Prior Election Czars' decision to count votes according to their own method, rather than using the Single Transferrable Voting method recommended by the Senate Elections Handbook, disenfranchised many student voters, an investigation by The Inquirer found.

The Student Body Elections Handbook recommends that all elections at Reed be counted by the Single Transferrable Voting (STV) method, but gives Election Czars the power to change the counting method.

When asked if they used the Single Transferrable Voting method, former Election Czar Ares Carnathan, who oversaw the Fall 2022 and Spring 2023 student body elections, said, "I have no motivation nor inclination to find the answers to the questions you ask. Please do not contact me again." Former Election Czar Aidan Mokalla, who oversaw the Fall 2023 election, did not respond to a request for comment.

However, the data suggests that neither Election Czar used STV. The official results for all three elections show the total number of votes increasing after each round of counting, ultimately exceeding Reed's student body size. This is impossible under STV. To understand why, let's consider a simplified example.

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A screenshot of the SOLAR Pro Mode extension in operation.

Correction: Wednesday, April 17, 11:09pm. The original version of this story mistakenly removed one phrase of the creator of the extension’s statement. The original quote read: "... your collaborator's journalistic integrity, and otherwise harmful coverage ...". The corrected full quote reads: "... collaborator's journalistic integrity given your history of biased, innacurate, and otherwise harmful coverage ...". The Inquirer regrets the error.

A Reed student created a browser extension which allows users to register for classes substantially more quickly than those without the technology, an investigation by The Reed Inquirer found.

The extension — SOLAR Pro Mode — advertises its ability to help users “Get the Reed College classes you want.” A review of its source code conducted by The Inquirer found that, once “armed,” the extension reloads SOLAR every 5 seconds to check whether the registration system has opened. Once it does, the extension immediately attempts to register the user for all the courses they’ve entered into a preset list.

The extension was likely publicly available as early as April 2023, as indicated by an update in the source repository’s “ReadMe” file — a public facing document with instructions on how to install the software. It is unclear how many students used the software to register for classes in 2023.

On Monday April 15, the extension was distributed to members of Weapons of Mass Distraction (WMD), Reed’s fire spinning club, and the Quest, one of Reed’s newspapers. As of writing, the extension reported 22 downloads across the Chrome and Firefox web stores, although Chrome analytics suggested that this number may be up to a week out of date.

The Inquirer has been able to independently confirm that at least one individual not associated with either WMD or the Quest downloaded and used the extension.

The creator of the extension announced in the Quest’s Discord server that they hoped to benefit “disabled and low-SES [socio-economic status] individuals,” whom the creator said are disadvantaged by the current system. Additionally, the creator said that they “wanted [SOLAR Pro Mode] to be more widely known,” in order to “force Reed to change how registration works,” since, “if everyone who’s registering uses it, it will essentially become a janky random lottery and probably crash solar [sic].” They described their actions as “kinda a form of non violent protest.”

Skye Mandigo-Stoba, a leader of Reed’s Disabled Student Union (DSU), was critical of the extension, saying, “Solar Pro [sic] seems to have caused more harm than good for the disabled community on campus, seeing as many of the students I have talked to now cannot get into classes they need to take because they were full the instant Solar [sic] opened.” Mandigo-Stoba also noted that the extension was not distributed to either the DSU or the C.A.R.D.S. committee prior to registration, and said that “I think this was a well intentioned effort, but the outcomes show that the creator likely did not ask the communities they were trying to serve what they needed.”

The Inquirer has identified the student who created the extension, but has decided not to reveal their name, fearing that they might become the subject of harassment. Responding to a request for comment from one reporter, the student said, “I am not interested in working with journalists who have consistently shown disregard for the safety of those being reported on and the accuracy of their stories. I have serious concerns about you and your collaborator’s journalist integrity, given your history of biased, innacurate, and otherwise harmful coverage as part of the Quest, and I do not wish to lend any legitimacy to your new venture.”

The Inquirer denies allegations of inaccuracy and unprofessional conduct. Its reporters stand by their prior coverage.

