Reed College Magazine June 2011

‰ June 2011

Forward Thinker Psychologist Daryl Bem ’60 has just published an extraordinary hypothesis.

You may already know what it is.

Nuclear scrounge Page 8 COME TO REUNIONS! Page 10

TORTURE TORTURE AND AND DEMOCRACY DEMOCRACY Page 16

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See pages 10–11 for more on Reunions.

You, yes you!

JUNE 6–12, 2011

JOCULARITY AND REVELRY AT REUNIONS 2011!

Register online and see who’s already signed up to attend at reunions.reed.edu.

Celebrate 100 years of all things Reed with an array of friends, new and old.

• Find your thesis in the tower.

• Take a nap at your old thesis desk.

• Read that obscure primary source that provided a bright idea.

• Look for that log in the canyon on which you carved a love note.

• Find the comic book you donated to the MLLL. • Have a spirited discussion with your favorite faculty members.

• Sit down in your old dorm social room and debate topics important or not.

Not your reunion year? No problem. All alumni are welcome to celebrate Reed’s 100th birthday!

REGISTER TODAY! Email: alumni@reed.edu Phone: 503/777-7589

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Facebook: Reed College Centennial Reunions 2011 Check out the latest Riffin’ Griffin posts: blogs.reed.edu/the_riffin_griffin/

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‰ june 2011

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Features 14

Departments 2 Editor’s Letter

To Squier the Circle

Return to the Mother Ship

Psych students deepen understanding at Squier Retreat.

By allen neuringer

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3 Letters Demographics Out of Joint Little Old Lady From Pasadena Thinking of Kim Quirk Baker ’88

Rugby, Nails, and Verse

Working with her hands helped poet Elyse Fenton ’03 hone her craft.

By dave jarecki 18

Rhapsody in Brick

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The Showman’s Doppelganger

The HBO drama Treme features a lead character based on flamboyant New Orleans jazzman Davis Rogan ’90. Or is it the other way around?

By Mike Perlstein ’84

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Force Majeure

Professor Darius Rejali is a leading authority on why states use torture— even though it doesn’t work.

By Martha Gies

Circle of Hull Lloyd Reynolds Leaps from the Page Profs Granted Tenure Caption Contest Call for Nominations Enter Sallyportal Nuclear Scrounge

Forward Thinker

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classic Lectures 38

Ionian Thinkers

By C.D.C. Reeve

ALUMNI PROFILES

Connecting Reedies Across the Globe

Dance at Reunions The Tees of Reed Camp Westwind

9 Puzzled Corner 10 Come to Reunions!

Return. Rejoice. Register.

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Supreme Indignity

Mike Munk ’56, Ethan Scarl ’61, and Phil Wikelund ’68

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Three Steps Forward

Jo-Ann Brody ’68 54

Active Voice

John Vergin ’78 16

4 Eliot Circular News from Campus

Daryl Bem ’60 has just published an extraordinary hypothesis. You may already know what it is.

By bill donahue

Reed will break ground on a $28 million performing arts building this summer.

By Randall s. Barton

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12 Adventures in the First Person Plate Tectonics and the Odes of Horace

44 Reediana Books by Reedies 48 Class Notes 61 In Memoriam 70 Apocrypha Tradition • Myth • Legend Desperately Seeking “Reed Girls”

Mentoring Sciencelings Hilleary Osheroff ’00

on the cover: Illustration by Gavin Potenza.

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Editor’s Letter

‰ June 2011

www.reed.edu/reed_magazine 3203 SE Woodstock Boulevard, Portland, Oregon 97202 503/777-7591 Volume 90, No. 2 Magazine editor Chris Lydgate ’90 503/777-7596 chris.lydgate@reed.edu class notes editor Laurie Lindquist 503/777-7591 reed.magazine@reed.edu graphic designer Tom Humphrey 503/459-4632 tom.humphrey@reed.edu alumni news editor Robin Tovey ’97 ADVISORY BOARD Diane Morgan ’77, Matt Giraud ’85, Naomi McCoy ’94, Caitlin Baggott ’99, and Jay Dickson [English 1996–]

Alien species, or shamanic ritual? Davis Rogan ’90 leads a parade at Reunions.

Return to the Mother Ship examples necessary). We love big ideas, sciA lot of people just don’t get Reed.

Having spent more than two decades entific revolutions, drums, and J.S. Bach.

Perhaps most important, we share a living in Portland, I have encountered many amusing misperceptions from local profound bond—a bond forged by the joy, residents, most of whom are surprised to sorrow, delight, and discovery that shaped learn that Reed students study Homer, do our youth.

So, I contend, we are a tribe, with an six quarters of P.E., and write a thesis. The general perception seems to be that Reed ancestral homeland and an annual converis some sort of spaceship that crash-landed gence known as Reunions. Whether we live on Woodstock Boulevard 100 years ago and in East Timor or Eastmoreland, it feels good to stroll across the quad or wander through is still liable to take off.

At the same time, there is something dif- the canyon. It feels good to reconnect with ferent about Reedies. We are not an alien spe- long lost classmates. It feels good to meet cies, but—at the risk of arousing the ghost of new classmates with whom we have so the late anthro professor Gail Kelly ’55—I much in common. It feels good to rethink old experiences in the light of time and submit that we do constitute a tribe.

Over the past century, we have devel- (maybe) wisdom. It feels good to belong.

Reed is a part of us, just as we are a part oped distinctive traditions. We have legends, from the Doyle Owl to the ghost of of Reed. We need one another. We belong Prexy to the MG buried under the library. to one another. Join us for Centennial We have heroes and semi-mythical fig- Reunions June 6–12. It’s going to be out ures, from Lloyd Reynolds to Dorothy of this world.

Johansen ’33 to Nick Wheeler ’55. We share rituals such as all-night Hum papers, scrounging, folkdance, and Thesis Parade.

We maintain an epic kinship system (no —Chris Lydgate ’90 2

Reed College Relations vice president, college relations Hugh Porter director, public affairs Jennifer Bates director, alumni & parent relations Mike Teskey director, development Jan Kurtz Reed College is a private, independent, non-sectarian four-year college of liberal arts and sciences. Reed provides news of interest to alumni, parents, and friends.

Views expressed in the magazine belong to their authors and do not necessarily represent officers, trustees, faculty, alumni, students, administrators, or anyone else at Reed, all of whom are eminently capable of articulating their own beliefs.

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

Periodicals postage paid at Portland, Oregon.

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

Reed magazine june 2011

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Letters to Reed Demographics Out of Joint

The December 2010 magazine reported that the entering Class of 2014 includes just 8 African American and 21 Hispanic students, out of 373.

To a recent graduate, Reed’s racial homogeneity is no secret. Nonetheless, these are dismally low figures, and they deserve the attention of everyone who cares for the future of the College.

Blacks and Latinos now comprise more than one-quarter of the U.S. population. They are under-represented at Reed by a factor of six and three, respectively. Even by the standards of other elite liberal arts colleges, Reed’s demographics are radically out of joint with the country’s.

For too long, I didn’t see this as a problem that had particular relevance for me, lately a part of Reed’s white supermajority. But it does. The academy and the nation cry out for creative minds trained to confront the full breadth of our world with clear vision. It is more important than ever for Reed’s students to encompass the experience of our society as a whole, not just of certain privileged strata.

When some perspectives are missing, all of us are left blind.

Institutional cultures die hard, and they rarely die harder than they do at Reed. The College has often proclaimed that it is ‘not for everyone.’ As a mandate for intellectual rigor, that exclusivity is honorable. Too often, however, Reed has also been less than welcoming for students of color, and in the school’s second century, this dishonorable tradition must change. I hope that students, faculty, and staff may all come to sense the urgency of making the College accessible for all thinkers, regardless of race.

—Joel Batterman ’10 Ann Arbor, MI Response from Keith Todd, dean oF admission:

Thanks for raising this issue. Over the past decade, minority enrollment has increased at Reed, but we were disappointed in this past year’s numbers.

About 22 percent of the entering class are students of color, with additional diversity coming from our international students. We are working to increase our recruitment toward students of color; this spring, we increased the number of admitted students of color we flew to campus to visit, and we also have increased the number of underrepresented students in our outreach mailings for the next cycle. Events such as our Minority Student Preview Days have been positive in affecting enrollment, and we are looking to create new avenues to attract the broadest, most diverse pool of intellectually motivated students possible.

Little Old Lady From Pasadena

I was very much taken with the [March 2011] cover story, “Fighting for Amanda’s Dream.” So much passion, greed, determination, vision in all the particulars of that drama. Martin Winch’s sense of duty and honor to his aunt and uncle’s dream is the first instance of what became the Reed Honor Code, writ large. The Reeds’ 12-year “residence” in Pasadena, California set off one of those “Ah-ha!” epiphanies in my mind.

When I was a boy, my parents would often take me to play in a park with an old Victorian house on it. I always wondered why it was called Carmelita, and who lived in that old house. At the back of the property stood an immensely tall, shingle-clad water tower. It was all torn down in the 1960s, and in its place was built the Pasadena Museum of Modern Art, complete with beautiful gardens. The multiple layers of symbolism, connection, symmetry, irony, what-might-have-been, came cascading in, now knowing the back-story. Amanda Reed did get an institution built for the “intelligence, prosperity, and happiness of its inhabitants” . . . in both cities. And every New Year’s Day, that institution (now the Norton Simon Museum) is the backdrop for all to see as the television cameras film the Tournament of Roses Parade making the great turn at the corner of Orange Grove and Colorado Boulevards.

Fleshing-out that period of Amanda and Simeon’s life in Pasadena would provide an interesting resonance to the founding of Reed.

—Stuart Byles ’75 La Crescenta, California

Thinking of Kim Quirk Baker ’88

Throughout her tragically short life, Kim Quirk was a constant reminder of how powerful an infectious smile and positive attitude can be. At Reed, in addition to being a wonderful friend who always had time for others, she also managed to study, sing in a band, volunteer AND graduate on time—no small feat. She took that boundless energy into the “real world,” where she excelled at everything she tried, making countless friends across the globe and inspiring many to push their boundaries, even a little, like she did most every day. Whether it was working as the art director of a sporting equipment company in Hood River, Oregon, rock climbing in Spain, or raising a family in Colorado, Kim approached these endeavors with singular dedication, flavored, of course, with healthy dose of fun. Even when confronted by her recent illness, Kim fought it with heroic grit

and determination, remaining overwhelmingly positive throughout, fighting (and laughing and smiling), all while giving those around her the strength to carry on without her. Kim will be dearly missed. Not only by those whom she touched closely through friendships over the years, but also by those who barely knew her. Anyone fortunate enough to spend time with her will forever cherish the wonderful and enduring spirit that was Kim. —Kim Wolfkill ’87 Seattle, Washington When I think of Kim I see her radiant smile, which is a nice way to remember someone. I was a sophomore when Kim started as a freshman in 1984 and it is such a joy to remember my time with her because she was always so positive and full of energy. She was witty, kind, and artistic.

I remember that year around Thanksgiving she went up the hill and got work painting storefront windows for the holidays for money!

I can’t imagine having the guts or the talent to do that, but that is the way she lived then and continued to live her life—upbeat and seeking new challenges undaunted.

Tiny and redheaded, she also became the coxswain for our crew team and led us to first place in the novice division of a headrace on the Willamette River.

I don’t think we ever saw each other again after Reed, but we shared the same birth date (a couple years apart) and we used to call each other once a year on that day and catch up.

We lost touch, but I kept track of her through a network of mutual friends. She had moved back to Colorado, she had started a singing career, she lived in Gibraltar, she had a daughter, and she got sick.

Kim died earlier this year and I was very saddened by the news. She had a two-year old daughter, Victoria. Facebook is a funny thing—her page is still up, but now it is filled with lovely and heartfelt and sad messages about how much she is missed. It also contains this message: People have been asking how to contribute to Victoria. Please send any contributions to the BBVA Compass Bank, 7375 Ralston Road, Arvada, Colorado 80002, made out to the Victoria Baker Trust Fund.

I honor her by helping her daughter, whom I’ve never met. Kim helped to make our time at Reed fun. She was a sweet person; I wish I could tell her that now.

—Greg Clarke ’88 Evanston, Illinois june 2011 Reed magazine

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Eliot Circular

Eliot Circle has witnessed many strange and unexplained phenomena over the years, but the sudden apparition of a terrestrial shipwreck involving a tugboat, a freight container, and random chunks of rusty iron was enough to make even the most battle-hardened administrator stagger in amazement.

The installation, dubbed Assembly of Freight, was created by sculptor Ben Wolf as part of RAW (Reed Arts Week, for those

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of you with short memories). This year’s theme, Geographies, emphasized the remapping of ordinary space and featured a labyrinth of hanging laundry in the Grove, a surreal living room in commons, rolling pallets of grass in Eliot Hall, theatrical performances, poetry readings, and lectures— all orchestrated by student directors Kylie Gilchrist ’12 and Allie Tepper ’11.

Assembly was definitely the highlight of the show, however. Wolf and his assistants

spent several days camped out in the parking lot cattycorner from the 7-Eleven, cutting and welding individual components, which were finally assembled on site with the help of a crane and a forklift. At one point, metal thieves raided their makeshift staging area and made off with several tons of scrap, but the artists persevered in their vision, refusing to allow petty larceny to, uh, torpedo their shipwreck.

—Anna Mann

photo by Megan Stockton

Circle of Hull

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Preventing Drug Abuse As part of its mission to care for its students and provide an outstanding academic experience, Reed is constantly seeking ways to prevent and reduce alcohol and drug abuse. At the invitation of Dean Mike Brody, an expert panel visited Reed in April to take a look at the college’s practices and make recommendations.

The panelists included Beth DeRicco, director of wellness and prevention services at the University of Connecticut; Jason Kilmer, assistant director of health and wellness for alcohol and other drug education at the University of Washington; Mary Larimer, professor of psychiatry at the Center for the Study of Health and Risk Behaviors at the University of Washington; Melissa Lewis, assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Washington; and Linda Major, assistant to the vice chancellor at the University of Nebraska.

Following the tragic drug-related deaths of two students since 2008, Reed has stepped up its efforts in education, prevention, and enforcement, with a particular focus on stress management, which research shows to have strong preventive benefits. Specific initiatives include:

REED

Eliot Society

100 100 y e a r s o f r e e d.

years of giving.

make your mark.

Amanda Reed’s bequest founded the college.

As Reed celebrates its centennial, we invite you to make a bequest commitment of your own.

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

Can’t come to Reunions? Reunions can come to you!

• Mandatory sessions on alcohol and drugs during O-week, followed by presentations through the year led by peers, staff, and outside experts.

• A wellness coordinator who leads a peer health advocacy program and coordinates health promotion resources.

• A “wellness website,” including online tools designed to help students assess their drinking and marijuana use.

• An improved health and counseling center with more clinicians, a wider range of services, a stress reduction room, acupuncture, and naturopathy.

• Thoughtful and consistent enforcement of Reed’s AOD policy.

For more about stress management at Reed, see “Finding Balance” in Reed December 2010. For more about AOD policy, see www.reed.edu/academic/ gbook/comm_pol/drug_policy.html

Visit bookstore.reed.edu to order Reed goodies, gifts, and centennial memorabilia.

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

june 2011 Reed magazine

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Eliot Circular

continued

No strings attached. Lloyd and Virginia Reynolds carved these marvellous (and rather mischievous) puppets sometime in the late 1930s.

Poetry in motion.

Undated example of Lloyd’s calligraphy demonstrates the interplay between phrase and stroke.

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Dangerous curves.

Undated woodblock print of a First Nations mask.

Reed magazine  june 2011

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photo by vivian johnson

The ultimate wordsmith. Lloyd Reynolds, 1961.

Lloyd Reynolds Leaps From the Page Lloyd Reynolds, the dynamic and controversial artist and teacher who inspired and influenced generations of students, is being honored during Reed’s centennial year in the exhibition Lloyd Reynolds: A Life of Forms in Art. Lloyd’s work as a calligrapher and visual artist, and as an instructor at Reed [English and art 1929–69], is represented by hundreds of items, selected by curators Stephanie Snyder ’91 and Gay Walker ’69 from the Lloyd J. Reynolds Collection in the Hauser Library and the Reed College Art Collection.

During his lifetime [1902–1978], Lloyd maintained a passion for art and literature and a dislike of commercialism. In addition to formal studies in forestry and English literature, he investigated a multitude of artistic, cultural, and intellectual traditions. He was self-taught and daring, which led to original and innovative approaches to course offerings, most notably calligraphy, a beloved Reed tradition based on authentic sources and beautiful writing.

Calligraphy in the exhibition reflects Lloyd’s integrity as a scholar and teacher—his work is precise and illuminating rather than decorative. The show also includes richly carved wood engravings, correspondence with former students and friends, drawings and illustrations, a delightful hand-carved cast of puppets, and a continuous screening of an Oregon educational series recorded in 1976.

Lloyd Reynolds: A Life of Forms in Art runs through June 11 in the Cooley Art Gallery, Hauser Library; www.reed.edu/gallery.

Newly tenured profs Dana Katz, Michael Faletra , Catherine Witt, and Alexander Montgomery-Amo. Not pictured: Akihiko Miyoshi.

Profs Granted Tenure

In February, the board of trustees granted tenure to the following members of the Reed faculty:

Michael Faletra english and humanities.

Faletra earned his PhD from Boston College and his BA from Boston University. He is the author of The History of the Kings of Britain, a translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s medieval blockbuster, Historia Regum Britanniae, and has taught at Reed (with interregna) since 2001.

Dana Katz art history and humanities Katz earned her PhD from the University of Chicago, her MA from the University of Illinois, and her BA from the University of Michigan. She is the author of The Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance and has been teaching at Reed since 2005.

Akihiko Miyoshi art Miyoshi earned an MFA in photography from Rochester Institute of Technology, an MS in electrical and computer engi-

neering from Carnegie Mellon, and a BA from Keio University in Tokyo. He has been teaching at Reed since 2005.

Alexander Montgomery-Amo political science Montgomer y - Amo ear ned a PhD from Stanford University in political science; an MA from Stanford in sociology; an MA from UC Berkeley in energy and resources; and a BA from the University of Chicago in physics. He is an expert on nuclear proliferation and has taught at Reed since 2006.

Catherine Witt french Witt earned her PhD in French literature from Princeton, an MA in modern European literature from the University of Sussex, and a BA from Oxford University. She has taught at Reed since 2005 and is working on a book about the emergence of the modern prose poem in nineteenth-century France.

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Eliot Circular

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Caption contest!

Last issue, we asked you for amusing captions for this historical Reed photo. And you answered. We received entries from classmates of all vintages and appellations. A sagacious owl has granted eternal timê to these lucky correspondents . . .

Grand Winner Please donate to the equipment fund! —Jill McLean ’56 Honorable Mention The Ladd Racquet never quite caught on like the Doyle Owl. —Nathaniel Unrath ’02

Call for Nominations To celebrate a century of alumni achievement, Reed is creating a new awards program.

The inaugural award will be presented to a deserving classmate at the centennial ceremony on September 24, 2011. We are seeking nominations. For a complete description of the criteria and a nomination form, go to www.reed.edu/alumni.

Enter Sallyportal is the name of the Reed magazine blog.

Swing by blogs.reed.edu/ reed_magazine for news and views about what’s going on at Reed these days.

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Reed’s reactor glows with pride after scrounging almost 3 kg of uranium from the University of Arizona.

Nuclear Scrounge For the first time in more than 40 years, the Reed reactor has received a fresh shipment of Uranium 235 to augment its dwindling supply. Fittingly, Reed managed to obtain the fuel through a time-honored technique—scrounging.

Some time ago, Reed reactor director Stephen Frantz learned that the University of Arizona was shutting down its reactor and planning to ship roughly three kilograms of fuel to a federal storage depository. Although the Arizona fuel rods were somewhat depleted, Frantz knew they were still sufficiently radioactive to allow Reed students to perform experiments for the next hundred years. In addition, the Arizona fuel was housed in containers made of stainless steel, which is more durable than the aluminum containers used for Reed’s supply.

After months of consultation (and forkwaving) with officials at Arizona and the Department of Energy, Frantz was able to broker a nuclear scrounge. Arizona would send its old fuel to Reed; in turn, Reed would send its old fuel to the DOE’s Idaho National Laboratory.

This spring, Reed received 91 fuel rods, each containing 31 grams of uranium-zir-

conium hydride, for a total of 2.821 kilograms. “This is easily the most significant event in the history of the reactor since it first went critical in 1968,” Frantz told the Quest. “Reed needed more fuel, but new fuel is almost impossible to obtain. This will enable us to operate and fulfill our mission for many more decades.”

The new fuel will allow Reed to operate the reactor at a higher power, once it has obtained permission from government regulators. (The reactor is currently rated at 250 kilowatts; Reed will seek approval to double the power level.)

Reed is the only liberal arts college in the world with a nuclear reactor. Some 46 students are currently licensed to operate the reactor; about half are women. In fact, Reed licenses more female operators than all other colleges and universities combined.

Frantz showed off the new fuel during a tour in March. As the reactor powered up, the core began to glow with Cerenkov radiation, bathing the room in a ghostly gleam of turquoise. For a moment, the pens in Frantz’s shirt pocket looked strangely like the tines of a fork—or was it just our imagination? —Anna Mann.

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Empire of the Griffin Connecting Reed alumni across the globe

You know Reed. But how well do you know Reedies? A free bumper sticker to the first 12 readers who can correctly answer the following questions about our illustrious classmates. Note that this puzzle has been fiendishly designed to confound Googlers and encourage good old-fashioned browsing. And yes, the answers are all in this issue!

Kinetic sculptor José Brown ’71.

Dance at Reunions

For more, see www.reediesdance.com.

Who just won a whopping $50 million grant for their education reform foundation in Baltimore?

Who won a bet against Robert Oppenheimer by producing 50 curies of barium-lanthanum-140 for the Manhattan Project? illustratioin for reed by s.britt

Dance will be everywhere at Centennial Reunions! Despite the huge impact that dance has had on the lives of so many Reedies, this is the first time that there will be a major dance presence at any reunion celebration. Look for workshops, improvisation sessions, “The Return of The Ice-Cream Social,” an open house with current and emeritus faculty at the home of professor Judy Massee [dance 1968–98], an exhibition of dance images, 100 Years, 100 Images of Dance, and site-specific happenings choreographed for random times and locations across campus, culminating in the Great Skip across the Great Lawn on Saturday afternoon!

All ages and experience levels are welcome at all events; there will be an event specifically designed for kids and parents on Saturday morning.

Cary Tucker ’93 remembers an exasperated professor Ottomar Rudolf [German 1963–98] once asking his class: “What do you people do besides study?”

“Wir tanzen!” Cary replied. (We dance!)

Whether you like folk, modern, contactimprov, swing, choreography, or just like to get-down and boogie, there will be an opportunity for you to move or enjoy watching others move! Also, be on the lookout for a special installation of Dansemuse, an interactive video-controlled performance instrument to be played by movement. —Amy Lindsay ’81

Whose short story inspired Meat Loaf’s new album Hang Cool Teddy Bear?

