Reed College Magazine June 2013

‰ june 2013

Metamorphosis

How a group of Nicaraguan children invented a brand new language.

Hail, GILGAMESH | HOW REED CHANGED US | the two afghanistans

EDWARD B. SEGEL, PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF HISTORY AND HUMANITIES FAVO R I T E P L AC E S FACULTY LOUNGES IN VOLLUM AND ELIOT FAVO R I T E C L A S S TAU G H T VARIETIES OF DIPLOMATIC HISTORY NUMBER OF THESIS STUDENTS SUPERVISED

92

Reed will always be the place for me.

In his 38 years of teaching history and the humanities at Reed, the intellectual excitement of students was a constant for Ed Segel. So was the atmosphere of mentorship and collaboration that animates the Reed experience.

As part of the community of alumni, parents, and friends who give to the Annual Fund, you make Reed the right place for Ed, his students, and everyone who considers Reed a part of who they are.

Use the enclosed envelope, visit giving.reed.edu, or call 877/865-1469 to make your Annual Fund gift.

REED June 2013

26 12

Features 12

20

Metamorphosis

Departments

LASER Focus

Reed students tutor Portland middle-schoolers

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From the Editor

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Letters

By Randall S. Barton 14

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Music to My Ears

Fifty years later, an alumnus audits a Reed class in music theory

by Jim Kahan ’64

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Master of Deception

By Alex Blum ’14

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Garbage and Gutenberg

Can 3-D printers help impoverished communities?

By Juliette Guilbert ’89 26

How a group of Nicaraguan children invented a brand new language, and what it tells us about the structure of human thought.

Between Two Worlds

Shadab Zeest Hashmi ’95 navigates the journey from Pakistan to California.

By Chris Lydgate ’90 30

By Bill Donahue

Games without Rules

Tamim Ansary ’70 traces the history of the two Afghanistans

By Miles Bryan ’13

Apuleius Unbridled

Professor Sonia Sabnis reads The Golden Ass with a fresh eye.

By Bill Donahue 18

Birth of a Language

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Going through the Fire How did Reed change us? The Oral History Project yields telling clues.

By John Sheehy ’82

cover photo by eric rose

photos by (clockwise from top-left): eric rose, daniel cronin, leah nash, leah nash, bear guerra

Wordsmith Roger Hobbs ’11 on the art of addictive fiction.

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Eliot Circular Attack of the bucktooth engineers

Gilgamesh triumphs School of Hard NOx Striking keys in Africa Professors Corner New trustees join board

10 Empire of the Griffin

Connecting Reedies Across the Globe

From your Alumni Board President

40 Reediana

Books By Reedies

44 Class Notes 56 In Memoriam 62 Apocrypha

Tradition, Myth, Legend

Diary of My Upstairs Dormmate

june 2013 Reed magazine

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Letter from the editor

Thesis, Antithesis, and Metamorphosis It’s a bittersweet time of year.

The dogwood is blooming and the sky has lost its perpetual scowl. Baby ducklings ply the canyon, paddling furiously to keep up with their mothers. And from the registrar’s office comes a honk of kazoos and a shimmer of gongs as seniors turn in the final drafts of their theses. On the steps of

aimee sisco

Bio major Wren Kominos-Marvell ’13 gets a bearhug after turning in his thesis.

Eliot, a bio major shouts for joy and hugs a friend in triumph. Across campus, seniors strut their plastic laurels to show they’ve finished their theses. It’s not over yet—they still have to defend their work in the oral exams (and write their final papers) but the end is in sight. Odysseus is back in Ithaca.

This spring, I’ve had the pleasure of reading several senior theses, including that of linguistics major Katelyn Best ’13 (see page 26). I’ve gained a passing acquaintance with

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creole grammar, Malthusian pessimism, African famine, and performative utterances. I’ve also gained a deeper respect for our students and their accomplishments.

Through the sultr y afternoons of September, the gales of November, and the gloomy dawn of March, they sat at their library carrels or hauled their laptops to the Paradox Café and plunged headlong into an intellectual adventure—the joy and terror of marshalling an investigation into hitherto unexplored territory. They battled with sources, agonized over analysis, sweated through semiotics and semicolons. They underwent a full baptismal immersion in their discipline. They confronted data that confounds, texts that resist, conjectures that don’t conject. They wrestled with their own doubts. They engaged, to borrow William Foster’s memorable phrase, in that most painful of human activities: thinking.

In April—if they are lucky—something remarkable happens. The long arc comes full circle. The stubborn pieces of the jigsaw finally snap into place. The trees become a forest.

What emerges is a precious scrap of truth, often not so much a conclusion as a starting point. But it is real and it is theirs. A little formatting, some fuss with the footnotes, and they’re done—liberated! And the cries of jubilation echo through Eliot Hall.

And here’s where the bittersweetness comes in—for alumni, anyway. Turning in a thesis is a moment of triumph, but also a rite of passage, marking the metamorphosis from student to scholar, from adolescent to adult. It signals the end of their Reed odyssey and the beginning of journeys unknown. From now on, life gets complicated. Our accomplishments are staggered in stages, the moment of joy diluted by provisos, caveats and codicils. There is no finish line—not, at least, in a cosmic sense. We understand this all too well; the students will learn it in their own time. But today they can savor their victory—may they relish it always.

‰ June 2013

www.reed.edu/reed_magazine 3203 SE Woodstock Boulevard, Portland, Oregon 97202 503/777-7591 Volume 92, No. 2 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 ALUMNI NEWS EDITOR Robin Tovey ’97 Valiant Interns Miles Bryan ’13, Kim Durkin ’13, Daniel Ku ’13, Sandesh Adhikary ’15 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 Administration and Vision Write to us! We love getting mail from readers. Letters should be about Reed (and its alumni) or Reed (and its contents) and run no more than 300 words; subsequent replies may run only half the length of their predecessors. Our decision to print a letter does not imply any endorsement. Letters are subject to editing. (Beware the editor’s hatchet.) For contact information, look to your left. Read more letters and commentary at www.reed.edu/reed_magazine.

Logophilia One of the pains and pleasures of moving from a house is that things lost or put aside are found and so it comes about that I am reading the December 2012 Reed magazine, and two items spoke to my pleasure in a book group here in McMinnville. The first was a note in “Empire of the Griffin”: “This year expect to hear more about an online book club for Reedies everywhere.” The second was a remark by Suzanne Cassidy ’65 that at Reed her favorite class was Senior Symposium, “where students from different disciplines got together once a week to discuss books they were reading.”

I belong to a book club that meets for two hours, once a month, at the local senior center (good for those of us in our 80s and 90s who don’t drive at night). Rather than all of us reading an assigned book, we have chosen either a free choice or to read to an assigned theme. This way we have books on the Silk Road, books on the meaning of dreams, books about small Oregon towns founded on faith or progressive ideals.

We bring books from the library or books of our own to lend out and to discuss and share. In past months we have talked about The Tenth Parallel, Stealth of Nations, For the Love of Physics, 1493, a biography on Cleopatra, and we share good suspense and mystery writers. Some of us also belong to more conventional book clubs with a chosen book discussed by all readers but as Suzanne wrote, “a multidisciplinary approach is more rewarding and richer.”

For me, in my 90s, it has given me access to books and ideas that I also find rewarding and rich outside my normal range of interest.

So: thank you, Reed, for your December 2012 magazine.

—Rosina Corbett Morgan ’41 Milwaukie, Oregon

Action against irresponsible drug use was needed at Reed, as indicated by recent mandates from law enforcement and two drug overdoses. However, the prioritizing of this action, to the extent that it becomes the apparent primary mission of the college president, is an indication of a loss of vision by the college.

President John Kroger, as depicted in his autobiographical Convictions, is a man able to prosecute Mafia criminals and Colombian drug lords, with a philosophical perspective, and a genuine intention to maintain honesty in the legal arena. The book includes some thoughtful reflections, such as: “What appears to be a difficult ethical quandary is sometimes the product of ignorance of your options.” Missing from the book is evidence of qualities that might be sought by a presidential search team.

It seems certain that the motivation for hiring Kroger was the intention to eradicate drug use on campus. This did not begin with his tenure.

President emeritus Colin Diver, in his June 2012 exit interview, was asked what he might change at Reed, if wishes could come true, and his reply: “The most obvious example is addressing illegal drug and alcohol use.” Diver followed his wish with the accurate thought: “It’s emphatically a legal obligation. I think it’s a moral one, too.”

But recognizing a need should be followed by an appropriate course of action. The draconian efforts of Mr. Diver (police arrest leading to felony prosecution of student with quantity amounts of marijuana) have been followed by the micromanagement-level enforcement efforts of Mr. Kroger this year (as reflected in the tinted imagery of the Quest).

Given that a major reduction in use was needed, an appropriate countereffort would involve midlevel administrators and the security staff. Choosing for president a prosecutorial attorney, a law enforcement officer, to accomplish this single-minded goal indicates that the central vision of the college is a remedial one, that Reed wants to correct a student-level problem by dedicating the highest office to this issue. One can question this motive without faulting Kroger for accepting the job.

A college presidency is a well-paid, highstatus job that would burnish any résumé.

Suitable nominees would not be scarce. What is important is that the college have a vision, an intention, and that the primary administrator of the college reflect that vision and enact that intention.

The current strategy prioritizes the drug

problem over the other wide-perspective problems faced by all colleges, in particular attracting and retaining the best professors, an ongoing problem at Reed as elsewhere. If financial inducements for faculty are already at their maximum, a vision of a college dedicated to teaching and learning, administered with a willful intent to perpetuate academic inquiry, would be the best inducement to faculty retention. The current vision implies that Reed is resting on its laurels in regard to quality of instruction.

A higher vision might seek a 21st-century Mortimer Adler, a philosopher of education, an inclusive communicator between the branches of the academy, working to publish a 21stcentury Great Books, enhancing community outreach, and using the internet to facilitate wider education. This is one of several more noble visions that could have been pursued by those who select the president of Reed College.

—Peter Abrahams ’77 Portland, Oregon

Remembering Prof. Crandall

I am so sad to hear of the passing of Richard Crandall ’69, one of my favorite teachers at Reed.

Two memories stand out. First, I remember a class wherein we needed to multiply some rather large numbers to get an answer. We all bowed our heads towards our handheld calculators, but Richard admonished us to look up and do the math in our heads. How?! These were really large numbers. He showed us some shortcuts and then quizzed each of us with some examples.

It was high-pressure stuff, but he was right: it was possible to exercise our brains to get the answer without the help of a machine. After my fear subsided, I came to really respect him for that lesson.

My second story recalls an after-hours encounter in the electronics lab. I was thinking about geomagnetism for my thesis. After some discussion with Richard about this, he grabbed an oscilloscope mounted on a wheeled cart and suggested we try to measure the magnitude of the earth’s magnetic field by noting how the deflection of the ’scope’s green dot from center varied with the cart’s rotation. It didn’t really work, but it was so fun to try! Richard’s enthusiasm really inspired me. The guy was brilliant and yes, intimidating, but also enthusiastic and fun. Reed has lost a great mentor.

—Michael Steele ’81 Seattle, Washington

june 2013 Reed magazine

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Eliot Circular news from campus

Reed canyon is under construction. Trees are being felled, dams built, and new areas flooded. These represent some of the most significant changes to the canyon since its restoration in the late ’90s, and they are the work of a masterful colony of engineers. Yes, we’re talking about beavers.

Like many other native species, beavers are increasingly returning to the canyon, drawn by Reed’s herculean efforts to restore the area to its native state. This spring, roughly a dozen of them have been demonstrating their species’ legendary industry.

They have downed scores of trees to create a series of dams and ponds, slowing the flow of Reed Lake, and raising the water level by as much as six feet.

“The beavers are doing what we couldn’t,” says canyon restoration specialist Zac Perry.

“They’re reshaping the canyon.”

Ironically, Perry has long wished for many of these changes, but was hamstrung by state

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Reed magazine june 2013

top: leah nash, left: zac perry

Bucktooth Engineers Reshape Canyon

and local regulations. The canyon is a designated wilderness area, intended as a haven for Oregon’s native ecosystems to thrive. But Industrious beavers have dammed sections of the that designation also limits human meddling. Canyon, flooding invasive bunchgrass.

For example, Perry cannot divert water from the lake, slow the creek down, or build dams glorified park. The lake was diked in 1929 to without enduring lengthy state and federal make space for the outdoor swimming pool, woody debris was burned because it was conpermitting processes.

The beavers, however, have made short sidered ugly, and bags of concrete served as work of the bureaucratic niceties. Their stepping stones through the marsh shallows.

In those years beavers were seen as a dams have flooded areas which had been overrun by invasive bunchgrass, a rhizom- menace. That began to change when Perry atous perennial which had fiercely resist- arrived in 1999 to lead Reed’s initiative to ed all human efforts at control. In addition, restore the canyon. Perry and his canyon they’ve been eagerly chewing away at inva- crews have reintroduced scores of native sive trees—such as wild plum and sycamore plants, and their hard work has attracted sevmaple—that have taken root on the canyon’s eral sentinel species, including otters, herons, banks. (They generally seem to find native steelhead trout, and coyotes. Maintaining wilderness in an urban setting is a nevertrees unappetizing.)

Canyon crews of yore did not always ending task, however—so the crews weltake so kindly to the chiseling critters. For come all the help they can get. decades, Reed treated the canyon as a kind of —MILES BRYAN ’13

Consisting of 282 Babylonian laws inscribed on a stone stele and various clay tablets, Code of Hammurabi (above) is among the oldest deciphered writings of significant length in the world. Below, clay mask of the Huwawa, the monster defeated by Gilgamesh and Enkidu.

Triumph of Gilgamesh Achilles is in. Odysseus is out. And Hum 110 will have a new syllabus in the fall, beginning with two texts focused on Mesopotamia: the Code of Hammurabi and the Epic of Gilgamesh.

The revised syllabus recognizes the importance of the Greco-Roman experience in our intellectual heritage, according to professor Robert Knapp [English 1974–], but also explores some of the extraordinary civilizations that influenced the Greeks.

Consisting of 282 Babylonian laws inscribed on a stone stele and various clay tablets, Hammurabi is one of the oldest deciphered writings of significant length in the world, and was recovered by archeologists in 1901.

“The Code of Hammurabi provides some insight into the organization of one of humanity’s earliest, and most influential, complex, sedentary civilizations,” says professor David Garrett [history 1998– ], who will deliver the lecture. “It introduces a central theme in the study of human society generally, the co-evolution of political authority and attempts to shape behavior through formal legal codes.” Hammurabi is no stranger to Hum 110—it was actually a mainstay of the syllabus in the early 1940s, when Reed’s foundational humanities

course first took shape.

The Epic of Gilgamesh predates Homer by 1,500 years and is perhaps the oldest written story on earth. Discovered in 1853, it is a poem about a Sumerian king, Gilgamesh, who may have lived around 2500 BC in Mesopotamia.

In the last 50 years, says Knapp, scholarship has made it clear that the Greeks cannot be understood without considering the Mesopotamian influences on them.

“Nathalia King [English 1987–] was a very vigorous proponent of doing Gilgamesh,” Knapp says. “As she puts it, it is a poem that makes the case that in order to become human, one must accept being mortal. I don’t think there’s any doubt that Gilgamesh influences Homer.”

The late discovery of both texts precluded their ability to influence the Western tradition as it conceived of itself coming out of the Renaissance, Knapp says. But it is useful for students to consider the Babylonian,

Persian, and Egyptian empires that predated the Greco-Roman civilization.

As to the return of the Iliad, the faculty reasoned that Gilgamesh talks more successfully to the Iliad than it does to the Odyssey. During the three-year trial period of the 2010 syllabus, the majority of them regretted losing the Iliad, which raises more complex issues than the Odyssey—a text many incoming students have already encountered in high school.

Knapp says one thing that distinguishes Reed’s humanities course is that the people who originally pulled it together were historians.

“You can see it in the details of the syllabus,” he says. “Yes, we read a number of texts that count as great books, enabling a kind of attention you can only give to texts that have that kind of density, which partly comes from comment on them. But it’s also a course that tries to be historical.”

—RANDALL S. BARTON

june 2013 Reed magazine

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m at t d ’a n n u n z i o

Eliot Circular

Cole Perkinson ’13 plays a Zimbabwean marimba in the Quad. His other instruments include a deze (hollowed-out gourd) , a mbira (thumb piano propped up inside the deze), hosho (shakers), and a chipendani (one-stringed mouth bow).

Striking Keys in Africa All roads lead somewhere. For Cole Perkinson ’13, they lead to Africa.

Cole, a chemistry–physics major, has been awarded a Watson Fellowship to spend a year in Africa exploring native music.

The Watson Year provides fellows with an opportunity to test their aspirations, abilities, and perseverance through a personal project that is cultivated on an international scale. Watson Fellows have gone on to become CEOs of major corporations, college presidents, diplomats, artists, lawyers, doctors, journalists, and renowned researchers and innovators. The program offers a stipend of $25,000 to 40 fellows from 40 liberal arts colleges to pursue an independent study of something they are passionate about in a country that is not their own.

For Cole, that passion is Zimbabwean music, which he has played with his family since he was 10 years old. “It’s some of the most fun music around to play,” he says.

“There’s room to explore in the music and

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invent everywhere.”

In addition to its complex rhythmic patterns and vast range of moods—from exuberant dancing to spiritual ceremony— Zimbabwean music is a profoundly social activity, Cole says.

“ I think there’s an inherent connection between music and mathematics.”

—Cole Perkinson ’13 Son of Prof. David Perkinson [mathematics 1990–] and Diane Perkinson, Cole is also passionate about chemistry and physics and has been active in Reed’s Science Outreach program. Cole believes the two fields have much in common.

“I think there’s an inherent connection between music and mathematics,” he says.

“You often see people who are interested in

both; they seem to go together. They’re both pursuits that are abstract and because of that, they’re beautiful in their own sense.

They’re not trying to achieve some sort of secondary goal.”

Cole will spend time in five African nations: Zimbabwe, Botswana, Mozambique, South Africa, and Ghana. In each country he will work with traditional musicians and then travel with groups that play more modern music.

After he completes his musical tour of Africa, he plans to reapply to Cambridge for graduate school. (He was accepted this year, but chose to pursue the Watson instead.)

At Cambridge, he hopes to pursue a master’s or PhD in the physics department at Cavendish Laboratory and to get involved with chamber and choral music.

Fo r t h e n e x t ye a r, h o we ve r, h e sees himself playing a lot of marimba music. He leaves for Africa on August 1.

—LAUREN COOPER ’16

School of Hard NOx

Professors’ Corner

Julie Fry [chemistry 2008–] has received a $300,000 grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to study the effects of nitric oxide (NOx) in southeastern forests. She will be doing research and battling the heat in Alabama this summer, along with research assistant Hannah Allen ’14, who won the Mellon Environmental Studies Summer Experience Fellowship to fund her participation.

When natural emissions from forests interact with pollutants, including NOx and related chemicals, they form tiny atmospheric particles or aerosols.

NOx comes from a variety of sources, including vehicle exhaust, coal-burning power plants, and large urban areas.

“We really don’t understand the chemistry of particle formation,” says Fry, whose project is part of a large scale collaborative effort known as the Southern Oxidant and Aerosol Study.

Their research has implication for both climate change and human health. The aerosols, if inhaled over long periods of time, can cause cardiovascular and pulmonary disease. However, the particles can also create a light-blocking haze, which causes regional cooling.

Fry is particularly excited about the project’s opportunities for students. “It’s a great way to introduce students to the scientific community of atmospheric chemistry,” she says.

“They get to connect with some of the big people in the field, to hear what the cutting-edge questions are.”

Senior Danielle Draper ’13 accompanied Fry on a previous project looking at similar chemistry in the pine forests of Colorado.

In addition, the EPA grant provides funds for a postdoctoral researcher, Ben Ayres, who joined Julie’s lab this spring.

“He’ll be a great resource in the lab for future thesis students,” says Julie.

“I love working with thesis students, and I always wish I had more time.

This allows someone else to act as a mentor, as well.”

Plus, she jokes, “he’s from Georgia, so he can help us with the humidity.”

David Schiff [music 1980–] wrote a cover story for the Times Literary Supplement last month on the American composer Marc Blitzstein.

Several members of the faculty were awarded grants from the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust in 2013.

Enriqueta Canseco-Gonzalez [psychology 1992–] won $50,000 to investigate brain plasticity by recording human brain activity elicited by auditory “soundscapes” before and after undergoing sensory substitution training. Such training allows subjects to extract shape information from auditory stimuli. The success of the sensory substitution procedure will be assessed in a task using novel sounds to identify novel shapes. She hopes to demonstrate the time course of lateral occipital complex activity in shape processing (regardless of modality) and assess how it is modulated by crossmodal plasticity.

Kara Cerveny [biology 2012–] won $52,000 for a project investigating how the vertebrate eye grows, specifically regarding the origin and maintenance of neural stem cells in the zebrafish retina. Stem cells can proliferate indefinitely. Stem cell niches provide an environment that controls the balance between proliferation and differentiation, ensuring that the appropriate

numbers of new cells are generated. To elucidate how neural stem cell niches are formed and maintained, this project exploits a powerful model: the growing zebrafish eye and its stem cell niche, the ciliary marginal zone (CMZ). The experiments decipher the origins of the CMZ and investigate how a nicheproduced signal, retinoic acid, controls proliferation and differentiation. The results will shed light on the regulation of neural tissue growth, with implications for neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorders.

