Brooks Bulletin Magazine, Spring 2012

Spring/Summer 2012

BROOKS B U L L E T I N

Brooks School Board of Trustees 2011 - 2012 President William N. Booth ’67 Vice Presidents W. J. Patrick Curley III ’69 Paul L. Hallingby ’65 Secretary Charles E. Bascom ’60 Assistant Secretary Ginger Pearson ’99 Treasurer Donald R. Peck Assistant Treasurer Deane H. Dolben

John R. Barker ’87

Alumni Trustees

Lammot Copeland, Jr. ’50

John R. Hartigan ’11

Anthony H. Everets ’93

Appalonia E. Tankersley ’10

Carol W. Geremia Steven R. Gorham ’85

Trustees Emeriti

Francis X. Knott

Lucius A.D. Andrew ’57

Elizabeth M. Lee

Lawrence W. Becker

Diana D. Merriam

Henry M. Buhl ’48

John R. Packard, Jr. (Head of School)

Steve Forbes ’66

Charles C. Platt ’71

James G. Hellmuth

David A. Rountree

H. Anthony Ittleson ’56

Lynne A. Sawyer ’83

Michael B. Keating ’58

Letitia Wightman Scott ’84

Frank A. Kissel ’69

Thomas E. Shirley

Peter A. Nadosy ’64

Isabella P. Speakman ’92

Peter W. Nash ’51

Craig J. Ziady ’85

Cera B. Robbins Eleanor R. Seaman David R. Williams III ’67

F E AT U R E S 24

departments 2 Head of School’s Message

Welcome to Winter Term

For three weeks in January, students and faculty departed from their normal schedules to embark on year one of Winter Term. The intense, one-topic course of study found students immersed in subjects as varied as the Vietnam War, boat building, and the U.S. legal system.

6 News and Notes 54 Brooks Connections 68 Class Notes 96 Parting Shot

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My Life

In his two years at Brooks, Elijah Soko ’12 has been most recognized as one of the top soccer players in New England. But even a brief conversation with this student-athlete reveals a young man of incredible depth and thoughtfulness.

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Ask the Experts

Alumni in the fields of politics, economics, finance, education and media share their thoughts on the state of the country as we head into a presidential election.

ON THE COVER: Tess Pellegrini ’14, Natalie Palmer ’13, Megan Flanagan ’13 and Amanda Peck ’14 row on Lake Cochichewick against Groton. THIS PAGE: The Robert Lehman Art Center this year has hosted the exhibits of visiting artists, including photographs by Paola deNegri, paintings by Cynthia Packard and works by sculptor and musician Jack Vasapoli, who used this outdoor space to stage a concert during his exhibit opening.

HEAD OF SCHOOL’SMESSAGE

Friends, Transitions, Aspirations A new administrative structure will lead us into next year with fresh thinking and ambitious goals

Head of School John R. Packard

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I RECENTLY DELIVERED MY FINAL CHAPEL ADDRESS OF THE YEAR just weeks ahead of Prize Day and on the verge of our closing stretch with 89 soon-to-be graduates. With each passing year I find myself feeling these points in time more intensely than was once the case. Perhaps this is due to age and experience, although I do not believe my 44 years of age and 22 years of experience qualify me as any sort of sage. Yet for me, the final two-thirds of the current school year have been an especially rich blend of moments reflecting on time spent with extraordinary people at the school and a lot of work and thinking about how to find our way from this year to next with high hopes in mind. What has been and what might still be have occupied a lot of my thought.

While it is certainly true that incredible relationships with students have been at the core of what has made this life so alluring to me and others through the years, the time we spend with one another, as colleagues, has also been profoundly meaningful. I started at Brooks during a point in the school’s history when some of its finest faculty members were nearing the end of three-, four- and nearly five-decade tours of duty at this school. The wisdom was palpable, and their example and words still echo in my head. I was also fortunate to begin growing up at Brooks, if you will, with colleagues and peers who have become educators of the highest order, school people I have always been proud to work with and friends who matter to me. These relationships have been a constant in my life at Brooks, as have those I have enjoyed with so many who have arrived since my beginning and with whom I look forward so excitedly to the school’s future.

Among the first people I met at Brooks School way back in 1990 was John Quirk. I remember the occasion well for two reasons: First, it was the opening faculty party that year and at it Richard Holmes announced he would be retiring from the school at the year’s end after an astounding 43 years on the faculty. Second, I met John that night. Little did I know then what would be in store for the next half of my life, and John has been part of that phase every step of the way. Through these 22 years, we have spent a lot of time thinking, coaching, teaching and living this school’s life together. We were always in touch, always listening to each other and always enamored with a life that gave us so much access to extraordinary students, colleagues and possibilities. Above all, he was just fun to work with. Thus, his appointment as Tabor Academy’s next head of school is bittersweet. Things will not be quite the same without him.

On a few occasions during this relatively short period of our relationship when I have been

head of school and John has been associate head for school affairs, we chatted about next steps for him and I hoped he might be drawn to the sort of life Fessenden Wilder lived at Brooks for such a lengthy tenure. In Brooks at Fifty, Mr. Ashburn concluded his thoughts about Mr. Wilder by saying, “It was our good luck that he refused at least three headmasterships to stay at Brooks.” Mr. Ashburn’s luck with Mr. Wilder will not be mine and ours with John, and while I believe he has been tempted to follow such a path over the years,

port, Rhode Island, and spent his first six years in admission work at Brooks. As a story about him in this issue of the Bulletin will attest (see page 14), he is an incredibly accomplished boarding school professional, and our conversations culminated with his appointment as associate head for external affairs. He is not replacing John or Karen in that role, but will oversee advancement, admission, communications and alumni as part of a larger administrative solution, which includes three additional associate

position the school to begin tackling a number of initiatives and aspirations we have not yet been able to reach. Our hope is that a combination of terrific people, some fresh perspective, new and exciting roles for folks returning to Brooks and a redesigned framework for us to work within will help us deliver a great school to students today, while also working on delivering an even greater school to students in the future.

Closing the doors on 2011–2012 brings with it mixed emotions. I will miss my

We are poised to step into more substantive conversation with faculty, alumni, and parents aimed at ensuring this school’s ability to achieve its mission for generations to come. that choice would not be fair to him or to those who will come to know and respect him at Tabor Academy. He and I will find our way into a new chapter of our relationship moving forward, and that does provide some consolation, but it will not replace the sense of loss I will feel when recalling the phase of our friendship that has been centered on this school.

With John’s move to Tabor becoming official in mid-October and Karen Callahan departing the advancement office for an exciting consulting opportunity at Marts & Lundy that took effect on January 1, much of the year has been spent contemplating how to replace the two of them. Then and now, we focused on finding great people and an administrative structure that would suit and inspire them. To that end, I called Jim Hamilton within 48 hours of John’s news in order to begin some conversation with him.

Jim is finishing his ninth year as director of admission at St. George’s School, in New-

head appointments: current Academic Dean Lance Latham will be leaving his role in order to become associate head for academic affairs; current Dean of Students Andrea Heinze will become associate head for student affairs; and current Chief Operating Officer Brett Fuhrman will round out this group as associate head for finances and operations.

Three objectives are achieved with these changes: First, along with moves within these four areas of the school, we account for the absence of John and Karen. This will be easier said than done, but we believe we have the right people and structure in place.

Second, we step in the direction of addressing a New England Association of Schools & Colleges recommendation from our reaccreditation aimed at our need to become more systematized. It is our hope that this structure draws clearer lines for both those working within the school and those looking at the school from the outside. Third, we

friend John Quirk and the sense of shared experience I have felt with him through these many years. To pause appropriately over these final weeks and recall so much I am proud to have been a part of with him will hold great meaning to me. I am also excited to be nearing the end of a year’s worth of transition in anticipation of a fuller and deeper conversation about this school’s highest aspirations. We are poised to step into more substantive conversation with faculty, alumni and parents aimed at ensuring this school’s ability to achieve its mission for generations to come.

The moments in this life when I find myself looking over my shoulder and recalling so much rich experience with students and colleagues are equaled in significance and meaning only by the wondering and dreaming I do with those same colleagues and students about where we might go. What a privilege it is to do both at Brooks School.

Enjoy the summer.

Spring / Summer 2012 3

CAMPUSSCENE

Jill Doherty ’13 carries the ball up the field against Groton while Jackie Kelleher ’12 looks for a pass. Brooks went on to win the game, 16-7.

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Spring / Summer 2012 5

NEWS&NOTES

Chace House Nears Completion As the exterior receives finishing touches, the dorm’s interior takes shape ---Chace House, the new dormitory set to open to students this fall, is nearing its early-summer completion date.

As the millwork, windows and roofing materials were installed this spring, students were taking an active role in bringing to life the idea of an environmentally themed dorm.

Students in the Brooks Institute of Sustainability (BIS), working with Sustainability Director Brian Palm, have drafted an environmental agreement that Chace House residents will be asked to sign, pledging that they will follow sustainable practices such as turning off lights when they leave a room and turning off the faucet while they brush their teeth.

The idea of an environmental pledge continues the work of student involvement in the new dorm. Last summer students working at the Brooks Institute for Sustainability researched environmentally friendly options for Chace House. One of their suggestions was to incorporate composting toilets — a recommendation that was adopted in the final specifications.

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“The BIS had already been working on green aspects of the dorm, so it made sense to us to incorporate a green-living style with it,” said Will Stockwell, a sixth-former and a BIS member.

Brooks is one of a handful of high schools following this college model of theme dorms — making Chace a green-living dorm is a first step for other residences to take up. Merriman will also be a green dorm, which means one boys dorm and one for girls will be living sustainable practices in their daily and nightly routines.

The BIS studied the green contracts of some colleges and universities as part of their research: “We looked at Dartmouth, Yale and Plymouth State, among other colleges,” said Stockwell. The group came up with a contract, now in draft form. “We hope it will be something that other dorms strive to be,” he says. “The dorm parents are signing the agreement as well, so it’s something that everyone living in the new building will be committing to.”

The two-story, 13,992-square-foot structure consists of a 22-bed dormitory, a second-floor faculty apartment and two attached faculty

“It was an honor to name the dorm for Kim Chace, who passed away last spring. His support helped make the building possible. His initial gift was critical to creating momentum for the project, and he increased that gift to get us across the finish line.”

— HEAD OF SCHOOL JOHN PACKARD

SUSTAINABILITY A FOCUS IN CHACE HOUSE Chace House was designed with durability and sustainability in mind, using a number of environmentally friendly elements that will reduce future operation costs. Here are just a few: • A heating system with a natural gas– fired burner that is 97.5 percent efficient, to reduce heating bills • A high-efficiency envelope with superior insulation, to prevent energy loss and reduce electric bills

houses. The $3.3 million project was fully funded when construction began at the site, which is perpendicular to Blake House and across the street from PBA dormitory.

So how does a student land one of the 22 coveted spots in the new building? Not surprisingly, interest in living in the dorm was overwhelming. Rather than following the traditional dorm selection method, in which students are asked to rank their top choices and then they are placed by dorm faculty, the Chase selection involved a lottery to ensure fairness and equal access for all. Once those students were housed, the dorm faculty met to assign dorms for the rest of the boarding students with a goal of ensuring balance and diversity and providing enjoyable living experiences for everyone.

Construction has been moving along at a steady pace throughout this school year. Chief Operating Officer Brett Fuhrman said the warm spell was a big help: “The best bonus of this project has been the weather — we’ve had such a mild winter, it’s been very cooperative with the progression of the construction,” he said.

It’s been going so well, in fact, that the work on the faculty houses should be completed in time for faculty members John McVeigh and Willie Waters to move in around July 1.

The general contractor is Nauset Construction Corporation, whose president, Anthony Papantonis, is a Brooks alum (’81) and current parent (P’13).

The dorm is being named to com-

memorate alumnus and longtime trustee Kim Chace ’52.

“It was an honor to name the dorm for Kim Chace, who passed away last spring,” said Head of School John Packard.

“His support helped make the building possible. His initial gift was critical to creating momentum for the project, and he increased that gift to get us across the finish line.” Chace’s granddaughters graduated from Brooks, Caroline Saltonstall in 2009 and Elizabeth Saltonstall in 2011.

As the project nears completion, some unique features are coming to light. On every dorm floor, there are two “hybrid” rooms. Each consists of two singles with a double pocket door, so if the students in adjoining rooms want to share a bedroom, they can turn one single into a bedroom and the other into a study/hangout area.

Another slight change from the original plan involves the composting toilets.

Instead of two toilets and two urinals, the dorm will feature four composting toilets.

Part of the reason for that change is to keep the dorm as gender-neutral as possible. Although it’s slated to be a boys dorm when it opens, says Fuhrman, years down the road it will be helpful to have the option of using it for girls instead.

In April and May, the millwork continued, and the carpet-tile and vinyl-plank flooring were put down. Fuhrman said all the furnishings have been picked out.

Landscaping will start soon, with a rain garden around the perimeter of the building and a walkway arc with a seating area out front.

• Low-flow water facilities, to reduce the sewage bills • A zinc roof (which typically lasts longer than a traditional roof) • Individual room thermostats with an automated system that can be programmed remotely • Energy-control systems with occupancy sensors (so when the windows are open, the heat won’t continue to blast) • A cupola, much like the one in the Science Center, that will release warm air from the building on hot days • Solar lighting tubes in hallways, to create natural day lighting • Occupancy-sensored lighting, including limited hallway lighting at nighttime (so not all the lights turn on in the middle of the night when someone walks to the bathroom) • Flooring materials made out of recycled products that minimize maintenance • LED lighting • Drought-tolerant native exterior planting and landscaping that is waterefficient to reduce stormwater runoff and allow greater groundwater infiltration • Extra-thick, soundproof walls in each room • Four composting toilets

Spring / Summer 2012 7

NEWS&NOTES Admissions: By the Numbers The Brooks admission season is now closed. Below are some of the numbers behind this fall’s entering class and the student body as a whole.

1,006

23.6

Total enrollment for 2012–2013

Percent accepted

Number of new students enrolled for 2012–2013

2,739

28

Number of countries from which students applied

Number of inquiries

20

Boys named John who submitted applications (the most popular boys name by far, followed by 11 Williams and 10 Christophers)

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Drummers

369

Number of interviews Number of applications

97

2

$3,003,035 Amount of financial awarded for 2012–2013

8 Girls named Isabel who submitted applications (the second most popular girls name was Anna, with 7)

1

Licensed pilot Cartoonist Bassoon player Cellist Certified EMT

30

Number of states from which students applied

Caputo admitted to being an adrenaline junkie when he was younger.

“Getting shot took a lot of that out of me,” he said.

Vietnam Expert Visits with Fifth-Formers Phil Caputo P’91 visits campus to talk about the Vietnam War “A Rumor of War was a book I had to write,” said author Phil Caputo.

“It’s hard to explain, but it was something I had to do even if I didn’t want to do it. It was a compulsion, an obsession.”

With those words, Caputo recounted the thoughts and ideas that first took shape in his head in 1967 and would result, 10 years later, in one of the defining books of the Vietnam War. Caputo was on campus this spring, addressing fifth-formers who were on the cusp of studying the Vietnam War in their history classes.

“Mr. Caputo is the father of Marc [Brooks class of 1991], and we were hoping to have him talk to the Vietnam Winter Term class,” said Head of School John Packard. “We couldn’t get our schedules to line up then, but we are very fortunate that he was able to visit us now. He is a legend among those who study that period in American history.”

For more than an hour, Caputo talked about the process that led to his first published book (he now has 14 titles to his name). Although he started working on the book in 1967, progress was slow as he struggled with structure and format. He originally envisioned the book as a novel, along the lines of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls or James Jones’s The Thin Red Line.

While hitchhiking from southern Spain to Barcelona and, eventu-

ally, to London, Caputo read and fell in love with World War I memoirs. It dawned on him that he could write A Rumor of War as a straight memoir but structure it, in terms of narrative tension, as a novel.

That epiphany got him past an early hurdle, but he still made very little progress on the book. He was working as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune and was also starting a family, which meant that free moments were few and far between. Ironically, getting shot in an ambush in Lebanon in the ’70s, and the subsequent disability leave, gave him the time he needed to finish the book.

“After about 10 years, I had completed only about 100 pages,” said Caputo. “Thanks to getting shot, I was able to tackle the rest in eight months.”

Toward the end of his talk, Caputo took questions from students.

Topics ranged from comparing Vietnam with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to asking how difficult it was to adjust from serving a tour of duty in Vietnam to everyday life back home.

“As we start to study the Vietnam War in our history class, it was great to be able to ask questions of someone who was there,” said Connor Hannough ’13. “Talking to a veteran makes the war more real than anything a history book could convey.”

Spring / Summer 2012 9

NEWS&NOTES

Anthony Barry ’12 drives for a layup against Beaver Country Day in the Class B semifinal game.

Winter Sports Wrap-up Boys basketball and hockey made exciting runs in the postseason BOYS BASKETBALL (record: 14-7) The boys basketball program enjoyed another excellent year, advancing to the Class B semifinals for the second year in a row. The Green and White were led by a strong senior class, including captains Anthony Barry (ISL All-League, All-New England), Aaron Davis (ISL AllLeague, All-New England), Connor Mahoney and Chad Rogers. The team took on a challenging schedule and had to fight through injuries and illness all year, including losing star junior David Berroa to a broken leg early in the season. Over the last two seasons, Brooks has been near the top of the New England Class B standings with a combined 39-9 record.

GIRLS BASKETBALL (record: 10-12) The girls basketball team got off to a fast start this season, jumping out to a 9-0 record. This included being crowned champions of the Ray Brown Holiday Tournament at Williston-Northampton School.

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After March break, Brooks battled through a tough ISL schedule, while also battling some class B prep powerhouses. Brooks was also hit by the injury bug that left key players sophomore Alex Norgaisse and junior Kim Neyman out for the season. Captains Thalia Garcia ’13 (ISL AllLeague, All-New England) and Suki Smith ’13 were both forced to miss games during the second half of the season with injuries. When the team finally returned to full strength, they made one final push for the tournament but came up just short.

