Reed College is one of those schools that can cause a lot of damage to an impressionable kid like myself. I got their mailing late in my junior year of high school and decided, "Well, this would be the best school in the world if they even live up to half of what they say..."
I went and visited and they sorta kinda DO...not good, not good...like falling in love with the girl you can never have because she has to marry the rich Harvard guy and you're just a public school tool with a scholarship that might get you two weeks at Reed.
That said, I think Reed is a really excellent school that suffers from all the minor ailments most small liberal arts schools suffer from: a lack of diversity, a surplus of people who don't want to be social (and are paying 32,000 so they don't have to be), and the omnipresent pot presence.
I think Reed benefits from an unusually devoted student body (reed seems to inspire fanaticism, at least in its 'prospies' (prospective students)) and an unusually rigorous academic program which, at least in the sciences, is second to none. of course I'm not a science major, so why would I go there...? see: fanaticism
There are numerous myths connected with Reed College, most notably that the beat movement gained much of its impetus from reed grads who lived in a house off-campus. the college loves to perpetuate these myths as part of 'old reed'...this is from Reed Magazine, Feburary 99 (http://web.reed.edu/community/newsandpub/feb1999/)
"It was the late 1940s and a group of impoverished Reed students decided to commingle resources and rent a house together near campus. Thus begins the tale of the first "Reed house" and the unique people who inhabited it.
Among the students were Gary Snyder '51, who would become one of the original Beat poets and later win a Pulitzer Prize for literature; Philip Whalen '51, who would also become a Beat poet and later a Buddhist monk; poet Lew Welch '50, whose thesis on Gertrude Stein would later be published with a foreword by William Carlos Williams; Don Berry '53, who would become perhaps this century's greatest writer on Oregon history; and William Dickey '51, who would also become an accomplished, award-winning poet.
The group drank cheap wine, wrote poetry, and had all-night discussions and arguments on wide-ranging topics. Berry later recalled, "It was probably the birth canal for the Beat Generation--classic postwar Bohemianism and also one of the richest experiences of my life. The quality of minds involved was extraordinary."
The 'quality of minds' is what attracted me to reed in the first place, but there is also (supposedly) a rich and free social culture on campus that enables you to be anyone you want to be. You'd better get social, because there aren't any sports to play except rugby (and that only because someone once said it impressed judges for the Rhodes Scholarship)
Ultimately the thing that kept Reed in my brain was the admissions-office propaganda, which forced anyone reading their mailings to become intimately acquainted with the college's folkloric history. The Doyle Owl, a statue that "everybody goes apeshit over" is the centerpiece of their reed mythos.
Supposedly there is a car buried under the Hauser Library. I don't even attend the school, and I know all this and more.
The Princeton Review awards reed the honor of being a community of 'birkenstock-wearing, clove-smoking hippies.' That's not totally accurate, but it's a decent stereotype to take with you if you go to visit this Portland, Oregon liberal arts school.