Who recently organized a “Breastfeeding Street Party” in Portland?

Got ’em? Send us your answers in the enclosed envelope, or email puzzled@reed.edu. Hints available if the price is right.

The Tees of Reed

T-shirt connoisseur Travis Greenwood ’01 is compiling a digital gallery of Reed t-shirts and related artifacts. In particular, he’s looking for classic shirts from O-Week, Renn Fayre, Beer Nation, Nitrogen Day, KRRC, bands, etc. that speak to Reed memes, campus traditions, and hot-button issues of their day. All class years are encouraged to submit tees—the more sensational and transgressive, the better.

Contact Travis at travis@founditemclothing.com.

Camp Westwind The weekend retreat at Camp Westwind for alumni and their families, sponsored by the Portland alumni chapter, will be October 14–16, 2011. Join alumni from a variety of eras and swap Olde Reed stories and songs in a beautiful forested setting on the Oregon coast. A limited number of reduced-rate spaces are available for kitchen and cleaning crew people.

For details and registration, see www.reed.edu/alumni/westwind.

june 2011 Reed magazine

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Come Round Out Reunions!

Return. Rejoice. Register.

100 years of Reed

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2000 alumni

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June 6-12, 2011

Make plans. Make peace. Make history. register at reunions.reed.edu/

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Adventures in the First Person

Plate Tectonics and the Odes of Horace Professor Frederic Peachy [classics 1956– 82] loved to begin class at eight o’clock in the morning. He would bounce in with a cheery, “Good morning, children!” One day a classmate got up the nerve to reply, “Good morning, Daddy,” which left him nonplussed—though only for a moment.

I read the Odes of Horace for the first time in his Latin 31 class in the fall and winter of 1961. That was the winter when a silver thaw turned a heavy snowfall on the meadow in front of Eliot Hall into an unbroken stretch of rounded hills and valleys like the mountains of the moon. I had to cross that obstacle course one morning and was glad to arrive at Professor Peachy’s office with no broken bones.

The office, which doubled as classroom, was located in an old frame structure left over from World War II (or perhaps World War I—it was hard to tell). We used to wonder what future archeologists would make of our civilization if that building was the only remnant.

Professor Peachy kept a Japanese bayonet on his desk, which he used as a letter opener. We never thought to ask exactly how he had come by it.

We spent most of Latin 31 struggling with translation and grammar, but did not look for hidden meanings because the point of each poem appeared to be obvious enough. Yes, there seemed to be an excess of fictional friends and lovers in the Odes, and sometimes the attitude of the author was hard to grasp. But after all, these were the products of another time and place, so what else could you expect?

Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65–8 BCE) is not now as famous as his friend Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro, 70–19 BCE), but to Latin students he is equally well known.

Like the Aeneid, the Bucolics, and the Georgics of Virgil, the Odes of Horace became instant classics, the sort of stuff that every school boy and girl was made to study.

After thousands of years of scholarly examination, you might think there was little new to say about an author’s work. But you would be wrong. In 1991, Jean-Yves Maleuvre began to publish revolutionary studies proposing that Horace and Virgil both employed two layers of meaning (la double

écriture)—so that they could denounce the crimes and hypocrisy of a dictator in ways that would not cost them their lives.

The tip-off to the presence of double meanings is a curious accusation by Augustus’ general Agrippa (Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, 63–12 BCE), who said that Virgil and Maecenas (and Horace by implication) used cacozelia latens.

Cacozelia is a Greek word signifying the kind of sarcasm in which the meaning is the opposite of what the words seem to say. For example, suppose you stumbled as

But suppose we pause instead after quam minimum (“as little as possible”)? Then the line reads: Seize the day as little as possible—believe in tomorrow.

In other words, “Do not give yourself up to passing pleasures in despair; instead, hope for better days in the future.”

Why would Horace say that? And why be ambiguous on such a crucial point? Because Augustus was a bloody dictator. Because

Was Horace actually subverting the dominant paradigm? you walked up some steps and I remarked, “Man, you sure are graceful.” Latens is Latin for “hidden,” or “lurking.” And so we may suppose that Agrippa accused them of a kind of hidden sarcasm in which they used statements that could be taken two ways.

For example, line 256 in Horace’s Epistles, book 2, letter 1, reads et formidatam Parthis te principe Romam, which is usually understood as: With you as leader, Rome is fearsome to the Parthians.

However, formidatus can mean either “terrified” or “terrifying,” so an alternative meaning would be: With you as leader, Rome is terrified by the Parthians.

The ancient Romans did not use commas or quotation marks, which meant that sometimes a sentence might be taken two ways, and that an apparent monologue might actually be a dialogue. Take for example that famous quotation carpe diem, literally “pluck the day.” The full line from Odes 1.11.8 reads carpe diem quam minimum credula postero, that is, “Seize the day as little as possible believe in tomorrow.” This requires a pause in order to make the meaning clear, and scholars have traditionally placed one after diem (“day”): Seize the day—as little as possible believe in tomorrow.

Horace commanded a legion for Brutus and the republican forces at the battle of Philippi in 42 BCE, when they were defeated by Augustus and Marc Antony. Although Horace enjoyed the amnesty granted to political nobodies after the reprisals were over, we should not assume that the battle changed his allegiance to the republic—or his hatred for Augustus.

Or take that other famous and oftmocked line, dulce et decorum est pro patria mori : “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” This line is found in Odes 3.2.13, where it will be seen that the eight stanzas of this poem fall easily into two groups, the first four being an exhortation to young men to do their part by valorous military service, and the last four a song in praise of true personal integrity (virtus) regardless of popular opinion. The last lines threaten criminals with divine punishment, though it may be slow in coming.

Maleuvre has a convincing explanation for the apparent lack of harmony between the two halves of the poem. In the first half, we should imagine Augustus as the speaker, and in the second half, Horace himself. Augustus was noted for cowardice (he disappeared during the first day of battle at Philippi, and was not seen again until the next day), so his appeal to bravery is hypocritical. If he is the intended speaker in the first half, there is no doubt who Horace has in mind when, in the final stanza, he warns the criminal (scelestus) that punishment will soon overtake him.

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Lyre, lyre, pants on fire. Was Horace guilty of cacozelia latens? (Illustration from a seventeenth century edition of the Odes.)

It is also clear that with praise of virtus, Horace condemns the hypocritical appeal to patriotism in the first half.

If these two odes were the only ones in which a case could be made for cacozelia latens, you might well doubt whether the poet harbored hidden animosity towards Augustus. But in fact the animosity, or something related to it, can be found in nearly every ode and also in Virgil’s Bucolics and in the Aeneid. (I chose these two odes for illustration because in these instances the case can be made briefly.)

Maleuvre’s ideas have met a rather frosty reception from the scholarly world, much as the theory of continental drift was a scientific heresy from 1596, when it was first proposed by Abraham Ortelius, until about 1960, when the theory of plate tectonics offered an explanation for it (though we should note that not everyone finds it adequate). Students who pointed out that North and South America could once have been joined to Africa and Europe were put down as naïve; scientists who suggested it were considered eccentric. Now those who oppose

plate tectonics are considered eccentric!

Anyone who makes a serious study of cacozelia latens in the works of Horace and Virgil will, I think, be attracted to this new viewpoint, just as the theory of tectonic plates is more persuasive than the older notion of continents sinking (Atlantis!) and rising again from the ocean floor. Who knows—perhaps Horace will become a richer, more complex author for the students who read him tomorrow.

I think Professor Peachy would have admired Maleuvre’s thesis. Like Horace, he had the quality that Walt Whitman once described (speaking of himself, naturally) of being “in the drama, yet outside it.” He cared about people and was patient with his students. At the same time he was one of the “greatest generation,” one of the soldiers who returned from the war strengthened rather than broken.

Like Horace, he was a combat veteran, with an earthy sense of humor. (On one occasion he explained that the city of Rome had its origin when “Mars knocked up the vestal virgins.”)

Many years later, I learned that he fought with the Marines at the battle of Guadalcanal and received the Bronze Star for his service at New Britain. Like Horace and the anger that infuses his Odes, Professor Peachy came by his bayonet the hard way. —Mike Taylor ’62 Though a math major, Michael Taylor enjoys classical literature. He has published three novels for young adults (Daggers and Ink, The Tombs of Alexandria, and The Natron Smugglers) and one for not-so-young adults (The New Herakles). Like most Reedies, he feels that he was marked for life by the Reed experience, which is evidently different from, say, the Harvard or the Stanford experience. Such schools give you a good education and bragging rights, but not a weltanschauung.

Further Reading

Petite stéréoscopie des Odes et Epodes d’Horace (2 volumes), Jean-Yves Maleuvre. J. Touzot: Paris, 1995/1997.

Cacozelia Latens, Jean-Yves Maleuvre. www.espace-horace.org Virgil Murder, Jean-Yves Maleuvre. virgilmurder.org Life of Virgil, Suetonius.

In Memoriam: Professor Frederic Peachy. Bulletin of the Classical Association of the Pacific Northwest, 28.1, October 1997.

Clareti “Enigmata”: The Latin Riddles of Claret, Frederic Peachy. University of California Press: Berkeley, 1957.

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To Squier the Circle Psych Students Deepen Understanding and Community at Squier Retreat High on a bluff overlooking the Columbia River, 32 Reed students, sophomores to seniors, gather with 8 psychology professors on a Saturday morning for the 13th annual Squier Retreat at Menucha, a retreat center in the Columbia Gorge. Through Sunday afternoon, students and faculty will explore serious ideas and have fun.

After introductions in the meeting room in Ballard Hall, we walk to the dining room, where the faculty serve lunch family style. Meals at Menucha are satisfying, if not fancy, with provisions for vegetarians and vegans. Students and faculty often sit with different folks at different meals, so that discussions are varied and the room is abuzz with chatter and laughter.

Back in Ballard, faculty members introduce topics that provoke discussions, sometimes among small groups, sometimes with everyone together. Here is a sample. Professor Tim Hackenberg shows—with a game played by all—that, when community and individual benefits are in conflict, communication among individuals decreases selfish behaviors. Professor Enriqueta Canseco-Gonzalez asks for volunteers who are proficient in a foreign language. We laugh as each of the volunteers (fluent in French, German, Korean, and Spanish) attempts to communicate a phrase, using only the foreign language, and this prompts a discussion about how to facilitate communication across languages. Professor Peter Marks admits to being an active, some would say compulsive, player of World of Warcraft and then leads a discussion about the reinforcement contingencies underlying computer games. Discussions are freewheeling and sometimes veer in unexpected directions, as when Professor Dan Reisberg argues that there is a symmetry between religious faith and scientific faith, which sparks a debate over whether Pope John Paul actually performed miracles.

“Faculty Speed Dating,” organized by Professor Kris Anderson, gives students time to question each faculty member individually. Students can ask any question on any topic with the understanding that the faculty member will answer honestly or choose not to answer. Sample questions: What led you to become a psy-

Les Squier [psychology 1953–88] also served as dean of students and interpreter of dreams.

chologist? Do you believe in God? What was your most embarrassing experience?

What experiment would you do if you had no ethical constraints? Why were you arrested (asked of only one colleague!)?

How do you organize your time?

The sun shines as we walk to the grassy field below Ballard. Some of us play tag— three faculty members run almost as fast as students; some form a group tangle and unwind (in a game called Knots that I won’t try to explain); some kick a soccer ball across the field; others converse or stroll. A bald eagle soars overhead as we end the afternoon with a walk to view dusk over the Columbia River.

After dinner comes entertainment. In Psychology Pictionary, organized this year

by Jessica Gerhardt ’11, and Professor Kathy Oleson, students try to depict, via drawings, randomly selected psychological words or phrases, such as primacy effect, proprioception, oral fixation, and retrograde amnesia. Both drawings and calledout guesses can be hilarious.

Another Squier tradition is the wrongly named “Not So Talented Talent Show.”

Guitar and ukulele playing accompany a series of beautifully delivered songs, both popular—with the group joining—and student composed (Gray Davidson ’11,

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Zina Jenny ’12, Camille Charlier ’12, Mariah Gottman ’13, and Jessica Gerhardt ’11). Mathias Quackenbush ’11 plays Debussy’s La danse on an old baby grand piano with energy and nuance. Ross Barnett ’13 reads a poem, Don Berg ’12 a short story. As Adrienne Wise ’12 performs gymnastic contortions, many in the audience gasp and hands go to heads in disbelief. Her body holds seemingly impossible, but at the same time beautiful, positions. Peter Marks, accompanied

by Professor Acacia Parks ’03, bring the group to its feet with cheers as he completes a rap rendition, based on his research, of the song Popular. We conclude with the group learning to sing the Egyptian national anthem—I play the piano—intermixed with dancing of the Israeli hora. Then, while some choose sleep at the end of a stimulating day, others play games late into the night: Wink, Sweaty Old Man, Taboo, or Mafia.

A word about Les Squier. At the beginning of the retreat, I talk about Les and why the event was named in his honor.

More than that: the retreat was motivated by Les’s life. He taught at Reed for 43 years, was chair for 20, and set the tone, goals, and ethics of the psychology department over much of that time. Les sought excellence in teaching, critical thinking, mutual support and friendship among faculty and students, and a focus on student welfare, all of which psychology faculty value to this day. After Les died in 1996, the Squier Memorial Fund was established with the great help of Anne Wood Squier ’60, and the department draws on it to subsidize the retreat.

At the end of each Squier retreat, my colleagues and I are tired (as, no doubt, are the students). We’ve been away from homes and families and have lectures to prepare, quals to read, labs to organize. But I know that my colleagues join me in that, after each retreat, I feel a closeness to our students, an appreciation of their hidden talents, an admiration for my colleagues— their energy and their creative ideas—and a deep satisfaction that we continue a tradition modeled on Les Squier’s life at Reed.

— By Allen Neuringer

COME EAT FROM THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE COMRADES OF THE QUEST An Oral History of Reed College

By John Sheehy ’82 Hardbound. 400 pages.

Oregon State University Press. $34.95.

Preorder (through September 1) $29.95.

Constructed from the oral histories of past presidents, professors, alumni, and trustees, this book charts the colorful— and often dramatic—evolution of the Reed community over the college’s first century.

THINKING REED

Centennial Essays

by Graduates of Reed College Edited by Professors Roger Porter and Robert Reynolds Hardbound. 400 pages. Reed College. $19.95.

In this collection of essays marking the college’s centennial, thirty-three alumni reflect on their careers as they look back at Reed and the intellectual community that helped shape their accomplishments.

Preorder together and save (through September 1). $45.95.

CENTENNIAL POSTER Created and produced by David Lance Goines 16.5” x 24”. $50.

Renowned poster artist David Lance Goines visited campus and experienced Reed classes firsthand before designing and printing this limited edition commemorative poster. All proceeds from poster sales will directly support student financial aid.

Allen Neuringer is professor emeritus of psychology at Reed.

To order, visit bookstore.reed.edu.

Explore 100 years of Reed at centennial.reed.edu.

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photo by James Davies

Rugby, Nails, and Verse Working with her hands helped poet Elyse Fenton ’03 hone her craft.

By Dave Jarecki

Elyse Fenton collects words, holds them in her mind like river stones, then stacks them into poetic form with the same precision she employed those summers she spent building trails in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. She orchestrates the movement of words through reckless play with the adroitness she displayed as a scrum half on Reed’s rugby team. Yet, her work remains alight with tenderness, awe, and love. Not just for the power of words, but also, one feels, the literal existence of words, how they look, read, and sound as well as the residue they leave behind on the lips.

“Once upon a time I had a journal,” she laughs over the phone from Philadelphia, where she lives with her husband Peenesh and their 14-month-old daughter, Mira. “I would write words in the journal, and I’d look things up. That process has faded, but I’m still hungry for words.”

Not only has Elyse stayed hungry for words, but she also remains loyal to the notion that a single word can lead her into the guts of a poem. Her love for language helps make reading Clamor, her awardwinning debut poetry collection, such a delight.

The collection has won a great deal of acclaim, including the 2008 Pablo Neruda Prize for the poem “Infidelity,” the 2009 Cleveland State University first book prize, and most recently, the 2010 University of Wales Dylan Thomas prize, given annually to a writer under the age of 30. Elyse was the first American and the first poet to win the award.

Most of the attention, from back-cover blurbs to international interviews, dwells on the book’s subject material—a war bride channeling words from the front delivered via text messages by her soldier husband. And while many of the poems

read like memoir, Elyse’s poetic grace and aptitude for language allowed her to enter any number of worlds the words presented, thereby embodying the experience in new ways. This willingness to follow the thread of language—be it a sentence, phrase, or single word—is something Elyse has been doing almost her entire life.

“Around the time I was five or six,” she says, “I had the habit of saying everything out loud, then repeating the words under my breath in a quiet whisper. I was learning to read the sound and surfaces of language. Even then I wanted to savor words.”

In the poem “Commerce,” which opens the book’s dreamlike second section, she engages the reader in her language play, hovering around the heteronyms wound (“wownd”) and wound (“woond”). In “Word from the Front,” we fall into the poem on the back of a corkscrew landing, a phrase

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that came her way across 7,000 miles.

“The material of war demands that we navigate the language in different ways,” Elyse says. “The way we speak of war can often feel clichéd and overused. In order to articulate things in a wilder, more accurate sense, it becomes necessary to reach deeper into our poetic bag of tricks.”

A drive to see how language can connect us to moments that are fragile and fleeting.

Professor Lisa Steinman [English 1976–], who served as Elyse’s thesis adviser and also worked with her in a number of classes, isn’t surprised by her willingness to delve deep into language, nor of her success.

“Elyse arrived here as one of the most careful craftsmen of language I’d seen in an undergrad,” Steinman says. “It made working with her a great pleasure.” Steinman recalls how Elyse’s thesis, Hammer Struck Music, worked language in a similar way, with the language, in this case coming from the world of manual labor, something Elyse knew about from working as a trail builder and carpentry apprentice.

“Her thesis was very carefully crafted,” Steinman says. “As we read poems aloud, she was always thinking about diction, syntax, clarity . . . even the etymology of words.”

“I was obsessed with various tellings of the John Henry song,” Elyse says of

Clamor at Reed

her thesis. “The thesis includes a series of poems about John Henry and imagining John Henry’s wife. A lot of that thinking, I believe, translated into the thinking, or at least the prethinking, for Clamor.”

Whether describing the thoughts of John Henry’s wife, or grappling with the uncertainty brought on by Peenesh’s deployment, Elyse’s poetic drive is fueled by her desire to see how closely language can connect us to moments that are both fragile and fleeting.

“In Clamor, the material is very much about language, which in itself is anchored by the potential for failure. It’s a very elegiac notion—our attempts to articulate something are hampered because we can’t actually get to the thing itself.”

Elyse is well aware that the majority of the public interest and praise for Clamor has to do with the book’s portrait of a 21st-century war bride floating kernels of thought back and forth to her soldier husband via a handheld screen, then dealing with the emotional aftermath of all that couldn’t be said and shared. Still, she hopes that readers are able to move beyond the subject and sink into the craft as well.

“It’s amazing to have a readership come of this. I’m certainly thankful the book has reached varying audiences, but it would be great if, in being attracted to the material, readers take more time with the language.”

Winning the Dylan Thomas prize, along with its $47,000 bounty, has been a great honor for Elyse, but hasn’t really changed the painstaking process of writing for her.

She remains committed to keeping her nose on the page, her keen ear tuned to conversa-

It was standing-room only in the psychology auditorium when poet Elyse Fenton ’03 read from her award-winning collection, Clamor, in March. Okay, nobody was actually standing: late arrivals sat on the floor or reclined against the wall, situational discomforts that paled in comparison to the striking corporeality of the poems we heard.

Professor Lisa Steinman, Elyse’s thesis adviser, praised her aptitude for “making things that are lost or imagined real,” in a warm introduction. Steinman noted with pleasure that Elyse’s Reed experience is evident in her work as much through references to Orpheus and Dante as through a distinctive “physicality of language” honed by a rugby player.

Elyse took to the podium with obvious joy at being back at Reed, and reflected on her own routine of Thursdays past: rugby,

tions and everyday language. She will always be collecting words, holding them in her mind then stacking them into poetic form, building trails through new terrain.

Word from the Front His voice over the wind-strafed line drops its familiar tone to answer, Yes, we did a corkscrew landing down into the lit-up city, and I’m nodding on my end, a little pleased by my own insider’s knowledge of the way planes avert danger by spiraling deep into the coned center of sky deemed safe, and I can’t help but savor the sound of the word—the tracer round of its implications—and the image— a plane corkscrewing down into the verdant green neck of Baghdad’s bottle-glass night so I don’t yet register the casual solemnity of newscaster banter falling like spent shells from both our mouths, nor am I startled by the feigned evenness in my lover’s tone, the way he wrests the brief quaver from his voice like a pilot pulling hard out of an engineless plummet, but only at the last minute and with the cratered ground terrifying, in sight—

the scrounge, a visiting-writer reading, and the promise of cookies during the reception afterward.

Love, loss, and the human heart are recurring themes that Elyse tackles in poems such as “Gratitude,” “The War Bride Waits,” and “The Dreams.” She drills down to the level of human anatomy in others like “After the Blast,” “Love in Wartime,” and “Mercy” (which she dedicated to broken rugby players everywhere).

Elyse has a powerful way with descriptions of destruction and debris, be it material or emotional, in part because there is a surgical precision to how she wields words. Whether she is talking about scars, ribs, or limbs (be they attached to people or to oaks), there is a beautiful utility in her language as it cuts to the bone.

—ROBIN TOVEY ’97

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Centennial Campaign

Rhapsody In Brick

Reed will break ground on $28 million performing arts building this summer.

By Randall S. Barton

Try to imagine Reed without the performing arts. No Boar’s Head Procession, no Hum Play, no Fridays at Four. No drums at Thesis Parade, no Shakespeare in Cerf Amphitheatre, no bagpipes at commencement. The performing arts add spice to campus life, as they trigger inquiry and scholarship.

This summer, Reed will break ground on a $28 million performing arts building packed with stages, studios, classrooms, and practice space, made possible by the Centennial Campaign. For the first time, the music, dance, and theatre departments will be united under one roof as the college makes a historic bricks-and-mortar commitment to the performing arts.

“Enhancement of Reed’s programs in music, dance, and theatre has been a goal of the college for as long as I can remember,” says Roger Perlmutter ’73, chairman of the board of trustees. “Construction of a new performing arts building emerged as the highest priority capital project when

the college formulated its strategic plan five years ago. Our new building will, for the first time, pay appropriate respect to the talent and aspirations of our gifted undergraduates in the performing arts.”

The performing arts provide unparalleled opportunities for students to hone skills in creative expression and oral communication. In addition, says President Colin Diver, Reed students need more opportunities for teamwork.

“We don’t have some of the outlets that other schools have, such as self-governing fraternities or varsity athletic teams. But what we do have is programs in music, dance, and theatre—very small programs doing good work under difficult circumstances. It seemed to be the logical place to invest to give students those kinds of outlets. The fact that we were going to do a Centennial Campaign provided the vehicle for lifting this up and making it the centerpiece.”