BOYS HOCKEY (record: 16-11-1) The 2011–2012 season was an exciting one for Brooks hockey. With a 10-3-1 league record (16-11-1 overall), the team finished as ISL Eberhart Division Champions and qualified for the New England Division I Piatelli/Simmons Tournament, where they faced second-ranked South Kent in the quarterfinals. On a snowy Wednesday the team traveled to Eaglebrook and played from the front. Brooks opened the scor-

ing, and South Kent tied it before the first intermission. In the second, Brooks took a 2-1 lead, and after South Kent again pulled even, Brooks went up 3-2 for a lead it would never relinquish, ultimately prevailing 5-3. In the semifinals, Brooks took on third-seeded Holderness. The Bulls scored early on the power play before Brooks tied the game at one. The scoring went back and forth, with Brooks holding a 3-2 edge after two periods. In the third, Holderness went on top 4-3 and added an empty-netter in the final seconds to prevail 5-3.

GIRLS HOCKEY (record: 13-13) The girls hockey team finished the season 12-13-0 and just barely missed earning a spot in the New England Tournament. This year’s team preferred to play the role of the underdog and came up big in games where they were able to sneak up on opponents not expecting as much from this talented group. In the regular season, Brooks defeated two of the eventually tournament-bound Division I teams (Cushing and Lawrence Academy, who went on to be tournament finalists), and took another, Nobles, into overtime before falling to them 3-2. Other highlights were winning three games at the Exeter New Year’s Tournament and ending the season on a two-game winning streak, beating Governor’s Academy for the first time in four years.

BOYS SQUASH (record: 10-5) The Brooks first team completed one of its best seasons in recent history. The team posted a 10-5 record against New England opponents and finished in third place in the ISL. The top eight players included three seniors: Henry Wagner, Mercer Knott and captain CJ Smith (ISL All-League).

The three combined to play nine seasons on the first team. The team also welcomed to its ranks new fourth-former Seif Abou Eleinen (ISL AllLeague). Seif went undefeated at #1 this season (11-0) and won the U.S. Open U17 championship. The team earned several team and individual honors this year. Most notably, Brooks won the ISL Team Sportsmanship Award, the New England Team Sportsmanship Award, and the Individual ISL Sportsmanship Award (CJ Smith).

GIRLS SQUASH (record: 7-8) Girls squash had an excellent season, with senior co-captains Tori Gardiner and Ellie Barker providing inspirational leadership. Brooks qualified for Division II at Nationals and then qualified for Division A in the New England Tournament. Andreina Benedith ’14 (ISL AllLeague) played the top position for the team all season. The program graduates three seniors, but Elise O’Brien ’14, captain-elect Ren Robinson ’13, Charlotte McCoy ’14, Ellie Olsen ’13 and Allie Barry ’13 return this fall.

WRESTLING (record: 9-11) The wrestling program had solid team success and some outstanding individual performances. The team posted a strong 7-5 dual-meet record in the ISL. At the Graves-Kelsey, the team had an excellent topthree finish. Outstanding individual performances at the GravesKelsey included two individual weight-class champions: Nate Gibeley ’14 (152 pounds) and Andrew Konovalchik ’14 (160 pounds). At the New England Tournament, Brooks wrestling was represented by Andrew Kimball ’13, Nate Gibeley, Alex Lawton ’15, Andrew Bolte ’15 and Andrew Konovalchik by virtue of their individual top-four ISL placement. Brooks had an impressive three individual placers at the New England Tournament: They were: Alex Lawton (120 pounds) in 8th place; Nate Gibeley (152 pounds) in 6th place; and Andrew Konovalchik (160 pounds) in 2nd place.

Clockwise from top left: Elise O’Brien ’14 on the home courts of the Danforth Center; Seif Abou Eleinen ’14 won the U17 U.S. Open; Connor Hannough ’13 in the semifinal game against Holderness.

Spring / Summer 2012 11

NEWS&NOTES Up Close and Personal

Yum Yum

Renu Mukherjee ’15 never truly expected that telling the story of her first Casino Night at Brooks — feeling alone, not knowing anyone and shy — would win her not only applause but also a prize.

Renu was named this year’s winner of the Wilder Speaking Prize, a tradition that dates back nearly 40 years. Established by E. Todd Cobey Jr. ’61 and John Cobey ’62 in 1966, the all-school oratory competition honors former schoolmaster F. Fessenden Wilder. StuRenu Mukherjee dents are required to recite a memorized speech and then deliver their own, longer speech. Those latter speeches have, in past years, ranged from serious to humorous, but they always involve a personal tale, and often reflect a moment when students have learned something about themselves.

Others finalists this year were: Ani Bilazarian ’13, Nick Papantonis ’13 and Alexy Santos ’12 (last year’s Wilder winner). Each was asked to consider a quote from Albert Einstein in the prepared personal speech: “I must be willing to give up what I am in order to become what I will be.”

After they delivered their speeches, each talked about why he or she decided to take part in this Brooks tradition — all agreed they wanted to challenge themselves. For Alexy Santos ’12, it was the Einstein quote that caught his attention.

“I realized I had the opportunity to tell a story that I could grow from,” said Santos, who shared a story of how he struggled to fit in with friends at school.

For Nick Papantonis ’13 and Ani Bilazarian ’13, it was not just the chance to overcome a fear of public speaking, but also a chance to share their stories of exchange: Nick spent four weeks in Botswana and Ani lived in Uganda for the same amount of time.

Before her speeches, admits Renu, she was a wreck.

“Hands icy, knees shaking, sweat on the back of my neck, I just wanted to run away,” she says. “Yet when I went up there, I was a different person.

I was ready to share my story with the rest of the Brooks community, and not even nerves were going to ruin that.”

In the wake of the wellness initiative held concurrently with Winter Term in January, many changes have come about in the dining hall — some popular, like the fruit smoothies offered daily at breakfast, and some not so popular, like taking away chocolate milk which was deemed unhealthy thanks to its high-fructose corn syrup content. But it’s been good news on the food front lately: Students cheered when they heard chocolate milk (a healthier version) has returned to the dining hall, thanks to discussions between administrators and student government reps.

Wilder Speaking Prize tradition continues as students share their stories with school

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Students work to bring back a dining hall favorite

A Way with Words

Two fifth-formers win town’s Robert Frost Poetry Contest The inspiring writing of fifth-formers Rachel Loh and Isabel Hancock garnered them praise from North Andover’s poet laureate during the Robert Frost Poetry Awards earlier this spring. “Both poems showed insight and creativity, and speak to the poets’ potential as writers,” said Gayle Heney, North Andover’s poet laureate, who is the creator and judge of the contest, for which some 50 high school students from Brooks and North Andover High School submitted entries. “Poetry is a lot of fun because there aren’t the constraints that apply to all other forms of writing. It captures my thought process, which is much more fluid and random.

I can suddenly think of something, jot down a few lines, return to it later and a poem will come out of that,” said Isabel.

“

f(t) = 20e^(-t/2) + 3sin(t/2) + cos(3t/2) + 7, where t is measured in hours between now and when the calculator is returned or I find out where it is.

The equation by which sixth-former Aaron Baumgarten pledged to tally the reward for his missing TI-84 Plus Silver Edition calculator.

His starting offer was $28. Aaron will be a freshman at MIT this fall.

Mutual Admiration When budding photographer Simons Finnerty ’14 got a look at a new coffee table book, Tomboy Style by Lizzie Garrett ’01, he got in touch with the author right away to tell her he loved the book (based on Garrett’s blog of the same name). And when Garrett saw Finnerty’s photography — portraits of friends, shots from back home in Georgia and scenic Brooks pics — she was equally complimentary. Thus the two connected, talking almost daily about style, design, photography and fashion.

“He’s got an incredible eye, and he’s obviously driven,” Garrett said. She liked his work so much that she gave him a shoutout on her blog, tomboystyle.blogspot.com.

They talk quite a bit about each other’s Brooks experiences. Simons, who hails from Atlanta, has been taking pictures from a very young age. “I remember going to Italy in the summer after third grade and I was using this compact film camera, just taking roll after roll. None of it was really good,” he says. “but I liked taking them.” He has his

own blog to share his work, which is what Lizzie pointed her readers to earlier this spring. It’s been a busy year for Garrett, with her book hitting shelves and garnering rave reviews for its study of the fusion of fashion and character that makes up tomboy style. In the book’s introduction, she talks about her early love of the tomboy style, which she developed during her Brooks years and through her friendship with Kingsley Woolworth ’00. For Garrett, it’s been a great way to reconnect with the school. “If I could mentor Simons a little bit, this could possibly be my gift back to the school,” said Garrett, who is based in L.A. “It’s great because our connection happened in such an organic way, nothing forced about it. It reconnects me to Brooks, it’s been very uplifting for me,” she says.

This photo, taken on the Brooks campus by Simons Finnerty ’14, struck a chord with Lizzie Garrett ’01. “It is very likely that Simons was born the year I started boarding school,” she wrote on her blog. “But he instantly showed me how little things have changed on the staid New England campus. A very welcome idleness indeed. When I saw these photos it reminded me of my first fall. I could almost smell the grounds from his photos.”

Shedding Light on Bottled-Water Waste If you thought you were being environmentally friendly by recycling your plastic water bottles, a group of Brooks students have some news for you: Ditch the plastic and choose something more permanent.

The Power-Saving Rangers, the school’s environmental group, shared the latest news that despite recycling efforts, plastic water bottles use more energy to create and ultimately end up in landfills. The Rangers asked classmates to use permanent water bottles instead of disposable ones by signing a pledge: they could choose to be the ‘Ultimate Tree Hugger’ and avoid using any bottles that are not reusable or be a ‘Beginner Greenie’ and stick with just water.

Trending Now: Best of Prom 2012

Big-night fashion trends include classic tuxes for guys, sparkle for girls It was all about elegant gowns and some elaborate updos for girls, and for guys mostly black tuxes, a few white sport coats, at least two canes and one top hat. It was Prom 2012 for Brooks students, and it was set against the sunset-lit skyline of downtown Boston, aboard the Spirit of Boston cruise ship. The clothing styles were classic, simple and understated: Most of the sixth-form girls wore floor-length gowns, while juniors opted for shorter dresses — both adorned with sequins and crystals, or in rich tones of turquoise, plum and red. Boys kept it pretty traditional, most in black tuxes or dark suits. Aside from the fashion, highlights of the night included the setting, the tunes and the chow. The heels came off and the bow-ties and cummerbunds loosened up when the DJ started playing dance music, and the dancing continued until the boat got back to the dock. (For more pictures from Prom 2012, please see pages 17-18.)

Spring / Summer 2012 13

NEWS&NOTES

Jim Hamilton returns to Brooks to lead the external affairs team, consisting of admission, advancement and communications.

A New Voice on Campus Jim Hamilton returns to Brooks in associate head role Jim Hamilton started his first stint at Brooks not really knowing where it might lead. He had been in finance for a year after graduating from Amherst College, but he wasn’t finding any reward in the work. A graduate of the Roxbury Latin School, he knew he would enjoy being in a similar school environment.

He worked for six years in admission and financial aid at Brooks before heading to St. George’s to lead the admission office there.

Now, Hamilton is returning to Great Pond Road in a new position: associate head for external affairs. As part of his role, Jim will oversee the offices of advancement, communications and admission. “(Head of School) John Packard is creating a team where people can sit and talk about everything that’s going on, in a strate-

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gic way. It’s a real opportunity to help Brooks get to the next level,” Hamilton said.

Packard and Hamilton had worked together previously in the Brooks admission office.

“This position really evolved around Jim’s talents as a school leader,” said Packard.

“I have a great respect for him as a school professional. He’ll be providing a level of leadership and thought around our programs in those three areas and how they should evolve.”

With plans to hire a new development director, who will focus mainly on internal work by the start of the 2012-2013 school year, Hamilton and Packard will also take on outreach and fundraising roles, something that Packard said he’s looking forward to.

“I’m eager to get into a new mode with a new team,” Packard said. “We’ve got a great

school and a great product, because it’s not a static product. I want to be in steady, broader conversations with more people in more meaningful ways about it.”

Hamilton and his wife, Lucy, have three children: TJ (11), Cameron (6) and Jackson (5). They’ll be living in Andrew House on the edge of campus. Hamilton says the whole family is excited to be on campus, and that he’s looking forward to taking part in Brooks traditions, such as the services in the Ashburn Chapel and seated dinners. It’s an exciting time to be returning, he says, and when he saw a familiar face in the hallway of the academic building, he knew he made the right decision.

“I was walking through the academic building and saw the Endicott Peabody bust and thought, ‘Oh, yea!’”

Although he’s still fully involved in St. George’s, Hamilton took some time to answer a few questions about his return to Brooks, and his new gig.

You’ve been away from Brooks for about nine years. What do you feel you’ve learned professionally in that time? My departure from Brooks came because I was ready to take that leap into management at another school, and it’s been an incredible nine years.

I’ve had the opportunity to really hone my leadership and management skills. I’ve also gotten to see how things are done slightly differently. I learned so much in my time at Brooks and was fortunate to work with wonderful teachers and administrators on my way to becoming a school person. The two people in particular who taught me so much were Directors of Admission Judy Beams and Bill Poirot. Spending time with them taught me about the nuts and bolts of admission, but also taught me what it meant to be a school person — it’s the idea of being part of a school’s community and a school culture.

What would you say has changed here, and what has stayed the same? As I reflect on coming back to Brooks, the important things have stayed the same . . . the character of the school, of the kids, the quality of the education those kids are receiving. At the same time, there’s that natural evolution that happens at a school. John Packard has assumed leadership and brought with that new ideas and changes; there’s been a natural turnover of faculty and an influx of talented people.

And, of course, there are the incredible physical changes to the school since I left: a new athletic center, a new science center, the new dorm that will be opening this fall. I feel I’m returning to a place I know, but that there’s also going to be tons of education for me in my new role.

How did you choose this career in schools?

Some of my teachers and advisors from eighth and ninth grade are among some of my closest confidants and mentors now as an

adult. I benefited so much from that, so being part of institutions that are working hard to give kids incredible experiences and opportunities was a real draw for me. Out of college, I went into finance for a year and quickly realized the rewards weren’t there for me. When my first opportunity in admission and financial aid at Brooks came up, it seemed to combine numbers and math with

and making sure that those offices have a great working relationship. We’re all involved in looking outward from the school and telling the Brooks story. I’ll also be focusing on fund-raising, and, along with John Packard, will be working on building bridges and helping folks understand the importance of that story. I get back to this notion of being a school person. I hope to jump in in ways

“

Some of my teachers and advisors . . . are among my closest confidants and mentors now as an adult. I benefited so much from that, so being part of institutions that are working hard to give kids incredible experiences and opportunities was a real draw for me.”

— ASSOCIATE HEAD FOR EXTERNAL AFFAIRS JIM HAMILTON

the ability to travel and talk about a great school. And being the head baseball coach and head football coach was ideal. Being as close with Bill Poirot as I was, I learned a lot.

I was inspired by his energy and interest in school life. And now, to be part of a team led

by Packard is very exciting.

This is a new position — what will your priorities be, beyond an initial “getting-settledin” phase? I’ve been talking to folks I didn’t work with before — Director of Communications and Marketing Dan Callahan, Chief Operating Officer Brett Fuhrman — and reconnecting with folks I’ve worked with before — John Packard, Academic Dean Lance Latham, Dean of Students Andrea Heinze. I feel I have a familiarity with them and we’ll be able to hit the ground running. Given this new structure, we’re all going to be working together to figure out what this means for the school. For me specifically, I’ll be working on tying together the areas I’m responsible for

that maybe past people haven’t. I hope to teach a class down the line, be an advisor. In those ways, I want people to see that hey, yeah, this is a position that’s really going to benefit us.

You’ve been an advisor, teacher and coach — what’s the best piece of advice you’d say you’ve given to a student? And what would you say is the best piece of advice you’ve ever gotten yourself? Well, I feel like they are almost the same; it’s advice that centers on that idea of working hard. Be yourself and work hard. Professionally, it’s been work hard to get to know people. And I often say to my advisees: If you’re proud of the work you do, the results are generally going to be pretty good. If you take pride in your work, there won’t be any surprises.

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Andrew Lee ’13 traveled to Cambodia to see how the money he helped raised at Brooks was being used.

The Fruits of His Labor Fifth-former sees how donations are put to good use Since starting up a Brooks branch of the microfinance organization Mi3 last year, Andrew Lee ’13 has raised some $550 to send to Cambodia for farmers to build chicken coops and make a living by raising chickens.

And now, just about a year after he first began his grassroots work with Mi3, Andrew has even better news: The coops that Brooks community members helped fund are complete, and some 50 chickens are now thriving in them.

Andrew’s been encouraging his fellow students to take part in the fund-raising and donate, and his enthusiasm for the Chicken Coop Project was strengthened last summer during the time he spent living in Cambodia with Sokchea Monn and his family (Monn is a survivor of the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s).

Monn, founder of the Supplementary Teaching Educational Program (STEP), had approached the parent Mi3 organization in hopes of transforming Cambodia’s educational system. With Mi3’s help, STEP provides Cambodian students with opportunities to keep them out of poverty. It’s also evolving to in-

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clude bringing capital to other projects, one of which is to support Cambodian farmers as they establish chicken farms to run as small businesses.

Motivated to reach his first goal of raising $250, Andrew sat at a table in the Brooks dining hall accompanied by a box with a rubber duck on top. “It looked like a chicken because I had nothing else. I got $350 like that,” he said, snapping his fingers.

Raising money that quickly inspired him to keep going. He added six student members to his team, which was “a huge blessing,” he said. The team established a few fund-raisers, including selling Taco Bell products on campus for a profit and hosting an Xbox tournament.

As rewarding as the process has been, it has been challenging. Andrew learned that it isn’t easy running a charity organization. Inspiring new members — and keeping them — requires skill. In the beginning, when he brought people in, they all ended up leaving. “The first lesson I learned is that you can’t be a dictator,” he says. “There’s a fine line between being a leader and being a dictator.”

Now the branch has six other students — Dane Kim ’14, Will Adie ’14, Patrick Liu ’14, Zachary McCabe ’15, Hilton Chao ’14 and Ben Seifert ’13 — who look into fund-raising projects when they find time, what with schoolwork and activities.

