The Exeter Bulletin, fall 2020

Her Courage The Exeter HerBulletin Character Her Intellect Her Strength Her Depth Her Empathy Her Charm Her Humor Her Honesty Her Integrity Her Patience Her Passion Her Voice at the Table Her Knowledge Her Confidence Her Perspectiv Her Understan FA L L 2 0 2 0

C E L E B R AT I N G 5 0 Y E A R S O F C O E D U C AT I O N AT E X E T E R

November

17

A DAY OF

GIVING

240 Years of Excellence.

24 Hours of Giving Back.

During this year’s online fundraising challenge, make a gift and help uphold the standard of excellence that has defined an Exeter education since 1781.

The Exeter Fund

#AlwaysExeter

FALL

The Exeter Bulletin Principal William K. Rawson ’71; P’08 Executive Editor Karen Ingraham Managing Editor Patrick Garrity Senior Editor Jennifer Wagner Class Notes Editor Cathy Webber Editorial Coordinator Maxine Weed Creative Director/Design David Nelson, Nelson Design Communications Advisory Committee Daniel G. Brown ’82, Robert C. Burtman ’74, Dorinda Elliott ’76, Alison Freeland ’72, Keith Johnson ’52, Yvonne M. Lopez ’93 Trustees President Morgan C.W. Sze ’83

Wole C. Coaxum ’88, Suzi Kwon Cohen ’88, Mark A. Edwards ’78, Elizabeth A. “Betsy” Fleming ’86, Claudine Gay ’88, Peter A. Georgescu ’57, Scott S.W. Hahn ’90, Jacqueline Hayes ’85, Ira D. Helfand, M.D. ’67, Jennifer P. Holleran ’86, Cia Buckley Marakovits ’83, Sally J. Michaels ’82, William K. Rawson ’71, Genisha Saverimuthu ’02, Peter M. Scocimara ’82, Sanjay K. Shetty, M.D. ’92, Serena Wille Sides ’89, Kristyn A. (McLeod) Van Ostern ’96, Janney Wilson ’83 The Exeter Bulletin (ISSN No. 0195-0207) is published four times each year: fall, winter, spring and summer,

by Phillips Exeter Academy 20 Main Street, Exeter NH 03833-2460 Telephone 603-772-4311 Periodicals postage paid at Exeter, NH, and at additional mailing offices. Printed in the USA by Cummings Printing.

The Exeter Bulletin is printed on recycled paper and sent free of charge to alumni, parents, grandparents, friends and educational institutions by Phillips Exeter Academy, Exeter, NH. Communications may be addressed to the editor; email bulletin@exeter.edu.

Copyright 2020 by the Trustees of Phillips Exeter Academy.

ISSN-0195-0207 Postmasters: Send address changes to: Phillips Exeter Academy Records Office 20 Main Street Exeter, NH 03833-2460

MARY SCHWALM

Vice President Deidre G. O’Byrne ’84

“THE QUESTIONS AND THE WONDERING ARE WHAT LEAD THEM TO GENUINE LEARNING.” —page 32

IN THIS ISSUE

Volume CXXV, Issue no. 1

Features 24 Together Again

Campus community overcomes challenges to start new year.

32 A Redesigned Start

Inside academic life as the fall term takes shape.

By Nicole Pellaton

38 Laugh Track

Flipping the script with television writer, director and producer Greg Daniels '81.

By Jennifer Wagner

Her Voice at the Table

24 38

42 The Early Years

A special section dedicated to the 50th anniversary of coeducation.

Departments ALAMY

6

Around the Table

20

Sports: Meet new Director of Physical Education and Athletics Jason Baseden

66

Class Notes: Keeping up with your classmates

—Cover photograph by Bradford Herzog

SU M M E R

20 19

T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N • 3

Exonians don't let physical distancing stop them from connecting on the quad.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY MARY SCHWALM

T H E

V I E W

F RO M

H E R E

A RO U N D

T H E

TA B L E

AROUND THE TABLE

What’s new and notable at the Academy

Our Values in Action

By Principal Bill Rawson ’71; P’08

R

ecently, an alumnus asked me to share what is most meaningful about serving as Exeter’s principal. For me, it starts with the students. Spending time with them, supporting their experience here, means everything to me.

That is especially true now, as we have all worked together this fall to meet the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Students on campus are committed to being here and working hard to follow our health and safety protocols. It is wonderful to have them back. I also enjoy connecting with the Exonians who continue with distance learning at home.

We have built the schedule this term to provide them with greater opportunities to connect synchronously with their peers and faculty and truly feel part of campus life.

All of this is possible in large part due to Exeter’s faculty and staff, who continue to work extremely hard — many have been required largely to reinvent their jobs — to ensure the Exeter experience continues to be rigorous, supportive and safe. I am thankful for their dedication to the Academy, to one another, and to our students.

This sense of shared responsibility draws from Exeter’s founding principle: that “the time of youth is the important period, on the improvement or neglect of which depend the most weighty consequences, to individuals themselves and the community.” It is the singular reason our school exists today, and guides all that we do together.

Last year, I joined a small group of trustees and faculty in the sizable task of creating a succinct, modern expression of the Academy’s mission. We spent an entire year producing a single sentence, and it was well worth the effort. Our revised mission — each word derived from Exeter’s Deed of Gift — is to unite goodness and knowledge and inspire youth from every quarter to lead purposeful lives. Its power lies in its brevity: We now have a phrase that can live easily at the forefront of our minds as we go about our daily business of teaching and learning.

The new mission is supported by five statements that reflect our core values and draw more heavily from the language in the Deed of Gift (see sidebar).

I write this column as the national election draws near. This is a challenging time, and we

6 • T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N

FA L L

20 20

will support our students in every way possible as they navigate the divisive political discourse here in the United States. Across the globe, we are facing social, economic and environmental challenges that require us to act with compassion, courage and conviction. Our mission and our values matter more now than ever as we prepare our students to become global citizens and meet the issues before them with determination and innovative thinking.

We strive to create a community where we can seek out perspectives different from our own, be challenged in our beliefs, and learn from each other. This requires that we act and engage with empathy.

Empathy does not require agreement, but it does require that we try to understand the feelings, thoughts and experiences of others, and be willing to learn from others. We will continue to reinforce the type of Harkness pedagogy and civil discourse that provides the opportunity to learn and grow as individuals and as a community.

As we navigate the challenges before us, we also must make time to celebrate a milestone in our school’s history that was as transformative in nature as the decision to adopt Harkness as our method of instruction. Fifty years ago, the Exeter Trustees approved coeducation, and 39 brave female day students enrolled that September. The journey since then has been one of profound discovery and growth for the school.

Our theme for this special anniversary year is “Her Voice at the Table: 50 Years of Coeducation at Exeter.”

We promise a robust celebration of “her voice” in all aspects of Academy life; we will acknowledge that it was not always easy, and for some, it was painful. We will recognize that part of our story as we celebrate the extraordinary accomplishments of our alumnae, as students here at Exeter and in the world beyond. I hope that you will join the conversation. E

FA L L

20 20

The Academy’s Mission Unite goodness and knowledge and inspire youth from every quarter to lead purposeful lives.

Values

All text in italics is taken from the Deed of Gift (1781).

Knowledge and Goodness “Above all, it is expected that the attention of instructors to the disposition of the minds and morals of the youth under their charge will exceed every other care; well considering that though goodness without knowledge is weak and feeble, yet knowledge without goodness is dangerous, and that both united form the noblest character, and lay the surest foundation of usefulness to [hu]mankind.” Exeter today continues the commitment to unite knowledge and goodness. The challenges that students meet at Exeter and the support they receive have a common objective: to stimulate their development as individuals and prepare them to lead purposeful lives.

Academic Excellence Academic excellence is a signature strength of Phillips Exeter Academy.

In every discipline and at every level within our curriculum we inspire students to develop critical thinking skills and seek complex truths.

Intellectual exploration through rigorous inquiry and thoughtful discourse at the Harkness table nurtures inquisitiveness, creativity, insight, empathy, independent thought and mastery in our students.

Youth From Every Quarter “The Academy shall ever be equally open to youth of requisite qualification from every quarter.” We seek to build an intentionally diverse community of students and adults. We are committed to teaching the skills, modeling the behaviors, providing the resources and cultivating the inclusion and equity that are required to unlock the richness of that diversity. Our Harkness pedagogy is grounded in the belief that we are all better equipped to learn and to lead when our thoughts are tested by others, particularly by those whose ideas, perspectives, experiences or identities differ from our own.

Youth is the Important Period The “time of youth is the important period” to instill a lasting capacity to nurture one’s self, develop a sense of one’s own potential and consider one’s place in the larger whole. Our residential community encourages students to explore emerging interests — academic, artistic, athletic and extracurricular — with similarly motivated peers and in the process develop their values and passions and the agency needed to carry these forward.

Non Sibi Non Sibi, or “Not For Oneself,” inscribed on Exeter’s seal, attests to the philosophy that wisdom gained here should be used for others as well as for oneself. Exonians are motivated by this philosophy to face the challenges of their day. Teaching and living the principles of a just and sustainable society — environmentally, economically and socially — are fundamental to this philosophy today. Exeter seeks to graduate young people whose ambitions and actions are inspired by their interest in others and the world around them.

T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N • 7

A RO U N D

E

X

E

T H E

T

E

R

TA B L E

A

N

N

O

T

A

T

E

D

The Art of Discourse in Courtney Marshall's Classroom

By Jennifer Wagner

W

PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHRISTIAN HARRISON

hether it’s casually chatting

about an afternoon Zumba class or diving deep into the racialized history of physical fitness, English Instructor Courtney Marshall knows how to get the conversation going. Sometimes, she says, all it takes for students to find the gift of gab is a Barbie.

“Toys, having things to do with their hands, really work to get ideas out there.”

Along with her ever-growing collection of dolls, Marshall brings a depth of experience to every dialogue. She holds a doctorate in English and a graduate certificate in women’s studies from UCLA. Prior to joining Exeter’s faculty in 2016, she taught for six years at the University of New Hampshire. An active advocate for the incarcerated, Marshall also leads literacy groups for prisoners at the Northern New Hampshire Correctional Facility.

This year, the Kirtland House dorm head is taking on an additional role: associate dean of advising. “I love advising,” Marshall says. “People entrust their pride and joy with us, and it’s our job and our joy to be able to connect and support them and advocate for them, in addition to their families.”

Here’s a peek at a few of the icebreakers inside Marshall’s Phillips Hall classroom. E

Marshall brought her first Barbie to class to spark conversation about race and the psychological effects of segregation while teaching Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. “I was caught up with the character Claudia and her white dolls,” Marshall says. “The one with the big Afro, she was first. I wound up buying more and more. I have one with a prosthetic leg, one in a wheelchair.”

8 • T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N

FA L L

20 20

This desktop placard reminds students to consider their actions. “That’s always a question in class,” says Marshall, who taught a course last year examining Black women performers. “You want to say hello to somebody, but you’re not sure? I say, ‘What would Beyoncé do?’ If you think you want to turn in something late? I say, ‘What would Beyoncé do?’”

“This is one of those books that I’m so glad my grandmother had the good sense to buy and make me look at,” Marshall says of the 1974 tome about the Black experience in America. “When I think about what my grandmother was able to make possible for me and my siblings, and for so many kids in the neighborhood, that is what pushes me in my teaching.”

Marshall found this portrait of William H. Bolden, Exeter’s first Black faculty member, in her classroom’s closet and thought, “Who’s this guy?” “Right now, I’m the only Black woman teacher in English, in all of the humanities,” she says. “There are no models for how to do this job in this body. I often turn to literature for those models and I turn to people who have done it before.”

FA L L

20 20

T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N • 9

A RO U N D

T H E

TA B L E

Living a Spiritual Life in Uncertain Times TA B L E TA L K W I T H R E V. B O N N I E - J E A N N E C A S E Y

By Sarah Pruitt ’95

R

everend Bonnie-Jeanne Casey sits in a sunny spot in Phillips Church

1 0 • T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N

FA L L

CARNE GRIFFITHS

in mid-August, looking ahead to a fall like none other in Exeter’s history.

With physical distancing, mask-wearing and other restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic, she finds it hard to predict what exactly her work as the school’s new director of religious and spiritual life might look like — but she expects much of it won’t take place in this historic building on the corner of Front Street and Tan Lane.

“I think we’ll be outside in small-group settings as much as we can, because the health and safety of everybody is going to be paramount,” Casey says.

Casey is just getting to know the campus, having recently moved from Arlington, Massachusetts, with her wife, Maggie O’Grady, and their 7-yearold son, Thomas. She was immediately struck by all the natural beauty in and around Exeter, and looks forward to finding “sacred spaces” for conversation and contemplation outside of the traditional chapel environment. She hopes that students and other members of the Exeter community will do the same.

“One of the great learnings of religion is that you take the weather with you,” she says.

“You take spirituality with you.”

Casey knows whereof she speaks. Raised in a Catholic family near Boston, she earned a B.A. from Smith College and a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School. Along the way, she embraced the more liberal teachings of the Unitarian Universalist faith, and was ordained as a minister in 1995. “My tradition lives the multi-faith tradition of the country in some ways,” Casey says. “We feel like it’s our duty to learn about the religions of the world ... to better understand our own traditions.”

After serving as an associate minister at a church in Madison, Wisconsin, Casey spent six years as parish minister at Philadelphia’s Church of the Restoration. In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when Casey’s church became a sanctuary for the grieving population of north Philadelphia — located a short bus or train ride away from New York City — she began thinking about expanding her mission beyond fellow members of her own faith.

“I said to myself, if I stay as a parish minister, I’m just going to meet other

20 20

Unitarians, people who think like I do,” she recalls. “I felt as though the world really needs a warm welcome to learn about other people’s religions. So, I embarked on this road to go into education more than congregation ministry.”

Casey worked as a chaplain at Wellesley College and director of spiritual life at Babson College before moving into a longtime role at Simmons University in Boston.

Initially hired to complete a diversity, equity and inclusion inventory at the school, she became its director of spiritual life in 2011. Casey began taking finance courses while at Wellesley and completed her Master of Business Administration degree at Simmons before she began working there.

“I really wanted to understand money as a resource, and be a good steward of resources,” she says of the decision to get her MBA. “The ministry is often about power, and about finding ways to help the powerless and reckon with the powerful. I think a business degree helps you learn different skills on how to do that.”

Having more than once been in the position of counseling students faced with leaving their studies because they could not afford tuition, Casey is particularly sensitive to the issue of financial inequalities among students at the institutions where she works. At Simmons, her office set up substantial scholarships that enabled students to get paid while doing work in their own faith or another faith tradition that interested them.

“Phillips Exeter is really on the forefront of taking financial equity seriously, and that’s one of the things that gets me excited about working at the institution,” Casey says. “There’s always more to do.”

At Exeter, Casey will be working with a younger population of students, but it’s a group she has long been interested in through her research work. For her doctorate, which she earned at Boston University, Casey focused on young members of the growing group known as “nones” — 14- to 18-year-olds who claim to have no religious identity, or a multiple religious identity. She believes these young people are “changing the landscape” of religion today, but not exactly in the way most people think.

“Everyone will point to a Pew study from several years ago where they started seeing this secularization [of America],” Casey says. “My experience has not been so much of a secularization as a different spiritualization. ...