Launched in 2005 with a goal of $200

million, the Centennial Campaign is the most ambitious fundraising effort in campus history. It has allowed Reed to adopt a three-phase plan for the performing arts.

In Phase One, the college added professors, beefed up support for research, and strengthened programs in all three departments.

Money for this phase (now mostly complete) was raised with a $1.5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and nearly $4.5 million in gifts from alumni and friends.

Phase Two consists of the performing arts building. Reed hopes to raise at least half of the cost, $14 million, from gifts, with the remainder to be financed with bonds.

Phase Three envisions a 450-seat proscenium theatre, which will connect to the southwest corner of the performing arts building. Construction of the theatre will not begin until the projected $10 million cost has been raised. This could take five to ten years, according to Hugh Porter, vice president for college relations, unless donors step forward to put it on a fast track.

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Art on the Margins The performing arts have been an integral part of the Reed experience from almost the beginning. Theatre classes were offered in the art and literature departments before the theatre department was established in 1938. Music history and appreciation classes were part of the curriculum before the music department became a reality in 1947. The P.E. department offered dance classes before the dance department was formed in 1949.

Although more than half of all Reed students take part in the performing arts, the disciplines have been physically marginalized in makeshift quarters spread across eight separate buildings on campus.

The current theatre was built in 1972, using insurance money from a fire that destroyed the old student union. It has virtually no wing space, and a backstage can be created only with curtains. It lacks a catwalk, and the beams that students once crawled along to set the lights were declared unsafe by OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration). Scenery must be built and stored in a warehouse several blocks away. There are no handicap accessible restrooms.

“That run-down, outdated building affirms the secondary status of the theatre department,” says literature/theatre major Dominic Finocchiaro ’11.

Isolated on the southwestern corner of campus, Prexy—built in 1915 as a residence for the college president—houses the music department’s 14 practice rooms. The building has an undeniable charm, with verdant views of the Great Lawn. Practice rooms are not soundproofed, however, and the background cacophony is a real challenge for student musicians. Because of the sound transference, it is necessary to limit percus-

Renderings by Opsis Architecture

Now that Phase One is complete, and the departments have better support, the focus has shifted to Phase Two—finding them a better home. In October, the board of trustees voted to approve the new facility and set about raising money from themselves. Soon their efforts yielded over $7.5 million in support for the building.

“There’s obviously a need, because the performing arts have been on the ‘to do’ list for a number of years and we are a liberal arts college,” says trustee Alice Steiner ’74.

“The notion of having a liberal arts college without strong performing arts components didn’t make much sense.”

The crowning touch for the performing arts building will be a 450-seat proscenium theatre that will be added when its projected $10 million cost has been raised.

An ideal venue for thesis performances, the 180-seat studio theatre will be equipped with movable seating platforms, catwalks and large acoustical doors that allow the stage to expand into the adjacent scene shop.

The 6,929 square-foot Winter Garden will provide students with space, air, and light for guerrilla theatre, spontaneous jam sessions, impromptu performances, and creative encounters.

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Performing Arts

continued

sive instruments, for instance, to certain blocks of time during the week. Denise VanLeuven, director of private music instruction, says she frequently has to request that students play more softly. The old building is in need of constant repairs as well as humidification to protect the instruments.

“Lots of our peer institutions have more robust involvement with the arts than Reed has had,” says professor Morgan Luker [music 2010–], Reed’s first ethnomusicologist, whose position was funded by the Centennial Campaign. “Music has something to say to the rest of the academic community.

It’s not a music appreciation model that we’re going for here. It’s about using the arts as a different way of knowing, participating, and engaging.”

With faculty dispersed in two different buildings, the dance department shares facilities with the P.E. department in the sports center.

“To say dance was marginalized is an understatement,” says professor Minh Tran [dance 2008–], one of two half-time dance professors whose positions were also endowed by the campaign. “It’s a gym, it’s not a dance studio. The echo is so bad that when we’re having student discussion, I can’t even hear the students, and they’re only 10 feet from me. I have to scream when I teach. On top of that, we’re competing with a basketball literally smashing against the wall on the other side of a thin dividing wall.”

Existing facilities are a hurdle for students who want to participate in dance, he says.

While the notion of the starving artist is a popular trope, makeshift facilities really don’t contribute much to teaching—or learning.

“The only way to teach the performing arts is to do it,” Diver says. “And if you’re going to have people doing it, you’ve got to have the equivalent of great chemistry labs, which is to say good theatres, great rehearsal spaces, great practice rooms—the whole nine yards.”

A Floorplan for All Seasons Due for completion in 2013, the new academic facility will bring the three performing arts departments together in a building carved into the slope above the tennis courts on the west side of campus.

“At every corner, this is a teaching facility,” stresses Alec Holser, partner in Opsis

Left: Mellow Cello? New soundproofed practice rooms will replace the distracting cacophony of Prexy.

Right: Stop! In the name of love . . . a dedicated dance studio will benefit instruction in a discipline that currently shares space with the P.E. department. Here, professor Minh Tran leads a dance class in a sports center gym.

Architecture. “Whether it’s a stair landing or a lobby space that works for performance, it’s got to be a place where students come together to learn and connect, to do what Reed students do—get together in small groups and discuss.”

The visual centerpiece of the three-story building will be a 6,929 square-foot atrium Winter Garden that frames the view to the west hills. Extending from the west entrance to the second-level east entrance, it has been designed as a place that will accommodate impromptu jam sessions, guerrilla theatre, and spontaneous gatherings. Outside, an informal amphitheatre is created by a series of terraces descending from the Gray Campus Center quad to the entry plaza.

Professors from the three departments met regularly with the architects and suggested that the “back of the house”—the activities traditionally located behind the theatre—be moved forward so that students could witness the process of creating a performance.

The green room—usually situated backstage—has been brought into the atrium, functioning as a student lounge during the day. A rehearsal room has a glass wall onto the atrium and the 99-seat black box theatre is outfitted with large doors that afford views of rehearsals and set building.

At the north end of the building (now the path between the sports center and Kaul Auditorium) a loading deck will function as another entry. A back stairs will provide quick access to the black box theatre and rehearsal room.

“The whole idea is to make the building

a crossroads,” Holser says. “You can move through it in multiple ways, adding points of interaction and connection between people.”

The costume and scene shops on the north wall will benefit from the northern light.

“That’s why the garret studios in Paris had those big, slanted skylights facing north,” Holser says. “Northern light is ideal because it’s constant and doesn’t have the bright shadows. When you’re doing costumes you also have to be able to close those windows off and look at them with stage light. But for day-to-day working, you want it to be light.”

The building will step down from the quad to the west parking lot, a 30-foot difference in elevation, and become Reed’s public portal to the west. It will also complete what is now a three-sided quad, but because of the slope, it will read essentially as a one-story building.

Diver hopes that the building will become an iconic space on campus. “People wrap up a lot of memories in their experience of throwing Frisbees on the quad, sitting on the S.U. porch, hanging out in Old Dorm Block or at the Paradox,” Diver says.

“I’m hoping they’ll have similar memories of things they do in the new building.”

Diver is also excited about the building’s large Winter Garden atrium. “The Reed campus doesn’t have enough indoor/ outdoor spaces. It has a lot of nice indoor spaces. But this is a climate in which it rains so much that people—particularly during the academic year—can’t hang out outside, unless they’re under cover. One of the reasons the SU porch is so popular is

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you can hang out there on a 40-degree day.

The Winter Garden will be wholly under cover, but it will feel like you’re on a porch, like you’re outdoors.”

In addition to the black box theatre, the building will include a state-of-the-art 180seat studio theatre (with catwalks!) and a design studio.

The theatre department has as many as 12 students a year doing productions in connection with their theses, says professor Kathleen Worley [theatre 1985–]. The additional performing and rehearsal spaces will make it possible to stage simultaneous events. In addition, technical rehearsals— where sound and lights are set—can occur at the same time students are rehearsing in another space.

The dance department finally gets a dedicated dance studio, divisible by a semi-soundproof wall affording concurrent use by two classes. A wall of south-facing windows lends the two-story space a loftlike feel and showcases student dancers.

Another large rehearsal space—outfitted with retractable seating and an overhead lighting grid—will be shared by dance and theatre and can be used as a venue for thesis projects and performances by students, faculty, or visiting artists.

Though the music department will continue to perform in Kaul and the Eliot Hall chapel, it gains a 2,200 square-foot music/ choir rehearsal room and soundproofed practice rooms that will replace those at Prexy.

Perhaps the jewel in the crown will be the 450-seat proscenium theatre, which could host major theatre and dance performances. (Big dance productions are currently presented in Kaul Auditorium, although a sprung floor, lighting, and soft goods must be rented for each performance.) It could also be a venue for touring companies, providing students with the valuable experience of taking in professional performances.

Scholarship and the performing arts Reed has always maintained a strong commitment to active learning. Students don’t just read scholarship; they have to be scholars, creating a thesis from primary source material.

Rachel Carnes ’93 was a dance/theatre major who went on to found a nonprofit based in Eugene that uses dance to develop social, emotional, and cognitive intelligence.

“My teachers at Reed—and the curriculum they developed—enabled me to see that

the performing arts could, and should, be integrated into every other field of study,” she says. “Now I use dance to teach nondancers about how their brains work. I use theatre to teach non-performers how to get kids excited about math, science, and reading. I simply want every kid, every student, to have the chance to learn the way I did.

When I was a younger person, I didn’t think of my time rehearsing on stage or working in the studio as ‘inquiry.’ But in retrospect, I realize that few opportunities in life have tested my critical thinking skills more thoroughly, or more enjoyably than Dance 210.”

“There is a Reed approach across the board and it’s there in theatre,” adds Finocchiaro.

“Each department translates that approach differently, but the general approach is the same: creating well-rounded, thoughtful students that know how to think on their feet, know how to analyze and actually be aware of what they’re doing, whatever that is.”

While he never considered himself a hands-on person, he ended up becoming the master electrician for the department for two years.

“You can’t come in here and say, ‘I’m an actor,’ because you’re going to do everything. You’re going to learn things you didn’t think you were able to learn, be good at, or ever wanted to do. I never thought I would be an electrician, hanging lights and building platforms. But I have more confidence on a general level because of those skills the department taught me.”

Finocchiaro’s thesis, Shooting History in the Neck, explores the ways in which American avant-garde theatre directors deconstruct and explode both history and historical personalities.

A graduate of Reed should have a strong sense of the skills needed in the performing arts, according to Worley. The performing arts require a commitment to a choice to see where it leads as well as collaboration with others, including the audience.

“The liberal arts are wonderful in that they allow you to make multiple suppositions and to explore possibilities in an intellectual way,” Worley says. “You can hypothesize anything about a piece of literature and write about it, and there’s no particular consequence for that, except that you enrich your mind with the juggling of possibilities. But if you’re doing a production of A Doll’s House, you have to make a whole bunch of choices and you will find out the consequences of those choices. Our lives are filled with situations in which we

have to make choices and live with the consequences of those choices. The practice of art teaches something about that.”

“Dance can at once be evocative, referential, and abstract,” says professor Carla Mann ’81 [dance 1995–]. “For me, that seems to be a really potent area for generating critical thinking and analysis. We often think of the activities of critical analysis as being reading and writing and speaking.

But they could also be moving, making, and seeing. Dance really brings those activities together in a way that not only articulates ideas, but embodies them.”

The goal of the new building is to promote more collaboration—both planned and spontaneous—among students, faculty, and departments, and its placement on the quad will reinforce the visibility of the performing arts at Reed. The sciences, long grouped in buildings on the east end of the campus, will be finally balanced by the performing arts on the west, giving students in all disciplines the opportunity to explore innumerable pathways that lead in new and unexpected directions.

At a Glance:

Performing Arts Building • 450-seat Proscenium Theatre. (Phase III).

• 180-seat Studio Theatre with movable seating platforms.

• 99-seat Black Box Theatre with a barn door that opens to the lobby.

• Dance studio with sprung wood floor.

• Theatre/dance rehearsal room.

• Music/choir rehearsal room.

• Winter Garden lobby with radiantly heated and chilled concrete floors and natural ventilation.

• Rooftop garden for gatherings and functions.

• Classrooms, practice rooms, technology center, multimedia library, scene studio, costume studio, and offices.

• Bioswales and rain gardens cleanse all onsite rainwater with zero discharge to city’s storm water system.

• Windows and skylights reduce dependence on artificial light and provide better options for teaching and learning.

•New public entry on the west edge of campus.

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The Showman’s Doppelganger The HBO drama Treme features a lead character based on flamboyant New Orleans jazzman Davis Rogan ’90.

Or is it the other way around?

By Mike Perlstein ’84 photography by david rae morris

Alright, well, the apartment is messy.

And the girls, they aren’t as fine (in the classic Hollywood sense).

I’d like to think I’m a bit dressier And I know more about wine.

I get tired of explaining what really happened So I sat down and wrote these lines.

—“The Real Davis” by Davis Rogan.

It’s a strange and heady experience being the real Davis Rogan these days, floating somewhere in the metaphysical space where Marshall McLuhan’s warning that the medium is the message overlaps with Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame. But it turns out that’s a great career trajectory for a piano-playing Reedie from New Orleans.

Especially when those 15 minutes promise to stretch into five seasons as a creative muse for the one of the most critically acclaimed television shows of the past few years: the HBO series Treme, created

by David Simon and Eric Overmyer ’73 (who also brought you the HBO hit show The Wire).

“Never do things happen on merit in the music business,” Davis quips, “except this time.”

Officially, his title for the show is “consultant.” It’s a role that covers a lot of ground: a guest script writer, an occasional songsmith, and a recurring cameo as a musical sideman named “Rogan.” But his fun-house mirror stroke of fame comes from being the inspiration for lead character Davis McAlary.

In the show, McAlary—the TV Davis— mimics his real-life counterpart in many respects: the cluttered apartment, the wrinkled, untucked gingham shirts, the soul patch and unkempt hair, the rapid-fire wit, and the outsized personality that is sometimes charming, sometimes annoying, and always in your face.

The show takes plenty of poetic license, of course, stretching stories and doctoring details for entertainment value. The real Davis comes from a middle-class background provided by his father, a petroleum

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engineer, and his housewife mother, who raised four children before she died at 42 of an aneurysm. The TV Davis comes from old Uptown money, often embarrassing his family with his black sheep antics.

The real Davis was fired from the radio station WWOZ for playing too much hiphop. The TV Davis is fired for staging the voodoo sacrifice of a chicken on the air by mojo musician Coco Robicheaux. The real Davis is taller.

Nonetheless, the parallels are striking, even occasionally uncomfortable, such as

when the TV Davis, after hours of carousing, goes right up to the edge of losing control.

But Davis doesn’t seem to mind.

“It’s just a surreal twist in an already surreal life,” he says. “But I’m really too closely involved to have any perspective. It’s like watching your hair grow.”

Set in the rubble of post-Katrina New Orleans, Treme takes its title from a deeply historic and musically rich Creole enclave bordering the French Quarter. Decades of

neglect kept the neighborhood under the radar and off the tourism trail, which helped it maintain its pure cultural roots. It was a place where brass bands drew raucous crowds at ramshackle nightclubs, secondline parades would break out at the drop of a feathered fedora, and a close-knit sense of community softened the jagged edge of persistent poverty.

The show tracks a loosely connected cast of New Orleans characters—including a chef, a Mardi Gras Indian chief, a civil rights attorney, a trombone player, and the rogujune 2011 Reed magazine 23

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Davis Rogan

continued

ish Davis—as they rebuild their lives after the hurricane. The show hits notes that are familiar (government ineptitude, police brutality, celebration of food and music) and others that are considered part of the Big Easy exotica (jazz funerals and second lines, the mysterious culture of the Mardi Gras Indians, the nuances of the city’s Mardi Gras traditions). Sure, there’s plotdriven suspense involving relationships, unsolved Katrina deaths, and surviving in a disaster zone, but the show also features the kind of artistic license that has garnered widespread critical acclaim and a cult-type audience. Music is a driving force throughout the series, and many episodes include long, artful tracking shots of New Orleans musicians going to town, whether it’s in the studio, a Mardi Gras Indian practice, or a freewheeling street parade.

USA Today called it “the soundtrack of New Orleans.” Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times wrote, “Treme is most of all a story about survival—and the pursuit of pleasure—in the wake of a catastrophe that quickly morphed into, as one character puts it, ‘federally induced disaster.’”

One half of the show’s brain trust is former newspaper reporter David Simon, who created the HBO hit series The Wire.

The other half is Eric Overmyer ’73, a veteran playwright and scriptwriter who credits his days at Reed for helping him find his literary identity.

Even before the hurricane, Simon and Overmyer had talked about doing a show based on the music and culture of New Orleans. After Katrina, the city seemed like an ideal backdrop for an urban drama.

Simon began soaking up everything he could about the city. One day he was reading Offbeat, a New Orleans music magazine, and stumbled across a glowing review of a local album titled Once and Future DJ. He bought the CD, loved it, and, pulling from many of the autobiographical lyrics, began envisioning a character based on the DJ—who was, of course, Davis.

Lives in New Orleans are divided into two distinct phases: before and after Katrina.

Davis is no exception.

Before the cataclysmic storm, Davis was doing what he has done for most of the 20 years since he graduated from Reed as an English major: teaching music in

public schools, playing small nightclubs, leading a band with a revolving cast of notoriously independent sidemen, and living in a dilapidated two-story Victorian in Treme, which he bought in 1993 with a modest inheritance.

He enjoyed some success with a horndriven funk-and-rap band called “All That,” but mostly it was a hand-to-mouth existence.

In 2003, Reed classmate Br uce Bennett ’90 moved to New Orleans to teach music at Tulane University. Bruce knew Davis from their Portland days. He remembered the lanky, scruffy, hyper-literate KRRC disc jockey trying to push New Orleans delicacies like chicory coffee and cheese grits. Or blaring the Meters from the window of his Westport dorm room strewn with Spanish moss and decorated

another casualty of Katrina, or would have been—except that Bruce had saved a copy on his hard drive, which he had hastily packed at 3 a.m. as he and his family evacuated during the storm’s approach. Eventually, Davis and Bruce tracked each other down amid the New Orleans diaspora and the album was recovered.

Good thing, too. The record generated great local buzz once people began trickling back to the waterlogged city, including the review in Offbeat that would catch David Simon’s eye.

Davis remembers the email that would change his life. It was summer 2006, and he was an artist in residence in France’s Loire Valley. At first, he was tempted to blow off the inquiry, thinking it was yet another journalist or researcher with a

Treme traces a cast of colorful New Orleans characters as they rebuild their lives from the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina. with Jazz Fest posters. He also remembers Davis writing music for a seven-piece brass orchestra in composition class, and leading thesis parades with a sousaphone and bass drum–driven band.

“He was Davis,” Bruce says. “Articulate, literate, and always looking for a party.”

Nearly 15 years later, reunited with Bruce in New Orleans, Davis resumed the role he enjoyed when the two were at Reed: ambassador to the Big Easy. The two slurped raw oysters at local dive bars and ate boiled crawfish on the Mississippi River levee. They soaked up the city’s live music, from traditional jazz to genrehopping underground party bands. While Bruce is more inclined toward symphonic electronica than Davis’s trademark style of classic R&B and novelty songwriting, the two found plenty of common ground.

So much so that Davis recruited Bruce to mix and master his magnum opus, Once and Future DJ. Davis had just put the finishing touches on the album as Katrina was heading into the Gulf of Mexico. He dropped the master disc in the mail just as the monster took an ominous turn and zeroed in on New Orleans, and fled to Houston in a cramped Toyota Corolla.

Unfortunately, after the levees broke and most of the city drowned, the disc never made it to the manufacturer in New Jersey. Davis’s masterpiece was just

Katrina question. But once he recognized whom it was from, he realized it was his ticket back home.

“Despite being a Reed graduate, I’m an entertainer from New Orleans and I’m trying to get a break any way I can,” Davis said one night over a bowl of gumbo. “Any idiot who wants to make me rich and famous is OK in my book, but in this case, I’m fortunate to be working with television geniuses.”

Davis was eager to share his life story and New Orleans insights, but first he wanted to familiarize himself with Simon’s work. He faced a steep learning curve. Not only was he unfamiliar with The Wire, he didn’t own a TV and rarely watched any.

Simon’s people sent him DVDs of the first few seasons, Davis borrowed a television, and, as he put it, “I was blown away. I was watching the work of a master storyteller.”

When Davis returned to New Orleans in the fall of 2006, Simon and his substantial creative entourage had already set up camp. Much of the city was still a mess, and the cleanup was bogged down in government ineptitude. But a hardscrabble recovery was being sparked by the city’s cultural institutions—food, music and celebration—and Davis jumped on the HBO tab for a whirlwind of wining, dining, second-line parades, and live music at storied hole-in-the-wall nightclubs.

At one long, languorous, and well-lubricated dinner, at Irene’s in the French Quar-

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The show has definitely given Davis’s career a boost. He is about to release his second album. His gigs are drawing bigger crowds. And in his day job as a public school music teacher, he recently landed the perfect gig: teaching gifted students part time at Audubon Charter School, an only-in-New Orleans creation that combines Montessori and French immersion programs.

The flexibility is critical. After all, Davis needs the wiggle room for late-night rehearsals, lost car keys, fever dream songwriting sessions, monster hangovers, and, of course, calls from the Treme creative crew.

Davis has helped the show far beyond the confines of the character Davis McAlary, according to Blake Leyh, the show’s music supervisor. Frequently, he says, Davis plays the role of ambassador and tour guide. “We have spent more than a few evenings together in dive bars listening to deafening sousaphones, and Sunday afternoons in the streets following a second line,” Leyh says. “And Davis

p h o t o g b y Pa u l S c h i r a l d i • c o u r t e s y o f h b o

ter, Davis was introduced to Eric Overmyer ’73. Neither of them knew about the other’s Reed connections until about half an hour into the meal, when Eric asked where Davis went to college. From there, they veered into nostalgia about the Doyle Owl (both claim sightings), professor Lisa Steinman [English 1976–] (mutual admiration) and the theatre department (each took the same playwriting class nearly two decades apart). Finally, it came time to talk about a contract. Davis thought to himself, “Are you kidding me? I’m having as much fun as I’ve ever had in my life, and I’m getting paid to show people around New Orleans and talk endlessly about myself.”

Negotiations were brief. Davis recalled saying, “I’ll tell you everything I know and I trust you’ll take care of me.” As a gesture of good faith, Simon placed one of his songs, “Do Me That Way,” in the fifth and final season of The Wire.

Simon has made good on his end of the deal. From the first season, Davis can reel off his credits with exacting detail: co-writer of episode No. 7, six lines of dialogue as his cameo character Rogan, an original jingle, and a portion of his song “Strippers,” which includes the immortal lines: I got strippers moving in my neighborhood.

We can call it gentrification, but I call it good.

Xeroxing a mirror: Davis (center, munching) and actor Steve Zahn (right, scoffing) who plays Davis on TV.

was the first person to take me to see the horror-punk band Balzac; a memorable evening involving Sazeracs and absinthe that ended with me dragging him from his car to his doorstep.”

