The Exeter Bulletin, winter 2017

The Exeter Bulletin WINTER 2017

From

Ideas

Actions

to

to

Solutions Social Innovation at Exeter

Reunions

2017 MAY 5-7

(children’s program available) 30th Reunion | Class of 1987 25th Reunion

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20th Reunion

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Class of 1997

15th Reunion

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Class of 2002

Class of 1992

MAY 19-21 50th Reunion | (begins May 18) 60th Reunion | (begins May 18)

Class of 1967 Class of 1957

45th Reunion

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Class of 1972

5th Reunion

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Class of 2012

MAY 12-14 MAY 23-25 55th Reunion

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Class of 1962

75th Reunion

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Class of 1942

40th Reunion

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Class of 1977

70th Reunion

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Class of 1947

35th Reunion

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Class of 1982

65th Reunion

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Class of 1952

10th Reunion

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Class of 2007

REUNITE WITH THE PEOPLE, THE PLACE, THE PAST AND THE PRESENT. FOR MORE INFORMATION VISIT WWW.EXETER.EDU/REUNIONS OR CALL THE ALUMNI AND PARENT RELATIONS OFFICE AT 603-777-3264

The Exeter Bulletin

Principal Instructor Lisa MacFarlane ’66 (Hon.); P’09, P’13 Editor Karen Ingraham Associate Editor Genny Beckman Moriarty Class Notes Editor Janice M. Reiter Contributing Editor Karen Stewart Creative Director/Design David Nelson, Nelson Design Communications Advisory Committee Daniel G. Brown ’82, Robert C. Burtman ’74, Dorinda Elliott ’76, Alison Freeland ’72, Keith Johnson ’52, Yvonne M. Lopez ’93 Trustees President Eunice Johnson Panetta ’84 Vice President Marc C. de La Bruyère ’77 Wole C. Coaxum ’88, Walter C. Donovan ’81, John A. Downer ’75, Mark A. Edwards ’78, David E. Goel ’89, Jacqueline J. Hayes, Esq. ’85, Jennifer P. Holleran ’86, Lisa MacFarlane, Sally J. Michaels ’82, Deidre O’Byrne ’84, Kerry Landreth Reed ’91, Dr. Nina D. Russell ’82, Peter M. Scocimara ’82, Serena Wille Sides ’89, J. Douglas Smith ’83, Morgan C. Sze ’83, Remy White Trafelet ’88 and Nancy H. Wilder ’75 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 2016 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

WINTER

“OFTEN THE BEST, MOST POWERFUL SOLUTIONS COME FROM WITHIN THE GROUP THAT IS EXPERIENCING THE PROBLEM.” —page 22

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IN THIS ISSUE

Volume CXXII, Issue no. 2

Features

22 From Ideas to Actions to Solutions

Social innovation at Exeter

By Melanie Nelson

28 Speaking Out

Students of color share their experiences at Exeter

By Daneet Steffens ’82

34 Where Wolves Roam

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PEA biology teachers visit Yellowstone

By Sarah Anderson

Departments 6

Around the Table: Heard in Assembly Hall, Meet an Exonian, Exeter Deconstructed and more

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Table Talk with Jared Schwede ’03

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Inside the Writing Life: Charlie Smith ’65

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Sports: Thinking Outside the Box: a profile of Sarah Odell ’06.

Plus, fall sports roundup.

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Connections: News and Notes from the Alumni Community

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Profiles: Mike Socolow ’87, Juliet Kostritsky ’72, Caitlin Andrews ’12 and Emma Glennon ’10

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Finis Origine Pendet: Giving Thanks, by Lauren Fidelak ’17 —Cover illustration by Chris Reed

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Cast members perform a scene from Charles Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby on Fisher Theater’s Mainstage in November.

—Photograph by Diana Davidson ’18

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AROUND THE TABLE

What’s new and notable at the Academy

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If You Build It, They Will Thrive

By Lisa MacFarlane ’66 (Hon.); P’09, P’13

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ecently, as I was thinking about Exeter, the oft-quoted line from Field of Dreams — “If you build it, they will come” — came to mind.

Exeter is fortunate to have the generosity of loyal alumni and parents who make it possible to renew our existing buildings and create new spaces that meet our changing programmatic needs. Even as I write, our new field house and the David E. Goel and Stacey L. Goel Center for Theater and Dance are rising from their foundations across campus. We are so fortunate to have the means of being attentive to how these spaces promote optimal learning and living. Nonetheless, the people within the community — the students, faculty and staff — are ultimately what matter most. After all, for at least a few centuries here in America, one-room school houses did the trick.

To be truly successful in our endeavor to unite “goodness and knowledge” within our students, we must provide more than beautiful facilities. With this in mind, I would like to ask us to re-envision the Field of Dreams quote, first by applying the word “build” not only to physical structures, but also to ideas, programs and curricular and pedagogical innovations. Second, I would ask that we replace the word “come” with the word “thrive.” At Exeter, we don’t just want students from every quarter to attend our school, we want them to thrive here, to grow beyond their own and others’ expectations.

“If you build it, they will thrive.”

Physical spaces and structures do, of course, inspire.

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You might wonder what else, what less materially, we are building here at Exeter in order to better ourselves.

As you will see in this issue of the Bulletin, the answer is, “A great deal.” Across campus, the concept of social innovation is taking root in the form of new classes, extracurricular activities, and yes, even spaces. Through their participation in such groundbreaking programs, our students are developing empathy and creativity while gaining exposure to an economic model that is inclusive of, and benefits, many people and cultures, as opposed to a select few. More recently, and led by our Director of Studies Brooks Moriarty ’87; P’18, the faculty has voted to develop something called the Sandbox, an experimental space in which faculty creativity around the curriculum can find expression. And in terms of work that invites external collaboration, we have recently partnered with the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Study of Boys’ and Girls’ Lives; the first group of Exeter student researchers are learning about, and conducting, participatory action research on how Academy students experience our visitations policy and evening prayer.

I hope — we hope — that these endeavors are as exciting to you as they are to us. What’s more, we hope that you will join us in thinking about and sharing ways for Exonians to thrive, for themselves and for a world that desperately needs their compassion and boundless talents. That, after all, is why we are in the game. E

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To watch video of these assemblies and more, go to exeter.gameonstream.com.

HEARD IN ASSEMBLY HALL On Sept. 20 “The Republican party can … learn [from Trump’s] success, and try and take elements of Trumpism, get rid of the appeals to bigotry and white identity politics, and try and craft an agenda on the economy and foreign policy that is more responsive to the struggles of the white working class — and not only the white working class, but the working class writ large.”

—Ross Douthat, op-ed columnist for The New York Times, on “Why America (Still) Needs Conservatism” On Oct. 14 “Those who are marginalized are often invisible. … I really wanted to capture the individuals that are not usually captured on the page. You see them, or you don’t see them, but their voices are unheard for the most part. And in this case, [it was] working class Jamaican women. Often times, in literature, they’re mostly caricatures. And I wanted to write rounded, complex characters and give them voice.

—Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of The New York Times Notable Book of the Year Here Comes the Sun On Oct. 18 “What does it say … when the two worst things a guy can call another guy are some variation of ‘woman’ and ‘gay’?

What does that tell us about how we see those two groups of people? Not only do we have this distancing happening, but it also starts to look a little bit like a hierarchy. … It feeds into this binary, that there are definite, unchangeable characteristics that are a man and are a woman.”

—Eric Barthold, founder of “Man Up and Open Up” On Oct. 28 “When you go out into the world and start the real business of living, hang on to what you’ve learned in this crucible. …

When you leave here, you’ll think that civil discourse is normal. … You’ll be able to listen to what the person across the table has to say, even if you disagree. … You won’t even realize it, but you’ll know that it’s OK to change your mind. When you walk into a room and take your seat at the table, you will already know that there is more than one way to solve a problem. In fact, you’ll already be wondering how the other guy sees the issue.

—Connie Trimble ’80, 2016 John Phillips Award recipient

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On Nov. 15 “In my opinion, our country is having an identity crisis. … We’re just not quite sure who we are as a country, and that’s a struggle worth being in together. …

This is deep-seated, embedded dysfunction in the United States of America, and so this is a crisis — and in crisis is also opportunity. …

“We’re standing on either side of the divide … and to me what it feels like, is that you can be in the same room, at the same table, at the same school, in the same country with people, and it actually feels like we’re on different planets. … We aren’t necessarily connecting and having honest dialogue across the difference, and … when we sit with our back to someone and imagine what’s going on, it creates fear and distrust of the other person.”

—Debby Irving, author of Waking up White On Dec. 6 “What terrifies me the most about climate change is that it will increase the frequency of war. We’ll be fighting wars over water and other resources. … [In] regions that are already unstable because of religious, political and socioeconomic tensions … when you add the burden of not being able to feed your family, or there’s a huge refugee crisis because there’s a drought, those can exacerbate already existing tensions and spark them into conflicts.”

—Sophie Robinson ’07, producer of The Age of Consequences, a documentary film about the effects of climate change on national and global security On Dec. 13 “Why, when the rest of the world, and particularly scientists around the world, are moving toward not only acceptance of the idea that global warming is a problem, but an urgent call to do something about it — why is it that the U.S. Congress is the only body … that is moving in the opposite direction, saying we shouldn’t do anything about it, it’s not real, it’s a hoax. … It makes no sense, until you look at the money … .”

—2016 Bragdon Fellow Jane Mayer, author of Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

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by Genny Beckman Moriarty

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VIEWING THE SPECTRUM OF WOMEN IN HISTORY

Ma’s enthusiasm for her experience emerges palpably from her reflection. “As the six weeks flew by,” she writes, “I was amazed at how much I have learned and grown.”

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Her first task involved researching living New York women under age 35. The women’s history team she was partnering with was working on a project called Women’s Voices, writing biographical profiles woven with historical primary sources, to be displayed for the public on digital panels. Initially, Ma was baffled by her assignment: “I hadn’t registered contemporary women as part of history,” she explains.

But Ma’s investigations revealed a couple of surprises.

First, she realized that up until that point, all of her women-centered historical research had focused on white, middle-class, heterosexual women — and furthermore, that her own biases reflected a painful truth about the feminist narrative in America.

As she learned more about the lives of these young women, she also learned more about the intersectionSally Ma ’17 ality of feminism. “I was intrigued by the eloquence and bravery of women with diverse identities and background,” she recalls. As the only Asian on the women’s history team, Ma dedicated herself to uncovering the voices of Asian-American women — among them a Korean-American activist advocating for NYPD police reform and the rights of queer people of color, and a first-generation Thai-American New York firefighter (the first and only Asian female in FDNY). “I marveled at young women who were and still are making history in subtle and important ways,” she writes.

After studying the lives of older women who had lived through the first and second wave of feminism, Ma looked back at some of the profiles she had written of these younger women, and something dawned on her.

“I began to view feminism as a large, interconnected CHERYL SENTER

hile perhaps not as outlandish as Night at the Museum or as mysterious as The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, two Exonians have had their own gratifying adventures in historical sleuthing, fieldwork and bringing the past to life.

Christine Hu ’17 and Xiaoyu “Sally” Ma ’17 were selected by the Academy’s History Department to serve as Exeter’s first New York City History Interns last summer, through a new program supported by an anonymous alumni donor who hopes to encourage the study of history and the humanities. Through observations, workshops and hands-on experience, the young scholars gained a deeper appreciation for the rigors and rewards of research and the thrill of discovery.

