The Exeter Bulletin, spring 2021

The Exeter Bulletin SPRING 2021

Symphony of Change

E X E T E R’S V I B R A N T M U S I C P RO G R A M DECIDES WHERE TO GO NEXT

Registration is now open!

Connect, engage and reminisce at a one-of-a-kind virtual celebration for classes ending in 0, 1, 5 and 6. Join Harkness discussions with faculty, talk with current students about Exeter today, participate in unique events for you and your classmates, and connect with Exonians across the globe.

Register by May 17 at exeter.edu/reunion

SPRING

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 Coeducation Section Designer Jacqueline Trimmer 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

Vice President Deidre G. O’Byrne ’84 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 2021 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

PATRICK GARRIT Y

President Morgan C.W. Sze ’83

“WE’RE ALL DIGGING IN AND TRYING TO LOOK HONESTLY AT WHERE WE’VE BEEN, AND WHAT IT IS WE’RE WILLING TO STAND BEHIND.” —page 30

IN THIS ISSUE

Volume CXXV, Issue no. 3

Features 30 Symphony of Change Exeter’s vibrant music program decides where to go next.

By Sarah Pruitt ’95

38 For the People Rohan Pavuluri ’14 leverages technology for social justice.

By Sarah Zobel

Her Voice at the Table 42 Her Potential 30 38

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

Departments 6

Around the Table: Principal’s message, Heard in Assembly, faculty accolades and more

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Inside the Writing Life: Chang-rae Lee ’83

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Sports: A conversation with baseball general manager Sam Fuld ’00

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Connections: Catching up with our alumni

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Class Notes

—Cover photograph by Bruce T. Martin

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Will Simpson ’24 takes the fast lane across the Academy Building lawn.

PHOTO BY MARY SCHWALM

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AROUND THE TABLE

What’s new and notable at the Academy

Exeter Lives Within Each of Us

By Principal Bill Rawson ’71; P’08

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uite a few years ago, returning to the Exeter Inn from an alumni volunteer dinner with the senior class in Love Gym, I found myself walking alone a few paces ahead of an older couple. I stopped to introduce myself, and to my utter astonishment, Mickey O’Connell ’46 said, “I remember you. You played lacrosse!”

Mickey had watched me play in the Exeter-Andover game my senior year, his 25th reunion year, more than a quarter century before this chance encounter. But Mickey was an All-American at Williams College and had a deep passion for the game, so he remembered. Thus began a wonderful friendship that continued until Mickey died a few years ago. He and I sought out each other every year at that dinner and stayed in touch when Mickey was no longer well enough to make the trip from his home in Ohio.

I tell seniors every year at graduation that they have only just begun the process of forming lifelong connections with fellow Exonians, not only in their class but across generations. They are surprised when I tell them of the close friendships I have forged over the years with classmates whom I did not know while I was a student.

I tell them also of how deeply enriched I have felt by the friendships I have developed with Exonians both many years older and many years younger than me. I tell them my experiences are not unique, and that they can look forward to similar experiences in their professional and personal lives.

At a recent outdoor assembly, we gave all students

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a T-shirt that has their class year on the front and the Lion Rampant on the back superimposed on an image of the world. The image is accompanied by the following words: “Exeter lives within each of us and forms around us, no matter the distance between us.”

That expression is particularly apt during this difficult pandemic year, when students have spent portions of the school year learning remotely, and have only recently been able to resume such activities as interscholastic athletics and theatrical and musical performances before live audiences, with various COVID protocols and restrictions in place. The expression will remain true after the pandemic is over.

Exonians are bound together by our school’s mission to unite goodness and knowledge and inspire youth from every quarter to lead purposeful lives. We are bound together by our commitment to non sibi, inscribed on the school seal. We are bound together by our experiences at Exeter, experiences that in some ways might be quite similar and in other ways very different. Experiences that challenged us, were uplifting, were sometimes very difficult, and in all cases were transformative.

As you read through these pages, I hope you will feel inspired by the many dimensions of the Exeter community, of which you all are an important part. I hope you will feel inspired to visit campus when pandemic conditions permit, to renew old friendships with classmates, and to forge entirely new connections with fellow Exonians across generations. E

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“Exonians are bound together by our school’s mission to unite goodness and knowledge and inspire youth from every quarter to lead purposeful lives.”

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New Positions Focus on Hiring, Retaining Faculty of Color

By Debbie Kane

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his spring, two new staff positions have been filled

kindness forward in my position.”

Ramesh joined Exeter’s Mathematics Department in 2016 after a brief career in finance (an accomplished tennis player, she is also director of the Academy’s tennis program). In her new position, she works alongside Dean of Faculty Ellen Wolff and Director of Equity and Inclusion Stephanie Bramlett on such issues as faculty recruitment, onboarding and retention. “Our goal is increase faculty of color by 50% in the next five years,” Ramesh says. “We also need to help current faculty of color thrive.”

Club adviser to the Hindu Society and the Sub-Continent Society, Ramesh is especially cognizant of the need to support faculty of color like herself who are balancRamesh ing club advising along with other responsibilities. “We don’t want to burden them with too much,” she says. “It’s difficult for me to balance clubs with my own commitments to sports and academics.” She’s also re-evaluating faculty hiring practices, based on her prior experiences serving on Exeter hiring

to further Exeter’s commitment to institutionalizing anti-racism. The appointments are considered critical to the Academy’s efforts to improve recruitment, support and retention of faculty of color.

Pajaro-Mariñez Mathematics Instructor Gayatri Ramesh was named assistant dean of faculty in January, and Kevin PajaroMariñez joined the staff in March as assistant director of equity and inclusion.

Here’s a little background on each and their goals for their new positions.

Gayatri Ramesh, Assistant Dean of Faculty Ramesh strives to bring empathy to her new role, a sentiment inspired by her mother, a human relations professional.

“She accompanied an employee’s wife, who went into early labor, to the hospital while her husband was away,” says Ramesh, originally from south India.

“I hope to bring that same practice of

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committees, and investigating different hiring methods such as developing relationships with colleges and universities and developing a ready pool of candidates to contact when there’s an employment opportunity at Exeter. “I like that this is a new position so that we can determine its scope and responsibilities,” Ramesh says.

Kevin Pajaro-Mariñez, Assistant Director of Equity and Inclusion As assistant director of equity and inclusion, Pajaro-Mariñez brings perspective as a first-generation Black Latino. “Diversity, equity and inclusion work appeals to me intellectually,” he says, “but I’m not estranged from many of the things our students experience like microaggressions or anti-Black racism. For others, this is jargon. I try to bring home that my experiences and ideas mean real things for people in real life.”

Pajaro-Mariñez, most recently director of a residence hall at the University of Michigan, sees parallels between his higher education experience and Exeter. “The support system needed for students is the same, even though the institutional context is different,” he says. “A lot of those skills translate into my work now.”

In his new role, he supports Exeter’s current diversity and inclusion initiatives (including the Exeter Diversity Institute and MLK Day programming), and facilitates conversations with Exeter faculty and staff about their roles in justice and equity issues. He also builds community in the greater Exeter area, collaborating with the town, local groups and schools on diversity and inclusion topics. “I see my job as making social justice accessible to students and reaching out to a variety of people on campus,” he says. “The relationships I build are important if I’m trying to create an environment where everyone feels welcome.”

Pajaro-Mariñez is used to creating programs where he sees a need. At Michigan, he created the Black Men’s Reading and Reflection Group, a cohort and community-based reading group where Black men read Black feminist texts and prioritize critical discussions around masculinity. “This group is a testament to building and sustaining genuine relationships with other men,” he says.

“When you humanize relationships, you’re more able to relate to one another in ways that can deepen capacity for change.” E

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Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Task Force The new trustee Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Task Force was formed with the broad purpose “to assist and guide the Academy in becoming a fully inclusive, just and equitable learning community,” in line with the school’s DEI Vision Statement announced by the Trustees in January 2018.

The 10-person task force adopted its charter in October and is actively engaged under the leadership of Trustee Jackie Hayes ’85. The charter maps out three initial priorities: GROWING UNDERSTANDING: Acknowledging and building a comprehensive understanding of our own history, as it intertwines with the institution and legacies of slavery, racism and inequality in our country, and how that history manifests in the experiences of BIPOC students and adults on campus; TRANSFORMING SYSTEMS: Supporting BIPOC students and adults by ensuring the cultivation of an inclusive, equitable community through (a) a comprehensive assessment and, where necessary, revision of current policies, practices and systems; and (b) the building of lasting infrastructure and investment that transforms campus culture to reflect anti-racist principles; and CULTIVATING COMMUNITY: Guiding the development and launch of teaching and learning initiatives, professional development opportunities, research projects, educational exhibitions and events, and permanent recognition and commemoration, all to foster and celebrate diversity, equity and inclusion to the fullest extent.

The group also will facilitate coordination to ensure that consideration of DEI priorities is infused in the work of all trustee committees. E

Find the task force’s full charter and other diversity and inclusion initiatives at exeter.edu/community/ inclusive-community.

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Zooming in on Harkness

By Jennifer Wagner

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ing in Phillips Hall room 402, Modern Languages Instructor P. Fermin PerezAndreu and his Spanish 220 class get to work on the day’s lesson: the subjunctive mood.

A digital camera perched on the oaken Harkness table silently beams images of the scene over the internet to two students Zooming in for the H format class. The live audio-video feed connects the six mask-clad students seated in Exeter with those off-campus in real time. Thanks in part to this hybrid model — currently deployed in 105 classrooms across the Academy Building, Phelps Science Center and Phillips Hall in response to the COVID-19 pandemic — there’s excitement to learn, even at 8:10 a.m.

“Teaching in a classroom while also having remote students on a screen makes it complicated, but everyone is showing an enormous capacity for adaptation and resilience,” Perez-Andreu says. “It is encouraging to see how patient and willing to collaborate and learn our students are.”

Here’s a peek at what’s powering this high-tech educational experience. E

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n a brisk March morn-

Kira Ferdyn ’22 gazes through one of 39 pieces of shatter- and chemical-resistant polycarbonate attached to this particular Harkness table. (More than 100,000 pounds of sheeting was used to outfit 105 classrooms.)

Each table-shield system also includes risers, clips, base plates, 65 strips of damage-free Velcro and miles of parachute cord. It took 1.5 hours to set up this room.

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Left: New wireless network and capacity upgrades make Exeter’s on-campus network 10 times faster and Internet connection is twice as fast as pre-pandemic. Even with every student and faculty member on campus using Zoom during return-to-campus quarantine periods, we haven’t come close to hitting our maximum available bandwidth.

Above: Digital inking tablets, coupled with Microsoft OneNote, allow remote and in-person students to share their ideas, equations and drawings on virtual whiteboards, ensuring everyone can participate and collaborate.

The on-table videoconferencing system swivels to face the active speaker, here capturing instructor Perez-Andreu in action. Each system features a 360-degree camera, eight omnidirectional microphones and two speakerphones, so all students can see and hear each person talking in real time.

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Paul and Denise Pouliot

JOHN BENFORD

Sag8mo and Sag8moskwa (head speakers) of the Cowasuck Band of the Pennacook Abenaki People “Once we develop an inclusive past we’re going to have an inclusive future. We keep dividing ourselves between Indigenous history versus colonial history. This all happened together, it all interlapped with each other and shaped us all into who we are today. We have to be honest about it, truthful and blunt. We can’t change it. None of us can. There should be no shame in having the conversation.”

Heard in Assembly SOUND BITES FROM THE WINTER SPEAKER SERIES

Paul Tran poet “My mother came to the United States in 1989 as a Vietnamese refugee and worked three jobs so I could be the first in my family and first in my neighborhood to graduate high school and go to college. I initially came to poetry because I wanted to see my family somewhere in American literature, because until that point, none of the stories I had seen about Vietnamese people or people who have built lives after the Vietnam War featured anyone I knew.”

Burke

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CHRYSANTHEMUM TRAN — PAUL TRAN

Compiled by Maxine Weed

Tran

Teresa Blankmeyer Burke professor of philosophy, Gallaudet University “One of the challenges, when we think about disability, is that in the dominant model, disability is seen as a medical condition, a medical variation in the body that medicine and science can fix. By shifting perspective from that medical model to where I’m fitting into the world, I think about the social model of disability. The social model of disability asks the medical model to invert and to consider that the issue isn’t with the people and bodies that have all kinds of human variations. The issue is with how we construct our society.”

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Roxane Gay ’92 writer “Diversity is a problem, seemingly without solutions. We talk about it and talk about it and talk about it and nothing much seems to change. We are careless with language. As if simply by saying the word ‘diversity,’ we are doing something or creating change. But that’s not how it works. Change requires intent and effort and material support, which in most cases is a robust and long-term financial commitment. And always change requires a little or a lot of imagination, a willingness to think differently, react differently, act differently.”

Gay

WINNIE AU

Deborah Berke architect, dean of the Yale School of Architecture “The thing that will make you the best architect is to be the most culturally literate person you can be. You should know about all kinds of music; you should know about art history from around the world. … Think about your community. When you were little, what was it like to walk to school or take the bus? Did you see a building go up? How did it change when the gas station went away and a branch bank was put there? What did you see? Use your eyes all the time. Remember every place you go.”

Berke

Ocampo

Anthony Ocampo sociologist “I am technically a sociologist, and part of my job is to collect data, surveys and interviews to highlight social inequalities in society and institutions. I have found that facts are really powerful, facts are incredibly important, but facts are not the only thing to change people’s hearts and minds. … At the heart of it, I consider myself a storyteller, in part because, as corny as it sounds, I’ve seen the ways in

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which storytelling about Black and brown lives, about queer and trans lives, has really been at the heart of how progress and change happen in real life.”

Acevedo

Elizabeth Acevedo poet “I signed up for my first poetry slam my ninth-grade year of high school. I competed with 450 other students for five spots to represent the New York City team. It was where I really saw what a poem can be on a stage. My classmates, who didn’t consider themselves rappers or performance poets or spoken-word artists, also slammed, and they were slamming with work that I wouldn’t have necessarily thought would do well on a stage but did. That was the first inkling I had that slam poetry as a genre isn’t real. A poetry slam is the arena.

How you show up, what form you show up with, you embody it however you embody it.”

