Reed College Magazine December 2021

‰ december 2021

PUT IT TO THE TEST From black holes to hungry microbes, research at Reed is heating up.

THE WORLD MAY CHANGE, BUT SOME THINGS REMAIN THE SAME—STUDENTS WERE STILL SCURRYING ACROSS THE CANYON BRIDGE THIS FALL UNDER A BLANKET OF RAIN— BOUND FOR THE LIBRARY, CLASSROOMS, OR COMMONS.

Artwork by Mariza Ryce Aparicio-Tovar ’09

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F EATU RES 14

What the Pandemic Has Taught Us about Teaching (and Learning) How coronavirus spurred Reed professors to rethink their classroom strategies.

BY ROMEL HERNANDEZ

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Secrets Do Make Friends

Psychologist Luke Chang ’02 spills the beans about the hidden power of gossip.

BY BEN READ ’21

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Put It To the Test

From black holes to hungry cells, research at Reed is heating up.

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BY CHRIS LYDGATE ’90

DEPA RTMENTS 2

This Must Be the Place

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Mailbox

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Eliot Circular

NEWS FROM CAMPUS

Furthering Reed’s Commitment to Sustainability Merck Gift Honors Perlmutter

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ON THE COVER: Hannah Meier ’21 examines how a colony of phytoplankton responds to sudden spikes in water temperature.

Photo by Alisha Jucevic

Inspiring Professors Named to Chairs 12

Advocates of the Griffin

A L L T H I N G S A LU M N I

Letter from the President of the Alumni Board New Faces on the Alumni Board

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26 Reediana

B O O K S , F I L M S , A N D M U S I C BY R E E D I E S

Guardians of the Trees

by Kinari Webb ’95 30 Class

36 In

Notes

N E W S F R O M O U R C L A S S M AT E S .

Memoriam

H O N O R I N G C L AS S M AT E S , P R O F E S S O R S , A N D F R I E N D S W H O H AV E D I E D.

Prof. Ed Segel always focused on the big questions.

Prof. Tom Wieting connected math to physics, chemistry, art, and theology.

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Object of Study W H AT R E E D S T U D E N T S A R E LO O K I N G AT I N C L A S S

Chiseled in Sparta

Reed Magazine december 2021

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This Must Be the Place photo by Kyle Johnson

‰ December 2021

www.reed.edu/reed-magazine 3203 SE Woodstock Boulevard, Portland, Oregon 97202 503/777-7591 Volume 100, No.4 REED MAGAZINE editor

Chris Lydgate ’90 503/777-7596 chris.lydgate@reed.edu writer/In Memoriam editor

Randall S. Barton 503/517-5544 bartonr@reed.edu writer/reediana editor

Katie Pelletier ’03 503/777-7727 pelletic@reed.edu class notes editor

Joanne Hossack ’82 joanne@reed.edu art director

Tom Humphrey tom.humphrey@reed.edu grammatical kapeLlmeister

Virginia O. Hancock ’62 REED COLLEGE RELATIONS vice president, college relations

Hugh Porter director, communications & public affairs

Mandy Heaton

What is the Light?

Reed is a vibrant place of inquiry and exploration.

Intellectual curiosity and creative energy abound.

Every research project begins with questions, and if the questions matter, they tend to multiply. What? Why? How? Hypotheses lead to new insights, which, in turn, bring up additional lines of inquiry. To research is to embark on a journey with a map that changes as you move along.

That’s why at Reed we believe in the teacherscholar model. Our world-class faculty, across all fields and disciplines, inspire, support, and partner with students. Professors here have a saying, “research is teaching is research.” This is how Reed nurtures brilliance.

In this issue, you will meet Reedies who are looking up at the heavens, scrutinizing microscopic aquatic plants, delving into political biases, listening in on gossip, examining ancient art

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objects, and more. You can sense the excitement of discovery that pervades their work and the passion that drives their questions.

If you would like to hear some of our recent alumni speaking directly about their senior thesis research, I highly recommend that you tune into the podcast series “Burn Your Draft,” executive produced and sponsored by Seth Paskin ’90. Student hosts ask recent grads about the journey of discovery that ultimately led to the bound copy that will live on in the thesis tower.

(You’ll find it at blogs.reed.edu.)

What then is the Light? It could be the initial question; it could be the pursuit of knowledge or the illumination of discovery. What I do know is it shines brightly here at Reed and always will.

Audrey Bilger President of Reed

Reed College is an institution of higher education in the liberal arts and sciences devoted to the intrinsic value of intellectual pursuit and governed by the highest standards of scholarly practice, critical thought, and creativity.

Reed Magazine provides news of interest to the Reed community. 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 Magazine (ISSN 0895-8564) is published quarterly by the Office of Public Affairs at Reed College.

Periodicals postage paid at Portland, Oregon.

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

Mailbox Write to us! We love getting mail from readers. Letters should be about Reed (and its alumni) or Reed Magazine (and its contents) and run no more than 300 words; subsequent replies may run only half the length of their predecessors. Our decision to print a letter does not imply any endorsement. Letters are subject to editing. (Beware the editor’s hatchet.) For contact information, look to your left.

Remembering President Bragdon I just read your piece on Paul Bragdon [Reed President 1971–88], and want to thank you for it. As a freshman in the fall of 1974, I had, of course, not the least notion of the perilous straits that Reed was steering through. I did have, however, an awareness of Bragdon. Tall, with Paul Newman–esque good looks, calm, genial, and nearly always smiling, he was very present on campus without being in any way obtrusive.

In later years, as I learned more about the man, I simply thought of him as the man who saved Reed College. And that is how I have referred to him for many years now.

When my current students become aware of my own long connection with the school, they are often curious and amused at my responses to their inevitable queries about “Old Reed.” I tell them that my student days were marked by a certain vigorous intellectual scrappiness; a feeling of “Here we all are, come hell or high water, out to get an education, damn it!” Being at Reed back then had an edginess and excitement. This was perhaps a sign of those times, but probably also a response to being at a school we students did not even know was teetering. And though I admit to missing some of those qualities in present-day Reed, I am still grateful to Bragdon for directing the school onto safer and sounder footing.

John Vergin ’78 Portland When I arrived at Reed as a transfer student in 1983, I quickly became friends with Florence Lehman ’41, who was then the director of alumni relations. She knew I was spending Thanksgiving on campus and invited me to her house for dinner.

She didn’t mention who else was going to be there, so I was surprised when I arrived to see Paul and Nancy Bragdon among the assembled. I had seen Paul on campus, but had never spoken with him, and I assumed the dinner would end up being stiff and formal.

But Paul didn’t roll like that. When I mentioned that I was from New York, he told stories of his time at the mayor’s office and the blackout of 1965. Paul sat in a rocking chair, a drink in his hand, and was so relaxed and engaging that I forgot he was a college president.

Over my years at Reed, Bragdon always said hello when we crossed paths. When I passed through the registrar’s office during the thesis parade, he had a big smile and handshake for me. When I worked in the admissions office after graduation, we talked shop on more than a few occasions. He remained personable and accessible despite all the troubles on campus during those years.

Ken Belson ’87 New York City Never had a lot of contact with President Bragdon, but he definitely had a sense of humor. I had to make an appointment with him my senior year when I was applying to law school to see how high I could aim. I wore my best tie (my only tie, if truth be told), ironed my nicest pair of jeans, and even wiped the dust off my Frye boots. He welcomed me into his office, opened my file, looked at it, smiled, and said, “You can apply anywhere you want.”

Still wouldn’t tell me my actual grades, but getting into Berkeley Law was good enough for me.

Norm Vance ’74 Berkeley, California

“Howl” at Reed I was one of a small group of Reed students (plus a few friends of Gary Snyder ’51 from his time at Reed) who attended the 1956 reading of “Howl” that was described in the Reed Magazine. The only other fellow student that I can remember from that event was Art Stone ’60, a math major with wide cultural interests.

My memory is that Gary Snyder also read from his recent work, but I may be confusing that with a later event at Reed.

President Bragdon, “the man who saved Reed College.”

There was also a rowdy party afterwards at an off-campus apartment (on Southeast Powell Blvd., if I recall correctly). I am sure I accurately recall holding a working mss. of “Howl” in my hands, and noticing that some of the more daring language (judged by the standards of that era) had been written in with pencil on the original typescript. Students with cars were a rarity then. I wonder how I got there and back from the Reed campus?

A few weeks, perhaps a month, later, I was sitting on a grassy knoll behind the Greyhound bus station in San Francisco during spring vacation. Looking up, I recognized Allen Ginsberg, who was on his lunch break from his job humping baggage at the station. I walked up to him.

“Allen Ginsberg? The poet?” This must have been one of his first experiences of public celebrity.

He was clearly pleased. We talked briefly. As in several chance encounters over the years in various venues, Ginsberg was cordial and modest.

William Bernhardt ’60 Staten Island, New York

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photo by helen fernandez

Letters to Reed Women in Science Prof. Helen Stafford [biology 1954–87] was my thesis advisor 1959–60. I didn’t have much background in plants but did have some background in organic chemistry and took some biology courses. Only genetics sparked my interest.

It was with some trepidation that I started with her at the last minute at the beginning of my senior year. It was quite a struggle compared to a summer I spent doing research in human physiology at the University of Washington, where I was basically left to my own devices.

With Helen I learned to persevere through some rough times, the kind of research investigation that pulled me through my postdoctoral work in later years. I think that the Reed painting of her was really the way she was with her students.

She certainly was my guiding light.

Michael Buettner ’60 Port Townsend, Washington I was excited to read the article “Fighting Structural Racism in Science,” which discusses the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation’s grant to Reed “aimed at boosting the number of underrepresented students majoring in science,” and noting that the grant “strengthens Reed’s commitment to students from historically marginalized groups who major in STEM.” However, I was dismayed that the article did not even mention the gross underrepresentation of women generally in science majors. A quick search reveals that only about 20% of STEM majors are women. Do the Moore Foundation’s grant and Reed’s commitment not include women who are not also persons of color? In any case, I believe the article should have at least mentioned the disparities facing all women with respect to STEM. Women of all backgrounds in the U.S. and abroad continue to face systemic inequality, sexism, and misogyny, yet the necessary conversations and work to achieve equity often fail to address these unresolved and critical issues.

Deborah Clarke Trejo ’91 Austin, Texas From the Editor: Thank you for highlighting the pervasive structural sexism that persists in STEM, an issue that is (or should be) well familiar to our readers. We’ve recently published several articles relevant to this subject, including a profile of Prof.

Kelly Chacon in chemistry, an article on the mural honoring Prof. Helen Stafford in biology, an obituary for the brilliant chemist Marilyn Olmstead ’65, and an obituary for the daring stunt pilot Joann

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Prof. Helen Stafford [biology 1954-87] was both mentor and role model for women facing structural sexism in STEM.

Osterud ’68. Without a doubt, the article would have been stronger if we had emphasized the challenges faced by women in these fields. Last year 35% of STEM majors at Reed were women; we have a lot of work to do.

Remembering Coach Scrivens It was a pleasure to read about the life of Jack Scrivens in Reed Magazine, September 2021.

I too was a beneficiary of Jack’s pedagogical talents and his quiet, almost Zen, approach to racquet sports. “Constructing a good point” was the goal in squash, from which winning or losing didn’t matter so much if there were enough such points. He also appreciated how to win.

He was national amateur handball champion for a while.

I learned squash and racquetball from Jack during 1961–64. (I also played on Jerome Barta’s six-man football team.) When I got to Georgia Tech in 1971 (1971–2007) I continued to learn racquetball from coach David Houser and student services director Roger Wehrli. Jack had prepared me well enough to join their daily noon matches. David was 50+ state champion in Georgia and Florida and Wehrli was national amateur champion for five years. From 1992 to 1994, I was ranked ninth or better nationally in the 45+ category.

Just as Jack was the last PE instructor with an academic title at Reed, so was Houser at GT. Both were wrongheaded decisions. A major part of our physical beings is nourished by physical activities. It is possible to reach very high levels of performance, at least if you have the good fortune to meet a Jack Scrivens, and can take instruction.

Ronald F. Fox ’64 Smyrna, Georgia

Touchdown Jesus You really got carried away with the fiction of the Columbus Day Storm football story in the Scrivens obit. Five column-inches of a highly detailed Holy Erroneous Event with but a one-sentence almost-disclaimer. There were a number of witnesses to the football game who were part of the marching band who wrote to the magazine that the event never took place in 1962, but I guess your journalistic practice is to never let the truth get in the way of a cute story.

The prank was the work of Foster Boys Incorporated, who were inactive by fall of 1962 because of attrition due to graduation or dropping out, not to mention that their base of operations, the Fishmarket, had been condemned and closed down at the end of the 1962 spring semester (the official housecooling party

there, where, among other things, the electrical wiring was removed, was something to behold).

Your version of the story added all sorts of elaborations, as the more supposed facts you present, the more real it appears to be. There was no motorcycle—that is conflated with a matador vs. Vespa-with-horns bullfight that took place on the Great Lawn, also an FBI prank and also in 1959. Instead, the cross-bearing person, surrounded by acolytes, came out of the canyon.

And the acolytes were not singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers” (although there may have been Savoyards amongst them), but were instead chanting in Latin (the translation of which is “The rains have arrived. Break out the wine casks”). A 3 x 5 card with the actual chant is buried somewhere in the Archives in the Library.

The actual halftime cross event did take place in October 1959, either on the 3rd or the 24th (both “home” games for Reed, and both won by Reed, according to the Quest). I have spoken with two witnesses (who shall remain anonymous) who recall the incident in that year. One was a member of the football team, but because he is nearsighted but played football without his glasses, did not recognize anybody. The other also did not recognize who the central figure was, but was sufficiently discomfited that he asked that apologies be offered for any offense taken to the prank.

No, I was not present in 1959 (having arrived at Reed the following year), and I was not a member of FBI, but was a hanger-on, having lived for a short while at the Fishmarket (when one of my housemates was the original Doyle Owl). And I was certainly present for Typhoon Freda and would have known about the prank had it been planned and executed by FBI then.

Jim Kahan ’64 Portland From the Editor: Thanks for setting the record straight. The version of this story that we retold in the obit was based on Coach Scrivens’s account, but we should have foregrounded the persuasive chronology that you have compiled. I wonder if anyone has photos of the Vespa-with-horns bullfight . . .

Correction Our recent obit for sociologist Robert Mare ’73 misstated the thesis advisor of Don Treiman ’62. Don’s advisor was in fact the inimitable Prof.

John Pock [1955–98], who also advised Rob, Christine Schwartz ’96, Sarah Burgard ’97, Elizabeth Bruch ’99, and many other Reed sociology majors. Prof. Pock died in 2012.

G N O M O LO G I A : A D A G I E S AND PROVERBS, COLLECTED BY THOMAS FULLER, 1732

—

“He that plants trees loves others besides himself.”

R e e d matte rs.

When you make a gift in your will or trust, you influence the future of Reed.

Contact Kathy Saitas in the office of gift planning to discuss creative and mutually beneficial ways to make a difference at Reed: 503-777-7573, giftplanning@reed.edu, reed.edu/legacyplanning.

Eliot Circular news from campus

photo by lauren labarre

Furthering Reed’s Commitment to Sustainability In October, the Board of Trustees voted to curtail Reed’s endowment investments in fossil fuels. The move is in line with other colleges and universities that have announced fossil-fuel divestment strategies, and was shared in the following letter.

Dear Reed community: We write to provide an update on the management of Reed College’s endowment and Reed’s Board of Trustees’ ongoing discussions with respect to the college’s approach to sustainability. On Saturday, the Reed College Board of Trustees voted to direct Reed’s Investment Committee to take the following actions related to the endowment’s investments in fossil fuels: Prohibit any new investments in public funds or private partnerships that are focused on the oil, gas, and coal industries, including infrastructure and field services.

This includes 1) acquiring, developing, producing, or exploring for oil, gas, and coal; and 2) providing equipment, services, and infrastructure related to these industries.

Phase out all such existing investments in private partnerships in accordance with the funds’ typical life cycles, or sooner if both prudent and practicable.

While the board has a fiduciary duty to protect the health and integrity of the endowment, which provides crucial support for college operations, the decision to curtail Reed’s endowment investments in fossil fuels is a direct result of years of thoughtful community discussions and demonstrates an expansion of Reed’s institutional commitment to sustainability. The board recognizes the current climate crisis as substantially the result of greenhouse gas accumulation associated with the combustion of fossil fuels. Beyond the college’s own actions to reduce its carbon footprint, the board believes that steady reduction in fossil fuel use now represents an issue of global importance that affects all of humanity, a position that, in alignment with Reed’s Investment Responsibility Policy, “reflects widely held, perhaps almost universally held, social or moral positions.” The vote thus represents an evolution of the

board’s views regarding Reed’s endowment investments in fossil fuels (see Statement: July 2014 and Statement: December 2019).

We take this opportunity to reaffirm the college’s commitment to Reed’s Sustainability Mission. The sustainability measures that the college and our community have implemented, evident across a range of activities and programs, are significant. In addition to the notable reduction in carbon emissions—a reduction of more than 2.6 million pounds per year since 2013—Reed’s most important contribution to sustainability is our work to educate students to become leaders in careers and institutions that develop sustainable approaches. We take great pride in the strength of Reed’s environmental studies program, the support that the Center for Life Beyond Reed provides students who seek careers in sustainability, and the academic research opportunities at Reed related to environmental issues.

Reflecting on the series of robust debates and forums that led to the board’s decision, such as the Reed Union: Community Responsibility in a Time of Climate Crisis, we extend our appreciation to past and present members of Reed’s Sustainability Committee, Fossil Free Reed, Greenboard, and many members of our community for tackling complex concerns with open discourse and thoughtful determination. We also thank the Board of Trustees for its sustained engagement on this important issue.

Sincerely, Roger M. Perlmutter ’73 Chairman, Reed College Board of Trustees Audrey Bilger President, Reed College

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Eliot Circular photo by DOMINICK REUTER

Merck Foundation Gift Honors Reed Trustee The Merck Foundation made a gift to Reed to honor Roger Perlmutter ’73, chair of the board of trustees.

The Merck Foundation has made a $1.5 million gift to Reed to honor leading immunologist and Reed trustee Roger Perlmutter ’73, who retired last year as executive vice president of Merck Research Laboratories.

The gift creates the Roger M. Perlmutter Professorship in Biological Sciences, which has been awarded to Prof. Suzy Renn [see page 11].

“I am deeply grateful to the Merck Foundation for this marvelous tribute to one of our most accomplished graduates,” says President Audrey Bilger. “I can think of no better way to celebrate his achievements than supporting the next generation of innovators in the biological sciences at Reed.”

“When I arrived at Reed in 1969 I thought that I might become a poet,” says Perlmutter.

“However, in part because I had no talent in this line of work, my attention was increasingly drawn to the sciences. I am enormously grateful to Reed for providing the robust intellectual environment that enabled me to pursue interdisciplinary research, and I am delighted that the Merck Foundation has

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made this commitment to ensure that students now and in the future will gain the benefit of the extraordinary education that Reed provides.”

Perlmutter majored in biology at Reed and wrote his thesis on immune suppression with Prof. Larry Ruben [biology 195592]. He went on to earn both MD and PhD degrees from Washington University in St. Louis and became professor and chairman of the Department of Immunology at the University of Washington in Seattle. He also served as a professor in the Departments of Medicine and Biochemistry there, and as an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and both a Distinguished Fellow and past president of the American Association of Immunologists.

Perlmutter joined Merck in 1997 as executive vice president of basic and preclinical research. From 2001 to 2012, he served as executive vice president and head of research

and development at Amgen. He returned to Merck in 2013, serving as executive vice president and president of Merck Research Laboratories until last year.

