Michael "Mike" Reed '75

12 comments on Michael "Mike" Reed '75

1. While not knowing Mike well, I admired him on and off the track field, and especially now upon learning of his impressive accomplishments since Williams. Last year he lead a wonderful Class of 1975 Black Experience remembrance (link below)…. Graceful Mike left me in the dust when racing the hurdles (we tied once!), and I sensed early on he’d be in the fast lane in any endeavor he chose. Thank you for being a friendly, lovely classmate, Mike. My wife and I extend our heartfelt condolences to all his family. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHIlSCEy6NU&t=40s

2. Mike was one of those people who had an indelible presence. I first encountered him when I used to go down to the track at Williams to watch him practice on the hurdles. My brother Stan (’75) was on the track team with him. Stan and I were just communicating about him today, and ironically, we both used the same expression, “poetry in motion”. His athletic style was definitely a metaphor for his personality — smooth, steady, strong, entrancing, accomplished, energetic, and more. I didn’t know him well, but some 25 years later (in 2000), he came to my office in New York City to talk about his organization change consulting work. As I sat spellbound by his brilliant presentation, I still hadn’t placed him. But finally, we realized we knew each other at Williams. It was a small world moment. He was clearly admired and loved, as evidenced by these messages. I am fortunate to have known him, and I hope his family can focus on his wonderful legacy to help them move through their grieving process.

3. Mike Reed had a great influential presence in the Willams College community and impacted everyone who came to know him. He had a way of making you laugh and think, and evaluate situations all at once. He made an impact by encouraging others to engage and become active in our various environments. I am grateful for the positive example Mike had in inspiring others to always press forward at Williams and beyond. He will be greatly missed.

4. I recalled meeting Paula at another institution, who encouraged me to apply to Williams. When I got arrived my freshman days, I checked in with Paula who told me to meet and get to know Mike. She was right on every level. Mike challenged me not to be intimated by Williams and the Williams experience: “You’re here now so rise to the occasion.” He wrote a recommendation for me to get a federal internship in Washington the summer of my junior year. When I told him that it didn’t pay, he introduced me to a salesman at a fine haberdashery and I had summer income. Several years after graduation, I kept in touch. A true mentor and role model. Thank you Mike! My blessings to the family. (when I was given the information of Mike’s death, all I could text back was nooooo.) Mike will be missed.

5. I met Mike when I joined the Board of Trustees in 2005. He was already a trustee, and I was new and young and completely clueless and intimidated. I will never forget how Mike went out of his way to welcome me, and to make me feel comfortable and to tell me that I belonged (even when I’m pretty sure I didn’t!). That is the kindness and thoughtfulness that he showed everyone. Over the years, we became friends, and I was always so impressed by Mike’s ability to be simultaneously both so warm and funny…while also being so incredibly focused on and effective at making the college and the world a more diverse place. I’m so glad Morty chose Mike to inaugurate the role at the College, and love that he went on to do the same at Dickinson and Bowdoin. I also loved his friendship with Jimmy Lee, and how they both would crack up laughing as they reminisced about their time running together on the track team. Their friendship and incredible mutual respect (which would not have been obvious given their life paths!) was such a good example of the power of Williams. Mike’s passing is such a loss for the world and for all of us. I’m just grateful that I got to know him, and also grateful for the legacy that he leaves.

6. I was saddened to hear of Mike’s passing. I had the pleasure of running 8 seasons of indoor and outdoor track at Williams with Mike, and we were co-captains senior year. He was the consummate teammate — a gifted hard worker who never complained and was unfailingly positive. If you never saw him run, you missed out on something special. He was so smooth over the hurdles and made everything look so easy — poetry in motion. He won All-American honors back when Williams still had a 1/3 mile square cinder track and Williams Track and Field was not the relative juggernaut that it is now. Senior year I was privileged to run a leg (the slowest) on the outdoor mile relay team that Mike anchored to a college record that stood for more than 10 years. I regret that I didn’t get to know Mike better in college, because I was too busy trying to keep my own head above water academically and socially, but I did look him up and have a nice visit with him and Allison in Carlisle a few years ago, for which I am grateful. Mike was a good soul. May he rest in peace and may we meet again in the hereafter!