Casey Gerald writer “When I think about the time that we’re living in right now, about your generation, about the challenges and opportunities that you’re going to face in the world as you finish at Exeter and go on from here, I see that the world is on fire, and you will have to make a new one. It will be you that will have to ignore the wisdom of authorities and folks who seemingly are experts and those who say, ‘We don’t have the money for your idea’ or ‘Your idea doesn’t make any sense.’

You’re going to have to find a band of misfits and do it anyway.” E

Gerald

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Exonians in Action Exeter Senior Named Nation’s Top Young Scientist

Yunseo Choi ’21 joined the ranks of 13 Nobel Prize winners and scores of the nation’s top science minds this spring when she was awarded first place in the 80th Regeneron Science Talent Search.

Choi, a resident of Seoul, South Korea, and a four-year Exeter student, outlasted 39 finalists from across the United States to claim a $250,000 winner’s prize.

Choi’s project, “On Two-Sided Matching in Infinite Markets,” had been chosen in January as a finalist in the STS, the nation’s Choi oldest science and mathematics competition for high school seniors, established by what is now called the Society for Science in 1921. Finalists were selected from more than 1,700 entrants.

Each finalist already had secured at least a $25,000 prize, with the top 10 prizes ranging from $40,000 to $250,000. The top 10 winners were identified — counting down from 10 — at the conclusion of an hourlong online ceremony March 17.

Selection as a finalist triggered an arduous round of judging from a panel of 16 scientists. Each finalist was required to present their project to the panel and was subjected to rigorous questioning by the judges.

Choi’s project aims to build off the Gale-Shapley algorithm, which seeks to solve the problem of finding a stable match between two equally sized sets of elements.

The two California professors for whom the algorithm is named proved in 1962 that, for any equal number of men and women, it is always possible to find matches to make all marriages stable.

“Gale and Shapley proposed a seemingly impossible question: ‘How can we form stable marriages?’ (as if they had watched any season of ‘The Bachelor’!),” Choi wrote in an email after she was selected as a finalist. “This question cannot be answered with mathematics alone.

However, matching theory begins to answer this question by characterizing the problem through models of men

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and women and their preferences on each other.”

Economic theorists have since applied matching algorithms in countless ways.

“Matching markets dominate the world, from Tinder to Airbnb,” Choi said. “Algorithms and policies that are derived from the study of matching theory have so many useful applications. Usually in mathematics there’s a lot of abstraction. You’re thinking about things that can be implemented and be useful in many, many years to come.

But matching theory compared to that is much more tangible and practically useful.”

Choi, who hopes to be a theoretical economist someday, credits her teachers and mentors — including Exeter Math Instructor Jeff Ibbotson and a cast of college mathematicians, including Duke Kominers at Harvard, where she’s headed in the fall.

“Without them, none of this would have been possible,” she said. “Although progress should never be judged by the resulting outcome alone, being named a Regeneron STS Finalist is such an incredible honor.”

“Yunseo is a fabulous student and always approaches mathematics with a depth of insight and continuing interest in various subfields of math,” Ibbotson said. “She loves sharing new proofs of well-known results and she is constantly thinking about extensions of the things she has learned. She truly lives the life of a mathematician!”

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Along with 13 Nobelists, two past winners of the competition have gone on to win the Fields Medal; 11 have been awarded the National Medal of Science; 18 received MacArthur Fellowships; 43 have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences; and 11 have been elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

Physics Club Wins National Title Again

PEA’s Physics Club snared the top spot in the 14th U.S. Association for Young Physicists Tournament, combining months of preparation with game-day poise to outpoint 10 rivals from the United States and China.

The inner workings of a lava lamp and the physics of terrestrial and lunar impact craters were among the specific problems the students had to master, but Exeter’s aptitude was built on teamwork and exhaustive research.

“After a while, it felt that we were in the same room every evening working together on all the problems,” said Alexander Morand ’22, a threeyear veteran of the USAYPT and Exeter’s captain.

“Zoom or no Zoom, we worked hard as a team and, as individuals, we each became proficient in all the problems, something that really helped us on the day of the competition.”

The competition consists of head-to-head debates over the quality of each team’s solution. Teams are judged on their own solutions to the problems and on their ability to evaluate and discuss the opposition’s solutions.

Club co-heads Alexander Morand ’22, Neil Chowdhury ’22, Jacob David ’22 and Jonathan Meng ’21 were the problem presenters this year, but Morand credited the team’s “scouts” — club members who “watch the other teams’ presentations to observe weaknesses and strengths and to take notice of jurors’ and opposition team’s questions” — as critical to PEA’s success.

The other club members were Alex Ecker ’22, Jack Kugler ’23, Alexander Masoudi ’22, Krish Patel ’23, Michael Popik ’22, Achyuta Rajaram ’24, Jocelyn Sides ’22, Celine Tan ’22, Isabella Vesely ’23 and Aubrey Zhang ’23. The club adviser was Director of Studies Scott Saltman.

Exonians shine at Model UN conference

The 2021 Yale Model United Nations annual conference drew more than 2,000 students from 40 countries and every inhabited continent.

Exeter’s delegates shined among the brightest.

The PEA Model UN club was named the

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outstanding large delegation at the conclusion of the four-day international relations simulation, secondbest in the large division. The Yale conference, in its 47th year, was held virtually due to COVID-19 restrictions. Seven committee sessions filled the docket, with topics ranging from NATO intervention in Afghanistan to cyberwarfare to the 1848 revolutions in Europe. Each of Exeter’s 20 delegates was assigned to represent a nation or governing body and was meticulously prepared beforehand by PEA MUN co-heads Phil Horrigan ’21 and Nahla Owens ’21. Club advisers were instructors Eve Southworth, Marianne Zwicker and Rachel Labes.

The delegates, with individual honors in parentheses: Vibha Udayakumar ’23; Anderson Lynch ’23 (honorable mention); Jessica Huang ’23 (honorable mention); Haakon Kohler ’23; Arhon Strauss ’23; Grace Keyt ’23 (best); Valentina Kafati ’22 (best); Toby Chan ’22; Angela Zhang ’23; Alexander Luque ’22 (honorable mention); Tucker Gibbs ’23 (outstanding); Sabrina Kearney ’22 (outstanding); Sreesa Virinchi ’23 (honorable mention); Sam Creelan ’23; Cindy Su ’23 (outstanding); Stephen McNulty ’21 (honorable mention); Tina Huang ’22; Pedro Coelho ’22 (best); Lekha Masoudi ’22 (outstanding); Arya Nistane ’22.

Kendrah Su ’22 extends Scholastic run Kendrah Su ’22 has turned recognition from the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards into an annual pastime. The upper from Sugar Land, Texas, was honored with two gold medals and one silver medal to lead an Exeter contingent in the nation’s longestrunning recognition program for teen writers and artists. Su has collected six golds and two silvers for her poetry over the past three years (See her goldmedal poem on Page 104).

Other Exeter students recognized this year were Maame Dufie Awuah ’23, silver; Renee Bertrand ’21, silver with distinction; Emma Chen ’22, silver; Alexandria Westray ’22, gold; Clark Wu ’23, silver; and Daniel Zhang ’22, silver.

Debaters earn national tournament bids

Exonians flexed their Harkness skills throughout winter term to earn spots in three national debate competitions. The Exeter Forensics Team is led by seniors Albert Chu and Kilin Tang. Chu and Tang, along with Shrayes Upadhyayula ’22, Aaron Joy ’23 and Sachin Shetty ’23, qualified for the National Speech & Debate Tournament in July. The tournament is the largest high school competition in the world with more than 6,000 competitors. E

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Instructor Bill Jordan Honored for Excellence, Service N E W E N G L A N D H I S T O R Y T E A C H E R S A S S O C I AT I O N N A M E S H I M T H E 2 0 2 0 R E C I P I E N T O F T H E H O R A C E K I D G E R A WA R D

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nstructor in History Bill Jordan has been awarded the

Horace Kidger Award for dedication to his field and for inspiring the next generation of historians.

The Kidger Award, bestowed by the New England History Teachers Association, has been given annually since 1952 to recognize excellence in teaching, research, writing and service to the history profession.

Jordan has taught history at Exeter since the fall of 1997. He has published a book on history, Black Newspapers and America’s War for Democracy, 1914-1920 (University of North Carolina Press, 2001), as well as articles and reviews in journals, including the Journal of American History and the American Historical Review.

He was nominated by his students and his nomination was confirmed by colleagues. In the announcement, the NEHTA board anonymously quoted one of Jordan’s colleagues, who said, “Bill is an educator. Teaching is not his job; it’s his identity. He reads widely, thinks deeply, and engages passionately with history and contemporary political discourse.”

WILLIE PERDOMO WINS FOUNDATION FOR CONTEMPORARY ARTS GRANT

Willie Perdomo, poet, author and an instructor in English since 2013, has been awarded the Cy Twombly Award for

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Poetry by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

The distinction includes a $40,000 unrestricted grant, one of 20 the foundation bestows annually to support the work of artists and provide meaningful peer recognition and encouragement.

Perdomo published his fourth book, The Crazy Bunch, in 2019. He is the author of the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon and the PEN/Open Book Award-winner Smoking Lovely.

He is teaching ENG-430: 11th-grade English and ENG-573: Beats, Rhymes and Narrative this spring.

COURTNEY MARSHALL RECOGNIZED BY BLM CHAPTER

A regional chapter of Black Lives Matter recognized English Instructor Courtney Marshall as one of 10 influ-

ential community members as part of the first BIPOC Seacoast Leaders Awards.

The awards are designed to celebrate the achievements, talent and advocacy of people of color who are contributing to the New Hampshire Seacoast region through different disciplines and sectors.

Marshall has taught a variety of English courses at Exeter since joining the Academy faculty in 2016. She holds a doctorate in English and a graduate certificate in women’s studies from UCLA. Prior to Exeter, 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. E

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Been There, Done That DILLON MIMS ’21 DIGS INTO ‘PRECEDENTED TIMES’ WITH P ODCAST PROJECT

By Patrick Garrity

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illon Mims ’21 spent the early days of the

pandemic bombarded by history. A toxic presidential campaign. A national reckoning over racial and social injustice. A novel coronavirus killing indiscriminately.

Quarantined in his Norwalk, Connecticut, home last spring, Mims juggled remote learning with the glut of bad news filling his screens each day.

“Something I kept hearing was the notion of something being ‘unprecedented,’” he says. “I couldn’t tell you if it was a genuine intellectual curiosity or I just didn’t want that to be true, but I became obsessed with the idea of proving that notion wrong.”

The self-described “down-the-rabbit-hole political junkie” combined a recent affinity for podcasts and his mission to debunk the prevailing narrative to create “Precedented Times,” a six-episode podcast that debuted April 7 on multiple platforms. The project is Mims’ senior independent study, a program that allows Exeter students to explore areas of interest that fall outside traditional course descriptions. Seniors, with approval from the faculty, may design individual or joint projects of comparable value and scope to those of an academic course.

Other senior projects during the 2020-21 winter term included, among others, Luke Breen’s research of the local surfing culture in Rincon, Puerto Rico; Sophie Cavalcanti’s creation of an annotated bibliography on racism in books and movies in French and German; and Senai Robinson and Philip Horrigan’s investigation into the relationship 250 years ago between Exeter’s founders and slavery.

Each student works with a faculty member to shape their project and document their work, then presents their finished product at the conclusion of the term.

Mims, who was advised by History Instructor Bill Jordan, played a trailer for the upcoming series and summarized his process to a remote audience over Zoom.

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned through the study of American history,” Mims recites in his trailer, “it’s that the United States has been through tons of difficult times before. And the more I dug, the more similarities I found between our past and our present.”

Originally intending to make 10 episodes, he soon realized the amount of research, writing and production

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Mims meets MLK Day speaker Ibram Kendi.

for each episode would require him to temper his own expectations. Eventually, he chose six current issues or events to examine: the pandemic, the 2020 presidential campaign, racial and social upheaval, conspiracy theories, the influence of white supremacy and disputed election results.

Mims researched each topic extensively, then spent four to five days writing an episode. He then used an audio transcription program to create and edit each episode almost as one would a written document. Four of the six episodes are completed, at an average duration of 48 minutes, with two more in production.

“I think that something happened between my lower spring and my upper winter where I just really fell in love with history,” he says, crediting the research required to write the notorious U.S. History 333 paper as a tipping point. “I was given the freedom to study what I wanted to study and research what I wanted to research, and this is an extension of that. I realized that when I had the freedom to study what I want and those elements of history that I find interesting, the passion never runs out for me.”

Along with satisfying his premise that current times — while challenging — are not, in fact, “unprecedented,” Mims says he acquired an appreciation for how much time and resources go into producing his favorite podcasts. He also discovered a favorite quote from historian Jeffrey A. Engel: “The old aphorism ‘Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it’ is, in fact, false.

Those who study history are also doomed to repeat it. But we are less surprised.”

“This is what my podcast is all about,” Mims says. “We may not be able to control that history will repeat itself, but we can know what to do when it happens.” E

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Phillips, Founders’ Day Award Recipients Chosen BEAR ATWOOD ’77, JACKIE THOMAS TO BE HONORED FOR THEIR SERVICE

By Adam Loyd

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Thomas

Atwood

recipients of two of the Academy’s most prestigious honors. Jacquelyn “Jackie” H. Thomas ’45, ’62, ’69 (Hon.); P’78, ’79, ’81 will receive the Founders’ Day Award and Bear Hailey Atwood ’77 will receive the John and Elizabeth Phillips Award.

Recognized by the General Alumni Association annually since 1976, the Founders’ Day Award is given to those who have demonstrated exceptional service to the Academy. During her 35 years as Academy Librarian, Thomas was an advocate for the inclusion of female faculty and staff. She served on numerous committees and as a day student adviser and tennis coach. Thomas was the 1989 recipient of the Rupert Radford ’15 Faculty Fellowship and in 1990 was named the James H. Ottaway Jr. ’55 Professor.

Thomas will receive the award in a virtual assembly on May 21.

The 2021 John and Elizabeth Phillips Award recipient, Bear Atwood, has spent more than three decades in law advocating for the rights of the underrepresented. The vice president of the National Organization for Women, Atwood has devoted her career to fighting for gender, racial and sexual orientation equity. In 2014, she founded her own firm focused on civil rights law and criminal defense.

Awarded by the Trustees and given annually since 1965, the John and Elizabeth Phillips Award recognizes an Exonian whose life and contributions to humankind exemplify the nobility of character that John and Elizabeth Phillips sought to promote in establishing the Academy.