People are coming to recognize that as wonderful as their own tradition might be, and as firmly rooted in that tradition they might be, there are other traditions that have insight and wisdom. All we need to do is to open our ears and our hearts to what those messages are.”

For her first few months at Exeter, Casey is seeking to build a welcoming environment that will encourage curiosity, empathy and humility in the classroom, as well as in the religious and spiritual life on campus. “At bottom, what makes us good learners is that we don’t think that we know it all, and that we’re interested to learn more,” she stresses. “If we bring that sense of curiosity to our understanding of other people, then I think we’re setting ourselves up more for success than if we didn’t have that humility at the root.”

As for all the uncertainty surrounding what fall — and beyond — will bring, Casey knows one thing for sure. “I think the students are going to have to lead with what they want,” she says. “We really have to figure it out together.” E

“At bottom, what makes us good learners is that we don’t think that we know it all, and that we’re interested to learn more.”

FA L L

20 20

T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N • 11

A RO U N D

T H E

TA B L E

Meet the Trustees Exeter’s Trustees welcomed five new members to their ranks on July 1. We thank these Exonian volunteers for their dedicated service to the Academy.

Elizabeth “Betsy” Fleming ’86 Charlotte, North Carolina

Incoming Vice President, GAA

Betsy entered Exeter as an upper from Spartanburg High School, Spartanburg, South Carolina. She lived in Dunbar Hall, ran cross-country and was on the track team. Betsy was senior class president and recipient of the Thomas H. Cornell Award, given to the member of the graduating class who exemplifies the Exeter Spirit. She earned a bachelor’s degree, magna cum laude, in fine arts from Harvard University; a master’s degree in the history of design from the Royal College of Art in London; and a Ph.D. in art history from Yale University.

During her professional career, Betsy has served in various leadership roles, including president of Converse College in Spartanburg and executive director of the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, South Carolina. Betsy is on the board of directors of Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina, Davidson College, Spoleto Festival USA, the Aspen Institute, and CTE, one of North Carolina’s largest privately held companies. She is vice president of the General Alumni Association of Phillips Exeter Academy and has served the Academy as class president, class agent, President’s Award Committee member, and reunion major gift chair.

Scott S.W. Hahn ’90; P’22

Seoul, South Korea Born in Seoul, Scott entered Exeter as a prep and lived in Cilley Hall. At Exeter, he played varsity lacrosse and football and was president of the Economics Club, editor-in-chief of The Exonian, member of Student Council and ESSO, dorm proctor, and student representative of the Exeter Budget Committee. Scott received his B.A., cum laude, in economics from Yale University in 1994 and earned his M.B.A. from Harvard Business School in 2000. Scott is the founder and CEO of Hahn & Company, the leading private equity investment group focused on corporate acquisitions and investments in South Korea. Previously with Morgan Stanley for 15 years, Scott was managing director and chief investment officer of Morgan Stanley Private Equity Asia and was global partner of Morgan Stanley’s Merchant Banking Division.

Ira D. Helfand ’67

Leeds, Massachusetts Ira entered Exeter as a prep from Milford, Massachusetts, and lived in Merrill Hall. He was president of the Student Council and active in PEA Senate, The Exonian, Branch-Soule Debate Society, John Phillips Committee, World Federalists, Civil Rights Club, Cum Laude Society, Herodotan Society, Academy Team and The Inquirers. Ira earned his Bachelor of Arts, cum laude, in history at Harvard and his M.D. at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He is an internal medicine doctor at Family Care Medical Center in Springfield, Massachusetts.

He is co-founder and past president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, and he currently serves on PSR’s board and co-chairs its Nuclear Abolition Committee. He is also co-president of PSR’s global federation, the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which received the 1984 UNESCO

1 2 • T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N

FA L L

20 20

Peace Education Prize and the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize. He is a member of the International Steering Group of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which IPPNW founded in 2007 and which won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. Ira has spoken widely on climate change and the medical effects of nuclear war in the U.S., Russia, India, Pakistan and France. He was class vice president, assembly speaker and reunion volunteer, and received the John Phillips Award in 2003.

Genisha Saverimuthu ’02 San Francisco, California

Incoming Vice President, GAA

Genisha was a four-year resident of Merrill Hall, participated in the Student Council, In Essence (a cappella group), Concert Choir, theater, and the study abroad program in Mexico. She earned her Bachelor of Science from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and her MBA from Columbia University. Genisha is currently the head of Strategy and Operations, Global Search Partnerships at Google, and her experience includes business strategy and operations management for technology companies and startups across Asia and North America. Previously, she worked in McKinsey’s Media and Technology practice in New York City. During her undergraduate years, she taught middle school children in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, and worked at the U.S. Embassy in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Genisha is the vice president of Exeter’s General Alumni Association and has served as an admissions representative, regional association vice president, a class agent, and a PEA mentor. She helped start Exeter’s female alumni group, Exae Circle, and is the co-founder of SAMBAL, a nonprofit organization providing technology access and education to underprivileged children in South Asia.

Sanjay Shetty ’92; P’23

Dallas, Texas Sanjay lived in Wentworth Hall and was actively involved in Debate Team, Branche-Soule Debate Society, Indian Society, Student Council, ESSO, and Peer Tutoring. His scientific research at PEA was recognized when he was named a Westinghouse Science Talent Search Finalist. He earned his Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude, in biochemical sciences at Harvard College; a Master of Arts in biology at Harvard University; his M.D. at Harvard Medical School; and his MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Sanjay serves on the executive leadership team of Steward Health Care as president of the Southern Region, which includes hospitals in Texas, Florida, Louisiana and Arkansas. He is the former president of Steward Medical Group and Steward Health Care Network. A practicing radiologist, he has been actively involved in the state- and national-level activities of the American College of Radiology, including as past president of the Massachusetts Radiological Society and as a past member of the ACR National Council Steering Committee. Sanjay is a former member of the Board of Trustees at the Chestnut Hill School (CHS), where his service included positions as chair of the Trusteeship Committee, co-chair of the Head of School Search Committee, and vice president of the Board of Trustees. He lives in Dallas with his wife, Greeshma, and he is the proud parent of Sachin ’23 and Amani. Sanjay is currently a PEA class president, a class agent, and an admissions representative. He has previously served as class vice president and class correspondent. E

FA L L

20 20

T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N • 1 3

A RO U N D

T H E

TA B L E

Being Intentional about Anti-racism A C O N V E R S AT I O N W I T H D E A N O F M U LT I C U LT U R A L A F F A I R S SHERRY HERNÁNDE Z

By Debbie Kane racism that pervades our country, OMA’s work is a critical cog in the Academy’s efforts to become an anti-racist school and to provide every student with an equitable experience on campus.

Tell us about the Office of Multicultural Affairs and its mission.

L

ast month, we caught up with Sherry Hernández, interim dean of multicultural affairs, to discuss how she and her team are supporting Exeter students this academic year. Prior to joining the Office of Multicultural Affairs, Hernández was an associate director of college counseling, where she led the financial aid and scholarship initiatives for the office. In her new role, Hernández works with a close-knit team to support BIPOC, LGBTQ and international students who seek engagement and advocacy in their affinity and cultural spaces. OMA also works within the larger body of students and employees to help nurture a community that is more culturally aware and inclusive. As we continue to grapple with the impact of COVID-19 and reckon with the systemic

14 • T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N

OMA is seen by our students of color, our LGBTQ students and international students as a safe place. This academic year, we’re thoughtful in how we support the Academy’s commitment to becoming an anti-racist school. We’re very deliberate about identifying ways to do that, from developing cultural sensitivity programs for our international students to helping train student proctors and student listeners.

I work with an incredible team that includes Hadley Camilus, our associate dean of multicultural student affairs; Jen Smith, our international student coordinator; Wei-ling Woo ’07, our Asian student coordinator; Joanne Lembo, our first LGBTQ student coordinator; and Danique Montique, administrative intern.

How is OMA supporting Exeter's anti-racist efforts?

We have four goals that inform how we approach our anti-racism work: • Self-reflect and be intentional. Being anti-racist requires intentionality. We’re influenced by the work of author Ibram X. Kendi, who emphasizes self-examination and self-reflection. People may say something racist and anti-racist in the same sentence.

Each member of our staff is committed to constantly reflecting on how to be anti-racist.

FA L L

20 20

• Be identity-informed and support students at the intersection of their identities. Many Exeter students identify as people of color or LGBTQ; it’s important that we recognize and support them.

We’re identity-informed in our process and are partnering with departments on campus to track racial issues and make changes. For example, when our students self-identify their race (say, during the admissions or financial aid process), we need to make sure that information is used appropriately. Knowing that data is critical to our work — we aren’t color-blind. To understand and address equity issues, we need to know who we’re working with to provide specific support to specific groups. Not one approach fits all.

• Identify and dismantle racist policies and work with people who have the authority to make that change. OMA’s work is supported by Dean of Students Brooks Moriarty ’87 and Director of Equity and Inclusion Stephanie Bramlett.

• Create programming for BIPOC, international and LGBTQ students.

20 20

How have you supported students through the pandemic and during this period of heightened awareness of racial violence?

Our Black and brown students are more likely to be affected by COVID-19, on top of the harm they’ve already experienced by increased violence against people of color. I meet daily with the dean of students, as well as the deans of academic affairs, residential life, and health and wellness, to discuss how we can best help these students.

Whatever extra accommodations we can offer lets our students know we’re here to help them thrive academically.

At the start of last spring’s term, many of the issues coming up around the pandemic for students included not having adequate space at home for remote learning, internet connectivity issues, or perhaps sharing a device with other family members.

These students rely on the academic environment that’s here and needed to be back on campus. Being able to bring them back this term safely, where they may have their own space to take classes and not have distractions, is one way we’ve been able to support them.

“I hope students maintain the trust they have in OMA and see us as a refuge.”

A lot of our programming and the anti-racist student leadership training we did this year with proctors, student leaders and athletic team captains was informed by themes we’re seeing on the Black at Exeter and Queer at Exeter Instagram accounts. We’re paying attention to what students are saying there; we hear them and we’re here to support them.

We encourage cross-sectional programming that amplifies student voices from different groups. Our student leaders are excited about these opportunities; they want to create awareness and amplify the needs of their peers based on their identities. I’m excited about that; when we all work together, it makes the effort stronger.

This year, we developed the Anti-racist International Student Curriculum for our new international students.

It was also informed by what we heard through Black at Exeter and Queer at Exeter posts. Our goal is to give international students information about themselves so they can meet the challenges of being anti-racist. We’re having four sessions; the first was to have the students reflect on their own racial identities. Moving forward, we’ll give them more tools to work with, defining vocabulary terms such as microaggression and systemic racism.

FA L L

The third and fourth sessions we’ll teach them steps to become genuine allies for their peers.

What is OMA’s greatest challenge this year?

I hope students maintain the trust they have in OMA and see us as a refuge. It’s challenging with social distancing.

We’re reimagining how we can continue to serve our students and let them know we’re accessible in ways that are relevant now. We’re doing OMA drop-in hours outside so students can visit us even though we’re not having indoor meetings at this time. Usually, students come in and out: they hang out here, do their homework, banter, get snacks, talk to the adults. I miss that vibrance.

But unofficially the students have claimed the courtyard outside Principal Rawson’s office as their OMA hangout space, which is wonderful to see.

What motivates you in your work?

I’m in an incredible position to support our marginalized students. The work is engaging and meaningful and challenging at the same time, which makes it very worthwhile.

It’s like a class you love that’s hard but stretches you and makes you grow. E

T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N • 1 5

A RO U N D

T H E

TA B L E

EXETER DECONSTRUCTED T H E S C H O O L W E L O V E I N D E TA I L

The Gerald Laing Sculptures

ALL PHOTOS BY PATRICK GARRIT Y

By Patrick Garrity

Four sculptures of painted steel first imagined on New York City’s streets and brought to life in the Scottish Highlands ornament Exeter’s campus.

They are the work of Gerald Laing, gifted and then regifted by Ken Wilson ’65.

Laing was a British artist who honed his style alongside the likes of Milbuie Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein in 1960s New York. He said his work of the time “quickly evolved from pop art paintings through highly finished abstract pieces to abstract sculpture.” The four pieces in place at the Academy were crafted soon after Laing relocated from New York to Scotland and later purchased and donated by Wilson.

In 2015, the sculptures were removed from campus for conservation and restoration. Through Wilson’s generosity, the sculptures were sandblasted and repainted and then reinstalled.

Milbuie is the star of Laing’s quartet, thanks to its prime location on the Academy lawn. Named after the Scottish Highlands peak Mill Buie, the sculpTorgorm ture’s repeating red “peaks” welcome visitors as they Big Trace approach Lamont Gallery.

Torgorm originally was placed near Phillips Hall since its arches emulate the windows of the building. In 2018, a restored Torgorm was installed behind Phelps Science Center and beside Lamont Health and Wellness Center.

Scatwell is made up of a large pair of 12-foot, bright yellow curves cantilevered off a base. Originally in the courtyard next to Frederick R. Mayer Art Center, it was reinstalled in front of Love Gymnasium in 2016.

Big Trace is similar to some of the drawings and prints that Laing created while working in New York before moving to Scotland. It was installed in 2016 on the grounds of the principal’s residence at Saltonstall House. E Scatwell

1 6 • T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N

FA L L

20 20

I N S I D E

T H E

W R I T I N G

L I F E

From Silence to Speaking Up A CONVERSATION WITH AUTHOR AND ADVOCATE HEATHER BRYANT ’95

By Daneet Steffens ’82

H

This book has a lovely, invitational tone. How did it come about?

COLAGE published a guide for kids of transgender

FA L L

20 20

parents on their website in 2008. It had a similar model in that it was written by the community, for the community, particularly speaking from kids’ experiences. I’d been working with COLAGE on an update when we were approached by a publisher to do a handbook on the topic for a wider audience. So, I put together a proposal, keeping that focus on sharing our own experiences as kids with trans parents.

How did you decide to include your personal experience in the book?

JACOB POLCYN-EVANS

eather Bryant ’95 was only 10 years old when her father, Dana, transitioned. She kept this fact a secret from most, including during her time at the Academy. It wasn’t until after graduating from Smith College that she began to share her experience more widely, partly thanks to her involvement with COLAGE, a network of peers with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer parents and caregivers.

Over the years, Bryant has explored her upbringing through writing. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in The Massachusetts Review, Anchor magazine and CURA: A Literary Magazine of Art and Action. Her essay “Habitat,” about a visit with her trans parent, won the 2009 Southeast Review Narrative Nonfiction Contest.

Now, in her debut book, My Trans Parent: A User Guide for When Your Parent Transitions, Bryant offers life-changing — and life-affirming — perspective to other kids and families. “Coming out can really be about letting people in, a friend told me once,” Bryant writes in My Trans Parent.

“People talk a lot about ‘coming out of the closet,’ like you’re jumping out from this dark place into the light, but another way of looking at it is letting people in. ... That’s what I didn’t expect about sharing my story: that it would bring others to open up with me, too.”

Bryant advocates for creating conversational opportunities around challenging topics in her role as a COLAGE ambassador and recently participated in a Zoom meet-up, “Beyond the Book,” with fellow Exonians. We caught up with her via Skype to chat about her new book, her personal story and how she thrives on her Exeter connections.

I had been writing a family memoir. I thought the handbook would be advice and tips, and that my story would be separate. But the memoir kind of snuck into the handbook and became a part of it — a guiding piece, really. I remember discussing the changing shape of the book with my mom’s friend.

