Reed College Magazine March 2017

‰ BREAKING THE FRAME Students tackle the ultimate outsider art form — comics.

BY RANDALL S. BARTON

JUNE 7–11, 2017 Captivating lectures, panels, and salons Raucous dance parties and live music Marketplace of Reed authors and artisans and a family-friendly carnival Cosmic face painting, parade, and fireworks

Rediscover all you love about Reed!

Register today!

REUNIONS.REED.EDU

kendrick brinson

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march 2017

FEATURES 12

Reed Takes a Fresh Look at Hum 110

By Chris Lydgate ’90

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The Dynamics of Compassion

Psychologist Paul Piff ’04 unveils the link between socioeconomic status and altruism—and finds hints of a path to a kinder society.

By Marty Smith ’88 m at t d ’a n n u n z i o

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Codebreaker

Prof. Sarah Schaack [bio] cracks the secrets of rogue DNA.

By Katie Pelletier ’03

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Breaking the Frame

Art students tackle the ultimate outsider art form— comics.

By Randall S. Barton 14

Students in Prof. Daniel Duford’s class on graphic novels start every class by sketching a cartoon self-portrait.

1. Anna Normark ’19

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2. Ali Cox ’18

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7. Buggy Stallings ’18 9. Eric Bohrer ’17 10. Emily Garcia ’17 11. Nate Ward ’17

32 Class Notes 40 In Memoriam Honoring our dead classmates Novelist Roger Hobbs ’11 Prof. Frank Gwilliam [bio]

8. Steven Chiboucas ’17

12. Jari Lanzalotta ’17

Religion major named Rhodes Scholar Theatre department stages insurrection Join alumni on Ireland trip Saluting Prof. Robert Brightman ’73 [anthro]

Meet the candidates for the Alumni Board

4. Shin Dickens ’17 5. Calyx Reed ’17

6 Eliot Circular

11 Empire of the Griffin

3. Katie Garland ’18

6. Anayanci De Paz ’19

DEPARTMENTS

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48 Object of Study Learn about pluripotency from a zebrafish embryo

march 2017 Reed magazine

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Letter from the editor

The Contest

march 2017

www.reed.edu/reed_magazine

For most of my life, I subscribed to the notion that humankind is locked in an epic battle between knowledge and ignorance. This idea is encapsulated by the mission statement of The Economist, which I first ran across my senior year at the Reed library, procrastinating on my thesis: “To take part in a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress.”

If you buy into this idea, it follows that the solution to most of our problems is education. The intelligent mind, equipped with shiny facts, will vanquish ignorance.

It’s an appealing philosophy. But my faith in this commonsense ideal has taken A stockpile of facts is a few knocks lately. We live in an era of mist not enough. We need and shadow, of fake news and “alternative people who know facts.” Technology is only making matters how to sort through worse. Our smartphones are not delivering us from ignorance—instead, they are competing claims, burying us under a tide of misinforma- interrogate the tion. Conspiracy theories that were once authority of sources, confined to the ravings of lunatics now weigh the evidence, flourish on social media like mushrooms and reach their own in a woodpile.

I no longer believe that society can solve conclusions. this problem simply by ladling information into students and sending them into the media landscape we inhabit today. Their innocent certitude will crumble at the first encounter with the partisan fanatics who insist that the MMR vaccine is linked to autism and that global warming is a liberal fiction. No. A stockpile of facts is not enough. We need people who know how to sort through competing claims, interrogate the authority of sources, weigh the evidence, and reach their own conclusions. People who are willing to go to unfamiliar places and absorb new perspectives. People with the guts to revise their ideas based on new research. People who believe in something kind of old-fashioned—the truth.

In short, we need more Reedies. Because sometimes the enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, but something more sinister.

—CHRIS LYDGATE ’90 EDITOR 2

Reed magazine march 2017

3203 SE Woodstock Boulevard, Portland, Oregon 97202 503/777-7591 Volume 96, No. 1 MAGAZINE editor

Chris Lydgate ’90 503/777-7596 chris.lydgate@reed.edu class notes editor

Katie Pelletier ’03 503/517-7727 pelletic@reed.edu In Memoriam editor

Randall S. Barton 503/517-5544 bartonr@reed.edu art director

Tom Humphrey 503/459-4632 tom.humphrey@reed.edu REED COLLEGE RELATIONS vice president, college relations

Hugh Porter director, communications & public affairs

Mandy Heaton director, alumni & parent relations

Mike Teskey director, development

Jan Kurtz Reed College is a private, independent, non-sectarian four-year college of liberal arts and sciences. Reed provides news of interest to alumni, parents, and friends. Views expressed in the magazine belong to their authors and do not necessarily represent officers, trustees, faculty, alumni, students, administrators, or anyone else at Reed, all of whom are eminently capable of articulating their own beliefs.

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

Periodicals postage paid at Portland, Oregon.

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

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.

Mightier than the Pen

Let me compliment you on the December 2016 Reed magazine. I was delighted to find that it had zero references to calligraphy or to Prof. Lloyd Reynolds [English and art 1929-69]. (I didn’t do an electronic search. Please don’t tell me I am wrong.)

Reed has a creation myth and tales of lost greatness. Stories are repeated time and time again, without giving the old farts time to die so that the stories can seem new to new ears.

Repeating these tales must provide some survival benefit, I suppose.

There is no part of the mythos more annoying to this reader, and less valuable to the future of Reed students, than the calligraphy element.

Calligraphy combines a unique combination of deluded self-appreciation and utter lack of value to society. By any metric relating to speed of reading or depth of comprehension of text written in this sort of script, calligraphy is a dead loss. As a bonus negative, the writing itself is slow. I place calligraphy on par with teaching a pig to waltz, or teaching oneself to tie a bow tie 13 different ways. (Oups! Sorry about your cover art!)

Please carry on with your good works. I know you will backslide. It’s hard to break a bad habit.

I forgive you in advance. It’s no real problem with me. When I see an article with mention of calligraphy or Reynolds, I just throw the magazine away and carry on. No donation that year!

Lawrence Butcher ’75 Mountain View, CA For many years we have maintained an unofficial policy of mentioning Lloyd Reynolds at least six times in every issue (it used to be six per article, but we decided to ease up). I have no idea how an entire issue slipped through the copy desk in this lamentable Lloydless state, but I’m glad you enjoyed your reprieve. It will be brief.

From the Editor:

Raindrops Keep “Fallen” on our Head

I, too, winced at the use of the euphemism “fallen” when honoring our fellow classmates, professors, and friends. So I smiled when I saw John Cushing’s friendly but clear protest letter about the euphemism. I also understand it’s a tricky topic for many people. In response to your asking for suggestions as to how to word these announcements, I suggest something along the lines of “Honoring the recent death(s) of fellow classmates, professors, and friends.” This avoids the use of the word “dead,” which is graceless and heavy handed, in this context, but which does look at the subject without blinking.

I don’t think we need euphemisms, but we do need some grace when it comes to remembering them.

Respectfully, and in honor of Reed College, and fellow classmates, professors and friends, dead or alive, Elizabeth Donnally Davidson ’70, MAT ’71 Bainbridge Island, Washington I agree with John Cushing ’67’s letter regarding the use of “fallen,” but would not support his suggested use of “departed.” That sounds too much like someone just left campus or an airport, although I understand the use of “dearly departed.” “Deceased” is appropriate and accurate, but just “In Memoriam” is sufficient and clear without further explanation.

Jim Temple ’66 Berrien Springs, Michigan I don’t doubt you are hearing from lots of Reedies in response to your request in response to John Cushing’s letter protesting use of “fallen” for deceased Reedies. Here’s my proposal. Like the computer in Red Dwarf I want to say “They’re dead, Dave. They’re all dead.” I have long hated the use of “fallen” with regard to soldiers or anyone else who has died. “In Memoriam” is for those members of the Reed community who have died. So why not say so? They didn’t fall down. They died.

Richard McClelland ’70 “Departed”? By which train?

“Deceased”? Fancy-shmancy!

Can’t we finally get rid of 19th-century euphemisms & recognize that death is the inevitable end of everyone’s mortal life? What’s wrong with “dead” &/or “died”? They imply nothing about any postdeath state, other than complete separation from interaction with the “living.” [This does bar

discussion of ghosts, but Reed Magazine has a supposedly knowledgeable readership.]

Wm. D. Fountain ’61 Carlsbad, California

“More Rigor!” They Cried

President Kroger is quoted (December 2016, p.

7) as saying “the graduation rate for all Reedies is too low.” Hogwash. Reed used to be synonymous with academic rigor and repute; Reedies that could not hack it did not graduate. Perhaps Kroger should just completely destroy the declining academic reputation of Reed completely and just offer a diploma when parents cut the check? The current grade inflation has already rendered Reed grades as useless as those of its peers. Should students feel they are owed a diploma like they apparently are entitled to a 4.0? Students should not expect to graduate simply because they got accepted.

As for your request for a better alternative to “fallen” . . . seriously? From a Reedie? I can’t believe you did not consult Mr. Praline: “’E’s not pinin’! ’E’s passed on! This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! ’E’s expired and gone to meet ’is maker! ’E’s a stiff! Bereft of life, ’e rests in peace! If you hadn’t nailed ‘im to the perch ‘e’d be pushing up the daisies! ’Is metabolic processes are now ’istory! ’E’s off the twig! ’E’s kicked the bucket, ’e’s shuffled off ’is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-PARROT!!”

Choose any of the above when I have entered my final slumber to see what dream may come.

Philip Wilk ’95 Germantown, Maryland I applaud your lively defense of rigor (and rigor mortis), but your underlying assumption about grade inflation is off the mark. According to the registrar, the average GPA for all Reed students in 2015–16 was 3.11 on a 4.00 scale, a figure that has increased by less than 0.15 of a grade point over the past 31 years—hardly an erosion of standards.

Does this mean that Reed is fated to have a lower graduation rate than other colleges? Probably. But personally I am convinced that Reed can improve its graduation rate without sacrificing rigor, if it provides students with the right support. Perhaps we should install a parrot in Commons?

From the Editor:

Although the stories in Reed Magazine are always well written and interesting, my favorite section is “What is a Reedie?” The graduates’ stories and impressions prompt appreciative tears: in this era where stupid seems to reign, it’s wonderful march 2017 Reed magazine

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Letters to Reed that Reed continues to challenge students with the highest academic standards. The variety of personalities, interests, thesis topics, and outside pursuits demonstrates that Reed is striving for diversity. Unleashed into the world, these graduates promise to provide the leadership and progressiveness we so desperately need. There is hope.

When I was in high school, I wanted to attend Reed, but a variety of obstacles (mostly financial) prevented that. As a higher education reporter for the Oregonian in the mid-1980s, I became familiar with the MALS program (then directed

by Toinette Menashe MALS ’72) and promptly sought acceptance into the program. Later, I took a year’s leave of absence from the newspaper to study at Reed full time. My undergraduate

gift to all who knew her. She and husband Cliff Sather ’61 were wonderful partners. And she delighted in son Tom and family.

Joella Werlin, friend The obituary for Prof. William Couch Jr. [English 1953-55], interested me because I had a part in his hiring by Reed. I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago from 1951–54 working part time in Harper Library. I became acquainted with Bill Couch, either because he also worked in the library or because he was there for many hours doing his doctoral research in English literature.

He asked many people, including me, where he might apply to teach. I suggested he try Reed with some trepidation because I knew Reed had no black faculty members. Also I remembered the unhappy experience of two students, the

“ There is no part of the mythos more annoying to this reader [. . . ]than the calligraphy element” —Lawrence Butcher ’75 classes included a full year of Hum 110, as well as a smattering of history and literature, and I continued to take the MALS courses at night. My thesis was on the Hitler Youth movement before and during World War II. Attending Reed was the best educational move I ever made; the experience gave me the confidence to delve thoroughly into any project that came my way.

Ten years ago, I moved to Cannon Beach, which, it seems, is a mecca for Reedies. I have spent most of my time as an editor of local weeklies and a reporter for the local daily newspaper.

In November, I was one of three city council candidates; two of us were Reed graduates. I will start my new “education” as a city councilor in January.

What I also find interesting in Reed magazine are the Class Notes. The accomplishments achieved by Reed graduates who have pursued their destinies throughout the world demonstrate how thoroughly they were taught to be curious and to trust their instincts. They have kept the promise.

Thank you for producing a magazine that reassures its readers that there are still educated, well-rounded thinkers out there, propagating the world with wisdom.

Nancy McCarthy MALS ’92 Cannon Beach, Oregon

Remembering Louise Sather ’61

Reed lost an inspiring exemplar with the passing of Louise K. Sather ’61. So many talents reconfigured through the years in so many creative ways! She was deeply probing and brought warmth as well as understanding when friends turned to her for wise counsel.

The profile of Louise in Reed Magazine is a

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Reed magazine march 2017

only African Americans enrolled; she was in her 20s and he a young 17- or 18-year-old. She said everyone assumed they should date one another, and she was too mature to be interested in him.

She stayed only one year; I don’t remember whether he returned.

What I did not know then about Bill Couch was his many other accomplishments and interests. It makes me appreciate him even more.

Annice Mills Alt ’51 Southern Pines, North Carolina

Race, Class, and Reed

I am writing about the article “Protest Amplifies Discussion of Race on Campus” that appeared in the December 2016 issue. I was struck by a quote from Addison Bates ’18, one of 400 demonstrators demanding changes in the Reed curriculum and the hiring of more tenured black professors. Ms. Bates said: “Our goal is to move our institution away from perpetuating racism and towards perpetuating antiracism.” I think that this statement is mistaken because it is empty of any concrete content and rather irresponsible.

The article provides data of a higher dropout rate for black students than white students at Reed. Unfortunately, the partial statistics presented in the article ignore other sociological categories, such as wealth, or students that do not fit into the black and white mold.

Also absent in the article are the following words or phrases: poverty, inequality, contingent labor and part-time work as the new “normal,” poverty wages, the student loan crisis, Wall Street and capitalism. This is unfortunate because those terms could contribute an economic and class explanation of the plight of student, lower middle-class, and working-class youth in campuses

and cities across the nation. A recent news item, for instance, reports on colleges setting up food banks for impoverished students. A survey of 3,000 college students published in October

by Students Against Hunger indicates that an astounding 48% have faced food insecurity.

Earlier this month, economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, leading experts on global inequality, released a groundbreaking study on the growth of income inequality in the United States between 1946 and 2016. The conclusions are staggering: Since the mid-1970s there has occurred one of the most rapid upward redistributions of income in modern history, for any country. The U.S. is now the most economically and socially unequal advanced nation in this entire planet.

The phenomenon of homeless students has also become more common; “One sees them discretely washing their teeth and themselves in the college restrooms in the morning,” one student told me during a Thanksgiving dinner for impoverished community college students given by a community church in California. Homelessness and the housing crisis go hand in hand; in Seattle, students are being asked to pay upwards of $700 a month for rooms the size of a parking lot stall.

Median rents in Oakland, California, are now topping $3,000 a month.

Also left out of the equation are 25 years of imperialist wars, based on lies, being fought mostly by youth that have been forced by economic circumstances to join the military, “economic draftees.”

Surely all the above factors may help explain the low rates of graduation for black students at Reed and elsewhere.

According to another report, a layer of elderly citizens that retired on Social Security are having the student loans that they defaulted on deducted from their paltry Social Security checks, driving them below the poverty line.

I hope that this letter encourages Addison Bates and other students to see the issues that confront youth and college students in Portland and elsewhere in a larger, social context, because these are class issues. I think that those students that focus on race, which, I insist, represents a totally unscientific, totally abstract perspective, are making a mistake.

Ms. Bates has been quoted using the unfortunate phrase that Reed currently “perpetuates” racism. Those are very strong words that are not grounded in any evidence. I hope that Addison reconsiders and throws herself into a serious study, a serious campaign, really, of the economic causes and political solutions for the growing inequality, poverty, and police violence that more and more characterize our society.

Gerardo Nebbia ’72, socialist Paramount, California

EVENTS AT

STIMULATE YOUR INTELLECT.

More than 200 public events each year.

Archaeological Institute of America Lecture Series March 2, March 22, April 6 Performing Arts Building 320 Free

The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution March 6 Performing Arts Building 320 Free

David R. Eddings Lecture Fred Moten March 9 Eliot Hall chapel Free

“The Six Types of Data Journalism Stories” Andrew Flowers March 22 Vollum lecture hall Free

“U.S. Immigration Policy in the Age of Trump: Do Facts Matter?”