Andrew also discovered the importance of having a network. “I learned that connections are paramount,” he says. “Never do it alone.

Another person can bring encouragement.

When I was about to give up, faculty advisor Brick Moltz fully supported me, and without that support I don’t think I would have succeeded.”

Another challenge was being patient as the farmers learned how to raise chickens and run a sustainable business. “When the chicken coop is successful, which I have no doubt it will be, they’ll build a bigger one, which is how Mi3 goes,” Andrew says. “In that village, we’ll invest more money so they can create more money.”

Captivated by the project, Andrew arranged a three-week trip last summer that comprised stops in Italy, East Timor and Cambodia. For one week, he lived in a village with Monn, his wife and three children, thoroughly appreciating the time he spent getting to know the activist.

As he learned more about the history of Cambodia, Andrew felt more compassion for the Cambodian people. “I learned about the Khmer Rouge, the Communist genocidal group that killed millions of Cambodians,” he says. “I went to one of the Khmer Rouge prison camps, and the images were absolutely gruesome. I also learned more about Sokchea’s organization, STEP. I went to one of his schools and it looked amazing. I also worked on the project by going to Sokchea’s village, which was the exact place where the Khmer Rouge tortured people.”

Andrew hopes to continue contributing to the cause and plans to return to Cambodia this summer. The experience of getting involved in a nonprofit organization has been gratifying, he says. “I was an investor as a high school student, I got to meet Sokchea Monn and live in his house, and I was able to contribute to increasing revenue to farmers in Cambodia. I can do a small thing to make an impact on this world.”

For more on Mi3 initiatives, go online to www.microinvestmentinitiative.org/cambodia

Scott Kelly, French teacher

FAST In your first year at Brooks, what would you say is the best thing about teaching? When I see kids being active in their approach, even if they’re frustrated. Frustration is fine, because at least there’s some engagement there.

When a student says “I don’t understand” to you as a teacher, that student is saying “I want to understand.”

How do you balance being a teacher with being a dorm parent and a coach? It can feel busy, for sure, but everyone has to do the balancing act, right? There are times when some things are humming along smoothly and other things require more attention. At various times you emphasize certain things while others are simmering.

Why did being in Rent appeal to you? I heard they needed some guys, and I support the message of the show very much. I did have to warn them that I’m not a singer. It was definitely fun, and a great time working with the kids.

What’s the biggest challenge you face as a teacher?

Classroom management can be challenging. You have to be nimble. You have to react to the mood of the day, not force it.

Scott Kelly came to Brooks this year after earning his master’s degree in French studies at New York University. Prior to that, he taught for two years at Choate Rosemary Hall and was a teaching fellow at Phillips Andover. He also spent time in Germany on a Fulbright scholarship; he wanted to be in a foreign place to give him the perspective of his students as they’re learning a new language. He’s teaching French I and two sections of French II, as well as an advanced French senior seminar. He’s a dorm parent in Blake and a coach, and is involved in extracurriculars — he was in the cast of this year’s winter musical, Rent, for example.

You teach a senior seminar; tell us a little bit about it.

We’re discussing French colonization in Africa, postcolonization immigration and the interactions between two cultures. We’re studying the use of language through all of this — can language be used to dominate or to exclude a group? I love teaching the basics, but this advanced stuff is very interesting, because students can start to see a culture differently. You can understand a culture a little bit better if you know its language.

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Isabelle Choy ’13, left, handles a blowtorch under the watchful eye of visiting artist Cynthia Packard.

“Talent equals discipline, stamina and fearlessness,” Packard told students.

An Artistic Winter and Spring Visiting artists work with students in various media Cynthia Packard will slather a canvas with paint, cloth, lace, wax and even tar, and then she’ll pick up her blowtorch and get to work.

For the Provincetown artist, it’s all part of her process, a conversation she has with whatever piece she’s working on. Eventually, she told Brooks students when she visited earlier this semester, that piece “becomes a friend, or an enemy at times.”

Packard was one of two visiting artists this semester who held shows in the Robert Lehman Art Center and worked with students in classes.

At Jack Vasapoli’s sculpture opening in the Lehman in April, it was all about the music — both the blues and Cajun that Vasapoli and the Swamptones played for guests, and the blues greats Vasapoli immortalized in sculpture.

Arts Department Chair Amy Graham

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talked about the importance of integrating the gallery into the arts curriculum during Vasapoli’s exhibit opening.

“My whole philosophy for this space is that the shows should be something different every time — different style, different media,” Graham said. “Everything here is for us, this space is for the community, and the artists who show here should be involved in the community as well, as artists working with our students in our studios. It’s not separate; it’s all connected.”

When Packard visited in February, she had the handful of students start by drawing one line on a square piece of wood. There was more to it than just placing a line on a blank surface, however.

“Painting is about freeing yourself, freeing yourself, freeing yourself, not forcing something,” she told them. She then in-

structed them to stand boldly, and showed them how to hold their charcoal pieces more like swords than writing instruments, before making the crucial first, dramatic stroke on their surface.

“Your first strokes on the canvas come from your soul, from your gut,” she said.

After a little while of painting the wood canvases with a paint-and-wax mixture, Packard ignited the blowtorch and showed students how it can transform artwork.

Working with the students was exciting, Packard said, because “they’re going to places they’ve never been before. They’re thinking outside the box, and getting away from what they assume painting is. They’re thinking of more abstract ideas, and understanding how composition, line, shape and form all relate.

It’s their voice, nobody else’s voice.”

Not that studying art isn’t important. “All paintings need a strong foundation and structure, but there’s also an emotional connection,” she said.

Holly St. Cyr, a fifth-form art student, said she loved Packard’s energy, and also heard her message when it came to finding artistic freedom.

“I learned to be free with your strokes/marks. It was really cool to let go and let your soul take control of the wood canvas,” Holly says. “Personally, it was sort of hard to let go, but overall I loved the experiences, and the rawness of using the blowtorches.”

Isabelle Choy ’13 says Packard is “the opposite of the kind of artist” that Isabelle believes she is. “She just does what she feels like and then fixes anything she doesn’t like. I’m more of a planner. But going through her process was so inspiring because it taught me that you can be spontaneous and still create what you want,” said Isabelle.

And, she says, it was great to think of a blowtorch as an artistic tool. “The blowtorch melts the wax paint and gives it a totally different effect. For me, because I’m more of an abstract artist, I liked that the torch allowed me to blend the colors flawlessly.”

One of Packard’s great-grandfathers was Max Bohm, an impressionist painter, and her

Cynthia Packard was one of the visiting artists who came to campus in the last few months. Among others were:

DeSales Harrison, a poet and poetry professor at Oberlin College, worked with students in English classes about finding inspiration.

Sculptor Jack Vasapoli works with fourth-former Lara Lord on a carving outside the art studios.

mother is the landscape artist Anne Packard.

Cynthia Packard graduated from the Massachusetts College of Art, and works out of her Provincetown studio.

Packard says she’s planning on getting back into the studio to work on her large-scale paintings, and getting back to working in sculpture.

INSPIRED BY MUSIC Students were exposed to some very funky sculpture in April, when Jack Vasapoli came to Brooks to share his love of blues and jazz music, as well as crafting tributes to great musicians in wood.

The art gallery was rocking on April 17 for Vasapoli’s exhibit opening. A shy public speaker, he talked briefly with the large crowd, but spent most of his time behind the microphone singing and playing guitar. He’s a member of the Swamptones band, which performed in the outside as students and adults danced to doo wop, Cajun and blues music.

Vasapoli worked with art classes in the art studios and the Lehman gallery all week, showing them the various stages of creating a piece of sculpture, using a piece of plaster.

“I’m showing them how carving is really about taking away to create the art, not adding,”

much as he carves his art out of raw wood.

It’s a painstaking process, he said — a smaller bust of Frank Sinatra, for example, took about 40 hours to complete, and a sixfoot-tall statue of Dizzy Gillespie took some 400 hours to finish.

Interestingly, it takes just as long to complete the finishing work — sanding and painting a sculpture to perfection — as it does to complete the first phase, the basic form, Vasapoli said.

A self-taught sculptor, Jack worked for several years in Hillsborough, N.H. and North Reading, Mass., as a biology and chemistry teacher, before opening an optical business with his brother in 1984. He’s semiretired now from a position as an optician at the Lahey Clinic in Peabody.

He said he’s driven partly because of his love of music, but also because art was always something he was discouraged from pursuing. That just made him want to become an artist even more, he said. Same goes for his love of music — and he enjoys how those two paths intersect in his sculpture.

“I enjoy sculpting the musician pieces as a tribute to those legends; I don’t think they’ve been recognized in that form before,” he said.

Gayle Heney, North Andover’s poet laureate, worked with students in English classes in the Lehman Art Center during Packard’s exhibit.

Students were asked to pick a piece of art and write a short piece, describing what they saw in it.

Hank Rogerson, director, actor and writer, talked with English classes about acting and the film industry. His recent documentary Shakespeare Behind Bars is available on DVD.

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NEWS&NOTES

Faculty member Jeff Saunders, Hadley Barlow ’13, faculty member Lisa Saunders and Alex Meyers ’13 pose before attended chapel at Glenalmond College in Scotland.

Getting a Firsthand Look Faculty visit students on exchange in Botswana, Scotland Ren Robinson looked a little bit nervous as she double-checked her helmet and asked what she should do with her hands. A man with a heavy accent was giving her instructions, reassuring her that the zipline is perfectly safe, and she’d love it. Luckily, as she was about to skim the lush green vista of treetops dangling from a rope, she had faculty member Becca Smith ’05 behind her. Literally behind her, nestled in on the same zipline, ready to go. As they took off, faculty member Kathy Crowley captured it all on video — from the nervous looks to the screaming and laughing as the flying duo took off.

The zipline in Botswana was just one of

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many activities that faculty members enjoyed with Brooks students abroad this spring, as part of the Exchange Program.

Smith and Crowley went to Maru-a-Pula School in Botswana, where they met up with Robinson ’13 and Nick Papantonis ’13. Faculty members Lisa and Jeff Saunders headed to Glenalmond College in Scotland, where Hadley Barlow ’13 and Alex Meyers ’13 were on exchange for four weeks.

There were several purposes to the faculty travels. They served as ambassadors of Brooks, much like Brooks students do on exchange, but also met with faculty in both schools and took in the exchange experience

in person: something that’s important, says Exchange Program Coordinator John McLoughlin.

“We know, as a school, that we believe part of our student experience should be global, we recognize the value of that,” McLoughlin said. “So as a faculty, we need to model that.”

The faculty/staff travel grant is given each year, with different partner schools being visited. Grant recipients attend classes, participate in activities and excursions, explore possibilities for program development, and foster relationships with partner school exchange coordinators, administrators and faculty.

For Jeff and Lisa Saunders, the opportunity to travel to Scotland, and then tack on their own jaunt to London was a welcomed one. Lisa, who is the assistant directory of information technology, has been involved in the Exchange Program as a guide to exchange students from other countries who come to Brooks and a chaperone on day trips with them here, such as visits to Ipswich, Boston or Washington D.C. She also serves on the committee that chooses which Brooks students will ultimately be headed to the exchange partner schools.

“The Exchange Program here offers a huge value to the school. It makes us better global citizens,” said Lisa Saunders, who spent a year in Venezuela when she was a high school student. “As a committee member, the Scotland exchange was the one I knew the least about, so I wanted to know more; to be the best I can be in my committee role, it was a great opportunity to see it firsthand.”

They each stayed in dorms during their stay, attended classes and chapel and got a feel for the daily life of a student at Glenalmond.

Jeff Saunders teaches mathematics and robotics, but is also a bit of a history buff on the side. Heading to Glenalmond College was a chance to explore a little of his ancestry. He said one of the highlights was taking the Brooks students to different historical sites.

He also enjoyed getting to know the faculty at Glenalmond.

“We connected very easily with the teachers there. They were picking our brains and we were picking theirs. It was helpful to see how they handle things in the classroom,” said Jeff Saunders, who visited math classes

and chemistry classes during the trip.

The duo could also report on how well Hadley and Alex were assimilating into the Glenalmond culture. They noted that it was great to see Alex playing rugby with his Glenalmond classmates, and Hadley got involved in a lacrosse tournament. Lisa Saunders noticed that the Scottish students don’t focus on one sport per season.

“They have two or three practices per week and maybe a couple of games, but on other days they are free to do something different,” she said.

Jeff Saunders was impressed that both the teachers and students were genuinely interested in getting to know all four of the Brooks visitors.

“Everyone we met was really interested in talking to all of us; it wasn’t just small talk,” he said.

Lisa Saunders said their visit gave them a perspective that extends even beyond the Exchange Program.

“We had the opportunity to feel what it would have been like to be new students walking into a school. Everything was new, everything looked different,” she said. “We hear about these exchange trips from kids and hear their impressions, which is great, but it’s even better to be there experiencing that with them.”

In Botswana, Kathy Crowley and Becca Smith also found that spending time learning the daily routine of a foreign school was an education in itself — both for them and for the two Brooks students who attended.

“We all got exposure to different things: the grading system is different, the teaching is

Fifth-formers Nick Papantonis and Ren Robinson pose with faculty members Kathy Crowley and Becca Smith ‘05 near Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe.

different. It was interesting to compare and contrast not just for the students, but for the two of us as well, as teachers,” said Smith.

Both enjoyed seeing the sights of Botswana — including a safari in Chobe National Park and checking out the awe-inspiring Victoria Falls both from a helicopter and from the ground — with Nick and Ren. Smith said it was also an opportunity to step into the role of being a student again.

“To me, the value of travel rooted in an institution or a group of people is that it allows you to look at what you do with greater perspective. I got to observe and participate in things that are different from what I do on a daily basis. I got to go to history class for the

first time in several years, and sit in on other classes and really take it in,” she said. “You’re a student in that sense — you’re experiencing a different place, a different culture. You don’t get to do that often when you are where you work or where you live.”

Crowley said she noticed that both Ren and Nick “had gained confidence” through their exchange experience.

Smith agreed, especially after sitting in on a biology class where Ren was explaining a concept to her Botswana classmates.

“It was amazing to see her teaching stuff she had struggled with two months prior,” said Smith.

BOTSWANA AND SCOTLAND: FAVORITE MEMORIES Nick Papantonis ’13 and Alex Meyers ‘13 share their favorite parts of their exchange trips:

and go on a safari. Getting to know them better was fantastic and that’s a memory I wouldn't want to have with anyone else.

Nick: On the first Sunday I was in Botswana, a fellow student and

Alex: My top experience was walking into a field right next to Glenalmond's campus with some friends, looking around and seeing green fields as far as the eye could see. Just talking to each other as teenagers would, totally disregarding the fact that we lived in two similar yet different countries. Of course we mentioned some differences between our lives, but it didn't get in the way of forming lifelong friendships that I'll cherish forever.

I woke up at 4:30 a.m. to hike a mountain. At the top, we watched the sunrise and were able to view the entire city stretched before us. On the last Sunday, the same student held a “graduation dinner” for himself and a girl. Twenty people were at the dinner; 15 of them I had never really talked to, but by the end of the night they turned out to be some of the most memorable people in the entire trip. I also liked when Ren Robinson ’13, faculty members Kathy Crowley and Becca Smith ’05 and I went to view Victoria Falls

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WINTER TERM WELCOME TO

by Michelle Morrissey and Dan Callahan

It’s January 2012. Students are back from winter break, but rather than preparing for first-semester exams, they are about to embark on a new program: Winter Term. During the next three weeks, they will be following an immersive course of study, enrolling in single classes of 5 to 14 students.

Subjects they could choose from included SCUBA diving, decoding The Da Vinci Code, the Second Amendment, and the history of Boston. Classes went on trips that ranged from day trips to Cambridge and Newburyport to excursions to Washington, D.C., Ireland and Peru. The stories on the following pages provide snapshots of just a few of those memorable experiences.

WINTER TERM JAN 6-28 2012

Vietnam Experience Veterans bring history, controversy of war to life for students

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“I’m sorry, guys, I’m sorry,” says Peter Eaton ’60, wiping his eyes as he apologizes to the small group of students gathered in a library conference room.

Everyone is silent.

“Take your time,” Head of School John Packard says gently.

Eaton had been talking to Packard’s class about his experiences as a young Army lieutenant in Vietnam. But there was one story — that of a young soldier, injured in an explosion — that brings Eaton quickly to tears.

Eaton has just shown the students in Packard’s class what is true for hundreds of thousands of Vietnam veterans: Despite the years that have passed, for so many the experience lies just below the surface.

Eaton’s story was one of many heard by students in the Winter Term class The Vietnam Experience, taught by Packard and faculty member John Fahey.

Students were most affected by the people they heard from first hand — Eaton, soldierturned-peace-activist Shep Gurwitz, and veteran and author Jack McLean among them. It was McLean they spent the most time with; he met the group in D.C. during their threeday visit to explore the Vietnam Memorial and the American History Museum, and to visit Marines at Quantico.

The personal connections that the handful of students in the class made with veterans they met meant students weren’t just reading about Vietnam; they were hearing about it from those who were there. The war ended long ago enough that Brooks students don’t know the complexities and intricacies of that time in American history, but it’s recent enough that students are curious about it; they can draw correlations between Vietnam and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan they’ve known in their lifetime.

For Matt Maley ’12, the raw emotions of these eyewitnesses made this unlike any other history class he’s taken.

“It was interesting to hear from so many different people. Mr. Eaton showed us that he still deals with his experiences, he’s emotional about it. But Shep Gurwitz was remarkable because of his lack of emotion; he feels numbed by his experience in Vietnam,” Matt said.

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WINTER TERM JAN 6-28 2012

Sport Science Exploring the scientific study of athletic performance

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Ever heard the sound of a baseball hitting a wall at 180 miles per hour?

Students in the Sports Science Winter Term class have, and they all agree: it’s very, very loud.

How did they come to witness such an unusual thing? No, there wasn’t a pitching phenom in the group who was showing off a cannon arm. Instead, the class took a field trip to the UMass Lowell Baseball Research Center, where they got an up-close look at the confluence of science and sport.