I was trying to figure out how to approach it and she said, “Well, as you think about different aspects of the experience, think ‘OK, how did I go through that when I was a teen, when I was a child?’” That helped me map it out.

Was there a particular point when you realized you were ready to share your story?

I remember being at this COLAGE retreat where we had postcards with an Audre Lorde quote: “When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed, but when we are silent we are still afraid, so it is better to speak.”

That, for me, just swung open the door. I thought, “I’m going to be afraid either way, so I might as well just start sharing my story.”

How did Exeter impact you as a writer?

I always think of [Exeter] as having been a sink-orswim environment and my strength came to the surface.

T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N • 1 7

I N S I D E

T H E

W R I T I N G

L I F E

I arrived at Exeter equally in love with math and English.

Then I became much more excited not just about English but about language. I took French and Italian and loved it when we were allowed to write creatively in any of our classes. I remember lower year being asked to write a story about how our grandparents met, and I asked my grandparents for their story and turned it into fiction. And I remember writing a memoir piece in my senior year; I remember it being a very emotional piece, but leaving out the part about my trans parent. And I’ll never forget senior year taking a creative writing workshop elective.

That was my favorite semester.

In your 2017 essay “From Silence to Speaking,” you quote Kenji Yoshino ’87. More recently, you’ve connected with Renee Edelman ’73 and Robert Conner ’15. What do you enjoy about those Exeter connections?

I had two close friends at Exeter who were, for a long time, the only ones whom I told about my family. They helped me see the way in which my story was relatable and also the fact that every family has a story. I really appreciated Kenji’s book Covering — I just always seem to find these Exeter touchstones along the way. Renee was a workshop student of mine and we bonded immediately.

She had recently connected with Robert and we figured out that we represent three generations of Exeter! Renee was there early on in the new coed world of Exeter and Robert is very active in the LGBTQ+ community. They have been helping me with the second job of a writer, which is getting your work out into the world.

One powerful point you make in the book is that the shape of families is changing.

Yes. Talking with some of the younger kids for this book highlighted for me just how much this new generation has a completely different view to previous generations.

As a kid, I felt like I wasn’t seeing my family’s story out in the world; the youngest interviewees were the most fun because they have this wide-open view of the world and are looking at it so broadly.

You aren’t just sharing stories in the book; you provide readers with practical tools to share their own stories.

Part of my own journey was toward an understanding that my family story was mine to tell. A lot of times when our parents go through things that are pretty major, we might think, “Oh, that’s their story or their journey,” but it’s also your story. You are in it. So, throughout the book I really do encourage people to tell their own story. I found that the more people tell the thing that they don’t want to tell, the thing that they most think that the world should not know or should not see, those are the stories that break down barriers and walls of difference between people.

Those stories are the ones we really need to share. E

1 8 • T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N

Alumni are encouraged to advise the Bulletin editor (bulletin@exeter.edu) of their own publications, recordings, films, etc., in any field, and those of their classmates, for inclusion in future Exonians in Review columns. Please send a review copy of your published work to the editor to be considered for an extended profile or review in future issues. Works can be sent to: Phillips Exeter Academy, The Exeter Bulletin, 20 Main Street, Exeter, NH 03833.

ALUMNI 1955—Joe Nadeau. I Can Still See It Now: Phillips Exeter Academy 1955-2055, A 100 Year Kaleidoscope. (Old Africa Books, 2020) 1956—Phil Harvey with Lisa Conyers. Welfare for the Rich: How Your Tax Dollars End Up in Millionaires’ Pockets—And What You Can Do About it. (Post Hill Press, 2020) 1957—Jonathan Kelley. Timely Tips for the Home Chef. (Self-published, 2020) 1959—David R. Johnson. Changing Climate Changing Lives: Against the Backdrop of Past Changes. (Outskirts Press, 2020) 1962—Larry I. Palmer. Scholarship Boy: Meditations on Family and Race. (Paul Dry Books, 2020) 1962—Chester E. Finn Jr., editor, with Michael J. Petrilli. How to Educate an American: The Conservative Vision for Tomorrow’s Schools. (Templeton Press, 2020) 1962—Bruce Valley.

Zen and the Art of Collecting Old Cars: Adventures in Toyland. (Great Life Press, 2020) 1963—David Rice. Pilgrim on the John Muir Trail. (Self-published, 2019) 1965—Charlie Smith. Demo: Poems. (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2020)

FA L L

20 20

E XO N I A N S

I N

R E V I E W

1976—Tim Borstelmann. Just Like Us:

1982—Eric Steel, screenwriter,

2004—Ryan Dunfee, host.

The American Struggle to Understand

director. Minyan, film, premiered at

“Man:age,” podcast. (2020)

Foreigners. (Columbia University

the Berlin International Film Festival

Press, 2020)

in 2020.

1982—Dan Brown. Wild Symphony.

1983—Manette Pottle, film producer.

(Rodale Kids, 2020)

School Podcast.” (2020)

Picture a Scientist, film, premiered at the Tribeca

1983—Elizabeth

Film Festival in 2020.

Gardner. Here: In

2012—Ryan Dean, host. “The After

2012—Vishal Khetpal, producer. “The Nocturnists,” an independent medical storytelling community.

1983—Maud Bryt, artist.

FAC U LT Y

Wonder. (Dusty

“Maud Bryt: Here I’ll

Alex Myers. The

Road Press, 2019)

Show You,” exhibition of

Story of Silence.

watercolors at the Pamela

(HarperVoyager,

Salisbury Gallery in New

2020)

the Undertow of

1991—Joseph Reid. Departure.

York. (2020)

(Thomas & Mercer, 2020) 1991—Ana C.H. Silva. While Mercury Fish. (Finishing Line Press, 2020) 1999 —Jeremy England. Every Life Is on Fire: How Thermodynamics Explains the Origins of Living Things.

(Basic Books, 2020) BEYOND BOOKS 1957—Peter Georgescu. “The Aspirations for Stakeholder Capitalism Must Be Very, Very High.”

(Forbes, June 2020) 1964—Robert Dole. “Daniel Paul Schreber’s Homosexuality and Schizophrenia.” (Journal of Literature

Erica Plouffe

1985—Dana Pilson. “Margaret

Lazure. “The Bless

French Cresson: Talented Daughter

Day,” essay.

of a Famous Father.” (Fine Art

(Stonecoast

Connoisseur, October 2019)

Review, August 2020)

1988—China Forbes, singer, with

—“Ciambella for Sorella.” (Exposition

Pink Martini. “Let’s Be Friends,” single.

Review, August 2020)

(2020) 1988—Betsy Walker Williamson.

“Pandemic Effect: Equity in Architecture Firms.” (Canadian Architect, August 2020) 1989—Leather Storrs, cohost.

“Cooked with Cannabis,” television series. (2020)

—“Saved by DJ Big Man with Beard,” flash story. (Toho Journal, August 2020) —“In Transit,” flash essay. (Hippocampus Magazine, July/August 2020) —“Why My Mother Is No Longer a Hairdresser.” (The London Independent Story Prize, June 2020)

no. 6)

1989—Vivian Wesson. “Why Facial

—“The Duck Walk,” fiction. (Phoebe,

Recognition Technology Is Flawed.”

Issue 49.2, May 2020)

—“John Nash’s Homosexuality and

(New York State Bar Association

and Art Studies, June 2020, vol. 10,

Schizophrenia.” (Journal of Literature

Journal, July 7, 2020)

and Art Studies, May 2020, vol. 10,

1992—Jeremy Faro. “Placelessness,”

no. 5) —“Émile Nelligan’s Homosexuality Literature and Art Studies, April 2020,

1993—John Forté, recording artist. Riddem Drive, solo music album.

Immunity After Rabies Vaccination

(2020)

in Dogs: The Rabies Challenge Fund

1996—Stephanie

Research Study.” (Canadian Journal of Veterinary Research, April 2020)

FA L L

20 20

Intersect Aspen. (2020)

vol. 94, no. 2, Summer 2020)

1973—Kris Christine. “Duration of

curated by Lyons Wier Gallery at

essay. (Prairie Schooner,

and Schizophrenia.” (Journal of vol. 10, no. 4)

Tara Lewis. Group exhibition of work

Clifford. “The First Year Out.” (Marie Claire, June 2020)

T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N • 19

AT H L E T I C D I R E C T O R B R I N G S GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE TO N E W LY E X P A N D E D P O S I T I O N

S

By Craig Morgan ’84

ince childhood, athletics have been a constant for Jason Baseden, Exeter’s new director of physical education and athletics. An Oregon native, Baseden competed in “all-comers track meets” in Eugene, site of the University of Oregon’s famed Hayward Field, which has hosted numerous Olympic trials, USA Track & Field championships and NCAA championships.

Baseden played football, basketball and ran track in high school, where he earned All-America honors in the 1,500 meters and a scholarship to St. John’s University in New York.

While injuries derailed his Olympic dreams, his education opened other doors and broadened his perspective. He worked for Universal Television in sales and

20 • T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N

CHRISTIAN HARRISON

A Conversation with Jason Baseden

marketing. He spent time in Spain and in South Africa, working for the nonprofit Hoops for Hope, where he now sits on the board. He worked in ad sales for the Discovery Channel, but an opportunity to work the Tour de France sent him back to Europe. He coached basketball, track and field, and strength and conditioning at the American School of Paris before spending seven years as the athletic director at the International School of Brussels, where he met his wife, Katie.

While in Brussels, Baseden joined the board of the International Association of Athletic Administrators & Coaches, on which he still serves. With a family on their minds, Jason and Katie explored opportunities to return to the States. Baseden earned his master’s in athletic administration from Ohio University, and he accepted a position as athletic director at The Peddie School in Hightstown, New Jersey, where he spent the past five years.

Baseden accepted the newly created position of director of physical education and athletics — mere months before the COVID-19 pandemic altered the athletic and academic landscape. He, Katie and their two children — son, Ciaran, 16 months; and daughter, Carys, 3 — moved to Exeter over the summer.

We caught up with Baseden to discuss his vision for PEA athletics and the challenges ahead.

Your first term looks much different than anyone ever envisioned. Can you talk about how you’ve had to adapt to the current challenges?

COVID has presented us with one of the greatest challenges of our time. This fall, we’ve really had to get

FA L L

20 20

S P O RTS

creative and basically bring our indoor sports outside.

We’ve also created an opportunity for all of our athletes on campus to participate this fall. Our Monday-Tuesday Thursday-Fridays are fall sports, and on our Wednesdays and Saturdays, we’ve added winter and spring sports.

This is a way to give all of our athletes the opportunity to follow their passion and to be able to work with their coaches in ways we wouldn’t be able to do in a regular year. We’ve created basketball courts and volleyball courts on our tennis courts. We’ve taken our indoor fitness facility [in the Downer Family Fitness Center] and brought it outdoors to Hatch Field, where we have a number of squat racks and free weights and other equipment in an open, breathable space. Students, at 6 o’clock in the morning and throughout the day, have been working with coach [Shaun] Fishel, working on their different exercises and strength and conditioning and injury prevention.

Despite the challenges, what are some of the positives you’ve taken away from this?

The best part of this fall is that it has been an opportunity for our students who’ve been taking all of their classes online, pretty much in their dorm rooms, to be able to come together in the afternoons with their friends and their teammates and share in exercise and movement. The students are having a great time, and we certainly want to thank our coaching staff for being so flexible. We’re asking them to coach students in an environment that’s very foreign, very different, and they’ve been very creative and supportive of us and our students in their efforts.

How have your international experiences shaped your perspective, and how will they inform your approach at Exeter?

In my conversations and my experience, Exeter is hungry to look to the outside world in athletics. Exeter, for all intents and purposes, is an international school. The sport world is international, too, so I truly believe the time spent abroad broadened my vision on what educational athletics is, and what it can do for students beyond their time here, in terms of their lifelong learning.

What are the benefits of combining the physical education and athletic departments?

In many ways, they are one and the same position, but hiring an outside [athletic director] and making sure that this position reports directly to the principal, that’s a new thing. The Academy did a self-study in 2015 and one of the things that came out of that was we needed more of an outside look. The old way of rotating the leadership every five years didn’t allow for a lot of outside thinking.

FA L L

20 20

In many ways, I feel that some of the challenges we have today in PE and athletics are due to not having the perspective of outside voices, and also a voice at the leadership table. That provides a greater footing to launch Exeter PE and athletics into 2025, 2030 and beyond. With our resources and traditions and history, we should be the greatest in the world at what we do.

What is your vision for PEA PE and athletics?

My vision is that we transition from our traditional approach to PE and move toward exercise science. I really like the collegiate model that focuses on kinesiology, biomechanics, physiology, sports medicine, sports nutrition, etc. I’d like us to offer courses in this realm. In order to do this the right way, we would need to develop and maintain a human performance lab that our exercise science courses can use. It would also create possibilities for us to collaborate with the Science, Math and Health departments. Our exercise science courses will be a perfect complement to our athletes and athletic teams.

Athletes will benefit from a more detailed look and deeper understanding of their movements, strengths and weaknesses, allowing them to create a plan to reach their full potential. If you look at Stanford’s or Duke’s exercise science program, they collaborate with their athletics program, their health science program, and their medical schools. … I really think we need to look at Phillips Exeter Academy exercise science and athletics as the future, with the goal of making sure we’re cutting edge, doing something nobody else is doing.

What is the long-term value of sports?

If there is one thing that we need to have in common, it’s movement. Sports are a perfect vehicle for that. We want our students to try everything, and hopefully with a number of offerings they can find something they are passionate about. If we can do that, we can create a lifelong sport or two or three that involve movement. Yoga or tai chi, for example, is something they can carry with them for the rest of their lives to support [their] health and happiness.

With team sports, it’s the perfect way to develop life skills like working with others. I think Forbes had a piece that showed that a high percentage of the Fortune 500 CEOs were ex-varsity athletes. There is a skill set you gain from working with others toward a common goal and then the emotion that comes with the sports — the highs and lows build integrity — prepares you for dealing with adversity. That’s why these things are important and need to be a part of an overall education. I find that you can have the smartest people in the world but if they don’t have the grit, life skills and social skills to put that academic knowledge to use, then they fall short of their potential. E

T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N • 21

2 2 • T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N

FA L L

20 20

GOALORIENTED E X E T E R AT H L E T E S PERSEVERE IN AN A LT E R E D S P O R T S LANDSCAPE

T

o understand how Exeter athletics is adapting to life in a pandemic and the restrictions it has wrought, one needn’t look further than the Academy tennis courts on a September afternoon.

On Wednesdays and Saturdays this fall, the courts are the site of a Big Red sports gumbo: basketball here, volleyball and water polo there — and, yes, tennis, too. The unlikely menagerie is evidence of perseverance and creativity in an altered landscape that has canceled interscholastic competition but not our student-athletes’ passion for playing.

Most training has been taken outdoors to limit interaction in enclosed spaces. Many winter and spring sports have been added to the fall practice schedule to give athletes from those seasons the opportunity to connect and decompress in between online classes. Strength and conditioning activities and the foundational benefits of exercise have been emphasized in the absence of games. And the camaraderie of being part of a team remains a constant, even without an Exeter/ Andover fall weekend for the first time since 1896.