Jay Mellies [biology 1999–] won $50,000 to investigate the metabolism of enteropathogenic Escherichia coli (EPEC). Mellies has discovered that the plasmid-encoded virulence regulator PerC in EPEC controls expression of an enzyme involved in central metabolism. He proposes to investigate predicted growth deficiencies of an EPEC strain where the gene encoding the acetyl-CoA acetyltransferase has been deleted, and demonstrate in competition assays that a virulence gene regulatory circuitry confers a selective advantage on EPEC via enhanced metabolic activity. This work has important implications for our understanding of niche adaptation, which is critical for bacterial pathogens that cause disease in human hosts.

Erik Zornik [biology 2012–] won $52,000 to investigate how hormones regulate behavior. Zornik will investigate how hormones and the brain control frog (Xenopus laevis) vocalizations.

Vocal circuit activity is altered following castration, indicating that hormones maintain vocal networks. Using an experimentally powerful “calling brain in a dish” preparation, he will 1) verify that androgens (such as testosterone) maintain normal vocal circuit function, 2) identify neuronal activity patterns that may underlie circuit changes, and 3) determine whether identified neurons express hormone receptors.

Results will provide a strong foundation for understanding the relationship between hormones and behavior.

—KATE SCHIMEL ’13

june 2013 Reed magazine

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Eliot Circular New Trustees Join Board The board of trustees elected four new members to its ranks in April. The new members bring a wealth of diverse knowledge and experience to the board.

Dr. Suzanne B. Cassidy ’65 of Sausalito, California, is a medical geneticist and pediatrician. Suzanne’s practice is focused on the causes of developmental delay, particularly Prader-Willi syndrome, an area in which she is considered to be one of the world’s top experts.

She is a consultant with Genetic Medicine Central California and is president of the International PraderWilli Syndrome Organisation. Previously, Suzanne was the chief of the human genetics division and director of the residency training program in medical genetics at the University of California, Irvine. She has served on the boards of the American Board of Medical Genetics and the American Society of Human Genetics. In 1996 and 1998, Suzanne was featured in American Health magazine as one of the “Best Doctors in America.”

Richard Danzig ’65 of Washington, D.C., is a member of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board; a bioterrorism consultant; a director of Human Genome Sciences

Corporation; and a director of the European venture capital fund Saffron Hill Ventures.

He served as Secretary of the Navy from 1998 to 2001 and as Under Secretary of the Navy from 1993 to 1997; he was the vice chairman and interim president of the International Human Rights Law Group; he has taught law at Harvard and Stanford; and he was a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Byron White. He is also the author of National Service: What Would It Mean?, which informed the development of the current U.S. civilian national service system.

Kurt DelBene of Medina, Washington, was a business strategy consultant and software developer for AT&T Bell Laboratories before joining Microsoft in 1992. Kurt worked on the development of several highprofile Microsoft applications, including Outlook, Exchange, Schedule+ and messaging and personal information-management applications, and was responsible for the development of Microsoft client and server software. Since taking over as president of Microsoft Office Division, his responsibilities have expanded to include the company’s

global strategy for a wide range of products including Office, Exchange, Sharepoint, Lync, and Visio. Kurt is married to Suzan DelBene ’83, who was recently elected member of the U.S. House of Representatives, serving Washington’s First Congressional District.

Georges St. Laurent Jr. of Vancouver, Washington, manages a portfolio of investments across the financial services, real estate, and agricultural sectors. Georges’ impressive career includes being president and CEO of Western Bank, where he grew assets from $300 million to roughly $1 billion before Washington Mutual acquired it in 1996. He was a founding board member of Celera Genomics, the company that deciphered the human genome in 2001. He is the owner of St. Laurent Land and Cattle Company in Eagle Point, Oregon, and is the founder of St. Laurent Realty, Florida.

He served as CEO of Consolidated Forest Products and CEO of GS Containers, which manufactures Sterno Canned Heat. Georges is a member of the President’s Circle of the National Academy of Sciences and has served as a trustee for Rockefeller University, the Sabin Foundation, and Oregon Health & Science University.

Call for Images Do you have photographs in your collection showing banners on the Reed campus calligraphed by students and faculty from the ’40s through the ’80s? We are looking for more good images of this tradition on campus during the teaching days of Lloyd Reynolds and Robert Palladino to add to the Reed archives. Now that the scriptorium is up and running, new examples of how calligraphy impacted the campus are always welcome. If you have images, please consider giving them to the archives. To learn how, visit library.reed.edu/using/collections/archives. html, email walkerg@reed.edu, or just call us at (503) 777-7702. —GAY WALKER ’69

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Sometimes it’s what is outside that counts: outside your country, outside your regular routine, or outside your comfort zone.

We are pleased to offer a range of stimulating explorations for you, your family, and friends.

VIRGINIA WOOLF’S ENGLAND

O C TO B E R 9– 17

CAMP WESTWIND, ON THE OREGON COAST

O C TO B E R 11– 13

PUERTO RICO’S COFFEE & RUM HERITAGE

O C TO B E R 20– 26

View from Camp Westwind PHOTO BY BEN SALZBERG ’94

For more information, visit www.reed.edu/alumni/travel/.

Sissinghurst Castle, Kent, England PHOTO BY MIKE TESKEY

Coffee plantation gates, Puerto Rico

PHOTO BY MIKE TESKEY

Alumni & Parent Relations alumni@reed.edu 503/777-7589

Empire of the Griffin Connecting Reed alumni across the globe

Towards a Vibrant Virtual Community

As my term as president of the alumni board draws to a close, I want to first express my deep gratitude to the staff of alumni & parent relations for their work with our board. Their dedication, experience, and solution-driven approach make volunteering fun, rewarding, and, most of all, easy!

In our effort to establish roots for life beyond Reed, the board has expanded its partnership with career services. As working weekend volunteers can affirm, the career services staff has been wonderfully welcoming, helpful, and generous with their time. We owe a particular thank you to Brooke Hunter, with whom we have worked closely on working weekend and supporting new programming for current students.

You can help ignite the imagination of students and inspire their career exploration by keeping your alumni directory information up to date and joining the alumni career network. For instructions on how to do so and to

leah nash

BY CHANTAL SUDBRACK ’97 ALUMNI ASSOCIATION PRESIDENT

relations director Mike Teskey—who amazes me with his temperance and unfettered willingness to explore new directions. Our leadership has spent energy on becoming better organized, establishing a higher level of professionalism, and improving our visibility on campus and off. This year, we introduced the first digestible yet comprehensive alumni association guidebook, implemented a 10-year strategic plan, and developed the ground work for expanding the Life Beyond Reed initiative. Congratulations to Reunions ’13 class leaders, committee members, organizers of alumni college and Reunions Paideia. Reunions has gotten off to an extraordinary start with record early registration of 600+

by April 1, and will undoubtedly be memorable because of your efforts.

Lastly, I extend particular thanks to those volunteers who are completing their terms and rolling off leadership positions on the alumni board. I encourage each of you to explore new challenges and new ways to contribute.

To learn more about volunteering in general, all are welcome to join us on

No matter where you live, there are many ways to connect with other Reed alumni. volunteer as an intern host, extern mentor, or a panelist for working weekend, please visit www.reed.edu/career /alumni.

Throughout my executive service, I have been grateful for the camaraderie and able assistance of vice president Greg Byshenk ’89 (the board is in good hands as he succeeds me as president), secretary Scott Foster ’77, immediate past president Jay Hubert ’66, and alumni & parent

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campus for the next leadership summit, September 20 & 21; email alumni@reed.edu for more information.

This year the alumni association has made significant strides towards a more vibrant virtual community.

Whether you live in a chapter city, abroad, or in a more remote area, there are many ways to connect with other alumni; check out the variety of intersection points, including ReediEnews, career services, Reed Switchboard, and

Renn Fayre Revisions, at alumni.reed .edu. Also, Sallyportal, the official blog of Reed magazine, is a great forum for reading incisive coverage of all things Reed and responding to it. Finally, keep a watchful eye towards future launches of an online book club and a one-stop volunteer resource page.

Love Reed.

Reed on the Road

Next Time You’re on the washington coast. . . aimee sisco

Welcomes, thank yous, and insights were woven together in Reed on the Road, a series of events that brought alumni and friends together in several cities.

The events provided an opportunity to meet President John R. Kroger and to share thoughts on leading Reed in the coming years. And the college extended thanks to everyone who pitched in to make the Centennial Campaign a success.

Herewith some of the ideas exchanged: Education is transparent at Reed. Tom Weisner ’65 suggested that true learning happens when students put forth—and defend—their ideas in front of probing peers. What a marvelous observation of the hard-hewn way we learn at Reed.

Be gentle with ourselves. I overheard this observation in Chicago. Reedies take education seriously and thereby create a stimulating and enriching environment for all. But it’s important to forgive the mistakes we make along the way.

Why we need each other. Larry Rinder ’83 suggested that actively engaged alumni are the ideal resource to help Reed resist pressure to make the curriculum too instrumentalist. Alumni understand how a Reed education can be effectively applied in the world, and they help Reed make sure its curriculum stays focused on the why, not the how.

Dubai, Mumbai, Shanghai, or Goodbye. It’s great to read Plato and Aristotle, but several alumni want Reed to take a more global outlook. Adnan Hassan ’83 commented that the locus of power is shifting East. He urged Reed to beef up its study abroad program and to encourage students to look beyond Europe.

Reed passions run deep. Whether the lively views were voiced at the tables, posted on the comment charts, or shared in casual conversation, it was clear that alumni care passionately about Reed. As student Serra Shelton ’15 said in a recent video about the Centennial Campaign. “You have changed a life and, for that, thank you just isn’t enough.”

—MIKE TESKEY

Colony at the Coast Located on the outskirts of a wellloved if careworn beach community in Seaview, Washington, the Sou’wester might be easy to miss or to misunderstand. The collection of vintage travel trailers, cabins, and campsites—providing overnight or even monthly accommodations—seems to meander through the shore pine and salal toward the sea. A handful of gardens (at least one is secret), an occasional fire pit, an area for RV hookup, and a series of open-air buildings—a bike shed, an event space, a kitchen—serve to further confuse the perimeter, giving the place an air of artsy serendipity. Even the lodge, that magnificent red structure rising up somewhere near the center of the property, has either two main entrances or two side entrances, depending on your perspective.

The lodge was built as a vacation home in 1892 by U.S. senator and Oregon resident Henr y Winslow Corbett. In the ’40s or ’50s the secondfloor ballroom was converted to suites, which is about when the cabins were added. Thandi Rosenbaum ’00 bought the Sou’wester last spring. She and her team gave it a major overhaul, refinishing hardwood floors, fixing plumbing, painting walls, and getting rid of a half century of junk. Then they added back

into the spaces the streamlined furniture and housewares for which the midcentury era is known.

The art she selected—a mix of vintage finds and original works by local artists, not to mention other objects she’s collected, like a whale bone she’s put in one of the cabins or a foundobject installation of tsunami debris she’s set up near the lodge—are key to Rosenbaum’s vision for the Sou’wester.

Hoping to inspire and support creativity in all forms, the former anthropology major has established an artist’s residency program that gives discounted rates to artists who want to come to the coast to work for a week or longer. She’s also hosted a steady program of music shows, yoga retreats, and craft workshops since reopening last June.

Next time you’re in Astoria, cross the mighty Columbia for a stop at the Sou’wester! After checking in, check out the “thrifty”—an honor-system thrift store in a trailer—where you can finally get that new-to-you pair of high-waisted pants. Then grab a locally grown organic cranberry juice from the general store on the wraparound porch (also honor system) and sign out a bicycle for a youthful ride through the grassy dunes and salty breezes of the glorious Long Beach Peninsula. —AIMÉE SISCO

To see more of the ideas exchanged from ROTR, visit the Riffin’ Griffin blog at blogs.reed.edu/riffin_griffin.

june 2013 Reed magazine 11

Reedies Mentor Portland Kids in LASER Program

BY RANDALL S. BARTON

To boldly go where no man has gone before—that was the mission of the starship Enterprise. But who would ever choose to go back to middle school, the accursed planet of cliques, acne, and algebra?

The answer is Reedies, who are braving the final frontier to help Portland middle schoolers navigate the treacherous minefields of adolescence. Reed has allied with Lane Middle School in a program known as LASER (Lane After School Education with Reed) that places Reedies in classrooms to assist and mentor the kids.

“It’s a good partnership,” says Ned Carson ’13, a Spanish major from Cambridge, Massachusetts. “In addition to being a stable presence in these kids’ lives, Reed students can step outside these brick buildings and realize there’s good education out there that isn’t high-level liberal arts education.”

Located in the Brentwood/Darlington neighborhood, just a couple of miles from Reed, Lane Middle School serves a large number of minority students and emigrants from Europe and states of the former Soviet Union. Roughly 86% of its 400 students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.

This year, 38 Reed volunteers have made a yearlong commitment to LASER, travelling to Lane once or twice a week. Some Reedies serve as interns, working with small groups of students in the classroom at the teacher’s direction. Others serve as mentors, spending time with individual students outside the classroom developing a big-brother/big-sister relationship.

While volunteering in general can be a rewarding experience, Reedies find there’s something special about working with middle school children, who—like them—are going through a time of transition.

“Middle school is an interesting time because the kids are grappling with these new tools,” says Ned, who has served as mentor and intern, and who spent a year as an assistant basketball coach. “They’re developing social skills and an ability to create communities that really mean something

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to them. The negative side of that is cliques, excluding people and being really mean in new and creative ways.”

Interns’ involvement is based upon their own experience and interests. This year several are volunteering in special education, music, and Spanish. They also participate in a program that prepares kids for college by building their academic skills, serving as examples by their very presence.

“When we got to Lane writing skills were extremely low,” says Fawn Livingston-Gray ’95, who has coordinated SEEDS (Students for Education, Empowerment, and Direct Service) at Reed for the last seven years.

“Only 14% were passing. So we had a writingtutoring program for a year while Lane made changes to their writing curriculum. After a year it wasn’t needed, but that’s an example of our being responsive to their needs.”

The mentoring program fosters afterschool, one-on-one relationships between Reedies and Lane kids, many of whom suf-

“ You’re dealing with a little human being, but it isn’t the little part that matters” —Ned Carson ’13 fer from instability due to poverty or, as the children of immigrants, find themselves enmeshed in a clash of cultures.

“It’s really about developing near-peer relationships, like an older brother, sister, or a friend who is there to challenge you and help you grow,” explains Mark Angeles ’15, who coordinates the mentoring program.

“After-school programs keep kids who are struggling in class motivated to come to school. They know that there’s somebody they can talk to and hang out with, free from the stresses of classroom activities.”

Mentors engage their mentees in a variety of ways: playing games, making brownies, doing arts and crafts projects. Mark recalls a boy whose parents worked 10-hour days, seven days a week. The after-school

program provided him with activities and interests other than watching television by himself for hours on end.

“Reedies recognize that these kids face challenges they may not have faced or that affluent people don’t face,” says Fawn. “They want to help them succeed.”

LASER began in 2007 after a similar program with Portland’s Harriet Tubman Middle School could no longer be sustained because to falling enrollment in that school. The program is also supported by Oregon Mentors, a nonprofit that serves youth mentoring programs. They help contextualize challenges middle-school children might face at home, with worries about fitting in and a changing

daniel cronin

Boldly venturing back to middle school. Valiant Reedies Mark Angeles ’15 and Katie Halloran ’15 volunteer as mentors at Lane Middle School, a couple of miles from campus.

body. Volunteers learn how to use positive reinforcement and basic friendship skills, like knowing when and how to listen.

“Mentoring is about developing a very basic friendship with someone a lot younger than you,” Ned says. “You’re dealing with a little human being, but it isn’t the little part that matters. It’s the human part. The little part might determine some of the ways this person is going to act, but if you just look at that you’re going to miss that there’s actually being another person right there.”

Working with children provides many “aha” moments, says Katie Halloran ’15, who coordinates the interns, but the reward comes from seeing kids become more engaged.

For example, one girl told her, “I used to be really good at math, but I’m not anymore.”

“She had all this stuff to deal with at home, but the idea that she could change so dramatically that she was not good at math anymore is something you address,” Katie says.

“You affirm: ‘You are smart. You are good at math. You can do these things.’”

Despite the differences between middle school and college, Reedies discover Lane and Reed are both institutions with high standards that do good jobs of preparing students for the future.

“Lane has a really cool identity,” Ned says.

“The teachers and students have a friendly, upbeat attitude about things and everyone

is always doing things with a smile on their faces. The teachers care about those kids and do a really good job of preparing them for high school. It’s fun to see.”

“Mentoring isn’t going to solve every­ thing,” Fawn says, “but it can have a small, broad impact on kids. We know it reduces chances that kids will drop out of school, have early parenting, or engage in drug and alcohol use.”

LASER gives Reedies the opportunity to confront social and economic inequities that stratify public education, gain firsthand teaching experience, and forge connections with the Portland community.

june 2013 Reed magazine 13

photos by leah nash

adventures in the first person

Music to My Ears

BY JIM KAHAN ’64

For alumni who live in Portland, one of the best deals in town is being able to audit a course at Reed for the pittance of $100. All you need is the permission of the instructor.

Last fall, I audited Music Theory I, taught by Professor Virginia Oglesby Hancock ’62 [music 1991–]. The story, in short, is simple: I came, I audited, I survived.

It all started two years ago, when I was preparing A Reed Century, my adaptation of songs from Gilbert and Sullivan operettas to celebrate the Reed Centennial. Admittedly a musical amateur, I asked Ginny to help me by directing the singers for this Reunions presentation. At one point, she changed a note on my score so that a G-sharp became an A-flat. When I asked about this (after all, the two notes refer to the same black key on a piano), she said something about “enharmonic equivalence.” I looked it up and understood it—sort of. But later, when she came to a segment of four measures of madrigal-style four-part harmony that I needed to insert to cover a textual adaptation, she made major revisions. When I asked why, she replied that if I had ever taken her music theory course, I would understand. A year later, I decided to take up the challenge and set out on my adventure.

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My first reaction upon finding myself back in Eliot 314 with some 30-odd Reed students was the shock of recognition. They were amazingly like people I knew 50 years ago. There were the studious types who took notes and never looked up, the class clowns reacting with loud guffaws to the examples of musical errors Ginny brought up, and the iconoclasts who interpreted everything as if it were jazz. Classroom attire ranged from barefoot to hiking boots; we sported an impressive variety of hairstyles for both men and women, from multicolored and shoulder-length to my own fringe around the back and sides. The students were smart— really smart. After a few weeks, they seemed to accept me as one of them, as they would not stop their hallway rants about professors when I showed up and would sometimes even ask how I interpreted a point.

My second reaction was the thrill of learning something new. In grad school, I took courses in statistics, social psychology, and game theory, but these were pretty much within my comfort zones, as I built upon established bases of knowledge. But although I have long appreciated music and even performed it, I possessed no theoretical foundation. So this was like going back to my freshman year—and it felt wonderful!

Although I was only auditing the course,

I decided to go full tilt. I spent hours studying the material so that I could tell an appoggiatura (a leap then a step) from an escape tone (a step then a leap). I did exercises in writing four-part harmony that Bach would approve of. I learned the difference between a half-diminished and a diminished-diminished seventh chord and why it matters. By the end of the semester, I could even appreciate almost every joke in David Rakowski’s “Music Theory Song.”

My third reaction was a sense of astonishment at the workload. Reading, absorbing, and digesting the material took many long hours, quite apart from the time in class. How could these students possibly keep up with all their courses, which presumably had similar demands?

“Did we really work that hard back then?”

I asked Ginny.

“Yes,” she smiled. “We sure did.”

Coming back to a Reed classroom as a student, after spending a substantial part of my career on the other side of the desk, was

eye-opening. Ginny is an outstanding teacher—of that there can be no question—but more important, she is an outstanding teacher in the Reed style. And I could only fully grasp what “Reed style” meant after being away. Ginny has mastery of her subject and an unswerving dedication to making sure students understand what she is teaching.

For Music Theory I, she has seven classroom contact hours per week, plus office hours, plus time going over homework assignments.

She frequently announces the availability of tutors to help students who might feel overwhelmed. For students whose barriers are nonacademic, I am confident that in private discussions, she recommends contacting the new Reed student support services that were woefully lacking my first time around. She is unapologetic about the amount of work she requires and demands that as students in a music course, we support music at Reed.

Nothing arouses her ire more than students not supporting their peers by attending their concerts. Perhaps for someone who is young and doesn’t know her, this can be intimidating, but I failed both of those criteria; my fellow classmates stayed young, but got to know her pretty quickly. Her sense of humor is omnipresent, and her beaming smile when students do something creative is a wonderful reward.

Following my graduation in 1964, I left Portland, and lived in a variety of places, including North Carolina, France, Nevada, Southern California, Israel, and the Netherlands. During my diaspora, I had frequent dreams of coming back to Reed, and even redoing my four years, armed, of course, with everything I had learned in the interim.

When waking from these dreams, I told myself that you can’t go home again. Fate, however, brought me back to Portland in 2005, blessed me with a new marriage to my Reedie bride, and enabled me to get intensely involved with the college. Now, with the lifespace to audit the courses I never had time for back then, I have learned that Thomas Wolfe was wrong—you can go home again.

Formerly a professor of psychology and then a behavioral scientist for the RAND Corporation, Jim Kahan ’64 was Reed’s commencement speaker in 2005 and has written several articles for Reed. He received the 2011 Babson Society Award for his service to the college and is also the founder of the Dorothy Johansen Society for the History of Reed College.

Can’t come to Reunions?

Reunions can come to you!

Visit bookstore.reed.edu to order Reed goodies, gifts, and books by Reedies and other venerable authors.

REED COLLEGE BOOKSTORE bookstore.reed.edu • Jules Wright • 503/777-7757 • wrightj@reed.edu

Between Two Worlds Shadab Zeest Hashmi ’95 navigates the journey from Pakistan to California.