Atwood will receive the honor at an assembly on Oct. 22.

The Awards Committee also rescheduled the date to honor the 2020 Founders’ Day Award recipient, Alan Jones ’72. Jones was to receive his recognition in a virtual assembly on April 30.

The current Exeter Fund national co-chair, Jones has served the Academy in many roles including GAA president and trustee, reunion major gift chair and class president. He received the 1994 President’s Award for outstanding service to the Academy. E

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Biology Instructor Kadeine Peterson

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Marymegan Wright ’21

Genesis Jarrett ’21 highlights the power of protest.

Students hold candles to shine light on racial injustice and police brutality.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARY SCHWALM

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CAMPUS LIFE AT A GLANCE

LIFE IMITATING ART: The Elizabeth Phillips Academy Center offers space to study.

MUG SHOT: Lassiter Foregger ’23 and Grace Keyt ’23 paint mugs.

GRILL SESSION: Physically distanced students still gather in one of the most popular spots on campus.

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 A N D C H E R Y L S E N T E R

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ON THE BALL: Friends get in a game of Spikeball before afternoon classes.

WE ARE EX-ET-ER! Red Bandits rile the crowd during a spirit assembly.

I ROBOT: The VERTEX Robotics team works on its robot.

SPRING TERM BEGINS: Sunshine welcomed students to the final trimester of the year.

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EXETER DECONSTRUCTED

By Patrick Garrity

PATRICK GARRIT Y

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

The Korean-Vietnam War Memorial They all died in service.

• Capt. Lester Chase ’35 was killed on Nov. 29, 1950, in the early hours of the Battle of Chosin Reservoir.

• Lt. Alan Tarr ’46 died on Feb. 22, 1953, when the F-80C Shooting Star he was piloting crashed into the Yellow Sea. • Lt. Charles Ryberg ’63 died in an explosion near the Vietnam demilitarized zone on Sept. 7, 1967, only three months after graduating from Harvard.

• Lt. Richard Pershing ’61 was killed in a rocket attack on Feb. 17, 1968, as he searched for the body of a missing soldier during the siege of Hue. He is buried on a grassy knoll in Arlington National Cemetery next to his famous grandfather, World War I General of the Armies John J. Pershing.

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Their names and those of 11 more fallen Exonians are engraved on a memorial constructed 25 years ago to honor Exeter alumni who died serving in the Korean and Vietnam wars. The structure, a crescent bench of polished granite on stone pavers, sits between the former and current libraries. On the back of the bench a message is etched: “Phillips Exeter Academy records here the names of Exonians who, in the spirit of non sibi, gave their lives in Korea and Vietnam.” The memorial, paid for with donations from dozens of alumni and their families, was designed

by Boston architects Leers Weinzapfel Associates.

Harold Brown ’74, then director of alumni affairs, told The Exonian ahead of the memorial’s November 1995 dedication that the site was chosen because it was a well-trafficked location “where students and faculty walk at least once a week. The idea of making it a bench is to give those who have passed away the ability to ... always be a part of the Exeter community.” E

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Home Is Where the Art Is A C O N V E R S AT I O N W I T H A U T H O R C H A N G - R A E L E E ’ 8 3

By Daneet Steffens ’82

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© MICHELLE BRANCA LEE

hang-rae Lee, whose family came to America from Korea when he was 3, published his first novel, Native Speaker, in 1995. In the 25 years since then, he has continued to use his writing to explore the themes of immigration, assimilation, Korean history, the American Asian experience and dystopian America. His work has garnered multiple honors, including the Heartland Fiction Prize, a PEN/Hemingway Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He is currently the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor in the English Department and Creative Writing Program at Stanford University.

He has just been given the Award of Merit for the Novel from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, for recognition of a writer’s lifetime achievement.

Lee’s latest novel, My Year Abroad, tackles the myriad experiences of college student Tiller Bardmon after he meets the mesmerizing Chinese entrepreneur Pong Lou. The ensuing whirlwind of business politics, ineluctable family ties, immigration histories, glitzy casinos, wild surfing and a home-based supper club has a jazzier, more eclectic feel than his earlier narratives, but delivers the same provocative punch. We chatted with Lee via Zoom about this book, his teaching role and his memories of Exeter.

My Year Abroad is picaresque, serious, seriously funny and downright scary. What was your starting point?

It started with the character of Pong Lou. I had befriended this fellow in Princeton, and I was so taken by him and his life. He was my age, a newer immigrant — I wouldn’t actually call him Chinese American, I would just call him Chinese — and had multiple enterprises, small but significant, as well as having a day job at a pharmaceutical company. I loved his energy, his courage and his exuberance for the chase, that anything in this world was open to him if he applied himself. That was a kind of immigrant that I had not really been familiar with. My view of immigrants comes from a very different time in American culture. My family and I, we were mostly isolated, wary, often cowed, not because the community had malice toward us, but because of language issues, cultural issues. This fellow really inspired me. I decided to write a novel about him, a different kind of immigrant story.

How did the book take on its expansive shape?

Once I started to write this character, flesh him out, I realized I wasn’t going to be satisfied with just a ‘new-striver-immigrant’ story. I began considering why I was so enraptured by him. I loved the fact that he was not really rooted, but still very comfortable. And I realized that I needed another character in this novel, someone who was going to be taken up and inspired by this fellow. So I paired him with someone younger, someone who’s just on the brink of finding out lots of things about himself, who’s about to emerge into the bigger world.

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Family and food have been major elements in your work.

Did you know that this book was going to embrace those elements, too?

You’ve mentioned that Island of the Blue Dolphins was a childhood favorite. Is there some connection between that book’s main character, Karana, and your Victor Jr.?

Not at all! I knew that Tiller and Pong would have a business adventure, that they would have some kind of product, some sort of mercantile activity, but I had no idea what that was going to be. Once I started to investigate-slash-create Tiller, I thought, “He’s looking to consume and taste, to just stuff himself with the world.”

I realized that that was something that Pong could be into as well: maybe he has a product, maybe he has stores, maybe he has all these ventures that cater to people who are ravenously consuming. I then realized that this was going to be a book about visceral sensation. Tiller wants to taste the world, but, you know, there’s an unspoken pact there that the world will taste you back. For better or worse.

Absolutely! And also, to Tiller. It’s not just about selftaught learning, it’s about the sense of being orphaned.

Immigrants can feel a little orphaned in new cultures: I couldn’t go to my parents and ask for guidance — they didn’t even speak the language. You’re kind of on your own. I’ve always identified with kids who have to be this way, not strict autodidacts, but who are curating their selves — in education, culture, style.

Have your books helped you figure out your place in America?

No. I don’t feel any more resolved or sure about my identity than before I wrote Native Speaker. This is something I experience with my students, too: I teach an Asian American autobiography class and the students always think, “I’m going to take this class, write about myself and figure things out.” They soon realize that there are so many more areas, facets, places in their identities and in their lives that they have not yet explored or considered or reckoned with, that it’s just about continuing to build self. I certainly feel that way; I’m still building my identity.

“Sitting around that Harkness table, I learned to not be satisfied with the first best answer. “

How did Exeter impact your life?

I never have fun in the actual act of writing, but I did enjoy afterward having written those words. I understood that that was part of the character and psyche of Tiller, that he had a lot of range, a lot of different sources for his language — high, low, popular, academic, rude, profane. I liked the idea that this palette of language was there, very wide, very colorful. It was something that I did not allow myself in other books because of their nature.

Sitting around that Harkness table, I learned to not be satisfied with the first best answer. As a writer, I always have an immediate idea for this sentence, this character, this description, but Exeter was the first place that really trained me to be open to other answers or responses. It was always surprising where enlightenment came from, in those classrooms. Sometimes it would be from a quiet student, sometimes it was the teacher, often it was from the folks who always spoke up. But it was always unlikely and surprising and cool.

Why did you allow yourself to go there now?

Do you duplicate that approach in your classes?

In some ways, this is my most personal novel. There’s a melody to Tiller and cadence and rhythm — the way he thinks and expresses himself — that’s probably as close to mine as any character I’ve ever written. The other books are also me, but because of their characters and subjects, they employ a different kind of music. People would always be surprised after reading my books that I wasn’t such a dour, serious guy. This one is more in tune with who I am.

I absolutely do. I tell my students, “I’m just one of you. I hope that you will all guide the discussion to wherever it’s going to go.” I really loved that about Exeter, that most of the teachers weren’t strict or parochial in what they were going to discuss. And isn’t that what an artist, a writer, needs to learn? People always ask me, “Do you plan out your books?” and I say, “Well, only in the most general way.” If it has any life, if it has any vitality, it’s only because you discover those things along the way. E

This book is packed with wordplay. Was it fun to write?

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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 1956—Peter Brooks. Balzac’s Lives. (New York Review Books, 2020) 1958—Bruce B. Lawrence. The Bruce B. Lawrence Reader: Islam beyond Borders. (Duke University Press, 2020) 1959—John R. “Rusty” Potter. Cleared for Takeoff: Memoirs of an Air Traffic Controller.

(Self-published, 2020) 1960—John Wilcox. The Evolution of Corporate Governance. (Morrow Sodali, 2020) 1961—Timothy W. Ransom. For the Good of the Order: The Braget Farm and Land Use in the Nisqually Valley. (Self-published, 2020) 1961—Bruce L. Reynolds. From the Lake: Selected Poems. (Politics & Prose, 2020) 1966—Jeffrey A. Sheehan. There Are No Foreign Lands (Chinese Edition). (Selfpublished, 2019) 1967—Preston Zoller, as Preston Fleming.

Root and Branch. (PF Publishing, 2020) 1968—Joseph W. Carvin. It’s Been 400 Billion Years: The Story of Life on Earth a Million Years at a Time. (Nothing in Common Books, 2020) 1972—Tom Hinkle. Small Wonder: A History of Small Point, Maine. (Arcadia Publishing, 2020) 1972—Roland Merullo. From These Broken Streets: A Novel. (Lake Union Publishing, 2020) 1976—Peter Canning. Killing Season: A Paramedic’s Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Opioid Epidemic. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021) 1984—Nick Benson, translated with Elena Coda. My Karst and My City and Other Essays.

(The Lorenzo Da Ponte Italian Library, 2020) 1997—Marissa King. Social Chemistry: Decoding the Patterns of Human Connection.

(Dutton, 2021) 2005—Leslie Moclock. Rocks, Minerals, and Geology of the Pacific Northwest. (Timber Press, 2021) BEYOND BOOKS 1957—George D. Brown. “Defending Bridgegate.” (Washington & Lee Law Review, vol. 77, no. 1, 2020) 1969—Anthony Davis, composer. “You Have the Right to Remain Silent,” written for solo clarinet/contra-alto clarinet and chamber ensemble, performed Nov. 2020 by the Cincinnati Symphony in its live series.

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1980—Alexandra Grant. “Telepathy Is One Step Further Than Empathy,” solo art show at the Orange County Museum of Art, Sept. 24, 2020, to Feb. 21, 2021.

1981—Claudia Putnam. “Remanence,” poem.

(Tar River Poetry vol. 60, no. 1, 2020) —“Elements,” poem. (Literary Accents vol. 1, no. 4, 2021) —“Reading Octavio Paz,” poem. (The Write Launch, no. 46, Feb. 2021) 2013—Duncan Robinson and Davis Reid. “The Long Shot,” podcast. Offers an inside look into the NBA season while showcasing stories of those who have overcome the odds and achieved success. (shows.cadence13.com/ podcast/long-shot, 2021) 2014—Oishi Banerjee, producer, editor. “The AI Health Podcast.” Features conversations with entrepreneurs, investors and scientists about the ways in which artificial intelligence will transform health care, biotech and medicine. (theaihealthpodcast.com/, 2020) FAC U LT Y Erica Lazure. Proof of Me + Other stories.

Short story collection was awarded the 2020 New American Fiction Prize and is forthcoming

by New American Press.

— “The Haircut,” flash fiction. (Fifty Word Stories, March 2021) “Transit Assistance in Roma,” essay. (Wanderlust 2021: A Collection of International Travel Essays, 2021) — “On Sail,” flash fiction. (Iron Horse Literary Review, Dec. 31, 2020) — “Veterans’ Day,” flash fiction. (The Cormorant Broadsheet [Ireland], January 2021) — “Cult of the Panda: Adventures & Old-School Fiats in Italy,” essay. (Parhelion Literary Journal, Dec. 2020) Matt W. Miller. Tender the River. (Texas A&M University Press, 2021) — “Wonder Woman ’84,” poem. (The Night Heron Barks, winter 2021) Willie Perdomo. Smoking Lovely: The Remix.

(Haymarket Books, 2021) Jon Sakata and Willie Perdomo. ex(i/ha)le, art-sound installation featuring mixed instrumental ensemble music, spoken poetry, video and material haptic assemblages. (Being and Feeling: Alone/Together Exhibition, 2020) Ralph Sneeden. “Canoe,” poem. (Split Rock Review, no. 16, spring 2021)

1971—John Soady, musician. The latest from his band, See No Weevil, can be sampled at seenoweevil.com.

— “Driving Past the Properties I Landscaped as a Teenager” and “Fish Brook,” poems. (Ploughshares, vol. 47, no. 1, April 2021)

1972—Sarah Lindemann-Komarova. “Russians Want Change, Even Without Embracing Dissident Navalny,” essay. (News-Decoder, 2021)

— “Evidence of the Journey,” poem. (Poetry Daily, featured in “What Poetry Sparks” with Paul Yoon)

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Major Transition S A M F U L D ’0 0 M O V E S F R O M T H E D I A M O N D T O T H E F R O N T O F F I C E

By Brian Muldoon

MILES KENNEDY/THE PHILLIES

wanted to play straightforward and we had 100 kids trying out. That wasn’t my style, so I cut him.”

“I don’t know if ‘fancy’ is the right word,” Fuld argues with a laugh. “I might have had a little more flair to my game. But I thought I was good enough to at least make JV.” After a second thought and a sit-down meeting between the legendary coach and the perplexed prep, Fuld was added to the JV roster.

He quickly worked his way up to the varsity. “I had a quick conversation with [the other coaches] and said, ‘We ought to give this kid another look,’” Dennehy says, chuckling.

“Sam and I often kid about this now.”

It was an honest introduction to Coach Dennehy and the blue-collar, hard-nosed approach with which Fuld would become familiar as he played soccer and baseball — where there was no question about his ability — under Dennehy for the next four years.

