The Reed of the East

I am pleased by and grateful for the letter from Roger Andriola ’69 [Letters, June 2012], and I want to thank him for taking the time and trouble to write it. To learn that one has influenced a student intellectually in a way that he experienced as a life landmark is the greatest gift a teacher can be given. Your readers may be interested to know that the story has yet one more Reed connection. When I was interviewed at Reed by the Yale law professor whose interviewing trip I emulated seven years later, I expressed doubts about whether a legal education would be sufficiently intellectually challenging (as opposed to arduous) for a Reed philosophy major with no interest in actually practicing law. He replied that Yale was different from the others. “At Yale, we like to think of ourselves as the Reed College of law schools,” he assured me. So I went there, and, as I compared notes with friends at Harvard and elsewhere, discovered that it was. I suppose one could say that it was a Reed orientation that my Yale-educated colleagues and I offered to the Reed-educated Mr. Andriola, obviously to very good effect.

—Michael E. Levine ’62

Woodbridge, Connecticut