Pat Drane, assistant director of the Center, met with the class for the morning, and together they watched a baseball-themed episode of the TV show Mythbusters. On the program, the host questioned a few popular myths: Can a corked bat really help a player hit more home runs? Does humidity impact how far a ball travels? Can a pitcher really make a ball curve? Is it really slower to slide into a base?

The Mythbusters host led a series of experiments to test those myths, and at UMass, Pat Drane had the Brooks students conduct their own experiments and then compare their results with the Mythbusters conclusions. Along the way, they learned about topics such as the coefficient of restitution (COR), friction and acceleration. They also learned to identify flaws in an experiment’s methods and assumptions.

“In this class, physics teacher Randy Hesse and I wanted to combine classroom studies with getting off campus for fieldwork,” said Science Department Chair Mary Jo Carabatsos. “The trip to the Baseball Research Center allowed us to put scientific principles into practice. We had just been studying COR, so to go to UMass and be able to fire baseballs off a wall and measure rebound speeds was a pretty cool experience for our students.”

And if you’re wondering about those baseball myths, the answers are: no, it seems that a cork bat doesn’t have much of an effect on a baseball; yes, a ball that is stored in dry conditions travels farther than one that’s stored in humid conditions; yes, a pitcher can make a ball curve (but the idea of a rising fastball is a fallacy); and yes, it is slightly faster to slide into a base than it is to remain standing up.

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WINTER TERM JAN 6-28 2012

Cultural History of Ireland Learning goes from the classroom to the streets of Dublin

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Students in a history class this January took their learning outside the classroom — far outside. They headed down to Cambridge, where they tapped their toes to Irish bands such as Fellswater and the Kyle Carey Trio at Club Passim. And they kept going, across the Atlantic, in fact. After hitting the books to learn about Irish culture, the students and their teachers hit the streets of Dublin, the shores of Dinish Island, where they were hosted by Board President Nick Booth ’67, and other sites on the Emerald Isle. They tasted fish and chips and beef stew at The Quays in Dublin’s Temple Bar district. They dipped their hands in Torc Waterfall at the Lakes of Killarney, and stepped into the cells at Kilmainham Gaol, where political prisoners were jailed.

The course was the idea of Willie Waters ’02 and Susannah Whitaker, who had traveled to Ireland in 2010 for vacation. “As we learned about Winter Term, we wanted to share our passion for Irish history and culture with the kids; we felt really strongly that any course on Ireland should have a travel component,” Whitaker said. “Its heritage sites are unbelievable, and being able to go in January there were far fewer tourists and so it gave it a really authentic feel.”

The course focused on Irish culture through a variety of topics: literature, movies, cuisine, sports and language. The group read works by Yeats, James Joyce and Frank McCourt and watched films such as The Wind That Shakes the Barley and Michael Collins. The two weeks of classtime were packed: students spent days on research projects or reading assignments, and in the evenings, they watched movies chronicling Irish culture or learned to make traditional dishes like Irish farls. Each of the eight students had to research a topic of Irish culture and then lead the group as they explored that area.

Caroline Trustey ’13 researched the Blasket Islands, off the coast of the Dingle Peninsula. “This class was unlike anything I’d ever done; Irish history typically isn’t covered this in-depth in any other history class,” Caroline said. As to the historical sites they visited, she was most impressed with the group’s trip to the old jail in Dublin. “Seeing the jail cells of the different leaders of the Easter Rebellion . . . it was cool to assign a place to what we had learned.”

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WINTER TERM JAN 6-28 2012

Mock Trial An introduction to the basics of the American legal system

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“May I approach the witness, your honor?” Daniel Smith ’13 asks.

After receiving an approving nod from Judge Boal, Smith walks briskly to the witness stand as he flips through some loosely stapled papers.

“You’re aware of the state’s zero tolerance law for driving under the influence, aren’t you?” Smith asks.

“Yes,” says the witness, a state police officer (played by Patrick Gordon ’13).

“So you know that under the state’s guidelines, you are supposed to conduct a field sobriety test if you suspect someone of drunk driving,” says Smith. “Can you please explain to the court why such a test wasn’t administered in this case?”

The heated exchange between attorney and witness was just one of several riveting confrontations in the mock trial put on by Alex Costello’s Winter Term class. Conducted in the U.S. District Court in Boston’s John Joseph Moakley Courthouse, the trial lasted two hours and was the culmination of three weeks of case preparation that included research on applicable laws, reviewing depositions, and getting advice from practicing defense attorneys and prosecutors.

At the end of the trial, after the verdict was read (a tie), the class had an opportunity to talk to the jury, which was composed of law students from Northeastern and Boston Universities. One of the jurors said, “You’re all high school students? Wow. I was really impressed with your public speaking ability and knowledge of the law. Great job.”

“Watching these kids think and act like lawyers was worth the price of admission,” said Costello. “They conducted the trial better than some lawyers we saw in district courts across the Commonwealth. I was proud of them.”

“My most vivid memories of this class will be centered on the late nights we spent working on our case in the library,” said Ani Bilazarian ’13. “Our group was fantastic, and I made and have remained friends with people I first really got to know during Winter Term.”

“Years from now, when I think back on my time at Brooks in general and this class in particular, I will remember my cross examination,” said Nick Demsher ’14. “It was very important to my team, and I loved the mixed feelings I had of being simultaneously nervous and excited.”

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WINTER TERM JAN 6-28 2012

Wooden Ships Preserving and perpetuating the craft of wooden boat restoration

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Henry Wagner ’12 would love to climb into the 19-foot boat he helped build in January, admire the mast he helped sand, the curved trim pieces he helped shape, and take to the lake aboard his Winter Term project.

Wagner was one of 14 students who learned the craft of boatbuilding as part of the Winter Term course taught by faculty members Matt Grant and John Haile.

“It was great to be out of the classroom, working with your hands,” said Henry.

Grant’s hope was simply that “kids would enjoy themselves, and that they would take away from the class an understanding of woodworking, how to use hand tools and power tools, possibly even a love for the process of working with wood,” he said.

Students started with a donated hull, and from there, worked as a team to add a floor, deck and spar to bring the vessel to seaworthy status. Students and faculty worked closely with Graham McKay, a professional shipwright from Lowell’s Boat Building in Essex, Mass.

“The great thing about a hands-on course like this is that once you make something with your hands, you have ownership of a physical thing. There’s a pride element there, you become a part of a bigger thing,” To hear Henry and Tommy Mumford ’12 talk about it, that responsibility shows. Even after Winter Term was over, they spent an additional 50 hours this spring finishing the boat.

Mumford said it was great to see the fruits of his labor in a physical form, not just as a grade on a paper or a test.

“When you’re done for the day, it isn’t just ‘We’re done with the day.’ It wasn’t just your mind that was tired. Your back’s a little sore, your hands are tired; you feel the effects of your work. That contributes more to the feeling of completion,” he said.

He also felt proud with how much carpentry the class had learned in a short amount of time. “The first deck brace took an entire day to make and the last one we made took an hour,” Tommy said. “That gave us a real sense of accomplishment.”

Spring / Summer 2012 35

WINTER TERM JAN 6-28 2012

Pressing Pause Removing ourselves from the rigors of our busy daily schedules

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Although it’s January, a light rain is falling on the hills of North Conway, N.H. Fortunately for the students in the Pressing Pause Winter Term class, the evening temperatures in this part of New England have been dipping below freezing and the steady drizzle turns to ice overnight — a perfect formula for ice climbing.

The class had driven up to Attitash the day before and bonded at dinner and around progressively sillier stories as the night wore on. Today, they are getting an ice-climbing lesson from the experts at REI. Loaded with gear, they look like actors from The Eiger Sanction with their crampons and ice axes and harnesses.

The lessons take place at Cathedral Ledge, a mecca in summer for rock climbers but equally popular in winter for those who prefer to take on the ever-changing obstacle that ice presents.

First up is Tyler Britt ’13, and he tentatively flicks his ax against the white wall until it holds. His confidence grows as he ascends, and there is a rhythm to his process as he first makes sure his ax is secure and then creates footholds with the sharp spikes of his crampons. It doesn’t take him long to reach the top of the ledge, and the look of accomplishment on his face is hard to miss even from a distance.

That look is precisely the reason why teachers Brian Palm and Becca Smith ’05 proposed the class.

“Our goal was to put kids in situations that would take them out of their comfort zone,” said Palm. “Whether it was going telemark skiing, practicing yoga or doing an overnight solo, we wanted them to try new things. And then we asked them to keep journals of their experiences. Too often these days, we don’t have time to pause from our busy schedules to reflect on what is going on in our lives.”

The opportunity that Winter Term provided to move at a slower pace was something that fifth-former Nick Gates appreciated.

“The time we were able to spend together allowed us to bond as a group,” he said. “The night we spent together at Attitash, playing music and playing games, is something I’ll always remember. The 12 kids and three adults shared a connection that was very special.”

Spring / Summer 2012 37

And the lord heard the voice of Elijah; and the soul of the child came into him again, and he revived.

—1 Kings 17:22

My Life It is noisy inside the chapel on Sunday evening. Students file in, chatting excitedly about what went on over the weekend. Old pews creak angrily with each teenage body that descends upon them. There is laughter; lots of laughter. Outside, the chapel bell’s insistent ringing begins to slow. As its echoes fade, conversations halt. The chapel is silent. Elijah Soko ’12 rises and walks to the pulpit.

“Good evening,” he says, “and welcome to the Frank D. Ashburn Chapel.”

His voice is deep and powerful, slow and melodic, precise, emotive and layered in a thick Zimbabwean accent. It’s a voice that commands attention. A room that was moments earlier fractured into countless youthful ramblings in now united as one, with all eyes fixed on a young man who, less than two years ago, had never set foot in this chapel, had never heard of Brooks School, and had never dreamed of a future of limitless possibilities in America.

by Dan Callahan

Spring / Summer 2012 39

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t first glance, Elijah is not unlike many other Brooks students: friendly, confident, welcoming, engaging. When you walk past him on campus, he will greet you with a smile and ask how you are doing; there is something about the way he asks that tells you he is sincerely interested in your response and isn’t simply tossing out a polite formality. Spend any length of time talking to him, however, and you quickly realize that the path that led him to Brooks is uniquely his own.

A CHILD OF ZIMBABWE Elijah was born in Mutare to what he describes as a “lower middle-class family.” He has a sister who is five years older, and his father, who was never content to settle, worked hard to provide for his wife and children.

His parents met in high school, and then his father left the country to attend college in Germany on a scholarship. He came back to Zimbabwe to get an advanced degree in business.

“Because of my father’s hard work, he lifted our family out of the poor area where we were living and moved us into a good neighborhood,” said Elijah.

Elijah speaks comfortably about his childhood, and seeing him at Brooks, where he fits in so seamlessly, it is easy to imagine that growing up in Mutare must be similar to growing up in America. Even a cursory understanding of Zimbabwe, however, dispels any notion that the two experiences are in any way alike.

Zimbabwe occupies 150,872 square miles in south-central Africa. It is bordered to the north and south by the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers. A country of almost limitless natural resources, Zimbabwe is home to some of the world’s largest platinum mines and diamond fields. Yet it is consistently ranked as one of the world’s poorest countries. (Due to hyper-inflation, in 2008 Zimbabwe experienced 87 sextillion percent inflation, according to a study published by the Cato Institute.) The life expectency in Zimbabwe is the lowest in the world — 34 years for men and 37 years for women. It is estimated that 20 percent of the population is infected with HIV and AIDS.

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At the 2012 prom, Elijah delivered roses to each of the young African women attending Brooks this spring as part of the Exchange Program.

As a child, Elijah suffered from asthma, and Zimbabwe is not a country in which you want to have health problems. In 2009, three of the four largest hospitals and the country’s only medical school were shut down because of lack of funding.

Elijah had to walk to school every day, and he would end up in the emergency room three times a week for oxygen. He was warned that he would need to stop playing sports if he wanted to control his asthma. But Elijah refused. Eventually, the doctors gave in and sent Elijah home with an inhaler.

“Over time, my lungs adjusted and I grew out of it,” said Elijah. “I think it was because I

continued to play sports that I overcame asthma.

Sports have always been very special to me.”

When Elijah’s father was promoted, he moved the family to Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe. He enrolled Elijah at St. George’s College, one of the best private high schools in the country.

“I was very shy back then,” said Elijah. “I had never seen a private school like this. St. George’s was where President Mugabe sent his kids. It was very different from what I was used to.”

One day during a fourth-grade phys ed class, Elijah, who had grown up playing soccer, tried rugby. He was good. Very good. The teacher was impressed.

With a newfound sense of confidence, Elijah

started to assert himself more. His teachers loved him and made him a prefect of the middle school.

“I came out of my shell because of rugby,” said Elijah.

When he reached seventh grade, his father was promoted again, and everything seemed to be going well. At a party to celebrate his new job, his father called Elijah over and told him to get his rugby trophies.

“It was the first time I could tell that my dad was really proud of me,” said Elijah. “He was showing off my trophies to his friends. I didn’t say anything, but it meant a lot to me.”

A week after the party, they found his father’s body. He was dead. Murdered.

Elijah was 13 years old.

“To this day, no one has a good explanantion as to why he was killed,” said Elijah. “They think it was work related. We’ll probably never know.

But I think back to that party all the time, remembering my dad being so proud of me.”

FINDING SOCCER AND RELIGION “Losing my dad made me think about what is important in life,” said Elijah. “I started to realize that spending my time trying to impress friends and girls was a pursuit of something that had no lasting meaning.”

As Elijah struggled in a search for answers, he found himself in a conversation with a friend who started talking about God and religion.

“That was an important moment for me at a very difficult time in my life. I felt a desire to get to know God and have a relationship with him,” said Elijah. “I had gone to church before. Everyone in Zimbabwe goes to church. But I had never really paid attention. Suddenly, my eyes were open and I was absorbing everything.”

At the same time, Elijah was reevaluating his desire to play rugby. Soccer had always been his true love, but he had been drawn away by the lure of immediate success on the rugby field. He made the decision to return to soccer, against the protestations of his teammates. He went from being a star on the rugby team to riding the bench on the soccer pitch, but he was happy.

“Playing soccer and building a relationship with God gave my life a purpose,” said Elijah.

Much like his parents, Elijah is a hard

Top: At UN Flag Day in the chapel, Elijah proudly waives the flag of his home country, Zimbabwe; bottom left: Elijah with his mother, Getrude; bottom right: in the 2011 Class B tournament finals, Brooks came up just short against a very talented South Kent squad.

worker, and it didn’t take him long to crack the starting lineup of his soccer team. As his talents started to emerge, he was noticed by coaches outside of his school. He was referred to Grassroots Soccer, an organization that uses the popularity of soccer to educate, inspire, and mobilize communities to stop the spread of HIV. THE STARS ALIGN For a teenager from Zimbabwe to end up at a school like Brooks, it takes an almost impossible chain of events to fall into place. In Elijah’s case, it also took a series of selfless acts on the part of a loosely connected cast of characters.

The chain starts with Methembe Ndlovu.

Methembe is the country director for Grassroots Soccer. He is a former professional soccer player, is widely recognized throughout Zimbabwe, and played soccer in the United States at Dartmouth College. He is also the owner of the Bantu Rovers, a professional football club. It was Methembe who saw Elijah play, did some research, asked a few questions and decided he was a great candidate to gain acceptance into an American prep school. It was Methembe who invited Elijah to participate in a Grassroots Soccer showcase.

The next person in the chain is Jeff Cook, soccer coach at Dartmouth and a close friend of Methembe’s. Cook has traveled to Zimbabwe four

Spring / Summer 2012 41

Against Suffield Academy in the 2011 Class B quarterfinals, Elijah suprised the crowd with his presence in the starting lineup. Elijah had missed the last two games of the season with an injured left knee and wasn’t expected to play. His leadership inspired his team to a 1-0 victory.

times in the last five years to coach and scout players at the Grassroots Soccer showcase. Cook agreed with Methembe’s assessment that Elijah could thrive in America. Cook has played a role in placing African soccer players in a number of schools and colleges, including Creighton, Bradley, Blair Academy and Kimball Union Academy (KUA).

KUA’s soccer coach is Chris Cheney, another friend of Jeff Cook’s. KUA is a prep soccer power and in recent years has proved to be a competitive rival to Dusty Richard’s Brooks teams. (A few years ago, Zimbabwe native Lucky Mkosana led

Zimbabwe for a few years,” said Dusty. “I saw how great Lucky was at KUA, and Peter Grieve and I had talked about using his connections to help us out. The most important thing to me was finding someone who wasn’t just a great soccer player, but who was also a great kid who could handle the academic rigor of our classes and who would also contribute to school life. We were looking for a very special kid, and we found one.”

Willie Waters ’02, who coaches with Dusty and who worked in the admission office at the time, conducted the interview with Elijah.

That friendly dinner invitation turned into a relationship that would grow and strengthen over the next two years. Before long, Elijah was attending church with the Bilazarians on Sundays, and an increasing number of other Brooks students started to join them.

“That’s the beauty of a boarding education,” said Melanie. “Kids get real exposure to different families and different cultures.”

“It has been amazing seeing Elijah fit in so well at Brooks,” said Waters. “It’s hard to imagine a new fifth-former coming to a place with no clue

“Elijah began to use his wisdom and voice more on the field, in class, in chapel, with his peers and most importantly with himself. He began owning it. That’s what a boarding school like Brooks can do.”

—Melanie Bilazarian P’11, 13

Kimball Union to a victory over Brooks in the Class B championships. Lucky graduated from Dartmouth this spring.)

Because of the rivalry, Cheney was familar with Brooks. But the most important connection that brings Brooks into this story is Peter Grieve. Grieve is the parent of three former and current Brooks students: Alex ’09, Porter ’11 and Graham ’14. He is also on the Board of Directors of Grassroots Soccer and co-owns the Bantu Rovers with Methembe.

Grieve had spoken to Dusty on several occasions about their shared vision of bringing African soccer players to Brooks.

Those are the characters that would ultimately play a role in Elijah leaving Africa and arriving in North Andover in September 2010. The chain of events was set in motion at the showcase, where Elijah played very well. Jeff Cook contacted Chris Cheney about the possibility of bringing Elijah to KUA, but KUA was already overenrolled and had no room. Rather than give up on Elijah, Cheney thought immediately of Brooks and Dusty.