“Coach Dennehy is one of the best; he means the world to me,” says Fuld of his former coach and longtime friend. “I’ve learned so much from him and Coach [Dana] Barbin — unsurprisingly a lot about mental toughness.”

Now, it is Fuld’s turn to pick the players. In December, Fuld was Sam Fuld has spent his adult named general manager of the life in a baseball dugout.

Philadelphia Phillies. While you could categorize Fuld as a baseball lifer, it was a quick rise through the front-office ranks to uit dancing and play soccer!” one of the premier jobs in Major League Baseball.

Those loud instructions caught Sam Just 36 months removed from the last of eight seasons Fuld ’00 off guard. He was a great athlete, playing in the majors, Fuld has ascended quickly within played club soccer growing up, and the Phillies organization. He kicked off his post-playing thought his tryout during his first fall on campus was career as the team’s Major League Player Information going a little better than that.

Coordinator in 2017 before becoming the Phillies’ Former Big Red coach Bill Dennehy was unimpressed: Director of Integrative Baseball Performance — roles “He was dancing with the soccer ball, being all fancy. I

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get a chance to win many championships as an that focused on utilizing analytics and sports athlete,” Fuld says. “Winning that championship science. Now he will work closely with two-time World Series champion and President of Baseball game mattered a lot. There’s no better feeling.

Following that championship game with a win Operations Dave Dombrowski on bringing a title over Andover the next weekend to close out the back to one of the most rabid fan bases in sports. year, it’s a feeling I won’t ever forget.”

“It has only been a few months into the job Following graduation, Fuld enjoyed a but it feels like it could be a full year,” Fuld says.

“Some days it feels like I’ve been drinking from a decorated career at Stanford, where he was a two-time All-American and is still the all-time firehose, but I’d be gasping for more air if I didn’t program leader in runs scored (268) and is have the great resources around me, including second in hits (356). After being drafted after his Dave.”

A continued role in baseball after his playing days were over felt like a natural progression for the Stanford University grad, who will rely on his experiences as a player to help aid in strategies in the front office.

“Really from the day my playing career started, I wasn’t sure how long it was going to last,” Fuld says humbly.

“It could have been the next day that I was looking for what was life after baseball. I was always thinking about it in some respect — searching for something that would be interesting, challenging and satisfying. I knew staying in baseball would fit.”

Fuld’s career on the diamond in Fuld credits former Big Red Coach Bill Dennehy for Exeter is one not many will forget. teaching him to be mentally tough on the field.

Mammoth home runs, leaping and diving catches in the outfield and junior season, he decided to return to Stanford speed around the basepaths led Big Red to a title in 1999 and droves of Major League scouts to the and finish his economics degree. He was drafted once again after his senior season by the Chicago Exeter campus.

Cubs and started his professional career.

“One game Sam hit a ball that almost hit Fuld made his big-league debut in 2007 the mound on the JV field beyond the varsity and stuck around the majors for parts of eight outfield,” Dennehy recalls vividly. “One scout seasons with the Cubs, Tampa Bay Rays, came over to me during the game and said a Minnesota Twins and Oakland Athletics. bunch of them were having a bet on how far that Now in Philadelphia with his wife and fellow ball was hit. After the game, I grabbed a tape Exeter grad, Sarah (Kolodner) ’01, and four and walked it out. It was like 445 feet; the scouts children, Fuld is spending the early months of could not believe it. I kept telling them do no the season at the Phillies’ spring training facility underestimate this kid.” in Clearwater, Florida. Dennehy is still on the It was hits like that — along with batting over sidelines watching. .600 in two out of his four seasons in a Big Red Enjoying his retirement after 46 years of uniform — that helped bring Exeter to a 16-2 overall record and the Central New England Prep service at the Academy and spending winters in Florida, Dennehy has been a Phillies spring trainSchool Baseball League title in ’99, one season ing season ticket holder and could not be happier after not even making the league tournament. to have a front-row seat to Fuld’s newest gig.

The team was comprised of a roster of just 12 “Sam is a superstar in everything he does,” players, but their talent and cohesion allowed for Dennehy says. “I’m not the least bit surprised, something special. but I am so happy to see his success.” E “I don’t care how good you are, you just don’t

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nother season of interscholastic competition was lost to the restrictions of the pandemic over the winter, but Big Red athletes pulled on their masks and took to the courts, ice, mat, track and pool for spirited play all the same. The return of games for the spring sports season is a welcome sight on the south side of campus and beyond. Go, Big Red! E

PHOTOS BY CHRISTIAN HARRISON, MARY SCHWALM AND PATRICK GARRIT Y

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t is early March, and Kristofer Johnson is feeling

hopeful. As director of choral activities and chair of the Music Department, he’s steered Exeter’s musical community through the upheaval caused by a global

pandemic and a calendar year spent physically distanced,

of Change through remote learning or on-campus hybrid learning.

Now, as the winter term draws to a close, the choirs and orchestra have just started meeting in person for the first time in nearly a year. Singers are doubling up on masks, layering fabric masks over surgical ones, while musicians who play wind instruments use bell covers to block the exit of any aerosol droplets. Everyone stands nine feet apart, and they meet in the rooms with the most ventilation. These precautions are small prices to pay, however, for the renewed energy and excitement of in-person interaction.

“Every rehearsal has a few extra steps, and a few extra minutes of making sure that things are safe and the kids are distanced,” Johnson says. “But the students are so hungry to make music and to be together doing it that it’s been really joyful.”

This spring, as Exeter’s students, faculty and staff — like the rest of the world — tentatively emerge into a new kind of normalcy, music makers and fans alike have a lot to look forward to. As part of a commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion at both the school and the departmental level, Johnson and his colleagues are working to decenter the traditional Western musical canon, open up the department to more modern musical styles, and provide support and encouragement to anyone who’s making music or wants to make music at Exeter.

“We are really undertaking a comprehensive review of how we program for all of our ensembles,” explains Johnson. “It’s an ongoing effort, and we’re all digging in and trying to look honestly at where we’ve been, and what it is we’re willing to stand behind.”

E X E T E R’S VIBRANT MUSIC PROGRAM DECIDES WHERE TO GO NEXT

By Sarah Pruitt ’95 Photographs by Christian Harrison unless noted

MAKING MUSIC THE MODERN WAY

In the fall of 2020, Eric Schultz, director of the new electronic and emerging music program, was surprised and delighted to see that 64 students signed up for the new Electronic Music Composers Collective (aka EMC2) course. “That’s 5% of the school,” he points out. Such robust numbers for a brand-new course taught by a new faculty member, Schultz says, “confirmed for all of us that there’s a lot of interest in doing this kind of music [at Exeter].”

Before Schultz’s arrival, his future colleagues in the Music Department had designed EMC2 as an evening workshop that functions similarly to the Concert Choir, Symphony Orchestra and Choral Union, but focuses on making contemporary styles of music — including pop, hip-hop, electronic dance music (EDM), ambient and experimental

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Kristofer Johnson, who joined the Music Department eight years ago and has been department chair since 2018, says the department is undertaking a “comprehensive review.”

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— primarily using technology. Schultz has taken charge of the course, and renamed it Modern Music Making to encompass a wider range of musical styles beyond the electronic.

As a longtime professor of music technology at Chabot College, a large community college in the San Francisco Bay Area, Schultz had launched a similar program to teach music that had previously been considered “nonacademic.” Trained as a composer, he’s also played the saxophone in bands ranging from rock to jazz to blues to country, written music for symphony orchestras and choirs, and released his own electro-acoustic solo album, Estuary, in 2018.

Schultz sees this multifaceted approach to music as the heart of the Modern Music Making course. “The whole idea is to open the doors of the Music Department to all who want to make music,” he says. “I want the students to feel very free and supported to make what they want to make and explore what they want to explore.”

A broad range of students has embraced the course. “There are students who have been making music with a laptop since they were in elementary school,” Schultz says. Some have even released their music commercially, on Spotify, Apple Music or other applications, while others are accomplished classical musicians. At the other end of the spectrum, he says, “there are students who cannot read music notation, who have never used a computer to make music, who don’t play an instrument, and who are just curious.”

Students use different applications and software to compose their music, and upload it as MP3s to Canvas, as they would any other school assignment. Though most of the classes began winter term online, the first in-person sessions started in March, and Schultz was finally able to play the music on large, high-quality speakers for the group to critique. “As students who are deeply into one musical genre are exposed to other genres, they’re seeing connections, and they’re getting creative ideas about how to broaden their own sense of music,” Schultz says.

“That is a beautiful thing.”

Plans are in the works for how to release the music made by students during spring term for the larger Exeter community to enjoy. Schultz has the long-term vision of building a recording studio and creative space, but for now, he and his colleagues are carefully considering, “how we can present this music with the same level of prestige as the other music that we present at this school,” he says.

Looking ahead to the fall, the Music Department will welcome another new faculty member, Marcus Rabb, as director of jazz and bands. A talented jazz trumpet player with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music from Howard University, Rabb has taught music for more than 20 years, most recently at Middlesex School, and has performed with Aretha Franklin, Tito Puente and Wynton Marsalis, among others.

“Between Eric and Marcus, we’re going to see contemporary music ensembles, like bands and combos, become centralized,” Johnson says. “So [the students have] faculty time and coaching and support in the department, and appearances in our concert series in a way that you’re used to seeing the Symphony Orchestra and the Concert Choir.”

“There is a lot of momentum toward expanding what kind of music is taught in musical academia,” adds Schultz. “It’s really exciting to think we’re going to be on the forefront of that.”

a lot of

“... there’s

interest in doing this

kind of music [at Exeter].”

Eric Schultz, the director of the new and emerging music program, found 64 students signed up for the debut of his electronic music composing course.

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LOOKING BACK, AND LOOKING AHEAD

As 2020 approached, and each department planned for how to commemorate 50 years of coeducation at Exeter, Johnson and his colleagues decided to commission an original composition for the Concert Choir and Chamber Orchestra to perform. In the interest of representing new viewpoints and styles, they sought a young composer, and someone who didn’t identify as male. After interviewing a number of people, and narrowing it down to a pool of finalists, the core music faculty chose Tanner Porter, a composer-performer, songwriter and visual artist from California whose work blurs the boundaries between classical and contemporary music.

As Porter began meeting virtually with students in the choir and orchestra last fall, she also met with members of the Feminist Club and students in the class Music and Protest, taught by Music Instructor Rohan Smith. “The idea from the beginning was to get to work with as many students as possible, even those who don’t necessarily have a musical interest,” Porter says. “Those who might be interested in the piece just in terms of the concept, and being a part of the conversation.”

Porter started by giving the students an introduction to her process of composition, in which storytelling plays a central role.

“The idea was to build up a common language,” she says. As she began writing the piece itself, she brought selections to the Zoom sessions for feedback.

“The students were from the beginning a very active part of the workshopping process for me,” Porter says. “It was definitely a good learning experience for me, and very humbling to get to open up my creative process to 70 young people.”

As part of her research for the composition, Porter interviewed several women from Exeter’s early graduating classes after coeducation was adopted in 1970, including Theater and Dance Instructor Sarah Ream ’75. She also interviewed Jacquelyn “Jackie” Thomas ’45, ’62, ’69 (Hon.); P’78, P’79, P’81, and Susan Herney ’69, ’74,’ 83 (Hon.), two of the first women on Exeter’s faculty. These conversations, and especially those she had with current students, inspired the central themes of Porter’s composition, which she has titled “Ease the Roads.”

“One of the things [the students] said from the beginning was that they were interested in a piece that when it ends, it doesn’t really feel like it’s ended because this is an ongoing conversation,” says Porter. “I was definitely interested in writing a piece that looks forward into the future…. [as well as] this idea that every generation is working for the next generation to not have to work quite so hard, or in quite the same ways.”

Porter turned in the completed composition at the end of winter term and will continue to help make adjustments as rehearsals go forward. To accommodate a larger audience, the final performance will likely be livestreamed on YouTube from “The Bowld,” in the Class of 1959 Music Building Addition’s performance space.

Johnson lauds the “genre-expanding nature” of Porter’s work. “It’s hard to pigeonhole exactly where it belongs in terms of style,” he says. “It’s really exciting to get out of the historical canon and be trying to create something new and fresh and interesting.”

“It’s really exciting to get out of the historical canon and be trying to create something and

new

PATRICK GARRIT Y

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fresh interesting.”

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and

Cellist Augusta Manchester ’22 performs a Brahms sonata during the student soloist concert in The Bowld.

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WELCOMING NEW VOICES

“...they’re

getting

The smaller world necessitated by the pandemic has also seen another member of the Music Department join forces with the Theater and Dance Department to ensure the continued vibrancy of musical performance at Exeter. In mid-March, the latter department staged What Comes Next?, the musical that Choral Assistant Intern Jerome Walker co-wrote as part of his senior thesis at Yale University. Walker also served as musical director and pianist for the production.

In his second year working at Exeter, Walker has taken on an increasing number of responsibilities. In addition to working with the Concert Choir and directing the Choral Union, he taught a general music listening course in the winter term, and will teach a course in music theory in the spring. He’s also an adviser for the Gender and Sexuality Alliance and related student affinity groups, including one for queer students of color.

What Comes Next? is the poignant story of a couple and their daughter, dealing with the sudden death of their son and her brother — and the uncertainty of their future without him — on the anniversary of his untimely death.

Walker and Lauren Josef, chair of the Theater and Dance Department, thought the play would be suitable for pandemic times because of its relatively small cast of seven.

They decided to double-cast the show in order to include more students. “But we had so many fantastic people come out in auditions that ... to only cast 14 people in something this term was just not enough,” Walker says. To open the door even wider to student performers, they decided to put together a cabaret show called The Bad Side. “We did all kinds of campy, creepy villain songs from musicals,” Walker says. Rehearsals for the cabaret were “a lot of fun,” he says, and a good balance for the heavy emotional themes of What Comes Next?

Auditions for both productions were held over Zoom, along with a majority of the rehearsals; the first in-person rehearsal took place near the end of February. Actors wore masks, and a small audience watched the four live productions of the musical, along with a livestream of each production on YouTube.

Though Walker and his co-author, Noah Parnes, held a staged reading of the play at Yale, this was the first full-scale production of the musical, with costumes, set design, lighting and the other trappings of a production. “One of the main differences for me was that it did not feel like I was the only engine making the thing go,” Walker says. “It was so beautiful to see it brought to life in such a different way.”

