The Exeter Bulletin WINTER 2021
Person and Path HOW EXETER SUPPORTS STUDENTS IN THEIR IDENTITY BUILDING
WINTER
The Exeter Bulletin Principal William K. Rawson ’71; P’08 Executive Editor Karen Ingraham Managing Editor Patrick Garrity Senior Editor Jennifer Wagner Class Notes Editor Cathy Webber Editorial Coordinator Maxine Weed Creative Director/Design David Nelson, Nelson Design Coeducation Section Designer Jacqueline Trimmer Communications Advisory Committee Daniel G. Brown ’82, Robert C. Burtman ’74, Dorinda Elliott ’76, Alison Freeland ’72, Keith Johnson ’52, Yvonne M. Lopez ’93 Trustees President Morgan C.W. Sze ’83
Wole C. Coaxum ’88, Suzi Kwon Cohen ’88, Mark A. Edwards ’78, Elizabeth A. “Betsy” Fleming ’86, Claudine Gay ’88, Peter A. Georgescu ’57, Scott S.W. Hahn ’90, Jacqueline Hayes ’85, Ira D. Helfand, M.D. ’67, Jennifer P. Holleran ’86, Cia Buckley Marakovits ’83, Sally J. Michaels ’82, William K. Rawson ’71, Genisha Saverimuthu ’02, Peter M. Scocimara ’82, Sanjay K. Shetty, M.D. ’92, Serena Wille Sides ’89, Kristyn A. (McLeod) Van Ostern ’96, Janney Wilson ’83 The Exeter Bulletin (ISSN No. 0195-0207) is published four times each year: fall, winter, spring and summer, by Phillips Exeter Academy 20 Main Street, Exeter NH 03833-2460 Telephone 603-772-4311 Periodicals postage paid at Exeter, NH, and at additional mailing offices. Printed in the USA by Cummings Printing. The Exeter Bulletin is printed on recycled paper and sent free of charge to alumni, parents, grandparents, friends and educational institutions by Phillips Exeter Academy, Exeter, NH. Communications may be addressed to the editor; email bulletin@exeter.edu. Copyright 2021 by the Trustees of Phillips Exeter Academy. ISSN-0195-0207 Postmasters: Send address changes to: Phillips Exeter Academy Records Office 20 Main Street Exeter, NH 03833-2460
PATRICK GARRIT Y
Vice President Deidre G. O’Byrne ’84
“THE TRUE, AMAZING PART OF WHAT WE’RE DOING HERE IS THE COMMUNITY WE’RE IN, THE PEOPLE WHO MAKE IT UP AND THE STORIES THEY HAVE.” —page 30
IN THIS ISSUE
Volume CXXV, Issue no. 2
Features 30 Person and Path How Exeter supports students in their identity building. By Nicole Pellaton
38 Hellos for the Heroes Senior Ryan Pettit’s letter-writing campaign brings joy to veterans. By Juliet Eastland ’86
Her Voice at the Table 42 Impact 30 42
A special section dedicated to the 50th anniversary of coeducation.
Departments 6
Around the Table: Principal’s message, Heard in Assembly, scholars in residence and more
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Table Talk: Assistant Principal Karen Lassey
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Inside the Writing Life: Novelist Dan Brown ’82 on how his new children’s book took shape
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Sports: A conversation with NBA Medical Director Leroy Sims ’97 Plus: Exeter’s first Red-Gray Weekend
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Connections: Catching up with our alumni
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Class Notes —Cover illustration by Davide Bonazzi
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Paths shoveled clean after a December snowfall crisscross the quad during winter break. PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHRISTIAN HARRISON
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What’s new and notable at the Academy
Individual Growth and Public Purpose By Principal Bill Rawson ’71; P’08
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s we prepare to welcome our students back to campus this
month, we do so with a deep sense of purpose and gratitude. Our students bring an incredible thirst for knowledge, a desire to excel in every aspect of their Exeter experience, and a great sense of joy in being part of the Exeter community. Their commitment reinforces our own sense of purpose, and their presence reminds us of how fortunate we all are to live and learn alongside each other. I began dorm duty in Wentworth Hall last fall, and am eager to return to my duties this term. The individual conversations I have had with students have been quite meaningful and insightful. Listening to dormmates from around the world engage in passionate debate, and watching them play games or simply hang out, also has been a wonderful privilege. So too are the opportunities to connect with students in other ways — from meetings with ESSO leadership, Student Council and Student Listeners, to attending rehearsals, athletic practices, club meetings and other student gatherings. In every instance, I have been deeply impressed by our students’ resilience, their determination to make the most of their opportunities this year, and their gratitude for all that their teachers, coaches and every other adult in the community have done to support them. All that we do at Exeter is grounded in our mission to unite goodness and knowledge and inspire youth from every quarter to lead purposeful lives. As those words guide us today, they also compel us to look forward and dare to imagine the Exeter of tomorrow — just as our predecessors did 50 years ago. The adoption of coeducation was a monumental shift for our school, requiring an ability to imagine an Exeter that did not yet exist and the willingness to change. As we continue to honor the anniversary of coeducation,
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we do so with a deep appreciation for the girls and women who pushed Exeter forward and redefined how we interpret “youth from every quarter.” I encourage you to read some of their stories in this magazine and on exeter.edu/coeducation. We bring the same determination and resolve to our work to become a fully inclusive, equitable and anti-racist community. This work is fundamental to our mission and requires active, sustained participation from every member in our community. I am grateful for the foundation laid by those who came before us, and for the adults and students who today are greatly expanding upon those efforts, both inside and outside the classroom. The conversations we are having, and the commitments we have made, are essential to what we want Exeter to be, now and in the future. I invite you to visit exeter.edu/diversityvision and exeter.edu/antiracism to learn more about our vision for diversity, equity and inclusion, and to see some of the work being done this year. The Academy was founded on the philosophy of non sibi — a belief that the “wisdom gained here should be used for others as well as for oneself,” as expressed in our value statement. “Teaching and living the principles of a just and sustainable society,” it continues, “are fundamental to this philosophy today.” The education gained here is an avenue for transformative individual growth informed by a deep sense of public purpose. As you read this issue of the Bulletin, I hope you will see that we are busy building on our strengths, living our values, and imagining the Exeter of tomorrow. We see exciting opportunities in the years ahead for our school, and we look forward to working with every member of our community to turn those opportunities into realities for our students. E
“The conversations we are having, and the commitments we have made, are essential to what we want Exeter to be, now and in the future.“
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Letters to the Editor A NAME WITH THE FACE
PIONEERING FACULTY
In assembling the fall 2020 issue of the Bulletin, the The [fall 2020] issue was excellent, but I noticed editors zeroed in on a transone error that you should correct. I believe fixing image for the cover. you meant Pat Peard, not Beard, in the list of The photograph is of a soliteachers on page 56 (“Pioneers: The Faculty tary young woman seated at Members Who Opened the Doors for Others”). a Harkness table, her gaze Ms. Peard was an exceptional teacher and fixed on the camera lens, her deserves to be remembered. She taught history, thoughts her own. and in one course, we covered the Third Reich The image, shot by longand grappled with the question of collective time Academy photographer responsibility and individual guilt. In that, she Bradford Herzog, is cataloged managed to get Gisela Warburg Wyzanski, wife in the school’s archives simply of the top federal circuit court judge in Boston as “Girl in Classroom, 1971.” and an Exeter graduate, to come and speak Her identity was a mystery to to us about her childhood in Nazi Germany the editors — but not to our and the family’s journey to the U.S. She was readers. a member of two of Germany’s most promiWe heard first from nent families, the Oppenheimers and the Instructor Emeritus in History Warburgs, both Jewish, and the story she Jack Herney ’46, ’69, ’71, ’74, told was chilling. I believe that all of us ’92, ’95 (Hon.), who tipped there learned lessons for a lifetime in this us off on a lead from his most grown-up and sobering session on wife, Susan Herney ’69, ’74, citizenship. ’83 (Hon.), the school’s first David Pfeiffer ’76 female dean of students. Her London sleuthing of the Academy’s Editor’s note: Thank you, David. Patricia old student directories, or Peard taught history at the Academy for a “Facebooks” as they were decade beginning in 1975. Our apologies for once known, led Herney to the error. guess that the girl pictured was Kim Beaty ’73. FIRST FEMALE TRUSTEE Paul Outlaw ’74 soon On page 47 of the fall 2020 issue, I followed the Herneys’ email suddenly came upon a picture of myself as to the editors with his own: the first woman trustee at Exeter. I was a Cover girl: Kim Beaty ’73. “That wonderful Bradford freshman dean at that point at Bryn Mawr Herzog photo is of the one and age 35. I enjoyed my time at the school and only Constance Peck Beaty (aka “Kim”) ’73, whom very much, especially my fellow trustees and some of I remember fondly as a talented budding artist and kind the faculty I got to know. My only problem was that there person.” was no “ladies’ room” within miles of the building we “Yes, that’s me,” Beaty confirmed to us. “It was fun to met in — so I just decided to make the men’s room my get the magazine. What a jolt as I took it out of my P.O. own when needed. The school has certainly come a long box! way in supporting its female students. When I spoke with “I’m not sure what class I was in. I have a dim memory students in those early days, they always would say “the of someone coming into class at the Academy Building, school” or “they” and I would try to get them to say “my and I am suspecting English (best guess is Mr. Heath’s school” and “we.” But those were many years ago. class, but could be Mr. Marriott, or Miss France) judgMary Patterson McPherson ing by the books in front of me. Possibly French? … But, President Emeritus, Bryn Mawr College really, who knows?” Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania Thanks to all who helped ID our cover girl. We’ll make sure our archives are updated.