Perlmutter has worked on scores of vaccines and therapeutics for multiple cancers, diabetes, and infections caused by Ebola virus, human immunodeficiency virus, hepatitis C virus, and cytomegalovirus. He is perhaps best known for his work on pembrolizumab, an immunotherapy drug he helped develop at Merck, which is used to treat certain types of cancer. In his final years at Merck, he worked with a team that developed molnupiravir, an oral, direct-acting antiviral for the treatment of COVID-19. He is now chairman and chief executive officer of Eikon Therapeutics.

Perlmutter joined Reed’s board of trustees in 2004 and has served as chair since 2010. This is the second professorship at Reed to carry his name. The first, the Amgen-Perlmutter Professorship of Biology and Chemistry, was created by Amgen when he left the company in 2012.

—CHRIS LYDGATE ’90

photo by Jason Timochko

photo by nina johnson ’99

RANDOM WALK

Some Things We Learned From Reading This Issue

Works by Georganne Deen and Nayland Blake, part of the Cooley Gallery exhibition No Face, No Case: Portraiture’s Breaking.

No Face, No Case No Face, No Case, Portraiture’s Breaking, a new exhibition of photography, painting, and sculpture at the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, explores and expands the boundaries of portraiture as an artistic tradition. It is the first exhibition at the Cooley since the gallery closed its doors as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the first ever researched and organized by a class of Reed student curators.

Many of the works on display were the first of their kind to depict queer subjects and subjects of color “in such a radical way,” according to Stephanie Snyder ’91, the John and Anne Hauberg Curator and Director of the Cooley. In No Face, No Case, what matters is not just who or what we are looking at, but also how we are seeing, especially when the work of art may not seem like a portrait at all.

As the representation of the likeness of an individual, portraiture has a long history as a form of currency, dating back to court portraits of royalty and aristocrats. The exhibition interrogates this tradition and the power relationships involved, breaking down the expectations of what a portrait should be or whom it should portray.

Featuring photographs by the likes of Catherine Opie, Yasumasa Morimura, and Laura Aguilar, the exhibition asks what kinds of relationships viewers might form with the works of art that undermine the systems of state power and surveillance alluded to in the title.

“We wanted works in the exhibition to

speak to a sense of deeply close encounter while not reinforcing positions of power and dominance,” Snyder says. “When you encounter Laura Aguilar’s intimate photographs, for example, you encounter multiple perspectives at once—perspectives on power and history and the future.”

The show was organized by a group of faculty and student curators who took part in Art 353, Making an Exhibition, taught

by Snyder, Prof. William Diebold, and Prof. Kris Cohen.

Prof. Diebold had been hoping to teach a course like this ever since he arrived at Reed. “I wanted the students to be able to do everything,” he says.

Over the semester, the students and professors conceived, researched, and designed an exhibition influenced by the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, the national reckoning with anti-Black racism, and being isolated from each other in the digital learning environment.

“I had never been in a class before that so heavily centered collective, creative practice,” says Aliza Phillips ’21.

The exhibition is curated from a group of over 50 works of art donated to Reed College by Peter Norton ’65, who has demonstrated a commitment to collecting works by LGBTQ+ and BIPOC artists since he began his career as an art collector during the AIDS crisis and the culture wars in the early 1990s. This donation provided the opportunity for this experiential learning experience. —BEN READ ’21

Kathleen Bucklin Davies ’67 is now the national 12K champion for her age group (75-79 years) after running the USATF Championship race in Sandy Hook, New Jersey. “I know there are women faster than I am, but you have to be there and you have to run,” she said. “I was and I did!” PAGE 30 Segel’s First Law: All problems are essentially problems of diplomatic history. Segel’s Second Law: Always save room for dessert. PAGE 36 Girls in Sparta in the sixth century BCE sometimes wore chitōniskoi or short tunics​​. These garments may be what inspired the lyric poet Ibykos to describe Spartan girls as phainomērides or “thigh-flashers.”

PAGE 48 Partly because of the harsh ultraviolet light that blankets the Tibetan plateau, cataracts are rampant and blindness is common. In the 1990s, ophthalmologist Marc Lieberman ’70 traveled to Tibet to share new surgical techniques with local doctors, restoring the sight of thousands of people. PAGE 47 During the 1970s, tables at the Portland restaurant Indigene, run by Millie Howe ’58 and Prof. Howard Waskow [English 1964-72], were booked so far in advance that at least one divorce settlement stipulated which party would be awarded a coveted reservation there. PAGE 42 Warming oceans and declining populations of turtles have fueled a steady increase in populations of box jellyfish, fearsome cnidarians whose venom is so powerful it can kill swimmers unfortunate enough to tangle with it. PAGE 27

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lauren labarre

INSPIRING PROFESSORS NAMED TO CHAIRS

Professor Chris Koski

For more than 100 years, Reed professors have set themselves apart by treating students as intellectual peers—“Comrades of the Quest,” to borrow President William T. Foster’s memorable phrase. Here we celebrate six professors who have recently been appointed to prestigious chairs—a mark of esteem from their colleagues and a recognition of their knack for inspiring students.

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Prof. Jon Rork

George Hay Professor of Economics

Prof. Rork studies public finance. His current research interests lie in the realms of state taxation, interjurisdictional competition, and the economic determinants of interstate migration, especially as they pertain to the elderly. He has published his research in journals including the Journal of Urban Economics, Regional Science and Urban Economics, National Tax Journal, Journal of Regional Science, and Public Finance Review.

He teaches courses in microeconomic

theory, game theory and urban economics.

He earned his PhD from Stanford and has taught at Reed since 2010.

The Hay Chair honors Prof. George Hay, who joined the Reed faculty in 1956 and worked extensively in international economics, traveling to Indonesia, South America, and Africa. A powerhouse for the college, Hay served as the director of admissions from 1958–1964, vice president and treasurer from 1973–1979, executive vice president from 1979–1980, and acting president in 1980–81.

The chair was established in 1989 through the leadership of longtime trustee Richard P. Wollenberg. Ultimately, donors contributed more than 100 gifts to endow a professorship in Hay’s memory.

Prof. Suzy Renn

Prof. Kambiz GhaneaBassiri

Roger M. Perlmutter Professorship in Biological Sciences

Thomas Lamb Eliot Professor of Religion and Humanities

Prof. Renn is a neuroscientist who studies the evolution of social behavior. She’s an expert on African cichlids, a type of fish that has experienced an incredibly rapid evolut ion a r y rad i at ion , resulting in thousands of closely related species that exhibit a wealth of morphological and behavioral diversity despite very low genomic sequence divergence. She’s been teaching at Reed since 2006.

The Perlmutter Professorship was created this year by the Merck Foundation to honor longtime trustee Roger Perlmutter ’73 on the occasion of his retirement as executive vice president of Merck Research Laboratories. The chair will help anchor instruction in biology at Reed while contributing to the legacy of one of the college’s most important leaders.

Prof. GhaneaBassiri specializes in Islamic studies and A mer ican religious history. He was named a Carnegie Scholar for his book A History of Islam in America and a Guggenheim Fellow for his work on the mosque in Islamic history. He teaches courses on humanities, Islam, theory and method in the study of religion, and religious diversity. He joined Reed in 2002 after earning a PhD in religion at Harvard University.

The Thomas Lamb Eliot Memorial Fund for Religion was established in 1953 by his son, William Greenleaf Eliot Jr. Thomas Lamb Eliot was the chair of the founding board of trustees and served as a trustee from 1911 to 1925. Following in his father’s footsteps, Eliot, Jr. served as a trustee from 1925 to 1941. The endowment supports religious interests and studies of the students, faculty, and community of Reed.

Prof. Jan Mieszkowski

Reginald F. Arragon Chair in Humanities

Prof. Mieszkowski is a specialist in 18th and 19th European literature and philosophy. He teaches courses in German and comparative literature and literary theory, ancient and modern humanities, and continental philosophy. He is the author of three books: Labors of Imagination (2006), Watching War (2012), and Crises of the Sentence (2019). He holds a PhD in German literature from Johns Hopkins University and has taught at Reed since 1997. ​​The Arragon Chair was created by James C. March ’77 and Melissa March in honor of Rex Arragon, a beloved professor of history [1923–74]. After attending Reed, Jim studied the economics of information at Stanford University. He went on to found WJM Technologies, a software company that developed tools to detect bank fraud.

Prof. Kris Cohen

Jane Neuberger Goodsell Professor of Art History and Humanities

Prof. Cohen is trained as a media theorist and an art historian. His research interests include modern and contemporary art, networked and computational media, critical theory, affect theory, queer theory, and Black studies. He’s the author of Never Alone, Except for Now: Art, Networks, Populations (2017). He teaches courses on the history of modern art, video art, the politics of representation, art and technology, and the arts of capitalism. He earned his PhD in art history from the University of Chicago and has taught at Reed since 2011.

The Goodsell Chair, created by Sue and Edward Cooley and John and Betty Gray, honors author and columnist Jane

Neuberger Goodsell ’42. Goodsell majored in English literature at Reed and began her writing career as she was raising three daughters. In addition to her column From Soup to Nonsense, which was syndicated in the national labor press, Goodsell published her first children’s book, Katie’s Magic Glasses, in 1965. Her later books include Toby’s Toe, Not a Good Word About Anybody, and children’s biographies of Eleanor Roosevelt, the Mayo brothers, and Hawaii senator Daniel Inouye.

Prof. Chris Koski

Daniel B. Greenberg Chair in Environmental Studies

Prof. Koski is an expert on the political dimensions of policy making, such as environmental policy, energy policy, public budgeting, and climate change. He currently teaches courses on American politics, public policy, state and local politics and policy, and environmental politics and policy. He can be found talking politics and policy anywhere, but particularly where there is pinball, barbecue, good fishing, or wild things. He earned his PhD from the University of Washington and came to Reed in 2011. ​​The Greenberg Chair was created this year in memory of Daniel B. Greenberg ’62, who served on Reed’s board of trustees for more than 45 years and oversaw growth and transformation in every area of the college. His philanthropic leadership in collaboration with his wife, Susan Steinhauser, was instrumental to several essential initiatives, including environmental studies.

The environmental studies chair will support generations of talented teacher-scholars in this important field of endeavor and further Dan’s remarkable legacy at Reed.

Reed Magazine december 2021 11

Advocates of the Griffin

News of the Alumni Association • Connecting Reed Alumni Around the Globe

EDITED BY KATIE RAMSEY ’04

NOMINATION NATION

We need you This fall, Reedies returned to campus excited for the opportunity to once again sit next to peers in conferences, attend office hours in person, exchange ideas in the library lobby, and dance late into the night in the SU. While the COVID-19 protocols that are still in place may make daily life look a little different from the life we knew at Reed, we can’t help but be relieved that students are back and able to enjoy the personal connections, mentorships, and academic rigor that distinguish Reed.

With this return to campus, Reed has made great efforts to support students, especially through increasing financial aid. Not only has the average Reed grant increased from $40K to $44K, but also the number of students receiving financial aid has increased from 53% to 58%. With more students on campus than ever, Reed awarded $38.2M in financial aid this year.

12 Reed Magazine december 2021

This was made possible thanks to gifts from alumni, parents, and friends last fiscal year. As a nonprofit, Reed relies upon the philanthropy of its community–especially­alumni– to make possible all of the things that make Reed, Reed. Every gift makes a meaningful and direct impact in the life of a fellow Reedie.

As Reedies, we know the magic of sitting around a table (conference or dinner), sharing our perspectives, and sparking connections to new ideas.

We hope you’ll join us in supporting fellow Reedies return to that magic by making a gift to Reed this year.

The nominating committee of the board of directors of the alumni association proposes the following nominees to serve terms on the Alumni Board beginning July 1, 2022: Nominee for Alumni Trustee: Carla Beam ’76 Nominee for President: Dave Baxter ’87 Nominee for Vice President: Dylan Rivera ’95 Nominee for Secretary: Andrei Stephens ’08 Nominees for At-Large Director: Grant Burgess ’13, Maya Campbell ’14, Jennifer Delfino ’05, Avigail Hurvitz-Prinz ’05, and Lanlan Valentina Jin ’11 Nominees for Chapter Leadership Council:

Eve Lyons ’95.

Kyndra Homuth Kennedy ’04 Cori Savaiano ’11 Alumni Fundraising for Reed Co-Chairs We always need more volunteers; reach out to alumni@reed.edu to help!

Nominees for Nominating Committee for 2022–23:

alea adigweme ’06 (past president, chair), Dave Baxter ’87 (president), Charli Krause ’09, Yuka Nagashima ’92, and Darlene Pasieczny ’01 Please find additional details on the nominees and petition process on alumni.reed.edu.

photos by lauren labarre

FORGING AHEAD!

Are you searching for pathways into a career, curious about how to make your next move, or willing to lend a helping hand to someone who is? The Committee for Young Alumni (CYA) has launched an initiative to connect recent alumni in need of timely insight with other recent(ish) alumni who can help them explore their options! Building on the Communities of Purpose advising model adopted by the Center for Life Beyond Reed, the CYA’s Communities of Purpose Pathfinder Initiative aims to serve alumni who are early in their career exploration.

Because Pathfinder volunteers are only a step or two (or three) ahead in forging their own paths, they can offer recent experience and advice for a constantly changing world.

To find out more about the initiative, get in touch with a Pathfinder, or learn more about the different Communities of Purpose, please visit the Alumni Board’s Committee for Young Alumni page at alumni.reed.edu.

Or simply email alumni@reed.edu and we’ll be in touch.

Are you 5–10 years out from Reed, have a few years career experience, and would like to volunteer to be a Pathfinder? We need your help! Email alumni@reed.edu to get connected.

The Committee for Young Alumni (a working committee of the Alumni Board)

EVENTS GALORE

Reunions 2022: June 10–12 Save the date & get involved!

Does your class year end in a 2 or a 7?

Are you longing to reconnect with your dormies and reminisce about Hum 110?

You are in luck! Reunions 2022 planning is officially underway, and we are looking for creative minds, social butterflies, and party planners to join their quinquennial

class committees. Bonus points if you can say “quinquennial” three times fast. From Spanish coffee demonstrations and poetry readings to building a scale model of Reed’s campus in Minecraft, class events are where it’s at. Find out more by emailing alumni@reed.edu.

Alumni Programs hosted 68 virtual events last year. From career-based panel series and affinity group meetups to Minecraft building sessions and virtual book clubs, more than 1,300 alumni from all over the world attended a variety of events throughout the course of the year.

Did you know about them? Most alumni events are announced through emails from the alumni office and on Reed’s social media platforms. If you are not receiving these emails, please email us at alumni@ reed.edu and we’ll help figure out how to get you connected.

Reed Magazine december 2021 13

What the Pandemic Has Taught Us about Teaching (and Learning)

How coronavirus spurred Reed professors to rethink their classroom strategies.

BY ROMEL HERNANDEZ

Prof. Mary Ashburn Miller [history] teaches a course about the Black Death titled “Crisis & Catastrophe in Modern Europe.” But even she was caught off guard by the challenges thrown up by the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the spring of 2020, when Reed moved instruction out of classrooms and onto computer screens, professors scrambled to adapt their courses to a whole new medium.

Suddenly, they had to master apps like Moodle, Gradescope, and Zoom to deliver instruction.

Throughout the pandemic, Reed’s Center for Teaching and Learning has proved an invaluable resource—a place where faculty can go to brainstorm ideas, share tips, and vent frustrations.

Some of those ideas have proven so effective, in fact, that professors are employing them again this semester—even though Reed’s classes this year are all face-to-face.

Prof. Miller, who is currently the director of the CTL, says the upheaval caused by the pandemic has given her a new perspective. “I have always loved thinking and learning and talking about teaching,” she says. “This was an opportunity to explore whole new ways and new tools to do my job.”

Professors also had to think more about equity and accessibility for students who didn’t have access to stable Wi-Fi connections or might be cramped in a living room with rowdy siblings. “We couldn’t operate with the illusion that we exist in a bubble that the world doesn’t touch,” she says. “We had to solve problems like, how can a student participate when they don’t have a good internet connection? Now we can build options and structures to support students.”

She says, “We’ve had to think differently about everything we did and come up with creative solutions to problems. My sense in talking to colleagues is that we’re stronger teachers for it.”

Reed launched the CTL in 2014 thanks to a generous gift from Dan Kemp ’58, a legendary

14 Reed Magazine december 2021

chemist at MIT who never forgot the inspirational teaching he received from Prof. Arthur Scott [chemistry 1923–79]. Since then, the CTL has helped Reed faculty explore new ideas in the classroom. Here are four examples of Reed professors leading the way.

them. The result is that students often don’t understand how the instrument works. But when forced to make an instrument from scratch they have a new appreciation for what is happening under the hood.”

SPECTRAL EVIDENCE

As soon as he started holding classes on Zoom, Prof. Kevin Holmes [psychology] could see that videoconferencing was difficult for some of his students. Some had slow internet connections, some were in different time zones, and some were simply reluctant to participate.

So he found new ways to get conversations going with a social annotation tool called Hypothesis, which allows students to mark up and comment on the readings before class. He found that students read more closely and were more likely to engage with peers in their written responses to the text.

He also saw that some students who previously might have been reluctant to speak up in class were encouraged to participate more by sharing their questions and observations online.

“We were able to get a conversation going before we even met back together online,” Prof. Holmes says. “Which in turn made class discussions richer and more inclusive.”

With the return to face-to-face instruction, he still uses Hypothesis to stimulate questions and create a learning community that extends beyond the classroom.

KICKSTART THE CONVERSATION

When the pandemic hit, all Reed’s science labs were forced to go online only.

That posed two problems for the chemistry department, according to department associate Danielle Cass. First, the chemicals can be hazardous. Second, the instruments are often big and expensive.

It wasn’t hard to devise experiments that used kitchen ingredients such as food coloring, baking soda, and vinegar. But what about the instruments? You’re not going to buy every student their own $10,000 spectrophotometer.

Then Cass remembered a Reed student she taught several years ago who had attempted to construct their own spectrophotometer out of Lego and spare parts. After scouring the internet, Cass figured out a way to construct a makeshift instrument out of 3D-printed parts and off-the-shelf components. Working with Jay Ewing in the machine shop, she printed enough parts to send a kit to every student in Chem 101.

Students assembled the kits at home, and voila—each one now had a working (if sometimes temperamental) spectrophotometer at a cost of roughly $50.

When Chem 101 students returned to the lab in person, Cass made sure they once again got the opportunity to make their own spectrophotometers in the lab.

“It turns out that having students make their own spectrophotometer adds to their learning experience in a way we had not done in the past,” she says. “The spectrophotometers in the lab, although more stable and reproducible, also are a black box of components. Students push a button and the instrument spits out numbers to

GO MODULAR

As someone who teaches at the intersection of computer science and biology, Prof. Anna Ritz [biology] adapted more readily than most to the technology of virtual learning.

But after she realized how much disruption the pandemic was causing in the personal lives of her students, she had a brain wave. She split the course into 2-4 week independent modules. Each module had two assignments that were released on the first day and due on the last day. This simplified

photos by lauren labarre

SHINE A LITTLE LIGHT. Last year the chemistry department put together DIY spectrophotometer kits for students to assemble at home.

The project proved so successful that professors did it again this year, even though the labs are now in-person. Here Prof. Nicole James works with a Chem 101 student in the lab.

deadlines and gave students more flexibility in determining when they could work on their assignments. It also meant that a student going through severe (but temporary) turmoil didn’t have to drop out of the course; instead, they could work with Prof. Ritz to come up with a plan for modules where they had trouble. She also coached students on time management and waived penalties for late assignments, opting for one-on-one meetings to discuss making up work.