BY BILL DONAHUE

Shadab Zeest Hashmi grew up in Peshawar, Pakistan, in the shadow of the snowcapped Safed Koh mountains marking the border with Afghanistan. In the streets near her home, vendors sold plums and corn with salt and lime. She came to love the bakery that served pink coconut rolls and the clothes dyer who sat before boiling pots of dye listening to cricket games on the radio. Then at age 18, she left Pakistan to land at Reed.

It was 1991. That September, Nirvana would release its second album, Nevermind, replete with the smash hit “Smells Like

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Teen Spirit”; nose rings would become de rigueur among the more stylish habitués of the Paradox Café. And Shadab would never live in Pakistan again. You’d expect her poetry to be steeped in a longing for home, and in many ways it is. In her second book, Kohl & Chalk, published in early 2013, Shadab visits Peshawar with her three children and remembers: afternoon shadows on slate verandahs, the squeaking of a rusted seesaw, the breaking open of a walnut in a door hinge; its embossed shell a secret cracking.

The longing aches. Still, even though Kohl & Chalk is a medley of piquant tableaux largely set in Shadab’s native land, it would be wrong to sum up the book as a sepia-tinted paean to the Pakistan of yore.

The volume’s title hints at an outlook that is both cosmopolitan and gracefully political. Kohl is the black lead-based eyeliner that women in Africa and the Middle East have been wearing to dramatic effect since about 3000 BC. Shadab included it in the title because, she says, “My book is the story of a writing woman faced with the challenge of producing poetry while being responsible for raising a family.” “Chalk” is

I bring Socrates from the glass shelves Cut a mango in cubes to go with some milk There is no need for Chopin because the young Afghan from the refugee camp (who made himself a wheelchair after the war) plays his flute all day long to the rain’s vigorous beat.

In “Ghazal for the Ninth Month,” Shadab muses on the irony of taking the oath as an American citizen within weeks of her son’s birth: I had sworn to bear arms for this country.

Bear arms? Kill like a predator? In other dreams I bore you through the cold months, through snow in Julian rain in Sedona Not for a single moment were we apart.

photo by bear guerra

a subtle plea for education which, Shadab says, could prove a “great equalizer” in Pakistan’s viciously stratified society.

Shadab writes as a naturalized American tuned in to both the troubles with Pakistan’s nascent democracy and the cruelty that Americans have been meting out on the Arab world since 9/11. But she forgoes shrill outrage, writing instead with a sensual—one might even say maternal—compassion. In “Monsoon,” she glimpses the dark side of her border-town childhood, dwelling on a casualty of the ’80s-era war that the U.S. helped wage against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

“Thirteenth Anniversary” celebrates Shadab’s marriage in a Pakistani idiom— “The years clip like prayer beads in the quiet hours of marble mosque”—and in “Night of the Eid Moon,” she homes in on a mother lovingly sewing a wedding dress, only to face the sad fact that this marriage too will live in the vortex of Islamophobia. Shadab envisions the dress’ sequins falling like shrunken stars through a basin of smoke where the clatter of child-sized glass bangles will amplify Don’t Hate Me: I’m Muslim.

At boarding school in Pakistan, Shadab studied Keats and Coleridge, as well as the Urdu poets Iqbal and Ghalib. But she only got serious about poetry at Reed, where she enjoyed what she calls a “highly sensitive, customized apprenticeship” under her thesis adviser, poet Lisa Steinman [English 1976–]. Steinman helped Shadab compose a series of poems meditating on her life as a post-colonialist Pakistani. “Lisa’s strategy at our weekly meetings,” Shadab says, “was to listen to my ramblings very attentively and get a sense of what direction might be best for me. She taught me to appreciate contemporary aesthetics, all the while supporting my own thematic and aesthetic choices so that I had enough freedom to swim through the

soup of the unconscious and to think of structure and the narrative of my thesis.”

At Reed, Shadab also conceived a larger project after she attended a concert of the Al-Andalus Ensemble, a group whose act features both the flamenco guitar and the Arab oud, in tribute to Spain’s long-ago convivencia, which saw Jews and Muslims living in neighborly harmony in southern Spain from 711 to 1492. Shadab’s first book, Baker of Tarifa, imagines a small coastal town during the time of the convivencia. It celebrates “Jewish leather merchants” and “Muslim botanists. Arabic is a Semitic language,” she declares in one poem.

In 2011 Shadab ventured outside poetry to write an op-ed for the Washington Post arguing for a modern-day convivencia. The piece takes issue with Pakistan’s inflexible antiblasphemy law as well as California-based Christians who had just picketed a Muslim charity event, chanting, “Muhammad was a pervert!” What both sides need, Shadab suggests, is to learn from Muhammad himself, who showed humility and mercy when the people of the war-torn city Taif pelted him and his adopted son Zaid with stones.

“Gabriel appeared with a summons from the Almighty to punish the people of Taif,” Shadab writes. “Still Muhammad’s feet bled as he pleaded their case and prayed for another chance for them.”

Shadab’s next book will consider an even earlier détente. It will be about the traders who lived in and near Peshawar when it was a stop on the Silk Road during the first few centuries after Christ. “The Silk Road was a moving marketplace, a fluid and shifting convivencia,” she says. “Buddhists, Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Parsis traded stories, traditions, and languages across different cultures.” As a poet, Shadab feels responsible for helping us to remember that golden moment. “In our times,” she says, “we have seen the devastations of literalism and intolerance—be it in the name of religion or patriotism or democracy. Convivencia is an idealistic idea, of course. But poetry is a place to dream. And perhaps to influence civilization in some small but deep way.”

Go Further Kohl & Chalk, Poetic Matrix Press, 2013 Baker of Tarifa, Poetic Matrix Press, 2010

june 2013 Reed magazine 17

Games Without Rules Tamim Ansary ’70 traces the history of the two Afghanistans.

BY MILES BRYAN ’13

Hamid Karzai has not turned out to be the kind of president America wanted for Afghanistan. Since he was elected in 2004, Karzai has approved reactionary social laws, flirted with the Taliban, and embraced conservative religious leaders. Yet Karzai is in a tougher position than one might think.

While he has disappointed abroad, Karzai’s compliance with America and other Western powers has infuriated many Afghans at home. Karzai is trapped in a double bind, one that seems like it may destroy him. Such a fate would not be surprising—it is the same trap that has destroyed almost every single Afghan ruler in the last two centuries.

That’s the conclusion of Tamim Ansary’s new book, Games without Rules: The Often Interrupted History of Afghanistan. Tamim contends that the history of Afghanistan is best understood as the story of two competing power structures: a local, informal network of tribes and villages, and the global, formal system of urban elites. Leaders like Karzai have been able bring the informal networks together in battle against foreign powers, but that cohesion has never lasted in peacetime. While his diagnosis may seem pessimistic, Tamim is not. History, as the historian E.P. Thompson wrote, may have a logic, but it never has a law. Like Thompson, Tamim knows that to change the course of history you have to understand it first—a task that his new book accomplishes with remarkable clarity.

Growing up as a child of Kabul’s first Afghan-American marriage, Tamim always felt like somewhat of an outsider. He moved to Colorado when he was 16, and enrolled at Carleton College in Minnesota two years later. But the buttoned-down Midwest culture made him feel out of place. Tamim wanted to go somewhere where everyone would seem as idiosyncratic as he felt—naturally, he transferred to Reed, where he majored in literature but fell in love with the social psychology classes of professor Bill Wiest

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[psychology 1961–95]. After he graduated, Tamim wrote for the Scribe, Portland’s first alternative weekly. In 1979, an engine failure in San Francisco brought him to the steps of the Asian Foundation, a think-tank focused on Asia and the Middle East. At the foundation, he saw a chance to help his two countries understand each other. He never looked back.

In Games without Rules, Tamim suggests that a telling clue to Afghanistan’s identity can be found in its national pastime, buzkashi. This game involved men on horseback competing to snatch a goat carcass off the ground and carry it to a designated goalpost.

There were no rules: buzkashi was governed by tradition, social context, and by implicit understandings among the players. Such was Afghanistan. Before the mid-18th century, each Afghan town or village had its own sphere of influence. They usually had a malik, a formal headman, and a mullah—an all-purpose Muslim cleric who took on the community’s religious duties simply because he knew how to read and had a basic understanding of sharia, or Islamic religious law.

Afghanistan had traditions, values, customs, and contexts, but no rules. That is, until the British invaded, and the Great Game began.

In 1830, a crafty Afghan leader named Dost Mohammed was looking to unite his territory into a kingdom. For help Mohammed turned to the British and Russian scouts who, by the early 19th century, were plying him with gifts and praise. The British wanted a buffer against Russian aggression into India, their colonial jewel; the Russians wanted a pathway to the Indian Ocean. Both saw their answer in Afghanistan. In 1838 the British, having been rebuffed by Mohammed, took matters into their own hands by invading the country. The British easily took Afghanistan— whose tribal warriors were no match for British muskets—but holding the country was another matter. The Afghans had coalesced in wartime, but under occupation they dissolved into an unruly gang of mullahs and maliks that, to the British, was entirely untamable. The Afghans simply would not stop fighting. The British were forced out in 1842, invaded for a second time in 1878, and were then forced out

again. For the rest of that century and much of the next, the Afghans would be left more or less alone. When they were drawn back into the Great Game, it was being played under a new name: the Cold War. In the years following the British exodus, one Afghanistan became two. A series of modernizing kings created networks of officialdom—mayors, bureaucrats, administrators, technicians, and institutions— superimposed on traditional village and tribal structure. This second Afghanistan was composed of the rich and elite, centered in Kabul, and infatuated with Western ideas—such as communism. In 1973 Afghanistan’s communist prime

ariel zambelich

minister (and great-grandfather of a current Reedie) Daoud Khan overthrew the monarchy and established a republic in its place. Khan flirted with his Soviet neighbors—he willingly accepted their military and economic aid—but he would not always toe their line. When Khan was toppled in a military coup in 1978, the Russians saw an opportunity to cement their influence in Afghanistan once and for all.

They invaded the following year.

On the face of it, the Afghan-Soviet War

was part of the Great Game: Afghanistan once again fighting for its independence from an imperial power. In reality, the Soviet war was as much a conflict between the two Afghanistans as it was a phase of the Cold War. The Soviets and the Afghan allies were not just communists: they were the modernizing elite of Kabul. The Mujahedeen were not just anti-Soviet freedom fighters: they were the villages and tribes of the old country. When the last Soviet fighters marched out of Afghanistan in 1989, it

was less of an ideological victory for the capitalist West than the defeat of the new Afghanistan by the old.

When U.S. troops invaded Afghanistan 12 years later, it was the old country that they found. The years of chaos that followed are a well-worn, and by now unsurprising, story. But in Games without Rules Tamim is hopeful about his home country’s future: cell phones, computers, and other technology are drawing even the most remote Afghan villages into the modern era. The logic of Afghanistan’s history is finally becoming clear. Now all that’s left is to change it.

Miles Bryan ’13 is a history major and aspiring journalist.

june 2013 Reed magazine 19

photo by eric rose

Metamorphosis “ Transformation” has become a buzzword lately.

Management gurus offer “transformational leadership.”

Policy wonks expound the virtues of “transformational government.” Diet books tout “transformational weight loss.” A quick search on Amazon reveals more than two thousand book titles including the word.

The overmarketing of transformation probably sticks in the craw of most of our readers (I know it does in mine).

Which is a shame, I would argue, because transformation—or metamorphosis, as we define it in this issue— lies at the heart of what Reed is all about.

From the planks of Theseus to the hexameters of Ovid to the nightmares of Gregor Samsa, the twin themes of change and constancy have beckoned artists, writers, scientists, and scholars across the centuries. They also apply to our individual journeys through Reed and beyond.

In this issue, we explore the concept from several viewpoints.

In MASTER OF DECEPTION, we meet bestselling author Roger Hobbs ’11, whose protagonist is a professional shapeshifter—a discipline, Roger suggests, that animates many successful writers.

The advent of 3D printing holds immense potential to revolutionize manufacturing. GARBAGE AND GUTENBERG profiles engineer Matt Rogge ’97, who built a 3D printer capable of transforming plastic milk jugs into kayaks, barrels, and other essential items.

When does a succession of signs become a language?

That is one of the many fascinating questions raised by the linguistics thesis of Katelyn Best ’13, which forms the basis of BIRTH OF A LANGUAGE. Why should Ovid get all the glory, anyway? In APULEIUS UNBRIDLED, professor Sonia Sabnis [classics 2006–] takes a fresh look at the other Metamorphoses of the ancient world, the earthy, bawdy satire known as the Golden Ass. Finally, inspired by the biological dimension of metamorphosis—that is, an organism’s transformation from larva to adult—we turn the focus on ourselves, and ask how Reed changed us—a question John Sheehy ’82 explores in GOING THROUGH THE FIRE, drawing heavily on his magisterial history of Reed, Comrades of the Quest.

As always, we welcome your comments, no matter what stage of the Reed life cycle you happen to occupy at the moment. Join the conversation at www.reed.edu /reed_magazine. —THE EDITOR

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Master of Deception Wordsmith Roger Hobbs ’11 on the art of addictive fiction.

BY ALEX BLUM ’14

The New Yorker ad for Ghostman, Roger Hobbs’ new crime novel, features a paragraph-long excerpt. “These days I’m the best in the business. I can hit a bank and disappear in two days and no one would even know I was there,” it begins. At the bottom of the passage, a code scannable by smartphone is labeled “Scan to Keep Reading Ghostman.” A masked figure hovers in the background, his black gun pointing at the code.

It’s the classic drug dealer’s gambit: give the first hit for free, and they’ll come begging for more. Hobbs’ writing is particularly tailored for this approach. If literary fiction is like a psychedelic drug, he says, mystery is “the meth of the written word.”

Hobbs delivers quite the high. The book revolves around a career criminal known as “Jack.” (We never learn his real name, or much else about him, though Hobbs does mention that he reads Virgil when he’s not busy with crime.) Jack is a “ghostman,” helping people to disappear from the law. We find him in a race against the clock to track down dirty money, with plenty of violence and intrigue along the way. The prose is analytical and efficient, with plenty of detail and fascinating digressions into the nuts and bolts of criminal enterprise—the first couple of pages, for example, are devoted to an analysis of the three ways to rob a casino. In truth, Ghostman’s driving force is its plot. Hobbs describes it like this: “It’s not the journey and it’s not the destination that matters. It’s how motherfucking fast you’re going.”

If his book’s reception is any indication, Hobbs has succeeded in going pretty fast. The renowned New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani praised Hobbs for his “sheer, masterly use of details,” and his “ability to immerse us in Jack’s unsavory world and to make the nefarious transactions he

22 Reed magazine june 2013

and his cohort engage in seem so palpably real.” The book made the New York Times bestseller list and will be translated into 20 different languages; Warner Bros. picked up the movie rights.

I met Hobbs at the Paradox Cafe in March (he still lives in southeast Portland).

He wore a black suit and purple tie, something of a uniform for him. He has worn a suit every day since his high school years in Pennsylvania. He comes across as slightly ill-at-ease, with a sly wit and a high laugh that he deploys liberally.

Hobbs relished the academic independence he found at Reed. He studied Latin with professor Sonia Sabnis [classics 2006–] and is particularly grateful to professor Robert Knapp [English 1974–], who taught him late middle ages literature and literary theory and served as his thesis adviser. “He is a mysterious old man who always knows more than he says,” Hobbs says. “He doesn’t feel the need to baby you along, but rather just reveal to you the mysteries of the universe.”

Hobbs wrote his thesis on the narratology of suspense in the mysteries of Edgar Allen Poe. Amazingly, he wrote Ghostman at the same time, working every day at his thesis desk in the library; he sent the manuscript to his agent on the day he graduated.

The two projects could not have been more different. His thesis involved chains of heterodiagenic focalization. His book was written for entertainment—pure and simple.

Too many writing programs treat commercial fiction “like it’s trash,” he says. But commercial fiction, he believes, is in many ways closer to the purpose of language—to take an idea or experience and effectively communicate it to another. Fiction that’s designed to sell must be easily understandable by “as many others as possible,” he reasons. Compared to fiction that’s focused on truths that are personal to the writer, commercial fiction is a purer expression of language. I asked whether this approach didn’t risk diluting the ideas that could be communicated: Wouldn’t some truths be less understandable by many people, but more accurately representative of your own experience? “It’s noble to get it right at the

photo by leah nash

expense of your audience, but that involves a selfishness I never had,” he said.

Hobbs is genuinely passionate about language. Writing, he says, “is an elegant blend of the ecstasy of creation, the empathy of the audience, and the ego of your power over them.”

He enjoyed that feeling from a young age, when he first started telling stories. “I knew that I wanted to lie to people for a living and be very comfortable doing it,” he says. “So I decided I could either be a politician, or

a professor, or a writer. I picked the most honest of the three.”

Jake is a master of deception—he uses fake passports, hair dye, and makeup to alter his identity—but Hobbs says his character is not a liar. Instead, he uses “deceptive truths” to mislead people. “Since he’s no one, he’s afforded the freedom to tell the honest truth,” Hobbs says. “You can still be an honest person and a professional liar . . . if there’s one great similarity between us, it’s that.”

After we finished the interview, we

stepped onto the Paradox porch for cigarettes. A girl recognized him: “Aren’t you the guy who wrote the book?” She must not have heard about Ghostman’s success, though; she asked politely if it was doing well. Hobbs told her about Warner Bros. and the distribution contracts in 16 countries—an impressive resume, presented with perfect honesty.

“I straight-up don’t believe you,” she said.

Hobbs laughed his high laugh.

june 2013 Reed magazine 23

Garbage and Gutenberg

Can 3-D printers help impoverished communities?

BY JULIETTE GUILBERT ’89

I made my 11-year-old daughter paddle the boat first. Cowardly, yes—but her summercamp credentials are a lot more current than mine. After she expertly maneuvered the tiny plastic canoe around the shallows of Lake Washington, I was shamed into giving it a go. Matt Rogge ’97, a rangy fellow whose easy grin and intense blue eyes make him look more like a river guide than an engineering student, made encouraging noises and did his best to keep me from upending into the drink.

I wobbled till the icy water of the lake threatened to slosh over the gunwales. It was a tippy, leaky little vessel, about a quarter the size of any canoe I’d ever seen before.

But, to be fair, it did start life as a truckload of plastic milk jugs. Matt chopped them up and fed them to Big Red, the 3-D printer he helped design and build, and Big Red extruded yards and yards of plastic filament into the shape of a canoe. Then he paddled the boat to second place in Seattle’s 2012 Seafair Milk Carton Derby (over the strenuous objections of derby purists).

What excited Matt most wasn’t the Cinderella story of the boat race, though. It was the fact that he’d turned a truckload of garbage into something useful—a goal he’d been chasing since signing up for a postbaccalaureate degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Washington, at age 37. In a way, though, the journey began three weeks after his Reed graduation, when he’d reported to his Peace Corps posting in Ghana, ready to try his hand at teaching science.

24 Reed magazine june 2013

It didn’t take long for him to notice that his new community had more basic needs— and to remake himself as a budding water engineer. “It was a town with 2,000 people and only one quality water source,” he says. “So I shifted into hand drilling wells and building pumps. It took some convincing to get out of the classroom.”

Matt enjoyed the hands-on work. At Reed, he’d majored in chemistry, writing a thesis under professor Maggie Geselbracht [chemistry 1993–], an experience he describes as empowering. “The thesis was huge,” he says. “It encourages experimentation. You want to figure out how to do something? Go ahead and do it. You’re encouraged to be creative, and you don’t get stomped when you come up with an idea that’s a little on the outside.”

At the same time, though, chemistry didn’t always satisfy his desire to get his hands dirty. “In chemistry, you can’t even see the things you’re trying to control,” he says. For more immediate gratification, he turned to art, fast-talking his way into a sculpture class with Lea Black [art 1989– 94] as a freshman (you were supposed to take painting first) and then taking sculpture all four years at Reed.

In Ghana, building pumps gave Matt the sensory gratification of sculpture, together with the more abstract challenges of backcountry engineering. “I’d figure something out, and then boom—there’s a working pump where there wasn’t one before.”

But trying to build infrastructure in a poor, remote community of the world was also frustrating. If a pump failed because of a

50-cent part, the cost of shipping a replacement part from Europe could be 10 times that amount. Often, the only solution was to fabricate the parts out of plastic himself—a difficult and time-consuming task.

During a second Peace Corps stint in Bolivia and Panama (this time with his wife, Alicia Ashby ’00), the challenges were the same. He was signed up to design and build gravity-flow water systems—“lots of ditch digging”—but again, there was a constant shortage of crucial parts and no local manufacturing base to make them.

“Then I read about 3-D printing,” Matt says. “And I immediately knew that’s what I wanted to work on.”

3-D printers lay down strips of plastic filament to construct three-dimensional objects—ranging from DIY art projects to industrial prototypes. What if people in remote areas could just print some of the things they needed? From small items like those pesky pump parts to big stuff, like latrines, seeders, even (yes, we admit this is weird) more 3-D printers?

The problem was finding a printer that could meet the needs of remote communities. There were powerful, expensive industrial models that cost $15,000 and up—out of reach for a poor village. And there were the cheap ones used by hobbyists—$300 or less, but too small to get the job done and dependent for their feedstock on plastic filament that cost $20 a pound. The printer of his dreams was big, powerful, and cheap. It could print large objects using waste plastic, not expensive filament. And it didn’t exist.

