Liberal Arts and Science University and the Global Challenges of the 21st Century

Introduction. Over the last 30 years, the educational model based on liberal arts and sciences has spread beyond its traditional United States to other parts of the world. However, recently, many liberal arts and science universities face a challenge: due to the pressures of the fast developing world, young people prefer more STEMs (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) oriented universities. The paper addresses the following question: How have private liberal arts universities adjusted to the global challenges of the 21st century? Methods and Materials. This paper conducts a case study of one of American leading private small universities – Reed College (Portland, Oregon, USA) by using reports on and studies of liberal arts universities and its graduates; interviews with students, faculty and administration of Reed College as well as academic writings on the subject. Paper examines the Reed College curriculum, faculty and student body, examines evidence from the current Reed faculty, student body and alumni, as well as the information about jobs that Reed alums land. Analysis. In the process of analysis, the paper discusses as to whether this adaptation has led to giving up on some of Reed College traditional principles. The role of international partnerships / programs in this process is analyzed. Results. The paper demonstrates that Reed College has been adapting to the global challenges of the 21st century by keeping its main focus on individual learning, research collaboration between faculty and students as well as expanding its majors to reflect the demands of the time, staying financially sound by incorporating alumni donations, and engaging internationally.

In the News

Welcome to the December 2019 issue of C&RL News. In this month’s Perspectives on the Framework column, Robin Ford of Reed College reflects on the Scholarship as Conversation frame as it relates to equity and social justice in her article “The long conversation.”

Using Student Narratives to Understand the Perceived Impact of First-Year Seminar Participation

The purpose of this multi-campus study was to determine how participating in a first-year seminar impacts students during the first semester of college. In the years since the first credit-bearing first-year seminar was offered at Reed College in 1911 (Gordon & Grites, 1984), many campuses have created seminars that address a variety of subject matter and meet the needs of an institution and its students. The customized nature of contemporary seminars has caused much of the course assessment and research to focus on measuring the impact of these institution-specific courses on retention (Porter & Swing, 2006). Qualitative methods were used in this study to identify additional ways first-year seminar participation influences the early college experience of students enrolled in the course. The study found that participating in a first-year seminar contributed to students' feelings of confidence in academic skills and abilities, as well as the connections they developed with their peers and seminar instructor. Several aspects of the first-year seminars in this study, including the content and ways in which the course was taught, were found to contribute to the perceptions of the participants.

The 2018 Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (GCCBOSC 2018)

In 2018, the annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference was held for the first time in conjunction with the Galaxy Community Conference, as an experiment to see if we could reach people in the bioinformatics community who aren’t part of the audience attracted by ISMB. Held in June 2018 at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, GCCBOSC (Galaxy Community Conference and Bioinformatics Open Source Conference) attracted over 300 participants from around the world. The meeting started with two days of training, followed by two days of talks and poster/demo sessions (with some joint and some parallel sessions). The joint sessions included well-received keynote talks by Tracy Teal, Fernando Pérez and Lucia Peixoto, as well as a panel discussion about documentation and training. After the main meeting, many attendees stayed for up to four additional collaboration days, an extended version of the Codefests that have been held in conjunction with previous BOSCs. GCCBOSC was a successful experiment. The organizers concluded that the best way to serve the broadest community of potential BOSC attendees will be to partner some years with the International Society for Computational Biology (ISMB) and others with GCC.

Whaling in the New Northwest

Don goldsberry had been speaking for only a few minutes at the Game Commission’s April 1972 hearing, and already Elizabeth Stanton Lay couldn’t believe her ears. Branding killer whales with dry ice? Burning their skin with lasers? Confining them to pools for research and profit? What kind of men were these? After listening to representatives from the Audubon Society, Friends of the Earth, and the Washington Environment Council voice their opposition, the sixty-year-old Lay rose to speak. “I have never before heard such a frank statement of what seems to me a totally inhumane attitude toward living creatures,” she declared. Marine mammals could do without the type of “research” Namu Inc. proposed. Whales were disappearing around the world, she reminded listeners, and the same could happen to orcas in Puget Sound. “When I was a very little girl, we used to see blackfish out in the bay, and we loved it,” she recalled. Now locals rarely saw the great creatures, except when men like Goldsberry trapped them behind nets. Lay was never one to stand idly by. Named after Elizabeth Cady Stanton, organizer of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention on women’s rights, she would have made her namesake proud. Born in Tacoma in 1911, she had grown up in the nearby town of Rosedale on Henderson Bay and earned a history degree from Reed College in Portland, followed by a master’s degree in political science from the University of Washington. She studied in Geneva, worked as a journalist in Washington, DC, and served in the new Federal Security Agency during World War II. From the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s, she worked as a historian for the US military, living in Paris, Frankfurt, and Seoul and producing a two-volume account of the Berlin Airlift. By the time of the Game Commission hearing, Lay had retired to Rosedale, where she played the organ at her Christian Science church, promoted forest preservation, and fought to stop orca capture. Her interest in the issue may have started with young Ken Gormly’s 1968 account of the catch in Vaughn Bay.

Oscar on the Boards: Playwrights Represent the Playwright on Stage

In this article Roger Porter analyzes five plays about Oscar Wilde, by Leslie and Sewell Stokes, David Hare, Eric Bentley, Moises Kaufman, and Terry Eagleton. He focuses on various aspects of the three Wilde trials of 1895, and shows how, while the plays employ verbatim transcripts of the court records, they use the latter in quite different ways and with different emphases, suggesting how the several playwrights regard Douglas in his relation with Wilde, as well as Douglas's implication in the verdict. Several of the plays focus almost exclusively on Wilde's personality, while others engage with larger issues, including Victorian moral regulation of sexuality, the relation of art to society, and English attitudes towards the Irish. He also stresses how the plays’ dramaturgy relates to their perspectives on Wilde, especially on his cultural role. Roger Porter is Professor Emeritus of English, Reed College, Portland, Oregon, USA. He is the author of Self-Same Songs: Autobiographical Performances and Reflections (University of Nebraska Press), Bureau of Missing Persons: Writing the Secret Lives of Fathers (Cornell University Press), and co-editor (with Sandra Gilbert) of Eating Words: a Norton Anthology of Food Writing.