President’s Office
Colin S. Diver
PRESIDENT 2002–PRESENT
Born on December 29, 1943, in Boston, Massachusetts
Reed’s 14th and current president, Colin S. Diver, came to Reed from the University of Pennsylvania, where he served as Charles A. Heimbold Jr. Professor of Law and Economics and for ten years was dean of the law school. He previously taught at Boston University and Harvard's Kennedy School. He holds a law degree from Harvard. Diver is the fourth Amherst College alumnus to head Reed. Other Amherst alumni who have been president of Reed are Dexter Keezer, Duncan Ballantine, and Paul Bragdon.
In his inaugural address, Diver championed the role of a Reed education in promoting creativity. The goal of a Reed education, he said, should be to enable Reed’s graduates to make genuinely original and valuable contributions to human knowledge or human society. Diver, who has taught a course on constitutional democracy during his presidency, consistently makes time to advise senior thesis students in the political science department; he also serves as the college’s pre-law advisor. In service of achieving a strong and healthy academic community, his presidency has been characterized by dramatic increases in the college's admission selectivity, student body diversity, and its retention and graduation rates.
Recognizing the need to increase facilities for academic and residential programs, Diver has taken advantage of opportunities to expand the boundaries of Reed's campus. The college has acquired a seven-and-a-half-acre tract of land formerly occupied by the Eastmoreland Hospital, a one-and-a-half-acre parcel adjacent to the Reed canyon, and various residential properties adjacent to the campus. Pursuing a stated goal to increase the proportion of Reed students able to live on campus to 75 percent, the college under Diver's leadership acquired the Birchwood apartments, constructed a new Spanish language house along Woodstock Boulevard, and constructed four new residence halls on the north campus, connected to the main campus by a new cross-canyon bridge. President Diver has also identified a need for new facilities to combine the music, theatre, and dance departments within a unified performing arts center and to expand faculty office space to address curricular growth and development.
Diver holds an honorary degree from Amherst College and has served on the Amherst College Board of Trustees. In 2004, the University of Pennsylvania School of Law honored him with the creation of the Colin S. Diver Distinguished Professorship. As an authority in administrative law, Diver co-wrote a popular textbook that is used across the nation; Administrative Law: Cases and Materials is now in its fifth edition.