So, just as he’d built fabricated spare

Matt Rogge ’97 paddles the world’s first 3-D printed boat.

parts for his water pumps and lab equipment for his chemistry students, Matt set out to build himself a printer. At UW, he founded a 3-D printing club, Washington Open Object Fabricators (WOOF), teamed up with two like-minded budding engineer undergrads, and got down to it. That’s when he met a leggy red 4 feet × 8 feet plasma cutter that was struggling to grow up into a working 3-D printer.

Other student groups had worked on Big Red before—four, to be exact—but nobody had gotten it to print in 3-D. “They could never make an extruder that worked, and they couldn’t get the software to work,” Matt says. “It was stuck in two-dimensional space.” Big Red’s Greenlake coming-out party was proof that one could build a 3-D printer that combined power, flexibility, and cheapness. Matt seems most excited about the cheapness.

“Filament for the boat would have cost $800,” he says. “If we’d bought the plastic milk bottles, instead of getting them for free, it would have cost about $3.20.”

After the derby, things went into high gear. In October, his team won $100,000 in the 3D4D Challenge, a competition sponsored by the charity techfortrade to promote the use of 3-D printing to improve life in the developing world. This summer, after graduating, he’ll head to Oaxaca to put the technology to use work in the real world.

“It’s pretty exciting and somewhat scary,” he says. “We’re going into totally uncharted territory. The big question is whether we can make things people consider useful.”

The demand is out there. A story in the Economist about the 3D4D contest led to calls from around the world. “People were asking if we could provide them with printers to make boats,” he says, “so they could stop cutting down their old-growth forests.”

But Matt and his partners want to start a self-sustaining business, not an NGO, and the path to a working business model isn’t entirely clear yet.

“From my experience in the Peace Corps, if we just brought machines down and set

met at the lake, Matt had used Big Red to print two-thirds of a toilet (the job failed partway), which he proudly displayed from the back of his SUV. About to head off for a spring break trip to Oaxaca to network and connect with NGO partners, Matt was bursting with ideas and enthusiasm about recycling, water, and sanitation, and what he might eventually be able to print: low-smoke wood stoves, affordable seeders, cheap LED headlamps, maybe even an entire water pump print-

“ People were asking if we could provide them with printers to make boats, so they could stop cutting down their old-growth forests.” —Matt Rogge ’97 them loose, they’d go to the scrap pile within a year,” he says. “So we want to build a shop that makes printers. That way [the locals] have the capacity. And I’d like to start leasing printers—a couple of 3-D printers might provide some income.”

At the same time, he’s working on refining the technology further. Big Red was built from a repurposed machine for cutting metal in three dimensions; now the team is developing a a Big Red-style sprinter from the ground up. (He estimates the cost at $1,000 for parts, with about two days’ labor). Matt and his partners plan to build printers in a few different sizes for different uses. They’ve designed and built a low-cost machine that creates that pricey plastic filament from waste. And shortly before we

ed from scratch. “It’s misleading to say you can print anything,” he cautions. But, the gleam in his eye seems to say, that doesn’t mean you can’t try.

“A lot of people said this would never work, that we were crazy,” he says. “After we printed the boat and paddled it around Green Lake, I found a web page that was just a list of why you can’t print largescale objects. I’m glad I didn’t read that until afterward.”

“But would that have stopped you from trying it?” I asked.

“No,” he said, grinning. “I don’t think so.”

Juliette Guilbert ’89 was delighted to find that not only did she and Matt Rogge go to the same college, they also went to the same summer camp. Why she still can’t paddle a canoe remains a mystery.

june 2013 Reed magazine 25

Birth of a Language How a group of Nicaraguan children invented a new language and what it tells us about the nature of the human mind.

BY CHRIS LYDGATE ’90

Her hands pirouette through the air like miniature ballerinas. There is no hesitation, no break in the rhythm, as she pokes an invisible ogre with an imaginary knitting needle or slices an ethereal loaf of bread.

Her fingers fly far faster than the lumbering words that describe them. What is remarkable about this conversation is not the story the young woman is telling, but the way she is telling it. She is using one of the world’s youngest known languages—Nicaraguan Sign Language, also known as Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua, or ISN. No one knows exactly how many people use ISN as their primary means of communication; the total is probably less than a thousand. But for linguists, ISN has profound implications. Emerging unexpectedly from Managua in the 1980s, it represents one of the few times that scholars have been able to witness the birth of a completely new language. ISN also provides an unparalleled opportunity to test one of the most controversial theories in linguistics, explore the forces that shape human language, and shed light on a philosophical debate that goes back to Descartes. All of which is elegantly captured in the senior thesis of linguistics major Katelyn Best ’13.

Linguists categorize languages according to their ancestry. The Romance languages (such as French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish) descend from Latin. The Polynesian languages (such as Hawaiian, Samoan, Tongan, and Maori) share

Linguistics major Katelyn Best ’13 examined the grammatical structure of ISN in her senior thesis.

photo by eric rose

For most of the last century, most of Nicaragua’s deaf people lived in profound linguistic isolation. With little or no contact with other deaf people, they used rudimentary gestures known as “home signs” to communicate with their families, but these gestures were of little value outside the deaf person’s immediate circle.

In 1977, the government of Nicaragua established that nation’s first school for deaf children in the capital, Managua. Four years later, following the overthrow of the Somoza government, the Communist regime set up a second, larger school for the deaf designed to help its students learn vocational skills.

The school’s initial approach was to teach its students to lip-read Spanish and to use American Sign Language to spell individual words. After several years, however, two things became clear. First, the classes weren’t very effective—the students weren’t interested in lip-reading. Second, the students were using their own system of gestures to communicate in the playground, on the bus, and in the classroom (especially when the teacher’s back was turned).

Trouble was, none of the teachers could understand them.

In 1986, the Nicaraguan Ministry of Education hired an American sign language expert, linguist Judy Kegl, to figure out what was going on. What she discovered was astonishing.

“When I noticed that the younger the child, the more fluent they were signing, it reminded me of the rebirth of Hebrew, where a dead language was brought back to life by teaching it to children and letting their brains do the rest,” says Kegl, now professor and director of the signed language research lab at the University of Southern Maine. “Here, the children’s brains were taking in the raw material of gestural input and via the acquisition process creating a new language.”

Kegl was witnessing a profound moment.

Unbeknownst to their teachers, the children were developing a method of communication that was far more sophisticated than a pantomime collection of gestures. They found ways to convey complex abstractions and make critical distinctions in time, space, mood, and aspect—all without having known any other language. They were, in other words, creating a language out of thin air.

Birth of a Language a lineage that can be traced back, linguists believe, to Taiwan. Readers of a certain age may remember the grand branching language diagrams that used to adorn the inside covers of dictionaries. As you move up the tree, the names of the language families grow increasingly august—Indo-European, Niger-Congo, Dravidian, Sino-Tibetan, Afro-Asiatic, and so on. And at the very top, there lies a question mark—do the trunks converge? Was there, as the Book of Genesis suggests, a single great-grandmother tongue, now lost to the millennia, that gave rise to all the spoken languages of the world? If so, what did it sound like—and how was it transformed into languages as different as Cornish and Kxoe?

These questions are still hotly debated by linguists. But while specific genealogies can be hard to untangle (is Scots a dialect of English or a variant of Gaelic with English influence?), it’s fair to say that virtually all languages are related to, and derived from, older languages.

That’s not the case with ISN, however.

Although it uses the ASL system for fingerspelling and has borrowed some vocabulary, the two languages are not genetically related. The fact that ISN has no real linguistic ancestors makes it an ideal testing ground to examine questions about the structure of language, says Katelyn.

It’s an overcast March afternoon, and we’re sitting in the Paradox Café. Katelyn is perched in a chair sporting a white sweater, a plaid skirt, green Nike sneakers, and a Mickey Mouse watch. She grew up in Eugene and went to a French immersion school. She visited Reed during her senior year in high school and was instantly smitten. “I knew I wanted to be here.”

She packed a lot into her four years on campus. She played the cello in the orchestra, wrote for the Quest, worked with the canyon crew, and rode horses for PE—she enjoyed riding so much that she worked at the stables in return for lessons. But it was an introductory course with professor Matt Pearson ’92 [linguistics 2001–] that awakened her to the joys of linguistics. “It was really fun, looking for patterns in languages to see how they’re related,” she says.

The following semester, she took a course in so-called “contact languages” with professor Kara Becker [linguistics 2010–] and studied pidgins—trade languages which arise when two or more groups need to

28 Reed magazine june 2013

communicate but have no language in common. Pidgins typically have impoverished vocabularies, stripped-down grammar, and low prestige. They are almost always second languages, spoken because the primary languages are mutually unintelligible.

After a couple of generations, however, the children of pidgin-speakers confront a dilemma. They have limited access to their parents’ primary language—in fact, pidgin may be the only language they have ever really used. So they make it better. They develop, refine, and extend the pidgin into a creole—a highly structured language capable of expressing the full range of human thought. Creoles are spoken throughout the world, particularly in places with a legacy of colonialism and slavery, such as Jamaica, Haiti, Papua New Guinea, Hawaii, Suriname, and so on. They typically draw their lexicon from the dominant, or superstrate lan-

Bickerton proposed something much more radical. Cast upon a rocky linguistic shore, deprived of a fully expressive language of their own, the children of pidgin speakers drew upon an innate faculty—the language bioprogram—to build a new language from within. This program favors certain grammatical features, such as putting subjects before objects. The reason that creoles are so similar, in other words, is that the human mind is preprogrammed to construct language in a certain way—and creoles offer a peek into that ideal structure.

Bickerton’s hypothesis echoes Noam Chomsky’s theory of “deep grammar” and touches on a philosophical debate that has been raging since the 17th century. Do we acquire our ideas from sensation and experience? Or are we born with certain ideas built into our minds? Hume argued that our ideas come from perceptions—how could

Could ISN hold the key to a philosophical conundrum? guage, but their grammatical structure is often completely different. For example, take this statement in Guyanese Creole: She mosi de bad mek she tek he. (“She could only have married him because she was completely broke.”)

Or this one: Mi mind gi’ me se me de mek me de.

[My mind gives me that I exist] causes [(the fact that) I exist] (“I think therefore I am.”)

In the 1980s, a British linguist named Derek Bickerton noticed some striking similarities between Sranan, a creole spoken in Suriname, and Hawaiian Creole.

Although the two languages had radically different origins, they both demonstrated linguistic properties that had nothing to do with English. And it wasn’t just the creoles of Suriname and Hawaii that were similar—many creoles, including those based on French and Arabic, showed similar characteristics.

Several theories had been proposed to account for this unlikely phenomenon. One theory held that 17th-century sailors spoke a sort of nautical jargon that was adopted around the world. Another proposed that a protocreole arose in Portuguese colonies in West Africa and subsequently migrated. A third was that substrate languages from Africa were responsible for the creoles’ similarities.

you have the idea of the color red if you had never seen the color red? Descartes proposed that some ideas, such as God, must be innate, because nothing in our experience corresponds to them.

Katelyn first encountered the Bickerton hypothesis in Becker’s class. “I found it very appealing,” she says. “We know that language acquisition happens but the mechanism is a mystery. Bickerton’s hypothesis that creoles are the closest thing to the original human language—that really intrigued me.”

She was also struck by its shortcomings— many scholars have picked on Bickerton’s definition of creoles or pointed out that not all creoles demonstrate the features he predicted. Much of the debate has centered on the influence of the dominant, or superstrate language, which tends to obscure the mechanism of the bioprogram.

Later in the course, she read a 1996 paper by Kegl and McWhorter in which the authors tossed out the casual suggestion that ISN would be an ideal candidate for exploring Bickerton’s hypothesis. Suddenly, she knew she had found the perfect thesis topic—to test Bickerton on a language with no ancestors at all.

Katelyn’s project posed a dozen headaches.

Although she was proficient in French and Spanish, she had no experience with sign

leah nash

languages—certainly not with ISN, and nor, for that matter, with ASL. What she needed was an informant—a native speaker who could give her insights into the grammatical structure of ISN by demonstration.

Traveling to Nicaragua was impractical but, fortunately, Katelyn tracked down a deaf woman in Maine whose first language was ISN. Katelyn spent a week in Maine over winter break staying with Kegl and communicating with her informant, Sayda, a 25-year-old woman from Managua who had been profoundly deaf since birth. Although ISN is her first language, she also knows ASL and can read and write Spanish.

To prepare for her sessions, Katelyn took a crash course in ASL so she could ask Sayda about how ISN worked. After the first couple of sessions, however, she altered the format because she worried that Sayda was trying to accommodate Katelyn’s rudimentary grasp of ASL. Instead, she asked Sayda to describe pictures and tell her stories such as Jack and the Beanstalk. Katelyn made videos of the sessions and then combed through the footage.

All through the sodden Portland spring, Katelyn analyzed her recordings. She learned some fascinating things about ISN— the sign for “California,” for example, is a series of interlocking rings, because in 1984 the Summer Olympics (whose iconic flag sports five interlocking rings) took place in Los Angeles.

But was Bickerton right? In fact, Katelyn did find several of the features that he predicted. Most creoles don’t often use the verb “to be” in the present tense, preferring, for example, “He tired” over “He is tired.” This construction, known to linguists as copula absence, was present in ISN, in keeping with Bickerton’s theory.

She soon discovered that most of Bickerton’s predictions were not borne out, however. Based on the properties of creoles, for example, Bickerton proposed that the language bioprogram would favor subject-verb-object word order, i.e. “The woman reads the book.” But the most common order in ISN is subject-object-verb, or “The woman [the book] reads.” Bickerton also predicted that the bioprogram would favor the use of definite and indefinite articles— which Katelyn also did not find.

What were her feelings as the results became clear? “I don’t want to say I was rooting for Bickerton,” Katelyn smiles. “As a researcher, I’m trying to stay neutral. It’s

Acrolect acrobatics: prof. Kara Becker discusses code-switching in Linguistics 330, Contact Languages, with Katelyn Best ’13 (left) and Rosemary Ingham ’13 (right).

kind of what I was expecting, because his theory has gotten so much criticism. But it was apparent almost immediately that ISN didn’t have the features he predicted.”

She offers several possible explanations for her results. Bickerton’s theory might just be wrong. Or perhaps there is one bioprogram for spoken languages, and a different one for sign languages. Or, as Katelyn says, “Maybe Bickerton was right on the big idea but wrong on the details.” If he had written his theory after studying ISN, for example, instead of Hawaiian Creole, he might have predicted a different set of features.

Interestingly, however, she discovered that ISN does share features with other sign languages—shaking the head and lowering the eyebrows, for example, to emphasize a negative. Perhaps more surprising is ISN’s use of loci—specific points in space near a signer’s body that are used as temporary holding locations for various actors and objects in a narrative. For example, if the story involves a Giant who lives on top of a beanstalk, the giant is typically described once—and then pigeonholed into a particular space. Every time the story subsequently refers to the Giant, the signer simply points to the space—the equivalent of saying “he,” but without its maddening imprecision in spoken language. Such loci are found in ASL and other sign langauges.

For Becker, who wrote her dissertation on the sociolinguistics of the New York accent, Katelyn’s thesis is a good example of the ambition and rigor of undergraduate

research at Reed. “I love our students,” she says. “They are incredibly hardworking and creative. They collect data. They make hypotheses. They test them. At Reed, students do linguistics—they don’t just read about it.”

The longterm outlook for ISN is unclear.

Languages with a small number of users are at risk of being swamped by more dominant tongues, as has happened with many indigenous tribal languages in the Americas.

Sign languages are not immune—a sign language once used in Martha’s Vineyard is extinct; others from Ghana to Thailand are now endangered.

On the other hand, ISN’s vigorous popularity among deaf children and young adults in Nicaragua augurs well for its survival. As Bickerton wrote, “Some people try to use language as an instrument of power, to build artificial barriers, keep other people in line, stamp them all into the same mold, but language itself resists power; it’s demotic, it’s subversive, it slips through the cracks of dictatorships, it makes fools of the powerful.”

As long as it survives, ISN will provide linguists—including Katelyn, if her luck holds—with an unparalleled opportunity to understand the machinery of language and to gain insight into the oldest tongues of humankind by studying the youngest.

GO FURTHER Bastard Tongues by Derek Bickerton. 2008 Creation through contact: Sign language emergence and sign language change in Nicaragua, by Judy Kegl et al. 1999

june 2013 Reed magazine 29

Apuleius Unbridled

Professor Sonia Sabnis reads The Golden Ass with a fresh eye.

BY BILL DONAHUE PHOTOS BY LEAH NASH

So this dude named Lucius fools around with magic and (check it out, yo!) turns himself into a donkey. As he wanders through the boondocks, he keeps hearing weird stories—a randy witch who transforms men into animals, thieves who try to sell a young bride to a brothel, a frog that jumps out of a dog’s mouth. Lucius finally turns back into a man, only to be completely duped by this goofy religious cult, which suckers Homeboy out of all the cash lining his sorry pockets.

The author of this outlandish tale, written in the second century, is a disheveled street wiseman named Apuleius—a sort of second-century Bob Dylan. His wry barbs at the indolent Roman gentry are so well aimed that we can safely assume, even in the absence of photographs, that Apuleius had rock star charisma.

Or at least that is, roughly speaking, the considered opinion of professor Sonia Sabnis [classics 2006–], an Apuleius scholar who earned her PhD from University of California, Berkeley. As Sabnis sees it, Apuleius was writing when the fatted Roman Empire was, like today’s America, “highly stratified and obsessed with appearances and absurd spectacles.” Just as today’s Americans revel in celebrity gossip and reality TV shows like Biggest Loser, the Roman elite honed a blood thirst for gladiatorial games. Apuleius took a shank to their inflated egos, and Sabnis is following suit with her own sharp, iconoclastic critique.

When she presented a paper at the 2011 meeting of the American Philological Association, she took issue with the stodgy archaisms that abound in The Golden Ass

This 16th-century fresco by an unknown artist depicts a scene from Metamorphoses, better known as the Golden Ass—a rollicking novel whose barbed critique of the Roman Empire has lost none of its edge over the millennia.

translations used by today’s college students—“verily,” for instance, and “forsooth.”

In that paper, she celebrates the “innovation of Apuleius’s language in combination with the colloquialism and humor of his storytelling.” She zeroes in on one of Apuleius’s favorite adverbs, prorsus, which, despite more than two millennia of Latin scholarship, still eludes definition. Sabnis suggested that prorsus might be compared to the pause word “like” popularized by, like, you know, Valley Girls. She shows how both John Arthur Hanson, the Princeton professor behind a popular 1989 translation, and she herself render one sentence uttered by a young nobleman, Tlepolemus, who, disguised as a bandit, voices a boast to a band of thieves. The sentence is “totamque prorsus deuastaui Macedoniam.”

Hanson: “I laid waste the whole of Macedonia.”

Sabnis: “I wasted like all of Macedonia.”

Sabnis points out that the English word

“like” is an intensifier used to lay extra stress on what follows—and argues that the word fits in Tlepolemus’s mouth because he is “trying to ingratiate himself to a robber band by mimicking the solemn heroization and amplification that they use when describing their feats of banditry on the margins of society.” Dude’s trying to sound like he’s got some street, in other words; he’s trying to fit in.

Later, Sabnis discusses a passage in which an old woman is mocking—and also quoting—a young bride, in hopes of making the lass seem like an airhead. The old woman says, “se nunc maxime prorsus.” P.G. Walsh, a distinguished Scottish classicist, renders the sentence, “She kept repeating that now all was up with her.” And Sabnis? “She kept saying that she was now like totally dead.”

The Golden Ass (or, to use the book’s Latin name, The Metamorphoses) has made frequent appearances in Humanities 110 since at least 1990 and will return to the

june 2013 Reed magazine 31

Apuleius Unbridled syllabus in spring 2014. “The book has a lot of intellectual depth,” explains professor Wally Englert [classics 1981–]. “It references the ancient Egyptians, and it references Plato and Virgil. It’s a great way to end the course—in The Golden Ass, students can see reflections of the earlier things they’ve read.”

No one could be happier about The Golden Ass’s comeback than Sabnis, who has spent much of her career studying the book—and also reveling in the subversive bent of its author. “Apuleius was from a fairly elite family,” she explains, “but he wasn’t from Rome. He was from North Africa. He had an outsider’s perspective, and his characters aren’t Roman noblemen.” No, in The Golden Ass, rural Greek women and slaves play starring roles, and we get the inside story from a lowly donkey. Lucius spends most of the book as an ass—and as such, he plays a sort of undercover reporter, spying on Roman citizens in their least gracious moments. They swap husbands and wives and engage in lurid trysts. They party like it’s spring break at Daytona Beach. They beat their animals and enlist them to perform in sex shows. One wealthy chucklehead even serves Lucius honeyed wine and hires a stableman to teach him silly tricks— never mind that he’s a donkey.

As Sabnis sees it, Apuleius is “resisting the Roman Empire through storytelling.”

Her dissertation, “Storytelling Slaves and

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Narrative Resistance in Apuleius,” considers how slaves assert their voices in an unfair, hierarchical Roman society. In a subsequent paper on Florida 6, Apuleius’ meditation on India, Sabnis credits the ancient author with a cultural sensitivity that eluded most Roman chroniclers. As she tells it, Apuleius discusses the Indian allures that mesmerized many Romans—“enormous elephants, dusky inhabitants, and a majestic river”— but then goes on to add that he is bored hearing about such things, given that they exist in Africa as well. Apuleius turns ironic when he says that India is procul a nobis, meaning “far from us,” and, Sabnis says, he points up the “severe limitations” of his contemporaries, who tended to regard India as a sort of jasmine-scented amusement park.

