The Festival Must Go On

When an epic ice storm hit Portland in January, nothing could stop Paideia 2024.

Despite the snow and ice-covered roads, students, staff, and alumni were able to come together for this year’s celebration of learning, demonstrating the resilience of the passion for learning within the Reed community. Instructors lead classes from as far away as Croatia and as close as a few hundred (slippery) feet from their dorms.

Here is a short list of things we learned this year:

• During the 1990s the food scroungers of Reed were said to have their own trading cards, sometimes including details such as superpowers.¹
• Austria's declaration of war on Serbia in July of 1914 caught other European leaders by surprise. Since it was in the middle of summer holiday, the British prime minister was out birdwatching in the countryside and the German prime minister was at a hot spring in modern-day Munich when the telegram reached him.²
• There are thousands of refugees and asylum seekers who remain untreated for the psychological trauma of their migration. The Coalition for Work with Psychotrauma and Peace is willing and ready to help with this.³
• If you tie twice during a vote in Survivor then the contestants that were not voted for draw rocks and whoever gets a different colored rock than the rest is automatically eliminated.⁴
• The word “zine” comes from the term “fanzine”, which were self-circulated science fiction fandom publications from the late 1920s.⁵
• Starting to invest at a young age means having a higher risk tolerance, allowing you to be more aggressive with your investments.⁶
• A large part of the Pacific Northwest was created from the collision of a land formation called the Siletzia block. The integration of this land left behind a trail of volcanoes that trace down into Northern California.⁷
• Reed’s annual Renn Fayre used to include the election of a pope and an anti-pope. Jeff “Moose” Price ‘03, the host of the event, was able to attest to this.⁸

Check out a gallery of photos of Paideia and snowy campus environs. 

Classes from which we gathered these new facts:
¹ Found Foodage: Scrounging (with instructor Milo Gardner-Stephens ’25); ²Creating Crashing Concert: The Concert of Europe and European Diplomacy from 1815 to 1914 (with instructor Christian Ramos ’24); ³Working with Psychological Traumatization in Migrants and Refugees (with instructor Charles David Tauber ’75, MD); ⁴Survivor College Survivor: Season 2 (with instructor Gavin Leonard ’25, Lily Hahm ’25, and Miles McCall ’25); ⁵Zine Making Workshop,⁶Introduction to Investing and Personal Finance for College Students (with instructor Aida Taha ’26; ⁷Earthquakes, Volcanos, and Catastrophic Floods: The Geology of Reed and Eastside Portland. (with instructor Paul Edison-Lahm, '83); ⁸Blue Like Jazz: The Papal Screening (with instructor Jeff "Moose" Price ’03).