“When you think about it, what Cheney did is pretty remarkable,” said Peter Grieve. “He delivered a star player to one of his chief rivals. He wasn’t thinking about himself. He was thinking about how he could help a kid from Zimbabwe. A kid he had never even met.”

When Dusty Richard learned about Elijah, he was immediately interested.

“I had been watching the soccer players from

“Obviously, we couldn’t interview Elijah in person, so most of what we learned about him was what came through over the phone,” said Waters. “Elijah is incredibly articulate, and in the end we took a leap of faith based on his belief in himself and his belief that he was capable of doing the work at Brooks. When we picked him up for preseason, we had no idea if he could really play soccer, but we were sure he was a great person.”

In the team’s first scrimmage, ironically against KUA, any concerns about Elijah’s soccer prowess were laid to rest. He recorded a hat trick.

A LEADER EMERGES From his first days in a Brooks uniform, it was clear that Elijah was going to be a star on the pitch.

It has taken longer for him to emerge as a leader in the school, a role he now embraces.

“His humility actually got in the way, until, finally, enough voices joined together in one loud chorus, shouting, ‘Leadership potential!’ It gave him the collected affirmation he needed to look deep and recognize what was always there,” said Melanie Bilazarian, mother of Ara ’11 and Ani ’13.

The Bilazarians, who live in Andover, got to know Elijah almost by accident. “My son Ara and Elijah sat at the same dinner table during preseason in 2010,” said Melanie. “Ara saw Elijah pray before eating, and he thought it was so cool that this new kid was so open about his faith. They started chatting and Ara invited him over for dinner.”

what to expect and doing as well as Elijah has.

When he showed up for preseason, he was too polite to even tell us he didn’t have a pillow!”

WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS After putting together two impressive soccer seasons and finding success in the classroom, Elijah was accepted at Dartmouth College, where he will get a chance to play for Jeff Cook.

“We know we’re getting a talented player,” said Cook. “Elijah scores goals; he gets himself into the right areas to help his teams win. More important, thought, is how excited we are that Dartmouth is getting a special kid. After he got his official acceptence letter, Elijah emailed our admission office to thank them for giving him this opportunity.”

“I’m looking forward to college and getting the best education I can,” said Elijah. “Eventually, though, I’d like to go back to Zimbabwe. I miss it.

When I think about my country, I’m really proud.

The people are so friendly, but right now there’s too much corruption. In the private schools, you see Bentleys and Rolls Royces, but when you go out into the country you see poverty at its worst.

It’s hard to reconcile.”

If all goes well, his path back to Zimbabwe might include one additional detour: Elijah has a dream of one day playing professional soccer.

“It’s a dream I’ve had my whole life,” said Elijah. “I don’t know if I’ll ever be good enough, but if I work hard, you just never know.”

Spring / Summer 2012 43

Exp Ask the

perts With the United States clawing its way out of the Great Recession, and with a

Republican primary that was as contentious as any other in recent memory, the stage is set for a dramatic 2012 presidential election. Added to the nowstandard partisan rhetoric are grassroots efforts such as the Tea Party

activists and the Occupy movement. With so much at stake and so many opinions about how to move forward, the Bulletin asked several Brooks alumni for their expert advice on what we should expect.

by Emily Young

Spring / Summer 2012 45

What are your thoughts on the current campaign climate?

The current campaign climate is toxic, but that’s not surprising given the prevalence of unaccountable super PACs and the polarized nature of our politics.

—Robert DiClerico ’62 | political science professor at West Virginia University

The campaign climate is unpleasant, but that is hardly a surprise.

Politics is a means of fighting without violence. It has always been ugly and always will be. We can hope, however, that our leaders — and so the electorate — will hew to civility, which increasingly seems in diminishing supply. As Winston Churchill put it, “Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms.”

—Roger Colinvaux ’85 | law professor at the Catholic University of America

I don’t subscribe to the wholesale idea that it’s getting worse. Everybody always thinks it’s worse than the previous cycle. This is just the process and this is the way it works.

—Cristina Antelo ’95 | principal at the Podesta Group

People like us in Wisconsin are experiencing a charged political atmosphere on the local level. Over the summer, we’ll vote on an unprecedented gubernatorial recall, so we’re in a hyper-partisan charged atmosphere. This presidential election will impact the statewide races. We saw a lot of money spent during the last election and we’ll see a lot more money spent this time on advertising and driving turnout, which is interesting.

—Jim Greer ’98 | partner at Nation Consulting

The Republican primary has been incredible to watch. In our polls, majorities tell us, “The more I hear from the Republican candidates, the less I like.” The tenor and substance of the debate has brought the Republican agenda into clear focus for many voters and they don’t like what they hear.

—Erica Seifert ’98 | senior associate at Greenberg Quinlan Rosner

I’ve noticed that we stereotype people now based on party affiliation. Not sure if this is true across the country, but in many parts of the country that are so polarized, it’s now taboo to talk politics. The two-party system is so polarizing that people might worry what stereotypes will be placed on them if they’re open and honest about their political beliefs. Unfortunately, this is how we understand the different perspectives of an issue and become more informed. So, if

Meet the

Experts

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Cristina Antelo ’95 | Antelo is a principal at the Podesta Group, a leading lobbying firm in Washington, D.C. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., she entered into politics as a legal fellow for the Senate Democratic Steering Committee. She is a founding member and president of the Hispanic Lobbyists Association and a board member of the Hispanic Bar Association of D.C. Foundation.

we don’t discuss politics, we are not taking steps to be informed.

Compared to other countries, where talking about politics is a calm and social part of life, it’s odd to me that it’s such a taboo here. An academic explanation is social identity theory: We identify with people like us and categorize people who don’t share our beliefs. We make a lot of assumptions about people and it seems that we do this based on party affiliation. For example, a guest speaker in my class spoke about civic leadership. I teach in Indiana, which is a very Republican state. He told a story about going to an event with his kids, where he saw a huge pickup truck covered with Republican and progun stickers. When he pulled up next to it, he said, “What kind of idiot would drive this car?” Well, it was one of his kids who pointed out, once inside, that they were socializing with the owner of the truck; it was one of their friends. He admitted that he judged too quickly based on very limited information and I think this is a very common practice.

—Rachel Clapp-Smith ’92 | professor of leadership in Purdue University Calumet’s department of management

It reminds you of what Bismarck said. He said there are two things that nice people shouldn’t see made: one is sausages and the other is laws. And if he were around today, he would add U.S. president to the list. Our process is open, very transparent, very messy. But a candidate will emerge. And I think the pressure of the process has made the current front-runner, Romney, a stronger candidate than he was when he began the campaign. When he began the campaign, he had a 59-point program, which was incomprehensible. Comedians pointed out that God had only 10. And just recently, he had to come out with a tax plan — a 20 percent across-the-board cut on the income tax rate and other provisions — which he never would have done if it weren’t for the pressure of the political process.

—Steve Forbes ’66 | chairman and editor-in-chief of Forbes Media

The current campaign climate in the United States reflects a division in our country that I have not seen since the Vietnam War. And it is sad that a president who ran on “hope and change” is now promoting “divide and blame.” Nor has the political climate in the U.S. Congress done anything to help the situation. Under our constitutional form of government, Congress has the power of the purse. And yet we have not passed a budget in three years. The president’s principle piece of legislation — so-called Obamacare — is facing a critical test with the Supreme Court, with over half of our states’ attorneys general calling it unconstitutional. Our war of “necessity” in Afghanistan is fast becoming our next Vietnam. The economic recovery is marginal, unemployment continues above 8 percent and the housing/banking crisis has not been solved with the Dodd/Frank

Rachel Clapp-Smith ’92 | Clapp-Smith is a professor of leadership in Purdue University Calumet’s department of management. She is the co-author of the book chapter, The Role of Psychological Capital in Global Mindset Development, in addition to penning numerous academic journal pieces.

Her doctoral research focused on organizational behavior and leadership, while her MBA work focused on international management.

Roger Colinvaux ’85 | Colinvaux is a law professor at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and is former legislation counsel to Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation. He is an expert on the tax laws affecting nonprofit organizations and recently testified before the U.S. Senate Finance Committee on tax reform and the charitable deduction. He has a forthcoming piece discussing the political speech of charities after the Citizens United decision.

legislation, which merely codifies “too big to fail.” Somewhere in all of this, our political leaders have lost sight of the fact that individual liberty, private property, free markets, entrepreneurship, personal responsibility and limited government are the values that sustained this country and its economic growth through 200 or more years of its history. But free enterprise has been replaced with the “free lunch” as the compelling economic and political value.

—Rob Simmons ’61 | chairman of the board for the Yankee Institute for Public Policy

I think it’s becoming more partisan and more toxic every day, which is the exact opposite of the experience I had during the first 12 of my 14 years here at the Statehouse. It was very nonpartisan. We would have disagreements over policy, but it was never personal. During the last couple of years, it’s become more personal. It’s not as bad in Boston as it is down in D.C., but it’s starting to seep down to this level. I have many Republican friends who I came in with and over the years we have had policy disputes, but by and large, the fundamentals of what we do aren’t partisan. Good schools, safe streets, good healthcare — those aren’t really partisan issues. I just think sometimes the extremes of both the left and the right tend to dominate the discussion because the media love a fight, so that stuff gets the most coverage.

—David Torrisi ’86 | Massachusetts state representative (D-North Andover)

Why don’t we hold political candidates accountable for the campaign promises they break?

I think we do hold politicians accountable. That’s why 80 Republican freshmen were elected during the last election; people were unhappy with the way things were going and they voted out those responsible.

I truly believe in the system. I think it is working.

—Cristina Antelo ’95

There is a great article first published in 1975 by Steven Kerr called “On the folly of rewarding A while hoping for B.” He describes how we create reward systems to try to reward certain behavior, but we actually end up rewarding behavior we don’t even want. . . . So, look at the politicians who give something that is appealing to us. Usually that message is very inspiring, but there’s not a lot of content behind it. For example, a statement like “All Americans deserve healthcare.”

Inspiring, but there are no details on how to make that happen. A candidate who gives all operatives on how to turn something into

Robert DiClerico ’62 | DiClerico is the Eberly Professor for Outstanding Teaching in West Virginia University’s department of political science, where he’s taught for the last 40 years. His primary research and classwork is focused on the president and presidential elections. He is the author of eight books, in addition to numerous scholarly articles published in Presidential Studies Quarterly, and South Atlantic Quarterly.

Steve Forbes ’66 | Forbes is chairman and editor-in-chief of Forbes Media, which includes a number of print and online magazines, investment newsletters, as well as the Forbes Investors Advisory Institute. He pens editorials for each Forbes issue, one of the country’s leading business magazines, in addition to authoring and co-authoring several books. He ran to be the Republican nominee in the 1996 and 2000 presidential races. He served as chair of the bipartisan Board for International Broadcasting from 1985 to 1993.

reality, we typically punish that person. But people speaking in broad goals without substantives, we reward those people. I would say this current climate isn’t new from other climates. . . . As voters, we tend to punish those who give us too many details. From a leadership perspective, having an inspiring vision is critical, but successful leaders also know and can communicate the path to that vision.

Put differently, transformational leaders are effective when they also manage the transactional processes well. Therefore, when we reward solely on vision, as Kerr maintains, we are disappointed when attaining the vision is too painful or unpopular or perhaps impossible.

—Rachel Clapp-Smith ’92

To be honest, I often feel sympathy for (some) political candidates.

To oversimplify, any completely honest (in the sense of forthright) candidate will not be elected. Any electable candidate who is not willing to break a promise no matter what the circumstances probably should not be elected. Promises often are a form of pandering, or messaging. And sometimes, the facts change — and leadership and hard choices are required. But more importantly, depending on the promise, the electorate should to a certain extent relax and not impose a promise-keeping litmus test, especially since promises made, or hopes held by voters, often turn on events that are not in an official’s complete control. Litmus tests lead to gotcha politics. Instead, voters should assess candidates based on the overall record, fairly presented, and the particular circumstances and challenges of office.

—Roger Colinvaux ’85

I think candidates are held accountable by their opponents for the big promises they break. The problem is that in contrast to the old nominating process, where candidates had to make their case to a relatively small number of party elites, now they have to appeal to a host of primary electorates and this leads to over-promising, be it ethanol for farmers, new programs for the Space Center in Florida, re-dredging the port in Charleston, S.C., or what to do with Yucca Mountain. John Kennedy made 30 promises when he ran for president in 1960. Barack Obama made 260. The over promising creates excessive expectations that inevitably lead to some degree of disillusionment after the winner takes office.

—Robert DiClerico ’62

We do. You saw it in 2010. A lot of Republicans lost their primaries.

In fact, it’s easy now to keep track of what these people are doing. I should say, easier . . .

—Steve Forbes ’66

Jim Greer ’98 | As a partner at the Wisconsin-based public affairs consulting firm Nation Consulting, Greer represents clients in the telecommunications, construction and financial services industries. He previously served as director of business development for WisPolitics Publishing, an online news company covering business, political and governmental topics in Wisconsin and Iowa. He’s worked on a number of political campaigns, including Governor Tommy Thompson’s 1998 reelection campaign.

Trevor Potter ’74 | Potter heads up Caplin & Drysdale’s political law practice in its Washington, D.C., office.

He previously served as the commissioner and chairman of the Federal Election Commission. He acted as general counsel to the John McCain 2008 and 2000 presidential campaigns, as well as deputy general counsel to the George H. W. Bush 1988 campaign. He currently represents Stephen Colbert, his SuperPAC and 501C-4, sharing campaign finance advice on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report.

Spring / Summer 2012 47

I think people are naturally cynical about politicians. But in reality, our political system was designed to be ineffective. And there’s a good reason for that: When the country was founded, politicians were afraid of ruling by the fleeting fancy of the masses, so the system was designed to be more measured in its implementation of policy.

—Jim Greer ’98

A candidate’s campaign promises are meant to showcase his core values or vision at a specific point in time, but the public recognizes that these promises often lack a realistic plan or time frame and may fall out of favor altogether. Newt Gingrich guaranteed he’d build a colony on the moon; Michele Bachmann vowed to cut gas prices to $2 a gallon; Ron Paul pledged to defund all U.S. military bases worldwide and Mitt Romney promised every college graduate a job under his watch. These join a long list of “chicken in every pot and two cars in every garage” campaign promises that will never happen.

The public accepts these broken promises because they’re not all that different from our compulsion with New Year’s Day resolutions that are often abandoned a month later along with that expensive new gym membership.

—Rob Quigley ’88 | social media director at Source Interlink Media

I think we do. The difference is that we are much better at holding candidates accountable for whom they purport to be than for what they promise to do. And this makes a lot of sense: Voters increasingly select their candidates based on personal traits (regression analysis shows that, controlling for party identification, candidate character traits are strong independent predictors of vote choices). Because these personal signifiers are more important to us, it makes sense that we would care deeply when a professed “family values” politician turns out to be an adulterer or when a reform politician turns out to be a shill for the corporate lobby. The other reason we are more apt to ignore broken policy promises is that most Americans understand — indeed vote for — divided government. We have just been through four big-wave elections. This is not a recent phenomenon, but it feels more extreme now — it has become much more difficult for members of either party to successfully enact a strong policy agenda under divided government. Voters deeply understand this. They hate it, but they vote for it.

In light of Olympia Snowe’s exit from

politics, have we reached a point where the two-party system is logjammed to such a degree that no major reform is possible anymore?

Actually, a good part, though not all, of the current logjam in Washington could be avoided were it not for the filibuster. Between 1973 and 1990, it was used only 39 times. From last January to this January, it was used 39 times. Now it is being deployed not simply to filibuster bills on the Senate floor, but to prevent bills from even being brought to the floor. I think a compelling argument can be made to get rid of it.

—Robert DiClerico ’62

Major reform is coming. And what you’re seeing now is the very messy process of a new consensus emerging. It reminds you again of Bismarck. But it’s happening. You had the first glimpse of it a year and a half ago, when the president had his deficit reduction commission, whose findings he resolutely ignored. He appointed these guys, Democrats and Republicans, and they proposed changes, which he simply ignored, on the spending side. And they also proposed simplifying the tax code, not as far as I would like to go, but simplifying the code and sharply reducing tax rates. Democrats signed on to that. The White House didn’t like it. But a lot of Democrats did. So, yes, there is a consensus emerging and going through the political process, which is sometimes unsightly, but the system works. It molds a new consensus and then people look back and wonder what the fuss was all about.

—Steve Forbes ’66

Senator Snowe’s departure is indicative of the partisan and geographic separation of the two parties. Eastern moderate Republicans and Southern Democratic conservatives have virtually disappeared.

And since those were largely the only types of Republicans and Democrats who could get elected in those parts of the country, the political map becomes even more segregated.

—Erica Seifert ’98

—Trevor Potter ’74 | head of Caplin & Drysdale’s political law practice

Presidents may promise a lot of things, but if the Congress is in the hands of the opposing party, there is very little the president can do.

It has been a crazy two years in this town. Partisans in Congress are more entrenched in party orthodoxy than ever before. The American people are definitely tuned in to this. This is a big topic in focus groups and in-depth interviews. Most people want candidates who

—Jonathan Taplin ’65 | director of USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab

Meet the

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Rob Quigley ’88 | Quigley is the social media director at Source Interlink Media, a publishing company that produces more than 75 action sport magazines and websites. He recently served as the new media advisor for former presidential candidate Jon Huntsman, managing the campaign's online presence. And he previously served as the new media director for California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Brooks Bulletins Bulletin

Erica Seifert ’98 | Seifert is a senior associate at the research and strategic consulting firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, in Washington, D.C., where she focuses her research on U.S. political issues. Seifert, who recently completed her doctoral degree in history, is preparing for the release in June of her first book, The Politics of Authenticity in Presidential Campaigns.

