President William Trufant Foster, ca. 1915.
eed’s founding president, William Trufant Foster, was the youngest college president in the country when hired at 31. His rapid rise, coupled with his aversion to orthodoxy, tagged him as a brilliant upstart. The same reputation would soon be attributed to Reed.
Foster had a clear, if radical, vision for the school that would sprout up on the old Ladd farm in the rural outskirts of Portland. Reed would be committed to intellectual purity and meritocracy, avoiding the gentleman’s club atmosphere and “the sheep-dip method of education” that prevailed at other colleges. It would be imbued with a “deathless spirit” of intellectual rigor, academic freedom, and democracy; it would be independent, operating “without fear or favor of politicians, or religious sects, or benefactors, or public cries, or the college’s own administrative machinery”; and it would revolutionize higher education, becoming “first rank” among academic institutions.
As “comrades of the quest,” Foster recruited a cadre of young faculty from the East. He discarded rigid classical studies in favor of laissez-faire electives. He set out to make Reed tough, shutting the doors “on idlers by means of a discipline from which there would be no escape,” and setting the senior thesis and orals exam as mandatory goalposts for graduation. In this climate of rigorous inquiry, he eschewed grading to underscore Reed’s commitment to students and faculty “studying together” in a collaboration unbound by custom, tradition, or codified rules of behavior. This approach was tempered only by the honor principle, an ideal of community responsibility that he felt no need to define lest it become sclerotic. Then, for good measure, he banned the sideshow amusements of fraternities, sororities, and intercollegiate sports.