Nostalgia is for Geeks: Institutional Memory at Reed
When the Union of Reed College Housing Advisors (URCHA) announced its formation at a rally on September 22, 2023, organizers relayed the story of how Reed College contracted union-busting law firm Barran Liebman to suppress the previous HA unionization attempt in 2018. When Barran Liebman tried to convince the Trump-appointed National Labor Relations Board to overturn the precedent allowing student workers to unionize, effectively arguing that no students in the United States were eligible to form a union, HAs withdrew their petition for recognition to protect unionized students at other schools.
Reed cultivates a public image centered on progressive values, most notably the Honor Principle, leaving union supporters confused about how the college could argue for the dissolution of every student worker union in the country just to avoid paying its own HAs a living wage. Students were not the only ones surprised to learn this happened. Turnover in Reed’s administration between 2018 and 2023 was so high that when URCHA representative Eli Rall ‘26 brought up the previous unionization attempt to counterparts, “I had admin sitting across from me looking like I was crazy.”
Incidents like this are part of a broader crisis of institutional memory, the collective knowledge held by members of institutions at all levels. Students have long lamented that Reed’s student body loses its collective knowledge in four-year cycles, but, in the past year, discourse on memory has expanded to take a more explicitly activist direction. The school’s ongoing shift to more corporate-style governance, as exemplified by changes to the HA contract, marginalization of faculty on certain governance matters, and a failed attempt to overhaul staff pay without guaranteeing living wages, has set off an explosion of projects seeking to preserve Reed’s history and anti-authoritarian culture. “The official history of Reed is that everything that has happened at Reed is because admin let it happen. They have completely covered up and will not talk about the amount of extreme and radical protests that had to go on with the student body in order to make those things happen,” said Rall.
Like most colleges, the Reed student body’s collective memory is reproduced mainly through individual conversations between students and more experienced peers. Orientation focuses on a synchronic view of the college, and although it includes an introduction video from the Student Body Government, does not cover Reed history, the histories of student dissent, or student autonomy. These were previously covered in the Student Body Handbook, written by the student body for freshmen each year, but no new editions of the Handbook have been published since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Because transmission of memory is mostly peer-to-peer, the disruptions associated with COVID-19 often come up as a dividing line in Reed’s collective memory. Rall considers themself well-informed on Reed’s history, but said before URCHA was formed in 2023, ”I don't remember necessarily hearing about [the 2018 HA unionization attempt] specifically, except through the grapevine of like, ‘Hey, this is probably something you should look at.’” In another more extreme example, when Drum Korps signator Connor Gilligan ‘26 was a freshman, the last graduating DK member handed him a page labeled “Institutional Knowledge” and tasked him with carrying on the longstanding club. When interactions like these don’t have a chance to occur between students, knowledge about both Reed’s past and present disappears, with potentially severe consequences for student autonomy.
“By not protecting institutional memory, we allow personnel at the college to change the terms around student autonomy. If we forget what we as students have done, we won’t know what we as students are capable of,” says Kes Vounzi ‘25 of Receipts, a recently-revived creative publication for students of color. Losing knowledge about student autonomy creates an environment where students can be governed without their consent, in contravention of the Honor Principle, which is generally held to necessitate that all members of the college community are honest and fair in their dealings with one another.
Much of Reed’s governance structure is theoretically based on equality between students, staff, and faculty, but Rall believes Reed’s current leadership “would much rather have everything be in their control, and they will do any sort of sneaky maneuvers that they see fit in order to see that happen.” They give the addition of mandatory campus-wide quiet hours to the 2023-24 housing contract, which was done with no formal announcement by Residence Life, as an example. Contracts up to and including the 2022-23 academic year did not mention quiet hours; each HA set their own policy at the beginning of the year in consultation with their residents, and could adjust it as needed. When Rall spoke to a dean in Student Life about the change, they were told, in essence, that the college would only allow such a change with a signature. In Rall’s view, this shows that “they are interested in manufacturing as much consent for any of their policies with as little education… as possible, which is not real consent.”
Tara Weling ‘25, who compiled a 111-page Reed lore document over the past year, said that while there is “no clear metanarrative” of Reed history, the college’s official messaging “mostly just talks about Reed as a place of intellectual rigor, while [Reed’s first President] William Trufant Foster also believed Reed to be a place of student-oriented leadership.” The Community, Faculty, and Student Constitutions reflect Foster’s beliefs: the Legislation Committee has equal representation of students, staff, and faculty, and students have exclusive authority over their own funds, spaces, and organizations. Weling says that in practice, though, the power of the student body has weakened over time. Students and alumni have recently voiced concerns about declining student body participation, which further jeopardizes the role of students in Reed’s governance.
Whether a decline in participation really exists is disputed, but there are concerning signs. In the most recent Senate election, there were fewer candidates than open seats. Turnout was barely above the 25% quorum. Weling believes the possible decline in student participation is attributable to a long-term change in the type of students Reed admits, saying administrators want “students who will publish papers, get more funding, students who are getting outside scholarship money,” as opposed to those “whose mission aligns with the activist or personal portion” of Reed’s history, which it emphasizes less. Reed’s current Strategic Plan largely situates “student leadership” in the context of career preparation.
