Reed College Magazine March 2020

‰ march 2020

GOING STOIC

Can a two-millenia-old philosophy help you cope with modern living?

Breathe easy.

Make a gift that provides security for your future and Reed’s. Receive a dependable cash flow for life—regardless of market fluctuations—with a charitable gift annuity.

When you establish a charitable gift annuity at Reed, you can •

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Charitable gift annuities are subject to age minimums and are not available in some states.

Features 10

Teaming Up With June, July, and August

Reed helps students take advantage of a valuable resource—summertime.

By Chris Lydgate ’90

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The Transformative Power of the Watson Fellowship

Reed celebrates 50 years of partnership with the Watson Foundation, propelling students around the globe to develop their potential.

By Romel Hernandez

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Bullets, Ice, and Snow

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By Miles Bryan ’13 16

In the Soil of Cyprus, Clues To an Empire

Reed students dig for artifacts that could shed light on the world of Alexander the Great.

nina johnson ’99

Haley Swinth

How a ragtag bunch of skiers became the U.S. Army’s first cold-weather soldiers.

By Randall S. Barton 20

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Never Just Words

Prof. Samiya Bashir opens up about poetry, politics, and writer’s block.

Departments 4 Eliot Circular

By Josh Cox ’18 24

David Reed Wins Eliot Award Kathryn Oleson to Be Dean of Faculty Battle of the Brain Theories

Going Stoic

Can a two-millenia-old philosophy help you cope with modern living?

By Cecilia D’Anastasio ’13

8 Advocates of the Griffin

News of the Alumni Association

30 Reediana

Books, Films, and Music by Reedies

American Sutra by Duncan Ryu-ken Williams ’91 And many more.

34 Class Notes News from our classmates.

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40 In Memoriam

Honoring classmates, professors, and friends who have died.

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Prof. Robert Paul, philosophy.

Prof. Robert Rosenbaum, mathematics.

Robert Wollheim ’70, prisoner of conscience who became a judge.

And too many more

48 Object of Study

Cover illustration by Cat Finnie

What Reed students are looking at in class

#MeToo with the Early Moderns.

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This Must Be the Place

march 2020

www.reed.edu/reed-magazine 3203 SE Woodstock Boulevard, Portland, Oregon 97202 503/777-7591 Volume 99, No.1 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

Listening To Your Stories

BY PRESIDENT AUDREY BILGER

As buds, blossoms, and fresh green leaves emerge in this first spring of the new decade, I continue to discover more about Reed and to be inspired. Getting to know the people, spaces, and history of the college is an ongoing adventure. From my earliest encounters, I have been struck by the passion, excitement, and energy that drive Reed’s mission. We are a community that cares.

These past months have gone by quickly, and in pausing to take stock, I am continually mindful of the privilege of belonging to Reed. Among the enduring memories of my time here, the festivities surrounding my inauguration stand out. It was an evening of poetry, music, dancing, friendship, family, and many joyful, smiling faces. On branches around campus, weathergrams swayed in the wind, many of which remain and will linger on for some time to come.

When I meet members of our extended community, I ask them to tell me their Reed stories. What brought you to Reed? What has your experience been? How do you see the college?

Needless to say, I have heard some incredible stories. I have heard from those who say their lives were dramatically changed by their time at Reed, from others who tell me that Reed blew their minds and stretched 2

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them beyond what they could have imagined, and from Reedies who remain connected to one another in a spirit of solidarity and camaraderie.

If there is a common thread through all of these stories, it is this: no one is neutral about Reed. Even when I hear stories about disappointments or disillusionments, they tend to be undergirded by a belief in what Reed stands for—and in what it can and should be. There is also a strong sense of ownership among most everyone who finds their way to the college, and a great deal of love for Reed.

Throughout its histor y, Reed has remained true to the founding principles of academic excellence, freedom of inquiry, and participatory democracy. In this century, we have faced and will continue to face many challenges, and our ability to remain strong and persevere requires that we champion these principles. We must also support one another and be willing to engage in difficult conversations and to listen, explore, and be genuinely curious.

My Reed experience has been and continues to be transformative. Cheryl and I feel welcomed, accepted, and a strong sense of belonging. Thanks to everyone who has shared their Reed stories with us. We cannot wait to hear more and to share our own Reed story with you.

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 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.

From Warblers to Wrens

Thank you for your article “Good Eggs” about my grandfather’s paintings. I wasn’t aware that the paintings in Birds of the Pacific Coast were with Portland Audubon, and am pleased to hear about their scanning and future home with the Oregon Historical Society. Years ago, my wife framed a print of the rufous Hummingbird painting, and it’s currently on our wall. How lovely to know that this image and its fellows will be in the public domain.

(By the way, my graduation year was 1963, not 1968 as stated in the article.) My parents actually met at Reed; my mother, Margery Washburn Horsfall ’28, and my paternal grandmother, Carra Elizabeth Huntting Horsfall ’30, were also Reedies.

Robert Bruce (Bob) Horsfall III ’63 New Westminster, Canada

STEM Winders

I read with interest your December 2019 article “Reed Leads the Pack in STEM PhDs,” which tracks how many STEM BAs go on to get STEM PhDs. I was wondering how Reed does with a slightly different cohort: Reedies with nonSTEM BAs who nonethless get STEM PhDs. I know there’s at least one: me. I got a non-STEM BA in economics (economic history, not economic science), and eventually ended up with a PhD in genetics. In grad school I knew a philosophy undergraduate major (I think UChicago) who ended up with a PhD in chemical physics.

I’m sure other Reedies have tons of examples.

Tom Boal ’78 McLean, Virginia

Remembering Mr. Old Growth

I enjoyed the article “The Paradox of Wildfire” in Reed Magazine’s December 2019 issue. I wanted to add a note about Dr. Bert Brehm

Rufous Hummingbird with red-flowering currant, one of many works of art by R. Bruce Horsfall previously housed at Portland Audubon and preserved by a joint effort between Reed College, the Oregon Historical Society, and Portland Audubon.

[biology 1962–93] and his course Plant Communities. I took the class in 1985 and learned a great deal about old-growth forests, both in the classroom and on memorable field trips. Dr. Brehm collaborated with Dr. Jerry Franklin, who was also known at the time as Mr. Old Growth. After I dropped out of Reed in 1986, I got an internship with Dr. Jerry Franklin at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest and got to use some of the plant sampling techniques I had learned in Bert Brehm’s class. Later I was hired by another Forest Service experiment station to interpret aerial photographs for a project on old-growth wildlife and vegetation. All of this is to say that Dr. Bert Brehm was an incredible teacher who had a love for old-growth forests that lit a fire (so to speak) under me. He deserves mention in any article that includes some of the history of environmental science at Reed.

Dvora Robinson ’88 Portland, Oregon

Pressing Correction

Because of errors on the part of the editor, a feature in the December edition of Reed Magazine (“Reynolds Presses Come Back Home to Reed”) misstated the origin of several pieces of letterpress equipment given to Reed’s art department by the Oregon College of Art and Craft, which closed its doors last year.

While some of the equipment may indeed be connected to Prof. Lloyd Reynolds [English and art 1929–69], its overall provenance has proven difficult to document. We do know that one of the magnificent Vandercook presses belonged to Oregon’s poet laureate Kim Stafford, an admirer of Reynolds’s legacy, who donated it to OCAC. We apologize for the mistakes.

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Eliot Circular news from campus

“Master of the Brushstroke” Wins Eliot Award

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Abstract artist David Reed ’68 will return to campus in March to receive the prestigious Eliot Award, which recognizes a Reed grad who has demonstrated long and important service in their field of endeavor and who exemplifies the qualities that Reed values, including intellectual rigor, independence, and integrity.

With a creative career spanning 50 years, Reed has established himself as an innovative force in abstract painting. “No painter has contributed as much in terms of expanding the vocabulary of abstract painting and maintaining its relevance

Courtesy of the artist and Häusler Contemporary Zürich | München, Photo by Lance Brewer

This detail of David Reed’s painting #702, 2017-2018, demonstrates the expressive, iridescent quality of his work.

What it does not convey is the scale and scope—the full canvas is more than two feet tall and almost ten feet wide.

B r i t ta P e d e r s e n / d pa

during this era of marginalization,” wrote critic Michael Brennan in the Brooklyn Rail.

“Reed possesses a technical command that far outpaces other artists of his generation,” wrote John Yau in Hyperallergic.

“His palette, which seems to include every existing artificial color, has no peer.”

Reed has won many awards, including fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Reed arrived on campus in 1963 as a naive and idealistic premed student. He graduated with the class of ’68 as one of

the college’s very first studio art majors and set off to make his mark as a painter in New York City.

“Reed is a place that challenged him as an artist both intellectually and creatively,” says Stephanie Snyder ’91, director and curator of the Cooley Gallery. “I am elated that he is receiving this recognition.”

Reed will deliver a public lecture titled “Thoughts on Artists and Education” at 6:30 on Tuesday, March 10, in Vollum Hall. —ROMEL HERNANDEZ

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Eliot Circular

Social Psychologist to Be Dean of the Faculty Prof. Kathryn Oleson, a social psychologist with deep expertise in classroom dynamics, will become Reed’s next dean of the faculty on July 1, 2020.

Prof. Oleson has devoted much of her professional career to finding ways to make the classroom more inclusive—and more effective. She is the author of the forthcoming book, Promoting Inclusive Classroom Dynamics in Higher Education: A ResearchBased Pedagogical Guide for Faculty, and has authored scores of scholarly articles on topics such as social identity theory, unconscious bias, uncertainty, self-doubt,

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self-handicapping, stereotyping, and even productive procrastination.

“Kathy is an exemplary teacher and scholar who has demonstrated a strong commitment to advancing Reed’s academic program,” said President Audrey Bilger.

Prof. Oleson joined Reed’s psychology department in 1995 and has held numerous leadership roles. She served as the founding director of Reed’s Center for Teaching and Learning, where she developed a program where professors can learn more about the social dynamics of their own classrooms with the help of student consultants. From 2014

to 2016 (under her leadership), the center held 20 workshops for faculty to strengthen their pedagogy, drawing more than 100 professors from 25 departments. She frequently leads campus workshops on classroom dynamics, unconscious bias, and the use of “productive discomfort.”

“I feel honored to be selected as dean and appreciate the warm reaction from students, alums, staff, faculty, and trustees,” she said. “I am passionate about Reed’s educational mission, and I look forward to this opportunity to support and develop our outstanding academic program as Reed responds to the

leah nash

Battle of the Brain Theories

ever-changing demands of higher education.”

Prof. Oleson earned her PhD in social psychology at Princeton University, funded by a National Science Foundation graduate fellowship. She was then a National Institute of Mental Health Postdoctoral Fellow at Ohio State University from 1993 to 1995.

Since joining Reed, she has taught courses on social psychology, research design and data analysis, interpersonal perception, stereotyping and prejudice, and the social self.

She has also taught intro psych and Senior Symposium and supervised no fewer than 96 senior theses.

Prof. Michael Pitts [psychology 2011–] and two other prominent neuroscientists will referee a groundbreaking contest to investigate one of the oldest and most immense questions in the natural sciences: the neural basis of consciousness.

“It’s as fundamental as looking at black holes and the origins of the universe,” he says.

Researchers have proposed several competing theories of consciousness over the past few decades, and each has found some degree of experimental support. But figuring out how to test the theories against each other has proven extremely difficult.

In March 2018, Dawid Potgieter of the Templeton World Charity Foundation convened a workshop designed as a “structured adversarial collaboration,” where major proponents of two leading theories of consciousness—global workspace theory (GWT) and integrated information theory (IIT)—came together to debate their ideas.

In the middle of the debate, Prof.

Pitts walked up to a whiteboard and sketched a rough idea for an experimental design where the two theories would predict different outcomes.

Researchers Lucia Melloni of the Max Planck Institute and Liad Mudrik of Tel Aviv University joined in, and started making suggestions. A few hours later, the three of them were asked to lead the project, which has since been funded by a $5 million grant from Templeton to the Max Planck

Prof. Michael Pitts

Institute and then shared among the three principal investigators and eleven other labs.

None of the three investigators subscribes to either theory; they will collaborate with proponents of both GWT and IIT on an advisory committee to determine how data will be collected and analyzed. Having key supporters of both theories involved in the decision-making process will help ensure that each theory’s predictions are being properly tested and will make it harder for them to back out of the competition.

Designing experiments for this competition is difficult, Pitts says, because “the two theories overlap quite a bit, but our project is trying to focus on where they do not overlap.”

The project will generate an enormous treasure trove of high-quality brain data that could ultimately help doctors around the world shape treatment for patients who are behaviorally unresponsive, like those in comas. Pitts expects that it will take three years for the experiments to be conducted and the data to be analyzed before a verdict is reached.

—COLIN HAWKINSON ’19

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Advocates of the Griffin

News of the Alumni Association • More at alumni.reed.edu Edited by Katie Ramsey ’04 and Calyx Reed ’17

Kiss of the Grape Trial. Error. Heartache. And the giddy thrill of delight when you know you’re finally on the right track. Making wine is sort of like writing a thesis, except that you get to taste the results.

No one knows this better than Reed’s alumni wine makers. Like grapes on a vine, they’re a complex, noble bunch, bursting with creative energy—so much energy that we couldn’t contain them all in this edition of Reed Magazine, lest they overflow the pages. So we decided to celebrate them with a special digital feature on Reed vintners.

Check it out on our website and learn about grapes, grappa, and the enigmatic secrets of Les Garagistes.

Many of these vintners have generously agreed to donate the fruit of their labor at the the 5th Annual Reedies Drink Reedie Wine for Reed fundraiser on Wednesday May 6, 2020 at Stoel Rives in downtown Portland.

RSVP to alumni@reed.edu. Don’t miss it!

Reunions 2020 registration is now open!

Join us on campus June 11–14 for a chance to reconnect with Reed and Reedies. From class receptions, to engaging panels and discussions, to fireworks and Stop Making Sense, Reunions 2020 has something for everyone. Find out more and register at reunions.reed.edu.

Democracy 2020: Mechanics, Opportunities, and Perils

Alumni College at Reunions is back! Get some perspective on the upcoming election cycle and explore questions that are fundamental to our democracy on June 10–12. Democracy 2020: Mechanics, Opportunities, and Perils will investigate American governance from the creation of political theory to affecting change post election. Workshop your own political vision with Khristina Haddad ’92, see how social media influences elections with Mark Wiener ’78 and Megan Keating ’17, and study how people make choices in elections withProf. Vasiliy Safin ’07.

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ROLL OUT THE BARREL. Gena Hennen ’00, winemaker at Adelsheim Vineyard, checks in on the fruit of her labors.

Unlock the Treasure

Between March 6 and 17, join fellow alumni by making a gift to Reed and help unlock $100,000 from Richard H. Wollenberg ‘75 and Barbara Wollenberg. 1,911 donors are needed to release the money that funds financial aid, student research, science labs, and more. Special thanks to the alumni board, who reached 100% participation in giving by December 31!

Paideia

A special thanks to our alumni for contributing their time and knowledge at Paideia! Like the crows that roost each night in downtown Portland, alumni came to rest in Vollum Hall and Eliot, this time not as students but as teachers. From playing the penny whistle to learning about plant medicine and the basics of poetry submissions, Reed alumni once again showed that their interests and expertise are as varied as the theses tucked away in the tower.

Haley Swinth

A WORKFORCE TO BE RECKONED WITH Reedies are skilled synthesizers, critics, analysts, and storytellers in a wide range of fields, making them great interns and employees.

Look to Reed when seeking excellent future talent for your institution.

Questions? Email Brooke Hunter, assistant director of employer relations & strategic partnerships, at hunterb@reed.edu.

Post a job or internship: reed.edu/beyond-reed > Employers

Head of the Boar

More than 200 alumni and their families gathered at Reed on December 14 for the Portland Alumni Holiday Party. From the singular Boar’s Head procession to the lively photo booth run by Nina Johnson ’99, a good time was had by all.

TEAMING UP WITH JUNE, JULY, AND AUGUST Reed helps students take advantage of a valuable resource—summertime.

BY CHRIS LYDGATE ’90

Deciphering the genetic machinery of the Zika virus. Translating the poems of Gerald of Wales. Digging for archaeological relics in Cyprus. Those are just some of the 88 intriguing projects that students pursued last summer, thanks to Reed’s emphasis on student research.

Research, whether it involves test tubes or medieval manuscripts, is fundamental to every discipline. But it also has striking educational 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.

“Undergraduate research is one of the distinguishing features of Reed,” says Alice Harra, director of the Center for Life Beyond Reed. “Our students know how to take in vast amounts of information, synthesize, analyze, and troubleshoot.”

The cornerstone of Reed’s academic program has always been the senior thesis, a yearlong project in which students pursue original scholarship. In the last decade, however, Reed has set out to provide students with more opportunities to undertake research in their sophomore and junior years; the skills they gain from these projects often prove invaluable for their theses and their careers.

“I’ve been really impressed by the resources Reed makes available to support undergraduate research,” says Prof. Tristan Nighswander [economics 2018–], an economist and member of Reed’s Undergraduate Research Committee. “The collaborative approach we take at Reed gives students a

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real leg up in developing a researcher’s too kit, not only for their senior theses but for potential careers in think tanks, academia, consulting firms, or policy institutions.”

Summer is the obvious choice for digging into a big project. But it also presents challenges for students and their families, especially those with financial need. Where will they live while the dorms are closed? How will they pay for their room and board? What if they need to earn money to help their families? What about travel expenses?

With the help of generous donors, Reed is building an extensive system to support students’ strong appetite for summer research, including departmental fellowships, opportunity grants, research grants, internships, and creative fellowships.

