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Eliot Circular

Collect ’Em All!

CSO Dhyana Westfall ’05

CSO Dhyana Westfall ’05
Photo by Tom Humphrey

Beat it, Babe Ruth. Pick up your deck, Pikachu. Move over, Magic: the Gathering. A new set of rectangular exchange objects hit campus this semester—Community Safety Trading Cards.

Reed’s community safety officers (CSOs) now carry trading cards as they make their rounds, handing them out to students as a way to build relationships.

“As a team, we talked over the summer about what we wanted to accomplish this year, and our first priority is to develop relationships with individual students,” says Gary Granger, director of community safety. “We hit on the cards as a fun way for CSOs to establish a personal connection.”

Each CSO’s card includes a photo and fun facts, from hobbies to favorite epic poems to potential superpowers (“atmokinesis” is one). 

The project borrows from a venerable Reed tradition. In the 1990s, CSOs and scroungers both issued trading cards, and Reed’s nuclear reactor still circulates cards of operators and supervisors.

As the semester goes on, Granger envisions giving away goodies—a box of doughnuts, maybe?—to students who have acquired particular cards. But he concedes that he doesn’t know exactly how students will use them. We wouldn’t be surprised if they wind up clothespinned to bicycle spokes—or taped to the sundial above the Sallyport.