There will be no wins and losses on the field this fall, but Big Red has proven to be a winner, nonetheless. E

PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHRISTIAN HARRISON AND BRIAN MULDOON

FA L L

20 20

T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N • 2 3

Together Again

24 • T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N

FA L L

20 20

CAMPUS COMMUNIT Y OVERCOME S C H A L L E N G E S T O S TA R T N E W Y E A R

By Patrick Garrity

M

asks might conceal the smiles but they can’t suppress the

joy. Make no mistake: Exeter is back.

Physically distancing, learning remotely and adapting on the fly, certainly, but back together as a campus community after a long spring term and summer break apart because of the pandemic.

Students began a staggered return to campus in early September to start a new academic year.

They found many necessary changes. Most boarding students are living in single-occupancy rooms. Classes are largely being conducted online, with boarders logging on from their dorm rooms and day students from the library.

About 150 students have chosen to study from home for the term.

Meals are offered in grab-and-go options to allow students to dine outdoors or in dorm rooms. Clubs meet virtually, and sports practices have been modified to limit close contact. Assemblies are conducted without actually assembling — in person at least; speakers address the student body each Tuesday and Friday remotely.

And yet, despite all the changes and challenges, campus has crackled to life. Paths and quads and athletic fields buzz. Students have keenly adapted Harkness skills to their Zoom meetings, and our faculty — a spring term of remote teaching now under their belts — have shown off their flexibility and creativity to maintain Exeter’s renowned academic rigor. Music ensembles and dance companies convene outdoors. Science labs venture outside for improvised field trips. Exeter, masked and six feet apart, is still Exeter.

Principal Rawson’s Opening Assembly message clearly was well received: “Though this year will be different as a consequence of the pandemic, our aspirations as a school are the same. … I hope you find joy in all of your activities; in knowing that you belong here; in finding kindred spirits; and in building friendships with those who might seem very different from you,” Principal Rawson said. “I encourage you to focus not on what is currently out of reach because of the pandemic, but on what you can do, here and now, to make the most of every day and every opportunity.”

Clockwise from top left: Dunbar Hall residents bond; day students undergo a round of virus testing; Siona Jain ’22 makes a welcome sign for her Amen Hall dormmates; Health Instructor Liz Hurley puts her Peabody Hall residents through their paces.

P H O T O G R A P H Y B Y P AT R I C K G A R R I T Y, C H R I S T I A N H A R R I S O N , M A R Y S C H W A L M A N D C H R I S T I N A B R E E N

FA L L

20 20

T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N • 2 5

Clockwise from top left: Clyde’s Cupcakes sweetens up the weekend; PEA gear awaits new arrivals; Marymegan Wright ‘21 at Bancroft Hall; Dunbar Hall proctors prep for moving in; Langdell Hall neighbors chat.

26 • T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N

FA L L

20 20

Clockwise from top: Phelps Stadium is converted to a movie theater for one September evening; the Dance Company loosens up on the lawn of the Goel Center; Science Instructor Chris Matlack leads an ecology field trip.

FA L L

20 20

T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N • 27

Top: Physical Education Instructor Bruce Shang talks with proctors outside Webster Hall; Lamont Health and Wellness Center staff check in students for COVID19 testing at Fisher Squash Center.

28 • T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N

FA L L

20 20

Clockwise from top: Principal Rawson ’71; P’08 chats with students in the quad; students grab a meal in an outdoor dining tent; Soule Hall residents play ball on the Academy Building lawn.

FA L L

20 20

T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N • 2 9

A New Take on an Old Tradition P R I N C I PA L B I L L R AWS O N D E L I V E RS O P E N I N G A S S E M B LY REMARKS TO REMOTE AU D I E N C E

By Adam Loyd

30 • T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N

C

ustoms such as Opening Assembly are hallowed at the Academy, 240 years young this fall. As with so many events over the past eight months, the annual tradition required adaptation to accommodate COVID-19 health and safety guidelines.

Instead of addressing a crowded Assembly Hall, Principal Bill Rawson ’71; P’08 ushered in the new year from the steps outside Phillips Hall, speaking to a dozen physically distanced student leaders on the lawn and a virtual audience tuning in from near and far.

Rawson acknowledged that the span of time between the end of winter term — when the 2019-20 academic year was abruptly short-circuited — and the start of school was “a very difficult period of separation” brought on by the global pandemic and compounded by “anti-Black violence and racism that continue to plague this country.”

FA L L

20 20

In his remarks, Rawson remained hopeful, calling on the Exeter community to embrace the opportunity and to support one another like never before.

“We need to be in community now as much as ever, and we will navigate the challenges before us together,” he said. “I believe it will be an important year and a very good year, one that will stand out in our memories because of obstacles overcome and important work accomplished.”

Among the virtual audience, first-year students and those new to Exeter received a special message from the principal. “If you are feeling a little anxious, that is entirely normal, and you likely are not alone,” he said. “Rest assured: You can do the work; you will make lifelong friends; absolutely, you belong here.”

Rawson referenced some of the new campus health and safety protocols, urging the entire community to subscribe to an “unfailing adherence” to the guidelines, calling it “non sibi in action.”

“Wearing a mask, keeping physically distant, washing hands and using hand sanitizer at every opportunity are ways we help protect the health of those around us,” he said.

Rawson also used the address to introduce a revised mission statement for the Academy, developed by a small group of trustees and faculty last year, with language coming directly from the Deed of Gift: to “unite goodness and knowledge and inspire youth from every quarter to lead purposeful lives,” he declared.

Complementing the mission statement, Rawson unveiled five core values — knowledge and goodness, academic excellence, a commitment to youth from every quarter, a recognition that the time of youth is the important period and non sibi — that “reflect the character of our school and the reason that we are all here today.” He encouraged students to “take these words to heart” and to see the mission as “an invitation to open your minds and to seek out new avenues of discovery in all that you pursue here.”

(See page 7 for more on Exeter’s values.)

Rawson also noted that the 2020-21 school year marks the 50th anniversary of the Academy becoming a coeducational institution, a milestone he called “transformative.” Rawson pledged a “renewed commitment” to diversity, equity and inclusion and to becoming an anti-racist school, citing the work as fundamentally important to the Academy’s “educational mission and method.”

“Our DEI work, including our commitment to actively opposing racism and becoming an anti-racist school, is not the work of a few; it is work we all share,” he said. “It is work we must actively do together.”

In his remarks, Rawson harkened back to a line from his first opening-of-school address as principal in 2018, now more applicable than ever: “We are not special simply because we are here.

But because we are here, we have the opportunity to accomplish special things together.” E Top: Principal Rawson delivers his Opening Assembly remarks from the steps of Phillips Hall. Left: Student leaders listen to Rawson’s address.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY PATRICK GARRIT Y

FA L L

20 20

T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N • 31

A Redesigned

3 2 • T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N

FA L L

20 20

Start

INSIDE ACADEMIC LIFE AS THE F A L L T E R M TA K E S S H A P E

By Nicole Pellaton

W

hen History Department Chair Kent McConnell

asked his U.S. History students in September if they were interested in doing small-group projects such as short videos, one boy responded, “I’d love to do anything that will get me outside and off Zoom!” That comment underscores a significant change in the mood and the realities facing the Academy community as the 240th academic year kicked off.

“In the spring our focus was very different. It was about caring concern for the students in that unusual time,” says Science Instructor Alison Hobbie. “Now, it’s how can we find the rigor and find the engagement at a level that keeps them engaged with each other and keeps them engaged with material.”

With online learning still in place for health and safety reasons, faculty and students returned to campus ready to dig in to Harkness dialogue via Zoom. Boarders are logging in from dorms, day students from cubicles in the Academy Library, and students who chose not to or who were unable to return to campus are joining in from around the world.

At press time, a few weeks into fall term, classrooms remained empty but hopes were pinned on being able to start some form of in-person small-group learning soon. We caught up with several faculty members to hear how their classes were going.

SOLUTION FOR AEROSOLS

“We have remade ourselves in a huge way because so much of what we are accustomed to is not OK during this pandemic,” says Kris Johnson, Music Department chair. “We can’t gather singers in a room. We can’t have wind ensembles inside. We can’t have a full, 60-piece symphony orchestra.” To respond to the situation, Johnson and his department colleagues devised a set of 13 academic credit-bearing modules that “blur a little bit about what’s an ensemble versus what’s a class, versus just an experience.” The modules replace traditional ensembles with safer, smaller groups.

They also include many topics that have never been offered before, including Electronic Music Composer’s Collective (EMCC), Music of Protest, Ensemble Leadership, Contemporary Music Listening and Music Theater Workshop.

Students may take as many modules as can fit into their schedules, and sign-ups show that they are loving these options.

Participation in ensembles (including the new ensemble-based modules) has increased by 40% over last year. Some of the new topics are “exploding,” says Johnson, citing EMCC, which starts the term with two-week segments focusing on hip-hop, meditative music and electronic dance music.

More than 60 students are signed up Science Instructor Alison for EMCC, which is taught in several Hobbie records a lab on sections by Eric Schultz, Exeter’s her mobile phone.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHRISTIAN HARRISON

FA L L

20 20

T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N • 33

first director of electronic and emerging music, a teaching position that was enabled when the Class of 1959 Music Center Addition opened in 2017 with a high-tech Music Media and Technology Suite.

Students continue to sign up for one-on-one Zoom private lessons and are finding ways to leverage the technology to experiment with microphones and use recordings for playback and review. Jazz Ensemble moved into a class block this year and has garnered 25 students, “a phenomenal number,” Johnson says.

Concert Choir and Chamber Orchestra continue to operate, with the choir holding outdoor rehearsals under a tent installed on the Academy Building lawn.

“Students will be wearing surgical masks. They’ll get fresh masks for each rehearsal. We’ll limit rehearsals to 30 minutes in small cohorts and then have a time for clearing the air. Singers will be physically distant.

There’s a raft of things to take care of [regarding] student safety, but they will be singing,” Johnson says.

The Bowld, Exeter’s recently constructed concert hall, which has eight air changes per hour, will also hold smaller, socially distanced rehearsals for the Chamber Orchestra. “We will be doing things safely in the building, just not things that generate potentially dangerous aerosols like singing and woodwind playing,” Johnson says.

During fall and winter terms, students will also have the opportunity to collaborate with American composer Tanner Porter on her creation of an original piece to honor Exeter’s 50th anniversary of coeducation. “Her compositional voice is cross-genre. It incorporates both style and currency that our students will respond to very positively,” Johnson says. A performance is planned for spring 2021.

PUSHING THE FULCRUM

“In science we’re always trying to balance the amount of content we are providing and the time we spend on problem-solving skills, scientific thinking skills [and] justifying an argument using evidence,” says Alison Hobbie, who is teaching four sections of Accelerated Chemistry, a class that covers two years of chemistry and prepares students for the AP exam.

“This term, because of constraints of contact with students and methods of assessment, I’m pushing that fulcrum a little bit,” she says. “A little bit less content and a little bit more skills, especially in terms of assessment.” Hobbie is changing the balance carefully because there is much that students need to master. “I want them to know what’s going to happen when I mix two things together — if I’m going to get a precipitate, or if it’s going to be bubbles, or if it’s going to blow up and they should run away.”

At least for now, labs are virtual. “The real loss

34 • T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N

is that I don’t have students in the classroom touching things. That is huge,” Hobbie says. She worked with Anthony Fuda, chemistry lab coordinator, to videotape all the 300- and 400-level chemistry labs. But she remains hopeful: “If all goes well, we might be able to have a small group of students working in the lab and maybe they have lab partners who are on Zoom and they can be engaging with them one-on-one.”

For the start of the term, Hobbie meets with the entire class synchronously twice a week. “I’m trying to figure out ways to have a lot of synchronous time because in science it’s really valuable to be able to talk through a problem, solve together, be able to hear each other’s thinking,” she says. Hobbie has split each class into two teams. During the asynchronous blocks, one team does selfstudy, such as balancing equations on their own. “The other team is meeting with me, and we are going over a little lab that they looked at for homework. They will work first with partners, and then as a small group of six, to come up with an analysis. …

That will give them enough information to complete the lab on their own.” The next week, the teams “flip-flop.”

Hobbie is eager to return to her pre-pandemic ability to “gauge the temperature of the room.” “It’s such a joy with Harkness to see the eye contact and the body language and know, all right, we got this.

Or, it looks like we need to hold off a little bit, spend a little bit more time,” she says. In the meantime, she is creating assessments that help flag when students want or need curricular help. Students may submit ungraded assessments along with assignments indicating whether or not they felt prepared. Tests will have more open-ended questions and will provide opportunities for students to describe their process.

“Maybe little videos that they send me at the end of a test … three minutes talking about problem number seven, and how they worked through it,” she says.

Hobbie is ready to respond to the students’ hunger for connection and challenge. “Students are in a different place than they were through the spring,” she says. “Many are carrying some trauma. Many are carrying sadness. But most are also carrying real excitement to be back, either back here or back in

FA L L

20 20

a way that feels different, feels more engaged, feels more energized.”

THE HISTORICAL LENS

McConnell knew he wanted to change his approach to creating intellectual engagement in his classes this term, Salem Witch Trials: A Global History of Witchcraft and United States History, Colonial Origins to 1861. “At the table, the idea of exploration and experimentation with ideas is present because it’s a corporate thing, and the teacher has a lot of ability to encourage this pursuit of knowledge,” he says. “Last spring it was very clear that in isolation students struggled with that.”

This fall, students will spend more time exploring digital materials during their asynchronous blocks.

These materials will be more diverse than in previous sessions of the class, and will include geographic information system (GIS) maps, photos of historic artifacts, and texts from museum and historical archives.

“I’m going to ask them to look at picture artifacts or texts that are not in context. They’ll know they’re in context of the era we’re studying, but they’ll have

FA L L

20 20

to make sense of them,” Music Department Chair McConnell explains. “I will Kris Johnson says new music also use discussion boards modules are “exploding” with in which I give very specific student enrollment this term. questions for students to consider, which is quite the opposite of what you do in a Harkness class. It’s a much more directed type of approach when it’s asynchronous.”

McConnell aims for high energy in the synchronous Zoom meetings. “There seems to be more resilience and more of a sense of ‘we can make this work,’” he says. “It’s better than it was last spring. … It’s more democratic or more widespread conversation.” He typically starts classes with “general questions oriented toward subjects that I want the students to talk through. … In a physical Harkness session, I wouldn’t be as specific or guiding. I might at times, but not constantly. I’m hoping that a little bit of that can come back to our Harkness discussions that are synchronous.”

McConnell has revised assessments and assignments, partly due to shorter synchronous class time,

T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N • 3 5

but also because, like many faculty members, he seeks the direct involvement of students in the selection of course deliverables, to ensure excitement and connection. Tests are out. Small-group projects, including documentaries or TEDx-style videos, are in. Readings are reduced. Papers, presented to the class for group discussion, and online discussion boards form more of the assignments.

“I want students to have enthusiasm about what they’re doing, especially during the pandemic, where the last thing I want to do is make education yet another stress and burden for them,” McConnell says.

“I want students to know that I recognize the conditions they’re in, that I’m flexible, that they’ll do work but I think that the work needs to be fun to some level.

It should be arduous for sure. It shouldn’t be beyond what they can achieve, but it should stretch them.”

The global witchcraft course, for example, has undergone significant restructuring. The Salem component has been lengthened and, for the first time, it will be co-taught by McConnell and Benjamin

English Instructor Patty Burke Hickey encourages preps to “be brave and take chances with ideas.”