“Many times students might be dealing with disruptions that we may not always know about,” Ritz says. “Teaching during the pandemic made me more aware of how important it is to strategize with students in supportive ways to help them succeed instead of penalizing them.”

EMBRACE TECHNOLOGY

When her classes went online, Prof. Miller tried out several new approaches to engage students. Instead of assigning research papers, for example, she encouraged students to take on projects that were more visual and interactive. Her students showed they were up to the challenge, constructing visual archives and making slideshow presentations about concepts they studied in class. One student even created a board game to illustrate how folks in the 18th century thought about chance and fate.

She also recruited prominent historians around the country to participate in small Zoom sessions with students. Students interviewed some of the historians who wrote the texts on the class syllabus, giving them an invaluable glimpse into the scholarly research and writing process.

Miller hopes to continue the interview experiment in the future.

“The scholars were so generous with their time,” she says. “And the students were amazing, too. When we were thrown into some very challenging circumstances, everyone really rose to the occasion.”

Reed Magazine december 2021 15

SECRETS DO MAKE FRIENDS Psychologist Luke Chang ’02 spills the beans about the hidden power of gossip.

BY BEN READ ’21

Gossip enjoys a reputation that, is shall we say, less than savory. From the tidbits of Tacitus to the scandal sheets of the Victorian era to anonymous apps like Yik Yak, gossip has been used to spread disinformation, undermine enemies, and perpetuate stereotypes. But gossip is more than trash talk, according to Dartmouth psychologist Luke Chang ’02. This ubiquitous behavior can also be prosocial, promoting vicarious learning and strengthening social connection.

Gossip is an easy way to find people who are like you or share your worldview, Chang says. This can lead to what psychologists call groupthink or what sociologists call homophily—in which you find yourself exchanging opinions and beliefs with people who already think the way you do.

“Bias propagates,” he says.

But gossip is also a way of keeping up to date on each other’s lives and learning about our networks. Gossip helps us stay connected to our coworkers, our friends, and our family, and it can even help groups of people organize. Gossip can also help us form new relationships through the trust built from disclosing information.

Chang, an associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth, studies altruistic behavior—why people sometimes do good things, even when it’s not in their own interest. Gossip is one piece of the puzzle. “People talk,” he says.

That back channel shapes perceptions of

16 Reed Magazine december 2021

reputation, trustworthiness, and social dynamics—subjects that many psychologists have considered too difficult to study.

Which is exactly what drew Chang to the field in the first place. “I like topics that are really interesting to think about and work on, but that a lot of people don’t think you can study scientifically,” he says.

Chang and his collaborator Eshin Jolly designed a new experimental paradigm by adapting a “public goods” game—a model typically used in behavioral economics—to see how gossip would affect participants’ decisions to contribute to the public good.

In a public goods game, each participant begins with a certain amount of wealth.

They can then decide whether to contribute a portion of this wealth to the collective pot, which is then multiplied and divided among all participants evenly. Everyone eats. However, if a participant hoards their wealth, they will still receive their share of the pot, incentivizing selfish behavior—at the expense of the common good.

In a traditional paradigm, cooperation between participants tends to unravel after a few rounds. But the advent of gossip can transform the social dynamic. Chang and Jolly created an experimental condition in which participants in a six-person group could view their neighbors’ actions and communicate with other participants who could view their neighbors’ actions. In this condition, gossip prevented the game from devolving into selfish hoarding. Instead, participants developed connections to their neighbors and acquired knowledge

about other players that was impossible to observe directly. Writing in the journal Current Biology, the authors concluded that “social information acquired through gossip aids in vicarious learning, directly influencing future behavior and impression formation.”

For Chang, this demonstrated how we learn what is socially acceptable and how to be a part of a community. Gossip can “prevent the unraveling,” he says.

The experiment made headlines around the globe, from the New York Times to the South China Morning Post. Which Chang finds more than somewhat ironic. As a student at Reed, he sometimes struggled. “I think everybody, including me, was surprised that I ended up as a professor in psychology.”

illustration for reed magazine by tatjana prenzel

The lights went on when he took Psych 101, Foundations in Psychological Science.

He loved the course—especially the labs— and went on to take a course on learning and memory with Prof. Allen Neuringer [psych 1970–2008] where he used a Skinner box to train rats to exhibit random or creative behavior.

“To be able to do that, and really test ideas, is a completely different way to learn about psychology than memorizing a bunch of facts,” he says. Since he graduated, Chang has been a student or an instructor at the University of Arizona, UCLA, the New School, and Dartmouth. “Some of the classes I took as a psych major at Reed, I think, are among the best,” he insists.

But it was his senior thesis that truly launched his career. Working with Prof.

Jennifer Corpus, he explored the relationship between academic dishonesty and intrinsic and extrinsic motivation— in other words, whether students are less likely to cheat if they care more about their learning than their grades. In the course of this project, he discovered his own passion for research—the same motivation that drives him today. “And that’s kind of what Reed’s all about,” he said.

At Dartmouth, his lab is working on everything from mapping emotions in the brain to what researchers call a socially transmitted placebo: the way that doctors’ beliefs about a treatment affect patients’ outcomes.

His work combines psychology, economics, computer science, and cognitive neuroscience—an interdisciplinary approach that he values about a liberal arts education.

“A lot of different disciplines are working on similar problems but from different perspectives,” he says. “And they have the tools and theory that can help you if you combine it in different ways. The more I interact with other fields and read other things, the more ideas I come up with, and the more ways I think about solving problems. Everybody thinks I’m becoming more original but really I’m just stealing ideas or borrowing things from other fields.”

Chang’s best bit of gossip? He married his TA, Eunice Lee ’00. As a first-year student at Reed, he ended up as a participant in her thesis experiment. Years later, the two met again in a master’s program for psychology. The rest, as they say, is history.

Reed Magazine december 2021 17

PUT IT TO THE TEST From black holes to hungry microbes, research at Reed is heating up.

Prof. Kara Cerveny [center] and Harpeth Lee ’22 [right] prepare a sample for Reed’s new light sheet microscope.

18 Reed Magazine december 2021

Measuring the mass of black holes.

Probing the secrets of the cell.

Disentangling the linguistic frames that stoke prejudice. Those are just some of the scores of projects that students tackled last summer, thanks to a renewed emphasis on research at Reed.

Whether it involves test tubes or manuscripts, research is fundamental to every discipline. But it also has striking benefits for undergrads. A growing body of evidence shows that those who do research get better at overcoming obstacles, thinking independently, and understanding how knowledge is constructed. And 83% of potential employers believe that developing research skills in college will help grads succeed in their careers, according to a study by the Association of American Colleges & Universities.

With the help of alumni, parents, and foundations, Reed is building an extensive system to provide students with outstanding opportunities to pursue research, including departmental fellowships, opportunity grants, research grants, internships, and creative fellowships.

Check out some of the amazing projects Reed students and professors have been pursuing.

—CHRIS LYDGATE ’90

december 2021 Reed Magazine 19

Through the Looking Glass Grant from the Beckman Foundation brings cuttingedge microscope to Reed.

Reed is now home to a powerful new microscope that enables biologists to create moving images of living cells with astonishing accuracy, thanks to a $1.2 million award from the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation.

“This is a big leap for the department,” says Prof. Kara Cerveny [biology], the principal investigator for the grant.

The instrument, known as a light sheet microscope (LSM), is a gamechanging invention that is having a profound impact on biological research. The Beckman Foundation notes that the technology enables “unprecedented understanding of the intricate dynamics of cells and their components within living specimens.”

The award was given to Prof.

Cerveny, Prof. Derek Applewhite and Prof. Erik Zornik, to support the QUICK project (that’s Quantitative Undergrad-focused Imaging and Computation for Knowledge).

The beneficiaries will include not only biologists, but also faculty and students from math, computer science, and physics.

An LSM gives researchers the ability to create a 3D image of a sample without damaging it. This means scientists can observe a living organism’s development in real time, watching cells divide and differentiate. Older imaging equipment typically disrupts the system it captures. “Cells don’t do well under the long blasts of a laser,” says Cerveny, whose research into

20 Reed Magazine december 2021

the eye structures in zebrafish will help advance our understanding of the formation of the visual system.

“Previously with our laser scanning confocal microscope, it would take over five minutes to partially capture an image of an embryo, with a laser shining on the entire embryo for the entire time. And if the embryo were alive, it would be negatively affected by prolonged exposure to the laser.

In contrast, an LSM rapidly shines a thin sheet of light through a thin plane of tissue and captures an image of the sample with minimal impact on the sample. Each of the layers is captured in high resolution and can

be reconstructed into powerful 3D renderings.”

For living embryos that are imaged like this throughout development, researchers can collect 3D time-lapse imaging. “Think of those time-lapse images of a plant growing but on a microscopic scale,” Cerveny says.

One challenge with a microscope like this, however, is managing the terabytes of data it generates. To this end Reed’s biologists have teamed up with colleagues in physics, computer science, statistics, and Reed’s Computing & Information Services (CIS) to solve some of the storage and computational issues.

ABOVE

Looking head-on at a zebrafish, with its eyes on either side, this single frame from a timelapse image produced by Reed’s light sheet microscope shows the visual system. In magenta are the neurons in the eye that project to the brain and then to the optic nerve. The cyan staining highlights a number of other structures in the fish.

Headlines and Political Bias

Prof. Mark Hopkins and his students in computer science will collaborate on methods of data storage and algorithms for large data extraction. Prof. Kelly McConville’s statistics students will help do the large data analysis. Harpeth Lee ’22, the inaugural QUICK intern, worked with Cerveny and McConville to understand the data structures of LSM files and created several lessons that McConville will use in her introductory statistics course. Prof.

Joel Franklin ’97 and his physics students will work on computational methods to assemble and view the complex LSM images, which have

applications in virtual reality and other fields.

Other colleagues on the project include Reed’s instrumentation biologist, Greta Glover, who will help with maintaining the device and training students; Marianne Colgrove ’84, interim chief information officer; Ben Poliakoff, associate director of tech infrastructure; and Trina Marmarelli, director of instructional technology.

“I want to empower students to not just capture images, but to quantify these in a meaningful and powerful way,” Cerveny says.

Why do so many people click on partisan headlines that support their political outlook, even when they know the news source is biased?

Prof. Glenn Baker and psychology major Jesse Atkin ’21 ran a series of experiments to see how subjects would respond to headlines when news sources were labeled with a “bias indicator” that rated the reliability of their information. Their hope was that labels would encourage people to stick with trustworthy sources and steer clear of clickbait.

Disappointingly, the bias indicator had minimal effect—subjects were still drawn to headlines that affirmed their opinions. (This effect was actually stronger for subjects on the more liberal end of the spectrum.)

But then the Reed team went one step farther: they rewrote the headlines to make them less inflammatory.

When presented with moderate headlines, the partisan effect evaporated— subjects were far less likely to click on a headline from a dubious source just because it supported their view.

These results dovetail with the social identity theory proposed by Polish psychologist Henri Tajfel in 1979. Tajfel found that people who identify with a particular social group (the “in-group”) are motivated to seek out information that bolsters the ingroup and derogates those they perceive as rivals (the “out-group”).

This is one reason why political ideology is so hard to challenge. “We get really bent out of shape about information that we disagree with,” says Prof. Baker.

Moderate headlines may offer a way to reduce political polarization.

Unfortunately, media platforms have strong incentives to keep using inflammatory headlines as a way to gain audience share. —CHRIS LYDGATE ’90

—KATIE PELLETIER ’03

december 2021 Reed Magazine 21

Life and Death in a Drop of Water Reed biologists focus on phytoplankton to investigate ecological resilience and adaptation.

They grow by the thousands in a single drop of water. Phytoplankton— microscopic aquatic plants—are a fundamental link in the ecosystem, generating about half the oxygen in the earth’s atmosphere.

A team of biologists led by Prof.

Sam Fey recently published new findings that shed light on how phytoplankton respond to big swings in temperature—findings with significant implications for how ecologists make predictions about the ultimate fate of populations in unstable ecosystems, from sea urchins to manatees to human beings.

“Now we have a framework that can help us make better forecasts—to

22 Reed Magazine december 2021

predict how organisms respond to environmental fluctuations, and when or whether a population will go extinct,” says Prof. Fey. The research, which is supported by a multiyear grant from the NSF, focuses on a phenomenon known as phenotypic plasticity, which is where an individual responds to changing environmental circumstances in its own lifetime. For example, the coat of the arctic hare turns white during the winter to provide camouflage in the snow, then turns brown in the spring when the snow melts.

Until recently, many ecologists simply omitted phenotypic plasticity from their models because it was so poorly

understood. But fudging this factor can obscure crucial issues when conditions change rapidly. For example, if snow on a particular mountain starts to melt earlier in the season, the hares may still be white and will be soon picked off by hungry predators—a scenario that could easily lead to population crash.

Plankton are useful organisms in which to study this question, because of their remarkable growth rate (under ideal conditions the population can double every 24 hours) and their exquisite sensitivity to temperature, which is easy to measure and manipulate.

The team, which included Maeve Kolk ’19, Delaney Brubaker ’21, biology lab manager Tamara Layden,

ABOVE

Prof. Sam Fey and Isaac Schuman ’21 develop a new model for phenotypic plasticity.

left: photo by Alisha Jucevic; right: photo by tom humphrey STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY.

Prof. Derek Applewhite investigates how cells get their shape.

The Shape of Things To Come

and researchers from UCLA and Yale University, studied colonies of phytoplankton both in the lab and in the Reed Canyon. After years of work, they developed a new mathematical framework for predicting the effect of plasticity when conditions change suddenly. In particular, they were able to predict how a colony of plankton would respond to sudden spikes in water temperature.

The findings, published in Ecological Monographs and Limnolog y and Oceanography Letters, should help biologists make better predictions about the long-term survival of organisms whose landscape is changing before their eyes. —CHRIS LYDGATE ’90

As bio majors know, cells are not just blobs of goo. In fact, they come in a fantastic range of shapes, from the diabolical corkscrew of the bacteria responsible for Lyme disease to the intricate branching of the neurons in your brain. These shapes don’t emerge by accident—they depend on a structure known as the cytoskeleton, a network of filaments which give shape to the cell, somewhat like the way tentpoles give shape to a tent.

The cytoskeleton is regulated by a complex interplay of genes that are switched on and off during different phases of development as the cell undergoes morphogenesis—the process of changing shape.

Prof. Derek Applewhite [biology] and students in his lab have been working to better understand how the cytoskeleton is regulated. One aspect of this research is focused on how cells contract. A protein known as flapwing is known to inhibit cell contractility, but the mechanism by which it does this remains unclear.

Andy Zhao ’22 hypothesized that the presence of another protein, moesin, might hold the clue. He set out to investigate by depleting fruit-fly cells of their natural moesin and then replacing it with with a mutant version. Sure enough, the mutant moesin interfered with the cells’ ability to contract properly. The next step: figure out if the effect is due to direct antagonism or indirect inhibition.

Elle Oberweis-Manion ’23 focused on apical constriction, the process which turns round cells into apical (wedge-shaped) cells. Tiled together in their millions, these apical cells yield a convex structure that can ultimately join up with itself to create a tube— the fundamental organizing principle of all higher forms of life.

Elle investigated the role of a family of proteins known as septins on the folded-gastrulation signaling pathway, which regulates apical constriction by manipulating the molecular motor protein non-muscle myosin II. —CHRIS LYDGATE ’90

december 2021 Reed Magazine 23

Black Holes and Stellar Observations Deep in the heart of the Milky Way, at the convergence of its spiral arms, lurks a dark colossus: a black hole with a mass of more than 4 million suns.

This pattern—a massive black hole surrounded by a galactic whorl of stars—is repeated throughout the cosmos. Astronomers now believe that the mass of a black hole provides vital clues about the birth, lifespan, and fate of its surrounding galaxy, but obtaining accurate measurements for distant black holes is exceedingly difficult.

One powerful technique is to calculate stellar velocity dispersion, a statistical measure of the speed and directions in which stars are moving around their galaxy; the higher the stellar dispersion, the more massive the black hole at the center.

Unfortunately, this approach gets complicated when we look at highly elliptical galaxies, because our measurements are contaminated by the rotation of the galactic disk. (Since we are observing these galaxies from an angle, rather than straight on, we can’t always tell which stars are in the “front” and which ones are at the “back.”)

Prof. Alison Crocker and physics major Max Piper ’21 created an ingenious way to correct errors in dispersion observations, inspired by the senior thesis of Farhanul Hasan ’18 from a couple years back. They applied a mathematical formula based on the ellipticity of the observed galaxy to the calculation of stellar dispersion.

This error-correction should yield more accurate readings for stellar dispersion and more information about the black holes that are deeply entwined with the fate of the galaxies that revolve around them.

—CHRIS LYDGATE ’90

24 Reed Magazine december 2021

DARK HEART. This artist’s conception depicts a rapidly-spinning supermassive black hole surrounded by an accretion disc. This thin disc of rotating material consists of the leftovers of a Sun-like star which was ripped apart by the tidal forces of the black hole.

Credit: ESO

photo by Bridget perier ’23

Grants Power Research

Reed professors are pulling in more research grants than ever. Over the past 4 years, faculty have garnered over $10 million in federal grants.

Here’s a sampling of recent awards.

The Philosophy of Care. Prof.

Tamara Metz [political science] was awarded $169K from the National Endowment for the Humanities for research into the political implications of caregiving.

HUNTING FOR CLUES.

Riyaz Ditter ’22 searches for the genes that help Pseudomonas 9.2 digest plastic.

Germs that Eat Plastic Our planet is drowning in plastic.

Plastic bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) choke our rivers and pollute our oceans. A plastic gyre twice the size of Texas swirls in the Pacific ocean, where wind and waves ceaselessly grind the stuff into eversmaller bits.

But there is hope on the horizon.

For several years, Prof. Jay Mellies and Reed biology students have been working to recruit a microscopic ally in the war on plastic pollution. They have developed a bacterial stew that is capable of breaking down scraps of PET and eating it.

The stew—technically a consortium—is composed of several strains of bacteria that work together synergistically to consume PET. Over the summer, students investigated several key questions about how the germs pull off this remarkable stunt.

One strain in particular, Pseudomonas 9.2, can do the job on its own (although more efficiently when it works in tandem with other strains).

But the genes responsible for this microbial feat remain unknown. BMB

major Riyaz Ditter ’22 set out to hunt them down.

The first step was to look at the genes involved in hydrolyzation—the chemical process by which the bacteria chops long strands of PET into shorter, digestible chunks—and identify potential candidates. The next step was to create knockout mutants—that is, strains of bacteria with one of the suspect genes stripped out. Finally Riyaz fed the mutants some tasty plastic to see if the missing genes robbed them of their ability to degrade it.

Each step in the process proved trickier than anticipated. Nonetheless, the research identified three promising candidate genes that may play a role in digesting PET. Deepika Shingwekar ’24 took a different tack. She investigated whether softening up PET with chemicals would help the consortium break it down faster. Working with 7 forms of PET (pellets, shreds, film, and so on) she found that pretreating the plastic with sodium hydroxide or hydrogen peroxide made it more digestible to the bacteria and hastened its degradation.

—CHRIS LYDGATE ’90

World of Silly Putty. Prof. Kyle Ormsby [math] and Prof. Angélica Osorno [math] were awarded $378K by the NSF to investigate issues in the field of homotopy.