Wayne Cornelius March 28 Vollum lecture hall Free

These Violent Delights Reed Theatre March 31–April 8 Diver Studio Theater Tickets required

Steven E. Ostrow Distinguished Visitors Program in the Visual Arts Finbarr Barry Flood

“Night of Concertos” Reed Orchestra Concert April 18 Kaul Auditorium Free

Mysticism, Modernity, & Movement Reed Music & Dance Departments April 21 Performing Arts Building atrium Free

Spring Dance Concert May 5–6 Greenwood Performance Theater Tickets required

April 5 Vollum lecture hall Free

Visit events.reed.edu to learn more, to purchase tickets, and to sign-up for our mailing list.

Eliot Circular news from campus

p h o t o s t h i s pa g e b y t o m h u m p h r e y

Religion Major Named Rhodes Scholar R e l i g i o n m a j o r Pe m a M .

McLaughlin ’16 was named a Rhodes Scholar in November, becoming the 32nd Reed grad to win the prestigious award.

Pema compiled an impressive track record at Reed, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and winning the Class of ’21 Award for their senior thesis, “Pointing at the Moon,” which traced the development of Buddhism in America and posed deep questions about the nature and definition of religion.

Pema has also conducted research on Daoism, the Nation of Islam, and studied Chinese, history, humanities, and Japanese sword arts. Prof. Kambiz GhaneaBassiri [religion], who served as their thesis adviser, called Pema “an extraordinary student.”

Pema grew up in a Tibetan Buddhist community near Junction City, California, a remote town in Trinity County with a population of 400, and came to Reed on a full scholarship.

“Honestly, my first thought

beyond just being very excited was that I was so excited to tell all of my Reed professors, who’ve gotten me to this moment,” Pema said.

Pema took a religion class during their first year at Reed and was fascinated by the discipline.

“The stakes are high, the history is bloody, and the responsibility to the people you’re writing about is profound,” Pema said. “Religion is such a compelling point of access to human culture. And the faculty in the Reed religion department are the most amazing professors in the world.”

Pema also worked in the Hauser Library, learned Chinese, joined a writers’ group, and volunteered with SEEDS, serving with local nonprofits such as Books to Prisoners and the Children’s Book Bank.

Rhodes Scholarships are awarded to outstanding young scholars who demonstrate “intellect, character, leadership, and commitment to service.” The award will allow Pema to go to Oxford to study Buddhism and Sanskrit.

January’s snowstorm, the biggest in 20 years, brought Portland traffic to a halt. But the nearly 12 inches of snow that settled in Reed Canyon conjured visions of a frozen Narnia.

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Giuseppe milo

Elliot Leffler

Eliot Circular

Dublin, Sligo, and Gort

Theater Department Stages Insurrection In the midst of the presidential election last year, Reed’s theatre department staged a joyous insurrection—Paris Commune, a musical by Steven Cosson and Michael Friedman about the political turmoil in France in 1871, when struggling workers banded together with the Paris guard and formed a self-government that lasted for 10 weeks.

“I first discovered Paris Commune last spring, in the midst of a heated primary

between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders,” wrote director Prof. Elliot Leffler [theatre 2014–] in the program notes.

“For the first time in a long time, Americans were talking passionately about the prospect of a political revolution to upend the economic inequality plaguing our society. This play—chronicling an event that took place 145 years ago and 5,000 miles away— seemed powerfully resonant.”

The play made creative use

of historical documents, like the diary of the inimitable Louise Michel (played by Ashlin Hatch ’16) and the anonymous radical newspaper Père Duchêne (Madhav Pulle ’19), and punctuated with a history of labor told through the can-can.

Elliot Menard ’19, who played the Soprano, gave a noteworthy musical performance, as did the entire the cast. The inimitable John Vergin ’78 served as musical director and played piano.

Join Prof. Jay Dickson and a merry band of alumni on the adventure of a lifetime—a trip to Ireland during June 12-21, 2017. We’ll visit Dublin on Bloomsday.

We’ll enjoy special access to historic manuscripts, including the Book of Kells. We’ll explore megaliths and visit areas that inspired the poetry of Yeats, including Rosses Point, Glencar Waterfall, and Thoor Ballylee. Not to mention nature walks, bike rides, and pub crawls. For details or to sign up, please visit Eventbrite.

REED COLLEGE MASTER OF ARTS IN LIBERAL STUDIES

“The MALS program has given me the opportunity to broaden my intellectual horizons, explore historical foundations, entertain alternative modes for expressing ideas and values, and engage in critical, future-oriented thinking. The program offers a deeply compelling experience for anyone who wants greater insight into who we are now, how we became that way, and the larger possibilities, going forward, of being and becoming human.”

— NEIL RAMILLER MALS ’17

Learn more at reed.edu/MALS

LAST LECTURE Saluting our retiring (and not-so-retiring) professors

Chasing Coyote

Prof. Robert Brightman ’73 [anthro 1988-2016] Though it is impossible to reduce a life’s work to a single element, Prof. Robert Brightman always encouraged his students to “attend to the living, breathing, enculturated, biographical human subjects who inhabit these rhizomic assemblages, hybrid collectives, relational ontologies, post-human Anthropocenes, and other constructs we traffic in.”

He retired from Reed last year, but continues his research in anthropology and linguistics. He also writes short stories and works as expert witness and researcher for legal firms representing Native American communities in Canada and the United States.

His 1993 book Grateful Prey examines different aspects of human-animal relations in the hunting practices of the Rock Cree people in northern Canada. He has written comparative studies of hunter-gatherer peoples, focusing on gender and on effects of religious conceptions on sustainable and nonsustainable foraging practices.

Prof. Brightman first came to Reed in the Sixties, as a student planning to major in English. While studying Native American languages and societies with Prof. David French ’39 [anthro 1947-88], he discovered that anthropology fired his imagination. He invokes Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, who suggested that anthropology is a means to the “permanent decolonization of thought.”

Brightman collaborated with French on his senior thesis, The Continuing Adventures of Raven and Coyote: A Comparative Analysis of North American Indian Transformer Myths.

As was French’s custom, thesis conferences often occurred in the early a.m. at the professor’s home across the street on Woodstock Boulevard. When Brightman became a professor, he based his own thesis advising on French’s informal and collaborative model, albeit without the nocturnal office hours. The thesis focused on the Native Northwest literary characters Raven and Coyote, and in particular on how their actions institute and explain natural phenomena and cultural practices. In later graduate research with Cree, Brightman encountered similar characters and became interested in the seemingly

incongruous juxtaposition of wisdom and benevolence with imbecility and moral chaos in the same personage. For example, the character who institutes the incest taboo in one story, violates it in another.

After earning his PhD from the University of Chicago, he began teaching at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. In 1988, he returned to Reed, where he divided his teaching and research between cultural anthropology and linguistics. In 1998, he was named to the endowed chair in American Indian Studies established at Reed by Ruth Cooperman Greenberg. The many courses he taught included “North American Indians,” “Semiotics and Structuralism,” “Algonquian” (linguistics), “Myth and Folktale,” “Subject, Person, Self, Individual,” and “Nature, Culture, and Environmentalism.”

Brightman’s principal theoretical contributions focus on change and continuity in

the anthropological culture concept, and on the conventional character of customs commonly believed to be necessary.

“Nowhere are customs imagined as more naturally inevitable than in the anthropological theories of hunter-gatherer societies,” he explains. “In most of these societies, for example, men specialize in big-game hunting and women in plant collection. This is usually ‘explained’ in anthropology by one or another supposed female incapacity that limits women’s hunting. But it’s ontology (including theological ideas) and gender politics, not primary and secondary sexual characteristics, that gets us this recurring division of labor. The revisability of conventions connects with anthropology’s explicit or implicit comparativism, one of the discipline’s defining qualities.”

—RANDALL S. BARTON

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Empire of the Griffin Connecting Reed alumni across the globe

The Alumni Board The Alumni Board is Reed’s national volunteer board of directors whose purpose is to work in partnerships with the college to direct the alumni association’s goals, programs, and services, and represent the alumni in the broader Reed College community. Here we present nominees for new terms; continuing members are listed below.

Scott Foster ’77

Jinyoung Park ’11

Margaret Anderson ’05

NOMINATIONS FOR ALUMNI BOARD STARTING JULY 2017 Alumni Trustee Nominee: Captain Scott E. Foster, USN (ret), ’77 Biology Scott recently retired as executive director of Coast Life Support District, a public agency providing emergency medical response to a rural community in northern California. He previously was a U.S. Navy officer, operating medical care systems all over the world.

He began his career as an Army reconnaissance squad leader in Panama, switched to the Navy, then served as senior policy analyst for the Chief of Naval Operations at the Pentagon. He also earned the Federal Excellence in Healthcare Leadership Award.

Scott worked as a night-shift EMT in St. Vincent Hospital while he was a student.

He is a big-band jazz guitarist and has been playing professionally for more than 20 years.

Scott earned a B.A. in biology from Reed, an M.A. in health services administration from Washington University, and an M.S. in management information systems from the Naval Postgraduate School. He has served on a zillion Reed boards and committees, including the alumni board, the alumni engagement committee, the Washington, D.C., chapter, his 30th class reunion committee, and many others. He also is a volunteer firefighter. Scott and his wife, Susan Rudy ‘79, live in Jenner, CA; they are the parents of Claire Rudy Foster ‘06.

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Alumni Board Secretary Nominee: Jinyoung Park ’11 Linguistics Jinyoung is the assistant director of the Center for Public Policy Research at Tulane University, where she directs external relations with funding agencies and policy groups. She works with Tulane’s faculty on grant development and submission, manages grant-funded activities and special projects, and coordinates the annual Yates Lecture.

She is also the lead vocalist for a local band, U4ria. Jinyoung earned a B.A. in linguistics from Reed and an M.B.A. from Tulane. She joined Reed’s alumni board in 2015. She also has served as a career network, admission, and Alumni Fundraising for Reed volunteer; on the alumni engagement committee; and as a local alumni host. Jinyoung lives in New Orleans, LA. At-Large Member Nominee: Margaret Anderson ’05 Political Science & Russian Margaret is a senior program officer for Cultivating New Frontiers in Agriculture, an international non-profit that works with businesses, foundations, governments, and communities to help meet the world’s growing demand for food. Her background includes economic development, inclusive finance, and international education, and she has worked on private health sector and development finance projects with USAID, World Bank, IFC, and the Gates Foundation. Margaret earned a B.A. in political science and Russian

from Reed, an M.A. in Russian studies from European University at St. Petersburg, and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago.

She serves on the steering committee of Reed’s Washington, D.C., alumni chapter.

She also has served as a local alumni host, and as career network and admission volunteer. Margaret and her husband, John Mackedon, live in Silver Spring, MD. At-Large Member Nominee: Eira May ’08 English Eira is an editor at Vacasa, a full-service vacation rental company with operations in the U.S., Europe, and Central and South America.

She is responsible for thought leadership and contributed content, and her writing has been published in Forbes, Fortune, and the Huffington Post. She previously worked as a content strategist, marketing research analyst, and consultant for Seabourne, Growthink, Huron Consulting Group, MasterPlans, and the Lyceum Agency, and as editor in chief for Perfectly Scientific Press. Eira earned a B.A. in English from Reed, and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in English and new media studies from UC-Davis. She has been an active Reed volunteer and has participated in Beyond Reed at Paideia. Eira and her husband, Christopher May ‘08, live in Portland.

Eira May ’08

Michael McGreevey ’04

At-Large Member Nominee: Michael McGreevey ’04 Anthropology Michael is a senior grant manager for Conser vation International’s Global Conservation Fund, where he focuses on sustainable financing for conservation investments. Michael previously worked on climate policy with the Environmental Defense Fund and on indigenous issues at Ecotrust. Michael earned a B.A. in anthropology from Reed and an M.S. from Johns Hopkins University. He is a member of the Conservation Finance Alliance. Michael and his wife, Carol Hu ‘03, live in Oakland, CA, where they have coordinated Earth Day gatherings for Reedies.

At-Large Member Nominee: Ben Rankin ’87 English Ben is a principal in Human Capital Investments. He has developed industrial and real estate projects for 20 years; his work has focused on waste and energy recovery, historic preservation and affordable housing.

Ben also teaches at Pinchot University, and he has been a theater director and producer.

Ben earned a B.A. in English from Reed and an M.B.A. from the University of Washington.

He has been a Working Weekend mentor and career network volunteer for Reed, and a board member and advisor to various other organizations. Ben and his wife, Margit, live in Seattle, WA.

Ben Rankin ’87

Andrei Stephens ’08

At-Large Member Nominee: Andrei Stephens ’08 Economics Andrei is the mobile product manager for Quicken Loans, where he works on product strategy and innovation. He previously served as a product manager at a venturebacked mobile SaaS company, and he has consulted with start-ups on three continents. His experience includes developing mobile products across platforms and through both business-to-business and business-to-consumer models. Andrei earned a B.A. in economics from Reed and an M.B.A. from Oxford. He has served as a career network volunteer and local alumni host for Reed, and he has participated in Beyond Reed at Paideia. Andrei lives in Detroit, MI. Nominating Committee for 2017-2018 For complete bios, please visit alumni.reed.edu Rich Roher ’79, Past-President Lisa Saldana ’94, President Laura Saunders ’63 Suzanne Cassidy ’65 Clara Siegel ’09

Continuing Alumni Board for 2017-2018 President: Lisa Saldana ’94 Vice President: Beverly Lau ’06 Past President: Richard Roher ’79 Alumni Trustees: Mo Copeland ’82, Jay Hubert ’66, Dylan Rivera ’95 At-Large Members: Alea Adigweme ’06, David Hardy ’71, MJ Jacobs ’04, Rebecca Ok ’09, Melissa Osborn ’13, Darlene Pasieczny ’01, Sebastian Pastore ’88, Shimon Prohow ’02, Jeremy Stone ’99

Three ways you can get involved with Reed today

• ATTEND alumni events! Become

active in your local alumni chapter or return to campus in June for Reunions.

• VOLUNTEER your time, skills,

and experience to enrich the college, the student experience, and the alumni community.

• GIVE an annual gift to Reed and

ensure the challenging, rigorous, and transformative education you received is possible for others.

Visit alumni.reed.edu for more details.

march 2017 Reed magazine 11

Taking a Fresh Look at Hum 110

BY CHRIS LYDGATE ’90

In masterful fashion, Prof. Lena Lenček took the lectern last semester and delivered a classic lecture on the ancient Greek poet Hesiod before an audience of 300 students in Hum 110. Ranging from the myth of Prometheus to the songs of Bob Dylan, Prof. Lencek zeroed in on the central issues posed by Hesiod’s epic Works and Days. Is toil a virtue? Are the gods just? Is it acceptable to use guile in pursuit of justice?

Sitting in the back of the lecture hall, I couldn’t help but marvel at her dazzling dissection. It reminded me of everything I loved about Hum 110 when I was a student in the ’80s, frantically scribbling notes and smoking Camels.

But times change, and truth be told, not everyone loves Hum 110. As Reed and the nation become more diverse, it was perhaps inevitable that students would eventually cast a critical eye on the college’s signature humanities course. Pointing to the stubborn persistence of longstanding racial inequities in the United States, some students have called out Hum 110 as an example of cultural myopia, or even institutional racism.

Shouldn’t it reflect all humanity, they ask, not just a bunch of dead white European men?

The protests against Hum 110 have ignited a respectful but passionate campus debate over the scope and structure of the course and whether it represents a vision of intellectual life in which all students feel included. At a deeper level, the debate is about race, power, culture, and the nature of education itself.

A Foundational Course Reed’s emphasis on the humanities stretches back to its foundation. Scornful of what he called the “sheep-dip” approach to education, Reed’s first president, William T. Foster, insisted that students “specialize in the humanities” in order to grasp the fundamental interconnectedness of human knowledge.

After WWI, in the teeth of a national mania for practical instruction, Reed doubled down on the humanities with yearlong courses in literature and history. In fact, when the trustees installed President Norm Coleman in 1924, students voiced bitter protests in

12 Reed magazine march 2017

the Quest because they worried he might water down Foster’s sweeping vision.

The course we now know as Hum 110 (originally Hum 11) was born in 1943 when the Reed faculty decided to combine the mandatory freshman literature and history courses, creating a unique intellectual experience rooted in several key elements:

• Students look at the same texts through the lens

of different disciplines. They read the plays of Sophocles, for example, as both literature and philosophy; they look at Moses as both a spiritual figure and as a politician.

• Large lectures by a rotating cast of professors. Small

conferences where students learn how to discuss, debate, and defend their readings. Challenging assignments that help students develop their analytical powers and writing skills.

• A focus on the ancient Mediterranean world, especially Greece, because of its enormous influence on the subsequent history of Europe and America.

In some ways, the course has changed remarkably little. The interdisciplinary structure remains in force, and many of the books that students read in 1943 are still on the current reading list, such as the Code of Hammurabi, Homer’s Iliad, Herodotus’s Histories, and works by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, and Aristotle.