“There is significant demand for summer research fellowships, and with very good reason,” says Prof. Nigel Nicholson [classics 1995–], dean of the faculty. “These fellowships provide a wonderful opportunity for students to partner with faculty members on their research projects and understand in an intimate way what high-level research looks like. Not only do students learn specific skills that can help them in their own academic work; they also learn crucial soft skills, such as how to work in teams, how to take responsibility for a specific part of a project, and what it means to be answerable to someone else’s agenda and schedule.”

Many alumni say the experience of doing research at Reed proved invaluable later in their careers. Biotechnologist Nick Galakatos ’79 did a summer research internship in organic chemistry after his sophomore year. “This was a great learning experience for me, one that shaped my further academic focus, that included a PhD and a postdoc,” he says. “It was also great fun to be on campus in the summer, and get to know folks without the day-to-day

academic pressure. The greatest value for me, however, was to experience research itself, which by definition is doing things that no one else has done before. It was exhilarating to be able to do that. Also, and more importantly, it taught me how to deal with uncertainty and manage failure. When you try to innovate, the outcome is uncertain and failure is more likely than success. Research itself is a great teacher; the more you do, the more successful you are likely to be, and the more successful you are, the more comfortable you become taking risk and innovating!”

Nick, who is now the global head of life sciences at Blackstone (and a Reed trustee), established the Galakatos Fund at Reed to support student research.

Check out some of the amazing projects Reed students pursued last summer, thanks to support from donors like Nick.

Digging for Clues in Cyprus

The death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE plunged the ancient Mediterranean into political chaos (see page 16). The Walter Englert Classics Student Opportunity Fund and the Rumpakis/Dussin Classics Research Fund helped Reed students go to Cyprus for an archaeological dig. Project supervisor: Prof.

Thomas Landvatter [classics 2015–].

nina johnson ’99

WHAT THEY DID LAST SUMMER: Reed students share their research projects. Center: bio major Sasha Chang ’22 presented her work on neurogenesis in the eye of the zebrafish.

The Translator Is a Traitor

Gerald of Wales [1146–1223] is a key source for understanding medieval Britain. An influential writer and priest, he witnessed the Anglo-Norman colonization of Ireland and was a close adviser to Henry II. Surprisingly, several of his poems have never been translated. English major Kashaf Qureshi ’20 pored through medieval Latin manuscripts to transcribe and translate twenty poems, ranging from priestly angst (“On the Given Misery of the Human Condition and Advice for Its Cure”) to political intrigue (“On Dogs and His Rivals Gerald, Acting in the Manner of St. Jerome, Bites Back in Response to Constant Insults”).

Kashaf says, “I learned a lot about the process of translating, which I can sum up with a phrase Prof. Faletra repeated throughout the summer: traduttore, traditore, or “translator, traitor.” I was constantly immersed in this dilemma of translating, struggling to do justice to Gerald’s voice. Translating from any language is difficult because a word in one language can never convey the same thing (at least not in the same way) in another language.” She also caught more than 40 transcription errors made by previous scholars.

Her work was supported by a Ruby-Lankford Grant. Project supervisor: Prof. Michael Faletra [English 2001–].

Healing a Wound

How exactly does an organism heal a wound? Skin cells boast an internal structure (known as a cytoskeleton) composed of a network of actin and microtubule microfilaments, which gives the cell shape and allows it to move. Key to this network are gargantuan modular proteins known as spectraplakins, which physically bind the cytoskeleton together.

Bio major Julia Montes-Laing ’20 conducted a series of experiments to examine the role of a particular spectraplakin, known as Shot, in fruit-fly cells. She scratched “wounds” into epithelial sheets to investigate the behavior of cells that were starved of Shot.

“My experience of doing research is very positive,” says Julia. “Impostor syndrome is something I have struggled with throughout my time at Reed, and my time in the Applewhite lab has taught me to be confident in what I can offer the Reed community . . . Having a space that was safe to make mistakes and grow was a crucial part of my Reed experience.”

This project was supported by the Galakatos Fund. Project supervisor: Prof.

Derek Applewhite [biology 2014–].

The Physics of Delay

We often associate gadgetry with speed— we want faster calculations, faster searches, faster downloads, and we want them now!

But sometimes it’s vital to slow the signal down—stutterers, for example, often find that hearing their own speech echoed back with a split-second delay will smooth their articulation. Some commercial audio gear does this sort of thing, but not very precisely.

Physics major Alex Striff ’21 designed and built an electronic circuit that takes an analog signal (such as music), converts it to digital format, introduces a precise amount of delay, and converts it back to an analog signal.

“Working on this project taught me a lot about both electronics and the human process of research,” says Alex. “While I had a good deal of electronics skills from my own tinkering before Reed and the introductory labs, the need to apply those skills to a real project helped to solidify them. The most important skill that I learned was how to design professional printed circuit boards.”

This project was supported by the DelordMockett Fund. Project supervisor: Prof.

Lucas Illing [physics 2007–].

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THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF THE WATSON FELLOWSHIP

Reed celebrates 50 years of partnership with the Watson Foundation, propelling students around the globe to develop their potential.

BY ROMEL HERNANDEZ

Fifty years ago, the Thomas J. Watson Foundation embarked on a visionary, ambitious undertaking: to challenge graduating college students to create an original yearlong project arising from their own interests and passions. A key requirement: they must remain outside the United States for an entire calendar year.

Partnering with Reed and 39 other elite colleges, the Watson Foundation forged a fellowship that has become a byword for adventure and self-discovery, and developed a generation of humane and effective leaders. Since then, 68 Reedies have been granted the unique opportunity to travel the globe, pursuing creative projects that span—and often fuse—art and science, tradition and innovation. Sometimes the fellowship proceeds more or less as planned. Sometimes it takes a radical detour. Yet when they reflect on what they learned from the experience, fellows say the chance encounters and unexpected detours were often the most significant. The journey was as meaningful as the destination.

“The Watson Fellowship is a transformative experience and an inspiring example of the power of philanthropy,” says President Audrey Bilger. “We are proud to partner with the foundation and grateful that our students have this unique opportunity.”

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Named for the first CEO of IBM, and founded by his widow, Jeannette Watson, the fellowship’s guiding mission is to cultivate future leaders with an international outlook. The program offers a $36,000 stipend and covers health insurance and student loan repayments for the year. In return, the fellows are expected to completely immerse themselves in the experience, spending the entire year outside the United States and limiting visits from family or friends.

The application process is extremely competitive. At Reed, advisers at the Center for Life Beyond Reed reach out to juniors (or even sophomores) who show strong academic promise or have been nominated by the faculty, and invite them to imagine themselves doing a Watson project. The advisers support students through the process of constructing a competitive proposal over the summer and into the fall of their senior year. The proposals are then submitted to a faculty committee that nominates four finalists to the foundation. CLBR’s career and fellowship advisers, along with faculty members of the Fellowships and Awards Committee, prepare the four nominees for their final interviews with the foundation representatives. This year, the foundation selected just 41 fellows nationwide.

Reed art major Rose Driver ’19, who was named a fellow in March, was bowled

over when she heard the news. “I was totally elated,” she says. “I was tearing up!” She is currently traveling through Germany, Japan, Indonesia, and Australia, where she is looking at comic artists and the communities they form, exploring the catharsis, companionship, conversations, and collective pride of creating together.

Prof. Sam Fey [biology 2017–] admires the way the fellowship inspires students to connect their academic curiosity to the wider world. “One of the best parts of serving on Reed’s Fellowships and Awards Committee is interacting with students who passionately dive headfirst into exploring the ‘what would you want to do if you could spend a year doing anything?’ question that is central to the Watson Fellowship,” he says.

“Regardless of the outcome, this process— which occurs between students, faculty, and CLBR staff—is often a meaningful first step for students to engage in big-picture, creative thinking about how interests inside and outside of the classroom intersect.”

To celebrate 50 years of partnership between Reed and the Watson Foundation, we caught up with some Reed fellows to ask them what they learned from their experience—and how it changed them. [We talked to lots of alumni for this feature.

Look online for more details—and more great stories.]

How To Develop A Photographer

Planting Seeds of Change

Deep Diving into Coral Reefs

Said Nuseibeh ’81 English

Kraig Kraft ’00 biology

Rennie S. Meyers ’15 environmental studies–history

Occupation: Photographer.

Watson project: In the Footsteps of al-Mutanabbi What was your plan? I wanted to experience and document the pastoral nomadic Bedouin civilization before it vanished, while establishing a sensual foundation for a projected translation of classical Arabic poetry into English.

What actually happened? It took me seven months to secure acceptance and a home in the desert among the Huweitat bedu [an Arabian desert tribe—Ed.]. I helped herd camels, carry water, and gather firewood for the hearth and fresh grasses for the herd. I once got stranded on a 50-foot sandstone cliff and learned how to use my mind to overcome my trembling knees and sweaty palms to climb my way out of a scary predicament. One of my most beautiful experiences was seeing how integral poetry was to daily experience, where everyone composed extemporaneous verse to accompany work and play.

Where did you go from there? For 15 years I was black-and-white silver gelatin printer for the late artist Ruth Bernhard. As a photographer specializing in art and artifacts of the early Islamic period, I gained some notoriety for photographs of the seventh-century Islamic mosaics in the Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem. I have exhibited widely, published sparingly, but contributed frequently to scholarly international publications.

Occupation: Global programs director, World Coffee Research. Author.

Watson project: Agricultural Biotechnologies in the Service of the Poor What was your plan? My proposal was to see the promise and the realities of GMOs that claimed to solve a problem for poor farmers in the developing world.

What actually happened? I visited the Philippines for the first time since my family left when I was two years old. I saw giant, nitrogen-fixing corn [which minimizes need for fertilizer—Ed] in the mountains of Oaxaca. I saw noncyanogenic cassava [eliminating naturally occurring cyanide in the tropical tuber—Ed] and ate it fresh out of the ground in Brazil.

What did you learn? I learned I wanted to get a PhD, not only for the science and the discovery, but to become an authority in the field. I learned to be travel savvy and how to be alone. I also learned to scuba dive.

Where did you go from there? I got a PhD in agricultural ecology from UC Davis, where my research focused on the genetics and ecology of the chile pepper in Mexico. I co-authored a book titled Chasing Chiles: Hot Spots along the Pepper Trail. I worked in Nicaragua for a large faith-based international NGO as the technical adviser for coffee and cacao in Latin America. After getting caught up in that country’s recent social unrest, I moved with my family to France to work as global programs director for World Coffee Research, a nonprofit focused on building more sustainable and dignified livelihoods for coffee farmers.

Occupation: Sea Grant Marine Policy Fellow, U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure.

Watson project: Deep Water, Horizons: Artificial Reef Communities, above and below the Water Line What was your plan? To explore how different communities use artificial reefs and coral restoration projects to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

What actually happened? I learned about nature-based infrastructure, design, coastal hazards and risk, and just how much people care about coral. I also almost ran over a nine-foot anaconda in the jungle, had my headlamp flare out while climbing through caves in Malaysia, and swam alone with a dozen sharks (by accident).

What did you learn? Working with communities invested in coastal resilience helped me center equity, inclusion, and access in my understanding of coastal development and adaptation planning, and pointed out just how much international conservation work can be a colonizing practice. I am grateful for the adventure and for what was, generally, a productively destabilizing experience. I also learned to deal with disappointment when things fell through.

Where did you go from there? I went to grad school and now work on ocean, coastal, and maritime policy. I try to bring resilience, equity, design thinking, and good science to everything I do in my work.

Reed Magazine march 2020 13

BULLETS, ICE, AND SNOW

Soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division train for combat by skiing uphill along the Continental Divide.

How a ragtag bunch of skiers became the U.S. Army’s first alpine soldiers.

BY MILES BRYAN ’13

For Allied commanders seeking to pry Italy out of Nazi control as WWII raged in 1944, the 10th Mountain Division was not the obvious choice to spearhead an assault. The troops were green and had never seen combat. And those skis they were so proud of? A dead giveaway to sharp-eared German snipers.

But the men of the 10th had something others didn’t: they could climb. And climbing was the only way to reach Riva Ridge,

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an icy German outpost that provided crucial protection to its soldiers on nearby Mt. Belvedere, which U.S. forces had already twice failed to capture.

This time was different. On February 19, 1945, 10th Mountain Division soldiers climbed silently and single file up icy paths with such stealth that, when they finally reached the top of the ridge, they found the Germans asleep in their foxholes. They took the ridge, and then Mt. Belvedere. The German hold on the Apennine Mountains,

known as the Gothic Line, had been broken.

The transformation of a motley bunch of college students and European expats into an elite fighting force is told in glowing detail by historian Maurice Isserman ’73 in his new book: The Winter Army: The World War II Odyssey of the 10th Mountain Division, America’s Elite Alpine Warriors. It’s a colorful, unlikely story—and the origins of its telling are at Reed.

Maurice traces his interest in mountaineering to the moment when his plane from

f r o m “ S k i Pat r o l i n C o l o r a d o ” b y C a m e r o n a n d M i l l e r ( A r c a d i a P u b l i s h i n g , 2 0 1 8 )

Connecticut began to descend into Portland in 1968 and he saw “real mountains” for the first time. Arriving on campus, he was soon swept up in the revolutionary spirit of the era. He joined the local chapter of Students for a Democratic Society and helped lead a revolt against Hum 110 (now a Reed tradition). That revolution stalled, but he caught the history bug in classes with Prof. Eugene Lunn [history 1968–70]. When the United States invaded Cambodia in 1970, Maurice dropped out of Reed to join the Portland

Revolutionary Youth Movement. He spent completely failed. I can get roused up about two years with the group, writing for underand hate Fascism with a great good will and ground newspapers and helping found the also the leaders of those governments arouse People’s Food Store (now the People’s Food similar feelings. But to hate the German Co-Op). He also climbed Mt. Hood and other people or the Japanese people or even the mountains in the rugged Pacific Northwest.

German soldier or Japanese soldier, I seem Returning to Reed, Maurice wrote his theutterly incapable of doing that. sis on the Communist Party in America in the It was a chance encounter between 1930s. That led to a PhD at the University Maurice and Harris at Reed Reunions in 2002 of Rochester and a series of seminal books that planted the seed for Winter Army. Both on the American left. But around the year 2000, Maurice—by then a tenured pro- men had just published books: Maurice’s on the divides of the 1960s, fessor at Hamilton College in Harris’s on his time in the upstate New York—hit the aca10th. They started talking demic equivalent of a midlife crisis. and ended up buying each As he began casting around for a other’s books. Harris died in new topic, his mind drifted back to 2015, at age 101, but his voice his days climbing Oregon’s peaks. anchors the reader throughThe 10th Mountain Division out the 10th’s journey. was also the product of a midlife For most of the war, that crisis of sorts. In 1940, Charles journey consisted of “hurry “Minnie” Dole was on a ski trip up and wait.” The 10th trained with friends when the converin the Colorado Rockies while sation turned to the astonishing their comrades were shipped news from Finland, whose troops The Winter Army off to Europe. When the 10th on skis were mounting a spirit- by Maurice Isserman ’73. was finally deployed to the ed defense against Soviet aggression. With war on the horizon, the U.S. Army, Aleutian Islands, it was a disaster. Ordered to push the Japanese off the island of Kiska, the friends agreed, should have soldiers who the 10th expected stiff resistance, but the could ski. Dole had founded the National Ski Japanese had secretly evacuated the island Patrol System a few years earlier, but he had weeks earlier. Nevertheless, 19 of the 10th’s no connections to the military. The friends’ troops were killed—all by friendly fire. first letter to the War Department in balmy When the 10th’s mettle was finally put to Washington was met with a polite dismissal. the test, however, the division became a legBut Dole kept pushing, and after two years end. After the victory at Riva Ridge, it played American military officials finally relented. a key role in the conflict—not once failing to At the time skiing was an elite pursuit, and take an objective despite suffering the highthe Mountain Division quickly filled up with volunteers from Dartmouth and Harvard, est casualty rate of any U.S. division in the Italian campaign for their time in combat. as well as with Europeans who had come to Ironically, the division’s most lasting legaAmerica to escape the Nazis. The soldiers were sharp, too: about half of them qualified for offi- cy may lie not in combat, but in the influence of its veterans after the war. Some of cer school. Reed grad Harris Dusenbery ’36 was one of them. Harris didn’t have to fight— them moved to a rundown mining town in Colorado and transformed it into America’s he was married and had a child before the premier ski destination—Aspen. Other vetattack on Pearl Harbor—but he volunteered erans include David Brower, the prime mover for the mountain troops anyway. Like a typical of the Sierra Club; Bill Bowerman, cofounder Reedie, Harris read Marcus Aurelius and Dante of Nike; Senator Bob Dole of Kansas; comin Italy and his outlook shines through in his letters to his wife, which feature prominently puter scientist Franz Alt; climatologist John in Winter Army. In December 1943 he wrote: Imbrie; and many others. This book is a fitting tribute to an extraordinary group.

The army tries to teach us to hate our enemies, but as far as I am concerned . . . these attempts at indoctrination of emotion have

Miles Bryan ’13 is a freelance radio reporter, editor, and producer based in Philadelphia.

Reed Magazine march 2020 15

IN THE SOIL OF CYPRUS, CLUES TO AN EMPIRE

Prof. Tom Landvatter (center) explains the stratigraphy of the excavation unit, with Yes,im Yilmaz ’20, Maia Shideler ’20, trench supervisor Melanie Godsey (PhD student at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), and Duncan Feiges ’20.

16 Reed Magazine march 2020

Reed Students dig for artifacts that could shed light on the world of Alexander the Great.

BY RANDALL S. BARTON

photo by beth platte

It’s one thing to dust off the classics, quite another to get your fingers in the dirt.

Last summer, Prof. Thomas Landvatter [classics 2015–] led six students on an archaeological dig at the Vigla Archaeological Project in Cyprus, supported in part by the Walter Englert Classics Student Opportunity Fund and the Rumpakis-Dussin Fund.