36 • T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N

C. Ray, emeritus professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, author of several articles and a book on Salem, and a longtime research collaborator with McConnell. “Students will not only get a chance to interact with a scholar who has dedicated 20 years or so [to Salem], but they’ll also have the opportunity to ask him questions,” McConnell says. Students will dive deeply into themes of ostracism and violence.

They will use the Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project, a website hosted by the University of Virginia and originated by Ray, as a major research tool. They will also be able to post their own research to the site, for which McConnell is the faculty curator.

“What I like to do is really problematize Salem,” McConnell says. “I try to get students to wrestle with this history, which has this large dialogue with what we’re living today, but try to isolate it to the point of getting it to individuals. As the lives of individuals come into view, students begin to understand the social forces at play and how certain beliefs shaped the decisions that were made. Soon, they recognize that some of the causative forces shaping the

FA L L

20 20

decisions made in the past are still alive and well today.”

McConnell adds, “My whole modus of teaching is to present conditions in which the student is almost ensnarled or entrapped in a way that they can’t help but develop some sense of sympathy, and hopefully empathy, for the historical past.”

software, utilizing discussion boards, hyperlinks to multimedia, and tools such as Loom and Flipgrid, both video-based interfaces designed to encourage conversation among groups. Students log in to see Burke Hickey’s friendly avatar describe assignments, define expectations and guide them through the Canvas sites.

CARING FOR NEW PREPS

Exeter opened with a staggered schedule: Uppers and seniors returned to campus in early September, with preps and lowers following in early October. While this afforded valuable weeks to safely roll out and adjust protocols with half of the students, it deferred the campus experience for preps. A big concern for Patty Burke Hickey, coordinator of the English curriculum for ninth graders, was helping these newest Exonians feel part of the community.

“I love ninth graders because they have so much energy and they’re so excited to be here,” Burke Hickey says. “Designing the ninth grade courses this year was about making them feel like they were almost here during the first few weeks of the term” and transitioning them smoothly after they arrived on campus.

This year’s warm welcome extended to re-creating some of the traditional new-student experiences, such as the live Harkness discussion with seniors that typically takes place on a stage as preps watch. The English Department filmed a discussion in Zoom, illustrating how Harkness interactions occur online; new students were able to watch it independently from home.

Burke Hickey projects positive vibes — “Whatever I bring to the class, they feel,” she says — and works to create engagement among the students and with the class materials as quickly as possible. For the first day of classes, she used a storytelling game to get the students interacting with each other. At the start of each class, the students take time to check in with one another, share experiences and ask questions.

“I want them to feel that I’ve created a space that allows them to be brave and take some chances with ideas,” Burke Hickey says. “And to not feel as if they’ve always got to come up with the perfect answer. The questions and the wondering are what lead them to genuine learning.”

After taking classes this summer in online course design, she created interactive, navigation-friendly sites on Canvas, the Academy’s online learning

FA L L

20 20

During the asynchronous History Department Chair blocks, Burke Hickey invites Kent McConnell invites his students to meet with her students to “wrestle” with one-on-one if they have history this term. questions about homework: “Part of planning the online courses this term for me is using the asynchronous work time to get them ready to make the most out of the synchronous time and really work on Harkness discussions via Zoom.”

For added academic support, all preps, lowers and uppers will have the same English teacher in fall and winter term, to protect what Burke Hickey calls the “arc of their learning.” “It is going to be really important to their sense of community and continuity. And it will help them move forward as writers, as readers, and with their discussion skills on Zoom, until we can get them in the classroom.” E

T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N • 37

Laugh Tr ack LEWIS/NEW YORK TIMES

Greg Daniels ’81 in his office when “The Office” was on the air.

3 8 • T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N

FA L L

20 20

T

he genius of Greg Daniels ’81 is how he makes everyday life funny, absurdly funny. Just consider the Emmy Award-winning writer’s first big television credit: “The Parking Space,” which aired in April 1992, during season three of the sitcom “Seinfeld.” After hours of searching, main character George Costanza finally finds a prime parking spot in front of Jerry’s building in New York City.

But just as he tries to back in, another car pulls up and starts to nose into the space first.

The two drivers remain in deadlock all day, neither budging. In itself, it’s not a funny

FLIPPING THE SCRIPT WITH TELEVISION WRITER, D I R E C TO R A N D P R O D U C E R G R E G DA N I E L S ’8 1

By Jennifer Wagner

scenario. But in Daniels’ deft hands, it’s side-splitting. The 57-year-old’s particular brand of character comedy makes us laugh and also feel. The whole scene is pathetically relatable. And that’s because it actually happened to Daniels’ dad, Aaron.

Aaron Daniels’ daily commute took him between the family’s garage-less apartment in the city and New Jersey, where he was the sales manager of WPAT radio station. Greg recalls the night of the parking incident like it was yesterday and delivers its retelling in his signature style: dry, deadpan and satirical. “They get into this locked conflict and they were there for hours,” he says. “My dad flagged down a friend of his [who] was walking by and had him tell my mom so that my mom could bring my dad dinner in his car. He didn’t get the spot; after four hours he had to give up. When he got home, he woke me up and made me memorize the license plate so that if I ever saw the car, I could pop the tires.”

Daniels’ dad wasn’t just fodder for his son’s jokes, he was critic, fan and beta tester.

“He had an act that he would do at the yearly meeting of his company — it was his version of Johnny Carson’s Carnac [the Magnificent] called Aaronac, and so I wrote jokes for him,” says Daniels, who drew on this memory when he adapted the British mockumentary series “The Office” for American audiences. “In ‘The Office’ there’s an Aaronac joke where Michael is preparing to do something for the Dundies. He tells the same joke that I wrote for my dad when I was 14.”

“Greg was always both serious and funny — and serious about being funny,” says fellow Exonian and elementary school friend Mark Sussman ’81. “I find that a number of his perceptions and observations on the world crop up from time to time in his work for television, from references to ’70s pop music albums or movies to certain pranks pulled by teenage boys spending summers in Long Island.”

Writing from life is a common technique for TV writers, Daniels says. “There’s a lot of volume involved in television, so if you have a good story, you put it right in there.

That way, you’re not copying other shows, you’re taking the stories from your lives.”

Indeed, Daniels has built a career recasting his personal life as comedy. After a short run working on “Not Necessarily the News” and “Saturday Night Live,” he spent the next 30 years writing, producing and directing comedy scripts for popular and long-running TV shows including “The Simpsons,” “King of the Hill,” “The Office” and “Parks and Recreation.”

This year, he brings two new shows to the small screen: “Upload,” a futuristic mystery comedy about a character who dies and is uploaded onto a virtual afterlife

FA L L

20 20

T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N • 3 9

AMAZON STUDIOS

program, and the Netflix series “Space Force,” created with actor Steve Carell about the sixth branch of the armed forces, the United States Space Force.

While “Upload” is Daniels’ first foray into science fiction, the story is solidly grounded in the deep and thoughtful real-life musings he put to paper in the 1980s after considering compact discs. “At the time, there was a lot of stuff about analog versus digital, so I was just thinking, what’s the craziest thing you can digitize?” he says. “Well, I guess you could digitize yourself and you could live on a computer.” Taking the idea one step further, he imagines not just digital people, but a digital heaven. “It just felt like it was an interesting topic because when you think about heaven, you think about living forever in some pleasant way, and there’s also this notion of justice. If other people are making the heaven, you don’t have that notion of justice really because they’re going to do what they do when they make our society here.”

“The Harkness experience is incredibly valuable, just to have practice sitting around the table with other people and speaking up and listening and participating. I use it every day.”

D ALAMY

4 0 • T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N

aniels attended an all-boys elementary school in New York City and was “pretty nerdy,” he says. “If there were little cliques that you could be a part of, mine was the one that came to school doing Monty Python voices. That was a thing that people did when I was 12.” One of his favorite sketches by the 1970s British comedy group was “The Knights of Ni.” And yes, he can still recite a few lines by heart. “We want … a shrubbery!”

When he arrived at Exeter his lower year in late 1978 there were no televisions. He didn’t even have a radio. He had to make his own entertainment. “We were a little bit entertainment starved while we were students,” Daniels says. “And I think that made us try [to] suck whatever entertainment juice we could get out of the classics that we were studying.” English instructors like Norval Rindfleisch made a lasting impression on the teen. “He was a big proponent of finding emotional stories from father-son relationships,” Daniels says. “I later used a lot of stuff that I learned from him, in terms of what kind of stories to tell. The first time I ran my own show, a show called ‘King of the Hill,’ the central dynamic is between a father and a son. I used to think about Mr. Rindfleisch a lot during that show.”

Friends say Daniels often doodled cartoons on a napkin or scrap of paper and added hidden witticisms to the pages of The Exonian. “I didn’t have a humor column like Russell Baker,” he says. “I put jokes

FA L L

20 20

ALAMY ALAMY

in all the calendar events.”

Daniels graduated from Exeter in 1981 and went on to Harvard, where he wrote for the Harvard Lampoon humor magazine and met a longtime collaborator, comedian Conan O’Brien. After they graduated with bachelor’s degrees in history and literature, Daniels and O’Brien moved to Los Angeles. They had heard that a new show, “Not Necessarily the News,” was hiring writers. “We were working as temps,” Daniels recalls. “But we wrote a packet of sample material and they hired us for three weeks. We split a salary because we were a team.” The pair eventually got a nineweek contract and felt secure enough to purchase a car. “We bought a car from a rental company called Rent-a-Wreck,” Daniels says. “You have to imagine that when Rent-a-Wreck is done with your car, it’s in bad shape.

There was a big hole in the floorboards. You could look at the street going by underneath.”

That early work on “Not Necessarily the News” gained Daniels and O’Brien acceptance into the esteemed Writers Guild and led to new opportunities, including a career-launching interview with Lorne Michaels of “Saturday Night Live.” “We probably blew the interview badly,” Daniels says. “We were just kind of like bushy-tailed nerds.”

Apparently, Michaels liked the bushy-tailed nerds, because Daniels spent the next three years in New York writing for “SNL.” O’Brien moved on to “The Simpsons,” but left the show just as Daniels arrived in 1993. Daniels describes his experience on the animated series as “super fun when everybody’s contributing and the work is good,” but also “stressful.” At those times, he kept one image in his mind: a Weeble. “Weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down,” he says, repeating the childhood toy’s jingle. “I would say my joke and the boss would go, ‘Nope, that stinks.’ And I’d throw out another joke.”

FA L L

20 20

GETTY IMAGES

T

hen and now, Daniels spends most of his day-to-day in a comedy writer’s room. Although the conversations are currently occurring over Zoom from his California home rather than in person, the collaborative process remains much the same as what he experienced at Exeter. “I’m probably living the same life that I lived in 11th grade,” he quips. “Just the snacks have changed. There’s a lot more Trader Joe’s now.” More seriously, he likens the writing process to a Harkness discussion. “There may be six or 12 writers all in the same room, all around a table. We’re pitching stories, we’re breaking stories, we’re rewriting and we’re talking about themes, we’re talking about characters,” he says. “It’s a lot like an English class.”

In this way, over the course of a 35-year career, Daniels has developed some 600 half-hour television episodes. “That’s a lot of pages to fill,” he says. “The Harkness experience is incredibly valuable, just to have practice sitting around the table with other people and speaking up and listening and participating. I use it every day.”

Another memorable takeaway from his time at the Academy came from Hammy Bissell ’29 following a squash match. Bissell was retired at the time, but he remained a fixture in the gym, coaching club squash and acting as the team’s unofficial cheerleader and mentor. “He said to me, ‘When somebody else comes into the court and you’re playing them, and if they are really good, you start to try [to] do the shots that they’re really good at. Don’t do that. Just do what you’re good at. Play your own game.’ I thought that was really good advice. I think about that a lot.” E

TV Guide: Daniels has written, directed and produced comedy scripts for popular shows (opposite page) “Upload” and “The Simpsons,” and (from top) “King of the Hill,” “The Office” and “Parks and Recreation.”

T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N • 41

D

In this Issue 44 Her History 47 Firsts for Females 48 Trailblazers 54 Pioneers

uring a meeting of the Golden Branch Debate Society, an Exeter upper named Joseph Harwood argued that “coeducation raises the standard of scholarship, secures better order, and enables each sex to more fully appreciate the worth of the other. The question is one of custom and privilege against justice and right.”

That debate occurred on March 13, 1897.

It took more than seven decades for the argument to be won, for Phillips Exeter Academy to open its doors to girls and embrace the merits of coeducation. When 39 young women walked into Academy classrooms and brought their voices to the table in the fall of 1970, Exeter took a decisive step in its mission to embrace “youth from every quarter.”

In these pages and in coming issues of The Exeter Bulletin, we reflect on the past 50 years and appreciate how this pivotal decision forever changed our school. We honor the grit and fortitude it took to make Exeter a better place, starting with those who lived history as it happened: the students and instructors of those first years of coeducation.

Yesterday A RT

I L LUST R AT I O N S

BY

ASA KO

M ASU N O U C H I

50 Y E A RS O F C O E D U CAT I O N AT E X E T E R

Her History KEY HISTORIC EVENTS F R O M E A R LY I N T H E C O E D U C AT I O N T I M E L I N E

Compiled by Patrick Garrity

Andre Vernet in 1972

Are we to become the school for the boys who cannot be sent to a coed prep school?”

—Andre Vernet, instructor in modern languages, October 1969

A six-person Academic Planning Committee presents a recommendation to admit up to 250 girls in grades 11 and 12 within two years.

Trustees reject recommendation.

The Exeter Bulletin publishes results of a survey of students, faculty and alumni. On the subject of coeducation, students (88 percent) and faculty (77 percent) express strong support.

JAN 1965

DEC 1965

JAN 1969

Strongly in Favor

JULY 3, 1961

MAR 1, 1969

Summer Session Leads Way In 1961, Exeter Summer Session admits 13 girls as day students. The following summer, a record enrollment of 237 students includes 62 girls.

There is a lot to do before we take on coeducation.”

—Principal Richard Day, in announcing the Trustees’ decision to reject a faculty committee recommendation to admit girls, Dec. 13, 1965

Task Force Convened The Trustees appoint a committee of Trustees, faculty, alumni and students “to carry out a thorough study of the mixed education of boys and girls at Exeter.”

It would not be the tradition of this school to wait until everybody else had done it and then say it was the thing to do.”

—Donald Cole, instructor in history and member of faculty committee studying coeducation, October 1969

4 4 • T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N

FA L L

20 20

Y E S T E R D AY

BRADFORD HERZOG

People feel there is a manly toughness about Exeter that would be lost if girls were admitted. ...

This is not a tradition to be cherished.”

—Eric Gronningsater ‘70, managing editor of The Exonian, Nov. 8, 1969

First Boarders Transform Campus

Coeducation Ushers in New Era School opens with 891 students, including 39 girls.

Classes begin with 81 female boarders among the 128 girls enrolled. Bancroft and Hoyt halls are established as the first two girls dormitories.

SEPT 15, 1970

SEPT 14, 1971

FEB 27, 1970 Trustees Vote to Admit Girls On a Friday afternoon, the Trustees announce that Phillips Exeter Academy will admit girls starting in the fall.

The vote is 16-0.

Let people say of this year that it was a happy one, a year in which we grew in awareness and understanding of each other, in which we made a fundamental change with wisdom and foresight.”