Shapeshifting Cells. Prof. Derek Applewhite [biology] and Prof. Anna Ritz [biology] were awarded $589K by the NSF to investigate the role of non-muscle myosin II in regulating the shape of cells.

Neural Codes of Behavior. Prof.

Erik Zornik [psychology] was awarded $670K by the NSF to investigate the neural mechanisms of vocal evolution in frogs.

Technological Prediction. Prof.

Mark Bedau [philosophy] was awarded $170K by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity to predict technological progress by embedding input-output networks in semantic spaces.

Heavy Metal Detox. Prof. Kelly Chacón [chemistry] was awarded $650K by the National Science Foundation to investigate ways to detoxify tellurium and selenium contamination.

Trees, Inequality, and Urban Heat Zones. Prof. Aaron Ramirez [biology] was awarded $1.5M by the National Science Foundation to investigate the socio-ecological dynamics of urban forests in US cities with a history of marginalization.

december 2021 Reed Magazine 25

Reediana Books. Music. Film. Send us your work!

EDITED BY KATIE PELLETIER Email reed.magazine@reed.edu

Guardians of the Trees A new memoir from Kinari Webb ’95 makes the case for planetary health

BY MEGAN BURBANK

When the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami killed almost 100,000 people in December 2004, Dr. Kinari Webb, then a resident in family medicine, wanted to help. As the only doctor in her residency who spoke Indonesian, Webb asked to go to Aceh, Indonesia, to aid in relief efforts. But once there, she was struck by the disconnect between NGOs on the ground and the communities they were there to help. That disconnect made it difficult to provide meaningful aid, even amid an emergency that required it.

The disaster had caused trauma on a massive scale, such that “every single story was, truly, the worst story I had ever heard,” writes Webb in her new book, Guardians of the Trees: A Journey of Hope Through Healing the Planet, a chronicle of her longstanding career in the world of international nonprofits.

In Aceh, it seemed that aid organizations just weren’t listening, and the dysfunction was so widespread that Webb recalled feeling surprised in one meeting between NGOs when a volunteer from a small nonprofit expressed concerns he’d heard from local farmers.

“He actually talked to the people here and asked them what they needed?” Webb recalled thinking. “That behavior was incredibly rare.

The standard belief seemed to be: We know what is best for you. We are the experts.”

Webb had seen firsthand that this white savior approach didn’t work: “That is why we had an entire storeroom full of malaria medications for a region with no malaria—and

26 Reed Magazine december 2021

no sanitary napkins for women, even two months after the tsunami.”

No one, it seemed, had bothered to do what that lone aid worker had. The result was that people in crisis weren’t getting the tools and support they needed.

This experience would go on to inform Webb’s work as a physician and nonprofit leader. In 2005, she founded Health in Harmony, a nonprofit focused on fighting climate change and protecting rainforests in collaboration with local communities, and carried this work out with ASRI, a health care organization and community clinic she cofounded in the West Kalimantan province of Indonesia.

With Health in Harmony, Webb deviated from the NGOs she’d worked alongside in Aceh: the organization is based on a practice Webb calls “radical listening,” in which the organization asks communities in threatened rainforest areas what they need to make conservation possible, then actively involves the communities in developing and executing these solutions.

Guardians of the Trees documents Webb’s initial journey into this work among communities around Gunung Palung National Park in Indonesia, an area of personal connection for Webb. Long before she became a doctor, while she was a 21-year-old biology major at Reed, Webb was hired as a research assistant at a forest station in West Kalimantan.

Back then, she studied orangutans, “one of the literally wildest things I was passionate about” and a source of childhood

fascination. Webb recounts getting the news of her research job over a pay phone at a classical music concert in Portland. Standing on a red carpet in a red velvet dress, “thanks to a free ticket from the Reed Culture office,” she delights in a brief moment of glamorous serendipity before embarking on an adventure into the rainforest involving a “misnamed” boat called the Express, navigating sandbanks in another boat that “barely floated above the waterline,” unwelcome intestinal distress, and sharing coffee with loggers on a sapling platform.

But once ensconced in the rainforest, following orangutans and sharing spaghetti with her coworkers, Webb describes feeling bowled over by the incredible biodiversity around her and hyperaware of the interdependence of all life. “Extreme diversity means that everything is rare and that you are constantly seeing things you will probably never see again,” she says, cataloguing “a fluffy white moonrat, the size of a house cat; a sun bear with huge long claws; a ground squirrel standing as tall as my mid-thigh; a tiny bird so brightly colored that it could have been painted by Gauguin; a green pie viper on a branch that I almost put my hand on; and a troop of halfinch iridescent blue ants attacking a foot-long purple millipede.”

But Webb’s discovery of this gorgeous, thriving world also came with the knowledge that, like so many wild places, it was threatened—by the very loggers she’d had coffee with. It’s rare to bear witness to a person’s discovery of what their life’s project will be, but that’s what happens in these early sections of Webb’s book. It’s no surprise that in her later career, Webb returned to Borneo to find ways to protect the rainforest she came to love as a student.

Of course, she also brought the knowledge,

hard won in Aceh, that nonprofits can cause more harm than good if they reinforce colonial attitudes and racism. Instead of replicating that approach, Webb and her Indonesian colleagues were able to discern the root cause of logging in their radical listening sessions with communities adjacent to Gunung Palung National Park, and a surprising nexus between logging and health care began to emerge. Loggers reported that cutting wood in the national park was not a voluntary activity, but a last resort often prompted by expensive medical care that couldn’t be accessed in other ways. “On a broader scale, I knew this was largely because resources had been taken from these communities through a long history of colonization,” writes Webb.

To address this lack of resources, Webb and ASRI began providing accessible, highquality health care to disincentivize logging, employing a popular noncash payment system that has allowed community members to pay for their care through any number of accessible options: contributing seedlings for reforestation, helping out in the clinic garden, or even making handicrafts for ASRI to sell to help pay for medications.

Webb’s book focuses largely on this outreach work, which, indeed, has resulted in a reduction in logging in Gunung Palung National Park and better health outcomes for the communities around it.

But Webb herself becomes evidence of the link between environmental and human health when she describes being stung by a box jellyfish while swimming at sunset in 2011. The sting, a brutal medical emergency, sends her body into involuntary contractions, nearly kills her, and causes long-term autoimmune dysregulation that forces her to slow her tendency toward overwork and ultimately fly to Minnesota for care at the Mayo Clinic. “Funnily enough,” she writes, “I was even a good case example of how damaged

Kinari Webb ’95 founded Health In Harmony, a nonprofit dedicated to the idea that human and environmental health are inextricably intwined.

ecosystems can hurt people’s health, since jellyfish have been steadily increasing with the warming oceans and the loss of predators like turtles.”

The message is clear: human beings will not survive if climate change progresses to the point that our planet becomes unlivable.

Our fates really are interconnected. It may be hard to feel hope under these circumstances, but in Webb’s work to preserve the “lungs of the earth” through rejecting colonial patterns

in favor of deep listening, it is possible to see where her hope comes from, tenuous though it may be.

“My fragile hope was buoyed when the results of ASRI’s five-year impact survey came in and showed that it was actually possible for humans and the natural ecosystem to simultaneously thrive,” she notes. “We did not have to see these two things in conflict with each other. In fact, if both don’t thrive, neither can in the long run.”

Reed Magazine december 2021 27

REEDIANA The Last Embassy: The Dutch Mission of 1795 and the Forgotten History of Western Encounters with China Tonio Andrade ’91 tells the story of the Dutch mission of 1795, bringing to light a dramatic but littleknown episode that transforms our understanding of the history of China and the West. Drawing on archival material, he paints a panoramic and multifaceted portrait of an age marked by intrigues and war. Illustrated with sketches and paintings by Chinese and European artists, his book suggests that the Qing court, often mischaracterized as arrogant and narrow-minded, was in fact open, flexible, curious, and cosmopolitan.

(Princeton, 2021)

True Stories: Tales from the Generation of a New World Culture

The Power of Pattern: Patterning in the Early Years

Garrick Beck ’71 traces the evolution of a New World Culture from the Beatnik 1950s through the passions and protests and psychedelics of the 1960s and onward into environmental and cross-cultural arts and political movements which today are thriving around the world. These stories take the reader to party with author Jack Kerouac, protest with Dorothy Day, and drop acid with Merry Prankster Ken Kesey. The history recounted here uncovers the origins of the Oregon Country Fair, the Rainbow Gatherings, and the infamous Vortex Festival. (IUniverse Press, 2017)

A new book by Helen Thouless ’95 (et al.) follows a group of teachers and their classes of threeto five-year-olds as they explore different types of pattern. The team developed activities which engaged children in creative thinking and mathematical reasoning in a range of enjoyable contexts, both indoors and out. Included are learning trajectories, suggestions for practical activities, an example of a pattern lesson, and much more. (Association of Teachers of Mathematics, 2021)

Impuls Deutsch 1 and 2 Friedemann Weidauer ’82 has published first- and a secondyear college textbook for German. The books are based on the concept of a flipped classroom in which class time is used for interactive activities, and students study and practice at home. They are also meant to shift the focus to topics that might actually interest students, such as climate change, diversity, recycling, postcolonial issues (such as trade), GMOs, student protest movements, and sustainability. (Klett, 2019/2021)

28 Reed Magazine december 2021

Davos Man: How The Billionaires Devoured the World.

New York Times’s global economics correspondent, Peter S. Goodman ’89, exposes how billionaires’ systematic plunder of the world—brazenly accelerated during the pandemic— has transformed 21st-century life and dangerously destabilized democracy. Drawing on decades of experience covering the global economy, he profiles five “Davos Men”—members of the billionaire class— chronicling how their shocking exploitation of the global pandemic has hastened a 50-year trend of wealth centralization that impacts nearly every aspect of our modern society. (Custom House, 2022)

Daughters In her new poetry collection Brittney Corrigan ’94 reimagines characters from mythology, folklore, fairy tales, and pop culture from the perspective of their daughters—daughters we don’t expect individuals like Bigfoot, the Mad Hatter, and Medusa to have.

Taking on such topics as aging, rebellion, loss, domestic violence, homelessness, and gender identity, the voices of daughters aim to turn the reader’s conceptions of the characters on their ends and throw light upon what it means for a girl to come out from under her parents as a woman of her own making. (Airlie Press, 2021)

Dining with a Cursed Bloodline From 2018 to 2021, Andrea Lambert ’98 wrote a column in Entropy magazine’s Food section. Her new book is a series of autobiographical personal essays investigating sumptuous food, the goings on of a tight-knit Reno family, and queer disabled survival during the Trumpocalypse. A widowed witch with schizoaffective disorder, anxiety, and PTSD explores her world through food, from cherry clafoutis to traditional Italian Christmas cookies. (Lost Angelene Books, 2021)

Continuous Discovery Habits A new book edited by Melissa (Feineman) Suzuno ’02 offers practical tips for building successful products that customers love. How do you know that you are making a product or service that your customers want? How do you ensure that you are improving it over time? How do you guarantee that your team is creating value for your customers in a way that creates value for your business? This book offers a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery to help answer each of these questions. You’ll learn to balance action with doubt so that you can get started without being blindsided by what you don’t get right. (Product Talk, 2021)

Functional Linear Algebra Inspired by the Reed math department’s use of calculus textbooks written specifically for Reed, Hannah Robbins ’02, has published a unique textbook addressing a need for a one-term linear algebra course. It unites the computational and algorithmic aspects of linear algebra with the theoretical ideas of the course, as well as centering the idea of a linear function to ease the transition from calculus to linear algebra. (Yes, the title is a math pun!)

(Chapman and Hall, 2021)

In the Morning We Are Glass Reed Library’s catalogue specialist, Caroline Wilcox Reul, has published a German-to-English translation of a poetry collection by Andra Schwartz, which centers on Lusatia, a region in eastern Germany near the Polish and Czech borders that has undergone drastic changes from coal mining, politics, and demographic shifts.

Caroline’s translations have appeared in many literary journals, including the PEN Poetry Series, Lunch Ticket, the Los Angeles Review, and others. In 2018, she was awarded the Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation and Multilingual Texts. (Zephyr Press, 2021)

Lives CJ Evans ’02, winner of the 2021 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, has a new poetry collection forthcoming in 2022. In Lives, poems contain music matched to matter, so that reading them often involves both swoon and startle: “When it folds open, the rule-less rile / of sky,” CJ writes, “the comets and giants. And also: / books, chamomile, and more kissing.” Panoramic in time and space, Lives knows each of us, our ordinary lives, and our occupancy within history and the universe, our yearning for connection: “And if I turned to you now, my one wet muscle run dry, would you / turn to me? And what else could my heart be for if not to try?” (Sarabande Books, 2022)

Visit us for a great selection of holiday gifts, including these hand-thrown mugs from Deneen Pottery—available in the store and online.

bookstore.reed.edu Reed Magazine december 2021 29

Class Notes

These Class Notes reflect information we received by September 15.

The Class Notes deadline for the next issue is December 15.

Class Notes are the lifeblood of Reed Magazine.

While a Reed education confers many special powers, omniscience is unfortunately not among them; your classmates rely on you to tell us what’s going on. So share your news! Tell us about births, deaths, weddings, voyages, adventures, transformations, astonishment, woe, delight, fellowship, discovery, and mischief.

Email us at reed.magazine@reed.edu. Post a note online at iris.reed.edu.

Find us on Facebook via “ReediEnews.” Scribble something in the enclosed return envelope. Or mail us at Reed magazine, Reed College, 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd, Portland OR 97202. Photos are welcome, as are digital images at 300 dpi. And don’t forget the pertinent details: name, class year, and your current address!

As of September 2019, new class notes are available online in pdf form in our digital magazine. If you have any questions or concerns, let us know.

EDITED BY JOANNE HOSSACK ’82

1952 70th reunion 1962 60th reunion

In mid-August Steve Shields, Carol Hurwitz, Sue Hanchett, and Bill Jarrico ’61 met in Cherry Grove, Fire Island, New York, for lunch. They were there for a week visiting Carol’s oldest daughter and her four children in Ocean Beach, Fire Island. Carol recently moved from Scarsdale, New York, to Albany, California. The rest of the crew lives in California as well: Sue in Pasadena, Bill in Pacoima, and Steve in Walnut Creek.

1963–66

How now! what news with you?

1967 55th reunion

On September 19, 2021, Kathleen (Bucklin) Davies ran the 12K (7.46 miles) USATF Championship race on Sandy Hook, New Jersey. She won her age group, making her the NATIONAL 12K CHAMPION in the 75–79-year age group. “ I know there are women faster than I am, but you have to be there and you have to run. I was and I did!”

Christine Johnson is chair of the board of the Northwest Natural Resource

30 Reed Magazine december 2021

Lunching on Fire Island, left to right: Steve Shields ’62, Carol Hurwitz ’62, Sue Hanchett ’62, and Bill Jarrico ’61.

Group (www.nnrg.org), which helps folks steward their forests in Washington and Oregon. “We are looking for an endowment forest. Kinda like Match.Forest? If you or your family has a forest in western Washington or Oregon that you would like to put in good hands but continue to own, get in touch.”

Kathleen (Bucklin) Davies ’67 (right) with other members of the Morris County, New Jersey, Striders’ 50+ team, which placed sixth at the USATF Championship race on Sandy Hook.

1968

After a blessed career as a civil rights lawyer and children’s policy advocate, Lois Salisbury retired 10 years ago to pursue another passion, tennis. (While at Reed, she learned to play squash. Later, her yen for racquet sports morphed into a love of tennis.) Then, a big challenge came along. She became the cochair of the Tennis Coalition of San Francisco, whose initial undertaking was the complete renovation of the historic public tennis center in Golden Gate Park. Six years later, the new $27 million facility opened in March, built where tennis has been played since 1895, near the Conservatory of Flowers. The convergence of spring, COVID waning, a safe sport, and a stunning new public facility instantly yielded a happy, hopping place. Under the new night lights, the 16-court public, affordable facility is busy every night

until 10:00 p.m. In September, Lois celebrated her 75th birthday among many friends at the tennis center and was surprised and honored by a declaration from San Francisco Mayor London Breed that September 19, 2021 was Lois Salisbury Day in San Francisco! Otherwise, she and her husband Bob live happily on

Lois Salisbury ’68, cochair of the Tennis Coalition of San Francisco, checks the progress of the renovation of the historic public tennis center in Golden Gate Park.

their houseboat in Sausalito, where they moved after decades in San Francisco.

“One day at a time as I wait for the pandemic and its surges to abate!” writes Thomas Weiss. We hear you, Thomas.

1969

Good news or bad, that thou comest in so bluntly?

1970

Alan Ridley qualified to fence (again) in the National Championships and July Challenge in Philadelphia in July 2021. He also immensely enjoyed the recent class reunion. Alan is still interested in discovering ways to reduce and extinguish Reed alumni student debt and hearing from alumni struggling to pay off Reed College student debt.

Fred Zemke (FREDZ) thanks Wee Wily Willy Worrall (WWWWW, the W is silent) ’68 for his class note, and reciprocates with the following: “I still have the colorful robe your friend made (see picture). Since leaving Reed, I got a PhD in mathematics at Claremont Graduate School, then perished after a few years in academia, but acquired a wife (Patricia May English) and adopted her three children from her previous marriage—this has been the best decision of my life. Patty and I moved to Goleta while she completed her PhD at UC Santa Barbara, and I fell back on computers. Along the way I converted to Judaism—the other good decision of my life—the culmination of a process that began with learning Biblical Hebrew at Reed from Simon Parker [religion 1968–75]. After our children grew up, our marriage dissolved, though Patty remains my best friend. In 1996 I joined Oracle as SQL standards representative,

and remain in that position in spite of several periods of total disability from Lyme disease and a back injury. I now have six grandchildren, and currently live in the San Luis Obispo area near my daughter and her two children.”

1971

In 1986, Garrick Beck began a gardening program for children living in the concrete canyons of New York City, with a 12-week stepby-step curriculum for kindergarten through sixth grade. The program is still going, and the curriculum is available as a book. (See Reediana.)

Make a gift to the Class of ’71 Scholarship

1972 50th reunion

Edward Peters backpacked a section of Mt. Rainier’s Wonderland Trail with Jim Hauser MAT ’70, whose friend had won the trail permit lottery. It was physically challenging but most worthwhile.

As training for the trip, Edward walked around Seattle’s Green Lake with Peter Renz ’59 [math 1968–70], who was visiting from Massachusetts.

1973

Karen Greenbaum-Maya writes, “Who needs to be exhorted to change their life?

Life changes on you. My beloved husband of 35 years, Walter Maya, died of lung cancer late in 2018. Not much you can say after that, except that I continue to write poetry. Among other things, I am working on a singable and tonally accurate translation of Schumann’s setting of Heine’s poems, Dichterliebe. During the summer I was accepted into an exhilarating translation workshop led by Robert Hass. He deserves his reputation.”

1974–76

Fred Zemke ’70 celebrates Purim 2008. His elegant robe was made by a friend of Will Worrall ’68.

1977 45th reunion

The end of August at Indian Bar Campground, Mt. Rainier. From left: Jim Hauser MAT ’70, Mary Robinson, Lael Lou, and Edward Peters ’72, who writes, “For Reedies of my era, the appropriate title for this photo is The End of August at the Hotel Ozone.” Photo by trip leader Jane Gill.

The excuse that thou dost make in this delay / Is longer than the tale thou dost excuse.

Is thy news good, or bad? answer to that; / Say either, and I’ll stay the circumstance:

1978–80

Let me be satisfied, is’t good or bad?

