REFLECTIONS Cracking the Slightly Intriguing Mystery of Reed

William Diebold

[art history 1987–2020]

Jane Neuberger Goodsell Professor of Art History and Humanities.

When I was offered a visiting position in art history at Reed in 1987, I knew only one thing about the college. It concerned my future colleague Peter Parshall [art history 1971–2000], who was the other art historian in residence that year. We had the same doctoral adviser, although we attended different universities about 15 years apart. I had never met Peter, but his name actually came up fairly frequently in conversations with my adviser. It was invariably accompanied by the same two facts: he was really smart and taught at a liberal arts college in Oregon (the tone left no doubt that the “and” there was to be understood as a “but”). So Reed was a slightly intriguing mystery, and I accepted the one-year appointment as a kind of lark. One year turned into two and then came the Cooley-Gray gift, which doubled the number of art historians at Reed and made it possible to assign one to each of the humanities courses. Thus began my real education and my real debt to Reed.

I was, at least in theory, favorably disposed to the humanities. Erwin Panofsky’s 1940 essay “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline” had been a touchstone of my education. But a favorable disposition is not the same thing as knowing or teaching the humanities. In 1987, I would have said that both my undergraduate (Yale) and graduate (Johns Hopkins) educations were humanistic. Reed put the lie to that. During my career I taught both many iterations of Humanities 110 and modern European humanities. In all those years and syllabi, I count only two texts I had read previous to my arrival at Reed. David Lodge’s academic novel Changing Places describes a faculty dinner table game; the goal is to name the most famous book one has not read. A junior English professor wins (with Hamlet), but is denied tenure as a result. Fortunately, there is no (official) Reed equivalent, since I have a whole career’s worth of winners: Plato’s Republic, Madame Bovary, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. My lack of education before Reed was truly scandalous.

As scandalous as the assumption that there must be something wrong with an art historian who ends up teaching at a liberal arts college in Oregon.

In any event, my thanks to Reed and its humanities program for forcing/ allowing me to become better educated. Peter Parshall, by the way, feels exactly the same way about the role of the humanities program in his education. This suggests that our common advisor may actually have taught us some of the same things, that it wasn’t just happenstance when lightning struck twice and another of his students ended up at Reed.