Is she a fan? Is she smitten? Well, consider Sabnis’ favorite necklace, which is a goldplated donkey with the letters ASS stamped on it. At Reed, Sabnis’s trademark is her “Zidane lecture,” in which she compares Apuleius to Zinedine Zidane, the dashing Egyptian-born soccer star who, while playing for France in the 2006 World Cup final, famously head butted an Italian defender, earning himself an ejection and (ultimately) a five-meter-high bronze statue in Paris.

“Just as Apuleius is resisting the Roman Empire,” Sabnis reasons, “Zidane is resisting the Italians.”

Sabnis’ passion for Apuleius would have been hard to predict 20-odd years ago when she first encountered Latin as an eighth

grader in Southern California. Then, she was drawn to the puzzle the language presented—to “the challenge of doing the grammar in a way that balanced.” Latin was a dead language to her, and it didn’t come alive, really, until, as a junior at Columbia University, she spent a semester in Rome, where suddenly the wonders of the ancient world were all around her, as taxis and Vespas spritzed about in the streets. She went to restaurants and ate in grotto-like basements where the brickwork was a remnant from the Theatre of Pompey, completed in 55 BC. She saw the Norwegian folk pop duo, the Kings of Convenience, play amid the ruins of Ostia, an old Roman harbor town. “I was in a place that had never not been a Roman city,” she remembers, with delight. “There are layers and layers of history in Rome, and you have to interact with all of them.” Sabnis began realizing that being a classical scholar was all about connecting the ancient to the modern. She asked herself, “Why would I ever want to do anything else?”

Eventually, as her Latin evolved, Sabnis came to recognize that Apuleius is like, say, James Joyce or Vladimir Nabokov, a nimble trickster with language—so deft that he can load brief phrases with political satire. When Lucius shambles into the barn as a donkey, for instance, Apuleius ironically gives him highfalutin airs, so that he expects loca lautia—that is, the red carpet treatment reserved for Roman noblemen.

As Lucius lasciviously eyes a comely slave

maiden stirring a pot, Apuleius describes him as obstupui, or stupefied, thereby making a sarcastic allusion to Virgil’s Aeneid, wherein the mighty hero gazes obstupui upon the fall of Troy.

Readers don’t need to understand the references to catch the drift. “He’s offering a critique,” Sabnis says, “but you don’t have to give it deep thought. It’s light entertainment.” The wry mix of the satirical and the sublime sings to Sabnis. “Well,”

writes in a caption. “But how was the clay lamp mixed up in all of this?”

Spurious? Well, for centuries, many belletrists regarded The Golden Ass itself as throwaway—as nothing but an amusing donkey romp through the Greek countryside. But then in 1985, John J. Winkler, a Stanford professor and erstwhile Benedictine monk, attacked that reading with his book, Auctor and Actor: A Narratological Reading of Apuleius. Winkler called The Golden Ass

Apuleius is like James Joyce or Vladimir Nabokov—a nimble trickster with language, so deft that he can load brief phrases with political satire. she says, “I grew up in the ’80s, in front of the television.” She herself has a knack for wordplay. In the photo on her Reed website, she clutches a small placard reading, “LAETABERIS,” which is Latin for “You shall rejoice.” Follow the link to Sabnis’ personal website, and you’ll find “something I did when I was supposed to be working on my dissertation”: a small drama that Sabnis created by moving plastic figurines around on her desk and snapping photos. We see the Belgian cartoon hero, Tintin, the boy reporter, cowering inside a clay lamp. He is attacked by two Swiss knights bearing battle-axes, only to be later saved by a gaunt, almond-eyed space alien. “Bravo!” Sabnis

“a philosophical comedy about religious knowledge”—and also described the book as a detective novel challenging the reader with “hermeneutic entertainment.” He explained that 60% of the text consists of 15 tales that Lucius, the narrator, pastes in while taking breaks from his own asinine autobiography. There is, for instance, a story a baker tells about an adulterous wife and a long fable that an old woman tells about a love affair between the god Cupid and a mortal girl named Psyche. All of these stories—indeed the whole of The Golden Ass— is shrouded, Winkler feels, in complexity.

We don’t know how credible the storytellers are, or what their agendas are, and we

need to read as gumshoes might. We need to be discerning from the very moment, a few lines into the prologue, when Apuleius signals that we’re stepping into a swamp of ambiguity. “Quis ile?” he asks before introducing Lucius. “Who’s speaking?”

At a recent conference of her Latin 312 class, Sabnis spoke of how easily Psyche enters the underworld: “She just walks right in, as compared to Virgil’s Aeneas, who has great difficulty getting into the underworld. You can read Psyche’s story as a dream or as allegory. It’s up to the reader.” One student said, “I’m reminded of Augustine, who says that reading Scripture is like a puzzle.”

Many of Sabnis’ students diverge from her take on The Golden Ass, however, to embrace the book as a growing-up story and Lucius as a sort of ancient world big brother to Holden Caulfield. “Lucius’ curiosity accompanies him throughout his journey, even when times are most difficult and dismal,” Brian Urrutia ’09 wrote in a paper for Sabnis. “Is this so unlike a student at Reed?” Helen SpencerWallace ’14, who is readying to write her junior qualifying paper on The Golden Ass, is meanwhile intrigued by how Lucius, a recent college grad and budding professional, negotiates the pressure to conform.

“Everyone has to appear to conform, and then not conform,” she says. “Lucius is figuring out how to do that.”

At the end of The Golden Ass, Lucius seems to conform completely. The goddess Isis metamorphoses the donkey Lucius back into a man—and then insists that, in exchange, “All the remaining days of your life must be dedicated to me.” Lucius lets himself be led, sheep-like, to the temple, and when he steps inside, to encounter, within “the secret recesses,” a stack of sacred texts, he’s all gaga, reveling over the books’ “unknown characters.”

If Apuleius left it at that, we might take him at face value. But no, he begins to lay the whole reverence shtick on with a trowel, describing the books’ “hierographically painted animals” and their “wreathed and twisted letters with tails that twirled like wheels or spiraled together like the vine tendrils, so that it was altogether impossible for any peeping profane to comprehend.”

We’re lost in the fun house, ultimately, and that’s exactly where Apuleius wants to keep us, laughing, and trying to figure out the magic underlying all his tricks.

june 2013 Reed magazine 33

Going through the Fire

What makes Reed work? The Oral History Project yields some telling clues.

BY JOHN SHEEHY ’82

Climbing aboard a clutch of logs that he had strung together as a transport raft, Don Wheeler ’35 set off one early fall day in 1931 down the Columbia River from his family’s fruit farm in eastern Washington, bound for Reed College in Portland, Oregon.

Known among his high school teachers as “the genius in overalls,” Wheeler was no stranger to the river. By age 16 he had distinguished himself as the only person alive to have successfully traversed the Columbia’s treacherous Priest Rapids. As his raft neared Portland, Wheeler put in ashore and hitchhiked the rest of the way into town on an empty dynamite truck returning from Idaho. Four years later, this genius in overalls found himself hoisted onto the shoulders of fellow Reed students and paraded by torchlight through Portland’s Eastmoreland neighborhood—one of two Reed graduates selected that year for the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Wheeler’s metamorphosis from farm boy

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to hero scholar was its almost commonplace occurrence at Reed. By the time of Wheeler’s graduation in 1935, the college was producing the country’s highest percentage of Rhodes Scholars, as well as the highest percentage of students going on to receive PhDs in the sciences and the second highest percentage in the social sciences.

Remarkably, Reed had reached this pinnacle within two decades of first opening its doors in 1911. The question on the mind of educators around the country was, how?

What was Reed’s formula for success? The answer to that question lies largely in the singularity of purpose the college chose to pursue at its inception.

“Reed students could not parrot an instructor or memorize a text,” boasted the college’s founding president, William Foster [1910–19]. “If they were to survive, they had to engage in that most painful of all human activities—thinking.”

Foster’s goal was to make critical thinking—thinking about thinking—Reed’s holy grail. While the term “critical thinking” has since become something of a buzzword

Don Wheeler ’35 (left) paddled a log raft down the Columbia River to get to Reed.

among liberal arts colleges, at the time of Reed’s founding it was at the forefront of reform efforts in higher education. The antebellum liberal arts college, centered around the Greek idea of cultivating knowledge for the sake of being, had been largely pushed aside by the German research university model, which, with its pursuit of knowledge

Many alumni interviewed for the Oral History Project said the Reed conference system was a defining experience. Although the two photos shown here were taken 20 years apart (at left, 1962; above, 1980s), the intellectual atmosphere remained fundamentally unaltered.

for the sake of doing, was proving better suited to the market needs of the industrial age. In desperation, many liberal arts colleges had resorted to attracting students with promises of spectator sports, secret societies, and the empty credentialing of the “gentleman’s C.” Reed launched into this sea of mediocrity with a vision to restore relevancy to the liberal arts through a strict focus on intellectual enthusiasm, combining the traditional emphasis of knowledge for the sake of being with an emerging new American philosophy called pragmatism. Advanced in the late 19th century by the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, among others, pragmatism’s principal tenet was the skepticism of ideology.

Ideas were not to be viewed as immutable truths, but as contingent and provisional responses to the environment—tools that people could utilize in the spirit of scientific inquiry for coping with the world around them. The pragmatists’ skepticism served as a personal safeguard against an increasingly impersonal mass society undergoing

the disruptions of rapid industrialization, liberating a rising new generation of progressives with a sense of choice and possibilities in a universe where they viewed themselves able to interact with their environment as agents of their own destinies.

William Foster took the helm of Reed College just two months after receiving his doctorate in education from John Dewey’s Columbia Teacher’s College. His plan was to create a democratic learning community founded on tolerance and equality. It would employ the most rigorous intellectual training possible for the purpose of grinding down the unexamined beliefs and ideologies of students and replacing them with a pragmatic method of thinking. His chief advantage was starting out with a blank slate—Reed was largely unencumbered by the ponderous influence of faculty, alumni, and sectarian tradition that dogged other schools. This allowed him to integrate critical thinking into the three essential promises that college traditionally offers students: personal development, socialization, and achievement.

Prof F.L. “Grif” Griffin [math 1911–52] approached math as a whole language, not just a series of disjointed topics.

Different colleges worked these three promises to different purposes. While the majority of schools were geared toward instrumental knowledge and skill training— certifying that a student is intellectually and socially prepared to enter a specific career path in the workforce—for students enrolling at Reed the outcomes were less narrowly defined. They aligned more behind promises of personal enlightenment, empowerment, and self-expression; the creation of intimate relationships of mutual trust and support; and the attainment of broad intellectual preparation for life.

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students, 1980s

“Reed was not fashioned as a savingsbank college where a student would deposit some course credits and then draw out a diploma,” said founding professor F.L. Griffin [mathematics 1911–52], “but as a coherent educational enterprise.”

The purpose of that enterprise was to train students not only to think independently, but to think anew—to master that most difficult maneuver, the intellectual pivot. This required approaching thinking as a free-form and boundless activity. What made this approach relevant is that it provided students with a flexibility of perspective—a deep understanding that “you are not your ideas, but merely a holder of your ideas”—which was critical not only in adapting to the fast-changing modern world, but also in helping shape it.

While Reed’s educational model has evolved over the decades, its essential purpose—thinking about thinking—remains the same as it was that fall day in 1931 when Wheeler set out for college aboard a log raft down the Columbia River. His personal transformation at Reed is echoed in the stories of hundreds of alumni—stories captured in the Reed Oral History Project.

Their firsthand accounts reveal a common pattern of intellectual rites of passage that help explain why Reed works.

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Part of the secret to the college’s early success was undoubtedly the unique pool of students it attracted. Many of them were outsiders to private elite colleges of the time, admitted without the barriers of ability to pay, religious affiliation, or gender that limited or restricted admission to other schools.

In Reed’s coed, nonsectarian, egalitarian community, students found an environment of broad toleration.

Prior to the 1950s, roughly 80% of them came from the Pacific Northwest. A large number had grown up on ranches and farms, or in small rural towns. Others came from Portland, whose only other college offering until 1938 was a Catholic men’s college. The remainder of the student body was mostly composed of students from the East Coast and California, many of them Jewish students denied admission at other elite colleges because of quota systems, or Unitarians, attracted to Reed by the legacy of its founder, Unitarian minister Thomas Lamb Eliot.

What drew many of them to campus was the college’s iconoclastic image.

“In the Portland area,” recalled Mary Barnard ’32, “Reed was looked upon by the young as a school for dreary drudges because there were no Greek-letter fraternities and sororities and no intercollegiate

sports. Parents, on the other hand, viewed Reed as extremely dangerous. The rumor persisted that the principal subjects taught at Reed were ‘atheism, communism, and free love.’”

The pejorative slur “atheism, communism, free love” was first directed at the college around the time of the Red Scare in the Pacific Northwest following the First World War. It originated in conservative quarters from critics irritated by the college’s progressive activism, nonsectarian values, and pacifist politics during the 1910s. In a cocky display of nonconformity, students adopted the slur in the 1920s as the college’s tonguein-cheek motto. It stuck, and for decades functioned, along with Reed’s reputation for academic rigor, like a high birdcall to a certain breed of prospective student.

“As a rough working rule,” mused Dexter Keezer [president 1934–42], “I thought a college ought to be willing to accommodate about 5% of freaks and geniuses in its student body, and not be too much bothered by what they did or why they did it. At Reed it seemed to me that that 5% joint classification was exceeded.”

Reed’s high tolerance for individualism— for allowing people to be themselves without the fear of being judged as different, strange, or eccentric—distinguished the

community from its very beginning. The archetypal story found in the oral histories is one of having grown up feeling out of place or misunderstood among family and community, and then arriving at Reed with a sense of having come home.

“I immediately realized—almost in a blinding flash of epiphany—that this was where I personally belonged,” said Rhodes Scholar Gale Dick ’50. “For the first time in my life I was with a whole bunch of people who shared all kinds of interests. Until then I didn’t know that there was anybody else in the world who did.”

Coupled with this sense of camaraderie was another common Reed archetype— that of the big frog arriving from the small pond. “I had never met anybody smarter

at any moment. I told them that they were far from unique, that in fact the Reed norm was very close to where they were.”

What became evident to even the brightest students was that a high IQ or perfect GPA score in high school wasn’t enough to guarantee success at Reed. It also took grit and perseverance.

“All of my friends from Lincoln High School in Portland who had started with me dropped out one by one,” said Helen Thorsen ’24. “If you didn’t make study your whole life, you might just as well not even try, because if you tried to do anything else, you were sunk.”

Adding to the workload stress was a chronic sense of dissatisfaction many students felt about the papers they wrote or the

“ Freshman humanities was the thing that changed most of us. The course just knocked the pins out of everybody.”

—Armand Schwartz ’60. than I was when I was growing up,” said Joe Weisman ’65. “I got to Reed and all of a sudden I was just kind of middle, or less.”

This humbling adjustment in personal narrative was critical to William Foster’s use of rigor. Arguably, the most transformative learning systems are inherently authoritarian—they seek first to make you vulnerable by highlighting your ignorance, and then they dominate you. Their ability to leave a lasting imprint rests in great part on your surrendering to their dominance. At Reed, some students found the experience liberating.

“The first two years of the Reed system, that of knocking the arrogance out of you, really worked for me,” Mertie Hansen Mueller ’56 said. “I went from thinking I was the smartest, strongest person to being completely open to learning because I knew that there was so much I didn’t know, that I would never know, no matter if I studied a lifetime.”

Other students, including many used to being recognized and rewarded as high achievers, found that this shift to lifelong learning gave rise to a sense of “impostor’s syndrome.”

“Many of my advisees were certain that they had been admitted by error,” said professor Carol Creedon [psychology 1957–91].

“Since entering Reed they had become more convinced than ever that they were unworthy, and that the mistake would be discovered

research they conducted, some of it exacerbated by the college’s policy of providing narrative evaluations of the students’ work instead of reporting their grades to them.

“If you weren’t doing well, you would get a white slip in your mail slot,” said Carl Larson ’27. “The first time I got a warning, I thought I had been at the top of the class. I corralled that professor right away.

He said to me, ‘Oh, you can do better.’ To which I responded, ‘If you’re already doing the best you can, how are you going to do any better?’ He said, ‘Just keep showing up.’”

The expectation of continual improvement, exacerbated by curricular hurdles like the junior qualification exam and senior thesis, pushed most students beyond their intellectual comfort zones.

“The junior qual for political science majors lasted a whole week,” said Elizabeth Tabor Mullady ’38. “There were no subjects. They could ask you about anything.

You could go anyplace to take it, even off campus. Do anything you wanted to do.

Take any books you wanted to read. Nothing would help. If you had asked me my name at the end of it, I couldn’t have told you. I was just gone.”

The effect was partly intentional. If, on some level, we know what the learning system wants from us—say, by the use of grades as feedback on a defined path toward earning a degree to enter a specific career—we

Poet Mary Barnard ’32. “Parents viewed Reed as extremely dangerous.”

can erect certain internal defenses that allow us to choose how much of ourselves we give away to the system. But when the contract with the system is as existential as learning for the sake of learning, and progress is measured more qualitatively than quantitatively, we are apt to lose some of our psychic protections, allowing the system to get more deeply into our heads. This, arguably, was the true agenda of William Foster’s plan.

Reed found its ideal vehicle for this intellectual immersion in the college’s groundbreaking humanities program. Developed in 1921 by Foster’s successor, Richard Scholz [president 1921–24], the mandatory oneyear freshman course (originally offered until 1943 in two sequential tracks of history and literature) was both an innovation and an outlier in higher education. No mere civics course or history of Western society’s early development in Greece and Rome—as was the case with many of the Western civilization courses that followed it in the 1920s and 1930s—humanities as taught at Reed was first and foremost a pragmatic training ground. Students learned critical thinking by doing critical thinking. They did so in small conferences patterned after those Richard Scholz had experienced at Oxford as a member of the first class of American Rhodes Scholars in 1904.

“Freshman humanities was the thing that changed most of us,” said Armand Schwartz ’60. “The course just knocked the pins out of everybody, and we had to rethink who we were, what we were, and where we were going and why. The purpose of the whole exercise seemed to be to take you apart, examine everything, and then put you back together. It was just like rebuilding an engine.”

Professor Rex Arragon [history 1923– 62], who directed Reed’s humanities program for more than 40 years, claimed that he followed John Dewey’s maxim of “learning by doing”—the “doing” in this case being reasoning.

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Prof. Rex Arragon [history 1923–74] was the intellectual architect of freshman Humanities.

“According to Dewey,” Arragon said, “a situation does not simply mold us, we also shape it by our scientific inquiry. We use our heads, that is, our reason. We observe systematically, inquire, and experiment by formal procedures, then distinguish, analyze, relate ideas, and draw conclusions. Rationality is essential. Without it, instrumentalism, like other empiricism, is helpless. Emphasis upon reason, upon critical intelligence or cautious thinking, is the chief means as well as one of the significant ends of study.”

To instigate this kind of critical thinking in the small humanities conferences, professors employed the Socratic method. “You always answered a question with a question,” said professor John Pock [sociology 1955–98]. “The demand was very heavy on the students to do the discovery of the issues, and to analyze and examine a line of argument. It wasn’t a matter of the teacher sitting there and doing a minilecture on something.”

This approach relied upon a pedagogy of what might be called “informal reasoning.”

According to studies in cognitive science, engaging students in such a manner makes reasoning more deliberate, transparent, and step oriented than displays of formal reasoning—the professorial “sage on the stage,” or what William Foster derided as “assemblyline and loudspeaker education”—where a professor pours information into the minds of students with hopes of making them wise.

Relying too heavily on formal reasoning— the so-called “expert’s blind spot” where content knowledge tends to eclipse pedagogical knowledge—provides students with

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Prof. Carol Creedon [psych 1957-91] said many students “were certain they had been admitted by error.”

Pres. Keezer thought Reed had too many “freaks and geniuses.” Armand Schwartz ’60 said that Hum “knocked the pins out of everybody. Prof. Marvin Levich expected the best from students—and found that they usually delivered.

little insight into how to solve real problems, because they do not gain access to the professor’s own cognitive “box of tricks.”

“Reed teachers did not pontificate,” William Foster maintained, “they guided.

And they did not always win arguments with students.”

But they did set the standards of reasoning.

“You had a problem that you asked students to pursue,” said longtime professor Marvin Levich [philosophy 1953–94], “and then you talked at it as if everyone in that class were a professional, as though they were your equals. That was a method of teaching that made some people uncomfortable, but in a lot of cases it was amazing how—if you expected the best from the students—how many of them would, in one way or another, fulfill your expectation. I thought that any other method of teaching was coddling the students.”

This modus operandi was essential to Foster’s idea of a democratic learning environment where students engaged with teachers

as “coworkers” in constructing knowledge, not merely consuming it. That required placing more emphasis on encouraging the characteristics involved in forming a flexibility of perspective—motivation, curiosity, imagination, and creativity—than merely learning by rote and recall. The approach was institutionalized in the mandatory humanities course, whose broad coverage of literature, history, philosophy, religion, politics, and the arts meant that no professor could possibly be an expert in every discipline.

“That leveled the playing field,” said professor Robert Knapp [English 1974–], “so that both faculty and students were in the position of having to confront and make sensible arguments about things that ought to be part of the common heritage—whether or not they really are—and to do so on a basis where every argument can be challenged, where nobody can just pull out the particular expertise to say, ‘Well, I just happen to know the answers to more of these things.’”

This combination of amateurism and professionalism—the professionalism for

Prof. Robert Knapp [English 1974–]: “Every argument can be challenged.”

faculty having to do with how to address a field of study, what kinds of question to ask, what kinds of answers make sense—was essential to the success of teaching humanities at Reed.