The creative chaos—and occasional overindulgence—that Davis is known for in real life has become an important dynamic of the McAlary character. One of the best descriptions of the TV Davis comes from author Constance Ash, who blogs about Treme on the site Back of Town.

“It’s not an easy thing to be a society’s energetic, 24/7 King of Absurdity—the clown in Shakespeare, the Fool in the Tarot, the ruler of Mis-rule for feasts and Uncommon Days, Papa Legba in Haitian Vodún, Eleggua-Eshu of Ifá’s system of divination—the opener of the ways among the worlds, owner of the crossroads, the irresistible force of chaos, that turns all upside down and leaves behind a new order.”

That’s a lofty description to attach to a TV character, but can it be applied to Davis Rogan in real life? Is the TV Davis an example of art imitating life, or is it the other way around? And where exactly is the line between fact and fantasy when it comes to Davis and the show’s often gut-wrenching depiction of New Orleans?

Some perspective was offered by Jimbo Walsh, a master bass player and frequent sideman in Davis’s bands. Walsh, whose father and mother were Reed graduates in the late ’40s, says Davis has remained the

same outsized New Orleans character he’s always been, despite his newfound notoriety. In his opinion, the TV Davis comes across tame compared to the real thing.

“There was a strange moment on my first day on the set. They were portraying Davis’ apartment and I thought, “They’ve even had to tone this down,” Walsh said. “I really think the real Davis is just too large to be captured, even by such amazing TV talents. They’re fortunate to come across a character with such a wealth of stories.

Davis is pure New Orleans.”

As Rogan expressed it in the song “The Real Davis:” “So how does it feel to have a character loosely based on you in a TV show?

And is it surreal, like you’re in a play?

What can I say?

It’s just my everyday.

Mike Perlstein ’84 is managing editor of the investigative desk at WWL-TV in New Orleans. He previously spent more than 20 years as a writer at the Times-Picayune, where he was part of the team that won two Pulitzer Prizes for coverage of Hurricane Katrina.

STOP PRESS Davis and his New Orleans All Star Rhythm & Blues Review will play at Reed for Reunions.

See reunions.reed.edu.

To hear Davis’ music, visit davisrogan.com

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Force Majeure Reed professor Darius Rejali is a leading authority on why states and police use torture—even though it doesn’t work.

By Martha Gies

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p h o t o b y m at t d ’a n n u n z i o

Professor Darius Rejali still remembers the headline that changed the course of his work. It was December 26, 2002, and he had gone walking in Fairfax, Virginia, with his father, who wanted to buy a lottery ticket. On their way to a grocery store, Rejali noticed a front-page story blaring from the Washington Post newspaper box: “U.S. Decries Abuse but Defends Interrogations.”

He unleashed a sturdy Anglo-Saxon verb, alarming his genteel father, who asked what was wrong.

“I will have to write Torture and Democracy all over again,” Rejali complained.

For years, Rejali [political science 1989–] had been working on a huge study of the history of torture, developing his theory of how it was the democracies— principally France and England—who “advanced” torture by developing techniques that left no mark on the body.

Princeton University Press had already bought the book and the manuscript was near completion. Now it would have to end, not with British and French colonialism, but with American torture after 9/11.

He knew his publisher would insist. “And what was worse,” he says today, “I would have to wait till we had a public torture crisis so that I had all the information.”

4/28/11 11:23 AM

Force Majeure

continued

He didn’t have to wait long. In April 2004, 60 Minutes II broke an obscene story of U.S. soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners of war at Abu Ghraib. Photos of the captives—naked, bruised, hooded, sexually abused, and set upon by dogs— were emailed around the globe, horrifying millions.

Rejali shared the disgust but not the surprise. He knew that the final pieces of evidence he’d waited for would quickly become available. He also knew that the scandal would catapult his book from the relative obscurity of Princeton’s backlist onto the desks of scholars and journalists around the world.

This was not the first time Rejali found himself in the crosshairs of history. Twenty-five years earlier, his life had been turned upside down by tumultuous events in the Middle East—events that, like Abu Ghraib, showed the dark side of democracy.

Rejali was born in Tehran in 1959. His father, David Rejali, came from a traditional family that prayed three times a day and observed the Shia holidays. Now 83, the elder Rejali dates his own loss of religious practice to the 11 years he spent studying in the United States. Shortly before he returned home with a doctorate in chemistry from Temple University, he met a young American woman at an International House dance. The relationship between this handsome, gentle Iranian and the brilliant, independent graduate student quickly grew serious, but David hesitated.

“Iran is a third world country,” he demurred.

“Look,” Sallie told him, “I traveled in the highlands of Peru. I don’t think there’s anything you can tell me about a backwards third world country.”

Though Iran could be tough on American brides, Sallie fit in easily: she picked up the language and charmed her new family.

“Farsi’s easy to learn,” Sallie, now 76, comments dismissively. “People just see it as difficult because of the alphabet.”

The first of their three children, Rejali grew up speaking Farsi until he was six, when he was enrolled at the Community School (formerly Presbyterian Mission School), where classes were taught in English. Exposed to people from all over the world, his considers this his first immersion in the cosmopolitan life.

Rejali has incandescent memories of childhood: of the annual Islamic holiday feasts at his grandfather’s house, where the poor arrived with their dishes and were invited to scoop food out of giant pots in the garden, and the rich—men, of course—sat on wooden beds stacked with Persian carpets and smoked hookahs; of the coronation of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, televised from Sadabad palace in 1967, and especially that moment when Farah Diba kneeled before him and the Shah placed the tiara on his wife’s head; of going with his family at age 12 to the Iran-American Cultural Society to see a chunk of the moon, an iconic souvenir of the Apollo spaceflight; and of summer holidays in the Caspian, amidst orange trees and rice paddies, where the family had built a little villa, so close to the border of the Soviet Union that he could hear

Rejali (c. 1966) in his grandfather’s garden.

“ Look,” Sallie told him, “I traveled in the highlands of Peru. I don’t think there’s anything you can tell me about a backwards third world country.” left: David and Sallie Rejali, 1959

Russian broadcasts on the radio.

Rejali left home in 1977 to go to Swarthmore. As it turned out, he would never live in Iran again. In the middle of his sophomore year, alarmed about the political situation in Tehran, he made a long-distance phone call to his family. “And my mother was, ‘Everything’s fine! Don’t worry, just carry on!’ And I was like, ‘Okay.’”

Two and a half months later, his parents called from London. The trip was purely coincidental: his parents, both of whom taught at Pars College, had gone abroad for a brief stay, and that weekend armed fighting broke out between Ayatollah Khomeini’s rebel troops and troops loyal to the Shah. Khomeini’s victory represented the first religiously led revolution in the Middle East and the emergence of political Islam. Instead of returning to Iran, David and Sallie Rejali came to Virginia, where they bought a second home.

While the revolution didn’t change his life at Swarthmore, Rejali points out, “It taught me a very important lesson, which I’ve never forgotten: American students, in these political crises, try to be on the

side of the just. But what they forget is that both sides have victims.”

If Rejali was more or less buffered from the revolution, it was different later that year, when President Jimmy Carter permitted the Shah to enter the United States, ostensibly for medical treatment. On November 4, 1979, Iranian militants stormed the American Embassy in Tehran and seized 66 hostages, the majority of whom would remain captive for 444 days.

Rejali’s Swarthmore friends did not realize that Iran had smoldered since 1953, when America toppled the popular and legally-elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh by means of a CIA-orchestrated coup, and planted the Shah back on the throne, thereby suffocating Iran’s new democracy movement.

Without this essential background, Americans could not understand the Iranian sense of threat when the Shah showed up in the United States under the protection of President Carter. For once, the eloquent Rejali couldn’t persuade anyone of

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When Rejali arrived at Reed in 1989, the political science department consisted of just two other professors: political theorist

Photo Courtesy of J. Kazeroni

the facts.

“I felt actually asphyxiated in the United States during the hostage crisis,” he recalls.

“I just wanted to get the hell out of Dodge.”

He left the country to do graduate work in Montreal, where he could study with the philosopher Charles Taylor, whom he had read with admiration at Swarthmore.

At McGill, Rejali read Foucault’s Discipline and Punish with an eye on Iran. Iranian society had gone through the kinds of changes that Foucault identifies in Europe, he noted, yet without discarding torture.

He browsed through a rich trove of nineteenth-century travelogues and old Qajar texts at McGill’s Institute of Islamic Studies, looking for accounts of punishment.

He’d known since high school that his own family had been implicated in torture.

“It was routine for the textbooks used during the Pahlavi dynasty to talk about the violence of the dynasty that preceded them,” he explains. “One book told the story of how a Qajar king ordered thousands of people in town to be blinded, literally removed their eyes.” The story held a special horror for him because that king was his greatgrandfather’s great-granduncle.

So while other Iranians of his generation were trying to explain why the revolution went wrong, he was interested in understanding why things remain the same: despite entire revolutions that are “opposed to torture,” torture comes back. “The study of the state wasn’t as interesting to me as the study of punishment as it happened through every aspect of Iranian society,” he says of the work that later became his first book.

Even as the hostage crisis had separated Rejali from American colleagues, now his work separated him from other Iranians.

“They wanted me to tell the story of torture in a way that would fit their political biases,” he remembers. As had happened at Swarthmore, his knowledge of history, quite simply, made him lonely.

Meanwhile, in 1984, his own parents, unable to find satisfying work in the United States, actually returned to Iran. When Rejali talks about the several distortions the revolution inflicted on his family, he cites this moment: “They chose family economic security and political insecurity, rather than the reverse.”

The Rejali family spent summers at a villa on the Caspian Sea. Ca. 1974

Peter Steinberger [1977–] and Americanist Steve Kapsch [1974–2005]. Rejali worked around their specialties. “My job, as the middle guy, was to cover everything in between,” he explains. “I’ve been Mr. Philosophy of Social Science, Mr. Social Theory, Mr. Comparative Revolutions.”

This meant that students could take several different courses from him; he calculates that Joseph Orosco ’92 holds the all-time record. “Thirteen courses, if I’m not mistaken.”

Orosco, now associate professor in philosophy and director of the Peace Studies Program at Oregon State University, clearly remembers Rejali’s charisma and sense of style. “He would come to class wearing a shirt with French cuffs, blue jeans, Doc Martens, and a suit jacket, a combination of formal and rowdy that caught people’s imagination.”

Orosco also remembers Rejali in connection with ritual. “He has this sort of alchemist persona. He took pains to make sure his office was structured and decorated in the right way [down to] the type of pen he’d have to do his writing.

“I use that technique now when talking with my own graduate students,” Orosco says. “I talk to them about writing as a sacred ritual: take the work seriously and give it some sort of sacred character.”

Orosco insists Rejali saved him at Reed. “I was floundering around in philosophy, find-

ing my classes dry, until I took his course in political theory. He has a way of engaging students, getting them to talk to each other, to take the texts seriously, and to engage with the world. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of political history and theory, both in Western and Iranian contexts. I just never met anyone who had this range.”

I met Rejali in the fall of 1999 when author Elinor Langer [creative writing 1985– 87] brought brought him to dinner at my apartment. A short and portly Iranian American with an easy, gregarious laugh, Rejali wears his erudition lightly; he is as likely to quote Harry Potter, Lewis Carroll, or Star Trek as Weber, Locke, or Foucault.

The following spring, I invited him to my birthday reading of The Gilgamesh, and then to lecture on torture for the human rights class I was teaching for the graduate writing program at Lewis & Clark College.

Now it is hard to remember that just 11 years ago students had to be convinced torture actually existed. Rejali gave a talk, both moving and hopeful, about the techniques different people devise—emotional, physical, and psychological—to survive torture. “Torture teaches you something,” he told my students. “When you look at the victims, it teaches you about the miracle of human resilience.”

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Force Majeure

continued

Guantánamo began receiving prisoners outfitted in fluorescent orange jumpsuits and turquoise face masks, I asked Rejali whether he thought there was any chance that we were torturing them. He paused, and his careful answer turned out to be prophetic. “I don’t know if we are torturing prisoners,” he said, “but if we are, we will never be able to release them.”

In 1994, Rejali published Torture and Modernity, alerting the Portland Iranian community to the presence of a Persian academic in their midst. Amnesty International activist Goudarz Eghtedari was in Powell’s Books one day, researching material for two campaigns, when his eye fell on Rejali’s book. “So I called him up,” Goudarz recalls, and persuaded Rejali to collaborate on a paper he planned to deliver at the Center for Iranian Research and Analysis (CIRA) conference in Atlanta, and then proposed that Portland host CIRA in 1997. He appointed Rejali conference chair.

To be brought into Portland’s Iranian community by Goudarz Eghtedari is to be plunged into its core: Rejali met all the prominent local Iranian intellectuals. Of Rejali, Goudarz reports with satisfaction, “Now we are best of friends and he has improved his Persian dramatically.”

His Iranian roots are important to Rejali and in 2001, at the age of 42, he made his first trip back. He’d never fulfilled his obligatory military service, and his parents, retired and living in Virginia, were worried about this visit. I remember the moment his going-away dinner turned solemn, as some of us feared he might not make it home.

Rejali wanted to see what President Khatami’s reform movement looked like in the provinces, and his parents traveled with him to Hamadan, Esfahan, and Shiraz, north to the Caspian, and to Mashad and Neyshabur on the Afghan frontier.

“It was a great experience, but the ’rents wouldn’t let me out of their sight,” Rejali says, calling Sallie and David by a term he sometimes uses humorously.

Everyone made it home without incident—just weeks before 9/11.

In the fall of 2001, Rejali was already seven years into Torture and Democracy.

In addition to his central thesis about the development of sophisticated “stealth” tor-

tures, the book serves as an encyclopedic reference guide, with tortures organized by category.

“Rather than focus on countries as my subjects,” he explains, “I chose practices and techniques, following them as they snuck across borders.” Calculating that one out of every three countries practices torture, he decided this would be less repetitious.

Research had taken him to the Library of Congress, the Kew Public Record Office in London, where he examined the colonial records of the English, and to Cambodia’s Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum on the site of a notorious prison used by the Khmer Rouge in the late ’70s.

For the most part, though, he relied heavily on a number of clever librarians, especially Sally Loomis [library 1997– 2006]. “She loved it. I’d tell her, ‘Well, here’s an obscure hit for you. Do you think you can find this?’ And she’d go out and find it!”

At the Bibliothêque nationale, former student Joel Reville ’97 also located

had understood he’d be alone with Aaron Brown, he found himself facing the formidable author and jurist Alan Dershowitz, who believes torture justified in a tickingtime-bomb situation. “I had to make a quick decision: stick to program or argue with him about his stuff,” Rejali recalls, now uncomfortably aware of just how green he was back then.

For his fiercely passionate belief that torture cannot be justified and should be abolished, Rejali soon found a mask for the world’s camera, one of cool and urbane detachment. The press buried him for months. “I was sick of it,” he recalls.

He escaped to Tehran of all places, where, with the evidence he’d been waiting for, he wrote the final pages of Torture and Democracy.

“That was a big deal to me, writing in my great-grandmother’s room.”

The moderate President Khatami was gone now, and Ahmadinejad’s conservative presidency had begun: Rejali carefully tore

Confessions obtained under duress are useless, Rejali says.

People will say anything to make the torture stop. material for him. “I’ve never been to Paris,” Rejali admits. “I like Europe, but I often think I’m just saving it for when I need a wheelchair.”

In his home office, originally the dining room, he had placed a big bronze dragonshaped candleholder from Indonesia, and the candle was lit whenever he worked.

He wrote wearing his old Spanish riding cape and listened to atonal performances of cold, spiritless pieces of modern music that he describes as “incredibly wrenching.”

“Some music that I think very few people would ever want to listen to,” Rejali says. “Because it was connected to the interior scape that I was traveling to, the music was just right. People would actually come into my office when I’d be working at home, and they’d go, ‘What the hell is that?’” And he’d explain it was, say, the Georgian composer Kancheli. “And they’re going, ‘It’s horrible!’ And it’s like, ‘Well, you should see what I’m writing.’”

As the Abu Ghraib scandal unfolded, the media descended on him: MSNBC, the New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Baltimore Sun. On CNN, where he

up all his early drafts and papers. “I left Iran on my own, at 3:00 in the morning, on a snowy night. You could get arrested on the way to the airport and disappear.

Dad always says that 98 percent of the time nothing’s going to happen, but that 2 percent of the time, when something happens, it’s really bad.”

Back in Portland, Rejali “undid” his home office. “We had this big ceremony, a sort of a cleansing ritual.” To make the transformation complete, he installed a George Steck grand piano.

When Torture and Democracy finally came out in 2007, contributing editor Scott Horton, interviewing Rejali for Harper’s Magazine, called the 849-page volume “magisterial.” It won the Human Rights Book of the Year Award from the American Political Science Association, the Raphael Lemkin Award from the Institute for the Study of Genocide, and snagged him a prestigious Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the Danish Center for International Studies and Human Rights.

Media buzz included the Washington Post, Al Jazeera with David Frost, Democracy Now, and the BBC. Interviewers invariably asked if torture ever worked, and

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Rejali patiently explained that both criminal confessions and military intelligence obtained under torture are false: people will say anything to make the torture stop.

Finally it wound down and he was able to get back to work. A $100,000 Carnegie grant supported research on his next book, Approaches to Violence (Princeton University Press, 2012).

For years now, I’ve been asking Rejali how he lives with the nightmare that is his subject. Recently, he suggested that I’ve got the question backwards: his vast interest in the world is what permits him to approach the material in the first place.

Among those pleasures that have refreshed and sustained him over the last 15 years were several trips to Burning Man; the support of his parents, with whom he has purchased an apartment on Spain’s Costa del Sol; a love of surfing on his new Robert August board; connections with scholars and surfers all over the world; and the enormous pride and satisfaction he takes in the achievements of his former students. Last year, when Joshua Phillips ’96 published None of Us Were Like This Before: American Soldiers and Torture, Rejali sent the good news widely to his huge email list.

But his best sense of achievement and source of peace with the awful implications of his research came out of left field.

Federal Public Defender Steve Sady was one of 13 Oregon lawyers who volunteered to defend prisoners held in extrajudicial detention at Guantánamo Bay. Sady had met Rejali at an orientation to Islamic culture, and when the lawyers returned from having met their new clients at Guantánamo, he called him for an opinion on the case of Abdul Rahim al Janko.

According to Amnesty International, al Janko had spent most of the past decade behind bars. He had been held by the Taliban for almost two years before being taken into U.S. custody at the air base in Kandahar in January 2002, and then transferred to Guantánamo.

What Sady wanted to confirm was his client’s contention that he had been tortured by the Taliban: if this were true, it would prove al Janko could not have been working for them. Rejali recalls telling Sady that the torture described was too indistinct, so Sady returned with specific information: “He was electrocuted in Kan-

Darius at Swarthmore. The Iranian revolution of 1979 taught him an important lesson. “Both sides have victims.”

dahar Prison.”

Rejali said, “Well, that’s good, because it’s one of two places we know in Afghanistan where electric torture happened in the ’80s and ’90s.”

“He said he couldn’t see the instrument because he was blindfolded, but it made a certain kind of grinding noise.”

“Yeah, it’s the old Soviet-style magneto,” Rejali said with a nod. “That’s the only kind of machine of electric torture that makes that noise.”

“And they attached the wires to his toes.”

“You mean like this?” Rejali asked, and gave him a drawing of an Afghan prisoner being electrocuted by that same machine.

“Where did you get this?” Sady demanded.

“This was drawn by Hamid Karzai’s minister of health, who was a prisoner in Kandahar Prison a decade ago,” Rejali explained.

Step by step, Rejali was able to corroborate both the electric and the crippling falaka torture, where the soles of the feet are beaten until they swell and turn black.

Rejali was at the family home in Spain in the summer of 2009 when the federal judge ordered al Janko released. “I was walking into town and got the news on my iPhone, outside the Finnish bar that has free Wi-Fi. And I just sat down on a bench, and looked at the sky. It was just so amazing to think that my work, so impenetrable for all those years to so many, changed the life of this single person. The causal role I had played in events overwhelmed me. “

That next year, he spent four months researching in Denmark on his Fulbright, and then traveled for the rest of 2010.

“Everywhere in Europe, I was encountering the new Islamophobia,” he reports. Now, for the first time in his life, he found himself viewed as “Muslim,” with all the edgy distrust that can imply.

Although Rejali was never an observant Muslim—never learned the prayers and never went to Friday mosque—he does relate to the central role of justice and mercy in Shi’ite thinking and theology.

And so, when he returned to Reed last fall, he offered a new course, Muslim as Enemy. “We look at three historical discourses about ‘enemy,’” Rejali explains.

“Locke on how we calculate who is the enemy, Carl Schmitt on the existential threat that the enemy poses, and Mary Shelley’s story of Frankenstein, where we make our own enemy.

“And then we read Aristotle on friendship, and we think about whether or how we can reduce that hatred of the enemy.

How we can make friends.”

Martha Gies is a Portland writer whose short stories and essays appear widely in literary quarterlies, including Orion, the Sun, and Zyzzyva, and in various anthologies.

In 2004, Oregon State University Press published Up All Night, her portrait of Portland told through the stories of 23 people who work graveyard shift. Her last story for Reed was about the Black Panthers.

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Forward Thinker

Psychologist Daryl Bem ’60 has just published an extraordinary hypothesis.

Go ahead and guess.

By Bill Donahue illustration by gavin potenza

It’s possible that you already know what this article is going to say—that, in fact, you anticipated this first sentence, replete with commas, before I even tapped it to life on my keyboard. Over the eons, to avoid calamity and strengthen their chance of reproducing, humans have developed a weak form of precognition, the ability to see into the future. At least that’s what Daryl Bem ’60 believes, and— Wait, wait, wait. I know what you’re thinking—Bem is one of those Reedies, sitting cross-legged in a cave somewhere, sipping kombucha tea as he muses on Jungian symbology and the alignment of his chakras.

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Forward Thinker

continued

Actually, Bem is an emeritus professor at Cornell University and a researcher of international renown. University of California at Santa Barbara psychologist Jonathan Schooler calls him “one of the most eminent psychologists in the field.” He is a versatile academic who, in a full halfcentury as a published scholar, has written on risk taking, self-perception, and sex discrimination. He has just published a nuanced paper in the March issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, laden with statistics that, he argues, provide compelling evidence for precognition.

Bem’s 61-page study, “Feeling the Future,” is hardly the first to present evidence for ESP, but it may be the most prestigious and consequential. As Douglas Hofstadter, a cognitive scientist at Indiana University, Bloomington, says, “If any of his claims were true, then all of the bases underlying contemporary science would be toppled, and we would have to rethink everything about the nature of the universe.”

Hofstadter and many other skeptics feel that Bem’s paper should never have been published. In a blog entry, Hofstadter calls the article an offense to anyone who dares to “believe deeply in science” and adds that Bem is “necessarily, certainly, undoubtedly wrong in some fashion.”

Meanwhile, ESP believers hail Bem as a sort of psychological Galileo. Dean Radin, the past president of the Parapsychological Association, and a senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Petaluma, California, reckons that the paper will “dissolve past prejudices. A few generations from now,” he says hopefully on his blog, “I suspect that psi will still be controversial, but no more so than dozens of other leading-edge topics in science.”