Walker feels lucky to have worked in Exeter’s Music Department “at a pretty pivotal time in its history.” Like Johnson, he sees the importance of Schultz’s and Rabb’s roles in centering contemporary music — both electronic and emerging music and jazz — in the program in a way they haven’t been before.

“We talk all the time about how we want any student on campus to be able to come into our building and find a place where they fit in,” Walker says. “But it’s one thing to think that, and it’s another thing to really take a critical look at — OK, what do we teach?

Who is full-time faculty? Where do we allocate our time and our resources? That’s something that has been happening at the school generally for the last couple of years, and something that I have felt the Music Department has really taken in stride, which has been great.” E

creative

ideas

about how to broaden their own sense of music”

Choral Assistant Intern Jerome Walker wrote and directed a musical that Exeter’s Theater and Dance Department performed in March.

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FOR

the

People R O H A N P AV U L U R I ’ 1 4 L E V E R A G E S T E C H N O LO GY F O R S O C I A L J U S T I C E

by Sarah Zobel

I

n telling the tale of how he came to create Upsolve, a nonprofit online platform that empowers families to overcome financial distress, Rohan Pavuluri ’14 repeatedly mentions luck. He was lucky, he says, to go to Exeter and Harvard; lucky to have the instructors and professors he credits with shaping the trajectory of his life; lucky to meet his future Upsolve co-founder; lucky to get funding and gain traction as a startup. “If you ask me, is it either hard work or luck,” he says. “I’ll say 100% luck.”

Don’t be fooled. Though there may have been a bit of good fortune at his back, Pavuluri is driven, and at the age of 25, he’s already positively improved the lives of millions of Americans through his ingenuity, compassion and

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dogged determination. “It’s part of the American DNA that when people hit hard times, we give them a second chance,” Pavuluri says.

The Upsolve site currently tallies more than 2 million visitors per year and — through educational tools and a free app that helps families file bankruptcy — has helped relieve $300 million in debt — numbers that will no doubt increase in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Invoking the organization’s slogan, “Civil Rights Should Be Free,” Pavuluri says, “There is a civil rights injustice that we don’t talk about in America, which is that low-income and working-class families live in a different legal system than everyone else. If you can’t afford a lawyer within our civil legal system, you have no right to a free

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lawyer. It’s a modern-day poll tax, in the form of legal fees. If you can’t pay legal fees, you don’t have the same rights as everyone else.”

Pavuluri is turning heads with his deep commitment to non sibi work. He was recognized on the 2018 Forbes 30 under 30 Law & Policy list and, together with Upsolve, was given a Robin Hood Foundation Heroes Award for “extraordinary contributions in the fight against poverty.” This year, he was named to the TIME 100 Next list of “rising stars shaping the future.”

To anyone who knew him as an Exonian,

none of this comes as a surprise. As a 14-year-old in his first trimester, the budding “emerging leader” managed to arrange an hourlong private chat with assembly speaker Andrew Card, chief of staff under former President George W. Bush, when he realized that both he and Card had free time between the assembly and lunch. By his upper year, Pavuluri was on a first-name basis with former New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch, at the latter’s insistence. “You realize these senators, governors and CEOs are just people, and that you, too, can go after the biggest vision of your goals for the world,” Pavuluri says.

With a developing interest in politics and public policy, the Chicago native was drawn to the Academy not only for its academic excellence, but also by the promise of working with inspiring changemakers. A member of the Exeter Democrats Club, Pavuluri got involved at the grassroots level and was known to help rally peers at 5 a.m. with coffee and doughnuts before they headed out to distribute campaign literature.

He worked across the aisle, too, sharing introductory duties for the assembly featuring Gov. Lynch — his invitee — with Zach Young ’13, head of the Exeter Republicans, for example. He and Young also collaborated on the Exeter Political Union, a club that held bipartisan dialogues on issues such as gun regulation. “Rohan is a very thoughtful communicator who enjoys the exchange of ideas leading toward action,” Young says. “But he’s not someone who will just debate all day. He’s someone who, ultimately, wants to get projects done that affect people in material ways.”

Pavuluri spent all four summers during high school working either on Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn’s campaign or

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in his office, and developed interests beyond politics, as well. He was an active member of Exeter’s cycling and mock trial teams. And while both of those endeavors were new to him when he arrived on campus, he was eventually named captain of each team. Cycling coach Don Mills says Pavuluri had an easygoing, calm mentality as a rider and set an example for the rest of the team, which won the New England championship his senior year.

He shared even greater successes with the mock trial team, which was invited to the national championships

“You realize these senators, governors and CEOs are just people, and that you, too, can go after the biggest vision of your goals for the world.” three years running. Walter Stahr ’75, the team’s adviser at the time, remembers returning home after the first trip to nationals. In the Albuquerque airport, Pavuluri, then a lower, spotted the team that had won. “He just walked over and introduced himself and struck up a conversation,” Stahr says, laughing at the combination of friendliness and desire to glean a tip or two from the victors. The following year, the Exonians came in 10th place nationwide. Of Pavuluri’s grasp of the elements of law and his mock trial skills, Stahr says, “There are some things you can’t coach: a certain kind of confidence, physical presence, quickness on your feet. He had all those things from a very early age.” Being a natty dresser in the courtroom didn’t hurt, either.

In class, Pavuluri accumulated honors. He notably won the Negley Prize in American History for the year’s best work. Pavuluri wrote about the contentious nomination of Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court.

Instructor in History Bill Jordan describes that essay as “graduate-school level.” He remembers Pavuluri taking every relevant book he could find in the library back to his room, where he holed up and wrote. Pavuluri was also awarded the Nathaniel Gordon Bible Fund Prize for the study of religion and the Harvard Book Prize.

“He has this thirst for learning that was really fun to

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see and very contagious — it spread to others,” Religion Instructor Kathleen Brownback says. “If you hadn’t done the reading, you didn’t want to go up against an argument of Rohan’s.” But if he was known for being hardworking and bright, Pavuluri wanted others to be engaged, too. Brownback compares the Harkness method to spinning plates, with multiple ideas and discussions

going at one time: “If somebody dropped a plate, Rohan would pick it up, turn it into a Frisbee and send it sailing across.”

Top: Pavuluri ’14 joins math classmates around the Harkness table his senior year. Bottom: Teammate Joon Yang ’13 and Pavuluri race the clock during the cycling team’s time trial in 2013.

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Honing his critical thinking skills and mastering the art of persuasive argumentation at Exeter, Pavuluri says, meant that when he matriculated at Harvard, he was able to appreciate it as “an incubator,” rather than four more years of education. His goal was to discover novel uses for technology and ways to get software in people’s hands, especially those with limited financial, social or political capital. “Software and public policy both have the ability to reach a lot of people and make a difference in their lives quickly,” he says.

During his sophomore year, he routinely spent time at Harvard Law School, thinking he would eventually pursue a law degree. Looking for nontraditional ways to use technology to help marginalized communities, he joined the law school’s Access to Justice Lab as a research assistant in its Financial Distress Research Project. He found his polestar when he learned that filing for bankruptcy costs $1,500 and that legal representation is not guaranteed in matters of civil law: “If you can’t pay legal fees, you don’t have the same rights as everyone else. In poverty law, that is an unconscionable reality.”

That summer, he established a Robin Hood Foundation–supported clinic in Brooklyn, to begin to address these inequities. In the interest of better understanding his beneficiaries, he joined them at church, in their neighborhoods,

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Engineer Milton Syed ’14 and Rohan Pavuluri ’14 accept a prize grant from Harvard President Drew Faust.

and in housing and bankruptcy courts. His presence was noted by a court security guard, who wondered what could bring him there every single day. When Pavuluri outlined the sheer number of people who have lost virtually everything through an unexpected medical bill, a job loss, or a family breakup, the guard suggested he meet with a sitting judge, who then introduced him to attorney Jonathan Petts.

In 2017, Petts and Pavuluri joined forces to found Upsolve. Three years later, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit was named a TIME 2020 Best Invention.

The nonprofit has raised $5 million in philanthropic funding to date from individuals, foundations, universities, government agencies and corporations. It’s a point of pride for Pavuluri that his team is a unique cross-section of Silicon Valley techies and members of the world of social justice — indeed, that the entire organization enjoys that blend. The monthly “Upsolve Data Report” looks at a particular issue through the lens of actual data points from Upsolve users; two recent posts focused on the effects of job loss, student loans and medical debt, as well as Black financial peril.

Friends say it is authentic non sibi that underlies all of Pavuluri’s work. “He didn’t do the things he did [at Exeter] because it was going to get him into college or because the cool kids did it or any of those superfluous

reasons,” says mock trial teammate Gene Chang ’13. “For Rohan, it was a genuine passion and it showed.

I think he has accomplished the most of my friends from Exeter and Harvard — and these are accomplished people — and the reason he hasn’t run out of fuel is because he genuinely believes what he’s doing will make a difference, and he has fun doing it. It’s only a matter of time before Rohan’s invited to be an assembly speaker.”

The soft-spoken Pavuluri deflects the praise, giving the nod to others, including Upsolve’s users for teaching him “what would be valuable in their lives — really, we co-created with them.” He even named one user to the four-member board. He explains that like Khan Academy and K-12 education or the Mayo Clinic and health, Upsolve’s goal is to be the source for anyone in financial distress. Resources on student loans and debt collection, as well as whether it’s OK to buy a car after filing for Chapter 7 protection, are already available.

“People are so lonely when they’re going through legal and financial problems,” Pavuluri says. “Our goal is to provide them with education, an online community and the appropriate level of care. Ultimately, Upsolve is not just about bankruptcy. Our goal is to be the best place on the internet for any low-income family who’s in financial distress and needs help.” E

“Software and public policy both have the ability to reach a lot of people and make a difference in their lives quickly.”

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Abby Asch ’21 paints the first strokes on a portrait in Mayer Art Center.

TOM KATES PHOTOGRAPHY

her potential D

oors are open to girls at Exeter; the glass ceilings have long been cracked.

In the 50 years since girls added their voices to Harkness discussions, they have redefined student leadership at the Academy. Girls are just as likely as anyone to be president of the Student Council, the club heads of ESSO, the editor-in-chief of The Exonian or the student of first rank.

Many of the most significant initiatives underway on campus today are being steered by girls. The Afro-Latinx Society, the longest-serving club on campus dedicated to achieving racial equality, equity and inclusion, is led this year by four girls. The Exeter Climate Lobby, the most active club dedicated to promoting sustainability and awareness of climate change, was founded by four girls in the class of 2021.

All three editors of the 2021 PEAN are girls. Sixteen of the 25 students on the masthead of The Exonian are girls. From Model UN and WPEA to the Biology and Beekeeping clubs, girls have taken on student leadership roles throughout our community.

So much of this leveled landscape is a credit to the 50 classes that preceded this year’s seniors. They cut the paths, set the expectations and refused to be limited. Because of that, coeducation is no longer a progressive idea at Exeter.

It’s table stakes for students of all genders.

In these pages, we meet some of the girls who have thrived in the Exeter of today (and two teachers who preceded them).

They are well on their way to shaping their world, just as they have shaped their school.

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44 Her History 48 Voices of the Future

54 Their Voices Together

56 Her Voice

in Teaching

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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 IN THE C O E D U C AT I O N T I M E L I N E F R O M 2000–PRESENT

After I was elected, much of the focus was on my gender rather than my ideas and my plans. … I hope that in the future that when a girl is elected, the focus should be on her qualifications, not on her gender.”

—Alice Ju ’14, on her election as Student Council president, May 2013

Compiled by Patrick Garrity

Alice Ju ′14 and Emily Lemmerman ′15

Speaker Challenges Assembly

Alumna named Rhodes Scholar Kristin Javaras ′95, a senior at Harvard University, is one of 32 United States students to win a Rhodes Scholarship.

Marian Wright Edelman, American activist and founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, tells an Exeter assembly “The fellowship of human beings is more important than the fellowship of classes, races and religion."

JAN 2000

JAN 19, 2004

Girls Voted to Lead Student Council Alice Ju ’14 and Emily Lemmerman ’15 are elected Student Council president and vice president, the first time girls have held those positions concurrently.

MAY 8, 2013

NOV 1, 2011

Maria Cabildo ’85 Receives Phillips Award

By Patrick Garrity Maria Cabildo ’85 remembers the moment she discovered her calling.

She was 13 years old and at her family’s home in East Los Angeles, looking over her brother’s shoulder as he applied to colleges, including an urban-planning program.

“I had never heard of urban planning.

I’d heard of teachers, doctors, lawyers, even engineers, but never an urban planner,” she recalled. When her brother explained what an urban planner did, Cabildo was dejected.

Maria Cabildo ’85

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HER POTENTIAL

It makes a statement that we want to make all students as comfortable in their own skin as possible. We are not trying to put the proverbial square peg into the round hole. In addition, it levels the playing field for both boys and girls.”

—Jeffrey Ward, instructor in science, on the amended dress code, May 2015

Gender-Neutral Dress Code a First for PEA In a landmark decision, Exeter’s faculty approved a proposal to rewrite the school’s dress code to adopt gender-neutral guidelines. The amended dress code calls for students to wear a blouse, polo or collared shirt, sweater, turtleneck, dress or ethnic attire. Neckties will no longer be required.

Courtney Henrich ′15 in a 2014 game.

Henrich Sets Big Red Basketball Mark Courtney Henrich ’15 scores 28 points in a girls varsity basketball win over Deerfield, including the 1,000th of her career. She is first Exeter girls basketball player to surpass the 1,000-point milestone.

JAN 1, 2015 “Someone had planned my community,” she said. “Someone had planned the five freeways that ripped through my neighborhood. Someone had planned the unsafe walk to and from school. Someone had planned a community without parks for me and my friends to play. Someone had planned to make me feel as though East LA was a place that needed to be fled — or razed altogether.”

Cabildo recounted this moment to an Exeter assembly on Nov. 1, 2011, the day she was awarded the John Phillips Award (since renamed the John and Elizabeth Phillips Award). She was the first woman to receive the Academy’s most prestigious alumni honor.

A year after that epiphany as a 13-yearold, Cabildo was a ninth grader at Exeter

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Eunice Johnson Panetta ’84 is formally elected president of the Trustees, the first alumna to hold the position.

The approval comes after a yearlong discussion about dress-code reforms prompted by concerns about a strong gender divide. The Exonian reported that “many students pushed for a change in the dress code to accommodate those members of the PEA community who do not identify as the gender that they were assigned.”