Reed Director of Web Support Services Jason Parker dispelled rumors that the deployment of SOLAR Pro Mode caused the widespread SOLAR outage that afflicted campus as registration opened Tuesday, saying in an email to the Inquirer that, “we do not believe browser plugin use was a factor.” Instead, in a public statement, Parker attributed the crash to a problem with Banner, a piece of software widely used by colleges and universities. “A change to Banner in December introduced an extra process … [which] did cause SOLAR-to-Banner communication to slow down,” Parker said, “This led to longer request processing times, but was only perceptible when we had the volume experienced on Monday.” Parker alerted campus Tuesday evening that the issue had been fixed, and that registration would continue as normal at 8:30am Wednesday morning.

The number of students in Reed classes typically exceeds the institution’s advertised student to faculty ratio of 9:1, an investigation by The Reed Inquirer found.

The Inquirer’s analysis is based on data available for 82% of Reed’s Spring 2024 classes, obtained by webscraping the SOLAR class registration system. Reporters requested access to the complete data from Dean of Faculty Kathy Oleson, but did not receive a response in time for publication.

Classes at Reed are divided into Groups 1, 2, and 3, which encompass the humanities, the social sciences, and natural sciences, respectively. The Inquirer found that 30% of social science sections enrolled at least 18 students — double the ratio advertised by the college — compared to 20% of class sections in the humanities and natural sciences. The typical section size for social science classes was 14 students, compared to 11 in the humanities and 15 in the natural sciences.

Of Reed’s departments, English and Environmental Studies reported the highest typical class sizes, each with 19 students.

Higher level courses tended to have smaller class sizes than introductory sections, but the contrast was more extreme in some divisions than others. Social science classes reported typical class sizes of 21 for 100 level classes, but below 9 for 400 level classes.

Humanities classes typically enrolled 9-12 students regardless of level, while natural science classes typically enrolled 15 students in introductory sections, and 13 in higher level sections.

When asked, Professor Christian Kroll said that he was not concerned by typically larger section sizes in Spanish literature classes. “When you have 20 students or more the conversation tends to be more dynamic,” he said. “I speak less and the conversations are almost always student driven…It is much more dynamic for the type of courses I teach in which different perspectives from different disciplines really add to the discussion.”

Dean Oleson did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

How do your classes this spring stack up? Explore the data.

The Reed Student Body Senate announced Wednesday it will conduct an advisory referendum during the next Student Body Election, currently scheduled for mid-April. The Senate will also add two new senators to that body, with a ninth to be elected in Spring 2024 and a tenth in Fall 2024.

Senate Election Liaisons Lily Garvey and Andrew Sakahara confirmed in an email to the student body that the topic of the referendum will be announced “after nominations close” on April 8 at 11:59pm.

The referendum was added to the ballot by an 8-0 vote of the Senate, according to the liaisons.

As reported by the Quest on March 29, Senate Secretary Taylor Barthes confirmed that the referendum “is solely at the request of the Senate and is not a result of processes outlined in Article 3, Section 4 or Article 4 Section 1 of the Community Constitution or the result of decisions made by Election Czars.”

Typically, as described in the articles of the Community Constitution cited by Barthes, student referendums are held to facilitate the “creation, revision, or abolishment of community-wide legislation,” and are initiated either by the Senate in response to a vote of the faculty, or by a petition of 20% of enrolled students, faculty, or staff.

There is no mention of an “advisory referendum” in the Community Constitution. Similarly, no references to referendums — advisory or otherwise—appear in either the Senate Bylaws or Student Body Elections Handbook. It is unclear what procedure the Senate used to add the referendum to the ballot, or if they are empowered to do so under the available governing documents.

The Student Body Senate did not respond to a request for comment.

Reed’s Office of Community Safety alerted campus early Wednesday, March 13, that the college had received an emailed threat of explosives and an accompanying shooting on campus. The threat was received by more than 200 institutions across the United States, and Director of Community Safety Gary Granger stated that “we have no reason to believe that Reed is specifically being targeted.” Reed Community Safety alerted the Portland Police Bureau upon receiving the threat, and assured the Reed Community that the PPB was responding to the matter. At this time there have been no further developments to suggest that the threat was credible.