“If you're looking to appeal to a broader audience, you're looking to do a more standardized, corporatized version of the product that you're creating. And in this case, the product is Reed College,” Assistant Director of Alumni Relations Tess Buchannan ‘21 said. Reed once avoided advertising, relying on word of mouth to attract prospective students, but in the past several decades has sought to broaden its appeal and grow its number of applicants, partially because the original approach left the college’s graduation rate low and its budget unstable.
The version of itself that Reed sells, though, often erases the historical and ongoing struggles of marginalized students. Vounzi says, “Reed was represented to me as a community bound by the Honor Principle,” where “if you come from a marginalized background, this community has resources for you to ensure equal access.” But, they said, “This representation of Reed I was sold is inconsistent with my experiences,” adding “There is a wanton disregard of the stories, experiences, and impact driven by people who share my identities.” Vounzi cited the example of “lost narratives” surrounding the 2017-18 Reedies Against Racism protests, which are generally remembered solely for demanding changes to the Hum 110 curriculum even though they started because of the college’s mistreatment of Black students.
Reed’s administration isn’t always familiar with the stories it isn’t telling. Gilligan said that rather than making concerted efforts to “kill institutional knowledge,” senior staff don’t know what students want or think, and “aren’t doing enough for their own institutional knowledge.” Reed spokesperson Sheena McFarland says new staff at all levels are oriented to institutional memory and culture “formally” via Reed’s Strategic Plan and values statements and “informally” through conversation with peers. Gilligan attested that when he brought up the 2018 HA unionization attempt to McFarland, who joined the college in 2023, she was unfamiliar with it and believed Reed had always supported unions, raising questions about how much memory senior staff actually retain.
Although Reed highlights its history of political engagement in the abstract, Rall said the college’s current senior leadership does not appreciate the scale of past student protest movements, and fails to comprehend that “those protests will come back if they do not start recognizing our autonomy.” Student Body President Andee Gude ‘26 said non-students’ attempts to represent the history of dissent at Reed are “interestingly put.” A 2023 Reed Magazine obituary of alum, trustee, and Renn Fayre founder Linda Howard ‘70 approvingly cited her involvement in the 1960s struggle for a Black Studies program, but brushed over its fate by saying “Unfortunately, the program was short-lived” without mentioning the years of institutional racism that led to the program being permanently disbanded by a faculty vote in 1975. The obituary also attributed the protests’ success to conversations with faculty members, brushing over tactics like class boycotts, occupations, and mass tuition strikes in which hundreds of students took part. Gude believes students and administrators differ in what should be considered institutional memory because “[administrators’] perspective is rooted in exceptionalism,'' centering individual achievements, whereas students want to know, “‘How can we keep good things going? What are these traditions we want to keep alive? How do we want to treat each other?’”
To answer these questions, students affiliated with a variety of formal and informal projects are taking memory into their own hands. One of the first dilemmas these projects must confront, though, is that just because materials are archived doesn’t mean people will seek them out. Gude notes that, “Materially, we have an archive space,” but “I don’t always feel like things get passed down through the grapevine.”
One of the most prominent models for addressing this dilemma comes from the Reed Zine Library, which takes a grassroots, participatory approach to institutional memory. Zines are self-published, small-circulation print publications commonly associated with DIY culture. The Zine Library was founded by former Special Collections Archivist Maria Cunningham in 2018 to increase the representation of BIPOC and queer authors in the Archives’ primary source inventory, and is now run by Social Sciences Librarian Ann Matsushima Chiu and Visual Resources Curator Chloe Van Stralendorff along with a team of student interns. “We’re actively trying to give students resources so that they can then go off and publish their own types of things, all sorts of different art pieces and writing pieces and things like that, and be able to capture their experiences,” says Matsushima Chiu.
Establishing a place for zines in the Library and encouraging their creation emphasizes the multiplicity of Reed histories, and is premised on the belief that reducing barriers to self-representation can highlight parts of the college’s world that aren’t always preserved and shared otherwise. For example, the zine collection includes primary material from a now-defunct Feminist Student Union that is poorly documented elsewhere. Van Stralendorff explains, “When placed within a library, zines become part of a tapestry of stories, where every voice and experience is valued, represented, and contributes to the collective memory.“ That’s important because the scholarly process that produces most material in the rest of the Library involves “a lot of gatekeeping,” Matsushima Chiu says, and so some knowledge “is not allowed through.” To facilitate the collection of non-conventional materials, the Zine Library collection policy is independent of the main Library policy.
The Zine Library’s engagement over the past year has been perhaps the strongest of any organization involved in institutional memory at Reed. In March, the first-ever Zine Fest drew 850 people, to share information and build affinities between Reedie zine makers and readers. The Zine Library also participates in outreach to classes to solicit zine creation, and one of its interns facilitates the student Zine Club, which sees relatively high participation at its regular meetings. As programs putting students in charge of their own memory like those offered by the Zine Library grow over time, Matsushima Chiu says it will “be really interesting to see the progression of student work or progression of student thought and what they're thinking about and what they're trying to capture.”
The growth of interest in institutional memory at Reed since the COVID-19 pandemic requires students to be clear-eyed about their goals. Although the college’s governance is moving in concerning directions, visions of Reed history that invoke a supposed fall from grace are a symptom of lost, not preserved, memory. Rather, as Buchannan notes, the point is that “if we have a good sense of institutional memory, we know where we've been, it's easier to decide where we want to go.”
This is a version of a story written for StudentNation.