But in other ways, Hum 110 has changed dramatically. The chronological and geographical scope has expanded and contracted like an accordion. At various times, it has featured the Confessions of St. Augustine, the Song of Roland, Dante’s Inferno and the welsh epic Mabinogion.

As our understanding of the ancient world has evolved, the course has evolved with it. Hum 110 now begins with the Epic of Gilgamesh and ancient Egyptian poetry, including the Book of the Dead, to provide a deeper look at the diverse cultural forces that shaped the ancient Mediterranean.

Students explore gender and ethnicity in the Book of Esther and examine how women are systematically silenced in the Iliad. They read Apuleius’s Golden Ass as a subversive narrative which offers savage insight into the brutal power relations of imperial Rome. Every ten years, the faculty conduct a thoroughgoing review to make sure the course stays fresh and up to date.

Firing the Canon To student critics, however, Hum 110 still contains glaring structural defects. It completely ignores many of the world’s great civilizations. Its authors are overwhelmingly male and white. And while Reed offers many courses that focus on other parts of the world (see the Foundations of Chinese Civilization), only Hum 110 is mandatory—a requirement, they say, that conveys the surreptitious message that white men are the authentic source of thought and civilization. Finally, the critics charge that the course does not acknowledge the role these texts have played in colonialism, racism, and slavery.

The 24 professors who teach Hum 110— and who are responsible for the curriculum— respond to these criticisms in different ways.

(Which should come as no surprise; there has been robust faculty debate over the course for the last fifty years.) But after conducting several interviews and following several conversations, I’d like to offer some insights from the course’s defenders.

First, the racial categories of 21st-century America do not map well onto the ancient Mediterranean. “The idea that Hum 110 is a ‘white’ course is very strange to me,” says Prof. Jay Dickson [English]. “It presupposes that our contemporary racial categories are timeless.”

Indeed, efforts to claim ancient authors and societies as “white” or “black” have often been driven by ideological motives—before the Civil War, for example, black writers and activists pointed to ancient Egypt as a great example of black civilization, while apologists for slavery stridently insisted that the ancient Egyptians were—you guessed it— white. In any case, the notion that the ancient Greeks should be coded as white is widely challenged by scholars.

Second, the course offers an excellent platform for critically examining key constructs that have framed the narrative of race.

“Whiteness, western, eastern, canon, identity, nation, race, europe are, among others, terms that are repeatedly historicized, considered critically, and interrogated by lecturers in Hum 110 as it currently stands,” says Prof. Lucia Martinez [English].

More important, the professors who teach Hum 110 today do not treat its texts as holy

objects of veneration but rather as messages in bottles, cast into a distant sea many ages ago, laden with tantalizing clues. They analyze, dissect, compare, and contextualize the readings, unpacking the tacit assumptions and interrogating the far-reaching implications.

The texts are “great” not only because they are aesthetically pleasing but also because they have exerted a tremendous influence on history—for good and for ill. Aristotle’s ideas about cause and effect, for example, provide an intellectual scaffold that scientists still rely on today. But at the same time, his doctrine of the “natural slave” in the Politics was deployed to justify the plantation system.

“I certainly understand the concerns the

conducted in April 2016, 44% of respondents said that Hum 110 was one of the reasons they came to Reed; 70% said they would describe the course positively; 70% said they enjoyed or “sort of” enjoyed the course; and 91% said the skills they learned proved either very useful or somewhat useful in their subsequent coursework.

But the survey also revealed pockets of dissatisfaction. Only 30% of female students said they would describe the course positively. 47% of students who identify as black, indigenous, and people of color think Hum 110 should change. And 75% of transgender students think the texts should be changed. (The study was conducted by

fast as everyone would like—but we are making progress.”

The debate over Hum 110 has a special resonance for alumni, many of whom had a love-hate relationship with the course. “When I took Hum 110 in the mid-’80s I was absolutely convinced it was too conservative and Western-focused, and needed a radical overhaul,” says Sandeep Kaushik ’89, a political consultant based in Seattle. “But in the 30 years since, it turned out that the grounding I got at Reed in Greek and Roman classical texts and ideas has repeatedly proven invaluable to me in making my way in the world.”

Can Hum 110 evolve so that all students feel more invested in the course? What is

“ Hum 110 is like a shark. It has to keep moving or it dies.”

—Prof. Jay Dickson [English]

protesting students have registered with the existing syllabus,” says Prof. Lenček. “To them, the primary readings as currently constituted—and the secondary materials—do not represent the heritage of the entire, diverse freshman class; nor, in their view, do they articulate a systematic critique of the legacy of ancient Mediterranean civilizations.”

She goes on: “I acknowledge that their criticism is justified, but I also keep in mind that this same intersection of Mediterranean civilization incubated the ideas and forms that gave rise to many of the foundational, positive and productive institutions of Western civilization, whose benefits we enjoy in the form of freedom of speech, the rule of law, and liberal democracy, to name just a few. I think it is crucial for our students to have an accurate and critical knowledge of this civilizational legacy, just as it is crucial for us all to know and respect the multiple civilizational currents that feed our diverse society.”

Where do we go from here?

It’s clear that many students at Reed revel in the depth and complexity of Hum 110.

According to an online student survey

the Student Committee for Academic Policy and Planning.)

In October, the student senate sent a letter to the faculty endorsing the call for change.

“Many feel that the content and the mandatory nature of [Hum 110] is alienating for underrepresented minorities and marginalized groups,” the senators wrote.

In fact, many professors want to see changes to the course, too. “Hum 110 is like a shark,” says Prof. Dickson. “It has to keep moving, or it dies.”

The Hum 110 faculty has been working with students to rethink the course. Last semester, the faculty voted to accelerate the timetable for reviewing the course, and several committees are now hard at work looking at fresh proposals. The ideas range from the modest (continuing to focus on Greece and Rome), to the innovative (Greece, Rome, and Islam), to the radical (scrap the course, hold 24 individual seminars).

“Students have been very effective in getting their concerns on the table,” says Prof.

Libby Drumm [Spanish], who now chairs the Hum 110 faculty. “We’re working hard to address these concerns—maybe not as

the significance of an author’s identity to a particular text? What is the justification for making students read Hesiod but not, say, Toni Morrison?

“I am confident that Reed’s faculty, students, alumni, and administration have the creativity, patience, sound judgement, and good will to arrive at a consensus solution that will result in a stronger, more vibrant and more representative Humanities program,” says Prof. Lenček.

The faculty will canvass opinions from students, professors, and alumni this semester and plans to discuss and ultimately vote on proposals in the fall. Changes, if any, would take effect in Fall 2018.

Go Further

How the Humanities Saved Reed. An examination of the role the humanities played in shaping Reed’s identity. By John Sheehy ’82, March 2009.

Defending the Citadel. An account of the battles over Hum 110 and the concept of “relevance” between the Young Turks and the Old Guard in the late 1960s. By Laura Ross ’98, December 2008.

What Hum 110 is All About. An introduction to a collection of classic Hum lectures. By Prof. Peter Steinberger [poli sci], March 2011.

march 2017 Reed magazine 13

The Dynamics of Compassion Psychologist Paul Piff ’04 unveils the link between socioeconomic status and altruism—and finds hints of a path to a kinder society

BY MARTY SMITH ’88

Paul Piff wasn’t planning to lead a scientific assault on the morals of the One Percent.

He was just following the data.

“It was an accident,” he admits. As a grad student at UC Berkeley, Piff was running an experiment called the “dictator test,” in which participants can choose to share a portion of a small cash gift with a stranger. He was expecting to find some connection between specific personality traits—such as empathy, emotional intelligence, and religiosity—and altruistic behavior.

Unfortunately, the experiment was a

14 Reed magazine march 2017

bust—subjects’ willingness to share didn’t seem to line up with any of the personality traits he was testing. On a hunch, Piff tried a second run through the data, this time plotting subjects’ generosity against their socioeconomic status.

A provocative conclusion leapt off the page: as income went up, the propensity to help others went down. In other words, wealth—in this experiment at least—seemed to make subjects less concerned with the plight of their neighbor.

Since that day in 2006, Piff and his

colleagues have explored this dynamic in a variety of contexts, from traffic patterns to board games. All the results have fallen in line with the same broad trend: a sense of privilege over others seems to be associated with a reduced capacity for empathy.

The political implications of this work has insured plenty of attention. Piff’s been on the cover of New York magazine, given a TED talk that has garnered over 3 million views, and been approached by publishers eager for a popularized version of his conclusions. (That book, he says, is “coming along.”)

kendrick brinson

For those on the left end of the political spectrum, Piff’s findings confirmed their worst fears about the moral bankruptcy of the robber barons. For those on the right, it was yet another plot cooked up by liberal academics (one internet commenter referred, memorably, to “university moochers, who never had a real job and live off the public dole”).

A more careful look, however, shows the work to be less a rebuke to any particular social class than a revelation about habits of mind common to all of us.

Clean-cut and boyish, the 35-year-old Piff is hardly central casting’s idea of a Molotov-chucking class warrior. During a recent campus visit, he greeted a reporter in a short-sleeved button-down shirt and crisp khakis, the Mao cap and Che Guevara beard conspicuous by their absence.

He characterizes his background as “comfortably middle-class.” He lived in Seattle till the age of four, then moved with his family to Haifa, Israel, where his father worked as an archivist and his mother a translator for the Baha’I faith.

When it came time to shop for colleges, he was attracted to Reed for its reputation for whip-smart, burn-the-midnight-oil rigor.

“That’s not the kind of student I was in high school,” he laughs, “but I was attracted to that.” One suspects he got serious soon thereafter—underneath the relaxed demeanor and self-deprecating jibes, there’s a certain intensity that suggests that you want him on your team at the interdepartmental softball tournament.

A fascination with the problem of free will led him to a class with Prof. Allen Neuringer [psychology 1970-2008] on Functional Variability of Behavior, which dealt with the psychological bases of free will.

“My hand shot up to ask a question; something like, ‘How can an action we take willingly not be a choice?’ and Neuringer said, ‘Well, did you choose to raise your hand just now?’” Piff recalls. “It blew my mind, the way you could take these big ideas and make them real.”

He credits Reed’s focus on teaching over publication grubbing for the experience. “That [class] is something that would never happen at a big research university,” says Piff, “where a professor can take a specific interest they’re passionate about and drill down and make a class out of it.”

Today, Piff is pursuing his own passions, as an assistant professor at UC Irvine. He has no doubts about the impact of his undergrad experience on his future career. “Reed changed my life,” he says. “It’s a very special place.”

Piff’s most famous experiment is also the one that most clearly shows his work to be more nuanced than the class-war cudgel it seems on first blush.

In this test, pairs of subjects flipped a coin before playing a round of Monopoly. The winner of the coin toss got certain perks—they began the game with twice as much money, got to roll two dice to the loser’s one, and collected twice as much money each time they passed go.

Watching video of this experiment is eye-opening: soon the “rich” player begins showing more dominant behavior—physically taking up more space, barking orders rather than making requests, even eating more pretzels from the bowl provided by the researchers.

After the game, the “rich” players were asked why they won. They tended to cite factors like their own good judgment and strategic play rather than the obvious material advantage with which they’d started the game. Born on third base, they thought they’d hit a triple.

It seems that the context of the situation—whether a person feels advantaged relative to another, regardless of the actual contents of their bank accounts—lies at the root of this lack of compassion.

The good news is that, in addition to making poverty-stricken sophomores behave like Andrew Carnegie with a bad hangover, Piff has also run experiments in which well-heeled participants can be induced to dial back their indifference. One such study showed that viewing a 46-second video on child poverty made wealthy subjects just as compassionate as their blue-collar counterparts.

“Wealth buys us space from other people,” say Piff. When we isolate ourselves from those less fortunate, we run the risk of descending into callous self-absorption.

Paying more attention to the full breadth of humanity can actually make us more humane.

His advice? “Talk to somebody you wouldn’t ordinarily talk to. Get out of your comfort zone.” The world might be a better place, it seems, if we all took the bus every once in a while.

Watch an entertaining PBS NewsHour video of Paul Piff’s subjects playing Monopoly by searching “Why Those Who Feel They Have Less Give More” on YouTube.

Marty Smith, aka Dr. Know, is a columnist for Willamette Week.

march 2017 Reed magazine 15

Codebreaker Prof. Sarah Schaack [biology] cracks the secrets of rogue DNA

BY KATIE PELLETIER ’03

On June 24, 2000, President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair made a dramatic joint announcement.

After decades of intense effort, scientists around the world had acheived a remarkable breakthrough: the sequencing of the human genome.

Prof. Sarah Schaack was a lowly grad student when she heard the news—and the many unexpected developments that would soon follow.

First of all, after the helical skein was unfurled, and the roughly 3.3 billion nucleotides accounted for, the actual number of genes in the human genome would prove to be laughably few. Scientists had guessed that we would boast around 100,000 genes. Instead, the human genome consists of a mere 20,500 genes, similar to the earthworm, but only half as many as rice (40,000). In fact, genes comprise only 3% of our genetic material.

So what is other 97%? Many scientists referto it as “junk.” But as she read the reports, Schaack began to wonder.

m at t d ’a n n u n z i o

On a rainy afternoon in December, I find Prof. Schaack in her office in the biology building sitting among piles of papers and stacks of lab notebooks. She wears a festive holiday-light necklace; through the door, you can hear the muffled clink of students washing glassware in the lab.

Schaack came to Reed in 2011. When not in the classroom or lab, she can be found taking students on field trips to collect specimens like speckled rattlesnakes in the desert, or hosting jam sessions in her living room. She is committed to

community outreach and runs a program teaching bioinformatics and genomics to young scientists in East Africa.

“I like provoking people to think differently about things,” she says. “I like sharing very recent discoveries instead of having it be that people are only exposed to things that are fossilized in text books.”

It’s a busy time of year. There are thesis chapters to read, lab notebooks to grade, and lectures to prepare. But Schaack is happy to talk about her specialty: a kind of DNA known as transposable elements (TEs).

“They are a topic in science that has lots of the elements of a good story,” she says. “They’re surprising, they’re underestimated, they are underappreciated, and they’re wacky.”

TEs are basically asymptomatic viruses that have invaded our genome, recently or eons ago, and can still operate as both protagonists and antagonists, influencing function and health. TEs, in other words, are tricksters: they’ve hitched a ride on our genome, and they can jump around within that genome, as well as transfer to the genomes of other species. They can be small or large segments of DNA, and they partake in an exciting coevolutionary dynamic with their hosts. They’re referred to as “selfish DNA” because they operate to ensure their own, not their host’s, survival. And, importantly, all that jumping around can give rise to mutations in their host, usually neutral to deleterious, but sometimes remarkable and dramatic, even beneficial. “Those are the fairy tales of the transposable element world,” she says.

TEs were first discovered by biologist Barbara McClintock at Cold Spring Harbor Lab in the late 1940s, but it took another four decades for the importance of her findings to be recognized—a lag often attributed to the difficulties women face in biology.

Prof. Sarah Schaack teaches lab techniques to students in her Genes, Genetics & Genomes course. She is expecting a baby in May!

march 2017 Reed magazine 17

m at t d ’a n n u n z i o

Codebreaker continued It turns out that most of our DNA is comprised of TEs and their carcasses.Modern sequencing technology has made great advances in our understanding, but still, comparatively few labs study TEs, and they remain enigmatic.

Schaack researches the rates of movement of TEs and their gross scale accumulation in the genome. She looks at organisms like the speckled rattlesnake, waterfleas, Tasmanian devils, bats, and crop pests to better understand mutations that arise from TE movement.

“There’s nothing else in biology that I would rather study than transposable elements. In fact if I couldn’t study TEs, I don’t know if I would be a biologist. I really love this question, this set of questions,” she says.

She almost didn’t study this set of questions. In 1999, she enrolled in a PhD program to study tropical ecology at the University of Florida. There, she stumbled upon something new. “I had a terrible case of genetics envy brewing, and so I started a journal club on evolutionary genetics with a friend of mine,” she says. The journal club would meet once a week and discuss a selection of scientific papers. The members were mostly professors,

18 Reed magazine march 2017

and the club had one unofficial rule—you had to bring a paper that was outside your comfort zone. “If the professors brought a paper that they didn’t really know, there was no intimidation in talking about it, because we all were clueless about it.”

One day, a biologist she admired brought a

did with me. And it had a big effect.”

The other thing that had a big effect were the mentors who backed her along the way.