—Principal Richard Day, Opening Assembly, Sept. 15, 1970

Six Women Join the Faculty The school year begins with 15 new faculty members, including Carol Ann Block (Music), Deborah Devecchi (Math), Nancy Jackson (English), Jane Scarborough (History), Karen Timmer (Physical Education) and Roslyn Grant (Modern Languages), who was also Exeter's first Black female teacher.

Roslyn Grant in 1972

FA L L

2 0 2 0

T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N • 4 5

50 Y E A RS O F C O E D U CAT I O N AT E X E T E R

Coeducation will somewhat mollify the coarseness that a boarding school like Exeter might tend to create, and will evoke a more natural environment.”

—Jane Scarborough, instructor in history, November 1971

New Tradition for Oldest Rivalry Girls teams compete in the annual Exeter-Andover rivalry for the first time, with Big Red falling to the Blue in girls soccer and field hockey.

NOV 7, 1973 OCT 20, 1971

DEC 20, 1973

Big Red Romps to Win

Strides Toward Equality

Captain Holly Kistler ’72 scores four goals, and Liz Berman ’72 adds three more as the Exeter girls field hockey squad romps to its historic first victory, 13-0 over Cardinal Cushing.

Three years after opening its doors to girls, the Academy reports the boy-girl ratio at PEA is 3:1.

Exeter field hockey game in 1971

To see the full coeducation timeline, visit exeter.edu/coeducation.

4 6 • T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N

FA L L

20 20

Y E S T E R D AY

Firsts for Females First Faculty SEPT 5, 1968 The school year begins with the Academy’s first full-time female faculty member, Anne W. Cunningham, instructor in mathematics.

First Graduates JUNE 5, 1971 Nine girls are among the 183 seniors who take part in Commencement exercises, becoming the first girls to be granted diplomas from Phillips Exeter Academy in the school’s 190 years.

First Trustee NOV 11, 1972 Mary Patterson McPherson, a dean at Bryn Mawr College, is the first woman appointed to the Board of Trustees. McPherson is the first non-alumnus to become a Trustee in a hundred years.

First Awarded Top Rank JUNE 6, 1974 Harriet Sue Schwartz becomes the first girl to receive the Faculty Excellence Award (student of first rank), and six other girls are the first to graduate after attending the Academy for four years.

FA L L

2 0 2 0

T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N • 47

50 Y E A RS O F C O E D U CAT I O N AT E X E T E R

Trailblazers T H E F I R S T G I R L S AT E X E T E R

By Sarah Pruitt ‘95

Gloria (Bilson) Nagel ’75 never felt so foreign as the day she stepped onto Exeter’s campus, located less than 10 miles from her home in Hampton, New Hampshire. It was the fall of 1971, and Nagel was one of just 10 girls who arrived to begin their prep year.

Y E S T E R D AY

“I

Gloria (Bilson) Nagel '75 in 1971 and today.

Hampshire, before deciding to spend her senior year at Exeter. “A lot of the faculty knew me from growing up there, so that was part of the experience,” Fleischmann says. “It was sort of like coming home in a weird way.”

HER PERSPECTIVE

Fleischmann found the experience of being one of only a handful of girls “awkward,” but not too disconcerting, as she had three brothers and was used to being outnumbered. “I was very comfortable being around boys, actually maybe more so than around girls, so I don’t think I felt quite as on display as some of the others did.”

“Most of the time my point of view was welcomed,” adds Lanton. “Other times it was discounted by some of the teachers, [and] you could tell where their vote was on the issue of admitting girls.”

In those earliest years of coeducation, Nagel, like

BRADFORD HERZOG

didn’t realize how few of us girls there would be until I was actually there,” Nagel says.

Her mother had heard about the school going coed the previous year and mailed in her daughter’s application for her.

“It was much like stepping onto Mars,” Nagel adds.

“We were a curiosity, an attraction, an oddity, an experiment, and a foreign species, and in those early days, [we] certainly felt like one.”

Thirty-nine girls had entered the Academy Building a year earlier, filing in under the Latin words inscribed over the front entrance: “HUC VENITE PUERI UT VIRI SITIS,” or “Come hither, boys, that ye may become men.” Nine girls graduated in the spring of 1971, out of a senior class of more than 200.

Linda Lanton ’74 also arrived on campus that fall of 1971, one of 128 girls (including the first 81 female boarders) enrolled for the coming school year. As a new lower from Memphis, Tennessee, she had been recruited to Exeter by A Better Chance, a Boston-based organization that aimed to place academically talented students of color in high-achieving schools.

A couple of months after unpacking her steamer trunk — “I had everything I owned in there” — in her room in Bancroft, Lanton joined her fellow students in moving books from the old Davis Library (now the Davis Center) into the newly opened Academy Library designed by Louis Kahn. “I remember walking into the center of that huge magnificent space in the middle, with its bold geometric shapes,” she recalls. “It was elegant in its simplicity, but it [was] a library with stacks of bookshelves.” Lanton resolved in that moment that she wanted to become an architect. “I wanted to know how to do something that impacts people the way [the library] impacted me.”

Nagel also remembers moving books as part of the “human chain” that transported some 60,000 volumes from the old library to the new one. As a day student, she was then assigned a carrel in the Academy Library, but also spent a lot of time in the day student girls lounge, set up in one of the girls dorms.

Ellen Fleischmann ’72 was another new arrival in 1971, but she was no stranger to Exeter’s campus. Her father had taught history and coached football at the Academy; the family lived in Dunbar Hall, and Fleischmann remembers playing foursquare with the dorm boys as a kid. The family moved away when she was a young teenager, and she attended high school at the Kent School, in Connecticut, and a public high school in Meredith, New

FA L L

20 20

T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N • 4 9

50 Y E A RS O F C O E D U CAT I O N AT E X E T E R

Lanton and Fleischmann, often found herself the only girl around the Harkness table. “I remember sitting there, and then all of a sudden there would be a silent pause, and inevitably either the teacher or one of the boys would say, ‘Well, let’s hear from the female perspective,’” she says. “And all eyes would turn to me.”

Nagel says she and other female students sensed in those moments “that what we would have to say would be credited to half the world’s population. … While this may have caused us to be more thoughtful before speaking, it also bred in us a bold confidence to speak our mind and impose our voice in those early years.

The culture of the early 1970s was loud with feminist voices promoting equal rights for women, but we were living it, every day.”

“It's the kind of place that's populated by so many bright people that you want to rise to the occasion ... .”

Lanton recounts one experience with a male English teacher, a Shakespeare expert, who took her to task for her diction and threatened her with a demerit every time she mispronounced a word. Lanton accepted the challenge, performing a flawless soliloquy from Henry IV that earned her a round of applause from her classmates and a perfect score from the teacher. “Exeter demands excellence from you,” she says. “It’s the kind of place that’s populated by so many bright people that you want to rise to the occasion, because it’s the standard.”

Linda Lanton '74 in 1974 and today with her son, Franklin K. Galloway '97.

As for the boys, they seemed to welcome the arrival of girls — in their own way. “They were extremely polite, as if they had guests,” Lanton says. Nagel remembers having boys offer to carry her books between classes, or pull her chair out for her in the dining hall.

HER CONFIDENCE

BRADFORD HERZOG

Nagel and other day student girls felt singled out in a more negative way during the ninth-grade physical education program. They were automatically placed in the lowest-level group, despite scoring in the 90th percentile on the physical challenges they were given to assess ability. “They had us doing some kind of calisthenics, or simple gymnastics,” she recalls. “I remember the forward roll, specifically, because the girls were the only ones in our group who could do them.”

Nagel decided to speak up. “I felt strongly that I should be placed where I scored, just like any other student,” she recalls. She argued her case to Ted Seabrooke, then chair of the Physical Education Department and coach of wrestling and lacrosse. He agreed to place the girls in the advanced group for the rest of the term.

“Our little band of girls summoned all the grit we had beyond our teeth to run obstacle courses, stadium steps, play basketball, lacrosse, baseball, ice hockey, swim, and even wrestle in classes with the best male athletes in our class,” Nagel says. “We failed abysmally ... but we never quit. We stuck it out and fought hard every day to do our best in spite of what others might think.”

50 • T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N

FA L L

20 20

Y E S T E R D AY

Inspired by the experience, Nagel went on to play varsity soccer, squash and track. “In the early days, it was pretty much whoever wanted to sign up could make the team,” she says. She and her teammates played full seasons in all three sports, competing against schools like Pinkerton Academy, the Tilton School, St. Paul’s School (which went coed in 1971) and Abbot Academy, the girls school that would merge with Andover in 1973.

Lanton came to Exeter as an athlete, having played soccer and basketball and run track in Memphis. After seeing her run, track coaches Bucky Bruce and Ralph Lovshin asked her to practice with the boys. “If Bucky thought I was falling behind too much, he would start yelling, ‘What do you think we’re doing here, playing patty-cake?’” she says. “He never cut me any slack just because I was practicing with the boys.”

“We stuck it out and fought hard every day to do our best in spite of what others might think.”

Lanton’s speed in events such as the 100-yard dash, 220-yard dash, and 4 x 440 relay earned her the nickname “Flash,” though others at Exeter still called her by her childhood moniker, “Puncan” (the Southern pronunciation of “pumpkin”).

Fleischmann wasn’t interested in team sports, but she did start practicing yoga while at Exeter, and took advantage of a newly introduced physical education program called Outdoor Challenge. Rather than take

FA L L

20 20

gym class, she learned first aid, hiked and rappelled on the big boulders at Pawtuckaway State Park in nearby Nottingham.

In addition to athletics, Nagel participated in Glee Club and joined a new fencing club, started by a friend of hers. She also remembers taking part in the poetry troupe run by Dolores Kendrick, future poet laureate of the District of Columbia. Kendrick arrived at the Academy in the fall of 1972 as one of the school’s first Black female instructors. “She was very cutting edge, avant-garde,” says Nagel of Kendrick. “She brought poems written by Black artists and set them to movement, and we would perform them as a group in a combination of lyrical dance and poetry.”

Later in life, Nagel relied on the discussion-based classroom methods she first saw around the Harkness table in her work as a teacher of humanities, including poetry, performance and drama, to middle and high school students. “Maybe some Dolores Kendrick rubbed off on me,” she says with a laugh.

Dolores Kendrick, instructor in English, in 1972.

T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N • 51

50 Y E A RS O F C O E D U CAT I O N AT E X E T E R

HER STRENGTH

Ellen Fleischmann '71 in 1971 and today.

Fleischmann, now a history professor at the University of Dayton specializing in the history of the Middle East, believes Exeter was the place that — in some unconscious way — served as the foundation for her becoming an academic scholar. “I feel like what I learned there was how to learn,” she says. “I was not very directed or focused, but I could be, and I think Exeter tapped into those parts of me that could have been at that time.”

Lanton did end up studying architecture at Cornell, but after getting her MBA she started working in finance, where there were more job opportunities. She later went back for her law degree at Boston University and began working in international mergers and acquisitions for Motorola. Drawing on her desire to combine knowledge and goodness for the benefit of others, she now consults for clients in the health care industry.

“My ultimate goal is to have some meaningful impact in the field of mental health, and to make some major contributions that will benefit patients,” she says.

Anne Marden ’76 started at Exeter as a new lower from Concord, Massachusetts, in January 1974. By that time, the school’s boy-girl ratio had reached 3-to-1. She initially lived in Bancroft, where she and her three roommates crammed their beds into one room and used the other as a “studying room.” Still uncertain of her place at the Academy, Marden at first gravitated to friends she met from the town of Exeter, who reminded her more of the kids she had hung out with back in Concord.

For her upper year, Marden moved to Lamont, which had become a girls dorm with only single rooms.

“Eventually you find your way to the people whom you connect with,” she says of the older girls she met there.

Despite hanging out in the butt room a lot, these dorm mates were also serious about their studies and proved to be a point of inspiration for Marden. She began to apply herself more to not only her academics but also rowing, which she had picked up during her lower spring as a “lark.”

“Eventually you find your way to the people whom you connect with.”

BRADFORD HERZOG

With the guidance of Sharon Vaissiere, a celebrated rower from Boston University who coached the girls varsity crew in 1974 and ’75, Marden began training seriously on her own, including running and lifting weights.

She bonded with Kendrick, who took an interest in her writing, and with Anja Bankoski, a new teacher in the Math Department who took over as coach after Vaissiere left, despite having no experience with rowing. “I think it was really hard for the female teachers there,” Marden says.

“They were really brave.”

Bankoski, later known as Anja Greer, would go on to found a summer math conference at the Academy for high school teachers that bears her name today.

It was during Marden’s years at Exeter, she says, that she “started really developing the habits as an athlete that propelled me to the Olympics.”

After rowing at Princeton, Marden competed in three Olympics, winning silver medals in the quadruple sculls in Los Angeles in 1984 and the

52 • T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N

FA L L

20 20

Y E S T E R D AY

was far more supportive of her academic ambitions. Like Nagel, Taylor-Butler had accumulated enough credits by the middle of her senior year to graduate early, and she took that opportunity.

Now an award-winning author of children’s literature with some 65 books to her credit, Taylor-Butler has drawn on her experiences as one of Exeter’s earliest Black female students to push back against cultural unawareness in the publishing industry. “Exeter taught me to advocate for myself a little harder,” she says. “If you ask, would I do it again, the answer is yes.”

Anne Marden '76 in 1976 and today.

single sculls in Seoul in 1988 — the latter while working in finance at J.P. Morgan in New York and London.

Christine Taylor-Butler ’77 came to Exeter as a new lower in the fall of 1974. A self-described “free-range kid” from Cleveland, Ohio, she immediately chafed at Exeter’s rules governing student behavior, many of which she saw as arbitrary.

As a Black student on a partial scholarship, TaylorButler felt tensions around both race and class at Exeter.

“They expected people to be grateful for the gift of being there,” she says. While she wanted to try sports like squash and rowing, coaches kept steering her toward basketball. “My application says I go to the art museum and the library for fun, and I ride a unicycle,” she says she remembers thinking. “Where did you get basketball?”

This was only one of multiple “microaggressions” that Taylor-Butler experienced at Exeter, although she says she wouldn’t have known to use that term at the time.

One of the worst occurred during the college application process, when she told her college counselor she wanted to apply to MIT. “He said, ‘You don’t have any chance of getting in there,’” she recalls. “‘Why don’t you set your sights a little lower?’”

Taylor-Butler enjoyed proving him wrong: She ended up getting in early to MIT, thanks in part to a recommendation from her science teacher, Charles Compton, who

“Exeter taught me to advocate for myself a little harder.”

HER IMPACT

As Nagel, Lanton, Fleischmann, Marden and TaylorButler navigated their way through the early years of coeducation at Exeter, they did so against a backdrop of the feminist movement, and the debate over the Equal Rights Amendment, which passed both houses of Congress by 1972 but would fail to win ratification by the states. Despite this, none of the five women seems to have viewed herself as a feminist trailblazer at the time. “My daughter always says to me, ‘Mom, I’m so proud of you for being one of the first,’” Nagel says. “But for me it was just life. It was just school — just what I did.”

All five were humble about the role they played in paving the way for later generations of girls at Exeter — including mine.

By the fall of 1991, when I began my prep year at Exeter, male and female enrollment at the school was approaching a 50/50 split. Kendra Stearns O’Donnell was in the middle of her tenure as the school’s 12th principal, the first woman to hold that post, and Carmen Stewart ’92 had become the first girl elected as president of Student Council the previous spring.