MAY 2015

MAY 11, 2015

First Alumna to Head Trustees

— 3,000 miles and a light year away from East LA. “I have such gratitude in my heart for the Academy and for the Exeter alumni who make it possible for kids from East LA and other neighborhoods with economic and social challenges to come and blossom here,” she told the assembly. “That generosity changed my life forever, and has enabled me to improve the lives of children and families in East LA.” From Exeter, Cabildo enrolled at Columbia University, where she majored in urban studies. She returned to Los Angeles, working for Mayor Tom Bradley for a year before completing a master’s in urban and regional planning at UCLA, where she developed a passion for housing. She translated

her dreams for her native neighborhood into action by founding the East LA Community Corporation (ELACC). She has dedicated her adult life to developing and revitalizing neighborhoods in and around Los Angeles.

“The good days really do outnumber the bad days,” she told her assembly audience that day, “but the bad days spur me on to look for solutions to the challenges my community faces.

“I just want to urge all of you to cultivate empathy and compassion in your daily lives. And if you do this, even if you don’t choose a life of service, you’ll be making the world a much better place just by being in it.”

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

Director of Equity and Inclusion Hired Stephanie Bramlett is hired to serve as the Academy’s first director of equity and inclusion.

JULY 26, 2018

It is time to honor someone whose contributions to the founding of this school have gone unrecognized for 238 years.”

—Principal Bill Rawson, in announcing at Opening Assembly the naming of the Elizabeth Phillips Academy Center.

The John and Elizabeth Phillips Award Principal Rawson announces that henceforth the top alumni honor, awarded since 1965, will be named the John and Elizabeth Phillips Award.

OCT 26, 2018

MAR 2017

SEP 7, 2018

NOV 10, 2019

All-gender Housing Offered

Academy Center Renamed

The first all-gender housing options are announced, to open in the fall of 2017. Williams House and Kirtland House will meet the needs of all students regardless of gender expression, gender identity, sex or sexual orientation.

The Academy Center is renamed to honor Elizabeth Phillips, the wife of John Phillips, who equally devoted her money and care to establishing Phillips Exeter Academy in 1781. The Elizabeth Phillips Academy Center is the hub of student life.

Girls Volleyball Finishes Unbeaten Big Red caps a 20-0 season by winning the program’s fifth New England title. Exeter won 60 of 67 sets during its dominant season.

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

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Our Voice CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF COEDUCATION AT EXETER

Join us for a finale to a year of celebration.

Enjoy special performances by students and alumnae, hear from incredible guest speakers and share in moments of reflection.

Register to attend and spend your evening with Exonians during the receptions following the virtual event.

JUNE 6, 2021 | 6PM EDT For more information visit exeter.edu/coeducation

The FEW Project

Pioneer classes go on the record A group of seven classmates from 1972 and 1973 will launch this spring the First Exeter Women (FEW) Project, a survey they developed to record the history of female students in the early years of coeducation at Exeter.

Women in the classes of 1971 to 1976 are invited to reflect on the girls they were, the women they became, and how Exeter influenced that process. The FEW Project goal is ultimately to donate the material to the Academy Archives.

FEW will reach out to the classes of 1977 to 1981 at a later date.

The alumnae involved in the project are Chloe Gavin ’72, Beth Harrison Hadley ’73, Alison Freeland ’72, Sarah Lindemann-Komarova ’72, Zoe Mandes Billman ’72, Renee Edelman ’73 and Emilykaye Lonian Mitchelson ’73.

“We first Exeter women created that history, and we want the early women to record their stories and reminiscences so that history will be saved,” says Gavin, the project’s founder.

“We found it very rewarding to talk about our experiences at Exeter together, and we think that alumnae who respond to the survey questions will feel the same way.”

Find the survey at firstexeterwomen.com

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

Voices of the Future Nine girls were among the graduates of Exeter’s class of 1971. The idea of coeducation was still so unfamiliar that the diplomas the school conferred that commencement day 50 years ago recognized “his” successful completion of the course of study. There was a lot of work to do.

This June, more than 150 girls will join those nine pioneers and the thousands of girls who have graduated over the past half-century. Their impact on the institution is important and lasting.

Their impact on their world? Stay tuned.

Here are three Exonians who seem sure to leave a mark.

Nahla Owens '21 says an assembly talk by civil justice lawyer Bryan Stevenson motivated her to pursue a law degree.

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PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRISTIAN HARRISON

HER POTENTIAL

Nahla Owens

By Adam Loyd Even empty, an energy exists inside Assembly Hall. Decades of inspiring words from featured speakers line the walls like coats of paint, the buzz of opening days is woven into the seatback fabric, and cheers from E/A pep rallies past linger in the rafters. In the days before the start of her final semester at Exeter, Nahla Owens ’21 sits in the middle of the yawning space, its aura amplified by the stillness, reflecting on four remarkable years.

Looking around the auditorium, the memories come quickly. “I was sitting over there for my first ever UnSilenced,” she says, pointing to a row of seats near the stage. The traditional kickoff to the Academy’s annual celebration of the life of Martin Luther King Jr., UnSilenced features a variety of student performances with a social justice theme.

“I remember feeling the passion and the stage presence of every single performer and how that was reciprocated by the audience.”

Walking back to McConnell Hall that night, Owens knew she wanted to be more than a spectator next time. “It was just an amazing feeling to be there. And it made me realize, ‘Oh my goodness, this is something I have to be a part of.’”

This revelatory moment almost never happened.

Three days before the start of Owens’ prep year, Hurricane Harvey spun through the Gulf of Mexico, making landfall across Texas and Louisiana and causing extensive flooding in her hometown of Houston. Her family’s home was destroyed. She lost nearly everything.

Despite the devastation, Owens’ parents were determined to see their daughter’s dream realized.

The family drove to New Hampshire, arriving just before the start of fall term, the entirety of Owens’ possessions fitting into a single backpack. The ordeal shaped her perspective as a new student.

“I think stepping on campus, the thought was ‘This is my home now, and I have to make it worth it,’” she says. “I really just wanted to take advantage of everything that I could here.”

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A snapshot of the senior’s superlatives shows she’s done just that. Developing a passion for social activism, Owens took on leadership roles in the Afro-Latinx Society, Model UN Club, Democratic Club and as a research fellow for the ACLU. She fulfilled her goal from prep year, producing and co-hosting the two most recent installments of UnSilenced — perhaps inspiring the next wave of students to get involved.

“It was a lot of hard work, but the “It was a lot of hard thing that made it all worth it was the people who came up to me and said, work, but the thing ‘Wow, that really had a profound impact that made it all on me.’”

Owens hopes to continue her work worth it was the as an activist and leader in college and plans to pursue a degree in law. She cites people who came an assembly address from 2019 Bragdon up to me and said, Fellow and civil justice lawyer Bryan Stevenson as one of the most influential ‘Wow, that really moments of her time at Exeter.

“As he was walking across that had a profound stage, he stopped very briefly to wave impact on me.’” to me, and I turned around and audibly screamed. Thinking back on it, very embarrassing,” she recalls smiling. “After my experience in the hurricane, I really connect with Stevenson’s philosophy of ‘If I can do something good for someone in the world, why would I not do it?’”

By the time Assembly Hall returns to full-throat, Owens will be on to college, but her contributions to that space and the Academy will live on. Despite her accomplishments, Owens remains humble, remembering the sacrifices her parents made as they rebuilt their lives and home from afar.

“I have so much gratitude for the grit and resilience that they showed and how generous they were letting me experience Exeter after going through something that was very difficult for them,” she says.

“I’m really grateful.”

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Audrey Yin

By Jennifer Wagner Music. Writing. Visual art. Activism.

Visit Audrey Yin’s homepage online and you’ll find these five words boldly set in all caps, clickable links of her life.

“Yeah, that is totally me,” says the four-year senior. A brief scan of her accomplishments — vocalist in Concert Choir, first-chair oboist in Symphony Orchestra, Scholastic Art & Writing Awards winner, co-founder of VOCPEA — bears that out. But what’s not represented is how all of her interests interconnect. What is the wellspring of her creativity? Turns out, it’s empathy — and Exeter.

“Audrey’s remarkable artistry is born from the most astonishing depth of compassion,” says her longtime mentor, Music Department Chair Kris Johnson.

“She makes art to express her own humanity and to understand others.”

“Music has always been the biggest part of my identity,” Yin says. “It’s a safe haven for me. That tied with Mr. Johnson, who showed me that singing in choir is a very good chance for unity, because apparently our heartbeats line up when we sing. … When you’re perfectly in tune with each other, you can just feel the vibrations.”

The confidence and community Yin gained in Concert Choir inspired her to explore her musical self. She spent hours in the Class of 1945 Library’s listening room, choosing albums by jacket cover, expanding her musical oeuvre.

“I just wanted to explore everything,” she says. “Then I really got into recording and producing and finding my own [musical] style. Exeter has given me the

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opportunity to develop into myself.

It’s made me a more secure person.

Now, I’m just doing my thing.” This year, Yin wrote, performed and released her debut solo album, Heartworm. (Take a listen on her YouTube channel or any streaming platform.)

Yin has come a long way since her prep year when she took her first hesitant steps on campus during the Academy’s International Student Orientation Program. “It is one of the best parts of Exeter because it immediately gave me this community to turn to,” says Yin, who was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Shanghai and New York City. The friendships she formed then became an important support group, she says, especially following a racist incident she experienced walking through the town of Exeter. “That memory served as a motivation for me to do a lot of the activism work that I do now,” she says. “To not be complicit and try my best to do something positive.”

The summer after her prep year, Yin did just that, and organized the online support platform HapPEA (pronounced “happy”), where students can publish stories centering on social justice issues and understand, Yin says, that “they are not alone.”

In her upper year, when she learned that the pandemic disproportionately affected Black, Indigenous and people of color, she co-developed Voices of Color at PEA, or VOCPEA, an Instagram platform for students of color to share how COVID-19 has impacted their lives.

“Struggle is something that we all have

in common,” she says. “We forget about that when we leave the table sometimes, like how to have just basic compassion. It’s not just a classroom thing that students should do to impress their teacher. Compassion should be a lifelong sentiment.”

Yin also performed in and helped organize a virtual fundraising concert — in collaboration with Exeter’s annual UnSilenced event — that raised more than $15,000 for organizations related to Black Lives Matter.

“Audrey’s example as a creative spirit lifts and energizes every space she enters,” Johnson says. “Her soulful contributions to Exeter are beyond measure.”

In May, Yin will find out if she will be named a U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts for the stop-motion short film she submitted to the National YoungArts Foundation. “I’ve always had this feeling for film,” she says, “but I’m only starting to develop my aesthetic as a director.”

Heading off to Cornell in the fall, Yin plans to pursue a double major in art history and performing and media arts — and to continue promoting change.

“Even though I lived in China, I was very influenced by Western TV shows and they didn’t have a lot of kids or characters who looked like me,” she says. “I want to do something productive with my movies, create movies that show intersections of people and characters that are not just tokenized. … If art is going to be such a crucial part of my life, I might as well do something good with it.”

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HER POTENTIAL

“Struggle is something that we all have in common.

We forget about that when we leave the table sometimes, like how to have just basic compassion. It’s not just a classroom thing that students should do to impress their teacher. Compassion should be a lifelong sentiment.”

Musicmaker Audrey Yin '21 plays oboe, piano, ukulele and here, guitar, inside The Bowld.

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PHOTOGRAPH BY PATRICK GARRIT Y

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“I know that things change, and I don’t want to set something in stone when I know that there’s so many opportunities I don’t even know exist yet.”

Addie Luce ’21 plans to row for the University of Virginia.

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PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRISTIAN HARRISON

HER POTENTIAL

Addie Luce

By Patrick Garrity Addie Luce ’21 arrived at Exeter a world-champion tap dancer. She was shy in a crowd and struggled to find her place as a ninth-grade day student.

She will graduate in June as a Division I college rower, poised and popular with her dorm mates and lamenting the time on campus lost to the pandemic.

Hers is an evolution that underscores the Academy as a place for self-discovery. Sitting in the quiet of an empty Saltonstall Boathouse, Luce recounts her journey and looks ahead to her final term of high school and her last season rowing on the Squamscott River.

“Before I came, I was watching all these videos and looking at what the student body looked like, and it made me really excited — but I was like, ‘They’re all really mature and that’s not me,’” she recalls. “And I thought, ‘Maybe one day it will be.’”

She lives in McConnell Hall now, having converted to a boarder her lower year. By then, she had enjoyed two transformative experiences: a debut spring season as a prep with Big Red girls crew and a summer break trip to Yellowstone National Park led by Biology Instructor Townley Chisholm. Both events shaped the three years that followed.

“I left that [Yellowstone] trip designing the courses I would take at Exeter to revolve around Mr. Chisholm’s classes,” says Luce, who has taken every biology course the Academy offers. “I often stayed at the back of the line when hiking to talk to him about anything and everything. His passion for science and biology amazed me — and still does.”

The trip came on the heels of her first time in a rowing shell. An accomplished dancer (“I think I partly got into Exeter because I won the World Tap Dance Championships in Germany”) and a soccer player before PEA, she felt neither pursuit was a fit for her here. Luce and her mother would drive past

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Lake Cochichewick near their home in Boxford, Massachusetts, on the way to dance practice and see crews on the water. “‘That is the most beautiful sport,’ my mom would say.”

Luce, looking for an activity to fill a void, took a shot.

“I wasn’t the best,” she reports. “I was on the sixth boat, which is the worst of the novice.” She attended a rowing camp that summer, then hit the weight room in fall of her lower year. Her progress got her noticed.

“There was one day where they were practicing for the Head of the Charles and someone was missing, and they asked me to go on a boat,” she recalls.

“That was like, ‘Oh, wow. They believe in me a little bit.’”

“I kind of ran with that,” she says. “I came back lower spring and I was going to be on the top three boats or the top two or three. And then I had an amazing season in my lower year. I found my place.”

Luce credits her crew coaches, Modern Languages Instructor Sally Morris and English Instructor Becky Moore, for dishing out the appropriate portions of support and challenge to motivate her, and the skill and strength of her best friend and fellow captain Nina Weeldreyer ’21 — bound for Princeton’s top-ranked program — to inspire her. The result for Luce is a spot on the roster at the University of Virginia. She signed a national letter of intent last fall.

