Reed College Magazine March 2015

‰ march 2015

INTERSTELLAR ODY S SE Y

Two Reed grads hunt for the classical roots of science fiction.

Conquering the number plane | the science of theatre | revenge of the mantis shrimp

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REED march 2015

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The Art and Craft of Teaching

Reed profs sharpen pedagogical skills at Center for Teaching and Learning.

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FEATURES

By Randall S. Barton 18

Conquering the Number Plane

Math major finds new way to pack polynomials.

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By Chris Lydgate ’90

The Dharma of Tenzin Sangpo

DEPARTMENTS

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Tibetan asylee finds his home at Reed.

By Randall S. Barton

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The Science of Theatre

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Sociologist Sarah Shostak ’92 digs into politics of population health.

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From religion major to mixed martial artist.

By Bill Donahue

6 Eliot Circular Reed wins dance grant Reed declares new majors Software Design Studio says “Hello, World!”

Psych prof. hailed

Interstellar Odyssey Uncovering origins of science fiction in ancient classics.

By Randall S. Barton

Revenge of the Mantis Shrimp

3 Letters

By James Helmsworth

Prof. Peter Ksander uses stage as laboratory.

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Exposed Science

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Peak chemist takes Eliot award

11 Empire of the Griffin

By D. K. Holm

The Pacifist Menace

World War I ravaged a continent—and nearly destroyed a college.

By Raymond Rendleman ’06

Connecting Reed alumni around the globe

38 Reediana

Books, films, and music by Reedies

44 Class Notes 56 In Memoriam 64 Apocrypha The Quest and the Front-Page Fraud

Cover illustration by Vincent Di Fate

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Letter from the editor

march 2015

www.reed.edu/reed_magazine 3203 SE Woodstock Boulevard, Portland, Oregon 97202 503/777-7591 Volume 94, No. 1 MAGAZINE editor Chris Lydgate ’90 503/777-7596 chris.lydgate@reed.edu class notes editor Laurie Lindquist 503/777-7591 reed.magazine@reed.edu Art director Tom Humphrey 503/459-4632 tom.humphrey@reed.edu REED COLLEGE RELATIONS vice president, college relations Hugh Porter More than 100 alumni came back to campus to help students get a head start on their careers at Working Weekend.

Spirit of the Airwaves Ding. Facebook beckons. Ding. Hey, they like my comment. Ding. Wait, no they don’t!

Ding . . .

One of the vaunted powers of social media is its ability to connect people—anywhere, any time—at the swipe of a finger.

This multitentacled matrix of constant connectivity is a mixed blessing, however. Like many alumni, I take part in Reedrelated groups on Facebook. The exchanges are usually thoughtful, nostalgic, passionate, and fun—often all at once. But over winter break, the atmosphere on my favorite group took a dramatic turn for the worse.

The conversation deteriorated into a sort of trench warfare between generational camps.

Old Reedies were written off as intolerant troglodytes. New Reedies were denigrated as hair-trigger zealots of political correctness. Fur and feathers flew.

Ironically, the squabbling reached its nadir at the same moment that Reed witnessed a dramatic show of intergenerational altruism—Working Weekend, the annual event that brings alumni back to campus to help students get a headstart on their careers. This year, more than 100 alumni and parents volunteered their time, expertise, and connections to a record 230 students.

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Reed magazine march 2015

Executive director, communications & public affairs Mandy Heaton director, alumni relations Mike Teskey

The contrast between the two worlds— the virtual and the real—couldn’t have been more stark. While cyberspace seethed, I stood in Kaul Auditorium and listened to the exuberant din of hundreds of students and alumni swapping stories, shar-

Online we were putting each other down. In real life, we were helping each other out. ing insights, and opening their rolodexes.

Online we were putting each other down.

In real life, we were helping each other out.

For me, the weekend was a vivid reminder of the power of networking in the oldfashioned sense—students and alumni talking face to face. It also confirmed the perils of networking in the newfangled sense—that while social media can connect us, it can also consume us.

Like Abraham Lincoln, I believe in the better angels of our nature—and try to summon them whenever I’m on Facebook.

—CHRIS LYDGATE ’90

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.

Letters to Reed 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 only run 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.

Prime Exponent

Worth a 1000 Words

Around the World in Weighty Phrases

You question (December 2014) what those four early faculty are up to. Recent discovery of this old chromatolithograph makes it clear.

—John Bear ’59 Berkeley, California robert miller

I remember little of my education at Reed College better than my calculus class with Joe Roberts [1952–2014].

I remember sitting in the classroom at Reed, watching Professor Roberts enter. He ran his hand through his hair, offered his straightforward greeting, “How is mathematics today?” and then moved, as in a dance, to an extraordinary mathematical journey on the blackboard.

I’d been blessed since elementary school with more than one extraordinary teacher of mathematics, but I never held court as head of class.

It has always been a bit of mystery to me that I ever was allowed into Professor Roberts’ class, and to this day when people mention calculus I find my intellect feeling a bit fuzzy. Sometimes I find myself wondering, was I even there? In calculus class? Reed College?

Then I read Bill Donahue’s article “Prime Exponent” in the September 2014 edition of Reed, and I knew, yes, I was there. I was one of the many lucky students fortunate enough to experience this extraordinary teacher.

I often remember taking the final exam for that course—delightful! I never learned, did I pass or fail? I never received any grade from Reed College or from any teacher in the school.

So I’ve never known, should I be dismayed by my profound lack of understanding or delighted because I passed the test?

I do know that I have carried into my life and into my work a profound appreciation for numbers, and I have tried as an elementary grades Waldorf schoolteacher to bring to my students some of the awesome and beautiful truths of numbers that Joe Roberts revealed to me.

I believe that some of those truths appear in my paintings, as well, but that would take more than 300 words to relate.

—Kate Walter ’72 Tucson, Arizona

Poet of Ordinary Mysteries Our obituary of poet Vern Rutsala ’56 mistakenly included the wrong photo. Here’s the real Vern, along with our apologies to the family.

“Readers from across the globe,” declares the editor of Reed, “alerted us to a carnival of errors in the last magazine.”

U.S. spies have been “conducting surveillance in the online games played by millions of people across the globe”—thus were my eyes assaulted by a New York Times story one morning. Another headline read, “A Moment of Unity as the Tributes Flow from Across the World”— modified, mercifully, to “Around the World” in the Times online edition.

Don’t know much about geography . . . Many people, perhaps even a majority, believe that the earth is round. The last time I used such a medieval phrase was as a young child, and I was quickly corrected by my mother. How is it that the flat-earth society is suddenly resurgent?

Curious, I did a little research. How often in the past, I wondered, were the phrases “across the world” and “across the globe” used in the Times (as an indicator of the media in general), as opposed to the “around” versions.

Using the Times online search facility, I came up with some illuminating results: For most of the 20th century, the annual frequency of “across” rested comfortably in the 1% to 5% range, with an occasional anomalous year. An exception was the World War II period, when there was a spike march 2015 Reed magazine

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Letters to Reed to nearly 10%, but that increase tapered off by midcentury. Stories about Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days and Howard Hughes’ flight around the globe did not skew the results. On the other hand, reviews of the 1930 movie Across the World with Mr. and Mrs. Martin Johnson produced a visible blip in the data. Then, suddenly and inauspiciously, with the inauguration of George Bush the Lesser, the rate of “across” leaped to the double digits, peaking above 30% for Bush’s two final years. As suddenly as Bush was out of office, the rate dropped to 16%, and as the Obama years progressed, into the single digits, though the damage seems to have been done, and we’re still hovering around 9%.

—Roger Lippman ’69 Seattle, Washington From the editor: Although it is deeply disheartening to be thus associated with the George W Bush adminstration, I will take this as a round to bear.

Brain Waves

My wife and I laughed when we saw the cover of the latest (excellent) Reed magazine. In 1968, when she and I first met, I was working with an ancient EEG machine in the basement of Eliot, exploring the potential of biofeedback as a tool for exploring human consciousness. (You wrote about my thesis in “What Life Can Compare with This? Sitting Alone at the Window, I Watch the Flowers Bloom, the Leaves Fall, the Seasons Come and Go”—the thesis title — in Gary Wolf’s February 2002 article (in Reed) about me.

The use of brain waves as a tool for exploring and controlling consciousness was a new idea in 1968. Joe Kamiya at Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute had reported that trained Buddhist meditators had exhibited high levels of the 8-12-cps “alpha frequency” as measured by electroencephalography, and that untrained subjects had learned to emit higher levels of alpha when a tone was sounded whenever alpha appeared. Not only might we be able to use electronic methods to map consciousness, but it appeared that by becoming aware of our brain’s unconscious processes, we might be able to learn how to control them.

There was an ancient EEG machine in the psych department. These days, brain waves are recorded digitally and displayed on a screen. In 1968, these machines spewed out fan-folded 4

Reed magazine march 2015

Exploring the Labyrinth

reams of white paper at a frightening rate. I knew nothing about electronics. My roommate, the late Richard Crandall ’69, built the feedback apparatus.

It turns out that EEG neurofeedback has real but limited usefulness, and using it to map consciousness is akin to sitting on Neahkahnie Mountain and attempting to map the ocean floor by looking at the waves—useful, yes, but extremely limited.

I do have some authentic photos of me and some of the apparatus. Although it appears that they were taken in a lighthearted moment.

—Howard Rheingold ’68 Mill Valley, California

Prexy’s Midnight Runner

I was delighted to read “Prexy Gets Facelift” (Reed, December 2014). The historical account was nearly right, but missed a detail of supreme importance (to me, anyway). True, in 1958 the men’s dorm was removed from Prexy and the music program was installed, with piano taught in the big room, first-floor northeast corner of the building, and nearly all the rest of the rooms used for practice. However, contrary to the claim that “the building was declared unsafe as a residence,” in fact it remained a residence for years to come. There was a three-room apartment on the second floor (again, northeast corner) containing a living room with fireplace, a bedroom/study, and a full private bathroom.

This apartment was occupied by the building’s student-custodian, who lived there rent free in exchange for unlocking the front door at 7 a.m. every day, locking it again at 11 p.m., and vacuuming the whole building once a week (with special attention to the piano room). I held this job my senior year, 1961–62, and ohla-la, was that apartment ever a superchallenge to the open-door policy. It was also a challenge to the student-custodian, who could not roust himself at 7 a.m. most days, so was awakened by shouting from below and heavy rapping on the front door. Musicians, you gotta love ’em . . . and I did!

—John Belmont ’62 Overland Park, Kansas

My how times change. Never in various forays within the steam tunnels of Reed did I foresee them becoming venues for freshman orientation.

Nor did I envision the smiling faces of coeds, all in a row, leaving their names as did craftsmen behind the walls of the Sistine Chapel. But carefully did you reveal some and leave much unsaid. You mention Eliot Hall, the Old Dorm Block, and Physical Plant, but nary a word of the other significant buildings to which, through steam tunnels, may be gained entry. You mention “sentries and locks,” but omit other access available to the quiet and unobtrusive. A reference to “surreal artwork” doth not justice do to some of the sculpture left in situ. Finally, the phrase “difficult to navigate” doth not adequately describe the three-inch-high stalagmites dripped from the mesh ceiling, which make interesting the long hands-and-knees traverse to a particularly guarded location.

A question then. Is the orientation through high and wide tunnels naught but an interesting sidelight for freshmen, or a ruse, a gambit, to distract the adventurous mind from what else may lie beneath the lawns? ’Twas a time when a small and select group, styling itself “Trophies Anonymous,” explored the nether regions of the campus. Quiet, discreet fun was had by all.

—Jonathan Hough ’59 Boulder, Colorado

Best Profs Ranking

Congratulations to Reed for its first-place status in the Princeton Review about student rankings of their professors! A great performance and one with which I heartily agree. My professor in Humanities 11 & 21 was Richard Jones [history 1941–86], and he gave me a lifelong appreciation of the subject. I read extensively and most of it is in the history and other social sciences areas.

—Thomas Hall ’53 San Francisco, California

Impoverished Cookery

A thread in the (unofficial) Reed group on Facebook brought up the continuing existence and availability of Jay Rosenberg’s wonderful Impoverished Students’ Book of Cookery, Drinkery, and Housekeepery (a classic piece of Reediana that seems due for a profile in Reed magazine).

It’s a wonderful (if somewhat dated) book that covers some inexpensive recipes, some homebrewing basics, multiple-household budgeting, and more. It is still available for a mere $10 per book in the Reed bookstore (tinyurl.com /ImpoverishedStudent), with $4.40 from each sale going to the Jay Rosenberg Cookbook Scholarship Fund. My first exposure to the book was when I received it as a high school graduation present, and I invite the readers of Reed magazine to join me in making commitment to include a copy of this book in every high school and college graduation and housewarming pres-

ent we give. If we do this, in addition to whatever charitable contribution we make to the college (whether specifically to the financial aid fund or untethered), we can give a useful (and entertaining) book to those who might find it useful while helping Reed edge slightly closer to being able to adopt a need-blind admissions policy.

—Ray Wells ’94 Ellensburg, Washington

Out of the Shadows

I have pondered writing this letter for some time but feared that it would bring unpleasant consequences and so did not follow through.

At this point I have decided it needs to be written anyway.

Your magazine includes features on Reed, Reed graduates, and the Reed experience— for the most part positive. Yet for some of us, women in particular, the Reed experience was marred by institutionally tolerated sexual misconduct that will forever influence our lives and feelings about Reed. This misconduct meant that in a place where the life of the mind was said to be paramount, we were treated instead as bodies.

I attended Reed from 1981-85 and in those four years I myself was subject to some inappropriate conduct by male faculty, I was also told flat-out by a male professor I knew that he was sleeping with at least one of his Hum 110 students, and a close friend endured sexual abuse by her thesis advisor that qualified as felonious. In the latter case, the professor was ultimately fired, but with no black mark on his record, allowing him to continue his career at another institution.

Recently I had a conversation with former Reed president Steve Koblik, whose term from 1992 until 2001 occurred well after my graduation. He shared stories indicating that in the decades prior to his term sexual predation by male faculty on female students was an open secret. (Though President Koblik and the college can be lauded for implementing new policies regarding sexual misconduct during his tenure, for women of earlier generations the damage had already been done.) If you publish this letter I have no doubt that you will hear from other Reedies whose experiences second both my account and his assessment of those earlier days.

Especially after reading “Out of the Shadows” (Reed, December 2014), on a Reed graduate who works toward justice for children who were sexually abused, I am asking myself these questions: When will the sexual exploitation that many Reed women experienced come “out of the shadows”? Will there ever be a statement by Reed as an institution that such conduct was wrong and that it should never have been tolerated?

Before closing I would like to emphasize that I had many fine professors at Reed of both genders. I am by no means impugning all of Reed’s faculty and administrators. However, the trust

that female students had in Reed was, in too many instances, not returned with policies and actions that would have protected us from those who were willing to abuse their power.

It is hard to put this history behind us when it remains unacknowledged. If any school can do this is in a thoughtful way, it should be Reed, and I am hopeful that, in some future issue of Reed magazine, I may see such an attempt to be truthful about the past and embrace a more equal future.

—Paula Scott ’85 South Pasadena, California Thanks for raising a difficult but important issue. According to Comrades of the Quest, romantic relationships between students and professors were common in the 1950s and 1960s. The first official statement I have found condemning this sort of thing is a 1980 memo from acting president George Hay which makes clear that sexual harassment— as it was then understood—was unacceptable.

But it seems that during the 1980s the faculty as a whole was reluctant to declare that any sexual relationship between professor and student, even if apparently consensual, constituted an abuse of power. The debate was doubtless complicated by the fact that several professors were married to former students.

In 1993, the faculty revised its policy thus: “Because those who teach are entrusted with guiding students, judging their work, giving grades for courses and papers, and recommending students, instructors are in a particularly delicate relationship of trust and power. This relationship must not be jeopardized by possible doubt of intent, fairness of professional judgment, or the appearance to other students of favoritism.

It is therefore inappropriate for faculty to have romantic or sexual relationships with students.”

The current policy is even more emphatic and can be found at http://bit.ly/17AEpFV. From the editor:

Fossil Fuels

I was surprised to find the editor defending the decision of the board of trustees not to divest from fossil fuels as “protecting academic freedom” (Letters, December 2014). Who was supposedly persecuted for their ideas? The only freedom protected by the trustees’ action is the freedom of capital to pursue profit without restriction. What impulse made the editor invoke academic freedom?

I suggest that the editor was motivated by the need to make the action of the trustees correspond to the mission of the institution it supports. As I understand it and experienced it, Reed is committed to thinking critically about issues that matter and applying the results of that thinking in the real world. It feels wrong if Reed is supported by investments that are used to bring about what the scientific consensus believes is a climate disaster, and to promote lies and distortions that discredit

critical thinking about that disaster and their role in creating it. Therefore we must be acting to protect academic freedom. That makes us feel better.

The need for compatibility between mission and action (in this case the actions taken to support the institution financially) is real.

So is the need to develop financial support to accomplish the mission. I do understand the “slippery slope” argument. If they agree to divest from fossil fuels, how will the trustees deal with what could become a never ending stream of demands to divest from other industries? Corporations exist to pursue profit, and most of them engage in at least some unsavory activities to that end.

I suggest that the board of trustees solve this dilemma by reflecting on the mission of Reed. It is not to evaluate and rule on the public benefit of every corporation in which they may invest the endowment, but neither is it to blindly provide financing to institutions that are totally incompatible with its mission. I suggest the following as possible principles which would mandate divestment from fossil fuels without venturing too far out onto the “slippery slope”: 1) The divestment should be in response to an issue of global importance. Many injustices exist, but few have the reach of negatively impacting all of humanity (and most other species as well).

2) The target of divestment should have proved itself resistant to taking reasonable action or reform.

3) There should exist a movement with some momentum and chance of success (the Rockefellers have joined the fossil fuel divestment movement).

4) There should be some risk that if the divestment is successful that it will negatively affect the college’s investments. (In my previous letter [December 2014] I argued that by taking what is really an ideological stand that money must follow its own rules, the board of trustees was overlooking risks that should be taken into account in making wise investment decisions. ) The trustees of course will need to develop their own guidelines. It is a difficult task and they will not be able to avoid criticism from those scrutinizing their decisions. Still, they need to “person up” and make the tough calls to keep Reed’s investments consistent with its mission.

—Roger Gadway ’67 White Salmon, Washington From the editor: As I see it, my role is not to defend but to explain. Last year I had the opportunity to watch several trustees discuss the question of divestment with students.

In that session, it was clear to me that the trustees were concerned about the potential impact of divestment on academic freedom because of the “slippery slope” argument.

Thanks for focusing on this point in your valuable contribution to the debate.

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news from campus

Jump for Joy! Reed Wins $800K Grant for Dance

experience,” Prof. Mann says. “It sparks innovation across disciplines through the Reed has won an $800,000 grant from the professor to begin in the fall. After that, way it teaches students to interrogate hisAndrew W. Mellon Foundation to strengthen the dance department will devise and pro- torical, aesthetic, and social issues; to engage its dance program with more classes, more pose a major. kinesthetically with space, time, and moveworkshops, and—pending approval from the The grant will also allow Reed to invite ment; to approach solving problems with crefaculty—a freestanding dance major. renowned dancers to campus for artistic res- ativity and rigor; and to pursue productively “I am thrilled by what the Mellon Founda- idencies, during which they will put on mas- both individual and collaborative endeavors.” tion’s support will mean for dance at Reed,” ter workshops, lectures, and performances.

With the opening of the Performing Arts says Prof. Carla Mann ’81 [dance 1995–].

Interest in dance among Reed students Building, Reed now boasts outstanding facilThe grant will allow the college to expand is strong and growing. In spring 2014, some ities for dance, including a dedicated dance faculty positions in the dance department 151 Reed students enrolled in dance courses. studio with a sprung wood floor, a flexible from 2 to 2.5, enabling professors to teach And while Reed has long allowed students to performance laboratory space named in 12–13 courses a year. It also sets the stage pursue interdisciplinary majors such as dance– honor of the late Prof. Massee, and a retrofor us to offer a dance major—something theatre, dance–literature, or dance–classics, it fitted stage in the old theatre building.

“This is going to be a remarkable time for Reed dancers have long hoped for. Reed has never offered a stand alone dance major. dance at Reed,” Mann says. “I can’t wait!” will launch a search for a new tenure-track “Dance is central to the liberal arts

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leah nash

Eliot Circular

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Prof. Irena Swanson ’87 [math 2005–]: Reed has a proud tradition of integrating computers and the humanities.

Reed Declares New Majors The perennial sophomore’s dilemma—What should I major in?—just got harder.

In November, the faculty voted to broaden Reed’s curriculum by approving a new major in comparative literature and two new concentrations in the math department: math– computer science and math–statistics. All three tracks will be in place by fall 2015.

The math–computer science concentration may seem like the most radical addition.

Are computers really compatible with Reed’s emphasis on the humanities? The answer is a resounding Yes. (See next page.) Reed has pioneered the use of computing in the liberal arts and sciences amid growing recognition that computer science constitutes a distinct intellectual discipline, bristling with unsolved problems, theoretical debates, and recursive paradoxes.

“Reed has a long and proud tradition of integrating computers in meaningful ways into the liberal arts,” says Prof. Irena Swanson ’87 [math 2005–]. “It is now recognizing computer science as a field of study with academic methods of its own and with great interdisciplinary connections.”

Reed offers courses on algorithm design, programming languages, interactive graphics,

computer systems, computability, complexity, and cryptography.

The new structure encourages students to fulfill the requirements of the math major with upper-level mathematics coursework in computer science.

In a similar vein, the math–stats concentration encourages students to pursue studies in statistics while also taking courses in applied fields such as physics, biology, psychology, or economics.

data science, also as a discipline in its own right. The math–CS and math–stats concentrations, respectively, are such options for a mathematics student.”

The comp lit major is designed for students who want to study literary questions that do not fall neatly into a particular national canon, or who want to explore relationships among literature, film, and the visual and performing arts, according to Prof. Libby Drumm [Spanish 1995–].

Students will be able to focus on computer science, statistics, and comparative literature.

“There is a great need for Reed students outside of mathematics to be able to wrestle with data, to have sophistication in asking and answering statistical questions, and to have the computational intuitions and savvy to carry such analyses out,” says Prof.

Jim Fix [math 1999–]. “I think it is natural for a place like Reed to provide an option for students to engage in deep investigation of computational approaches, as a discipline in its own right, and in deep investigation of

It will also foreground important debates about what it means to study individual cultural traditions within a “global” horizon. “I think comp lit will provide great opportunities for interdisciplinary work for our students,” says Prof. Drumm.

“A number of students have already expressed considerable enthusiasm for this new program,” agrees Prof. Jan Mieszkowski [German 1997–]. “We sense that there’s a lot of potential for exciting work.”

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Eliot Circular

Prof. Metz Wins Goldschmidt Fellowship

Software Studio Says “Hello, World!”

“ This is about bending technology to your will.”