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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 By Patrick Garrity
PATRICK GARRIT Y
Most Exeter customs are sanctified by doctrine or decree and officially hallowed by time. And then there’s the tradition that is the legacy of a lark between a father and daughter on a road trip to Maine. The story of how an icon of American lawn kitsch came to represent the first girls dorm on campus emerged after the fall issue of the Bulletin included a photo of Bancroft Hall proctor Marymegan Wright ’21 planting plastic flamingoes at the dorm’s entrance on move-in day. Allyson Mendenhall ’86 saw the photo and sent us a letter to share the tradition’s origin: “Circa 1985, my dad came to visit, and as we drove into Maine for a little exploring, I saw plastic pink flamingoes on lawns for the first time. We didn’t have that kind of thing in my hometown of Aspen. My dad thought it was hilarious that I was sheltered from this ubiquitous lawn ornament and promptly pulled over at the next hardware store we passed to buy a pair for me. I came back to campus after the weekend and put them in the lawn in front of Bancroft. Thus started a tradition: boys dorms stealing them in the dead of night, the flamingo gracing dorm T-shirts, the entire dorm sporting pink tie-dye T-shirts and shorts for Field Day senior year, etc. ... I can’t believe it’s still a tradition and the dorm has an enduring mascot 35 years later!” E
CHERYL SENTER
The Bancroft Flamingo
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#unsung heroes M AT T H E W N G A I ’ 2 1 H O N O R S T H E P E O P L E B E H I N D T H E S C E N E S W H O K E E P E X E T E R R U N N I N G A N D E XO N I A N S SA F E A N D W E L L By Patrick Garrity
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hey keep the paths clear and the lights on. They prepare the meals,
clean the dorms, and ensure our community remains healthy and safe. They are the unsung heroes of Exeter, and Matthew Ngai ’21 wants to make sure they get some credit. The senior from Lambesc, France, is using the Academy’s Instagram account as a vehicle to celebrate the “many employees working in behind-thescenes capacities who are tasked with keeping this school up and running day after day.” Ngai pitched the project over the summer in the hope his fellow students “could have a greater appreciation of the
privilege that we enjoy and sometimes take for granted. I really believe the school’s employees deserve more recognition, and it only feels right to do this project for them.” Of his first subjects, the staff at Lamont Health and Wellness Center, Ngai wrote: “The health center staff has always worked tirelessly to keep our community safe and well, and the pandemic has only made the job more challenging.” He called Mailroom Supervisor Joe Goudreault and his team “an even more vital conduit between students and the outside world” because of the isolation of a closed campus.
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Ngai’s posts have reached thousands of people and have prompted an outpouring of praise for those he’s featured. “Joe is absolutely fantastic,” wrote Ayush Noori ’20 of Goudreault. “He cares deeply about the students! Lucky to have him on campus.” Said Nicie Panetta, a class of 1984 graduate and a former president of the Trustees, on a post about Jim Lombardo, the lead central heating plant technician at PEA: “Thank you, Mr. Lombardo, for your decades of hard work and expertise in keeping our Academy family safe and warm!” E
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Physician-Scientist Honored E M E R Y N . B R O W N ’ 74 R E C E I V E S J O H N A N D E L I Z A B E T H P H I L L I P S A WA R D
Watch the award assembly video at exeter.edu/emerybrown.
By Jennifer Wagner
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mery N. Brown ’74 is not only the world’s leading physician-scientist in the field of anesthesiology, but a true pioneer. He is one of only 25 people — and the first African American, the first statistician and the first anesthesiologist — elected to all three branches of the National Academies: Medicine, Sciences and Engineering. For his paradigm-shifting contributions to statistics, neuroscience and clinical medicine, Academy Trustees honored Brown with the 2020 John and Elizabeth Phillips Award during a virtual assembly in October. Speaking from his desk in Jeremiah Smith Hall, Principal Bill Rawson ’71; P’08 opened the community-wide Zoom webinar announcing, “This is without a doubt one of the most exciting and important days of the school year because this is the day we present the Academy’s highest honor.” Trustee and General Alumni Association President Janney Wilson ’83 delivered the award citation detailing the significance of Brown’s life work. “You have broadened our understanding of how drugs influence neural networks in the brain to achieve unconsciousness and have improved the comfort and safety of millions of surgical patients,” she said. Beyond the operating room, she added, Brown’s discoveries have offered insights into possible cures for some of the deepest forms of human suffering: addiction, dementia and depression. Quoting a colleague, Wilson said, “[Dr. Brown’s] scientific contributions are profound enough to shed light on that which makes us most human — consciousness itself.” Brown accepted the award remotely from his home in Massachusetts with humility and a deep sense of gratitude. “I just feel that Exeter giving me this award is ironic because [the Academy] has given me so much,” he said. “I just can’t emphasize enough how much Exeter has contributed to me and my success.” Brown was a financial aid recipient while at Exeter and graduated in 1974. He went on to receive a degree
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in applied mathematics from Harvard before earning a doctorate in statistics along with a medical degree at Harvard Medical School. For the past 30 years, he has simultaneously practiced as an anesthesiologist, studied neuroscience and published more than 400 original papers, inventing and patenting landmark scientific and medical technologies. Sharing his findings is as important to Brown as developing them. He is a frequent lecturer, presenting in Spanish or French when he is abroad. He currently teaches medical engineering and computational neuroscience at MIT, as well as anesthesiology at Harvard Medical School. He is the only person to hold simultaneous endowed chairs at both of these institutions. Coming close to tears, Brown concluded his remarks with heartfelt sentiments of gratitude. “Exeter helped me become basically who I am,” he shared. “One of the things that happened was, by coming to Exeter, I realized I could actually accomplish things. I wasn’t just a kid in Florida dreaming about things. I was now a kid from Florida going to Exeter and Exeter showing him that dreams could come true.” At the class of 1974 after-party, hosted by Gonzalo Rodriguez ’74, the class presented a crystal vase etched with the Exeter lion rampant to Brown and his wife, Virginia. Class President Constance Hamilton Jameson noted to Brown, “At Exeter you earned the name ‘Vitamin E’ — energy, excellence, extraordinary talent — adding spirit, speed and power to the team. We are delighted to share our Vitamin E with the world. You have made the world a better place.” E Since 1965, Academy Trustees have presented this award to an Exonian whose life and contributions to the welfare of community, country and humanity exemplify the nobility of character and usefulness to society that the founders sought to promote in establishing the Academy. The award was renamed in 2019 to acknowledge Elizabeth Phillips’ role as co-founder of the school.
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In the Presence of Poets R E F L E C T I O N S O N T H E I M PAC T O F T H E L A M O N T P O E T RY S E R I E S By Daniel Zhang ’22
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t makes sense that the Academy’s twice-yearly Lamont Poetry Series readings fit so well within the frenetic groove of Exeter. Harkness, after all, is fundamentally an act of listening, attention and empathy — what is required to be truly present at a reading. In the crowded Assembly Hall on a weekday night, our community is unanimous: We all dedicate our undivided attention, and the poet dedicates theirs. We are most Exonian Gregory Pardlo Elizabeth Alexander Arthur Sze when we are listening. Exonians, past and present, have so much to be grateful for in the programs that bring the foremost writers of our time to campus. Pore over the library’s archive of Lamont Poets and see what you find — Mark Doty, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Levine, Patricia Smith, Natasha Trethewey, Julia Alvarez, just to name a few — and one can see the legacy of literature carved into Exeter. Climb the concave steps to Assembly Hall and know that the weight of these names once imprinted on the marble you are ascending. Stand on the assembly stage and look out, underneath glaring stage lights, and think of the figures who have once stood on the same wooden floorboards as you now stand. After a term of impassioned discussion over an author’s body of work, to see the writer — to know there is a real, breathing person behind their work who will answer your every question, comment and note — is an immense privilege. It is one thing to read Beyond Katrina in class. It is another to ask Natasha Trethewey a question about how the alternating prose/poetry structure informs the development of generational trauma in the Gulf Coast, to see her nodding in recognition as you speak, to see the slight pause of deep thought before she responds, to hear an answer you can’t wait to discuss in your next English class. This live interaction is inseparable from the Exeter English experience. As a prep, good writing seems to exist on a completely other plane as to be achievable. But the opportunity to interact with master writers in almost casual exchanges has de-abstracted the deft composition of their work. I am nowhere close to approaching the agile expertise of these writers, but hearing their voices and lived experiences reminds me that they are real people, not ideas. I leave each reading with a mind full of possibility. And this is not to say the Lamont Poet is only for writers. After a coffee discussion with Viet Thanh Nguyen in The Exeter Inn’s quiet alcove on the psychopathy of war and colonization, I have a refreshed, empathetic perspective to bring to my next history class. I can’t say that Arthur Sze’s explanation of parallel lines intersecting in the infinite as a metaphor for possibility has improved my calculus grade, but it has shown me the power of mathematical thought to model abstract concepts of humanities precisely. When I ask Ilya Kaminsky what he means when he says political and he chooses the original etymology — the Greek πολις, which simply refers to communal gatherings without the complex connotations of modern politics — I have a new dimension to bring to my Greek class discussion on Plato’s Crito. Every crevice of Exeter’s interwoven intellectual web feels the impact of the writers we bring. Inaugural Lamont Poet Jorge Luis Borges once said, “Art is fire plus algebra.” Our instructors teach us algebra throughout the term — the mechanics of a poet’s work. But then we bring the fire right to our campus and watch it glow in our Assembly Hall. We are so close to the fire it almost burns. E
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Dr. Jud Brewer
Behavioral neuroscientist, Brown University psychiatry professor
“Logically, we know we don’t need a six-month supply of toilet paper, but when we see someone else’s cart piled high, their anxiety infects us, and we go into survival mode. … In psychology, the spread of emotion from one person to another is termed social contagion. Our own anxiety can be cued or triggered simply by talking to someone else who is anxious. Their fearful words are like a sneeze landing directly on our brain, emotionally infecting our prefrontal cortex and sending it out of control.”
Heard in Assembly S O U N D B I T E S F R O M L A S T F A L L’ S S P E A K E R S E R I E S Compiled by Jennifer Wagner Kerry Kuykendall Smith ’90, retired Navy commander “In a ready room of 36 Naval officers, only three of us were women, so we couldn’t hide, we couldn’t blend into the crowd. Throughout my career there were probably some people who thought I was a quota. Many judged me before they got to know me. I spent the first few months in each of my new assignments showing others why I was there and why I deserved to be there. That’s exhausting, but it instilled in me a high work ethic. And as others got to know me, I feel I was judged on my merits and treated equally.”
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Dr. Nicole Christian-Brathwaite, psychiatrist “One of the more classic forms of microaggression is when people say, ‘I don’t see color.’ People try to use that to say, ‘I’m not racist,’ or, ‘I can’t have bias because I don’t see color.’ But realistically, we all know that everyone sees color. It’s impossible not to see color. It’s part of who we are. So when you say you don’t see color, you’re invalidating a part of who that person is.” Martin Cox, economist, director of the John Locke Institute “I’d like to offer you three suggestions for how to listen generously. First, be generous in attributing to your opponent the very best possible motives. Second, be generous by trying to understand what your opponent really believes and why she believes it. In other words, listen as though your opponent’s opinion really matters. Third, be generous by listening as though you might actually be persuaded to change your mind.”
Christian-Brathwaite
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Natasha Trethewey, former U.S. Poet Laureate, 2007 Pulitzer Prize winner “Though I was too young to recall the night the Klan burned a cross in our driveway, I heard the story again and again and the night lives in my memory as experience. I see it as though watching a scene in a documentary, silent, but the metal box fan in the window a whirring sound like an old movie projector.” Dr. Alison M. Buttenheim ’87, behavioral scientist “We had to say what ethical principles or moral values are going to guide this [vaccine allocation] decision. The three that emerged … were: maximum benefit, trying to give maximum benefit to the population; equal concern, meaning everyone’s life has equal value; and we also wanted to be evidence-based. So that was the ethical, moral soup in which we were stewing to come up with the allocation framework.”