“The communication was distributed to more than 100 admissions offices across the United States, alerting them to the reported presence of four fertilizer-based explosive devices,” Director Granger wrote Wednesday, “two on campus premises (with one concealed underground), one within a vehicle, and another in possession of an unidentified individual. The identity of the person who disseminated this information remains unknown.”

The emailed threat, a copy of which Director Granger provided to reporters for the Quest and The Inquirer, was sent at 4:03 AM Wednesday to 301 email addresses associated with college admissions departments across the U.S. The message originated from a user identified as “AustralianHitler@dnmx.org.” Dnmx is an anonymity-focused email provider which, on its website, describes itself as “The Anonymous Email Service For The Dark Net.”

The threat message itself, a copy of which can be found here, read:

*Formatting preserved

In an email to reporters, Director Granger assessed the credibility of the threat as low, emphasizing the number of institutions targeted and the vague nature of the message. “Even in a high-risk environment (i.e., a place/organization that might be a high value target for a person or group), the vast majority of threats are simply that,” Director Granger wrote. “... Since this was sent to over 200 institutions, the credibility is pretty low. I don't believe we at Reed are at any increased risk.”

“However,” Director Granger continued, “in my 40+ years of dealing with bomb threats one [thing] has been true across time: one always responds as if the threat may be credible because not to do so invites a potentially avoidable disaster.”

By isolating the domain names hosting each targeted email address, The Inquirer was able to identify the websites of all institutions to receive the threat message. Reporters were then able to cross reference the targeted domains with the federal Integrated Post Secondary Education Dataset (IPEDS) — a sprawling government database of U.S. colleges — identifying the names and street addresses of the institutions targeted, and by extension their latitudes and longitudes.

Overall, approximately 269 unique institutions in 48 U.S. states or territories received the threat message. Of these, 252 had domain names with exact matches in the IPEDs database. The remaining seventeen did not, however, indicating that those addresses were compiled and added to the target list from some reference list other than IPEDs.

Using Google Reverse search, reporters were able to identify that the seventeen unusual addresses appeared in a public file called colleges.txt, which contains a list of 1,717 colleges and their admissions email addresses. Of the 301 email addresses to receive the threat, 300 appear exactly in colleges.txt. Exactly one, the admissions email address for Robert Gordon University in Scotland, does not.

While The Inquirer has been unable to verify whether the colleges.txt source file was used to compile the list of targeted email addresses, it is hosted alongside an open source Python program, “sendmail.py,” which appears designed to help users solicit free t-shirts by sending mass emails to college admissions addresses. The program is hosted in a public GitHub repository titled “TikTokHacks,” which appears to have been created by the TikTok influencer @hoppuman, who uses the same username on both platforms.

A sample message provided alongside the Python program reads:

The program also comes with a manual, "READ THIS FIRST.txt", which instructs users to "edit Messages.txt to change the message you want to send." The manual includes a disclaimer that "I am not responsible for all the mail you will get because of this."

Late Wednesday, a local Fox 65 station in Kentucky reported that nearby Asbury university had received an emailed threat of “multiple bombs on campuses and that there would be an active shooter threat.” The university, Fox reporter Madylin Goins wrote, “was one of 200 colleges and universities that received bomb and shooting threats on Wednesday.”

Asbury’s contact email address does not appear in the threat message received by Reed, but does appear in the TikTokHacks GitHub repository. The Inquirer reached out to Fox 65 with its findings in an attempt to confirm whether the threat message received by Asbury used the same language as the one received by Reed, and whether the 200 colleges referenced were distinct from those targeted in the same batch as Reed, but did not receive a response in time for publication.