History Instructor Betty Luther-Hillman, who worked with the donor to establish the internships, says the two applicants faced stiff competition during the selection process, but Hu and Ma stood out for the quality of their coursework within the department and the clear articulation of their interests and goals.

“Both students seemed to benefit greatly from the internships in developing new skills, meeting scholars and researchers whose history research is reaching a wide audience, and gaining new understanding of what it means to research history at an advanced level,” Luther-Hillman says. The program will be expanding this year to offer three internships.

Hu, who worked at the Center for Science and Society at Columbia University, and Ma, who interned at the New York Historical Society, wrote reflections about their experiences upon their return. We share some of their thoughts below.

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CHERYL SENTER

crash course in paleography — which entails the study continuum,” she writes. “More importantly, I realized of ancient languages and the deciphering and dating that displaying [the stories of] these contemporary of journals, letters and other historical manuscripts. women would better engage the public, emphasizing Historians at The Making and Knowing Project are their role in this historical narrative of women’s struggle involved in reconstructing the materials and techand empowerment.” niques of 16th-century French artisans, as collected in There were other shifts in Ma’s thinking, too. While a medieval manuscript. The manuscript, written by an working on a small-scale exhibit about early female anonymous craftsperson and known to historians as entrepreneurs in the beauty industry, she bumped up BnF Ms. Fr. 640, is described on the project’s website as against the limits of her research skills. She knew well a combination of how-to manual, recipe collection and how to use evidence from a text to support a thesis, but “book of secrets.” she had “no clue” how to obtain the During her internship, visual storytelling components required Hu had the chance to by an exhibition. Her colleagues pointed observe graduate-level her toward a treasure trove of resources, and professional historiincluding the Library of Congress Prints ans working to transcribe, and Photographs Collection, and under translate and digitize the guidance of her supervisor, she came historical documents to see how the act of narrowing her focus — namely, the “secrets” or onto a few arresting objects could help her techniques outlined within tell a more persuasive story. the manuscript — which “Instead of amassing evidence to make are being presented in an the strongest case … I shifted my mindset open-access digital platto garnering the most visually striking form for the public. Visitors items and tinkering with the captions to the project’s site can to express complicated ideas in simple, Christine Hu ’17 read such gems as the one inviting language,” she writes. “In doing above, taken from instrucso, I made exciting progress toward transtions for “Casting in Box Molds.” lating intellectual ideas [and] … demonstrating … women’s “It was a wonderful experience to see The Making and valiance and ingenuity through the exhibit.”

Knowing project up close,” Hu writes in her reflection. “I Ma’s internship with the New York Historical Society had never been previously exposed to the digital humantransformed her understanding of history in numerous ities, and it was exciting to see so many areas of expertise ways, giving her insights into the inner workings of a come together.” museum and the power of public history to transmit As part of her responsibilities, Hu practiced editing complex ideas in approachable ways in order to effect annotations, taking notes on sources, and updating change. She relished the opportunity to devote so much time to examining the lives of women, whose stories have the center’s webpage and social media accounts.

Over the course of the summer, she sat in on a series inspired her immensely: “The women I inquired into of lectures on topics that ranged from “the birth of during the internship continue to empower me to break the codex” to introductory paleography, and she had boundaries as I move forward and pursue my dream of “the privilege,” in her words, of visiting Columbia’s becoming a human rights lawyer and an accomplished Rare Book & Manuscript Library and other historical historian.” preservation labs and libraries. As a historian-intraining, she delighted in being a fly on the wall as RE-CREATING HISTORY professional historians immersed themselves in their THROUGH TRANSLATION work. “I gained insight into the process of collaboration “Note that I filled the box mold before pressing it, and did at a higher level,” she writes. “It was beneficial and not hit it, but rather pressed it with the strength of my hands thought-provoking to sit through debates on markup and alone, because hitting it makes it go awry. Secure your box translations.” mold that it does not shift at all, & if you put some moistLike Ma, Hu is grateful for the opportunities afforded ened sand under it, it will only hold in place more firmly.” by the internship: “The experience absolutely reinforced —From medieval French manuscript BnF Ms. Fr.640 my passion for history. I’ve really witnessed how interdisciplinary and engaging it can be!” E Christine Hu’s work for The Center for Science and Society’s Making and Knowing Project gave her a

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Building a Power Plant on a Chip A C O N V E R S AT I O N W I T H J A R E D S C H W E D E ’0 3

By Sarah Zobel

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onversations about clean, renewable sources of energy tend to focus on solar and wind power. But Jared Schwede ’03 has his eye on another option: thermionics, the conversion of heat into electricity by placing two different electrodes — one hot and one cold — on either end of a vacuum tube. The converter itself is not much bigger than a postage stamp.

“It’s basically the simplest heat engine you can possibly imagine,” says Schwede, who has a Ph.D. in physics but insists the science behind thermionics is accessible to all, if unfamiliar.

The vacuum tube acts as an insulator, and the heat coming out of the hot side releases electrons that become a source of energy when they reach the cold side. It’s akin to heating water, which lets off steam just before it comes to a boil; in thermionics, the electrons are the steam. Schwede admits that the science is somewhat counterintuitive to most people — even he sounds awed by its capabilities: “You have something the size of a quarter, you dump heat on it, and it’s as efficient as an internal combustion engine, which is an amazing but complex piece of machinery.”

It’s inexpensive; it’s the same basic technology that’s at the heart of fluorescent lighting and cathode ray tube monitors, among other things; and if it sounds like something straight out of the 1960s, that’s because it is (though, as might be expected, it owes a debt to early work in electron evaporation by Thomas Edison). Thermionics originally gained traction as a tool in the space program, with researchers of the day achieving a 15 percent power conversion efficiency, but it fell out of favor as the Space Race ended and vacuum tube technology came to be viewed as outdated. Yet a handful of physicists continued working on it; by the time Schwede was publishing his thesis, “Photon-enhanced Thermionic Emission for Concentrated Solar Energy Harvesting,” in 2014, it was enjoying something of a low-key renaissance.

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“We realized that by leveraging the things that worked well and adding new materials and new microfabrication techniques, we could take this technology with its 15 percent efficiency and increase its performance to 25 percent for the first generation and 35 percent for the second — if not higher,” says Schwede, who has since co-founded Spark Thermionics. “At that level, you’re talking about something that’s competitive with virtually any engine — a diesel generator or whatever you’d like — but all in a really neat package.”

It’s a package that might one day power homes, a use in which the U.S. Department of Energy is keenly interested and Spark is working toward, at least in part, Schwede says. Because the heating and cooling needs of a house in the United States are essentially balanced with its electricity needs, a thermionic generator that is heated by the combustion of natural gas or other fuels is able to meet all of those needs simultaneously.

“The miraculous thing is this is the cleanest way that you can generate electricity from natural gas, because you’re already using all the heat that would be wasted in a power plant to heat the water in your home,” Schwede says. “So it’s a very clean way to generate electricity, but it’s very complementary to highly distributive choices like wind or solar.” It’s also a uniquely attractive option for providing power to regions of the world that don’t have an electric grid already in place, since it allows for the creation of electricity right at the location where it will be used.

Schwede’s graduate work was initially focused on a blend of the photovoltaic effect — using the sun’s heat to create power — and thermionic emission. But the challenges that would be associated with retrofitting a lot of so-called power towers in the desert, coupled with the recognition that it would be burdensome to commercialize the technology when very few power plants would be built at any one time anywhere in the world, gave Schwede and his colleagues pause, and they turned back to the vacuum tube technology. “We realized it had gotten a bad rap,” he says. “Ultimately, using conventional thermionics would allow us to access different applications — we wouldn’t be limited to power towers out in the desert, and it could be a much better route to getting what we think could be a really transformative energy technology out into the world.”

At this point, the only real downside to the technology is that the existing prototypes are 30-plus years old (to get an idea how dated the science is, visit YouTube and watch GE’s “How a Thermionic Converter Works—A Model Demonstration,” one of the more “recent” video

explanations from the 1950s). But the timing of Spark’s creation was fortuitous: Even as Schwede was wrapping up his Ph.D., the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was establishing Cyclotron Road, a proto-startup incubator that provides tools, financing and experts to “hard energy” tech innovators. Spark Thermionics was invited to be a part of it. So rather than having to follow the stereotypical “a few guys in a garage” formula common to Silicon Valley startups, Schwede says, Spark has been able to leverage the knowledge and expertise of scientists who are leaders in their respective fields.

“Unlike the typical trajectory for an energy startup, where you raise money and hit the ground running before you even know what it is you’re trying to build, this gives us the flexibility to really understand our technology and tech development, while being able to work with — and

“...YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT SOMETHING THAT’S COMPETITIVE WITH VIRTUALLY ANY ENGINE — A DIESEL GENERATOR OR WHATEVER YOU’D LIKE — BUT ALL IN A REALLY NEAT PACKAGE.”

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lean on — the best scientists on the planet,” he says. For example, by sheer coincidence, a specialized spin-polarized, low-energy electron microscope (SPEEM) at Berkeley Lab that’s sensitive to structural and electrical properties of various surfaces turned out to be the perfect tool for examining thermionic electrodes. The collaboration at Cyclotron Road is working well: Spark has already received two government awards, including $3.8 million from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E). Spark has closed its first round of funding, and is hoping to have a functioning prototype within the next several months.

Schwede has been acknowledged for his work in thermionics with the Ross N. Tucker Award, which recognizes excellence in semiconductor and materials research, as well as with an award from Stanford’s Global Climate and Energy Project. A native of Washington State, he came to Exeter after earning a high score on what was then called the American High School Math Exam and receiving a subsequent invitation to apply to the Academy. For someone who is clearly accomplished in math and science, Schwede maintains a genuine sense of wonder in his chosen field.

“The principle is really simple,” he says of thermionics, “but it does seem like magic.” E

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CAMPUS LIFE AT A GLANCE

NOLS CALIFORNIA Exonians head toward the Pacific coast for a week of kayaking, nature-watching and leadership training with the National Outdoor Leadership School over Thanksgiving break.

EXETER BARS Students receive a sweet thank you treat after Exeter families help raise nearly $400,000 in 24 hours during November’s Day of Giving.

GINGERBREAD HOUSES BK Kim ’17 and Lyle Seeligson ’17 create a holiday house that looks good enough to eat.

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FALL DANCE PRODUCTION Samantha Resnick ’19 performs with the Dance Company.

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HOLIDAY CONCERT Chair of the Music Department Peter Schultz conducts a strings ensemble at the annual holiday concert.

EXETER/ANDOVER GAMES Principal Lisa MacFarlane takes to the field at halftime to cheer on Big Red.

NICHOLAS NICKLEBY A Dickens tale comes to life at Fisher Theater.

ESSO READING BUDDIES Grace Gray ’19 reads The Polar Express while her young friends get cozy in the library.

ARIZONA Intrepid Thanksgiving travelers bundle up to hike the Grand Canyon and study the geology of the desert southwest.

JUSTICE FOR ALL Exonians learn about the history of the civil rights movement on a trip to Alabama over Thanksgiving break.

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

ROWING AT EXETER Opened in 1990 to accommodate a growing crew program, the SALSTONSTALL BOATHOUSE replaced the old Academy Boathouse. The facility holds 20 shells (including eights, quads, pairs and singles), which have been faithfully cared for by boatman Keith Hereford for many years.