As a first-generation student at Earlham, a small liberal arts school in Indiana, she found herself a bit lost at first. During orientation week of her freshman year, her advisor asked

“ I was 17 years old, I was the first person in my family to go to college, and I had zero dollars.” paper on the recently sequenced pine genome, the biggest genome to be sequenced at that point. “It turns out that most of what’s in pine is transposable elements. And I had never heard of transposable elements before,” she says.

Schaack was hooked. She realized she was in the the wrong PhD program, and so she made the risky decision to reapply to graduate school and change the entire trajectory of her career.

“You can see why—” she says, then pauses.

“I guess maybe I haven’t said this in words, but that’s why I’m pretty excited about sharing new stuff that’s on the edge of my knowledge with students, because that’s what someone

her about her plans for graduate school. “I was 17 years old, I was the first person in my family to go to college, and I had zero dollars,” she says. “I said, ‘I don’t know what that is.’

And he said, ‘Well never mind then, it doesn’t matter. You can take whatever you want.’”

That was all the guidance she got until she was fortuitously reassigned to a new advisor, who took a different approach.

“He really asked me, ‘What do you want to do?’ And I still didn’t know. But the whole tenor of the conversation was much more thought-provoking and exploratory for me.”

He helped her to hone in on her interest in biology and later suggested she apply for a position at the Kellogg Biological Station

when she graduated. This guidance was life-changing.

Other mentors would also show her paths and opportunities that she otherwise wouldn’t have known existed, and she would seize them. “I benefitted so much from that good mentorship and the good advice that people gave me without me even seeking it, so I try to be proactive about offering that kind of good environment to the Reed students that I mentor,” she says. “Being maybe not the easiest person in the world myself to mentor has made me better at mentoring other folks. If I had been really well-behaved, and well-prepared, and never made a mistake, I might not have learned as many lessons about what good mentorship could do.”

In 2016, she won an award from the Murdock Charitable Trust recognizing the extraordinary way she involves undergraduates in her research. In her lab this semester, students will work with her to advance scientific understanding of TEs, analyzing rates of TE movement in Drosophila and Daphnia— research made possible by a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation.

Former thesis student Michael Song ’15, a PhD candidate studying fern evolution at UC Berkeley, notes that Schaack was “the single most influential person” in his time at Reed.

“I think what distinguishes her as a mentor is the trust she puts in you to really figure things out,” he says. “You can have no background in her field but you’ll come out of her lab essentially a pro. She holds students to high standards and that’s important whether you’re going to grad school or anything really.”

Jolie Kaner ’15, who coauthored a paper with Schaack on Ebola, based on her senior thesis, notes fondly that Schaack dove into unknown territory, outside her field, on this project because it was important to Jolie.

This willingness to tackle new subjects with students is no small feat. Since 2011 Schaack has mentored over 50 individual Reed student research experiences and published 8 papers with students in peerreviewed journals, bringing her total peerreviewed publications to 33. (But it’s the student coauthored papers, she tells me, about which she is especially happy.)

Like some of her fascinating TEs, Schaack has a habit of affecting large scale change: inspiring her students, surprising her colleagues, and making new discoveries whose implications have yet to be mapped out.

R AC H E L YO D E R ’ 7 5 Giving since 1979

Reed major: Mathematics

Who I am:

A high school math teacher, former Peace Corps volunteer, artist, musician, kayaker, knitter, writer, cook, cyclist, traveler, and morning person.

When I came to Reed:

I joined the Reed community choir and spent Wednesday evenings in the Winch social room singing Verdi’s Requiem.

Why I give:

Because my time at Reed changed my life by exposing me to people and ideas far beyond the borders of the rural Oregon community where I grew up. I am proud to be a graduate and thankful for the financial assistance that made it possible.

Learn more

giving.reed.edu/loyal-owl

Breaking the Frame Students Tackle the Ultimate Outsider Art Form—Comics!

Psych major Jari Lanzalotta ’17 refines the pencil drawings for his project Bam, Bam, Bam before moving on to the final ink drawings.

photo by nina johnson ‘99

A page from Emily Garcia’s graphic novel, ‫( גולם‬Golem).

22 Reed magazine march 2017

nina johnson ‘99

BY RANDALL S. BARTON

In 1954, a prominent psychiatrist by the name of Dr. Fredric Wertham warned America about a dark, insidious force corrupting the morals of an entire generation.

Titled Seduction of the Innocent, Dr. Wertham’s book became a best-seller, playing on postwar anxiety about juvenile delinquents, sparked by an unlikely instrument of insurrection— the ten-cent comic book.

Today, comics—and their highbrow cousins, graphic novels—constitute a billion-dollar industry with a growing and dedicated readership among all walks of life. But comics are also a compelling and distinctive art form, with their own logic, discipline, tools, and traditions, just as worthy of study as ceramics or printmaking, if perhaps dappled with a little more gutter and shadow.

For the past two years, visiting professor Daniel Duford has taught Art 251, Making Graphic Novels, where students explore the history, structure, and mechanics of visual storytelling—and produce their own comic by the semester’s end.

“Reed students tend to be very cerebral and live in their heads, which is great—you can get to a lot of places there,” Duford says.

“But a medium like comics, even though it goes back to a ‘junk’ culture, provides a space where things can become ungainly. In academic study you’re not always allowed to get into a mess.”

Visiting professors leaven the bread at Reed’s intellectual banquet by allowing departments to offer a broader range of courses, which can be changed every few years.

Most students in this popular class are not art majors, but fans of the medium, curious about both the theory and practice of comics. Practitioners of the form are known as comic book artists, or cartoonists, but even if none of his students go on to produce comics for a living, Duford believes they will benefit from having learned to think with their hands.

He refers to a favorite book, Trickster Makes This World, in which author Lewis Hyde refers to “working the joints”—effecting change in the place that bends. Hyde writes: “There is an art-making that begins with poreseeking (lifting the shame covers, finding the loophole, refusing to guard the secrets), that uncovers a plenitude of material hidden from conventional eyes, and that points toward a kind of mind able to work with that revealed complexity.”

Religion major Emily Garcia ’17 sketches a page of her graphic novel.

In mythological stories, Trickster often uses humor to cross over the boundaries that groups use to regulate social life. One of the best places to skirt boundaries is through the pores where the humors flow. Comics provide a porous place to cross over—to work the joints.

“This medium is both cerebral and physical,” Duford says. “The thinking happens through your hands, and it’s messy. Comics carry the whiff of being discredited, of being somewhat unworthy. There are attempts to elevate it, but it works best when it still has a little bit of the stink of the gutter, the junk culture that it rose out of.”

The impact of a comic doesn’t depend on flawless drawing, but on some combination of rhythm, design, language, and story.

“It can be a really clunky, awkward drawing,” Duford explains. “It isn’t important that one is able to render the human figure beautifully, or perfectly capture the roundness of a tree. If you can communicate visually, and have a design sense—meaning you understand how to make these images somehow communicate rhythm and movement—you can do a comic.”

The semester begins with studying the form. Building blocks are made up of images in boxes that form a sequence; space between

the panels is called the gutter. Comics are a hybrid medium that borrow from painting, illustration, and cinema, employing terminology like “shots” for images and “sound effects” for the classic POW, ZAP, and WHAM. But the form also boasts features that are distinctively its own. To begin with, comics are both simultaneous and sequential.

“When you look at a painting, and spend time in front of it, there’s this kind of gestalt,” says Duford. “A movie, on the other hand, is watched in sequence; many images proceed in a line before you. In comics, you’re doing both.”

At the beginning of every class, Duford asks each student to draw a cartoon self-portrait before they go to work on their projects. They scratch away with pencils and pen nibs on Bristol paper as he makes the rounds, offering tips and suggestions. “I would broaden this line; a really thick line will give it more weight.”

Because graphic novels can be read quickly, there is a misperception that they are easy to create. In reality it is a labor-intensive endeavor. It took Duford several years to complete an 80-page comic novel, which can be read in less than an hour. To tap into the physical experience of making comics, he pushes his students to draw lots of pages. The class is organized so that most drawing assignments

photo by nina johnson ‘99

Visiting professor Daniel Duford demonstrates the use of woodcut prints to make comics.

begin in the classroom and are finished as homework.

“If you’re quick enough technically I guess you could get an assignment done in class; but I don’t think anyone ever has,” says Shin Dickens ’17, a classics/religion major. “This is my most work-intensive class, but it occupies a different space in time. Before I do anything large, I start with small, thumbnail sketches to get the flow. I’m a nocturnal person and sometimes I go into the art building at 10 p.m. and work until 4 in the morning. I can’t do readings like that, but I can come in and draw like that.”

In her favorite classroom exercise, each student draws a door. They then pass their page to the next student, who has a minute to sketch a character entering the door.

The paper continues to be passed on, with additional prompts for characters and scenes, until each student winds up with their original page, illustrated with a story made by everyone else.

“It’s getting at the reduction—how clearly you can notate an idea,” Duford explains.

“Because there is no time to think, there’s no

24 Reed magazine march 2017

ego involved. Creatively it breaks you through to places you might not have gone before.”

Indeed, too much time spent on a panel stifles the energy. Or, as a French cartoonist once observed “Good drawings get in the way of good comics.” Being a sequential art, there must be a balance between descriptive information and the need to move to the next panel. The student practitioners consider, “How does the beat work in these four panels?”

“Think in terms of music,” Duford suggests. “This is the mechanics of composing; you build slowly.

Students study the works of nine cartoonists, exploring how they handle rhythm, line, and page layout. In class, they imitate these styles while listening to a recording of Sir John Gielgud performing Hamlet. The assignment includes inserting a reference from Hamlet into the finished comic.

When Duford was a kid growing up in Bridgeport, Connecticut, comics got no respect. He was chastised for squandering

the money he earned mowing lawns on 35-cent comics at Kathy’s Luncheonette and Variety Store. He started college at the University of Hartford, finishing his BFA at the University of New Mexico. His wife, Tracey Schlapp, did her undergraduate work at Lewis and Clark. The couple moved to Portland in 1996, charmed by its quirky mix of microbrews and bike lanes. Daniel taught at Oregon College of Art and Craft and Pacific Northwest College of Art before coming to Reed.

“I did a lot of shows in ceramic galleries,” he says, “but I was always in the wrong place; my work never quite fit.” At the time, his drawings and ceramic works were both fairly abstract. Then he began teaching at St. Mary’s Home for Boys, a residential treatment center for at-risk youth.

“Those boys, who were from foster care and had lived hard lives, really affected me,” Duford says. “The maleness and fragility of that experience shifted me into straight figurative, narrative work. That’s when I started to make comics.”

His first showing of large, figurative

An excerpt from A Grand Adventure by Katie Garland ’18.

ceramics and highly charged, political drawings happened to coincide with 9/11.

It marked the beginning of a trajectory to narrative-based, figurative work, steeped in mythology and contemporary politics.

Exploring the myths of Americana, Duford weaves folklore and fiction into alternative narratives of power, promoting the heroism of unrecognized characters.

A myth, he explains, is a story that has truth—not always quantifiable truth, but transcendent truth dealing with the beliefs and mores of a culture.

“Myth is a way of organizing experience beyond the mundane,” he says. “We’re in a time where the transcendent is mistrusted, and at least in the art world, it’s a very cynical time. The fine art world will often take a vernacular art form and put it in a museum, where it dies. I think a more interesting situation occurs when boundaries and contexts are confused.”

In Portland’s Old Town neighborhood, Duford completed The Green Man of Portland, an installation of two outdoor sculptures and eight story makers told as a poem over

ten blocks. He has completing the fourth installment of the graphic novel, The Naked Boy and is looking for a publisher for the whole series as one volume.

Now Duford’s daughter is an avid comics reader. On excursions to local comics shops he shepherds her to the kids’ section because many of the books in the shops are too risqué for children.

“Comics are not really a gateway to reading,” he says. “It’s a kind of reading, and even though it seems simple, it’s actually very complex. My daughter started early with a comic called Owly, which is all images. When Owly exclaims something it’s only in symbols, like an exclamation point. But she got it. She understood even though it was pretextural language.”

Reading comics requires that the reader simultaneously think both about the text and the image, which is a stand-in for story exposition.

Elizabeth Stallings ’18, an English major from Nashville, Tennessee, says the course helps her burnish her storytelling abilities. She loves the class, despite her lack

of confidence in her drawing skills.

“I’m using a different part of my brain than I do the rest of the time at Reed, which is fun,” she says. “Making art is a different way of interacting with people, but it’s not been a part of myself that I shared with others. When you walk into this class and everyone is exposing themselves in that way, it creates a pretty special place.”

In one project, Elizabeth worked with a partner from a creative writing class, creating a comic in which the story would have to be very condensed.

“My partner and I worked together to figure out how to condense the words, and yet give it the same feel,” she says. “I’ve been thinking a lot about making things short and sweet. It’s distilling more than diluting.”

In class, students discuss how the text and images work together. Halfway through the semester, they produce and critique twopage comics they have produced featuring a splash page—a full-page, single panel that sets up the story—with a facing page of sequential panels that expand it.

During the critique, Elizabeth initially

march 2017 Reed magazine 25

From Codex to Comix: A Cartoon History of Comics 110 CE.

Roman emperor Trajan erects massive column to celebrate victory over the Dacians. Spiral frieze depicts the military campaign in 155 sequential scenes, from Trajan crossing the Danube to the death of the Dacian King Decebalus.

1897.

The irrepressible Katzenjammer Kids make their debut in the New York Journal, complete with outsized pranks and outrageous German accents.

R. Crumb publishes Zap Comix

600-900.

Mayan scribes use “speech scrolls,” ancestors of the speech bubble, to indicate dialog.

1500s.

Aztec priests create codices, pictorial “strips” depicting legends, rulers, conquests, and ceremonies. Scholars have identified some 500 surviving codices; many of those from the Colonial era include captions and commentary.

1734.

Artist William Hogarth paints A Rake’s Progress, a sequence of eight scenes depicting the decline and fall of a dashing playboy who squanders his fortune on gambling, liquor, and vice.

1826.

Glasgow Looking Glass runs History of a Coat, by William Heath, a comic strip complete with panels, speech bubbles, and a cliff-hanger.

1960.

ABOVE:

1929.

Hergé writes the first Adventures of Tintin.

Dell Comic publishes The Funnies #1, the first American newsstand comic.

1938.

DC Comics publishes Action Comics #1, featuring the buttoneddown reporter Clark Kent, whose secret identity is... Superman!

The Man of Steel ignites the superhero genre.

DC soon unleashes Batman, Wonder Woman, the Flash, Green Lantern, the Atom, Hawkman, Green Arrow, and Aquaman.

WWII.

American GIs share their comic books with civilians in Europe and Japan, cross-pollinating those countries’ own graphic traditions.

26 Reed magazine march 2017

1946.

First installment of Sazae-san, by Machiko Hasegawa, a comic strip based on a “liberated” Japanese woman, ushers in the birth of manga.

LATE 1940s.

Comics become a thriving business in the US as returning GIs seek more mature content and titles get more lurid.

1954.

Psychiatrist Fredric Wertham warns that comic books are leading a generation of American kids into juvenile delinquency.

Senate launches a probe into the industry.

Publishers adopt the Comics Code, forswearing “lurid, unsavory gruesome

Sazae-san, by Machiko Hasegawa History of a Coat, by William Heath

ABOVE: LEF T:

Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four

LEFT: Hergé writes the first Adventures of Tintin

illustrations,” excessive violence, illicit sex, crooked cops, and sympathetic criminals, and promising that good will always triumph over evil—on the page, at least.

LATE 1950s.

The Code puts several publishers out of business and forces others to sand down their storylines. What good is superhuman strength if you can’t punch bad guys? Violence is permitted against monsters, however, so superheroes are increasingly pitted against aliens and supervillains, which robs the genre of its social relevance.

DC Comics revives the superhero genre with the Justice League of America—Batman, Aquaman, the Flash, Green Lantern, Martian Manhunter, Superman, and Wonder Woman.

1961.

At Marvel, writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby are given the task of going toe to toe with the Justice League.

Instead of flawless paladins, they create a team of conflicted characters with complex relationships— the Fantastic Four.

1968.

R. Crumb publishes Zap Comix, a signal event for the underground comix movement, which defy the Code and revel in counterculture themes such as sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.

1980.

Art Spiegelman publishes first installment of Maus, a biographical strip based on his father’s imprisonment at Auschwitz.

1981.

Frank Miller takes over Marvel’s Daredevil, giving the blind crimefighter a darker past and a mean streak.

Sales soar.

1991.

First appearance of Naoko Takeuchi’s Sailor Moon, featuring independent female characters with magical powers. Global sensation.

Art Spiegelman publishes first installment of Maus, a biographical strip based on his father’s imprisonment at Auschwitz.

photo by nina johnson ‘99

felt some trepidation at seeing her comic posted on the wall. “Oh, no! I can’t believe he’s making me do this!” she thought.

