 Reed's first president (1910–1919) was William Trufant Foster, a former professor at Bates College and Bowdoin College in Maine.Contrary to popular belief, the college did not grow out of student revolts and experimentation, but out of a desire to provide a "more flexible, individualized approach to a rigorous liberal arts education".Founded explicitly in reaction to the "prevailing model of East Coast, Ivy League education", the college's lack of varsity athletics, fraternities, and exclusive social clubs – as well as its coeducational, nonsectarian, and egalitarian status—gave way to an intensely academic and intellectual college whose purpose was to devote itself to "the life of the mind", that life being understood primarily as the academic life.