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Ketch Secor ’96, singer-songwriter “The first song I ever sang, at age 12, with a guitar in my lap, was Phil Ochs’ “The Ballad of Medgar Evers.” Not knowing any chords, I used my thumb to bar the fingerboard and, moving between the frets, I could recognize Phil’s simple melody. That I could only play it on two strings didn’t bother me. I was singing a hard-hitting tune about a Black civil rights leader’s murder. I was singing something that needed to be sung.”
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Negin Farsad, comedian “Lucille Ball gave me a vision of the world that wasn’t true, but I didn’t know it. As a kid, I didn’t know that women had such a hard time and that only 28% of speaking parts went to women in television until as recently as a couple of years ago. So that was a subconscious inspiration for me, just to see a woman like that, being hilarious.” E
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Scholars in Residence D O C T O R A L C A N D I D AT E S B R I N G T O C A M P U S FRE SH VIEWS ON RACE AND IDENTIT Y By Lissa Gumprecht
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t the start of the academic year, the Academy named three doctoral candi-
dates as the 2020-21 John and Elizabeth Phillips Dissertation Year Fellows. Established in 2013, the fellowship program was created to support Ph.D. candidates in the completion stage of their dissertation. Specifically calling for candidates who are traditionally underrepresented in the graduate school environment, the Fellowship Committee also seeks applicants who express an interest in becoming part of an independent secondary school. In alignment with the Academy’s mission and work around diversity, equity and inclusion, the 2020-21 fellowship selection process gave priority consideration to scholars researching topics related to race, identity and culture. In addition to their dissertation work, the Fellows deliver two online seminars to students per term and engage in discussions with any students or groups interested in their fields of study. The three appointees represent a broad range of academic research, and their membership in the Exeter community this year promises to enrich dialogues across disciplines.
Joud Alkorani holds an M.A. in
Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies from the University of Toronto, where she is completing her doctorate in the Department for the Study of Religion and the Center for Diaspora and Transnational Studies. She was drawn to the fellowship by the opportunity to share intellectual discourse with a new audience — Exeter students. “I’m excited by the possibilities that arise from exploring these questions alongside Exeter’s talented students,” Joud shared, “by what I can learn from them and by the insights that arise from doing so during such a charged moment in our world’s history.” Her dissertation, Between Fate and Fortune: Islam, Neoliberalism, and Destiny in Dubai, explores the relationship between Islam and neoliberalism in narratives of middle-class migrant Muslim women in Dubai, examining how the city transfigures Muslims’ subjectivities.
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Sherard Harrington is completing his doctorate in English Literature at the University of New Hampshire. His dissertation, Othered Ambitions: The Conflation of Villainy, Non-Heterosexuality, and Race in Popular Culture, focuses on the vilification of sexual orientation and race in 20th-century literature, graphic novels, plays and television. It builds on the work he did earning his MFA in creative writing from the University of Central Florida, where he wrote a collection of short stories and essays about coming out of the closet in a military family while overseas and in the South. Harrington has also pursued a research project in Massachusetts to uncover the histories of indigenous and African peoples who lived and fought for their rights in the Commonwealth.
A graduate of Choate Rosemary Hall, Katherine Morales is already familiar with the unique opportunity of learning at a school like Exeter. “I have always had a love for the boarding school experience. As I learned about the fellowship, I was drawn to the opportunity to teach, mentor and share my academic knowledge with students,” she said. Her master’s degree, earned at the University of Maryland, College Park, examined the relationship between therapists’ perceived cultural humility and the outcomes of psychotherapy. Her dissertation — A Mixed-Method Study: Client Perspective of Therapists’ Missed Cultural Opportunities and Its Effect on Working Alliance and Client Session Satisfaction — also addresses how race, ethnicity and culture affect the outcomes of counseling, examining client experiences in which therapists missed opportunities to acknowledge clients’ cultural backgrounds. Her goal is to develop interventions that address disparities in treatment outcomes for minority clients and to improve multicultural competencies.
The Dissertation Year fellowship is part of a larger program at the Academy to attract scholars and educators who are traditionally underrepresented in the secondary school environment. Since 1998, the John and Elizabeth Phillips Fellowship program has appointed 27 individuals to Exeter’s faculty. These appointments are a one-, two- or three-year commitment, and several instructors have accepted an invitation to stay on after their fellowship concludes. E
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Leading through Change TA B L E TA L K W I T H A S S I S TA N T P R I N C I P A L K A R E N L A S S E Y By Debbie Kane
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hether it’s coordinating Exeter’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic or mapping out a math solution, Assistant Principal Karen Lassey P’14, P’16 is a problem-solver. “I love systems and operations,” she says. They are skills she learned as an engineer in the
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The school’s greatest success over the past year, Lassey believes, has been responding quickly to meet the pandemic’s ever-changing conditions. “We were responsive to input from students and adults on campus and pivoted when necessary, reshaping our plans almost continuously,” she says. “We are a school that plans very carefully and deliberately, usually within fixed parameters, and this required a greater level of responsiveness and flexibility, with the same expectation of input from multiple constituencies. We all share a commitment to providing the best support to our students. That shared value and commitment allowed us to achieve what we did this fall, through incredibly hard work, high standards and thoughtfulness.” Lassey’s primary role during the pandemic is collaborating with Principal Rawson and other administrators to meet their goals and “hold pieces of the planning together”: assessing resources, recommending adjustments, making sure people have what they need to meet deadlines, and communicating as decisions are made or plans shift. She oversaw the creation of Exeter’s COVID-related student guidebook and other interim communications that outlined details of Exeter’s pandemic plan. She supported the medical director, Dr. Katy Lilly, whose work, skill and dedication have been critical to the success of the school’s response throughout the pandemic. She also worked with Exeter’s ITS Department to establish a COVID-19 dashboard on the school website. In the fall, as the campus community adapted to a hybrid term, Lassey moderated virtual “town hall” panels of school leaders to keep parents updated on changes and activities. “It’s something we should continue doing,” she says. “It’s a way to communicate with families that [allows] parents to ask questions and offer input.” One of the greatest transformations last fall was around the Harkness table. Lassey, who has taught both physics and math during her 24-year career at Exeter, experienced those changes first-hand when she taught “Transition 1 Mathematics.” The class began fully remote, with students both on and off campus attending via Zoom. In late October, when it was deemed safe to do
U. S. Army more than 25 years ago and influence how she tackles challenges today. For the better part of the past year, under the leadership of Principal Bill Rawson ’71; P’08, Lassey has managed Exeter’s response to the pandemic, collaborating with colleagues from across campus. “We had to rethink almost every aspect of the student experience (and our support operations) through the lens of health and safety,” she says. “We had to think about what’s core to the Exeter experience. The biggest pieces to re-imagine were dorm living and dining but even creating spaces for day students, we had to work through how to maintain community when there are students both on and off-campus.”
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so, mask-wearing students in the Phillips Hall classroom were separated from one another at the table by Plexiglas dividers. A 360-degree camera sat in the middle of the table, which created greater cohesion and connection between those in-class and students joining remotely. Being back in the classroom, even in this novel form, was a welcome development for Lassey. “It’s been so nice to interact with students in person again,” she says. The new format meant adjusting some of her teaching methods. “I don’t typically do math instruction,” she explains. “I try to empower students who have a unique way of looking at a problem to speak up and help one another.” To support her students during the fall term, Lassey occasionally created a video of herself demonstrating alternative strategies to solving specific problems, once the students had wrestled with them, to provide additional resources for them — something she would not have done previously. “Teaching remotely doesn’t replicate the classroom but it does draw on new opportunities,” she says. The in-person models that she and some of her colleagues used in the fall will be deployed in 70 Exeter classrooms, across disciplines, when students return in the winter, with more in-person instruction planned for spring term. Lassey, who grew up in New Hampshire, didn’t envision joining the military. But when she received an Army ROTC flyer during her freshman year at Amherst College she was intrigued. “My grandfather, father and uncle were all in the army,” she says. “I’d never thought about it before then.” She received a ROTC scholarship at Amherst, and after graduation, served as an army engineer during the first Gulf War, supporting the design and construction of temporary roads and facilities in Saudi Arabia. In 1993, she was deployed to Somalia. “We built roads for dispersing humanitarian relief, and violence escalated while we were there,” she remembers. “There were explosive devices in some of the areas where UN troops were operating, so we adapted our mission to building new and safer routes around those areas.” After returning stateside, she taught at the U.S. Army Engineer School in Missouri and worked in the private sector before coming to Exeter as an instructor. She was named dean of academic affairs in 2012 and became assistant principal in 2017. She remains actively involved in campus life, living on campus, doing dorm duty and advising
students. She is also club adviser to the Feminist Union, aka FEM Club, which hosts feminism-centered discussions and events. “I hope to get back into the classroom more, too,” she says. Before the pandemic, Lassey was facilitating major initiatives for the Academy — coordinating strategic planning efforts and overseeing and supporting the work of the directors of religious services, health services, and global programs. Working closely with Christina Palmer, director of student well-being and Holly Barcroft, general counsel, Lassey manages the school’s response to sexual misconduct allegations. Re-designing this process a few years ago was “a collaboration with a lot of people — deans, faculty, student advisers and the students involved,” she says. “We worked with students to get feedback and design protocols that are trauma-informed. Nothing about these situations is positive, but we try to put in as many supports as possible [for] all students involved and that don’t diminish the agency of the reporting student. We’re trying to create a process that’s the least harming to students who come forward and encourages students to come forward.” Lassey is also deeply committed to Exeter’s anti-racism work. She completed her doctoral dissertation, which focused on equity and inclusion, just before the pandemic started. “I was personally immersed in these topics for the last two to three years with an education leadership focus,” she says. She is putting her research into action, with a particular focus on data and equity. This winter, as part of the school’s anti-racist curriculum, she is co-facilitating a student group discussion entitled, “The Racialization of Scientific Thought.” Lassey is also advising a student with a senior project about equity with regard to education policy in the U.S. Among Lassey’s takeaways from this challenging year (and something she is familiar with) is the ability to respond to changing conditions — and learn from the experience. “Sometimes, when you’re forced to adapt and adjust, you make leaps and bounds that are greater than when you have the luxury of time,” she concludes. E
“We had to rethink almost every aspect of the student experience (and our support operations) through the lens of health and safety.”
