A Traditional College

A good many people complain about the results of college education and the time lost in what is known as college "life" as distinguished from college work. A good many colleges would try reforms, moreover, were it not for the weight of "traditions" and the opposition of more or less obscurantist alumni.

Suppose some one should say to you--"Here are a couple of millions of dollars. Go ahead and start a college. There are no alumni to hold you back, and as for traditions, you can begin at the ground and make your own!"

Roughly, this was what happened to Dr. William Trufant Foster, about ten years ago, when he was asked to start a college at Portland, Oregon. Reed College is the result,--an attractive little institution looking down on Portland and the Willamette River from one of the outlying hills.

Reed doesn't need to worry about making itself so fascinating that the "prep" school football stars will go nowhere else. It has no intercollegiate athletics, but compulsory infra-mural exercise and sports for all students able to take part. It has neither fraternities nor sororities. And it has stoutly refused to grow any faster than its equipment and teaching staff would justify.

But Reed has flourished, nevertheless. It has maintained the accent on scholarship with which it started and its students appear to be regular boys and girls, like any others.

There is a real place for "small" colleges of this sort in cities of over 200,000 inhabitants, and there ought to be more of them. Leslie's Magazine