The Reed team sought clues to the farflung turmoil sparked by the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE, whose sudden demise plunged the ancient Mediterranean into political chaos, splitting his sprawling empire into rival factions as individual city-states scrambled to establish alliances and fend off invaders.

The general vicinity around the village of Pyla was first identified as a place of interest in 2003, following the discovery of pottery from the early Hellenistic period. In the course of test excavations to see what lay underground, archaeologists discovered Vigla—a short-lived military fort from around the end of the fourth century BCE, the time of Alexander the Great and his successors.

The site, a plateau somewhat larger than Reed’s Great Lawn, is surrounded by evidence of fortification walls, and its soil abounds in pottery, bronze arrowheads, iron spear points, and sling bullets. Its straightforward stratigraphy and limited occupation provide ideal conditions for learning the basics of archaeological methodology. Excavations at Vigla are codirected by Prof. Landvatter and Prof. Brandon Olson, a faculty member at Metropolitan State University of Denver.

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Yes,im Yilmaz ’20 holds a Hellenistic lamp found in the excavation unit.

“Our interest is the period immediately following the death of Alexander the Great, when Cyprus’s political situation shifted from a collection of semi-independent city-kingdoms to province of a Hellenistic empire,” Landvatter said. “This early part of the Hellenistic period (323–30 BCE) is poorly understood archaeologically, especially the mechanisms by which the eastern Mediterranean came under the control of various Hellenistic monarchs. We are interested in whether the occupants of the fort were foreign mercenaries, connected primarily with wider Mediterranean trade networks, or were soldiers in the employ of co-opted local elites.”

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Because towns and cities tended to be occupied well into the Roman period, archaeological data from this early Hellenistic period has often been obliterated.

“This site gives us an opportunity to look at a very critical period of transition in really nice detail in a way we haven’t really been able to elsewhere,” Landvatter said.

“We are extremely fortunate at Reed to have access to such an amazing site, and I could not pass up the opportunity to work there,” said Duncan Feiges ’20, a classics major with a history and archaeology concentration. “It was a chance to see the other side of the work which we have been looking at in the classroom.”

Rising early in the morning, students headed out to the site at about 6:30 a.m. and began cleaning up around 2:30 in the afternoon to avoid the intense heat of the day.

The Reed team dug three trenches, with excavations proceeding in reverse order of deposition—in other words, the most recent thing laid down is the first taken out. All the excavation was done by hand.

Students loosened topsoil with pickaxes and trowels, pulled the soil into buckets with hoes, and then ferried and sifted the soil. The top layer, from when the site was farmland, contained primarily plow lines— ripples left by the plow.

stones or dirt for several hours a day really does a number on your legs. Aside from the occasional use of larger hand tools to rapidly remove layers of sediment, most of the work was actually rather delicate and precise. As such, it was not always backbreaking in the traditional sense, but often left us sore from sitting in the same position for hours. We certainly went to bed tired.”

“I have never slept as well as I did the first weeks of the dig,” said Maia Shideler ’20. “Reed doesn’t often give you an opportunity to work with your hands. The satisfaction and sense of purpose that digging conveyed was astounding.”

In the largest trench (5 by 5 meters), the crew found bullet casings near the surface, probably owing to the military conflict that raged across the island in 1974.

they’re cleaned up, you can date them relatively well. You know that everything at the level you find the coin had to have been abandoned after that date.”

Antiquities become the property of the Cypriot government and are taken to a storage facility associated with the local archaeological museum. Pottery is cleaned, categorized, and dated. Metal objects like coins and arrowheads are photographed, cataloged, and sent to a museum in Nicosia for conservation and processing.

“My favorite activity was certainly washing our finds,” Maia said. “I was lucky enough to process one of our major artifacts, a perfectly intact bowl. The feeling of holding a piece of history, newly coaxed up from the ground and shedding the last of millenniaold dirt, was nearly indescribable.”

“ THE FEELING OF HOLDING A PIECE OF HISTORY, NEWLY COAXED UP FROM THE GROUND AND SHEDDING THE LAST OF MILLENNIA-OLD DIRT, WAS NEARLY INDESCRIBABLE.” —Maia Shideler ’20

photo by beth platte

“The topsoil is all modern,” Landvatter explained. “It’s not of concern to us, though everything is recorded. You slow down when you get to more delicate layers, representative of actual ancient deposition.”

As they proceeded downward, the team took note of changes in soil color, textures, and inclusions that could point to distinct past events. Was the number of rocks in the soil changing? Were more bits of pottery suddenly being uncovered? Objects were scooped into a dustpan with brushes, photographed, and their elevation points recorded with a GPS unit.

“The work was definitely exhausting,” Duncan said. “Crouching and kneeling on

One side of trench faced the ocean, where the plateau was worn down by the ocean breeze. Roughly 50 centimeters down, students found loom weights (ceramic triangles with holes in them) and other materials from the Hellenistic era. While evidence of weaving industries may seem unusual for a fort, it is possible that soldiers would have needed to produce their own cloth.

In the middle trench, pottery first appeared as irregular sherds; the number of artifacts and quality of preservation increased as time went on. Sling bullets—dense lead shots propelled from slings—were uncovered along with plates, coins, and large, wellpreserved pieces of pottery. “We excavated a small echinus bowl, which was intact and in situ on the floor,” Duncan recalled. “I was glad for the chance to stand on an ancient site and handle materials that had been untouched by human hands since they were left over 2,000 years ago.”

They also found little coins that had been abandoned centuries ago. “It was pocket change, like someone dropped a penny and just walked off,” Landvatter explained.

“They’re low-value bronze coins, but once

The students’ enthusiasm never flagged.

“They were all up and ready to go at 6:30 in the morning, and there was very little standing around,” Landvatter said. “They would ask, ‘Is there anything else I can do?’ and then just do it. They were totally into it. I’d ask them, ‘Are you still liking this?’ and they would reply, ‘Oh my god, this is the most fun I’ve had in years.’”

In addition to working the dig, students toured the country, visiting sites dating from the Bronze Age to the Roman period.

“Wandering between rows of baked white houses as we searched the skyline for landmark minarets, and the many happy hours spent diving in the Mediterranean’s clear shallows, are memories that will always make me smile,” Maia said.

The Reed team also included Beth Platte, an instructional technologist at Reed, who has a PhD in Greek and Roman history and field experience in Italy, Turkey, and Egypt.

She documented the dig with photographs, including those in this story. Check out her blog on the Vigla dig at blogs.reed.edu/ vigla-archaeological-project.

Reed Magazine march 2020 19

NEVER JUST WORDS

20 Reed Magazine  march 2020

Prof. Samiya Bashir opens up about poetry, politics, and writer’s block.

BY JOSH COX ’18

A voice spills over you, weighted with music, whether mirthful, melancholic, or mad. The words are powerful, evocative.

But the meaning is not just contained in the words. Sometimes it is only breath that comes through the mic, and somehow it fits just as well as any verse. And there is movement, whether a full-bodied pace or a stretch of the arms, the shoulders, the neck.

Samiya Bashir doesn’t just read her work.

She performs it, delivering the lines with the intensity of an actor—fitting for someone who once dreamed of a career on the stage.

Prof. Bashir is on a roll right now. In 2018, she earned tenure at Reed and her third collection of poetry, Field Theories, won an Oregon Book Award. Last year, its titular poem won a Pushcart Prize. To follow it all up, she was awarded the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize by the American Academy in Rome and is currently on sabbatical completing the fellowship.

Some people might be tempted to rest on their laurels. Not her. She’s not cut out to be a body at rest.

photo by nina johnson ’99

Bashir did not originally want to be a poet.

As a girl, her twin obsessions were theatre and fiction. She grew up in Michigan, the eldest daughter of two teachers. Her father immigrated to the States from Somalia in the sixties on a college scholarship, where he met Bashir’s mother, a Michigan native and fellow student. Both parents worked in the Ann Arbor public school system: her mother as an English and language arts teacher and her father as a math and science teacher.

Reed Magazine march 2020 21

NEVER JUST WORDS Bashir frames their jobs as an integral part of her upbringing. Because of them, she was surrounded by learning. More important, it meant she and her siblings had advocates within the public school system who allowed them to evade some of its prejudice. When Bashir and her sister were placed in remedial classes even after scoring high marks on standardized tests, for example, their parents were able to intercede—a privilege she recognizes other black and brown schoolmates didn’t always have.

Her parents’ commitment to education brought other advantages too: her mother taught Braille and often worked on the Braille typewriter she kept in the house.

Bashir acknowledges that her early exposure to different forms of communication had a profound influence on her development. Her mother decked out the family’s basement with black art and black history posters in order to expose her kids and their friends, whether white, black, or brown, to cultures that were being neglected at school.

All the way from childhood through her teenage years, Bashir kept a journal. It was chock full of creative writing, short stories, and even a novel. When she left home for college, however, the journal was misplaced and never recovered. She was devastated— she didn’t write for years. When she finally picked up her pen again, she was still too grief-stricken to write fiction. Instead, she renewed her focus on her other childhood dream: theatre.

Theatre became her everything. At the age of 19, she moved to Los Angeles. She started appearing in local productions and being recognized for her work—literally. One day, while she was marching at a political protest, two women interrupted her to pay compliments on a recent performance. Bashir appreciated the recognition but realized that the more accomplished an actor she became, the more she would have to deal with incidents like this. Maybe, she thought, she should write plays rather than act in them.

Bashir may have never returned to poetry were it not for one critical life event. In 1992, a jury acquitted four officers of the Los Angeles Police Department of all charges in the brutal assault of Rodney King at a traffic stop, despite an explosive video of them tasering him, tackling him, and striking him

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Magnetic performance: Prof. Bashir reads from her collection Field Theories at the American Academy in Rome.

with batons. LA erupted in riots. Smoldering with anger, Bashir and some friends decided to watch the fittingly titled 1991 film A Place of Rage. It was a choice that would alter the trajectory of her life. When she watched Berkeley poet June Jordan read “Poem about My Rights,” a flashbulb went off in her head.

She needed to work with this person.

After Berkeley, she went to New York City to work in publishing, did a two-year residency in Austin, Texas, earned a graduate degree from the University of Michigan, and even taught a year of public high school in Arkansas. She won numerous awards, grants, and fellowships, and published two books of poetry, Where the Apple Falls (2005) and

“SOMETIMES YOU JUST HAVE TO TALK THINGS OUT” Bashir transferred to UC Berkeley, where Jordan taught, and promptly enrolled in the professor’s Poetry for the People program, then in its second year. The initiative had a peer-education model in which students learned how to lead poetry workshops. By the time she graduated, she had taught all over the Bay Area. Like her parents before her, she discovered that she loved teaching—and reaching—young minds.

Gospel (2009). As a teacher, she went from strength to strength, joining the English department at Reed in 2012. As a writer, however, she ran headlong into a brick wall.

By the time Bashir arrived at Reed, she was hard at work on her third book, Field Theories.

It was not going well. Something was wrong and she could not figure out what. She was

Photo by Scarlett Freund

mired in it—too entrenched in what she wanted from the collection to see it for what it was. Then a chance remark from a friend gave her an idea. “I had been trying to mend a broken wing, when I actually needed a whole new bird,” she says.

The next day, she tore the collection apart—literally. She printed out her drafts and spread them all over her floors and walls so she could see the words. This exercise clarified the material she had to work with and broke free her mental logjam. When she finally published Field Theories in 2017, it felt much more authentic to her than her first two collections. That chance conversation is one reason she seeks out creatives, writers, and intellectuals on campus and beyond. “Sometimes you just have to talk things out,” she says.

The connection between creativity and community is central to her teaching philosophy. To her, teaching is more than

a job or duty—it is a gift to the teacher.

She loves connecting with fledgling writers and helping them develop, something she describes as “opening the window to let one’s voice breathe.”

In her classes at Reed, she introduces students to the technique of embodied writing and guides them through the process of leaning into their emotions. She constantly reiterates that struggle is part of the work of writing. It is frustrating but valuable. It is almost like teething, hellish as you are growing through it, but worthwhile, because in the end you have better tools with which to bite into your work.

“Samiya’s classes, like poetry itself in many ways, give as much as they take,” says Ben Read ’21. “The poetry classes I’ve taken with Samiya are some of the most rewarding classes I’ve taken at Reed . . . As my professor, Samiya has transformed not just my writing, but my beliefs about where and how a poem can be found. She is incredibly generous with her attention and her knowledge.”

The advice she gives to her students is the same advice she continues to impose upon herself. She says that when she crashes into an obstacle in her writing, teaching reminds her that she has a map. She often pauses and considers “what would I tell my students,” then uses that as a launching point to reenter the work, a practice that helps her fight writer’s block. She believes that in those moments, we know the answer, we have just convinced ourselves we don’t.

That technique has paid off for her in Rome. At the American Academy, she was given an artist’s studio in the main pavillion—a first for a poet—in consideration of the visual and multimedia way she works.

She’s got easels, screens, and everything else she needs to enter and reenter a piece. She is also invigorated by the other Fellows and a revolving cast of visiting writers, artists, and scholars, with many of whom she has long hoped to collaborate.

Of her upcoming book, she prefers to say little—it’s still in the process of becoming, and she is not yet comfortable trying to describe it. That’s OK. Whatever it is, we know her work will never just be words.

Field Theories

by Samiya Bashir, 2017

Synchronous Rotation After Dizzy rolled Bags Jackson and his vibes outta Detroit Bags wrote his love songs in the minor keys. Said the minor registers the heart. The magnet of us: iron filings thrown up the greedy gullet of space before one turn humbles another slow as hours plucked through catgut blue. Please, the old song goes, send me someone to love. Me? Who am I kidding? Every day I meet some minor love or two.

Hey you: let’s toss our tarantellas across the tracks. Let’s reveal one another bit by puckered bit. Let’s emit this fit of heat before we burn.

Or let’s burn.

Josh Cox ’18 graduated with a degree in English. He recently won a grant from the Precipice Fund to connect and promote Portland’s POC arts community.

Reed Magazine march 2020 23

GOING STOIC Can a two-millenia-old philosophy help you cope with modern living?

BY CECILIA D’ANASTASIO ’13 | ILLUSTRATIONS BY CAT FINNIE

On my first morning as a new Stoic, I was energy to focus on what is under our comgroggily leaving my bedroom to wash my plete control, while regarding everything else face when I noticed three fish belly-up on as indifferent.” the bottom of the living room fish tank. The Lesson one, I read in a cloud of melannight before, my partner and I had trans- choly on a crowded morning-commuter M ferred our three painted tetras into a more train, dealt with a central Stoic tenet, the spacious home and replaced our gaudy “dichotomy of control.” According to the plastic decorations (including one yellow Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus (55SpongeBob SquarePants pine135 CE), “Remove aversion, apple) with a more adult underthen, from all things that are water bonsai and living plants. not in your control, and transIt was a meticulous, controlled fer it to the nature of what is process that we weren’t totally in our control.” For the most meticulous about. A longtime part, you can’t control the outfriend from Reed came over side world; you can only conpartway through and, in an trol your reaction to it. When effort to play host, we forgot it comes to what we can’t conto check the tank’s ammonia trol, the ancients’ advice is to be balance. at peace with the fact that anyDragging the net through thing could happen, and acceptthe bottom of the tank and spi- A Handbook for New Stoics ing of that “anything” outcome. raling a little, my first thought by Gregory Lopez ’99 “Feeling devastated over was, Damn me for getting so my dumb fish,” I wrote under attached to the critters.

Wednesday’s exercise. Then, I was to write It was a bad day to crack open A Handbook what I could not control: “the impact of for New Stoics, a 52-week master class in, every new factor on my fish.” its cover reads, “how to thrive in a world It’s 2019, and despite the number of busiout of your control.” Some 2,300 years after nesses and products peddling some notion the ancient Greeks brought Stoicism into of agency over our lives—from Amazon this world, and thousands of years into Prime and meal prep delivery to exercise its reputation as a hard-boiled philosophy apps and Soylent—the overwhelming feelfor the unfeeling and aloof, A Handbook ing among lots of Americans is, broadly, a for New Stoics summons the wisdom of loss of control. Bad things are happening, ancient Stoics Zeno, Epictetus, Seneca, constantly and at a rapid fire rate, and we and Marcus Aurelius for a more modern unfailingly hear about every single one of practice. “The basic idea,” the book reads, them on social media at all hours. Many “is that it is imperative to use our mental of these things are very far away, or not

Reed Magazine march 2020 25

GOING STOIC things we are able to change by ourselves directly—not by voting, by bringing a canvas tote to the grocery store, by donating to a GoFundMe, by reading a privacy policy, or by flying to Flint, Michigan, with an industrial-sized water filter.

A recent New Yorker article on the renaissance of astrology, part of the now $2.2 billion “mystical services” industry, explains that in this age of uncertainty, young people are turning en masse to extrarational means of coping with circumstances outside our control. The author quotes Theodor Adorno’s takedown of a 1953 astrology column in his newspaper, in which he says that the column was for “persons who do not any longer feel that they are the self-determining subjects free of their fate.” As the threat of irreversible climate change is repeated every day with more urgency, as my generation of 20-to-40-year-olds is reminded constantly that we will face a retirement crisis, it’s fair to say this is even more the case for us now.

It’s interesting, then, that there’s a small renaissance of the opposite sort addressing the same problem. Around 300 BCE, a man named Zeno of Citium fell deeply in love with philosophy after making his fortune as a merchant. Once he mastered the philosophies of Socrates and the Cynic Crates, Zeno began teaching his own spins under a colonnade in central Athens. On those steps, or stoa in ancient Greek, Zeno and his disciplines became known as the Stoics. All this talk of discipline, control, and self-agency would froth and ferment against the background of a deeply torn land that Alexander the Great had sliced and diced in his famous conquests. Control was slipping away from city-states subject to the political tides.