Rob Simmons ’61 | Simmons serves as chairman of the board for the Yankee Institute for Public Policy, one of the nation’s first statebased, free-market think tanks. The institute looks to free enterprise, entrepreneurship and limited government for solutions to our economic problems. He is a Vietnam veteran and retired Army colonel. He served three terms in Congress from 2001 to 2007, and was a Connecticut state representative from 1991 to 2001.

have their own strong convictions, but not who follow the party line.

I don’t think that this is a permanent transformation, however.

We’ve been through hidebound partisan periods in the past and voters have consistently punished the worse offenders on both sides.

—Erica Seifert ’98

Olympia Snowe, Lincoln Chafee, Joe Lieberman and Chris Shays are just a few examples of moderate New England legislators who have been abandoned by their parties for candidates on what I call the “wings.” A bipartisan approach to our problems has been abandoned for what is essentially a screaming match in the Congress, where there is little progress and nothing of significance is getting done. In my last election, I was booed in a debate when I said I would engage in bipartisan approaches to our nation’s problems. And yet when it comes to transportation, are Republican roads different from Democrat roads? When it comes to the care for our veterans, do Republican and Democrat amputees get different treatment? Does our obligation to “provide for the common defense” really have a partisan political dimension? Do the healthcare needs of seniors who are Republicans differ from those of seniors who are Democrats? To listen to the rhetoric, you would think that one party wants to help Grandma and the other wants her over the cliff. This is an absurd situation for us to be in. I think it is foolish and we must look foolish to the world.

—Rob Simmons ’61

I was in D.C. in the mid-’90s and I think it started then. This may sound biased, but I was working for a Democrat congressman, Marty Meehan, during the Newt Gingrich Republican revolution of 1994. They took over the House of 1995, which set a different tone. I don’t think it has to do with policy issues; it has to do with a lot more personal attacks. I would say the concern, for both parties now, is it’s more important to be in power than sharing power and getting things done. Look at the last few years: any House majority has no interest in working with the president to get things done. The days of Teddy Kennedy and John McCain working on immigration reform, or McCain and Feingold working on campaign reform, you don’t see too many joint efforts like that anymore.

During every election there’s criticism of the two-party system.

What are your thoughts: Is the two-party system broken?

I don’t know if it’s broken, but there has been a breakdown of communication on both sides. The Tea Party and the people we are electing right now are way more to the right and are very new to the system and very ideological. They aren’t creating a lot of room for negotiation. I don’t know if a multiparty system would help. Maybe it would. Maybe if there were five parties there would be a way to cobble together a majority. But there are enough legislators so entrenched in their ideas that they can’t ever cobble anything together.

I don’t think the two-party system is broken, just the communication is broken, which won’t get better until the economy really improves — when tax revenues are up and legislators are coming up with ways to improve the future instead of just debating what to cut from the budget.

—Cristina Antelo ’95

We’ve had the two-party system in one form or another for so long, I’m hesitant to say it’s broken. Having lived in a country, Germany, that had multiple parties, my general sense is people there are more informed, but you’ll also often see two larger parties battling it out.

Then the larger parties need to make concessions to smaller parties that might be quite polarizing or radical to get their votes in Parliament. If we were talking about this more often as a nation, I don’t know if two- or multiparty systems would be better. It comes back to being informed.

—Rachel Clapp-Smith ’92

The two-party system is simply reflecting the degree of polarization in the society. However, should the parties diverge too far to the left and right, respectively, leaving moderates without a meaningful choice, a center party may well develop to fill the void.

—Robert DiClerico ’62

—David Torrisi ’86

Virtually every poll shows the country is more politically polarized than in the past. It used to be that political scientists said that the two parties in the United States failed to present a strong contrast on policy: Both of them had portions that overlapped each other, so there was a significant “center,” or consensus, in American politics.

The parties now have redefined themselves as liberal or conservative,

Jonathan Taplin ’65 | Taplin is a professor at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and is director of the Annenberg Innovation Lab. His 2011 e-book, Outlaw Blues: Adventures in the Counter-Culture Wars, is the first product in the school’s deal with Apple, allowing professors to publish books in the digital medium. He is a business and government consultant, specializing in digital media’s role in the economic infrastructure.

David Torrisi ’86 | Torrisi is currently serving his seventh term as a Massachusetts state representative (D-North Andover).

He is the House chairman of the Joint Committee on Higher Education.

He previously worked as a legislative aide to U.S. Representative Marty Meehan (D- Lowell) before his election to the North Andover Board of Selectmen in 1996. He remains a member of the Massachusetts Bar Association.

Read additional alumni responses online Given the depth of knowledge of our alumni experts, they had more to say than we have room to print in this issue of the Bulletin. To read answers to questions about the role of new media on the presidential election, the cause and impact of low voter turnout, and the prospect of treating healthcare as a value proposition and not an ideological issue, please visit the Brooks School website: www.brooksschool.org.

Spring / Summer 2012 49

and the country has largely seen this political divide become a geographic one as well — a conservative South, a more liberal East and West. We now have two political parties with very little policy overlap — much more like the stark choices usually offered by the European political parties. The problem is that we do not have a European parliamentary system of government, where the winning party has control of both the executive and legislative branches and may therefore implement its program. Instead, we have a separation of powers among the House, the Senate and the presidency, which makes it relatively easy for one party or governmental power to prevent the others from enacting their policies. The result is gridlock and partisan rancor in Washington. However, this is not necessarily the fault of the parties, but rather of the voters: The country is largely split between conservatives and liberals, and party purists use the primary-election process to replace the more moderate party elements with true believers. This results in the parties becoming even more “pure” and extreme, and less likely to be able to engage in the legislative compromises necessary to accomplish anything in Washington.

—Trevor Potter ’74

The two-party system certainly moderates the debate in the United States, but I don’t know that it’s irreparably broken. I was more concerned about this in 2004, when it seemed like the primary process served only to anoint establishment candidates. There has been a big shift since then — Democrats had an extended primary in 2008 and Republicans are now in the midst of an extended primary. We’ve also found that events and personalities can upend the talking points, as we saw in 2008. I think the biggest change, however, will come with the onslaught of extra-partisan actors this year. I wonder whether independent pressure groups will become like very small, well-funded political parties. Will we even be able to say that we have a two-party system after this? I don’t know.

—Erica Seifert ’98

What influence do you think the Occupy Movement and the Tea Party have had on this election; how would you compare that to similar grassroots movements of four years ago?

The two movements are so different. The Tea Party movement had substantial impact and will continue to, through its members here now and those elected again in the fall. It is a very well-organized and well-operated machine that has objects to affect political change. The Occupy Movement is also well-organized, but it doesn’t have a political agenda, so it’s not at the table. The Obama grassroots effort was interesting; a lot of young people were very energized. But those people have now graduated from college and have not gotten jobs, or they got jobs below their expectations, and a lot of them are not as motivated as they were the last go-round. One segment that really interests me is the Latino population. They were heavy for Obama four years ago, and two years ago they single-handedly saved some Democrats, like Harry Reid. Several states through the census gained new seats because of Latinos. And Republicans like Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney are doing some real damage with regard to Latinos. It will be interesting to see if they turn out in droves in excitement and elect more members to Congress.

—Cristina Antelo ’95

The Tea Party had a profound impact; you saw it in the 2010 elections. Or, even on the legislative level of the states; the Republicans in state legislatures had their best showing since 1928. Several incumbents were tossed out in the primaries. Whereas Occupy Wall Street makes a lot of noise, gets a lot of media coverage, but in terms of impacting the political process the way the Tea Party did: virtually nil.

The two-party system is just as good or bad as it has always been, although it’s been seriously affected by what I call the “affliction of the wings.” Just as an eagle, the symbol of our great country, is sustained in flight by a right wing and left wing, joined together by a strong central body with a heart and a brain, our body politic also has two wings. But as the left and right wings of our two parties have become increasingly extreme in their views, the heart and the brain have been increasingly diminished. With the loss of the center, the bird can no longer fly effectively, but just flaps and flaps and flaps.

I think both of these movements represent the activist grassroots of their parties — they are the angry purists who have a clear view of what needs to be done and believe the party structures are too accommodating to the status quo to do it. The strains of a weak economy and budget deficits have energized them and they both believe the country is badly off course and headed in the wrong direction — but they fundamentally disagree on what the correct direction is!

—Rob Simmons ’61

—Trevor Potter ’74

While more and more voters are unenrolled, people, when they go to the polls, like to vote for a Democrat or a Republican. They’re not likely to vote third party. So until the public is more accepting, we will probably just stick with the two parties. Plus, you need to have a real strong personality to lead a third-party movement and in this current climate, I don’t see anyone on the national stage — Michael Bloomberg has always been a possibility. Or, think about Ross Perot back in ’92. He was able to self-finance and self-promote; he’s a multibillionaire. But a guy like Ron Paul, who is running for president, some say he might step aside to make a third-party run. Or Ralph Nader 12 years ago: They don’t have the money or the charisma to lead a third-party effort. So, I don’t see a third-party any time in the near future.

Although I wouldn’t want to watch a mud-wrestling match between the two groups, I think they’ve had a largely positive impact on politics. We did a comprehensive study of the Tea Party movement back in 2010 and found that participants do not behave significantly differently from conservative Republicans at the ballot box. Most hold pretty orthodox establishment ideas. Indeed, this is not a blue-collar, populist revolt — they are among the most pro-business segments of the electorate. While the rank and file are slightly less likely to be college graduates, the serious Tea Party activists are more likely to hold a four-year college degree than the average voter (48 percent). I think the difference is energy and mobilization, and that has already been a very big deal — because they are active and motivated participants, they have driven the Republican Party to the right, on some issues out of the mainstream. As for Occupy, even though the tent cities have come down, I do think that they served to bring economic inequality into the public debate. I conducted a series of

—David Torrisi ’86

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—Steve Forbes ’66

focus groups on this topic in 2011 and most of the people in our focus groups hadn't given it much thought beyond their own personal pocketbook problems. When we ask people about inequality now, the results are much different. People are clued in.

—Erica Seifert ’98

My reading of the Tea Party is based on my experiences here in Connecticut, where I attended three of the original Tea Party events on April 15, 2009. I was impressed by the spontaneity, sincerity and sanity of the concerns expressed at the events. Taxed Enough Already becomes TEA — an acronym. And I also felt I was taxed enough already — especially when the housing market collapsed and other economic crises wiped out 40 years of careful savings for my retirement. The people who came to the event were like me: hard-working, middle-class citizens who were upset by the economic collapse and the idea that government “stimulus” through excessive deficit spending and more taxes would solve the problem. It did not make sense then and it has not worked now. By contrast, my perspective of the Occupy Wall Street Movement is that it was well orchestrated by the SEIU [Service Employees International Union] and other groups of organized labor, anarchists, socialists, communists, with a mix of idealistic youth, who followed a national blue print designed to divert attention from the failures of liberal policies in Washington, D.C., and fix the blame on the private sector of our economy. TARP, the stimulus package and Dodd/Frank all came from Washington, D.C. But, if you “occupy Washington,” you have to blame the Democratic Party in the White House and the Senate for at least part of the problem. So the focus was on Wall Street. Nothing useful will be accomplished with this sort of transparent class warfare. This is why I say I have not seen America so divided since the Vietnam War.

system and take advantage of carrots not meant for them. So, there are some unintended loopholes that some take advantage of and don’t pay enough. Some wealthy individuals don’t pay enough, but it’s mostly corporations. I think corporate tax reform is needed. We don’t need to raise the rate they pay; they just need to pay what they’re supposed to pay in the first place.

—Cristina Antelo ’95

I would say what most economists and fiscal experts acknowledge: that the deficit cannot reasonably be trimmed without both revenue increases and spending cuts. Fiscal sanity is a question of political will and leadership. Neither side has shown enough of either in recent years on this issue. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said that taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society. Progressive taxation, based on principles of ability to pay and fairness, are a part of our history. But the tax system (and the federal budget it supports) truly has become too complex for citizens to understand, paving the way for destructive, but not altogether false, campaigns against taxation and spending generally. Tax reform is an opportunity that occurs for each generation, and it is essential now. My hope is that the next four years will bring a holistic approach to the federal budget and a sensible discussion about the size, role and importance of government and the needs of our citizens.

—Roger Colinvaux ’85

The last time I ran, in 2010, the Tea Party was out there. There was a lot of anger and I think that was fueled mostly by the economy. A lot of people were out of work; a lot of people were worried about their future and their kids’ futures. The stock market was in the tank and people were losing money in their 401Ks. It worried a lot of people and generated a lot of anger. I felt a little bit of that in my last campaign. But at the end of the day, that nervousness about the economy was hijacked by these Obama-haters. Unfortunately, a certain element of racism seeped into that movement and people became more concerned about standing against anything Obama proposed, as opposed to trying to get something done for the good of the country. And I think people are starting to see that.

Don’t call it reform, call it what it is: a tax increase. First of all, top earners in this country pay three times as much of their income in taxes than does the middle class. . . . The bottom half pay nothing. So, in that sense, the system is highly progressive. What you do when you raise tax rates is that you don’t collect revenue so much as you discourage capital creation and risk-taking. The Brits, for example, raised their top rate from 40 to 50 [percent] a couple of years ago and discovered they received no extra revenue. They got in less than they did before. And if Mr. Buffett feels he’s under-taxed, there’s a website for the treasury that tells you where you can send in a check if you feel the itch to pay more. Most of his income is capital gains. And even at those levels, his secretary probably would have to make $200,000 to $400,000 a year to have a rate that exceeded his. A flat tax would work now more than ever, because all we’ve done in recent years is clutter the code even more. Twenty-five countries have tried it, and it’s worked for those that have tried. The simplicity means it’s easier to collect, and the low rate encourages commerce. That’s what we need right now: more commerce, not less.

—David Torrisi ’86

—Steve Forbes ’66

—Rob Simmons ’61

Warren Buffet continues to call for tax reforms, which Obama is calling the Buffet Rule. Would you say the rich aren’t taxed enough?

I think if the tax system worked the way it’s supposed to work in concept, the rich are taxed the way the system envisions them to pay.

But there are a lot of loopholes out there that tax experts and tax accountants can help people take advantage of the system and get more deductions than legislators meant to offer. Once people see the carrot out there, they do what they can to take advantage of the carrot. Legislators can’t envision how some people will manipulate the

Yes. Certainly. And I am not alone — I have yet to find a close result on this topic. This is the one issue that completely baffles me — there is huge support for returning the tax rate to Clintonian levels, but you wouldn’t know it in Washington, D.C. Back in September 2010, I conducted research on the Bush tax cuts, finding that only 38 percent supported extending the cuts for those at the top. CBS/NYT found a similar result [in February] — 55 percent of all voters said that the very wealthy pay less than their share of taxes. To my mind, we live in a consumer’s economy, largely supported by the disposable income of those in the middle class. This has been eroding since the late 1970s. Even with a rise in dual-income households and a vast expansion of credit for middle-income people, those in the middle have less and less left over every month as those at the top take home larger and larger shares. There is no trickle down. This just isn’t sustainable. We need a big change.

—Erica Seifert ’98

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Brooks Alum Helps Colbert Explain PACs Election law expert Trevor Potter ’74 is a regular on The Colbert Report When Stephen Colbert, host of The Colbert Report, needed an expert to explain what Political Action Committees (PACs) are, he turned to Caplin & Drysdale lawyer and former Federal Election Commission chairman Trevor Potter ’74. The guest spot quickly turned into a regular gig on the late-night Comedy Central show.

“If you had told me that there was a well-known, highly competent late-night show that wanted to spend a lot of time talking about campaign finance, I would have said ‘No chance,’” Potter said. “I give speeches all over place; I have for years. But I usually speak to groups who already know a lot about the issue. Suddenly, here I am, able to communicate through Stephen to an audience of millions, most of whom don’t know about the issue. The subjects of money in politics, how we finance our elections and whether campaign money can buy legislative actions are hugely important to our democracy.”

Potter says he got a call from a Comedy Central staffer who said, “We just want to make sure you know what you just agreed to do. Have you seen the show? Are you aware it’s a bit of a circus?”

Potter had seen the show before and figured he could survive a one-night guest spot.

At the end of that first taping, Colbert said to Potter, “I’d really like

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to have a PAC and its pretty clear to me that I’m going to need a lawyer to have one. Would you be willing to be my lawyer?”

Potter agreed. “I obviously didn’t know at the time that it was going to be this somewhat crazy ride. I’ve been on the show seven or eight time since then and I’ve really enjoyed it. He is doing important work in explaining these issues.”

Potter helped Colbert form a Super PAC and Colbert subsequently announced his bid for the presidency. Colbert later dropped out of the race and threw his support behind Herman Cain. To date, Comedy Central viewers have donated more than $1 million to his PAC — all of which is perfectly legal, thanks to Potter’s guidance.

“There is a gap between what the Supreme Court thought an independent expenditure would be and what it ended up being through the Super PACs,” said Potter. “The idea that an independent expenditure can also involve the candidate talking to a PAC, or the candidate soliciting funds for the PAC, or the PAC being run by the candidate’s best friend, all of that is pretty contrary to what a wholly independent expenditure would be. And Stephen does a very good job of dramatizing that.”

Legal Background The Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. FEC decision in 2010 leaned on the First Amendment to declare it unconstitutional to prohibit a union or corporation from using its own money to campaign for or against a political candidate. The decision has led to the creation of Super PACs, through which a handful of billionaires are pouring unimaginable amounts of money into the race and therefore drastically altering the presidential campaign during this current cycle.

“For years, corporate PACs had been pushing the boundaries, disguising campaigning as allowable speech on the issues,” said Roger Colinvaux ’85, a law professor at the Catholic University of America. “Now the mask is off — and the expressions are in full throat. What has surprised some, however, is that the old rules, it turns out, did suppress speech. The prior need to pretend that speech was about ‘issues’ and not about ‘candidates’ meant that effective corporate PAC speech was harder and less attractive. Now that the masquerade is over, some wealthy donors are more willing than before to spend extraordinary sums funding PACs to speak directly on behalf of a candidate.”

The ruling has led some to wonder whether everyone’s vote and voice are still truly equal. Equal access to government is one of the founding principles of the our country, noted Washington lobbyist Cristina Antelo ’95, who is torn on whether such large donations should be protected by the First Amendment.

