New staffer pursues social change here and abroad

At first there seems to be a bit of the Southern gentleman in him – courtly, mustachioed, with the faintest whisper of a Southern accent – but that impression vanishes like bayou fog under a sizzling sun when you get to know him. As it turns out, Ed Reed is a man of the world, not of the South.

Reed recently joined the UW–Madison staff as associate director of the Center for East Asian Studies. And oh, the places he has gone before coming here…

His global journey began in Natchez, Miss., where he grew up. Natchez sits on the Mississippi River, in sight of Louisiana, and the Deep South doesn’t get much deeper than that. This made Reed’s father remarkable, because he was what was called a “Southern liberal,” an endangered species in those days.

Tom Reed served on the city council and the state legislature and worked in Washington as a New Deal supporter. “Dad always wanted to change the world by representing the politically weaker and economically deprived segments of society,” says Reed. In other words, he was an inside agitator.

And so was his son. During summers off as a college student, he worked for a federal poverty program in Adams County, where Natchez is located. “One day I was talking to a county supervisor,” says Reed, “and he told me they didn’t need any outside agitators like me. I told him no, I lived just five blocks away.”

In the South of the ’60s, the Catholic Church was a force for social change, and that’s why Reed chose to attend Catholic seminary for five years: “But by the late ’60s, the church had put the brakes on, and I decided not to enter the priesthood.”

Instead, he entered the Peace Corps and spent three years in South Korea, most of the time teaching English. “I found I had a real affinity for Korean culture,” says Reed. “I like the Korean combination of respect for others with honesty. You can make great friends there.”

After the Peace Corps, Reed earned master’s degrees in agricultural economics and public policy and a doctorate in development studies at UW–Madison. For his fieldwork, he lived in South Korean villages in the mid-1970s.

Though studying cooperation among farmers, Reed also saw a cultural earthquake with continuing aftershocks. “After the Korean War, South Korea experienced a forced march to industrialization,” he says. “It was the most rapid economic change of any country in history.”

Millions of Koreans poured into the cities, especially Seoul, creating slums and hardship. Reed says the high level of discipline in Korean culture enabled those migrating families to not only endure, but to ultimately prosper.

“When I first went to South Korea, it was treason to even talk about North Korea,” says Reed. “This only made me want to know more about what was happening there.”

Reed first found himself in North Korea as a representative of the American Friends Service Committee. He came there as part of a two-person team to discuss Quaker support for Korean reunification.

His team was pure Badger: The other member was Joe Elder, professor of sociology and a former member of Reed’s doctoral committee. Elder is a Quaker and an expert on reconciliation.

With his wife, Teresita, Reed continued the Quaker reconciliation program from a base in Japan from 1994 to 1997. It eventually came to light that, in stark contrast to the prosperity in South Korea, at least a million people had starved to death in the North in the mid-1990s.

“It’s pretty grim,” says Reed, one of just a few outsiders allowed in North Korea. “Though officials have tried to shield me, I’ve seen malnourished children with distended bellies in hospitals and orphanages. In fact, an entire generation of children has been physically and mentally damaged.”

In 1997, Reed began a series of 15 extended visits to all parts of North Korea when he joined the staff of World Vision International, a humanitarian nonprofit organization. He negotiated with North Korean authorities to boost production of cooperative farms, give emergency aid to hospitals and orphanages and, most important, deliver food.

“The need for food is one reason why North Korea is trying to normalize relations with the U.S. and South Korea, but political reunification is at least 10 or 20 years away,” says Reed. “More important for the short term are demilitarization of the peninsula, economic cooperation, humanitarian relief and allowing separated families to have contact.”

Reed also worked for six years at the International Institute of Rural Reconstruction, based in the Philippines, training development workers and consulting with community-centered movements in India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Thailand. And, not incidentally, he got married to Teresita.

This Southerner-turned-world-citizen came home, in a way, when he joined the Center for East Asian Studies staff last month. In Madison are his brother Tom, sister-in-law Judy Reed and his alma mater.

“I’m excited about the considerable East Asian resources we have at UW–Madison,” says Reed. “I hope to build on that by creating more global linkages for the state of Wisconsin.”

And, he adds, by offering students what he began seeking in the ’60s: a deeper, more liberating way of regarding the world.