“Stoicism offered its adherents a new view of themselves and their place in the universe,” explains Reed emeritus professor of classics Walter Englert [1981–2018].

“Stoics saw themselves as not in control of many things (including external events, politics, other people’s actions and opinions, and even their own health/bodies), but in control of their thoughts and emotions.”

At a cafe in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Reed alumnus and A Handbook for New Stoics coauthor Gregory Lopez ’99 counted on his fingers the number of modern Stoic groups he’s a part of: the New York City Stoics, the Stoic Fellowship, Stoic magazine, Stoic Camp, and the Modern Stoicism team, which runs

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Stoicon, an international convention that, last year in Athens, attracted hundreds who identify with the Stoic philosophy. Less selfhelp and more self-discipline, A Handbook for New Stoics is a good stab at a bible for the movement, which Greg and his coauthor, Massimo Pigliucci, a professor of philosophy at CUNY, estimate encompasses hundreds of thousands of practicing modern Stoics.

“Zeno the founder described Stoicism’s goal as ‘a smooth flow of life,’ and I guess that’s the case,” says Greg. “But I think at least initially while it’s practice, it makes it a little harder.”

Before Reed, Greg was always on the science track, he explained. He was enamored of physics. “It amazed me that one could actually predict with a reasonable degree

connecting the dots between Buddhism, public do-gooding, his Reed College education in the Classics, molecular biology, and his deep-seated belief that thoughts determine emotions more than external reality.

“All of wellbeing is ultimately internal,” he says. “So it doesn’t matter what’s going on on the outside.”

After journaling in the book for a week, I cracked open “Week Two” on my Wednesday morning subway commute. My controllables and uncontrollables had been sorted, and it was time, as the book read, to “Focus on what is completely in your control.”

Under the fish tank, I kept a small pharmacy of aquarium chemicals. And later, on

“ It was tempting to feel that I had complete control over what was to come. This is the promise of technology, to “hack things.” of certainty where a sled would be if you give it some initial conditions. This is like wizardry. It’s like, I could predict the future with math.” He fell into biochemistry and molecular biology at Reed, where he says he thrived under the guidance of Prof. Johnny Powell [physics 1987–2018]. But by graduation, Greg had ruled out becoming a professor, citing how he didn’t think he could frame his scientific research in terms of possible grants. He got a doctorate in pharmacy and now works at a startup that looks at the evidence basis for nutritional supplements.

Although he read a couple of Stoic texts at Reed, Stoicism didn’t present itself to him as a viable way of life until decades later. His Stoic lifestyle fell into place naturally, as he’d been practicing Buddhism and volunteering with an organization that teaches cognitive behavioral therapy, which he says was heavily inspired by Stoicism, to people with addictive behaviors. He describes how, in the 1950s, psychoanalyst Albert Ellis drew from Stoic philosophers Epictetus and Seneca in his groundbreaking rational emotive therapy—the idea that our behavior is heavily influenced by our thinking. The goal of this therapy is to identify and challenge the kind of thinking underpinning aggression, addiction, and self-sabotaging behavior.

It was reading Ellis’s work that persuaded Greg to give an ancient philosophy a modern shake. Investigating online, he began

Amazon, I trawled through pages and pages of reviews for different pH tests, ammonia tests, nitrite tests, with each reviewer reporting a wildly differing result. There was infinite information on infinite fora, and I felt paralyzed by the canyon between the amount of control I was being sold and the amount of control I felt. That night, someone would tell me a harrowing story about how their boss, who kept a $10,000 fish menagerie, paid an expert incalculable sums to move his tank from one home to another, only for all of the fish to die midtransfer. I didn’t know whether to feel better or worse.

Staring into the tank, now furnished with dull, green mossballs and a lifeless and nubbed bonsai, I sank into a fresh worry.

A Handbook for New Stoics asked me to revisit what I’d written the week before and brainstorm ways I could have avoided something out of my control that I didn’t want by leveraging factors within my control. I thought back to the traumatic fish tank transfer and, putting the book back in my bag, became overwhelmed with regret and self-pity. Was A Handbook for New Stoics telling me I killed my fish?

“So first of all, take it as data,” Greg explained when I asked him that same question. “If past situations come up in my mind, it’s like, is there something I can learn from it? And if there is, then I can process it and be done with it. And if there isn’t, then that

illustration by cat finnie

is all beyond the circle of control—barring a time machine,” he laughed. More seriously, he added, “And so, one of the major lessons of Stoicism is to not beat yourself up over past errors because the past is done. You just can’t go back and change it. It’s completely beyond your control.”

With all the money I’d sunk into fish care, and the time my partner and I spent researching it on endless fish forum threads, it was tempting to feel that I had complete control over what was to come. This is the promise of technology, to “hack” things.

Cheat the system. Undermine the facts of things. Part of why there’s a small swelling of Stoic currents now is that, despite that promise, “we want the same things, we’re afraid of the same things,” says Greg’s coauthor, Dr. Pigliucci. “Even down to the mundane,” he says, citing a frustrated letter the Stoic Seneca wrote to his friend Lucilius complaining about how the traffic

noise under his apartment distracted him from writing.

“The new tools are what they are. They’re tools,” says Dr. Pigliucci.

If human nature hasn’t changed much, as Dr. Pigliucci says, then we’re still experiencing the same heartbreak, the same existential fears for our countries, the same mourning of dead pets. (One famous poem from the Roman poet Catullus describes his girlfriend mourning her pet sparrow.) Dr. Pigliucci says that daily he engages in the Stoic practice of not getting angry on Twitter, where he maintains his calm while people, he says, “throw all sorts of stuff at me.”

Throughout weeks of Stoic discipline, as laid out in A Handbook for New Stoics, I challenged myself to cut out my midday snack, to throw out my old coats, to catalog what I did wrong on a certain day, to consider how the universe doesn’t care about me. For the most part, it stung. Stoicism isn’t the

self-flagellating forgiveness of Catholicism or the quick-release pleasure of impulse shopping. It is a slow-release pill of selfbetterment that you have to dry swallow every second of every day.

This, too, is a mind game, it turns out.

Week 10 asked me to “act the opposite,” quoting Seneca, who says that “we are attracted by such things as riches, pleasures, beauty, ambition, and other such coaxing and pleasing objects; we are repelled by toil, death, pain, disgrace, or lives of greater frugality. We ought therefore to train ourselves so that we may avoid a fear of the one or a desire for the other.” Okay, I thought, taking account of my Stoic practice so far: I was still beating myself up for killing my fish and, on top of that, skipping my daily snack made me grumpy at work.

In the prompt under Wednesday’s “Aversions (Things You Dislike or Avoid),” I wrote in “Stoicism,” partly as a joke, but

Reed Magazine march 2020 27

MARCH 6–17 FROM MARCH 6 THROUGH 17, MAKE A GIFT IN HONOR OF THE PERSON, PLACE, OR THING AT REED THAT’S MEANINGFUL TO YOU. Nü Reedies! New minors! President Bilger!

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GOING STOIC partly in truth, because 10 weeks in, I was feeling no more enlightened and significantly more down on myself. Stoicism was hard, as were commuting, staying attentive at work, grocery shopping, meal prep, exercise, and being a good friend, daughter, and fish mom.

But one day that week—sandwiched between the day I barely forced myself to stop being afraid of dogs and the day I almost relished in buying nothing at all and, at the last moment, impulsively ordered delivery dinner—I hit a low point. That day, the single most consistent thought I had on the subway, trudging through Times Square to my office, responding to morning emails, shoving a bleak lunch into my face, suffering through the afternoon yawns and then dragging my corpse-like body back home, was that I am transcendentally bad at Stoicism and my life just could not accommodate it. At that low point, I decided to give up. F it.

The next day, I was released. I awoke in a good mood. Maybe I had had too much coffee, or found a rare seat on the subway that morning, but on that day, I persuaded myself to control-view every feeling of offense, hurt, or anxiety that came up.

Two deep breaths, and I commented “Thank you” under a particularly cruel edit from my boss or found it in me to patiently tell a dawdling Times Square tourist, “Excuse me.” I returned home equally tired.

Either I had properly internalized the dichotomy of control, or my state of utter surrender happens to resemble what it is to be a mediocre Stoic. In either case, I take no credit.

In a Chinatown aquarium store, my partner and I picked out three identical barbs— fast-moving fish that move in packs. I didn’t immediately name them. And although the pharmacy of fish-keeping chemicals and equipment expands weekly under the aquarium, and although we meticulously check the tank’s pH, nitrite, ammonia, and temperature, the barbs, in my Stoic mind, remain high-maintenance decorations.

Cecilia D’Anastasio ’13 is a staff writer at Wired, where she covers video games and gaming culture. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with several fish and a small, terrible frog.

Want to think like a Roman emperor?

Greg Lopez suggests four easy meditations.

Take a (much) broader perspective Your hairdresser gave you a new do that is more mullet than bob and you are mortified with the result. Are you adding to your misery by stewing on your problem?

To get some perspective, compare your situation to other problems that people experience and have throughout history, from getting a bad haircut to plague or war.

Remind yourself of impermanence Lost umbrella, cracked phone screen, dead fish? Frequently reminding yourself of the impermanence of things can be a “vaccine” against the sting of loss.

Make a list of impermanent things in your life and rank them on a scale of 1–10 in terms of difficulty of their loss. Each day, choose one (starting with the easiest) and remind yourself of its impermanence whenever you encounter it.

Premeditate on encountering difficult people You know your neighbor is going to let their dog poop on your doorstep. Again. Each morning “premeditate” on frustrating people.

Remind yourself that they are doing what they think is right, and that you are practicing focusing only on what’s in your control.

Come up with some reasons that you will be better off if you try to work with other people, even if it’s only to cultivate your own prosocial tendencies.

Review your actions nightly Maybe you lost your cool when that driver cut you off and you flipped him the bird. Look at and learn from, rather than dwell on, past actions. Devise three questions with which to review your

Greg Lopez ’99, author of A Handbook for New Stoics

day and journal about them.

Epictetus suggested asking, “What did I do wrong?” “What did I do right?” and “What should I work on in the future?” Afterward, pardon yourself for your missteps by acknowledging your efforts and your intention to not repeat mistakes in the future.

Catch and apply the dichotomy of control to initial impressions Your slice of pizza arrived generously dusted with olives, which you hate. Initial impressions and judgments contribute to an urge to act, and acting on those impressions means you have assented to your first impressions about reality and what is appropriate.

(Maybe the pizza was a simple mix-up and easily rectified; maybe the olives were a fancy sort that is in fact quite tasty?) Practice pausing whenever you encounter something that seems very desirable or undesirable to you.

Say to yourself, “This is just my first impression; it may not be as it appears,” or something similar that you devise as a means of helping you implement this daily meditation.

Reed Magazine march 2020 29

Reediana

BOOKS. MUSIC. FILM. SEND US YOUR WORK! Edited by Katie Pelletier • reed.magazine@reed.edu

Keeping the Faith The brutal World War II internment of Ruth Hibbets Heim ’91 says Duncan was 120,000 Japanese Americans in dirty live- always “a special and nice presence to be stock pens and tarpaper barracks across around, open to the world.” Religion profesthe United States has been documented in sor Steven Wasserstrom [1987–] vividly exhibits and monuments, fiction and film. remembers his “calm, almost serene presence, But no historical account until now has with a beautiful smile and great determinafocused specifically on what it meant to tion and focus. He had a deep seriousness be a Japanese American Buddhist during without being solemn.” those wartime days. American Sutra: A Story Deepak Sarma ’91, now a Case Western of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War professor of South Asian religions, used to (Harvard University Press, 2019) meticulous- revel in the philosophical dialogues he and ly documents how the U.S. government sin- Duncan would conduct on the old commons gled out Buddhist priests and steps. “People would sit nearby their congregants as particular and listen to us debate. Once threats to national security— one of the campus dogs came and how Buddhists challenged by and Duncan did a classicalthis discrimination while takly Buddhist thing. He said, ‘We ing comfort from their beliefs should all be just like this dog and forging a new American and be here in the moment.’

Buddhism.

By their senior year, Deepak Author Duncan Ryūken remembers Williams as a fullWilliams ’91, an ordained Soto on Zen practitioner, wearing Zen Buddhist priest who also “monochromatic gray clothes” directs the Shinso Ito Center for and leading meditation groups Japanese Religions and Culture American Sutra on campus. at the University of Southern by Duncan Ryu-ken Williams ’91 Says Duncan, “I was searchCalifornia, says he has “one foot in ing during my Reed years for this the academic world and one foot in the priest- question of who am I—British or Japanese? ly world.” His background is equally bifurcat- Christian or Buddhist? Buddhism provided an ed: he had a Japanese mother and an English outlook that says you don’t need to choose. father, and attended both Buddhist temple and There’s a Japanese word, chudo, that means an Anglican-Episcopalian church in Tokyo. “I ‘middle way,’ where you find liberation and grew up bireligiously, if that’s a word,” he says. freedom between two extremes.” By his senior Both parents were professors, his father at year he had taken precepts and started to live Tokyo University of Foreign Studies and his at the Dharma Rain Zen Center in Southeast mother at a Japanese women’s college. The Portland, and he was ordained in Japan the international high school Duncan attended summer following graduation. in Tokyo had sent several graduates to Reed, An avid environmentalist, he was arrested but his arrival on campus was a bit of a shock. as a freshman with other Reedies in an anti“I went to a pretty strict all-boys school with nuclear protest at the Nevada Test Site. He uniforms in Japan, and I landed at Reed in wrote his religion thesis on environmental1987 with a coed dorm and coed showers,” ism and Buddhist leaders, one of whom was he says by phone from Los Angeles. “It was a the poet and Zen Buddhist Gary Snyder ’51. different universe. Some people loved it and “I ended up doing two chapters of my thesis on some people hated it—I became one of the him based on two or three long interviews,” people who loved it.”

Duncan recalls. He drew from this thesis for Acquaintances from that era recall him Buddhism and Ecology, a book he coedited in warmly. Amherst religion professor Maria 1997 while still a PhD candidate at Harvard.

30 Reed Magazine march 2020

Duncan calls Prof. Steve Wasserstrom’s classes on theory and methods in religious studies a key influence on his research approach. Sanskrit scholar Prof. Edwin Gerow [religion and linguistics 1985–96] was another huge influence, and not just for Duncan. Following a distinguished career at University of Chicago, Gerow was invited to Reed to teach religion, humanities, and, with a core group of seniors, Sanskrit.

“He really treated us like graduate students,” recalls Deepak. Gerow’s influence on that group, which included Williams, Heim, Sarma, Kermit Rosen ’91, and Rob Stein ’91, was so intense that all five proceeded directly to graduate programs in religion and Asian studies—three at Harvard, one

photo by dorothea Lange

Windstorm and barrack homes at the internment camp in Manzanar, California, where Americans of Japanese ancestry were incarcerated during World War II.

at the University of Chicago, and one at the University of Virginia.

The germ for American Sutra, says Duncan, was the death in 2000 of Masatoshi Nagatomi, a mentor at Harvard. Nagatomi’s widow, Masumi Nagatomi, asked Duncan to review a trove of family documents, journals, and Buddhist sermons dating to World War II. Moved by their conversations about the hardships she and her late husband had experienced as Japanese Buddhist internees, Duncan embarked on 17 years of research, translating diaries and interviewing dozens of survivors.

“About three or four years ago this was a 700-page manuscript,” he says. “I was advised by editors to cut it in half. They said the other

big challenge for the broader readership was that all these Japanese names are hard to follow. They said, ‘Can you get them down to seven main characters or something like that?’ The challenge was, I’d interviewed 120 camp survivors and army veterans, or I’d read their diaries. To leave them out of my book would have felt like an erasure. So the book has an extensive section of end notes that references these people.”

The book’s epigraph, a poem written in 1942 by the Buddhist monk Nyogen Senzaki, invokes the style of a Buddhist sutra, or scripture—hence the title. “The point he makes,” says Duncan, “is that people’s lived Buddhism is not in India, not in a text from 2,500 years ago, but in Los

Angeles in a horse stall . . . These people’s lives are themselves like a teaching. They are the people who really had faith in both Buddhism and America and embodied it in the most trying circumstances. When you can enact Buddhist aspirations and American ideals, that makes something called American Buddhism.”

Not until the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, more than 40 years after their forcible uprooting, did the interned families receive an official government apology and modest financial reparations. Today, more than 30 years onward, as Gary Snyder notes in his cover blurb, “the meaning of ‘citizenship’ in America is still unsettled”—making American Sutra more timely than ever. —ANGIE JABINE ’79 march 2020 Reed Magazine 31

REEDIANA Romance Languages: A Historical Introduction Carol Rosen ’60 traces the changes that led from colloquial Latin to five major Romance languages: Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian.

She provides not only an essential guide for those new to the topic, but also a reliable compendium for the specialist. Several of Carol’s essays were also translated into Italian and released in two books, Dal giardino della sintassi (Edizioni ETS, 2012) and Ragionare la grammatica (Edizioni ETS, 2017), which includes two previously unpublished essays. (See also In Memoriam, December 2019.)

Speaker for the God Henry Morrison Millstein ’70 warns, “This is not your Sunday School Jeremiah.” This historical novel on the life of the biblical prophet Jeremiah seeks a fresh and transgressive way of reading the prophet’s story in the light of both contemporary research in Israelite history and contemporary concerns about the interplay of sexuality and spirituality. (Smashwords. com, 2020)

Italo Scanga

Italo Scanga’s sculpture, Metaphysical V, 1986

Written by art critic Matthew Kangas ’71, this monograph chronicles multimedia artist Italo Scanga’s life as a “permanent immigrant” and how this status informed his career through subject matter, content, and style. This definitive book contains fully illustrated chapters, 61 color plates, and a thorough biographical data section, including a selected bibliography and list of solo and group exhibitions.

