I used to despise the relative obscurity of my alma mater, Reed College. The name of the Portland, Oregon, liberal arts school has spurred more than a few quizzical looks in Washington when I’ve mentioned it. “Reed? Where’s that?” This has been a persistent source of chagrin and insecurity about my social status. A friend and former colleague knew how to play this masterfully: One day I received a call on my office line. When I picked up, he simply asked, “Is Reed even accredited?” And down the phone went.
Reed’s anonymity is partly self-inflicted. Sure, the school of 1,400 has a stellar reputation among academics: It’s second among all liberal arts colleges in Rhodes Scholarships awarded (32) and routinely ranks in the top five, percentage-wise, of college graduates who go on to earn doctorates. But Reed hides its light under a bushel. It refuses to participate in the U.S. News college ranking survey, for example. That’s intellectually defensible, laudable even. The clickbait-before-clickbait-even-existed list actually penalizes intellectual rigor, dinging schools that graduate a lower percentage of students. Apparently it’s bad that a school like Reed is tough to get through; the U.S. News scheme encourages schools to wave along even failing students in order to keep their graduation rates up. (Public school teachers’ unions, famous for graduating students who can’t even read, would surely love such a system.) But Reed’s proud refusal to play the U.S. News game adds to those quizzical looks, not to mention idiots calling it “Weed College.” And it hasn’t escaped my notice that while Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are invariably referred to in media reports as “Harvard dropouts,” Steve Jobs, who went to Reed, is almost always simply a “college dropout.”
But, it turns out, notoriety isn’t always a good thing either. In recent months, a flurry of national publications have written about my old school, and what they’ve reported hasn’t been good. A protest movement, dubbed Reedies Against Racism, has taken to disrupting lectures in Hum 110, the mandatory freshman humanities course that focuses on Ancient Greece, Rome, and the Bible. Reedies Against Racism, which charges the course is “white supremacist,” is inspired by Black Lives Matter; they apparently think the problem with rogue cops is that they’ve spent a bit too much time reading Aristotle and Plato.
Reed’s administration, led by president John Kroger, has badly mishandled the protest movement. Kroger began by attempting to appease the mob; he moved up a scheduled decennial review of the Hum 110 curriculum and allowed silent protests in the classroom. Reedies Against Racism pocketed their gains and pushed for more: This fall, they disrupted Hum lectures so badly that they ended up canceled. Cue the cascade of pieces about Reed in the likes of the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and the Economist.
The pieces are generally fine, with a few caveats. Reading them is a bit like hearing your own voice recorded; something seems . . . off. For example, the school is often referred to as “ultra liberal” or, in the words of the Atlantic, “the most liberal college in the country.” This is nonsensical; the “most liberal college in the country” would never have a mandatory course like Hum 110. Nor does Reed offer majors in women’s studies, ethnic studies, or any other disciplines that would mark it as truly “liberal” (though those subjects aren’t ignored: Hum 110, for example, examines the role of women in the ancient world). Sure, the student body leans left—we’re not talking about Brigham Young here—but that didn’t stop a suspected reactionary like myself from being elected to the student senate. And, as mentioned, the most famous person to have attended Reed just happened to be one of the most successful entrepreneurs in modern history.
If you think I’m sounding a bit defensive here . . . you’re probably right. Reed’s a special place, and I’m proud to have attended. The only school to host a nuclear reactor manned by undergraduates also stages Renn Fayre every spring, a three-day bacchanalia of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. (Though those on hallucinogens are kept away from the reactors during Renn Fayre, we all hope.) Reed has no NCAA sports teams yet does have mandatory PE (badminton FTW). That, indeed, is the tragedy of Reedies Against Racism: If they have their druthers, Reed will be just like every other liberal arts college in the country. Instead of Hum 110, there’ll be ethnic studies around the clock and mandatory training in micro-aggressions. At that point, Reed might as well be done with it and execute a strategic merger with Brown University, a school that’s bizarrely proud of how few demands it places on its students.
But hey—nobody ever asks if Brown is accredited.
