William Trufant Foster acted as Reed College's first president, from 1910 to 1919. Born in 1979, Foster received a Bachelors and a Masters at Harvard. After graduation, he taught at Bates and Bowdoin College.

As president of Reed, Foster announced that the college, unlike many other liberal arts schools at the time, would have no intercollegiate sports or fraternal organizations. He instituted oral examinations and the senior thesis, requirements that define a Reed education to this day. In a 1948 Reed commencement speech, Foster said, “From the outset we held that men and women of college age could and should do more than hand back what they had heard in lectures or read in books. We believed that if we selected the right students and expected and encouraged them to do original work, at least some of them would do it as undergraduates, instead of waiting for graduate study.”

Foster was an advocate of simplified spelling. He served on the Advisory Council of the Simplified Spelling Board and as Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Maine Center of the Simplified Spelling Board. During his presidency, many Reed publications used simplified spelling.

Foster was president of Reed during World War I. He oversaw the creation of the female reconstruction aide program on campus from 1918-1920.

After leaving Reed, Foster wrote extensively about economics, often collaborating with economist Waddill Catchings.

[Information from the “Presidents of Reed” page on Reed’s website.]