1981 Make a gift to the Class of ’81 Scholarship

1982 40th reunion

In the past two years, Friedemann Weidauer and coauthors have published a first- and a second-year college textbook for German with the German publisher Klett under the title Impuls Deutsch (I and II). “Among the pedagogic innovations, it is based on the concept of a flipped classroom (i.e., class time is solely used for interactive activities; the students study

“The journal wanted a head shot, so . . .” writes Karen Greenbaum-Maya ’73.

Reed Magazine december 2021 31

Class Notes and practice everything at home), and it is also meant to shift the focus to topics that might actually interest students, such as climate change, diversity, recycling, postcolonial issues (such as trade), GMOs, student protest movements, and sustainability. In one chapter, we discuss exercise options of diverse groups. We were criticized for having only Caucasian persons featured; the editor failed to see that one of them had Down syndrome and the other was transgender. The books were immediately adopted by about onethird of all German programs in this country.” (See Reediana.)

1983

After a few years of full-time ministry, Sara Nichols is now back in full-time public policy as staff for the Joint Legislative Emergency Management Committee in the California legislature, “which, as fate would have it, has been unable to meet due to the ongoing emergency.

Recently, Russ Haan, Sunny Childs, Harry Mersmann ’82, and our partners gathered in Florence, Oregon to celebrate basically all of us turning 60 in the past year. Time marches on!”

Make a gift to the Class of ’83 Well-Endowed Scholarship

1984–86

What news, what news, in this our tottering state?

1987 35th reunion

In July, Ken Belson returned to Japan, where he lived for 12 years, to cover the Tokyo Olympics for the New York Times sports section. “They were my fourth Olympic Games, and easily the oddest.

Without fans in the seats, the events lacked much of the excitement and color.

32 Reed Magazine december 2021

But the athletics were superb and worth the trip.”

1988

If’t be summer news, / Smile to’t before; if winterly, thou need’st / But keep that countenance still.

1989

After five years in London, Peter Goodman has moved back to the US, settling in the Lower Hudson Valley. He’s still covering the global economy for the New York Times, and has a new book out in January: Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World. (See Reediana.)

1990

Sarah Dougher is delighted to announce the publication of a book called Tick Tock: Essays on Becoming a Parent After 40 (Dottir Press, 2021), in which she has an essay tracing her winding path to parenthood.

“I hope this book can make a connection with some older parents in the Reed world (and beyond),” she writes. A version of the essay, “I Had My First Child at 45. Here’s What I Learned,” ran in the New York Times in September.

1991

Tonio Andrade writes, “In July, I had an opportunity to walk through the Reed campus for the first time in years, accompanied by my wife and three daughters, one of whom says she’d like to go to college in the Pacific Northwest because it’s so cool and rainy there. Maybe she’s changed her mind now, because it was in the 90s that day. But the campus was as beautiful as ever, and as we strolled, I found myself thinking of many friends and acquaintances: Zan Kocher ’90, Jamie Lee ’92, Jonathan Turkanis ’92, Jeff Bradford ’92, and others. Our stay in Portland was too short, and now I’m

back at home in Decatur, Georgia, where I’m relatively happy in an academic sort of way as professor of Chinese and global history at Emory University. My fourth book came out in June and I’m working on a fifth, or trying. It’s hard to focus on academic writing when the world is burning up.”

Sara Levin writes, “I had a great time at our 30-year virtual reunion. While it would have been great to be in our old stomping grounds in person, connecting with classmates all over the country was meaningful and fun. And our special guests Igor Vamos ’90, David Autrey ’89, and Amy Wesselman provided antics, education, and erudition! Here’s to having our 35th in person.” Sara’s been busy during her pandemic life: “My team at United Way has been working hard since March 2020 to get food and rent assistance to families impacted by COVID and the economic crisis. We’ve also created special flexible grants to Black and Indigneous groups hit hardest.

In personal news, my daughter started middle school (in person!) and I’ve joined many others in a newfound (pandemicspurred) baking obsession. Always happy to share with Seattle-area Reedies!”

In addition to serving as a professor of Indian religions and philosophy at Case Western Reserve University, Deepak Sarma is now a cultural consultant for Mattel and Netflix for projects that involve Hinduism and India directly or indirectly. To find out more—and to find out what Deepak says is the best place to spend a day in Cleveland!—search for Deepak’s name with “Netflix” at thedaily. case.edu.

1992 30th reunion

Ay me! what news? why dost thou wring thy hands?

Sarah Dougher ’90 has an essay in Tick Tock: Essays on Becoming a Parent After 40 Deepak Sarma ’91 is now a cultural consultant for Mattel and Netflix.

Khristina Haddad ’92 (left) and Meisha Rosenberg ’93 (right) meet up in Central Park in August.

1993

Renee Nuñez-Kemp ’96 and Andrew welcomed their son Orion Everett Rene Kemp on January 14, 2021.

Meisha Rosenberg, a writer working on a biography for which she received a research fellowship from the Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers, and Khristina H. Haddad ’92, associate professor and chair of political science, Moravian University, enjoyed a Reed reunion in Central Park in the midst of the pandemic.

It’s Rachel Wilch ’04!

And her son! Ernie! say hello from Seattle!

1994

Brittney Corrigan has published a new collection of poetry. (See Reediana.)

1995

Helen Thouless had a busy summer!

She got married to Peet Sasaki; she has a new job as a senior lecturer of primary mathematics at St Mary’s University, Twickenham; and her book The Power of Pattern: Patterning in the Early Years was published. (See Reediana.)

1996

Renee Nuñez-Kemp and Andrew welcomed their son Orion Everett Rene Kemp on January 14, 2021. Orion was born “all natural” at 5:45 a.m., with vital statistics of 8.56 oz and 50 cm. Renee and Andrew recently moved to Jacksonville next to a river and many oak trees. They spent the last two years remodeling and many years searching for their unique house where they plan to raise their children. Renee wasn’t sure she wanted children for most of her life and then she met Andrew and wanted them more than anything in the world! She is very grateful for two healthy pregnancies and two amazing labor/birth experiences, both in her 40s!

1997 25th reunion

I know, by that same eye, there’s some good news.

1998

Andrea Lambert has published a collection of autobiographical personal essays.

(See Reediana.)

1999–2001

What news, then, in your paper?

2002 20th reunion

CJ Evans is the 2021 winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry for his forthcoming book, Lives. CJ is the author of A Penance (New Issues Press) and The Category of Outcast, selected by Terrance Hayes for the Poetry Society of America’s New American Poets chapbook series. He received the Amy Lowell Travelling Scholarship and is the editorial director of Two Lines Press, a publisher of

international literature in translation. He lives in the Bay Area with his wife, Naomi Edelson ’01, and their two awesome kids and cat. (See Reediana.)

Inspired by the Reed math department’s use of calculus textbooks written specifically for Reed, Hannah Robbins has created a unique textbook addressing a need for a one-term linear algebra course—and the title is a math pun!) (See Reediana.)

Melissa (Feineman) Suzuno and Katy Davis went on a brief but momentous road trip from Oakland to the beautiful and aptly named Pleasanton, California, in May 2021 to receive both doses of the COVID vaccine. They celebrated by creating a playlist just for the occasion and look forward to enjoying the benefits of being fully vaccinated. Melissa also reports that, after years of editing written content online, she has edited Continuous Discovery Habits, an actual, physical book! The book offers practical tips for building successful products that customers love. Melissa writes that it was challenging and fun to be involved throughout the process, from providing

developmental feedback on the manuscript to conducting interviews with subject matter experts and making final copy edits. Enthusiastic Amazon reviewers have described the book as “a pageturner” and “a must-read for any product manager.” (See Reediana.)

2003

What say you to a letter from your friends / Of much good news?

2004

Aaron Rabiroff is moving from North Fair Oaks, California, to Valdosta, Georgia, where his wife has accepted a position at Georgia State Valdosta University’s anthropology department. Thanks to the magic of the internet, Aaron will continue to represent clients at his California law firm, while preparing to join a third state bar, while looking to expand the firm to the Southeast. This will be Aaron’s first time south of the MasonDixon Line except for 3 days he spent in Atlanta in the late ’90s, and the summer in law school when he got a Drive-By Truckers CD stuck in his car’s CD player.

Reed Magazine december 2021 33

Class Notes

Celebrating the baptism of Josephine Coyote O’Donnell, left to right: Kate Betcher ’05, mom Adonia Lugo ’05, Josie, dad Ben O’Donnell ’05, and Sarah Lindsey ’05.

Rachel Wilch lives in Seattle, where she works on transportation policy for King County. She and her husband, John Mix, welcomed their son Ernie in 2018.

2005

Clockwise from top left: Ginger Jui ’07, Dan Liu ’08, Jesse Kauppila ’07, and Vicky Zero ’07.

Adonia Lugo and Ben O’Donnell welcomed their daughter, Josephine Coyote O’Donnell, on February 24 this year. Five months in, Josie enthusiastically chews on Reed Magazine, smiles at anybody nearby, and rolls over one way but not the other.

Kate Betcher and Sarah Lindsey happily joined us in Los Angeles to stand as fairy godmothers at Josie’s baptism in June.

Ginger Jui ’07 and Vicky Zero ’07— reunited at last!—in the Snowy Range of Wyoming.

2006

Lend me the letter; let me see what news.

2007 15th reunion

On Thursday, July 1, Brett Holverstott held the inaugural opening for the Figure | Ground Art Gallery in Pioneer Square, Seattle, featuring a solo show

by Dean Fisher. Brett created the gallery with the goal of supporting the worldwide grassroots resurgence in the figurative arts; its long-term mission is to foster a flourishing art culture in our time.

The gallery has a small, beautiful upstairs space overlooking Occidental Avenue, and Brett hopes to make the space available for local alumni events. The show will be rotated every month, with openings on First Thursdays. Brett’s interest in the arts includes learning to sculpt at the Gage Academy and writing art reviews on Medium, and relates back to his experience having an online art gallery through college and, at the age of 19, creating the nonprofit organization the Foundation for the Advancement of Art. Brett is a practicing architect and published writer.

Ginger Jui is the gender-explosive, lactose-intolerant executive director of a bicycle advocacy organization in Oakland, California. Ginger interweaves epic bicycle adventures with building resilient organizations for social justice and sustainability.

Jesse Kauppila is living the dream of climbing/skiing big mountains in the Pacific Northwest. He’s putting his MFA from Carnegie Mellon to good use programming giant robots to make flying cars.

Vicky Zero is an environmental consultant based in Laramie, Wyoming, specializing in habitat conservation plans to support wind energy while protecting endangered bat species. After years of vegetarianism, she now avidly shoots things and eats them.

34 Reed Magazine december 2021

2008

Dan Liu is a historian of science based in Berlin, Germany, and recent recipient of a three-year research grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG). He’s researching the history of lactose intolerance and how adult lactase persistence among dairy pastoralists became the textbook example of gene-culture coevolution.

2009

Come, come; sans compliment, what news abroad?

2010

Anna Evans-Goldstein has been happily unemployed for the last year and a half after being let go from her position at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. She hangs out with her dog and fixes things.

Natalie Sheehan was married to her longtime partner, Allen Blankenship, in a small ceremony in Seattle on July 10, 2021.

2011

Todd Garon has moved to Chicago and now builds podcast studios.

Brett Holverstott ’07 has opened the Figure | Ground Art Gallery in Pioneer Square, Seattle.

Anna EvansGoldstein ’10 hangs out with her dog, not working.

The career of Annie Sui ’12 is definitely in better shape than the floor in this commercial she’s in with JK Simmons!

David Krueger started a job as tenure-track faculty in machine learning at Cambridge this summer.

2012 10th reunion

Annie Sui is an actor and copywriter in LA now. “I’ve got a commercial for an insurance company with Oscar winner (ooh la la) JK Simmons out now. Feels good to have a break a few years in.”

2013

How couldst thou in a mile confound an hour, / And bring thy news so late?

2014

On June 4, a seminal study was published in the journal Science with the author list bookended by two Reedies: Will Voss and Greg Ippolito ’89, a graduate student and research associate professor, respectively, at The University of Texas at Austin. The study, titled “Prevalent, Protective, and Convergent IgG Recognition of SARS-CoV-2 Non-RBD Spike Epitopes,” was the first high-resolution molecular

look at the circulating plasma antibodies generated by SARS-CoV-2, offering the most detailed picture yet of the array of antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 found in people who’ve fully recovered from mild cases of COVID-19. The study also identified a class of “public” antibodies (derived from different individuals but with similar molecular features) directed against the spike protein. The study has important implications for vaccine design and our understanding of the continually evolving immune response to SARS-CoV-2.

Excitingly, NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins wrote about the study on the NIH Director’s Blog. Will and Greg wish to acknowledge the crucial role that Reed played in helping them reach this milestone—directly, by its curriculum which nourished them while students, and indirectly, by alumnus Roger M. Perlmutter ’73, chairman of the Reed College Board of Trustees, through whom their academic lineage in immunology was derived.

2015

On August 3, 2021, Rennie Meyers won the daily Politico Morning Energy Trivia contest. Previous winners of this prestigious contest include assistant secretaries in the Department of Energy and executives in the private and nonprofit sectors. Congratulations, Rennie! Rennie would like to note that she did not submit this class note and that Julia Selker is to blame; that said, yes, she was pleased.

2016

The best news is, that we have safely found / Our king and company; the next, our ship—

2017 5th reunion

Which, but three glasses since, we gave out split—

2018–21

Is tight and yare and bravely rigg’d as when / We first put out to sea.

Reed Magazine december 2021 35

In Memoriam EDITED BY RANDALL BARTON Email bartonr@reed.edu

Historian of the Big Questions

Prof. Edward Barton Segel [history 1973–2011] September 30, 2021, in Portland, Oregon.

Whether the subject was Beethoven or Vietnam, Aristotle or the Cold War, Prof. Ed Segel’s sparkling lectures inspired generations of students. For a remarkable 38 years, from 1973 to 2011, he taught history and humanities at Reed, always prompting his students to consider the Big Questions. His academic domain was European diplomatic history, in particular the relations between the European great powers from the late 18th century to the present. But his passion lay in seeing his students succeed.

“I’m always happy if my students go on to become thoughtful thinkers, PhDs, and academics,” he said. “But what I really want them to do is go out and take over the world.”

Segel grew up in a primarily Jewish 36 Reed Magazine december 2021

neighborhood in inner-city Boston. “Ed was quick to point out that his birthday was on Christmas Day,” remembered Leslie Vickers Jones ’83. “I can still hear him say, ‘And my mother’s name was Mary!’” Having immigrated from London, his mother vividly remembered the coronation of King Edward VII in 1902, when she was a child.

“I think that started his fascination with the British monarchy and the British royal family,” said Prof. Jay Dickson [English]. “His house on Southeast Rural Road had all kinds of royal memorabilia in it—a framed poster announcing the 1947 honeymoon cruise of Princess Elizabeth and Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh; christening spoons to commemorate the marriages of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer and of Prince William and Catherine Middleton. He also had prominently displayed in his living room an

old British tin chocolate box with his great hero, Sir Winston Churchill’s portrait on it. He was an unabashed Anglophile.”

Indeed, Segel hosted an annual Fourth of July barbecue, called “Poor Old George III,” to mourn the secession of the Thirteen Colonies from the British, and some wondered if he didn’t have something of a British accent, perhaps from the year he spent at Oxford.

“Ed seemed to speak with a rhotacism, which made it hard for him to pronounce his r sounds (which thus made it especially difficult for him to give directions to the street he lived on, Rural Road),” Dickson said. “He told me that Barbara Walters grew up in the same primarily Jewish inner Boston neighborhood he did, although they never actually met. I have always thought his seeming rhotacism was like hers and that likely it was due more to their having the

same accent than that they had actual speech impediments.”

Segel graduated from Everett High School in Boston and earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Harvard, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa his junior year. Henry Kissinger was one of his Harvard professors. Between college and graduate school, he did a yearlong fellowship at Oxford University in England.

Segel earned both an MA and a PhD in history from UC Berkeley, where he was mentored by Raymond Sontag, an advocate of a policy of containment of Soviet expansion during the Cold War. As a professor, Segel developed courses on both the Cold War and the Vietnam War, which was particularly personal for him because three of his college classmates were killed in the conflict.

He was appointed to the faculty at UC Berkeley and taught there from 1965 to 1973.

“To put it all in one sentence,” he said, “I didn’t publish, so I perished. In 1972–73 I applied for academic jobs and was very lucky to come to a place like Reed, which does not emphasize publication as much as teaching.”

Beginning at Reed in the fall of ’73, Segel taught history and humanities. His primary academic interests were diplomatic history of the 19th and 20th centuries, European history, and intellectual history in the European mode.

Like his mentor Sontag, he sought to weave the strands of domestic and diplomatic history by entering the mindset of diplomats and the public.

One of “Segel’s Laws” held that all problems are essentially problems of diplomatic history. (A less scholarly law was “Always save room for dessert.”)

He also lectured on the French Revolution, Edmund Burke, Beethoven, Vietnam, and everything in between, taking particular pride in his humanities lectures on Beethoven and Mozart.

A mentor at Reed was Prof. John Tomsich [history 1962–99], whose subtlety of thought and mastery of a broad scope of historical movements Segel strove to match. Both men served long terms as chair of the history department.

“Ed was the ideal professor for humanities, given his broad interests from opera and literature to, of course, history,” said Peter Goodman ’89. “He drew on the entirety of human experience in choosing how to present the texts we confronted, and he encouraged us to use the readings as jumping-off points for the biggest questions that could be asked—questions about justice, tradition, and social progress.”

Segel’s wry sense of humor also endeared him to his students. On election night 2004,

Amanda Waldroupe ’07 watched the returns with friends and went to bed, pretty certain that John Kerry would lose. She awoke the next morning in a state of despair, confirmed that Bush had won the election, and made her way to the 9 a.m. Hum 220 lecture.

“I walked across the campus to the psych auditorium and will always remember how quiet campus was that morning,” she said.

“People were walking to class together but not speaking. It felt like walking through a graveyard.

We took our seats, and Ed stood at the lectern, looking down at his notes. He was about to start lecturing, then he stopped. ‘I know that many of you must be disappointed by last night,’ he said.

‘Sometimes it is good to live inside a bubble.’”

When he was at Berkeley, Segel began seeing a therapist for being gay. “I then believed, like practically everybody else outside of the movement itself, that being gay is in some sense abnormal,” he remembered. He found a psychiatrist who in their first conversation admitted, “I do have trouble accepting homosexuality.”

“If I knew then what I know now, I’d have gotten up and walked out,” he said. “He was giving me a sales job to change. But since I wanted to change, that seemed okay at the time.

Later, I realized it was a very bad therapeutic approach, because he should have been neutral, rather than cheer me on that way. The positive side of that is that after about three years, when I realized that I like myself the way I am and that means liking myself as gay, I didn’t do that because of his urging. I did it the other way round, against his urging. So, in a way, that made my own decision more authentic.”

Segel said he was “more or less” openly gay when he came to Reed. “The openness increased as time went on,” he said. “At first, I was a little nervous about being out on campus, and then I realized that some gay students at Berkeley whom I knew had called up gay friends of theirs at Reed and said, ‘There’s this young guy, Ed Segel, coming up. Say hello to him.’ So, they knew about me before I got here. And then I kept running into them at the gay bars. So much for having a cover. I realized, there’s just no point.”

He recalled that when he arrived at Reed, the 10-member faculty advisory committee had three members who were gay. “They weren’t out in that they didn’t talk about gay issues, but everybody knew, and they knew that everybody knew,” he said. “So, the atmosphere was quite tolerant, quite accepting.”