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Clubs in the Time of COVID S T U D E N T S G E T C R E AT I V E T O O F F E R THEIR PEERS POINTS OF CONNECTION By Sarah Pruitt ’95
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Maggie Wainwright ’21 has relied on Dramat, the school’s student-run theater group, to provide her with not only a creative outlet, but a strong sense of community. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and she and her fellow Dramat members dispersed to their respective homes for the all-virtual spring term, Wainwright saw that community come together again in a new way. “As soon as we went online, club members jumped in with creative ideas and ways to connect,” Wainwright says. Dramat held two performances over Zoom during the spring, along with a virtual awards show on Instagram, complete with fake golden trophies mailed to the student actors, directors, designers and techies that had made those performances possible. In the fall, most students returned to campus, but classes stayed virtual, and social distancing, mask-wearing, and restrictions on in-person gatherings remained in place. Faced with these challenges, Dramat and other clubs — along with affinity groups like the Afro-Latinx Exonian Society (ALES) and Asian Voices — again got creative in order to keep a vital sense of community alive for Exeter’s students. The club heads have been aided in their efforts by the Student Activities Office, which worked hard to ensure that clubs could continue operations despite the ongoing pandemic-related restrictions. “This year we’re taking a more proactive approach to make sure that our clubs are accessible to all students, whether remote or in person,” says Joanne Lembo, director of student activities. That nimbleness and creativity will carry into winter term, with the community once again scattered around
the country and globe until mid-February. After setting a mandatory schedule for club and affinity group meetings in the fall, Lembo plans to ensure that scheduled club meeting times are in time zones that work for all club members, including international students. “We realized this fall it was not perfect for our remote students, especially when daylight saving time hit,” she says. “We’re looking to make it better in the winter.”
A VIRTUAL CONFERENCE
“In a typical year, we spend a lot of time preparing for conferences, which are held on college campuses,” says Nahla Owens ’21, co-president of Model United Nations, another popular club. “But because of COVID-19, it was difficult for us to even think about leaving campus or
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bringing people to campus.” The club usually hosts its own Model UN conference at Exeter, inviting about 500 students from schools around the country. In March 2020, Owens and her four co-presidents started planning to have their annual conference go virtual. Held over a weekend in early November, Exeter’s one-day online Model UN conference, PEAMUN XII, hosted delegates from all over North America. Each delegate paid just $5 to participate, and all the admissions proceeds went to charities chosen by Owens and her co-president, Noah James ’21. “We wanted to use the opportunity to be as non sibi a club as we could possibly be, and raise money for causes that we cared about while also bringing people into the fold that may not have had the opportunity to attend a Model UN conference before,” Owens says. Along with the virtual conference expanding its reach, it also allowed for a star speaker it might not otherwise have drawn: Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power delivered the keynote address, donating her time after a correspondence with James.
AVOIDING “ZOOM FATIGUE”
“As soon as we went online, club members jumped in with creative ideas and ways to connect.”
As a leader of both Mock Trial and the Democratic Club, as well as Dramat, Wainwright has enjoyed the community provided through both virtual and in-person meetings. In the fall, she and her fellow club heads petitioned Student Activities to allow them to hold in-person auditions and rehearsals, a process that Lembo says was open to any dorm, class, club, or other group that wanted to meet in person. By November, Dramat had staged several student-run productions, performing under a large tent set up near The David E. and Stacey L. Goel Center for Theater and Dance. While meetings of both ALES and Asian Voices, an Asian student affinity group, have in the past centered on discussion, simply moving that discussion online wasn’t enough, given that most students are spending much of their day in virtual classrooms already. “Convincing people to spend another hour of their day being on Zoom is really hard,” says Owens, who is also president of ALES and co-president of the Democratic Club. “Zoom fatigue” is real, agrees JaQ Lai ’21, who leads
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Asian Voices. With the arrival of the pandemic, his group shifted its structure from a straightforward biweekly discussion to a rotating split between discussion and other community-building virtual activities, such as watching movies together or playing online web games. For Halloween, ALES partnered with Asian Voices to host a “Spooky Stories Night.” Courtney Marshall, an instructor in English, read short horror stories written by authors of color on Zoom, and her readings were projected into a space at Grainger Auditorium. Students attending in person enjoyed socially distanced snacks of apple cider and cider doughnuts, while remote students were able to attend the reading virtually.
CLUB NIGHT REIMAGINED
Signing up new members also took on a new format this year. Normally, the fall Club Night has been so popular that it’s been held in one of the hockey rinks, Lembo says. This year, instead of an in-person event, she created a page on ExeterConnect, gave each club a dedicated school email address, and asked all club heads to create up-to-one-minutelong videos to promote their clubs. On the first-ever Virtual Club Night in September, each club hosted its own Zoom meeting where interested students could get more information. The night was a success, with the sign-up page getting some 2,000 views, according to the Exonian. Owens, Wainwright and Lai agree that clubs have been able to provide a sense of an all-important community, given that COVID-19 has limited the everyday social interactions that students used to take for granted. “You can’t say ‘Oh, I’ll bump into you on my way to class, or on the way to the dining hall,’” says Owens. “That kind of spontaneity doesn’t really exist on campus anymore.” At such an anxious and unsettled time, club meetings — whether virtual or in person — have given new students opportunities to meet people with common interests. Clubs are also the rare spaces where students from all grade levels and dorms can interact. Last fall, Lai moved into the new all-upperclassmen dormitory in The Exeter Inn, and has relied on clubs for the chance to mix with younger students. “It ties me back in with the Exeter community so I’m not just this washed-out senior,” he says. “It’s nice being able to connect in that way.” E
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ON STAGE THE SHOW MUST GO ON Though the audiences were remote, the performances of our student musicians, dancers and players during fall term were as genuine as ever. To their dedication and the ability to overcome the limitations of the pandemic, we say “Bravo!” E
Instructor in Music Rohan Smith conducts in “The Bowld.”
The Dance Company performs in the Goel Center.
Bai Xue ‘23 plays violin in the Chamber Orchestra concert.
The fall dance concert was titled “To Move Forward.”
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Symphonic Prose A C O N V E R S AT I O N W I T H N O V E L I S T D A N B R O W N ’ 8 2 By Jennifer Wagner
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ults, conspiracy theories, dashing Ivy League
Where did the idea for this fantastical story spring from?
I used to walk out in the [Academy’s] Gillespie reserve. I was writing music and poetry at the time and I heard a bunch of frogs in the river croaking. There was a big fat
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bullfrog and some high peepers and some frogs in the middle and it sounded like a fugue to me. I went home and I wrote a piece of music that was called “Happy Frogs.” And then I wrote a poem to go with it such that you would know what you were hearing. I must have been maybe 19 at the time. So Wild Symphony has been in the works for years. CODY O’LOUGHLIN
professors — these are the elements we have come to expect from Dan Brown thrillers. But a timpani-playing kangaroo? That’s new territory for the bestselling author of The Da Vinci Code. Brown’s latest page-turner, Wild Symphony, tracks the adventures of a diminutive mouse as he gathers a menagerie of animal friends to put on a concert. Each page of this genre-busting picture book for the under-10 set features a poem that imparts a life lesson and also an original musical composition. The music, performed and recorded by Croatia’s Zagreb Festival Orchestra, is accessible through a smartphone app that allows readers to listen along. Of the book’s enhanced audio capabilities, Brown says: “I was eager to try to re-create the experience I had as a kid. Of reading a children’s book and listening to classical music — but also taking it a step further, such that the music you’re listening to is directly related to what you’re reading.” Brown has also hidden anagrams and word games in the illustrations for kids and adults to discover. We spoke with the author about his new project over Zoom, where he was comfortably ensconced in the library of his New Hampshire home, just miles from Exeter’s campus.
This has been 30 years in progress. It started with a little project called “SynthAnimals,” which I sold [in Exeter] at the Water Street Bookstore and Whirlygigs on consignment. It was a cassette tape and a little book that went with it. I forgot about it until I was on tour a couple years ago. I was giving an interview on Chinese National TV and the interviewer said, “Before you talk about your adult books, I want to talk about your children’s book.” I said, “I don’t have a children’s book.” He said, “Yes you do. We found it on eBay. Here it is.” They played a song. I read a poem. We had a laugh and went on with the interview. Then Random House said, “This could be a real thing if you double the size, write 10 more poems, 10 more pieces of music, orchestrate it for symphony and illustrate it.” I decided to do it.
You mentioned walking in the Academy woods. What was it like to grow up on campus in the ’70s?
I grew up in the dorms, Dunbar, Bancroft Hall and
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Moulton House. We didn’t have a TV, so I read a lot of children’s books. I loved Dr. Seuss, Richard Scarry, Maurice Sendak, all of them. And I would listen to my parents’ record collection, which was all classical music. My mom was a professional pianist and organist. Music and children’s books really became a big part of my childhood. What’s your earliest memory of music?
My mom playing piano, and me lying under the piano listening. She also played at Sunday morning services at Christ Church in Exeter, and when I was a little kid I’d sit on the piano or organ bench and turn pages for her. That’s a lot of pressure for a little kid. If you turn too early or turn too late, it’s a big disaster. You learn to read rhythms very quickly. So that’s where your musicality came from. What about the poetry?
My dad’s a very good poet and a mathematician. He taught at Exeter for a long time. He would always write poems at Christmas for our treasure hunts. He’d write little poems that point you to another room and you’d find your next poem and you’d go all over the house on these treasure hunts. Poetry for me as a kid was fun. It was less fun when I got to Exeter and I had to read The Odyssey. When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?
I wrote a book called The Giraffe, The Pig and The Pants on Fire, which I dictated to my mom when I was 5 years old. I told her what to write, she wrote it down. I drew pictures for every page, and we bound it in cardboard. I still have it. So, apparently as of 5 years old, I was telling stories. In college, I majored in creative writing and music composition, so one of those was likely going to happen.
bed. I don’t move and then I wake up and write. I will put in at least four hours, sometimes eight if it’s going well. By noon, I’ve put in an eight-hour day. Then I work out, talk to publishers, talk to agents, whatever it is I’m doing that day. They’re long days. It’s like you’re almost still asleep when you start writing.
I move quickly from the sleep state to writing. When you wake up, you’re often coming out of a REM sleep, which is where you dream and where your mind creates something out of nothing. You’re in that frame of mind. I find if I try to sit down and write late in the day, it’s a struggle. I’m much more creative in the morning, much more focused. There’s a tradition of moralistic messages in fairy tales and each of your poems has a moral too.
