Texas A&M University and Reed College Join CRL Partnership

Texas A&M University and Reed College recently joined the CRL partnership, as a voting member and associate member respectively. The two new members span the range of institutions of higher education: Texas A&M is a major research university of the first rank; Reed College is an outstanding four-year liberal arts college with a strong commitment to research-based learning.

At Texas A&M the mission of providing the highest quality undergraduate and graduate programs is viewed as inseparable from its research mission. The university libraries support a strong humanities and social sciences curriculum. Texas A&M's history program has earned distinction in comparative border studies, diplomatic and military history, modern European history, and 20th-century U.S. history. The Department of Political Science is a research-oriented department with a nationally-ranked Ph.D. program and a highly productive faculty. The department is the editorial home of the American Journal of Political Science and Presidential Studies Quarterly. The approximately 30 tenured and tenure-track faculty in the Department of Sociology have expertise in a wide range of substantive areas such as culture, demography and human ecology, law, deviance, and social control, race and ethnic relations, rural sociology, social organizations, and social psychology.

The libraries also support the following colleges: Agriculture and Life Sciences, Architecture, Education, Geosciences, Liberal Arts, Science and Veterinary Medicine, as well as the Dwight Look College of Engineering, George Bush School of Government and Public Service, and Mays Business School.

Since its founding in 1908 as an independent undergraduate institution, Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, has remained committed to provide a balanced, comprehensive education in liberal arts and sciences, fulfilling the highest standards of intellectual excellence. The distinctive Reed experience includes a challenging curriculum involving wide reading, conference and laboratory-based teaching in small groups, and a student body motivated by enthusiasm for serious intellectual work. Reed offers a B.A. in 22 major fields and numerous interdisciplinary fields, as well as a master of arts in liberal studies degree.

Reed College strives to create a research-rich environment for its faculty and students. Reed faculty have earned national distinction in such fields as modern European history, the economics of international trade, genetics, and historical sociology. In addition, Reed ranks first in the nation in the production of future Ph.D.s in the life sciences, second in foreign languages, third in political science, chemistry, and mathematics and statistics, and fourth in history and the humanities. 1 Among all institutions of higher learning, it ranks fourth in the nation in all fields.

1 According to the Weighted Baccalaureate Origins Study (Higher Education Data Sharing Consortium, 2002). This reflects institutions in the nation ranked by percentage of graduates who goes on to earn a Ph.D. in selected disciplines.