“Ed was openly gay at a time when this was rather rare in academia,” said Prof. Matt Pearson ’92 [linguistics]. “He was an early patron of the

Portland Gay Men’s Chorus, and an avid faculty supporter of successive generations of queer student groups on campus. In the early years, even in a city like Portland and at a college like Reed, that took guts. Today’s generation of queer Reed faculty owe him a debt of gratitude.”

Prof. Dickson remembered Segel as one of the kindest and most caring teachers at Reed, to whom many gay students came for mentorship and advice. “During a time in the ’70s and ’80s , in particular, where it was not easy to be openly gay, his homosexuality was well known to students and to faculty alike (although he would always speak of it in extremely dignified terms—he would refer to himself winkingly as ‘a gentleman of a certain character’). Gay students in particular knew he was someone to offer advice about the tricky question of negotiating a gay identity in a college where the dominant culture was not only heterosexual, but also sometimes homophobic.”

In addition to being named an honorary lifetime member of the Gay Men’s Chorus, Segel also supported equity groups, including the Right to Privacy PAC, Basic Rights Oregon, the Q Center, and GLAPN. When he retired in 2011, former students, spearheaded by Lucien L. Foster ’95, Nelson Minar ’94, and Behzad Khosrowshahi ’91, established the Ed Segel Scholarship.

“Ed influenced me during my four years at the college and guided me afterwards,” said Lucien, who heads digital partnerships for BNY Mellon.

“That makes a professor very special.”

An interdisciplinary major in history and literature, Lucien also hit it off with Segel philosophically. The two enjoyed occasional nights at the opera, dined out together, and Segel advised Lucien on everything from career moves to personal relationships with girlfriends, both during and after college. “His advice was incredibly valuable, and he continued to be an important player in my life as I went forward,” Lucien said.

Sheldon Yett ’86, a seasoned UN diplomat who heads a mission for UNICEF, had Segel for his thesis adviser, but found in him a lasting friend and mentor. Segel encouraged him to join the Peace Corps. “It’s funny, but somehow the guy walking around campus in a well-tailored suit was the easiest person to talk to,” Sheldon said.

Ed’s only brother, Lawrence Segel, predeceased him. Memorial donations may be made to the Edward B. Segel Student Scholarship Fund at Reed College.

Reed Magazine december 2021 37

In Memoriam

Iconic Professor, Brilliant Mathematician Prof. Thomas Wieting [math 1965–2016] July 19, 2021, in Portland, Oregon.

From the uncountably vast to the minutely infinitesimal, Prof. Tom Wieting roamed the domain of mathematics with unquenchable curiosity, inspiring generations of Reed students through his extraordinary ability to find connections to physics, chemistry, art, and even theology.

Prof. Wieting was renowned for his elegant blackboards and extraordinarily lucid lectures, always delivered without notes. “If I’m not ready to talk without notes, it means I’m not properly prepared,” he once said. “Besides, the pressure to perform actually clarifies my thoughts and appeals to the frustrated actor in me.”

Eloquent in thought, admired for his flawless lectures, and known for his dry humor, Wieting was a brilliant professor who cared deeply about his students. For more than 50 years, he taught an astonishing range of courses and wrote scores of essays on a glittering array of subjects, including complex numbers, real numbers, mathematical physics, the theory of Frobenius, Turing machines, the history of astronomy, space travel, the trials of Galileo, perspective drawing, and the geometry of M.C. Escher. He published a book on chromatic plane ornaments and mentored at least 69 thesis students, many of whom went on to careers in math, physics, or technology.

His Renaissance approach led to a strong connection with the physics department, a stint teaching in Humanities 110, and the MALS program, where his course on the Copernican revolution and trials of Galileo was a perennial favorite.

Born in 1938, he grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and Owensboro, Kentucky, in a devout family whose father directed the local YMCA and whose mother was the church organist. As a young boy, he pondered how it is that shadows form, sparking an interest in light that would reach its apotheosis at Reed.

In 1956, his interest in politics led him to be elected to the Kentucky state Democratic convention, where he served as the youngest delegate. He went to college at Washington and Lee University, where his focus shifted from politics to math when his freshman adviser—taking note of his test scores—said, “You should be taking calculus.” Acting on this advice, Wieting signed up for the class and found his true calling.

He went to graduate school at Harvard, where he was surrounded by sophisticated mathematicians. While he found the context inspiring, he became frustrated with his thesis project on harmonic analysis. Taking a break to shift focus, he accepted a two-year appointment at Reed and 38 Reed Magazine december 2021

six years later earned tenure. He then returned to Harvard to finish his doctorate on a project in ergodic theory. Wieting considered appointments elsewhere, but Reed provided the context he sought—to study broadly without borders— so he decided to return.

“I’ve always preferred the wide perspective,” he explained, “and I think it has served my students well, as I have been able to design special courses and advise on widely varied thesis projects, following their interests.”

“To think about mathematics with Tom Wieting is to journey into a realm of crystalline, unabashedly serious, and inevitably mysterious beauty,” said John Lind ’06. “He does not hound, pamper, showboat, or bore, but rather encourages you to develop your own methods for apprehending truth. I learned from him that a

mathematician can be a stylish and graceful sort of being, and can carry a brilliant sense of humor delivered between the lines with a straight face.”

Wieting was renowned for his extraordinarily lucid lectures. His style made such a deep impression that some of his students formed a Tom Wieting band and set one of his lectures to music.

“I don’t study mathematics simply to solve a combinational problem that seems interesting,” Wieting said. “It’s a study of the purest form of understanding, and the power of description through the metaphors of mathematics is what gives it life. It’s a route, a language toward understanding the world. The central focus in my intellectual life at Reed is that I have sought an understanding of light in the metaphors of mathematics.” He frequently described the beauty of mathematics as “silent music.”

Elegant in voice, Wieting sang tenor for many years in Reed’s Collegium Musicum. His presence throughout campus frequently was preceded by his singing. He recited Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” from memory at Reed’s annual talent show. He was an avid whitewater rafter and navigated many of the great rivers of the American West, including the Deschutes, the Rogue, the Snake, and the Missouri. He introduced many students, faculty, and staff to the

thrill of whitewater through the Gray Fund and private trips.

Wieting was predeceased by his former wife Beth Wieting MALS ’71, who taught piano at the college for several years in the 1970s. He is survived by his long-term partner, Barbara Amen, who retired last year from her role as director of the MALS and Special Programs; his son Aaron Wieting; and his daughter Alexandra Amen.

One of his favorite quotes comes from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: “Gladley wolde he lerne and gladley teche.”

Please direct contributions in his name to the Professor Thomas Wieting Mathematics & Physics Student Fellowship Fund. Contact the development office at development@reed.edu or 503-777-7573 for more information.

Subversive with a Sharp Pen Michael Munk ’56

The week of July 20th, 2021, in Portland.

Historian, journalist, political scientist, and union organizer, Mike led the life of a radical, fighting for social justice in domains both vast and tiny. It was an epiphany he had at Reed that set him on his lifetime quest.

He was born in 1934 in Prague, Czechoslovakia, where he lived with his younger sister, Suzanne, and his parents, Frank and Nadia.

Mike’s father, Prof. Frank Munk [political science 1939–65], managed a chain of department stores in Czechoslovakia and was a member of the Czech National Socialist Party. Soon after German troops invaded the country in 1939, a Czech secret service agent came to Frank’s office and said, “I want to show you a paper.” It was a Gestapo arrest list with Frank’s name near the top. The family escaped Czechoslovakia and came to Portland, where Prof. Arthur Scott [chemistry 1923–79], who was married to Mike’s aunt Vera, helped Frank secure a position as a lecturer in economics at Reed.

Mike came to the U.S. not knowing any English, but remembered one day in kindergarten at Duniway School, when he suddenly understood every word in the song “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.” He grew up pedaling his bike around campus near the family’s home on Woodstock Boulevard and learning to swim in the old outdoor pool.

Frank Munk left Reed after two years to accept a position at UC Berkeley. Wartime in the Bay Area impacted Mike as a child. His father was a neighborhood air raid warden, and Mike attended rallies in Golden Gate Park, where Frank gave speeches for Russian war relief. The Russians would eventually liberate Prague. In 1944, Frank became director of training for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in Washington, D.C., and moved his family to nearby College Park, Maryland, where Mike experienced his first conscious brush with anti-Semitism and racism.

Many in Maryland were nostalgic for a Confederacy they had never joined. When he was 10 or 11 years old, Mike was on a walk with his mother and came across a sign for a new housing development that said “Gentiles Only.”

“I didn’t know what that meant and pointed it out to my mother, who was absolutely shocked,” he recalled. “She picked up a really heavy rock and threw it against the sign with enough force to knock it down. It remains among the strongest memories of my life. Her explanation was something like, ‘That’s a really evil business there.’” It would be many more years before Mike realized his father was Jewish.

In 1946, Frank returned to Reed to teach.

Mike graduated from Lincoln High School, took a job on the assembly line at the Pacific Car and Foundry Company in Renton, Washington, and started at Reed in the fall. He began as a chemistry major, but put off by the exponential

functions in Prof. Louise Rosenbaum’s [math 1940–53] class, he switched to political science.

The fall student body election pitted a Portland chemistry major, Al Levinson ’54, against an international student, Carlos Ogimi ’54, who was known as a leftist. Mike was impressed with Al’s campaign slogan: “Do you want a Reed diploma to be more than an automatic listing on the attorney general’s list of subversive organizations?”

A fellow Czech native who had escaped to Palestine, Gad Levy ’54, challenged Mike. Which of the two candidates, he asked, was more articulate and knowledgeable, and thus, a better representative for Reed students? When Mike agreed Reed Magazine december 2021 39

In Memoriam that Carlos would be better, Gad told him he shouldn’t be afraid to act on his belief.

“I suddenly realized that I had absorbed so much of the McCarthy-era atmosphere that I was intimidated from following my own preference,” Mike said. “That was an epiphany of sorts.”

He began paying more attention to politics and got involved in Focus, a successor to previous leftist student clubs at Reed, which invited speakers to campus, organized debates, and circulated petitions for leftist causes like nuclear disarmament and defense of civil liberties. Mike wrote for the Inquest, a student-run newspaper that took on campus issues. He circulated petitions, urging students to join picket lines for various causes off campus. Their reluctance to become involved indicated to Mike that they were deeply intimidated by McCarthyism.

“Academically, McCarthyism taught us to avoid the dreaded ‘value judgment,’ expressing an opinion based on personal values,” he said, “It all came down to a phrase I remember Reedies declaring much too often: ‘It’s not smart to be political these days.’”

Mike was on a picket line in San Francisco on June 19, 1953, the day Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were electrocuted at Sing Sing Prison in New York, having been convicted of conspiring to pass U.S. atomic secrets to the Soviets.

“That execution made a major impact on me,” Mike said. “I thought it was an act of a protofascist regime. I had been meeting all kinds of people, from rarefied academics to union organizers, who had lost jobs or couldn’t get jobs because of their politics. I became rather militant and made a lot of unwelcome noise on campus about all that.”

He became active in the Oregon Young Democrats, campaigned for the election of Senator Richard Neuberger, organized Oregonians against nuclear testing, and participated in serious discussions at the knotty-pine-paneled coffee shop in the basement of the student union.

A course that impacted him greatly was one on public opinion taught by Prof. Maure Goldschmidt ’30 [political science 1935–81]. “It was a full year of what we would call political behavior from an empirical perspective,” Mike remembered. “I took it in my junior year, followed by Maure’s political theory course in my senior year.

We surveyed some of the more advanced ideas of the political science profession at the time, and when I began teaching, I frequently used that course as a foundation for my own.”

Goldschmidt advised on Mike’s thesis, “Politics in the Press: A Content Analysis of Portland Press Coverage in the 1954 Oregon Senatorial Campaign.” “I hoped to expose the propaganda that we had an objective press,” Mike said, “so I devised an empirical measure of that. I used advertising agency research about the differential attention given by readers to pages and 40 Reed Magazine december 2021

parts of pages and translated that into a formula to multiply by the column inches the papers devoted to each candidate. With that I was able to demonstrate the validity of my hypothesis.

When a summary of my thesis, my first publication, was published by Monroe Sweetland in the Oregon Democrat, almost every newspaper in the state ran an editorial denouncing it.”

Mike became chairman of the Oregon Young Democrats caucus in 1956. “We tried to get them to pass a resolution to urge recognition of China,” he said. “It failed in a very close vote, so the Oregonian reported that Reed students were defeated in their efforts to pass ‘left-wing resolutions.’ My purpose for going into the YDs was to radicalize them. The idea was, let’s see if Young Democrats could do something relevant politically. Could they speak out against McCarthyism? Could they support the recognition of Red China?”

When the radical positions failed, he left the Young Democrats. By the spring of ’58, he was working on his master’s degree at the University of Oregon. After finishing his thesis, he took a trip to San Francisco to visit Erika Zusi ’60, whom he would marry. Having previously worked a summer job as a part-time longshoreman on the Portland waterfront, he stopped in at the ILWU union hall when he got to San Francisco, showed them his white card, and was sent to a warehouse job in the city.

“I learned a lot about working-class radicalism working with longshoremen,” he said. “I was eager to go to work there every day.”

Drafted into the army, Mike served as part of the military occupation in Korea, where he witnessed what U.S. military occupation means to the people who live under it.

“I learned about imperialism firsthand in Korea,” he said. “I saw how desperate the poverty of the people was contrasted with our troops, who lived a much more luxurious life than they had in the States. We had houseboys to do all the housekeeping and details soldiers have to do at home. Even privates could hire a woman and a room permanently in the village across from the base. We were the only people to have reliable electricity, plumbing, PXs, stuff like that.

The contrast was incredible.”

While in the service, Mike wrote about his experiences in Korea using a pseudonym and pontificated about U.S. policies. After his twoyear stint in the army, he earned a PhD from New York University, worked in New York for farm labor advocates, and wrote for a radical newspaper. During the ’60s, sensing that the academic atmosphere had improved for radicals, he joined academia and taught political science at a number of Midwestern and East Coast schools, including Rutgers University. When he retired from Rutgers, he decided to return to Oregon.

“For the first time, I was able to choose where I wanted to live instead of where a job was,” he said. “I started having recurring dreams of the Oregon coast.”

Back in Oregon, he followed his interest, which turned out to be rehabilitating the local left. He wrote a lengthy piece for the Oregon Historical Quarterly about Reed College firing Prof. Stanley Moore [philosophy 1948–54] for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Mike also wrote about the romance between early-20th-century radical writers and activists John Reed and Louise Bryant, beginning with their meeting in Portland in 1915 and ending with Reed’s death in Moscow in 1920. In 2007, he published The Portland Red Guide: Sites & Stories of Our Radical Past, an informal history of the city’s radical, labor, and equal rights struggles since the 19th century.

Written with verve, it brought the legendary characters to life, and Reed and Reedies were mentioned at least 23 times.

Mike served as director of the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission, where he worked to have a bench dedicated to John Reed in Portland’s Washington Park. The Oregonian named him one of Portland’s local literary luminaries.

Mike published extensively, including the article “McCarthyism Laid to Rest?” for Reed Magazine (Spring 2006).

In later years, Mike looked back on that longago election discussion in Foster-Scholz as the turn-around event in his life.

“That debate changed me from a very pragmatic kid, who was concerned that Reed not be seen as deviant or subversive, to one who tried to act deviant from and subversive of what I came to regard as capitalist culture,” he said. “I suddenly understood that being afraid of being in opposition was the end of integrity. If you are constantly worried about how to protect your career, you become part of the dominant system.

Something like that might help explain why I never had children of my own. That debate bred in me the importance of the very simple notion of standing up for what you believe.”

Married five times, twice to Reedies, Mike had no children.

Betty Jean Killman Wozencraft ’51 May 1, 2021, in Cleveland, Ohio.

Betty Jean was born in Portland and majored in math at Reed, where she wrote her thesis, “Arithmetic of PartiallyOrdered Sets,” with Prof.

Phillip W. Carruth [math 1950–51]. She worked as a defense finance and accounting service financial systems specialist. Predeceased by her husband, John Wozencraft, she is survived by her sister, Sylvia Killman, and her five children: John Wozencraft, Dave Wozencraft, Tom Wozencraft, Jean Ornellas-Wozencraft, and Mary Henderson.

Marguerite Hartshorne Udell ’54 Dec 29, 2020, in New York City.

Rita grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Washington, D.C., and graduated from West High School in Madison, Wisconsin, when Senator Joseph McCarthy was a political force.

“Most of the families that had children in West High School were in favor of him,” she remembered. “My family was not. It was a very, very conformist period. Everybody had to think the same things and dress alike and, of course, that was high school, anyway.”

She studied art at Washington University in St. Louis, but realized she wanted a deeper intellectual experience. Somebody recommended that she try Reed, and her parents were all for it.

Rita estimated there were about 600 students on campus when she arrived at Reed.

“It was really small, and you felt that there was plenty of room for everybody,” she remembered.

“The buildings were half empty. It was wonderful.

You didn’t feel that you were competing for space with anyone. I was very happy to get there because there didn’t seem to be any attempt by anybody to do anything the way anybody else was doing it. Everybody was behaving totally individually, and walking around by themselves and wearing funny clothes and not trying to be stylish. It was a terrific liberation for me.”

Overjoyed to discover there were no cliques at Reed and no social pecking order, she attended on-campus dances and art movies and thrilled to the classical music students played and the Picasso and Braque reproductions they hung on their walls.

“Hanging around the coffee shop was a very major part of my social life,” she said. “I spent most of my day in the coffee shop if I possibly could. I smoked and had coffee and took tests there. They let us go sit in the coffee shop and take our tests. It was wonderful. Thus Reed, a place of spiritual sustenance and deliverance from past evils, at times seemed like heaven.”

To earn money for board, she was a “hasher,” waiting tables at dinner. She got into folk dancing, sang the role of Mabel in Pirates of Penzance, and met Richard Udell ’55. She wrote her thesis, “The Impermeable Bubble,” advised by Prof. Kaspar Locher [German 1950–88].

While Rita was at graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, Richard proposed by mail, and they married the summer after he graduated. She completed two semesters of graduate

work in English literature before deciding she didn’t want to teach.

She raised two sons, got a master’s degree in urban planning from Hunter College, and worked as a planner at the New York City Department of City Planning for eight years. They moved to Florida for Rich’s career; there Rita began doing freelance editorial work, which she continued after their return to New York. She sang in a number of choruses and small ensembles, and she and Richard enjoyed singing Renaissance music. She was survived by her two sons, Benjamin and Edward, and by Richard, who died earlier this year. They were both faithful supporters of Reed.

HONOR THEIR

Memory IN THE SPIRIT OF REED

Richard Udell ’55 May 17, 2021, in New York City.

Richard grew up in a wealthy New York family. His grandfather had founded Max Udell Sons & Co., one of the largest manufacturers of men’s clothing in the world.

“My father was wealthy, my mother was beautiful, and that’s a combination that often goes together,” Rich said. He loved playing basketball and handball, and attended progressive private schools, including the City and Country School and Elisabeth Irwin.

While considering which college to go to, Rich wrote to the U.S. Department of Education and asked for a list of intellectual schools far from New York City. The list he got back included Reed, and he sent a letter to the college asking for more information. He received an admissions piece called “I Choose Reed,” written by Reed students, and liked what he saw. “It seemed like it was the perfect place for me,” he said. “It was just like the high school I was going to, intellectual, liberal, and progressive in its outlook. It also seemed to be highly student oriented. In other words, students had a lot to do with what happened.”