Rowing is her only firm plan for college at the moment. She has yet to decide on a major and has learned from her four years at Exeter to remain open to possibility.

“I know that things change, and I don’t want to set something in stone when I know that there’s so many opportunities I don’t even know exist yet.” E

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!eir voices toge!"

Catherine Webber '21 sits at a lab bench on the top

floor of Phelps Science Center flanked by fixtures of her Exeter experience: her mom and fruit flies.

Her mom, Science Instructor Anne Rankin '92, has brought Webber to this building since before she could walk.

The flies — thousands of them flitting about in vials, snacking on a sugary goo — have been staples in Rankin’s genetics course for nearly as long. Drosophila melanogaster, it turns out, has a genetic makeup remarkably similar to that of humans.

Rankin returned to Exeter to teach in 1999. She still has a photo on her phone of an illustration of a fruit fly an elementary-school-aged Catherine drew on her whiteboard, a big clock embedded in its cartoon abdomen. “Time Taker,” the fly was named, a not-so-subtle commentary on how much time Mom spent in the lab.

It rubbed off on her daughter — Mom’s passion for science and research; not necessarily the bugs. Webber intends to study molecular and organismal biology and ecology at Colorado College on a pre-med track.

It is not uncommon for children of faculty to attend the Academy. It also is not uncommon for daughters of alumnae from the past 50 years of coeducation to follow in their mothers’ paths to Exeter. What is rare is to be both a child of an instructor and a child of an alumna, a distinction that informed Webber’s Exeter experience even before she applied.

“The conversations surrounding Exeter in my family have always been overwhelmingly positive,” Webber says. “My grandfather [Kenneth “Ned” Rankin ’59], one of Hammy Bissell’s boys, credits Exeter with changing the path of his life. My mother made the decision to come back as a teacher because she loved her time here as a student so much. …

Exeter taught everyone in my family lessons and gave them memories that they’ve held on to for their whole lives.”

Rankin tried to leave her status as Exeter alumna and instructor out of her daughter’s equation and predetermine nothing.

“I really did think about whether it was the right place for her,” says the teacher. “And I tried really hard not to think too much about my own experience because I think it’s changed.

The school has changed a lot. I didn’t want to layer my experience or push my experience onto her.”

Rankin arrived at Exeter in the fall of 1988, the second of four siblings to follow their father to the Academy. Coeducation was nearing the end of its second decade by then, and Rankin said she didn’t much consider gender during the application process nor during her time while a student here.

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CHRISTIAN HARRISON

By Patrick Garrity

“Maybe it’s because "She has more of my dad felt like the school a sense of I can was a better place with do whatever I want. girls. He was not an alum I'm equipped to do who was grumpy about girls being here. All of the that.' And I guess narrative [in my home] I don't know where about the school was like, that came from ‘It’s better for having because that certainly girls.’ So, when I walked in here, it was like, ‘It’s didn't come from me.” better because I’m here.’”

Exeter’s evolution since her days as a student, Rankin says, revolves around the community’s attention to developing the “whole person” rather than simply “what can we put in your brain?” She says she is a strong proponent of this holistic approach: “Learning is an emotional activity. And if you’re not settled and calm and feeling OK, you actually can’t learn, period.”

Different, too, are the mother’s and daughter’s experiences as Exeter students. Rankin traveled across the country as a fouryear boarder. Webber grew up on and around campus and now lives with her parents and younger sister a few miles away. Her best friends at the Academy include fellow faculty children and playmates she’s had since grade school.

“I had totally different stressors,” Rankin says. “I was homesick and I wasn’t trying to navigate my sibling relationship and I wasn’t trying to keep up with my chore chart at home — all those things that you’re trying to do as a day student.

I think she’s having a really different experience than I did.”

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HER POTENTIAL

"My mom credits my risk-taking to a confident streak or fearlessness. I think it's much more about growing up here and watching the people I was surrounded by taking risks.”

Webber acknowledges the differences, too — for better and for worse.

She admits to struggling at times to square her experience with those of her peers, but she says she started to embrace her individual journey during her senior year with the help of her genetics teacher: Mom. Because Rankin is the only instructor teaching the subject, Webber signed up and just completed two terms of genetics with her mother as her teacher — and those dreaded time-taking fruit flies as her research fodder.

“I think having my mom as a teacher was key in figuring out how to balance Exeter as my home and as my school,” Webber says. “I learned that the two aren’t mutually exclusive and it actually isn’t important to find a distinction. The fact that I grew up here is what makes my experience unique from the ‘normal’ Exeter experience. I’ve learned to cherish this.”

Sitting side by side in a science lab, the pair exhibit far more similarities than differences. Rankin admires her daughter’s quiet self-confidence and willingness to take risks.

“She has more of a sense of, ‘I can do whatever I want.

I’m equipped to do that.’ And I guess I don’t know exactly where that came from because that certainly didn’t come from me,” Rankin says. “I mean, I’m an overthinker.”

“That is an understatement,” her daughter quickly agrees.

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“I ponder everything,” Rankin adds, “like, ‘What could go wrong here?’”

“It took seven years to remodel our kitchen,” Webber says with a smile.

Webber acknowledges that it’s a “very teenage reaction” to try to distance herself from her parents and stake her independence, “but I think having her as a teacher, we’ve definitely learned that we think the same way.” As for that quiet confidence her mother envies, Webber believes she came by that at PEA. “My mom credits my risk-taking to a confident streak or fearlessness,” she says. “I think it’s much more about growing up here and watching the people I was surrounded by taking risks.”

Webber spent spring term of her lower year studying at The Island School in the Bahamas. Over a hundred days in 2019, she studied fisheries, sustainability and food-production systems as well as humanities coursework steeped in local culture. It was a transformational experience for her — in part because it was somewhere other than the campus that she’s occupied for most of 18 years. She’s ready to leave the nest.

“I am excited for the ways in which my college experience will be different from Exeter, moving across the country, a new learning methodology, teachers who didn’t know me as a little kid,” Webber says.

“I am also expecting to deeply miss Exeter. I’m going to miss being surrounded by people as passionate as Exeter students and I’m going to miss Harkness. … Exeter has certainly prepared me for the next step.” E

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Her VoiCe iN TeAchINg

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HER POTENTIAL

DON’T BE A BOrING MATHEMATICIAN. That’s the advice Diana Davis ’03 recently gave a group of graduate students at her alma mater, Brown University. So, it’s not surprising to learn that when she was earning her Ph.D., she explained her theorem on geometric surfaces in a decidedly nontraditional way — through a dance video.

“A lot of math Ph.D. results are about really abstract things, things that you can’t explain rigorously to the person next to you on the airplane,” Davis says. “I knew I could make a dance which was my actual result, not a metaphor, nothing brushed under the rug. Figuring out how to express it through dance, it actually made me understand my results much more smoothly.”

In the nearly five-minute short, “Cutting Sequences on the Double Pentagon,” which she posted online, a student leaps across the surface of a pentagon, her path creating lines, cutting a sequence of colors, as classical music plays in the background.

Davis recorded the movements on an iPad taped to a board, tied to a chair, suspended in the air. The effort earned her an award from Science magazine — and a following. She now counts more than 1,000 subscribers on her YouTube channel and has been invited to speak at math conferences in 23 states and nine countries.

Davis further celebrates the art of mathematical ideas in her new book, Illustrating Mathematics. “The main ways that people express ideas in math are with words, equations and line drawings,” she says. “But you can use laser cutting, 3D printing; you can knit things; you can use paper folding and stitching. Math is beautiful and I love to get the word out.”

Davis’ enthusiasm for using innovative techniques to elucidate mathematical ideas grew out of her time as a student at Exeter. “I remember Philip Mallinson. He was a math teacher, and his classroom was just full of geometry toys,” she says.

“I LIKE HAVING GEOMETRY TOYS ...

THEY hELP YOU THINK, AND THEY’RE FUN.” “His table had all these objects on it and above the chalkboard there were hubcaps, because hubcaps have interesting symmetries. One day he told us, ‘They say that the person who dies with the most toys wins. I’m ahead.’ And I always think about that. I like having geometry toys, because they help you think, and they’re fun.”

Her biggest mentor by far, she says, was Rick Parris. “I was fortunate to have him for math in my prep fall and also as a cross-country coach” she says. “He was a big part of writing the

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problem-based curriculum that’s so innovative and influential at Exeter. I would say that curriculum is what made me a mathematician. I loved learning math in this way, I loved discovering math, and I loved talking about it with my classmates and presenting it to my classmates.”

Last fall, Davis returned to Exeter as a full-time instructor in mathematics. It’s a position she is somewhat familiar with. She taught for many years at Exeter Summer, completed an internship in the Math Department in 2008, and since 2004 has helped advance the Harkness pedagogy among fellow instructors at the Anja S. Greer Conference on Mathematics and Technology, working up from student helper to leader.

Most recently, she held posts as a visiting assistant professor at Swarthmore College and Williams College, and was a postdoctoral lecturer at Northwestern University, where she received the Math Department award for Excellence in Teaching.

“I HAVE ALWAYS WANTED TO HAVE A POSITIVE IMPACT ON THE WORLD AND USE MY SKILLS TO DO THAT.” Transitioning from Harkness student to teacher has been a process for the New Hampshire native. “It’s like opposite skills,” she says. “I had honed this skill of having an idea, expressing an idea, coming up with a good example, drawing a good figure, explaining things well. But then, to be a good Harkness teacher, you want to create a situation where students have ideas and students can explain things. You can’t just sit there and wait for them to do it, either. You have to carefully craft an environment.

That’s not a skill that you learn as a Harkness student at all.

It is a hard thing to learn, which I’m of course still working on.”

Davis is bringing her finely honed math skills to bear outside the classroom as well. “I have always wanted to have a positive impact on the world and use my skills to do that,” she says.

“I have been able to do that through teaching, but my sphere of influence is small.”

This past summer, she guided a group of 40 undergraduate and high school students to help find mathematical solutions to detect and combat political gerrymandering and segregation in school districting. “With the gerrymandering project, we did data science research, we got data on four states, and we made incremental progress toward bending the arc of history toward justice.”

For Davis, math teaches more than numbers. “Math teaches you to question others’ assertions, to be skeptical of what people tell you, to want evidence and want proof,” she says. “That kind of skepticism and looking for proof is something that is really important in greater life.” E

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CONNECTIONS

News and notes from the alumni community

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Ties That Bind

By Nadia Saliba ’95, co-chair of The Exeter Fund

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efore COVID-19, when I imagined May 2020 and my 25th Exeter reunion, I pictured a slightly more svelte version of myself chatting with classmates over a glass of wine at The Exeter Inn. I couldn’t wait to order a chicken-finger sub from Romeo’s, and to sit around Mr. Vorkink’s oversized Harkness table filled with books and knickknacks, marveling with classmates at how some of our most valued experiences after Exeter consisted of turns life took while we were making other plans. I anticipated my slow heartbeat, the smell of incense and the just-extinguished candles in the dark at the end of Evening Prayer.

And, most of all, I looked forward to reveling in those spontaneous conversations that happen between events, on campus pathways and greens, with Exonians I did not necessarily know well 25 years ago, but with whom I now discover an unexpected connection.

The reality of a pandemic world has put returning to campus on pause, and has forced us to reimagine how we will commemorate our 25th reunion.

Over the past year, thanks to technology, I have had the chance to connect with classmates and other Exeter alumni in ways I might not have absent the pandemic. On a McConnell dorm reunion on Zoom, I got to meet former dorm mates’ new babies and hear about an old roommate’s hard-fought (and since successful!) campaign for Newport-Mesa school district trustee. Through an Exeter “Beyond the Book” session, I discovered a classmate’s story of her father’s transgender journey during our Exeter years. It made me appreciate the numerous things I didn’t know about my classmates’ lives back then, and how grateful I am to have the opportunity to break down old barriers and know people better now.

So much of what I value about Exeter consists of the personal connections it has fostered in my life with people of diverse talents, interests and paths in life. During my three years as a student at the Academy, Exeter gave me my family away from home, my closest confidants and my first love. My connections with fellow students and faculty taught me to hold myself to a high standard academically, athletically and personally.

In the years since, those same connections have become an integral part of my professional network, and a constant source of enriching relationships. Many of my closest friendships today are with Exeter classmates.

When I connect with another Exonian, I know that even if our time at the Academy was separated by 20 years, we share many elements of the same experience. We each remember our yearly spots in Assembly Hall, and the privilege we felt when the words “senior class” were called. We remember extended hours in the library sitting with friends, all working on our 333 papers. We remember the lyrics of “Celebrate” echoing around the quad just after the midnight scream. We remember the difference between who we were when we graduated and who we were when we entered.

The realities of the COVID-19 world mean our delayed 25th reunion this May still won’t look like what I once imagined. But I intend to seize the opportunity of a virtual reunion to continue making and nurturing the connections that form such a meaningful part our Exeter experience. E

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Lights, Camera, Action

By Juliet Eastland ’86

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ockey, soccer, baseball, football, tennis: athlete Brian Shactman ’90 arrived on campus upper

year with serious sports chops. So when he decided senior spring not to play lacrosse, a sport he picked up at Exeter, and audition for Senior Acting Ensemble, his friends were surprised.

In fact, Shactman had long wanted to act, but hadn’t mustered the self-confidence. In his hometown of Swampscott, Massachusetts, he says it felt like you were either a “jock” or a “drama guy” or a “science geek,” not all three. “Exeter was an eye-opener because some of the athletes I looked up to the most were just as talented in a bunch of different things,” he says.

Teachers, particularly English Instructor James Valhouli, helped him overcome his academic insecurity and classroom shyness.

Senior spring, Shactman acted in two productions (“Brechtian atypical stuff,” he remembers). He loved the camaraderie, the character exploration and the shared purpose. “To go from zero to 100, no one knows their Shactman (left) with news anchor Lester Holt lines, then six weeks later you put on a show,” he says. “It was one of the best experiences of my entire life.”

Exeter was so transformative, Shactman decided to pursue teaching. But an encounter with a local newspaper editor spawned a sportswriting gig. Then a chance meeting with a producer at ESPN.com sparked what became a globetrotting television and radio career at ESPN, NBC Connecticut, CNBC, MSNBC, NBC10 Boston and NECN. To date, Shactman has covered three Olympic Games, the World Cup, the Super Bowl and the World Series. For his documentary about basketball coach Geno Auriemma he earned the Associated Press Award. He’s anchored and co-anchored shows at MSNBC and CNBC, and covered the presidential primaries for NBC10 Boston and NECN. As lead correspondent, he’s reported on the exotic-animal trade from LaGuardia’s Customs Department, and on lithium-ion batteries from Bolivia’s salt flats (where his crew, stranded at 14,000 feet, was rescued by the Bolivian military).