Exonian rowers have competed at the international level over the years, among them Laurence Stoddard ’21, who was the coxswain for an American boat that won the gold medal in the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris. In 1952, Exeter’s top four rowers made it to the Olympic trials in Helsinki, where they lost to Navy and Cornell in the semifinals. More recently, Benj Cohen ’15 represented the U.S. at the 2015 World Rowing Junior Championships in Rio de Janeiro.

The current facility was named after Principal Emeritus William G. Salstonstall ’24, who was an oarsmen and coach as well. Above, Kathie Salstonstall christens a new shell at the building’s dedication ceremony.

By the 1880s, rowing at Exeter had died out, most likely due to the expenses involved, but the sport saw a revival when the Academy funded its first interscholastic team in 1912. Hoping to cultivate future collegiate rowers, Harvard donated two barges and an eight-oared shell. Not to be outdone, Yale later followed suit.

Officially recognized by Exeter in 1864, crew was run for many years as a club sport, with members covering the costs themselves. Club rowers built their first boathouse in 1874 for $315. Left, the Academy Boathouse (the fifth in Exeter’s history), circa 1931.

When construction crews were dredging the dock area for the foundation of the Salstonstall Boathouse, they dug up mounds of discarded leather shoes from the Squamscott River. The shoes were a remnant of Exeter’s days as a mill town, and the chemicals from the tanning process necessitated trucking the materials to a special hazardous waste disposal site at great expense.

WITH SPECIAL THANKS KATHERINE SCOTT ’93 A HISTORY OF ROWING MAINTAINS EXETERCRE

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TO PEA ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS; AND KATH LEHMAN ’93, THE AUTHORS OF AT E X E T E R ; A N D D A N M A H R ’0 7, W H O W.C O M . P H OTO C R E D I T S : P E A A R C H I V E S

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Writing a New Kind of Ending 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 R L I E S M I T H ’6 5 Daneet Steffens ’82

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he novel Ginny Gall, by Charlie Smith ’65, is both beautiful and harrowing. Smith, the author of eight novels, a book of novellas, and eight books of prize-winning poetry, tells the story of Delvin Walker, an African-American born in Tennessee in 1913. Young Delvin loses his mother when she flees their home after being accused of murder; is taken in by the kind and literate Cornelius Oliver; has to hightail it out of town after a skirmish with a white boy; and rides the U.S. railroad system in a bid to find a home, a place, his life. The novel sprawls across the America of Jim Crow and the Great Depression, steeped in the segregation, violence and destitution of the era, while vibrantly capturing the making of a man — and a writer.

Q: This could have been a novel about the breaking of a man, but you took it in a different direction.

Where did this story come from? How did you decide where it would go?

Smith: Well, I’m not really a writer who forecasts his novels; I just start off writing. But this novel does have a kind of faint template: There are certain skeletal bones that reference the Scottsboro Boys in Alabama in 1931, nine young black men who were pulled off a train, accused of raping a couple of white women and thrown into prison. Those facts were more than I usually have to go on when I start writing.

One of the things that I wanted to do was write an imagined biography of a young man in peril in the South, the extreme difficulty that someone can find himself in — not of his own making — and how he responds to it. As far as the character being a writer, it wasn’t something that I thought of before I started the book, but as I moved along, I found myself interested in the side of Delvin that would culminate in someone who was becoming a writer.

So I went along in that way, and that’s what followed.

I generally write prose tragedies — I’ve been writing them for 30 or 40 years. But part of what I decided to do when I was imagining this book was [to try] to write a book that didn’t culminate in tragedy. Or not that only. To make a road of troubles and pain and confusion but always with a snaking bright line through it to amendable possibility and freedom, or the chance of them.

Q: I’m interested in the idea that you didn’t plan on Delvin being a writer, because he was such an early reader: His mom takes pride in his literacy and he tells her, “It’s like I can tell the secrets now.” I took it as

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Novelist and poet Charlie Smith ’65 explores the interplay of darkness and light in his work.

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a lovely indicator that to be a writer, you’ve got to be a reader. But you didn’t plan for that?

Smith: Many readers are not writers; it doesn’t automatically follow. But someone who was smart was more interesting to me than someone who was not smart. So having this particular character and an interest in this particular character’s development — as a man of intelligence and as a man with the ability to see and be aware of things, to observe — that was what was part of it.

Q: And that’s something that comes through so palpably, the way you capture Delvin’s excitement and curiosity. Your language reflects that, and it doesn’t change when things take a darker turn.

Even the bleakest parts of the book had this sort of light shining on them because of the way you used your language. Did you maintain that language to show how Delvin’s mind works?

Smith: Some of that is simply the way I write. I write pretty dark books — but this one is very light-spattered despite all the trouble and grief—it’s kind of a square dance compared to the books I usually write. But the juxtaposition of dark and light is an important part of how I approach a novel, and some of these decisions are intuitive decisions, they’re not something that I organize ahead of time. So the lightness you’re referring to is somewhat characteristic of how I write novels, but it’s also characteristic of this particular person — Delvin Walker — of how he experiences life.

I think what is steadfast and kind of wonderful about him is that he has a quality in him which is not just some kind of dumb adherence to a plan, or some stubbornness or even some kind of roguish wiliness that lets him slip the noose time and again. It’s something deep in his own heart that is a kind of lightness, or at least he sees a light. It’s not something that he holds on to as one would hold on to part of a religion or something like that, but a part instead of humanness that is naturally evoked in him — what would be called character, I guess, and what literature itself expresses, which is, in turn, the moral reliance that we find in literature.

Q: This book is steeped in a universal element, the recognition of the absolute necessity of being able to connect with others, whether it’s through Delvin’s experiences in prison, or his conversation with the old Confederate who says, “It’s good to get the human touch as often as you can.”

Smith: Yes, well, that’s interesting to Delvin, that’s something that he found out and came to know. And I think part of it was that he was a boy who became a man who had lost his mother at a very young age in a kind of violent way — she was there one moment and then she was gone, and there was no way to contact her. That loss was a powerful part of his life throughout his life, and probably would have something to do with him being willing to reach out to others, to want to seek a connection that had been lost to him in a very terrible way.

Q: When did you start writing both prose and poetry?

Smith: I started writing stories when I was a young boy, but I started writing poems when I was at Exeter.

A lot of what Exeter’s English classes consisted of was being assigned some kind of story to write just about every week. That routine of having to write stories was a great help to me.

I was pretty buffaloed by studies of grammar and things like that, which Exeter didn’t do much of — it was mostly reading books and writing, and that suited me wonderfully.

And I had a class in which we were assigned to write a poem every week and I became very interested in that.

When I discovered poetry — through a very ordinary anthology that we had freshman year at Exeter — I was just knocked out. It was just so great. Up until then the best thing in my life had been sports; I was a wrestler at Exeter. That poetry class gave me the sense that it was possible to actually write a poem, not just read one. I think I was the first one asked to put his poem on the blackboard for the first assignment and I put on a four-line poem about the rain that the class had quite a laugh about.

Q: That was your first appreciation as a poet?

Smith: Yes, that was the first: the laughingstock. They laughed because it was so terrible! Still, it didn’t set me back. E

“I WRITE PRETTY DARK BOOKS — BUT THIS ONE IS VERY LIGHTSPATTERED DESPITE ALL THE TROUBLE AND GRIEF — IT’S KIND OF A SQUARE DANCE COMPARED TO THE BOOKS I USUALLY WRITE.”

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E XO N I A N S

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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 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: Bulletin Editor, Phillips Exeter Academy, 20 Main Street, Exeter, NH 03833-2460.

ALUMNI 1956—William “Bill” Peace.

Seeking Father Khaliq. (Strategic Book Publishing & Rights, 2016)

1986—Kate Laird. Homeschool Teacher: A Practical Guide to Inspiring Academic Excellence.

(Bay Books, 2016) B R I E F LY N OT E D 1980—Bruce B. Lawrence.

“Hobbes, Locke, and the Problem of Political Economy” IN Economics and Human Flourishing: Perspectives from Political Philosophy. (AEI Press, 2016) 2016—Lillian Brown. “Armageddon” [essay]. IN Hippocampus Magazine (online). (Oct. 1, 2016)

1963—Edward L. Robinson.

Data Analysis for Scientists and Engineers. (Princeton University Press, 2016) 1966—Peter Thompson. Winter Light. (Lavender Ink, 2016)

Voices” [long poem]. IN Kenyon Review. (v. XXXVIII, no. 4, July/August 2016) —No Other Gods. (Salmon Poetry, 2015). Finalist for 2016 New Hampshire Literary Awards Outstanding Book of Poetry —“Driving to Malaga” [essay]. IN The Common. (no. 10, October 2015) Willie Perdomo. “Another Kind of Open” [poem]. IN PEN America: A Journal for Writers and Readers (no. 19, 2016) [“Hauntings”]

FAC U LT Y/ F O R M E R FAC U LT Y Sarah Anderson. “Bioluminescence” [poem]. IN Off the Coast. (summer 2016) [“Crooked Axis”]

1968—Bob Fitzgerald. Adman Cowboy. (CreateSpace, 2016) 1970—Gaylon Ferguson. Natural Bravery. (Shambhala Publications, 2016)

—“The Best Thing to Do” [poem].

IN The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks. (University of Arkansas Press, 2017) Maggie Dietz [former Bennett Fellow]. That Kind of Happy. (University of Chicago Press, 2016)

—“Gun-Sitting” [essay]. IN Hippocampus Magazine (online). (June 1, 2016)

1979—Julian “Ross” King, editor.

Score One for the Dancing Girl, and Other Selections from the Kimun ch’ongwa: A Story Collection from Nineteenth-Century Korea.

(University of Toronto Press, 2016) 1980—Gus Lowell. American Conservative: Reclaiming Conservatism from the Right. (Algora, 2016)

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Sue Repko. “Detours” [essay]. IN Literal Latte. (spring 2015). Named a “Notable Essay” in Best American Essays, edited by Jonathan Franzen (Mariner Books, 2016)

—“The Gun Show” [essay]. IN The Southeast Review. (v. 34.2, fall 2016)

Todd Hearon. “Crows in Eden: An American Oratorio for Broken

Ralph Sneeden. “The Legible Element.” IN The Surfer’s Journal. (v. 26, no. 1, 2017)

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S P O RTS

Thinking Outside the Box T H E L E S S O N S S A R A H O D E L L ’0 6 H A S L E A R N E D F R O M P L AY I N G A N D C O A C H I N G S Q U A S H

By Janet Reynolds

S

CHRIS NOLL/MISS PORTER’S SCHOOL

arah Odell ’06 has spent much of her life playing inside a big box, and she wouldn’t have it any other way. While Odell has sampled other sports — she played field hockey and rowed crew her first year at Exeter — her real passion is squash, a game she discovered at age 9.

Odell grew up outside Philadelphia, the city that has the most squash courts per capita in the U.S. (Toronto is the only city in North America that has more courts per capita than Philadelphia.) “In gym class if you’re in private school, they’ll hand you a squash racket,” Odell says of growing up there.

Odell loved the sport as soon as she started taking lessons. She’s also been quite successful. She was team captain while at Exeter and was a four-year number one player at Wellesley College, where she was team captain during her junior and senior years. In 2009, Odell represented the U.S. at the Maccabiah Games in Israel, where she won a silver medal. Since college, Odell has served on the board of New York Squash, where she created the first women’s doubles league in the U.S. In 2015, New York Squash presented her with the Wedgewood Award for outstanding contributions to the women’s game. Today she coaches the varsity team at Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut, where she is also an English teacher. A Level II-certified coach, Odell will come full circle this summer when she will be the head coach for the U.S. junior teams at the Maccabiah Games.