Philosophy classes with philosophy professors Stanley Moore [1948–54] and Marvin Levich [1953–94] honed his ability to analyze and understand arguments. “They directly affected my legal career by enhancing my ability to analyze arguments, identify assumptions, etc.,” Rich said. He also gained a lifelong interest in English history after studying with Prof. Richard Jones [history 1941–86].

“Jones was a wonderful teacher,” Rich remembered. “He would have us read various historical accounts of the same thing and analyze why they were different and what their sources were.”

At Reed, Rich was an avid biker, played on the intramural basketball team, and wrote for the Quest, including a sports column and a weekly column about the student council. He loved to sing, and one of his most memorable experiences was performing in the campus production of The

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In Memoriam Pirates of Penzance. The other was meeting Rita Hartshorne ’54, whom he married after graduation. He wrote his thesis, “Edward Hyde and Reform,” advised by Profs. Walter Weir [philosophy 1952–56] and Richard Jones [history 1941–86].

Richard went on to law school at the University of Pennsylvania and worked as chief counsel for various record companies, publishers, and conglomerates, including Gulf + Western (Simon & Schuster), Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, and the McGraw-Hill Educational Publishing Group.

Rich is survived by his sons, Benjamin and Edward. Rita died shortly before him; they were both faithful supporters of Reed.

Ruth Oser Newman ’55

April 25, 2021, in Sunnyvale, California.

Ruthie was born in Berkeley, California. The family moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and then, in 1935, to the Soviet Union. Two years later, they fled the threat of Stalin’s Great Purge, taking refuge with Ruthie’s grandparents in Tel Aviv. In 1938, they returned to Berkeley, where Ruthie met Dirk Newman at Garfield Junior High. They began dating in high school and married in 1954, following his graduation from UC Berkeley. The following year, Ruthie completed her BA degree at Reed, having written her thesis, “An Analysis of Louis MacNeice’s Ten Burnt Offerings,” advised by Prof. Kenneth Hanson [English 1954–86]. She credited Reed for providing an intellectual foundation that set the course for her work as a teacher, and for establishing her enthusiasm for art, music, philosophy, poetr y, and literature.

After graduating from Reed, she joined Dirk, who was working as an engineer at Boeing. They raised two children, Keith and Robin, at their home on Mercer Island. Passionate about art, Ruthie became a volunteer docent at the Seattle Art Museum and took ceramic classes at the University of Washington, the Archie Bray Foundation, and Pottery Northwest under such influential instructors as Robert Sperry, Ken Ferguson, and Dave Shaner.

In the ’60s, she began teaching English, art, photography, ceramics, and humanities at Issaquah High School and then moved to Mercer Island High School, where she taught until retiring in 2002. Even when teaching, Ruthie found time to work on her ceramic pottery and sculpture in the private studio Dirk built for her. She loved exploring the world and creating photos for her art history lectures, 42 Reed Magazine december 2021

often traveling with students and former students, leading marathon-paced itineraries.

Having spent most of her adult life on Mercer Island, Ruthie retired to Orcas Island, where she reveled in the beauty of the island, her book club, and hosting visitors at her oceanfront home. Eventually she moved back to the Bay Area, where her surviving child, Keith, and his family could better attend to her needs and allow time with her great-grandchildren. She was a streadfast supporter of Reed.

career practicing law for Sideman & Bancroft in San Francisco.

Roy met Pamela Martin when they were both students at UC Berkeley. They married in 1963, participated in antiwar protests, traveled extensively, and raised four children. She survives him, as do their four sons, Scot, Daniel, Stephen, and Lark.

Roy Fisher Doolan ’58

August 1, 2021, in Berkeley, California, of vascular dementia.

Born in Manila, the Philippines, as a youngster Roy swam with the turtles in the Pacific Ocean. This idyllic life came to an abrupt halt with the bombing of Pearl Harbor when he was five years old. His life of privilege was suddenly transformed when he and his parents were taken to Santo Tomas Internment Camp, a prison camp run by the Japanese military.

Roy and his mother survived for two years in a large classroom packed with other women and children before being allowed to relocate to a scrap-wood shanty his father built, where the family lived for the remaining year of internment. The camp was liberated by General Douglas MacArthur’s troops on February 3, 1945, a day Roy’s family always celebrated as Liberation Day. Those three years of internment, from ages five to eight, were the subject of Roy’s memoir, My Life in a Japanese Prison Camp During World War II, written after he retired. An active member of the Civilian Ex-Prisoners of War organization, he cherished long-term friendships with his fellow internees and returned to the Philippines several times, including in 2015 to celebrate the 70th anniversary of his liberation.

When they returned to the United States, Roy and his parents settled in Healdsburg, California, where he graduated from high school.

He earned a bachelor’s degree from Reed and wrote his thesis, “Inter- and Intra-Industry Effects of Credit Controls on Housing,” with Prof. Arthur Leigh [economics 1945–88].

He earned an MBA from Cornell University, a law degree from Boalt Hall, UC Berkeley; completed a fellowship at Stanford University; and earned a master’s of tax law from Golden Gate University.

Roy worked as a CPA and as an attorney with a focus on estate and gift tax. For much of his career, he arbitrated cases for the appeals division of the IRS, taught classes in tax law, and was a union representative for the National Treasury Employees Union. He finished his

Mildred Howe ’58 May 21, 2021, in Portland.

In the topsy-turvy ’70s, Millie departed academia to open Indigine, one of Portland’s first restaurants focused on indigenous ingredients.

It quickly earned a reputation for being the hardest place in town to get a reservation.

Millie grew up in New Mexico and Arizona and graduated from high school in Phoenix.

At Reed, she wrote her thesis, “Capital Punishment: A Study of Opinions and Personality,” advised by Prof. Maure Goldschmidt [political science 1935–81]. Two professors made lasting impressions on her. Vera Krivoshein [Russian 1949–72] instilled a fascination with Russia, and Lloyd Reynolds [art and English 1929–69] imparted a love of calligraphy. For the rest of her life, Millie wrote with a calligraphy pen, including the menus at Indigine.

She went on to get a master’s degree in economics from Stanford University, but a long-unfinished chapter of her dissertation prevented her from receiving a doctorate from UC Berkeley. In addition to economics, Millie had a keen interest in Russia. During the early ’60s, she traveled in the Soviet Union and spent time working in Italy with an Italian economist and at Cambridge in England with Ajit Singh, an economist she met in the Berkeley School of Economics.

Millie returned to Reed as a professor of economics for two years from 1968 to 1970, days of tumult, both on America’s streets and at Reed. She left the college with a group of former faculty and students to create the Learning Community, an experimental institution of higher education. Having received a

$50,000 grant from the Carnegie Foundation and satellite accreditation from Antioch College, the Learning Community began formal operation in a dozen houses in Portland’s Irvington neighborhood during the summer of 1970.

To help raise funds, the community opened a restaurant downtown. The Learning Community foundered; in 1973 most of the houses were sold and the community disbanded.

Millie and her partner, former Reed Prof.

Howard Waskow [English 1964–72], had been very involved with the Learning Community restaurant, and when it closed, they opened a restaurant near Southeast 37th Avenue and Division Street. The space, basically a shack that had been a lawn mower repair shop, was christened Indigine. It featured a communal table that sat 16, and, in addition to Sunday brunch, offered two fixed-price dinner seatings on both Friday and Saturday. Tables were booked a year in advance and cancellations were unheard of.

At least one divorce settlement stipulated who would be awarded the Indigine reservations.

“In the beginning,” Millie recalled, “we offered four courses, including what became our signature soufflé—for $7.50.”

“Indigine became a cultural statement among those Portlanders who enjoyed adventurous eating coupled with a certain sense of exclusivity,” Matt Kramer ’73 wrote in Northwest Magazine. “It was a matter of Lucullan indulgence: the setting . . . was monastically austere. The atmosphere was and is carried by the patrons themselves. Getting a table at Indigine in the mid- to late ’70s was the most difficult feat in town.”

In addition to having a quick mind, insightful politics, and a love of teaching, Millie was also a terrific cook, a James Beard acolyte who made everything from scratch. She was a local seafood evangelist, gathered the provisions for her restaurant in the mornings, prepared them in the afternoons, and was always finding new ways of offering her innovative cooking to her fans. Her giant cinnamon rolls were made from a sourdough starter she nursed along for decades.

The menu circled the globe, offering everything from German pancakes to huevos rancheros. As a student at UC Berkeley, Millie had become friends with Gopalan Shyamala, the mother of Vice President Kamala Harris, and learned to cook and appreciate East Indian food. The Saturday evening East Indian feast was part of the Indigine legend. Millie’s love of Russia was reflected in the “Khrushchev’s Special,” a tempting plate of blini, gravlax, sour cream, caviar, and pickles.

The restaurant went through phases. For a time, it was open only for weekend brunch and takeout. In 1983, it was expanded to 10 tables and instituted a split menu, with threecourse, simple suppers on weeknights and the legendary East Indian feast on Saturday.

Though it was something of a one-woman show, Millie had as many as 10 part-time employees and was only rarely present during the dinner hour. Having spent the day doing the marketing and basic preparations, she left the final touches to her assistants.

“We called it the finishing school because Millie employed so many Reedies,” said Stacy Lee Fletcher, who worked with Millie as her sous chef and cared for her in her last years.

Indigine closed its doors in 1999.

Comparing her life as a professor with that of being a restaurateur, Millie responded, “Running this restaurant is infinitely more challenging. There is an intellectual rigor. With cooking it’s a matter of sequence, of knowing your priorities. Classicism, or whatever one’s training, it’s crippling. It doesn’t encourage innovation. I think that most people can’t break free from it. I believe that this applies to cooking as well.”

Robert E. Myers ’60

July 8, 2021, in Santa Rosa, California.

Born in Los Angeles, California, Bob excelled in school and sports. He was a starting lineman on Piedmont High’s legendary 1941 football team and in the high school’s hall of fame.

His nascent college career was interrupted

by World War II. After graduating from the California Maritime Academy, Bob served in the merchant marine until the war ended.

A lifelong learner and teacher, Bob earned a bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley, a master’s degree from Reed, and an EdD from the University of Georgia. In 1953, Bob discovered his true calling—as an elementary teacher—and met Patricia Anne Tazer, his wife of nearly 65 years. He taught at elementary schools and at Augsburg College, the University of Oregon, the University of Victoria, and the University of Portland. His adviser at the University of Georgia, E. Paul Torrance, remarked that Bob elevated teaching to an art, especially when it came to encouraging his students’ creativity.

A devoted mentor and friend to his students.

Bob wrote more than 50 books on creativity in education and pioneered the use of Idea Books in the classroom. He won the Outstanding Book award from Pi Lambda Theta for Creative Learning and Teaching, and the Golden Eagle from the Council on International Nontheatrical Events for his film Feather in 1973.

Bob was an avid sports fan, loved music, and enjoyed exploring the Oregon and California coastlines. He is survived by his wife, Pat, and his children, Kathleen McCafferty, Edward Myers, Margaret Myers, Hal Myers, and Karen Myers.

William Bilderback ’61

May 19, 2020, in Portland, Oregon, at home.

The son of Dr. J.B. Bilderback, founder of Doernbecher Hospital for Children in Portland, Bill followed his older sister, Carolyn Bilderback ’38, to Reed. He was a student of Prof. Richard Jones [history 1941–86], who instilled in him a love of English history and history in general, sparking an affection for Reed that never waned.

He wrote his thesis, “The Cotton Whigs of Massachusetts: A Conservative Reaction to the Slavery Crisis,” advised by Prof. David Tyack [education and history 1959–69].

An excellent example of the value and openness of a Reed education, Bill was a Burkean conservative in a liberal environment. His devotion to history was evident throughout his life.

He received a PhD in history from the University of Washington with a dissertation on the American Communist Party of World War II. He was always interested in “the big three”—Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin—and his love of Churchill led him into the English archives in Manchester hoping to find evidence that Churchill did not sacrifice Russian prisoners of war to Stalin’s bloody retaliation.

He began his teaching career at Southern Oregon College and taught at Boise State, Oregon State, and Portland State universities. Early in his career, Bill showed his love of England and Shakespeare by directing a college production of Richard III. He loved libraries, any library, including Reed’s, the University of Washington’s, and the Hollywood Public Library in Portland. He was a steadfast suporter of Reed.

He is survived by Laura, his wife of 50 years; son, Eric; and daughter, Suzanne.

Mary Jane Robertson ’61 June 30, 2021, in West Palm Beach, Florida, following a series of strokes.

At Reed, Mary Jane majored in physics and wrote her thesis, “Thermoelectric Power in Silver Halides,” with Prof. Roland Hanson [physics 1960–63]. Among the lifelong friends she made at Reed were Linda Elmlund Mahoney ’61 and Susan Palo ’62. Mary Jane loved studying calligraphy with Prof. Lloyd Reynolds [art and English 1929–69] and for the rest of her life wrote her signature in an elegant chancery cursive.

She worked as a computer programmer in a number of California cities and Phoenix, Arizona, before finally settling in Key West, Florida, where Reed Magazine december 2021 43

In Memoriam she was captivated by the tropical climate and raffish bohemianism. She had for a time operated an independent bookstore in Detroit, and in Key West, Mary Jane worked in a bookstore, where she met and befriended the local clientele and many of the store’s visiting authors. Until the end, she made a weekly trek to the library, always returning with an armful of books. She is survived by her brother, Harry Robertson ’69.

Kenneth Kipnis ’65

August 26, 2021, in Portland.

A philosopher and medical ethicist, Kenneth forged a career as a selfdescribed “field ethicist” in the Socratic tradition.

He worked with professionals across a wide variety of disciplines— medicine, law, and public health—to apply philosophical principles to complex moral issues.

For more than 40 years, Ken systematically applied principles of ethics to challenging moral questions faced by professionals in law, medicine, nursing, early childhood education, criminal justice, and the military. Seeking out and attracting seemingly intractable ethical problems, he made his life’s work about determining what the study of philosophy had to offer those in profound ethical distress. He contributed important scholarship to such topics as triage during pandemics and natural disasters; the status of aborted fetuses showing signs of life at delivery; the treatment of infants born with ambiguous genitalia; the nature of brain death; doctor-parent decision-making for infants in the NICU; medical care in prisons and prisoners’ consent to medical experimentation; and petitions for the sterilization of mentally incapacitated adults who were wards of the state of Hawaii, among others.

He was born in New York City and went to high school in Teaneck, New Jersey, where he was drawn to philosophy and ethics. At Reed, he wrote his thesis, “What Ought to Be Done?” with Prof. Marvin Levich [philosophy 1953–94] advising. Between his junior and senior years, Ken participated in the 1964 Freedom Summer Project in Mississippi, registering disenfranchised Black voters and teaching at a Greenville, Mississippi, Freedom School.

He received an MA from the University of Chicago and a PhD from Brandeis University, and studied at the University of Chicago Law School as a postdoctoral student at large.

Ken discovered a love of teaching, both at the Freedom School and while at Brandeis, where he taught at an experimental school.

At Purdue University and Lake Forest College he taught in the philosophy departments before joining the faculty at the University of Hawaii at 44 Reed Magazine december 2021

Manoa in 1979, where he remained for 37 years, serving as department head for several years.

During his sabbatical years, he had appointments at the American Medical Association in Chicago, the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, and the College of Charleston.

In addition to publishing several books and dozens of articles in professional journals, he helped to create codes of ethics, served on boards of organizations and hospital ethics committees, provided expert testimony in court cases, and helped develop language for several laws adopted in Hawaii.

After living in Hawaii for several decades, Ken returned with his wife, Leanne, to Portland, where he enjoyed frequenting the famed movie theaters and visiting the campus. He was a member of the Northeast Village PDX, where he contributed to discussions about aging in the community and shared his enthusiastic reflections on books and movies.

One of his most satisfying experiences was being a good father. He challenged his son Adam to think critically and independently and to question authority. In his role as a partner and spouse, Ken shared more than 25 years of deep love and playful banter with Leanne.

He lived life with gusto and enthusiasm, describing himself as a “binge learner,” and was voraciously curious about everything and everyone. A reader, writer, collector of practical gadgets, and lover of film and music, Ken was an accomplished 12-string guitarist. In the early ’60s, he studied guitar with Rev. Gary Davis and mastered the Piedmont blues style; he also played in a jug band while at Reed College. In later years, his interest in folk tradition extended to contra dancing.

Ken is survived by his wife, Leanne; son Adam Smith-Kipnis; and brothers, Robert and Harvey. He described Reed as “the perfect place for an extended intellectual bender.” Donations to financial aid in his memory can be made at giving.reed.edu.

Robert Shimabukuro ’67

March 29, 2021, in Seattle, Washington, of natural causes.

As a child growing up in Maui, Bob’s life was ruled by asthma. The illness kept him out of school for nearly half of each year. When his congestion got bad, his parents or sister would rub his back to provide relief, and as they massaged and talked, he would listen.

“My mother would sing, my dad lectured me on Marx and Hegel, my sister talked about how the world treats women,” he remembered.

His father, who worked as a laborer, saw much of life in terms of the rich versus the poor. A union activist, he was on the board of

directors of the Hawaii Star, an activist community newspaper that made Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s list of subversive publications in the 1950s.

Bob watched as his mother washed the clothes of her seven children by hand. When breathing became exhausting, he’d sit and dream he was somebody else, somewhere else. For the rest of his life, he found refuge in just sitting and staring at beautiful scenery.

Curious about the rest of the world, Bob chose to go to college at Reed. He wrote his thesis, “Charles Sanders Peirce: The Theory of Meaning,” advised by Prof. Bonnie H. Garlan [philosophy 1965–68], and became involved with woodworking while working on theatre sets at Reed.

He married, had a daughter, and worked assorted odd jobs on both coasts, including plumbing, wiring, and remodeling. Then he took a job in a Portland furniture shop and learned enough about furniture design to open his own shop, Shimabukuro Distinct Furniture. Bob’s handcrafted tables, chairs, and breakfronts were prized for their beauty and restrained refinement.

For restaurateur Michael Vidor, he converted a storefront in Southeast Portland into an inviting neighborhood sushi-yakitori bar named Tanuki.

The rustic decor, with its fine-grained high-gloss wood, gave the restaurant the feeling of an old Japanese village. Bob also cooked in the restaurant twice a week.

The end of his marriage sparked a difficult period. Bob isolated himself for nearly four years, working in his shop except for trips to the hardware store and lumberyard. His work was featured in West Greets East, a selection of pieces by Northwest Japanese American artists in honor of the opening of the Japan-American Conference in Portland in 1985. His wooden boxes were displayed at the White Bird Gallery in Cannon Beach.

In 1987, Bob moved to Los Angeles, where he wrote a column for the Pacific Citizen, the national newspaper of the Japanese American Citizens League. One of his readers was a San Franciscan named Alice Ito. The two visited back and forth and discovered they enjoyed a shared perspective. They moved to Seattle, Alice’s hometown, and married in 1988. Bob rented a studio space in Pioneer Square and began crafting fine furniture. “He used to joke that he made the kind of furniture that we couldn’t afford,” Ito said.

Bob also worked as an editor and columnist for the International Examiner newspaper, where he advocated for Seattle’s marginalized communities. Ron Chew, an editor at the paper, remembered Bob as “a very low-key kind of person—a bit of a philosopher, a little bit of a dreamer, a social activist, a little bit of an artist, all wrapped up in one.”

J.K. Yamamoto, another coworker, enjoyed discussing pop culture with Bob. “He had a different take on movies,” Yamamoto said. “In Ghostbusters, he saw no reason to chase down ghosts that ‘weren’t doing a damn thing.’”