7. Mike had so many talents, but one that stands out to me was his mastery when it came to building community. This mastery showed during Mike’s time as a student at Williams when he was a leader in making the Black Student Union, the varsity track and field team and the A Better Chance program house on Hoxsey Street into powerfully supportive and vibrant communities for so many of us who were there with him in the 70’s. And it showed in his later work as a senior leader at Williams, Fairfield snd Bowdoin, and in all he did professionally outside the academy. Mike was such an effective community builder because he valued and cared deeply about others. In their remembrances, others have noted how everything Mike did seem effortless. That was, indeed, how it looked, but we all know of course that the difficult work of bringing people together, which Mike chose as his life’s work, is far from effortless. I’m grateful that someone so suited to do this work embraced it. Because of Mike, Williams and many other institutions with important, life affirming and life changing missions are different, and better, than they would otherwise be.

8. I was stunned to hear of Mike’s death. I didn’t know him well while at Williams, but I was certainly acquainted with him, as was nearly everyone our class. He had such a warm, open, self-assured manner than immediately put me at ease. I always looked forward to seeing and talking to him at reunions. Although I knew he was accomplished, it’s only as I read the tributes and obituary do I realize what a force of change and inclusivity he was. His death is a great loss to everyone he touched: the world needs more Mikes. My sincerest condolences go to his family, especially Bobette, who I remember fondly during my freshman year experience in Sage F.

9. Mike Reed was the reason I attended Williams College. I meet him at a college fair in Maryland. He radiated warmth and positive energy. Mike’s knowledge and passion about Williams and life in general captivated me immediately. He changed the course of my life in so many wonderful ways and I will be forever grateful.

10. Well to paraphrase/apply Wordsworth’s words from “Splendour in the Grass”, nothing will bring back the “radiance”and “glory” of “the hour” when we watched the young Mike Reed overcome life’s obstacles as symbolized by his love of hurdling through the track field. Neither will anything bring back the voice he contributed to that sexy a cappella Williams music group of handsome young Black men called, “The Black Complexities” (and complex, they were!). We won’t have again the pleasure of witnessing Mike mature into the role of husband and experience the happiness of fatherhood. We will never see again the courage he displayed in his anti-racism work, which we know had to be lonely and scary sometimes, which is why most of us avoid it. It was a marvel to listen to Mike recount the history of the Williams Black Lives that Mattered to him, which he did for the Black alum of the class of ’78 at our 40th reunion, the last time I saw him (Had only I known to take more pictures). However, as Wordsworth points out we should not despair but instead seek comfort in our reflections, our ability to make meaning of his existence and his death and our ability to connect to one another as one people—for Mike.

11. Dear Fellow Williams Alumni Members:
    How very sad to learn of Mike Reed’s passing. I had no idea he was so ill.
    Mike was smooth, cool, and dignified in his demeanor, even as a young man. He was very self aware, and was very capable of expressing his self awareness with clarity. Mike had a quiet swagger about him, not loud and boastful like some. He was an important and active member of our Black Student Union. His experiences at Williams during the early 1970’s, the first years of African American inclusion in sizable numbers and the years of a shift to co-education, gave Mike the perfect background to later work in Campus Equity and Inclusion at Williams and Bowdoin.
    For a time, when they were both employed by Williams College, both Mike Reed and Paula Moore Tabor were able to make those of us who were African Americans that attended Williams in the early 1970’s, many of whom had lost any feeling of connection to the campus, feel welcomed there again later in life. That was due in large part because both were able to navigate effortlessly between the black and white communities, (or at least they made it look effortless.) Now Mike and Paula are gone not just from Williams College, but from all of us who were eyewitnesses to their joyful transition from youth into young adulthood.

    Dear Mike:
    Rest in power Brother Mike. I want to thank you and your sister Bobette Reed for having been part of my Williams College experience. Finally, I hope you and Paula are somewhere organizing the best throw-down BSU party ever for those of us who are on our way!
    Linda Dorsey-Walker Class of ’76

12. I knew Mike casually when we both were students at Williams and involved with the Black Students union. He was a special person who I remember as someone that everyone respected and held in high esteem. He will be greatly missed.