The threats came the same day that the U.S. House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly in support of the so-called “TikTok ban,” a bill that would force Chinese parent company ByteDance to sell TikTok within six months or face a ban of the app on U.S. soil. The bill now faces a difficult road to approval in the Senate, per a New York Times assessment, but President Biden has said he would sign it into law if passed. The Biden administration has long argued that Chinese ownership of TikTok “poses grave national security risks to the United States, including the ability to meddle in elections,” but some lawmakers — and many TikTok users — have opposed the bill on free speech grounds. It was not immediately clear if there was any connection between the timing of the threats and the House vote.

This is a developing story, and The Inquirer will continue to follow it as more information becomes available.

Hi, I’m Declan Bradley, a former reporter and editor of the Reed College Quest and six-time nationally award winning student journalist. I cut my teeth reporting Senate Beat my first semester at Reed, and spent the next year editing the paper. Last December, I made the personal decision to withdraw from the reelection race to protect my own mental health, having been greatly disturbed by the ongoing messages I received regarding my coverage of student protests, which arrived at all hours of the day and night, including to my personal phone number. Stepping away from the paper was the right decision for me then, and I haven’t written for the Quest since.

However, journalism is my passion, and I believe in the importance of data-based, investigative reporting. This leaves me with something of a dilemma. I want to write news, but the new Quest editorial board have implemented policies I disagree with, and which make it difficult for me to have confidence in the integrity of my own work. These are, to name a few:

1. Barring online breaking news coverage, and restricting all news stories to align with the seven day print publication cycle.

2. Failure to commit to writer right of review.

I’ve covered why I feel unable to report for the Quest, but what will this site do that’s new(s)? I’ll start with what it won’t do. No opinion. No editorials, or reviews, or games, or charts, or entertainment columns. All things that have real value, and certainly have a place in a newsroom, but don’t have a place here. This site will do one thing: hard news. I anticipate that will usually take one of the following forms:

• Breaking News
• Investigative reporting
• Data-based coverage, usually investigative

The attentive reader will note that two of these are not currently published by the Quest, with one being explicitly forbidden by current editorial policy, and the third is published by that paper only rarely. That’s intentional. I have no desire to compete with the Quest, which still employs several reporters I respect.

Now, down to the nitty gritty. These are the policies I intend to obey going forward. They closely mimic the policies that the Quest followed last semester, which is again intentional. I reserve the right to alter these policies as this project evolves, but will post a notice if I do so.

1. The mission of The Inquirer is to report the truth, without fear or favor.
2. Other contributors to this project are welcome, provided that they are Reed community members (students, staff, faculty, etc), and that they adhere to these policies.
3. Anonymity will be granted to sources if and only if they are suffering a credible risk of real and immediate harm. (Sources in high risk situations are encouraged to contact me on Signal encrypted chat (@declanrjb.42), and of course no source will ever have their name printed without their explicit permission. If in doubt, contact me.)
4. Letters to the Editor are of course accepted, provided that they:
   • Pertain in some way to coverage published on this site.
   • Are signed, no anonymous letters.
   • Are addressed to me, by name. (Given that I’m the only person who works here, the Quest standard, “Dear editor,” seems a bit grandiose.)
5. All other forms of newspaper writing — including but not limited to opinion and entertainment writing — are distractions from the mission of this site, and will not be published.
6. In cases where Inquirer reporting includes a data science or programming aspect, all code and raw data files will be made open source and published alongside the story. (Thank you to The Markup for inspiring this practice.)

Since this site has a specialized mission, it will also have a specialized format. Source files for each story can be accessed through the Source button above the headline. Blue links reference either external sites or documents obtained by The Inquirer. Click on orange links to view annotations with additional information and details about the reporting process. Typically, plain text will be written in traditional formal news style, while annotations will follow a more informal, explainer journalism style.

I’ll leave you with what I consider to be the watchwords of this site, the key tenets of its coverage and what it exists to accomplish. The Inquirer is:

Fast	Breaking news, as it happens.
Accurate	The truth, without fear or favor.
Agile	Willing to embrace the future of news and adapt to a changing landscape.
Streamlined	The news, and nothing but the news.

This is the Reed Inquirer. Let’s get to work.