Years later, he still has the bottles of homemade moonshine bestowed on him by workers at a Tennessee farm, where he spent three days reporting for CNBC on cotton prices. “I love meeting people I would never have any business getting to meet,” he says. “I love the privilege of being able to enter people’s worlds and, no matter how foreign, make those connections.”

Nor do the connections end when the set goes dark. “I feel you have to give at least 10% of your time to something that’s not about you,” he says. His teenage mentorship of a boy with Down syndrome ultimately inspired his involvement with Special Olympics. After meeting a local father crusading for his son, Shactman joined the board of Beat Childhood Cancer. He emceed a fundraiser for School on Wheels of Massachusetts, and “loved the mission and people so much” that he joined the board.

At Exeter, he’s fundraised, organized reunions and recently interviewed Tom Steyer ’75 for the Academy’s Creating Conversations series. This May, he is hosting the signature Saturday evening event at Exeter’s virtual reunion celebration. Exeter “changed my life,” Shactman says. “I try to do what I can in kind to help the school.”

Seeking a saner work-life balance, Shactman and family recently moved to Connecticut, where he co-hosts WTIC-AM1080’s “Mornings with Ray and Brian.” He’s hoping to feature front-line workers.

His first guest? Tune in for details. E

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Next Gen Investor

By Sarah Pruitt ’95

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hen Terri Burns ’12 first heard the buzz about a new app that allowed high school students to virtually sign one another’s yearbooks during the COVID-19 pandemic, it took her back. Back to her childhood in Southern California, when she and her friends would sign each other’s elementary and middle school yearbooks with a certain abbreviation.

HAGS, short for “Have a Great Summer,” is the name of the app and the company that Burns introduced to her colleagues at GV (formerly Google Ventures), the venture capital firm backed by Alphabet, Inc. Intrigued by the app’s blend of intuitive product design, consumer social experience and nostalgia, Burns reached out to the three HAGS co-founders, who range in age from 18 to 23, to learn more.

In September 2020, not long after that first virtual coffee date, GV led a $1 million investment in the startup’s first seed round of funding. Thanks to Burns, HAGS is now one of the first companies in GV’s portfolio founded by members of Generation Z (those born between 1997 and 2012). After its virtual yearbook success, the company plans to expand into more social content for teenagers, providing them with innovative opportunities for online connection and fun.

“We wanted to learn from this team,” Burns says. “We were excited by the entire generation that was around this product, and we wanted to be able to put dollars to work in a space that we think is up-and-coming.”

Shortly after the HAGS announcement came news that Burns had broken some barriers of her own. After three years as a principal on the investing team, she became (at age 26) the youngest partner at GV, and also the first Black woman in that role.

“There were a number of people who took chances on me, who opened up doors for me,” Burns says of her success. “On the other hand, I’ve put a ton of time and effort and dedication into my job and my story and the work that I do every single day. As much as I recognize some of the forces that were outside of my control, I also recognize those that were in my control, and I have a lot of pride for them.”

When she was at Exeter, Burns could not foresee the eventual path her career would take. She was fascinated by courses like the Religion Department’s Global Ethics

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and the history course Why Are Poor Nations Poor? Outside of the classroom, Burns spent much of her time dancing: She was on the Poms (Exeter’s cheerleading and dance team), joined the Belly Dance Society, and took dance as her sport. To this day, she counts her dorm mates in Gould House among her closest friends.

It wasn’t until her sophomore year at New York University that Burns discovered computer science, ultimately declaring that her major, and embarked on her journey into the tech world. After graduation, Burns headed to Silicon Valley, where she worked as an associate product manager at Twitter, focusing on user experience.

During that period, Burns connected with a partner at GV, who became a mentor. Soon, a position opened up for someone at the outset of their career, who was new to the field of investment but possessed a degree of operational experience in the tech world. She turned out to be an ideal fit.

In addition to her work with HAGS, Burns looks forward to finding more opportunities to support the next generation of startup executives. “Gen Z is coming up in age and building, creating, and shaping the cultural landscape,” Burns says. “I absolutely love the opportunity to meet and work with incredible, smart, driven entrepreneurs every single day.” E

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B OB FISHER ’72, BILL FISHER ’75, JOHN FISHER ’79

Sporting Philanthropy

By Debbie Kane

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he Fisher brothers — Bob ’72, Bill ’75 and John ’79 — are close. The California

natives live near each other in San Francisco, joke easily and finish one another’s sentences in conversation. They followed similar educational paths, attending Exeter and receiving undergraduate degrees from Princeton and master’s degrees from Stanford. (“We did go to different nursery schools,” says Bill, wryly.) Another shared passion is the game of squash, a sport that the brothers played at Exeter and that Bill and John pursued on an intercollegiate level at Princeton.

In 2004, their love of the sport translated into a generous gift to Exeter: the 33,000-square-foot Fisher Squash Center. “Squash was an important part of our lives at Exeter,” John says. “That common interest of ours made school both fun and rewarding.”

FOLLOWING IN EACH OTHER’S FOOTSTEPS

Bob Fisher ’72, Principal Bill Rawson ’71, Bill Fisher ’75, Jim Steyer ’74 and John Fisher ’79 enjoying an Oakland Athletics baseball game.

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Born and raised in San Francisco, the Fishers are sons of Doris and Donald Fisher, co-founders of The Gap. Each has had professional success: Bob served as chairman of The Gap and is a funder of water conservation, climate, energy and environmental education efforts; Bill is founder and CEO of a private equity firm; and John is owner of the Oakland A’s baseball team, with stakes in two professional soccer teams. They’re equally focused on philanthropy, from the arts to education.

Their parents urged them to attend prep school. “Our parents were believers in a strong education,” Bob says. “Our dad wanted us to attend a school with a diverse student body.” The first of the brothers to head east, Bob chose Exeter. When it came time for Bill to decide where to attend high school, he quips, “I figured what was good enough for Bob was good enough for me.” He arrived at Exeter as a prep while Bob was a senior.

John followed his brothers to Exeter four years later.

The brothers had different experiences at Exeter. Bob enjoyed the freedom. “I loved being away,” he says. “Exeter was a great place to be. You could be whoever you wanted to be; you could create yourself.” Bill’s first few months on campus were filled with mishaps, which lead to various medical situations, from a patch over one eye to stitches from a fall culminating with a broken collarbone! Adjusting to East Coast weather (“During winter it was overcast every day and it felt like I went months without seeing the sun, just not something I experienced on the West Coast,” Bill says), made for a rocky start. The night before he started classes, John was so homesick that he checked himself into the infirmary with an upset stomach. “Our mom told Bill to visit me,” John says. “Bill comes up from Princeton, we go to lunch and he says, ‘Mom’s worried about you. She’s afraid you’re not going to eat. Don’t be so homesick — it’ll be fine when you have a lot of work to do’.”

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Ultimately, the Fishers made it through — and squash was a new experience the brothers embraced.

All tennis players prior to arriving at Exeter, they took up squash to improve their games in the off-season. “There were no indoor tennis courts to practice on during the winter,” says Bob. “You either went to a tennis academy or you played squash. Most of the squash players at the time were former tennis players.”

Requiring racket control as well as speed, agility and excellent hand-eye coordination, squash is the perfect winter stand-in for tennis. “You have Courtside with students in the Fisher Squash Center to be in really good shape,” Bill says.

“There’s a lot of strategy to the game.

“The game creates a closeness you don’t get as much of in Points and rallies last a long time; it’s easier to get rallies tennis,” John says. At the time, the boys squash coach was going than in tennis. You get an incredible workout.”

German Instructor Werner Brandes. “Once I was playing a kid named Jason Fish,” Bill says. “To get me psyched PLAYING FOR BIG RED up for the match, Werner says, ‘Fish, you will hook him Exeter’s boys squash program, founded in 1932, was and reel him in.’ Jason ended up going to Princeton with already renowned in interscholastic competition when me has become one of my closest friends and lives a few the brothers played for Big Red, producing players such blocks away in San Francisco.” as American national squash champion Germain Glidden One of John’s most vivid memories during his senior ’32, and intercollegiate champions Jack Holt ’39, Chester year was sitting in the locker room after losing a close LaRoche ’44 and Arif Sarfraz ’72, a contemporary and match. “We were playing an interscholastic tournament good friend of Bob and Bill. The girls program, estaband I lost 18-17 in the fourth game. I was crushed,” he lished in 1974, has turned out standouts like Demer says. “I was in the locker room and every part of me Holleran ’85, one of the most dominant U.S. women’s ached. But that game was one of the greatest memories of squash players. my squash experience. Nothing can compete with that.”

When the Fishers played squash at Exeter, the game John and Bill later became four-year varsity lettermen was different. In the U.S., it was played on a differin the sport at Princeton (Bill played on three national ent-sized court, the American court. Everywhere else in championship teams); Bob was a first-singles tennis the world, it was played on a shorter and wider court with player for the Tigers. a softer ball. When the U.S. adopted the international Beyond squash, Exeter has helped shape who the game, the Academy courts became obsolete. Back then, Fishers are as adults. “I think that period of my life there were three full-sized courts; team members pracbetween 14 and 18 were my most formative years,” ticed on smaller courts, often with up to three players at a John says. “I was challenged by the weather, academics time, reducing court time and training. That changed in and competitiveness of Exeter. I think it’s had a greater 2006 with construction of Fisher Squash Center, located impact on who I am than any other academic experience in Love Gym. Touted as the most tournament-friendly in my life.” squash venue in the U.S., the facility is equipped to host Bill agrees. “I’ve spent my career in international businational competitions with 10 international-regulaness,” he says. “Sports taught me a lot about competition. tion courts, each with glass back walls; gallery space to It’s a lot more fun to win than lose. Hard work at Exeter is accommodate 400 spectators; training, treatment and part of the experience and that taught me what working equipment rooms; a lounge; a team meeting room; and hard meant. Independence at age 14 is not easy. You have a multipurpose space. Now celebrating its 15th year of to figure it out.” Bob says, “It’s an amazing privilege to go impact, Fisher Squash Center is used throughout the to a school like Exeter.” academic year for Exeter’s varsity and junior varsity The Fisher family’s gift is a lasting tribute to the sport teams as well as a club program and the prep physical they love and lays the foundation for a new generation of education program.

Exeter squash players. E The Fishers gained many close friends playing squash.

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Rules of the Road

By Kendrah Su ’22 CHERYL CHALMERS

This summer, I learned to drive the people I love out of my life. To the rock-studded shores of Galveston beach, high tide murmuring I come bearing gifts. Hurricane Laura’s leftovers of murky water, plastic nooses, pier splinters fished out from between crooked teeth riggings unraveled from the seams of the Gulf Coast, whose coastlines crumble under the leaning timbers of homes that never healed.

Budweiser shards glint like the stained glass hands of Jesus himself, prying the wooden beams of a Louisiana church apart, a brown body on brown cross drags itself onto sand.

The trip back is always shorter.

On the back window of a lemon yellow sportscar, a coiled constrictor’s fangs open in black ink Don’t tread on me. An army of red brake lights gleam Right blinker on, check the rearview, the side mirror, over the shoulder Of the highway, reverse here if you’ve missed your exit.

Glue each car’s headlights to the bumper in front of them and all eyes on you.

Below, the nation’s veins unfurl in hazy red-and-white lights in a hurry to return home Crash through the guardrails. Learn the sensation of flight, of free-fall, the only drop-tower outside a theme park.

Beeline for the yellow car. Plow right into the side, your car is bigger, he’s probably not buckled up.

Grip drifts from ten and two to Chick-fil-A Sundays: off the clock. Honk honk honk. Stay in your lane, bitch!

Eyes up, past the boarded-up businesses on Main Street, the shattered windshields of cop cars, the two crowds of protestors Unaware of the other until convergence around a corner.

And they do not run as if the police finally came, when you’d try to Cross the blurred line between villainy and heroism, fluttering Fairy godmother curled into the pistol muzzle, bones stronger than a riot shield and Lighter than conscience.

Flee not as if rubber bullets nip their heels before ricocheting into flesh, eruption to Face the music of strangers down the street, of feet pounding asphalt into angry welts Opposite sides embrace, long-lost lovers melting into one another’s arms as home became unwelcome, and solace found herself in the streets we drive past.

I don’t want to hear about this George Troy guy under my roof!

No sirens. A hearse to the house across from us.

A procession in silence, in masks, bloated eyebags, stained T-shirts, and flip-flops.

I ask my friends at drivers ed Where will we go? with that vertical ID granting sixteen-year-olds the greatest freedom imaginable.

The new water park, SAT practice, to work, to the protests, to Galveston, to the border, ’cause why the hell not?

To my boyfriend’s house, to my girlfriend’s house, to no one’s house because I have no friends in this hellhole suburb and live only through unspoken thoughts, a fantasy where Hearses do not escort my neighbor Vivian Miss Laura’s victims or George Floyd.

Instead, the casket fills with what I wish I could say, Stop the car. E Kendrah Su ’22 was awarded a gold medal in the 2021 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards for this poem.

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In the middle of the American Revolution, John and Elizabeth Phillips started a revolution of their own.

They believed in the future of our new country, and in the potential of those who would someday lead it.

Their bequest helped a fledgling Academy prosper.

What will be the legacy of your estate plan?

Many Exonians choose to put Exeter in their wills.

Our Planned Giving Office will help you and your advisers as you consider a lasting gift to PEA. Please contact Phil Perham at 603-777-3594 or pperham@exeter.edu.

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.

Alumni Awards Each year, the Academy honors individuals whose selfless work and generosity of spirit reflect the ideals of goodness and knowledge united. We invite you to nominate members within our community whose accomplishments are most deserving of special recognition.

John and Elizabeth Phillips Award Bestowed upon an alumna or alumnus for their outstanding contribution to the welfare of community, country or humanity, beyond any volunteer service to the Academy.

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

President’s Award Given to an alumna or alumnus volunteer who has made outstanding contributions to promoting the activities and goals of the Academy within the past two years.

Submit nominations at exeter.edu/alumniawards Questions? Email awards@exeter.edu