—Reed CIO Marty Ringle expert mentorship that will enable any Advanced Computation proved that student—not just math and science the 24th Fermat number, a numermajors—to solve deep computational ic behemoth consisting of five milproblems. This is about bending tech- lion digits, was not prime. In 2013, nology to your will.”

Hannah Kosstrin, then visiting proReed’s first technologist-in-res- fessor of dance, developed the iPad idence is Lennon Day-Reynolds app KineScribe, which allows danc’03, director of engineering at Urban ers to use the Labanotation system Airship. Lennon previously worked at of choreography notation. (Not to Twitter, Sun, and Dark Horse Comics. mention that guy Steve Jobs . . .)

Students at the SDS will work on The SDS operates on an intern an array of fascinating projects. Some model. Reed students who are selectmay arise from their studies, such ed for the program are paid on an as the classics major who wants to hourly basis. SDS interns are paired analyze anaphora in the Iliad. Some with mentors who provide guidance may benefit the community, such as and offer insight into internships, “what-if?” scheduling software for stu- networking, and job hunting. dents. And some may simply appeal to The project has attracted overReedies on an intellectual level, such whelming student interest (120 as designing a program to play the applications for 10 spots) from a mulancient game of Go. titude of academic disciplines, but is The SDS draws on the college’s still shy of its fundraising goal. To proud tradition of integrating tech- find out how you can help, contact nology into the liberal arts. In the Duncan Rotch at rotchd@reed.edu.

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Reed magazine march 2015

tom humphrey

mandy heaton

Codeslingers, limber up your fingers. In January, thanks to financial support from alumni and friends, Reed launched a Software Design Studio (SDS) to help students explore the art and craft of coding through hands-on instruction and thoughtful mentorship.

Many Reed students already know how to write code as part of their Interpreting the prime directive, Reed flexes its coursework in physics, math, or psy- codeslinging muscle at the SDS. chology, but the SDS is designed to bolster programming skills with prac- ’50s, Prof. John Hancock [chemistry tical experience directed by a technol- 1955–89] built the DIMWIT system ogist in residence. It is also aimed at for molecular analysis, using relays students majoring in disciplines such from confiscated pinball machines. as classics or music who have never In the ’80s, Reed’s pioneering D-Lab written a line of code but are intrigued produced a host of applications for by the intellectual challenge. higher ed, including RaSCAL, a “Reedies are extraordinarily good at real-time Pascal compiler, and the problem solving,” says Marty Ringle, first color graphics system for the chief information officer. “What we Macintosh. In the ’90s, students hope to provide through the SDS is and professors at the Center for

Prof. Tamara Metz [poli sci 2006–] was awarded the Maure L. Goldschmidt Memorial Research Fellowship in 2014 to support her research into the politics of care.

Metz is investigating conflicts between the demands of care and political freedom in liberal democratic thought and practice.

In this tradition, to be free is to be left alone and obligations are incurred by consent. In reality, human beings are inevitably and, at times, utterly dependent on the energy and attention of others. Neither individuals nor societies can survive without care. In the late modern context, feminist and care theorists have argued, the state has a crucial role to play in ensuring the demands of care are met and the benefits and burdens of care are justly distributed. Metz aims to contribute to the reformulation of conceptions of freedom and to develop a theory of politics that resists the imperatives of neoliberal rationality without sacrificing individual autonomy.

The fellowship was established by David M. Goldschmidt ’65 in memory of his father, Prof. Maure Goldschmidt. Maure Goldschmidt graduated from Reed College with the class of 1930. He returned to his alma mater to serve as a member of the political science faculty for 33 years, holding the Cornelia Marvin Pierce Chair in American Institutions.

Metz is the author of Untying the Knot: Marriage, the State, and the Case for Their Divorce and the co-editor of Justice, Politics, and the Family.

cate whitcomb

Psych Prof Named Professor of the Year Prof. Jennifer Henderlong Corpus [psychology 2001–] was named 2014 Oregon Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in recognition of her innovative approach to teaching and learning and her ability to challenge students beyond the classroom.

“Each of our awardees, state and national, brings extraordinary leadership not just to their classrooms, but to their departments, colleges, and universities, and their respective professional fields,” said Anthony S. Bryk, president of CFAT. “We honor them for upholding and guiding the aspirations of their students, advancing knowledge, and elevating and dignifying the profession of teaching. In recognizing their commitment

“ This honor underscores how lucky I feel to be at Reed.” and excellence, their contributions, and their demonstrated passion, we support the centrality of teaching on campus and recognize its importance to the future of our country.”

Judges selected the national and state winners based on four criteria: impact on and

Prof. Minh Tran [dance 2008–] premiered his choreographed work “Unexpected Turbulence” at the Northwest Dance Project opener New Now Wow! in October at Portland State University. Praised for its sustained high energy, Tran’s piece also drew audience responses with its humor and layered dance movements.

“Unexpected Turbulence” derives inspiration from the required—and often mechanical—safety demonstrations given by airline attendants prior to flight. Nine dancers performed Tran’s piece to an original score by Portland musician Heather Perkins.

Blaine Truitt Covert

Unexpected Turbulence

involvement with undergraduate students; scholarly approach to teaching and learning; contributions to undergraduate education in the institution, community, and profession; and support from colleagues and current and former students.

“This honor underscores how lucky I feel to be at Reed, surrounded by outstanding educators and truly inspiring students,” Corpus told us. “I am grateful for the opportunity to know and learn from them on a daily basis.”

Prof. Corpus is an expert on the field of motivation and has conducted extensive research into the role of praise (of the attaboy! variety), which can function as a reward with both positive and negative consequences.

march 2015 Reed magazine

9

Eliot Circular ariel zambelich

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Browse online!

Peak Chemist Takes Eliot Award Reed is proud to announce that mountaineer, chemist, and environmental advocate Arlene Blum ’66 will be honored with the Thomas Lamb Eliot Award, recognizing distinguished and sustained achievement by a Reed grad, at Reunions in June.

Arlene has led expeditions to the world’s most challenging mountains, including Nepal’s Annapurna I—an adventure chronicled in her award-winning book, Annapurna: A Woman’s Place. She is also a groundbreaking chemist; she established that a flame retardant widely used in children’s pajamas was mutagenic (the chemical was later banned from children’s clothing). In 2013, she was instrumental in preventing the same flame retardant from creeping into pillows and bedding sold in California.

Arlene is a visiting scholar in chemistry at UC Berkeley and executive director of the Green Science Policy Institute, which brings together government, industry, scientists, and citizen groups to support chemical policies to protect human health and the environment.

She was selected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was chosen by the U.K. Guardian as one of the world’s 100 most inspiring women and by the National Women’s History Project as one of 100 “Women Taking the Lead to Save Our Planet.” She also was elected to the Hall of Mountaineering Excellence.

The trustees held a special dinner with Arlene over Working Weekend to celebrate her achievements. She also gave a public lecture titled “A Life of Mountains and Molecules.”

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

10 Reed magazine march 2015

Empire of the Griffin Connecting Reed alumni around the globe

Reed’s Prince of Fashion Makes a Splash at the Portland Art Museum You may associate Reedies with conspicuous non-consumption, yet we have cut a distinctive swath in the fashion world, both high and low, and none more so than with Emilio Pucci MA ’37. The legendary fashion designer had a fascinating life of international intrigue even before enroll-

As Emilio propelled Reed into the world of alpine sport, his designs propelled Italian fashion onto the world stage. ing at Reed (see “Tinker. Tailor.

Soldier. Spy.” in Reed, March 2014). His original designs are included in the exhibition Italian Style: Fashion Since 1945 showing at the Portland Art Museum through May 3, 2015.

Italian Style documents Italy’s dramatic transition from post-war devastation to burgeoning industry. Sumptuous displays include more than 100 ensembles and accessories created by leading Italian

fashion houses, including Pucci, Valentino, Gucci, Missoni, Armani, Dolce & Gabbana, Fendi, Prada, and Versace. As Emilio Pucci propelled Reed into the world of alpine sport as founder of the college ski

Holiday Party More than 200 Reedies, family, and friends attended the Alumni Holiday Party in December, which featured the swinging jazz standards of Rebecca Kilgore, the hallowed Boar’s Head Procession, and decorations in the theme of “My Favorite Things” (including brown-paper packages tied up with string, of course).

View photos of the festivities at alumni.reed.edu/holidayparty.

team, his breathtaking designs propelled Italian fashion onto the world stage.

For its presentation in Portland, the only West Coast venue, the museum has organized a variety of programs for

the general public, as well as a private tour for alumni led by docent Nancy Johannsen Morrice ’78. In addition, current Reed students are eligible for a $5 discount (show your ID at the box office). Reed alumni, staff, and faculty are eligible for a $5 discount by using the online code REED when purchasing a ticket. (See alumni .reed.edu for details.)

If you haven’t had your fill of high style after seeing the glamorous display at the museum, drop by Reed’s Hauser Library to see Emilio Pucci: Fashion Impressario, curated by Gay Walker ‘69, special collections librarian, in the flat cases through April 15. Also, you may listen to a talk that Pucci gave on campus in 1962, in which he credits his MA, and “many other things” learned at Reed, as the basis for the formation of his distinguished career.

Pucci goes on to define fashion in contrast to the dictionary definition of vulgarity, proposing that it is “a battle for taste, refinement, in order to make living more pleasant.”

Listen to the speech at soundcloud.com /reedcollege

Alumni Board Nominations For 3 year terms beginning July 1, 2015: Jinyoung Park, linguistics ’11, Louisiana Jenn Hubbs, chemistry ’06, Florida Jeremy Stone, anthopology ’99, British Columbia Darlene Pasieczny, art history ’01, Oregon Michael Jacobs, philosophy ’04, New York Find biographies and information on board service at alumni.reed.edu.

march 2015 Reed magazine 11

The Art and Craft of Teaching

Reed profs sharpen pedagogical skills at Center for Teaching and Learning

BY RANDALL S. BARTON

Reed has long been synonymous with excellent teaching. With its small classes, low student-faculty ratio, and spirit of intellectual inquiry, it’s the kind of place where professors enjoy a near-mythological status. But, as Prof. Morgan Luker [music 2010–] observes, “Great teachers are not born, they’re made.”

Prof. Luker is one of the professors excited about the new Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), which opened in September in the remodeled Greywood building.

“The center is a genuine home run,” says Nigel Nicholson, dean of the faculty and Walter Mintz Professor of Classics [1995–].

“It has generated real excitement and is already a wonderful resource for continuing and senior faculty as well as new faculty. Above all, it helps us frame teaching as a craft or practice rather than a gift.”

Historically, Reed’s intimate scale and collegial atmosphere have allowed professors to swap ideas and learn techniques from one another. But advances in technology—plus new research in education—have given all professors a chance to sharpen their game.

“Many faculty members are very friendly towards each other and converse a lot in the hallway and between classes,” says Prof.

12 Reed magazine march 2015

Sonia Sabnis [classics 2006–]. “But we didn’t have anything institutional for the support of teaching. If for some reason your teaching goes awry or you have an issue, it’s been hard to know where to go for help. The center has provided an environment to talk about teaching—both problems and triumphs— and share ideas in a systematic way.”

The Mellon Foundation provided funding for a pilot project where Reed professors investigated teaching and learning programs at other colleges, digested their findings, and compiled a report.

Daniel Kemp ’58, professor emeritus of chemistry at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is providing current funding for the programming at the center.

“When I was a graduate student at Princeton you learned the content of what you were going to teach,” says Prof. Kathy Oleson [psychology 1995–], the director of the center. “In many graduate schools the focus was research . . . . But if you value teaching, it’s not enough to say, ‘I know psychology.’ You have to be able to teach it to someone else.”

The center hosts programs and seminars on a variety of topics, such as effective conference participation, supporting students with disabilities, and how to put together a syllabus. Professors teaching the same

courses year after year can discover strategies to keep the material fresh for their students—and for themselves.

Prof. Jonathan Rork [economics 2010–] serves on the center’s advisory council and is investigating a program of formalized student peer advising.

“Students would share their experience of how to get the most from this new and challenging experience,” he says. “By formalizing it, we insure that everyone has access, that it isn’t limited to random discussions in the residence halls.”

At Brown University, Rork was a student adviser in the Meiklejohn program, meeting with advisees at the same time as their faculty adviser.

He envisions that Reed faculty would choose student academic advisers to work alongside them for key events like freshman orientation and junior quals.

“The faculty member would work through the nuts and bolts of the program and then I would chime in when they had questions,” he explains.

In their early years it can be difficult for junior faculty, who come from a range of backgrounds, to adjust to the culture at Reed, particularly the conference method, which may be unfamiliar to professors who hail from research universities.

illustration by lilli carrÉ

“I didn’t understand what a liberal arts education really was until I started to experience it,” says Prof. Kara Becker [linguistics 2010–]. “Teaching is the central thing we do, but there aren’t always opportunities to work on improving what you do in the classroom.”

One program pairs professors with students to provide feedback on the classroom experience. (As with all the center’s programs, participation is voluntary.)

Student-consultants monitor professors’ classes; compile detailed, minute-by-minute accounts of what transpires; and offer thoughts and suggestions, such as: “You asked a question and nobody responded.

Was it because no one had done the reading? Or was the question too broad?” or “This was great, the students seemed excited here.”

In the first semester, Prof. Becker collaborated with Julia Selker ’15, and Prof.

Luker with Ben Morris ’15.

“You work really hard on what you planned for class and you want it to go well,” Becker says. “When it ends, you feel something about it. Maybe it went well; maybe it was a disaster. Having that second pair of eyes to confirm or deny how things went is amazing.”

Julia agrees. “Experiencing a class from this perspective, I think of a gazillion things that I would never have noticed as a student, and probably not as a professor,” she says.

“I didn’t expect to be so excited about the possibility of changing things and exploring different techniques. Kara never shies away from more effort. She has a lot of goals she wants to accomplish and it makes teaching feel like such an adventure.”

Neither Ben nor Julia major in the courses they evaluated, allowing them to observe classroom dynamics without having to focus on content. Ben is a psychology major and Julia majors in physics.

smaller groups for discussion.

“There is a lot to learn, but we don’t have to reinvent the wheel,” he says. “This program was taken from other models that work. Some of the professors participating in it are bulletproof, famously among the best teachers here. It’s about continuing development. This has been tremendously valuable. I would do it for every class I had, if I could.”

For his part, Ben has gained a new appre-

“Great teachers are not born, they’re made.”

Each week they meet with their respective teachers to discuss which aspects of class to pay attention to, how lectures flowed, and whether students struggled with aspects of discussion or the formulation of a question.

“I watch not only what Morgan is doing, but how engaged the students are, their body language, and how certain exercises are being responded to,” Ben says.

Luker admits that working with a student to improve his pedagogy was risky in terms of his ego. But the experience has given him new insights and encouraged him to try new techniques, such as breaking the class into

—Prof. Morgan Luker

ciation for how much work a professor does on a day-to-day basis.

“If a professor is communicating the information effectively, it doesn’t feel like teaching is this big action that is carefully crafted and consciously put together,” Ben says. “But in large respect, it is. It’s astounding the consciousness Morgan needs in thinking about what he’s doing, and saying it well while teaching the content.”

Enthusiasm is running high during CTL’s second semester; with more than 40 faculty signed up for learning seminars and 15 collaborations between professors and student consultants.

march 2015 Reed magazine 13

Natalie Behring

Conquering the Number Plane

Math major finds new way to pack polynomials Imagine you are the ticketmaster of a vast, Borgesian concert hall with an infinite number of seats, neatly arranged in rows and columns. Unfortunately, a mischievous hobgoblin has roped off a section of the auditorium with a velvet cord, putting it out of bounds. Guests are trickling in. How do you assign each guest to a seat of their own?

Okay, it’s a far-fetched scenario, but math major Maddie Brandt ’15 is the first person in history to solve it in her paper “Quadratic Packing Polynomials on Sectors of R2,” which she presented at a conference in January.

The problem of assigning guests to seats is directly related to the problem of mapping the non-negative integers (those friendly, deceptively familiar objects such as 0, 1, 2, 3, and their ilk) onto the coordinate plane (defined by pairs of integers such (0, 0), (0, 1), (0, 2), etc.—think of the game of Battleship). How do you map the integers to the coordinate pairs in such a way that you count all the pairs one after another, without skipping any?

Reed students meet this problem in Math 321, Real Analysis, and solve it with a packing polynomial—a formula that assigns (x, y) to an integer N. The standard solution, shown

14 Reed magazine march 2015

by Fueter and Pólya in 1923, is: (x+y)2 x+3y N= + 2 2 In Maddie’s paper, the problem is complicated by the rational sector—the hobgoblin’s velvet cord. She solved it by constructing K-stair polynomials.

Maddie came to Reed from St. Louis, Missouri, intending to major in physics. Then she took Math 332, Abstract Algebra, from Prof. Rao Potluri [1973–2014]. “I really loved that class,” she says. “It was like opening a doorway into a whole world. I got a taste for higher mathematics and I wanted more.”

The Reed math department is famous for its emphasis on understanding the why as well as the how. This approach can be challenging for students who just want to solve formulas, she says, but it has proven invaluable as she pursues mathematical ideas far beyond the reach of textbooks.

For her thesis with Prof. Angélica Osorno [2013–], Maddie is working on the ErdösKo-Rado theorem, an influential idea in the field of combinatorics, which bears on the following conundrum. Suppose that the world has n languages, and you wish to assemble

a group of diplomats such that each diplomat speaks exactly k languages, and any two diplomats speak a common language. How many diplomats do you need?

Maddie is trying to find a new way to prove the EKR theorem by deriving it from a related idea known as the Baranyai theorem. So far, she’s discovered that a conjecture based on the Baranyai theorem, known as the wreath conjecture, does in fact lead to EKR. Proving the wreath conjecture, however, will be a major undertaking.

In addition to her polynomial pursuits, Maddie has worked at the Reed reactor, tutored in the math help center, and taken classes in ceramics. Last year she went to Budapest to study math and took a crash course in Hungarian (an experience she describes as “linguistic induction”).

Her paper won honorable mention for the Alice T. Schafer Mathematics Prize from the Association for Women in Mathematics, and she presented her findings at the Joint Mathematics Meetings, hosted by the Mathematical Association of America and the American Mathematical Society, in San Antonio, Texas. —CHRIS LYDGATE ’90

THERE’S MORE THAN ONE WAY TO SUPPORT THE PLACE YOU LOVE. To brainstorm creative ways to give to Reed, call Kathy Saitas in the office of planned giving at 503/777-7573. plannedgiving.reed.edu

The Dharma of Tenzin Sangpo

Tibetan asylee finds his home at Reed

BY RANDALL S. BARTON

“Even if today is your last day on earth,” advises an old Tibetan proverb, “it is best spent learning.”

It’s a fitting motto for Tenzin Sangpo ’18, a Tibetan who fled the chaos of Nepal and has now found refuge in the halls and classrooms of Reed. As a freshman majoring in physics he has only “touched” the field, but fathoms it partly through the lens of Buddhism.

“The core message of Buddhism is that ignorance is the cause of suffering,” Tenzin says. “You suffer because of ignorance about how things are, how the universe is, and how your actions impact your future wellbeing. So if you want to liberate yourself, you have to learn, to know what there is to know.”

In the 12th grade, he wrote essays correlating science with Buddhist dharma, and realized that both advocated experimentation and debate rather than blind faith.

“The Buddha never said, ‘Everything I’m saying is true, everything I’m saying is perfect,’” Tenzin says. “The Buddha said, ‘This is the road I took. Don’t accept my teachings just because you respect me—investigate them.’”

One reason he chose Reed was to gain insight into the Western mind and understand how it influenced science and philosophy of the 20th century.

Tenzin’s life has been a study in contrasts.

His grandparents fled Tibet when China invaded in 1959, settling in Nepal. Thirtytwo years later their grandson was born in Kathmandu.

“Nepal was a very pleasant place,” Tenzin says. “The weather was nice and the people were decent. Then, unfortunately, the Nepalese king was assassinated.”

In 2001, nine members of the Nepalese royal family—including the king—were mowed down by gunfire at the palace. The official story was that the crown prince massacred his family in a fit of pique over objections to his proposed bride, and then turned the gun on himself. But conspiracy theories abound that his uncle, who inherited the throne, arranged the murder of all competitors.

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A Maoist insurgency further destabilized the country, making it increasingly difficult for Tibetan Buddhists to live in Nepal.

“We were not allowed to celebrate His Holiness’ birthday in Nepal,” Tenzin says.

“Public gatherings of Tibetans were not allowed. If the police saw you with a Tibetan flag, they would confiscate it. If you protested, they’d beat you and throw you into prison.”

In return for investments they made in Nepal, Chinese authorities asked that the country detain and return any Tibetans escaping to India through Nepal.

Tenzin’s family moved to Dharamshala, India, where his father became president of the Tibetan Youth Congress, an organization that advocates for the independence of Tibet.

Tenzin boarded at the Tibetan Children’s Village, a school for Tibetan children in exile, with multiple branches and nearly 17,000 children under its care. In the eighth-grade exam, he earned the highest science scores in all of the TCV schools, was second in English, and was in the top 10 in math.

“I sort of became a small celebrity within the school,” he says. “They saw me go up to the stage three times to receive the awards.”

He was elected student prefect, and the following year, became school president. His scores on the 12th-grade board examinations indicated that Tenzin should pursue a career in science, and his uncle encouraged him to apply to elite American colleges.

“The process is such an enlightening experience,” his uncle said. “You will ask yourself questions, write personal essays.”

“In India everything is about your grade, your score,” Tenzin explains. “But in the United States, colleges want to know who you are.”

Using filters like “rigor” and “intellectual,” his internet searches of American colleges kept turning up Reed College, which was also mentioned in Bill Clinton’s autobiography and in the biography of Steve Jobs.

Tenzin became beguiled with the college that operated on the Honor Principle and prized the intellect.

Last year he and his father were granted political asylum and the family moved to

m at t d ’a n n u n z i o

Tenzin Sangpo ’18 holds a Tibetan lute he brought with him from India. The stringed instrument is known as a dramyin, which means “pleasant sounding” in Tibetan.

Portland. Tenzin began attending classes at Mt. Hood Community College and then was accepted at Reed. When he arrived for his first Hum conference, it was love at first sight.

“My eyebrows were raised,” he says.

“Everything is so nice, so worthy of highest praise. The professors are top class.”

Tenzin has become a master at recalibration. The cedar-covered hillsides of Dharmasala have given way to the food carts of Portland, but he still endeavors to reconcile the teachings of the Buddha with the tenets of quantum mechanics. And while the rigors of Hum 110 were humbling, he thrives on the challenge. It is exciting, he says, to see how the world has been influenced by the writings of Ancient Greece and how this plays out in television, cinema, and drama.

“As a Tibetan I have a fair understanding about Eastern civilization, about Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam,” he says. “I do prayers and meditation, wishing for the welfare of all sentient beings. That’s already built into me.

But I was always fascinated with Rome and Shakespeare. I wanted something of the West.”

One aspect of his Reed experience for which he has great affection is the Honor Principle.