My graduation year of 1995 marked the 25th anniversary of coeducation, and the following year, the Academy Building’s façade got a long-overdue update. Above the entrance, a second Latin inscription now reads “HIC QUAERITE PUERI PUELLAEQUE VIRTUTEM ET SCIENTIAM,” or “Here, boys and girls, seek goodness and knowledge.” E

Christine Taylor-Butler ’77 in 1976 and today.

FA L L

20 20

T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N • 53

50 Y E A RS O F C O E D U CAT I O N AT E X E T E R

Pioneers

T H E F A C U LT Y M E M B E R S W H O O P E N E D THE DOORS FOR OTHERS

By Sandra Guzmรกn

Phillips Exeter Academy Trustees voted unanimously on Feb. 27, 1970, to make the school coeducational. The next day, The New York Times buried the lede and carried the momentous announcement on its obituary page.

Y E S T E R D AY

P

erhaps editors at the newspaper of record regarded the historic decision to integrate girls into a 189-year-old boys’ preparatory school dead on arrival — but a group of pioneering people on campus worked assiduously to ensure that girls and women thrived. Among these courageous changemakers were the women who joined the faculty and paved the way for those who followed.

Stepping first onto campus and into the school’s classrooms, women faculty not only taught Harkness in their subject areas, but also championed greater equity for girls in all areas of the Academy, from academics and athletics to student programming and residential life. These early days were full of promise and also rife with challenges — challenges that were met head-on with clarity and courage.

In a series of recent interviews, as well as in past Exonian articles and historical recordings, several of the women faculty members who worked in the nascent days of coeducation shared their experiences. Here are a few of their stories.

FACULTY FIRSTS

Lynda K. Beck ’80 (Hon.) was 28 years old when she was appointed as the first woman instructor in the Science Department in 1972. Armed with a master’s degree and a doctorate in chemistry from the University of New Hampshire, Beck found her initial obstacle wasn’t in the classroom. The physical structures of the school itself vexed progress. “I worked at a girls dorm and the girls used to joke that their dorm had a sex change,” she remembers. “They used to put potted plants in the urinals and water them.”

The tougher conversations arose when she was confronted with mindsets embedded in a portion of the male faculty who were simply not ready for women to be treated as their equals. “They had wives and daughters, but women faculty were different,” Beck recalls. “Each time I came into a department meeting; the men would stand and when I left, they would all sit. This happened for many years and I thought, ‘Geez, this is just so ridiculous,’ but I didn’t let on. I just got into it until one day it stopped. ... It Lynda K. Beck '80 (Hon.), instructor in science. wasn’t easy, but I worked hard thinking that I didn’t want other women who came after me to work as hard as I did.”

The experience was not new to Beck. “I was used to a certain amount of sexism in college because I was usually the only woman in science classes,” she says. “I remember when UNH redesigned the science building, I was the only chemist Ph.D., and they asked me what kind of rugs I thought they should have. I’m not kidding!” Rather than hurling an insult at the male professor asking the only woman in the classroom about room décor, Beck instead listed the actual needs of the lab: fume hoods, eye washes and goggles. “You have to plug along, you have to bring people into leadership,” she says. “I didn’t want to make enemies, I just wanted to correct things.”

And correcting was what the New York native did in her three-decade tenure at the Academy. “It was very difficult,” she recalls. “Certainly, the community was very supportive and there was a lot of goodwill, but there was not a lot of understanding of what it means to be coed.”

As tough as it was for her and the other women faculty, she says she used every microaggression she experienced as a teachable moment. “Each time something sexist

“It wasn’t easy, but I worked hard thinking that I didn’t want other women who came after me to work as hard as I did.”

FA L L

20 20

T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N • 55

50 Y E A RS O F C O E D U CAT I O N AT E X E T E R

was said, I corrected it,” she asserts. “These were men raised in the ’50s and many just did not know how to work with women in professional settings and as peers, including some women who were better trained than they were,” she explains.

COMMITTEE FOR CHANGE

In the early 1970s, a small group of women formed a women’s committee to discuss ways to tackle issues of inequality that they faced at the Academy. They had good ideas to promote change, but lacked the resources to enact many of them. Their efforts were substantially elevated in 1980, when the late William L. Dunfey, father of former Trustee Julie Dunfey ’76; P’08, made a generous gift to establish the Committee to Enhance the Status of Women at Exeter. “My dad came of age during the Depression and was a graduate of UNH thanks to the GI bill,” explains Dunfey, a renowned filmmaker and one of only 10 girls in the 1972 prep class. “He was profoundly and intellectually engaged with the world and committed to making it a better place. He always noticed what was not being done and worked to fill those gaps. Establishing this PEA committee was a practical solution to address broad issues of equity and inclusion for women and girls.”

Beck and Math Instructor Robert Cornell founded the committee and were joined by students, faculty and staff of all genders, including Pat Beard, Jacquelyn Thomas, Molly Plumb, Jill Nooney, Kathy Nekton, Mary Frances Dagostino, Betty Pruitt, Charles Pratt and Ransom Lynch. The committee had practical goals, among them, recruiting and retaining women faculty, creating a faculty lounge, funding professional development, offering workshops for men, issuing a monthly newsletter, and organizing a women’s conference to bring women leaders and experts in coeducation to campus.

William Dunfey became a mentor to Beck as she rose through the ranks from the classroom to administrative positions that could effect systemic change. She served on several faculty committees, including the Principal’s Advisory Committee, the Educational Policy Committee and the Priorities Committee, before being named assistant principal, the second woman in the school’s history and the first openly gay woman to hold the position.

Members of the Committee to Enhance the Status of Women at Exeter in 1982.

56 • T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N

FA L L

20 20

Y E S T E R D AY

Among Beck’s most consequential accomplishments, she says, was helping to write the Academy’s first sexual harassment manual — not because there were any cases that she knew about, but because she considered the issue important and thought everyone had to be clear on the rules of behavior and engagement. She also fought successfully to obtain benefit partner rights for gay faculty and created the first schoolwide communication network between departments. “When I was first appointed to assistant principal, a group of secretaries met with me and told me they were going to do all they can to help me succeed,” she recalls. “One of them would come in after I’d written a memo and say, ‘Are you sure you meant this?’” Without support from women like the secretaries, Beck says that her success would not have been possible.

She also credits the women’s committee with helping her learn the soft skills needed to lead successfully within an institution steeped in white, male tradition that did not include her gender when it was founded in 1781. Only recently has Elizabeth Phillips been recognized as a pivotal force in the founding of the Academy with her husband — an acknowledgment that took more than 200 years.

ADAPTING FOR SUCCESS

Susan (Jorgensen) Herney ’69, ’74, ’83 (Hon.) was an influential figure in the school’s coeducation efforts, tallying nearly four decades at the Academy in various leadership roles in the offices of the Dean of Students, Alumni Affairs and Development, and Admissions.

Herney was first hired as an intern at Exeter Summer School to teach gymnastics in 1968, the year the first girls were integrated into the program.

In 1971, the Wisconsin native was recruited to be Susan (Jorgensen) Herney '69, '74, '83 (Hon.) in 1990. associate dean of students for the regular session.

She was 24 when she stepped into this role and recalled those early years as “magnetic.” She quickly learned that the transition to coeducation was not going to be smooth unless things changed.

“A lot of people thought when we went coed that our standards were going to be less, and of course that just wasn’t the case,” Herney says. “We learned together that Exeter needed to embrace women maybe differently than they thought they were going to.”

Herney says the women’s committee was instrumental in helping to lucidly voice concerns of the women faculty and girls. “We invited the principal at the time, Stephen Kurtz ’44, to dinner at the Exeter Inn and laid it all out,” Herney says. “We really were very straightforward and very tough on him about the things that women needed.

Women needed to be recognized, needed to be validated. Things are not going to change, and we are not going to be a true coeducational school until that happens.”

To Kurtz’s credit, Herney says, he listened and “took risks supporting those things that made a difference in the long run.”

“Women needed to be recognized, needed to be validated.”

RETREATS TO RECHARGE

To further unpack issues affecting them, a handful of women instructors would travel to a mountain retreat located a few hours north of Exeter for weeklong confabs. “These were women who understood something about the historic time they were living,” Beck

FA L L

20 20

T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N • 57

50 Y E A RS O F C O E D U CAT I O N AT E X E T E R

Women faculty of Phillips Exeter Academy in 1983.

says. “During the school year there wasn’t a lot of time to strategize and support each other,” Herney adds. “The retreats were times of wonderful reflection.”

When several male faculty members got wind of the first trip, they complained.

The women responded, “You’re living a retreat every day,” Beck says with a laugh.

As part of the retreat’s professional development, experts were invited to help train attendees how to manage the challenges in a school that was in the midst of profound transformation. The issues they discussed were wide-ranging — from how to change the culture of male privilege and get women to move from sitting at the back of the room during faculty meetings to the front, to changing protocols like the one that disallowed single women faculty to have guests in their faculty apartments. “We were unpacking white privilege and specifically, white male privilege back then,” Beck says.

Over the years, the committee helped spearhead other important initiatives, including a series that brought notable women such as Gloria Steinem to speak on campus.

It also planned and hosted a women’s conference, inviting students and faculty from surrounding independent schools and bringing together the latest experts in women’s education and rights. “I remember girls coming down the corridors with tears in their eyes, crying, so happy like it was a revival meeting,” Beck says. “They felt seen.”

SYMBOLISM IN SMALL CHANGES

Kathy Nutt Nekton P’85, P’98, who was hired in 1973 to teach in the Physical Education Department, remembers the powerful impact the committee had on the school. “It was intentional work to try to help the Academy move forward in the whole experience of being a true coeducational school, not a boys’ school that added a few women and a few girls,” Nekton says.

The women pioneers advocated for changes — even if some were deemed trivial.

Nekton, who taught for 35 years, recalls the brouhaha over a sauna and the size of the women’s locker room. “Women faculty had a very small locker room and the men’s

5 8 • T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N

FA L L

20 20

Y E S T E R D AY

locker had a sauna and the women’s did not,” she says. “It was those kinds of things that were more symbolic than anybody having to have a sauna.”

To handle the gender divide among the students inside the gym, Nekton remembers barricades were put in place so that girls could have a locker room of their own. Eventually a new wing of the gym was built on what is currently a world-class complex.

Beyond teaching, Nekton also coached the girls swim team and found that the attitude of some of the male athletes was lacking. “When we split lanes and the boys had four lanes and the girls had four lanes, [some boys] were incensed over the idea that girls could actually be as serious an athlete as they were,” she recalls. “It took a while.”

Nekton says her husband, Roger Nekton, who was the boys varsity swim team coach at the time, was instrumental in starting and supporting the girls swim team and helping change boys’ attitudes.

The addition of women instructors prompted new administrative changes as well. When Nekton became pregnant in 1979, there was no maternity leave policy in place at the Academy and she lobbied for one. Fast-forward to 2020, and the school now offers a three-month paid parental leave and provides six weeks of leave for the supporting parent.

Kathy Nutt Nekton P’85, P’98 in 1990.

Ditto for childcare. In the early days, faculty children were cared for in the basement of Tan Lane House.

Today, faculty send their children to the Harris Family Children’s Center, thanks to the advocacy of early faculty parents pushing for change.

HONORING PROGRESS

“[Change] is hard, frustrating, heartbreaking ... But when changes come, it's rewarding, exhilarating and even works.”

Herney, Nekton, William Dunfey and Julie Dunfey have all been honored with the Founders’ Day Award for their innovative spirit and the lasting impact they have made upon the Academy. When Nekton received her award in 2019, she shared a picture that she keeps close by. It was a 1972 faculty photo that reminds her of the progress women have made. In a sea of nearly 200 male instructors, there are six women faculty. Today, there are 217 faculty members, 100 male and 117 female.

“First you work hard because you were taught that’s what you do; then you realize there are things you come to believe in, people that matter, kids that count on you, and you begin to focus on what you can do in the big picture,” Nekton said in accepting her award. “[Change] is hard, frustrating, heartbreaking, and moves at a snail’s pace. But when changes come, it’s rewarding, exhilarating and even works.”

Beck echoed Nekton’s words and added that a lesson she learned on the women’s committee nearly 50 years ago applies today and in any struggle for social change.

“We learned that it was important to come together, to lean on each other to know that we were not alone, and to know that there was power in the collective,” Beck said. “You can’t have the same advocates always agitating; you have to get new people, new voices, and also turn over the people who are advocating for something bigger, grander.” E

FA L L

20 20

T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N • 59

CONNECTIONS

News and notes from the alumni community

60 • T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N

FA L L

20 1 6

C O N N ECT I O N S

Reinventions

By Betsy Fleming ’86 Trustee and General Alumni Association vice president

F

all is a season for reflection and transformation. As I write,

early morning temperatures have become cool. Leaves on trees are changing color. I think back to fall 1984 and sitting alone in the back seat of my family’s station wagon. We were pulling out of our driveway in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and heading to Exeter, where I would embark on my first year as a student.

My heart raced with a mix of anxiety and optimism as I thought, “I get to choose now who I want to be” irrespective of the conventions and norms that had, up until that minute, framed my life in a small Southern city.

This occasion was the first of many opportunities for conscious reinvention in my life. I am in one now in relation to the Academy, transitioning from supportive, yet distant, alumna to more engaged GAA vice president and new trustee. From my experience, successful transformation involves focusing on being rather than doing, getting curious, and owning the choice to reinvent. In assuming these new roles, I have chosen the mindset of being non sibi and being an individual who works to unite goodness and knowledge. I have also become insatiably curious about where the Academy is today, probing to understand how it is reinventing itself in the context of changing global, social, economic and health circumstances while remaining true to its distinct values and ideals.

This curiosity led me to a Zoom meeting with the faculty of the Art Department. Today, five women — all outstanding practicing artists — compose the team that instructs more than 600 students each year in the visual arts. Their pedagogy integrates individual craft and skill development with a substantial grounding in art history and theory.

The results are incredible bodies of work by diverse students, most of whom have no aspiration to pursue a professional career in the arts.

Instead, they take a keen understanding of how creative expression cultivates shared humanity and belonging into a myriad of other disciplines and professions. While the Academy transforms with changing times, it remains steadfast in its commitment to provide a breadth of exceptional learning experiences that lead to an openness to differing perspectives and greater connection as diverse humans engaged in a challenging world.

I invite you, too, to consider how you might reinvent and reinvigorate your relationship with the Academy. It is a choice to embrace a non sibi way of being and bring together goodness and knowledge in daily activities. I invite you to get curious about what is different today for Exonians in the context of the Academy’s 50th anniversary of coeducation and the expansion of its commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. I invite you to engage beyond your class by becoming a mentor or joining an affinity group. It promises to pay dividends. E www.exeter.edu/alumni

FA L L

20 20

T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N • 61

C O N N ECT I O N S

C A T C H I N G

U P

W I T H

A

Y O U N G

A L U M

3 QUESTIONS WITH ...

Alexandra Grounds ’17

By Sarah Zobel Arts Project studio space at the World Trade Center.

How did you get started as an artist?

I wasn’t painting all that much until I had class with [PEA Art Instructor] Tara Lewis my lower year. I convinced her to let me make a painting based on a Richard Phillips painting I’d seen on “Gossip Girl.” Then we invited Richard Phillips to Exeter, which was a dream come true. … Ms. Lewis helped me coordinate the sale of one of my paintings and I thought, ‘This is something I could actually do!’ I spent the next two years at Exeter changing my schedule around to take as many art classes as I could and just paint.