Some of these morals are derived from things I learned growing up on campus. Not initially as a student, but as someone there on campus as a young person. I just felt like, “We think different things. We can talk about our ideas. Some people do that. Some people do this. We’re all respectful of each other.” That’s the world I grew up in. If you look at a poem like “Happy Frogs,” the moral is basically, “Hey, we’re all different shapes and sizes and colors, but if we all work together, we can make beautiful music.” That’s just a way to tell kids that tolerance is important. What was the creative process like for this project?
The creative process was very different because it was so collaborative. I’m not used to collaborating at all. I was working with an illustrator, three producers, a bunch of sound engineers, 80 musicians. There were a lot of moving pieces. What did you enjoy most about that new process?
Is writing novels and composing music a similar process?
They’re very similar. You can’t write a novel or a piece of music without understanding structure above all. You really need to know how to arrange pieces, whether they’re melodies or plot points, in order to create something that has flow. You have got to understand dynamics. You can’t write a piece that’s all loud. You have no moments to catch your breath. And you can’t write a book that’s all car chasing where nobody ever gets to exhale for a second. Thematic material has to rise and fall in both of them at the right rate. At least for me, they inform each other. What is your writing day like?
I am up pretty much by 3:30 a.m. every day. I’m an early riser. I only sleep about five-and-a-half hours and I don’t set an alarm. I fall asleep within 30 seconds when I hit the
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The recording of the music. I’m very familiar with what it feels like to sit alone and write. But living in Croatia for several weeks while we recorded this was amazing. I think I went three times to finish the whole album. My brother Greg ’93 — he’s a professional musician — came over for one of the sessions along with his son, my nephew Griffin ’20. We had three Exonians in the recording booth. It was really fun. Can you tell me about the book’s dedication page?
My mom passed away about four years ago. This book really, it’s about being young at heart. It’s about morality and ethics. It’s about music. It’s about a lot of things that were important to her. I wish she could’ve seen it. If you look at the dedication page, you’ll see that there’s a staff of music that runs through it very faintly. The first three notes, it’s a C, a G and a B. Those are my mom’s initials. E
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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 their classmates, for inclusion in future Exonians in Review columns. Please send a review copy of your published work to the editor to be considered for an extended profile or review in future issues. Works can be sent to: Phillips Exeter Academy, The Exeter Bulletin, 20 Main Street, Exeter, NH 03833. ALUMNI 1955—Victor Wallis. Socialist Practice: Histories and Theories. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) 1958—Joseph “Jay” Kadane. Principles of Uncertainty, Second Edition. (Chapman & Hall/CRC, 2020) 1958—William “Bill” Weber, edited with Cormac Newark. The Oxford Handbook of the Operatic Canon. (Oxford University Press, 2020) 1959—Jan Schreiber. Bay Leaves: A Chapbook. (Kelsay Books, 2019) 1962—Douglas J. Penick. The Age of Waiting. (Arrowsmith Press, 2020) 1962—Kidder Smith. Li Bo Unkempt. (Punctum Books, 2020) 1963—Gove Effinger, with Gary L. Mullen. An Elementary Transition to Abstract Mathematics. (CRC Press, 2020) 1963—Carter Wiseman. Louis Kahn: A Life in Architecture. (University of Virginia Press, 2020) 1963—Pete Beaman. Letters from Duc Phong District. (Self-published, 2020) 1974—James “Jim” Steyer, editor. Which Side of History? How Technology Is Reshaping Democracy and Our Lives. (Chronicle Prism, 2020) 1976—Martha Newman. Cistercian Stories for Nuns and Monks: The Sacramental Imagination of Engelhard of Langheim. (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020) 1977—Susan Cole Ross. Sliding Home: Two Teachers Head for the Mountains to Educate Our Kids for a Year. (Piscataqua Press, 2020) 1990—Mark Elbroch. The Cougar Conundrum: Sharing the World with a Successful Predator. (Island Press, 2020) 1991—Sony Devabhaktuni, editor with John Lin. As Found Houses: Experiments from Self-Builders in Rural China. (Applied Research & Design, 2021)
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1993—Nick Psaris. Fun Q: A Functional Introduction to Machine Learning in Q. (Vector Sigma, 2020) 1995—Eric Michael Bovim. Around the Sun. (Epigraph Publishing, 2020) 1997—Marissa King. Social Chemistry: Decoding the Patterns of Human Connection. (Dutton, 2020) 1999—Brian d’Entremont. Hello, Normal. Where Have You Been? (Selfpublished, 2020) BEYOND BOOKS 1958—Jack D. Marietta. “Crime and Justice in Anglo-America.” Published in The Cambridge World History of Violence: Volume III. (Cambridge University Press, 2020) 1970—Mitch Wolfe, actor, producer. The Executive, comedic film. (Amazon Prime, 2020) 1974—Paul Outlaw, theater artist and vocalist. BigBlackOctoberSurprise, virtual theater show. (Outlawplay.com, 2020)
1996—Eirene Donohue, writer. A Sugar and Spice Holiday, film. (Lifetime Television, 2020) 1996—Jasmine Dreame Wagner, director, composer. Five Elizabeths, short art film. Premiered at the New York State International Film Festival in 2020. — “Landscape with Whirlpools” and “Spring Sun,” poems. (Interim, Vol. 37, Issue 1, 2020) 1998—Tim Gallagher. “The Practice of Touch,” essay. (The Sun magazine, Issue 540, December 2020) 2001—Emma Wynn. Help Me to Fall, chapbook of poetry. (Moonstone Arts Center, 2020) FAC U LT Y Diana Davis ’03, editor. Illustrating Mathematics. (American Mathematical Society, 2020) Erica Plouffe Lazure. “The Sacred Family,” essay. (The Ekphrastic Review, September 2020) — “Terraria,” fiction. (Tiny Seed Journal, September 2020) — Sugar Mountain, flash-fiction chapbook. (Ad-Hoc Press, 2020) — “The Shit Branch,” fiction. (Tahoma Literary Review, fall/winter 2020)
1976—Debby Montgomery Johnson, host. “Stand Up & Speak Up,” podcast. (thewomanbehindthesmile.com/show, 2020)
— “Highway Dogs and their Owners,” fiction. (Wrong Way Go Back, vol. 19, fall 2020)
1984—Greg Kostraba, pianist. Music for Flute, Cello & Piano by Women Composers, album. (Kickshaw Records, 2020)
Matt W. Miller. “Where One Starts From” and “Conditional,” poems. (Gulf Coast Literary Journal, vol. 33, no. 1, winter/spring 2021)
1993—Julio DeSanctis, writer and producer. Alive, horror film. Premiered at the Bangor (Maine) Drive-In in September 2020 before general release on streaming platforms. 1995—Marlo Hunter, director. American Reject, comedic film. Screened at multiple film festivals in 2020. — director of the nine-episode podcast musical, “Little Did I Know,” which was released in the spring.
— “Then I Let the Alpine Play,” “Misprision,” and “Tankas While Standing Near,” all 2020 Pushcart Prize-nominated poems. (The Green Mountains Review, vol. 31, spring 2020) — “again,” poem. (Rise Up Review, summer 2020) Willie Perdomo. “Bembé-Faced” and “Arroz con Son y Clave,” poems. (African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song, Library of America, 2020) Sue Repko. “Pandemic Thoughts, Racing,” essay. (The Keeping Room, September 2020) T H E
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On Call with the NBA M E E T D R . L E R O Y S I M S ’ 9 7, T H E P H Y S I C I A N W H O H E L P E D P R O B A S K E T B A L L B E AT B A C K T H E C O R O N AV I R U S By Patrick Garrity
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he 2020 NBA season ended with a predictable
outcome but in circumstances impossible to imagine on the day it began. LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers won the championship, as many anticipated. That it happened in an empty arena in the shadow of Walt Disney’s Magic Kingdom was the surreal part. Even more unlikely? A man who never scored a point was the MVP. Not for his game — Dr. Leroy Sims ’97 hasn’t played organized basketball since his days as a Big Red power forward. But his contribution to saving the NBA’s season as the league’s medical director was unquestionably outstanding. From June to October, Sims and his team constructed a quarantine “bubble” at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex outside Orlando, Florida, that allowed 22 teams to resume play. As the coronavirus raged across the country, Sims and the NBA pulled off a minor miracle: Not a single player, coach or staff member tested positive for COVID-19 after completing quarantine and entering the bubble. “I am really, really proud of the work we did,” Sims says. “People got tired, but … we stuck to our guns, we were strict. We made the rules, and we didn’t make any exceptions.” The rules — spelled out in an exhaustive, 113-page document of health and safety protocols — covered every aspect of life in the bubble, from screening (more than 150,000 tests were conducted in all) to on-court behavior (high-fives, fist bumps and hugs were strongly discouraged) to the players’ downtime (no doubles teams in pingpong; no headsets in the video-game room). The most important rule: No one could enter the bubble without completing a quarantine period. One player who accidently breached the perimeter to pick up a food delivery curbside was forced to quarantine for 10 days. “There were times when Dr. Sims had to be the bad guy,” Sims says. It may be one of the few times the affable Sims has played the heavy in a life that began on Chicago’s West Side and took a transformational turn at age 15 when he spent five weeks attending Exeter Summer. That summer was an eye-opening experience for
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Dr. Leroy Sims ’97 arrives at the NBA’s “bubble” in Orlando.
Sims, rich with discoveries of people and cultures beyond those he experienced in Chicago. “I roomed with a [student] from Taiwan, and he was waking up at 2, 3 in the morning,” Sims explains. His roommate went on to say that he had jet lag, to which Sims responded, “‘What is jet lag, and how do you get rid of it?!’ That was my world view at the time. I’d never even flown on a plane [before flying to Boston for Exeter’s summer program].” Sims says his discoveries that summer — an instructor introduced him to jazz pioneer John Coltrane and changed his consumption of music thereon — left him feeling vulnerable about all that he didn’t know: “I felt like I wanted something bigger. I wanted something more.”
UP FOR ANYTHING
A year later, he was a first-year upper living in Ewald. Sims inhaled Exeter. “I threw myself in,” he says. Sports, clubs, drama — there was little he wouldn’t try. Aside from being a member of what is now known as the Afro-Latinx Exonian Society, “I was on the Discipline Committee. I was a student listener. I was a proctor. I went to various non-Christian meetings. I was a DJ for WPEA. [At one point] I was the secretary of the
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Sub-Continent Society” because he had befriended students of Indian and Pakistani descent in Ewald who said, “‘Hey, come out [to one of our meetings].’ And I did.” “I was so raw with where I was, I was just an open book to new experiences,” he recalls. He also rose to the challenges the Academy presented. A notion of using spring track as a means to stay in shape for basketball was rewarded with a humbling 400-meter tryout lap that ended with a gassed Sims lying supine at the finish line. Sims says Big Red track and field coach Hillary Coder Hall dared him to measure up to his potential. “She said, ‘You’re fast, and if you decide to take this sport seriously, you can do very well. But you have to decide if this is something you want to take seriously,’” says Sims, who calls the conversation one of the defining moments of his two years at Exeter. “She was basically telling me, ‘You can’t just do this on talent. There’s a lot of talent around here. You need to show up, be disciplined, and you need to be ready.’ And I took that to heart.” The faculty recognized Sims’ commitment to his Exeter experience on graduation day, giving him the Warren Burke Shepard ’84 Award, which rewards a student who “tries hardest to realize the Exeter opportunity.” “I knew I had been given a gift, and I had to take advantage of that gift,” he says.