“It’s not someone at the top saying, ‘You should do this,’” he says. “The individual himself makes the decision, and not only about learning in the classroom, but also how you behave, your own conduct. Everyone is responsible for their own actions; that echoes what Buddhism has always been saying.”

“The Buddha was a teacher, but of course at one point he was a student with many teachers,” Tenzin says. “The Buddha is like the sun and his teachings are like the rays of the sun.

But you can’t light a fire of knowledge without a magnifying glass that brings all the light together. That magnifying glass is the teacher.”

When he was born, Tenzin’s mother asked the Dalai Lama to name him. His Holiness bestowed his own name, the one he’d been born with. In the name Tenzin, “Ten” refers to the teaching or dharma, and “Zin” means one who has grasped it—a prescient beginning for this Reedie who embraces learning.

march 2015 Reed magazine 17

The Science of Theatre

Prof. Peter Ksander uses the stage as a laboratory

BY RANDALL S. BARTON

If Friar Laurence had been able to communicate via cell phone instead of by letter, his message might have reached Romeo in time to explain the truth about Juliet and stop him from drinking the cup of poison.

Technology has the power to shape—and reshape—drama.

“The glowing rectangles we live with are changing our relationships,” says Prof. Peter Ksander [theatre 2011–]. “Theatre mirrors our life.”

Technology played a role in Ksander’s winning an award in October for outstanding visual design at the Bessie Awards in New York. He shared the award with the video designer, the lighting designer, the costume designer, and the interactive technology designer on the New York production This Was the End, which stars four actors in their 60s trying to alter the outcome of Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya.

The Bessies recognize exceptional work in dance and performance and singled out this production for “a theatre set seamlessly doubled by video projections, echoing the role of memory with its odd tricks and resurrections.”

Prof. Ksander built the set from a wall with cabinets salvaged from a New York public school. Actors were videotaped in and around the wall and that footage was projected directly onto the matching set during live performances, forming ghost images of the characters opening cabinets and running around the wall.

Ksander has loved creating imaginary worlds since he was a boy playing with Star Wars action figures. By the time he was studying for an MFA at the California Institute of the Arts, he realized that his interests in science, history, cartography, art, carpentry, and building codes could be fused into a single discipline—theatre.

He developed his practice in New York City, working first as a freelance designer, primarily in experimental downtown theatre. He designed sets and lighting for the National Theatre of Hungary, the Walker Art Center, Portland’s Time-Based

18 Reed magazine march 2015

Art Festival, the Public Theater, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In 2008 he won an Obie award for the scenic design of Untitled Mars (this title may change). He also served as a curator for the OntologicalHysteric Theater and the Incubator Arts Project, and has had continuing artistic relationships with the Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf, TENT, Stillpoint Productions, Restless NYC, and Banana Bag and Bodice.

While working with the OntologicalHysteric Theater in New York, he noticed a T-shirt the stage manager, Brendan Regimbal ’04, was wearing.

“What’s Renn Fayre?” he asked, eyeing the shirt. Reed College had come onto his radar.

Some time later when Peter decided to teach theatre, he spied an opening for a job at Reed.

“That’s the place where Brendan went,” he said to himself. “That’s a place I could be.”

As a teacher at Reed, Ksander finds theatre is an excellent laboratory for the investigation of hypotheses. What does it mean to be a human in a particular time or situation? How do we inhabit space and time?

“Experimental theatre is not a style and has nothing to do with content,” he explains.

“It’s more of a process borrowed from the sciences. What are the effects of putting walls in a certain configuration and what does that do to your experience? We use the methodology of experiment—hypothesis, test, and analyze results. Did it work?

Did it not work?”

One of Ksander’s main interests is history.

While historians typically focus on sweeping political, social, and economic trends, theatre looks at the moments when things change.

“Theatre looks at potentials, what might have been, and how tenuous every moment in history is,” he says. “Huge events often hinge on small things.”

He cites the unhappy accident of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s escaping one assassination attempt only to have his driver take a wrong turn. The car came to a stop in front of Gavrilo Princip, a tubercular revolutionary, who shot the archduke and his

wife at point-blank range, triggering the First World War. Designing a set is creating a crucible for a performance, Ksander says, in the sense that it is a chamber that amplifies the heat and reflects it inward.

“I try to create the conditions that amp up and intensify the performances,” he says.

“You can’t get out of this container and the heat is going up and up and up.”

Ksander teaches intro theatre, stage design, lighting design, and combining performance with technology. In his conferencelab classes, students investigate theories and methods used to represent designs.

“Writing a paper is not the most efficient

Leah Nash

Prof. Ksander and Marisa Kanai ’15 work on shadow theatre performance of Gilgamesh for Theatre 396, Puppetry and Performing Objects.

way to convey your design ideas,” Ksander explains. “I have to teach tools such as drafting, collage work, and model building—paper projects, we call them.”

Last fall he taught a course in visual performance narratives—how to create a narrative without dialogue.

“Peter always reminds us that we don’t have to communicate solely with words,” says Rennie Meyers ’15. “Visual narratives can evoke responses in a new, dynamic way. It’s a welcome reprieve from the written word.”

Last year Ksander cotaught a class in which students used shadow puppets to perform the Epic of Gilgamesh.

“Shadow puppetry combines all kinds of different things I’m interested in,” Peter says.

“It meshes both lighting and set design. Things that are difficult to express on stage—such as scale and things that are epic—are easy in shadow puppetry. Changes of location can be instantaneous in light and shadow.”

Making theatre has traditionally required that participants come together in the same room. Ksander is interested in reframing his practice so that “being in the room” might be accomplished in new ways.

For instance, instead of beginning with a script and designing a space to enclose it, he proposes a production that might begin with designing the space and then figuring

out, “What happens in it?” He is currently collaborating on a project where artists work independently on the text, movement score, and object score, and then layer them together.

Experimental? Definitely. But theatre is at its core an experimental enterprise, each performance a unique slice of time, space, and witnesses. “You can draw a circle around it, say 7:30 on Thursday night in this place,” Ksander says. “Those moments in time and space will never be the same again. The next night we’ll attempt to do it again, but it will be the next night.”

After all, theatre may be a kind of science, but it is not an exact science.

march 2015 Reed magazine 19

Revenge of the Mantis Shrimp p h o t o s b y m at t d ’a n n u n z i o

From religion major to mixed martial artist

BY BILL DONAHUE

Genteel and dapper, and given, always, to tucking a neat white kerchief into his breast pocket, the poet T.S. Eliot had very little to do with the pugilist arts, and it may be safely assumed that, in turn, most boxers and wrestlers carry little regard for the esteemed modernist. There are exceptions to every rule, though, and Emily Corso ’10 is a shining example.

Emily is a professional mixed martial arts fighter, ranked 14th in the world among 125-pound flyweights. She is one of very few pro athletes among Reed’s 20,000 living alumni, and each time she steps into the ring, she takes inspiration from the T.S. Eliot quote that’s tattooed, in looping cursive, around her left wrist.

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The quote, from Eliot’s poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock reads, “Do I dare disturb the universe?”

“It reminds me that if something’s hard you still have to do it,” says Emily. “It’s about being a change maker.”

In the eight years since she took a self-defense class at Reed to meet her PE requirements, Emily has been disturbing the universe daily. She’s evolved from a shy, unmuscled religion major—in her words, “a brain floating in a jar”—to a ripped, confident fight maestra who supplements her modest professional winnings by teaching self-defense part time and moonlighting as a personal trainer.

Emily credits Prof. Michael Foat ’86 [religion 1996–] for inspiring her at Reed.

“I’d go by his office and just hang out and talk,” she says. “He was very supportive.”

But what’s carried her most is her own self-discipline and strength. She revels in three hour sessions at the gym—in, she says, “living in my body and taking up physical space. Women aren’t supposed to do that, you know.” In the ring, she is, thanks to the extensive jiu-jitsu training she received from wrestling specialist Bill Bradley [CSO 2003–07]. (She’s still learning the other parts of the sport, boxing and kicking.) Since going pro last May, Emily has won all four of her matches by pinioning her foe into submission. In one fight in Great Falls, Montana, she won in less than 90 seconds—and then proved herself, in a post-bout interview, a peppy enthusiast

for her sport. “My opponents were sweet,” she said, her hair tied back into a ponytail as she wore black-framed eyeglasses. “The crowd was really sweet. The other camp

moves so quickly that it creates a vacuum bubble. When the bubble bursts, the prey gets knocked out. It’s a very violent animal full of random vicious aptitude, even

“Everyone should feel license to disturb the universe.” was respectful towards me both before and after the fight.”

Later, in discussing the ring name she’s chosen for herself, the Mantis Shrimp, Emily made clear that it is in fact possible to be both a geeked-out Reedie and a fearsome brawler. “The Mantis Shrimp,” she said, now waxing oceanographic, “has a bright technicolor shell, and it dismantles its prey. It

though it’s not scary looking. It can break the glass in an aquarium.”

Yes, Emily “the Mantis Shrimp” Corso has a unique stage persona, and yes, she’s inviting to bout promoters. In December, the premier company in women’s MMA, Invicta Fighting Championships, signed her onto a multibout contract that will extend past 2015. Bryson Davis ’09, a Portland lawyer

who serves as Emily’s agent, negotiated the contract. It’s unclear where she’ll fight—likely in the Midwest, given that Invicta is based in Missouri—but it is clear that her MMA journey will, oddly enough, afford her a way to enact the principles she learned at Reed.

“When I graduated,” she says, “I wanted to change the world. I thought fundraising was my calling, so I got a job doing that at the Portland Art Museum, and I told them, ‘I’ve got this hobby. I might come into work with bruises.’ Eventually I went pro. And I still want to change the world. And I think it’s possible to do that by fighting and teaching. I can help other people to live in their bodies, to not be afraid. Because, really, everyone should feel license to disturb the universe.”

march 2015 Reed magazine 21

Exposed Science

Sara Shostak ’92 digs into the politics of public health

BY JAMES HELMSWORTH

Not long after Lula Bishop moved into Midway Village, a public housing project in Daly City, California, she developed scoliosis and rapidly gained weight. Her younger son got rashes on his knees where he had knelt in the dirt. Her oldest son went crosseyed overnight. A brain tumor was pushing on his optic nerve.

They were hardly alone. Many neighbors were also suffering from a host of unexplained health issues, including cancer, seizures, infertility, and even death. They eventually discovered that Midway Village was built on soil contaminated by chemicals from an old PG&E gas-processing plant located nearby. In 1993, residents filed a class-action lawsuit against the federal government, blaming these chemicals for their illnesses. The federal government threw the case out. They sued PG&E and the San Mateo Housing Authority. Judges dismissed these cases, saying the residents didn’t demonstrate that pollution caused them to get sick. In 1999, dozens of the residents had their blood analyzed by a private medical clinic. The clinic found that the majority of them had “chromosome aberrations and irregularities.” But the chromosomal damage couldn’t be satisfactorily linked to chemical exposure. As of this writing, Midway is still accepting applications for housing from low-income residents of San Mateo County.

The controversy at Midway Village makes up one of the most vivid parts of Dr. Sara Shostak’s award-winning book, Exposed Science: Genes, the Environment, and the Politics of Population Health. Through rigorous analysis and interviews with scientists, regulators, and advocates, she makes the case that environmental health science, as a field, has structural vulnerabilities—vulnerabilities that some researchers have tried to address by focusing deep inside the human body, at the molecular level where genes and chemicals interact. Ironically, however, the focus

22 Reed magazine march 2015

on gene-environment interactions has had unintended consequences and may even put disadvantaged groups, like the low-income residents of Midway Village, at risk.

As useful as molecular-level research can be, Shostak contends that in many cases, there’s no need to wait for molecular-level data to take action to improve environmental health. “The research we need to identify precise biological mechanisms is not always the same as the research we need to motivate effective public health policy,” she says, “and focusing on the molecular level runs the risk of obfuscating the social, political, and economic factors that we already know shape people’s lives and life chances.”

Her fascination with sociology began at Reed, in the classroom of the late and legendary Prof. John Pock [sociology 1955-98], who is credited with launching the careers of more than 70 sociologists. Just a month into his year-long intro course, she knew that it was what she wanted to study. “It was just this incredibly exciting thing to discover that there was a systematic way of trying to understand this in the social world, and to analyze and come up with potential solutions for to address inequality.” Later she registered for a class on social stratification— required for all sociology majors—only to discover that she was the only student who had signed up. To her surprise, Pock decided to teach the course, anyway. For an entire semester, the pair met twice a week, together in a classroom by themselves. “I really had to be prepared,” she says Shostak credits Reed with her passion for research. When she took statistics, students had to write their own computer programs.

“There was no version of SPSS with pulldown menus then,” she says. “So, we would write out the code—I think it was in UNIX—and then we would have to wait for hours, most typically overnight for the analysis to run on the mainframe.” She continues, “So, on the one hand, it was excruciating—if you got

something wrong in your coding, you would have to again wait for hours for a second run.

But it was also thrilling for me, this sense that when I went to the computer lab in the morning, there could be an answer to a question that was important to me. I’m still motivated by that feeling—that we can ask important questions and find new answers. It’s a particular kind of creativity that is really compelling to me. And it’s something that I now try to impart to my students.”

But while many of Pock’s students went straight to grad school, Shostak had other plans. She was heavily involved with activism while on campus, particularly concerning violence against women and children, volunteering at shelters and on hotlines. After Reed, she did a stint as community organizer for HIV prevention in San Francisco. This drove her to attend a masters program in public health at UCLA. As a master’s student, she worked in health policy research, but eventually realized that she wanted to take a different route. “ I began to feel constrained by the limitation of receiving the questions of from others,” she says. “I started to wonder what it would look like to do

ben gebo

D E E R

Tr a v

el with

15 and beyond in 20

"The tour was like a rolling Hum conference by day, a late night

bull session at the Lutz by night.

In other words, just the perfect Reedie outing."

―John Sheehy ’82

research that steps back from the information needs of already defined policy debates and says ‘Well, wait a second, how do we do policy to begin with?’” she explains. So, in 1997, she moved to UCSF for a PhD program in sociology.

While she was in grad school, there was enormous scientific interest in the Human Genome Project. She became especially interested in the efforts of environmental health scientists who were beginning to mobilize their colleagues to support research on geneenvironment interaction. Conceptualizing them as “strategic social actors,” a concept developed by Neil Fligstein ’73, she began to investigate the scientists’ strategies.

Shostak argues that these strategies have relied on what she calls a “consensus critique.”

In order to circumvent the wide range of political and social differences among the actors in the field—researchers, activists, industry, and regulators—stakeholders build their conversations on concepts that they can agree on. What this usually means is focusing on the process of risk assessment and regulation. While this technique helps to resolve tensions in the field, Shostak points out that it does have some

drawbacks—it downplays the social and economic factors that cause individuals to get sick.

Thus, while environmental health scientists tend to see a genetic approach as means of increasing the certainty—and usability—of their research, environmental justice activists perceive research on gene-environment interaction as a smokescreen.

And that’s to say nothing of the way in which research has been shaped by the contentious politics of environmental regulation.

Shostak worries about how the consensus critique actually obfuscates “the degree to which political and economically motivated interests have started to drive knowledge production in the environmental health sciences.”

It’s a well-founded worry. One researcher interviewed in Exposed Science described a kind of “cold war” between independent researchers and industry researchers, in which independent researchers continually found themselves refuting industry-sponsored work, only to have their own research refuted by a new industry study. Amid the political debates, the people that are hurt by toxic environments, such as the residents of Midway Village, get left behind.

London ∙ New Orleans Curaçao ∙ Austin Greece ∙ Puerto Rico Check out our alumni travel opportunities at www.reed.edu/alumni/travel

pa i n t i n g b y v i n c e n t d i fat e

INTERSTELLAR OD Y S S E Y

Uncovering the origins of science fiction in the ancient classics

BY D.K. HOLM

Somewhere in your television viewing past, or buried at the bottom of a dusty shoebox filled with VHS tapes, there may be an old film called The Creation of the Humanoids. Released in 1962, the film chronicles tensions in a postapocalyptic civilization that depends on robots known as “clickers” for slave labor. Like much science fiction, Humanoids appears on the surface to be about one thing—human beings vs. robots—but is really about something else—in this case, racism.

Reacting against robot intrusion into society, an anticlicker Klan arises, led by Capt.

Kenneth Cragis (Don Megowan), whose mission is to root out a clicker conspiracy to replace human beings with replica humanoids. In the end, Cragis discovers that he himself has been a clicker all along. As film writer Chris Fujiwara has pointed out, Cragis’ discovery links him with Oedipus, whose hunt for the mysterious child abandoned by Jocasta finally leads him to the horrifying truth that he is the killer of his own father and the husband of his own mother.

Humanoids is hardly an exception. The history of science fiction as literature and film is marbled with astute and story-structuring allusions to the classics, as demonstrated by Classical Traditions in Science Fiction, a groundbreaking anthology which explores the Attic roots of the most modern and future-oriented of literary genres.

Edited by two Reedies, Brett Rogers ’98 and Ben Stevens ’99, the book marries two formerly separate disciplines and shows how classical themes constantly recur in SF, despite the genre’s obsession with new worlds and new technologies.

Published as part of Oxford’s Classical Presences series, the book marshals 14 essays by scholars of the classics, Greek, English, and philosophy with a twofold purpose:

“We think that a wide range of modern SF should be of great interest to anyone already interested in the ancient world and its classics. Moreover, we hope that this volume’s chapters demonstrate the relevance of a wide range of Greek and Roman classics for modern SF. Both as an area in which the meanings of classics are actively transformed, and as an open-ended set of texts whose own classic status is a matter of ongoing discussion and debate, SF stands to reveal much about the roles played by ancient classics as well as new classics in the modern world.”

The essays explore connections between Jules Verne and the Greek satirist Lucian; Dune and the Iliad; Alien, Resurrection, and the Odyssey; antiquity and Western identity in Battlestar Galactica; the Iliad and Dan Simmons’s Ilium; The Hunger Games and the Roman Empire; and the graphic novel Pax Romana, which explores the transition from antiquity to a Christian world.

The book devotes considerable attention to what William Johnson has called SF’s “territorial vagueness.” It’s easy to say that we know SF when we see it, but a working definition proves surprisingly elusive. As contributor Antony Keen writes, when it comes to science fiction, “there will always be debatable regions at the definitional margins.” He goes on to quote Adam Roberts’ dictum that science fiction is “premised on a material, instrumental version of the cosmos,” in contrast to its close ally, fantasy, which concerns “magic, the supernatural, the spiritual.” Alternately, Susan Sontag summed up the whole genre as consisting of the “imagination of disaster,” a fascination with/dread of irresistible destruction.

Under the aegis of writers such as H.G. Wells, SF fell within the “novel of ideas,” where brainiacs could envision an improved future of flying cars, sensible social orders, and interplanetary journeys. This air of makebelieve may be what keeps SF segregated in bookstores and offered as a novelty subject in college curricula rather than accepted as general literature—its imaginativeness aligns the SF field with comic books, cartoons, and lurid pulp magazines (and of course the pulps spawned the careers of several beloved SF writers, including Alfred Bester, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke). To be literature, one school of thought goes, an SF novel must be depressing—an account of hubris and failure, such as George Orwell’s 1984, where Winston Smith gains meager insight into the political forces behind his drab world before being crushed by the state, or in what some consider the first science fiction novel, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, where the optimism that drives scientific advance is hobbled by that familiar X factor, the human element.

But Frankenstein, after all, is subtitled The Modern Prometheus—a clue that even in its inchoate state, science fiction was drawing upon Greek concepts and themes. SF was not just pure fantasy, but was rooted in the classic tradition. In the case of Frankenstein, Shelley drew upon the myth of Prometheus, who steals fire from the gods and is condemned to eternal damnation. Dr. Frankenstein is seeking higher human knowledge, the secret to the spark of life, and pays dearly for it.

Jesse Weiner’s essay “Lucretius, Lucian, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” gives a thorough account of the book’s debate with the ancients, its later influence, and Shelley’s ambivalence about scientific progress. Weiner notes that the SF genre is “concerned, not

march 2015 Reed magazine 25

INTERSTELLAR ODYSSEY only with the speculative possibilities of science, but also with the ethical boundaries of human knowledge.” He also points out that the doctor’s “project of bringing forth a living creature from dead and decaying material appears to draw its inspiration from Lucretius’s favorite example of spontaneous generation . . . Shelley’s moral rejection of Lucretian science in Frankenstein has been described as a reaction against the Promethean radicalism of her husband, and of her father and mother, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. Be that as it may, Shelley’s ethical antipathy to Lucretius and the promises of modern science need not refute their epistemological legitimacy.”

Weiner continues: Shelley’s ambivalent handling of Lucretian material in her novel extends to a motif of gigantomachy, or war among giants. Lucretius famously celebrates the gigantomachy, likening the attempts of various mythological giants to overthrow the Olympian pantheon through force to his own attempt to liberate mankind from superstition through reason and science. Frankenstein has, of course, attempted to usurp the power of God and Nature through science, and the rebellion of Frankenstein’s monster (who is, quite literally, a chthonic giant) forms the novel’s conflict.

Rebelling against their creators, Frankenstein and his monster are not merely latter-day Prometheis; they are modern giants. The dialogue of their conflict frames the strife in terms of hierarchical inversion and martial imagery of the thunderbolt, the weapon used by Zeus to defeat Typhon, a giant monster who rose against Olympus. The Frankenstein myth as a gigantomachy is tantalizingly suggested by Percy Shelley, who describes the experience of reading Frankenstein with imagery drawn from the Greek myth of the giants Otos and Ephialtes: “Pelion is heaped on Ossa, Ossa upon Olympus.”

Classical connections come under scrutiny in Rebecca Raphael’s discussion of the links between Blade Runner (and its source, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep?), and the story of Pygmalion and Galatea in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Pygmalion is a sculptor who carves a statue of a woman in ivory.

So beautiful is the statue that Pygmalion falls in love with it, and prays to Venus for a wife just like her. That night, he makes love to the

26 Reed magazine march 2015

AN INTERVIEW WITH THE EDITORS OF

CLASSICAL TRADITIONS IN SCIENCE FICTION

Editors Brett Rogers ’98 and Benjamin Stevens ’99 sat down before their keyboard for an email interview with Reed about their new anthology investigating the links between the classics and science fiction.

Your post-Reed careers have been in academia. Looking back, what was special about Reed that would gestate the extracurricular marriage of an interest in classics and SF? One of the things that struck us as particular and peculiar about Reed is how Hum 110 makes the Greco-Roman classics so accessible to the student community as a whole, not to mention a wide range of faculty outside classics. It’s not that everyone loves Hum 110 or reads Homer’s Iliad with the same gusto or pleasure—and we take seriously the question of “Why care about this stuff, and devote precious time to it, as opposed to [whatever other stuff]?” But Hum 110 crucially generated a shared vocabulary for every student on the campus. In our time, almost every student we encountered had sung the first line of the Iliad at least once with 400 other people. And this shared culture meant we had something in common to refer to and bounce off of, whatever else we studied.

