Peek into Paideia 2025

A game of Survivor and a deep-dive into James Joyce's explicit literary output were just a couple classes featured this year.

This year’s festival of learning, Paideia, was jam-packed, offering 30+ classes a day. The dizzying number of choices ranged from playful to scholarly. Coding, line dancing, Reed history, solutions journalism, wildlife tracking, archaic calculation methods, robotics, documentary filmmaking, Japanese calligraphy—there were too many fascinating courses to attend or cover. Of the ones I attended, these stood out.

For the third year in a row, Reed’s self-produced version of CBS’s hit reality TV show Survivor —the infamous series in which contestants compete for the title of sole survivor or get voted off the island—took place in the Vollum Lounge. Led by Gavin Leonard ’25, Miles McCall ’25, Lily Hahm ’25, and Noah Goodman ’27, challenges included word scrambles, puzzles, and blind obstacle courses. Audience members saw firsthand that Reedies are not afraid to get their hands a little dirty when bragging rights are at stake. Other popular-culture themed Paideia courses included Building Reed College in Minecraft and The Evolution of Hip-Hop.

Among the more scholarly offerings, “How to S*xt Like Joyce,” taught by Caleb Stanco ’25, delved into James Joyce’s explicit literary output during a time of governmental censorship in Europe. Joyce, a pillar of the modernist movement, was born into a devout Catholic family in Dublin, but his faith was shaken during his teenage years. In the early 1900s he met his future wife, Nora Barnacle. Caleb presented the explicit letters between Joyce and Barnacle from 1909, the centerpiece of the class, pointing out how the erotic and romantic content, in addition to the story-like elements and ekphrastic evocations of past and future scenarios shaped the intensity of their desire for one another. Caleb’s final words were in defense of Joyce’s unabashed proclamations of love and lust, asserting that “there are things a thousand words can say that a picture cannot.” Other literature-infused courses included Memoir Writing, Ukrainian Art and Literature 101, and Afro-futurist Time Travel Club: Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Norbert Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings.

Tags: Students