This link will take you to the Reed College website.
And here’s a screenshot that I nabbed from that Reed College website.
Looks mighty pleasant, no? Makes me want to apply, so I can go hang out on the lawn outside my dorm, discussing Great Books, Big Ideas, Charlie Sheen, and whatever else students do during bull sessions these days. Leafy, laid back, lambent- ah, a word I’ve always wanted to use, even though the light may not be quite right for it. Anyway, these kids don’t appear to be sitting there texting each other. They’re actually hanging out together.
So, yep. I’d like to apply to Reed.
If only I had to do it all over again. If this time around I had some guts, Reed would definitely be on my short list: small, liberal arts, liberal, cool, funky, and far away from home.
Guess I’ll have to see if they have Elderhostel. And whether they keep students on hand to help the eldergeezers up from the sward after we creak-out after a bull session discussion Great Books, Big Ideas, Charlie Sheen, and hip replacements.
I can definitely see the Reed appeal.
In fact, it’s so darned appealing that another institution of higher learning “entity” pretty much appropriated the look, feel, list of faculty, local canyon, trees, art gallery, and founders. And made it their own.
That would be the “University of Redwood”, which may still have its site here. That is, if Reed’s attorneys have not yet prevailed and gotten GoDaddy to sever its old school ties with this scrim school.
Reed College officials found University of Redwood not in the US World Report, or in the Princeton Guide, but when they googled the names of their faculty members and lo and behold they found that their tenured faculty were also tenured at U of R. Quite a coincidence, no?
Officials at Reed suspect the site is part of a scheme to collect application fees from prospective students in Hong Kong and Asia. After collecting a fee, "a shrewd scammer could wait several weeks, then issue a rejection letter, and the student would never know," said Martin Ringle, chief technology officer at Reed.
A spokesman for Reed also found “serious mention of the University of Redwood on Asian higher-education blogs.” But, hey, you can’t expect those education bloggers to ask Dad and Mom to take them on a summer tour to visit campuses of interest, can you?
Of course, if they’d looked closely, they would have seen a few hints that something was amiss at old Redwood U.
For one thing, if you roam around their site, as I did, you’ll find a few peculiarities. Like information on Portland, Oregon. Which is helpful if you’re going to Reed College, because that’s where Reed is. But not so helpful if you’re going to school in Torrance, California, Redwood’s supposed home.
But if you’re applying from China, you might not pick up on the fine points like the difference (or distance) between Portland, Oregon, and Torrance, California, anymore than the average American student would pick up on the difference (or distance) between Wuhan and Harbin. (Let alone between 武 汉 and 哈 尔 滨 – hope these characters get published.) Heck, the average American high school student, from what I hear, probably wouldn’t be able to locate Oregon on a fill-in-the blanks map of the U.S.
As scams go, this one is pretty darned good – and nicely closed-loop: get students to apply and send in their application fee, wait a bit to “review” their application, then send them a “skinny envelope” (or skinny e-mail). If the scammers hadn’t gotten lazy and appropriated Reed College’s IP, they might never have been caught out. They could have easily created their very own Whattsamatta U and gone on for years. (What’s stock photo for, anyway?)
Meanwhile, all those kids who didn’t get in had to lick their wounds for a bit, then shrug it off. Maybe some of them actually got a real acceptance from Reed, which, they might be telling themselves, looks quite a bit like the University of Redwood – those jerks! So recklessly and foolishly selective that’s they’d reject me.
My guess is that within a day or so, University of Redwood will be GoDaddy history.
Meanwhile, talk about the virtual classroom. And a degree that’s not worth the paper it’s written (or not) on.
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