STANFORD, PERIOD
As open as Sims was to possibilities at Exeter, his college choice was less negotiable. He had fixated on Stanford University since boyhood when a 1988 issue of U.S. News & World Report ranked the Bay Area institution the best college in America. Photos of Stanford’s campus beguiled a 9-year-old Sims. The California Avenue stop on Chicago’s Green Line “L” near his home and reruns of the Los Angeles-based paramedic drama “Emergency!” were the limits of his Golden State knowledge, but he never wavered from his goal to attend Stanford. He still recalls fishing the acceptance letter out of his student P.O. box in the Academy Center. “By the end of that day, pretty much everyone on campus knew I had gotten into Stanford,” he says with a laugh. Sims poured himself into Stanford as he had Exeter. He walked on to the Cardinal’s national championship track team (he will forever own the school’s 55-meter dash record, an event no longer contested) and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biology. A sour experience with a doctor treating a stress fracture in his foot during his senior track season planted a seed in Sims’ mind that there must be a better way to perform sports medicine, but he was focused on one goal: to become a brain surgeon.
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He studied neurosurgery at Stanford School of Medicine, received a fellowship from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to conduct research in neurosurgery, and was tracking toward his goal when he began a neurosurgery sub-internship back at Stanford. “My first day, I got there at 8 a.m. [on Monday] and stayed in the hospital until about 8 p.m. on Tuesday,” he says. “My first week, I [worked] 106 hours in six days.” In addition to meeting his wife, Dr. Melissa Enriquez Sims, in medical school, Sims also was introduced to a mentor whose simple advice was to make a spreadsheet mapping his professional goals against his personal goals. “Neurosurgery hit all my professional goals and very few of my personal ones,” Sims says. “I need to work toward a more balanced life.”
NEW DIRECTION
The decision pained him — “I had told everyone in my life I was going to be a brain surgeon,” he says — but the seeds that took root years before while he was rehabilitating his foot injury steered him into sports medicine. He did a three-year emergency medicine residency at HarborUCLA Medical Center in Torrance, California, and returned to the Bay Area for a fellowship in primary care sports medicine at Stanford just as Stanford contracted to be the medical provider for the NBA’s Golden State Warriors. That opened new doors for Sims. In addition to eventually becoming the team doctor for the Warriors, he served as a team physician for USA Track & Field and was one of the two team physicians for USA Track & Field during the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Summer Olympic Games. In May 2018, he was hired as a vice president and medical director of events for the NBA. He was promoted to senior vice president of medical affairs in December on the heels of his “bubble” triumph over the virus. His current challenge may be even more complicated: overseeing health protocols for the new NBA season just underway — this time in 28 cities across the country as the virus spikes. Sims calls his feeling of accomplishment “multifactorial.” He is proud of the public-health impact his work has made on virus testing, particularly the data produced from asymptomatic populations tested daily, which didn’t exist in the medical literature. And he is personally gratified for how his high-profile role helped him bring attention to a disproportional lack of people of color in the medical field. “We need more Black doctors. We need more brown doctors,” he says. “The bubble gave me the visibility to push that message.” “Doing something that has an impact on sport, for the greater society and for the community, that’s how I look back on it,” Sims says. “There’s a lot of good that has been done. Completely exhausting, but so worth it.” E
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A DAY TO BE BIG RED AGAIN T
he last time a fall sports season ended at Exeter without a clash with Andover, Grover Cleveland was midway through his second term in the White House and the forward pass was against the rules of football. Little about 2020 was normal; certainly not a Big Red fall sports season without interscholastic competition. The usual Wednesday/ Saturday cadence of games was canceled, and fall concluded without the E/A rivalry for the first time since 1895. Exeter student-athletes spent the fall term training and training some more, strictly observing mask and physical-distancing protocols. And while the payoff at the end wasn’t a date with the Blue, there was a closing competition: Red-Gray Weekend. The intra-squad scrimmages allowed teams to finish with a flourish and offered a dose of normalcy in a fall season like no other. E
PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARY SCHWALM
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Person and Path HOW EXETER SUPPORTS STUDENTS IN THEIR IDENTITY BUILDING
T
By Nicole Pellaton
Illustrations by Davide Bonazzi
he question “Who am I?” is
central to adolescence. The process of exploring that question with authenticity and goodness is complex and highly individualized. As the world becomes increasingly global and fast-paced, so do the challenges to identity. You need only look back to 2020’s cascade of crises and polarizations to appreciate the urgent impacts on adolescents who are in key stages of forming their identities. “To be a teenager is to figure out who you are, and that is something that is fundamental to the work of secondary school education,” Religion Instructor Tom Simpson says. “How do you become a full person? How do you become a person who’s not only going to have the technical skills to thrive and succeed in today’s world, but also have the integrity and the sense of self, and the confidence, and the type of relationships, and an awareness of the ways in which our world functions, to be truly who
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you are and let those technical skills be used for something good?” Supporting students as they begin the lifelong journey of discovering who they are, and building self-awareness into that process so that they may continue to thrive, is a key theme of the updated Academy mission and values released last September by Principal William Rawson ’71; P’08. Exeter’s mission is to “Unite goodness and knowledge and inspire youth from every quarter to lead purposeful lives.” Five
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See the full Academy mission and values at www.exeter.edu/ academymission.
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timeless values outline Exeter’s commitment to provide the foundation from which Exonians can become productive citizens of the world. One value, “Youth Is the Important Period,” specifically addresses identity work through its emphasis on instilling a “lasting capacity to nurture one’s self, develop a sense of one’s own potential and consider one’s place in the larger
whole” in order for students to develop “their values and passions and the agency needed to carry these forward.” In these pages we take a look at some of the ways Exeter supports identity-building, including some recent innovations, through the lens of one student’s experience and
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in conversations with faculty. In future articles, we will continue to explore identity-building for self and in relation to being part of a diverse community.
DISCOVERY
“Something I love about Exeter is how clubs and classes feed into each other and build off of each other to help you figure out who you are,” says Anne Brandes ’21. The club that captured this senior’s interest, starting in prep year, was The Exonian, the Academy’s studentrun newspaper. In December, she completed her year as editor-in-chief. Brandes was drawn to The Exonian as a way to make an impact on her community, but as a self-identified introvert, she initially found the work of interviewing daunting. Over time, she acclimated and made important discoveries. “It was great that I could write and I was learning how to write. That was a really significant moment for me,” she says. The other discovery was people. “I can say this confidently as a senior: The point of Exeter isn’t really to get everything right or to have your homework done perfectly or be the most well-prepared when you go into class. If you’re that person, that’s excellent and I definitely recognize why it feels comfortable to be that person, but there’s a lot to be said for taking the extra moments. … If you don’t spend time talking to people, you’re going to miss out on a significant part of Exeter.” A highlight of Brandes’ work at The Exonian is the “Since 1878” project, an investigation of the newspaper’s coverage of racism at the Academy. Brandes and the editors started formulating the idea in June 2020, after the police killing of George Floyd ignited outrage around the world, and as the Academy was announcing initiatives to institutionalize the practice of anti-racism. “We felt that there was a dissonance between running anti-racist articles now without acknowledging how we’ve contributed to racism and documented racism in the past,”
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Brandes explains. “The Exonian was also having some serious conversations about its own racism much more recently than 1878 — more like 2020, 2019 — because of the lack of Black and Latinx voices in the newsroom.” Over the summer, a core group of writers researched and wrote the pieces that comprise the series, an amount of work that Brandes considers both stunning and indicative of her peers’ commitment to the Exeter community. To publish the series, Exonian staff spent weeks fact-checking, then Brandes and a small cadre of Exonian editors worked from 11 a.m. to dorm check-in for five days in November. “Hopefully we can … continue to acknowl-
journalism increased, Brandes became acutely aware of the ethics of reporting. Immersion in the Epistemology course readings (a 2,000-year retrospective of knowledge, from Plato and the Western philosophical tradition, to the scientific revolution, postmodernism and modern-day authors), and in particular a 2017 meditation by Math Instructor Jeff Ibbotson on the topic of finding truths, led to a breakthrough. “I realized that I didn’t believe in moral relativism, that I did think that pushing for objectivity was an incredibly important part of journalism … that there are such things as moral truths and that some ways of going
“The faculty members of the Religion Department see identity formation as a process, not an outcome. They observe closely and use a variety of techniques to assess how students are progressing along the path of greater self-realization.”
edge the truths that are part of the Exeter community and part of The Exonian that are harder or uncomfortable to acknowledge,” she says. It was in a class with History Instructor Leah Merrill ’93 during fall of lower year that Brandes realized “what good writing looks like.” She attributes much of her writing progress to Merrill’s thoughtful comments, which affected Brandes deeply. The research paper from that term holds pride of place in her desk drawer. “I look at that paper and I realize, ‘I can do this. Mrs. Merrill believes in me.’” Another key to Brandes’ development was the bookending of her work at The Exonian with two religion courses: Faith and Doubt in prep year and Epistemology in senior fall, both taught by Religion Department Chair Hannah Hofheinz. (Science Instructor John Blackwell co-teaches Epistemology.) As her focus on
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about the world are objectively right and objectively wrong,” Brandes explains. She is well aware of the difficulty of achieving objectivity, “especially in historically white newsrooms,” and feels that the Epistemology course had an “immediate impact on my work in journalism, especially because as an editor, ethical decisions are the name of the game.” Over her years at Exeter, Brandes pushed herself beyond her comfort zone many times and found the “moments of discomfort” to be “some of the biggest moments of growth.” “The true, amazing part of what we’re doing here is the community we’re in, the people who make it up and the stories they have,” she says. “I think that’s a collective experience that Exonians feel about Exeter: just this tremendous gratitude. You’re not feeling comfortable really until you’re about to leave, because that means that you’re
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constantly trying to improve yourself while you’re at the Academy.” For Brandes the “end goal” is “being a listener above everything else, being respectful, regardless of whether or not you agree with the position at hand, and acknowledging the unique context that everybody is in before they enter that Harkness table. … [These] are the moments where the Harkness table becomes the most hard and dangerous, but also the moments where the Harkness table has the most to give back.”