But she discovered fellow students were kind in the critique; it wasn’t a competition.

“Now I don’t care,” she says. “I’m where I’m at; you’re where you’re at.”

There is a decided difference between building a character in a novel and creating one in visual construction like a comic. Take a character like Charlie Brown: his round circle of a head seems to invite empathy. Now think of a novel like Madame Bovary, composed more of interior dialogue than exposition. How would you translate it visually, using just a few lines?

In one class, Daniel passes out portions of the script for My Dinner with Andre, essentially a movie about two guys talking.

Students are charged with distilling it into a comic with two characters and several scene changes.

“I love creating characters,” Shin says.

“The more I work on them, the more they show personality, having wants, needs, and thoughts. Sometimes I like some element of a character, a design or idea, but it doesn’t work. But occasionally they stick around and grow into themselves.”

Comics have long been associated with superheroes, but the medium also includes science fiction, memoir, and even reporting, as exemplified by Portland cartoonist/journalist Joe Sacco. Duford’s class investigates experimental forms, such as cantastoria, a kind of street theatre where the audience chants or sings text while gesturing to an image or series of images.

In the final weeks of the class, each student creates and publishes a graphic novel.

Because it is primarily a medium of reproduction, students must figure out which of the myriad methods they will use to reproduce their works. They have already learned how to draw so that the work can be scanned and reproduced.

“When I think about this class,” says Elizabeth, “I think about really being myself—not about how other people will perceive my work, which I very much did in the beginning. That has changed with the freedom to express myself the way that I want to express myself. In a discussion it’s easy for people to say, ‘I don’t agree with what you’re saying,’ since those arguments are based in fact. In the case of my comic, if you don’t like it, that’s fine, but you can’t tell me that it’s wrong.”

A page from Brown Girl In Private School by Anayanci De Paz ’19, and (top) the work in its early stages.

march 2017 Reed magazine 27

Reediana

Books. Music. Film. Send us your work!

Email reed.magazine@reed.edu

Baggywrinkles: A Lubber’s Guide to Life at Sea (Elea Press, 2016)

Lucy Bellwood ’12

Lucy Bellwood is a self-descibed adventure cartoonist with an interest in sailing. In her recent full-color educational and autobiographical comic series, Baggywrinkles: A Lubber’s Guide to Life at Sea, (made possible through a successful kickstarter campaign) Lucy brings tall ship history and culture to life with humor and smart, captivating illustration.

Lucy’s graphic work is remarkable. Lucid, quick-to-read, expressive and captivating, her drawings have an Hergé sensibility: clear line style and a pallette that tends

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towards bold pastels. She employs a pleasing diversity of layout, setting, and figurative detail in panels that are dynamic and always amusing.

The title of the collection takes its name from the soft rope coverings designed to prevent sail chafe, just one of the many maritime topics and ephemera covered in a series of delightfully illustrated sections.

Topics range from scurvy (“the biggest, baddest afflicion in all of maritime history”) to tattoos (do you know the meaning of a pig tattoo on the foot?) to the splendor

of being on a tall ship at sea.

Lucy has been an avid lover of sailing and tall ships for many years, having worked as a deckhand aboard the Lady Washington (which features in the book). She has also spent time aboard the Exy Johnson in San Pedro, California, the Charles W. Morgan (the last wooden whaling ship in the world), and a Schmidt Ocean Institute research vessel. Such expeditions inform this work, which teams with her infectious enthusiasm, as well as her other adventure comics, which can be found on her website.

—KATIE PELLETIER ’03

Field Theories (Nightboat, 2017)

Prof. Samiya Bashir [creative writing 2012–] research. Each Googled term will pull you further and further into another world, which perhaps is the world we live in, but another dimension of it—one in which the invisible becomes visible, the overlooked, suddenly called to attention. This palimpsest in flux where people and artifacts exist across time and theories is so imagistically, linguistically and theoretically robust, Bashir convinces us that their separation in our own dimension is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

Beyond being thematically inventive, her notion of omnipresence is powerful and political. It quashes the cultural impulse to label incidents of racism as isolated. Bashir artfully disabuses us of our belief in isolation and allows us to experience the multifaceted beauty inherent in our absurd existence.

In the title poem, among images of mattress stains and cat puke, she insists, again and again, “What is a thing of beauty if not us?”

Furthermore, Bashir’s structural innovation delights and dazzles. Poems sprawl.

Lines read vertically and jut out into diagonals.

kenan banks

When first diving in to Prof. Samiya Bashir’s Field Theories, you wonder what type of theories you will encounter: mathematical, physical, quantum, physiological, or social? The answer is, all of them.

In Bashir’s third full-length collection, she surveys multiplicities of existence. The speaker grapples with what it means to exist as a blackbody on our “sickening ball of melt.”

Bashir’s pursuit takes us on a journey unlike any we’ve previously known. We travel through epochs of time and encounter wooly mammoths and Eocene camels. Jazz riffs float along our periphery. We shift our gaze from mythological figures, to fast-food workers, and alchemists. We delve into physics, quantum mechanics, and mathematics. We oscillate between the terrestrial and the astral.

Voices of black folk heroes like John Henry and Polly Ann ring out alongside prominent black cultural icons like Mae Carol Jemison and Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Unless well versed in all academic disciplines, reading Field Theories will force you to

Often, Bashir transmogrifies language by imbedding mathematical symbols into the line. Meaning becomes duplicated and amplified. She superimposes the world of feeling upon the world of logic and certainty in a way that makes us wonder how we ever considered them in opposition.

Though ambitious and innovative, ambition and invention are not Field Theories’ greatest accomplishments. Most surprising is the way this book will alter the way you feel about the world around you, and, more importantly, your understanding of what it means to be human. —BONNIE ARNING

Tales of the Sisters, DRONE, and The Brighter House (sow’s Ear Poetry Chapbooks, 2016; the Backwaters Press, 2016; White Wine Press, 2016)

Kim Garcia ’85 Kim Garcia won an array of poetry awards this year resulting in three publications: a chapbook and two longer works, Tales of the Sisters, Drone, and The Brighter House. Each is a collection of lyric poetry that cuts close to the bone. With language that is understated yet riveting, Kim’s subjects range from family to fairy tales to war.

DRONE takes on modern warfare in poems that inhabit a variety of perspectives and personas. “It explores the human, animal, personal, and domestic aspects of the wars being fought by the US for incomprehensible reasons with indefinable outcomes.”

The poems in this collection, which won the 2015 Backwaters Prze, explore the wartime lives of soldiers, military families, prisoners, and immigrants.

Tales of the Sisters won the 2015 Sow’s Ear Chapbook Competition. A tightly constructed

collection exploring family, violence, loss, and myth-making, the poems probe difficult modern subjects using elements of fairy tales. There are woods and wolves and rumpelstilstskin, but also walruses, blood transfusions and pamphlets left with young girls

by Baptists. Like any good tale, the work is gripping and unsparing.

The Brighter House shares many poems with Tales of the Sisters, newly arranged among additional poems, they resonate in novel ways. The

camera pans more widely: poems probing childhood wounds are side-by-side expectant motherhood and the terrific mix of grace and tragedy in daily life. For example “The Dead in Summer” opens to baby sparrows in their nest under an airconditioner: “These are the grandchildren/ of that first mistake, not much/ to look at —featherless sinew, toothpick/ bones, then an ugly molt.” Again, language that can be soft is undercut by lurking violence, past and present.

In “Shifting Light/ Columbia Gorge,” a poem that braids several strands of time, the speaker, who has previously been picking unripened berries “planning a pie, sweetening/ what was sour,” tells us “It’s a sin to let time sugar the past.” Kim’s aesthetic stands up under this maxim: never sugared, never sentimental.

—KATIE PELLETIER ’03

march 2017 Reed magazine 29

Reediana The Thing Is: Selected Writings

By Patsy Garlan ’48

(Summerland Publishing, 2016)

An anxious writer braves the verdict of an austere IRS auditor. A corpse reveals our common humanity. A lonely old lady shares her bittersweet last hours. Fall leaves fall, dogs bound, cats stroll through these lively selections from Patsy’s 60-year writing career. In pithy poems, evocative stories, and telling essays, Patsy’s light touch draws the reader of The Thing Is into a world all human beings share and create.

The Branwell Snitbook

Morgan Sanders (Martha S. Clapp) ’55

(Galaxy 44, 2016)

Morgan, a painter and free lance photographer, entertained readers of a New York City community newpaper in the mid 1970’s with her weekly cartoons about the feline antics of Branwell F. Snit.

For the first time, the complete set of Branwell cat comics is available in a single book. Reproduced from the artist’s original drawings, each amusing installment is featured on its own page. Also included is the story of the real Branwell F. Snit, a prodigy cat whose creative sleeping, gourmet sensibilities, and passion for music inspired the witty cat comics that bear his name.

Grimahlka

By Caroline Miller ’59 MAT ’65 [Digital Fiction, 2016]

Recently published as a standalone short story and anthologized, Caroline’s latest, Grimahlka, is the story of the eponymous witch who raises a human child she finds in the forest. The world of men holds dangers for them both.

To save her daughter, the witch must face the darkest forces of the universe and make a terrible but lifesaving bargain.

Dangerous Bodies

By Charlotte Gould Warren ’59 [Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2016]

Charlotte, winner of the Washington Prize for her poetry collection, Gandhi’s Lap, has a new collection of poetry. Here, with deceptively pellucid language, Dangerous Bodies offers, in poem after poem, precise, jewel-like crystallizations of understanding that

30 Reed magazine march 2017

illuminate the craggy and often harrowing emotional terrain of a family gone wrong.

Encountering a small shorebird that regularly travels 20,000 miles a year from Africa to Alaska and the Arctic, Charlotte finds a perfect analog to her own poems: “song precariously perched; witness / against the barrens of space”. Through learning the names and life patterns of creatures and plants native to her part of the world, she shows us how we, too, can more fully anchor ourselves in a nourishing reality.

On the Pleasures of Owning Persons Volney Gay ’70 (IP Books, 2016)

Volney Gay has a new bookthat examines the pleasures that slavery gives to owners.

“This is a demanding, if not an unfathomable topic that rests upon a simple, self-evident truth. The unfathomable part is because slavery seems remote from us now in the 21st century we struggle to imagine its workings from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The self-evident truth is that millions of Americans, over a span of nearly four centuries, owned slaves because they wished to.”

Volney seeks to understand the likes of great men who laid the foundations of American freedom” who “defended to their graves the institution of slavery. He addresses three questions: what were these pleasures; how did freedomloving, American Christians explain ownership to themselves; how did they defend themselves against this double contradiction?

Paul Havas

By Matt Kangas ’71 (University of Washington Press, 2016)

The art of Paul Havas (1940-2012) is one of natural beauty, formal control, and unusual colors.

Havas settled in the Puget Sound region in 1965 and went on to create a body of work dominated by oil paintings and drawings of landscapes and cityscapes, attracting admiring critical attention and acquisitions by important museums. This book draws on Havas’s archive of writings, letters, and documentary photographs, as well as accounts and interviews with critics, curators, fellow artists, and friends to set the artist in a perspective of Pacific Northwest and American art history. The result is a lively tale of flyfishing, rural cabins, sophisticated city life, and doggedly consistent work habits in studios in Seattle and the Skagit Valley. Quiet yet friendly,

like his appealing paintings, Paul Havas is revealed as thoughtful and witty, with serious ideas about art, culture, and his own position in contemporary art. Readers are sure to enjoy this lavish volume with extensive color plates, useful contextual images, and historical documentary photographs.

Biblical Time Out of Mind: Maps, Myths and Memories

James Freeman ’78 and Dr. Tom Gage

The modern Middle East often seems like a web of problems none of which has proven more intractable over the last half century than the Israeli-Arab conflict. One of the core issues is the Israeli claim to ownership of modern-day real estate based on ancient stories that have been enshrined in scripture, promoted by politicians, and buttressed by Hollywood. In this book two revisionist thinkers expose what they argue are the tenuous underpinnings of these claims. Was the Exodus of scripture actually a Hebrew exodus. Was the Moses depicted by Charlton Heston actually a Hebrew leader? Or were they echoes of a much earlier exodus of Hyksos, the invasive people to first conquer and reign over Egyptians?

The authors argue that neither Moses nor the Hebrews were in Egypt until around 1000 BCE-500 years after the earlier Exodus is known to have taken place. They go on to sift through research of an Hyksos evacuation of Egypt led by an Eastern leader who is far different than the Moses with whom we are familiar.

Argon Desaki’s Report from Earth Alan Walworth ’72 (XPress, 2015)

Alan’s new fictional novel is structured as the dissertation of an extraterrestrial graduate student, Argon, who is studying of the evolution of intelligent life. On a field research expedition, Argon is marooned on planet Earth and separated from his partner, Snilya. He discovers our planet mired in problems: disruptive technologies, dangerously high greenhouse gas emissions, ineffective government, and widespread apathy. Argon finds an ideal path toward the solution of the planet’s problems and his own: a revolutionary Silicon Valley startup that turns dreams into reality.

Homage by Willie & the Whips

By Will Morgan ’88 [Teethskin Records, 2016]

Will’s band, Willie & the Whips, has released a new album that draws from American roots music and the rich blues traditions of the north Mississippi hill country, Louisiana swamp boogie, Memphis and Chicago blues sound. The band came together in Seattle in 2013 around

Skagit Marsh, a 2006 oil painting by Paul Havas, appears in a publication drawing on the artist’s work and life, by Matt Kangas ’71.

a mission to learn and transmit the blues as well as make good music together for people to dance and listen to. They are inspired by Slim Harpo, Mississippi Fred McDowell, RL Burnside, Jr Kimbrough, Johnny Shines, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed.

Emma and the Whale

Julie Case ’98 [Schwartz and Wade, 2017]

Toppling the Melting Pot José Antonio Orosco ’92

[Indiana University press, 2016]

The catalyst for much of classical pragmatist political thought was the great waves of migration to the United States in the early twentieth century. José-Antonio Orosco examines the work of several pragmatist social thinkers regarding the challenges large-scale immigration brings to American democracy. He argues that the ideas of the classical pragmatists can help us understand the ways in which immigrants might strengthen the cultural foundations of the United States in order to achieve a more deliberative and participatory democracy. He begins with a critique of the melting pot in favor of finding new ways to imagine the civic role of our immigrant population.

He concludes that by applying the insights of American pragmatism, we can find guidance through controversial contemporary issues such as undocumented immigration, multicultural education, and racialized conceptions of citizenship.

Randell Mills and the Search for Hydrino Energy

Brett Holverstott ’07, illustrated by Matt Schmidt

Julie’s first children’s book is inspired by her summers spent on Long Island. In this lyrical picture book with subtle conservation themes, a girl helps rescue a whale who has washed ashore.

Emma lives in a crooked house in an old whaling town, and often takes her dog, Nemo, to the beach. On their walks, they find amazing treasures, like shells and stones and sea glass—and even a loggerhead turtle. But one day, they find something completely unexpected: a baby whale, washed ashore. Emma empathizes with the animal’s suffering, imagining what the whale is thinking and feeling. When the tide starts to come in, Emma pushes as the water swirls and rises, and eventually the whale swims free, back to her mother.

[Knotted Road Press History, 2016]

Brettwrites a compelling firstperson account of his time in the labs of Randell Mills, a controversial proponent of hydrino energy. Told as a personal journey of discovery, this book takes an inside look at Mills, his critics and collaborators, experiments and technology, and the broad impact his theories may have on our understanding of the universe. This book presents a rare combination of hard science and engaging writing, achieving what the best of the popular science books do: making complex concepts understandable to everyone. An engaging and fascinating look at both the history of science as well as what’s happening today.

Mixed Feelings: Tropes of Love in German Jewish Culture

By Prof. Katja Garloff [German 1997–] [Cornell University Press, 2016]

Since the late 18th century, writers and thinkers have used the idea of love—often unrequited or impossible love—to comment on the changing cultural, social, and political position of Jews in the German-speaking countries. In Mixed Feelings, Garloff asks what it means for literature (and philosophy) to use love between individuals as a metaphor for group relations. This question is of renewed interest today, when theorists of multiculturalism turn toward love in their search for new models of particularity and universality.

Mixed Feelings is structured around two transformative moments in German Jewish culture and history that produced particularly rich clusters of interfaith love stories. Around 1800, literature promoted the rise of the Romantic love ideal and the shift from prearranged to love-based marriages.

In the German-speaking countries, this change in the theory and practice of love coincided with the beginnings of Jewish emancipation, and both its supporters and opponents linked their arguments to tropes of love. Garloff explores the generative powers of such tropes in Moses Mendelssohn, G. E. Lessing, Friedrich Schlegel, Dorothea Veit, and Achim von Arnim.