We all shared a meaningful basis for parody, fan fiction, and other subculture activity based on something of real intellectual substance.

An example that really captured this for us is the annual Hum Play, whose fourth iteration Brett cowrote and codirected in 1997 with Brent Miller ’99. (The play even included an homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey.) You can’t have a successful play making fun of antiquity with an audience of 400 people packed into Vollum and giggling at Homer jokes if this Hum 110 thing isn’t doing the job, isn’t generating this shared vocabulary. These were the kinds of community events that helped us understand that Hum 110 was not just fodder for serious learning, but also intellectual and creative play. And reception of the classics in SF is nothing if not the most glorious form of play, a kind of fantasizing about how the past relates to the future.

In the introduction you mention that elements of SF can be found in the adventures of Ulysses and classical mythology. So why do so many academics look down on SF? There are probably two relevant, intertwined problems here that keep SF from being looked upon more favorably. First is that it has been (still is?) difficult for people to reconcile the “classics” (literature “of the first rank,” to translate the ancient Latin term)—with all their attendant age and authority, passed down from scribe to monk to wealthy, educated book owners—as somehow comparable to “science fiction,” early on the stuff of pulp publication and thought, wrongly, to appeal only to the imaginations of children or the barely educated. That is, the facts of literary history and the tastes of literary tastemakers have often been set in opposition, rather than in alignment, privileging the “old” over the “new.’”

Second, we think it can be difficult for audiences, both academic and popular, to think about SF as being about more than, or other than, modern “technoscience.” While there’s plenty of scientific advancement in antiquity, there isn’t a scientific method, or the discovery of gravity, or rocket ships, or atomic weapons—tropes of the modern genre. So it’s easy for audiences to say, “Our world is simply different.” And it really is materially different. But as we note in our introduction to the book, if we opt to focus on “science fiction” not as the stuff of a particular material world but rather as “knowledge fiction” that challenges the framework of the reader’s experience and knowledge, then both the past and the future can be (and are) similarly “foreign countries.” Once we see both the classics and SF as similarly foreign to our own experience and mental templates, then we can see how much alike they really are. Approaching ancient classics and approaching modern SF require very similar extensions of the critical imagination.

There is almost as much in the book about SF movies as books. Do certain genres need technology to be fully realized?

We’re not sure we would claim that SF has been “fully realized” by film, and we imagine purists would say that movies can be worse than books, since, for example, they intrude on the audience’s own visual imagination, or we still lack the technology to represent a given concept properly. Certainly in the case of film adaptations—we’re thinking here, for example, of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and the different versions of Blade Runner—fans love to debate the relative merits of each different version and medium of the story. But we would also frame your observation a bit differently and say that films have made possible certain kinds of SF storytelling that are remarkably beautiful to see or inspire a certain kind of visual wonder. We can’t imagine being viscerally moved by the laboratory scene in Alien Resurrection without the grotesque

visual imagery, but we also find the intellectual debates in Asimov’s Foundation series to be stimulating thinking but terrible drama.

(There’s a reason movies or TV episodes are not exclusively devoted to exposition.) We think the most interesting question here would be whether the advent of film or television has somehow changed what kind of SF stories are possible or not possible, are being told or not told.

Is it as difficult to define the classical era as it is to define SF? Generally speaking, it’s safe to say that “classical antiquity” is traditionally defined by boundaries of space (the Mediterranean world, with preference given to locations in contact with Greek and/or Roman culture) and time (eighth century BCE to fourth/fifth century CE). But these boundaries of space and time are always being challenged, too.

If you’re a Homerist or an archaeologist, you might need to push back into the second millennium BCE and consider ancient

photos: b.rogers by hayley young; b.stevens by jeff fusco

Brett Rogers ’98 (left) and Benjamin Stevens ’99

Near Eastern sources; if you study religion or writing systems, you might need to push back even further, and look farther afield, to make sense of things properly. Similarly, if you want to study the idea of the “classics,” then things that happen after the fifth century CE are just as important to the story as events that are being defined as “classical.”

This is part of the point of work in reception studies: what we think we know about a past moment or work depends on a present standpoint and on a complex history connecting past and present. Thus it’s especially important to think about how perhaps the most characteristic modern genre, SF, helps shape current receptions of the ancient world. To put this all a bit differently, defining the “classical” depends on whose imagination we’re trying to define and what question we are trying to answer. In this respect, the “classical era” and “science fiction” are both “knowledge fictions” whose provisional definition depends on whose question we are answering. —D.K. HOLM

INTERSTELLAR ODYSSEY statue, and finds that Venus has granted his wish: Galatea comes alive (although her flesh is described as “waxy”) and later gives birth to a son named Paphos.

Raphael notes that she is not tracing “direct influence, but rather a comparative analysis of two phases of Western civilization’s engagement with the idea of artificial life . . . Blade Runner and Do Androids Dream do not explicitly rework the classical material, but rather continue variations on a theme, working with the structural possibilities implicit in the concept of artificial life in relation to humans.” With both the older myth figures and the characters of Roy Batty and Pris in Blade Runner, “there is a combination of exceptional ability or power and some deficiency or lack, relative to the divine or the human norm.” (Other classical “robots” include the golden maidens of Hephaestus in the Iliad and the bronze warrior Talos in the Argonautica.)

Unlike Dr. Frankenstein, however, Pygmalion “creates only the artifact, not the life”—only Venus has the power to do that.

Galatea is ultimately a creature of the gods, and does not represent a threat to the natural order, whereas Frankenstein’s creation is a true “monster” in the classical sense.

Several essays in Classical Traditions concern science fiction movies or have something to do with film adaptations of SF. Cinema as a subject first broke into the university curriculum in the ’70s, as one of the many fruits of campus disruption and the demand for an expanded canon. Including film analysis in the anthology makes sense when one reflects that motion pictures came into existence as a technology at the same time as SF’s first real popularizers, Verne and Wells, and that some of the earliest films—both commercial tales and their predecessors, what Tom Gunning calls the “cinema of attractions”—were exotic fantasies of space travel and other stretches of the imagination, especially in the films of magician-turnedfilmmaker Georges Méliès. The books of Wells and Verne were manifestations of both a fascination with and a fear of technology, and the clash of science and society sparked by the Industrial Revolution. The first films themselves were torn between pure standoffish documentary (the Lumière brothers), in which the “real” was allowed to be the

28 Reed magazine march 2015

Apollo (god? alien?) torments the crew in the 1967 Star Trek episode “Who Mourns for Adonais?”

Jules Verne’s 1864 novel Journey to the Center of the Earth makes frequent references to Greek and Roman classics. Illustration by Édouard Riou.

drama, and the romance of fantasy science fiction (Méliès), between pure documentary recording and playful or recreational fairy tales, as scholars such as Walter Benjamin have pointed out. As a genre in general, SF seems to fall broadly into romance, which also accommodates the novel of ideas, on the one hand capturing the thrill of adventure and exploration while on the other contemplating meaning and society.

The dual birth pains of science fiction and cinema raise a crucial question. Has the bifurcation of SF into the fraternal twinship of literature and cinema degraded a once-sophisticaed genre? Your average SF fan, especially one who came of age when wearing a pair of black-framed glasses was a sign of physical inferiority rather than a badge of hipsterism, is likely to decry the handling of SF “classics” at the ignorant hands of studio honchos. Following the pinnacle of cinematic SF, as found in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, comes a long litany of disappointment—the Aliens, the Predators, the Transformers, and hundreds of other episodes of cultural pabulum gussied up with special effects.

Something similar has happened in comic book adaptations. The DC heroes of the ’50s and ’60s, especially Superman and certain other characters, were science fiction figures, often battling aliens bent on destroying or enslaving Earth. The Marvel comics under the sway of artist-writer Jack Kirby had a visionary “sense of wonder”

A poster for the 2013 film The Hunger Games: Catching Fire features Finnick Odair as a sort of retiarius, or gladiator, trident in hand.

about galaxies and their denizens. Comic book fans are often upset when a new adaptation comes along, their ire often due to the mishandling of the subject by people who don’t understand—or don’t care about— the comic books that are being pillaged.

Marvel comics adaptations have become video-game style battles for dominance taking place in mythical worlds or on the streets of Manhattan.

A vivid example exists in the post–Tim Burton Batman films, two of which were directed by costume designer–turned-director Joel Schumacher. His Batmen seemed more influenced by the campy ’60s TV show than the noirish comic books—with Schumacher emphasizing the heroes posing in nipple-flexing costumery. Schumacher once bragged that he didn’t read the original Batman comics because he didn’t want his mind sullied by familiarity with the source.

What we see in this mélange is that the SF film has become a subset of the war film.

To have SF, first you have to have science.

Ares and the End of All

from the cover artist

For more than four decades, Vincent Di Fate has held an international reputation as a leader in science-fiction and astronomical art. He is a member of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, a winner of the Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist, and his paintings have been featured on the cover of hundreds of science fiction novels. He is the author of Infinite Worlds, a comprehensive history of science fiction art in America, published in 1997.

My cover painting depicts the confluence of myth and prophecy.

To the ancient Greeks, Ares was the god of war, exulting in the violence and chaos of armed combat. An Olympian, he was the son of Zeus and Hera. By contrast, his half-sister Athena was drawn to the intellectual side of warfare—its tactics and organization—and preferred to take dominion over the ideals for which war was waged.

Unfortunately, for the new war-oriented SF films, the science dwindles into irrelevancy; what matters is the monsters, the weapons, and the explosions. It’s as if Hollywood has taken The War of the Worlds, dropped the worlds, and stuck with the war.

There are historic and modern commercial reasons for this cinematic shift. War has indeed been part of the genre since its modern beginnings. Edgar Rice Burroughs invented the “space romance,” with its battles over extraterrestrial territory, a standard later taken up by many other writers, including E.E. “Doc” Smith with his Lensman series. Robert Heinlein often concentrated on the psychology of war while embedding his characters in strange intergalactic conflicts. When the SF movie took off as a genre in the ’50s, space travel (Destination Moon, Rocketship X-M) was eventually pushed aside by dramatic conflict, with man fighting flying saucers in the nation’s capital or battling giant ants in the Arizona desert.

By the time George Lucas came along in the mid-’70s, he also had made a shift from

Although their mythical exploits were essentially the same, the Romans called Ares Mars, and it was from the planet Mars—so named in honor of this deity for its baleful reddish hue—that author H.G. Wells chose to have his invading army hail in his classic 1897 novel The War of the Worlds. Perhaps the choice was further motivated by astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli’s observation of canali on the Martian surface some 20 years earlier. Schiaparelli’s term meant grooves or channels in his native tongue, but to the Englishspeaking world it was widely misreported as canals, suggesting a complex irrigation system of possible intelligent design.

the Orwellian intricacies of his dystopian THX-1138 to the war strain of SF found in Burroughs and Smith. The result was Star Wars. Though Star Wars is by itself a nearperfect little genre film, its prequel-sequels, heavily reliant on digital bytes and not on actors, were unable to avoid descending into torpor, inspiring scores of imitators to focus on the war and forget about the science.

Another reason for the shift to war is that movie studios like franchises because they think audiences like seeing the same thing over and over again. Predators and Aliens keep coming , long after the monsters themselves have been destroyed. Too often the narrative is betrayed by the need to extract residuals, toy store sales, and brand-name dominance.

In Hollywood, wars never end, nothing is concluded, no one really dies, and “endings” are a falsehood.

A notable exception to this sad catalog of warmongering is Interstellar, a science fiction tale with actual science in it, featuring speculation about how the universe functions

Wells’ novel of warring worlds is my favorite science fiction story, and I have had the good fortune to create pictures for it several times during the course of my long career as an illustrator. The Martians descend upon the earth not with swords and pikes, but with walking machines that emit a disintegrating heat ray and voluminous clouds of black, toxic gas—new and revolutionary methods of combat to a world which had not yet seen the horror of WWI. Sixteen years later, in the novel The World Set Free, Wells would suggest a weapon far more terrifying— one he called the atom bomb.

—Vincent Di Fate

outside the “gravity” of Newtonian physics.

Clearly influenced by 2001, the film is less the brainchild of its director Christopher Nolan than of the theoretical physics of Kip Thorne and the interests of producer Lynda Obst, who collaborated with Thorne on the film Contact, based on the Carl Sagan novel. Like the editors of Astounding, the movie demands that the science be plausible (though that doesn’t mean that it can’t be questioned, depending as it does on the wobbly world of string theory).

Of all the weird, otherworldly, and fantastic ideas in Classical Traditions, perhaps the most provocative is the suggestion that the link between SF and the classics is actually a two-way street—that some classics can be read as a form of SF. As Weiner writes, “Just as SF concerns itself with the moral ambiguities created in the wake of speculative science, it also explores the tensions between new developments and established traditions, and between modern rationalism and old superstitions.” Classical literature is brimming with this sort of thing—Odysseus defying Poseidon, Prometheus stealing fire from Olympus, Hephaestus forging the Golden Maidens. Who knows? Maybe the first time traveler was actually a Greek magician named Homer.

march 2015 Reed magazine 29

THE PACIFIST MENACE

WORLD WAR I RAVAGED A CONTINENT —AND NEARLY DESTROYED A COLLEGE

BY RAYMOND RENDLEMAN ’06

THE PACIFIST MENACE It was as unthinkable then as it would be now.

Soldiers stationed on campus. Barracks covering the Great Lawn. Reed College coursework requiring credits in the military arts.

Would you like to learn to be a soldier or a Red Cross nurse?

But this was Reed’s harsh reality during World War I, “the war to end all wars” that raged a century ago. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, pitted Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire against Serbia, Russia, Great Britain, and France in a devastating conflict. At least eight million soldiers perished, and tens of millions more were missing or wounded. The term “total war” was coined for the unprecedented degree to which civilians suffered.

The war wrought many consequences, big and small. It dismantled empires, transformed aviation, spawned horrifying new weapons, and changed the role of women.

It also nearly destroyed Reed College.

In 1917, as the United States stood on the brink of war, Reed had already earned a stellar academic reputation, thanks to the determination of President William Trufant Foster [1910–19] to scorn the “sheep dip” approach to education and focus on the rigorous study of the humanities, where learning was the core of the student’s experience.

But Reed’s political reputation was a different matter. Foster was an outspoken pacifist—at a time when pacifism was practically a dirty word.

“The war, I said, would settle nothing,” Foster wrote in his unpublished memoirs.

“The first World War would lead directly to a second World War and that to a third World War, unless we formed a world government with power to stop wars . . . . We had a mission at home, I said, to ‘make democracy safe for the world.’”

Foster certainly knew his position was

unpopular. He doesn’t seem to have cared much. His opposition to the war stemmed not from pie-in-the-sky idealism—he came up from the streets of Roxbury, after all— but from genuine concern about whether the United States should get entangled in a European conflict.

Moreover, he had the backing of the Reed trustees. During his years as Reed’s president, he said, there was not one interference with freedom of teaching or freedom of speech.

Despite “sharp provocations,” not one of the five trustees—Thomas Lamb Eliot, Cyrus Dolph, William M. Ladd, William P. Olds, and Charles Wolverton—ever flinched.

“There is no reason why independent thinking and tolerance of opposing views and painstaking search for the truth and free speech and highest community regard for the speaker cannot go together,” Foster noted. “Without freedom of speech there can be nothing worth the name of college. With freedom of speech there are sure to be statements from some teachers with which some men disagree.”

As impressive as all this must have sounded in the lecture halls of Reed, it rang hollow in the sitting rooms of Portland. Many locals were already suspicious of this godless den of troublemakers who advocated for social reform, blathered on about intellectual freedom, and couldn’t spell right (Foster was a champion of simplified spelling). Now their worst fears were being proven correct.

In a not-too-subtle editorial headlined “The Pacifist Menace,” the Oregonian branded Foster as one of the greatest enemies of the republic. His “disloyal opposition to the [U.S.] President’s excessively moderate and cautious course can be averted,” the newspaper assured its readers, but only if the likes of him and other “Socialist sowers of class hatred and secret champions of Germany” stop their “humiliation upon the American

We’ve all had close calls, and two of our cars have had hole put thru the roof by rocks falling on them, which has been thrown up by shells . . . . Every once in a while, the shells tear up our road, but it is all fixt up again in a few hours. On our first trip up to the postex, we had to fil in three shell holes at twenty-five yard intervals before we could go on.

We have three dugouts in which we live when on duty . . . . At first we found it a little hard to sleep without a lot of fresh air, but we’re used to it now. When off duty we stay in a ruind village a little further back , but not out of range, for they shell us every once in a while . . .

—Excerpt from a March 1918 letter from Albert Gentner ’16

32 Reed magazine march 2015

people by encouraging Germany to murder our citizens, to sink our ships and to block our ports.”

Foster was no fan of epithets, or any use of “-ists” in reducing a person or an intellectual argument: “If any professor were so far-sighted as to be able to tell us what actually would happen in the next generation, he would be condemned by some men as a starry-eyed idealist; by others as a communist, socialist, pacifist, or whatever happened to be the favorite epithet of the day.”

As the drums of war grew louder, Reed students infuriated Portland by remaining on the sidelines. Instead of marching in parades, Reedies took up a collection for feeding oneand-a-quarter million Belgian child refugees who found themselves in the crosshairs of the war. While students at Yale showed “intense patriotic spirit” in an 80% vote in favor of

President Foster addresses the Student Army Training Corps, 1918.

universal military service, Otto Schultz ’19 and Prof. Joseph K. Hart [education 1916– 20] circulated a petition against the declaration of war “until the people of the United States have been consulted thru some sort of general referendum.”

(A competing wartime petition encouraging the expulsion of all “Bolshevists” from Reed received a few signees after Foster pointed out that each student might have a different definition of that term. “If a man is really a fool, is it not better to provide him a platform on which to announce the fact than to make a martyr of him?” he asked.)

The simmering tension between town and gown boiled over in February, 1917, when Foster invited leading pacifist David Starr Jordan to give a major speech on campus. Once the president of Stanford, Jordan had been marginalized on his own campus

Return address, 116th Engineers detachment, “Somewhere in France” postmark:

Yesterday I began thinking how hard it was going to be to spend Christmas in this camp away from home with no mail and no Christmas packages . . . . But the cooks had been working all night to get our turkey dinner redy, and our lieutenant in command of the detachment has gotten a large number of Christmas Red Cross packages. We had our dinner—and I ate so much—have never eaten so much since I left . . . . After a big meal and distributing the Christmas gifts, it seemed like Christmas after all.

—Excerpt from a December 25, 1917, letter from Arne G. Rae ’19

Return address: 147th Field Artillery, 66th Brigade, 41st Division, Camp Mills, Hempstead, Long Island, New York

I do not have the regular gun drill as I am on the regimental telefone and radio detail, composed of five men from each battery. Our duties are to take charge of all communication work between observation and listening posts . . . . The war is getting closer and closer each day. We have received short trench overcoats, several units have their gas-masks . . .

—Excerpt from a November 16, 1917, letter from Richard M. Kennedy ’20

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THE PACIFIST MENACE because of his outspoken opposition to the war. At Reed, he made a compelling case why the U.S. should not fight in Europe. Rather than seeing any glory in the conflict, he spoke of how the corpses of men became manure for the grain fields. Soldiers also rendered the bodies so that the fat could lubricate their weapons in countries where oil was scarce.

Generals in Germany, Britain, France, and Russia were sending their fellow students to be massacred in the trenches, while the feeble and dissolute of mind and body stayed at home to father the next generation.

“Military training makes bad citizens, citizens who will willingly obey their masters in the factories without asking for a chance for the simple comforts and privileges of life,” Jordan said. “A war would cost us . . . a great deal in money and supplies. It would cost us many lives . . . but most of all it would be costly on account of the domestic principles we would have to sacrifice by entering such a conflict.”

Jordan’s account had no small effect on the crowd of Reedies. As the Quest reported, “Although Dr. Jordan spoke without passionate emphasis of either voice or gesture, the terrible conviction, which the rationality of his thoughts carried, stirred his listeners deeply, and the irony of fact that was at his command uncovered the stupendous folly of war more effectively than the cleverest mockery.”

For the Portland establishment, the speech was the final straw. The next day, Oregon senator Dan J. Malarkey mounted the podium at the Multnomah Hotel and denounced Foster and Jordan as “traitors”— to thunderous applause.

Foster shrugged off the insults. “I was born a rebel,” he later wrote. “New England ancestors made me a cantankerous nonconformist, scowling at contented men and women, and warning them that whatever they were doing, they should be doing something else.” But while the attacks in the Oregonian had little influence on him, they had a great impact on the only man in the world who could change Foster’s mind— President Woodrow Wilson.

Wilson and Foster were old friends. As president of Princeton, Wilson had inspired Foster to write a final chapter in his dissertation on progressive education. Written under Columbia University philosophy professor John Dewey, a social reformer who

34 Reed magazine march 2015

Excerpts from November 1917 “Devastation in France” and “Modern Warfare” lectures at Reed:

The total front amounts to twenty-two-hundred miles, nearly the distance between Chicago and San Francisco . . . . Germans have vented their worst hatred upon the quaint churches and beautiful cathedrals of the French, doubtless because they realize how much it hurts the spirit of these ardent people . . . . With all their shelling of the cathedral, they have not toucht the statue of Joan of Arc, a sign she is still with them in spirit and will again lead them to victory . . .

It is impossible for a German submarine to mistake a hospital boat. On the side of the ship is a red cross more than four times the height of a man. England has never misused the sign of a hospital ship, but the Germans have repeatedly destroyed them . . .

Wounded men walk if possible. Otherwise they must be taken in a canvas covered “bathtub” attacht to a motor-cycle, on an ordinary stretcher often carried by four German prisoners, on a stretcher on two wheels, or in a canal boat. The latter is much preferd because, altho it is slower, it lessens the pain of the wounded men.

—Reed College President William Trufant Foster

founded functional psychology as a way to study behavior adapting to environment, the chapter on the “Ideal College” propelled the 31-year-old Foster to his appointment at Reed as the youngest college president in the nation. In 1909, he listened to Wilson’s address at Haverford College arguing that “the nation needs trained and disciplined men . . . who can conceive and interpret, whose minds are accustomed to difficult tasks and questions.” Asking for a copy of Wilson’s speech afterward, he would go on to create his “Johns Hopkins for undergraduates” by committing Reed to an intellectual environment measured not by grades but by theses and oral exams. Instead of competitive sports and fraternal organizations, Foster envisioned a haven in which students lived democratically and pursued knowledge for knowledge’s sake.

But Jordan’s speech set off Wilson’s alarm bells. He requested a private conversation and literally called Foster into his office.

It’s unlikely that any primary record of this conversation survives. During the ’40s, Foster destroyed his notes and papers as he wrote his never-to-be-published memoirs, and the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library in Virginia has only a correspondence between the two from 1913.

What we do know comes from what Foster wrote in an open letter to the Quest, published March 6, 1917, saying that “every citizen can serve his country loyally in the present crisis by supporting the President of the United States.” In the event war is

declared, he wrote, everyone must be ready “to serve his country to the full extent of his power . . . . But, in the meantime, he can best serve his country by avoiding inflammatory utterances, by patiently awaiting evidence from official sources before forming convictions, by refusing to credit rumors, suspicions, guesses and partisan charges of all kinds.”