For more than three decades he had an enormous impact on the Japanese American community of Seattle. Bob’s column, first called “Bull Session” and later renamed “Fo’ Real,” often explored social issues that featured bits and pieces of his family’s stories. He wrote about ads that offended Asian Americans, national politics, the arts, baseball, racial intolerance, violence, and his brother Sam’s battle with AIDS. After Sam’s death, Bob founded and was executive director of the Asian Pacific AIDS Council.

“We wouldn’t be very happy or productive people if we weren’t pursuing activities and goals that really mean something for ourselves and other people,” he said.

Bob worked with Chew to create the Executive Order 9066: 50 Years Before and 50 Years After exhibit at Seattle’s Wing Luke Museum. Drawing more than 10,000 visitors in six months and raising $150,000 for the struggling museum, the exhibit exposed a dark chapter in American history in harrowing detail. Bob hand built a recreation of incarceration camp living quarters.

He also wrote a book examining the issues of redress and reparations for those who were incarcerated, based on hundreds of interviews.

Born in Seattle: The Campaign for Japanese American Redress was published in 2001 by the University of Washington Press.

“A lot of people nationally don’t realize that the redress movement, really the impetus and the energy, was born here in Seattle,” Chew said.

“And he’s the one person who documented it.”

In 1994, Bob and Alice welcomed a son, Zenwa Toshio Ito Shimabukuro.

Bob turned in his last column the day before his death. He is survived by his wife, Alice Ito; daughter, Mira; and son, Zenwa.

Alan Lewis ’68

January 19, 2020, in Salem Oregon, from liver complications.

Born in Chicago, Illinois, Alan enlisted in the U.S. Coast Guard after high school. Upon finishing his enlistment, he moved to Oregon and attended Reed, where he met Sandra Lyons, whom he married in 1965.

Some serious car problems prompted Alan to

learn how to fix his own car, starting him down a path that would define his livelihood for the rest of his life. After moving to Lincoln City, Oregon, in the early ’70s, Alan and Sandy ran a series of businesses, including the Taft Texaco station, Lincoln Auto Supply & Machine Shop, and a location in Oceanlake.

Alan had a great sense of humor and an interest in science and science fiction. He filled an entire room in his house with science fiction magazines from the ’50s and ’60s. Sandra died a few weeks prior to Allan, who was also predeceased by his sons, Matthew and Benjamin. His children Frank and Christine survive him, as does his brother Pete.

Calvin Freeman ’69

November 2020, in Elk Grove, California.

In the late ’60s, Calvin was one of the student leaders at Reed confronting what would come to be known as systemic racism. His participation in the Black Student Union helped change the dialogue about race at Reed. When he looked back at those days, he said, “On one hand . . . the failure of Reed to really recognize and embrace diversity and cultural studies and even allow the hint of a multicultural perspective in its academics was a major disappointment. Balanced against that are people I’ve remembered and loved my entire life . . . and memories and experiences that were hugely formative in where I am now and who I am now. Reed absolutely remains a part of me.”

His family placed a high value on education when he was growing up in St. Louis. Calvin’s mother worked as an account clerk for the telephone company, and his father, who had gone to college, worked for the post office. His grandmother, also a college graduate, was the first Black social worker supervisor in the state of Missouri. His parents divorced when he was a year old, but as both sides of his family attended the same Lutheran church, he maintained close contact with them.

Calvin was an assertive learner who was serious about school. In the fourth grade, his teacher gave him the fifth-grade history book to read. “Until I got to high school,” he said, “I was the student that every teacher loved to have in the classroom.”

He started out in segregated schools, but by the time Calvin was in the sixth grade, school integration had begun in St. Louis and he was moved into a gifted program.

“For the first time, we had white teachers who, for the first time, had Black students in their classes,” he recalled. “I had one teacher who viewed me as arrogant. Another viewed me as weird. A third one really got me. And then in high school, the same kind of mix.”

He went to two different high schools; the second was a new school and Calvin was in its first graduating class. A Black guidance counselor suggested that Calvin consider Reed and arranged an interview for him with an admission

Calvin Freeman ’69, front-left

officer. It was the beginning of affirmative action, and students like Calvin were in demand.

“I knew absolutely nothing about Reed, except that it had a terrific academic reputation, people folk danced and had intellectual discussions in the coffee shop,” he said. “But it was totally uncharted territory. I’d never been farther west than Jefferson City, Missouri, and it was a chance to see the Pacific Ocean.”

He arrived at Reed determined to major in physics, but his St. Louis public school education had not prepared him for the math and science required to succeed in undergraduate physics.

His sophomore year, he switched majors to economics, with Prof. Art Leigh [economics 1945–88] as his adviser.

“I fell totally in love with economics,” Calvin said. “The analytical tools that economists claim to have, the use of math in it, the rationality of it in terms of a systemic approach to a field, were just very attractive. And I wound up working for Art Leigh as a reader because of his vision impairment. I read articles, papers, and other things into a tape recorder. Can you think of a better way to make sure that a student reads the material?”

With Leigh advising, Calvin wrote his thesis, “A Redefinition of U.S. Balance of Payments.”

He played basketball and hosted The Night Beat Show, a late-night radio show on Reed station KRRC, with his best friend, Joe Hudson ’69. They spun jazz, R&B, and Motown records and did comedy sketches. Calvin’s calm demeanor, good sense of humor, and ability to hold his own in intellectual discussions earned him many friends on campus. By the end of his first semester, he believed he was well integrated into the school.

Prior to 1964, only two Black students had Reed Magazine december 2021 45

In Memoriam ever graduated from Reed. During Calvin’s first year there were eight Black students; by his junior year there were 38. The growing Black population on campus profoundly changed his social life as well as his academic and political outlook.

“When there was a critical mass of Black students, then our socializing tended to be with other Black students,” he said. “Not exclusively by any means, but much more of a bonding which, to white students, and maybe objectively true, there were barriers to entry and interaction, and feelings of being left out. It created a different vibe on the campus that hadn’t been there before.”

Nonviolent civil rights protests that had begun in the South in the ’50s and ’60s had become more militant by the late ’60s, especially following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. The Black Panthers had a small but active chapter in Portland, and other groups, like the Students for a Democratic Society, were advocating militancy versus peaceful means to create important change.

“That same kind of transition was happening on campus,” Calvin remembered, “especially when more politically sophisticated students generally, and especially more politically sophisticated Black students, came on campus. The tone changed to one of more activism and more demand for change on the campus in the curriculum, in the faculty, and in the student body.”

In 1967, Black students at Reed established a Black Student Union to call attention to the lack of culturally relevant studies on campus, the lack of Black faculty, and what they perceived as Reed’s reluctance to engage with what was happening in the outside world. Calvin served as the BSU’s first president.

Things heated up the next year following the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert Kennedy, the Tet Offensive and escalation of the war in Vietnam, and the election of Richard Nixon as president.

“It was absolutely the most tumultuous year of my life up to that point politically and socially,” Calvin said. “And in that year the Black Student Union took a decidedly more activist turn. I would say most of us, including myself, were fairly politically naïve in terms of mounting a movement and an action-based strategy for change. In my senior year, new students coming in brought more expertise in that area. Black studies was definitely early on the list of things we wanted to address.”

Prepared for stronger action than the dialogue engaged in the previous year, the BSU developed a concept paper on what Black studies should look like and ultimately staged a sit-in on the second floor of Eliot Hall, which ended peacefully after seven days. It resulted in funding for a Black studies center. But by 1975, that funding ended.

46 Reed Magazine december 2021

“The concept of racial unity was shocking to Reed at that time,” Calvin said, “and the takeover was also our way of staying linked to the broader African American community, notwithstanding how isolating Reed could be. I think it was a galvanizing event that provided some basic training in activism that we have carried forward through our lives—that part was a win. In terms of lasting change at Reed, no.”

After earning his MAT degree at Reed, Calvin took a job in educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin.

“I found that the field of public education is one of the most difficult and bankrupt fields to navigate and I fled from it into public health,” he said. After doing some consulting work, he wound up in Oakland, California, as an evaluator for California’s regional medical programs.

He then coordinated the state’s hypertension control program and became the head of disaster medical preparedness for the state. Calvin was the first chief of the Office of Multicultural Health in the state’s Department of Health Services, spent time at the California Endowment, and finally did consulting work.

Looking back to his years at Reed, Calvin said, “The Reed brand stays with you your entire life, and it’s a different kind of brand.” People might be impressed with graduates of Ivy League schools, he acknowledged, but wherever he went people were impressed with his having gone to Reed. “You went to Reed? How’d you do that?” they’d ask.

“That’s been immensely useful career-wise,” he said. “It opens doors and opens attitudes towards you in ways that few other academic brands can do.”

Calvin is survived by his wife, SueAnn, and his son, Yusef Edward Freeman. He was a faithful supporter of Reed.

Andrea Ireland Stapley ’69 June 1, 2021, in La Mesa, California.

When Andrea walked across the stage at Reed to receive her diploma, the waterfowl in the canyon burst out in a chorus of quacks and peeps. “I felt that Nature was applauding my success!” she said.

She wrote her thesis, “Andre Gide: Sublime Style,” advised by Prof. George Mulford [French 1968–71]. With sublime style, she posed as a centerfold for the Quest and participated in a film about Prof. James Webb [literature 1965– 71], in which cast members played themselves.

The film received an award at the Bellingham (Washington) Film Festival and was exhibited at dozens of colleges following its 1969 debut. When Andrea attended a psychedelic drugs symposium on campus, Timothy Leary singled her out and inquired about her sexual

experiences on LSD. “They’re blue,” she replied, to hoots of laughter.

While at Reed, a fellow student gave her a life reading with cards. Andrea soon discovered she had a talent for reading tarot cards. After graduating, she often entertained at parties, doing card readings as “Madame O.” “My years at Reed were the happiest of my life,” Andrea said. “Two things I learned at Reed have formed my life: unstructured independent study and the Honor Principle.”

She studied batik, jewelry, and weaving at Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico, and then worked in an interior design and craft studio. Upon deciding to pursue a modeling and acting career, Andrea moved to Hollywood and studied with acting coach Lee Strasberg, worked as a bunny at the Playboy Club in Century City, and picked up modeling and acting jobs on the side.

The tragic death of her brother, Kim Stapley ’68, drove her into a deep depression. She moved back to Arizona, where she worked as a legal secretary. After returning to Los Angeles, she did card readings and worked as a Vedic astrology healer and private counselor at several new age bookstores in Los Angeles.

“Richard Ireland, known as the psychic to the stars, initiated me as a professional after I read the cards for him in the early ’70s,” Andrea recalled. “From then on my work just snowballed.

I loved every minute of it!”

Marc Lieberman ’70

August 2, 2021, in San Francisco, California, of prostate cancer.

As a “Jewish Buddhist” ophthalmologist, Marc brought sight back to thousands of Tibetans stricken by cataracts and was celebrated in word and film for organizing a dialogue between leaders of the Jewish faith and the Dalai Lama.

He grew up in a Reform Jewish household in Baltimore, Maryland, at a time when its neighborhoods were defined by race, religion, and ethnicity. Though his brother and uncle were rabbis, healing also ran in the family. His father was an ear-nose-and-throat doctor, and Mark joked that left only one organ in the head for him to specialize in.

At Reed, he majored in religion and studied calligraphy with Prof. Lloyd Reynolds [art and English 1929–69].

“I was so taken with the marvelous blending of mind, heart, and hand,” Marc said. “[Reynolds] was a man who could wake up your soul.

He recognized the miraculous, the revolution of spirit. He profoundly appreciated the capacity for change, and that left me inspired at a very deep level. He was one of the first to speak of Asian spirituality. He planted the seed.”

Marc wrote his thesis, “Oral Tradition and the Ugaritic Poem of Keret,” advised by Prof.

Simon Parker [religion 1968–75]. He then set out for Israel, where he studied Hebrew calligraphy and planned to earn a PhD in Biblical studies.

“After Reed, I pinballed between my interest in religion and an uncertain sense of my scholastic fortitude,” Marc said. “I chickened out and opted for medicine.”

He took two years of premed courses at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; there he met Alicia Friedman, who became his first wife, and they had a son, Michael. Marc was accepted at Johns Hopkins Medical School and completed his ophthalmology residency at Hopkins’s Wilmer Eye Institute in 1980. The first time he assisted during eye surgery, he knew he’d found his specialty.

“When I was in my third year,” he recalls, “I was up all night and we were in the operating room, working in someone’s belly, and it was a bloody mess and so intensely surgical. I showered up, reported to the eye department, and walked in on a doctor doing a cataract operation. He was listening to Scarlatti. It looked like Prof. Reynolds’s calligraphy. I decided no more of this bloody stuff.”

Marc’s career trajectory included a glaucoma fellowship with Dr. Robert N. Shaffer; a stint as chief resident at University of Illinois Eye and Ear Infirmary; five years as an exclusive glaucoma consultant for Northern California Kaiser Permanente; and, as an academic, four years as glaucoma chief at Stanford University and seven years as glaucoma chief at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. In 1997, he left to start a solo practice as a glaucoma specialist in three offices in the Bay Area. He was a successful textbook author; his academic pièce de résistance was the 1999 publication of the seventh edition of Becker-Shaffer’s Diagnosis and Therapy of the Glaucomas, which he coauthored with two colleagues. The earlier edition had been his “bible” when he entered the field, and he had

a distinctive filial pleasure in paying homage to his teaching mentor by continuing his work.

Despite his professional success, Marc found himself growing disenchanted with medicine.

“There were so few role models of people who were connecting with patients as other humans,” he explained, “and the very reasons that motivated me to go into medicine became more and more distant the further I got in the field.”

From the beginning of his career in California, he taught for four to six weeks a year in eye programs throughout India and Burma. In India, he was amazed at how medical centers were “temples of love and service.”

At a yoga class in 1982 he met Nancy Garfield, who introduced him to the Bay Area’s Buddhist community. After the two attended a retreat at a monastery near Santa Cruz, Marc realized that he had found the answer to his frustrations and despair, or at least an avenue to address them. In 1986, he and Nancy married in a Buddhist ceremony. That marriage, like his first, ended in divorce, but he kept on with Buddhism, describing himself as “having Jewish roots and Buddhist wings.”

“It felt very much like coming home,” he said, “There was so much confluence with Jewish spirituality.”

Marc helped establish a Buddhist meditation monastery north of San Francisco and initiated and organized historic meetings between Jewish leaders and His Holiness the Dalai Lama, leader of six million Tibetan Buddhists.

Having learned from a mutual friend that the Dalai Lama wanted to learn about Judaism, in 1989 Marc volunteered to put together a crash course for him. He assembled a dream team of rabbis and academics.

Jewish and Buddhist thinkers discussed the two faiths’ shared experiences with suffering, their different concepts of God, and the role that mysticism plays in each. “The meetings became a love fest between the Jews and the Tibetans,” Marc said of the gathering in New Jersey.

A follow-up gathering the next year at the exiled Tibetan leader’s home in Dharamsala, India, was recounted in a bestselling book, The Jew in the Lotus by Rodger Kamenetz, which was made into a commercial movie of the same name. Over four days, recognizing the resonance between the Tibetan and Jewish experiences, Marc vowed to help the Tibetan people with his skills. In 1995, he established the Tibet Vision Project, a grand name for what was largely a solo act.

Partly due to the harsh ultraviolet light that blankets the 15,000-foot Tibetan Plateau, cataracts are rampant in Tibet. One in every 25 adults over the age of 40 has lost sight.

Yet cataracts are a surgically curable disease.

“It’s a profound irony,” Marc said. “These Tibetans are blind in this majestic land. They are blinded by the light that so delights us.”

Every year, Marc spent two months living in Tibet training Tibetan and Chinese ophthalmologists in general ophthalmology and specifically in modern lens implant/cataract surgery.

After mastering the surgery, the doctors and nurses were sent to remote communities in central Tibet, where they operated cataract camps to do the lens implants. The goal was to completely eliminate all present cataract blindness by the year 2020. Through the Tibet Vision Project, Marc helped restore sight to some 5,000 people.

“When we can restore vision in just a few minutes and make a patient’s life turn a new page,” Marc said, “people can go back to a life they barely remember. The miracle of watching people see again never tires me.”

The project’s efforts were supported solely by donations from patients and friends. Marc received the 2003 Outstanding Humanitarian Service Award from the American Academy of Ophthalmology for his years of volunteer work in Tibet. A documentary based on Marc’s work, Visioning Tibet, directed and produced

by Isaac Solotaroff, appeared on PBS in 2005.

The Chinese government gradually barred all foreign nongovernmental organizations from Tibet in 2008, bringing Marc’s efforts to an end.

Marc is survived by his brothers, Elias and Victor; his son, Michael; and two stepdaughters. He was a steadfast supporter of Reed.

Amy Kyle Hallowell ’06

May 10, 2021, in Downingtown, Pennsylvania.

Born in Southern California, Kyle went to high school in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and throughout her life summered on the Great Lakes of Ontario, Canada. She came to Reed to study studio art and psychology, finishing her education in art history and studio art at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster and at the Art Institute of Philadelphia, where she studied interior and graphic design. Kyle worked as a graphic designer and was a photographer, animal lover and yoga enthusiast, and the mother of two boys. She is survived by her sons, Finn and Indiana Pook; her father and stepmother, Todd and Lisa Hallowell; her mother and stepfather, Kim and Steve Cherry; and her brother, Henry.

Pending Melvin Harry Judkis ’39, Carol Joanne Hasson ’49, Mary McCain Rossborough ’49, Emmy Hammond Shakeshaft ’51, Robert James Conrad ’53, Jonathan Alper ’54, Wayne R. DeMott ’55, Glen Shipley ’55, Donald Scott III ’59, Mark R. Heilbrunn ’60, Stephen F. Johnston ’60, Patricia L. Lent ’61, Michael Humphreys ’64, Paul Meilleur ’65, John Mills Stidd ’65, Anthony Waters ’70, Brian G. Foster ’81, Judson Gerwin ’82.

Reed Magazine december 2021 47

Object of Study

What we’re looking at in class

Chiseled in Sparta Standing less than five inches tall, this bronze figure, which dates to c. 520 BCE, is one of the artifacts that students examine in Ancient Mediterranean Studies 377, Women in the Ancient World, with Prof. Ellen Millender. The statuette was likely produced or influenced by workshops in Laconia, home to the city of Sparta. It is part of a series of figures that served as votive statues or as handles to mirrors or paterai (offering dishes) that date from c. 570 to c. 470 BCE. 48 Reed Magazine december 2021

Scholars have identified these objects as portraits of seminude or naked Spartan girls engaged in athletic or ritual activity. All of the statuettes depict running girls, though this one may represent a dancing girl. All are dressed in chitōniskoi, short tunics that may have earned Spartan girls the sobriquet phainomērides (“thigh-flashers”) from the sixth-century BCE lyric poet Ibykos and the attention of other authors, including Sophokles, Euripides, and Plato.

“I absolutely love the material that we cover in this course,” says Prof. Millender. “From Homer’s Odyssey to Athenian pottery to inscriptions of female gladiators! How cool is that? What I particularly love about the course is how it takes the students to societies that are in many ways so alien from our own but are at times also disturbingly familiar in terms of their gender mores.”

S AV E T H E DAT E

*

Class years ending in a 2 or a 7 will be celebrating a reunion this year; however, all alumni are welcome to attend Reunions!

Volunteer for a class committee and help plan your class event at Reunions. Email alumni@reed.edu to get involved.

*on campus? We’re hoping!

reunions.reed.edu

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bridget perier ’º23

ALL THE NEWS AND THEN SOME. Anthro major Arianna Aguirre ’23 catches up with the latest developments on campus in the inimitable (and indomitable) Reed College Quest.