ABSTRACT
Over the thirty-five years between 1925 and 1960, Reed College remained close to the ideals and organizational practices of its first two presidents and its early faculty. It was relatively single-minded and integrated, with faculty perspectives, student values, curricular practices, and other features of its organization fitting closely together and sustaining an over-all character of remarkable persistence. By the late fifties, the science departments were graduating four times as many students as the Letters and Arts Division. The students had come to define the president as unsympathetic to the honor principle and student-faculty community government and hence as a mortal enemy of the dearest part of Reed. The defining characteristic was a product of academic rigor plus—or even multiplied by—the mix of student attitudes and values. A student at Reed not only learned a great deal from the faculty but also learned as much if not more from his fellow students.