Potter agrees. “The notion that a very small group of people, precisely because of their money, can have that much influence on the election is really contrary to many of the concepts of a democracy. One citizen, one vote. People have an equal say. We have two different concepts running into themselves.

One, that free speech means spending unlimited amounts of money if you have it and choose to; the other, that in a democracy, everyone gets one vote and has equal say.”

It has also led to a dramatic influx of negative ads, which media expert Jonathan Taplin ’65, director of USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab, says allows the Super PACs to do the dirty work, leaving the candidate to falsely pretend to be “above the fray.” Ultimately, Taplin predicts that the negativity will suppress voter turnout — and even wonders if that may have been the intent in the first place.

“I would say that there’s a fine line between free speech and the use of corporate money to win elections,” said Massachusetts State Representative David Torrisi ’86 (DNorth Andover). “It seems like we’ve gone overboard and I think people are disgusted by it. I think there is collateral damage that these Super PACs are doing: They are being used mostly to smear opponents.”

“In Republican primaries, Super PACs have provided TV ad buys to cash-strapped candidates who otherwise would be forced to drop out without air support,” said Rob Quigley ’88, who served as former candidate Jon Huntsman’s new media advisor and offers a different perspective. “These Super PACs will now fundamentally change the dynamics of the general election. President Obama has raised more than double what all the GOP candidates combined were able to bring in, which follows the trajectory of the fundraising advantage he and the Democratic Party held in the 2008 general election. However, when outside Super PAC fund-raising is factored in, they are merely on par with the GOP and its eventual nominee with $100 million raised.”

The numbers are truly staggering, when you consider that the election is still many months away. As early as March, Super PACs supporting Mitt Romney had already spent nearly $35 million, said Erica Seifert ’98, who conducts political research for Greenberg Quinlan Rosner.

“The money itself is an issue — most Americans are offended by these figures in this economy. Politicians invoke the need for painful ‘shared sacrifice’ to balance the budget, but spend unimaginable sums on their campaigns,” Seifert said. “Long term, however, I think this is deeper and much more fundamental than the size of the purse. We’re also moving into new communication territory where our public debate can be purchased as never before and where there’s a much steeper premium for entry.”

Potter, who previously acted as counsel for John McCain’s and George H.W. Bush’s presidential bids, wonders if the Court’s ruling might lead to corruption after Election Day. “Nobody should be able to buy governmental action,” Potter said. “Bribery is illegal.

So what do you do when you have someone who gives $20 million to a PAC associated with a candidate, the country then elects that

candidate, and then the donor seeks specific government action? That person is in a position to either threaten to oppose the candidate if he or she doesn’t do it, or to say, ‘I’ll support you again if you do do it.’ Is that a bribe? Is that appropriate? Those are all questions that we’re going to grapple with through this cycle and afterward.”

Others, however, don’t think such issues will come to pass.

“One, everyone knows who gave and what their particular interests are,” Steve Forbes ’66 said. “And two, once you’re in, you have plenty of people willing to write you checks.”

Colinvaux said it may take a few election cycles — and a new Supreme Court Justice or two — but with the passage of time, it could well be established that Super PAC spending is not independent of the candidates as required, and that speech suppression or no, super PACs indeed have a corrupting influence and a distortive impact on the voices raised in the public sphere. And while several Brooks alumni agree that the current Supreme Court ruling needs to be altered, they’re not in agreement as to how.

Robert DiClerico ’62, a political science professor at West Virginia University, believes the country should return to the old system of allowing unlimited soft money contributions to political parties, a practice that was outlawed by the McCain-Feingold Act of 2002. DiClerico thinks that unlimited soft money would help moderate the content of political ads.

Believing the election code is now almost as convoluted as the income tax code, Forbes believes campaign finance laws dating back to 1976 should be stricken and individuals should be allowed to give as much financial support to any candidate as they want — as long as the transparent information is available online that same day.

“Trying to keep money out of politics is like keeping a river from having water in it,” Forbes said. “The Mississippi will flow, no matter what you do.”

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In the early years of community service at Brooks, Stephen YangSammataro ’74 tutors a young student.

Endowed Fund Supports Community Service Northup family honors their parents and the legacy of the Lawrence Project When Fred Northup ’64 and his siblings (Ike ’71, Emma and Babie) wanted to do something in memory of their parents, one of the first things they thought of was the community service program at Brooks.

The Reverend Isaac Northup taught at Brooks from 1959 to 1971.

When he retired, he was named Master Emeritus, and his impact on the school can still be felt today. In the late 1960s, Rev. Northup established the Lawrence Project, an initiative that would evolve into what we now recognize as the community service program.

“Back then, students were required to play three sports, and there was no time for community service work,” says Fred Northup. “My father wanted to bring Brooks students into Lawrence to tutor kids.

Other faculty members initially opposed the idea because they were worried about losing athletes. But Headmaster Ashburn saw the importance of what my dad was trying to do and backed him. The result was one of the first real community service programs of any private school.”

In 2008, the Northup family established the Northup Community Service Fund with the purpose of endowing “the continuation of the community service program originally known as the Lawrence Project, which was founded by Reverend Isaac Northup.”

The Northup siblings hope their gift will further the work of their

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parents by focusing attention on the importance of giving back. Prior to joining the faculty at Brooks, Reverend Northup and his wife, Josephine, had for many years lived in Asheville, N.C., where the he was rector of a prominent Episcopal parish. Helping others was in the Northups’ blood.

“With our gift, we really wanted to recognize the spirit of service that both my parents embodied,” said Fred Northup. “My father’s Lawrence Project was the most noticeable of their contributions, but my mother was also extremely caring and generous. Living on the Brooks campus, she was always watching out for the kids who were having trouble adjusting. She would invite them into our house, and many became part of our family.”

Although the program has evolved over the years, the philosophy that guided and inspired the Lawrence Project is also at the heart of community service at Brooks today.

“My hope is that we continue to be good neighbors to local communities,” said Community Service Director Shaunielle McDonald ’94.

“Whether it is working at the Boys & Girls Club in Lawrence and Haverhill, helping at Sutton Hill Nursing Home or tutoring at Bellesini Academy, I want our students to be thinking about the ways that service adds meaning to their lives and to the lives of the people they help.”

“

“This year, we were very excited to welcome six new members, representing a wide spectrum of alumni classes. This board works to help develop initiatives to support alumni programs and the school’s mission. Every meeting we continue to identify more opportunities to fulfill these goals.”

— DIRECTOR OF ALUMNI PROGRAMS EMILY FRENCH ’03

Alumni Working to Share the Brooks Story Work with admission office on association board’s list of priorities The Alumni Association Board of Directors is tackling a few special projects this coming year: surveying alumni on the school’s reunion programming and building a network of alumni volunteers for the Office of Admission.

The board and Director of Admission and Financial Aid Andy Hirt have started exploring specific ways for alums to provide assistance with the admission process. And board members are looking forward to evaluating Brooks’ reunion model.

“We have received more and more questions each year about scheduling reunions during the school year, while students are still on campus, and about ‘cluster reunions,’ where certain reunions are structured to allow three classes to attend reunions together every five years,” board president Craig Ziady ’85 said.

In the cluster format, the middle class of each cluster would celebrate its reunion on the actual five-year interval. So, for example,

this spring the cluster of graduates from 2001, 2002 and 2003 could all celebrate their 15th reunion together, which would provide returning alums with the opportunity to reconnect with friends in other class years as well as their own.

“The first step in examining the reunion model is to survey the broad alumni/ae constituency to determine if the current reunion model is preferred or if any room for improvement exists,” Ziady said.

The board voted in six new members last spring: Geoff Fulgione ’77, Karl Arakelian ’83, Cristina Antelo ’95, Roz Mays ’02, John Petzold ’03 and Lexi Caffrey ’06. Their term officially started at the onset of the 2012 fiscal year, but they didn’t attend their first meeting until this past October.

“The alumni board has continued to grow over the past few years,” Director of Alumni Programs Emily French ’03 said.

“This year, we were very excited to welcome

six new members, representing a wide spectrum of alumni classes. This board works to help develop initiatives to support alumni programs and the school’s mission. Every meeting we continue to identify more opportunities to fulfill these goals.”

Ziady was quick to thank all the board members who recently cycled off the board, including Art Milliken ’47, who faithfully served since 1991.

“His energy, enthusiasm and love of Brooks is evident at every meeting and the board will miss the wisdom of his perspective,” Ziady said, “as well as his terrific world travel anecdotes!”

Now, here’s a chance to hear from the new members (please turn to page 56 for the bios of the alumni board).

Looking to volunteer for, or nominate a fellow Brooksian to, the board? Simply go to www.brooksschool.org/alumni/association to complete a short online form.

MISSION-DRIVEN ALUMNI ASSOCIATION BOARD OF DIRECTORS In partnership with the school, the Alumni Association Board of Directors, or alumni board, serves as advisors, advocates and fundraisers for the school. Our mission is to provide opportunities for alumni to connect with each other and to support the school in a variety of ways. All board members are volunteers and are elected by current members. All Brooks School alumni are eligible to serve on the board and can self-nominate or be nominated by a fellow alumnus/a.

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GEOFF FULGIONE ‘77

CRISTINA ANTELO ’95

Education: BA, UMass Amherst; MAT, Tufts University

Education: BSc, McGill University; DMD, University of Pennsylvania

Education: BA, Georgetown University; JD, George Washington University Law School

Residence: North Andover

Residence: North Andover

Residence: Washington, D.C.

Profession: Consultant for Fulgione Consulting

Profession: Dentist in family practice

Profession: A principal of the Podesta Group

Why volunteer? I’m hoping to bring new energy and ideas to the board with a class of ’77 perspective.

Work highlight: I would like to continue to focus on raising funds for financial aid, as I was a recipient as well.

How did Brooks prepare you for your current job? Brooks School set a high academic bar with support, which allowed students to find help when needed. Teaching initiative and perseverance at a young age has been an important attribute that has allowed for great success in the workplace.

Favorite Brooks course: Latin with Dr. Baade. He used to hit me on the head with his pipe and say, ‘Come on, Goofy,’ a parody of my name, Geoffrey. And I have to mention the most challenging history class: psychoanalysis of Richard Nixon with Mr. Keany. Yikes! I truly learned the appreciation of classical and jazz music (AP) with Mr. Peter Warsaw, an absolute genius.

Favorite campus activity: I played lots of sports, but loved to jam in the music room with my guitar. And I still do!

Favorite Brooks memory: Being coached by the Big Three: Mr. Nick Evangelos, Mr. Skip Perkins and Mr. Bill Poirot Why is the class of 1977 the best? The class of 1977 had a great sense of unity and pride. We were deeply competitive on the playing fields, as well as in the classroom; yet we were also the class that had a great sense of humor — a pretty grounded group of guys!

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Why volunteer: I’ve been locally involved with Brooks for many, many years now and this was the logical next step. I’m still pretty friendly with many faculty members and know many students who go there.

Work highlight: Trying to get alumni involved to perpetuate the experience that is Brooks.

How did Brooks prepare you for your current job? I learned to treat every person, or patient, with respect.

Favorite Brooks course: AP Biology with Nick Evangelos Favorite campus activity: Soccer with Dusty Favorite Brooks memory: The boys 1st soccer team winning the Gummere Cup Why is the class of 1983 the best? We were the first four-year graduating class with young ladies!

Why volunteer? Brooks made such an investment in me that I want to return the favor.

Work highlight: I am happy the new Winter Term was such a success. I hope future iterations will come to Washington for a hands-on learning experience in government.

How did Brooks prepare you for your current job? Brooks taught me to self-motivate, work hard and manage my time for the best efficiency.

Favorite Brooks course: Government and Politics with Mr. Packard Favorite campus activity: Becoming a prefect was an amazing accomplishment for me Favorite Brooks memory: Falling in love for the first time Why is the class of 1995 the best? Our SPC prank was a schoolwide water-balloon fight after School Meeting!

ROZ MAYS ‘02

JOHN PETZOLD ‘03

Education: BBA, George Washington University

Education: BS, Georgetown University

Residence: Brooklyn, N.Y.

Residence: New York City

Profession: Empowerment coach

Profession: A principal in Korn/Ferry International

Why volunteer: I am very thankful for everything Brooks has given to me, and being a part of the alumni board is a new way for me to pay it forward.

Work highlight: I am excited to have an awesome 10th anniversary this year! I’m hyped to bring new ideas and lots of energy to campus.

Why volunteer: I joined the board to encourage engagement among the impressive alumni network and to bridge communication among the current, past and future of Brooks School. I served for two years as a member of the Board of Trustees, from 2003 to 2005, and wanted to continue my involvement.

How did Brooks prepare you for your current job? Brooks gave me space to be loud, outspoken, kind of quirky, vibrant and bold. If I hadn’t had that space to get comfortable with standing out from the crowd, I would have been another corporate drone with no soul.

Work highlight: We’re working on developing an outreach program for prospective students, providing guidance and support throughout the admissions process. We’ve all got a great story to tell to the best and brightest prospects, to ensure the highestquality student population.

Favorite Brooks course: AP Art History with Mr. McCahill

How did Brooks prepare you for your current job? Brooks gave me the confidence and global perspective to tackle my clients’ ever-changing needs, all in a fostered, supportive environment.

Favorite campus activity: Varsity softball (ISL champs 1999 through 2002!)

Favorite Brooks memory: One random softball game in Spring 2000, our team was winning so badly that everyone was just bored and hot. Then, out of absolutely nowhere, I get up to bat and hit my firstever grand slam to end the game Why is the class of 2002 the best? Simple: Our class year is a palindrome. How awesome is that?

Favorite Brooks course: AP Spanish Literature with Señor Joel Dure Favorite campus activity: Spring Club with Mr. Grant Favorite Brooks memory: I was elected by my peers to give the graduation speech.

It was one of my proudest Brooks moments, being able to share my story with the community and get my classmates excited about what lay ahead.

Why is the class of 2003 the best? We were one of the smaller graduating classes in recent memory, allowing us the opportunity to truly mesh, despite the variances in personalities and socioeconomic backgrounds. We were a group of intellectuals, athletes, actors and musicians, but we were viewed as one.

LEXI CAFFREY ‘06 Education: BS, Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania Residence: New York City Profession: Financial analyst for NBC Universal’s treasury department Why volunteer? I thought it would be a great way to give back and to stay connected to what is currently going on at Brooks.

Work highlight: The dress code. I am excited for the opportunity to help ensure that one of Brooks’ long-standing traditions remains. After all, what is the point of “Hats off, blazers on,” if there are no blazers?

How did Brooks prepare you for your current job? Brooks prepared me by teaching me to challenge myself. I had a good, comfortable job in D.C. that I was excelling at, but I didn’t feel like I was being pushed. Instead of being content and putting my head down, I sought out a new opportunity, outside of my comfort zone.

Favorite Brook course: AP Environmental Science with Brian Palm Favorite campus activity: Girls 1st crew Favorite Brooks memory: Winning the 2004 USRowing Youth Nationals with the Blond Boat Why is the class of 2006 the best? Because of how much we care about Brooks and our willingness to show it. This is best demonstrated by our attendance record (though maybe not at Chapel senior year) and giving record. Attendance at our reunion last summer was outstanding, and any time I click on a Brooks event to check the guest list, there is always a handful of ‘06 grads and we are usually the first to sign up. We are willing to put our money where our mouth is, and have led the young alumni classes in giving percentage.

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Brooks Friends “Fun”raiser 2012

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T

here was music, fine dining, and plenty of high-end items

to bid on, as more than 200 parents gathered for the second annual BFF “Fun”raiser in April.

The event, hosted by the Parents Association in the Athletic Center, featured more than 130 items up for auction, and raised more than $66,000 to support Winter Term.

“The event was truly a unique social opportunity because it transcended grades and included faculty in a relaxed social setting,” said lead organizer Noreen Britt.

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Boston Alumni Reception 2012

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Flying High: Capt. William ‘Mac’ MacVittie ’02 William “Mac” MacVittie remembers sitting in math teacher Alex Moody’s class the second day of his senior year at Brooks when someone interrupted class: The United States was under attack.

It was Sept. 11, 2001.

The class watched the Twin Towers collapse on television — and MacVittie remembers he had an overwhelming feeling of helplessness.

He wanted to do something.

The next day, he did.

He sent his application to the U.S. Air Force Academy. “It just made sense. I knew it was the right thing to do,” he says.

MacVittie recalls that everyone in his military academy class knew full well that they were entering the military in a time of war.

“September 11th served as a constant reminder of why we were there,” he says. “If ever we needed encouragement as we struggled through the physical and psychological trials of basic training, or during that first year at the academy, our cadre had to show us but one image from that Tuesday morning and we redoubled our efforts.”

After his graduation, in 2006, MacVittie was trained as a cargo pilot at Baines Air Force Base in Oklahoma. Since then he’s had three deployments to Afghanistan: He’s flown 124 combat missions into Afghanistan and Iraq, delivering troops, food and humanitarian supplies to the front lines.

“The people who really deserve our credit are those men and women who run off the back of my airplane and go into the trenches,” he says.

“When I’m done in Afghanistan, I’ll spend nights in an air-conditioned trailer in the Middle East somewhere. There are people out there living in tents or no tents in Afghanistan, so to be able to serve those men and women is truly humbling. That’s the best part of my job.”

FAMILY TIES TO FLIGHT MacVittie didn’t feel exactly destined for the cockpit, but his family’s ties to the aerospace industry are strong.

His great-uncle James Smith McDonnell founded McDonnell Aircraft Corporation, in 1938, which in 1967 evolved to become McDon-

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nell Douglas, a major aerospace manufacturer and defense contractor prior to its merger with Boeing in 1997. His grandfather Sanford McDonnell became president of the company in 1971 and served as chairman of the board from 1980 to 1988. The study of flight and leadership in the industry is so important to his grandfather that McDonnell recently contributed $5 million to the construction of the Center for Character and Leadership Development facility at the U.S. Air Force Academy.

“My grandfather had once taken me out onto the flight line at Lambert Field [in St. Louis], where McDonnell Douglas built its fighter jets, and I remember sitting there at about age 10 and thinking how fascinating that would be,” MacVittie said. “My grandfather was always giving me model airplanes to fly around my house in Bridgewater, New Hampshire. I knew his love of flying, so that’s what sparked my interest in flying.”