“I have wanted to go back to Israel ever since I was a player,” she says. “It’s pretty much the dream come true to be coaching a team I played on.”

Odell is clear about what pulls her to squash, both as a player and a coach: It’s the combination of brawn and brains required to be successful. “You have to be in amazing shape to play at the highest level and also think three shots ahead of what your opponent is doing. It’s incredibly intellectual,” she says, noting that she once heard someone describe squash as “chess in short pants.”

“There’s no perfect novel. There’s no perfect game of squash,” adds Odell, who was a creative writing major at Wellesley. “It’s all about having the willingness to study a game

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Sarah Odell at the Maccabiah Games in Israel in 2009.

and then put in the time and practice on your own.” As in the classroom, the best students think outside and inside the box.

Odell cites a favorite Plato quote to illustrate her point: “You learn more about a person in an hour of play than a lifetime of conversation.” She adds, “[Squash is] another window into some of the girls I teach,” noting that since she teaches only juniors and seniors at MPS, coaching squash helps her get to know the younger students before she might have them in class.

“What I most hope as a coach is that they learn how to deal with failure,” Odell says of the life lessons learned on the court. “Particularly working with girls, and Porter’s girls, they’re nothing if not perfectionists. They’ll run through a brick wall to get their work done.”

And the stakes are high in the classroom, Odell adds, referencing the push that begins early in life to get into the best colleges: “The classroom today can feel like an unsafe place to fail.”

Enter squash. “Just in one match, you’re going to lose points and you have to figure out how to come back from that, how to change the momentum, get the next point,” Odell explains. “It’s exciting to help them work through the failure and figure out how to turn it around. Athletics are a safe place for girls in particular to fail, and to fail and learn from it without fear. Athletics are crucial for girls building grit and endurance.”

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“ATHLETICS ARE A SAFE PLACE FOR GIRLS IN PARTICULAR TO FAIL,AND TO FAIL AND LEARN FROM IT WITHOUT FEAR. ATHLETICS ARE CRUCIAL FOR GIRLS BUILDING GRIT AND ENDURANCE.” Her desire to help teenage girls learn how to rebound from failure is part of why Odell is a teacher today — that, and her experience while a four-year boarder at Exeter.

“As an Exonian, this is a tough question. We don’t like to talk about failure,” she writes when asked in a follow-up email to reflect on a way in which she has used some of her squash experiences to rebuild from a failure in another part of her life. “But I think what immediately comes to mind is that I never became a writer. Writing has always been my talent — it was the only thing I ever won a prize in at Exeter; I majored in creative writing at Wellesley; and I went to work for HarperCollins.”

She also applied to 16 full-time MFA programs and was rejected by all of them.

“But it was that realization, and what seemed like a never-ending onslaught of rejection letters from every program in the country, from Iowa to Michener to Ole Miss, that really made me pause, take stock, and re-evaluate what I enjoyed in my life, what I felt like I needed to do with my life. It was at that moment that I happened to have scheduled a fortuitous trip up to Exeter with some students. Watching Becky Moore’s English class and spending the weekend with my adviser, Karen Lassey P’14; P 16, are the reasons I went into teaching.

And now I’ve really found my calling. I’m good at it. I derive pleasure from it. I feel like I am giving back some of the gifts that were bestowed upon me.” E

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FALL SPORTS

GIRLS SOCCER RECORD: 4-9-5

Head Coach: Kevin Bartkovich Assistant Coaches: Alexa Caldwell, Sarah Anderson Captains: Daniela Nemirovsky ’17, Grace Pratt ’17 MVP: Hanna Gustafson ’17

GIRLS VOLLEYBALL RECORD: 10-6

2nd place in New England Tournament Head Coach: Bruce Shang Assistant Coach: Suzan Rowe Captains: Kat Dumoulin ’17, Rachel Luo ’17 MVP: Kat Dumoulin

BOYS CROSS-COUNTRY RECORD: 3-0

First place at Interschols Head Coach: Brandon Newbould Assistant Coaches: Nick Unger ’90, Bill Jordan Captains: Issay Matsumoto ’17, Jiro Mizuno ’17, Garrett Pitt ’17 MVP: Atticus Stonestrom ’17

FOOTBALL RECORD: 0-8

Head Coach: Rob Morris Assistant Coaches: Patrick Bond, Rory Early, Tom Evans, Dave Hudson Captains: Jack Farrell ’17, Harrison Money ’17, David O’Donnell ’17, Austin Scronce ’17 MVP: Nicholas Hall ’17

GIRLS CROSS-COUNTRY RECORD: 3-0

First place at Interschols Head Coach: Gwyn Coogan ’83 Assistant Coaches: Dale Braile, Sheri Dion Captains: Sarah Brown ’17, Christine Hu ’17 MVP: Christine Hu

WATER POLO RECORD: 13-2

2nd place in New England Tournament Head Coach: Don Mills Assistant Coach: Avery Reavill ’12 Captains: James “JP” Mullins ’17, Liam Oakley ’17 MVP: Taylor Walshe ’18

FIELD HOCKEY RECORD: 7-11-1

Head Coach: Liz Hurley Assistant Coach: Melissa Pacific Captains: Michaela Corvi ’17, Isabella Edo ’17, Abigail Yu ’17 MVPs: Michaela Corvi, Isabella Edo

BOYS SOCCER RECORD: 6-8-4

Head Coach: A.J. Cosgrove Assistant Coaches: John Hutchins, Nolan Lincoln Captains: Quintin DiStefano ’17, Peter “Max” Gross ’17, Tarek Khartabil ’17 MVP: Max Gross, Ignacio Roitman ’17 CREDITS: DIANA DAVIDSON ’18 FOR BOYS AND GIRLS CROSS-COUNTRY TEAMS, WATER POLO AND GIRLS SOCCER. CHRISTIAN HARRISON FOR ALL OTHER IMAGES.

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From

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Social Innovation at Exeter

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By Melanie Nelson

Illustrations by Chris Reed, photographs by Christian Harrison

xeter is no stranger to innovation. In fact, its core pedagogy is predicated on the pioneering notion that students learn most effectively from one another via active dialogue. It should come as no surprise, then, that in recent years Academy faculty and students have begun to explore how to incorporate the principles of social innovation into coursework and extracurricular endeavors.

According to the Center for Social Innovation at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, a social innovation is “a novel solution to a social problem that is more effective, efficient, sustainable, or just than current solutions.” Unlike in industry, where innovation bolsters the company and its shareholders, the value that is created by social innovation flows to society.

For Exeter, considering how to create the kind of environment and conditions in which social innovation can flourish has meant widening the aperture on Harkness learning. As the stories below demonstrate, this expansion is leading to ideas and collaborations that may, one day, change the world.

BUILDING UP FROM BEDROCK — THE CLASS

In the fall of 2015, Exeter’s director of service learning, Liz Reyes, received an email from newly arrived Principal Instructor Lisa MacFarlane. Would Reyes know of any students who might

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be interested in competing in the University of New Hampshire’s Social Venture Innovation Challenge (SVIC)? A quick survey of Exeter Student Service Organization (ESSO) students, with whom Reyes regularly works, revealed that they were indeed intrigued, and soon three teams formed.

At that point, the SVIC, which had begun in 2013 with a mission of creatively addressing urgent social and environmental challenges, offered two competitive tracks, one for college students and a second for citizens from across New Hampshire. By virtue of their ages and educational levels, the Exonians entered their ideas in the second track, where, competing with 25-, 30- and 40-yearolds from the Granite State, Team RAD (Rural Area Diagnostics) Health came in fourth. A fire had been lit, and Academy administrators took note. Soon English Instructor and Director of Studies Brooks Moriarty ’87; P’18 approached Reyes about formalizing social innovation at Exeter by creating a course about it, and what began last year as a kind of experimental club has become a term-long senior elective called Social Innovation.

The course, populated with seniors of all stripes (four-year boarders, postgraduates, two-year day students), incorporates traditional elements of Harkness learning — student-driven discussion moderated by an Seniors Melissa Lu, Maya instructor, group work — but adds a twist. “We believe it is crucial for students in Social Pierce, Kat Cucullo and Innovation to interact directly with clients and innovators,” Reyes says. She cites as an Joanna Papadakis believe example an assignment in which students are asked to choose an environmental issue food trucks can alleviate and then interview someone in the field: “I was surprised by how tentative the students hunger and curb food were about connecting with their subjects and scheduling a time to talk. Initially, they waste in New England. wanted to do everything over email, including the actual interviews. I explained that it helps to see the person you are interviewing, that questions may change or the conversation may shift organically based upon the responses of the interviewee. Building empathy and understanding nuance are critical aspects of the course.”

Another central concept is human agency, the idea that people have the power to shape their own lives. In order to get her Social Innovation students to think critically about agency, Reyes asks them, prior to brainstorming potential solutions to perceived societal problems, to consider the following questions: Is it a community need, and how do we know it is a community need?

“Through the exploration of agency, and of concepts like positive deviance and cultural taboo,” Reyes explains, “we are trying to show students that often the best, most powerful solutions come

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from within the group that is experiencing the problem.”

The culminating project for Reyes’ Social Innovation students was the creation and submission of projects for last fall’s UNH Social Venture Innovation Challenge, held in mid-November on the UNH campus. Nine teams from three different secondary schools — Exeter, Portsmouth High School and The Derryfield School — competed in the program’s high school track, which was piloted in 2016.

Science Instructor David Gulick with a new laser cutter in Exeter’s maker space.

GREAT MINDS THINK DIFFERENTLY — THE COMPETITION

As the 2016 SVIC competition got under way, teams took the floor to present short videos introducing their respective concepts, followed by oral presentations and then questions from the four judges. Innovation was both manifest and sophisticated, with students conceiving ideas and apparatus to address everything from beach pollution, to gender stereotyping in the media, to the need for more consistent data in the solar industry. The winning team, composed of four members of Exeter’s class of 2017 — Kat Cucullo, Melissa Lu, Joanna Papadakis and Maya Pierce — was “The Lucky Stop,” a food truck whose operators would use only almost-expired and “ugly” food (produce deemed too unattractive for the average consumer) to prepare meals.

It was a winning idea that almost didn’t happen. According to Lu, arriving at The Lucky Stop was “a long process because we went through approximately 15 other ideas first.” Cucullo concurs: “Our original idea was to create a composting truck to collect food waste and then use that waste to grow a garden on top of the truck. We were all in love with the idea until we found out someone had already pitched it at last year’s SVIC.” After that, continues Cucullo, “our other ideas kept missing the mark.” In fact, it wasn’t until the very last class brainstorm day that things started to coalesce.

“We were reflecting on a recent field trip to St. Vincent de Paul [a community assistance center in Exeter], where we learned about the food pantry and local residents who are unable to reach it

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due to disabilities or transportation issues,” Lu says. “At the same time,” Pierce adds, “I remembered a clip I had come across from John Oliver’s show ‘Last Week Tonight.’ It highlighted food waste and showed this guy traipsing around on a mound of discarded lettuce.” Soon thereafter came the lightbulb moment — a food truck with a mission to wipe out hunger. “Our next step,” Papadakis explains, “was to divvy up the work and get going.”