Bem’s paper details nine experiments that he conducted over the course of eight years in a cramped, windowless lab, using over 1,000 Cornell students as subjects. The endeavor might sound almost tedious in its plodding pursuit of precision, but somehow it wasn’t, for Bem is anything but a stolid technocrat. He is a lifelong magician who regularly performed mentalist tricks in the lecture hall at Cornell, seemingly reading his students’ minds by, for instance, guessing at the contents of a box brought from home. He’s an accomplished pianist who, on a lark, has twice conducted the symphony in his current home, Ithaca, New

York. And he’s also an inventive thinker with no patience for pro forma nonsense.

In his widely circulated 2003 essay, “Writing the Empirical Journal Article,” he says, “Scientific journals are published for specialized audiences who share a common background of substantive knowledge and methodological expertise. If you wish to write well, you should ignore this fact.”

Some of Bem’s experiments are just plain weird. In one, for example, he tested “retroactive recall” by showing subjects a list of words, asking them to recall the words, and then giving them the opportunity to rehearse some of those words after the quiz. Bizarrely, the words they recalled best were the same words they rehearsed after the quiz—as if the effects of the rehearsal somehow reached backwards in time.

The most talked-about experiment, though, involves pornography. Hypothesizing that humans have developed extrasensory antennae for sexual prospects, Bem sat subjects before a computer screen depicting a pair of blue velvet stage curtains and told them that an explicit image would soon appear behind one of the curtains. Could they guess which curtain would reveal the smut?

When tantalized with the prospect of porn in this either/or scenario, Bem’s 100 subjects guessed correctly 53.1 percent of the time.

To University of Amsterdam psychologist Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, that slim majority doesn’t mean much. In a rebuttal that accompanies Bem’s paper, he says that Bem went on a “fishing expedition” and failed to satisfy the scientific dictate that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Bem disagrees. “For all nine of my experiments, there was a less than one in 100 chance that the results were random,” he says. “For some, it was less than a one in 1,000 chance. Something is going on.”

Bem doesn’t claim to possess magnificent gifts of ESP himself. In fact, he believes that the ability prevails most in people who are not like him—in extroverts who “get bored easily and respond favorably to novel stimuli.” Still, in his paper he seems almost unable to contain his exuberance. He quotes the White Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, who encourages Alice to believe in “impossible things.” “When I was your age,” the Queen says to Alice, “I did it for half-anhour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as

many as six impossible things before breakfast.” He concludes by hoping that his article will prompt skeptics to “believe at least one anomalous thing before breakfast.”

When a prepublication version of the paper was released last fall, Ray Hyman, an emeritus psych professor at the University of Oregon, called it “craziness, pure craziness. I wouldn’t rule out that this was an elaborate joke,” Hyman added, noting Bem’s “great sense of humor.”

The media descended on the story.

Stephen Colbert brought Bem on air and made quips about “time-traveling porn.”

The New York Times interviewed Bem, as

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Heather Ainsworth / The New York Times / Redux

Experimental psychologist and amateur magician Daryl Bem ’60 landed on the front page of the New York Times in January for his research on ESP.

did Al-Jazeera, ABC, and Fox News. And by the time I finally reached him—in early February, at his modest condo in Ithaca— it seemed like he was returning from a long and comical voyage. The egghead scholar, who’s spent the last 54 years of his life tucked away on college campuses, had just journeyed through the bowels of celebrity culture—and emerged sporting a bemused grin. “My partner is always talking about who should play me in the film version,” Bem said of his longtime companion, Ithaca College communications professor Bruce Henderson. “He’s thinking Dustin Hoffman.”

Rumpled and balding, Bem lay sprawled on his beige couch in stocking feet and an old plaid flannel shirt and kept riffing on the strange and lovely twists in the plot that the study of precognition can create.

“One time,” he says, “I decided I was going to do a personality test on psi subjects. I figured I’d put it at the end of the experiment, so it wouldn’t affect anything, and then I started thinking.” Bem paused and then, meaningfully, he added, “But of course it would.”

Soon, his eyes were closed and he was gently cupping his hand over his face, searching for a word or a thought. He had

an intellect’s way of vanishing from the material world, and he could bring you along with him. As I sat there listening, I forgot about the piano nearby us, and the electronic keyboard. The only reality, it seemed, was the fine thread of ideas that Bem kept spinning forward, nimbly, like a spider creating the filament lines of its web.

“I love precognition,” Bem said. “It’s mind-boggling—you just can’t fathom how it works in a Newtonian world.” Then he smiled, with a joy so infectious that I felt almost like I was slipping down into a rabbit hole and back through time, to a long-ago morning in Colorado. june 2011 Reed magazine 35

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Forward Thinker

continued

Daryl Bem grew up in Denver. When he was eight he learned to perform magic tricks.

On Saturdays, he would take the city bus downtown, all alone, to the magic club at Pratt’s Bookstore. He still remembers the magic instructor at Pratt’s, a looming man named Earl “Elbow” Reum, and the way he made a small, glowing globe, the Zombie, disappear under a handkerchief.

Bem spent all his allowance money at the bookstore. “I loved how, with magic, you could fool people, even adults,” he says. “I’m interested in things that go beyond everyday experience—magic, ESP, music, whatever it is.”

When Bem arrived at Reed in 1956, he found transcendence in the study of physics. Considering thermodynamics and gravity in Eliot Hall, he wondered, “Why is it that math describes the physical universe so well? Is there a deep connection, or do the two simply seem to be held together because they were both invented by the human brain?”

He would eventually major in physics at Reed, but he also studied psychology.

For one pysch class, he performed fake demonstrations of ESP (in other words, magic shows) for small groups and then compared the subjects’ credulousness to their susceptibility to hypnosis. “That was fun,” he says now.

More critical was a lecture he heard one morning from professor Marvin Levich [philosophy 1953–94] on the philosophy of science. “He talked about what makes a theory good,” Bem says, “and how one theory might be chosen over another if it is aesthetically elegant—that is, simple and based on very few assumptions.”

That idea spurred Bem to read Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which popularized the word “paradigm,” and in time shaped his method of scientific inquiry. While some academics burrow deep into one area (like, say, gender roles in fourteenth-century Micronesia), Bem is a sort of intellectual freelancer who roams through wide-ranging phenomona and then, about once every decade, stumbles upon what he calls a “puzzle,” a psychological conundrum that he cannot resist.

Academically, Bem is best known for his “self-perception theory,” which describes attitude change. He began puzzling over

the theory’s root questions in the early ’60s, when he was taking a graduate psychology class at Harvard and considering how a 1954 Supreme Court case, Brown vs. Board of Education, ended up reducing Southerners’ racism by integrating schools.

Prevailing wisdom then attributed the shift to “cognitive dissonance”: psychologists held that people changed their attitudes to comply with their behavior so as to quell internal conflict.

Bem speculated, instead, that people changed attitudes simply by observing their own behavior. He tested his hunch by installing two lights, a “truth light” and a “lie light,” in his laboratory and asking subjects to make “attitude statements” (for instance, “this is a very funny cartoon”) in

Bem brought a certain skepticism to the meeting. He’s never had a single profound ESP experience. He’s never, say, conjured up a certain six-digit number and rushed to the convenience store, absolutely certain that he knows which lottery ticket to buy, and he’s dubious of the statistical sloppiness with which most people regard alleged miracles of premonition. “People read about them in the paper and they say, ‘That’s amazing! What are the odds of that happening?’ The real question we should ask is, ‘How many other people had premonitions that day and bought losing lottery tickets?’”

Bem is equally leery of zealous skeptics who ask him questions like, “If ESP truly existed, why aren’t there people out there

In retirement, Bem has returned to his first intellectual love, physics, and found in it a possible explanation for precognition. front of the lights. When people spoke in front of the “truth light,” he found, they believed what they said. “People observe their own behavior,” Bem explains now, “and make inferences about their attitudes.”

By the time Bem was 30, his work on self-perception had made him in a known entity in psychology departments nationwide. He had come a long way from the basement of Pratt’s.

Sort of.

“Pick a card,” Bem said. “Any card.”

We were sitting in his living room, and he was shuffling the deck. I chose the two of hearts. Bem shuffled again, with panache, and then beseeched me to draw from the deck. Naturally, I drew the two of hearts again.

“How did that work?” I asked, befuddled.

“Very well,” Bem said, “and if I told you, I’d have to kill you.” Soon he relented, though, and divulged the quotidian mechanics behind his trick.

“Giving the secrets away makes me very unpopular among magicians,” he said, “but I’m an educator as well as a magician.”

It was his interest in magic, in fact, that first led him to study ESP. In 1985, the Parapsychological Association, an international group comprising some 300 psi researchers, invited Bem to their annual convention in Boston, so he could show them how to avoid being duped by mentalists faking ESP.

making a living predicting the future?”

To this query, he responds, “How do you know there aren’t?”

What struck Bem when he got to Boston was the “robustness” of the reports on ESP that he read, particularly the ’70s-era “ganzfeld” experiments in which researcher Chuck Honorton subjected subjects to sensory deprivation to test for telepathy.

Honorton placed “receivers” in a comfortable chair, strapped halved ping pong balls over their eyes, and played white noise into their headphones. He found that they could identify target objects that “senders” had been thinking about significantly more often than chance would predict.

The evidence from the ganzfeld experiments was so impressive, Bem says, that he offered to help Honorton get his laboratory findings into an academic journal, eventually coauthoring a paper with him in the Psychological Bulletin.

As astonishing as these results were, Bem says, scientists at least have a conceptual framework for telepathy. “There are plenty of ways that communication happens invisibly,” he explains. “There are cell phones and radio. People have a mental image as to how telepathy might work.” Precognition is different, though.

“We can’t imagine that causation can go backwards in time,” he says. “But does time really only flow forward? Now, that’s a puzzle.”

And not just a problem for psychology.

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Physics major Daryl Bem poses for the 1960 Griffin.

Bem appeared on the Colbert Report to discuss his research, which Colbert referred to as “time-travelling porn.”

In retirement, Bem is returning to his first intellectual love, physics, and finding in the discipline an explanation for precognition.

As he notes in “Feeling the Future,” the field of quantum mechanics, like psi research, is premised on a model of reality that is “nonlocal: It must allow for the possibility that particles that have once interacted can become entangled”—that is, entwined, so that, even if they are spatially separate, they spin in relation to one another.

Entanglement is an accepted concept in physics; it was first described by Albert Einstein in 1935. Now Bem is suggesting that entanglement may manifest psychologically, too—that a person’s mind may be able to be . . . essentially elsewhere, interacting with stimuli that transcend the person’s immediate reality—even with stimuli that do not yet exist. Bem concedes that there is no laboratory proof for such entanglement, but he enthusiastically quotes from the 2006 book, Entangled Minds, by psi researcher Dean Radin: “The ontological parallels implied by entanglement and psi are so compelling that I believe they’d be foolish to ignore.”

Many of Bem’s colleagues are, naturally, rolling their eyes. When I met with the chair of Cornell’s psychology department, Tom Gilovich, he quoted the British novelist Ian McEwan, who lashes out at quantum mechanics in his latest book, calling it “a repository, a dump, of human aspiration.”

The field, McEwan insists, is “the borderland where mathematical rigor defeated common sense, and reason and fantasy irrationally merged. Here the mystically inclined could find whatever they required and claim science as their proof.”

Gilovich brims with respect for Bem’s “terrific experiment. It’s well-crafted and it’s inventive, and it presents intriguing evidence.” Still, he says, “I think there’s some bug in the program, some tiny mistake that we’ve yet to figure out.”

Schooler, the psychologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, also harbors some skepticism. As chronicled in a recent New Yorker story, Schooler studies “the decline effect,” which describes a pattern that he says is common to myriad forms of statistical research: initial studies clearly confirm a dazzling result and then subsequent studies prove less convincing.

The statistics sag. The truth somehow wears out and, Schooler asserts, the erosion rate is particularly bad when it comes to parapsychological experiments. “Whenever we’ve done experiments in the paradigm Bem describes,” he says, “we got effects the first time, and then we saw decline.”

Recently, two professors—Jeff Galak of Carnegie Mellon and Leif Nelson of the University of California at Berkeley— repeated Bem’s “retroactive recall” vocabulary tests. They failed to replicate Bem’s confirmation of ESP.

When I dropped by his condo one last time before leaving Ithaca, Bem told me, “I worry about the decline effect. I worry about it a lot.” He was still wearing the same rumpled plaid shirt and the same blue pants he wore on the previous day. “I think that the decline effect has something to do with the enthusiasm of the experimenter decreasing.” He added that there’s another impediment to psi research: “ESP is regarded as

superstitious nonsense. And so people learn to suppress it. You don’t practice precognition. You don’t take confidence in your skills and when you’re asked to, say, pick between two pictures.”

Still, Bem is undeterred. This spring at Cornell, he plans to take his “retroactive recall” study out of the lab and ask students in one Cornell psych class to study for a multiple choice test after turning in their exam books. “I just think it’d be neat to see what happens,” he told me. “I like solving puzzles.”

Bem didn’t elaborate, for now he was heading out. He had a meeting planned with his personal trainer, and he was attending reluctantly, playing the wise guy psychologist all the way.

As we stood out in the cold by his garage, he told me one more story. “The last time I went to the gym,” he said, “we lifted some weights and then the trainer asked me, ‘Do you want me to go upstairs to watch you do cardio?’ I told her, ‘No, the mere threat that you might come up is enough.’”

Bill Donahue writes for the Washington Post Magazine, Runner’s World, the Atlantic, and other magazines. He lives in Portland.

FURTHER READING Daryl J. Bem, “Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100, 407425. http://dbem.ws/FeelingFuture.pdf Eric-Jan Wagenmakers et al., Yes, Psychologists Must Change the Way They Analyze Their Data: Clarifcations for Bem, Utts, and Johnson (2011), http://dl.dropbox .com/u/1018886/ClarificationsForBemUttsJohnson.pdf Daryl J. Bem, Must Psychologists Change the Way They Analyze Their Data? A Response to Wagenmakers et al., http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8290411 /ResponsetoWagenmakers.pdf The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn.

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Classic Lectures

IONIAN THINKERS

By C.D.C. Reeve

Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes were from Miletus, which is on the Ionian coast of Asia Minor. Their great successor Heraclitus was from Ephesus, which is on the same coast. Together these Ionian thinkers of the sixth and late fifth centuries brought about one of the most significant revolutions we know of, one that set the civilized world on a path it has followed, with minor and not so minor deviations, ever since. What they did, to put it boldly and rather simply, was to invent critical rationality. For the theories they advanced, whether on the nature and origins of the cosmos or on ethics and politics, were not offered as gospels to be accepted on divine or human authority or, like Hesiod’s cosmology, on the authority of the Muses, but as rational constructions to be accepted or rejected on the basis of evidence and argument. Every university and college, every intellectual discipline and scientific advance, every step towards freedom and away from ignorance, superstition, and enslavement to repressive dogma is eloquent testimony to the power of their invention. If they had not existed, our world would not exist.

Of these thinkers, Thales was the first. His reputation in antiquity was immense. He was one of the fabled Seven Sages (Solon was another). He is credited with being able to predict solar eclipses and with determining the height of the pyramids by measuring the length of their shadows. Whether he wrote anything is unknown. If he did, no genuine fragment of it has survived. But despite the fact that we possess none of Thales’ original words, we do know that he held that everything is water, or something to that effect.

The first thing to notice about this claim is that it says that there is really only one thing—water—and that everything else is in some way made up of or built out of it. We don’t know just why Thales assigned

such a fundamental role to water. Perhaps, as Aristotle claims, he noticed that water is essential in various ways to the existence of living things (Metaphysics, 983b22–27), or that water alone exists naturally as a solid, liquid, and gas, and so might be the fundamental stuff from which all things were made.

If Thales did think in either of these ways, his doctrine is a prototype of many fundamental scientific doctrines. It is based (no doubt somewhat loosely) on evidence and argument, and it suggests that a single thing underlies and explains the apparent diversity of phenomena. Modern scientists who claim that everything is mass-energy or that the four-dimensional space-time continuum is the only real thing are heirs to Thales.

Two ancient stories about Thales are worth repeating, because of the somewhat different light they cast on early philosophy.

The first is recounted in Plato’s Theaetetus: Once while Thales was gazing upwards while doing astronomy, he fell into a well. A clever and delightful Thracian serving girl is said to have made fun of him, since he was eager to know the things in the heavens but failed to notice what was in front of him and right next to his feet (174a4–8).

The second story might be thought of as Thales’ slightly revengeful response to the servant-girl. It is found in Aristotle’s Politics: The story goes that when they found fault with him [Thales] for his poverty, supposing that philosophy is useless, he learned from his astronomy that there would be a large crop of olives.

Then, while it was still winter, he obtained a little money and made deposits on all the olive presses both in Miletus and in Chios. Since no one bid against him, he rented them cheaply. When the right time came, suddenly many tried to get the presses all at once, and he rented them out

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[Anaximander] also declares that in the beginning humans were born from other kinds of animals, since other animals quickly manage on their own, and humans alone require lengthy nursing. For this reason, in the beginning, they would not have been preserved if they had been like this.

Here an observation coupled with an insightful piece of argument leads to a daring hypothesis: Human beings were not made by gods. They came from other animals.

The second piece of Anaximandrian speculation concerns the ancient question of what holds up the earth. Thales seems to have held that the earth is floating on water, “as if,” Aristotle witheringly comments, “the same question did not arise . . . for the water supporting the earth” (De Caelo 294a32–23). Aware, perhaps, of this defect in Thales’ answer and in other similar ones, Anaximander proposed a different kind of answer altogether. He declared that on whatever terms he wished, and so made a great deal of money. In this way he proved that philosophers can easily be wealthy if they desire, but this is not what they are interested in (I 11 1259a9–18).

The moral of the story is that apparently arcane knowledge can have important practical uses, so that philosophy can help us to live well, and that we neglect it at our peril (see Plato, Republic 487d ff.).

Anaximander was a younger contemporary of Thales. Only a few words of his writings have survived, but ancient sources give us a vivid idea of their astonishing scope.

They contained a cosmogony, or account of the origins of the cosmos; an account of the origins of life; astronomical, meteorological, and biological speculations; and a map of the known world. Our primary interest is in Anaximander’s most general explanatory doctrine, but a brief glimpse at two of his other views shows what a daring thinker he was.

The first of these concerns the origin of human beings:

the earth is at rest on account of its similarity.

For it is no more fitting for what is established at the center and equally related to the extremes to move up rather than down or sideways. And it is impossible for it to make a move simultaneously in opposite directions. Therefore, it is at rest of necessity.

In other words, the earth doesn’t move, not because it’s held up by something else, but because there’s nothing to cause it to move in one way rather than another. The cleverness of this answer is obvious, since it gets around the kind of criticism that Aristotle uses against Thales.

I turn now to Anaximander’s fundamental doctrine: Of those who declare that the first principle is one, moving, and indefinite, Anaximander . . . said that the indefinite was the first principle and element of things that are . . . He says that the first principle is neither water nor any other of the things called elements, but some other nature which is indefinite, out of which come to be all the heavens and the worlds in them.

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The fundamental stuff out of which everything else is made or comes to be isn’t any of the four recognized elements—earth, water, fire, and air (or dry, wet, hot, and cold)—but a fifth thing, the unlimited. Why? According to Aristotle (Physics III 5 204b22–29), Anaximander argued, “If everything is water, then everything must have the properties of water. But not only do some things lack these properties, some even have properties that are the opposites of those possessed by water: Earth isn’t wet, it’s dry. Since nothing can be both wet and dry, how can dry earth just be some form of wet water? How can what just is wet water become dry?” This is a powerful argument for thinking that if there is a single stuff of which all things (including

By attacking Thales’ ideas, Anaximander reveals himself as Thales’ true heir. the elements) are made, it cannot have any definite characteristics of its own. It must be indeterminate in quality.

More significantly, this Anaximandrian argument is a telling criticism of his predecessor, Thales. Consequently, it’s a good

example of the critical rationality I praise the Greek philosophers for inventing. Anaximander didn’t accept Thales’ doctrines on his authority or, as we are asked to accept Hesiod’s cosmogony, on the authority of the Muses; rather, he submitted them to rational scrutiny, modifying those that failed to pass muster and accepting only those that did. In the Nicomachean Ethics, just as he is about to criticize the doctrines of his own teacher, Plato, Aristotle recommends this as the appropriate attitude for a philosopher to take to his forebears: It presumably seems better, indeed only right, to destroy even what is close to us if that is the way to preserve the truth. And we must especially do this when we are philosophers, [lovers of wisdom]; for though we love both the truth and our friends, piety requires us to honour the truth first (I 6 1096a).

Paradoxically, then, it is by destroying Thales’ doctrines, rather than by accepting them unquestioningly, that Anaximander reveals himself as Thales’ true heir.

In addition to criticizing Thales’ doctrines, Anaximander also made an important suggestion about what causes the elements to interact and give rise to the things we see around us: The things that are perish into the things out of which they come to be, according to necessity, for they pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice in accordance with the ordering of time.

His idea seems to be that elements, conceived of as opposite powers (dry/wet, hot/ cold), struggle with one another, with sometimes one gaining the upper hand, sometimes another. When this happens the balance or equilibrium of the cosmos is disturbed: one opposite has gained “unjustly” at the expense of another, and must of necessity—or because of the laws governing the cosmos—pay reparation to it in due course, anaximander

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anaximenes

so that equilibrium is restored once more.

No doubt this is, indeed, “rather poetical,” as Simplicius puts it, but it certainly shouldn’t be dismissed on that account. For it contains the fundamentally important notion that the natural world is governed by necessity (by law) not by the arbitrary whim of the gods.

Many good and fruitful theories start their lives as metaphors.

Anaximander’s follower, Anaximenes, developed Anaximander’s account of the elements and introduced significant economies into it. In Anaximander’s cosmology, there are four elements (earth, water, fire, and air) as well as the somewhat mysterious indeterminate stuff, whose relation to them is not fully explained. Thus Anaximander has five fundamental things in his ontology. Anaximenes seems to have realized that the unlimited was unnecessary baggage, that one of the elements could play its role. He claimed that air is the fundamental principle of everything, and that earth, water, and fire are simply air which is to different degrees either rarefied or condensed. Earth is very dense air; fire is very rarefied air: The form of air is the following: when it is most even, it is invisible, but it is revealed by the cold and the hot and the wet, and movement. ... For when it is dissolved into what is finer, it comes to be fire, and on the other hand air comes to be winds when it becomes condensed. Cloud results from air through felting, and water when this happens to a greater degree. When condensed still more it becomes earth, and when it reaches the absolutely densest stage it becomes stones.

Thus Anaximenes’ theory is at once simpler and more complete than Anaximander’s. It needs only one thing—air—where Anaximander’s needs five. Moreover, it explains in a straightforward way what Anaximander leaves mysterious: how the one fundamental stuff can give rise to the other elements that appear in the world. This makes it a better theory and another good example of critical

rationality—or a critically rational tradition— in operation.

The next step in this line of argument was taken by Heraclitus of Ephesus, a consummate thinker and writer, if a rather difficult one. In the following fragments, he speaks of the birth of one element as the death of another.

