'There was much talk of [Reed's] expererience in the discussion period, and of breakaway group of faculty from [Reed] who subsequently joined the fledgling Evergreen faculty...' I tend to confuse the Black Studies Crisis (1968) with whatever antiwar protests there may have been at Reed. The former was more traumatic and divisive and left the faculty torn for a quarter of a century, at least. The only real campus protests over Vietnam (that I can remember) had to do with a faculty resolution to condemn the war. There was vigorous opposition to it on the grounds that the College traditionally did not and should not take political stands. Oddly, I can't remember if the resolution passed or failed. There would have been no point to robust or prolonged student demonstrations on the Reed campus. The College is at the north end of a green and mellow residential neighborhood four or five miles from downtown Portland. Demonstrators would have been thus invisible, and in any event demonstrating to the converted, for although there'd been some nasty opposition to the resolution, I doubt that any of the faculty actually favored the war. So, Reed's Vietnam displays would have been almost entirely intramural. The real protests were at Portland State, at the south end of downtown. There students and faculty members blocked Southwest Broadway (which runs through the center of town) with a 'medical tent' in which--in which what? My mind is blank. In which they ate and slept probably and refused to budge. This was a highly visible demonstration, in any case, and eventually, of course, the police either negotiated the tent's removal or demolished it themselves. I remember being on campus the night some Reedie's came back from whatever was happening on Southwest Broadway. I remember standing in front of the library trying to console one of my students, who was in tears because of what she'd seen at PSU. What had she seen? How young we all were. A few people from Reed did go to the new Evergreen State (in Washington) but I think most of them broke away out of necessity; they were not kept on here. Even before that, some Reed faculty (including at least two who'd failed to get tenure) started something in Portland, called The Learning Community. The Learning Community did not flourish and perhaps some of its faculty went north to Evergreen, which, as I understand it, is pretty much the Learning Community writ large. I do remember one or two contentious Reed Unions (assemblies of the entire community) that dealt with Vietnam. So we must have been divided over more than the faculty's resolution. (Faculty meetings themselves were closed.) But I can't remember what the debate turned on. It can't have been just 'Vietnam, for or against?' I should say that at Reed the faculty decides (and thus wrangles over) just about everything. In those days there wasn't even a Dean of the Faculty. This sort of fine-grained democracy can get in the way of close friendships. Robert Paul remembering little of Reed College ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html