19 minute read
Welcome to New Hall
RESIDENTIAL LIFE AND ACADEMIC EXCELLENCE COME TOGETHER IN EXETER’S NEWEST DORMITORY
By Sarah Pruitt ’95
New Hall, set upon the site of the former Fisher Theater and near the science and music centers, anchors a lively community hub on the western side of campus.
Welcome to New Hall
Move-in day falls on a sunny Wednesday in early September. All over campus, welcome signs decorate open dormitory doors and chalk-drawn arrows point the way inside. Students lug crates and drag suitcases along the pathways, taking frequent breaks to hug friends and compare summers.
A bit of extra excitement fills the air, along with the smell of fresh paint, as students and their families make their way down Front Street and enter the newly constructed 42,000-square-foot dormitory, currently known as New Hall. Resident faculty members perched on red Adirondack chairs greet new arrivals as they pass through the window-lined entrance and step tentatively into the dorm’s light-filled common room, where proctors have gathered to answer any questions.
In a third-floor room, Kendra Wang ’25 unpacks while her roommate, Jackie Addo ’25, has most of her belongings neatly arranged on her side of the room. The cozy double is made roomier by built-in wooden desks and shelves set against the window and dressers tucked underneath raised beds. Tackboard covers the wall above each bed, awaiting each student’s personalized array of fairy lights, posters, photographs and other decorations.
New Hall is the first dormitory to be built on Exeter’s campus in more than 50 years. If that isn’t significant enough, the sustainably constructed building also houses an academic space with four Harkness classrooms, bringing living and learning at Exeter together under one roof for the first time. With its opening this fall, New Hall has created a vibrant community hub on the western edge of campus, furthering the school’s vision of residential life as an essential part of the Exeter experience.
“There’s something really unique that boarding schools can offer to both day and boarding students,” says Carol Cahalane, the Academy’s dean of residential life since 2018. “It’s the opportunity to have many places and ways to gather with peers who are equally interested in connecting and learning about each other and the world together.”
Cahalane is far from the first school leader to place residential life among the most valuable aspects of an Exeter education. The process of converting the Academy to a residential school goes back to the construction of the first permanent dormitory on campus, Abbot Hall, in 1855 (see sidebar, “Abbot Hall”). In the early 1930s, Edward Harkness’ revolutionary gift funded the addition of Bancroft, Langdell, Merrill and Wheelwright Halls. This brought the school’s total to 13 large dormitories, each housing 35 to 70 students, in addition to eight smaller house dorms, and provided accommodations for instructors with families for the first time.
“The residential element is at the heart of the education we provide,” Principal Richard W. Day reported to the Trustees in 1971, two years after the last two large residence halls to be built, Main Street Dormitory and Ewald Dormitory, opened on the northern edge of campus. “Dormitory life is not separate from but an extension of what takes place in the classroom. The value of each experience is dependent upon the quality of both.”
This symbiotic relationship was on everyone’s mind in 2019-20, when more than 700 community members weighed in on a vision for Exeter’s future and composed a Campus Master Plan. Based on the result of a student housing study, the plan included the renovation of six existing dorms over the next decade, as well as the construction of a new residence hall to house 60 students. This new hall would allow for renovation of existing dorms without either executing that renovation completely in the summers or displacing students during the school year.
“The new dormitory is not about an expansion of student enrollment,” says Heather Taylor, campus planner and architect. “It’s about a long-term strategy to improve student life and housing options on campus.”
Following Wentworth’s renewal, Langdell and Merrill Halls are the next dorms scheduled for renovation, and students from both will be living together in New Hall for the next two years. Langdell and Merrill are expected to reopen in the 2024-25 school year along with an expansive new Wetherell Dining Complex. “We’re very fortunate in that all of these are good buildings with good bones that we will be able to renovate them for the next 100 years,” Taylor says. “My hope is that the same is true for the new dorm. You want to design a building that is timeless and functions for generations of our students.”
In accordance with the principle of environmental stewardship, a key aspect of the Campus Master Plan, the primary structure of New Hall is wood frame rather than steel, which minimizes its carbon footprint. Inside, the building maximizes natural light in both the residential and academic spaces, and geothermal heating and cooling systems provide dehumidification to the student rooms and air conditioning and heating to the faculty apartments and academic spaces. Faculty apartments on each level include separate studies opening directly to student hallways, ensuring a strong faculty-student connection as well as privacy for instructors and their families.