During his time at Brooks, MacVittie lived in Thorne House. In addition to classes and extracurricular activities, MacVittie said, he learned some valuable life lessons — many of which he carried with him through the Air Force Academy and his flight missions.

In hard times, he often drew strength from the wisdom imparted by history teacher and baseball coach Lance Latham and French teacher and soccer coach Nabil Alami-Hmidane. MacVittie remembers the coaches saying that you can’t always control the environment, you can’t always control the cards you’re dealt; all you can control is your attitude and how you conduct yourself.

“That principle was true on the baseball diamond and certainly, years later, when you find yourself in the middle of the desert and you’re homesick and life is hard. You can’t control that. You’ve made your decision,” MacVittie says. “But in that moment, the only thing you can control is your attitude, the manner in which you conduct yourself, the way you choose to face the day.”

At Brooks he served as a chapel prefect, and developed a sense of leadership from that position and from his dorm parent, John Quirk.

“Through his interactions he taught us the meaning of leading by example and how very powerful that can be,” recalls MacVittie. “When

“Mac” MacVittie, currently stationed at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois, said during his time in the Air Force Academy, he and his classmates were motivated to serve their country in the wake of the Sept. 11th attacks. “If ever we needed encouragement as we struggled through the physical and psychological trials of Basic Training, or during that first year at the Academy, our cadre had to show us but one image from that Tuesday morning and we redoubled our efforts.”

you’re put into that prefect role of being a leader among your peers, you learn to make choices — and fail occasionally — but to learn from that and pick yourself back up again. Who you become later in life is often influenced by the choices you make as a young man or woman. I would almost describe Brooks as a leadership laboratory.”

THE JOBS OF A CARGO PILOT All that leadership training comes in handy in the armed forces. While stationed in Charleston, South Carolina, from July 2008 to June 2011, Mac spent about two-thirds of his time in the Middle East flying C-17s, military transport aircraft designed for rapid airlift of troops and cargo.

Part of his job required delivering humanitarian aid, such as food, water and clothing, to the people in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. Humanitarian work with the Air Mobility Command is satisfying, he says, but nothing compares to bringing U.S. men and women back from war.

“I remember we brought home this one Army company of more than 150 people, and it was their fourth yearlong deployment in Iraq. I can’t imagine that kind of sacrifice and how challenging that must have been for their families,” he said. “We put those soldiers on our plane and liftoff for the last time out of Baghdad — and they all erupt in applause and chants and start singing. To be able bring those guys home was probably the greatest satisfaction of my job.”

But there things that, like any other veteran, MacVittie wishes weren’t part of his service: He also has the responsibility of evacuating wounded soldiers out of combat zones, usually to Ramstein Air Base in Germany.

“I don’t think there’s any higher mission than trying to save the life of another. Even to play a small role in that — to be the guy flying them

— was meaningful. The people, again, who deserve the most credit are the flight nurses and doctors who are working with the patients. It was humbling to bring those guys home.”

But sometimes, MacVittie knows, not everyone makes it home. It’s called “dignified transfer” — bringing back human remains.

“Those ceremonies when you bring home the flag-draped coffins are pretty sobering,” he says. “It reminds you that while the majority of people back here are going about their lives as if nothing has happened, there are people out there making the ultimate sacrifice.”

‘SLIPPING THE SURLY BONDS OF EARTH’ While at Brooks, Mac didn’t think he’d be headed for a cockpit; he had his sights set on attending Dartmouth, to be close to family, and possibly to study to become a veterinarian.

But when the planes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, his life turned in a different direction.

“I love what I do,” he says. “When I take off and break through the clouds and am on top of the world, I’m surprised I get paid to do what I do. It’s spectacular. When I was in pilot training, we flew this plane called a T-6 that had a bubble — it looked like a little WWII fighter, and you’re all alone up front. So you’d take off and you’d get above the clouds and you would feel like you’re the only person in the world. All you could see was the majesty of the Lord’s creation all around you, and that was incredible. It’s a great reminder of the beauty that’s out there and how much we have to be grateful for. I’m grateful every time I get to take off and see the world from above.” NH

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In the Know: Jane Lindholm ’97 There’s a reporter from the Montreal Gazette on the line, and Jane Lindholm ’97 is interviewing her about the asbestos problem across the border. The Montreal reporter answers questions about the controversy — the fact that Canada is exporting the much reviled mineral to Third World countries — and while Lindholm is listening to the answers, she’s also adjusting the audio settings of the recorded interview, wondering how many more times the woman will say “um” and noticing that she talks pretty fast.

It’s around 10:30 in the morning, just 90 minutes until Lindholm will air the asbestos report on Vermont Public Radio — those ums will have to be winnowed out and the reporter’s speedy speech slowed down a bit. There’s a last-minute edit to the intro to the asbestos segment, and another discussion between Jane and her fellow journalists about the sources for a story on the state’s recovery from Tropical Storm Irene.

But no matter what else is happening, they’ve always got their eyes on the digital clocks that adorn every room, watching as the large, bright red digits tick down the seconds until show time, when an illuminated sign comes on: ON AIR. It’s the daily routine at VPR, where Lindholm is host of the noon news show Vermont Edition.

“It’s a bit of a mad dash to get the show ready,” says Lindholm, as she finishes up her conversation with a producer about which parts of the asbestos interview could be cut to keep it to about 10 minutes. “She was an um-er, although they were fast ums,” she jokes.

The script editing, audio-clip editing, and discussions about the two sources who will be live interviews during the show all continue at this harried pace until just before the noon air time, when the team moves downstairs to the booth and Jane takes her seat in front of the microphone.

It’s a mad dash that Lindholm loves — and one she’s good at.

“Basically, she has from 9 A.M. to noon every day to become an expert in a new topic,” said one her producers, Ric Cengeri. “It’s pretty amazing.”

Lindholm has garnered praise lately for Vermont Edition’s dogged

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coverage of Hurricane Irene — Tropical Storm Irene is what it’s known as in the Green Mountain State — and its lingering effects.

Although the August 2011 storm was much ado about nothing in the rest of New England, it walloped Vermont, heavily damaging 1,400 homes and decimating roadways and communications systems, leaving more than a dozen towns isolated. Now, months later, half of those displaced residents still aren’t able to return to their homes.

One recent Vermont Edition was part of the station’s “Displaced by Irene,” a weeklong series that focused on rebuilding.

As Lindholm says in a recent “Displaced by Irene” segment: “Tropical Storm Irene is the lens through which Vermont sees itself these days,” with a new marketing slogan of VERMONT STRONG on magnets, T-shirts and license plates; a state legislature dominated by Irene concerns; and fund-raisers for those affected continuing even this many months after it hit.

The storm took the region by surprise. “Everyone was expecting a lot of rain,” Lindholm says, but not a storm that would rival the state’s biggest natural disaster, the so-called Superflood of 1927.

Irene washed out 220 roads and 100 bridges, making it impossible to get in or out of some areas. “Schools had classes in tents, and one principal’s office was in a pop-up camper,” says Lindholm. “A lot of the time you had to take a path through a forest to get to your home because the road and the driveway to it were gone. There were farmers whose cows were swept downstream. They had property, and then when the water cleared, they had no property.”

For a journalist, a major natural disaster is always a hectic but exciting event to cover. Lindholm and her colleagues went into action at VPR not only to report the news, but also to act as the hub of storm information. “There was no Internet, no cell service, and no landlines.

VPR became one of the few ways to stay connected; we became a communication forum in a unique way,” Lindholm said. “We felt a real need to be a community resource, where what we were doing actually mattered in that moment. It was an incredible experience to be a part of.”

Since then, it’s been a station-wide mission not to forget that feel-

ing, and Lindholm has filed Irene reports that have gone national, trying to get the word out to the rest of the nation about the storm and its effects on the Green Mountain State.

her to come down to Washington, D.C., to start working there.

Then tragedy struck again, this time on an even bigger scale: “Five days into my new job was September 11, 2001,” she said. She actually saw a plane hit the Pentagon as she rode by on the subway.

Like every other news outlet that day, NPR sprang into action. As a broadcast newbie, Lindholm was put on desk duty, calling families to ask if they would be willing to be interviewed on the air. Talking to people devastated by the events struck a chord. It brought her back to when Haley died and newspapers and TV stations were calling her for their coverage of the bus accident.

“I realized I had this perspective. I knew what it was like to lose someone you care about very personally . . . to lose someone in a very public way,” Lindholm says.

After a year and a half in D.C., she traveled to Australia to write one more book for Let’s Go and then went to Southeast Asia for a while. Once she came back to the United States, she got a job working for NPR’s Marketplace program in Los Angeles. When the job in Vermont opened up, Lindholm knew it was the chance of a lifetime

ALWAYS AN AVID FAN After graduating from Brooks in 1997, Lindholm went on to earn a degree in anthropology from Harvard. While there, she traveled and wrote for several of the Let’s Go travel guides, published by Harvard students since 1960.

Growing up, Jane recalls herself as an avid NPR listener, even as a youngster. “I grew up listening to NPR from the backseat as my mother or father was driving, and my friends in college would make fun of me for listening to so much of it,” she says. “I felt like NPR had always been a part of my life. Why wouldn’t I want to make my avocation my vocation?”

After listening to a lot of Car Talk, she decided to write to NPR and explain why public radio was so important to her, and to inquire about the possibility of being hired.

She didn’t hear back, so she continued on her road as a travel researcher and writer for Let’s Go. Just days after her 2001 graduation from Harvard, however, tragedy and fate would change her course and bring her back to the idea of public radio. Lindholm was preparing to go to Peru for work on another Let’s Go book, but her friend Haley asked to switch their trips — Haley wanted to head to Peru, which meant Jane was on her way to Salamanca, Spain.

They each flew out two days after graduation. Shortly after her arrival in Peru, Haley was killed in a bus accident.

Devastated, Jane returned to the States. “I had no plans; it really set me adrift,” she said.

She was back at home with her dad in Vermont, and that’s when her stepmother told her that an NPR producer had called. They wanted

YEARS AT BROOKS Her mother, Jody Douglass, served as Brooks’ assistant headmaster from 1991 to 2000, so Jane and her brother, David ’01, grew up on campus.

“We moved to Brooks when I was in seventh grade, and it was the best childhood; it was unique,” she said. “I was younger than the Brooks kids because I was in middle school, but I got to help out the soccer team, and I joined the gospel choir when I was 12 or 13. We had all these resources at our fingertips.”

Once she was admitted as a student, she says, it the best of both worlds — all the resources, but her own place to go home to.

It wasn’t all soccer games and home-cooked meals that made her love Brooks, she says. It was also the academic rigor of her classes.

“Brooks was the most challenging and inspirational time of my whole academic career,” she says. “The teachers really cared about you, and cared if you did well. That gave me a sense of responsibility; the teachers were invested in you and your education.”

She recalls the influences of John Quirk as an advisor, John Packard as a ninth-grade history teacher and Don Cameron as an inspiring cross-country coach for three years. “I learned how to focus from Mr. Cameron, and the benefits of that have extended into my life after Brooks,” she says.

That life now includes the hectic but fun pace of working at NPR, as well as settling into married life in Bristol, Vermont. As far as the daily grind of NPR goes, Jane revels in it. “I love it. It’s like cramming for a test,” she says. “But if you’re a true omnivore of information, like I am, it’s a great challenge. You get to learn so much; you have an ability to go wherever your curiosity leads, because your whole job is to be a proxy for the listeners, to ask the questions they would ask.” MM

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Foreign Service: Theodore Sedgwick ’66 It isn’t remarkable for the U.S. ambassador to Slovakia, Theodore “Tod” Sedgwick, to meet with other diplomats and politicians. What is remarkable, though, is that they’re usually cranking out tunes like “When I’m 64,” “Hey Jude” and select songs from Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Rolling Stones.

When he’s not doing the serious business of being an ambassador, Sedgwick is jamming with a few mayors and nonpolitical activists and the ambassadors to Greece and Romania as part of a ragtag rock group. With Sedgwick on the piano, the band entertains at functions for philanthropic groups such as the World Health Organization.

“We try to pick audiences where they’re trying to do some good in the world,” says Sedgwick. “In fact, we had a practice yesterday with the mayor of Bratislava [the capital of Slovakia], because he’s going to sing during some of our performances. We’re having a lot of fun with it.”

WORK OF AN AMBASSADOR Sedgwick, who was confirmed as ambassador by the Senate in June 2010, enjoys his role as a foreign diplomat. With about 100 people in the embassy reporting to him, he says he appreciates that the job is demanding and varied. One day he’s meeting with the Slovakian prime minister and the minister of defense to discuss President Obama’s new defense strategy and to praise NATO for its importance in maintaining stability in Europe; on another day he may be trying to increase U.S. exports to Slovakia or assisting any of the 130 American companies, such as Google, U.S. Steel, Dell, and Amazon, that operate in the country. He was recently on hand to witness the signing of a declaration of cooperation, focused on nuclear energy, between the United States and Slovakia.

Sedgwick is pleased to be involved in state department efforts in Slovakia, which was part of Czechoslovakia, a communist country until 1989. In that year, the Czechs held peaceful demonstrations, called the Velvet Revolution, which led to the collapse of the Communist Party and the adoption of a democratic system. “Slovakia came through a transition of a very authoritarian regime back in the communist days,” he says, “and is now a thriving democracy with free elec-

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tions, freedom of press and a free market.”

Slovakia became a separate nation 19 years ago, when it broke from Czechoslovakia. It joined NATO in 2004 and took the euro as its currency in 2009. “Slovakia is proud to share this experience of evolving to a free-market democracy,” Sedgwick says. “There are a lot of countries such as Georgia and Ukraine that have farther to go on the path to a democratic society. Slovakia is a great case study in that.

In fact, it’s quite exciting because recently they’ve agreed to help the Tunisians evolve as well. They’re playing a constructive role not only in the western Balkans and eastern partnership countries but also in North Africa and Arab Spring countries.”

One major challenge Slovakia faces as it shifts its political system is to stop pervasive corruption.

“There’s a lot of corruption associated with political parties and public tenders. The government now has made good progress. We’ve worked with it on the Open Government Partnership (OGP), a new international organization that promotes incorporating programs toward transparent governance.” Sedgwick says. Prime Minister Iveta Radicova met with President Obama in September at the United Nations during the first organizational meeting of the OGP. “Obama praised her work in trying to promote transparency in Slovakia,” he says. “The prime minister deserves a lot of credit. When you sign up to belong to these international organizations, you adhere to a certain standard of anti-corruption, so the country is making progress, but more progress needs to be made.”

Sedgwick would also like to see improvements in the judicial system. “One of the challenges I have,” says Sedgwick, “is that the judiciary is quite corrupt and backward. Business interests here have very little confidence in a well-functioning judiciary. This is an area where Slovakia needs to make more progress.”

Sedgwick also seeks to make a difference by speaking to youth about the subject. Recently, at the Business Academy, Sedgwick recommended that Slovakia apply a zero-tolerance policy to corruption.

“During the communist time, you’re made to believe that you couldn’t make a difference, that life is the way it is,” he says. “You have to reach young people and tell them they can make a difference. They

At left, Ambassador Sedgwick speaks at a ceremony with local officials while traveling in southern Slovakia. At right, he talks with students at the University of Economics in Bratislava.

need to know that they’re not burdened by the communist past and that they can make the future and stand up against corruption. I try to encourage them to not be cynical and to be active citizens.”

FROM JOURNALISM TO LEADERSHIP Prior to his ambassadorship, Sedgwick was a successful business executive who started his career as a journalist. After graduating from Harvard in 1971 and then traveling to India, he began writing for a small newspaper. He moved to Washington to write about the coal industry for a newsletter. When the editor and owner was going bankrupt, Sedgwick purchased the company for $70,000, and for 20 years grew it to become one of the leading providers of information in the energy market. In 1998, he sold the company, called Pasha Publishing, for $17.8 million to the Financial Times group. In 2002 he launched another publishing company, Io Energy, which produced online newsletters about the energy industry.

EARLY INFLUENCES AT BROOKS Sedgwick says one skill contributing to his successes is his ability to express himself clearly in writing and to articulate a point of view, and for this he credits The Rev. Fred Northup’s English class at Brooks.

Northup — who also married Sedgwick and his wife, Kate, in 1974 — provided a writing foundation for his studies in journalism. Sedgwick attended Harvard, where he wrote for the Harvard Crimson, and went on to be a newspaper reporter in West Virginia. That was the start of his long career in publishing.

Today, Sedgwick says he appreciates being able to speak succinctly and write well. “That’s something I do a lot here when I’m talking to people like the foreign minister or the defense minister,” he says. “I’m trying to explain initiatives simply because when we’re in a meeting, their time is valuable. You have to be clear in what you’re saying about important issues.”

Sedgwick also keeps up with his writing: He contributes a monthly column for a business newspaper in Slovakia.

Two other subjects that Sedgwick took at Brooks that influenced his life were history with Jack McBay — who inspired the ambassador to major in Ottoman history at Harvard and helped to prepare him for his current job, and French with Mr. Gifford. “Gifford imbued me with a strong interest in traveling,” he says, “so then I went to Greece the year after Brooks. I developed a life-long interest in global affairs and other cultures and languages.”

Reflecting on his career path, Sedgwick recognizes the importance of varying his positions. “I’ve been very fortunate to work in business, the nonprofit field, and in diplomacy in the political world as an ambassador,” he says. “It’s been wonderful to have these different experiences. Certain skills you pick up in the business world, in particular, apply effectively when you’re in diplomacy — being a leader, setting goals, motivating the team, prioritizing. When you’re a business leader, a lot of the same principles apply when you’re running an embassy.” NH

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PARTINGSHOT

The Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) put on a paint party in May. The event raised almost $1,000 for the Trevor Project, an organization that provides crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning youth.

Director of Communications Dan Callahan

Editor/Writer Michelle Morrissey

Writer Emily Young

Unsolicited manuscripts are welcome. Opinions expressed in the Bulletin are those of the authors and not necessarily of Brooks School. Copyright Š 2012 Brooks School, North Andover, MA