Comrades of the Quest: An Oral History of Reed College

by John Sheehy

“The Ideal College is a college free to pursue its mission with unobscured vision of the truth, and power to proclaim the truth without fear or favor of politicians, or religious sects, or benefactors, or public cries, or its own administrative machinery.” —William Trufant Foster


Visionary. Iconoclast. Rebel. William Trufant Foster set out in 1911 to launch the “ideal college,” and succeeded in building an intellectual liberal arts powerhouse that over the next century would perpetually seek to break the hard crust of custom and orthodoxy. Foster’s quest for excellence and truth generated a steady yield of students—ranging from poet Gary Snyder to muckraker Barbara Ehrenreich to Apple founder Steve Jobs—who left Reed College eager to challenge society’s dominant paradigms.

Comrades of the Quest chronicles the colorful cultural and social history of this band of young, iconoclastic West Coast intellectuals, and of the institution that nurtured them. Drawing from interviews with more than 1,400 people and from unpublished memoirs stretching back to the college’s early decades, John Sheehy weaves together a riveting story told from first-hand perspectives of this unique community’s early formation and its ongoing quest to bring Foster’s vision to life.

With a punch much mightier than its weight, the Reed community undertakes an arduous journey through the political and educational developments of the past century—from the progressive education movement in the 1910s, the general education programs between the two world wars, scientific methodology in the 1950s, political relevance in the 1960s, theories of structuralism and deconstruction in the 1970s, the cultural wars in the 1980s, political correctness in the 1990s, to ideological bias in the 2000s—while keeping its founding ideals largely intact.

At a time when America is struggling to sustain its innovative edge, Reed College remains an iconic model in equipping students with the most rigorous set of skills and attitudes possible for questioning status quo thinking in a rapidly changing world. Its story, populated with a rich cast of characters, and marked by intense rigor, demanding social freedom, and unconventional creativity, is no customary college history, but rather an intellectual thriller of American idealism played out against the hard world of social, religious, and political conformity, to great heights and near-fatal confrontations.

576 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2012

Reviews

[Scott Benowitz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Comrades Of The Quest is a history of Reed College, beginning in the years leading up to 1908 when the college was initially founded, continuing up into the early 2000's.
This book does present a very thorough and accurate history of the first 100 years of Reed College.
If you're interested in reading about the history of Reed College, the history of the city of Portland, the history of Oregon or the history of the Pacific northwest region then you will find this book to be interesting.
a personal note: Some of the research materials which the archivists of Reed College had used when they'd written Comrades Of The Quest was a series of interviews which were conducted with people who had attended the college from the 1930's through the early 2000's. I'm a Reed graduate and I conducted some of the interviews with alumni who had attended the college which the college's archivists used when they'd compiled the history of the college which comprises the content of this book. The college archivists who wrote this book have slightly reworded some of the sentences which are quoted from people who had been students at Reed from the 1930's through the early 2000's which are included in this book, so that the wording is grammatically correct; some of the quotes from the college's alumi which are included in this book are not the precise statements that they'd stated when we'd initially conducted the interviews with them. The rewordings that the archivists did is slight, the rewording does not alter the original intended meanings of any of the sentences which were taken from the series of alumni interviews which we'd conducted which are included in this book. The college's archivists have explained to me that this is not uncommon when people are compiling histories of events or institutions and they're using audio recordings of interviews as some of the source materials.