Around 1900, the rise of racial antisemitism had called into question the promises of emancipation and led to a crisis of German Jewish identity. At the same time, Jewish-Christian intermarriage prompted public debates that were tied up with racial discourses and concerns about procreation, heredity, and the mutability and immutability of the Jewish body. Garloff shows how modern German Jewish writers such as Arthur Schnitzler, Else LaskerSchüler, and Franz Rosenzweig wrest the idea of love away from biologist thought and reinstate it as a model of sociopolitical relations. She concludes by tracing the relevance of this model in post-Holocaust works by Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, and Barbara Honigmann.

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In Memoriam leah nash

Bête Noir Roger Hobbs ’11

November 14, 2016, in Portland, Oregon, of a drug overdose.

Bestselling crime writer Roger Hobbs ’11, whose debut novel Ghostman became an international hit, died in Portland of a drug overdose at the age of 28.

A precocious storyteller, Hobbs demonstrated a passion and talent for writing even as a child.

He streaked like a comet across the literary firmament, producing two thrillers that won numerous awards and critical acclaim.

He once described the experience of coming to Reed as “stepping into sunshine after four years in the dark. I could start fresh alongside hundreds of others who were ripe to shed their high school selves.”

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Randy and Renee Hobbs, Hobbs completed his first (unpublished) novel by the time he was 13 years old. He graduated from a suburban Philadelphia high school he described as “one of those big Eastern public schools that pumps out students in a way that would make 19th-century industrialists throw their top hats into the air and shout ‘Huzzah!’” In high school he wrote a play, “Not Another Divine Comedy,” which won the Pittsburgh New Works Festival and was performed by the Open Stage Company.

During his freshman year at Reed, the he wrote an essay for the New York Times titled Instant Message, Instant Girlfriend, about growing up with online media. He described his high school self: “I was at the bottom of the barrel, a plump, silent, painfully awkward dweeb who clung to his Latin textbook as if it held the secrets to existence.” But as the ladies began to respond to his online persona he experienced a transformation. “I suddenly shifted from on overweight, overdressed frog to a charming, handsome, technology-savvy prince.”

At Reed, he developed an interest in the noir genre. Majoring in English, he also studied ancient languages and narrative. His senior thesis, The Eye that Sees and the Voice that Speaks: Critical Theory and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” was written under the supervision of Prof.

Robert Knapp [English 1974–]. His friends invariably referred to him by his last name.

“Hobbs, as he preferred to be called, was a lovely person,” Knapp said. “He had a keen, avid mind, a distinctive voice, and was a kind and complicated soul. We all much admired his elegant thrillers, one of which he finished while writing a brilliant senior thesis.”

40 Reed magazine march 2017

Hobbs wrote Ghostman during his senior year at Reed. In his vernacular, a ghostman is an identity thief who works with criminal organizations to help people disappear. He wanted to play around with old-school criminals. “Essentially I wanted my characters to be analog players in a digital world,” he explained. “What would a real bank robbery look like in the 21st century?”

He queried literary agent Nat Sobel, sending him the first 50 pages of the manuscript. “What he sent was terrific,” Sobel said, “some of the best opening pages I’ve ever read.” Hobbs sent Sobel the finished manuscript on the day he graduated and signed a deal with Knopf soon after.

Ghostman became an international hit, making the New York Times bestseller list, and translated into 20 different languages. It won the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for Best Thriller, the Strand Critics Award for Best First Novel, and the Maltese Falcon Society Award for Best Hardboiled Novel. Warner Brothers purchased the movie rights.

New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani wrote that Hobbs “seizes our attention and holds it tight, not so much through his plotting or his characters but through his sheer, masterly use of details, and the authoritative, hard-boiled voice he has fashioned for Jack.”

His second book, Vanishing Games, was published in 2014, and at the time of his death he was working on his third. Friends remember him as a talented composer, with a love for travel, gambling, and making snarky comments about

bad movies.

Professor Roger Porter [English 1961-2015], taught him in a course on Shakespeare and film.

“Hobbs was a wonderfully imaginative student, often quirky in his insights and frequently brilliant; but his ideas were always devastatingly smart, and in class they served to move discussions in unexpected and inevitably fruitful directions. He was one of those students from whom I learned as much as I taught. Hobbs knew how to talk about film with wonderful acuity, and he always sought to find ways to see how a film director would help the viewer discover completely new things about the Shakespeare play being filmed. He had talent to burn, and his loss at such an early age is tragic, especially given all he might have accomplished.”

Hobbs’ parents; sister Rachel LeCure; and partner, Lara Evenson ’11 survive him.

The Spirit of Reed READ about classmates and professors who have died at www.reed. edu/reed_magazine/in-memoriam.

HONOR them with a gift in their name at reed.edu/givingtoreed.

SHARE your memories on our website or via email at reed.magazine@reed.edu

King of Crabs, Baron of Barnacles Prof. Frank Gwilliam [biology 1957–96]

November 27, 2016, in Portland, Oregon.

Marine biologist and neuroscientist Prof. Frank Gwilliam introduced generations of Reed students to the discipline of biology.

He grew up in Salt Lake City. His father died of influenza when he was 11 years old. He joined the navy at the age of 17, serving as a hospital corpsman aboard the USS Doyen, an amphibious personnel assault vessel, which took part in numerous island invasions in the Pacific theater, including Kiska, Tarawa, the Marshall Islands, Saipan, Guam, Leyte Gulf, Lingayen Gulf, and Iwo Jima.

After graduating from UC Berkeley, he served in Japan during the Korean War, and then received his PhD in zoology from UC Berkeley and did a Rockefeller postdoctoral fellowship in marine biology.

Gwilliam’s fascination with “critters” began in childhood, and his encounter with a coral reef off a Pacific island during WWII ignited a lifelong passion for marine invertebrates. He

Ruth Wetterborg Sandvik ’38

July 29, 2016, in Seattle, Washington, of a stroke.

“Reed taught me how to get along with people,” Ruth said of her alma mater. “That was always my aim and ambition: to be a person would could work with different kinds of people successfully.”

She was born in Grants Pass, Oregon, to Hermann and Vesta Wetterborg, and moved to Portland after her father got a job with Portland Electric Power Company. By the time Ruth and her sister, Betty Wetterborg Cronyn ’41 (wife of Prof. Marshall Cronyn ’40 [chemistry 1952–89]), got to Reed, it had already acquired the unofficial motto “Communism, Atheism, Free Love.”

“I figured Reed was atheistic because the founder, Amanda Reed, was a Unitarian and people thought that was atheistic,” Ruth said.

“It was communistic because we were taught how to think at Reed. Now where I got the idea that communists thought, I don’t know. And

was recruited to Reed by Prof. Lew Kleinholz [biology 1946–80] in 1957. He wholeheartedly enjoyed his work as a neuroscientist, a teacher, and a mentor of Reed students. With everyone in his life, he was loving, supportive, and funny “Frank Gwilliam taught me how to channel a love of biology into rigorous research, how to keep my curiosity alive and healthy, and by superb example, how to mentor, challenge, and nourish younger minds,” Jack Bradbury ’63 told Reed magazine in 2001.

“He was always one of my favorites!” says Marguerite Cohen ’75. “I still have a copy of Animals without Backbones on my shelf. We made a very early morning trek to Depoe Bay to collect sea lettuces, and I made it back to Portland in time to get to my Intro Math lecture.”

“I have such happy memories of dissecting lamprey and outdoor explorations and the dog named Clarissa,” says Robin Tovey ’97, who took Intro Bio with Prof. Gwilliam.

Gwilliam was an influential researcher who authored at least 20 scientific papers on everything from the sensitivity of crabs’ legs to the motor neurons of insects. Fascinated by the neural mechanisms underlying behavior, he wrote several papers on the so-called shadow reflex of barnacles, which retract their feeding appendices when they sense a loss of light,

indicating the presence of a predator. Electrical recordings identified the neural pathways controlling the reflex.

“He was a good mentor to me when I first got to Reed,” says Prof. Janis Shampay [bio 1990–]. “He’d been around the block, he knew everything, and he had sage advice for me as a junior professor.”

“Prof. Gwilliam was a kind and gentle man, and I have always counted him as a good friend,” says Prof. Bob Kaplan [1983–2015].

“His mentorship to me as a new professor at Reed in 1983 meant a lot to me. As colleagues, we spent many wonderful hours talking about invertebrate diversity and animal behavior.

What a gem he was and his influence on the curriculum will last for generations to come.”

Gwilliam served as provost (now known as dean of the faculty) from 1979 to 1981, after which he returned to teaching. Announcing his departure from that role, President Paul Bragdon told the faculty, “Mr. Gwilliam, with the president’s thanks and blessings, has gleefully fled the office of provost.”

Prof. Gwilliam is survived by his wife, Marjorie, and their children, Tassie and Jeff.

Honor him with a contribution to the G. Frank Gwilliam Memorial Scholarship: reed.edu/ givingtoreed.

then, free love. I always enjoyed saying, ‘I didn’t get any.’ But that’s what we knew about Reed when we first started.”

She thrived in the seminars and said that her Reed education enabled her to feel equal to anybody in the world. “I wouldn’t feel badly if I had to talk to the president of the United States,” she said in an interview with Cricket Parmalee ’67 in 2003. “Just the other day I carried that one step further. Now I’m trying to tell the president of the United States what to do. I sent him a message not to start the war in Iraq. But he didn’t listen to me.”

It was said when Ruth was at Reed that for every girl on campus there were seven boys.

“But we said six didn’t count because they were buried their books,” she jested.

An interdisciplinary major in literature and history, Ruth wrote her thesis on British poet Matthew Arnold with Prof. Rex Arragon [history 1923–1962]. After Reed, she got a job at the new Jane Addams High School for Girls

in Portland teaching grammar. After two years, she began teaching at a tiny high school in the mountain community of Odell, Oregon. After a year, she soured on the job and took a position with the telephone company in Portland.

A childhood friend, Alice Foster Longworth, phoned from Petersburg, Alaska, to tell Ruth about a job at a local junior high school. Ruth took it. She and Alice remained lifelong friends, cohosting a radio show on the local FM station.

Ruth married a “bashful Nor wegian march 2017 Reed magazine 41

In Memoriam fisherman,” Oscar Sandvik, and the couple had three children, Neil, Mark, and Diane.

She taught school until her first son was born in 1945, and returned to teaching in the 1960s. The superintendent of schools offered her the job of high-school librarian on the condition that Ruth get a degree in library science. Continuing to teach, she picked up her degree from the University of Portland in four summers and worked as librarian until she retired in 1981. Her predilection for violet attire earned her the moniker the Purple Librarian. It was a job she loved. “It was just in my nature,” she said. “I love to put things in order.”

Ruth also became a seasoned sailor, working with Oscar and her sons on his halibut boat, the Munroe. Oscar died in 1969.

Ruth was active in many Petersburg organizations. During World War II she watched for Japanese war planes atop the school gymnasium. She was a founder of KFSK public radio station, also serving as its president. She served on the library board and performed decades of public service in many spheres, including the Arts Council, the Civic Improvement Council, the Garden Club, the VFW Auxiliary, and the Clausen Museum.

While getting her library of science degree, she took a calligraphy class from Prof. Lloyd Reynolds [art 1929–69]. For years, Ruth taught calligraphy in Petersburg through the University of Alaska–Juneau.

She had a quest for inspirational knowledge, and when she happened on a book that spoke to her, she would buy multiple copies to send to friends. Well into her 90s she maintained a fitness regimen that included swimming, walking, and tai chi. Ruth lived in her home on Second Street for 70 years, before moving to an assisted living residence with a view of her beloved Devil’s Thumb mountain. After fracturing her hip in Petersburg, Ruth was medevaced to Swedish Hospital in Seattle. Following a hip operation, she suffered a stroke and died surrounded by family.

John K. Eide ’44

September 24, 2015, in Portland, Oregon.

Born in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, John was the son of Andrew and Stella Eide. He achieved the rank of Eagle Scout and spent many years as a scoutmaster for the Boy Scouts of America.

He attended Reed College from 1943 to 1944 as an Army Air Corps Pre-Meteorology cadet.

While in the service, he also attended Harvard University. John served as a weather observer and in a radar unit until he was discharged. He got a degree in industrial arts from Washington State University, and taught industrial arts at Harvey Scott School in Portland for 30 years.

In 1976, he was named Oregon State Industrial Arts Teacher of the Year. He organized Portland’s 42 Reed magazine march 2017

industrial arts teachers to make wooden toys for the Fireman’s Toy and Joy activity, personally making more than 1,000 toy trains that were given to children at Christmas. His wife, Marjorie Anne, predeceased him. His five children survive: John Eide, Barbara Aase, Marilyn Reichelt, Robert Eide, and Judy Cox.

Eunice Patterson Hyllested ’44 November 1, 2016, in Rice Lake, Wisconsin.

Born in Seattle, Wisconsin, to Eunice and Raymond Patterson, Eunice graduated from West Seattle High School and majored in political science at Reed.

She met her husband, Bob, on a World War II troop ship, the St. Michael, en route to Alaska where he served in the army in the Aleutians, and she was in civil service at Fort Richardson in Anchorage. They were married on March 13, 1945, while Eunice was serving in the Women’s Army Corps, just before Bob was sent to Okinawa. After the war, they settled in Rice Lake, Wisconsin, where Bob operated a delivery business and later did maintenance for the school system. Eunice had a bookkeeping and tax preparation business. For more than 60 years, she was an active member of the United Presbyterian Church, serving on the board of the Synod of Lakes and Prairies. She also was elected to the Rice Lake Board of Education, and served 12 years. Eunice led the League of Women Voters in a census to create a balanced city council, served with Lakeview Medical Auxiliary and the Golden K Club, and for more than 50 years was a member of the Fortnightly Club. She drew joy from her church and family, and loved reading and playing bridge.

She is survived by her son, Robert.

Barbara Creighton Pink ’46 ​October 18, 2016, in The Dalles, Oregon.

Born in The Dalles in 1927, Barbara attended Reed for one year. She married Casey Pink and the couple leased a farm in Rufus, Oregon, where they farmed wheat. The couple then purchased a cherry orchard located in The Dalles, and her many duties included serving as the bookkeeper.

When her husband died, she continued to partner with her son in the Pink Orchard. The property on Orchard Road is still in the family.

A dedicated wife and mother, Barbara also worked as a bookkeeper for the Mauser Lumber Company. She was an avid reader and a dedicated genealogist, tracking the roots of her and her husband’s families back to colonial America and prerevolution Ireland. These interests led Barbara to become a founding member of the Celilo Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. She was also an avid painter, working in watercolor, oil, and acrylic. Her son, Casey Pink, and daughters, Joan Chaichi and Dorothy Doyle, survive her.

Ernie Bonyhadi ’48 November 24, 2016, in Australia.

Prominent attorney, generous philanthropist, and steadfast Reed trustee Ernie Bonyhadi died on Thanksgiving Day while visiting family and friends in Australia. He was 92 years old.

Ernie lived an astonishing life. He escaped the Nazis as a boy, fled to the United States, and then returned to Germany with the U.S. Army to search for war criminals.

After graduating from Reed, he pursued a long and distinguished legal career, arguing before the Supreme Court, and became a stalwart Reed trustee, serving on the board for more than 25 years and remaining an active trustee emeritus until his death.

“He was not a typical lawyer,” says longtime friend and legal partner Charles Hinkle, who argued several cases alongside him. “He had a sort of effervescence. Nothing discouraged him.

He could see the good in everyone. He always spread light when there was darkness.”

Ernie’s family was part of a small Jewish community in Salzburg, Austria—home of the renowned music festival. As a child he met luminary conductors Arturo Toscanini and Bruno Walter. In 1938, when Nazi Germany annexed Austria, Ernie’s father sent his 14-year-old son to Munich to apprentice as a waiter. All hell broke loose on November 9, later known as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, when Jewish shops were vandalized, homes and apartments destroyed, and synagogues set on fire. Ernie’s father, Fred, was sent to Dachau concentration camp but was released after promising to leave the Third Reich as soon as possible. The family was forced to evacuate Salzburg, and fled to Vienna to make permanent travel arrangements. During this year Ernie had the prescient notion to learn English. In the end, the family was invited to join a German war bride from WWI who had married an American doctor and was living in Portland.

In October 1939, the family boarded a ship to New York, arriving a day after their passports had expired. Detained on Ellis Island until their passports could be returned to Vienna for the necessary extensions, the family gathered around the long tables every morning for breakfast.

“They had big bowls of cornflakes, which I had never had before,” Ernie remembered. “Somebody told me, ‘You don’t eat them dry. Put some sugar and milk on them.’ My first lesson.”