To ensure feasibility and impact, the girls left no stone unturned, conducting extensive online research, calling supermarkets and restaurants, poring over maps showing areas of New England with the highest rates of food insecurity, and even sitting down with the manager of Lexie’s, a popular eatery in Exeter that, as luck would have it, also runs a food truck. When the deadline arrived to submit their concept video and materials to the SVIC, The Lucky Stop had become an idea with, well, wheels.

Cucullo outlines how a typical day might unfold: “Mornings would be spent collecting food — primarily fruits and vegetables, which spoil quickly — from farms, supermarkets and restaurants.

Because of our status as a nonprofit with a mission-related enterprise, these food donors would get to take a tax deduction. After pickup, the produce would be delivered to a commissary kitchen for meal preparation, and then out to the streets in time for lunch.”

For their trial sales area, Team Lucky Stop selected Boston, a city with a thriving food truck scene. The roving purveyors would charge for weekday lunches, with revenues being cycled directly back into the nonprofit, so that on Saturdays and Sundays, the truck could become a mobile soup kitchen in Suffolk County, an area that includes Boston and has a high rate of food insecurity.

“Ultimately, we came to see how design thinking might fit within our own Harkness curriculum and add value.”

For their excellent idea, as well as their eloquent and thorough description of how it would be implemented, Team Lucky Stop won the high school track of the Social Venture Innovation Challenge, including $500 in prize money to help promote innovation at Exeter. The team’s success, Pierce says, was built on its diversity. “We are all so different, and we each brought our own unique talents and strengths to the table. Kat is great at videography, so she took on that piece; Joanna was a dutiful researcher; Melissa founded Exeter’s Business Club, so she brought that perspective; and I am involved in theater, which helped in presenting our concept.”

A FEEDBACK LOOP WITH FEELINGS — THE DESIGN APPROACH

In June 2015, Exeter Trustee Jennifer Holleran ’86, an educational consultant who also serves as the executive director of Startup:Education, a nonprofit created in 2010 by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg ’02 and his wife, Priscilla Chan, was planning a whirlwind tour of several San Francisco-area schools and wished to know if a few Exeter teachers were interested in joining her.

Science Instructors David Gulick and Erik Janicki and History Instructor Meg Foley, the BatesRussell Distinguished Faculty Professor, jumped at the chance.

While all of the schools on the junket were partnering with Startup:Education, it soon became clear to Gulick and his colleagues that each had a unique mission and philosophy, and often served a special population of learners. “East Palo Alto Academy was focusing on first-generation

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American students. Summit Public Schools were working on individualized education. Each place we visited was doing something cutting edge and spectacular,” he recalls. However, the approach of two schools in particular, The Nueva School and the Institute of Design at Stanford, struck a chord with Gulick and his colleagues. “Each of these places has embraced design thinking,” he explains, “and Nueva has even taken the step of incorporating it at all levels, from early elementary through high school.”

Design thinking, Gulick explains, is a “methodology or process of design that puts at the front end the step of getting to know the person or people for whom you will be designing.” Like Reyes’ approach with her Social Innovation students, the initial steps in design thinking (interviewing and observation) are intended to build empathy. “From there,” Gulick adds, “you move into brainstorming and the creation of a prototype. An added bonus of the frequent client communication that occurs in design thinking is that you learn early on what is working and what is not, and then modify accordingly.”

So, what did Gulick, Foley and Janicki see in the Bay-area students whom they watched apply design thinking? “We saw potential,” Gulick says. “We saw kids making progress even when they encountered setbacks. We saw students realize that their first ideas wouldn’t be their last ideas.

Ultimately, we came to see how design thinking might fit within our own Harkness curriculum and add value.”

Back on campus, the trio is helping design thinking to germinate. A maker space, where students can test out ideas and build prototypes using a band saw, laser cutter, and other high-tech equipment and programs, was launched in 2015, and Gulick and Foley will co-teach a new course on design thinking this spring. They are currently finalizing content for the course, which will be interdisciplinary. “After all,” Gulick says, “design crosses boundaries.”

“Research has proven that being in nature has positive psychological and physiological consequences, like lowering blood pressure and stress and lifting the spirits.”

SCATTERING IDEAS — THE CROSS-POLLINATION

Each summer since 2010, when Exeter first became involved with the Student Global Leadership Institute (SGLI), the Academy has sent three students and one teacher to Honolulu’s Punahou School, which directs and hosts the program. Drawing participants from around the world, each two-week-long institute is organized around a specific theme — 2016’s was conservation — and is composed of daily classes and networking sessions with local businesspeople, many of them Punahou alumni.

The overarching goal of the SGLI is “to develop a community of international youth leaders who understand and are engaged in shared global challenges and who galvanize positive social change.” Beyond attending the institute, the students sent by each constituent school are expected to implement a project of significance back on their home campuses by the following May. While the teacher who accompanies them helps to guide this process, the bulk of the work is undertaken by the students, who send regular progress reports to SGLI Director Chai Reddy.

This year’s Exonian attendees — seniors Meghan Chou, McCord “Mac” Perry and Seungmin

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“Sydney” Yoon — have chosen to undertake as their major project the installation of Seniors Sydney Yoon, campus green spaces in the form of nooks of trees and native bushes. Explains Academy Mac Perry and Meghan Science Instructor Tanya Waterman, who chaperoned the students at Punahou and Chou want to install green worked with them to identify their project theme, “They want to do this as much for the spaces around campus. personal well-being of students on campus as for the sake of the environment.” Chou elaborates: “While global warming and climate change were certainly top of mind when we were considering this idea, the well-being component made it feel especially timely and relevant. Research has proven that being in nature has positive psychological and physiological consequences, like lowering blood pressure and stress and lifting the spirits.”

Next steps, Chou says, include coordinating with the Academy’s facilities team on where and how to plant, and then spreading the word to the rest of the community. If all goes as planned, the project will come to its fruition on Climate Action Day in April, when Chou, Perry and Yoon hope to galvanize their fellow students to assist with plantings. “We feel that weaving our project into the slate of activities and programs that occur on Climate Action Day will help to raise awareness and energize the community,” Chou says. “We will try to make it an ongoing event. We’d love for that to be our legacy after we graduate.” E

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O

Speaking

ut

Students of color share their experiences at Exeter

By Daneet Steffens ’82

Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of Bulletin articles that provides space for various members of our community to engage in ongoing conversations about identity, empathy and acceptance. In future issues, you’ll hear from more students and also faculty members on their experiences, opinions and ideas about how to create and contribute to an inclusive community here and elsewhere.

A

n Academy assembly on October 11 last year gave six students of color — Christian

Flores ’18, Leena Hamad ’17, Livaslou Tanjong ’17, Nada Zohayr ’17, Kelvin Green ’17 and Adrian Venzon ’19 — a powerful platform from which to share their stories, not just with their fellow students but with Exeter’s faculty, administration, trustees, alumni and its wider community. But for the students and the school it wasn’t just about sharing perspectives: Behind each individual story lies a fervent hope that, by vocalizing these experiences, it will encourage others to participate and to recognize that every student at Exeter is part of the Academy’s collective narrative. The hope, too, is that this assembly, which was recorded and made available online (Exeter.gameonstream.com), will mark the beginning of something bigger.

While Exeter students are challenged academically on a daily basis, they are also learning — some for the first time — what living in a diverse community is like. Today, they are doing so in a national, even global, atmosphere in which difference is still not celebrated to its fullest extent, in which issues around diversity are too often divisive. With their act of outreach, of invitation, these students stood in front of their peers in the hope of creating a more unifying experience for everyone. From reminding us that, as Exonians, students have a strong common ground already — they are all here to learn, after all — to eloquently expressing how complicated individuals’ identities often are, they highlighted the challenges, the importance and the positive aspects of generating open conversations around race, class, culture and citizenship. At the same time, they showcased

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CHERYL SENTER

“Not everyone lives the same life, and that means that not everyone can approach a problem the same way.”

—Christian Flores ’18

the wealth of experience, difference, intellect, generosity, honesty and curiosity that is at the core of Exeter’s community.

“The overall goal of my speech was to make people think about things,” says Christian Flores, who shared, among other experiences, his family’s economic challenges and his discomfort of ordering in a restaurant with his heavily accented parents. “I just wanted people to see a different perspective. Exeter is diverse by the numbers, but oftentimes I feel that during class or during certain events, the diversity is overlooked and there’s more of a centralized, wealthier, white perspective.” He credits Exeter’s Office of Multicultural Student Affairs (OMSA) as a major support and information hub for all students — “Dean [Rosanna] Salcedo is in charge of that and she does a wonderful job of creating an atmosphere where people feel comfortable and confident” — and is heartened by the additional new posts of associate dean of OMSA and a director for equity and diversity, who will be part of Principal Lisa MacFarlane’s leadership team. “For the associate dean position, they actually had a lot of students of color be part of the hiring process. We got to interview and meet different candidates and then give our takes on their accomplishments and their overall sense of preparedness. I thought that was very progressive and that that was very thoughtful of the school to allow us to have a voice, to include us in the process.”

Flores, who recently participated in a weeklong, PEA civil rights-focused trip to Montgomery, Alabama, thinks it’s critical to maintain a focus on both class and race in discussions on campus, since, as he notes, “a poor white student still faces many struggles and to some extent is worse off since he/she is not considered.” He’d like a more diverse group of faculty at Exeter, and he also recognizes a need for the student body, as a group, to agree on specific policy changes they’d like to see.

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CHERYL SENTER

“It can be scary when people don’t agree with you, but when you’re the only one, it’s a golden opportunity for you to tell people what you’re thinking.”

—Leena Hamad ’17

Flores benefited from early exposure to the Harkness system via a New Jersey program that introduces low-income students to private schools, and realized then that he loved to hear different people’s perspectives. “That’s definitely what attracted me to Exeter,” he says. Now he hopes that the October assembly will continue to generate positive feedback and open-minded conversations. “Not everyone lives the same life, and that means that not everyone can approach a problem the same way. I remember hearing a comment that, ‘Well, if you come to America you should already come assuming that you have to sign up to the culture, that you need to know the language, you need to do A, B and C.’ What I would say to that person is that they need to understand that, because of different circumstances, not everyone can do A, B and C: You might not always be aware of what other people’s barriers have been that they’ve had to overcome or are working on overcoming, but if you can gain an understanding of those barriers, that will give you a better understanding of where people are coming from.”

IDENTITIES ARE COMPLEX ENTITIES

“Identities can, and usually are, multifaceted,” Leena Hamad said at the assembly. “I am Muslim, Arab, African, Sudanese, American ­— and it works. Labels should not be boxes, or tightly bound definitions of who I can and should be. There is nothing mutually exclusive about being an American woman and a Muslim, or Arab and African. Identities are fluid — they morph to fit you, not some imagined racial, ethnic or religious monolith. To say that there is a single Muslim experience — or a single Arab experience — is misleading. There are common threads, of course, but implying singularity erases the true diversity of experience.”

“The whole idea of identity not being monolithic,” explains Hamad, who grew up attending a Muslim school that helped shape and affirm her Muslim identity, “comes from my own experience of not really fitting any categories. Even in my Muslim school — where there weren’t many other Sudanese students — I was too Arab to be African and too African

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to be Arab, which is a really strange way to feel. You kind of have to pave your own way.”