(Chihuly Workshop, 2019)

Recuerdos de Cuba Allan Cate ’71 has released an album that resulted from his study of Afro-Latin music at California State University and from several trips to Cuba. It consists of original compositions and arrangements, each in a different genre of Cuban popular music such as mambo, bolero, and chachachá. Nearly all of the musicians used on the recording are Cuban, as is the primary lyricist. It is available at cdbaby.com and for streaming on YouTube.

32 Reed Magazine march 2020

The Emergence of Happiness and Against Middle Passages Poet and philosopher Steven Light ’73 has recently published two books of poetry, The Emergence of Happiness (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019) and Against Middle Passages (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017).

Deep State In a novel by Chris Hauty ’78, a recently elected populist president is at the center of an increasingly polarized Washington, DC. When the White House chief of staff is found dead in his house, a tenacious intern discovers a clue that suggests he died from something other than natural causes, and that a wideranging conspiracy is running beneath the surface of everyday events. The Deep State is real. Who will die to keep its secrets and who will kill to uncover the truth? (Atria/Emily Bestler Books, 2020)

Dreams of El Dorado H.W. Brands MALS ’79 tells the thrilling story of the settling of the American West, from John Jacob Astor’s fur trading outpost in Oregon to the Texas Revolution. He shows how the migrants’ dreams drove them to feats of courage and perseverance that put their stayat-home cousins to shame—and how those same dreams also drove them to outrageous acts of violence against indigenous peoples and one another.

(Basic Books, 2019)

Three-Dragon Ante: Legendary Edition Rob Heinsoo ’89 designed a game that is a reimagining of the classic Dungeons & Dragons, Three-Dragon Ante, a casual stand-alone card game of chance for two to six players. Each hand, players ante gold to the stakes and compete to play the strongest flight of three cards: traditional dragons, legendary dragons, or mortals. Combine it with the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop game, or play it on its own. The craftiest (and luckiest) player wins by taking the most gold!

Why Hackers Win: Power and Disruption in the Network Society When people think of hackers, they usually think of a lone wolf acting with the intent to garner personal data for identity theft and fraud. But what about the corporations and government entities that use hacking as a strategy for managing risk? Patrick Burkart ’91 has coauthored a new book that asks the pivotal question of how and why the instrumental uses of invasive software by corporations and government agencies contribute to social change. (University of California Press, 2019)

Gabriel Hernández Solano

The Truth about Denial People believe what they want to believe. In an accessible, historically and scientifically informed overview of our understanding of denial and denialism, Adrian Bardon ’92 introduces the reader to the latest developments in the interdisciplinary study of denial, and then investigates the role of human psychology and ideology in, respectively, science denial, economic policy, and religious belief. (Oxford University Press, 2020)

Robert Louis Stevenson and the Art of Collaboration In her recent book, Audrey Murfin ’96 investigates Stevenson’s literary collaborations with family and friends as he traveled Scotland, America, and the Pacific. With critical readings of both major and minor Stevenson texts, supported and contextualized by unpublished manuscripts and letters by both Stevenson and those he wrote with, this book argues that Stevenson’s writings are both a product of and a meditation on collaborative writing. (Edinburgh University Press, 2019)

Painting with Fire Matthew Hunter ’97 shows how experiments with chemicals known to change visibly over the course of time transformed British pictorial arts of the long 18th century—and how they can alter our conceptions of photography today.

By following the chemicals, Painting with Fire remaps familiar stories about academic painting and pictorial experiment amid the industrialization of chemical knowledge. (University of Chicago Press, 2019)

Narkomania: Drugs, HIV, and Citizenship in Ukraine Against the backdrop of a post-Soviet state set aflame by geopolitical conflict and violent revolution, Jennifer Carroll ’03 considers whether substance use disorders are everywhere the same and whether our responses to drug use presuppose what kind of people those who use drugs really are. This ethnography is a story about public health and international efforts to quell the spread of HIV; focuing on Ukraine, and unpacks the arguments and myths surrounding medication-assisted treatment. (Cornell University Press, 2019)

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) reads A Planet to Win.

A Planet to Win: Why We Need A Green New Deal In the 21st century, all politics are climate politics. Thea Riofrancos ’06 has coauthored a new book that explores the political potential and concrete first steps of a Green New Deal. it calls for dismantling the fossil fuel industry, building beautiful landscapes of renewable energy, and guaranteeing climate-friendly work, no-carbon housing, and free public transit. And it shows how a Green New Deal in the United States can strengthen climate justice movements worldwide. We stand on the brink of disaster, but also at the cusp of wondrous, transformative change. A Planet to Win is part of the Jacobin series, published in collaboration with Jacobin magazine, and it includes a foreward by Naomi Klein.

HONK! A Street Band Renaissance of Music and Activism Andrew Snyder ’07 coedited and published a book that explores increasingly interconnected alternative brass movements around the globe through the lens of the transnational HONK! festival network. He credits experiencing MarchFourth Marching Band at Renn Fayre with initially sparking his enthusiasm for alternative brass bands. (Routledge, 2020)

Monster Colored Glasses In his premier book of poetry, Ken Yoshikawa ’12 explores a bilingual narrative of surviving abuse and the return to vulnerability, chasing one’s inner child through the trauma caused by abuse and white supremacy. With the imagery of D&D, technology, monsters, and creatures of all sorts, the book approaches the themes of fear, perception, othering, masculinity, yellowface, social responsibility, and personal transformation. (Lightship Press, 2019)

From Darkness To Light Isabelle Sinclair ’22 was a 21-year-old inmate of the Coffee Creek Correctional Facility when she met Stuart Perrin, who teaches kundalini meditation practice there.

After attending one of his classes, she reached out to him, and they exchanged letters over the course of her incarceration. The letters, which they have gathered into a new book, chronicle her spiritual path, from what brought her into prison to what saved her from it. Isabelle has initiated a GoFundMe campaign to raise money to donate copies of the book to all correctional institutions in Oregon, in the hopes that it can help others in need. For more information see gofundme.com/f/FDTL-book-donation. (Blue Kite Press, 2019)

march 2020 Reed Magazine 33

Class Notes These Class Notes reflect information we received by December 15.

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

Dennis McGilvray ’65 in 2017.

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

1950 70th Reunion

All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.

1953

You can see Iris Lezak’s recent artwork on her website: irisartist.wordpress.com.

1959

Jill Fanning and Michael Fanning ’58 “are still in Montana, getting old, and enjoying the outdoors.”

1960 60th Reunion

David Rosen let us know about three books by his wife, Carol Rosen, who died in August. (See Reediana, and In Memoriam, December 2019.)

1964

Majda Jones has been retired for 10 years and is indulging in travel to Europe and to view wildlife around the world.

“The European travel centers around art museums, history, architecture, and visits with family in Bavaria and Slovenia.

But my real passion is helping to preserve wildlife and the environment wildlife needs to thrive.” Bravo, Majda!

34 Reed Magazine march 2020

1965 55th Reunion

Dennis McGilvray’s retirement from teaching cultural anthropology at the University of Colorado has given him the liberty to do fieldwork and attend conferences without regard for the academic calendar. “A recent example is the most wonderfully nerdy and arcane conference in recent memory: ‘Customizing Sharia: Matrilineal Muslims and Islamic Law in the Indian Ocean Littoral,’ held at Ashoka University, Delhi, August 2019, where I delivered a keynote talk on ‘Sri Lankan Moorish Dowry and Matrilocal Marriage’ to a rapt audience of matriMuslim specialists.”

Tom Roeper would like to hear more from his ’65 classmates. “I’m ultrabusy with academics at UMass, biking, our three grandchildren, our life in Amherst (sanctuary work), and trying to conceive of communities of local institutions that can fight climate change. Laura, my wife, writes art reviews and teaches at UMass.

Our son Tim teaches economics at NYU, and our daughter Maria is one of the directors of the United Machinists Union. We are so proud of them! And I never stop appreciating Reed—I sing its praises as I am advising three undergrad

theses this semester.” Academically, Tom is still pursuing the acquisition of recursion in a half dozen languages and is involved in controversies about Piraha and indigenous languages. Tom was an invited speaker in May at the 50th anniversary of the Brazilian linguistics society, and has many other projects in Germany, Holland, England, China, Japan, and Romania. “Our language disorders test (the DELV) is being republished and parts are translated into Chinese, Arabic, and Romani. Feels good to be getting experimental work into the practical domain. No one buys my book (The Prism of Grammar) any more. But it is used in lots of classes. People download it from Kazakhstan. Oh well, information wants to be free!”

Tom Weisner taught at UCLA in the anthropology and psychiatry departments for 42 years, retiring in 2014.

“My wife Susan and I are enjoying family (including four grandchildren—two here in Los Angeles, and two in DC), travel, some writing and speaking. My research interests include culture and child development, field research in Kenya and the United States, families and children at risk (disability, mental health, poverty), and the integration of qualitative and quantitative research methods (I started a mixed-methods software company [Dedoose.com] 10 years ago, to do mixed methods). Thanks to Reed for launching me, and Dennis McGilvray for agreeing to post if I did!”

[Thanks, Tom and Dennis, for the mutual peer pressure!]

1966

Larry Kuehn (also MAT ’68) retired as research director at the British Columbia

Teachers’ Federation after 40 years as an elected officer and staff member. He is writing a history of the BCTF and teaching a course at Simon Fraser University.

“I’m an art quilter!” writes Caroline Lamb. “This means I make quilts no one can sleep under.”

1967

“Finally showing signs of blossoming!” writes Martha Holden. “It’s been a journey (mix metaphors!) and there’s a lovely scent of potential fruit.”

1968

The family of Martha James MAT, who died in 1980, is eager to talk to anyone who attended school with her on campus and might share some memories.

She studied modern dance and calligraphy as well as education, and talked about classes from Lloyd Reynolds. If you have memories to share with Martha’s family, please contact them at info @seattlesciencewriter.com.

Deborah J. Ross published A Heat Wave in the Hellers, and Other Tales of Darkover through Book View Cafe, an author-owned cooperative, and sold a novelette, “Many Teeth,” to Sword and Sorceress 34. She also edited Lace and Blade 5. (See Reediana.)

1969

Just one small step to the mailbox, folks!

1970 50th Reunion

Though he was inspired by “the wondrous openness for exploration and discovery in Reed’s offerings and environment,” writes Marc Lieberman, “surely the late Lloyd Reynolds—calligrapher and spirit par excellence—had the greatest impact on me. His seamless integration of spirituality (e.g., Blake), his craftsman’s brilliance (calligraphy as marriage of movement and soul), and his inspirational teaching have persisted as the deepest

of all my mind-openings at Reed. My spiritual stirrings, which had coalesced at Reed, blossomed into my studies in Jerusalem, where the richness of Judaic thought and the seeds of dharma which Lloyd planted converged into the maturation of my Jewish-Buddhist integration.”

Later, Marc arranged a meeting between the Dalai Lama and various Jewish teachers and rabbis in New Jersey, starting a Jewish-Buddhist dialog that continued at His Holiness’s home base of Dharamsala (as chronicled in the book The Jew in the Lotus). Finding so many parts of himself coalescing, Marc was motivated to take his many years of teaching ophthalmology in India and Nepal up into Tibet; for a decade—until the Chinese expelled all foreign-aid workers from Tibet—his Tibet Vision Project provided equipment, free surgery to the needy, and training of Tibetan surgeons (chronicled in “Farsighted,” Reed, August 2005).

“No retirement for me!” proclaims Henry Morrison Millstein. “I’m still working for Islamic Networks Group, an interfaith (don’t be misled by the name) education group working against Islamophobia and all forms of racism and bigotry, and am also working, under a grant from the National Science Foundation, on a dictionary of the Ichishkiin language spoken on the Warm Springs Reservation in Oregon. And I have a novel, Speaker for the God, coming out very shortly.” (See Reediana.)

1971

Allan Cate reports that he graduated from California State University, Los Angeles with an MM option in AfroLatin music. His culminating project was the CD Recuerdos de Cuba (see Reediana). Since then he’s been studying music composition and film scoring at Pasadena City College and UCLA. “I continue to tune pianos, but not nearly as many as I used to. I also enjoy consorting with

my four grandchildren in their various activities when I have a chance.”

Carol Ellerby retired from being a public defender in Seattle after 22 years (8 years ago) and now resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico. “I am blessed with a grandchild, Jasper Lindberg Hughey!”

Matthew Kangas has published a monograph on the Italian-American artist Italo Scanga. (See Reediana.)

Susan Kinne retired last year from work as an epidemiologist at Public Health–Seattle & King County. Now her time is spent lounging about, repairing rowing shells, and serving as a Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) for foster children in the King County dependency system. She continues to row competitively with Anita Lourie Bigelow ’67, the founder of the Reed Alumni Rowing Association (RARA), “someone who was way cooler than I when we overlapped at Reed.”

A patient yak endures clueless rider Marc Lieberman ’70.

Carol Ellerby ’71 and grandchild Jasper Lindberg Hughey enjoy some bonding time.

David Perry ’73 (right) visited Richard Cuthbert ’73 in Seattle.

1972

Gary Rogowski had a short story published in the online literary magazine Umbrella Factory.

1973

Steve Light has published two books of poems within the past three years. (See Reediana.)

While en route to his cruise to Southeast Alaska in July, David Perry stopped in to visit Richard Cuthbert at his home in Seattle. Richard was recovering from a second knee replacement surgery two weeks before, and it was David’s first visit to Seattle in many years and the first time the two had been together since Richard visited David at his Chicago home in November 2013.

1974

Though you don’t call any more, we sit and wait in vain.

Reed Magazine march 2020 35

Class Notes 1975 45th Reunion

John Penney hears crickets “from my classmates (and everywhere around my house and this morning in house, in my home studio). I host a weekly live jazz radio program on WRCJ 90.9 FM, Detroit Public Television’s audio channel, Saturday nights 7–10. Earlier this year a major donor to DPTV provided funding for me to produce a limited-run series, 13 one-hour episodes we’re calling Jazz City, celebrating the historical and ongoing contributions of Detroit to jazz.

On Labor Day weekend I celebrated my 35th year as an emcee and broadcaster at the 40th annual Detroit Jazz Festival, the largest free jazz fest on the planet.

Attendance this year was estimated to be over 350,000, the largest ever. I serve on the advisory board of the Detroit Music Awards Foundation, and continue to work on historical research and writing, coauthoring a book about Sippie Wallace, her family, and her history. Retirement is not an option. Because, truth be told, what I get to do sure beats working.”

1976

We’re gonna rap on your door, tap on your windowpane . . .

1977

Kirsten Bey is planning a long dog trek following the 1925 Serum Run from Nenana to Nome, Alaska, for February/ March 2020. “One last big dog adventure.”

1978

After three decades toiling in the trenches of Hollywood, Chris Hauty wrote a novel, Deep State, that he’s sold to Simon & Schuster in a two-book deal. “To say I’m enjoying the liberation of fiction writing would be a mild understatement.” The book, a political thriller, was published in the United States on January 7, 2020, and in the United Kingdom, India, and Australia one week later. (See Reediana).

1979

Henry W. Brands MALS has a new book out, Dreams of El Dorado. (See Reediana.)

Bruce McQuistan has been having a great time at a leading computer gaming company, investigating hypervisors and boot security mechanisms, tweezing graphics drivers in virtual machines, and benchmarking virtualized graphics. The kids are doing well, too: “After six years of homeschooling, our daughter has pursued the plunge back into public school as a sophomore. Through the tears and

36 Reed Magazine march 2020

Karen Pate ’79 and Augie.

Craig Thom ’81 sent us his new corporate portrait.

“ I tell people that after a career in newspapers and now horse racing, I’m looking for my next dying industry . . . ” —Karen Pate ’79 terrifying indeterminacy of confronting scholastic rigor, she is flourishing and, to her surprise, acing her classes. We are proud of her. Our son is laser focused on deeply grokking all of his AP classes in order to get into Reed to follow his dream of being a scientist. He continues to devour literature considered cheesy by his parents and enjoys playing violin in the school orchestra.”

“After 29 years as an editor at the Oregonian, I fell victim a few years ago to one of a series of staff cutbacks,” writes Karen Pate. “A lifelong horsey girl, I stumbled into a job with the Oregon Racing Commission, collecting blood and urine from racehorses for drug testing. I thought it would be a short-term patch, but they added some office hours, then a year ago I started editing part-time for

Wyrmlings and Gods: the lowly and the mighty, from Rob Heinsoo ’89’s Three-Dragon Ante: Legendary Edition.

Oregon ArtsWatch (an online arts and culture site that all Reedies should like and follow!). So between the two, they feed the practical and poetic sides of my soul. I tell people that after a career in newspapers and now horse racing, I’m looking for my next dying industry to get into—but actually I’m pretty content in where I am in my working life.”

1980 40th Reunion

. . . or maybe just leave you a Post-It . . .

1981

“I have moved to Anacortes, Washington, with my lovely wife Pat and will continue to practice osteopathic medicine here,” writes Craig Thom. “My practice focuses on primary care with support from osteopathic manipulation, dry needling, and other integrative modalities. I am particularly interested in the interplay of subtle energies, fascia, and posture. My kids are doing well: Tobias is climbing the ladder at AirBnB in DC, Olivia is leaving HP to continue UX design for a smaller, more nimble company, and Emma is still traveling the world taking up one interesting project after another.” Craig shared a couple of reading recommendations.

His favorite read for deepening medical insight recently is Cells, Gels, and the Engines of Life by Gerald Pollack. “Be open to radically modifying your picture of cell biology in favor of something more simple and elegant.” And The Awakening Land

by Conrad Richter “is the most viscerally alert portrayal of the settling of the frontier I have ever encountered, written in 1940 after the author had spent years gathering old family stories in Ohio and Pennsylvania.”