Penniless, the family had to borrow money for the bus fare to Portland. It took three and a half days to get across the country.

Ernie worked as a paperboy, sales clerk, and photographer to earn his tuition at Reed.

In Portland, Ernie attended Lincoln High School and began earning money with a paper route. He liked to report that he arrived late for class because he kept opening doors for the girls.

When it came time for college, his teachers told him, “You should go to Reed; it’s the only game in town.” As a carrier for the Oregon Journal, he was awarded a $150 scholarship, but tuition at Reed was $250. In order to earn the extra money, he worked for a year at Montgomery Ward and in a photography darkroom. He started at Reed in 1942 as a chemistry major.

The following year he and his buddy, Bill Gittelsohn ’48 (now deceased), were drafted into the army. After basic training in California, Ernie was sent to the University of Chicago to study Japanese (he was already conversant in German, French, Italian, and English), but wound up back in Germany as part of a team assigned to interrogate prisoners of war.

“We were looking for certain war criminals,” Ernie remembered. “I often had sort of a nightmare that I interrogated Eichmann and missed him. When we interrogated prisoners, we had them strip to the waist and raise their arms because all of the SS, the Nazi elite forces, had their blood type tattooed on their armpit.”

Ernie and Bill both returned to Reed on the GI Bill, but Ernie was done with chemistry. “I figured this world had enough mad scientists,” he said. “What they needed were political scientists so there wouldn’t be any more wars.”

With Prof. Frank Munk [political science 1939–65] advising, Ernie wrote his thesis on the de-Nazification of Germany. He claimed the writing was easy because de-Nazification was what he had done in the army, but in those precomputer days, the process was difficult mechanically. It had to be typed with nine carbon copies; every mistake had to be corrected on every single sheet.

Justice James Brand of the Oregon Supreme Court [1941–1958] served on Ernie’s oral exam board. Brand had just returned from Nuremberg, where he was the presiding judge at the Judges’ Trial, the third in a set of 12 trials known collectively as the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials. One of the chapters in Ernie’s thesis was about the impact of de-Nazification on international law.

“Well, young man, it’s a pretty good thesis,” the judge said to Ernie. “But if you ever want to really publish it, you ought to go to law school and rewrite the chapter on international law.”

After his finals, Ernie asked about going to law school and discovered that the entrance exam was the following week—and that he would need to finish his applications prior to taking the test. He stayed up all night with his fiancée, Ilo Lehmann ’51, filling in law school applications. In the end, he was accepted at Stanford, Columbia, Michigan, Chicago, and Northwestern.

But due to overcrowding, the only colleges that offered housing for married veterans were Columbia and Stanford. His Reed professors

thought that Columbia was the better law school, and he would be able to live in veteran’s housing for $30 a month and enjoy the culture of New York City.

He met Ilo when she was a freshman and he was a senior at Reed. Her family were also refugees from Germany. He got a job slinging hamburgers in the student union coffee shop, where Ilo was the night manager. Their first date was a trip to Mount Hood to harvest Christmas trees for the social rooms on campus. The couple married after Ernie graduated in 1948. His pal, Bill Gittelsohn, married Shirley Georges ’49 around the same time and the couples attended each other’s engagement parties.

Ernie graduated with his JD from Columbia University and was admitted to the Oregon Bar in 1952. He practiced law at a number of firms, specializing in litigation, antitrust law, libel law, international business law, international dispute resolution, and transnational litigation. He was a name partner with Rives, Bonyhadi & Smith when it merged with another firm in 1979 to become Stoel Rives LLP, which became and continues to be Oregon’s largest law firm.

“He was a gutsy guy and a man for all seasons,” says former legal partner Bruce Hall. “In the field of human relationships, he was superb. He could talk to people better than anyone.”

“He knew everybody,” says his former legal partner, Charles Hinkle. “He always looked for, and usually found, just the right thing to make you feel better if things didn’t go well that day— whether it was the judge ruling against you or something at home.”

In the course of his career he argued cases before the Oregon U.S. District Court, the U.S. Court of Appeals (9th Circuit), and the United States Supreme Court. He served as a trustee at Reed from 1971to1995, was vice president of the Columbia University Law School alumni association, and was a member of the American Society of International Law, the Multnomah County Bar Association, the Oregon State Bar, B’nai B’rith, the Marines Memorial Club (San Francisco), the Arlington Club, and the Multnomah Athletic Club.

The Bonyhadis and the Gittelsohns built homes three doors apart from each other in Raleigh Hills and were neighbors for five decades. Their kids went to school together and the families vacationed together. Ernie and Bill both served on the board of trustees at Reed.

When Ernie was president of the alumni board, Shirley was secretary. The couples celebrated their 50th wedding anniversaries together in 1998 at Cannon Beach with all of their children attending. Bill died in June 2000. Ilo Bonyhadi died of pancreatic cancer the same year.

When she was diagnosed, Ilo researched the disease and told her husband, “You know, pancreatic cancer—that’s it, kid.” She cooked a freezer full of meals for him and counseled, “Go on the trips we planned, but don’t go alone. You’re no

damn good by yourself. You know that.”

When Ernie replied, “Well, who would I go with?” Ilo suggested Shirley Gittelsohn. “You’ve known her since before you knew me. You won’t have to BS her. She’ll either want to go with you or she won’t.”

Ernie and Shirley got together in 2001. They were lunching with their assorted offspring in Paris, when Shirley’s daughter asked, “What’s dejeuner d’affaires?”

“Dejeuner is lunch,” Ernie replied. “D’affair is what your mother and I are having.”

The couple married in October 2007, and enjoyed sharing travel and experiences until Shirley’s death in 2015.

“I feel a great debt to Reed for helping educate me,” Ernie said. “Reed really helped me be what I am. In the first place, it feeds you intellectually. I had role models—not in terms of any one guy, but in the combination of people who were so diverse as Arthur Scott [chemistry 1923– 79], Maure Goldschmidt ’30 [political science 1935­–81], Ed Garlan [philosophy 1946–73], Bob Rosenbaum [math 1939-53], and Dick Jones [history 1941–86]. They were all different, yet each had something to contribute. Ilo and I enjoyed what Reed had to offer, and we assisted in it. And most of our friends have gone to Reed.”

Ernie was a steadfast supporter of Reed, and established the Ernie and Ilo Bonyhadi Scholarship in 2000.

He is survived by his children, Mark Bonyhadi ’82 and Lyn Bonyhadi, and by his travel companion and partner, Dr. Gloria Reich ’54, whom he had known for over 60 years.

Colleen Powers Mahon ’48

October 8, 2016, in Missoula, Montana, of Alzheimer’s.

Born in Salem, Oregon, to Sidney and Anita Powers, Colleen was Queen of the Molalla Buckeroo and graduated as valedictorian from Molalla High School. After starting at Reed, she went on to Oregon State University, where she graduated with a degree in early childhood education. She later earned a master’s degree in teaching from OSU, and was a lifelong member of the Pi Beta Phi Fraternity for Women.

Colleen married Harold Mahon and had three children, Anne, Keith, and Marlise. The family traveled extensively throughout the United States and Europe, and lived in Seattle, Washington, Boulder, Colorado, Zurich, Switzerland, and Newton, Massachusetts. In later years, Colleen returned to Salem before moving to Missoula in 2013.

She was an active community member, particularly with the Girl Scouts and the PTA. Colleen loved raising Swiss mountain dogs, and was an avid genealogist, spending more than 20 years collecting stories and researching the lives of her family. Her daughter, Anne, preceded her in death, and her son, Keith, and daughter, Marlise Flynn, survive her.

march 2017 Reed magazine 43

In Memoriam Dale Owen Merrill ’49

August 23, 2016, in Flagstaff, Arizona.

For more than 40 years Dale lived in Goleta, California, where he was a school principal and a private pilot. As the first person in his family to attend college, he valued his education at Reed.

“Reed gave me a deep appreciation for a fine education,” he said. “I wish I had been better educated when I arrived; I would have chosen a different major.”

He wrote his thesis World Federalism: a Contemporary Social Movement with Prof. Read Bain [sociology 1947–49] advising, and credited Reed with instilling confidence in his ability to do hard academic work. As a day-dodger, Dale also felt that socially he ended up a veritable recluse. “Reed is especially heir to such problems of personality development since many high-IQ people have suffered ridicule in the public school system because of their intellectual abilities,” he said.

His fond memories of Reed included Prof.

Frank Griffin’s [math 1911-56] Math for NonScience Majors, and Prof. Corrine Pouteau [French 1934-49] and Dorothy Robinson Ainslie ’46 working as gypsy croupiers at the United World Federalists Carnival.

After graduating, he worked for the United World Federalists in California and taught at Southern Oregon College in Ashland, and at an elementary school in Salem, Oregon. In 1962, he got his master’s from Claremont McKenna College and began teaching in Goleta, California, where he quickly became principal of Goleta Union School.

Dale enjoyed raising cymbidium orchids, dahlias, and his two children Pat and Paul. His wife, Helen, passed away in 2011.

Kenneth Tollenaar ’50 September 25, 2016 in Eugene, Oregon.

Admired for his knowledgeable, level-headed, and pragmatic approach to issues, Ken poured his time and energy into his community. His public service career included 20 years as director of the University of Oregon Bureau of Governmental Research and Service, 7 years as executive director of the Association of Oregon Counties, and service as acting dean of the community service and public affairs program at the University of Oregon.

He was born in Portland to Roy and Alda 44 Reed magazine march 2017

Tollenaar, who moved to a farm in Newberg when Ken was in the eighth grade. After Pearl Harbor, Ken volunteered for the navy (despite being color-blind) and served in the U.S. Navy Construction Battalions. After his service he read a book called Peace or Anarchy by Cord Meyer, which discussed the need for a world federal government.

“I can’t say I did much more reading in those years, but I kind of carried that book in the back of my head,” Ken remembered. “I thought maybe there’s something beyond being a CPA.” He began studying at Willamette University, but had overlooked an admission requirement for mandatory chapel attendance.

“I was 21 or 22 years old and figured I could come to terms with my spiritualism in a different way, so I didn’t go to chapel,” he said. “The dean of students called me in and said, ‘We can’t tolerate this. Have you ever thought about going to Reed?’”

Ken contrasted his relationship with Reed professors with the scene in the movie The Paper Chase where on the last day of school a student gets on the elevator with his professor and says, “I just want you to know how much I’ve appreciated your class, how much I admire you, and how much you’ve meant to me.” The professor replies, “Thank you. What’s your name?”

“Nothing like that ever happened at Reed,” Ken said. “In fact, professors would take the initiative to single you out. I’ll never forget when Prof.

Charles Bagg [history 1946–74] stopped me out in front of the library and said, ‘You have a good analytical mind.’”

During his junior year he became engaged to Jean Scott ’51 and found himself in need of a summer job. While he was taking his junior quals, Prof. Charles McKinley [political science 1918–60] approached him and said, “Come and see me. I’ve got a job for you.” He put Ken onto a paid summer internship with the personnel director of the City of Portland.

Ken wrote his thesis, Political Policy of the American Federation of Labor, with his adviser, Prof. Maure Goldschmidt [political science 1935–81]. He recalled that Goldschmidt nodded off while reading his thesis draft. The thesis examined the sociological history of the AFL, analyzing decision making, the lobbying program, electoral activity, and other aspects of the subject. It led to his being named to the Multnomah County Central Labor Council as a representative of the local musicians union. Ken helped put himself through college by playing jazz in clubs and with dance bands.

He credited Reed with teaching him to think critically, communicate clearly, and act responsibly. “Reed’s impact on my life was profound,” he said. “It also opened the door to intellectual and cultural opportunities it would take far more than one lifetime to pursue.”

After graduating, he worked for the Civil Service Board until beginning a master’s program in public administration at the University of

Minnesota. The experience of going from Reed to graduate school was devastating.

“It took me until Christmas to realize that students were to shut up and listen to what the professor says,” he said. “Just the reverse of what it was at Reed.”

His postgraduate career began as a management assistant with the State Department in Washington, D.C., but it proved to be an unhappy year, as the department had become a target of Senator Joe McCarthy. Ken took an opportunity to return to Oregon as a research assistant for the Bureau of Municipal [later Govermental] Research and Service, assigned to the Portland office for five years. He took a break for a year and a half to serve as executive secretary for a legislative interim committee on local government. Local government became the substitute for the labor movement he had been so interested in during his years at Reed.

“It was a way for individuals to relate to something outside of their individual, narrow interests,” he said, “a way for people to feel they have some impact on their world.”

For seven years, he worked as executive director of the Association of Oregon Counties, lobbying issues of interest to counties, but he welcomed the opportunity to return to an academic environment, and stayed with the bureau (with some time-outs) for the remainder of his career. After retiring as director of the bureau in 1988, he continued to consult with the bureau and with Oregon State University, which had started up a small program of governmental research and education. Ken became active in civil affairs, serving on the Eugene Planning Commission and accepting an appointment to the city council. He received numerous awards during his career, including the Lane Council of Governments Outstanding Elected Official, and the Eugene City Club’s Turtle Award (for “sticking his neck out” in community affairs).

He and Jean later divorced, and in 1970 he married Priscilla Botkin Card, who predeceased him. His five children survive: David Tollenaar, Paul Tollenaar, Alison Kelly, Laura Tollenaar, and Megan Pierce.

George Simpson Barton ’55 October 15, 2016, in Vancouver, Washington, when he was struck by a falling tree limb outside his home during a windstorm.

George was born in Newark, Ohio, the son of the Rev. Lane Barton and Mar y Simpson Bar ton. He went to Reed and the University of O re gon Medical School , and though much of his professional life was spent as a neurologist at Kaiser Permanente, he lived a life of service—serving in the army as a doctor

in Germany, volunteering in the Peace Corps in Tunisia, and providing medical care at the Portland Black Panthers’ free clinic. After his son, William, was disabled by a brain tumor, George cared for him and enabled Will to live independently for 37 years.

George’s wife, Elizabeth McManus MAT ’70, survives him, as do his children, Anne Fitzpatrick ’78, Abraham, Catherine, Mariniah Prendergast ’89, and his siblings, the Rev. Lane Barton Jr. and Mary Faust. His son William predeceased him.

Leon Billings ’59

November 15, 2016, in Nashville, Tennessee, of a stroke.

Americans breathe a little easier because of Leon Billings, who forged a legacy as the largely unheralded chief architect of the 1970 Clean Air Act. He grew up in Helena, Montana, experiencing firsthand the power of clean air. His mother, Gretchen Garber Billings, had been afflicted with chronic lung disease as a child, finding relief only when she left her family home in Washington State to vacation with her grandparents in Montana. She married Henry Billings and moved to Montana where the couple edited a weekly newspaper, the People’s Voice, owned by a farmer-labor cooperative.

The newspaper engaged in an ongoing battle with the powerful Anaconda Copper Mining Company, which controlled the daily newspapers in the state. Harry’s column in the People’s Voice carried the quotation: “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a time of moral crisis, refuse to take a stand.”

Weaned on firebrand politics, Leon started college at Reed but returned to Montana, where he graduated from the University of Montana.

Milt Krieger ’60 lived in Foster-Scholz at the same time as Leon, and remembers that the lanky Montanan was blunt in speech, diffident to anarchic in behavior, and known as “Red” for the most obvious reason.

“We shared Alan Logan’s [German 1953–60] Hum 110 seminar,” Milt recollects. “Leon asked good questions, but because he spent more time elsewhere than in the library he lacked sufficient textual immersion to contribute fully to the discussions he prompted. We shared a passion for baseball, but we did not share his motorcycle, notoriously noisy during his

returns to campus after dark.”

After college, Leon worked as a reporter and farmworker organizer in California. He married Patricia Harstad, who became a delegate in the Maryland General Assembly; she died in 1990. Leon was appointed to her seat representing Montgomery County and then elected in his own right, serving three terms.

He was a founding member of the Montgomery County Green Democrats and received the Maryland League of Conservation Voters Environmental Leadership award, “for outstanding support and leadership in protecting Maryland’s environment.”

He worked as a lobbyist for the American Public Power Association, joined the Subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution of the Senate Committee on Public Works, and became chief of staff for Maine Senator Edmund Muskie.

In 1969, Ohio’s Cuyahoga River, polluted with oil slicks, caught fire—an event that galvanized the environmental movement. For decades Congress had deferred to states on environmental law. Now, fearing a challenge from Senator Muskie in the 1972 presidential election, the Nixon administration sought to curry favor with environmentalists. With Mr. Muskie’s backing and channelingf the characteristics he had admired most in his parents, Leon shrewdly negotiated a legislative coup. In short order, he was instrumental in drafting the 1970 Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Noise Control Act, and the Energy Supply and Environmental Coordination Act. A 1990 article in the Environmental Reporter called Leon “probably the most influential man in America on the drafting of legislation affecting the environment during the late ’60’s and the early ’70’s.”

