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A
message from the alumni association president
The more things change…
By Patrick Pruyne ’83
During a recent visit to campus I learned that
after many months of deliberation the faculty had elected to leave
the college
distribution requirements “as
is.”
You will recall that the requirements direct that every student will
have significant depth of study in each of four groups: A) literature,
philosophy, and the arts; B) history, social sciences, and psychology;
C) the natural sciences; and D) mathematics, logic, or foreign languages
or linguistics. This requirement ensures “the broad understanding
of the arts and sciences signified by a liberal education.” Along
with the humanities requirement these form the core curriculum of a Reed
education.
The requirements accomplish more than that. By grouping departments
together the faculty must consider its role in the larger context of
educating
Reed’s students. Ideally Reed faculty members embrace their teaching
responsibilities in a far less parochial manner than might occur otherwise.
This conservative decision set me off on a bit of a hunt for the earliest
history of these requirements that affect the nature of Reed so profoundly.
With the generous assistance of special collections librarian Gay Walker ’69,
I was able to review a selection of letters, speeches, and publications
from the first presidents of the college.
Reed’s first president, Foster (1910–19) articulated that
Reed would be “a college of liberal arts—not a trade school
or technical school or a University or a professional school of any kind.” His
successor, Scholz (1921–24), wrote in “Unifying the Liberal
College Curriculum” that “Reed College [is] an educational
experiment based on an honest effort to disregard old historic rivalries
and hostilities between the sciences and the arts.”
It is not surprising that détente between practitioners and promoters
of their own disciplines was and is required to construct such a core
curriculum. This worthy educational goal must co-exist with its own very
real political consequences. There is no perfect way to fashion a set
of studies for the roundly educated person without disenfranchising some
topical domain or enhancing the stature of another.
Yet the Reed faculty submits to and endorses this imperfect structure
each time the debate is engaged precisely because it serves the education
of their students so demonstrably well. Who among us does not know
the Reed scientist with a poet’s heart or the Reed mathematician with
a passion for architecture?
So the college arrives, once again, near where it began. After almost
a century of creating the environment necessary to produce true liberally
educated scholars the practical reality accepted is that what the college
has always done works and works better than any alternative model yet
considered.
As the college matures, as the faculty changes, and as the catalog
of course offerings expands, the context within which Reed students
pursue
their education remains based upon a broad, reliable, and uniquely
effective footing.
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