The building also incorporates the historic Dow Barn, which dates to the mid-19th century. Previously used only for storage, the barn was adjacent to neighboring Dow House, a former clinic that the Academy purchased in 1967 to adapt into a student and faculty residence. Dow Barn’s original exposed wood beams now adorn the cathedral ceiling in a second-floor faculty apartment. The façade on the barn end of New Hall incorporates the double doors and diamond-shaped windows of the original barn, as well as the vented cupola and weather vane. The same angular windows, repeated along the rest of the building, echo the barn’s classic look and feel, creating a seamless blend of historic and modern.
“I’m proud of the many sustainable features of the new building,” says Mark Leighton, director of Facilities Management. “Especially the reuse of Dow Barn, enhanced building envelope, geothermal systems, low-maintenance materials, and efficient sizing and layouts of the student and faculty spaces.”
In addition to its main residential space — bedrooms for 60 students, five faculty apartments, an airy front common room and ground-floor game room with kitchen and laundry — the building’s academic wing is home to the Health and Human Development Department, with four Harkness classrooms, a department room and a flexible common area.
New Hall was built on the former site of Fisher Theater, which was the hub of the Academy’s performing arts offerings from 1971 until the opening of The David E. and Stacey L. Goel Center for Theater and Dance in 2018. The sloping topography of the building site allows the new dormitory to easily incorporate academic and residential space, while keeping them securely separate.
The academic entrance, on the north side of the building, opens onto a courtyard adjacent to the ForrestalBowld Music Center and is a short walk from both the Lamont Health and Wellness Center and the Phelps
WE ASKED. YOU ANSWERED. WHAT DOES DORM LIFE MEAN TO YOU?
“Bancroft is the best dorm on campus for sure. Once you pass through those doors it’s like home. There’s no better feeling than seeing familiar faces, wise seniors and newly made friends. There’s a common thread of memories for everyone in the dorm, from late-night study sessions with friends, baking cookies in the kitchen, to playing Ping-Pong or singing songs in the common room. These traditions and bonds will last way past graduation and makes me proud to call Bancroft my home.” — Aveen Burney ’25
PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHRISTIAN HARRISON
Clockwise from top: Historic Dow Barn houses two of New Hall’s five faculty apartments; Priya Nwakanma ’23; the main floor common area; Nora Stahl ’25 decorating her room’s built-in desk.
Students Jackie Addo ’25 and Kendra Wang ’25 are one of several cross-dorm pairings in New Hall.
Science Center. On the Front Street side, a broad campus green in front of the student entrance to New Hall links the building to two smaller dorms, Dow House and Front Street Dormitory. “I love how the topography allows for two distinct entrances, both of which have strong connections to campus,” Leighton says.
While the union of Merrill and Langdell in New Hall was born of necessity, it’s also an unprecedented opportunity. For the first time, former residents of two different dorms, their affiliated day students, and a small group of new students have come together to create a unified dorm identity and forge the enduring bonds so many Exonians take away from their time on campus. “I do think each dorm has a very unique culture, and I’m fascinated to see how they mix,” says Troy Samuels, the head of New Hall and an instructor in history. “I’m excited to get to play around in terms of building community.”
While Samuels and other dorm faculty members take the lead in this process, they will rely on the support of senior proctors for the vital task of building dorm unity. Other large dorms on campus typically have six to eight student proctors, but New Hall has 10, five from each former dorm. “At the beginning of the year, we’re going to be doing double duty,” says Bronwyn Hall ’23, a senior proctor who spent her first three years at Exeter living in Merrill. “Two people on duty every night, one from each dorm, so that we make sure everyone gets a chance to get to know people that they don’t know, and even the proctors get to know the other dorm’s proctors.”
Hall and her fellow proctors also played a key role in helping their dormmates prepare for the transition during last spring term. Merrill and Langdell residents went through the process of room draw together and also gathered on a few more informal occasions, like toasting s’mores on Wetherell-Ford Quad. “I think they’re going to be a little cautious at first,” Samuels says, adding that the new dorm “has just so many wonderful spaces and wonderful opportunities for them. It’s going to be great.”
After meeting for the first time during an off-campus dinner outing at a local Thai restaurant, Addo and Wang became closer friends when they both ran winter track. As preps, Addo lived in Langdell and Wang lived in Merrill, but they decided in the spring to room together this year, becoming one of several cross-dorm pairings in New Hall.
A week after move-in day, their double looked well lived-in. They have both ordered shelves to attach to their beds for phone chargers and alarm clocks, and tacked up photographs, prints and collages over their beds. A shared built-in desk, which runs the length of the wall beneath the windows, is loaded with textbooks, laptops, Clorox wipes and other dorm room staples.
“I really like the view, especially when I’m studying,” Addo says. “When times get stressful, it’s really nice to look out at the trees.” The desk is so roomy that she has placed a second chair at the end, ideal for study sessions with a friend. Wang, a self-proclaimed “super clothes shopper,” loves the big closets.
