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Reed College to add computer science program, with an assist from Microsoft

Reed College will start a new computer science program in 2016. Steve Jobs, former Reed student and Apple co-founder, spent a lot of time in his brief tenure at Reed in the Westport dorm block on campus. (Andrew Theen/The Oregonian)

Reed College, whose most famous dropout co-founded Apple, will soon offer a degree program in computer science, thanks in part to a grant from Steve Jobs' former rival.

About a year and a half ago, the private college in Southeast Portland started planning in earnest to raise $5 million for a new computer science degree program. On Tuesday, school leaders say the fundraising is nearly complete.

Microsoft chipped in a $500,000 grant, and Reed collected another $4.25 million from anonymous donors. Kurt DelBene, a senior vice present at Microsoft, sits on Reed's board of trustees and helped orchestrate the grant, school officials said. Rep. Suzan DelBene, D-Wash., Kurt's wife, is a Reed alum.

While Reed's computer science connections date back decades, the school has never offered an undergraduate major.

Hugh Porter, vice president for college relations, said the faculty and students had to wrestle with whether adding a computer science program fit with Reed's liberal arts culture.

Jim Fix, a computer science professor who joined the the math department in 1999, was the first tenured faculty member in the discipline, though the school offered courses before that.

Kevin Myers, Reed's director of communications, said ever since Fix arrived at Reed the school planned to build a "state of the art" computer science program. "That's the direction we're moving in right now," Myers said in an interview.

Porter said so-called Reedies don't gravitate to how things work, rather they focus on the why. "It took someone like Jim Fix to sort of convince everybody that there was this really interesting theoretical underpinning as well as these practical skills," Porter said.

The college plans to hire two new full-time faculty members in the department. Reed, with an enrollment of roughly 1,400 students, wants to maintain a student to faculty ratio of 10 to 1.

The new major is the latest example of a developing trend on campus. In the decades since Jobs' time in the Eastmoreland neighborhood, Reed continued to pump students into the tech world. Alums include the founder of Portland-based tech company Puppet Labs and a co-founder of mobile developer Urban Airship.

Thirty-eight Reed alums work for Microsoft, more than for Apple. According to the school, about 10 percent of Reedies work in the tech industry in some capacity. Myers said the school has alums who work for Instagram, Twitter and other companies. More than half of the students taking computer science courses at Reed are women, which Myers said was a draw for Microsoft.

John Kroger, Reed's president, declined an interview request for this story but said in a statement the school was "deeply thankful to Microsoft for their support of computing and algorithmic thinking in our liberal arts setting."

"Reed graduates from a broad range of majors go on to be leaders in business and technology, and we're very proud of that," Kroger said.

About 110 current students take computer science courses through the math department. A smaller group participates in the Software Design Studio, an internship program where students learn how to design software programs.

The program won't have any direct relationship to Microsoft or Apple, but the head of the newly created department will be named "The Richard Crandall Chair of Computer Science." One of the anonymous donors requested Reed recognize the late Crandall, an inventor, Reed alum and former physics professor who was also a longtime friend and associate of Steve Jobs.