While expressing his hope that goodwill between nations could be retained without the U.S. resorting to war, he wrote that no one should attempt to restrain Wilson by suggesting that citizens wouldn’t heed his call to battle. “Since the beginning of our international difficulties, I have done nothing to badger him,” he wrote of Wilson. “I have been loyal to him and to the country according to the full measure of his own definition of loyalty.”

The grand compromise they achieved during that private conference? Foster would serve in the Red Cross, setting an example of helping the war effort without actually fighting.

In the same issue, the Quest also essentially reversed its position, declaring in an editorial on Jordan’s speech, “Pride ourselves as we may on our intellectual attitude toward the current events of the world, we often find emotionalism creeping in and dominating our judgement to different points of view.” The statement could have been written by Foster, who had reluctantly come to the conclusion that war was inevitable and that once it was declared, Reed would have to join it—or perish.

Foster opposed the war, but served in the Red Cross.

When Congress finally declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917, the nation had no plan for using colleges. Students and teachers “more or less hysterically,” Foster remembers, began enlisting or rushing out to do anything, anywhere, that sounded like war work, especially if a uniform went with it. “The Reed College men who have been anxiously awaiting for a month their chance to do service for their country are soon to be gratified,” the Quest declared in May as 33 Reedies signed up—early—for armed service.

The hard fact was that young men now wanted to serve rather than go to college.

Only 250 students enrolled in fall 1917, a drop of 13%. In May 1918, a paltry 37 seniors received degrees, only 11 of them men.

Enrollment fell and tuition receipts plunged at a time when Reed’s finances were already in perilous shape. Reed’s income from endowment had fallen to about a seventh of its power when the college admitted its first class, due to a real-estate crisis not entirely unlike that of 2009. Meanwhile, taxes on the college’s 40 properties were up 73% from 1909. Rampant inflation was also chipping away at faculty income: the $3,000 annual salary had lost half its purchasing power by 1918. “They were learning from the butcher, the baker and the electric-light maker that the purchasing power of a salary is its only charm,” Foster wrote.

Even with frozen wages and dipping into its own $20,000 surplus fund, Reed faced a $50,000 deficit over the next three years.

The college produced a fundraising pamphlet, “A War Emergency,” calling for donations from “citizens of Portland who believe that war work begins at home.” At the time, 90% of students came from the city, despite the college’s national reputation for excellence. Since the college had produced only five graduating classes, there was little choice but to appeal to wealthy Portlanders.

“To meet the emergency, the College cannot turn, as other colleges do, to federal state and city governments, to alumni, or to a religious denomination,” the pamphlet continued. “Its only resource is private aid; its only field is its own city.”

Despite the bleak financial picture, Foster was convinced that Reed and other colleges could play a vital part in the war. At a meeting in Chicago, he begged the Association of American Colleges and Universities to send a committee to Washington, D.C., to urge the army to make provision for the best use of colleges in the war effort. The association agreed and appointed him to lead the delegation. When U.S. Secretary of War Newton D. Baker asked for a written report, the committee nominated Foster to write it. That report deplored the fact that students and teachers were receiving demands from numerous official and semiofficial agencies without consideration of total future or even immediate needs. Colleges could not, he wrote, continue to meet the need for trained experts without prompt, definite action on the part of the government.

Secretary Baker agreed and publicly urged all students as a patriotic duty to continue their studies unless called into military service. He warned the country against sending too many college students to the front, thus cutting off the future supply of trained leaders. “We said we feared that such general terms would have little effect, while teachers and students were called every day to specific, often dramatic work; work which appealed

to them and to the public as patriotic, whereas able-bodied students and teachers who remained in college were regarded as slackers,” Foster wrote in his memoirs. If he had waited for Washington to act, he added as a theoretical historic alternative, there would have been no army corps at Reed College.

Partly on the strength of Foster’s report and further prompting, the Student Army Training Corps was organized in hundreds of colleges. In a July 18, 1918, letter to all students, Foster announced they were all “drafted into the servis of your country,” and would be provided with a uniform, receive instruction by U.S. Army officers, and most importantly, “go on with the studies of [their] choice.” Wilson echoed Foster’s own pleas that summer. “After the war there will be urgent need not only for trained leadership in all lines of industrial, commercial, social and civic life, but for a very high average of intelligence and preparation on the part of all people,” he declared. “I would therefore urge that the people continue to give generous support to their schools of all grades.” Wilson called Reed specifically “a bulwark of national defense” and said “it will be a public calamity if the work of the college is to suffer” during the war due to a lack of private financial contributions.

Reed could now solicit donations for the war effort, but it still had more men serving overseas in the army or navy than in its classrooms. Foster and Wilson told students that the U.S. now lacked physicists, chemists, psychologists, biologists, draftsmen, and accountants (and other professions trained through the humanities) who were willing to serve their government.

A Quest editorial from 1917 called on students to concentrate their anxiety about war into their studies: “Instead of expending all that precious energy into merely being

Return address, 1st Regiment U.S. Engineers, “Somewhere in France” postmark:

The artillery at the Front is very active at times, and the “Boom, Boom B-r-r-oom” of the big guns makes the whole earth seem to shake, but outside of occasional raiding Boche airplanes, or a big gas attack, when we are working behind the lines, we have nothing to fear from the Germans.

I believe that the Americans will prove the deciding factor in this war game if they are ever turned loose, and I hope that we will get into it, hot and heavy, before the spring is over. Most of us expect to be home in time for the opening of college next fall, and some of us even plan on spending the 4th of July in the good old U.S.A. —Excerpt from a February 19, 1918, letter from Forrest Foster ’22 (no relation to President Foster)

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Reed’s Student Army Training Corps Barracks was completed in September 1918—two months before the Armistice was signed.

THE PACIFIST MENACE excited, work it into your themes, enliven your thesis with it, employ it in ferreting out the truths of science in laboratory, project a little of that pep into Greek and Latin, attack math with bayonets and the German with military tactics.”

While “hastily planned and far from perfect,” Foster viewed authorization for a Reed branch of the training corps as a good first step toward keeping student-age men in school. The next step was to build a barracks.

To do this, he asked Harvey Eugene Davis [superintendent of buildings 1911–48] to go across the Columbia River and borrow blueprints of the army barracks at Vancouver and build a copy on the Reed campus. By fall 1918, the 200-person Student Army Training Corps Barracks was constructed on campus facing Woodstock Boulevard, just south of the present Hauser Library.

Two months after the building was completed, November 11, 1918, the Armistice was signed.

It took a full year for the U.S. government to reimburse Reed for the barracks—a delay that the college could ill afford. To keep the college open, Foster had to ask the board members, who were old and infirm by this point [Dolph was deceased], for emergency transactions of several hundred thousand dollars at a time—tens of millions in today’s dollars.

During the war, Foster had been able to raise substantial sums for emergency use.

When the emergency and patriotism died down after the war, however, the atmosphere

36 Reed magazine march 2015

turned chilly. Portlanders remembered Foster’s outspoken pacifism, and rumors still circulated about him being a German spy in a U.S. uniform. Reed’s daring academic experiment was in danger of being hijacked by his notoriety.

With his reputation preceding him into the living rooms of local families and potential wealthy donors, Foster resigned and urged Reed trustees to find a president who could save the college financially. He was not the right man, he said, because he “had been a leader in too many off-the-campus fights; too many for the good of Reed College . . . . I had the courage of my convictions—foolhardy courage at times—but I lacked the courage of my emotions.”

How genuine was Foster’s change of heart? That’s a difficult historical question, even with his personal testimony, because it requires evaluating whether he cynically made the appearance to back Wilson in a desperate attempt to save Reed. It’s impossible to know for sure, but Wilson, as his mentor, could have easily told him that serving in the Red Cross, despite his deeply divided feelings about the war, could shore up Reed’s battered public image, thereby advancing its cause of academic excellence through its ability to solicit “emergency war-effort contributions.”

However, the fact that Foster not only put on that Red Cross uniform—but also fully deployed his influence in that capacity worldwide—suggests his motives were genuine. After visiting 10 universities across the nation, Foster came back apparently convinced that loyalty to country could come

without sacrificing ideals. He addressed the student body in the Reed chapel on May 14, 1917, saying that he witnessed college men “responding superbly to the call of the nation in this crisis” by putting in an hour or two of military training at 5 a.m. before beginning the usual day’s work. “Colleges are offering all their resources—human and material—without a thought of self-protection. Traditionally the torch-bearers of idealism, they are true in this crisis to the noblest epochs of history. Nothing more could be desired than that the whole country could come to comprehend the seriousness of the war and to feel the eagerness to face duty as have our universities and colleges.” Surely, Foster could have satisfied Wilson’s demands and done much less for the war effort.

In his memoirs, written during the late ’40s, Foster said that he appreciated the trustees’ commitment to academic freedom: “They knew, moreover, that where everyone thinks alike, few are doing any thinking at all. When I consider the kind of world which has resulted from two wars—wars for which we are still paying billions—I wonder what will be the long view of history.”

Foster’s outspoken pacifism had brought Reed to the brink of financial ruin. But once war was declared, his determination to have Reed play a meaningful role in the war effort probably saved it.

After Foster resigned in 1919, the trustees resolved never again to allow Reed’s fate to be bound up with a political position— an attitude that would persist for decades and which in many ways still echoes today.

REED AND WORLD WAR I Anxious for Reed to play a role in the war effort, President William Trufant Foster created the nation’s first program to train young women to become “reconstruction aides” focusing on physical and occupational therapy for returning veterans.

The program was run by Dr. Mary McMillan [director of the Reed clinic 1918–19], who later became a legend in the field of physical therapy. Trainees took classes in biology, anatomy, physiology, personal hygiene, psychological aspects of recovery, posture, theory of bandaging, military hospital management, massage, corrective gymnastics, and orthopedic surgery.

Dr. McMillan once described the case of an ambulance driver who was brought back from Europe after a raid on a Red Cross hospital: “He had been standing with two companions. Then came the awful explosion. He was knocked down.

He didn’t lose consciousness. He found himself lying on the floor. On either side were his comrades. They had been blown to pieces . . . . ‘Oh they’re dead, and I’m not’ was the thought that went through his mind. It was curiously detached . . . . There was no great regret for their going, no great rejoicing that he was saved . . . . The amputations are necessarily quick work—guillotine operations, we call them. Often the muscles must be shrunk down over the bone-end by us, which is done by tight bandages and heavy weights . . . we often have to flatten out the bone-end by exercises so that it will bear weight.”

McMillan’s first cases never left her memory: “Bearded, broken men . . . came with their clothes caked in mud and their own blood. They were half demented with the thing that had befallen. They had lost their wives, their children, their all. They let us care for them as we would. The first thing was to cut their clothes from them.

We took their garments into the yard and in a great pile burned them.”

She prescribed daily gymnastic exercises and out-of-door games for all students to prepare for their arduous work in

At Reed, Dr. Mary McMillan ran the nation’s first program to train young women to become “reconstruction aides” focusing on physical and occupational therepy for returning veterans.

military hospitals. Mornings were spent attending clinics at various Portland hospitals and leading patients through exercises and massage. Reed graduated about 200 aides altogether; three died in the line of duty from influenza acquired in hospitals.

One of the aides, Col. Emma Vogel ’18, joined the Reed faculty to help train students in subsequent classes. After succeeding McMillan as head aide of the Department of Physiotherapy at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C., Emma became the first director of physical therapists in the U.S. Army.

At least 93 Reed students, professors, and alumni served in World War I. A bronze plaque at the entrance to Eliot Hall lists 12 students who died in the line of duty; many more were wounded.

AMONG THOSE WHO SERVED: Neil Malarkey ’19 (son of Dan Malarkey, the state senator who denounced Foster as a traitor) joined the troops to France and was badly burned when a large timber fell on a tank of ammonia, causing it to rupture.

He returned to Reed, graduated in English, and went on to became a district attorney and was elected as an Oregon state representative for Multnomah County.

Howard Hopkirk ’20 served as a first lieutenant and returned to write his thesis on

press associations and newspaper reporters. He became an influential figure in social work, authoring the book Institutions Serving Children and becoming executive director of the Child Welfare League of America.

Glenn C. Quiett ’20 served on the front lines in France, where he was exposed to poison gas and lost a lung. He returned to Reed and graduated in English, writing his thesis on the French playwright Eugene Scribe, whom he quoted thus: You believe, like everyone else, that political disasters, revolutions, the fall of empires stem from deep, profound, important reasons. Don’t you know that it was a window in the Trianon castle, criticized by Louis XIV and defended by Louvois, that gave birth to the war which now grips Europe?

Glenn went on to write the seminal history of 19th-century American expansion, They built the West: An Epic of Rails and Cities.

He died of tuberculosis in 1936; his friends and family raised money to build the Quiett infirmary that stands just north of Eliot Hall. When the building was dedicated, his aunt brought a bouquet of red carnations—Glenn’s favorite flowers—to adorn the entrance.

march 2015 Reed magazine 37

Reediana

Books, films, and music by Reedies

I Only Read It for the Cartoons The New Yorker’s Most Brilliantly Twisted Artists

By Richard Gehr ’78 New Harvest 2014 It’s a common experience in certain households: grabbing the new issue of the New Yorker, skipping right past the articles, and going straight for the real goods: the cartoons. Usually a single panel, with or without a caption, each one a world unto itself, the famous cartoons are variously whimsical, beautiful, and tragic—and often hilarious.

Richard Gehr ’78 was raised on New Yorker cartoons. But recently, he became interested in going deeper: what about the people who create these little worlds? His entertaining and illuminating new book, I Only Read It for the Cartoons: The New Yorker’s Most Brilliantly Twisted Artists, is the fruit of his quest for the answer to this question.

For anyone who wants to know the nuts and bolts of the cartoon-publishing process, there is information—like the fact that only 0.075% of all submitted cartoons end up making the cut—but the real soul of the book is its insight into the creative process of the artists. We finally see them as individual selves creating out of love, and ultimately gain an unrivaled perspective on what distinguishes New Yorker cartoons as an art form all their own.

A Portland native, Richard went to Lincoln High School with Matt Groening, a lifelong friend who would go on to create The Simpsons and who wrote the foreword to the book. He had an early interest in philosophy and critical theory—a “teenage structuralist,” he calls himself—but his first Reed experience actually took place before he was a student, when he skipped a day of high school to hang out on campus with the Merry Pranksters. Transferring to Reed from Portland State, he majored in philosophy, although he preferred the continental tradition to the analytic one emphasized at Reed, and the two professors who influenced 38 Reed magazine march 2015

him the most both taught French: Prof. Jane McLelland [French 1974–81], whom he remembers as “whip smart and all about clarity of thinking,” and Prof. Sam Danon [French 1962–2000], who “portrayed a French intellectual wonderfully and made you want to be one when you grew up.”

After a stint in grad school, Richard pursued a career in journalism, writing everything from book reviews to a biography of the band Phish. “My career is a perfect example of what a liberal arts education can provide,” he reflects. “My whole life is about making it up.”

This combination of curiosity and improvisation led to this book.

When veteran New Yorker cartoonist Leo McCullum died in 2010, Richard googled his name in search of interviews, but found nothing. “This is wrong,” he thought. “This is an important American art form and someone should be documenting it.”

So he made up a way to do it. He began writing a series of Q&As with New Yorker

cartoonists for a publication called The Comics Journal, which would eventually form the basis for this book. The cartoonists were universally welcoming and open, he says, almost all of them inviting him into their homes, and this intimacy provided him with the insight that makes up the central organizing principle of his book. “It’s not like the work’s drawn from their lives,” he explains, “it’s more like their work and their lives are so intermeshed that there’s no boundary.”

For example, there’s Roz Chast, whose cartoons feature eccentric characters who seem to exist in private neurotic worlds of their own devising, and jokes that don’t necessarily adhere to the logic of ordinary humor. Her first published New Yorker cartoon, labeled “Little Things,” depicted imaginary small objects like the “chent” and the “spak” that are reminiscent of the various bits of hardware that might be found at the back of some household drawer, but for the fact that they have no discernible purpose. They’re just odd

Desert-island castaways, grim reapers, and noses in the key of dumb. little shapes, and that’s the entire joke. And Chast herself? She turns out to be an insomniac with a severe phobia of latex balloons (Mylar ones are fine) and hobbies including weaving hook rugs and pysanky, a painstaking Ukrainian style of decorating Easter eggs.

Or there’s George Booth, whose characters live among the “detritus of life,” old pieces of broken machinery and tools scattered across their homes and lawns. There is no clear explanation for this fact in the cartoons and it is often irrelevant to the gag, although it does contribute greatly to the cartoons’ atmosphere, their sense of zaniness.

Thus Spoke Laozi Daodejing, a New Translation with Commentary Translated by Professor Emeritus Charles Q. Wu [Chinese 1988–2002] Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2013 But the reason why Booth draws this way turns out to be simply that this is exactly how he lives himself—surrounded by clutter.

Richard sometimes draws on his philosophical background, at times touching (gently) on theories of humor from such thinkers as Nietzsche and Kant in order to crystallize a point. But the main focus is on the form of New Yorker cartoons themselves, which have developed into a genre all their own. He traces the internal logic of each cartoonist’s individual sensibility as well as the hidden dynamics behind the classic tropes like the castaway on a desert island or the patient on a psychoanalyst’s couch. His favorite trope is the Grim Reaper, because death is “the big punchline.” In one of his favorite examples, a panel by Arnie Levin, Death shows up at a woman’s door only to tell her, “Relax. I’ve come for your toaster.”

Richard is a gifted writer, capable of such descriptions as: “[Victoria Roberts’] cartoons are theatrical vignettes, extremely short plays for precisely two people, a G-rated Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? condensed to its essence.”

But he prefers to let his subjects do the talking, and if he is a skilled writer he is at least as good an interviewer, snagging quotes like this one from Levin describing how he draws noses: “It’s like a key signature in music. For instance, if I wanted to do something outrageous or stupid—Lee used to say, ‘Make it more dumb’—I would make a stupid nose in the key signature of dumb. But if I want to make a point in a political gag, I draw something with a little more resonance or focus.”

You can’t make stuff like that up; it could only have come from the mouth of a real New Yorker cartoonist. The book is full of such nuggets, and ultimately they are what make it memorable, each one as mordant and as sublime as a classic Grim Reaper gag.

—ALEX BLUM ’14

The Daodejing is one of the most stimulating texts that China has given to the world, and has probably been translated into English more often than any other piece of literature. Profound and abstruse, it defies easy comprehension, not to mention translation. Indeed, the long list of translations may be regarded as a record of continuous dissatisfaction.

Charles Wu adds more stimulation by offering a new translation, notable for its thoughtful reflections and lucid rendition. That should come as no sur pr ise because it is hard to imagine anyone better trained than Prof. Wu in bridging English and Chinese literatures. He effortlessly offers, for instance, a Wordsworthian phrase of “wise passivity” as an explanation of wuwei, which he identifies as one of the “three key concepts in the Daodejing,” often translated as “nondoing” or “nonaction.”

This new book does not shy away from many thorny issues, some of which are almost as old as the text itself.

A good example is his daring response to the question of why yet another translation is justified. Wu professes that he took up the task because he could “bring the readers another step closer to what Laozi actually says and how he says it.” This explains the phrase in the title, Thus Spoke Laozi.

A claim such as this, committed to finding the authorial intent, contradicts the “inevitable subjectivity of interpretation or translation” that he himself readily acknowledges. What I think is at work here is not his command of etymological and exegetical scholarship so much

as the teacher in him. Charles Wu was a great teacher during his tenure at Reed, and he remains an excellent teacher in this new book. What he seeks is to help readers have “the aha! moment” in their reading of the Daodejing. Toward this goal, he combed through rich commentarial traditions and selected ideas that will stimulate readers. The kind teacher prepared the text bilingually, and in fact, the original Chinese text is included in both traditional and simplified scripts.

His discussion of the term Dao, and its literal rendition into “way” or “road,” which led to the adoption of the biblical “Way,” is a good example.

Wu calls it the “first success” by sinologists and translators. He stops short of embracing it, however, and settles with using the transliteration, dao. He argues that the biblical “Way” in John’s Gospel (4:16) remains fundamentally a means because “no one comes to the Father” without it. Dao in the Daodejing, on the other hand, is “the ultimate Almighty and the Mother of all things.” This stimulates an exciting comparison. Wu leaves out the possibility of finding the ultimate truth simply in being on the “Way.” It is again the teacher in him that leaves this bridge for readers to find. The Nietzschean allusion, “Thus Spoke Laozi,” graces the cover of the book, but I dare not celebrate the publication as an occasion of approaching a step closer to hearing what Laozi spoke. I celebrate it as a chance to acknowledge once again, “Thus Charles Stimulated Us. —PROF. HYONG RHEW [CHINESE 1988–] march 2015 Reed magazine 39

Reediana in brief Books, films, and music by Reedies

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Crime-Terror Alliances and the State: Ethnonationalist and Islamist Challenges to Regional Security, by Ted Gurr ’57, coauthor (Routledge, 2013). Ted and Lyubov Grigorova Mincheva examine the trans-border connections between militant and criminal networks and the relationship between these and the states in which they operate. “Unholy alliances” is a term used to describe hybrid trans-border militant and criminal networks that pose serious threats to security in Europe and elsewhere. The authors extend the concept of unholy alliances to include the trans-state criminal syndicates that arise in failed and dysfunctional states, exemplified by Serbia and Bulgaria during their post-Communist transitions, and develop a theoretical framework that looks at four kinds of factors conditioning the interactions among the political and the criminal: trans-state identity networks, armed conflict, the balance of market opportunities and constraints, and the role of unstable and corrupt states. A second publication for Ted is Political Rebellion: Causes, Outcomes and Alternatives (Routledge, 2015). This volume comprises key essays by Ted on the causes and consequences of organized political protest and rebellion, its outcomes, and strategies for conflict management. From the Castro-inspired revolutionary movements of Latin America in the ’60s to Yugoslavia’s dissolution in ethnonational wars of the ’90s and the popular revolts of the Arab Spring, millions of people have risked their lives by participating in protests and rebellions. Based on half a century of theorizing and social science research, this book brings together Ted’s extensive knowledge and addresses the key questions surrounding this subject. Ted also published a genealogy with Paul Magel, A Gurr Family Odyssey: From England to the American West, A Social History Covering Six Generations (Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, 2014).

(See Class Notes.)

A Jungian Life, by Tom Kirsch ’57 (Fisher King Press, 2014).

C.G. Jung, his ideas, and analytical psychology itself have been a central thread of Tom’s life. His parents were in analysis with C.G. Jung when he was born, and he was “imaged to be the product of a successful analysis.”