“We had guys who were more brilliant than the professors,” said Abe Bergman ’54, “but they flunked out. The fact that the professors knew you and you couldn’t BS, that alone was a discipline in critical thinking, of learning to speak your mind, of learning to question everything. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Why do you say that?’ ‘What’s your evidence for that?’ Those kinds of questions were constantly facing you, and you had to answer them.”

The questions did not end at the conference door. They continued in the dormitories, the coffee shop, the dining hall, the sports center, and out on the quad. The level of discourse could be just as rigorous as in the classroom. Many alumni claimed in their oral history interviews to having learned as much from their fellow students as from their professors.

“We played cards for keeps, we discussed things for keeps,” said Richard Abel ’48. “It was almost literally blood on the floor at the end of the night if you didn’t pay attention.”

Indeed, the intensity of Reed’s rigor took its toll. After the first two graduating classes in 1915 and 1916, Reed’s student retention rate dropped to between 40% and 50%, and remained there for the next 50 years. This created a bruising system of culling students after admittance, who, for various reasons, did not find Reed suitable, and either transferred to other schools or dropped out. For

some alumni who experienced those early sink-or-swim decades, the low graduation rate represented a badge of perseverance and endurance. For others, both graduates and nongraduates, it left them with a lovehate relationship with the institution.

With its five-year graduation rate now at 80%, Reed has in recent decades become a kinder and more supportive institution, with expanded counseling, wellness programs, cultural events, and academic support services. These changes, however, have not eliminated the creative tension and stress generated by the intensity of the academic program. Students still complain of Reed’s “stress culture.” That may be the inevitable nature of any truly transformational experience—it’s supposed to be hard.

In today’s globalized world, where students are exposed to ever-increasing levels of complexity and rapidly shifting mental frameworks, “perspective is more valuable than IQ,” asserts Nicholas Negroponte, founder of MIT’s innovative Media Lab. Yet, the dominant educational models remain heavily weighted toward the instrumental purpose of cultivating knowledge for the sake of doing. In addition, higher education is now faced with the emergence of the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), a digital version of the “assembly-line and loudspeaker” model of yesteryear that, with its promises of greater efficiency and broader democratization of education, threatens the relevancy of the liberal arts.

Faced with a similar situation 100 years ago, William Foster sought to address the challenge with a new model that trained

students to become innovative thinkers in the worlds they entered after graduation.

By merging the Greek idea of knowledge for the sake of being with the pragmatists’ approach to critical thinking, he designed a transformational learning system capable of leaving students with an indelible mark of self-knowledge, one that allowed them to hold their ground and constructively challenge the status quo, no matter what career they pursued. The promise of that outcome continues to attract a certain type of student to Reed today.

“When Dean of the Faculty Peter Steinberger [political science 1977–] proclaimed at my senior dinner that Reed College was the best liberal arts college in the country,” said Gabe Gao ’09, “I rolled my eyes, and let out a dismissive puff of air from between my pursed lips. Even in the throes of thesis parade and Renn Fayre jubilation, I had very ambivalent feelings about having attended Reed for the past four years.

Yet, within six months of graduating, I could not help but fully agree with Steinberger. This sentiment has nothing to do with comparing Reed to other colleges. Rather, it is a deep, inner feeling that those four years were well spent, and that my experience at Reed College has enabled me to become the kind of person that I actually want to become.”

John Sheehy ’82 is the author of Comrades of the Quest: An Oral History of Reed College and a member of the board of trustees.

GO FURTHER

Comrades of the Quest: An Oral History of Reed College.

Oregon State University Press, 2012.

june 2013 Reed magazine 39

Reediana Books by Reedies

The Shelter Cycle Peter Rock [English 2001–]

Colville has recently lost his younger brother to a roadside bombing in Afghanistan. Just as impending motherhood has shaken loose Francine’s childhood memories, Colville’s own loss has dislodged something within his psyche. Haltingly, he describes to Francine and her husband the signs and portents that have led him to Boise, where he believes he is destined to rescue the lost girl. But Colville’s mission changes from moment to moment, and Francine’s husband has every reason to mistrust him.

In the presence of outsiders, both Francine and Colville are taciturn about their unorthodox past. Rock sparingly and offhandedly metes out bits of crucial information—how Francine’s parents died, how Colville’s parents drifted away. Francine feels the failed apocalypse as a loss. “All the work and then all the years after, would feel different . . . if the bombs had come,” she thinks.

“And then her parents might still be alive.”

Neither Francine nor Colville can make sense of their past until they can once again

Watching War Jan Mieszkowski [German 1997–] Watching War presents the intriguing idea that 200 years after Waterloo, “the experience of the battlefield audience is still largely defined by what it does not or cannot see.”

Mieszkowski argues that war first emerged as a true mass spectacle on the vast battlefields of the Napoleonic era, in conflicts too large to be observed and too complex to be understood except through the imagination.

Drawing on works of literature, philosophy, military theory, and war photography, Watching War examines representational dynamics at work on battlefields from Waterloo to Afghanistan, and asks how war’s 40 Reed magazine june 2013

norah hoover

Supernatural forces, both menacing and benevolent, gust through this meticulously constructed novel based on the real-life sect known as the Church Universal and Triumphant. When Elizabeth Clare Prophet, the church’s leader, predicted a nuclear holocaust would come in 1990, her followers built a huge complex of underground shelters in Montana’s Paradise Valley. The predicted Doomsday fizzled, and Prophet eventually succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease, but the shelters have survived, and the religion still has adherents.

In his sixth novel, Peter Rock reunites two childhood friends 20 years after the calamity that never came. Francine is married, seven months pregnant, and living in Boise. News cameras swarm her street as she joins her neighbors in the search for a missing nine-year-old girl. Her thoughts are filled with memories of her childhood and the spirits she used to believe in—Undines, Salamanders, Gnomes, Sylphs. At this fraught moment, Colville, a wisp of a man, appears on Francine’s doorstep.

(houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013)

crawl into the fallout shelters, with their comforting mazes of bunk beds, classrooms, kitchens, and shrines. For Francine, the trip marks a final farewell to her childhood, however extraordinary. But the visit launches Colville on a stark vision quest that will keep readers guessing beyond the final page.

—ANGIE JABINE ’79

(stanford University Press, 2012)

imagery is created. In iconic battle images from the Civil War to Vietnam, significance—even of the frozen instant of death—is obscure, and the photographic gaze fails to adequately narrate war.

For Mieszkowski, war becomes total when it is too large to be viewed and must be imagined. Modern imaginaries reflect the representational authenticity of observations increasingly framed, he argues, by the modern viewer’s frame of reference— “. . . the perspectival logic and graphic design of video games, the very games now used by the military to train army recruits.” One

might also ask what process is at work as war is increasingly apprehended through sensors, images, and data harvested by remote human and machinic viewers.

What replaces the vanishing spectacle of war, as large, clearly defined battlefields give way to pockets of “irregular warfare” indistinguishable from criminal acts? Are audiences, conditioned by Hollywood spectacles, inured to “the powers of simulation and irony that now shape the battlefield”?

These are difficult and important questions, and Mieszkowski mines cultural and media accounts for clues. Watching War is a thoughtful and valuable contribution to the conversation on observing, representing, and imagining war. —REBECCA PERRY

The Walking Laleh Khadivi ’98 The paths of two Kurdish brothers, driven out of Iran by 1979’s Islamic revolution, diverge forever in The Walking, the second installment of Laleh Khadivi’s three-part family saga. On the run from imprisonment or worse, they village-hop their way to the Turkish border, find factory jobs, and trade their wages for a berth on a freighter that will spit them out at a nameless port in the Azores. Every day the brothers argue— what to do, where to go next?

(Bloomsbury USA, 2013)

Ali, the elder brother, wants no part of exile—his dearest wish is to return to his girlfriend and the life he’s always known. But his younger brother, Saladin, named for the Kurdish warrior who defeated Europe’s crusaders, has always had bigger dreams.

So obsessed with Hollywood glamour that he once tried to dig his own swimming pool, he fantasizes about living in Los Angeles, with its mansions, its pinup girls, its skewed reality where a B-movie actor can become President.

Saladin nearly kills himself getting to L.A., then courts starvation on its indifferent streets before an Iranian rug dealer gives him a job and finds him a place to live.

America is famously a nation of immigrants, and each group arrives with its own cultural baggage. The 444 days when Iranian revolutionaries held 52 Americans hostage in their own embassy were not an easy time to be Iranian in America.

Better to say you’re Spanish or Italian, or to call yourself “Persian.” Khadivi, who was two years old when her family left Iran, weaves her own relatives’ recollections into what is destined to become a classic refugee tale. She told Reed in 2011 that she struggled to find a structure for the book until she reread John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, which gives voice not just to Tom Joad and his family but to all the Dust Bowl refugees.

It was a good call. Disoriented, unmoored, yet still hopeful, the many Iranian voices in The Walking swell into a resounding clamor. —ANGIE JABINE ’79

The Less Subdued Excitement: A Century of Jazz in Bellingham and Whatcom County, Washington, by Milt Krieger ’60 (Whatcom County Historical Society, 2012). Who knew that this book, six years in the making, would stretch to 200 thoroughly illustrated pages? It draws primarily on pioneer musicians’ family archives, 100 interviews, and live performances that Milt has savored since 1970. It assays performers, promoters, the jazz-driven musicians’ union local, and the music’s audiences, displays local jazz among the local arts, and ends with a fine (but not Milt’s) poem. Among his points, Milt stresses that “jazz lives and matters, in small(er) communities, too!”

The Death of East Prussia: War and Revenge in Germany’s Easternmost Province, by Peter Clark ’63 (Andover Press, 2012). Peter creates a framework for the immense collateral damage inflicted on East Prussia resulting from Hitler’s war of annihilation in Poland and the Soviet Union. Thousands of Germans tried to flee rampaging Soviet soldiers, who invaded the province in the winter of 1945, raping, assaulting, murdering, and pillaging with abandon. Eyewitness testimony provides gripping personal narratives of the indomitable will of the East Prussians to survive under horrific conditions. Complementing this tale of human suffering is a historical analysis showing that geography, revenge, and political calculation can explain the extinction of East Prussia. Writes one reviewer: “This is a well-documented scholarly history that is hard to put down: no greater praise can be imagined.”

ariel zambelich

Metaphor, by David Ritchie ’65 (Cambridge University Press, 2013). An increasingly popular area of study, metaphor is relevant to the work of semanticists, pragmatists, discourse analysts, and also those working at the interface of language and literature and in other disciplines such as philosophy and psychology. This book, part of a new series, Key Topics in Semantics and Pragmatics, provides a summary, critique, and comparison of the most important theories on how metaphors are used and understood, drawing on research from linguistics, psychology, and other disciplines.

Reviewers found David’s writing to be highly accessible for students and other readers and the book to be among the best of current scholarship on the subject.

june 2013 Reed magazine 41

Reediana Peter Silverman ’65 published a short story, “The Happiest Day of My Life,” on Flash Fiction World. Find out what happened that special day at www.flash-fiction-world.com/the-happiest -day-of-my-life.html.

Maple Canyon Rock Climbs, by Sibylle Hechtel ’72, coauthor (Wolverine Publishing, 2012).

Maple Canyon is the most popular summer sport-climbing destination in the U.S. Its steep walls of cobbled conglomerate provide quality pitches for climbers of all abilities, and some of the most enjoyable—and steepest—climbing anywhere. Packed with color photographs and maps, this book provides a comprehensive guide to more than 400 rock climbs in Maple Canyon, Utah.

Cronkite’s War: His World War II Letters Home, by Maurice Isserman ’73, coeditor (National Geographic Society, 2013). Walter Cronkite was an obscure 23-year-old United Press wire service reporter when he married Betsy Maxwell on March 30, 1940, following a four-year courtship. The couple spent months apart in the summer and fall of 1942, as Walter, a credentialed war correspondent, sailed on convoys to England and North Africa across the submarine-infested waters of the North Atlantic. He consoled himself during his absence from Betsy by writing her long, detailed letters, describing his experiences, his observations of life in wartime Europe, and his longing for her.

More than a hundred of Walter’s letters to Betsy survive from 1943–45 (plus a few earlier letters) and form the basis for the book, which is illustrated with heartwarming photos of the couple taken during the war and coedited with Walter’s grandson, Walter Cronkite IV. Maurice is the Publius Virgilius Rogers Professor of History at Hamilton College.

“Mission: Botswana Law,” an essay by Carol Walters Hepburn ’75 and her husband, Bill Savage, was published in Trial Lawyer in winter 2013. In the article, Carol and Bill relate their experience teaching trial advocacy skills to lawyers in Botswana in a program run by Justice Advocacy Africa. Carol, who has a solo practice in Seattle, also practices with Bill in Portland. The two participated in the JAA program in 2010 and again in 2012, and found it particularly rewarding to be able to assist junior colleagues at this point in their careers.

Mort Morte, by David Sterry ’78 (Vagabondage Press, 2013). This illustrated novella is, according to David, a cross between Alice in Wonderland and The Tin Drum. He also published a new

42 Reed magazine june 2013

Matthew Benacquista ’82 with his first published textbook, An Introduction to the Evolution of Single and Binary Stars.

anthology, Johns, Marks, Tricks and Chickenhawks, coedited with RJ Martin, which features writings by people who sell sex and people who buy it. The New York Times Sunday Book Review called it “eyeopening, astonishing, brutally honest, and frequently funny.” Other publications coming out this year include What Are They Thinking? a book about the teenage brain, which David wrote with his wife, Arielle Ecstut, and two Duke University brain scientists, Aaron M. White and Scott Swartzwelder; a 10-year anniversary version of David’s memoir, Chicken; and The Hobbyist, a collaborative novel written with twins Keith and Kent Zimmerman about an “insanely bizarre, real-life, online club in Silicon Valley that rates prostitutes like a twisted Zagat guide.” (See Class Notes.)

An Introduction to the Evolution of Single and Binary Stars, by Matthew Benacquista ’82 (SpringerVerlag, 2012). Basic concepts of astronomy, stellar structure and atmospheres, single star evolution, binary systems and mass transfer, compact objects, and dynamical systems are covered in Matthew’s first published textbook.

Readers will understand the astrophysics behind the populations of compact object binary systems and have sufficient background to delve deeper into specific areas of interest. In addition, derivations of important concepts and worked examples are included. No previous knowledge of astronomy is assumed, although a familiarity with undergraduate quantum mechanics, classical mechanics, and thermodynamics is beneficial.

Matthew is assistant director of the Center for Gravitational Wave Astronomy at the University of Texas at Brownsville.

What the Faeries Left Behind, by Amber Michelle Cook ’92 (Unchangeling Press, 2013).

After coming home from a monotonous office job to the apartment where she lives alone, 30-something Abigail Watson is having a tough day in a hard week in a rotten month, and don’t even get her started on the year. Until that night when something wonderfully impossible shows up at her door and rings the bell insistently. You’re not supposed to answer the door late at night to strangers who come knocking unannounced, right? Right. But Abigail does. Because how can you be scared of someone with translucent wings like those of a dragonfly? What the Faeries Left Behind is an urban fairy tale antidote to those times when the dullness and drudgery of grown-up life seem inescapable, and to the misconception that wonder and play are just for children. More at ambermichellecook.weebly.com/my-book.html. (See Class Notes.)

Quench Your Thirst with Salt, by Nicole Walker ’92 (Zone 3 Press, 2013). Nicole’s collection of essays about growing up in Salt Lake City and being shaped by the Mormon culture and her parents’ antiMormon sensibility received the Zone 3 Press creative nonfiction prize. “The book couches the personal narrative in the environmental setting of the Salt Lake Valley, where, like my childhood, the valley is shaped and reshaped by strong and determined forces—both natural and man-made.”

Nicole is also coeditor with Margot Singer of Bending Genre: Essays on Nonfiction, published by Continuum Press in 2013. (See Class Notes.)

Birth, Breath, and Death: Meditations on Motherhood, Chaplaincy, and Life as a Doula, by Amy Wright Glenn ’96 (CreateSpace, 2013).

At the age of 14, Amy began to question the Mormon faith of her family.

She embarked on a lifelong personal and scholarly quest for truth. While teaching comparative religion and philosophy, she was drawn to the work of supporting women through labor and holding compassionate space for the dying. In her book, Amy relates tales of birth and death while drawing on her work as a birth doula and hospital chaplain and her own experience of motherhood.

We are born, we die, and in between these irrevocable facts of human existence the breath weaves all moments together. Birth, Breath, and Death entwines story, philosophy, and poetic reflection into transforming narratives that are full of grace. (See Class Notes.)

Science Writers’ Handbook: Everything You Need to Know to Pitch, Publish and Prosper in the Digital Age, by Michelle Nijhuis ’96, coeditor (Da Capo Lifelong Books, 2013).

The book is a collaborative project by more than 30 professional science journalists, and covers both the craft and commerce of science writing—and argues that, yes, it is possible to make a living doing quality journalism in the 21st century! For more information, see www.pitchpublishprosper.com.

Good Kids, by Benjamin Nugent ’99 (Scribner, 2013).

At 15, friends Josh and Khadijah observe his father and her mother connecting romantically in a natural foods store. Their families fall apart, and the friends sign a pact never to be unfaithful to a future partner before Kadijah moves away. At 28, struggling with personal identity and careers, they meet again and are forced to confront the terms of the pact they made. Ben’s fiction debut is “a hilarious, sad, handsomely plotted story of love and class.” Ben is director of creative writing at Southern New Hampshire University and teaches in the university’s MFA and undergraduate programs.

A Dark Dreambox of Another Kind: The Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton, by Alan Felsenthal ’03, coeditor (The Song Cave, 2013). American poet Alfred Starr Hamilton wrote thousands of poems during his lifetime, though only a small percentage of them ever found their way into print.

His poems appeared in poetry journals during the ’60s–’80s in two chapbooks, The Big Parade and Sphinx; and one full-length collection, The Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton, published by The Jargon Society in 1970. In this new volume, Alan and coeditor Ben Estes present a collection of Hamilton’s poems from these publications, along with many poems that were previously considered lost and poems from posthumously found notebooks. The editors state in their preface to the collection: “If you have encountered the wonderland of Hamilton’s writings before, we are happy to welcome you back. If this is your first time, prepare to enter a house of metaphor, where life is a poem and there is always more to be discovered.”

Fountainhead of Jihad: The Haqqani Nexus, 1973–2012, by Vahid Brown ’07 (Columbia University Press, 2013).

Drawing on a wealth of previously unstudied primary sources in several languages, Vahid and coauthor Don Rassler map the anatomy of a group frequently described as the most lethal actor in the Afghan insurgency. The Haqqani network has operated at the center of a transnational nexus of Islamist militancy for decades, lending support to the development of jihadi organizations from Southeast Asia to East Africa.

In addition to providing new evidence documenting the Haqqani network’s pivotal role in the birth and evolution of the global jihadi movement, this book significantly advances knowledge of the history of al-Qaeda by fundamentally altering the portrait painted by existing literature on the subject. Vahid is completing his doctorate at Princeton and is a specialist in the history of Islamist militancy. He is the author of Cracks in the Foundation: Leadership Schisms in al-Qaida, 1989–2006, a report published by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point.

God-fear/Loneliness: Fear & (Self-)Loathing in Portland, OR, by Eric Harvey ’14 (authorstand. com, 2011). Drawing on the style of Hunter S. Thompson, Eric explores his struggle with alcoholism and drug addiction. Although written while he was in the depths of despair, the book offers hope in the face of adversity. Forever optimistic, Eric finds support in memories of his family before his lifestyle altered dramatically at the age of 16. On medical leave for his recovery since his junior year at Reed in 2011, Eric lives in Santa Monica and studies journalism at UCLA Extension. Follow him on Twitter at ericharvey25.

Faculty Publications Revolutions in Twentieth-Century Physics, by David Griffiths (Cambridge University Press, 2012). David Griffiths, professor emeritus of physics, has written a book on modern physics “for those (like me) who might shy away from his more advanced texts,” notes Marianna Mullens ’07, book buyer at the Reed bookstore. Written in a friendly and informal style, the book uses problems and examples to help readers develop an understanding of what recent advances in physics actually mean, covering topics like quarks and leptons, antiparticles and Feynman diagrams, curved space-time, the Big Bang, and the expanding universe. “The conceptual changes brought by modern physics are important, radical, and fascinating, yet they are only vaguely understood by people working outside the field. Exploring the four pillars of modern physics—relativity, quantum mechanics, elementary particles, and cosmology—this clear and lively account will interest anyone who has wondered what Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger, and Heisenberg were really talking about.”

Mark Hinchliff, professor of philosophy, contributed the essay “Has the Theory of Reference Rested on a Mistake?” to the book Reference and Referring (MIT Press, 2012). After an introductory essay that casts current trends in reference and referring in terms of an ongoing dialogue between Fregean and Russellian approaches, the book addresses core semantic concepts from both philosophical and linguistic perspectives through specific topics, and balances a breadth of coverage with thematic unity.

Fear: Across the Disciplines, by Ben Lazier, coeditor (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012). “We habitually say that we see fear, that we smell it, touch it, breathe it. But how, after all is said and done, do we know it?” writes Ben Lazier, associate professor of history and humanities, and coeditor Jan Plamper, professor of history at Goldsmiths, University of London, in the introduction. The book provides a cross-disciplinary examination of fear by offering a broad survey of the psychological, biological, and philosophical basis of fear in historical and contemporary contexts, and opens a dialogue between science and the humanities to afford a more complete view of an emotion that has shaped human behavior since time immemorial. Contributors are leading figures in clinical psychology, neuroscience, the social sciences, and the humanities; consider categories of intentionality, temporality, admixture, spectacle, and politics in evaluating conceptions of fear; and include Jan Mieszkowski, professor of German and humanities, who wrote the chapter “Fear of a Safe Place.”

june 2013 Reed magazine 43

In Memoriam Professor Charles S. Rhyne [Art History 1960–97] April 14, 2013, in Portland, from a stroke.