Arriving at Exeter, Hamad was surprised by others’ misconceptions of Islam, but she used this as a positive opportunity to take initiative: “My approach in terms of educating others is to understand that the other person might not know a lot about that particular topic and not belittle them for that — there are plenty of reasons why people won’t know a lot about Islam. I think it’s important, if somebody says something ignorant, that you call them out, but you also outline the reasons why what they said was wrong. It’s better to educate in a more supportive way.” Her own frustrations tend to lie in the fact that so many of her fellow students view Muslims or Arabs as all the same: “When you over-politicize

“That’s when ideas start forming, that’s when the actual, the true connections happen, when we’re not expecting it. ”

CHERYL SENTER

—Nada Zohayr ’17

things like race and religion, you take away from the humanity of those issues. Looking at Muslims, for instance, as one entity rather than as a group of people, a group made up of individuals, you lose sight of the fact that those individuals are each diverse in their own ways. You lose sight of the human element.”

Fellow students told Hamad they found her speech inspiring, and she hopes that the momentum generated by the assembly will lead to open discussions of individual Exeter experiences around race, culture and class becoming integrated into daily and academic life.

“I think we need more conversations about this. We need to make it more of a regular thing because we tend to only have these conversations after something happens, after there’s a controversy in the world or after a big political event. We should make it a more regular thing where we invite people to talk about their experiences at Exeter.”

Like the other speakers, Hamad is strikingly astute and generous when it comes to her consideration of others. Ultimately, she says, no one should feel isolated or alone,

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“I really wanted to make sure I could bridge that gap in the hope that we can find some commonality in what we were sharing.”

—Kelvin Green ’17

CHERYL SENTER

particularly during discussions of race and class, whether they are taking place around the Harkness table or in a dorm common room. Try to see it, she says, as an empowering chance to share and communicate. “For a long time I was the only Sudanese person at Exeter, and I’ll still be the only African in my math class or the only Muslim in the room when we’re having a conversation like that, but I think it’s really important for other students at Exeter to know that when you are faced with that challenge of being the only one in the room, when something like that comes up, just see it as an opportunity. It can be scary when people don’t agree with you, but when you’re the only one, it’s a golden opportunity for you to tell people what you’re thinking.”

OPENING THE CONVERSATION

Nada Zohayr, who spoke of the often self-imposed pressures of being the offspring of immigrant parents — “I don’t have a safety net; I am my family’s safety net” — feels that her fellow students are Exeter’s biggest support system. “I often find that whenever I have an issue, I turn toward my dorm mates or my friends or my classmates before anyone else, and there are so many different clubs and affinity groups on campus as well. What’s really amazing, and what I think we sometimes forget about each other, is that everyone is doing so much work outside of the classroom. Forget about homework, forget about studying, we’re all doing so much work for each other whether it’s with affinity groups or for social justice causes. But oftentimes it’s not just during those formal meetings, it’s also in the dining halls and in the dormitories, when we’re sitting in circles at dinner, at lunch, at breakfast, and we’re really talking to each other. That’s when ideas start forming, that’s when the actual, the true connections happen, when we’re not expecting it. The best conversations I’ve ever had at Exeter have been in my dorm, with my dorm mates, at odd hours. One time it was 2 a.m. and I was writing a paper. I went to the bathroom and was washing my face and a dorm mate stopped by and we talked about a recent sexual assault case at another school, and we

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had a half-hour-long discussion about that. It’s times like that that really make you start to think as a person.”

“One of the biggest issues on campus,” she continues, “is that often we try to make the Harkness table into our battleground, the place where we are supposed to ‘really’ speak, yet there are unspoken barriers at the Harkness table that infringe upon discussion. Oftentimes like in English class or history class when we’re talking about issues relating to race — or gender and sexuality or women’s rights or labor issues — if the teacher doesn’t feel comfortable discussing it, then we don’t feel comfortable discussing it, either. We, as students, we’re young and we’re doing the best we can, but often we don’t know what to say or what is the right thing to say, and sometimes the teachers don’t know what to say, either — or at least they don’t know how to address our questions. We could be having braver conver-

“... racism is everywhere, and it doesn’t stand up when you look someone in the face and actually have a human interaction ... . ”

—Livaslou Tanjong ’17

sations in the classroom, like an intense history class when we talk about slavery or civil rights, or in English class when we’re reading about a woman’s side of the story. We need to open up these conversations even more, and not be afraid.”

FINDING COMMON PURPOSE

Kelvin Green, whose speech had a palpably inclusive stance, also received welcome feedback, including from faculty who appreciated his approach. “I really wanted this to be an opportunity that would connect us all,” he says. “We’re all here for education and learning and that’s the most important thing; this discussion is another part of that. We already have a common purpose, and learning each others’ experiences is just another part of our education here. I felt that by reaching out, that would (Continued on page 93)

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“...WE WILL ALL HAVE MORE PLACES THAT INVITE US TO BE SPIRITS OF INVENTION AND INNOVATION.”

COURTESY TOD WILLIAMS + BILLIE TSIEN

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CONNECTIONS

News and notes from the alumni community

The Bones of a Building Rob Richards, chair of the Theater and Dance Department

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tanding on the edge of South Campus, watching the foundation of the new Goel Center for Theater and Dance go up, evokes a powerful feeling. The seed of the design for the building came out of our department’s vision, the vision for our program, and it will be an incredibly inspiring space — one that puts a real buoyancy in our stride.

When the facility is complete, I think we’ll feel a culture shift. The arts are so important to education, and to learning creatively, and I think they’ll feel much more front and center. To have a playful spirit and to be collaborative are core strengths that our students can apply to whatever field they choose to pursue, and to every aspect of their lives.

One of the big, amazing gifts for me is that theater will finally be in the same building as dance. We will physically be the Theater and Dance Department with the ability to work more synergistically. And we will all have more places that invite us to be spirits of invention and innovation, like the costume area on the garden level or the stagecraft classroom next to it — where I hope to expand my puppetry work with the students. Just having the opportunity to inhabit the big empty space in the rehearsal room, with all of its possibility, is going to be a lot of fun.

I want to get to know the bones of this building, to see what all of these discussions and all of these sheets of paper will look like in the form of a building. When Tod [Williams], one of our architects, asked what we wanted the building to look like, somebody said, “like a geode.”

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It should sparkle on the inside.

There is something to that: the kids in their costumes under the stage lights, their faces, their smiles. That’s the payoff; that’s the wonderful reward.

The center’s proximity to our athletics complex, which will expand the South Campus as a destination — not only for our Academy community but for those outside of it — is also a gift. The Goel Center, even the landscaping around it and the new pedestrian walkway, will invite people in — and the performing arts are really meant to bring community together. I am thrilled that we will have the ability to provide greater avenues of connection for our students and for our neighbors in town and the greater Seacoast region.

My colleagues and I are eager to welcome each and every member of our Exeter family, as well as our community, to the Goel Center for Theater and Dance when it opens in spring 2018. I am so thankful for the alumni and parent support that has allowed our vision to take form and for the ongoing and additional support that will help to ensure its completion. E For more information on the David E. Goel and Stacey L. Goel Center for Theater and Dance, including real-time photos of construction and architectural renderings, go to www.exeter.edu/southcampus.

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C O N N ECT I O N S

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M I C H A E L J. S O C O LOW ’8 7

Media and the Nazi Olympics

By Craig Morgan ’84

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ichael J. Socolow’s new book marries three of his life’s greatest passions: history, media and rowing.

Six Minutes in Berlin: Broadcast Spectacle and Rowing Gold at the Nazi Olympics recounts the underdog tale of the University of Washington crew team, which upset every Ivy League crew to qualify for the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, and then rallied from behind to capture gold against strong German (bronze) and Italian (silver) crews in the eights.

The emergence of new radio technologies allowed a global audience to experience that dramatic event in real time on CBS, forever transforming the media landscape and the way people receive and consume information.

“It was really the world’s first great global broadcasting event,” says Socolow ’87, a professor at the University of Maine and a media historian whose research focuses on America’s original radio networks during the 1920s and 1930s. “There had never been 300 million people listening to the same broadcast, live at the same time, before the Berlin Olympics. It created this kind of new, electric, ephemeral celebrity that we see often now.”

While Jesse Owens and the Huskies crew became what Socolow calls “insta-Olympic stars,” advances in microphone technology, new types of network circuitry and new types of shortwave transmitters provided the perfect vehicle for Adolf Hitler to export his vision of Nazi Germany to the world.

“The Olympics were the greatest advertisement for what was called ‘The New Germany’ that was ever put together,” Socolow says. “What the Nazi propagandists understood, which the American radio networks did not, was the effectiveness of the technology of propaganda, more so than the actual content. By building this incredible radio plan for the Olympics, they insured their message got out no matter what happened.”

Socolow sees contemporary parallels.

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“Propagandists today spreading ‘fake news’ understand the new technology of distribution and how to exploit it — in some ways better than American media executives,” he says.

Socolow rowed for two years at Exeter before embarking on a School Year Abroad program, and he picked up the sport again at Columbia University. One day, while doing research for his doctorate in history at Georgetown, he came across the story of the Washington rowers at the Library of Congress.

“It is such a dramatic gold medal,” says Socolow, lapsing into the present tense, which makes the race feel all the more palpable. “It is like the 1980 Miracle On Ice. It is like Mary Lou Retton’s gold. It’s the classic come-from-behind story, but this one is different in that it actually happens 6,000 miles from home in front of 100,000 Germans and swastikas and Hitler, all rooting for the other team.”

Socolow is a former broadcast journalist who has worked as an assignment editor for CNN and as a freelance information manager for the host broadcast organizations at the Barcelona, Atlanta and Sydney Olympics.

His scholarship on media history has appeared in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, The Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media and Technology and Culture. His articles have appeared in Slate, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post.

He traces his love of writing to his Exeter days.

“The Exeter English and History departments when I was a student were incredible,” he says. “I was inspired by so many outstanding writer/teachers with whom I got to interact. … The opportunity to take classes with people who really are passionate about their work was transformative.”

So was this book, which Socolow labels a true labor of love.

“It was rewarding and cathartic to be able to write about three things I really love studying,” he says. E

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Reunion Planning with Heart

By Jennifer Simmons Kaleba

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ANNIE O’NEILL

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fter being peppered with questions about how she managed to get record-breaking attendance for the class of 1972’s 40th reunion — and her goal to exceed those numbers for the upcoming 45th — Juliet Kostritsky ’72; P’09 concluded her telephone interview with, “But I’d love to know more about you.”

If you want to know the secret in her sauce, there you have it. Kostritsky, a contract law professor at Case Western Reserve School of Law in Cleveland, and current president of the class of 1972, is legitimately, earnestly interested in people. That caring curiosity leads her and her fellow Reunion Committee members to pull out all the stops to reach alumni — emails, phone calls, and a very active Facebook page — and to make it clear to each classmate that everyone else from those shared days at Exeter is interested, too.

“Why do we return?” Kostritsky mused in her invitation to her classmates for the 45th reunion. “What draws us back? Why, the last time all of us met, did Iris Gowen travel all the way from Bangkok, and Nelson Graves from Paris? Not all of us need to cross an ocean — Gussie Wilson welcomed us into her home on Pine Street five years ago, and for her it was a different kind of journey, as it always is for each one of us. For me, ‘Why return?’ is a question that begs no answer — it’s all of you.”

