achieved if said cardboard were set on fire. Thus CHVNK, Reed’s mutant-bicycle collective, was born.

T he idea ger minated with K arl Anderson ’95, who in 1992 forged the first recorded tall bike in Reed’s history by asking a facilities services employee to help him weld together two bikes. (The employee’s name remains a carefully

leah nash

By Raymond Rendleman ’06

Reed’s tradition of mutant velocipedia still runs strong, as shown by Mark Angeles ’15 at Orientation 2012.

break a nose, or worse, for what an outsider might perceive as no reason in particular.

“We’ve always stated that we do it for the children—for the childlike aspects in all of us that are stupid and creative, and for all the kids who are much more likely to think it’s cool,” Karl says.

Being Reedies, they weren’t satisfied

The chosen arts included jousting, time trials, last-man-standing “foot-down derbies,” and baby-rescuing contests that ended up mangling more than a few dolls.

Popular jousting practices outgrew Renn Fayre, and by 2005 the number of participants at the annual “Chunkathon” exceeded 750. The organizers had tried to keep that

CH VNK: Mutant bikes, surreal modes of conveyance, and an apocalyptic philosophy. guarded secret.) Co-conspirators Al Kun ’95 and Justin Callaway ’94 were part of the core group from the very beginning.

While Al had the technical know-how to weld together bikes from scrap in semireliable ways, Justin had the passion to plan the next wild event. Karl, who worked in Reed’s computing services as a student, became the group’s de facto spokesman by creating one of the first websites in online history and publishing Chunk zines.

From the spark set at Renn Fayre, the tight-knit group of Reedies spread their gospel of crazy fun to thousands of enthusiasts across the country. They would troll dumpsters across Portland for castaway bikes; frequent donors included the nonprofit Community Cycling Center and Citybikes, a repair collective. They were all willing to

68 Reed magazine December 2012

with inventing a new form of transportation; they also invented an entire mythology. Having grown up under the threat of nuclear war in the ’80s, they welded together an apocalyptic vision of a future in which survivors of a nuclear holocaust would have to jury-rig their transportation out of scraps of trash and discarded mechanical components. The hardy population would necessarily construct their human-powered transports as tall as possible to avoid poison gases, toxic soil, and explosive surfaces.

A forcibly anticonsumerist environment would still allow for the production of massive amount of duct tape. The message was clear: Earth’s current population needs to practice the art of constructing, riding, and fighting such forms of transportation or expect imminent demise.

year’s blowout a secret, but the two-wheeled hordes found their location anyway, despite a leak to Willamette Week with the wrong address. With the Chunkathons getting out of hand, organizers had to make a decision: charge admission, hire security, and create an official festival, or else go underground. The constraints of institution being anathema to their “organization,” they went subterranean, but continue to reappear for occasional expeditions or impromptu bouts of bike polo. Recent expeditions have kept Chunk-style bikers in the public eye at the Municipal Elevator in Oregon City, at an abandoned war bunker in Kelley Point Park, and on Ross Island, with “aquachoppers” lashed to empty plastic drums.

Raymond Rendleman ’06 is a Portland reporter and editor who operates from an undisclosed location.

R E E D F A Y R E 2 0 1 3 Save the dates: June 12–16

Return To Mount Olympus Follow the music and join the dance at a fayre for all Reedies, not just those who have reunions! sing t o m driven e o tim f t the e hal and he m lo we aga an d in , m he ig of us e f h c , t t s o u he o r f m t an r e, o of y. on tw c e is he ts an ha d t d urn pl s un de red

Enjoy presentations, a Paideia-like Alumni College, and more.

s

Online registration will be available in early January.

artwork by LUCY BELLWOOD ’12

reedfayre.reed.edu alumni@reed.edu

503/777-7589

Reed College Reedfayre 2013

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3203 SE Woodstock Boulevard Portland, Oregon 97202-8199

Periodicals Postage Paid Portland, Oregon

jenn mcneil ’14

Econ major Lauren DeRosa ’13 unfolds a letterpress thesis on the periodic table by Kathleen Conahan ’12 at the 2012 conference of the Association of Graduate Liberal Studies Programs, The Crisis of the Book, hosted by Reed in October. The event included an exhibit of books by Reed students, some using unorthodox materials such as vegetable paper and squirrel hide.