An eminent art historian, Charles Rhyne was internationally renowned for his wide-ranging interests in the field, from the English landscape painter John Constable to the theory and practice of conservation, Northwest Coast American Indian art, and the use of digital images in research and teaching.

He was born in Philadelphia in 1932, the second son of the Reverend S. White and Ruth D. Rhyne. He was a graduate of Central High School, Philadelphia, and Wittenberg College in Ohio.

Between high school and college he attended Temple University’s Tyler Art School. As a student he ran track and cross-country, and he was proud of the fact that his Ohio Conference record for the 880 stood for many years.

He did his graduate work at the University of Chicago, first receiving a master’s degree from the Committee on Social Thought and then switching to art history. He was hired to

at the Yale Center for British Art; a Kress senior fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art; and a visiting scholar at the Getty Conservation Institute, Getty Research Institute, and J. Paul Getty Museum. In 2012, he received the American Institute for Conservation’s Special Recognition for Allied Professionals “for his invaluable contributions to art conservation.” Because of his interest in digital information and imaging and sharing through the internet, many of his lectures and publications are available online.

His lifelong interest in photography was the basis of all his other work; his slides and digital images were his research notes, providing evidence of how things were and how they change over time. They resulted in three major websites: Ara Pacis Augustae; Architecture, Restoration, and Imaging of Uxmal, Kabah, Sayil, and Labná; and Architecture of the Getty Center.

“ Charles’ curiosity was boundless.” teach at Reed in 1960 by Rex Arragon [history 1923–62] on the recommendation of his major professor, Joshua Taylor ’39, and taught until his retirement in 1997.

Charles’ dedication to teaching was exemplary, inspired by the quality of the students.

In retirement, he pursued his major areas of interest and frequently spoke of his gratitude to Reed for support during these years by providing an office and technical help for his use of digital imaging, especially in his websites. His vigor and pursuit of scholarship until the end were extraordinary.

“Charles’ curiosity was boundless,” said James Coddington ’74, Agnes Gund Chief Conservator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “For more than four decades a conversation with Charles always left me with not only a clearer understanding of whatever the topic was but also introduced new ones to think through. And they always left me hungry for more.”

Throughout his career, Charles lectured internationally and published widely. He was the recipient of many honors and grants that allowed him to pursue his varied interests and carry them over into his teaching. Among others, he was a Fulbright research fellow at the Courtauld Institute, London; a visiting fellow 56 Reed magazine june 2013

—James Coddington ’74

“A tremendous amount of information is conveyed in visual images, and these are tremendously important in world culture,” he said in a 1994 interview. “Academics have valued the written word, but have tended to overlook the amount of evidence and information retained in visual images.”

In addition to the nearly 2,000 photographs he took for his Ara Pacis Augustae website, Charles photographed wooden churches in Russia, American covered bridges, and master paintings on their way through the Portland Art Museum’s collection (one such photo is currently being used at the Museum of Modern Art in New York as reference to restore an original Jackson Pollock).

“I met him at the very end of his storied career, but was amazed at the tenacity of his scholarship and the wide variety of his eclectic pursuits,” said Max Maller ’13, who worked with Charles on Italian translations for his Ara Pacis Augustae website. “He was a visionary in the instructive use of technology, particularly digital images, in teaching art history, publishing on the subject as early as 1996 and most recently in an article, ‘The Book Transformed.’ His three websites are used every day around the world, and remain a testament to the focused breadth of his endeavors.”

During his career, Charles curated many important exhibitions of visual art on campus and was instrumental in the establishment of the Cooley Gallery. His advocacy for the visual arts on campus resulted in important donations to the Reed College art collection.

The conservation of art and architecture was central to his life’s work, and his research concerned everything from technical investigations into how masonry deteriorates to broad cultural issues, like the preservation of Native American art. As an example, he explained how the Zuni create ritual figures that are supposed to dissipate their energies back into the environment as they deteriorate. Conserving the figures violates the cycle.

Addressing the issue of preserving Native American totem poles, Charles said, “People think it’s very simple: you either preserve or you don’t. I try to lay out the complexity of things.”

A single totem pole, he explained, could present many options, ranging from letting nature take its course to moving the pole to a museum and replacing it with a replica. Should yellow jackets be prevented from nesting in the pole or seedlings be plucked from its cracks? Should it be stabilized, or righted and placed in the same position it was in 19th-century photographs?

Do you fill in cracks and repaint the pole?

“Each of these choices is an emotionally charged issue,” he concluded, “and the complexity of the situation is immense. It’s not just a matter of preserving or not. It’s how you should preserve it and if you preserve it, whether you display it and how you display it.”

Charles is survived by his wife, Barbara; their children, Sylvia, David, and Fillard, and their spouses; four grandchildren; his brother, White; and extended family.

Professor Ottomar Rudolf [German 1963–98] March 10, 2013, in Portland, from a stroke.

Scholar, athlete, and veteran of two wars, Ottomar Rudolf was a passionate and gifted teacher and a tireless champion of the arts.

Born in Pforzheim in the Black Forest of Germany in 1929, Ottomar Rudolf spent his childhood in Ulm, a medieval city on the Danube River, known as the birthplace of Einstein and home to the tallest church tower in the world.

As the Third Reich rose to power, he and two older brothers were targeted by intense propaganda. Standing in opposition to this was his father, a decorated World War I veteran and an antifascist, and his mother, a devotee of Catholicism and a German patriot. Their views made “a tremendous impression” on Ottomar, he said. Something other than the Nazi fervor “took hold” and “saved” him in many ways. He joined the Catholic Youth Organization and the Hitler Youth, going to meetings for the latter after attending morning mass. At 15, he enlisted in the Panzer tank corps, inspired by his hero, Field Marshal Rommel. The corps went to Normandy and to the Eastern Front, but a bullet wound sent Ottomar back to Ulm to recoup, ultimately preserving his life. He survived disappearances and deaths of friends and family, including a brother; hunger and scarcity; and the terrifying bombing of Ulm in 1944, with its flaming aftermath. A recounting of this time is recorded in his autobiography, I Remember: A Boy’s Years in Nazi Germany, published in 2012.

Postwar in Ulm, Ottomar began training for the university, fell in love with theatre, joined the church chorus, and became a musical conductor. At the behest of an uncle, he went to New York in 1946 to study engineering at Manhattan College. A short time into the program he switched to philosophy. “I was introduced to theology, meaning St. Thomas Aquinas, and I got hooked on him. Thomas Aquinas was the one who led me into philosophy.” Always balancing study with athletics, Ottomar joined the track team and became captain of the ski team.

After earning a BA, he enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania for graduate study and taught at St. Joseph’s College (University).

The U.S. Army drafted him into the Korean War and sent him to Fort Dix, where he trained with the signal corps. His tour of duty included a year in Korea and two years in Germany in the role of a photographer. He also worked for Stars and Stripes.

Back in New York, he returned to St. Joseph’s to teach and to Penn to complete a PhD in German, writing a dissertation on “the good age,” 18th-century German literature. He taught at Bryn Mawr and Haverford before coming to Reed in 1963. Reed’s burgeoning German department consisted of Kaspar Locher [German 1950–88], Vincenz Panny [German 1963–84], and Dieter Paetzold

[German 1963–86]. Shortly after his arrival, Ottomar presented his first humanities lecture on Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Students applauded him. “I loved lecturing in humanities. It’s hard work, because you have to prepare. I believe in a real lecture, not just giving some ideas out there.” And he thrived in conference classes. “I taught with some emotional pitch in it, because I noticed students don’t want to fall asleep.” When he became department chair, he invited all department members to teach language and literature, rather than employ a single language instructor or rely on lessons done in language lab. Teaching, he said, needs to be a human experience.

Sabbaticals provided an opportunity to do further research on his specialty, the Sturm und Drang movement. He published the book Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz: Moralist und Aufklärer in 1970. He also helped bring about an exchange program for Reed students with the University of Munich. Listening to afternoon concerts in Munich, Ottomar envisioned what would become Music Matinees: Sunday afternoon concerts featuring folk, jazz, and classical music in the Reed commons. The program ran under his direction for 28 years with financial support

daughter, Gabrielle, and later parted. He also served on the Administration Committee, where he worked alongside registrar Ellen Knowlton Johnson ’39 [administration 1945– 81], “one of the great ladies of our college,” and the Admissions Committee.

Ottomar characterized his academic position as conservative, belonging to Reed’s “Old Guard.”

He started the German House and directed and performed in the annual play. In his honor, a linden tree grows in front of the house. Ottomar

Teaching, Ottomar said, needs to be a human experience. from the college and the nonprofit Reed College Music Associates, which he also organized and chaired. “I believe the city needed something of excellence that was free,” he said. Ottomar served on the Portland Youth Philharmonic and Portland Opera boards, chaired the Portland Colleges Cultural Affairs Board, and was on the committee that gave Chamber Music Northwest its start. He was hired to be dramaturge for a New Rose Theatre German production, and lectured on humanities and on art, which he loved and collected.

Portlanders knew of his association with the Portland Brewing Company, which he helped get underway in 1985, arranging for brewing materials to be shipped from Bavaria.

The brewery honored him with its annual Oktoberfest and the accompanying celebratory beer, Uncle Otto’s. He also was honored with the Bundesverdienstkreuz 1. Klasse (the officer’s cross of the order of merit) presented to him by the Federal Republic of Germany in 1989.

Only a few years into his career at Reed, he was appointed to college committees, including the Faculty Advisory Committee, where he worked directly with the president and trustees. Trustee Laurie Miller Cummins ’39 introduced him to her daughter, Lesley, whom he married. They raised a son, Wolfgang, and a

taught for the Reed MALS program and for Reed Elderhostel programs. He sang in the Reed Chorus. Always intent on achieving balance, he brought intercollegiate soccer to the college and coached a winning team.

Acting on his own recommendation to keep departments open to new and young faculty, he chose to retire in 1998, intending to travel, write, and “do other things, like going to more concerts.” He attended monthly lunches with members of the Old Geezer Society: Larry Ruben [biology 1955–92], Frank Gwilliam [biology 1957–95], Bert Brehm [biology 1962–93], Ray Kierstead [history 1978–2000], and Paul Bragdon, president emeritus. He fished on the Rogue River with his son. And he unexpectedly met Catherine, who became his wife in 2003.

She welcomed students to their home, gained an appreciation for Ottomar’s legacy and Reed, and established the Catherine and Ottomar Rudolf Scholarship to assist students of German language and literature.

Reed was home, Ottomar said. “It is the college I’ve given my life to, and the college has given its life to me. So, I’m honored that I was hired, and given tenure, and was able to teach so long.”

Survivors include Catherine, his children, and two grandchildren. june 2013 Reed magazine 57

In Memoriam Paul Byron Simpson ’36 January 21, 2013, in Eugene, Oregon.

A fourth-generation Oregonian who grew up in Portland, Paul earned a BA in mathematics from Reed and then enrolled in a master’s program in economics at Cornell University. Completing that, he worked for the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C., and enlisted in the navy, serving stateside and as a supply officer in Saipan during World War II. He then returned to Cornell, where he completed a PhD and taught economics and statistics. He also taught at Princeton and Stanford before joining the economics faculty at the University of Oregon. “A man of a vast array of interests,” Paul loved music and performed on piano and viola. During travels in the U.S. and in Europe, South America, Australia, Korea, China, Africa, and Indonesia, he attended concerts and theatre productions and visited art museums. His love of the arts led to the vital role he played in founding Eugene’s Hult Center for the Performing Arts. He also helped found the Pearl Buck Center, which provides support to individuals with developmental challenges. Paul camped, hiked, and kayaked across the U.S. and cultivated a small-acreage farm in Creswell, Oregon. He and Jean W. Miller were wed in 1938 and raised three sons and one daughter. Jean died from cancer in the late ’70s, and in 1984 Paul wed Ellen Coleman Gruetter ’36, his high school and college classmate. “Brilliant and diverse, loved and adored by family and friends,” Paul is survived by three grandchildren and great-grandchildren and by four stepchildren. Ellen died in 2003 and one of Paul’s sons died in 2011.

Ethel Emma Fahlen Noble ’40 December 24, 2012, in Portland.

Ethel was a day-dodger at Reed, along with her sister, Mildred Fahlen Taxer ’42. Initially commuting an hour and a half twice daily, the sisters were able to arrange a morning lift to the campus from B e epske Brevet Selhorst ’41, one of the rare Reedite car owners at the time and also carpooled with Ricky Heinicke ’42 (Thomas Frazier) and Eugene Snyder ’41. Ethel was on the Central Dance Committee and was a member of the chorus.

She majored in psychology, studying with (William) Monte Griffith [psychology 1926– 54], and served as an assistant to Griffith in his role as supervisor of the merit systems for the state of Oregon employment service. She had a brief teaching experience at Chiloquin High School near Klamath Falls before her marriage to John L. Noble, a structural engineer with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. During 58 Reed magazine june 2013

World War II, while John served in the military, Ethel sold dresses, typed letters, worked as a bookkeeper, and did statistical studies at Kaiser Shipyard on Swan Island. Following the war, she managed the couple’s Portland home, raised their two sons, and did volunteer work. She was a member of the League of Women Voters for over 50 years, through which she exercised a long-standing engagement with public policy issues, and was a member of the First Congregational Church for more than 55 years.

She enjoyed activities with Reed alumni and with the Corps of Engineers Auxiliary. In an interview in 2004, Ethel said: “I appreciate the Reed training that has enriched the ordinary process of living and the relationships with family, friends, and associates. Some of the Reed goals that I value the most are the continuing quest for knowledge, the open-minded approach to problems, and the postponement of judgment until other points of views are considered. I realize what a privilege it was to have been exposed to a very dedicated and talented faculty—most especially Monte Griffith. His wit, keen insight, practical approach, and concern for the individual are not forgotten.”

Survivors include her sons, two grandsons, and sister Mildred. Her husband died in 1998.

Marian J. Wing O’Neill ’42 November 26, 2012, in Auburn, California.

Marian traveled widely as a child in England, Canada, and the western United States. She studied at Reed for three years before transferring to the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned a BA in psychology with a minor in art. She later took coursework at San Jose State, Sierra Junior College, and at other UC campuses, and was an occupational therapist at Newcastle School for Exceptional Children and a teacher. She also was an artist, whose watercolors and prints appeared in many exhibitions, and she was an active participant in the Sierra Foothills Unitarian Fellowship and the UC and Reed alumni associations. Marian and William Belcher ’42 married and had a son and four daughters. Survivors include her husband of 42 years, Robert J. O’Neill, and her children and five grandchildren.

We thank Marian’s daughter Nina Belcher for providing the details for this memorial.

Mary Ellen Bates ’43

February 14, 2013, in Pensacola, Florida.

A native of Vancouver, Washington, Mary earned a BA from Reed in sociology and joined the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAC) in the enlisted ranks. “My objective in joining the WAC was to do whatever I could, whenever I could, and do it well.” Rather than take a desk

job, Mary chose to get close to the conflict and was sent to officers’ training school. She was stationed with the Far East Air Force, serving in Australia, New Guinea, and the Philippines.

After being discharged in 1948, she earned an EdM in social sciences from Smith College and enrolled at the University of Washington law school. Barely seated in the classroom, she was recalled into military service. In the highly decorated military career that ensued, Mary undertook many challenges, including commanding squadrons for the Women’s Air Force and serving as an exchange officer with the Royal Air Force in England and as an administrative office and inspector general in France. In 1962, she received the uncommon distinction of being named honorary submariner with the U.S. Navy. She was a deputy base commander in Kansas and an executive officer in Korea and in Washington, finally retiring as a lieutenant colonel in 1973. Back home in Vancouver before a final move to Florida, Mary worked as a member of the city’s planning commission and volunteered with the Episcopal church and for the YWCA battered and destitute women’s shelter. She also was a member and president of Atheneum, an independent study group. “I should encourage young people to go into any profession in which they have an interest and can take pride, and in which they can serve society,” Mary stated. “I think we have an obligation to our fellow man—I really do.”

Elizabeth Tator Dissly ’43 January 8, 2013, in Louisville, Kentucky.

Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Betty grew up in Portland. Her sister and brother, Marjorie Tator McDonald ’34 and Kenneth Tator ’28, were graduates of Reed. Betty attended Reed for a year and there met Donald D. Dissly ’43, whom she married in 1942. She later graduated from Katharine Gibbs School in Boston, Massachusetts, and earned a BS from [State] University of New York. She worked at California Technical Institute, the Southeastern Indiana Rehabilitation Center, and United Cerebral Palsy in Pennsylvania. She volunteered at Bridgehaven Crisis Center and did tutoring at Seven Counties in Oldham County, Kentucky. Betty kept journals about her travels and took pleasure in doing needlework, reading, studying birds, growing flowers, and playing cards. Known to family and friends as “Lady Elizabeth,” she was treasured for her diverse interests and her sense of humor. Survivors include two daughters, three grandchildren, and nine great-grandchildren. Donald died in 2007.

Donald Roger Pinkham AMP ’44 October 29, 2012, in Exeter, California.

Don was enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, when he was drafted into the U.S. Army Air Corps. He studied both at Reed and at Yale to be a communications officer and served in India. After World War II, he earned

a BS in plant science from the University of California, Davis, and worked with his father in a fruit business, E.F. Pinkham and Son. In 1952, he married Helen Walter; they had a son and two daughters. Don was a member of the local school board, a volunteer with the Mineral King Preservation Society, and later a stockbroker with Dean Witter Reynolds. His travels with Helen to wine regions in Europe and his knowledge of viticulture led to opening a retail business, Wines of the World. Survivors include his wife and their children and grandchildren.

Cecil Charles Rix AMP ’44 December 9, 2012, in Houston, Texas.

Cecil attended Reed in the premeteorology program. “It was an excellent time of preparation for life at a critical time in my life.” During World War II, he served in Saipan and Guam, and after the war attended the University of Texas, Austin, where he earned a BS, MA, and PhD in geology. He worked as a research geologist with the Carter Oil Company in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and in the ’60s was part of the venture staff of Standard Oil responsible for the exploration and discovery of the first major gas field in the United Kingdom North Sea; his career continued in various capacities with Standard and Exxon. Cecil was a member of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, the Tulsa Geological Society, the Houston Geological Society, and the Geological Society of London. He also was a member of the Memorial Church of Christ and enjoyed gardening, music, photography, and travel. During his career, he visited six continents. Survivors include Martha Keller Rix, to whom he was married for 59 years; a son; and a grandson and granddaughter. A daughter predeceased him.

Peryl Gottesman ’45 February 14, 2013, in Portland.

Peryl was at Reed for a year. She then took a job selling women’s apparel at Meier & Frank, which led to a position as an assistant buyer for the Portland store. In the ’60s, she moved to Los Angeles and worked in the fashion industry in sales and in national marketing and manufacturing. She was co-owner of P.G. Howard, a company specializing in women’s wear. In the ’70s, she moved to Palm Springs, where she was successful as a developer for Palm Canyon Drive. The ’80s brought her back to Portland and to a prominent career in public relations for the Nob Hill district. She also was a volunteer for Planned Parenthood and a participant in the CASA child advocacy program.

Survivors include her nieces and nephews.

Cornelia LeBoutillier Eyre ’46 January 22, 2013.

Born in Bisbee, Arizona, Cornelia moved to California and Oregon following the early death of her father. She studied at Reed during the time that her mother, Cornelia Geer LeBoutillier, was dean of women (1941–43), and graduated from Radcliffe College in 1946.

An artist, gardener, activist, and collector of folk songs (which she sang and performed on guitar), Cornelia developed a unique career as a creator of mobiles, which she made from aluminum, glass, and wire. Following her marriage to John Eyre in 1952 in New York, she lived in New Jersey, Montreal, Vancouver, Bermuda, Rarotonga, and Ottawa. In all these places, she fished, gardened, cooked, sailed, sang songs, and created mobiles. She spent the best of her latter years nurturing and defending the farm she and John owned in Frelighsburg, Quebec, with its fabulous gardens, views into the Green Mountains of Vermont, and spacious art studio. She is survived by her son Banning, who provided the details for this memorial; son Stephen; daughter Alison; and three grandchildren. Inquiries and condolences may be made to Banning Eyre at banning@afropop.org.

John C. Siegle Sr. ’47

January 6, 2013, in New Castle, Delaware.

John received a BA in chemistry from Reed and a PhD in organic chemistry from Oregon State University. He served in the navy during World War II and taught chemistry at Reed and Purdue after the war. He worked for the DuPont Chemical Company, where he held six patents, retiring in 1985. John was a member of Calvary Episcopal Church and a member of the DuPont Country Club. Survivors include his wife of 34 years, Marilyn; two daughters and two sons; a stepdaughter; eight grandchildren; seven stepgrandchildren; and a great grandson.

Joyce Elaine Simon Gillespie ’48 November 20, 2012, in Priest River, Idaho.

Joyce came to Reed from nearby Gresham, Oregon, and studied at the college for two years. During World War II, she worked at Montgomery Ward, and in 1947 she married her best friend, Duane Gillespie. The couple moved to Priest River in 1954. Joyce worked briefly as a librarian for the Priest River Elementary School, but was primarily devoted to raising her three children and volunteering for 4-H, Job’s Daughters, and the Priest River Friends of the Library. She was passionate about gardening, and did beautiful work by hand, including sewing and quilting. With her husband she enjoyed picking huckleberries,

hunting for mushrooms, and stream fishing.

Survivors include two daughters and a son, nine grandchildren, and 10 great-grandchildren.

George S. Spencer ’50

December 14, 2012, in Sun City West, Arizona.