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At an early age, he was introduced to many of the first-generation analysts who surrounded Jung, and over time became acquainted with them. Later, in his roles with the International Association for Analytical Psychology, he gained a broad knowledge of the developments in analytical psychology, and both through his early family history and in his later professional life, Tom worked closely with many analysts who were integral in forming the foundations of analytical psychology. “Tom Kirsch is one of the core creators of the Jungian world as we find it today. His knowledge of the history, the issues and the personalities is second to none.

Every Jungian analyst, candidate, and scholar simply must read this book,” writes Andrew Samuels, Professor of Analytical Psychology, University of Essex. “But the way in which Kirsch situates his first-person narratives against the backdrop of world politics—in Russia, China, South Africa, and Latin America, for example—makes this memoir worthy of serious attention from non-Jungian thinkers and practitioners.” (See Class Notes.)

Real Mysteries: Narrative and the Unknowable, by Porter Abbott ’62 (Ohio State Press, 2013). In this groundbreaking book, Porter revisits the ancient theme of what we cannot know about ourselves and others, but shifts the focus from the representation of this theme to the ways narrative can be manipulated to immerse “the willing reader” in the actual experience of unknowing. This difficult and risky art, practiced so inventively by Samuel Beckett, was also practiced by modern writers such as Gabriel García Márquez, Herman Melville, and Toni Morrison, as well as by writers such as Gertrude Stein and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. “In accessible language, Abbott shows how narrative fiction may create spaces in which our ignorance, when it is by its nature absolute, can be not only acknowledged but felt, and why this is important.” (See Class Notes.)

“The ‘Domestication Syndrome’ in Mammals: A Unified Explanation Based on Neural Crest Cell Behavior and Genetics,” by Adam Wilkins ’65, was published in Genetics in July 2014. The “domestication syndrome” in animals, a problem bequeathed by Darwin, remained unsolved for more than 140 years, and Adam’s work has received tremendous coverage by the international press. The article is available at www .genetics.org.

The Legacy of the Olmsted Brothers in Portland, by William Hawkins ’58 (2014). Bill’s book was written for those “who love Portland’s flowerbeds, trees, meadows, soccer fields, parkways, and graceful gazebos,” writes Mike Francis in the Oregonian in October 2014, who calls Bill a “civic treasure.” The book contains an abundance of color photos and historic maps, and traces the development of Portland’s system of parks and parkways from the establishment in 1871 of what was then called City Park, now Washington Park. The Olmsted landscape design firm, headed initially by Frederick Law Olmsted and then by his stepson, John Charles Olmsted, and his son, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., was involved in the design of New York’s Central Park, the earliest plan for Yosemite National Park, Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, the Biltmore Estate, the U.S. Capitol grounds, and many other notable commissions. The book is available through his website, https://squareup.com/market/william-j-hawkinsiii-architect-faia, or through Powell’s, the Audubon Society of Portland, the Portland Art Museum, or Hoyt Arboretum.

Falling Behind? Boom, Bust and the Global Race for Scientific Talent, by Michael Teitelbaum ’66 (Princeton University Press, 2014).

Michael builds his response to the questions about the United States’ current position in the global race for scientific and engineering talent by examining historical precedent. He highlights five episodes of alarm about “falling behind,” which he traces back to the end of World War II. Claims from employers and educators, widely embraced by mainstream media and political leaders, he says, have figured prominently in recent policy debates about education, federal expenditures, tax policy, and immigration.

Falling Behind offers careful examinations of the existing evidence and of its use by those involved in these debates.

We Are Buyers. You Are Sellers. You’re Busted. by Dick Lee ’68 (HYMpress, 2014). Dick started writing this book— his fourth—to historically track corporate abuse of customers and describe the resulting deterioration of buyer-seller relations. “Our overriding opinion was you mass marketers didn’t know who we were, what we wanted, what we perceived and what we believed. Capitalism, if we could still call it that, kept acquiring a meaner, sharper edge.” His narrative begins in the post– World War II years, and when it reaches the 2010s, Dick makes two surprise findings. First, longstanding buyer-seller conflict is melding with more recently heightened employee anger at employers and public disgust with business buying votes with campaign cash. The combination is creating dangerously high levels of public anger directed at corporate America, he says. Second, and directly related, America is on course for an internal eruption targeting big business of a magnitude not seen since the Vietnam War and civil rights protests of the ’60s and early ’70s. (Read more: www.hympress.com.)

A Companion to Urban Anthropology, by Donald Nonini ’68, editor (WileyBlackwell 2014). This book, which Donald describes as an attempt to be a paradigm-defining compendium of concept essays for the urban anthropology of the future, presents a collection of original essays from international scholars on key issues in urban anthropology and broader cross-disciplinary urban studies. It features newly commissioned essays from 35 leading international scholars in urban and global studies and includes essays in classic areas of concern to urban anthropologists such as built structures and urban planning, community, security, markets, and race. Forthcoming is his book “Getting By”: Class and State Formation among Chinese in Malaysia (Cornell University Press), and he is writing a study of the local food movement in the United States, which he intends to complete by 2016. (See Class Notes.)

Out of the Eggs of Ants: An African Sketchbook and Other Poems, by Edward Fisher ’69 (Trafford Publishing, 2014).

As a youth, growing up in a military family stationed far and wide, Edward developed an early and enduring interest in the poetry and cultural mythology of the people of the world. Out of the Eggs of Ants is his third collection of poems. Edward taught high school English as a Peace Corps volunteer in the remote Karamoja region of Uganda, East Africa, where he shepherded students through Shakespeare and their first school newspaper. In his spare time, he assisted anthropologists with data gathering and accompanied a research team from Cambridge conducting wildlife studies. He also traveled extensively, hitchhiking through the Ituri rainforest; steamboating down the Congo River to its mouth; touring Ptolemy’s fabled Mountains of the Moon; camping out near the border of south Sudan; stranded penniless in Nairobi; bartering in the marketplace in Swahili; stumbling onto a jungle enclave of undercover Cold War spies; and waking up to gunfire on the morning Idi Amin staged his bloody military coup.

“Way Out Beyond the Diminished Row,” an article by Gerson Robboy ’69, was published in Northwest Accordion News, summer quarter 2014 (Vol. 24, No. 2). The last row of buttons on the left side of the accordion plays the diminished chords, Gerson explains, and in his article he discusses putting together multiple chords in order to finger chords for which there is no button—“hence, buttons out beyond the diminished row.”

Widow Walk, by Gar LaSalle ’70 (Greenleaf Book Group, 2013). First in a saga, Widow Walk is historical fiction based on true events that occurred in 1859 in the Pacific Northwest. Isaac Ebey, a prominent U.S. citizen and one of fewer than 5000 nonnative settlers in Puget Sound, was the victim of a retribution massacre perpetrated by “the Northerners,” a term used by native and nonnative inhabitants to describe marauding slaverheadhunters who traveled up and down the Pacific Coast on slaving raids.

Widow Walk recounts Ebey’s widow’s attempts to retrieve her kidnapped son as well as her involvement with Captain George E. Pickett, who later attained eponymous fame at Gettysburg. While Emmy is up north searching for her son, Pickett was standing down the Brits on San Juan Island in what was later named “The Pig War.” Gar’s book received the eLit Silver Medal award in 2014 for multicultural fiction, a 2014 USA Best Book Award for Best New Novel in Historical Fiction, and was a finalist for Indie Excellence Awards in Historical Fiction. The audio book version is narrated by John Aylward. The Italian-English bilingual edition is due out in February 2015 and the Spanish translation should be out midyear. View details at www .widow-walk.com. Isthmus, the first sequel to Widow Walk, was published by Avasta Press in 2014.

Set in 1860 Panama, less than a year after the events in Widow Walk, and involving some of the same characters, Gar’s story relates a fateful train ride through the Darién Jungle on the new transisthmus Panama Railroad. (See Class Notes.)

Chihuly Drawings, by Matthew Kangas ’71 (Museum of Glass, 2015). Matthew’s book catalogues exhibitions of Dale Chihuly’s work over 35 years, surveying more than 180 drawings that will be showing at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington beginning this month. Matthew also serves as contributing editor for a number of publications, including Art in America, Sculpture, Art Guide Northwest, and Visual Art Source, an online weekly newsletter.

Eggs Satori, by Karen Greenbaum-Maya ’73 (Kattywompus Press, 2014).

Five years ago Eggs Satori was chosen as a finalist in a competition held by PuddingHouse Publications, but its editors were hit by health crises, says Karen, and put their publications on permanent hold. When the editor of Kattywompus Press took a look at Karen’s prose poems, she accepted not only Burrowing Song (published in 2013) but also Eggs Satori. “Like Beethoven (in this regard and no other), the first is now the second.”

In addition, Karen’s poem “Our Lady of the Red Potatoes,” which she worked on for six years, and is not included in this edition, has been nominated for the 2016 Pushcart Prize. (See Class Notes.)

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Reediana R Quick Syntax Reference, by Margot Tollefson/Conard ’73 (Apress, 2014). Margot’s book is a reference detailing the intricacies of the R language. “Not only is R a free, open-source tool, R is powerful, flexible, and has state of the art statistical techniques available.” With the many details which must be correct when using any language, this book makes using R easier. R Quick Syntax Reference is for statisticians and other data analysts who are starting to use the R language. It is also for veteran R users who want a quick reference to the language—“an excellent choice for the busy data scientist who likes to experiment with new ways of analysis and who needs the flexibility of the data editing available in R.” (See Class Notes.)

New Turns in Old Roads, the third book of photography by Leo Rubinfien ’74, was published by Taka Ishii Gallery (www.takaishiigallery.com) in 2014. In addition, Chewing Gum and Chocolate, a posthumous book of photographs by Shomei Tomatsu, one of Japan’s foremost 20th-century photographers, edited by Leo, was published by Aperture Foundation in 2014. (See Class Notes.)

The Never-Open Desert Diner,

by James Anderson ’76 (Caravel Books, 2015). In a debut novel described by best-selling author C.J. Box (The Highway and Breaking Point) as striking, lyrical, whimsical, and atmospheric, James presents a haunting tale peopled with a cast of eccentric characters. At 38, protagonist Ben Jones is on the verge of losing his small trucking company—a career he loves. His truck route covers one of the most desolate and beautiful regions of the Utah desert, where Ben is drawn into a love affair with a mysterious woman and into the heart of a decades-old tragedy at a roadside café referred to by the locals as the Never-Open Desert Diner. In this story of love and loss, Ben discovers that the desert is relentless in its grip, and what the desert wants, it takes. “Part mystery, part love story, part meditation on place, The Never-Open Desert Diner will certainly keep readers turning the pages,” says Roland Merullo, author of Breakfast with

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Buddha and Vatican Waltz. William Hastings, author of The Hard Way, finds the book to be “crime fiction that transcends the noir genre, in the vein of James Lee Burke and Dennis Lehane.” The book is wrapped in a splendid cover designed by Patti Morris ’66. (See Class Notes.)

The Eternal Letter: Two Millennia of the Classical Roman Capital, by Paul Shaw ’76, editor (MIT Press, 2015).

This book contains essays by some of the most highly regarded practitioners in the fields of typography, lettering, and stone carving, who discuss the subtleties of the classical Roman capital letter itself, different iterations of it over the years, and the work of famous typographers and craftsmen. The essays cover such topics as efforts to calculate a geometric formulation of the Trajan letters; the recalculation of their proportions by early typefounders; the development and astonishing popularity of Adobe Trajan; type and letter designs by Father Edward M. Catich, Frederic W. Goudy, Eric Gill, Jan van Krimpen, Hermann Zapf, Matthew Carter, and others; the influence of Trajan in Russia; and three generations of letter carvers at the John Stevens Shop in Newport, Rhode Island. Essays about modern typefaces—including Mantinia, Senatus, and Penumbra—are contributed by the designers of these typefaces. (See Class Notes.)

“George D. Leman: An Arts and Crafts Vernacular Rediscovered,” by Doug Forsyth ’77 (American Bungalow, December 2014). This article about an unsung Buffalo builder, who stands tall in the company of Wright and Olmsted, is the 11th and final piece in Doug’s series on historic districts in Rust Belt cities and inner-ring suburbs.

Irish Wake Illustrated: Celebrating Life Together While Living It, by James Freeman ’78 (ebook, 2014).

James has published a collection of interconnected short stories, new and revised, peopled by car detailers, carpet cleaners, hospice volunteers,

soldiers, teachers, fishermen, and just plain reallife fictional folk. His friend and mentor, writer Bill Hotchkiss, described the collection as the work of a master storyteller, “scintillating, heartbreaking, and often heartwarming.” James also contributes his photography to the book. A second publication is the textbook English Composition II, Best Practices: American Literature and Culture Theme (BVT Publishers, 2015). His children’s book, Lady and Sierra’s Storage Shed Summer, is available as an ebook at bn.com and Amazon.

The Age of Consequences: A Chronicle of Concern and Hope, by Courtney White ’82 (Counterpoint, 2015).

Courtney’s newest book is one of questions and answers, he says, written to address difficult issues related to the health of the planet today and in the future, which are enlarged by his role as a parent.

“We live in what sustainability pioneer Wes Jackson calls ‘the most important moment in human history,’ meaning we live at a decisive moment of action.

The various challenges confronting us are like a bright warning light shining in the dashboard of a speeding vehicle called civilization, accompanied by an insistent and annoying buzzing sound, requiring immediate attention. I call this moment the Age of Consequences—a time when the worrying consequences of our hard partying over the past 60 years have begun to bite hard, raising difficult and anguished questions.” In 2008, he began to write, blending headlines with narrative and observation, travel, and research into chronological installments, and crossing his fingers, he says. “Answers exist if we’re willing to work together and try new ideas (and some old ones). While there’s much to worry about these days, there’s also a lot that we can do together at the grassroots—beginning literally with the grass and the roots.”

The Dung Ball Chronicle, by Wayne Miller ’83 (Kindle ebook). Wayne released a new sci-fi-satire, which updates his previous ebook and adds a second volume (learn more at dungballchronicle.com).

Things chronicled are not what they seem. “For one, the language is all wrong: The titular dung balls are actually made of hallucinogenic mold, cultivated for relaxation by members of an intelligent bug-like alien species, but providing an immersive escape for the small number of otherworld abductees brought back to the bugs’ world. The bugs are not especially arthropodic, but a crossmelding of earthly phyla, and are more socialist than hive social.”

Brand Shift: The Future of Brands and Marketing, by Owen Shapiro ’84, coauthor (David Houle & Associates, 2014).

Big Data and the future of human communications have profound implications for brands and marketing. “Brands that embrace and reflect these transformations have the potential to assume ever more important roles in our society, engendering lifestyle enhancements for consumers through trust and a commitment to serving the greater good,” says Owen. In Brand Shift, the authors provide a historical study of brands, analyze current trends, and examine how cultural change and accelerating technological advancement will affect brands and marketing in the near future. “There are many books on how to build brands in the 20th century. This is the first to show what it will take to build successful brands in the 21st century,” says Philip Kotler, S.C. Johnson & Son Distinguished Professor of International Marketing, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. See more at www.brandshiftbook.com.

“Venetian Vagabonds and Furious Frenchmen: Nationalist and Cosmopolitan Impulses among Europeans in Galata,” a paper that takes as its subject a homicide in 18th-century Istanbul, was published by Julie Landweber ’93 in The Journal of Ottoman Studies (issue 44, 2014).

(See Class Notes.)

Portland on the Take, by J.B. (Benji) Fisher ’94, coauthor (History Press, 2014).

With unprecedented access to police investigative files, Benji and J.D. Chandler bring Portland’s days of civic corruption and hidden murders out of the shadows and shed new light on Portland’s turbulent mid-20th-century past.

The essay “Monuments to Maritime Labor: the Dhow, Migration, and the Architecture of the 2022 Qatar World Cup,” by Laura Diamond Dixit ’04, was published in the Avery Review.

The essay is about the working conditions of Nepali migrant workers, the juridical structures that shape migration between South Asia and the Persian Gulf, and the symbolic representation of a transnational Indian Ocean history in the 2022 World Cup. Laura is a PhD student in the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.

Seagull (Thinking of You) with Family and Away Uniform, by Tina Satter MALS ’04 (53rd State Press, 2013). Tina’s first collection of plays includes Seagull (Thinking of You), a personal look at performance, failure, and attempted love; Family, which was named a top show in 2009; and Away Uniform. Tina directed students and alumni in readings from Seagull (Thinking of You) for the opening of Reed’s Performing Arts Building in 2013. (See Class Notes.)

Still Lifes from a Vanishing City: Essays and Photographs from Yangon, by Elizabeth Rush (née Mueller) ’07 (Global Directions/Things Asian Press, 2015) One hundred years ago, Yangon was the most cosmopolitan of Southeast Asia’s cities, Elizabeth writes. Under British rule in the ’20s and ’30s, it was arguably the second busiest immigration port in the world, trailing only New York City. In a single century, Myanmar went from being the wealthiest country in Southeast Asia to one of the poorest on earth. In 2010 and 2011, as the junta prepared to transition from a military dictatorship to a parliamentary system, they sold over 80% of their assets; colonial-era buildings were auctioned off; many homes more than 60 years old were condemned to be replaced with highrise condominiums. Elizabeth served as author and photographer for her new book—more than a record of Yangon’s disappearing colonial architecture, it is also an archive of the rich everyday lives people built in the wreckage of an abandoned empire. (See Class Notes.)

“Checking Email Less Frequently Reduces Stress,” an article coauthored by Kostadin Kushlev ’08, was published in Computers in Human Behavior in February, 2015. Kostadin’s research on the relationship of email and stress made headlines in the Guardian, the New Republic, and the Huffington Post. The findings were that limiting the frequency of checking email throughout the day reduced daily stress; that lower daily stress predicts greater wellbeing; and that the frequency of checking email did not directly impact other well-being outcomes. Kosta is a PhD candidate and Vanier scholar in psychology at the University of British Columbia.

Holding onto the Sky, a play cowritten by Taiga Christie ’10, Allie Cislo ’12, Jimmy Villafranca ’12, and Shabab Mirza ’15 (and others from the Faultline Ensemble and Rosehip Medic Collective).

What would happen if you could no longer cross the Willamette River to get to downtown Portland, because all of the bridges had collapsed during an earthquake? That question is just one of those explored in the play, which also examined ways in which communities unite to create networks of support. Talga served as director for the performance at the Headwaters Theatre in Portland in November 2014. The production utilized the talents of Paige Russell ’13 in costume design, Jimmy in additional roles as assistant stage manager and performer, and Corinne Bachaud ’14 and Jake Gonnella ’17 as performers. The production was funded in part by a grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council, and encouragement was provided by Prof. Kate Bredeson [theatre 2009–], Prof.

Kathleen Worley [theatre 1985–2014], and technical director Kristeen Crosser [theatre 2006–11].

14: Dred Scott, Wong Kim Ark & Vanessa Lopez, by Roland Wu ’13 (2014, Graham Street Productions). This documentary explores the recurring question of who has the right to be an American citizen and examines the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment through the lives of three ordinary and extraordinary American families who changed history by challenging the status quo. Roland has made three other documentaries, La Fragua; Edna Vazquez: Portrait in Three Colors; and There Are No Birds in the Nests of Yesterday. See more at www.rolanddahwen.com.

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In Memoriam Cartographer of the Brain Photo by Irene Fertik, 1987; Courtesy of the USC University Archives

Richard Frederick Thompson ’52 September 16, 2014, at home in Nipomo, California.

One of the leading behavioral neuroscientists in the world, Dick researched the basic processes in the brain during the establishment of learning and the coding of memory. Regarded by many as the world’s leading authority in his field, he was the first neuroscientist to identify and map the neural circuits responsible for classical conditioning or Pavlovian learning.

“The fundamental driver behind Dick’s work was the notion of behavioral plasticity, i.e that neural synapses will change as a function of the organism’s experience and that these changes can be stored,” says Joel Davis ’63, who was a junior at Reed when he met Dick. “At higher levels we call this memory and learning. Part of Dick’s genius was to find and examine simpler systems that showed learning-like plasticity but in a more restrained cellular network. Making use of newly developed intracelluar recording and stimulating techniques, Dick explored and described the cellular basis of habituation, or the learned ability to ignore nonrelevant stimuli. Dick’s second major contribution also involved a simple, model system to ascertain the site of certain types of classical, or Pavlovian, conditioning.”

A native of Portland, Dick was interested in science from a young age and decided to enter the field after reading books written by American psychologist and behaviorist Karl Lashley. He earned a BA from Reed in psychology, studying with Prof. Frederick Courts [psychology 1945–69] and Prof. Monte Griffith [psychology 1926–54]. His senior thesis, “An Examination of the Continuity-Discontinuity Controversy in Discrimination Learning.” written with Courts, was devoted to testing one of Lashley’s hypotheses on discrimination learning in animals. Dick later remarked, “If I had to enroll in an undergraduate school again, I would enroll at Reed.”

He earned an MS and a PhD from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, doing NIH postdoctoral research in the laboratory of neurophysiology with C.N. Woolsey at Madison and in the neurophysiology lab of Anders Lundberg at the University of Goteborg in Sweden. During his own career, 1959 to 2011, Dick received continuous federal research grant support for his laboratory. “He was one of the first members of the Society for Neuroscience,” says Joel, “an organization that grew from a few hundred people in the late ’60s to over 35,000 scientists today.”

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In 1959–67, he taught psychiatry and medical psychology at the University of Oregon Medical School (OHSU), where he pioneered work on habituation with Alden Spencer. At the school he met nursing student Judith K. Pedersen, a native of Denmark who had aspired to be a physician, but was forced to change her career path due to limited access for aspiring female medical students at the time. Dick and Judith married in 1960. They had three daughters, and Judith worked with Dick for more than 30 years as a senior research associate.

During the course of his career, Dick became known for his support and mentoring of his students, says Joel, who remembers visiting the Thompson Lab across the river at the medical school as a Reed junior and being so enthralled that he asked Dick if it were possible to collect the data for a thesis in his laboratory. “Prof. Courts agreed to the idea and I spent what became the start of a long association with Dick, which culminated in a PhD at UC Irvine in 1968—Dick’s first PhD student.”

Dick left Oregon to join the faculty in psychobiology, a new department, at UC Irvine (UCI). He was professor of neurobiology there until 1973, when he accepted an appointment as Karl Lashley Chair in psychology at Harvard.

“We liked Harvard,” said Dick, “but could not stand living in the Boston area.” He returned to UCI, where he taught in 1975–80. From there, he moved to Stanford as Bing Professor of Human Biology, professor of psychology, and chair of the human biology program in 1980–87, and from there to the University of Southern California (USC). He was Keck Professor of Psychology and Biological Sciences, director of the Program in Neural, Informational, and Behavioral Sciences, senior research associate at the Gerontology Research Institute, and professor of neurology in the School of Medicine at USC. He retired from USC Dornsife as University Professor Emeritus Richard F. Thompson, William M. Keck Chair Emeritus in Psychology and Biological Sciences.

His research focused on identifying places in the brain where memories are stored for particular forms of classical conditioning, a fundamental form of learning. He showed that the brain saves a memory by strengthening the synapses, or connections between neurons. Neurons also create new synapses during the learning process, which he defined as the creation of memory. His work also looked at the effects of behavioral stress, estrogen, and aging on learning.