Addo and Wang acknowledged having mixed feelings over the summer about the move to New Hall, and they worried about missing the close-knit culture of their former dorms. Now, however, they are optimistic.
“There was a lot of emphasis in the first dorm meeting of everyone really trying to make the effort to see us as one big dorm,” Wang says. “I think that’s actually going really well.”
Addo agreed, saying: “There are a lot of people from Merrill that I wanted to talk to — people in leadership roles or people that play on the volleyball team — but never really got to know. I’m still working on that since it’s only been a week. But I feel really close with the Merrill people, and I’m really excited to see what we can do as one dorm.”
WE ASKED. YOU ANSWERED. WHAT DOES DORM LIFE MEAN TO YOU?
“The first thing that comes to mind when I think of Dvnbar [aka Dunbar] is family. Dvnbar has given me a family in every sense of the word, from late-night baking in the kitchen to common room chats that go on for hours (even when I still have homework). It’s a favorite proctor leaving flowers outside your door the morning of the SAT and deliriously editing your 333 in the common room surrounded by friends. It’s book recommendations from dorm faculty and helping seniors into their prom dresses. It’s the night when I walked downstairs with a cup of tea and realized that I was exactly where I belonged. Dvnbar is a place that I have poured love into and that has loved me back.” — Riley Jones ’23
THE ACADEMY OVER TIME
1855
TOTAL ENROLLMENT
116
DORMITORIES
1
ANNUAL TUITION (BOARDING STUDENTS)
$20
2022
TOTAL ENROLLMENT
1,082
DORMITORIES
26
ANNUAL TUITION (BOARDING STUDENTS)
$61,121 Abbot Hall
EXETER’S FIRST ON-CAMPUS DORM
For nearly 75 years, the Academy operated without dormitories. Instead, “the boys boarded about town,” as one Exeter historian writes. But as enrollment grew, along with the cost of living, the Trustees recognized the need to offer on-campus housing to help ensure equal opportunity for all students. Charles H. Bell explains this thinking in his 1883 book Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire: A Historical Sketch, writing that the Trustees “determined to establish at the charge of the Academy, a dormitory and commons hall for the members of the school of limited means, by which the expense of living should be reduced to the minimum.”
The school experimented first with housing students in an Academy-owned building on Spring Street, which had been the J. & B. Williams printing shop. The arrangement worked so well that in September 1852 the Trustees voted “to erect a more suitable and capacious building for the same purpose, in the Academy grounds,” Bell writes. “It opened for use in 1855. It was constructed of brick, and contained rooms for fifty young men, with a dining hall and other needful accommodations; and cost about twenty thousand dollars.”
As Frank H. Cunningham details in his book Familiar Sketches of The Phillips Exeter Academy and Surroundings, the rooms were “furnished at a nominal rent, so that fifty boys are thus supported at about one half the cost of living at the ordinary boarding houses.” Residents paid $1 a year for a room. “The Trustees believe that no other institution of the kind in the country has approached this Academy in giving substantial aid to young men of poverty and merit,” Cunningham writes.
The building was named Abbot Hall, in honor of Benjamin Abbot, the Academy’s second principal, who served from 1788 to 1838. Abbot was a respected and beloved instructor, teaching such subjects as Latin and Greek for 44 years and counting among his pupils statesman Daniel Webster.
Ever considerate of the Academy’s mission to educate students in goodness and knowledge, the Trustees voted to post, inside each student’s Abbot Hall door, a set of eight rules, including: “There shall not be in or about the building, during study hours, any singing or playing of musical instruments, or any other noise inconsistent with the quiet study; and good order shall be preserved at all times.”
Abbot Hall remained the only on-campus dormitory until Soule Hall was built in 1893.
Abbot Hall, circa 1885; Abbot Hall Room 13, 1879
Health and Human Development Department Chair Michelle Soucy gathers with students in one of New Hall’s four new classrooms.
Living and Learning
4,000 SQUARE FEET OF NEW ACADEMIC SPACE
To accommodate its expanding academic curriculum, as well as the Academy’s commitment to promoting students’ physical, mental and emotional wellness, Exeter’s Health and Human Development Department has moved into a spacious new home on the lower level of New Hall.
New Hall’s academic space features four Harkness classrooms, a departmental office and a flexible lobby that can be used for group activities such as yoga, meditation and cooking, or just relaxing and connecting when not in class. Bookshelves lining the walls are home to an expanded library of health- and wellness-related books that students can browse and borrow.
While living and learning will be kept securely separate — dorm residents will have to exit the building to access the academic space — every Exeter student will have the opportunity to take classes in New Hall. “It used to be that only ninth graders and new 10th graders took health,” Department Chair Michelle Soucy says. “Right before the pandemic, we changed it, and now students from all four years take at least one class in Health and Human Development.”