From a class of approximately 330 alumni (one of whom is Kostritsky’s husband, Edward Gellert ’72), 26 percent attended their 40th reunion in 2012. The turnout was roughly triple that of other, more typical class reunions. “The role of Facebook was huge,” says Kostritsky, also a former class correspondent.

“We have maybe 115 members who are on it.” She and Frank McPhillips (class vice president and her attendance co-chair for the 40th) used old photos to inspire reunion-inducing nostalgia, calling up everything from Exeter’s production of Romeo and Juliet to the “moving of the books.”

During Kostritsky’s senior year, the Louis Kahndesigned Class of 1945 Library opened. Classes were cancelled one November day so that students, teachers and staff could move 60,000 books from the old library to their new home. The class of ’72 is also notable as the first class with female boarders. Forty women, including Kostritsky, were enrolled that year. When it is suggested that her class is more connected — and perhaps more

Juliet Kostritsky ’72 at the podium during her Law and Business course at Case Western School of Law.

likely to return — as a result of this integration, Kostritsky does not speculate. She does say, however, that regardless of social media and amusing memories, the enthusiasm for attending reunions lies in the pleasure of the Harkness experience.

“People definitely want to go to a Harkness class when they come back,” she says. “[Harkness is] probably not something we experience very often in our everyday lives anymore. In work, often you’re really working alone.

Everyone knows you can do your job, and so you do it.

You don’t have a reason to come together. It’s really an eye-opening experience to be with people who have a shared purpose and who all teach you.”

The class will hold its 45th reunion May 18-21, but Kostritsky says she doesn’t have any hard-number goal — though she admits her competitive nature makes her want to give record-breaking another try. Still, she says, “I think our goal is just to reach out to everyone and encourage as many people to come back as possible. We want to see people come back.” E

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C O N N ECT I O N S

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Service Through Ecology T W O A L U M N A E N A M E D 2 0 1 6 G AT E S C A M B R I D G E S C H O L A R S

By Lynn Horowitch ’81; P’19

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or approximately six months of each of the next three years, Caitlin Andrews ’12 will live in a bunkhouse on Tiritiri Matangi, a remote island off of New Zealand’s Whangaparaoa Peninsula. Accessible only by ferry, the island is home to hihi, a species of native birds that went extinct on the New Zealand mainland during the 1800s. On the mainland, hihi faced challenges, including disease and predators, that are not present in their offshore habitat.

Andrews will study the behaviors of individual birds, assessing their personalities, habits, strengths and weaknesses. Based on her research, Andrews will identify those members of the hihi population that would be most likely to overcome the challenges of thriving on the mainland. She will then be part of a team that seeks to reintroduce hihi to New Zealand.

Andrews is undertaking this work as a Gates Cambridge Scholar; she is one of two Exonians, along with Emma Glennon ’10, who were awarded this prestigious scholarship in 2016. The Gates Cambridge Scholarship, established by Bill and Melinda Gates in 2000, is given annually to 40 Americans and 55 people from other countries.

Gates Cambridge Scholars are selected on the basis of four criteria: academic excellence, leadership potential, a commitment to improving the lives of others and a good academic fit with the University of Cambridge. Applicants are ranked by Cambridge professors on academic ability. Those who pass that hurdle are then evaluated by shortlisting committees that consider the candidates’ full applications. Finally, those who are shortlisted are interviewed.

The Scholars receive full funding for their graduate work and also benefit from special programs throughout their studies. Both Andrews and Glennon are pursuing doctorates, typically awarded in Caitlin Andrews hopes to help reintroduce three or four years, compared with six or more in the United States. native hihi bird populations to New Zealand.

Andrews’ degree will be in zoology, while Glennon’s field of study is veterinary medicine. Glennon is undertaking her work as part of Churchill College at Cambridge, which has a focus on science, engineering and technology, and was established in 1958 to honor Winston Churchill. Andrews is affiliated with King’s College, which was founded in Cambridge in 1441 by King Henry VI. Andrews has had a lifelong interest in animal behavior, beginning with observing the backyard activities of her family dogs, pit bulls Astro, Comet and Jupiter. A native of West Newbury, Massachusetts, she was a four-year day student at Exeter. While at the Academy, she doubled up on science classes when her schedule permitted, taking electives in animal behavior and marine biology.

Andrews went to Harvard, graduating summa cum laude in 2016, and majoring in organismic and evolutionary biology. Andrews’ focus was on animal behavior and ecology. To gather data for her undergraduate thesis, she lived in a tent in Mexico for the summer before her senior year, researching sex differences in the ranging behavior of Yucatan spider monkeys in the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve. She has also studied parrot cognition at Harvard, dogs’ perceptions of morality at Yale, primate-human interactions in Rwanda and gorilla behavior at Boston’s Franklin Park Zoo.

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While Andrews’ current work focuses on the hihi population, it has broad implications. “Hihi eat nectar and are important pollinators,” Andrews explains. “Through my project, I am advocating for ‘rewilding,’ or the benefits of reintroducing a species.” The goal is to use hihi reintroductions not only to help hihi, but also to promote the health and sustainability of their environment.

Andrews says, “I am hoping to show that by helping a species, we are helping the entire New Zealand ecosystem.”

Glennon’s work also analyzes a specific animal as a means to improving conditions more broadly. She explores infectious diseases from an ecological perspective, looking at ways that human actions affect the population dynamics of fruit bats and thereby drive spillover of bat-borne viruses, including Ebola, rabies and others. Specifically, Glennon uses mathematical models to study ways diseases move through populations.

Unlike Andrews, who knew from a young age that she was fascinated by animal behavior, Glennon didn’t find her passion until college. At Exeter, Glennon was a three-year day student from Portsmouth. She did “a bit of everything” throughout her years at PEA. “I really loved languages, painting,” she says. “I did an exchange program in Germany. I had no idea — I loved everything!” She enrolled at Princeton, uncertain of what academic path she would pursue.

A combination of circumstances and experiences led Glennon to her current field. Her father became ill and passed away during her college years, planting the seeds for her interest in health and its determinants. Then a class in disease ecology during Glennon’s junior year opened her eyes to a new area of study that married many of her interests. She says, “Disease ecology combined my existing interest in public health with the kinds of field work and analytical problem-solving I love.”

For her undergraduate thesis, Glennon modeled the links between long-term climate variation, human behavior and cholera in Bangladesh, which she visited before her senior year Emma Glennon’s work in disease ecology at Princeton. She graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, currently centers on fruit bat populations. with a degree in ecology and evolutionary biology. Her next step was a Fulbright Research Grant. Glennon traveled to Delhi, India, to study antibiotic-resistant infections, under the auspices of two separate but collaborating organizations: the Public Health Foundation of India and the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy. “I was looking at drivers of resistance on a global scale,” she says.

Now Glennon is crunching data on fruit bats. At some point in her graduate studies, she plans to travel to Ghana and/or Australia, where data on the fruit bat populations are gathered. Glennon notes that being present as data come in can provide insights and valuable information. She says, “When I spent a summer in Bangladesh, where the cholera data came from, I could ask questions such as, ‘What do you wish you had better answers to?’ that guided my research.”

In pursuit of their degrees, neither Glennon nor Andrews takes classes or has a set schedule.

“It is straight research,” Glennon says. They both appreciate the opportunity to focus on their area of interest. “It’s really great to be able to choose a problem and hone in on it,” Glennon says. “The nerd in me gets really excited about that!”

While their work is independent, both Andrews and Glennon enjoy being part of a larger program. As Glennon says, “With Gates, being part of such an interdisciplinary group is a unique and incredible opportunity.” Andrews particularly appreciates the exposure to those with different interests and talents. “I’ve already made amazing friends,” she says.

And while each of them has a different area of study and a different plan for fulfilling their scholarship, all of the Gates Cambridge Scholars have a commitment to service to others. Glennon says, “Everyone here is passionate about some problem. There’s a very cool energy.” As Andrews concludes, “We all have a similar passion to help improve the world.” E

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Speaking Out (Continued from page 33) allow some of our white counterparts ... to realize that they also play a role in this narrative as well. That’s really important because a lot of times we talk about our experiences as students of color, and other students of color, they understand, they agree, but there’s this whole half of the community that you may have left out. So I really wanted to make sure I could bridge that gap in the hope that we can find some commonality in what we were sharing.”

Like Flores, Green commends the Office of Multicultural Student Affairs and the work that it does. “That office is really focused on our commonalities — you can see that their goal is to connect this multicultural society. They’re trying to connect the students of color and they’re also trying to create a base of learning for white students of the different people at Exeter who come from different backgrounds of different color. That’s one of their main goals: to create that sense of cohesiveness between the groups on campus.”

Faculty of color, he says, also actively provide a vital support system. “Our faculty of color reach out to us: Students of colors’ experience on a predominantly white campus is different than that of a white student and they recognize that. So do white faculty, for that matter: They recognize that they need to reach out and listen so that the students of color don’t feel alone. That’s been a really good structure to have. The faculty of color — black, Latino, Asian, Pacific Islander — many of them are new to the campus, but they find a way to integrate themselves with their own identity and then they also create that bond with those students.” Among Green’s main concerns is faculty of color retention: “Sometimes we would see a faculty of color come for a year or two and then they would leave. And students, we didn’t know all the intricacies or the issues, we just saw that suddenly, ‘Oh

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no, he’s no longer here,’ or ‘She’s no longer here, what’s up?’” But, he says, he’s seen many progressive changes in his four years at Exeter, including around that issue. “Miss MacFarlane has made some awesome strides in improving that effort. They are planning on hiring a director of diversity, equity and inclusion to work on policy and administration of faculty, to make our curriculum more inclusive, create programs for faculty diversity training and look at what we can enhance to keep faculty of color here, to make sure they want to stay here.”

Witnessing this shift in administration support, Green says, makes him feel acknowledged and heard. “As a lower, I participated in the Council for Equity and Social Justice planning, so I was in the room with Principal [Tom] Hassan and the new deans, speaking directly to the people who could make things happen, who could bring our concerns to the Trustees. That really made me feel like my voice was heard, and I think that’s what makes Exeter special: If you want to be heard, there are avenues for you to be heard. I feel like there has been noticeable progress in my four years here. Is it progress to the point where we say we’ve done enough? No, but it’s progress, and I think it’s important to recognize that.

I’ve learned so much at Exeter about social justice and allyship, that having a diverse pool of people supporting your cause, that is what creates change. It’s heartwarming to know that the little pushes that were made by our community throughout my four years are resulting in steps that are leading us forward.”

RAISING AWARENESS

“There were many individuals and groups working to make others aware of issues around race and class on campus,” says Livaslou Tanjong, who began organizing the assembly last spring, and whose speech shone with both poetry and clarity. (“Race is the awkward topic that no one wants to broach. But being black at Exeter, and seeing the physical diversity of

our campus means I aim to be vocal.”)

“I realized if we didn’t make room for this discussion on our schedule,” she says, “not everybody would see it. The assembly was an invitation, but it was also a gift to a lot of affinity groups on campus who had been trying to bring attention to these issues. Now people are more aware and asking questions; I do believe it has set new things in motion, and one of the benefits of this assembly is that people begin to see you as a person that they can talk to — they are more comfortable reaching out to me and speaking to me about these issues.”

Ideally, Tanjong would like to see more consistency of race discussions across campus and consensus among the faculty in terms of incorporating discussions around race and class into the classroom, as well as incorporating more diverse voices and opinions into the curriculum: “It’s one thing for me as a student to gather other students and say we’re going to talk about race.

