Reed College
private liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon
Reed College is a private liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon, United States. Founded in 1908, Reed is a residential college with a campus in the Eastmoreland neighborhood, Tudor-Gothic style architecture, and a forested canyon nature preserve at its center. Reed maintains a 9:1 student-to-faculty ratio and has approximately 1,300 undergraduate students.
Reed's curriculum includes programs in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and arts. The college operates the Reed Research Reactor, a TRIGA research reactor used for undergraduate education and research, and in 2025 was classified as a Research College and University by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education.
Reed has developed a reputation for academic rigor and political progressivism, as well as for distinctive student traditions and an unconventional approach to undergraduate education.
History
The Reed Institute (the legal name of the college) was founded in 1908 and held its first classes in 1911. Reed is named for Oregon pioneers Simeon Gannett Reed (1830–1895) and Amanda Reed (died 1904). Simeon was an entrepreneur involved in several enterprises, including trade on the Willamette and Columbia Rivers with his close friend and associate, former Portland Mayor William S. Ladd. Unitarian minister Thomas Lamb Eliot, who knew the Reeds from the church choir, is credited with convincing Reed of the need for the school.
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This entry incorporates text from “Reed College” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.