TRADITION
All of Exeter’s academic departments share the focus on helping students develop
The faculty members of the Religion Department see identity formation as a process, not an outcome. They observe closely and use a variety of techniques to assess how students are progressing along the path of greater self-realization. Ultimately, Hofheinz hopes to see students move toward a state of “coherence” where they are able to achieve authenticity and learn to “hold the whole — contradictions and dilemmas included within [themselves] — and be able to also recognize that other people are doing that as well. … Part of forming yourself is being able to have that coherence.” “How do I know when they’re doing the work?” Hofheinz asks. “Can they get trac-
“Counseling comes in around that time to say, how do we modify or create new markers? Let’s explore all aspects of who you are beyond the measures you are used to.” values, identity and purpose, but Hofheinz feels that the Religion Department is exceptionally positioned because of its course catalog, which the department chair compares favorably to that of “any high school or college in terms of the robustness of the offerings and their coherence.” “We get to explore how traditions around the globe throughout time have helped people with that process, not just here now, but everywhere and always,” Hofheinz says. “The wisdom traditions, the religious traditions, the philosophical traditions, ethical traditions, all have massive archives of some of the most committed and beautiful people, writings, artifacts, ideas, dilemmas, puzzles, games: everything that we get to explore with the students and let them experience the possibilities within those different languages. … This allows students different registers into which to enter into this conversation and build on it. What does it mean to live a meaningful life? But also what type? What is meaning? What are you here for? Why are you at all?”
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tion with seeing themselves? Can they get traction with saying not only, ‘This is what it is, but this is why I care.’ Or, ‘This is what I believe, but I see that there are alternatives.’ Or, ‘I used to say this, but I realized that I really said that because that’s what I always heard, and I’m not so sure about that anymore.’ Or, ‘I don’t know.’ … To me that’s one of the greatest successes at the end of a class: when a student says, ‘I don’t know, but I do know that this is a question that I’m interested in.’ … That indicates to me very concretely that they have moved from that immediate, intuitive, sure response that is not yet thought out, and there’s a reflection of the middle years that they’re moving through to becoming more of an autonomous grown-up.” “With preps and lowers, there are moments when it seems they’re trying to figure out if the idea they hold really matters,” observes Religion Instructor Austin Washington, who came to Exeter in large part because he wanted to teach at a school where “the role of an educator is
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understood to be in many respects all about identity-building or -shaping in some way.” In contrast, he sees uppers and seniors who are “more convinced of their ideas, and their ability to disagree and sustain their opinions, and allow them to be enriched, but not fundamentally changed. Those are some of the most exciting moments of identity development that I’ve witnessed,” he says, “when students understand that their ideas matter and that it doesn’t make them a bad person to have strong opinions about something, but it does matter how they share those opinions.” Hofheinz and the other members of the department see Harkness as an ideal environment for identity formation. “That’s the strength of Harkness: It allows that dialectical movement between an individual doing their own wrangling and wrestling, and the teacher being able to interact with them one-on-one through written assignments and individual conferences and conversations, but then really emphasizing that it’s in the students’ mutual interactions that they’re pushing each other to think slightly more and to come at it from different directions,” Hofheinz says. “It’s in that community work that the individual becomes possible.”
Counseling Betsy Dolan. “Being self-actualized and being content with not just who you are, but the fact that you can see yourself growing and that you’re going to continue to grow — you can make decisions
INTENTION
Self-authoring is the name of a new program developed by the College Counseling Office that asks lowers to consider who they are through a series of conversations and written reflections, all based on identity-related questions, such as: Who influences you and how? or, Where are you happiest? These forays into explicit identity work have the double benefit of initiating the college process with a focus on and understanding of self, as opposed to societal trends or external pressures, and introducing the college counselors to younger students in a friendly and supportive way. “Self-authorship is a way of empowering adolescents,” explains Dean of College
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that are informed.” Dolan was inspired to start the program after reading research by Marcia Baxter Magolda, a professor emerita at Miami University of Ohio and a leader in self-authorship theory. Recognizing a clear link between self-authorship and encouraging intentionality in Exeter students, Dolan introduced the concept to her team. Counselors Courtney Skerritt and Jeff Wong developed a curriculum specific to Exeter lowers. The program launched as a pilot with
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new lowers in the winter term of the 2019-20 academic year. Partnering with the Health and Human Development Department, college counselors, in pairs, visited several sessions of HHD240: Thriving in Community, a course that focuses on developing decision-making skills based on purpose and thoughtfulness.
The two-session program culminated in a Harkness discussion about fundamental questions: What does Exeter mean to you? Who are you at Exeter? “Every class was different,” Wong says. “It usually started with the concrete steps of what is Exeter. But then it became so much more, and that’s where you’d see people jump in and say, ‘I had a very different
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experience choosing to come here,’ or, ‘I’ve had a very different experience since I’ve gotten here.’ Some people talked about it from the 30,000-foot level of what it means to them or their families. For others, it was much more on the ground: ‘This is a change from where I grew up.’” Skerritt observed in the self-authoring Harkness conversations a clear willingness among students to “unpack” identity preconceptions, and an openness to new points of view, including those brought by students from around the world and from a tremendous diversity of personal experiences. She sees particular value in exploding some of the negative impacts of social media on identity-building: “With social media, it’s really easy to listen to the voice that is your own echo in terms of political beliefs, background and interests. But you don’t know who you’re going to be with at the Harkness table. … I see Harkness as the anti-social media.” Although the college counselors planned to reconnect with the lowers during spring term and again in the fall, the coronavirus pandemic put a temporary halt to those efforts. The college counselors are looking forward to rolling out the full program once in-person classes resume. “The best thing that could happen is students have this experience over the winter and spring terms,” Dolan adds. “We meet with them in the fall to remind them of it. And it informs their college process to such a degree that it doesn’t matter where they go. They know they can feel good about their person going forward, whatever the adventure is.”
THRIVING
Exeter’s Counseling and Psychological Services team provides another framework for identity formation based primarily on one-to-one meetings between a counselor and a student. The keys to creating a supportive environment for identity work, says Szu-Hui Lee, director of CAPS, are
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providing a “safe place, trusted adults, trusted relationships so that students can explore different aspects of themselves and know they’re still cared for, and know they are not judged.” For some Exonians, Lee says, finding their voice can involve healing from experienced trauma. “What we know about trauma work is healing starts when people feel safe,” she says. CAPS offers free counseling to Exeter students while they are on campus. During the pandemic, as some states have loosened licensure regulations and allowed out-ofstate counselors to provide care, CAPS has been able to offer remote counseling to an increasing number of students who live outside of New Hampshire. The five coun-
have those habits stay with you as an adult,” Lee says. “And it doesn’t end when you graduate from Exeter. … Positive self-identification means that you allow yourself the permission to continue to evolve. … At 24, when you decide to change your mind about something you thought you were pretty darn sure about at 14, that’s OK.” For many students, Exeter can be a bit of a jolt. “A lot of our students’ identity is grounded in their academics,” Lee says. “They’ve been on this journey to get ahead, get to Exeter, with the hopes that a great college would be next on their trajectory. They’re following markers that they themselves, or society, or their families have set for them.” When those markers are missed
“I realized that I didn’t believe in moral relativism … that there are such things as moral truths and that some ways of going about the world are objectively right and objectively wrong.” selors can provide a level of service that is unheard of in public schools and even at many universities, where individualized appointments can be strictly limited, Lee says. “We can see students every week if there is a need, from the time they are preps to the time that they’re seniors. … What does that mean? Some of the things that people might unpack in their adulthood or in college, our students have the opportunity to start a little earlier because they have these resources.” Lee’s advice to students is: Explore, explore, explore. “This is the time to go down every aisle in the grocery store and check everything out,” she says. “See what’s of interest. Discover things that are different and unfamiliar. And find joy in what you know and love.” The hoped-for result of this exploration is to anchor habits during four very formative years. “Studies have shown that if you form habits at an early age, that includes between 14 and 18, you’re more likely to
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— students don’t get the straight-A’s they are used to, or they get injured and can’t perform at their sport — they can falter and wonder about their own identity, sense of purpose and direction. “Counseling comes in around that time to say, how do we modify or create new markers? Let’s explore all aspects of who you are beyond the measures you are used to.” Lee explains: “I often tell students, think of a stool. There are three legs to a stool to hold it steady. When one is broken off, you can probably still lean on the other two. Healthy self-identification is making sure you know your identity comes from a collection of things that make you who you are. So, you have to make sure to have a lot of legs of different things, so that when something in your life isn’t going well, you’re still getting feedback from other things that matter to you, and holding steady. … That’s how you thrive: You have other things to lean on.” E
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Hellos for
NEIL WEBB
Heroes the
S E N I O R R YA N P E T T I T ’ S
L E T T E R-W R I T I N G C A M PA I G N B R I N G S J OY T O V E T E R A N S By Juliet Eastland ’86
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KETV 7
I
Ryan Pettit ’21 pens letters to veterans weekly to help ease their loneliness during the pandemic lockdown.
t was summer 2020, and Ryan Pettit ’21 was on the phone
at his parents’ home in rural Papillion, Nebraska, answering questions about corn. His interrogator on the other end was an elderly friend, confined by COVID-19 restrictions
to his room at a nearby veterans home in Norfolk. The friend wanted to know, how was the year’s crop looking? (Healthy.) How tall, on average, were the plants? (Six feet.) This being Nebraska, the nation’s number three state in corn production, the topic was of perennial interest during the pair’s weekly phone calls. “You take it for granted, seeing the corn grow outside your window,” Pettit says. “But you can’t really see it from his home.”