You often portray women in your work. What prompted that?

P

assing by a pop-up gallery in Manhattan’s Bowery last fall, it would have been tough not to notice the 6-by-4-foot oil painting of a tongue.

Delusions of the Wild, which renders everything from taste buds to sublingual veins in vivid shades of pink, red and blue, was a showstopper at Alexandra Grounds’ solo exhibition. “It definitely caught people’s attention, which was the goal,” says the junior art major at Columbia University.

An emerging artistic voice, Grounds focuses largely on extreme close-ups and icons of femininity such as Grace Kelly and Marilyn Monroe. This summer, her “Quarantine Series,” featuring a roll of golden toilet paper and a bottle of Purell sanitizer, arose from a desire to capture the strange tenor of the times. But as the impact of the pandemic grew, Grounds decided to sell her prints to raise money for the nonprofit Feeding America. Her donations provided meals for some 20,000 people.

We spoke by phone with the artist at her parents’ house in Scottsdale, Arizona, where she was deciding whether to hunker down or return to New York to accept a Silver

62 • T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N

As a young woman, growing up in today’s society, I felt pressure to be sexy and dress in a certain way while also trying to achieve my academic and intellectual pursuits. Those things seem to contradict each other a bit within the professional world. Painting gave me an outlet to get my voice and my opinions out to people who wouldn’t necessarily hear them. Feminism is about equality of genders and basically evening the playing field between men and women. But in my opinion, this can take away a lot of how women identify themselves — their femininity. It empowers me to embrace that side of myself as well as my sexuality, so I portray that through my work. It’s a different take on feminism.

Can you tell us about your process?

At first, a lot of my stuff was about aesthetics. I had messages, but I was still focused on creating a beautiful image. As I matured and developed more as an artist, including finding my artistic voice, I wanted to get into more intimate imagery that was even grotesque at times and see how far into detail I could go. … I’m trying to get as raw as possible in the human experience and get beyond the beautiful surface of everything. E

FA L L

20 20

C O N N ECT I O N S

P

R

O

F

I

L

E

K Y L E F L A N A G A N ’0 7

Shooting for the Stars

By Sarah Pruitt ’95

G

rowing up in Maine, Kyle Flanagan ’07

loved dinosaurs and space. “I had an early interest in the history of the universe, the natural world, all the different plant and animal species,” he remembers.

He was also really good at math. In his prep year at Exeter, he gravitated toward physics as “a way to apply math to the world in very tangible ways.” On the football field, Flanagan saw the role physics played in the “parabolic arc” of the ball, and in what happened when athletes collided on the turf.

Now, he channels his curiosity and scientific vision into Prime Lightworks, the space technology company he founded in 2015. Its mission: to make aerospace fully renewable. Currently in development is a microwave propulsion system that would enable spacecraft and satellites to operate in space using renewable power, without fossil fuel or other mass propellant. This year, Forbes magazine included Flanagan on its list of 30 Under 30 in Science.

Fresh out of Harvard in 2013, Flanagan scored a job as an engineer at Elon Musk’s aerospace company, SpaceX. Around that time, he read about the successful test of a device called a radio frequency (RF) resonant cavity thruster at NASA’s Eagleworks Advanced Propulsion Laboratory. The device — otherwise known as an EmDrive — had long existed only as a theory: that electromagnetic waves known as microwaves could, when channeled through a tapered chamber, generate enough thrust to propel a spacecraft. Controversy swirled around the so-called Impossible Drive. For one thing, it appears to violate Isaac Newton’s third law of motion. “From a purely Newtonian standpoint, this wouldn’t work,” Flanagan says, without an equal and opposite thrust reaction — i.e., no propellant being pushed out the back of the drive. “Our theory involves Einstein’s general relativity, relating electromagnetic energy to gravity.”

The NASA team’s claim to have generated a small

FA L L

20 20

amount of thrust intrigued Flanagan. “Space is very inefficient and wasteful,” he says. “Once a satellite runs out of fuel, it’s just dead weight. It orbits in space indefinitely, posing a collision risk, or it burns up in the atmosphere.”

Soon after the NASA test, Flanagan left SpaceX and founded Prime Lightworks. After going through Y Combinator, a prestigious Silicon Valley startup accelerator, the company raised more than $1.8 million in seed funding. It’s since benefited from other accelerator programs and an ongoing relationship with Greentown Labs, a cleantech startup incubator in Massachusetts.

Flanagan and Peter Dohm, his co-founder and VP of engineering, are testing a prototype of their RF resonant cavity thruster at the company’s Los Angeles, California, headquarters and Greentown Labs.

Similar to a solar sail, a spacecraft with reflective sails that uses light from the sun as momentum, their device would use a solar panel to produce microwave energy feeding an electromagnetic cavity resonator. As the microwaves bounce around inside the closed cavity, Flanagan and Dohm run “a tracking generator and a network analyzer as a digital electronics subsystem that powers a radio amplifier,” Flanagan explains. “We have a feedback loop that listens to the cavity resonance frequency and retunes ... kind of like a musical instrument.”

Just as a violinist shifts her fingers on the strings to find the right note, the system aims to hit on the frequency that will produce a high-amplitude electromagnetic wave on resonance. “The theory is that the louder we can make that note, the more thrust we’ll produce,” Flanagan says.

To continue testing and work toward making the technology commercially viable, Prime Lightworks is running a crowdfunding campaign through StartEngine, an equity crowdfunding site. “We think about it a lot — the democratization of space, the democratization of equity,” Flanagan says. “We are engaging a whole community that is backing a science experiment.” E

T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N • 63

C O N N ECT I O N S

G

I

V

I

N

G

B

A

C

K

T H AY E R “ T E D ” S C U D D E R ’4 8

Supporting Future Global Citizens

By Sarah Pruitt ’95

Ted Scudder ’48 with Principal Bill Rawson ’71, taken in March 2019 at Eliza and Ted’s home.

64 • T H E

E X E T E R

W

hen Ted Scudder ’48 joined a benchmark field study of the Kariba Dam in Zambia in 1956, he believed the dam would build prosperity and improve the lives of people in developing nations.

He later came to think differently.

Over more than 50 years as a professor and social anthropologist at the California Institute of Technology, Scudder emerged as one of the world’s leading experts on large dams — and an outspoken critic of their human and environmental effects.

In October 2005, he returned to Exeter to accept the John Phillips Award — which recognized the positive impact his life’s work has had on millions of people — and delivered a powerful call to action to the students gathered in Assembly Hall.

“Increasingly, I believe yours is the key generation,” he declared, urging them to do their utmost to confront the world’s problems, including the degradation of the planet’s resources and rising income inequality.

To ensure young Exonians would have opportunities to engage in this weighty work, Scudder and his wife established the Eliza D. and Thayer Scudder ’48 Global Awareness Fund. To date, the fund has enabled more than 170 students to travel to more than 13 nations, including Cuba, China, India, South Africa and Martinique, through Exeter’s Global Initiatives program.

By immersing themselves in the languages, cultures, economics, politics and religions of different countries, students gain firsthand exposure to the social sciences, an area of study Scudder believes “should be a major broadening aspect of a secondary school education.”

Among those who have benefited from the Scudders’ generosity is Olivia Reed ’16.

Reed vividly remembers dancing with local villagers outside Calcutta during her trip to India back in the spring of 2015. “I wasn’t expecting to learn so much about a different culture and the way people interact with the space around them,” she says. Reed was struck by the different expectations and social customs for women, and later drew on her travels for a multimedia project about how women were portrayed in Indian literature.

For Bryce Morales ’19, a spring-break trip to Cuba his senior year helped him better understand what he learned in a course in environmental history. “I had some of that in mind when we were looking at [Cuba’s] land and resource use ... or even just driving

B U L L E T I N

FA L L

20 20

through the countryside looking at some of the farms and factories.”

Eimer Page P’22, instructor in English and director of Global Initiatives, adds that the Scudder Fund has opened programs to a broad range of Exonians by allowing the school to subsidize travel for all participants, not only those who receive financial aid during the school year.

As for his own time at Exeter, Scudder admits to focusing more on extracurricular activities than on his studies. He fondly recounts bicycling to nearby beaches for bird-watching excursions and climbing Mount Washington with the Mountaineering Club, which he co-founded with the support of English Instructor Bob Bates ’29.

Scudder was also president of the Outing Club and captained the cross-country team to a New England championship. “What Exeter was able to do for me was prove I was a natural leader — the exact opposite of what I thought I was,” Scudder says.

Scudder went on to study biology and anthropology at Harvard with the intent of becoming a naturalist. There he met his future wife, Eliza, and they married while still undergrads. Eliza encouraged her husband to pursue his doctorate and served as a constant source of support for his work, while also pursuing her own career in early childhood education.

Scudder returned to Harvard for graduate studies in anthropology with an interest in learning more about Africa. Finding that the university didn’t offer a course in African Studies, he enrolled in one at Boston University, taught by social anthropologist Elizabeth Colson, who would invite him on that first field study of the Kariba Dam and become his longtime mentor.

He had hoped to complete his Ph.D. scaling snow-capped peaks in Uganda, perfecting his climbing (and yodeling) skills while studying the Bakonjo people. Instead, he found himself joining Colson in a parched rift valley, with temperatures of over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, living with the Gwembe Tonga, who would soon be forced from their ancestral homelands along the Zambezi River onto resettlement sites.

Scudder returned again and again to Zambia, and by the mid-1970s had come to realize the dam had increased poverty and caused other long-lasting problems for the Tonga. “If you study [large dams] over an extended period of time ... you find out how destructive they are,” he explains. “About 40 million people have been adversely affected.”

In the 1990s, Scudder’s research helped convince the government of Botswana to halt a dam project in the Okavango Delta. He views it as one of the biggest impacts he made in his career, calling the delta a “beautiful oasis in the middle of the desert,” where recent archaeological research has suggested modern humans originated.

Scudder’s non sibi spirit continues to make a difference at Exeter as well. While the COVID-19 pandemic has shut down travel for the foreseeable future, the fund has supported a number of virtual experiences, including a Russian language immersion and a remote learning program dedicated to the history and legacy of the sugar industry.

At 90, Ted Scudder remains engaged in and committed to the work he began more than six decades ago. The research he and Colson began in Zambia’s Gwembe Valley is now one of the longest-running anthropological studies in the world. Scudder still communicates weekly with his former research assistants and he and Eliza have funded the higher education of more than 70 Tonga women.

Meanwhile, his formative experiences at Exeter loom large in his mind. More than 70 years later, he proudly recounts what Dean Wells Kerr told him and a friend when they checked in after returning from one of their excursions: “He thought we had more fun at Exeter than any other students.” E

“Increasingly, I believe yours is the key generation.”

FA L L

20 20

T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N • 6 5

F I N I S

O R I G I N E

P E N D E T

Underneath This Note is a Blanket

By Ana C.H. Silva ’91

CHERYL CHALMERS

I remember the little children with dirty tote bags begging for overripe fruit. They always asked for that, or stale bread. I didn’t know if our cans would last, if our space heater would stop glowing. I could not risk disease. We had an extra room, though, and I knew my old self would have held one tight to my chest, sour smell and greasy hair, the fear of lice and fleas no matter at all. My old self, if she did exist, would have been unable to let the child go, to hear her make quiet knocks on other unreceptive doors.

Were you one of those children? I know you have been to starvation and back; I can see it in your eyes. Did you have a red wool cardigan with a sprinkle of moth holes at the bottom? It seemed so old-fashioned, from a time when people sat around warm hearths, decorated with personal knicknacks, blazing lights on in all the rooms, a roast in their ovens while they knitted loved ones sweaters they didn’t really need.

We live in a time where it’s hard to be a good person. That’s not an excuse. I’m sorry for what I did. I ignored the knocks, or briskly handed out small bags of old food with a quickly shut door.

What we shared last night — the bowl of hot ramen, the almost-tasty apple, your half bag of M&Ms, our conversation about poetry — when was the last time I’d talked of that? — and especially your warmth in the night, the good night hug, the nearness you gave me on the shared bed — was the first time I’ve relaxed since my children left.

The blanket is from me. It’s a good one.

E

Editor’s Note: This poem appears in Silva’s latest poetry collection, While Mercury Fish, published by Finishing Line Press in 2020.

11 2 • T H E

E X E T E R

B U L L E T I N

FA L L

20 20

LAMONT GALLERY FREDERICK R. MAYER ’45 ART CENTER ALANA YANG ’21, BEYOND BLACK AND WHITE, DIGITAL DRAWING

ELIZABETH KOSTINA ’20, UNITY IN COLOR, PHOTOGRAPH

CRITICAL JOY

Fall 2020 at the Lamont Gallery For these Exeter students and alumni, the arts offer tools for critical and joyful engagement with the world.

REWRITING THE NARRATIVE: STUDENT VOICES Sept. 15 – Nov. 21, 2020

THE UNITY IN COLOR PROJECT BY ELIZABETH KOSTINA ’20

GORDON D. CHASE ’66, FATEFUL EMBRACE, CHARCOAL ON PAPER

KATE GRIDLEY ’74, INSTALLATION VIEW OF PASSING THROUGH: PORTRAITS OF EMERGING ADULTS, FROM 2015 LAMONT GALLERY EXHIBITION.

2020 & 2021 EXHIBITIONS

Sept. 15 – Nov. 21, 2020

HIGH CONTRAST: THE CHARCOAL WORKS OF GORDON D. CHASE ’66 Sept. 15 – Dec. 31, 2020

COEDUCATION EXHIBITION January – April 2021 To celebrate the Academy’s 50th anniversary of coeducation,

SPACE ART

the Lamont Gallery will feature works by a number of Exeter

Summer 2021

alumnae artists.

May – June 2021 This exhibition features the creative works of current Exeter students enrolled in advanced art courses.

LAMONT GALLERY PHILLIPS EXETER ACADEMY 11 TAN LANE EXETER, NH 03833

AVERY LAVINE ’22, IN LUMINESCENCE, OIL ON CANVAS

ANNUAL ADVANCED STUDENT ART SHOW

Work by iconic space artist Chesley Bonestell intersects with contemporary artists in an exploration of all things cosmic. The Bonestell work is drawn from the collection of the late Jay Whipple ’51.

603-777-3461 • gallery@exeter.edu The Lamont Gallery is not hosting public visitors this fall in our efforts to protect public health.

To view virtual exhibits and for more on special programs and events, visit exeter.edu/lamontgallery.

PHILLIPS EXETER ACADEMY 20 Main Street Exeter, NH 03833-2460 Parents of Alumni: If this magazine is addressed to an Exonian who no longer maintains a permanent address at your home, please email us (records@exeter.edu) with their new address. Thank you.

HONORING EXTRAORDINARY SERVICE Each year, Exeter recognizes two individuals whose selfless work and generosity of spirit reflect the ideals

We invite you to nominate those members within our

of goodness and knowledge united.

of special recognition. Nominations are accepted year-

The John and Elizabeth Phi llips Award is bestowed upon an alumnus or alumna for

community whose accomplishments are most deserving round. To be considered for the 2020 awards, submissions must be received by October 1, 2019.

outstanding contribution to the welfare of community, country and humanity.

The Founders ’ Day Award is presented to an alumnus or alumna, a retired faculty or staff member, a parent, or a friend of Exeter, in recognition of exceptional service to the Academy.

Email awards@exeter.edu for more information or to submit a nomination.