In addition to introductory courses aimed at helping all new students acclimate to the school, the Health and Human Development curriculum includes a Teen Health course for each class year, including one designed to help prepare seniors for life beyond Exeter. “We cover finances, learning to cook for yourself, and a bunch of other stuff for what we call the emerging adult phase of life,” Soucy says.
In the courtyard outside the building’s entrance, a circular medallion with the words “youth from every quarter” and an engraving of a lion rampant adorn a stone wall. An anonymous donor intended the medallion, and a soon-tobe-installed stone bench, to serve as a corner of campus dedicated to wellness reflection. The new feature complements one of the department’s long-running fall programs, a positive psychology fair where students gather to paint and decorate rocks with messages of positivity.
“We’re envisioning that we’ll have a little rock garden there as well,” Soucy says. “We’re always talking about the psychology of looking at things in the positive, and how you can raise your mental health.”
WE ASKED. YOU ANSWERED. WHAT DOES DORM LIFE MEAN TO YOU?
“I was in Dow House for one year and it was a positive, learning experience. It was the first time I had been living away from home and it allowed me to interact with a wide variety of people, both from around the country and around the world. But without a doubt the best byproduct of being in the dorms was my roommate introducing me to Bruce Springsteen and his greatest hits. Thank you, David, I appreciate it to this day!” — Alexander Najemy ’97
Faculty in Residence
INSTRUCTOR ELLEE DEAN ’01 ON FAMILY LIFE IN NEW HALL
Ellee Dean ’01 is still settling into her home on the second floor of Exeter’s newest residence hall. “We’ve had two all-dorm meetings so far, and I think the vibe seems really playful,” she says. “The kids and adults are all talking about this being a historic moment … and a real opportunity to create something fresh.”
An instructor in English and one of five resident faculty members taking charge of New Hall, Dean shares the apartment with her husband, Porter Hayes, a regional director of major gifts in Exeter’s Office of Institutional Advancement; their sons Bode, 10, and Wyatt, 8; and the family’s dog, Bruno. It’s one of five faculty residences in New Hall, including at least one on each floor of student living space. All feature hardwood floors, spacious open-plan kitchens and living areas, and air conditioning, in addition to separate faculty entrances, dedicated parking spaces and two shared patios.
“We’ve talked about how nice it’s going to be to have our dorm team meeting and sit outside,” Dean says. “I’m also so excited about the bigger common spaces for the students. … I think having that big outdoor space in front of the dorm is going to be incredible. I can already imagine the kids having picnics out there.”
Dean’s apartment, like the other faculty residences, has a study that opens directly into the student hallway. The setup is ideal for dorm duty and fosters strong ties between resident faculty and students. Dean’s study contains a table with four chairs and a roll of kraft paper mounted on the wall, perfect for students — and kids — in the mood for a writing or drawing session. Dean has more experience than most with dorm life at Exeter. A resident of Amen Hall during her student years, she has lived in Webster Hall and Merrill Hall since joining the Academy as a faculty member in 2013. As a parent, she admits that living in a dorm has its perks. “There are always a ton of kids volunteering to babysit,” Dean says. Bode and Wyatt have also taken piano and chess lessons from student members of the Exeter Student Service Organization.
For their part, her children seem relatively unfazed by their new surroundings. Bode likes living closer to his elementary school, and to the adjacent fields where he plays baseball and lacrosse. Although Wyatt’s bedroom has a stunning view of the Academy Building’s bell tower, he’s far more excited to show off the LED lights his parents installed and his collection of Boston Celtics gear.
Wyatt does muster some enthusiasm for seeing familiar students and meeting new ones as the school year begins — particularly if those meetings involve the dorm’s basement game room. “I might play some Ping-Pong,” he says hopefully, before rushing down the hall to join his family. E
Scenes from a faculty apartment: Wyatt Hayes with a copter in his new bedroom, at the table with mom, Ellee Dean ’01, and kicking back.
Wyatt Hayes, Ellee Dean ’01, Bode Hayes, Porter Hayes
WE ASKED. YOU ANSWERED. WHAT DOES DORM LIFE MEAN TO YOU?
“Williams House was just that: a house, not a dorm. We were a family, no locked doors. French teacher Harris Thomas and his wife, Mary, were in loco parentis. Mary was the inspiration for the play Tea and Sympathy. The set for the play accurately represented the structure of the house, with the master’s residence occupying the ground floor around a grand creaking staircase that ran up from the front door. No butt room. We were a privileged few admitted to this special place. Lucky us Williams House alums.” — John Wilcox ’60