1982

Willa J. Casstevens accepted a position last year as social work program director and associate professor at Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, Iowa. “It’s great to be back in the Midwest after 13 years at North Carolina State University in Raleigh and 20 years in south Florida.” Her father, Professor Emeritus Thomas W. Casstevens ’59, is a Reed alumnus and lives with her five months of the year in Alta, Iowa; the remainder of the year he lives with her sister and her sister’s husband in Spokane, Washington.

1983

Larry Rinder will be stepping down from his position as director and chief curator of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive this month.

He will move to Ukiah, where he plans to host rescued farm animals and, perhaps, write a novel.

1984

Here come the minivans! Dodge Caravan and Plymouth Voyager hit the road.

1985 35th Reunion

Aretha Franklin’s voice legally declared one of Michigan’s natural resources.

1986–88

RIP Keyboard Cat.

1989

Back in 2005, Rob Heinsoo designed Three-Dragon Ante as a game-within-agame, the card game that Dungeons & Dragons characters play to gamble away their gold. It’s still part of official D&D, and in September WizKids published Rob’s expanded version of the game, Three-Dragon Ante: Legendary Edition.

The new edition can mesh with D&D, but most people play Three-Dragon Ante as a family (or drinking!) card game instead of as part of a D&D session. Thematically, it’s all about the dragons. Mechanically, it’s a counterpoint to poker, since no one folds out of hands; instead players compete for the main stakes with high cards and compete for smaller rewards with low cards. (See Reediana.)

Carlton Rounds moved to southeast Florida last year and is looking for deepthinking and weird-acting friends!

1990 30th Reunion

First World Radiosport Team Championship event held in Seattle.

1991

Tonio Andrade is living in Decatur, Georgia, and is relatively happy considering the state of the planet and the country. He is involved in environmental and transportation advocacy while holding

down a day job as a professor of history at Emory. He hopes that we will all stop driving our fucking cars so much.

Patrick Burkart’s Why Hackers Win: Power and Disruption in the Network Society was published by University of California Press in November. (See Reediana.)

Shula Neuman is tired of not seeing notes in the magazine from the alumni who graduated in the early ’90s. She’s currently the executive editor at St. Louis Public Radio, where she attempts to lead a great group of journalists to produce great coverage of the crazy news cycle in Missouri. She also was recently elected to the board of the Public Media Journalists Association. Aside from that, she does a lot of cycling.

1992

Adrian Bardon’s book The Truth About Denial has been published by Oxford University Press. (See Reediana.)

1993

Jessie Friedland is living in Savannah, Georgia, and is still hopeful that reason and intellect will triumph over idiocy.

DB LeConte-Spink has a podcast and has been involved in a fundraising effort to enable surgery to cure the damage done to a dog who was shot without provocation in a rural Oregon community. “Lucy and her owner are working hard to make sure this young dog is able to walk again despite the horrific violence to which she was subjected. Our fundraising work can be found at helpsavemy.dog.

In between these endeavors and (so far) not dying of stage IV metastatic malignant melanoma—a terminal diagnosis—I have been able to return to distance running and recently completed my first 50K trail event in several decades: the gorgeous Oil Creek ultramarathon.

Health willing, the plan is to (finally) step up to the 50-mile distance in the first half of next year and, who knows, I

might actually make some tangible progress towards completing the legendary Hardrock Hundred 100-mile trail race in Colorado before I die. Finally and unquestionably most blessedly, I am deeply fortunate to be engaged to a wonderful man and life partner. We haven’t yet set our official wedding date; however, it’s hoped we’ll do so at an auspicious time and folks from all walks of our shared lives will be invited.”

1994

Greg Lam ’96 and Rachael Carnes ’93 at the Midwest Dramatist Conference in Olathe, Kansas, in September.

DB LeConte-Spink ’93 and fiancé at the Oil Creek 50K trail ultramarathon in October.

Jessie Friedland ’93 has hope for the future.

How about a Royale with cheese?

“ I hope that we will all stop driving our f*cking cars so much.”

—Tonio Andrade ’91

1995 25th Reunion

Helen Thouless is in her third year of being a lecturer of mathematics education at UCL Institute of Education. A significant part of her job is training and observing beginning secondary mathematics teachers in schools across London.

As she happily gave up her car when she moved to London, she is making extensive use of the public transport system there as she visits schools in far-flung boroughs. Her free time is still spent fencing, and she has represented both England and Great Britain in several team competitions for the over-40s.

1996

Greg Lam and Rachael Carnes ’93 were at the Midwest Dramatists Conference in Olathe, Kansas, in September.

1997

Audrey Murfin’s book on Robert Louis Stevenson’s collaborative works was published last fall. (See Reediana.)

Reed Magazine march 2020 37

Class Notes

Matthew Hunter lives in Montreal with Daphne Kouretas and their two daughters: Lucia (6) and Zoë (15 months).

Although he is delighted to be on sabbatical this year, he continues to play in a band with other nerds (if not at the Foster-Scholz-Lounge–rocking magnitude of Das Bütt). Matthew’s new book was published in December. (See Reediana.)

2002

1998–99

2003

You think you’re some kind of Jedi, waving your hand around like that?

2000 20th Reunion London Eye opened.

2001

Travis Greenwood dropped a note “to let the mothership know that after 10+ years of bouncing around the non-tech side of tech, I’ve joined the marketing team at Velotech, a Portland-based ecommerce platform that owns and operates three websites in the bike and outdoor adventure spaces. In this role, I help shape strategy for email lists with about 500,000 subscribers between them. The role involves a little bit of everything: editing, creative direction, copywriting, a/b testing, etc., etc., etc. On a more personal level, reengaging with bikes professionally has led me to ride mine much more, and I recently hit my goal of 5,000 miles for the calendar year!” Travis also completed an epic 100mile odyssey from Hood River to Timberline Lodge—and back!—this past summer.

He encourages any and all Reedies in the e-commerce or digital spaces—or those looking to find a way in—to reach out at travisg@velotech.com.

38 Reed Magazine march 2020

Shimon Prohow and his wife, Nova Cohen-Prohow, welcomed their second child, Seeger Daniel Cohen-Prohow, into the world on September 29, 2019. At first impression, Seeger is seemingly nocturnal, but his parents hope he will adjust soon. Mom, Dad, and older brother Calder are doing well.

Jennifer Carroll’s new book was published by Cornell University Press in June 2019. (See Reediana.)

Winter Light Festival was an advertised Gray Fund Outing. It made me feel great to see that the program that was my inspiration for this field is also being shared with current students as a bona fide great time.”

2004

2007

Please scan the QR code to send us your class notes.

2005 15th Reunion

In July 2019, Lucas Tarr started as an assistant astronomer at the National Solar Observatory, supporting the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope. DKIST will begin science operations on Maui, Hawaii, in summer 2020. “Wish us luck with the new views of solar plasma!”

2006

As communications director for the Portland Winter Light Festival, Michelle David was hard at work in September, finalizing the artist/performance selection for the fifth year of this citywide, free event, which greeted over 154,000 visitors to Portland last year. “Back at Reed, my first job was as the Gray Fund Intern. That internship set me on a trajectory of event planning, community building, and a lifetime of love for the Rose City. Last winter, while on campus, I noticed that visiting the Portland

Thea Riofrancos explores the possibilities of a Green New Deal in her new book.

(See Reediana.)

Sara Robberson Lentz won a Gold Prize in the 2019 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards for Tumble, a popular science podcast for kids. Recent episodes have featured the science of whiskers and archaeologists skyping from a cave in South Africa. Check it out at www.sciencepodcastforkids.com.

Andrew Snyder’s book on alternative brass bands has hit the streets. (See Reediana.)

2008

Jesse Weinstein notes, “Life is stable for me, for which I’m grateful. Busy with political organizing, trying to rebuild the grass roots of the Democratic Party in Washington.”

2009

Rachel Fordyce, Kevin Henner ’10, Tom Chartrand, Rosie Pine ’11, and Caitlin O’Brien-Carelli ’07 enjoyed a

clockwise from top-left: Travis Greenwood ’01 is all smiles after about 7,500 feet of climbing!

DMatthew Hunter ’97 and daughter Zoë meet the Ionian Sea. The Cohen-Prohow boys, sons of Shimon Prohow ’02, get acquainted.

Spa day! Back row, left to right: Kevin Henner ’10, Tom Chartrand ’09. Front row, left to right: Rachel Fordyce ’09, Rosie Pine ’11, Caitlin O’Brien-Carelli ’07.

day of relaxation and friendship at a Korean spa in Lynnwood, Washington.

In October 2019, Zoe Vrabel cofounded the women’s advisory board for the International Flipper Pinball Association. “Pinball is enjoying a global resurgence and, as a male-dominated hobby, needs some updating to be welcoming to a broader swath of players.” Last June, an impromptu Reunions meet-up of Reedie pinballers was held at the Lutz, where participants waxed nostalgic about the pinball machines in the Reed ping-pong room (Lord of the Rings, Monopoly, Roller Coaster Tycoon) in between PBRs and high scores . . . hopefully an annual tradition in the making.

Emily Samstag, Zoe Vrabel, Rob Timberlake, and Gina Collecchia (all ’09) play pinball at the Lutz during Reed Reunions. (Photo by Gina Collecchia.)

From left to right: Natasha Wright ’10, John Wilmes ’10, Josh Hoak ’09, Erica Shannon ’10, Kyle Lamson, Renee Dosick ’11, Kristine Schultze ’11, May-Ling Li ’11, Jeremy Nelson ’11, Gavin Brown ’10, and Arthur Brown (’40?) turned out on an auspicious Friday the 13th for Renee and Kyle’s wedding.

2010 10th Reunion

Susan Lynch was named Vashon Island Poet Laureate 2019–2021. At the inaugural soirée at Vashon Winery last June, she read a trio of poems from her forthcoming chapbook, Nothing Doing. An islander since 2014, after completing an MFA in creative writing (poetry) at Goddard College’s West Coast program, she has been active in the poetry community—reading, teaching, editing, presenting, and facilitating collaborations with island artists and photographers—along with her 20 years as a shamanic practitioner.

Her plans for fostering poetry and poets during her tenure are, basically, “doing cool stuff with poetry, at all age levels.”

2011

Renee Dosick and her partner Kyle got married on Friday, September 13th, a full moon; the previous Friday the 13th full moon was the day they met, and the next one isn’t until 2049!

Ken Yoshikawa has published his first book of poetry. (See Reediana.)

2012

Not impressed.

2013

The late Alice Alsup’s poem “Driving Outside of Houston’s City Limits” was published in the anthology Houston’s Favorite Poems.

Wick Perry made a short narrative game for Coming Out Day! “It’s really special, and I’m excited to share it with my Reed community.” It’s about 20 minutes, in-browser, and headphones are recommended. Find it at wick.works/aesthetic.

2014

2015 5th Reunion . . . or pinball . . .

2016–17

. . . or Pokémon Go . . .

2018

Cooper Jackson, Aaron Till, Matthew Muller, Alex Grant, Will Schmid ’15, and Dylan Huff ’19 played a six-hour game of Twilight Imperium 4. Cooper won with the Mentak Coalition.

2019

Anthony Bencivengo was appointed to the City of Portland’s Unreinforced Masonry Advisory Committee, which is crafting recommendations for a program to help owners of earthquake-vulnerable buildings carry out seismic retrofits. Anthony, a volunteer union organizer with Portland Tenants United, will be representing the interests of renters in residential buildings.

Maybe you’re all off playing D&D . . .

Reed Magazine march 2020 39

In Memoriam Edited by Randall Barton • bartonr@reed.edu

Master of the Socratic Method Prof. Robert Allard Paul [philosophy 1966–96] November 22, 2019, in Lake Oswego, Oregon, of natural causes.

Prof. Robert Allard Paul was born in his paternal grandmother’s home in Red Lake Falls, Minnesota. His family soon headed to the Pacific Northwest, settling in Newberg, Oregon, where he was raised. After graduating from high school, Paul entered the ROTC and was a proud member of the Oregon National Guard.

In 1958, he earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Oregon, where he was founding editor of the Northwest Review, a quarterly journal featuring poetry, literary reviews, fiction, and visual arts of the region.

After gaining his master’s degree at the U of O, Robert began his philosophical studies at Cornell University Sage School of Philosophy. The philosophical theories of Ludwig Wittgenstein, considered by some to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, were very influential at the Sage School, beginning with the hiring of Prof.

Max Black in 1947. Paul studied with Black and with Prof. Norman Malcolm, a prominent interpreter of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. Paul brought this Wittgensteinian approach to philosophy to the Northwest, where, after a brief stint back at the University of Oregon, he taught this work to Reed students.

He was a visiting lecturer in philosophy at Indiana University and then an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon. In 1966, he was asked to consider a visiting position at Reed, which led to 30 years of teaching philosophy and humanities with another 20 years of emeritus teaching. A devoted member of the Reed community, Paul brought his favorite dog, Malcolm, a woolly wheaten terrier, to class. Malcolm greeted everyone before settling under the conference table.

When Paul retired, Prof. Mark Bedau ’77 [philosophy 1991–] noted that he had “a small but very devoted following of students, who hang on his every word as he leads them through the thought and method of Wittgenstein. Many of these students have since distinguished themselves in philosophy and other disciplines at institutions across the world.”

A few years after he retired, Paul taught a course with Prof. Mark Hinchliff ’81 [philosophy 1991–] who had been his student nearly 25 years before.

“At the end of our joint course, it was time to discuss grades for the students,” Hinchliff said. “We had given a number of short assignments along the way, as Bob often did. In that meeting, I saw that what mattered to Bob was whether the student had seen how hard the subject was, had appreciated that, had come to understand what a philosophical question was, had respected what it was to get an answer right, without distortion or obscurity, and had begun to do philosophy. I realized then that this was how Bob had taught our students in that class, how Bob had taught me, and how Bob had taught his students in every class. A student made a remark, and Bob gave a reply.

The reply was to move the student to a deeper philosophical understanding. Bob was a master of this sort of conversation, as old as philosophy itself. I shall miss him as my teacher, my colleague, and my friend.”

Paul wrote fiction and poetry, and was a serious and dedicated long-distance runner, engaging in marathons and ultramarathons (which range in distance from 27 to 100 miles).

He enjoyed hiking and backpacking in the mountains with his children.

He is survived by his wife, Linda Leigh Paul ’87 & ’95, his son, Christopher, and his daughter, Catherine, of his marriage to Patricia

Helmers; and his son, Timothy, of his marriage to Marilyn Paul.

In 1957, Paul wrote a critical review in the Northwest Review of Samuel Beckett’s All That Fall, a one-act radio play. In that piece, he asked, “Do we see ourselves in Beckett? Yes. We see ourselves, but not realistically, not as others see us. Beckett’s mirror is held not up to Nature, but to the mouth of the dying man, in hopes that he will, before the glass clouds over with that final breath, be able to reach out a finger, trace a small, clear space on the surface, and take one last inward look at his humanity. ‘One has, after all, these moments of lucidity.’ And if they come too late? Well what better way to die than in the presence surface of a reflected smile?”

From Prison Blues To A Judge’s Robes Robert Douglas Wollheim ’70 September 21, 2019, in Portland.

Bob lived by the words “Justice, justice shalt thou pursue” and “Do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God.” From the day in 1967 when he was imprisoned for refusing to fight in Vietnam until the day in 2014 when 40 Reed Magazine march 2020

he retired from the bench of the Oregon State Court of Appeals, his commitment to justice never wavered.

Bob came to Reed in 1966 from the South Side of Chicago, and attributed his ideas about fairness to his parents, Beatrice and Caesar, and to his Jewish heritage. Between 1967 and 1969,

he lived in an off-campus house called The Cosmos with Len Brackett ’70, David Simon ’70, Frank Poliat ’70, Laura Shill Schrager ’70, and Sam Schrager ’70. Among his other longstanding Reed compatriots were Jim Jackson ’70 and Selah Chamberlain ’70, who was also imprisoned for refusing induction.

As a sophomore at Reed, Bob surrendered his draft card at the Selective Service induction center in Portland. He was then reclassified from 2-S (student deferment status) to 1-A delinquent and drafted. He was tried before Gus J. Solomon ’26, chief judge of the U.S. District Court for Oregon. Solomon, widely known as liberal, was pained by the prospect of jailing Bob and urged him to become a conscientious objector instead. Bob refused, insisting that he was acting for political, not religious, reasons. It distressed him that his lawyer went along with the judge’s advice not to have a jury trial or to call any witnesses, and that he himself couldn’t speak until his sentencing hearing. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison.

As one of about a hundred draft resisters imprisoned at Safford, Arizona, Bob experienced intense loneliness, but he also connected with a wide range of prisoners. He observed different styles of activism and recognized that his own approach was political but not relentlessly so. After he had served almost five months of his sentence, a U.S. Supreme Court decision voided the Selective Service System’s practice of punishing protesters by drafting them. Bob was freed, his felony expunged, and he returned to Portland. The decision that triggered Bob’s release from prison applied only to prisoners who had appealed their convictions on the precise grounds cited in the decision.

Those without such pending appeals stayed in prison, which both horrified Bob and showed him the power of the law.

“As it turned out, the lawyer’s strategy for the appeal linked Bob to the Supreme Court case that was decided soon after, and that’s what sprung him from prison,” Sam Schrager explained. “Bob’s own case helped him appreciate how ignorant defendants often are about the law and piqued his own interest.”

In August 1970, after he was released, Bob helped organize demonstrations by the People’s Army Jamboree, a coalition of antiwar groups protesting the American Legion convention held in Portland. Violent, sometimes fatal, clashes between protesters and law enforcement were happening across America.