During the ’80s, Dick’s work in tracing the physical aspects of memory, based on the

research of Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov, was met with skepticism. In two decades’ time it became widely accepted, and Dick went on to identify and map the neural circuits involved in classical conditioning in 2002.

His contributions to science and psychology were recognized with awards such as the Commonwealth Fund Award, 1966; the Research Scientist Career Award from the National Institute of Mental Health, 1967–73; the distinguished scientific contribution award from the American Psychological Association, 1974, for work in brain function and behavior; the Howard Crosby Warren Medal from the Society of Experimental Psychologists, 1989, for outstanding contributions to experimental psychology; the John P. McGovern Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1999, for outstanding research in the behavioral sciences; the D.G. Marquis Behavioral Neuroscience Award, 1999, from the American Psychological Association; the USC Associates Award, 2000, for creativity in research and scholarship; the Karl Spencer Lashley Award from the American Philosophical Society, 2007; the Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in the Science of Psychology from the American Psychological Foundation, 2010; and the W. Horsley Gantt medal from the Pavlovian Society, 2011, for his discoveries regarding brain substrates of basic associative learning and memory.

Dick was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. He served as president of the American Psychological Society and was appointed a member of the Neuroscience Steering Committee for the National Institute of Mental Health and a member of the President’s National Medal of Science Committee. He also was appointed to the National Science Board, overseeing the National Science Foundation and providing advice on matters of science policy to the president and Congress.

He wrote numerous books and was editor of several others; he published 450 research papers. His first book, Foundations of Physiological Psychology, was published in 1967. Joel notes, “Foundations was really the first attempt to provide a sound physiological basis for perception and learning. It crossed the barrier from what was once called physiological psychology into the discipline of neuroscience.” Dick’s textbook The Brain: A Neuroscience Primer presents an overview of brain anatomy and physiology—from molecules to the mind. Memory: The Key to Consciousness, written with longtime colleague Stephen Madigan, focuses on cutting-edge research in behavioral science and neuroscience, exploring the mechanism of memory and learning. He served as chief editor for Physiological Psychology and the Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology and was chief editor and founder of Behavioral Neuroscience.

In response to news of Dick’s death, USC Provost Elizabeth Garrett stated that the university community had lost not only a worldrenowned scholar, but also an inspiring mentor.

Dick guided the careers of more than 60 graduate students and postdoctoral students. “As he helped to set the trajectory for modern neuroscience, Dick’s curiosity and aptitude across many areas of the sciences and humanities allowed him to answer some of the most difficult questions related to human behavior.”

“A huge coterie of grad students and postdocs were strongly influenced by Dick’s intelligence and generosity, including shared authorships and recommendations,” says Joel. “Many of his students gathered to toast his memory.

From 1962 to the present, they represented over 60 years of Dick’s commitment to scientific education.”

In his leisure time, Dick enjoyed tennis, fishing, swimming, reading mysteries, playing chess, and travel. Survivors include his wife; daughters Kathryn, Elizabeth, and Virginia; and seven grandchildren.

“Other than my father, Dick Thompson had more influence over my life and thinking than anyone else,” Joel says. “He will be missed.”

Georgia Lodema Shumway Edmonds-Hassett ’33 November 30, 2014, in Redmond, Oregon, at the age of 102 years.

Georgia graduated from Mount Baker High School as a salutatorian and came to Reed, where she earned a BA in general literature. Her sister L u c i l l e S h u m w ay Schwichtenberg ’27 also graduated from Reed. “Like many of us, I couldn’t get a job until I was employed by the Portland Library Association in April of 1934,” Georgia wrote at the time of her 50th class reunion. “Teaching positions were at a premium and I was glad to be an assistant librarian at Jefferson High School until I got my first teaching job in 1936 in Sisters, Oregon. I taught everything the principal did not teach. From there I went to a three-teacher high school at Rickreall, Oregon.” In 1940, she received an appointment to a clerical job at the VA Hospital in Roseburg, Oregon. She met Walter I. Edmonds in Roseburg; they married and had one son. Georgia helped with the family ranch in the Lookingglass area and with an automobile repair business they operated in Roseburg. When they retired in 1968, the couple moved to Redmond. Georgia was active in the Presbyterian church and in book clubs. She enjoyed golf and bridge. Walter died in 1976, and Georgia later married John Hassett, who predeceased her. Survivors include her son, two grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren.

Georgia’s niece Joann Schwichtenberg Freimund ’58 also attended Reed. “As I look back at my education at Reed,” Georgia wrote, “I am appreciative of the thirst for knowledge those years gave me. It was a good education and certainly broadened my life.”

Margaret Frances Wakefield Tator ’34

October 6, 2014, in Portland, at the age of 102 years.

Margaret moved to Portland from Michigan and attended Franklin High School. Her mother was a teacher and insisted on her children going to college, she told Will Levin ’05 in an interview in 2004. She learned about Reed because of a friend, Marjorie Tator McDonald ’34, who later became her sister-in-law. Margaret was a daydodger until her senior year and built on an interest in history, formed in high school, with courses taught by Prof. Rex Arragon [history 1923–62, 1970–74], who became her adviser for a thesis on Stephen A. Douglas. Margaret noted, “Reed was a good background, so that you knew that you didn’t know everything.” She participated in activities such as Campus Day and attended choral concerts, theatre productions, dances, and faculty teas. And she dated Carlton Tator, the only member of his family who did not attend Reed.

A great influence on Margaret’s life was Reed librarian Nell Avery Unger [1927–37], who later became head librarian in Portland. “She was an intelligent, smart lady, and she advised me to go to Columbia when I was deciding to be a librarian. (And she hired me as a branch librarian when I returned to Portland.)” Margaret earned a BS in library and archival science from Columbia in 1939. She and Carlton Tator married and had one son, John. They lived for 40 years in Palo Alto, where Carlton worked for United Airlines, and following Carlton’s death, Margaret returned to Oregon and lived in King City. Her son died in a traffic accident in 1984.

Writing about Margaret, librarian Tony Greiner reflected on meeting “this white-haired little old lady,” who wanted to learn to use computers more than 17 years ago at the Tigard library. “I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly she caught on, and soon she was given the job of checking donations to see if we already had copies in our collection. It wasn’t long before she would bring a few volumes to me and say things like ‘We don’t have this book under this name, but we do as an alternative title.’ That led to my discovering her professional experience. Once a librarian, always a librarian. We became friends, sharing food and talking books and of her travels to Japan, Australia, Africa, and Kansas City.”

From King City, Margaret moved into the Holladay Park Plaza retirement community in northeast Portland to be with her sister.

“Margaret had to reduce her belongings when she moved,” wrote Greiner, “but she kept a fine set of R.L. Stevenson that belonged to her father, and a well-worn first edition of Out of Africa by march 2015 Reed magazine 57

In retirement, Ross Coppock Jr. ’42 pursued a love of words.

Charles Kenneth Deeks ’43 June 21, 2014, in Eugene, Oregon.

Margaret Wakefield Tator ’34 became a librarian.

In Memoriam Dinesen. That one she had picked up when it was new. For her 100th birthday, she was taken on a fast ride in a red convertible by a nephew, visited the house she grew up in, and marveled at the size of a tree planted by her father.”

Mollie Schnitzer Levin ’35 November 5, 2014.

Born in Portland to Rose and Samuel Schnitzer, Mollie earned a BA in sociology from Reed.

Her siblings, Edith Schnitzer Goodman ’35, Manuel Schnitzer ’28, and Leonard Schnitzer ’46, also attended Reed. On a visit to Los Angeles in 1938, she met Bernard Levin—they were happily married for 66 years and raised three children, Ellen, Harold, and Nancy. Mollie was self-employed as a realtor in Beverly Hills for many years. Survivors include her children, three grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren. Her husband and one grandson predeceased her.

Ross Harding Coppock Jr. ’42 June 10, 2014, in Vancouver, Washington.

Born in Baker, Oregon, Ross grew up in small towns across the state and graduated from Hood River High School. He earned a BA from Reed in economics, working summers in lookout stations for the U.S. Forest Service, and hiking and mountain climbing. He was a junior economist and statistician at Bonneville Power following graduation. Just prior to beginning service in World War II, with the 10th Mountain Division 58 Reed magazine march 2015

ski troops in the United States and Italy, he married Dorothy G. Cottrell ’43. Ross wrote that he “dragged” Dorothy from camp to camp and that she earned all of his medals. Back in Oregon with daughter Jean, a toddler, and daughter Ann on the way, the family barely survived the Vanport Flood disaster of 1948. They raised Jean, Ann, and son Gordon in Portland and Beaverton.

Ross and Dorothy enjoyed playing bridge, sailing, camping, and exploring recreational and outof-the-way spaces along the Deschutes River and in central and eastern Oregon. Ross also operated a ham radio. For 23 years, he worked for Stanley Drug Products and was then in real estate until retirement in 1986. He was named Washington County realtor of the year in 1983. Ross was a board member for Washington County, a volunteer for the Reed alumni association, and a member of City Club. In retirement, he responded to the luxury of time by pursuing his love of words. He joined the Willamette Writers, wrote poetry, short fiction, and essays, and tried to avoid publication, he said. In his public obituary, we read, “He was a passionate champion of the underdog and compassionate fellow traveler for those who were less fortunate.” Colleagues admired his “simple, pipe-smoking, and laid-back manner and poker-face humor,” and valued his leadership, compassion, and critical judgment.

“Little of this entailed Reed directly,” Ross wrote, “yet without Reed, the prospect of a full life and a happy one would have been quite difficult to come by.” Dorothy died in 2013. Their children and five grandchildren survive him.

A Portland native, and graduate of Grant High School, Charlie lived near Marshall Cronyn ’40 [chemistry 1952–89] and followed him to Reed in 1939. He studied at the college for three years, completing a BA in biology. In 1942, he enlisted in the naval hospital corps and served in the Pacific Theatre during World War II. He returned to the United States in 1946 and that same year enrolled in medical school at UC Berkeley. He graduated in 1949 and did a medical internship at Los Angeles County Hospital and residency in urology at Multnomah County Hospital, where he met nurse Mary Jane Boozier; they married in 1952. Charlie returned to Reed in 1952–53 to study atomic energy with Prof. Arthur Scott [chemistry 1923–79]. He also did further studies in biological and chemical defense and set up a urology department aboard the hospital ship U.S.S. Haven. In 1958 he resigned from the navy and opened a urological medical practice in Fullerton, California. In 1979 Charlie and Mary Jane moved to Bend, where he opened a urological medical practice from which he retired in 1995. He enjoyed fishing, crossword puzzles, and family vacations. “With his keen memory, he became the family historian and keeper and teller of family stories.” Survivors include sons Rick, Don, Bruce, and Darryl; daughter Cherie; and four grandchildren. Mary died two days before Charlie did.

William Leonard Warner ’47

August 27, 2014, in Florence, Oregon.

Bill entered Reed in 1941, transferring from the University of Portland, and was called into active duty during World War II. He began naval training in 1943 at the Midshipman School at Columbia University, was commissioned an ensign in February 1944, and taught at Columbia until

final undergraduate year. He also earned an MS at MIT. Stan met Mary Riddle while he was at MIT working as a research engineer; they were married for 58 years. The couple moved west in 1957, when Stan went to work for Boeing in Seattle and then at the Stanford Research Institute. He went on to make a 20-year career with the Federal Aviation Administration in Washington, D.C. and Colorado. In retirement, he did freelance writing.

He is remembered for undertaking challenges and endeavors on behalf of others, for his keen interest in scientific developments, and for his positive attitude and wry sense of humor. Survivors include his wife; three children, Keith, Nan, and Karen; and four grandchildren.

Bill Warner ’47 and friend pose at the Oregon coast in 1999.

October that year. He was then assigned to the U.S.S. Spica in the Pacific as a deck officer, and after the war navigated the U.S.S. Manderson Victory from Puget Sound to Philadelphia. In 1946, he returned to Reed and completed a BA in economics, after which he worked for a year for Procter & Gamble in Portland. In 1948–50, he studied public administration at American University and worked in the management improvement group for President Truman’s budget bureau. Next, Bill moved to Modesto, California, working as a stockbroker and an allied member of New York Stock Exchange. He was an instructor in banking and investment for 17 years for the evening school of Modesto Junior College. He also worked for Dean Witter Reynolds, retiring as vice president in 1990, at which time he moved to Oregon. Bill and his wife, Ann, partnered the Winchester Bay Trading Company on the Oregon coast, selling gifts, books, and collectibles. Additionally, he was a broker with Brookstreet Securities Company, was active in the local community through a variety of projects and interests, and enjoyed fishing and gardening. With Heidi L. Hovgaard ’50, whom he married in 1946, he had three sons, Douglas, Robert, and Richard, who survive him, as do Ann and his five grandchildren. “The Honor Principle gave me a pride of place and participation which surpassed any other ethical or religious value I have,” Bill said. “I lived the F.L. Griffin credo: Four years of college can provide a beginning, but you must practice lifetime learning to finish the (endless) job.”

Richard Lyle Potter ’50

November 12, 2014, in Northridge, California.

Born in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, Dick attended Regina College, the University of Saskatchewan, and Reed, where he received a BA in biology. He went on to earn an MS in zoology from Washington State College (University) and

Robert Gordon Gillespie ’55 a PhD in biology from the University of Rochester, and was a research associate at Cal Tech in 1958–61. He joined the faculty in biology at San Fernando Valley State College (California State University, Northridge; CSUN) in 1961 and taught courses in physiology at CSUN until retirement in 1992. He also helped create a highly effective preprofessional advising office at the university, dedicated to supporting student applicants to medical, dental, and other health-related programs. In retirement, Dick served as president of the Association of Retired Faculty at CSUN and volunteered with the Methodist church as a teacher and choir member. Dick and Glenda Eberley were married for 50 years and had one daughter, Jayna. They traveled abroad, including to Europe and China. In retirement, Dick delved into family genealogy and enjoyed watercolor painting. Colleagues at CSUN remember him as a remarkable individual, possessed of a fine intellect and good humor. Survivors include his wife and daughter, two grandsons, and one great-grandson.

Stanley Oleson ’54

August 29, 2014, in Denver, Colorado, from complications related to Parkinson’s disease.

Raised on farmlands in Alberta, Canada, Stan received his education in a one-room schoolhouse and earned his keep doing chores—everything from milking cows to chopping wood. He moved with his family to Oregon when he was 15 and excelled at Colton High School, graduating as valedictorian. Following this, he worked on a dairy farm, attended night school, and delivered telegrams by bicycle for Western Union. He trained as a marine electrician and worked in the Portland shipyards until he enlisted, and received U.S. citizenship, to serve in the army air forces during World War II. He spent three years as a cryptographic technician in the Pacific Theatre. Stan then attended Reed and MIT in the 3-2 program in physics, receiving a BA from Reed and a BS from MIT. During summers, he worked as a forest ranger on Mount Hood, and he spent a year working as a rural mail carrier before completing his

October 11, 2014, in Portland, after a struggle with Lewy body disease.

A pioneer in the field of IT in higher education, and one of the first people to be considered a chief information officer in a university setting, Bob graduated from Grant High School in Portland and earned a BA from Reed in mathematics. “The process, the challenge, the demands prepared me to be creative, confident, and a risk taker.” He maintained a lifelong connection to the college and served as an alumni trustee in 1996–2000. After Reed, Bob entered the new field of digital computing. He first worked at Convair Astronautics, where he developed simulations for rocket guidance. Next, he was responsible for software research and architecture at Boeing, and then worked at Control Data doing software development. But it was at the University of Washington, where he served as director of the computer center and vice provost for computing, that he found his true calling.

Bob was a visionary, long anticipating the growth of technology and the internet; because of his early advocacy, he had a profound influence on federal policies that shaped technology in higher education. He assisted in the founding of computing organizations such as the Northwest Academic Computing Consortium, EDUCOM (now EDUCAUSE), and the Seminars on Academic Computing, and was a model for subsequent generations of higher education IT leaders. His work was recognized with the Kaul Foundation Award of Excellence for achievements as an educator, author, and expert in the field of computing in 1996; the 2009 EDUCAUSE Leadership Award in recognition of contributions to the computing profession; and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the NWACC in 2011 for his role in creating that organization.

In 1984, he cofounded the consulting firm of Gillespie, Folkner and Associates, which assisted in information technology planning for march 2015 Reed magazine 59

In Memoriam institutions of higher education, federal and state agencies, and the computing industry. In 1992, he founded Robert Gillespie Associates, which provided counsel on national issues of networks for universities and other partners. He was also an adviser on national computing and network policy issues for the Higher Education and Library Coalition on Information Policy, a coalition of national higher education and library associations.

Bob also had a rich and rewarding family life.

He and Mary Jo Mickelson ’55 married in 1953 and raised two sons, Peter Barr-Gillespie ’81 and Scott Gillespie ’84. The family enjoyed summertime camping, hiking, vacationing in the San Juan Islands, and traveling the Pacific Northwest and beyond to visit wineries and friends. They also enjoyed hunting for edible mushrooms, particularly morels in the spring and chanterelles in the fall. Wine and food were two of Bob’s main passions. In addition to wine tasting, he made wine for many years and never stopped researching and collecting favorite wines. He was an outstanding cook and inspired his sons to also become happy denizens of the kitchen. Two of his other passions were fishing, particularly for ling cod and salmon in the San Juan Islands, and mountain climbing, both in the Cascades and in the Olympics.

“Owing to the fact that Bob outlived so many of his peers, there are relatively few people in the profession today who know Bob or his work,” writes Marty Ringle, Reed’s chief information officer. “Being modest by nature, he spent no time engraving his name on the initiatives he championed; hence, his legacy may be obscure to all but those closest to him. But to those of us who knew him he is, and always will be, the mentor who showed us not only how to be IT leaders, but also why. Rest well, Bob, you’ve earned it.” Survivors include Mary Jo; Peter, and Scott; daughters-in-law Ann Barr-Gillespie ’82 and Nancy Gillespie; grandchildren Katie and Aidan Gillespie; and his brother Bruce. The family suggests donations in his name to Reed College.

John Terry Chase ’59

June 1, 2014, in Mitchellville, Maryland, following a stroke.

Terry received a BA from Reed in history and went on to study at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs on a fellowship.

He demonstrated a lifelong commitment to teaching, whether in the classroom or as a volunteer, and served as an editor and publisher for numerous companies, including the Congressional Research Service and the American Historical Association. During the Carter administration, he was a speechwriter for the Environmental Protection Agency. He wrote essays and history books, including The Study of American History, Gum Springs: Triumph of a Black Community, and he coedited two poetry anthologies with his wife, 60 Reed magazine march 2015

Sara Hannum Chase. In 1987, Terry earned an MA in history from George Mason University.

(He returned to George Mason in a doctor of arts in education program in the early ’90s.) For many years, he taught at the French International School in Bethesda, Maryland. Sara died in 1997 and Terry married again in 2000, losing his second wife to cancer in 2002. In his later years, suffering from Parkinson’s disease, Terry worked to complete an autobiography, The Seasons of My Life: The Reflections of a Septuagenarian on His Life and Times. He read a great deal and enjoyed listening to classical music. He also traveled the Aegean Sea, where he fell in love with the Greeks and the eastern Mediterranean. Survivors include his son, Robert.

David Byron Baldwin James ’59 [’68]

November 4, 2014, in Sante Fe, New Mexico.

David attended Reed for five years (and also took a graduate course at the college in summer 1969).

Called away in his fourth year, due to the death of his father, he completed requirements for a BA in literature in 1968. Says Frances Land Moore ’59, who met David on the train en route to Reed for their freshman year, “At Reed, David was a cheerful, optimistic person, full of boundless enthusiasm and ideas—enjoyable company. On Sundays, when there was no food service in the commons, he was among a small group of us who used to make dinner (macaroni & cheese on a hotplate) in the social room of the New Women’s Dorm (now McNaughton), then sip black tea and take turns reading Winnie-the-Pooh aloud.” David began his studies as a philosophy major, then switched to classics, and took several classes from Prof. Heinz F. Peters [German 1940–59], who instilled in him a deep love of German poetry, says Frances, adding: “He didn’t finish his thesis on time, but nevertheless spent the next year in Göttingen, Germany, on a scholarship. During his stay he enjoyed visiting historic and picturesque towns, drawing new ideas and insights from whatever he experienced.”

Carol Anderson, David’s classmate at Yale, who informed the college of his death, notes that he had a deep respect and affection for Reed and hoped that his children might have the joy of studying at the college. “He spoke of perhaps one day moving back to Portland.” From Frances we learned that David moved frequently and took many short-term jobs, including telephone sales and teaching Evelyn Wood speed reading. She saw him when he was at Yale, pursuing a PhD in literature and “still bubbling with enthusiasm.”

David taught at Baylor in Texas and moved to Santa Fe to be near his children. He taught classes at St. John’s College and worked in other capacities. Central to his life was poetry. “His great personal passions in later years were poetry—several of his poems were published—and Asatru, a revived form of Teutonic religion,” says Frances. “He was a guest speaker at Althing One

Terry Chase ’59 with his wife, Sara Hunnun Chase, and their son Robert in 1978.

David James ’59 [’68] in Winch Capehart.

in 1980, wrote essays on Asatru ethics, value, and rituals, and was invited to speak at AFA gatherings. He also was the first person in modern times to perform the reconstructed Midsummer ritual. Shortly before his death, he was close to completing his magnum opus: a comprehensive analysis of the Teutonic Weltanschauung and the religious values that came from it. Talking about it animated him whenever I came to visit him at his retirement home in Santa Fe.” Survivors include his son Byron; daughters Matilda, Ada, and Willa; and grandchildren Trinity and Serenity.

Gerald Stone ’65

September 2014, at home in Alameda, California.

Gerry studied at Reed for a year and a half and went on to earn a bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley. He served as editor for the Bancroft Library at Berkeley and was also a writer and photographer. “I met Gerry while we were registering for classes in 1961,” writes David Casseres ’65.

“I looked over his shoulder at his paperwork and

saw that he had attended Escola Americana in Rio de Janeiro. I went there, too, and we almost overlapped in time. We soon became close friends. We could make jokes with each other in Portuguese, baffling everyone around us. Gerry and I both loved to sing folk songs. Nobody else could sing like Gerry when the music moved him. He sang with a pure, angelic madness and with the authentic voice of cosmic laughter and sorrow—I look for words here, but those who heard him will know what I mean. And he made up little songs that sounded like nonsense, yet left you thinking about them for the rest of your life. ‘Fol the diddle i dee,’ sang Gerry.”

David and Gerry remained friends after Reed, though they were out of touch during the past few years. “He had a sad, funny, beautiful life while it lasted, and we all wish we could have him back again.” Marisa Casseres Schaer ’65 writes, “I didn’t see Gerry after my years at Reed, so my memories of him belong to the foolishness and joy of youth. My memories of Gerry Stone are serious, though. Along with being winsome, he was unfailingly kind, generous, and accepting. His was the kind of friendship that improves later life.”