George grew up in Honolulu, Hawaii, and was at work at the Bank of Hawaii when Pearl Harbor was attacked.

He then enlisted in the army air corps, serving as a pilot and as a pilot instructor. After the war he enrolled at Reed and earned a BA in biology. George was a nuclear engineer with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and was regional director of the Radiological Safety and Safeguards Division in Walnut Creek, California. In retirement, he and his wife, Beth, traveled abroad and moved to Sun City West, where George enjoyed playing golf. Beth died in 1992. Survivors include his wife Carol, two sons, five grandchildren, and 10 great-grandchildren.

Charles Haine Hawkins ’52 January 11, 2013, in Des Moines, Washington.

Charles grew up in Gresham, Oregon, and enlisted in the army after high school. He was stationed in postwar occupied Germany, where he played clarinet in the army band.

Returning from the war, he enrolled at Reed on the G.I. Bill and received a BA in sociology. He then earned a PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago. His postdoctoral work at the University of California, Berkeley, earned him a second master’s degree in public health.

He taught at Central Washington University, beginning in 1963, with a focus on social aspects of family life and family planning. He did research at the Oregon State Hospital and had sabbaticals in Mexico, Spain, and England.

He retired in the early ’90s. Interests outside of his career led to him joining the Audubon Society and the Washington Native Plant Society. Charles learned to ski and to mountain climb during his military service in Germany, and hiked, climbed, and did snowshoeing regularly in the Washington Cascades. He also enjoyed genealogy and playing the guitar. “He put the health of the natural environment first, setting a fantastic example for those around him with his activism and his daily life choices.” Survivors include two sons and a daughter, three grandchildren, a brother, and his friend and companion Ginger Jensen. june 2013 Reed magazine 59

In Memoriam Joan E. Baker ’53

December 10, 2012, in Cleveland, Ohio, from a brain tumor.

Joan and her sister, Lois Baker Janzer ’50, took English from the same teacher at West Seattle High School in Washington—“a wonderful, wonderful teacher, named Belle McKenzie”—who urged them both to go to Reed. At Reed, Joan served as editor of the literary magazine she named Janus. Produced via typewriter and mimeograph, the popular publication sold out in a day at 10¢ a copy. She included writing by William Dickey ’51, Gary Snyder ’51, Philip Whalen ’51, and Mary Mathisson MacKenzie ’53, bound in covers by artists like Charles Leong ’53. Joan also painted faculty houses, babysat and mowed lawns for faculty, and varnished the tables and booths in the coffee shop. She earned a BA in general literature with Lloyd Reynolds [English & art 1929–69] as her adviser. A year out of college, she worked for the National Hells Canyon Association. In an interview in 2004, she said: “I had a board of 29 people, labor leaders, farm leaders, public power leaders, and all that. Very, very interesting. But I did all the work. All of it.” The work included writing and producing a newsletter, writing letters, and even writing speeches for local senators. “That’s what led me into law, inadvertently. Because later on, there was another Federal Power Commission case, involving the potential Nez Perce Dam, which would have blocked the Salmon River. The head lawyer on that case asked me to come back to Washington and work with the lawyers who were working on that case.

So I did.” Joan also worked for the national Democratic Party and the American Public Power Association. She earned a JD from George Washington University and an LLM from Yale University, and was the first woman clerk for any of the male judges then in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. In addition, she was the first female professor of law at the University of Akron, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Colorado, Boulder. She found that heated interactions with male faculty and administrators overrode the positive experience she had with students, and she was confronted by challenges related to her worth and also by malice. Denied tenure at Colorado, she left to be an academic visitor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and then accepted a position at Cleveland State University in Marshall, where she worked for 20 years. “I decided that it would be Cleveland-Marshall, because there were 60 Reed magazine june 2013

three women already on the faculty, and I figured I deserved some company after six years of being the first woman.” She retired from Cleveland as professor emerita and provided academic support for students for two years.

In her public obituary, we read: “Joan was much loved and revered for her exceptional brilliance and generosity. She encouraged her students, family, and friends to reach for the stars.”

Survivors include Lois, and nieces, including Katy Izquierdo ’75, and nephews.

Arthur Edwin White Johnson ’53 October 23, 2012, in Oakland, California, after a brief reoccurrence of cancer.

A California Scholarship Foundation honors student, Art intended to study at Stanford but enrolled at Reed because of his interest in science and mathematics and the reputation of F.L. Griffin [mathematics, 1911–54] known to his high school counselor.

Art arrived at the college at the age of 16. “I wanted to go to a small school,” he said in an interview in 2007. “I had been active in sports in high school and it was an important diversion for me.

And Reed didn’t have a very large program, but you were able to participate. I also liked the academic environment. It was the first time I’d really been pressed in schooling.” Art and Edgar Jacobs ’53 became best friends on campus and were involved in football, swimming, and basketball; Art refereed junior varsity basketball and played on the varsity team. “In football, I was the quarterback. I tell my grandkids I was a starting quarterback at college at age 16. It doesn’t mean anything, but it sounds good.” He also worked as a lifeguard and lined the sports fields.

During winter breaks and summers, he worked at the Shell Oil Refinery in Martinez, California.

It was there that he met his future wife, Janice L. McDow. And it was in an economics class with Art Leigh [economics 1945–88] that Art found his academic focus. After transferring to the University of California, Berkeley, he earned an AB with honors in economics and premedicine (the latter because his mother wanted him to be a doctor). He served in the army during the Korean War, stationed at the Presidio in San Francisco, and afterward returned to UC Berkeley, where he earned an MBA in industrial relations.

Art worked for Procter & Gamble in Ohio, and then as industrial relations manager for the Kroger Company in Ohio, Michigan, and Texas.

In 1980, he became director of labor relations for the California Metal Trades Association; he was also president of the Bay Area chapter of the Industrial Relations Research Association. After retiring in 2000, he worked for his daughter and volunteered as a highway patrol officer for Castro

Valley. He coordinated the volunteer staff at all UC Berkeley home basketball games for 20 years and also volunteered at polling sites during elections. Survivors include a son and daughter, four grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren. His wife, a son, and a grandchild predeceased him.

Merrill Richard Francis ’54 October 1, 2012, in Los Angeles, California.

Merrill studied at Reed for a year and completed a BA in economics at Pomona College, graduating Phi Beta Kappa. He did service in the navy before earning a JD from Stanford Law School, where he was made a member of the Order of the Coif. Merrill’s 45-year legal career was with the firm Sheppard, Mullin, Richter, and Hampton in Los Angeles—he was a prominent finance lawyer, with special expertise in the fields of bankruptcy and creditors’ rights and was known for his encyclopedic knowledge of bankruptcy law as well as for his enthusiastic advocacy on behalf of his clients. Jim Joseph ’69 reported that he practiced in the same area of the law as did Merrill and worked on several cases with him. “I think he decamped to Pomona because the Portland weather got to him.” Merrill held leadership roles in many organizations, including the Los Angeles County Bar Association, the American Bar Association, and the Ninth Circuit Admissions Council, and was named a fellow of the American Bar Foundation.

He was a frequent lecturer on topics such as bankruptcy, workouts, uniform commercial code, and debtor-creditor relations for legal and financial associations. He also received the Les Tupper Community Service Award for his guidance and advocacy during the incorporation of La Canada Flintridge. Merrill supported the arts, enjoyed sailing, especially to Catalina Island, and ran in several marathons.

He married Nancy Humphreys in 1954; they had three children, two daughters and a son.

Survivors include his wife, Maria Del Carmen Heffler; his children, five grandchildren, two sisters, and a brother.

Donald E. Kephart ’54 December 24, 2012, in Portland.

A year before graduating from Reed with a BA in chemistry, Don married Silva Austin ’54, his Grant High School sweetheart. His 37-year career as a process engineer was at Tektronix, and he was the coinventor of three patents.

Don’s love of music led him to sing in the Boar’s Head Ensemble at Reed for many years, reports Virginia Oglesby Hancock ’62, and to perform as a violinist in the Marylhurst Community Orchestra for 25 years. He also enjoyed astronomy and did woodworking and home remodeling projects. In addition, he was a U.S. Army veteran and a 50-year member of Valley Community Church. Survivors include Silva, two sons and three daughters, eight grandchildren, and a sister.

Victoria Moran Sargent ’54 October 29, 2011, in Berkeley, California.

Vicky was at Reed for two years and completed a BA degree in English and social studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She also earned a general elementary school teaching certificate and taught at the Walden Center School in 1962–69. In 1980, she spent a year studying sculpture at École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France. She and Thornton W. (Tony) Sargent III ’51 married in 1952 and had two sons. Vicky and Tony were co-owners of the Rubissow Sargent Winery.

J. Frank Thibeau ’54

December 22, 2012, in Eugene, Oregon, from complications of emphysema and cancer.

Frank studied at Reed for three years and earned a BA from Portland State University. He also studied at Tulane University and earned an MFA from the University of Oregon. He spent 11 years in urban planning, working with the Portland City Planning Commission, the Metropolitan Planning Commission, the Lane Council of Governments, and the Bureau of Urban Research of the University of Oregon. Following that, he spent seven years with the theatre department at the University of Oregon and in theatre programs at Memphis State University and Rhode Island Junior College. With his wife and son, he managed a paper-recycling firm in Portland, and retired from his various occupations in 1996.

Survivors include his wife of 57 years, Carol; a daughter and son; and six grandchildren.

Stanley Gail Nathenson ’55 October 15, 2012, in Pelham, New York.

Stanley was at Reed for two years and earned a BA in psychology. He went on to earn an MD from Washington University in 1959, with special honors in phar macolo g y.

Following that, he had additional training at the National Institutes of Health and the Queen Victoria Hospital in Sussex, England. He was recognized as a National Foundation fellow and as a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Stanley joined the faculty of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1965 in microbiology, immunology, and cell biology. He was later named Samuel H. Golding Chair in Microbiology. The college also recognized Stanley as a distinguished professor and awarded him the Marshall S. Horwitz, MD Faculty Prize for Research Excellence. He held numerous leadership positions at the college, including director of the immunology and oncology training program. His research focused on two costimulatory molecules, B7-1 and B7-2, which had been found to play an important role in

Daniel Abrams ’70 on the steps of his house on SE 28th Avenue, a few blocks from campus.

activating and regulating T-cell immunity. His studies helped reveal the immunological basis for rejection of transplanted tissues and organs and led to therapies for overcoming the rejection process. He was the author of more than 250 research papers in the field of immunology. Stanley married Susan E. Lawrence in 1959; they had two sons.

Patrick Shane O’Neill ’58 January 25, 2013, in Dallas, Texas, of complications from Parkinson’s disease.

Shane earned a BA from Reed and a master’s degree from the University of Rochester in mathematics; he also studied for a doctorate at Michigan State University. He taught math in Dallas and Collin County community college systems in Texas for a number of years.

Survivors include a brother and sister.

Kathleen Virginia Cronin Tinkel ’63

November 21, 2012, in Milford, Connecticut, from cancer.

Kathleen studied at Reed for two years. She met her future husband, physicist Jack B. Tinkel, while taking summer classes at the University of California, Berkeley. The couple moved to New York City, Jack’s hometown, where they resided for 12 years. Kathleen started her own graphic design business, Tinkel Design, and maintained connections to clients in New York via train commute when the couple moved next to Connecticut. During this time, she also found time to remodel a 70-year-old house and to write and publish a book, Rooftop Gardening.

She was one of the founding managers of the Desktop Publishing Forum on CompuServe,

and, as computerization took over the publishing industry, she wrote about software, fonts, people, and the aesthetics of using type for many publications, including Step-by-Step Electronic Design, Personal Publishing, MacUser, Publish, Aldus, Adobe, MacWorld, PC Graphics, MacWeek, and U&lc quarterly. She also cofounded and edited MacPrePress, a weekly fax newsletter. Kathleen was diagnosed with endometrial cancer in 1998. She underwent surgery and moved to Milford, where Jack retired and she pared down her many projects.

Daniel Roark Abrams ’70

January 10, 2012, in Nahiku, Hawaii, from natural causes.

Daniel came to Reed from central Oregon and earned a BA in psychology. Martin White ’69 informed the college that Daniel moved to Maui in the ’70s, where he worked in construction, ran a bike repair shop, and grew organic produce, which he sold at local farmers’ markets. “Daniel lived mostly in Lahaina, but in recent years he lived on acreage he had purchased on Maui’s rugged north shore near the hamlet of Nahiku, not far from George Harrison’s Hawaiian getaway. He took great pleasure in rediscovering the cleverly engineered drainage systems early Hawaiian agriculturalists had constructed on his property. He was a regular patron at the Hana Public Library and had interests that ranged from popular mechanics to the historian Livy.” Notifying the college of his failing health in 2009, Daniel wrote, “I have very fond memories of my days at Reed.” Survivors include his sister, Linda Abrams Smeltzer, who also attended Reed.

june 2013 Reed magazine 61

Jacqui Kohler Koch ’70, MAT ’71, was at home on stage.

Jacqueline L. Kohler Koch ’70, MAT ’71

Michael Parrish ’70 boated on the Niger River in 2007.

Michael Udy Parrish ’70

February 8, 2013, in Los Angeles, California.

December 13, 2012, in Portland, from cancer.

Jacqui earned a BA and a master’s in teaching from Reed in theatre. She was a classroom instructor and also worked for the Bureau of Labor and Industries, where her skill in legal analysis motivated her to attend law school. She earned a JD from Northwestern School of Law at Lewis & Clark College, and for a number of years did employment, family, and appellate law, and also clerked for the Oregon Court of Appeals. More recently, she did coursework in calligraphy, drawing, bookmaking, and painting at Portland Community College. Survivors include a sister and two brothers.

Before coming to Reed, Michael built wells in desert villages in Niger as a Peace Corps volunteer. After earning a BA in general literature, he interned with I.F. Stone’s Weekly in Washington, D.C., and then worked for San Francisco Magazine and as editor of Francis Ford Coppola’s City magazine. He was founding editor of the Los Angeles Times Magazine and reported for the Times on the environment, including the Exxon Valdez crisis and Kuwait oil fires. He did freelance work for regional and national publications, such as Smithsonian and Life, and was an adjunct lecturer at USC Annenberg School and a licensed private investigator. In 2001, he published For the People:

REED

Annual Fund

Dave Weinstock ’92, on drums, also wrote music.

Inside the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office 1850–2000. Michael maintained a connection to Niger, returning to do a feature for Life magazine in 1985 and for a documentary with his fellow Peace Corps volunteers in 2008.

Survivors include his wife, Judie Lewellen; his daughter; mother; and three sisters.

David Andrew Weinstock ’92 February 5, 2013, in Columbus, Ohio.

Dave came to Reed from the McDonogh School in Maryland and majored in religion. After graduating, he composed and performed music.

His untimely death is mourned by his family, including his wife, Tori; his father and stepmother; his sister and her family; and his aunt; and by his friends. David was cherished and loved by many. Friends are planning to hold a memorial for him at Reunions.

Kenneth Richard Loveall MALS ’98

May 29, 2012, in Vancouver, Washington.

make your mark.

As a student, Dorothy O. Johansen ’33 was mentored by her professors.

As a professor, she in turn mentored decades of Reed students.

Professor Johansen’s bequest enables future generations of Reed students to experience the same intimate, transformative education that she valued so highly.

Your bequest commitment to Reed allows the college to carry out its mission.

Contact Kathy Saitas at 503/777-7573 or plannedgiving@reed.edu to make sure Reed can accept your gift as written. plannedgiving.reed.edu

62 Reed magazine june 2013

Ken served as a radar technician in the navy in the West Indies during the Vietnam War. Postwar, he earned a bachelor’s degree and worked as a drafter and later a web programmer for Clark County. He was a member of the Unitarian fellowship and volunteered for Habitat for Humanity. He also enjoyed home brewing. Ken retired from Clark County after 23 years, when he was diagnosed with myeloma.

He then volunteered at Empower Up, an electronics donation and recycling center. Survivors include his wife, Kathie; two daughters and a son; three granddaughters; and a sister.

pending Nelda Butt Stage ’38, Katherine Saremal Cornwell ’40, Anita Cadonau Birkland ’41 , Robert Taylor ’42, Jacob Avshalomov ’43, William Babson ’43, Dorothy Cottrell Coppock ’43, Jean Ainslie Kalahan ’47 , Richard Abel ’48, Daniel Bachman ’49, Richard Nelson ’50, Leonard Kampf ’51 , Richard Tisinger Jr. ’51, John Braun MA ’54, Niels Chew ’55, Archie Buie Jr. ’56, Elsa Warnick ’64, Robert Christie MAT ’67, Jane Clausen Parker ’68, Gregg Agins ’75, Paul Pojman ’87, John Goldsmith Jr. ’88, Christina Slawson Siegel ’90, and Professor Stephen Arch [biology 1972–2012].

apocrypha t r a d i t i o n • m y t h • l e g e n d

Diary of My Upstairs Dormmate Leafing through some personal papers, I chanced upon the following, which appears to be the diary of a resident of MacNaughton 307 in fall 1983. Since I resided in MacNaughton 207, directly below, at the same time, I read this document with considerable interest. I present it here without further comment.

January 10: Yay! My new, 1000-watt Gallien-Krueger bass amp was finally delivered today! I reacted to this event as I often do in moments of great excitement, by beating a heavy iron bar on the floor at irregular intervals for three hours. Of course, after this I was far too tired to slide the wheelless, 600-pound rig across the room to the corner I’ve chosen for it, but I figure I can do that much, much later tonight.

January 12: Couldn’t sleep again, so I did what I always do: tied a rope to an old cinderblock and dragged it back and forth across the floor until I was exhausted. Usually, three or four hours of this puts me right to sleep, but for some reason it didn’t do the trick this time. So I gave up and sat quietly till dawn, reading Siddhartha and moodily smashing wine bottles into a 55-gallon metal barrel I keep on hand for this very purpose.

January 16: Flamenco lesson today. I know this is an indulgence I really can’t afford, but I do enjoy it so, and everyone needs to broaden his cultural horizons, n’est-ce pas?

Plus, I save some money by allowing Miguel to do the lesson at 2 a.m. to accommodate his porphyria—I figure the rest of the budget I can make up by using enormous metal frying pans in lieu of castanets.

January 19: Played the bass line to Hawkwind’s “Orgone Accumulator” for 7 hours, 32 minutes, and 29 seconds last night—a new record! It totally smashes my previous records of 6:32:07, 6:28:52, 6:04:19, 5:41:29, 5:40:30, 5:21:20, 5:15:09 and 4:55:00. Per aspera ad astra!

January 31: Whew! What a party! I had no idea that a theological debate could go on for four days straight—it was like something out of Name of The Rose. I learned a lot and made a lot of new friends. My favorite is probably Gnossos, a peppery old Greek gentleman who smashes a plate on the floor whenever he makes a particularly good point, or when somebody else makes a good point, or, really, pretty much any old time he can get his hands on a plate.

Of course, I wouldn’t want you to get the idea that it was all deadly serious; we had plenty of fun as well. I doubt I’ll soon forget the lusty, improvised rendition of “One Singular Sensation” from A Chorus Line that we managed to pull together one night. The 7 hours of continuous practice were well worth it, and if you’ve never seen 25 peg-legged men arm-in-arm doing

illustration by hawk krall

January 15: That kid downstairs says he’s been having trouble sleeping, too. What a world!

January 26: Thought: What sort of a God would allow people to lose their faculties and be maimed in accidents? I don’t know, but I’ll bet hosting an all-night theological debate for hard-of-hearing men with peg legs would help me figure it out.

Rockettes-style high kicks—well, you’ve never seen 23 or 24 peg-legged men fall to the floor in a tangled heap, many inexplicably wearing suits of armor.

February 2: Saw the kid from Mac II in the mailroom today, and I have to say, he’s looking bad—sallow complexion, unshaven, dark circles around his eyes. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he was being tormented by one of those evil spirits that comes in the night and sucks out all your life force. Well, you know what’s great for driving away evil spirits: fireworks! And Chinese New Year is just around the corner! Gung Hay Fat Choy!!!

The diary ends here. It certainly explains a lot. To those of you who actually lived in MacNaughton in 1983, and who might cynically note that this reads more like my diary from that era, I have a simple explanation: Shut up.

Marty Smith ’88 writes the “Dr. Know” column for Willamette Week and appears on the Daria, Mitch, and Ted Show with Daria Eckhardt Eliuk ’94 on the Portland radio station 105.1 FM billed as “Marty Smith: The Man Who Knows Everything.” You can be horrified by more of his writing at martysmith.com.

get your groove on with the gods!

Reunions 2013 june 12–16, 2013

r eedfay r e . r eed . ed u

alumni@reed.edu

reedfayre.reed.edu

Register today at reedfayre.reed.edu.

Come fill up your dance card at Reed. Fun, intellect, and revelry will create a driving beat that will keep your toes tapping for the duration of the festivities and beyond.

• Dance with your friends like you were at a Reed social once again.

• Meet our new president, John R. Kroger.

• Indulge at Gastronomy Northwest, a Reedie food festival.

• Lace up your skates for the second-annual Reed’s Rockin’ Roller rink.

• Increase your wisdom at Alumni College.

• Salute our own gods of Reed, retiring professors.

That and much, much more awaits you on campus this June 12–16.

503/777-7589

Reed College Reedfayre 2013

blogs.reed.edu/riffin_griffin/

REED COLLEGE

3203 SE Woodstock Boulevard Portland, Oregon 97202-8199

Periodicals Postage Paid Portland, Oregon

leah nash

Bonfire of the Humanities: Seniors celebrate the end of the semester by burning drafts of their theses in a giant firepit outside the Library during Thesis Parade.