As Oregon authorities scrambled to keep the peace, Oregon U.S. Attorney Sid Lezak, who had charged and prosecuted Bob for resisting the draft, brokered an agreement among the activists, legionnaires, and law enforcement designed to keep the marches separate. When the war and the draft were over, Bob took pride in having been part of a movement that eventually led toward ending them.

Becoming a legal assistant with Legal Aid, he resumed his education at a community college. He went to work with the National Lawyers Guild, an organization of activist lawyers working within the legal system, and became a law clerk at Lindsay Hart, a Portland

HONOR THEIR

Memory IN THE SPIRIT OF REED

firm that supported politically and socially active lawyers.

“One day I decided that what the world really needed was another white, male, Jewish lawyer,” Bob said with his inveterate sense of humor.

After completing his undergraduate degree at Portland State University, he earned his JD from Lewis and Clark Law School and passed the bar exam in 1983. When he was admitted to practice in federal court the next year, Judge Gus Solomon presided over the occasion.

During his first year of law school, Bob met Karen Erde, a Portland physician. They married and had three children, Josh, Theo, and Nate Erde-Wollheim. Bob and Karen divorced in 2010, but remained close. Karen and their children survive Bob, as does attorney and mystery writer Val Bruech, whose companionship Bob enjoyed late in life.

Bob focused his law practice on advocacy for people pursuing workers’ compensation, personal injury, and Social Security disability claims. Believing Oregon’s prosperity was built “largely on the backs of working people,” he wanted to ensure their claims for benefits were heard. In addition to community service, he did pro bono work and was a board member of the AFL-CIO Labor’s Community Services Agency and Multnomah County Legal Aid Services. He supported the Willamette Valley Law Project (PCUN), an affiliate of Oregon’s largest Latino union, and the Campaign for Equal Justice, which champions access to justice for low-income Oregonians. Bob participated in many organizations and programs designed to increase the diversity of the Oregon bench and bar.

After years of private practice and community activism, in 1998 Bob was appointed by Governor John Kitzhaber to the Oregon State Court of Appeals. He won election later that year and reelection in 2004 and 2010.

At Bob’s retirement in 2014, Rick Haselton, then chief judge of the Court of Appeals,

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In Memoriam praised Bob’s opinions (there were more than 500), saying, “Because of Bob’s inimitable eloquence and penchant for plain speaking, many have been memorable in ways that so few of our pathologically impersonal renderings ever are.” Haselton marveled at the high rate of cases in which the Oregon Supreme Court agreed with Bob’s dissents and reversed the appellate court. He deemed Bob “the great, generous, humane heart of the Oregon Court of Appeals,” for whom “it has always, always been about people.”

The Willamette Valley Law Project honored him in 1998, declaring, “We consider Bob a ‘People’s Judge,’ demonstrated by his tireless advocacy for workers, including farm workers.

We know and trust that workers’ voices will be heard across Oregon’s judiciary because Bob will insist on it.” In 2007 Bob was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award for community contributions and dedicated service during the Keep Alive the Dream tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Li Re, former chair of the Oregon Minority Lawyers Association, praised Bob’s consistent and unconditional support of law students and lawyers from diverse and underrepresented backgrounds. “When he was invited, he showed up with no agenda of his own,” Re said.

“He mentored us. He hired us. He lifted us up.”

Bob was our awesomely accomplished, brave, cherished forever friend. We mourn his passing and celebrate his life. —Contributed by Patricia Mapps ’70.

Robert N. Walsh ’44

December 11, 2017, in Vero Beach, Florida.

Raised in Boston, Bob attended Reed for one year. “My going to Reed was accidental, rather than planned,” he said. “A kindly uncle gave me the opportunity at the last minute. As a C+ student, I was out of my league with so many scholarship winners and valedictorians. Not having had my last year of high school math, I had trouble with calculus. Getting extra help only gave me twice as much to do. I couldn’t close the gap and ended up doing rather poorly overall.

Personally, however, it probably was the most memorable year in my life.”

He left Reed to fight in World War II, and after the war returned to Boston, where he attended night school. Bob worked as a government engineer until retiring, when he enjoyed painting and doing research on Paris’s Père Lachaise Cemetery. He also busied himself lobbying state governments to adopt resolutions honoring Thomas Paine, leader of the American Revolution. Paine’s book Common Sense galvanized the decision of the Colonies for independence, and people often invoke his quote, “These are times that try men’s souls.”

Bob quoted John Adams, saying, “without the pen of Thomas Paine, the sword of 42 Reed Magazine march 2020

Washington would have been raised in vain.”

Bob’s wife, Patricia, predeceased him. He is survived by his three children, Susan, Robert, and Mark.

Jane Hartwell Stevens ’46 October 21, 2019, in Seattle, Washington.

Jane was born in Portland and attended Reed College. She graduated from Cornell University– New York Hospital School of Nursing and worked as a public health nurse in New York City. She married Alexander Stevens, and, except for the two years Alec served in the army in Heidelberg, Germany, they made their home in Seattle, where they raised three daughters.

Jane was a phenomenal mother and homemaker who made her own bread, kept fresh flowers in the house, and was a generous entertainer. She and her sister, Tory, spent wonderful summers on the Oregon coast with their children. Jane was a founder of the Wednesday Walkers, enthusiast hikers who walked every Wednesday from the mid-’60s until shortly before her death. This was typical of Jane, who was always game for any adventure. She volunteered at many places, including food banks, the Seattle Young Artists Music Festival, and St. Stephen’s Church.

Jane is survived by her husband, Alexander, and her three daughters, Mary Lane, Victoria, and Eugenia.

Irene Saloum Ellicott ’48

September 12, 2019, in Portland.

Born into a Portland retailing family, Irene worked after school at H. Saloum, her father’s dry-goods store. She both loved and hated working in retail.

“I made up my mind at that time never to be in merchandising,” she said, and began taking premed courses at Reed. But she left college to marry a man in merchandising and began raising a family. Eventually she and her husband opened Casual Village, a store in Lloyd Center, and over the years, four more shops were added.

When her eldest son joined the army and was deployed to Vietnam, Irene was devastated. “I had a choice of becoming a nervous wreck over the whole thing or doing something positive,” she said. Their stores weren’t occupying enough of her mental energies, so she began taking college courses. After auditing a French class at Reed, she moved on to Mt. Hood Community College for French and psychology and then transferred to Marylhurst College, where she acquired a bachelor’s degree in psychology—all while working full time in the family stores.

“Although I received my undergraduate

degree from Marylhurst,” Irene said, “I considered Reed my college. Reed gave me confidence in my intellectual ability to excel at anything I set my mind to.”

After getting her bachelor’s degree, Irene realized that a part of her life had never been finished. “I still had the intellect, and a whole new world opened up for me,” she said. She went on to get a master’s degree in clinical psychology from Portland State University and did postgraduate work with Masters and Johnson.

“Those years I spent going back to school and getting my degrees were the most exciting in my life,” she said. “I developed new selfconfidence and discovered I really did have the ability to learn, to get good grades, and to discipline myself.” Her thesis explored the impact of mastectomy on sexual function, the first scholarly exploration of that area.

“It was then that I became aware of human sexuality as an interesting subject of study,” she said. By this time, she had been divorced and remarried. Her second husband, Harold “Chris” Ellicott, was an executive at GeorgiaPacific with extensive experience in marketing and public relations.

At the point of being finished with merchandising and devoting her life to psychology, Irene was hit with the realization that if she made this choice she’d never again go to market. She realized that she really liked merchandising and had an idea for a different kind of women’s clothing store.

“No one had really done a store for contemporary women,” she said, “one that would offer clothes in medium to higher prices for the woman with a high taste level who couldn’t afford what her taste would like to have.”

With Chris, Irene opened East Street, a women’s clothing store in Lake Oswego. The two made a great team, attending markets around the world to buy for the store that became known for its selection of dresses and sportswear. In three years, the business expanded from 1,500 to 3,500 square feet. In 1987, they opened H.C. Ellicott, a women’s clothing store in Washington Square, which they operated for 18 years. One of their successful advertising campaigns, called “She’s a Winner,” used successful women who were customers as models.

Throughout her merchandising career, Irene also did marital and sexual dysfunction counseling. She had a passion for skiing, boating, tennis, and golf. Harold died in 2016. Irene is survived by her son, Nicholas Tecay.

Josephine Pesman Chanaud ’49 October 2019 in Prescott, Arizona.

While in high school in Denver, Colorado, Jo met with two “Reed Travelers,” current students who answered her questions about the college.

They clinched the deal when they reported there

Europe, and the Middle East, and sailed the Caribbean. Jo served as the librarian for a three-month Semester at Sea around the world.

The couple retired to Arizona in 2002.

When asked how Reed had affected her life, she replied, “It taught me to push myself to the limit intellectually. Whatever I don’t know (and there’s much!) I try to find out. That’s what librarianship is all about.”

Jo is survived by her husband, Bob, and her children, Megan O’Toole and Reid Sanford.

Virginia Sacressen Rausch ’50 August 5, 2019, in Bainbridge Island, Washington.

Robin Collins Coffee ’51

Josephine Pesman Chanaud ’49

were no sororities, no interschool athletics, no verboten subjects, and an emphasis on small classes with a 10:1 student-to-faculty ratio. She started at Reed when she was 16 years old and found it quite unlike her high school campus.

Classical music played in the background as she studied in her room at Winch. If the sun shone for days in a row, hundreds of students would haul their typewriters out on the lawn to write their papers. Instead of trying to blend in, people stood out and were characters: Mark Schindler ’45 was a yogi who studied upside down, and Alexander MacDonald ’46 dressed up in 18thcentury clothing.

Because she took two semesters off, Jo didn’t graduate until 1949. She majored in French and wrote her thesis on French playwright Henri-René Lenormand, advised

by Prof. Cecilia Tenney [French 1921–63].

That summer, she married Thomas Sanford ’51, and the couple moved to Berkeley, where Tom completed a PhD. They moved to British Columbia while he finished his dissertation on Canadian politics, and then Tom taught political science at Wesleyan University in Connecticut while Jo was a full-time mother to Megan and Reid. The couple divorced in 1962.

Jo began working at the library at the University of Colorado, where she met Bob Chanaud, who taught in the engineering department. After they married, she earned a master’s degree in library science at the University of Denver and supported Bob while he started a business. She did information retrieval work with UC Berkeley, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the Colorado Technical Reference Center, and Ball Brothers, and was head of the library reference department at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

She and Bob traveled extensively in Africa,

impact of Virginia and Robert Rausch on research and training of students,” said Dr. Joe Cook, professor and curator of the division of mammals at the Museum of Southwestern Biology at the University of New Mexico. “Reggie was such a wonderful and inspirational supporter. She and Robert donated their incomparable personal collection of parasites, research library, and equipment to the museum. Those donations served as the basis for creating a new division (the Division of Parasitology) and many new investigations of parasites. After Robert’s death in 2012, Reggie remained a strong supporter of both the Divisions of Parasites and Mammals, although she never wanted public recognition for these contributions.”

She is survived by her sister, Claire, and brother, David.

November 25, 2019, in Alameda, California.

A dedicated and pioneering mammalogist, Reggie and her husband, Robert Rausch, began their careers studying the mammals and parasites of Alaska and ended their careers at the University of Washington and the Burke Museum in Seattle.

When Reggie was at Reed, she sometimes brought her brother along to her visits with professors.

“I didn’t understand half of the issues they discussed, but I felt privileged to be with her at those times,” David Sacressen remembered.

“Reg had the patience to read the classics with me and was my important tutor. Reggie kept me informed of the work she did with her husband Robert concerning native diseases and chromosomes. She also taught me to be a feminist—that a woman may work at the occupation of her choice, the same as a man.”

While in Alaska, Reggie got a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She and Robert spent three years at the University of Saskatchewan and later conducted field work in China, Russia, and South America.

Over the course of their careers, the couple collectively wrote nearly 300 papers, many with a focus on Alaska’s fauna. They built significant collections integrating mammalian hosts and related parasites. More than 30,000 lots of parasites and 17,000 associated mammals from their work have been archived at natural history museums across the country. These specimens have been at the forefront of integrating research on the systematics, taxonomy, biogeography, epidemiology, and pathology of helminth parasites in vertebrate hosts.

“It is not easy to acknowledge the entire

Robin was the only child of Lorene Southwell and Grenold Collins, who met at the University of Washington in 1928. Loren dropped out of UW to marry Grenold and moved with him to Alaska, where he thrived, but she did not. The marriage ended in 1932, and Robin did not see her father again until she was nine years old, w i t h o n l y s p o rad i c co nt ac t w i t h h i m thereafter.

With her three-year-old daughter, Robin, Lorene ended up in San Francisco at the height of the Depression with $7 and no prospects.

Lorene eked out a living doing any work she could find as a single mother. They lived in a series of small apartments in rough parts of town, their longest residence a tiny rooftop apartment in the Tenderloin, where Robin grew up. She attended the prestigious Lowell High School, where she excelled academically. Bright, funny, and lively with her classmates, she nevertheless took a circuitous route home after school so they would not know the Reed Magazine march 2020 43

In Memoriam neighborhood where she and her mother lived.

At Reed, Robin flourished both academically and socially, making friends, attracting boyfriends, and becoming involved in many school activities. She was an avid swimmer and took part in the post-WWII explosion of interest in Northwest mountaineering. In 1948 and ’49 she summited Portland’s three “Guardian Peaks”—Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Hood, and Mt. Adams. She climbed Mt. Hood in the company of the future Pulitzer-winning poet Gary Snyder ’51, her boyfriend at the time.

Alice Moss ’52 remembered that when her father drove her to campus and they were moving her things into the dorm room, she saw Gary, dressed in lederhosen with a Tyrolean hat, climbing the side of the Ladd dormitory with a rope and climbing equipment to visit his girlfriend, Robin Collins.

Gary wrote a number of poems about their 1948–’49 relationship, most famously his widely anthologized “Four Poems for Robin” from his 1968 book, The Back Country. Robin was also a muse for Lew Welch ’50, whose first poems were written to her at Reed in 1950. In Lew’s 1977 roman à clef, I, Leo, he portrays her under the fictional name Barbara Small.

During 1949, Robin lived at the legendary “Reed house” at 1414 Southeast Lambert Street while taking a summer dance workshop. She was a reader on the staff of Reed’s literary magazine, Janus, worked on a number of Reed drama productions, and was a life model in art classes for the Portland painter Ed Danielsen.

Robin graduated magna cum laude with a thesis on Flaubert. She won a Fulbright scholarship, which took her to Aix-en-Provence from 1951 to 1953. (Native French speakers often said her French was flawless, and allowed that she knew more ways to swear than they did.)

In the summer of ’52, she traveled in France and Italy with Reed friends Florence Riddle ’51 and Gale Dick ’50. She received her master’s in romance languages from the University of Oregon and then won a fellowship to Radcliffe for graduate work in French and Spanish language and literature. As TA, she taught French to sections of undergraduates at Harvard. She was a professor of Romance languages at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, and taught briefly at San Francisco State College.

In 1960, she met Clark E. Coffee, an electrical engineer and computer programmer for some of the pioneering companies of Silicon Valley. They wed in 1962, with Clark bringing three young children from his previous marriage. In 1965, Robin and Clark had their own—and only—child, a son, Grenold.

Robin joined Clark in the creation and operation of Graphion, a computer typesetting 44 Reed Magazine march 2020

business that anticipated many of the electronic publishing advances to come. Clark’s innovative engineering and programming, coupled with Robin’s aesthetic and proofreading skills, combined to make Graphion a successful family business until their retirement in 1998.

In 2009, Robin and Clark moved from San Francisco to live with their son Grenold and his family in Alameda. Clark died in 2013 and Robin continued to live at the family home, happily surrounded by her grandchildren. Only in her final year and a half did her health fail, and after struggling with cancer and dementia, she died peacefully with her son at her side two months short of her 90th birthday.

Until the end of her life she was in love with the colors of nature. Finding an interesting leaf on the ground, she would take it home and tape it to the window to glow in the afternoon sun. She always had time for these aesthetic moments, exhorting those around her, her children and grandchildren, to “Look at this flower. No! Look at it!”

Robert Wells Ritchie ’57 July 15, 2019, in Palo Alto, California, from complications from Parkinson’s.

became the Paul G. Allen School).

One of seven full-time faculty comprising the early department, Bob helped establish its reputation for excellence in theoretical computer science research and teaching. He became the second permanent department chair, and during his six-year term led the department to national prominence, earning it a place among the top 10 programs in the country.

Bob was an early pioneer in the creation of what is now called computational complexity: the theory of the time and storage needed to solve computational problems. He was among the first to examine classically defined computations from mathematical logic and show that they are equivalent to modern complexity classes defined in terms of time and storage, calling them “predictably computable functions.”

He departed UW to embark on a second career in industry, first with a position in the research division at Xerox and then as HewlettPackard’s first director of university affairs, leading HP’s worldwide interaction with universities. After retiring, he volunteered time to the National Science Foundation and was involved in university accreditation.

Ritchie is survived by Audrey, his wife of 62 years; his daughter, Lynne Gustafson; and his son, Scott.

Edwin L. Emerick Jr. ’58

October 27, 2019, in Seattle, Washington, following a stroke.

Originally from Alameda, California, Robert earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics at Reed, where he wrote his thesis, “Conditions for the Power-Associativity of Algebras,” with Prof.

John Leadley [mathematics 1956–93] advising. After marrying, he went to Princeton, where he earned his PhD in three years. Bob joined the faculty at Dartmouth in 1960. Two years later, he returned west to Seattle and joined the faculty at the University of Washington, first as a professor of mathematics. He helped found the Department of Computer Science at the University of Washington (which ultimately

Ed was a Baker Scholar at Reed, which he considered his strongest academic experience. He wrote his thesis, “Symbolism, Perception and Language in the Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer,” with Prof. Edwin Garlan [philosophy 1946– 73] advising. He went on to get a legal education from the University of Chicago, where he earned a JD, and was a teaching fellow at the New York University School of Law. He joined the Seattle law firm that became McCune, Godfrey, Emerick, & Broggel in 1964, practicing in the University District for 52 years. Known for his integrity, intellect, and generosity, he was a lifelong learner who showed his love of family, friends, and community.