It is death to souls to become water, death to water to become earth, but from earth comes water and from water soul.

Fire lives the death of earth and air lives the death of fire, water lives the death of air, earth that of water.

If we set out the claims they make in a table, we can see that they describe the series of transformations already familiar to us from Anaximenes: Death of = Birth of Fire Air Air Water Water Earth Earth Water Road A Road B (Downward Road)

(Upward Road)

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Notice that the transformations are cyclical. When they are complete, what started as fire ends up being fire again.

Now, two questions naturally arise about this cycle of transformations: What causes it to occur? And what happens to fire, for example, when it becomes air? Anaximander’s answer to the first question is that strife between the opposites causes the transformations on Road A (the downward road), and that justice causes the transformations on

Heraclitus’ vision exerted enormous influence over succeeding generations.

illustrations for the nuremberg chronicle, ca. 1500

Road B (the upward road). Heraclitus adopts this answer, but sees that it can be simplified without loss of explanatory power. He sees that because the transformations are cyclical, we do not need two forces—strife and justice—to drive them, but only one. Hence he tells us that “justice is strife,” that “the road up and the road down are one and the same,” and that “the beginning and end are common on the circumference of a circle.” Thus the force that transforms fire into air also transforms air back into fire. (This Heraclitean criticism of Anaximander is a model of critical scientific rationality at work. Physicists like Steven Weinberg or Murray GellMann, who look for Grand Unified Theories in which gravitational, electromagnetic, and weak and strong forces are unified, are heirs to Heraclitus.)

To see how Heraclitus answered the question about what happens to fire when strife causes it to become air, we must begin, as he surely did, with Anaximenes. In Anaximenes’ view, elements change into one another by becoming more rarified or more condensed.

But this account is uneconomical because it introduces a new primitive notion—rarifaction/condensation—over and above the original four elements. Heraclitus seems to have noticed this defect in Anaximenes’ theory

and tried to rectify it. In his view, all that happens when fire is transformed into air is that it dies down. Thus Road A (the downward road) is the progressive dying down of fire and Road B (the upward one) is its progressive rekindling. Thus only fire “being kindled in measures and being extinguished in measures,” is needed to explain how strife (justice) causes the elements to be transformed into one another, so that their cyclical transformations are simply “the turnings of fire.”

But why does Heraclitus assign such a fundamental role to fire rather than to air or one of the other elements? Why does he identify the cosmos with “ever-living fire” rather than with ever-living air or ever-living water? Why is Road A the progressive dying down of fire rather than the progressive drying of the wet? To see a possible answer, we need to return to the first question we raised: What causes the elements to be transformed into one another? Anaximander’s answer was strife and justice. Heraclitus simplifies this to a single causal agent: strife. But Anaximander does not tell us why the elements strive with one another in the first place. Strife enters the Anaximandrian cosmos, as it were, from the outside; it is something extrinsic to, or

heraclitus

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over and above, the unlimited and the four elements. Strife, however, is intrinsic to a cosmos of fire. For fire is “want and satiety”: it exists only when striving with what it is trying to burn; it simultaneously wants or needs fuel and is becoming hungry through consuming it. It is this dynamic feature, possessed by none of the other opposites, that most likely led Heraclitus to assign priority to it. It enables him to “reduce” strife to fire (since if fire exists so must strife) just as he has already reduced justice to strife.

One final theoretical advantage of fire deserves to be mentioned. Fire exists through striving with its fuel, but its striving is lawgoverned or measured: Earth is poured out as sea, and is measured according to the same ratio (logos) it was before it became earth.

After all, the size or heat of fire is proportional to the amount of fuel being consumed. Thus if fire is the fundamentally real thing, this offers an explanation of the order observed in such things as the seasons and the rising and setting of the sun.

There is no doubt that the theory that results from these reductions is vastly more successful than any of the theories of Heraclitus’ predecessors. It is also fundamentally different in kind. Heraclitus doesn’t tell us that the cosmos and all its contents are fundamentally fire, he tells us that they are fire “being kindled in measures and being extinguished in measures.” This emphasizes the fact that what is fundamentally real for Heraclitus is not a static stuff to which change and activity are extrinsic, but a law-governed process or activity. Heraclitus differs from his predecessors, then, not simply in choosing fire rather than water, air, or the unlimited as his primary stuff, but in choosing law-governed change over static stability as being more fundamentally real. In the worlds of Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, change depends on stability; in Heraclitus’ world, stability depends on change: “Changing, it rests.”

Heraclitus’ powerful vision of the world exerted enormous influence over his successors, who tried in various ways to destroy, criticize, modify, and augment it. But it is not his theory so much as the spirit in which he offers it, that I have wanted to emphasize. He wasn’t the first to theorize in that spirit, he was part of a tradition of critical rationality that already existed. But he was the first to give explicit voice to it: Listening not to me but to the logos it is wise to agree that all things are one.

This is the injunction that all the subsequent Greek philosophers follow. As students of Greek philosophy, it is an injunction we must strive to follow ourselves. If we do, we will become what so many Greek philosophers thought was the best thing to be: critically rational human beings.

C.D.C. Reeve taught at Reed for 25 years (1976–2001) and is now Delta Kappa Epsilon Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

He works primarily in ancient Greek philosophy, especially Plato and Aristotle. His books include Philosopher-Kings (1988), Socrates in the Apology (1989), Practices of Reason (1992), Substantial Knowledge (2000), and Love’s Confusions (2005).

He has translated Plato’s Cratylus (1997); Euthyphro, Apology, Crito (2002); Republic (2004); and Meno (2006), as well as Aristotle’s Politics (1998). His new book, Immortal Life: Action, Contemplation, and Happiness in Aristotle, will soon appear from Harvard University Press. A related book, Aristotle on Practical Wisdom: Nicomachean Ethics Book VI, Translated with Introduction, Analysis, and Commentary, is in the works.

These classic Hum lectures were selected by Peter Steinberger [political science and humanities 1977–]. For more in the series, see www.reed.edu/reed_magazine.

Further Reading Patricia Curd, ed., A Presocratics Reader (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996) Charles Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) Karl Popper, “Back to the Presocratics,” in his Conjectures and Refutations (London: Routledge, 1963)

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Books by Reedies

photos by vivian johnson

Reediana Northwest Mountain Wildflowers Daniel Mathews ’70 (published as an iphone app, by earthrover software, 2011)

I’ll begin with this caveat: I don’t own a smart phone. I’d never even put my hands on one until I wrote this review. But apps like Northwest Mountain Wildflowers might be enough to convert me.

I’ve been a fan of Dan’s work ever since an old Reed boyfriend gave me a copy of Cascade-Olympic Natural History over 20 years ago.

Since then I’ve lugged that field guide, which must weigh three pounds, on nearly ever y hike I’ve taken. I’ve laughed at Dan’s description of Eriogonum pyrolifolium, also known as “dirty socks”; pored over the photographs of towhead baby in both its flowering and seed-head stages; and followed his advice never to eat camas of any kind.

Now Dan has published a digital edition of the wildflower section that is packed with information, putting hundreds of photographs and descriptions at your fingertips, but that weighs less than five ounces (the weight of an iPhone). Now when I’m on the trail wondering what that delicate white flower is, I can just pull out my borrowed iPhone and discover that it’s a narrowleaf arrowhead, which Dan informs us is often found in ponds, marshes, and lakeshores at low to mid elevations.

And because it’s not web based, you don’t have to be in signal range for the app to function, truly making it like a book in your pocket—only better (something I never thought I would admit).

The app also allows you to conveniently narrow your search by entering your location, and includes Dan’s lively commentary on the natural history of many of the plants.

Did you know, for example, that several species in the aster family have alpine populations that reproduce by cloning?

The design isn’t flawless (some clunky graphics and cluttered windows), but is easy to use, even for nontechies like myself. Dan is planning a companion app, Northwest Mountain Trees and Shrubs, later this year. Maybe by then I’ll have my own iPhone. —Anne Laufe ’86

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I am to be read not from left to right, but in Jewish: from right to left: The Poetics of Boris Slutsky

Bad News: How America’s Business Press Missed the Story of the Century

Marat Grinberg [Russian, 2006–]

(the new press, 2010)

Boris Slutsky (1919–1986) is a major figure of Russian poetry of the second half of the twentieth century, but his work has remained largely unexplored. The first scholarly monograph on Slutsky, Marat Grinberg’s book is a lengthy, detailed study of his poetic thought. Professor Grinberg makes a strong argument that Jewish culture is at the heart of Slutsky’s poetics, and that Slutsky offers a version of Jewish poetics centered around several key terms: hermeneutics, translation, and transplantation.

The book shows how Slutsky engages with biblical texts and their view of history, presenting his poetic project as a holy writ of his times, which daringly fuses biblical proof texts and stylistics with the language of late Russian modernism and Soviet newspeak. This engagement is exegetical and aimed toward the kind of commentary historically produced

by Jews on scripture. Grinberg argues that Slutsky’s work espouses a Jewish worldview, and thus that its significance as Jewish poetry is not limited to the themes of Jewish life or faith. In the words of Alice Nakhimovsky, a pioneer scholar of Russian-Jewish literature, Grinberg’s book “rescues a great poet from a numbing set of midcentury clichés. No longer a ‘war poet,’ or ‘Soviet diarist,’ or sometime Jew, Boris Slutsky emerges as he was in fact—a sometimes playful, sometimes anguished heir to Russian modernism, who read Jewish catastrophe through Jewish texts.” —Anna Mann Whether I get older or more mature — I begin to see clearly a Jew in me.

And I thought that I made it, And I thought that I broke through.

I didn’t make it, but unmade myself.

I didn’t break through, but broke down.

I am to be read not from left to right, But in Jewish: from right to left.

I dreamt of great glory, But have lived to see great wrath.

I, who crossed with one foot, Into either permanent residency, or citizenship, Return now to my kinless kin,

Edited by Anya Schiffrin ’84 The Great Recession of 2008 will doubtless occupy historians for decades to come. The detonation of the housing bubble, the infiltration of toxic derivatives, the collapse of Wall Street giants Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, the tsunami of mistrust that shuddered through the economy, choking off credit and shredding millions of jobs into slips of pink— any one of these, on their own, would constitute a major crisis. That all of them should happen with barely a word of warning from the media constitutes journalistic failure on an epic scale. Why didn’t someone sound the alarm sooner?

Edited by veteran journalist Anya Schiffrin, who teaches at Columbia University, thse compelling essays by prominent reporters (and a token economist) explore the various forces that prevented the press from doing its job, from deadline pressure to milquetoast regulation to a sort of mass psychosis.

Anya argues that business reporters suffer from a journalistic version of Stockholm Syndrome—identifying so strongly with the people and institutions they cover that they failed to ask the hard questions and probe the fundamentals until it was too late. They also tend to focus on the trees, not the forest. “We spent so much time trying to explain what a CDO and the other derivatives were that we never actually stood back and said, ‘This won’t work. You can’t be leveraged 30 times,’” one editor told her after the collapse.

Nonethless, there were warnings—especially early in the decade, when the new forms of flaky finance were first being pioneered. The New York Times ran an exposé, “Mortgaged Lives: Profiting from Fine Print with Wall Street’s Help” in March 2000. Businessweek followed with “Easy Money: Subprime Lenders Make a Killing Catering to Poorer Americans.

Now Wall Street Is Getting in on the Act” a month later.

But the articles that questioned the logic of the bubble never gained enough currency to pop it. “The problem has been that the average consumer has not wanted to understand what the business media were telling them or simply chose to ignore the warning signs,” writes journalism professor Chris Roush. “No one likes a nattering nabob of negativism, especially when the stock market is climbing and all of our 401(k) plans are tied to it.”

It was almost as if Americans bought into a collective delusion and could not bear to let it be shattered. As Upton Sinclair once wrote, “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” —Chris Lydgate ’90

Return from the point into Expanse . . .

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continued courtesy of warner a. eliot

Thomas Lamb Eliot (far right) on a picnic with friends fom the church, ca. 1865

No Silent Witness: The Eliot Parsonage Women and Their Unitarian World Cynthia Grant Tucker (oxford university press, 2010)

If you want a different take on dead white men, this book is for you. No Silent Witness is a historical account of the Eliot family, enormously influential in the founding and growth of Unitarianism, through the eyes of the family’s women. The book profiles each generation’s major female figure, beginning with matriarch Abigail Adams Cranch Eliot, the wife of William Greenleaf Eliot, who founded St. Louis’ Unitarian Church and Washington University.

Another figure is Henrietta Macks Eliot, wife of Thomas Lamb Eliot, who similarly established a Unitarian presence in Portland, and first urged parishioners Simeon and Amanda Reed to use their fortune philanthropically (he later served as first director of Reed’s board of regents).

The book is the first comprehensive examination of the women’s letters and diaries. Confined in public by their nineteenth- and early twentieth-century female roles, these headstrong, fiercely intelligent, and sophisticated women were set loose through private correspondence, revealing

Abby Eliot (left) with a student teacher at the Ruggles Street Nursery School and Training Center in Boston, ca. 1925.

they were as involved in Unitarianism’s success as their minister husbands. “This was no idle talk,” Tucker writes.

We are thus brought into drawing rooms and other private spaces to learn of struggling parsonages, financial troubles, and squabbles between Unitarian factions. Also given is an intimate account of family life—the impact of the untimely deaths of children, the suffering and strain brought on by the pressure to set an example for the parsonage, etc. Sometimes suffering from the dryness of an academic historical text, the book, in many places, paints such a vivid picture of these women’s lives that you could be watching a film. —Amanda Waldroupe ’07

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Connie Crooker ’69 served as editor for a very special book, Over the Hill Hikers (Jetty House, an imprint of Peter E. Randall Publisher, 2011), which chronicles the ups and downs of a group of White Mountain hikers led by Connie’s mother, Elizabeth MacGregor Bates. The group of retirees in Sandwich, New Hampshire, became a cohesive bunch of happy hikers under Elizabeth’s instinctive use of casual leadership. Connie says, “The author, Shirley Elder Lyons, is a professional journalist with a snappy writing style. Mom conducted many of the hiker interviews that form the basis of the book. We are thrilled to see Mom’s truly remarkable achievement honored, and in her lifetime too.”

The newest book

by Jeremy Popkin ’70, You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (Cambridge University Press, 2010), tells the dramatic story of how events in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue (today’s Haiti) led to the first decrees abolishing slavery in 1793 and 1794. Jeremy is T. Marshall Hahn Jr. Professor of History at the University of Kentucky.

Return to the Viewer: Selected Art Reviews, by Matthew Kangas ’71, was published by Midmarch Arts Press in February.

In addition, an article by Matthew, “How African Art Influenced Modern Art,” was in the January 2011 issue of Art Guide Northwest.

Meaning in Law: A Theory of Speech (Oxford University Press, 2009) was published by Charles Collier ’72, professor of law at the University of Florida. The First Amendment’s protection of speech has never been adequately theorized. Existing theories proceed on the basis of legal doctrine and judicial decision making, social and political philosophy, or legal and intellectual history.

In his book, Charles develops a legal theory of speech on the basis of linguistic theory and the philosophy of language.

Dan Feller ’72 is the editor of The Papers of Andrew Jackson, Volume 8: 1830, published in 2010 by the University of Tennessee Press. This volume offers an incomparable window not only into Andrew Jackson and his presidency, but also into America. It presents more than 500 documents from 1830, a core year in Jackson’s tumultuous presidency, including Jackson’s handwritten drafts of his presidential messages; private notes and memoranda; and correspondence with government officials, army and navy officers, friends and family, Indian leaders, foreign diplomats, and ordinary citizens throughout the country. Dan is professor of history at the University of Tennessee, and editor and director of the Papers of Andrew Jackson.

Laura Leviton ’73 published “Evaluability Assessment to Improve Public Health Policies, Programs, and Practices,” a chapter in the Annual Review of Public Health (April 2010). (See Class Notes.)

Liz Gray ’77 published an essay, “The Librarian as Gardener,” in Independent School Libraries: Perspectives on Excellence (Libraries Unlimited, 2010), and spent a good amount of time defending the printed book in her role as president of the Association of Independent School Librarians— most notably in her response to the question, “Do School Libraries Need Books?,” posed in the New York Times’ Room for Debate blog, on February 10, 2010.

Bill Nicholson ’78 recently published a law review article that illustrates the challenges faced by local governments during a time of limited resources. He focuses on the need for emergency managers and lawyers who understand both relevant law and one another’s needs. “Obtaining Competent Legal Advice: Challenges for Local Emergency Managers and Attorneys,” Natural Disaster Law issue, California Western Law Review, Vol. 46, No. 2, 343–368 (2010).

Collateral Damage,

by Tara Meixsell ’83, was published in 2010 through Create Space. Tara writes that the book was a monumental and challenging task done on five years of weekends at the request of a coworker, who became severely ill after exposure to toxins from the gas wells and waste pits that surrounded her home in Colorado. (See Class Notes.)

Recent publications by David S. Bloch ’93 include, with James G. McEwen, “Enforcing IP Against the Government,” Intellectual Property & Technology Law Journal (November 2010); “New Issues at the Intersection of Intellectual Property and Government Contracts,” in Inside the Minds: Litigation Strategies for Government Contracts (Aspatore Books, 2010); with Richard M. Gray and James G. McEwen, “Demystifying IP and Technology Licenses in Government Contracts,” The Licensing Journal, (May 2010); with George Chan and Euan Taylor, “Chinese Intellectual Property Litigation— Theories and Remedies,” in Doing

Business in China (Juris Publishing, 2010). “And Oxford has asked for a second edition of Intellectual Property in Government Contracts” (forthcoming this year).

Galen Longstreth ’98 has published her first picture book. Yes, Let’s (Tugboat Press, 2010) is a story, set in rhyme, of a fun-loving family that spends a day of exploration and adventure in the woods. Galen is currently working at the Princeton Public Library in Princeton, New Jersey.

Rebecca Ragain ’02 wrote a chapter about Portland’s specialty coffee scene for the book Brew to Bikes: Portland’s Artisan Economy (Ooligan Press, 2010).

Dan Denvir ’05 mentions Reed’s current stance on U.S. News rankings in his March 7 op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer on big business in education, “Numbers Game Doesn’t Add Up.” Paul Marthers MALS ’06 has published Eighth Sister No More: The Origins and Evolution of Connecticut College (Peter Lang, 2011). Examining Connecticut College’s founding in the context of its evolution, Paul illustrates how founding mission and vision inform the way colleges describe what they are and do, and whether there are essential elements of founding mission and vision that must be remembered or preserved. Paul is vice president for enrollment and dean of admissions at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

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In Memoriam Lucy Burpe Shepard Howard ’37

She helped activate a new Veterans Administration hospital in Sepulveda, California, and was the first director of nursing at the Dammasch State Hospital in Wilsonville, Oregon, where she worked for nine years. She also was an instructor in psychiatric and medical-surgical nursing at Clark College for over a decade.

In later years, she lived in Tualatin, where volunteered for the Tualatin Historical Society, the Tualatin-Durham Senior Citizens Center, and the Tualatin Presbyterian Church. Marian’s son died in 1991; survivors include three grandchildren.

November 10, 2010, in Portland.

Lucy lived to be 95, and was loved and t re a s ure d for he r kindness, humor, and creativity. She was youngest of five daughters born to Alice Failing Shepard and Edward Shepard, orchardist and editor of Better Fruit magazine. Following her father’s untimely death when she was three, she moved with her family from Hood River, Oregon, to northwest Portland, where her mother assumed management of the Failing family household. The household then was comprised of Lucy and her sisters, including Ann W. Shepard ’23 [dean of students, 1926–68], Elsie Shepard Patten ’33, and Henrietta Shepard Plueger ’35; grandmother Olivia Burch Henderson Failing, who was born in the second covered wagon train to Oregon; and aunt Henrietta Henderson Failing, founder and first curator of the Portland Art Museum. Lucy walked a few blocks from her home to attend the Cady School of Music Education (later Miss Catlin’s School), and met her future husband, Gordon Beebe, at a neighborhood dance class. Following her first year of college at the University of Washington, she enrolled at Reed and earned a BA in history. For the next year, she worked in a doctor’s office, and then she married Gordon. A son, Sandy, was born in Chicago, where the couple lived while Gordon did graduate study. After the outbreak of World War II, the family returned to Portland to be near extended family and to welcome a daughter, Leslie M. Beebe MAT ’66. Many years later, Lucy earned teaching credentials at Portland State College and taught seventh grade at Hayhurst School, and also was a librarian at Riverdale School. In 1986, she married Robert S. Howard III; they were together for 20 years. Lucy was recognized for her ability to recite hundreds and hundreds of passages, from plays, poetry, and epics to limericks and marching songs. To the end of her life, she recited lines from Chaucer, Shakespeare, and the Iliad. She wrote playful commentaries in rhyme and published three poems in her 90s.

She also enjoyed a good challenge, and taught herself and others a great variety of handwork skills. Many summers were spent vacationing

Nancy T. Lindbloom Simmons ’39

November 19, 2010, at home in Wenatchee, Washington.

Poet Lucy Shepard Howard ’37 kept on writing to the end.

at the Oregon Coast, but Lucy also traveled to Europe, Africa, and Asia. Survivors include her daughter and son, three grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.

“The View from My Window” How lucky I am That the view from my window Is an endless source of much pleasure Both sides of the city Are exceedingly pretty And the view of Mt. Hood A real treasure.

I can’t complain That we get too much rain Because moisture can emphasize color.

Without the spring showers We’d have far fewer flowers And the scene would, of course Be much duller.

— Lucy Shepard Howard ’37 (November 2008)

Marian Helen Stevens Larson ’37 October 11, 2010, in Tualatin, Oregon.

When Marian graduated from Portland’s Lincoln High School, she received the gift of a 1929 Model A Ford, which she named “M.D.,” short for doctor of medicine—her “special dream.”

She studied at Reed for two years, leaving the college so that her sister would have the means to attend school. As a mother in 1950, Marian completed a BS in nursing at St. Vincent Hospital in Portland, which, she said, partially realized her original dream. She also earned an MS in nursing from the University of Oregon in 1959 and “set forth on a very rewarding career.”

Nancy was the daughter of Swedish immigrants who settled in Portland. She earned a BA from Reed in s o c i o l o g y, t h e n worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a stenographer and migratory labor social worker.

She was commissioned in the U.S. Naval Reserve in 1943, where she served as personnel officer for the supervisor of shipbuilding in Portland. She married John Simmons, a Royal Navy supply officer, in 1944; the couple lived in London after the war and returned to the U.S. in 1948. Nancy earned a teacher’s certificate from Northern Idaho Junior College and taught history, social studies, and special education at junior high schools in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and Tacoma, Washington, before retiring in 1979. In retirement, she traveled with John, and was a community volunteer for organizations such as St. Clare Hospital, the Washington State Historical Museum, the Children’s Orthopedic Guild, and the AAUW. She enjoyed reading, and playing golf and bridge. In 2004, she and John moved to Wenatchee to be closer to family. Survivors include her husband, three daughters, four grandchildren, and a great-granddaughter.