But even if we make them aware of the issues, where does it go from there if the curriculum that the students are exposed to isn’t backing up what we’re saying? If, after I’ve talked, there’s nothing else there that reinforces what I’ve said, then they can listen, but they’re not necessarily going to learn.

It’s not enough to just discuss race in the context of day-to-day student social life or in dorm culture. At the end of the day, racism is everywhere and it doesn’t stand up when you look someone in the face and actually have a human interaction, but it also doesn’t stand up when you look at history. When you become educated and aware of what’s going on, you’re faced with facts, you begin to understand and that alters your mind, alters the way you look at people.

That changes things. I think if you’re talking about diversity, you should talk about diversity on your campus, and you should talk about diversity in your country. Because that’s where it affects you the most.” E

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M E M O R I A L

M I N U T E

PEA ARCHIVES (2)

Charles Arthur Compton ’45 1927–2014

C

harles Arthur Compton was born on May 17,

1927, in Princeton, New Jersey. Arthur’s father, Karl Taylor Compton, was a noted physicist and longtime president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Arthur’s uncle, Arthur Holly Compton, also a renowned physicist, received the Nobel Prize in physics for his discovery, the Compton effect, which helped verify the particle nature of photons. With these remarkably accomplished forebears, it is not surprising that Arthur Compton would pursue a science-related career. Arthur attended Phillips Exeter Academy and graduated in 1945. He chose MIT for his undergraduate work but interrupted his studies to spend two years in the

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U.S. Army before receiving his Bachelor of Science degree from MIT in 1951. In 1954, Arthur received a Master of Education degree from Harvard. He began his teaching career at the Mount Hermon School (now Northfield Mount Hermon) and returned in 1955 to teach at Exeter, where he and his first wife, Elizabeth Pope Compton, raised their three children. He retired in June 1990.

Arthur used his unique background as an effective tool in the classroom. As one colleague put it, “In classes he used a storytelling approach that incorporated many of the great historical figures in physics. Students were taken on a journey through the subject area and not simply introduced to the relevant ‘laws.’ They were encouraged

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to delve deeper into what truly mattered in physics and appreciate the wonder of the world around them.”

Though the bulk of his career at Exeter occurred in the classroom, Arthur took on numerous tasks to benefit the entire school and the science teaching community at large. In 1966, Arthur was chosen to chair the Planning Committee, a prestigious committee put together by then-Principal Richard Day to chart the future of the Academy. Among other things, this committee investigated the feasibility of coeducation at the school, which up to that time had been an all-male institution for more than 150 years. Arthur chaired the Science Department from 1968 to 1972, was named the 1961 Independence Foundation Professor in 1972, and was clerk of the Trustees from 1982 until his retirement. One of a group of faculty members who helped organize and time track meets, Arthur also spent time in the boathouse introducing neophytes to the sport of crew.

Arthur not only taught science, but thought deeply about science teaching methods. During his tenure as Science Department chair, Arthur often hosted evening department meetings at his own home. Those meetings dealt not only with the usual nuts and bolts of department business, but often morphed into philosophical discussions of science teaching techniques and pedagogy in general. As one colleague put it, “Arthur Compton was a true gentleman and scholar with a deep background and a broad range of interests. This permitted him to be an interesting and informed colleague during department discussions. Arthur would continually put up ‘straw men’ to initiate substantive debate regarding student instruction and course goals.”

That broad interest in pedagogy prompted Arthur to take part in the development of Harvard Project Physics from 1962 to 1968. Harvard Project Physics was one of several post-Sputnik-era initiatives to improve the teaching of physics by emphasizing the use of student lab work to introduce concepts and methods. He became one of several “trial teachers” for Harvard Project material.

In 1978, a UNESCO grant provided Arthur the opportunity to attend the Oxford Conference on the Role of the Laboratory in Physics Education. Another UNESCO grant in 1983 took Arthur again to England to attend the Malvern Conference on Science and Technology Education and Future Human Needs. He also contributed

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numerous articles to professional journals, as well as to The Exeter Bulletin. His involvement in professional organizations and his curiosity about innovations in teaching taking place around the world made him an important conduit between Exeter and the rapidly changing world of science education.

In addition to his writings relating to science education, Arthur was a prolific writer of letters and memos documenting his thoughts and ideas on any number of Academy-related issues. Most of those memos are typewritten, single-spaced and run on for several pages. They range from the advantages and disadvantages of a student work program, to the wisdom of doing away with diploma requirements, to an exhortation to the Academy to adopt a better-designed bicycle rack.

In a nine-page memo Arthur wrote in 1965, he outlined his thoughts on how the facilities at the Academy should be improved and modified to meet future needs.

He argued that the five dining halls that were scattered around the campus led to isolation, as well as being an inefficient way to feed students and faculty. He recommended major modifications to the “Chapel” (Assembly Hall) by adding a balcony and permanent seating. He wrote of the need for a “school center” to bring together in one place the meeting rooms and student organization offices that were, at the time, occupying random spaces around the campus.

It is safe to say that Arthur Compton’s ideas and recommendations served to catalyze action that produced profound improvements in the Academy — specifically in the way we now teach science, but more generally in a variety of changes that have taken place at Exeter over the past half-century.

Upon his retirement, Arthur moved to Sebastian, Florida, where he was active in the growth of the Unitarian Universalist Church and in local choral groups.

Arthur died in Florida on December 14, 2014, at age 87.

He is survived by his wife, Leona, and his three children: Lisa Compton Bellochio, Karl Compton and Carol Compton. E This Memorial Minute was presented at faculty meeting on October 10, 2016.

It was written by Science Instructor Richard Aaronian ’76, ’97 (Hon.); P’94, P’97 and Emeriti Science Instructors James Ekstrom and Lewis Hitzrot.

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F I N I S

O R I G I N E

P E N D E T

Giving Thanks

By Lauren Fidelak ’17, three-year senior in Hoyt Hall

Editor’s Note: Lauren composed the following essay to read at the annual Thanksgiving assembly, which was held on Nov. 18.

Watch the assembly at Exeter.gameonstream.com.

L

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COREY BRICKLEY

ast week when Mr. [Ron] Kim asked me to speak to you all today, I agreed immediately. The Thanksgiving assembly has always been one of my favorites, and I assumed that after two and a half years at a school like Exeter, where I see something new to be thankful for every day, this speech would come easily. However, as I sat down at my computer, ready to write, this was not the case I called my dad in search of inspiration and he told me this: “Get up on stage and say, ‘I’m thankful to write something that isn’t a college application,’ ” and while this couldn’t be any closer to the truth, it’s not what I had in mind for my assembly debut.

There are several obvious aspects of Exeter that I have to be thankful for, that we all have to be thankful for: the amazing, dedicated teachers; the financial aid packages that so many of us receive; the dining hall staff; and the people from Facilities who wake up before dawn every morning in the winter to keep the paths safe. I am forever grateful for their commitment to our community, and we wouldn’t be Exeter without them. But today, in light of the tensions that I have felt both on campus and across the country, I want to talk about you, my peers.

The first time I stepped foot on campus was move-in day of my lower year. I am from a small town in northwest Louisiana, where saying, “She went to boarding school” is synonymous with saying, “She did something wrong.” I applied to Exeter after Googling “Top Ten Boarding Schools in the Country” one day when I was bored, and when I was accepted and received full financial aid, I decided to come because, Why not? I think I might be standing on this stage today because of pure luck.

Even though she had never seen an Exeter student, my mom was convinced that she knew what you all would be like. (She had seen a movie or something where the kids went to boarding school.) When we went shopping for dress-code-appropriate clothes, she made me buy button-downs and slacks and tweed skirts because, “That’s how all the kids would be dressed.” If you look at my Lion Card picture from the first day, I’m actually wearing one of the button-downs and big pearl earrings. I arrived on

campus thinking that everyone’s last names would be Rockefeller or Kennedy, and that everyone would fly to school on their private planes. I didn’t think there was a spot for me, a girl from a small southern town who still spoke with a bit of a twang, at a school like Exeter, but with my closet full of blazers and a pearl necklace, I could sure try to fake it. As I’m sure most of you could figure out, when I actually got to campus, I was surprised to find that Exeter students are not all the same. Everyone dressed differently, spoke differently and acted differently. There were kids from various cultural, geographic and socioeconomic backgrounds, and kids who walked around speaking in foreign languages with their parents. To say the least, I had culture shock. After spending more time on campus, I came to a deeper understanding of what these differences mean and how they divide and unite us as a community.

As I stand here today, I know this: No two members of the Exeter community are the same, and that is what I am most thankful for. I am thankful for the chance to sit down at a Harkness table with peers from five or six countries, each with their own perspectives and ideas. I am thankful for a chemistry teacher with pink hair who’s in a rock band, and for my friends, a strange mixture of Northerners and Southerners, Americans and foreigners. I am thankful for a campus safety officer who shocked the whole school with her MLK Day performance, and for Ms. Janet in the dining hall, who always makes my day a little bit better. I am grateful for the Exeter Jewish Community because they have welcomed me into their community and taught me about their culture. I am thankful for every single person on campus who is completely unlike myself, because they remind me: We are not the same. But that’s OK. Often, however, I think we let our differences separate us, instead of appreciating the elements that make us all unique. At a time like this, with so much changing and shifting, it is important that we come together, as Exeter.

Have discussions, talk with your friends, your teachers, your dorm faculty. Speak your mind. Share your thoughts.

But remember: We are all different for a reason. Be thankful for the things that make each other special. An Exeter where everyone was the same would be quite boring.

This holiday season, I am grateful for every one of you.

This place is tough. As most of you know, it’s a constant grind, but we’re in it together. E

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A Summer to Remember

EXETER SUMMER JULY 2 – AUGUST 4, 2017

Begin a five-week journey of discovery! EXETER SUMMER students, currently in grades 7-12, represent a rich diversity of language, culture, religion and race. Students choose among 100 courses, 10 academic clusters and 15 sports. Whatever sparks your interest, you will find it at Exeter.

603.777.3488

| EXETER.EDU/SUMMER | SUMMER@EXETER.EDU

20 Main Street Exeter, NH 03833-2460 Parents of Alumni: If this magazine is addressed to a son or daughter who no longer maintains a permanent address at your home, please email us (records@exeter.edu) with his or her new address. Thank you.

THE ANJA S. GREER CONFERENCE ON MATHEMATICS AND TECHNOLOGY THE BIOLOGY INSTITUTE AT EXETER THE EXETER HUMANITIES INSTITUTE THE WRITERS’ WORKSHOP AT EXETER THE REX A. MCGUINN CONFERENCE ON SHAKESPEARE THE EXETER DIVERSITY INSTITUTE THE ENVIRONMENTAL LITERATURE INSTITUTE AT EXETER EXETER ASTRONOMY EDUCATION CONFERENCE

WHERE GREAT TEACHERS GO TO SCHOOL Each summer, secondary school educators from around the globe attend Exeter’s intensive weeklong professional development conferences.

June 25-30, 2017 ALL CONFERENCES ARE OPEN TO NOVICE AND VETERAN EDUCATORS FROM PUBLIC, PRIVATE AND PAROCHIAL SCHOOLS. FOR MORE INFORMATION AND REGISTRATION FORMS, VISIT WWW.EXETER.EDU/SUMMERPROGRAMS, OR CALL 603.777.4471.