He is survived by Patricia, his wife of 52 years, and his children, Ned (Edwin III) and Elizabeth.

Virginia Jardine Banks ’63 November 27, 2019, in Williamsburg, Virginia, from cardiac arrest.

Born and raised in Portland, Virginia was a history major at Reed, where she met her husband, David Banks ’63. She wrote her thesis, “George E. Chamberlain, Governor of Oregon, 1903– 1909,” with Prof. Dorothy O. Johansen ’33 [history 1934–84] advising and went on to earn a master’s degree in library science from UCLA.

Virginia worked as a cataloguer at the Library of Congress before opting for full-time motherhood. The family lived in Vienna, Virginia; Frankfurt, Germany; Rome, Italy; and The Hague, Netherlands, before retiring to Williamsburg in 2003. Virginia was a Cub Scout leader in Rome and an embassy community liaison officer in The Hague.

A Master Gardener, Virginia was especially interested in rhododendrons and azaleas, and was a long-time member of both the Azalea Society of America and the American Rhododendron Society. She was active in the Unitarian Church, and was an accomplished quilter and weaver, creating a large number of beautiful objects during her time in Williamsburg. She is survived by her husband of 50 years, her son, Larry Banks ’94, and her sister, Doris Snyder.

John Douglas (“Dugan”) Barr ’64 November 28, 2019, in Redding, California, in his sleep.

A bulldog in the courtroom, Dugan was more like a gentle giant to the clients he represented.

The renowned personal injury attorney and his business partner, Doug Mudford, represented 22% of the patients in one of several lawsuits filed against Redding Medical Center—the former name of Shasta Regional Medical Center.

Plaintiffs claimed that doctors at the hospital performed unnecessary open-heart surgery on hundreds of patients. The hospital owners paid $395 million in a 2005 settlement, and the doctors settled for $24 million.

“Dugan was the smartest person that I’ve ever met—not just the smartest lawyer, but the smartest person,” his law partner Doug Mudford said. “There never was a case that he felt he couldn’t handle. Working with him was truly amazing because it was fun to watch his brain work.”

The son of a Siskiyou superior court judge, John acquired the nickname “Dugan” to distinguish him from his father, also named John. He was raised in Yreka and attended Reed, where he wrote his thesis, “The Natural Allies: The Papers of Baron von Holstein and the Alliance Negotiations Between England

and Germany, 1898–1901,” advised by Prof.

Frank Smith Fussner [history 1950–75]. At Reed, he met his first wife, Candace Cudlip Camp ’65. The couple had two children, Ben and Carin, and later divorced.

Dugan earned a law degree from the University of Chicago, but felt he couldn’t return to Yreka to set up a law practice while his father was still a judge in Siskiyou County. He began practicing law in Redding and in 1973 set up his own practice.

Brandon Storment, who joined Barr & Mudford in 2018, remembered that Dugan’s “take-no-prisoners” courtroom style hid his teddy-bear personality.

“In the courtroom, as an advocate, he was very tough. He worked very hard on behalf of his clients, but personally he was a very sweet man,” Storment said. “Everybody knew Dugan and had a story about him. It seems like he’d helped everybody or their mom or their grandma, because he really cared about people.”

This year, Dugan sued the city of Redding and the California Department of Transportation on behalf of more than 400 people affected by the 2018 Carr Fire, which burned 229,651 acres and destroyed 1,079 homes. The case is ongoing.

Dugan and his wife Terry were active in the community and were honored at the 2014 State of the City luncheon for their philanthropy. He sometimes charged less for those who couldn’t afford his services or asked for no fee at all. A successful businessman besides his law firm, Dugan was active in Democratic Party politics and enjoyed both a state and national reputation. In 2005, he was named Trial Lawyer of the Year by the Sacramento Valley chapter of the American Board of Trial Advocates; he was also a fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers and of the International Academy of Trial Lawyers.

“He’s probably tried more personal injury cases than anybody in town,” said Redding attorney Joe Gazzigli. “Dugan had the ability to relate well with people. Most jurors liked him.”

Dugan is survived by his wife, Terry; his daughters, Catie Barr, Carin Barr, and Erin Zepeda; and his son, Ben Barr.

Max Deen Larsen ’68

January 12, 2018, in Baden by Vienna, Austria, of a pulmonary embolism.

Born in Richfield, Utah, Deen majored in German and religion at Reed, writing his thesis, “Paradox and Pointe in Friedrich Schlegel’s Fragments,” with Prof.

Ottomar Rudolf [German 1963–98]. He went on to earn a master’s degree in philosophy at Yale University, and both an MA and PhD

John A. Comstock ’70

from the University of Vienna.

He taught poetry at the Yale School of Music and at the Vienna Music Academy; history of opera at Stanford in Austria; and was adjunct professor of music at the University of Alberta in Canada. In 1973, Deen moved to Baden by Vienna, where he founded and became director of the Franz Schubert Institute Baden, which offered master classes in performance, coaching in voice, piano, and recitation, and seminars offering insight into the cultural background of the Age of Goethe and the German Romantics. Baden’s Schubert Days showcased Baden as a globally significant city of music and culture, and Deen was acclaimed for that recognition.

He is survived by his wife, Verena, and his children, Evelyn, Rainer, Gwendolyn, and Brent.

John A. Comstock ’70

October 13, 2019, on Marrowstone Island, Washington.

A Portland native, John served in the U.S. Navy as a sonar technician before starting at Reed, where he obtained a degree in mathematics and biology in 1970. He wrote his thesis, “The Toxicity of Zinc to Fish,” with Prof. Martin Pall [biology 1967–72] advising. He earned a master’s degree in cell and molecular biology from San Francisco State University.

A nature and science enthusiast, John worked as a biomedical engineer in cancer research, molecular evolution, and bird genetics. He served for 13 years at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, retiring as chief biomedical engineer in 2010.

An outdoorsman, John’s activities included rock climbing, backpacking, and bicycling. He was a woodworker and played the mandolin.

Embracing the principle of “do it yourself,” he always had a project. He generously contributed time and energy to community efforts Reed Magazine march 2020 45

In Memoriam in Washington, including the founding of the Biota of Marrowstone Island project and the renovation of the Fort Flagler State Park Interpretive Trail. Above all else, John was an avid birder and enthusiastically shared his lifelong passion with everyone he met.

He is sur vived by his wife, Jo Ann Comstock; his daughter, Robin Murray; his mother, Enid Verbon; and his brother, Steve Comstock.

George Lappas ’73 In 2016, in Athens, Greece.

A Greek citizen born in Cairo, George studied psychology at Reed and wrote his thesis, “The Social Immobilization of Chronic Mental Patients,” with Prof. Bill Wiest [psychology 1961–95]. Much later in life he said, “My enthusiasm for Reed never abated.” For a while after graduating he worked in state mental hospitals in Salem, Oregon, and in California. He became fascinated with Indian sculpture, and in 1974 went to India to study architecture and sculpture on a Watson Fellowship.

Continuing his sculpture career, he studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts, the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, and the École Supérieure des BeauxArts in Paris. He worked in Great Britain and France, and was a guest artist at the Cartier Foundation in Paris. George was a professor of sculpture and president at the Athens School of Fine Arts in 1992 and traveled and worked in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Japan. His works are included in many important international private and public collections.

Kevin C. Lavelle ’80

November 15, 2019, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, of pancreatic cancer.

Kevin was born in Youngstown, Ohio, where his father, Joseph P. Lavelle, was completing his medical residency as an obstetrician-gynecologist. When a snowstorm prevented other doctors from reaching the hospital, Joseph delivered Kevin himself. The family moved to San Francisco, where Kevin roved his Richmond 46 Reed Magazine march 2020

neighborhood, just blocks from Golden Gate Park, in a pair of square-toed cowboy boots and a holster. When he was four, his mother died after a short illness. His father remarried and the family eventually grew to nine children and moved to Burlingame.

After graduating from Serra High School, Kevin enrolled at California State University, Chico. At the urging of his college mentor, he transferred to Reed. Majoring in philosophy, he wrote his thesis, “The Function of Ideals in a Moral System,” advised by Prof. William Peck [philosophy 1961–2002]. At Reed, he met his first wife, Stacey Goodwin ’83, and they moved to Albuquerque to attend graduate school at the University of New Mexico, marrying the year after Kevin completed his master’s degree in philosophy. The couple moved to Santa Fe, where their daughter Sarah was born. The marriage ended in divorce in 2004. Kevin married Nancy Jane Broderdorp, who died of breast cancer in 2010.

His third wife, Rachel, wrote to him via an internet dating site in 2013. After a year of visiting each other cross-country, she moved to Santa Fe and they were married in 2016.

Until he was forced into retirement by his illness in 2018, Kevin taught philosophy for more than 25 years at the Albuquerque campus of Central New Mexico Community College and at Santa Fe Community College.

He loved classroom teaching but also taught online. He introduced countless students to the basics of logical and critical thinking, ancient and modern philosophy, and biomedical and business ethics.

Kevin was passionate about democratic politics and the welfare of ordinary citizens, including his students. He read several blogs and newspaper websites daily and was a frequent participant in many online political discussions. An avid explorer of federal and Native American lands, he mapped out trips and camping with friends along rarely traveled routes west and north into Canada and Alaska.

His international travels began with an SFCCorganized trip to Greece in 2013.

He is survived by Rachel Thompson, his wife of three years, and his daughter, Sarah Lavelle.

as “Mama Soo.” She and her beloved dog Koko Puffs died in a fire at her home in Rainier. She is survived by her mother, Jeanne Spooner.

Marcia Starr MALS ’93 October 18, 2019, in Portland.

Born in Trenton, New Jersey, Marcia graduated from Bennington College and moved to Portland in 1957. A graduate of the MALS program at Reed, she made lifelong friends through this program. Her friends knew her as loyal, trustworthy, and witty woman who spoke many languages, loved Oregon, and traveled the world.

She was a docent at the art museum and taught English to immigrants studying for citizenship.

Marcia is survived by her sons, David and Philip.

John Joseph (Ian) Quinn ’01 July 26, 2019, in Baltimore, Maryland.

Raised in Washington, D.C., Ian attended Reed from 1996 to 2000, and although he did not receive his degree, he valued his Reed experience. He is survived by his wife, Robin; his parents, Jake and Tina Quinn; and his brother, Conor.

Prof. Robert A. Rosenbaum [mathematics 1939–53]

December 3, 2017, in Delta, Colorado, at the age of 102.

Chelsea E. Spooner ’92

July 31, 2019, in Rainier, Washington, from a fire.

Chelsea graduated as valedictorian of her class from North Mason High School in Belfair, Washington, where she was also a star basketball player. Following in the footsteps of her father, Robert Spooner ’67, and her grandmother, Emily Louise Spooner ’30, Chelsea studied at Reed for two years, majoring in English. She then began a career with the Washington State Labor and Industries Department in Tumwater, Washington. A free spirit, she was smart, funny, and a funky fashionista who referred to herself

Born in Milford, Connecticut, Prof. Rosenbaum came to his career in mathematics naturally. His father, Joseph Rosenbaum, had emigrated to the United States from Russia, went to Yale, where he earned a PhD in math, and then taught math at a private school. When Bob was a boy,

Joseph would take him on long walks where he posed complicated math problems, such as “imagine the corners on a dodecahedron”—a solid figure with 12 flat faces. Bob would have preferred playing with friends, but grew to appreciate the challenge.

“My father thought this was a good way of teaching me mathematics, which eventually would become the intellectual field I enjoyed most,” Rosenbaum said. “I thought there could be nothing more beautiful than mathematics, and that I could make anybody see that beauty.”

Having begun school early and skipped some grades, Rosenbaum started at Yale when he was 16. Partly because of his age, but also because he had little money, he found the university isolating and difficult. After completing his bachelor’s degree, he did a fellowship at Cambridge University and then spent two years at Yale doing graduate work.

Prof. Frank Loxley Griffin [math 1911–56] brought him to Reed as a teaching fellow.

Louise Johnson was also a Griffin recruit. She married Rosenbaum and became Prof. Louise Johnson Rosenbaum [math 1940–53].

Because of his math skills, Rosenbaum served as a navigator with the Naval Air Corps in the Pacific during the war. He resumed his studies at Yale, obtained his PhD in 1947, and returned to Reed, where he taught until 1953.

The president of Wesleyan University then recruited him to strengthen the faculty there.

At Wesleyan, his career encompassed teaching and administration, with Rosenbaum serving as dean of sciences, provost, vice president of academic affairs, and acting president. It was said he could have been chosen as president if he had wanted the job, but, was

quite insistent on not becoming head dog permanently.

“I never enjoyed the work,” he said of administration. “I enjoyed classroom teaching more.”

Rosenbaum became interested in the way math was taught in high schools. He was the organizing spirit behind the Project to Increase Mastery of Mathematics and Science, which ran summer seminars for math and science high school teachers in Connecticut beginning in 1979. He directed and later guided PIMMS, which grew to include pre-school and elementary school teachers from around Connecticut. Currently, the program, which has offered summer programs to hundreds of teachers, is being administered by Central Connecticut State University.

Along with other faculty members, he proposed that Wesleyan institute graduate programs in math, the sciences, and music. He pushed for the construction of a science center, tweaked the curriculum, and played a leading role in establishing the Center for African American Studies, recruiting the school’s first professor of African American studies.

As an administrator during the years of student protests in the late ’60s, Rosenbaum was even-handed. Wesleyan was grappling with the recent readmission of women, an endangered endowment, anti-war sentiment, and the anger and disappointment of many African American students. When students went on strike after the United States bombed Cambodia in May 1970, Rosenbaum supported their protests while opposing violence and retaining academic standards.

“He recognized, in the energies of protest, the voice of conscience, and the chance to join

learning with action,” his colleague Richard Ohmann wrote in a tribute in Wesleyan Magazine.

Rosenbaum had become a squash player at Yale and continued to play, winning several national awards in his age group and playing until he turned 90. Wesleyan named its squash center for him, and he carried the Olympic torch on its way to Atlanta in 1996. He went rafting at age 83 and hiked in the Rockies at 10,000 feet when he was 100. He wrote articles in many journals, published three books, and was active in professional organizations.

Among the many honors accorded him, the city of Middletown, Connecticut, twice honored him with a Robert A. Rosenbaum Day. Louise died in 1980. Rosenbaum married Marjorie Rice Daltry, a Wesleyan professor who died in 2013. He is survived by his three sons, Robert, Joseph, and David.

Pending Robert Grant ’43, Elizabeth Tarr Schneider ’44, Jacqueline King Shank ’50, Marvin Weinstein ’51, Jill McLean ’56, Charles Richardson, Jr. ’56, Ethel Eva Bisbicos ’57, Mary Lederer ’57, Edwin Emerick, Jr. ’58, Robert Woods Mann ’60, James Border ’63, Thomas Forstenzer ’65, Eric Schoenfeld ’66, Felix Prael ’66, Martha Bair Steinbock ’71, James S. Martin ’75, Katherine Izquierdo Smith ’75, Brenda Daum ’04, Rebecca Richman ’14, Prof. Bill Wiest [psychology 1961–95].

A number of these memorialized were members of Reed’s Eliot Society and included a gift to the college in their estates. We are grateful for their contributions to the world and to the college.

REED COLLEGE MASTER OF ARTS IN LIBERAL STUDIES

“When I finished my undergraduate studies in engineering, I felt that my intellectual passions were unfulfilled; there were so many other things I wanted to know and study. I wasn’t ready to narrow my options down to one field with a specialized master’s degree, so I chose the MALS program to challenge myself and open my mind up to areas of inquiry that I had not yet explored. As a MALS student, I was able to rigorously study topics that truly excited me and to talk about problems that matter with others who care deeply. Reed’s interdisciplinary program allowed me to supplement the limited scope of my undergraduate studies, improve my writing and research skills, and prepare myself for further graduate studies beyond Reed.”

—LIBBY O’NEIL MALS ’19

Learn more at reed.edu/MALS.

Object of Study

#MeToo With The Early Moderns The Baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi (seen here in Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting, which students in Hum 212 will examine this spring) acquired fame in her own time, and in ours.

Trained in Rome by her father, Orazio Gentileschi, Artemisia excelled at dramatic narrative painting, particularly depictions of women heroines and female nudes. Painter to sacred and secular leaders, Artemisia would become the first woman admitted to Florence’s famed Accademia del Disegno, thus gaining her access to the art institutions traditionally forbidden to women.

Recently, Artemisia’s biography and her powerful heroines have found deep resonance with the #MeToo movement. In 1611, Agostino Tassi, a painter in Orazio’s circle, raped Artemisia. Orazio brought charges against Tassi, who was found guilty. As many #MeToo bloggers have remarked, Artemisia is an exceptional woman for her era in that she survived not only the violence of sexual assault but also the gender discrimination of the early modern patriarchy. —PROF. DANA E. KATZ [ART 2005–]

What they’re looking at in class

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JUNE 11–14, 2020 Timely and engaging panels and discussions Stop Making Sense and other dance parties Alumni College—Democracy 2020: Mechanics, Opportunities, and Perils Front lawn sun and sprawl Canyon rambles Fireworks, games, and conversations galore One new president Registration now open! reunions.reed.edu

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FEAST OF THE BEAST: Carollers Susanna Lundgren ’73, Chris Lydgate ’90, and Penny Hummel ’83 light up for the Boar’s Head Party in December.