Alan Loren Dean ’41, emeritus trustee

December 2, 2010, from a stroke, in Arlington, Virginia.

Alan grew up in a Swedish community in Portland’s Kenton neighborhood. He was fascinated with inorganic chemistry and thought june 2011 Reed magazine 61

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he would become a chemical engineer; he entered Reed with that intention. In an oral history interview in 2004, he reported: “After taking a year of chemistr y at Reed, and getting into a fair amount of organic chemistry, I said, ‘I’m not going to spend my life brooding over these complicated carbon rings.’” Instead, he switched to political science; he was particularly captivated by a course in psychometrics—the field of mathematics dealing with chiefly biological statistics. “I got so I could figure out not only simple things like standard deviations with pen and pencil—no computer or anything—but I could also work out a Parsonian product coefficient correlation, and that is not easy.” Mentor Charles McKinley [political science, 1918– 60] arranged for Alan to get into civil service testing, and he was special examiner for the city of Portland in 1939–41. Alan’s thesis, Personnel Administration in the Government of Portland, Oregon, completed requirements for a BA in political science. During his years at the college, he organized the first Reed Union, a debating group, the Day-Dodgers Union, and rifle and track clubs.

After graduating, he worked for the War Department as a civilian personnel director, an inspector of civilian personnel programs, and as a director of the department’s School of Public Personnel Administration; the work took him to Hermiston, Oregon; San Francisco; and Washington, D.C. For the next 27 years, he held senior positions with departments such as the Federal Aviation Agency; the Department of Transportation; the Office of Management and Budget; the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare; and the U.S. Railway Association. He also completed an MA in public administration at American University. Alan was principal architect in organizing public agencies such as NASA and the Federal Aviation Agency, and President Lyndon Johnson honored him as top civil servant in 1965. Alan joined Reed’s board of trustees in 1969, serving first as an alumni trustee, and became an emeritus trustee in 1998. He was married to Vera Sisson for 67 years; they had three daughters and nine grandchildren. Cherished of his many, many honors was his selection as the winner of the 1955 Washington Post “Ideal Father” contest based on the recommendation of his daughters, who touted his humor and his qualities as a civic leader, bricklayer, fruit grower, song leader, storyteller, and camp counselor. “I’ve had a very spectacular career,” Alan said, “including the highest rank

a career civil servant can reach, assistant secretary. There’s a saying that I adopted a long time ago about a good liberal arts education.

‘Liberal arts education prepares you for nothing while preparing you for everything.’ I have a graduate degree, of course, but when I left Reed, except for some occult science, there was almost no direction I couldn’t move if I wanted to.”

Irma Doris Gevurtz Robbins ’41 November 26, 2010, in Nevada City, California.

Irma’s family established and operated the Gevurtz Furniture Company, a prominent Portland business. Irma studied at Reed for two years and completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Washington. In 1942, she married Irvine Robbins, who, along with his brother-inlaw, Burt Baskin, cofounded the Baskin-Robbins Ice Cream Company. Irma and Irvine had three children and lived in the San Fernando Valley of California for 30 years, where she played golf and tennis and was active in several organizations and art museums. Survivors include two daughters; son John, author of Diet for a New America; five grandchildren and great-grandchildren; and a brother. Irma and Barbara Hervin Schwab ’41 were lifelong friends. Irma’s sisters Jane Gevurtz Green ’44 and Suzanne Gevurtz Itkin ’48 also attended Reed.

Barbara Lucille Hervin Schwab ’41

November 14, 2010, in Portland, from complications related to Alzheimer’s disease.

Barbara attended Reed for two years, and earned a BA from Stanford in social sciences. In 1941, she married Sidney Mayer Jr. ’32, a Reed biology graduate and a physician who died tragically in 1944, leaving Barbara with one son and a second son only a few days away from birth. In 1946, she married Herbert M. Schwab, who became first chief judge of the Oregon Court of Appeals; they had a daughter. Barbara reported that life with her family was a happy and rewarding one. She was a wonderful cook, who created legendary pies, and she enjoyed gardening and creating a beautiful home. Although she was gifted as a painter and sculptor, she passed up opportunities for serious study in favor of family obligations. She was also adept at languages and had a wonderful sense of humor. As a member of the Portland Symphony board, Barbara was instrumental in starting the Young Audiences program. She was active in the League of Women Voters, the Boys & Girls Aid Society, the Parry Center, the American Red Cross, Oregon Health & Science University, and the Oregon Humanities Forum; and while living in Salem, she was active in the Bush Barn Art Center, where she started a children’s book collection. At Cannon Beach, where she and Herbert lived for a time in retirement, she

volunteered for the Clatsop County Historical Society and helped to found and establish the Cannon Beach History House and the Cannon Beach Arts Association. Barbara worked for a year at Reed in alumni relations and event planning, and kept an active connection to the college and its alumni. Barbara’s brother, Jason A. Hervin ’41, also attended Reed, and her lifelong friend was Irma Gevurtz Robbins ’41. “My two years at Reed were two of the most pleasant, stimulating, challenging, and maturing of my life,” she noted. “Reed was where I learned about learning and about thinking and about evaluating. What a privilege to have been exposed to those brilliant, gentle, caring, constantly nudging people who comprised the Reed faculty at that time!” Survivors include three children and two grandchildren. Herbert died in 2005.

Louis George Stang ’41

December 1, 2010, at home in West Simsbury, Connecticut.

Louis earned a BA from Reed in chemistr y, graduating Phi Beta Kappa. One of his lasting memories of Reed was practicing on the pipe organ in the Eliot Hall chapel.

Following graduation, he attended the California Institute of Technology as a student and instructor in analytical chemistry. After the U.S. entered World War II, his mentor at Cal Tech encouraged him to join the National Defense Research Council in Illinois. There he met coworker Dorian Heintz; they married in 1943, and were employed at the Metallurgical Laboratory in Evanston. From there, they went to the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Louis was assigned the task of producing 50 curies of barium-lanthanum-140.

To meet this spectacular challenge and to overtake German and Russian military efforts, technology had to be invented and employed to construct the laboratory, the handling equipment, and also the reactor, which became known as the Stang reactor. “Dr. Robert Oppenheimer gave him exactly 365 days to accomplish this. A wager of one nickel was placed by Oppenheimer’s team that this couldn’t be done. That nickel was to become Louis and Dorian’s most prized possession.”

Following the war, radioisotope production was used primarily for medical purposes, and the couple went to Upton, New York, to design, build, and operate the hot lab at Brookhaven National Laboratory. They retired in Florida.

Louis and Dorian were humble and devout individuals, as well as gifted musicians, who possessed a great sense of adventure. Louis was founder and editor of the journal of the American Nuclear Society, Nuclear Applications,

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and was a recipient of the American Nuclear Society’s distinguished service award. Survivors include three sons and six grandchildren.

Dorian also died in 2010.

Harry Leonard Turtledove ’42 January 27, 2011, in Portland.

Harry earned a BA from Reed in political science, graduating Phi Beta Kappa. He was a day-dodger in his freshman and senior years, lived in Doyle in sophomore year, and spent his junior year at Wesleyan University. In an oral history interview in 2006, Harry reported that he chose Reed partly at the urging of a beloved high school teacher, but also because he was impressed by the Reed students he met and observed at political forums and discussions on campus.

After graduation, he spent the summer working in the shipyard at Swan Island before enlisting in the army. He served for four years in the U.S.; Calcutta, India; and Karachi, Pakistan. After the war, he was a reporter for the Oregon Journal, covering sports and music. “In 1949, I decided that I was going to look for other pastures, and I made the only use I ever made of the GI Bill of Rights,” he reported. “When I got out of the army, I had h ad e n o u g h o f o r g a n i z e d a ny t h i n g.”

He took a course at the University of London, which led to a job writing for the Marshall Plan Information Services, later U.S. Information Services, in both London and Paris. He returned to Portland and to Oregon politics, working on campaigns for the Democratic Party, and was then contacted by the CIA. “I spent three years in France with the CIA as a deep cover agent, which sounds very glamorous, but I was not living in any danger,” he said.

He was married to Patricia Lavan; they had a daughter and lived outside of Paris for four years. In 1958, they returned to Portland and Harry formed a public relations agency, Heims and Turtledove, later Turtledove Clemens.

Harry was involved in Oregon’s Democratic politics, including campaigns for representatives Edith Green and Les AuCoin, governor Bob Straub, Oregon Primary presidential primary candidate Robert Kennedy, and many others. In 2003, the Oregon Supreme Court appointed him to the Oregon State Bar Disciplinary Committee as a public member, where he served for five years. In his public obituary, we learned that he was a connoisseur of food and wine and considered going into the wine business. He was an accomplished pianist, and his love and knowledge of music led to supporting Friends of Chamber Music, Chamber

David Ernst ’42 and Harry Turtledove ’42, from the Griffin.

Music Northwest, and Portland Piano International. He continued to travel to Paris and Burgundy, even as his health failed. “His was a life well lived, a man deeply loved and respected for his wit and wisdom, his knowledge and kindness. Strong convictions and integrity were his hallmarks.” Patricia died in 1998. Survivors include his wife of 10 years, Elaine Durst; his daughter, Ann; his granddaughter, Miriam; and his sister, Alice Turtledove Meyer MALS ’89.

Elizabeth Edson Raymond ’43 July 27, 2010, in Seattle, Washington.

After her father died when she was one year old, Elizabeth moved with her mother from Montana to Tacoma, Washington, where her mother worked in the city’s library system.

Elizabeth studied at Reed for three years, and met her future husband, clinical psychologist William T. Raymond ’41, MA ’42, on her first evening on campus at the new-student dinner-dance. She related many details about her experience at Reed in an oral history interview in 2003. One of her reasons for choosing to major in sociology included reading The Grapes of Wrath, she said. “My mom brought me the book and I read it with passion and sorrow. And that made me very interested in how these people could be helped to better their lives. And social work, social service was a way of helping, I felt.” After Bill was drafted into service in World War II, Elizabeth returned to Tacoma and completed a BA in sociology at the University of Washington.

They married in 1943 and raised a son and daughter. Bill died in 1993.

Dorothy V. Grooms Macfarlane ’44

November 19, 2010, in Milwaukie, Oregon.

Dorothy’s introduction to Reed came through her father, Frederick Grooms, who was facilities director at the college in the 1930s. In addition to relishing time spent in biology lab, Dorothy had happy memories of square dancing and of playing squash and badminton with her friend “Cookie” [Mary Cook Yoakum ’44] and Charles Botsford [physical education, 1912–52]. Between her sophomore and junior years, she married James A.

Macfarlane and went on to earn a BA from Reed in biology. When her husband completed military service in 1946, the couple bought a home in Milwaukie, where they raised three daughters. Dorothy was a research assistant for 24 years: first at Oregon Health & Sciences University in the diabetes and metabolism department, and then in medical research at the Portland VA Medical Center. She retired in 1987 and pursued many interests, including hiking, traveling, photography, playing piano, and practicing ikebana. She delighted in visits and conversations with members of her extended family and was very active in her church. Survivors include her daughters. Her husband died in 1981.

Helen Leslie McKay Gnaedinger ’46

January 19, 2011, in Silverton, Idaho.

Leslie earned a BA from Reed in biology with a thesis on the resident canyon salam a n d e r, E n s a t i n a escholtzii. During her time at Reed, she was employed as a welder in the Portland shipyards and at the B-29 factory in Hoquiam, Washington, next door to her hometown, Aberdeen. As a lab instructor at Washington State College, earning a master’s degree in biology, she taught Ernest (Ned) Gnaedinger, a navy veteran studying premedicine; they married in 1947 and moved to Portland, where Leslie was a biological specialist for Multnomah County and Ned attended the University of Oregon Medical School.

In 1952, they moved to Ned’s hometown, Wallace, Idaho, where Leslie raised their family of two sons and two daughters, and Ned was a general practitioner and chief administrator for Wallace Hospital. In addition to being a loving and supportive parent, Leslie volunteered with the Shoshone County Medical Auxiliary, with Chapter X of PEO, and with the Shoshone Country Club. She read widely and variously and enjoyed discussing what she read. She also enjoyed outdoor recreation, spending many happy days at the family cabin at Killarney Lake on the Coeur d’Alene River.

Ten years ago, daughter Kristi reported: “Even though she married and became a housewife, she never lost her love of biology. She was always thrilled to help us dissect whatever we brought home. She still has her love of salamanders, too. We have a few of the local variety living in our basement bathroom. She feeds them worms from her garden.” Survivors included her children, 6 grandchildren, 10 great-grandchildren, and a sister. Her husband died in 2004. Leslie’s brother Donald R. McKay ’50 also attended Reed. june 2011 Reed magazine 63

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Rosellen Marie Layton Lawton ’46

September 28, 2010, in Fairfield, California.

Rosellen earned her BA from Reed in biology and was a medical assistant. She married physician R.E. Lawton; their family included two daughters and a son.

Stanley Lawrence Olds ’46 October 7, 2010, in Worcester, Massachusetts, following a lengthy illness.

Stanley received a BA from Reed in mathematics and an MS from the State University of Iowa in actuary science, graduating Phi Beta Kappa. For over 30 years, he was an actuary for State Mutual Life Assurance Company; he retired in 1989. In retirement, he was a volunteer math tutor for at-need students at South High Community School in Worcester.

He was a member of Temple Emanuel and cofounder and president of the Jewish Service Center for Older Adults. In his public obituary, we read: “He was the consummate community volunteer and will be sadly missed by all who knew him.” Survivors include his wife of 58 years, Rosalie Lasker Olds; a son and two daughters; four grandchildren; and a brother.

Lloyd Gouvy Lyman ’48

November 15, 2010, in Bandon, Oregon, from cancer.

Ned interrupted his studies at Reed to join the U.S. Navy and serve on the U.S.S. Todd in the Pacific Theater during World War II. At the end of the war, he returned to the college and earned a BA in history. He then studied library science at the University of California, Berkeley. His love of books and writing led to a professional life in publishing, beginning at the university press at Berkeley. He also worked at LSU Press in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and was director of the university press at Texas A&M. In retirement, he settled in Bandon and helped to develop a new library, which contains numerous volumes from his personal library. Memorial contributions for Ned are welcome through the Bandon Library Friends Foundation, PO Box 128, Bandon, 97411. Survivors include his wife, Lea; two daughters and a granddaughter; and his sister, Mary Lou Lyman ’47, who provided the details for this memorial.

William Harrison Telfer ’48 November 6, 2010, Newton, Maine, following a brief illness.

As a young boy interested in the natural world, Bill would bicycle any distance with

his friends in order to reach a prime spot for viewing birds. He enrolled at Reed and began studying science on an intensive track in anticipation of being drafted into the military—which he was, after his first year. Following World War II, he returned to Reed and completed a BA in biology. His deep interest in science was inspired by work with professors A.A. Knowlton [physics, 1915– 48], L.E. Griffith [biology, 1920–45], and Arthur F. Scott [chemistry, 1923–79]. Bill went on to earn graduate degrees in zoology from Harvard. His doctoral research marked the beginning of a lifelong study of oogenesis in insects. For much of his career he used the North American saturniid moth, Hyalophora cecropia, as a model. In a graduate course on nonvascular plants at Harvard, he met biologist Mary Andrus; they married in 1950. Bill joined the biology department at the University of Pennsylvania in 1954, was department chair in 1972–76, and was named the inaugural Class of 1939 Professor of Natural Science in 1991. He was coauthor of the textbook Biology of Organisms, and was recognized as an international authority on insect physiology and biochemistry. He retired as professor emeritus in 1994, but continued his writing and research at the university for 10 years, before moving to Maine. At the age of 84, he published an extensive review of 100 years of research on egg formation in the order Lepidoptera, with the aim of stimulating future research. Bill’s mother, Annie Harrison Telfer ’15, and sister, Sara Telfer Bunnett ’42, also attended Reed. Survivors include two daughters and a granddaughter. His wife died in 2007.

Mary Ella Carson Brodie ’49, MAT ’65 November 11, 2011, in Portland.

Mary spent her first year of college at Willamette University.

S he was skeptical about attending Reed for her second year, even though she thought well of the school and knew that living at home in Portland would save money. “At the end of the first week, I was committed to Reed. I have never regretted that choice. The curriculum, the professors, the friends I made, all have enriched my life more than I ever could have imagined,” she wrote many years later. After graduating with a BA in general literature, she moved to

San Francisco—a big adventure for a young woman from the Pacific Northwest, she said.

After three years, she came back to Portland, and worked in public welfare and also for the state in higher education and human resources. She earned a master’s degree in teaching from Reed, and spent 12 years as an instructor in English, Spanish, and typing at Wilson High School in southwest Portland. Her love of hiking led to her joining the Mazamas in 1957, and it was on a hike in the Columbia Gorge in the early seventies that she met Laird C. Brodie ’44. Since leaving Reed, he had married and raised a family of three. He was teaching at Portland State University and playing French horn for the Portland Opera and the Marylhurst College orchestra. He also enjoyed outdoor activities. The couple married in 1974.

“A year or so later, I stopped teaching, learned to make bread, and for the first time tried being a homebody.” Mary and Laird enjoyed music; hiking with the Mazamas in the U.S. and in Great Britain and South America; and several unforgettable ocean canoe outings near Vancouver Island in British Columbia. Mary was a member of the Reed College Women’s Committee, the alumni board, and the FosterScholz Club. Survivors include Clark and Greg Canham and members of Laird’s family.

David Petri Pearson ’49 November 14, 2010, in Portland.

Dave grew up in Portland, and started taking classes at Reed while attending Franklin High School.

He was drafted during World War II, and returned to the college after the war to complete a B A in chemistry. Dave and Patricia M. Cowan ’49, who met at church in their teens, were married a week before commencement 1949. Dave went on to earn an MS from Oregon State University and a PhD from the University of Southern California in physical chemistry and became a research chemist with the Phillips Petroleum Company. He and Pat—who taught high school mathematics and was a pension actuary—had five children and lived in California, Idaho, and Oklahoma, before returning to Portland in 1969. Dave taught at Portland State University and Southern Oregon College and was a research associate at the Oregon Graduate Center, and then joined the analytical lab at Portland General Electric as a senior chemist; he retired in 1987. Dave’s passion for skiing and mountain climbing began when he was a teen, and he made climbs throughout the northwestern U.S. and Canada with fellow climber Fred Ayres [chemistry, 1940–70] and

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other members of the Reed community.

Through the years, Pat and Dave also enjoyed backpacking, fishing, and cruising on their sailboat between Portland and Juneau, Alaska.

After retirement, they traveled to Italy, New Zealand, Chile, the Virgin Islands, and Hawaii; volunteered at their church and in their community; and spent time with their seven grandchildren. A year after Pat’s death in 2006, Dave established the Pearson Family Scholarship in her memory and in honor of their children, Kathy Pearson ’77, Jim Pearson, Becky Hanchett, Kristy Pearson-Denning ’83, and Judy Pearson ’84, who survive him.

Richard J. Brownstein ’52

January 24, 2011, in Portland, from a heart attack.

Dick was at Reed for two years before leaving to begin his study of law at Willamette University. In his eulogy for his father, son Richard J. Brownstein II ’85 related: “Certainly, one of my grandmother’s favorite stories was how, during my father’s second year at Reed, he visited law schools, including Willamette.

Apparently, at that time, students could go to law school without an undergraduate degree.

When my father asked to take the test at Willamette, he was told that the Willamette policy had changed and they now required an undergraduate degree. Whether apocryphal or accurate, my father begged to take the test, was granted his wish, and scored the highest in school history. Willamette made an exception for my dad, letting him matriculate. In any case, apocryphal or not, my father finished law school and was practicing law by the time he was 21 years old.” Dick earned a BL and an LLB from the university and practiced in Portland for 20 years with the firm that was ultimately named White, Sutherland, Brownstein & Parks. In 1955, he married Betty Baer.

Dick was committed to human rights, as was his close friend Fred Rosenbaum ’50, and received appointment and tenure as general counsel of the Housing Authority of Portland (1960–2004). He served as chairman with the Metropolitan Human Relations Commission and was appointed to the Oregon Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Said Richard: “My father had a simple, but effective two-pronged tool set: he was an analytical genius and he was morally grounded. In both regards, he was uncanny.

Put Mr. Spock and Mr. Gandhi together and you had my dad, at least from my detached perspective. My father could look at any situation—quite unemotionally—and then find the best practical solution, remembering, the whole time, his very humble beginnings. This explains why Dad was more prideful having been the attorney for 30 years for the Housing Authority of Portland than he was for having served congressmen.” For 33 years, Dick served in the Judge Advocate General Corps

for the U.S. Army Reserve, rising to the rank of colonel. He also was president of Portland Lodge B’nai B’rith, vice president of the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland, president of the Institute of Judaic Studies, a board member of the Mittleman Jewish Community Center, and a president of Congregation Neveh Shalom. Dick participated in Reed’s alumni association. He enjoyed distance running and competed in 19 marathons, including in Boston and New York. In his public obituary, we read: “Dick was a consummate storyteller whose infectious laugh could frequently be heard during the intermission of the opera at the Schnitz, in the restaurants of the University Club, or at the table sharing dinner with friends.” Survivors include his wife of 25 years, Donna; two sons and a daughter; two stepsons; and a sister.

William Robert Verry ’55 September 29, 2010, in Hillsboro, Oregon.

Bill attended Reed for two years and received a BS in general science from Portland State University. He earned an MA in chemistry education from Fresno State University and a PhD in systems engineering from the Ohio State University. He was a member of the research staff at the Riverside Research Institute in Arlington, Virginia, a systems engineer for the MITRE Corporation, in Bedford, Massachusetts, and later an administrator for Hillcrest Gardens in Livermore, California, and an administrator at Columbia Gorge Community College in The Dalles, Oregon. Survivors include his wife Jean Morrison Verry, to whom he was married for nearly 28 years; two sons and a daughter; and two stepsons and three stepdaughters. His mother, Maurine Houser Braden, and father, William R. Verry ’35, also attended Reed.

William F. Ringnalda ’57

August 14, 2010, in Salem, Oregon.

Bill attended Reed for over a year, and became a land engineer and surveyor. Survivors include his wife, Inez, and three sons, including Murco N. Ringnalda ’82, and a sister.

Lorna Claire Hart Shute ’57 January 14, 2011, in Saint George, Utah.

Lorna studied at Reed for a year and a half, and married R. Wayne Shute in 1959. She

later completed a BA in English literature at Brigham Young University. Lorna and her husband were very active in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and served together in missions to China, Armenia, Singapore, Greece, and Cyprus. In her public obituary, we read: “She was refined and cultured in her taste of music and art; she was a talented teacher; she spent her life with good, uplifting literature. Yet with all her well-known gifts, she was humble and unassuming, and spent her time serving her family and anyone she saw in need.” Survivors include her husband, 9 children, 41 grandchildren, 7 great-grandchildren, and her sister.

Lois Ringstrom Helton Spinrad MAT ’63 October 2, 2010, in Seattle, Washington.