Joe Weisman ’65 learned of Gerry’s death from Gerry’s brother Tony. “Tony told me that he and Gerry’s other brother, Tom, had been seeing Gerry frequently for the past few months as his health had become a little iffy and they were concerned about him.” Gerry worked at this and that, says Joe, and did a lot of hiking and climbing and photography and political activism. “He was caught painting an American flag upside down on a building as part of a protest against the first Iraq war and the judge offered him the choice of going to jail or quitting all drinking and getting a job. Gerry chose carefully and worked from then on as the editor of the University of California smart car project magazine [Intellimotion]. When his father died a few years ago, Gerry inherited the house in Alameda and shortly afterwards retired from work. He was a fool in the very best sense of the word: equal parts innocent, delightful, outrageous, and obnoxious. One of the most well-read and intelligent people I know, but so totally lacking in ambition that he only worked as much as he needed to do. A very good friend.”

David continues, “He never married, though he was often in love. His friends remember him not for life achievements but for his gentle and loving nature, his humor in the face of many disappointments and misadventures; his fundamental innocence.”

Mary Jo Summers Gettmann ’66

September 14, 2014, in Portland, from cancer.

Born and raised in Bend, Mary Jo loved the Cascade Lakes, skiing at Mount Bachelor, and being in 4-H in Bend. After high school, she spent a year traveling across Europe earning money as a translator. She attended Reed for two years and went on to earn a BS in mathematics from Oregon State University. In 1966, she married

her next-door neighbor from childhood, Gary Gettmann. She dedicated her life to raising their family. She also served as a volunteer in teaching children how to program computers and worked with children in track, JROTC, band, and 4-H. Mary Jo was a master gardener and was active in maintaining and preserving urban greenery.

She loved to cook, fish, travel, and spend time with her family. Survivors include her husband, daughter Melissa and son Brian, and four siblings. She was predeceased by her daughter Laura.

Laurance Oliver Kunkel ’70

September 20, 2014, at home in San Francisco, California.

“In 1969, Larry used Paideia time and money to begin work on a collection of photography, poetry, prose, and calligraphy. The book Cathedral appeared recently as a result; when I saw it, I was inspired with new confidence both in Reed and in the concept of an independent study period,” wrote Jan Clausen ’71 in an article in the Reed publication Sallyport (February 1970).

The process of creating Cathedral (and producing 1,000 copies) took 14 months. “It was suggested by several faculty members that I apply for interdisciplinary standing as a major in art and literature,” Larry said. “I formed an advisory committee of two members from each department, which approved my request.” Cathedral: A Montage of Graphics and Literature, dedicated to Lloyd Reynolds [English & art 1929–69], included work by 49 contributors and stood for Larry’s thesis. “I thought there was a lot of creative work being done at Reed that ought to have exposure. I wanted to produce something that contained beauty as a protest to the ugly things in our society.” Larry’s initial thought when he entered Reed was to study acting or physics. “I learned a great deal about what it means to read a poem, to look at a visual work, and most difficult of all, to gain some understanding of how the forms work together and relate to one another.”

He went on to apprentice with a photographer in San Francisco. From Fred Ross, Larry’s closest friend, we learned that he became a successful commercial photographer in the Bay Area, “working from a beautiful, live studio that he restored.

He specialized in complex, high-speed food photography in the age before digital cameras.” One notable ad, Ross says, captured a champagne cork an inch out of the bottle as it popped. “When his special skills were easily achieved with the use of digital photography, Larry turned to a meticulous renovation of a Victorian building next to his studio, where he lived out his last years in genteel luxury.” He is survived by his mother, Giselle V. Laurmann.

Beverly Bea Lipsitz ’72

August 27, 2014, in Portland.

Bev came to Reed from Stockbridge School in Massachusetts and studied at the college for a year and a half, and then took classes at Portland Community College and Portland State University,

For his thesis, Larry Kunkel ’70 created Cathedral.

where she earned a BS in geography. In 1988, she completed an MA in geography at the University of Oregon and worked in climatology research.

She also did computer programming and drove a school bus. When Bev received a diagnosis of ovarian cancer in 2008, she retired from her position as coordinator of the Banner student administrative database at Portland State. She studied photography and began traveling “just so she could use her camera in some of the most spectacular landscapes of the world,” says devoted friend Marie Reeder ’73. Bev went to Baja California, the Galapagos, Svalbard, Panama, and Costa Rica.

She also traveled with photography instructor Eddie Soloway to California, Maine, Molokai, and Mexico. She supported other women with latestage ovarian cancer at a weekly support group in Portland and at an annual retreat in Montana.

She was active in the Ovarian Cancer National Alliance’s Survivors Teaching Students program.

After living courageously for five years, supported by her family and close friends and her little dachshund, Scooby, she chose death with dignity.

Survivors include her wife of 35 years, Rosalyn Basin; their son, Benjamin Basin, and his wife and son; and brother-in-law Daryl Bem ’60.

Wayne Holmes Caplinger II ’78

August 7, 2013, in California.

Wayne came to Reed from Richland, Washington, where he was salutatorian of his class and a National Merit Scholar. He earned the rank of eagle in the Boy Scouts and went with his father, a scout leader, to the World Scout Jamboree in Japan in 1971. There, Wayne was selected to climb Mount Fuji. Randy Hardee ’80, who recently informed the college of Wayne’s death, met Wayne during freshman year at Reed in Math 200 and Physics 130 classes. Wayne earned a BA march 2015 Reed magazine 61

In Memoriam from Reed in mathematics and a PhD from the University of Edinburgh in artificial intelligence.

He went to work for Teknowledge in Palo Alto, California, where he helped develop the first “look ahead” data technology. His career took him to 15 countries, including Australia, Brazil, France, Italy, and South Africa. An accomplished athlete in his youth, Wayne explored judo, cross-country skiing, orienteering, scuba and cave diving, and sailing. He was a ski and sailing instructor, worked with ski rescue, and was a member of the Bay Area Orienteering Club. He was passionate about dancing and enjoyed English country and contra dancing with his wife, Robin Prothro, whom he married in 1992. He also enjoyed theatre and music, including opera, and taught himself to play a range of instruments. Later, as a guild member along with his partner Angela, he participated in the Renaissance Faire, the Great Dickens Christmas Fair, and in dance troupes such as the Merry Pryanksters and the New Queen’s Ha’Penny Consort. Wayne’s pleasure in performance was apparent to Randy in the late ’70s, on Randy’s first trip to the Clinton Street Theater showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

“Wayne led the Reed contingent into the theatre, wearing a cat suit that he’d made for the occasion, and clicking a pair of finger cymbals.” Wayne and Robin had a son, Andrew (Jamie), and a daughter, Bronwyn. While his children were at the East Bay Waldorf School, Wayne served as a volunteer to teach students to juggle and to ride a unicycle. He founded the Berkeley High School Orienteering Club and supported student endeavors leading to successful outcomes in state, regional, and national interscholastic competitions.

Diane Lynn Mark-Walker ’81 September 16, 2014, in Los Angeles, California, from a rare cancer.

A wonderful, intelligent, quirky, witty, loving, and generous woman, Diane had lived with appendix cancer for the last seven years. She never felt like she was in a battle, never seemed to wonder “Why me?”

Instead, she continued investigating this life with all its wonders.

Diane completed a BA in art, writing the thesis “The Monastic Context of the Book of Kells” with adviser Peter Parshall [art history 1971– 2000]. She cherished her time at Reed as a place of genuine intellectual inquiry that had enough institutional humanity to allow her to pursue Neoplatonism and calligraphy with equal passion, and where she made some lifelong friendships. She went on to Harvard, where she earned a master’s degree in theological studies, focusing her work on the history of religion, and also 62 Reed magazine march 2015

earned an MA in art history and art appreciation at Boston University.

Religion played a significant role in Diane’s life. For her, it was never a set of rules to be followed but rather a challenge to ask important questions, to align actions with convictions, and to structure an internal conversation of the spirit. Hers was a lifelong search that eventually led her to Zen Buddhism, a practice she continued even as her illness progressed.

While in Cambridge, Diane met her husband, Charles Mark, a woodworker and fine furniture artist now turned graphic designer and photographer. Their committed relationship began in January 1985, and they were married in May 1988. Their marriage—one of deep affection and total devotion—brought Diane much happiness. In 1990, a program in design at UCLA, lured them to Los Angeles, where they thenceforth made their home.

Diane was a talented writer and editor, alternately working as a freelancer and, for many years, as a staff writer and editor at the Getty Museum and the Getty Research Institute. As a book editor, she brought to bear both a writer’s instincts and a keen attention to detail. To say that Diane was detail-oriented does not do justice to the thorough and intelligent examination she devoted to anything that interested her.

Her many friends looked forward to her quirky and humorous emails, which often expressed great empathy and compassion for others. Even when she was very ill herself, she would offer a word of encouragement to a friend, make a recommendation regarding someone else’s much smaller problem, or express her delight in some aspect of what she called “the swirl of life outside my little compound.”

Baking was one of her strong and deeply realized interests. Impressed by the flavor and delicacy of the financiers at the Eric Kayser bakery in Paris, she eventually created her own version of the small almond cakes, which her husband declared surpassed even those of the award-winning bakery. In recent years, she was on a quest to perfect her piecrusts, discovering that she could produce tender, flaky results by freezing the butter and adding chilled vodka.

She created a seasonal chart of different pies to make—peach, cherry, apple, chocolate, and lemon—and with each passing month the pies kept getting better.

Diane spent many hours with cats, lavishing affection on both her own beloved rescue companions and those at Pet Orphans of Southern California, where she volunteered. It was cat care that finally persuaded her and Charlie to buy a microwave, so they could tempt ailing cats with warm food and heating pads on cold nights.

Diane wished to thank her many doctors and nurses at Kaiser Permanente for helping her, sometimes heroically, to remain with us much longer than any had predicted and to continue to enjoy the life she so loved. It was very important

to Diane that when she could no longer enjoy life—could no longer create, discuss, intuit, love, and care for others—she would no longer have to stay in this world. Though she had excellent care from Kaiser Hospice, her death, as many do, showed the need for a California “death with dignity” law. In the end, the body fights to live, and she had no way to quietly move on.

Diane is survived by Charles; her mother, Alice Speck; her sister, Cindy Walker; her brother, Kevin Walker; and her feline companion, Sumi Mark-Walker.

This memorial was composed by Chris Alden ’82, Peter Beeler ’81, Gail Draper ’81, and Charles Mark-Walker.

Kathryn Beall Kirk ’82

October 23, 2014, in Chevy Chase, Maryland, from cancer.

In November, classmates gathered at Portland’s Lucky Lab Brew Pub to mourn and celebrate the life of Kathy Beall Kirk, beloved Beer Mama to a generation of early ’80s Reedies. Others attended the large memorial service held in November at Bethesda–Chevy Chase High School, where Kathy had taught English for nearly 30 years.

The service was officiated by Holly Pruett ’85, who provided this memorial.

The quintessential California girl, Kathy followed her brother Will Beall ’77 to Reed. She befriended nearly everyone. Along with making kegs appear on sunny days, and heading up RennFayre, Kathy hosted daily General Hospital viewings and birthed the party mantra, “Wake up, Old Dorm Block!” She was equally serious about scholarship. As tribute to her thesis on the influence of female characters in Shakespeare (“Assay the Power You Have”), her memorial included recitation of a Shakespearean sonnet and a keepsake bookmark featuring the wisdom Kathy personified: “To thine own self be true.”

After earning her teaching credentials at Portland State University, Kathy drove east to marry Alan Kirk ’84. Several years later, they had twin sons, Roger and Gildon. For Kathy, twins were perfect: double the work, double the fun. Kathy remained the life of the party for her extended family on both coasts and a tight-knit circle of friends and professional colleagues in the Washington, D.C., area. Her teaching and leadership transformed the lives of countless students. “I was a math/science student all my life and thought English was a waste of time,” said one, “until I got to Ms. Kirk’s class, where she taught me that literature could hold the truth.”

A longtime colleague at Bethesda–Chevy Chase High School said at her memorial: “In some ways, gathering is an apt analogy for Kathy’s life. She met people and took them in—her college friends, her colleagues, her kids’ friends, her students. Especially her students.

Kathy had more students who loved her and felt her warmth and kindness than any teacher I’ve ever known. And once you were hers, she didn’t let you go.”

Kathy is remembered as a rabid sports fan

Lynnette (Allen) Crane MALS ’86

October 2, 2014, at home in Portland, from ovarian cancer.

Kathy Beall Kirk ’82 at the little library box she asked husband Alan Kirk ’84 to install outside their home.

who gave literary recommendations to rival the best reference librarian; a risk taker who was up for whatever; the friend and mentor who could find the perfect present, make the perfect gesture, and who knew just what to say to turn a bad situation around. She didn’t present different faces to different people or different versions of herself at various points in her life. She was herself —her genuine, optimistic, thoughtful, imaginative, deeply intelligent, intensely loving, and fun-loving self—with everyone.

In the seven months from diagnosis to demise, Kathy retired from the career she loved and focused on her family. In the last weekend of her life she traveled across country to attend her niece’s wedding. The bride memorialized Kathy on Facebook by noting: “This weekend, despite being in hospice care, she flew across the country and rocked out at my wedding. She danced, made s’mores, and made great memories with her entire family, without complaining once. To the end, she was all about her family, making others feel loved, and living life to the fullest.”

Kathy epitomized “attitude adjustment.” A colleague noted, “I always admired Kathy’s ability to get angry about something for two minutes, and then say ‘oh, well,’ and laugh that amazing laugh of hers. What a talent she had, to be able to let the bad stuff go!” She took that same approach to her terminal diagnosis. As her in-laws said, “In the last painful months of her life, she showed us how to do it—uncomplaining, courageous, and still thinking of others rather than herself.”

Those mourning Kathy’s untimely death will continue to hear the echo of her amazing laugh, and perhaps do as Felicia Value ’82 pledged when she heard the sad news: “Today I am going to try to be as kind as Kathy always, always was.

Thanks for the example, old friend.”

Memorial donations can be made to the Kathy Kirk Scholarship Fund established by her family.

Mail checks payable to Bethesda–Chevy Chase High School, Kathy Kirk Scholarship, 4301 EastWest Highway, Bethesda, Maryland 20814.

Lynnette received a BA from Evergreen State College and earned a master’s degree from Reed in English. She wrote a creative degree paper, “The Prism,” with Prof. Gary Gildner [creative writing 1983–84]. Lynnette taught English at Olympic College and Clark College in Washington and at Columbia Gorge Community College in Oregon until 1994, when she traveled abroad to teach. She was an instructor at Exeter College in England, Işık University in Turkey, the American University and Zayed University in Dubai, and Kuwait University, and had recently retired from teaching English as a foreign language. Survivors include her daughter and son, four grandchildren, and a sister and brother.

Ellen Elizabeth Browning ’92 October 7, 2014, in Brooklyn, New York.

Ellen was the first child of Kent and K athy Browning, who were young and involved in school and work at the time of her birth, so that her grandparents and other family members played an important role in her early childhood. Ellen’s first 15 years were spent in Long Beach, California, where she was a gifted student, an energetic athlete, a wonderful friend to many, and a kind and caring daughter. To address serious health concerns that arose when she was 15, Ellen went to live in Maryland and eventually graduated from Sandy Springs Friends School. At Reed, she majored in history, writing a thesis, “The Appearance and Disappearance of Eastern European Jewish Immigrant Women and Their Daughters in the Labor Movement in New York, 1881–1924.”

Her college years were spent in the manner of many students, says her family. She was adept at studying, working, partying, and trying to find out about life itself. Following graduation, Ellen moved to New York City, where many of her closest friends had grown up. She had a variety of interesting jobs, including that of a personal assistant to a renowned musician; a publicist for Farrar, Straus and Giroux; and head baker for the reputable Magnolia Bakery.

Throughout her high school years in Maryland, her college years in Portland, and her many years in New York, Ellen made great efforts to remain connected to her family in California. She was a wonderful older sister to her brothers and sister. She also remained close with many of her Reed and Portland friends after college. Ellen met the love of her life, Edward Price, in New York. They married in April 2003 and had two children, Zachary and Louisa, to whom Ellen was devoted, caring for them full time until she

became seriously ill and eventually passed away.

“I lived with Ellen in Brooklyn for almost seven years before she married, and miss her very much,” writes Jessica Dunlap ’97, who worked with Ellen’s sister Laura Browning O’Boyle on the details for this memorial.

Jennifer Hartman Seminatore ’06

September 7, 2014, in Sacramento, California,

Jenny earned a BA in sociology and wrote the thesis “From Negotiation to Critique: The Changing Character of U.S. Labor and Environmental Movements Confronting Issues of International Trade” with Prof. Erich Steinman [2005–06].

While in a doctorate program in sociology at UC Berkeley, Jenny earned the 2010 American Sociological Association Labor and Labor Movements/Critical Sociology Distinguished Student Paper Award for “The Consequences of Collective Action: The Blue-Green Coalition and the Emergence of a Polanyian Social Movement.”

Prof. Alex Hrycak [sociology 1998–] notes that Jenny was very involved in unionizing grad students at Berkeley and was shop steward for her union (UAW Local 2865). Jenny was married to Samuel D. Walling and had a stepdaughter, Ziola Meereiltagh. Survivors include her mother, Cecilia Hartman, and brother William. Her mother remarked, “Reed was a wonderful part of Jenny’s short life.”

Memorial donations may be made to Reed College for a scholarship program in Jenny’s honor that will foster collaboration between students and members of the sociology faculty on research projects motivated by Jenny’s commitments to social justice.

Pending

As Reed went to press, we learned of the deaths of the following people: Joseph Gunterman ’34, Jack Bailey ’36, Gregg Wood ’39, Neil Farnham ’40, Irene Carson ’41, Nancy Clark Martin ’41, Robert Martin ’41, Dudley Lapham ’43, Robert Fristrom ’44, Elizabeth Havely Golding ’45, Ruth (Sue) Blum Nace ’45, Nathalie Georgia Sato ’45, Jane Leedom Byrne ’48, Lynn Hall ’49, Henry Von Holt ’49, Ernest Scheuer ’51, Walter Berns AMP ’52, Laurie Malarkey Rahr ’53, David Ross ’53, Don Crowson ’55, Sacvan Bercovitch ’57, David Mesirow ’61, Paul Sikora ’70, David Kim ’74, Michael Schoenbeck ’92, Prof. Judy Massee, Dorothy Whitehead, honorary alumna, and Takeshi Fujino, friend and proprietor of Woodstock Wine & Deli.

HONOR departed classmates, professors, or friends by making a gift to Reed in their name. Visit giving.reed.edu or use the enclosed envelope.

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march 2015 Reed magazine 63

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

The Quest and the Front-Page Fraud It was nearing midnight, and the mood in the Quest office was decidedly grim.

The lead story was a bust—the reporter slept through the assignment and didn’t turn in his copy. Now editor BJ Warnock Fernea ’49 and features editor Bill Dickey ’51 were staring at a gaping hole on the front page, just 10 hours before the press deadline.

As they wracked their brains to fill the gap, Bill related a discussion about animal research that had taken place in a class with Prof. Lewis Kleinholz [biology 1946–89]. A student had asked about the anti-vivisection movement— weren’t they against cutting up animals for experiments? Prof. Kleinholz had dismissed this with the riposte, “We have to think of science.” An interesting debate, no doubt, but surely there was no way to turn it into a frontpage article at this late hour—or was there?

Seized by a sudden inspiration, the editors proceeded to take a playful swipe at Kleinholz.

Page 1 of the March 20, 1947 Quest announced that a leading anti-vivisectionist by the name of Dr. Laura Benson was planning to visit Reed to deliver a series of lectures. The story claimed that Dr. Benson was a professor at Arkansas Baptist College and winner of the 1942 William R. Habst Prize for work in the field of vitamin deficiencies. She had just returned from Europe, where she had investigated scientific practices, and was particularly desirous to meet Reed students intending to make careers in medicine and related fields.

There would even be a tea in her honor.

From lede to kicker, the story was fiction.

After they put the paper to bed, BJ and Bill swore each other to secrecy—fabrication being, then as now, a cardinal journalistic sin.

But their little joke took on a life of its own. The news about the anti-vivisectionist was the talk of the campus. Letters poured in. So BJ and Bill felt compelled to continue the farce. They published a follow-up piece on April 3, revealing that Dr. Benson’s tour was sponsored by the Southern States AntiVivisection League and quoting Benson to the effect that she was “firmly convinced, after many years work, both in the study and teaching of biology, that science can attain all of its important goals without the use of vivisection.” Medical breakthroughs such as insulin, she said, could have been developed by other

64 Reed magazine march 2015

INK-STAINED WRETCHES. The 1947 Quest staff included (l to r) Jim Whipple ’49, June Ekstrom (Bennett) ’50, Jerry Davis ’47, John Sperling ’48, Herb Margulies ’50, Lois Baker (Janzer) ’50, Bill Dickey ’51, and editor BJ Warnock (Fernea) ’49, wielding the editorial pencil in front. She and Bill dreamed up the spoof.

means. The Quest also reported that she drew a big crowd to her talk in Montana and a “spirited” question period followed her presentation. Reed was now scheduling a luncheon in her honor, along with a tea.

By this point, Kleinholz was fuming. He went to the Quest office and told the editors that it was preposterous for them to invite Benson to speak. BJ recalled him asking, “How can we prevent this woman from coming?” “And I said, ‘We can’t prevent her from coming.’ And Bill said, ‘How dare you even imagine that? I mean, freedom of speech!’ and so on, and so on. And then we realized we were going to have to do something.”

A grave headline greeted readers of the next Quest: “Laura Benson Dies in Downtown Hotel.” Apparently Dr Benson suffered a devastating seizure. Untrained in operating a rotary phone, the article reported, she could not call for help and was discovered in her waning moments by a chambermaid who had entered the room to empty ashtrays.

“Present at her deathbed were a physician and reporter from the Quest.” To the attending Quest reporter, Dr. Benson expressed her

disappointment at missing the opportunity to speak to Reed students, who, she understood were “among the most quick-witted in the nation.”

Her final words dealt with the care and feeding of six canaries, which she had brought along in a handbag. The cause of death, the Quest reported, was diabetes.

It’s not clear exactly when Prof. Kleinholz finally realized that Dr. Benson was the desperate creation of Quest editors on a deadline. The story fooled a lot of people. Years later, while BJ and Bill shared a laugh, classmates remained uncertain. “To this day, people come up to me and say, ‘Was that anti-vivisectionist business really true?’” BJ said in 2004.

The Reedies involved in this dubious chapter of student journalism went on to fascinating careers. BJ became an anthropologist, scholar, and filmmaker of international renown. Bill was an award-winning poet, who taught creative writing at San Francisco State University. And John Sperling ’48, the paper’s éminence gris, founded the University of Phoenix. —ANNA MANN

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BRANCHING OUT. Econ major Austin Weisgrau ’15 reads Freud’s classic essay, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in Eliot Circle.