When President Carter tapped Muskie as his secretary of state, Leon became Muskie’s executive assistant. Later, as an adjunct professor at the University of Southern California, he directed the Washington Program of USC’s Unruh Institute of Politics. He founded a government relations consulting firm, designing public policy strategies on issues pending before Congress, and advising on a broad range of environmental, health, energy, and safety legislation. He advised clients, including corporations, on how to live and profit while complying with environmental laws.

Leon’s second wife, the former Cherry Allen, and three children from his first marriage, Shannon, Erin, and Paul, survive him.

The Urban Dictionary defines the world moloso as a unique person who is strange and interesting. Phillip was definitely one of a kind: brilliant, humble, and endlessly curious about life and fond of witty jokes.

He graduated from Seattle’s Queen Anne High School in 1955, tied for the top of his class. Continuing his education at Reed, he worked with his advisers, Professors Herbert J. Landar [anthropology 1957–59] and David French ’39 [anthropology 1947–88] in writing his thesis, A Componential Analysis of Navaho Kinship Data. Phil went on to get a master’s in library science from the University of Denver and did graduate study at Yale.

Self-identified as an anthropologist, linguistics scholar, musician, and polymath, Phil was on the faculty at Glendale Community College from 1966 to 2002. He was a librarian, a professor of business and mathematics, and a department chair, teaching courses in English literature, composition, math, music, graphic arts, and computer science. He loved sharing his discoveries with others, and touched the lives of thousands of students. Upon retirement, he continued to study music, learning the bassoon, oboe, and guitar and continuing with the harpsichord and piano. He composed Kindertoten II, which was performed by the Glendale Community College Guitar Ensemble.

Phil was preceded in death by his long-term partner Gus, and is survived by nephews Mike Moloseau and Zachary Klaas and niece Mary Moloseau Goetz.

John Michael McCauley ’59

Irene Langston ’60

Born in Portland, Mike attended Roosevelt High School and Reed before graduating in mathematics from the University of Oregon in 1960. He earned a master’s in economics from Portland State University and worked as an economist for the State of Oregon, the Secretary of

Born in Corvallis, Oregon, Irene was the only child of Earl and Stella Jennings, and only 16 months old when her father died. Two years later, her mother married John Lance. Irene graduated from Washington High School, and the Oregon College of Education. She earned

November 10, 2016, in Astoria, Oregon.

State, the Department of Employment, Hyster Company, and B o n n e v i l l e Po w e r Administration.

Mike worked for a time at Portland’s famed Vat & Tonsure restaurant before moving to Seaside to care for his ailing parents. After moving to Astoria, he worked at the Ship Inn, a British pub. He enjoyed taking walks, listening to music, and writing poetry. His brother, James; daughter, Ann Margaret; and granddaughter, Estella Pecoraro, survive him. Mike’s first wife, Ann Goddard Jackson, lives in Portland, and his second wife, Jann Ingle Dryer, died in 2013.

Phillip Moloso III ’59

September 28, 2016, in Glendale, Arizona.

November 11, 2016, in Portland, Oregon.

march 2017 Reed magazine 45

In Memoriam an MAT in education from Reed College, and then an administrator’s certificate from the University of Oregon.

Irene married Ralph Shea, and they had two sons, Thomas and Daniel. This marriage ended in divorce, and in 1962 she married Chalmer Jack Langston, with whom she spent 33 happy years until his death in 1996.

Irene was an educator employed for more than 30 years by Portland Public Schools, working as a teacher at Sitton, Rigler, and Clinton Kelly; as a supervisor, and principal’s assistant at Lent; and an elementary principal at Applegate, John Ball, Humboldt, and Capitol Hill schools. She was active in the NEA, ESPA, and Phi Chapter of Delta Kappa Gamma. While teaching she served on the district’s math and language arts committees, and coauthored a math program for the district’s radio station, KBPS. Irene also tutored in reading for several years. After her husband’s death she delivered Meals on Wheels for Lents Loaves and Fishes.

Her sons survive her.

John (Jack) Ives ’63

October 31, 2016, in Tualatin, Oregon, after a series of strokes.

Jack grew up in Antioch, California, and attended Reed, and the Sorbonne in Paris, before graduating from UC Berkeley. He spent some time working in the chemical industry; worked in crafts for several years; briefly attended a seminary; and worked for the Baha’i Faith in the United States for nearly a dozen years. Jack lived in Albany, California, and also worked for the Edgar Cayce Foundation.

John had a brilliant inquiring mind that searched for wisdom and understanding. He had lasting friendships and was a benefactor to many in spite of limited means. His sister, Virginia Ives, survives him.

Kaye V. (Smith) Ladd ’63 October 27, 2016 in Olympia, Washington.

Born in Seattle, Kaye V. graduated from West Seattle High School. At Reed, she majored in chemistry and wrote her thesis, An Attempt to Determine the Existence of a Tetramethylene Radical in the Pyrolysis of Cyclobutane at 450° C., with Prof. Frederick D. Tabbutt [chemistry 1957–71] advising. She remembered washing the glassware in Prof. Helen Stafford’s 46 Reed magazine march 2017

Liz Powelson ’66

[biology 1954–87] lab to earn money for books.

“Dr. Stafford was the only woman scientist at Reed when I was there (and for a long time afterward),” Kaye V. observed. “She was an important role model for many of us.”

After getting a divorce in the late 60s, Kaye V. decided to keep her married name.

She received her master’s in physical chemistry from Brandeis University in 1965, and her doctorate in inorganic chemistry in 1974.

Living in Boston, Massachusetts, she worked as a scientist at Tyco Industries, as a research consultant at the New England Aquarium in Boston, and as a chemistry instructor at Suffolk University. Beginning in 1974, she taught chemistry at Evergreen State College in Olympia for 22 years, and inspired many students with her enthusiasm and energy. She once mused, “Preparation for ‘life in general’ is done well before someone reaches college. If I’m successful I can develop better analytical abilities in my students (increase knowledge and tools) and I might inspire a career choice, but I’m not going to make behavioral changes.”

In Boston, Kaye V. became involved with the feminist movement and active in the National Organization for Women, eventually serving as cochair of the local Olympia NOW organization. She also gave workshops on affirmative action compliance and taught a self-defense class for women.

Kaye V. was an avid runner, running races in each of the United States and several in Europe.

The Silver Strider running group named her Silver Strider of the Year in 2016. She also helped found the Women’s Independent Soccer League in Olympia and was the treasurer of the Women’s Investment Network.

In 2010, she married Karen Lichtenstein, who survives her, as does Todd Smith, her brother.

Brian Campf ’89

Elizabeth Maia Powelson ’66 March 14, 1970, in New York City, of murder.

As a result of conversations sparked during the 50th reunion of the class of 1966, it was learned that Liz Powelson, who had for many years been listed as missing, had in fact been tragically murdered in New York in the spring of 1970.

Liz came to Reed from Walnut Creek, California. She was the daughter of Dr. David Harvey Powelson and Marion Wylie Powelson, and had four brothers, David, Roger, Bruce, and Angus, all of whom are still alive. During her freshman year, Liz lived in the Ladd dorm, part of a tight-knit group of freshmen women known collectively as Third Floor Ladd. Liz left Reed at the end of her sophomore year and moved to New York City. Soon after moving to New York, she married Steve Haberfeld ’63, although they had divorced by the time of her death.

Liz had returned to school at Columbia University and was working for the New York Civil Liberties Union at the time she was killed.

The murder remains unsolved and is a source of deep sadness for her family, her friends, and those few Reed classmates who were aware of her fate. —JOANNE LESLIE ’66.

Brian Campf ’89

September 20, 2016 in Portland, Oregon, of a heart attack.

Born to Alan and Susan Campf, Brian grew up in Southwest Portland and graduated from Wilson High School. At Reed, he majored in political science and wrote his thesis, Plausible Denial and Covert Action, with Prof. Stefan Kapsch [political science 1974–2005] advising. He collected Reediana, everything from old photos of campus life to grand architectural plans of buildings that were never built on campus. After getting his law degree from Willamette University School of Law, he was

admitted to the Oregon State Bar in 1992.

Brian had a distinguished career in law, working on important tobacco industry and product liability litigation. Passionate about his work, he found reward in being a plaintiff’s advocate. In 1997, he married Sandra Schmahmann, and the couple enjoyed traveling, entertaining, and the company of friends and family.

For years the couple served as a “Reed family,” hosting international students and giving them a feeling of home in Portland.

With a deep love for and knowledge of Oregon sports history, Brian was a baseball scholar and a diehard Trail Blazer’s fan. He was photographed as a nine-year-old in the front row at the Trail Blazers championship rally at Terry Schrunk Plaza; the photo ran in Hoop magazine. He never forgot the 1976– 1977 season, and pined for the next championship. Full of love and laughter, Brian had a great sense of humor and brought joy to those around him. He loved sharing a meal with friends at a new restaurant he’d discovered.

Upbeat and optimistic, he believed in living life to its fullest, understanding the importance of being in the moment. His wife, Sandra Schmahmann; parents, Alan and Susan Campf; and brother Andrew survive him.

Peter Wadsworth ’02

December 2, 2016, in Oakland, California.

Peter perished in a catastrophic fire that claimed 36 lives at an Oakland warehouse known as the Ghost Ship. The fire broke out during a party at the warehouse, which served as an artists’ collective. Neighbors had complained of people living in the building illegally, with trash piling up and other unsafe conditions.

Bob Mule, Peter’s roommate in the Ghost Ship, told reporters that Peter had broken his ankle while trying to escape from the loft of his space. The oppressive heat and smoke forced Mule to abandon his attempt to pull Peter from the flames.

Peter grew up in Massachusetts. The son of Edward and Suzanne Wadsworth, he spent the first 12 summers of his life in Cohasset, where he and his younger brother, Nathaniel, learned to sail at the Yacht Club. The family lived in Boston most of the year, but their connection to Cohasset was strong. Peter loved learning about the artifacts in the Cohasset Maritime Museum and Historical Society from his uncle David, and his great-grandfather had designed the building in which it is housed.

He majored in history at Reed, and when he was a junior he met Jane Bulnes-Fowles ’03 in Hum 210. They began dating and continued to see each other after he left Reed. Peter then moved back to Portland and lived across from campus with Jane and her Reedie roommates.

“Even though he was no longer a student, he was still very much a part of Reed during that

time,” she remembered. “I found out after his death that he had driven multiple friends to their oral defenses to support them in their final tough Reed moments.”

When Jane graduated, she and Peter moved to Boston together, where she found work and he studied philosophy at Harvard. He worked with a number of MIT startups, and after they moved to the Bay Area three years ago, he continued to work with startups, artists, and artist groups. The couple broke up a few years ago, but continued to be best friends.

“In truth,” Jane said, “Peter’s work history is indicative of the very qualities that I associate with him and his time at Reed (and with so many Reedies.) He was fiercely inquisitive— he loved to learn about new things, whether that was a new take on history, another way to understand a piece of art or create something, or just a new way to think about things.

He read more widely than almost anyone I ever knew.

“That enthusiasm for learning was what propelled his career. He would read about a new technology and want to work with the people and startups that were doing that. He deeply believed in the power of ideas and of possibilities—another Reed trait, I think.”

Jane said Peter would meet with someone with a great product idea, but no experience, money, or business plan, and instead of laughing at them, would see the possibilities, and spend hours talking things through with them, pointing out intersections and tangents they hadn’t thought of. “It was the same spirit I saw in countless intellectual debates at Reed,” she says.

Peter’s longtime friend, Tammy Tasoff, said he was trying to get a marijuana-infused salsa company off the ground, and was also an artist who created replicas of Egyptian sculptures. He had worked at a company involved with drones, and was considered the Ghost Ship’s resident computer genius. His mother said that Peter was living in the warehouse because of the high rents in the city.

“Peter was very creative, charming, personable, and open-minded, unusually so,” she said.

“He was very tolerant of other views. He might not agree, but he was always willing to listen.”

Swan Vega, another artist living in the warehouse/collective, said that Peter was “a walking catalogue of correct factual knowledge.

He was like our Dumbledore—our wise wizard.

He was a genius. He was pure intelligence.”

Prof. David Tyack [history 1959–69]

October 27, 2016, in Stanford, California, from Parkinson’s disease.

A prolific and insightful author and exemplary teacher, Professor Tyack was renowned for his interpretations of the histories of American education and school reform. He grew up in the

small town of Hamilton, Massachusetts, and impressed a neighbor whose lawn he mowed.

The neighbor arranged a scholarship for Tyack at Phillips Academy. Tyack won further scholarships to Harvard, and completed his bachelor’s degree in 1952, followed by a PhD in 1958. At Harvard, he married Dorothy (Dee) Lloyd, and after nearly three decades they divorced.

Beginning in his undergraduate years, Tyack focused his attention upon the role public education played in forming American society. His undergraduate honors thesis was on the Cape Verdean community in New England, a subject to which he returned at the end of his life. He maintained a commitment to public schools and their need for improvement—particularly for children of low-income and nonwhite families.

He taught at Reed from 1959 to 1967, then moved to the University of Illinois and Stanford. In the course of his career he published 13 books and more than 100 articles. The One Best System, published in 1974, examined both the achievements and the failures of the system, everything from the successful assimilation of immigrants to racism and class bias, the opportunities offered to some, and the injustices perpetuated for others. Several of Tyack’s books were coauthored with graduate students, and following his 1980 marriage to political scientist Elisabeth Hansot, with his wife.

He served as president of the History of Education Society, and in the course of his career received multiple grants, fellowships,and awards. He collaborated with colleagues, studying everything from urban schools and school boards to the effects of the feminization of elementary school teaching.

Stanford honored him in 1996 with the Walter J. Gores Award for “his creative and dramatic ability to make the past come alive, and for his innovative efforts to involve students with the subject matter, transforming history from monologue into a conversation.”

Two sons, Daniel and Peter, survive him.

Elisabeth Hansot preceded him in death.

Pending Prof. Frederick Tabbutt,Attellia Vause Berg ’41,Margot Trumpler Howe ’41,Helen Sundell Thompson ’44, Edward Douglas Kuhns ’45,Elaine Tanner Van Bruggen ’47, Martha Hale Dillen ‘49, Lena Lorraine Jones ’49, William Montgomery ’51,Beatrice Cohen Koch ’56, Jean Tibbets Thiebaux ’57, Mary Jeanne Adamson Carrera ’58, Michael Levine ’62, Justin Simpson ’62, Joseph Michael Freeman ’72, Marielle Canning ’84, Susan Tuz ’88, Margalit “Mara” Gibbs ’19.

march 2017 Reed magazine 47

Object of Study What they’re looking at in class

EYE OF THE BEHOLDER Students in Prof. Kara Cerveny’s Developmental Biology class (Bio 351) study how neural stem and progenitor cells transition from proliferation to differentiation—that is, from being “generic” cells to being specialized cells, like blood cells, bone cells, and brain cells.

Students investigate this crucial event in the visual system of zebrafish, using cellular, genetic, and embryological manipulations to probe how progenitor cells regulate

48 Reed magazine march 2017

their behaviors by integrating extrinsic signals with cell-intrinsic cues. In the lab, students cut thin slices of zebrafish embryos and stain them with antibodies to examine cellular architecture.

Here we see a transverse crosssection from the head of a three-dayold zebrafish embryo stained with antibodies for beta-catenin (blue) and green fluorescent protein (um, green). The central open space is the mouth and the tissue directly above

it is the forebrain. On either side of the forebrain sit the two eyes, each comprised of a spherical lens and a trilaminar multicellular retina. The blue blobs in the forebrain highlight regions where many neurons connect with each other. This image was captured on a laser-scanning Nikon A1+ confocal with a 25X 1.2 NA water dipping lens by Avery Van Duzer ’18 and Evan Welch ’17.

The friends you made working in the bike co-op, shimmying at the pool hall formal, and debating at endless Senate meetings.

The peer tutors who got you through everything from your chemistry problem sets to your senior-year sociology term papers.

Your Hum 210 conference and the heavily-underlined copy of Leviathan you’ve held onto.

The spring in your step from a dance class that awakened new talents.

GIVE IN HONOR OF The path you took.

This March, make a gift in honor of what you love about Reed and help us inspire 1,200 donors in just 31 days.

If we reach our goal, the Annual Fund will receive a $50,000 gift from Linda Matthews ’67!

inhonor.reed.edu #inhonorofreed

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Elliot Leffler

Classics major Elliot Menard ’19 gets ready for her role in the musical Paris Commune, based on the insurrection of 1871.