Lois was an individual of great personal strength: a teacher, weaver, knitter, and musician. She earned a BA in social studies education from Stanford University, and married Paul Helton; they had a daughter and three sons and later divorced. While raising and supporting her children, Lois earned an MAT in chemistry from Reed, and taught science in the Beaverton School District. She worked for the school district for 20 years, and in her position as district administrator she met nuclear physicist Bernard Spinrad. They married in 1983 and moved to Ames, Iowa, where Bernard headed the nuclear physics department at Iowa State University. In Ames, Lois studied weaving with Emmy Hammond Shakeshaft ’51. Lois and Bernard retired to Seattle. Lois is remembered as a loving, disciplined, and adventurous person, who appreciated beauty in the arts and also in nature. Survivors include a daughter and three sons and her sister. Bernard died in 1999.

Judy A. Boyer Gibson MAT ’65 January 20, 2011, in Redmond, Oregon, from complications of breast cancer.

A potter and world traveler, Judy was born in Bremerton, Washington, and attended Linfield College in McMinnville, as well as the University of Aix-Marseilles in France; she earned a bachelor’s degree from San Fernando State College. After completing a master’s degree from Reed, she taught French and Spanish at Pacific University in Forest Grove, and taught humanities and English in schools in Piedmont, California. She and her husband, Hal Gibson, were living in Berkeley in the ’60s when the ceramics revolution took place, establishing the medium as a fine art. Judy wrote: “I became captivated by porcelain, and in a very short time, I abandoned my teaching career and became a potter.” She set up a studio in her home, and, for the next 25 years, learned the craft, sold to galleries, did shows, and became a master potter in june 2011 Reed magazine 65

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porcelain, primarily following the tradition of classical Chinese forms and glazes. Winters, off-season for her art, presented the opportunity for travel. She spent seven winters in Tobago, West Indies, learning to use local clay in a primitive studio she made. “As I was unable to get the proper papers to set up a business, I decided to travel elsewhere.” Other destinations were in Europe, South and Central America, Southeast Asia, Nepal, and the Near East. She and Hal built a passive, solar adobe house in New Mexico. They lived 10 years on the East Coast, where she took classes in writing and painting at the New School of Social Research in New York City. In 2003, the couple moved to Redmond, Oregon, where Judy set up a potting studio and began again to work on porcelain, and she published a collection of her short stories, Floating Free, in 2008. Survivors include Hal, her mother, and a niece and nephew.

Lorene Grayce Tompkins Reierson MAT ’65 January 29, 2010, in Lake Oswego, Oregon.

Lorene, or Jimmie, as she was known, earned a BS in physical education from Willamette University in 1938. She received a master’s degree at Reed in social science and taught social studies in Manzanita, Oregon. She also served on the city council there. Jimmie and Vern C. Reierson had a daughter and a son.

Paul George Hummasti ’67

August 18, 2010, in Springfield, Missouri, from cancer.

Paul was born in Astoria, Oregon, and grew up in Svensen, graduating from Knappa High School as valedictorian. He earned a BA from Reed in history and continued his studies at the University of Oregon, earning a PhD in 1975. During his graduate years, he studied in Finland on a Fulbright Scholarship at the

Left to right: Matthew E. Smith ’66, James W. Bell Jr. ’66, Larry M. Kuehn ’66, Jan Mainwaring (an infirmary nurse at Reed), Daniel Uyemura ’68, and Jay M. Hubert ’66; 1962. Daniel Uyemura designed the antennae of the Apollo rockets

University of Helsinki, and there he met Terttu Tukiainen; they married in Finland in 1972.

Paul taught history at the University of Oregon, California State University at Chico, the University of California at San Diego, Texas Tech, and Missouri State University in Springfield. He was also visiting professor at the University of Tampere in Finland and at Imperial College in London. He was a renowned scholar on Finnish immigration and socialism and published the book Finnish Radicals in Astoria, 1904–1940: A Study in Immigrant Socialism, as well as numerous articles based on his research.

He was also co-creator of the films Remembering Uniontown and Steam Whistle Logging, available through the Clatsop County Historical Society in Oregon. Among his many other interests were reading, traveling, and playing strategic board games. Survivors include his wife; four daughters, including Sarah Hummasti ’96; a grandson; and two brothers. His mother, Irma Marie Konttas, attended Reed in 1929–30.

Steven Adam Galper MAT ’68

May 25, 2007, in San Francisco, California.

Steven received a master’s degree in teaching from Reed and also held a master’s degree in social work. Our records show that after receiving his MAT, he lived in Hawaii, Massachusetts, and Washington.

Daniel Kenge Uyemura ’68 January 28, 2011, in Anguilla, West Indies, from respiratory disease.

Paul Hummasti ’67: expert on the Finnish diaspora.

Dan was born in Denver, Colorado, and moved with his family to Ontario, Oregon, where he attended high school, graduating as valedictorian. At Reed, he earned a BA in physics, and completed a dual-degree program at Columbia

University in electrical and electronic engineering. After graduation, he moved to College Park, Maryland, where he worked for Antenna Associates and enrolled in the MBA program at the University of Maryland. He met Jane Vielhaber in Maryland and they married in 1968.

In 1972, he joined the Amecom Division of Litton Industries and later became vice president for engineering. His 30-year technical career at Amecom included design of antennas carried on the Apollo space missions, and he also was responsible for development of classified defense projects and government contracts.

Dan and Jane loved to race their sailboat Shogun on the Chesapeake Bay. They also enjoyed sailing vacations throughout the Caribbean. In retirement, they sold their home in Maryland and purchased a home on the shore in Anguilla. In Dan’s public obituary, we read: “Despite having to survive a hurricane in the protection of a bathtub, and the frequent breakdown of electronics caused by the tropic air, the couple loved Anguilla, its idyllic setting, and constant 80-degree temperature.” We also learned that Dan was a voracious reader, often reading five or six books a week on any number of topics. On the patio of his home in Anguilla, Dan could see the island of St. Martin, seven miles away, while he read. Survivors include his wife and brother. We thank Jay Hubert ’66 for notifying the college of Dan’s death and for providing details for this memorial.

Dan L. Young MALS ’70 November 24, 2010, in Lincoln, Nebraska, from brain cancer.

Danny earned his BS from Kearney State College in education and a master’s degree from Reed in mathematics, with additional

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George Szabo MALS ’77 survived torpedoes on D-Day.

education toward a PhD in mathematics from the University of Missouri. His first job was teaching high school math and science in Barnston, Nebraska; he also coached baseball, basketball, and football. He moved to Omaha’s Westside High School, teaching math and coaching football, and then spent 17 years as offensive line coach of the fearsome University of Nebraska Cornhuskers, who won three national championships while he was on the coaching staff. Ken Nickerson ’63, professor of biology at the University of Nebraska, was in touch with us about Danny’s death: “It was very much a surprise to me that a Reed alumnus ended up as a legendary football coach . . .

A football coach from Reed was even more surprising in that I played (a little) on the 1959 Reed team, and I believe that football was dropped shortly thereafter.” Danny also taught football theory at and received the Lyell Bremser Merit Award. “The kids (players) absolutely loved Dan because of his honesty and the fact he was a straight shooter with them,” a colleague told the Husker Extra. “Ain’t nothing phony about him. You knew where you stood with Dan, on the field and in the meeting room.” Survivors include his son and daughter, five grandchildren, and a brother.

Brenton Sewall Wilcox ’72 February 16, 2009, in Pleasanton, California.

Brent attended Reed for three years, later earning a BA and MA in anthropology with an emphasis on archaeology from California State University, East Bay. He worked for William Self Associates, consultants in archaeology and historic preservation. He was also a firefighter, horticulturalist, and property manager.

George J. Szabo MALS ’77 June 1, 2010, in Boerne, Texas, from an infection contracted at a hospital.

George was born in Homestead, Pennsylvania, one of eight children, whose father was a Byzantine-rite Catholic priest. He remained a Pittsburgh Steelers fan throughout his life.

In 1942, he completed an AB in agriculture,

Musician and graphic designer Kim Quirk Baker ’88.

history, and political science at Rutgers. During World War II, he was a captain in the U.S. Navy and was second in command of a landing ship tank that arrived at Normandy on D-Day and was torpedoed by a German submarine. George survived the blast, along with only a few others, and he was awarded the Purple Heart. His primary career was as an executive for the Meier & Frank department store in Portland. In retirement, he earned a master’s degree from Reed. Daughter Monica Selk, who informed the college of her father’s death and provided details for this memorial, said: “He loved it. He loved the intellectual atmosphere and the nontraditional approach to education.”

After completing the degree, he taught history and business at Sandy Union High School, in Sandy, Oregon, and helped students open a school store, equipped with surplus counters and registers from Meier & Frank. George and his wife, Hope, enjoyed 67 years of marriage.

Her death in 2009 left George with a broken heart. Survivors include three daughters and two grandchildren.

Kimberly Jae Quirk Baker ’88 January 31, 2011, in Arvada, Colorado.

Kim earned a BA from Reed in international studies. Just out of college, she planned a career in acting and modeling, but instead developed her skills in design and graphic arts and worked as an art director in Hood River, Oregon, before moving to a similar position in Half Moon Bay, California. Later she became an emergency medical technician and took up the hobby of airplane flying. She was also a musician and released an album, I Can’t Wait, in 2003. “My career today has little to do with my major field of study at Reed,” Kim

wrote. “However, my learning experience was invaluable. Each day I find new ways to use the knowledge I gained at Reed, and I don’t mean just academic knowledge. Two of the most important things I learned were to respect the diversity of other people and how to learn.”

Kim is survived by her daughter Victoria, age 2. (See Letters.)

Melissa Barrett Dobbs ’91

June 30, 2010, in hospice in Washington, D.C., from cancer.

Melissa earned a BA in English at Reed and went on to earn a master’s in public administration from the Monterey Institute of International Studies, with an emphasis in Arabic. She spent two years in Cairo after graduate studies and was a Fulbright scholar in Damascus, Syria, in 1996. She remained professionally engaged with the region, working most recently at the Embassy of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as a media analyst. After settling in Washington, Melissa renewed an early interest in horseback riding and became an avid competitor in regional dressage and jumping events, with her beloved horses Izzie and Athena. She was committed to animal rights and environmental issues. After her initial diagnosis of breast cancer in 2005, she traveled widely, despite sometimes draining medical treatment. She treated friends and family to a running travelogue, penning vivid dispatches from many of her trips, often with a wry eye to humanity’s relationship to the natural world. She returned to the Middle East and traveled to France and Portugal earlier this year. She remained an active equestrian competitor before her illness became more severe. She is survived by her mother, sister, stepfather, stepsister, and stepbrother. Reed june 2011 Reed magazine 67

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In Memoriam

continued

Sharon Mussen ’93 counseled children and families.

friends at her memorial service included Neilson Abeel ’91, Susan Abramson ’91, Burton Callicott ’91, Matthew Robb ’91, and Will Swarts ’92.

Melissa Barrett Dobbs ’91: avid competitor in horseback riding.

cooperative individual, who handled the ups and downs of performance with equanimity and grace. Allison had taken a year’s leave of absence from the university to continue her study of Cuba’s popular dances. “It does not surprise me that she was back in Cuba,” said Laura. “Throughout her time at Reed she was dedicated to learning about other cultures in a hands-on way. I am sure her students must miss her very much.”

Sharon E.J. Mussen ’93 December 5, 2010, in Berkeley, California, following a long illness.

Sharon wrote her thesis on Ethiopian Jews, Persistent Identity System: The Conflicted Religious Assimilation of the Beta Israel into Israel, during a six-month study abroad program at Jerusalem University in Israel, and received a BA from Reed in anthropology. After that, she worked for Janus, a program providing shelter and counseling for troubled youth in Portland.

From there, she went to Smith College, completing an MSW, with internships and research focused on young unwed mothers. Following time in Ecuador, where she went to learn Spanish and to learn about a new culture, she moved to the Bay Area to be near her parents.

At the Center for Family Counseling in Oakland, California, she worked with families and children and initiated a program for the public schools that would provide counseling and support for parents. Sharon was a budding artist, who enjoyed working with metal and wire.

She also loved hiking and being outdoors. In her public obituary, we read that Sharon’s nonjudgmental devotion to friends and her love of animals were unwavering. “She filled our lives with hope and taught us to find meaning, beauty and joy in the unobvious.” Survivors include her parents and sister.

Allison Daniele Notter ’00

December 18, 2010, in Cuba, from a sudden illness.

Allison earned a BA from Reed in history and literature, and wrote her thesis, The Creation of Chicano Cultural Consciousness: The Arts in the United Farm Workers of America, with Laura Leibman, [English and humanities, 1995–].

Joseph Frederic Rancourt ’05 January 19, 2011, at home in Etna, New Hampshire, from natural causes.

Allison Notter ’00 taught dance in New York City.

Laura recalls Allison as one of her all-time favorite thesis students. “She had a great sense of humor and fun and I always looked forward to our weekly meetings. Even when she hadn’t gotten writing done for that week, she was honest about it and moved on to the next hurdle in her usual upbeat approach to life.” Laura said that the thesis focused largely on dramas written, produced, and acted by members of the Chicano farm workers movement, and that Allison did a substantial amount of primary research to complete it, including reading and translating large numbers of dramas and newspapers written in Spanish. After graduation, Allison returned to her hometown, New York City, and was performing, studying, and teaching dance there. She was a dance education major at New York University on a K-12 certification track, and taught ballroom dance in public schools through the American Ballroom Theater. A colleague described her as a conscientious and

Joe grew up in Madison, New Hampshire, and earned a BA in psychology from Reed. Steve Katz ’05, who informed us of Joe’s death and helped us learn more about his life, wrote: “I expected to have another 60 years with Joe, and it breaks my heart how many more adventures we could have had together. However, I would never trade the time I had with Joe for anything. The memories of us hiking, going shooting, playing poker, cooking, going to the ski cabin, the coast, Kean’s house, and more, will stay with me forever. He was a truly kind, loving person. When Joe died, I reconnected with old friends and got to know Joe’s family. We sang songs, drank whiskey, told stories, and lit off fireworks. At the memorial, we saw the rural New Hampshire community as well as friends from around the country turn out in support of Joe and his family. As we all stood up to share our memories of Joe, the snow softly fell outside, and I knew some part of him would stay with all of us.” Friend Lindsey West Wallace ’05 wrote: “Joe was a gregarious friend who was always up for an adventure and looking out for others. Thinking back on our time in Portland, I

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STAFF, FACULTY, AND FRIENDS

Raphael Mark Hanson

February 11, in Long Beach, California, from pneumonia.

Joe Rancourt ’05 with his mother, and his sister, Lichen, at her graduation from Syracuse in 2006.

have many happy memories of Joe from excursions camping, grilling, and exploring the great woods of the Pacific Northwest. Alex [Wallace ’06] and I are so saddened by his untimely passing. He was a very good man.” Friend Timothy Russell ’04 wrote: “Joe was an intelligent and kind person. He had all of the qualities that one looks for in a great friend. When I turned 21, Joe bought me my first legal beer at the Lutz tavern up on Woodstock. I remember he drove us up there after class and we listened to some great music that I had never heard before.” After college, Joe moved to Hanover, New Hampshire, where he was a research assistant in the psychology department at Dartmouth Medical School; colleagues continue to grieve for him.

Joe joined the Psychopharmacology Research Group at the medical school in October 2007.

Members of the group shared these thoughts: “From the first, he showed us the zest, enthusiasm, dedication, and collegiality that continued and even grew during his time with us. Initially, he worked on a number of research studies seeking better treatments for those suffering from alcoholism and schizophrenia. He was a quick study and just terrific—organizing the studies, working with patients enrolled in the research. And he was very inquisitive: he quite quickly learned about the neurobiological theories underpinning the studies.” In April 2010, Joe was promoted to project coordinator, managing a highly complicated neuroimaging study that explored the effects of cannabis in people with schizophrenia—a study typically coordinated by someone with an advanced degree.

“We just knew that Joe, with his quick mind and willingness to learn, could handle it, and handle it well.” Joe successfully led the group through the pilot phase of the study. “Recognizing what Joe did, our research group has dedicated this important study to his memory.” From Joe’s public obituary, we read: “Joe was a kind and gentle soul, smart as a whip, with a wonderful sense of humor, beloved by everyone who knew him. He loved to travel, read, fish, snow machine with his dad, kayak with his mom, cook for his friends, hang out with his family, and he loved music. He will be sorely missed.”

A memorial website, established by Joe’s sister, Lichen, is at littlegorilla.net. Survivors include his parents, sister, and grandparents.

Xeno Taylor-Fontana ’11 pedaled across the Golden Gate Bridge on his way from Portland to Equador.

Xeno Taylor-Fontana ’11 February 1, 2011, at the summit of Sherman Peak in the Sierra Nevada of California.

Xeno was so eager to get to Reed that he didn’t even wait his high school graduation ceremony, but hopped on a bicycle and pedaled solo 3,800 miles all the way from Trumansburg, New York, to Portland, hauling 150 pounds of gear. He thrived at Reed, developing a strong interest in political philosophy and theories of authority. Following his junior year, he took a leave of absence and went on an epic bike trip with Alex Ragus ’11 and Marie Perez ’12 from Portland to Quito, Ecuador.

Xeno’s father, philosopher Richard Taylor, died when Xeno was 16, and Xeno adopted his father’s admiration for stoic philosophy. “He had very high, exacting, and uncompromising standards for himself and for every aspect of his life,” writes his mother, Kim Fontana.

“He worked hard physically and intellectually and he wanted to be the best, not to be better than others—he cared nothing for that—but because he thought it was important to his personal integrity, his purpose, his responsibility, what one does. Anything he valued, he valued absolutely. He was also fundamentally a romantic. He believed in transcendent beauty, and he believed it was achievable in this life. In fact, it was hard for him, and ultimately intolerable, I believe, for things to be less than beautiful and perfect.”

Late in January, Xeno disappeared from campus, drove to the Sierra Nevada of southern California, abandoned his car, hiked several miles through deep snow to the summit of Sherman Peak, and took his own life. In a letter to his friends, his mother wrote: “I would ask each of you to care for each other, not just now, as you grieve together for your friend, but as you go through your lives. Gentleness in your treatment of each other and of yourselves is wisdom. We are all imperfect, foolish, and sometimes vain. Still, we are what we have to offer each other. Please give of yourselves to each other freely and with kindness.

Try to remember Xeno with fondness and love.

That’s all we can do now.” Survivors include his mother, Kim Fontana; “vice” mother, Calista Smith; his brother, Todd Taylor; grandparents; and many friends at Reed.

Raphael Hanson taught psychology at Reed in 1958–60. In 1961, after completing his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, he founded the psychology department at California State University, Long Beach. His interests ranged from economics and politics to classical music, Asian art, philanthropy, and tennis.

Survivors include a sister.

Robert Hale Noyes Jr. November 29, 2010, in Portland.

Robert served as a member of the Reed board of trustees [1962–68], and on the board of the Oregon Symphony, the Portland Opera, Outward Bound, Marylhurst College, and the Catlin Gabel School. He was educated at Williams College and Yale University, served with the navy during World War II, and established the Rono Corporation and the Norwest Publishing Company. He enjoyed fishing and playing tennis, even in his 90s. Survivors include his wife, Elizabeth Cronin Noyes; his daughter; three stepchildren; and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Jean Elizabeth Fox Sullivan December 21, 2010, in Redmond, Washington.

Jean was married to former Reed president Richard H. Sullivan [1956–67]. She grew up in Upper Montclair, New Jersey, graduated from Wellesley College, and did postgraduate work at Brown University and Radcliffe College. In notifying the college of Jean’s death, her daughter, Barbara Whitson, wrote that Jean had fond memories of her years at Reed and asked that her family convey her gratitude to the Reed community for the warmth and friendship shown to her. Jean was a loving and dedicated wife and mother, who enjoyed gardening and travel. Survivors include two daughters, a son, 10 grandchildren, and 8 great-grandchildren.

Pending As Reed went to press, we learned of the deaths of the following individuals; please contact us if you have memories of them that you wish to share.

Brunhilde Kaufer Liebes ’35, Beatrice Radding Matin ’35, Mary Coleman ’37, Paul Metz ’37, Doris Bailey Murphy ’38, Marjorie Barnard ’39, Mary Davidson Evers ’39, Evan Thomas ’39, J. Robert McGill ’40, Ruth Cahill ’43, Ruth Nishino Penfold ’43, Hulbert Sipple ’43, John McCarthy ’44, Kennard Morganstern AMP ’44, Priscilla Joubert Schwejda ’45, Melba Ince Murphy Niemela ’46, Frank Koehler ’48, Robert Sullivan ’49, Richard Biggs ’50, Frederick White ’50, Raymond Haas ’52, Renate Hayum ’53, Walter Clyde ’55, Barbara Reid Dudman ’60, Emery Jennings MAT ’61, David Van Campen ’61, John Salasin ’63, Michael Moss ’82, Joanna Ramwell Arpee ’83, Jordan Burby ’11; and S. Eugene Thompson, friend.

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Apocrypha

tradition • myth • legend

Desperately Seeking “Reed Girls” In August 1975, I moved into Kerr for my freshman year at Reed. My eyes were wide and anything was possible. The first person I met was my dorm mom, Teri Reis ’76.

She was a senior, an anthropology major, who would be there should we lose our room key, have a meltdown for whatever reason, or just want to hang out. Dorm moms and dads were different than the current resident advisers, I think. They were our friends and our mentors and a loose connection to the dean’s office. Mostly, they were students who were a couple of years older than the incoming freshmen who could help support kids who were away from home for the first time.

I adored Teri. She was smart and tough and brassy. She was loud and full of humor.

She took her studies very seriously. She worked hard and played hard and was a wonderful mentor for me.

It was a privilege to be the guardian of that poster.

Teri had a poster on her wall that she had inherited from her dorm mom, Joan Roxanne Russell ’74, known as “JR.” The poster had been an advertisement for a temp employment agency in London in the early ’60s. The employment agency was called “Reed Girls,” so, little wonder that a copy made its way to Woodstock Blvd. The life cycle of the poster was simple. When its first owner graduated, she gave it to one of her dormies. When that recipient graduated, she did the same. In the spring of ’76, Teri gave me the Reed Girls poster.

It was a privilege to be the guardian of that poster. As a dorm mom during my junior and senior years, I had an open-door policy. My dormies spent a lot of time in my room; someone always asked about the Reed Girls poster. I graduated in 1979 and gave the poster to one of my dormies, Elizabeth Jerison ’82, who, in turn, did the same.

About a year ago, my husband, Peter Guss ’78, and I were interviewed for the oral history project. I thought to include a story about the poster and sent a photo-

graph of it to Reed. Sometime later I was contacted by Gay Walker ’69, Reed’s archivist—it turned out that Caroline Mason Holmes ’69, one of her dormmates in Kerr, had also been a guardian of the poster.

My mission is to locate the poster and bring it back to Reed. Its last confirmed sighting was in 1995, when it was in

the Women’s Center on the first floor of McNaughton. My hope is that by reaching out to Reed alumni, we can track down more leads and bring the Reed Girls back to campus for Reed’s 100th birthday.

—ANNIE LIONNI ’79 If you have more stories or information about the Reed Girls poster, please contact annie@lionni.org.

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

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History major Maya Edelstein ’11 digs into Canyon Day.

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