Curiosity satisfied, the veteran (whom Pettit declines to name, citing privacy concerns) turned to another favorite topic. “What he really likes,” Pettit says, “[are] puzzles. He talks to me every time about puzzles. He’s even built a 3D one!” Despite chatting for months, the two have never met in person. Their telephonic friendship began in the spring, when Pettit — marooned at home for the foreseeable future and itching both to ease his own isolation and to mitigate the loneliness of others — decided to reach out to elderly veterans. The son of a veteran himself, he wanted to express his gratitude to those who’d served. And he’d seen the COVID-19 lockdown’s toll on his own grandparents, confined to their rooms in a Florida nursing home. “The isolation was terrible,” he says. “They almost just wanted to give up and leave the home and risk the pandemic. To be stuck in your room like that … it’s just miserable.” Pettit contacted Nebraska’s three veterans homes to ask whether residents would enjoy weekly phone calls. Deb Becker, volunteer coordinator at the Norfolk Veterans’ Home, responded quickly, and was surprised to learn that Pettit was acting independently. “When we first spoke with him, we thought it was a school project,” she says. “But he said no, he just wanted to do it because the veterans
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were alone and couldn’t be with their families.” Pettit helped Becker establish a Skype connection, then created a system: At a prearranged time, he would dial the facility, where a resident would be waiting. After chatting, the resident would trade places with another interested party. Amid the swirl of conversationalists, his friend emerged as a steady, weekly presence. “This gentleman has some PTSD,” Becker says, “and he needs that one-on-one contact.” This impulse to foster personal connections comes
Early last summer, he learned that a center serving low-income children and families wanted to build a community garden in downtown Omaha. “I said, ‘I can do this for free!’” he laughs. He brought 40 or 50 plants over from his own garden and planted them at the community center. With typical forethought, he built raised boxes with plexiglass windows so “kids could see the carrots growing in the box, and the potato tubers growing underneath the soil. “I really enjoyed nature growing up,” he explains. “I thought it’d be nice for kids from places in the city where they maybe weren’t exposed to that to be able to garden.” The Omaha–Council Bluffs, Iowa, area has a high concentration of “food deserts,” according to the Omaha Community Foundation, meaning many families struggle to find affordable produce. As Pettit’s home garden grew to bursting — it seems 40 tomato plants can yield thousands of tomatoes — he began ferrying over his own peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes and herbs, delighted to share with needy families the vegetables of his labors. While he was fostering growth and greenery, however, life in veterans homes was contracting and darkening daily. COVID-19 restrictions had halted outings and interactions with the outside world for residents. Indoors, strict room-capacity limits meant no more games or bingo nights. At most, two residents were allowed at a table. Social life was nonexistent. Already at particular risk for loneliness and social isolation — both associated with higher rates of depression, anxiety, suicide, stroke and heart disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — the elderly were reeling. The ongoing misery made the moments of joy even more poignant. One of Pettit’s happiest days came when a Norfolk nurse told him that staff had never been able to persuade his veteran friend to attend physical therapy. Now, after each call, the resident headed to PT without complaint. “You’re making a large difference in his life,” she told Pettit. “I didn’t really imagine this to be that impactful,” he admits. “I thought it was just kind of a nice thing to do, to brighten the vets’ days a little, but as soon as I heard that, I thought, ‘I’ve got to try to do something more.’” He wanted to expand his phone initiative, but while his relationship with Norfolk was strong, his connection to other veterans homes was, quite literally, faltering. At some, poor bandwidth made for glitchy and unreliable communication; others had limited technology, meaning there might be only one device among residents. Some residents didn’t want to interact with newfangled Skype or Zoom, or with phones at all. Pettit tried to
“When we first spoke with him, we thought it was a school project. But he said no, he just wanted to do it because the veterans were alone.” naturally to Pettit, who grew up in a family rooted in community and steeped in a culture of non sibi. His father, a civilian strategist in the U.S. Strategic Command, served for 28 years as a Navy pilot and captain, and was deployed to Iraq when Ryan was in kindergarten. It was community, Ryan says, that buoyed the family during and after that time — the military community, whose members understood the toll of parental absence, and the Pettits’ rural Nebraska neighbors, who became what he calls an “extended family,” delivering cookies and helping to fix the family’s leaky plumbing. He’d never forgotten their kindness, and made it his mission to treat others similarly. He brought this spirit of reciprocity and empathy to Exeter, where he co-founded a nonpartisan student political journal devoted to “respectful discourse,” and where he co-led ESSO youth basketball games and served as a Wentworth dorm proctor. Pettit takes proctoring seriously and has continued his duties remotely, for which his adviser, Sean Campbell, is grateful. “I think the role of proctor has a huge component of selflessness,” says Campbell, an instructor in computer science. “A lot of personal time is devoted to making sure students are welcomed and feeling connected to others, [which is] especially important for remote students.” During the pandemic, Campbell asked Pettit to organize online activities for the other dorm students and was delighted with the care Pettit took. “He did a great job putting this together,” Campbell says, “and those in attendance had a blast.” While tending remotely to young and old, Pettit has also been nurturing some smaller, nonhuman charges: A lifelong gardener, he spent spring break last March sowing a 300-plant nursery in his family’s sunroom, complete with a homegrown vermiculture composting system.
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enlist local friends as callers, but wrangling a posse of teenage volunteers into some semblance of consistency during a pandemic proved difficult, and too often, callers would renege, leaving veterans waiting in vain. “It was extremely frustrating,” Pettit says. Last summer, he decided to eschew electronics entirely and embrace an older technology: pen and paper. He began cold-calling veterans homes across the country asking whether residents would enjoy receiving citizens’ letters. Ultimately, 29 veterans homes from 23 states signed on. To amplify his efforts, Pettit created a website, Hellos for Heroes (hellosforheroes.org), explaining the initiative and urging visitors to write. The mission was simple: “to brighten the days of the many retired veterans stuck in isolation at residency homes.” Other than encouraging gratitude, he avoided posting editorial guidelines. The point was simply for writers to chat in their own voice, leaving recipients a bit cheerier than before. The site features a sample letter from “Shannon” — a transplanted Georgian, new owner of a rambunctious puppy, peanut-brittle connoisseur — who turns out to be Pettit’s mom. Pettit refuses to post the family surname, because, he says, “It feels cheesy to me when people stamp their name all over volunteer work.” “Ryan has never been one to boast about his work or his achievements,” Campbell, his adviser, says. “That just seems to be his personality.” Once the website launched, Pettit spread the word via Facebook, friends, relatives and media outlets. The publicity blitz worked. “My website traffic has gone way up,” he says. “About 1,000 people or so have interacted with the site, so I imagine if half those people are actually sending letters, that’s 500. I’m happy with that!” Local media has come calling. Daughters of the American Revolution awarded him its Outstanding National Community Service Award for 2020, and 110 DAR chapter members pledged to write letters in December. “Probably the time vets need letters the most,” Pettit says, who spends up to two hours weekly writing letters. Becker is delighted with the initiative. “We’ve gotten a lot of letters and cards, a lot of calls from people who heard about it on the news,” she says. Most missives arrive from Nebraska, but some hail from as far as
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Washington, D.C. Her staff pass around the letters and make sure to read them aloud for residents incapable of reading on their own. Other veterans homes post letters to a community board, or save them for residents having a particularly difficult day. Pettit’s one disappointment: “I don’t really receive letters back,” he says. Veterans homes are cognizant of HIPAA rules and wary of scams, so letters are monitored and residents generally discouraged from responding. Pettit’s letters haven’t reached any PEA alumni that he knows of, but the more writers, the better the chance. Even though he doesn’t receive responses, he knows that Hellos for Heroes missives are appreciated. “A lot of [Norfolk’s veterans] think Ryan is older than he is because he’s so polite and respectful,” Becker says. “He asks questions: ‘What’s your favorite ball team? What do you like to eat?’ It’s helped them pass the time. And the families really appreciate it, too.” Lately, residents have been assiduously following Pettit’s college-application process, hoping for happy results. “The guys are so anxious to see how far Ryan goes in life,” she says. “He has really stuck with [us]. He’s just the sweetest young man.” So what’s next for this empathetic entrepreneur? In college, he hopes to dual-major in biology and economics. At Exeter, his biology classes so inspired him, he launched his own research project studying human metabolic processes; and well before COVID-19, he’d found the world of pharmaceutical development and biotechnological innovation intriguing. For now, he continues his senior year remotely, writes letters, and, of course, tends to his plants. He calls his grandparents, who are surviving isolation, and speaks to his veteran friend weekly. He accepts all media opportunities to publicize Hellos for Heroes, because ideally, he’d like to see every veterans home in the country deluged with letters from grateful citizens. Pettit would love to launch a letter-writing program for all retirement facilities, but with an estimated 15,600 nursing homes in the U.S., it’s a steep goal. That said, he’s shown himself to be a gifted and creative problem-solver. “He is doing great things despite the fact that they may be less visible,” Campbell says. “He’s a great kid and a phenomenal scholar.” Don’t put it past him. E
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I L LUST R AT I O N S
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very time Connie Liu Trimble ’80 advances the fight against cervical cancer; every day Maria Cabildo ’85 lifts the disadvantaged with her work on low-income housing; every essay Roxane Gay ’92 pens for those in need of a champion, we are reminded that Exeter is not a final destination. It is a path to a purposeful life. Likewise, as we hail 50 years of coeducation at the Academy, we recognize not only our alumnae’s time on campus yesterday but the women they’ve become and the contributions they are making today. Trimble and Cabildo have earned recognition as John and Elizabeth Phillips Award winners. Gay is a best-selling author and an opinion writer at The New York Times, who delivered the keynote address last month during Exeter’s annual MLK Day. They are exemplary in that they are representative of so many of their fellow alumnae: a blend of goodness and knowledge, embodying the spirit of non sibi. Like a Harkness discussion that resonates long after class has ended or a season-ending victory over Andover, it is the way it should be. In the following pages, we meet five alumnae who — like Trimble, Cabildo and Gay — are among the thousands of Exonians doing good works, pushing boundaries and living the values they expressed as students at Phillips Exeter Academy.
IN THIS ISSUE 44 Her History 47 Exeter's 12th Principal 48 Her Voice ... in Action 54 Her Voice ... in Reflection
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Her History KEY HISTORIC EVENTS I N T H E C O E D U C AT I O N TIMELINE FROM 1980–2000 Compiled by Patrick Garrity
Women in the Faculty Get a Boost
Gloria Steinem Headlines Exeter Conference
William L. Dunfey, father of alumna Julie Dunfey ’76, donates funds to further improve opportunities for women teaching at Exeter, resulting in the establishment of the Committee to Enhance the Status of Women.
Exeter hosts a national conference of more than 200 women in independent school education. Speakers include Gloria Steinem, Carol Gilligan, Estelle Ramey, Natasha Josefowitz, Pauli Murray and Eleanor Holmes Norton.
APR 11, 1980
JUN 22–25, 1983
Women Bolster Faculty Ranks Eighteen of the 24 new fulland part-time instructors for the academic year 1985-86 are women.
SEP 1985
JUN 1981
NOV 18, 1983
JUL 1, 1985
Four-Year Girls Graduate
Trustees Commit to Hiring More Women
Herney Becomes Dean of Students
The Trustees approve plans for affirmative action to increase the number of women on the Academy faculty. Only one-quarter of the Academy faculty are women, while 40% of the student body are girls.
Susan Jorgensen Herney, a longtime member of the dean’s office, begins a six-year run as dean of students, the first woman to fill the role.
Included in the Academy’s bicentennial class are dozens of girls who arrived as preps, the first four-year boarding girls to graduate.
BRADFORD HERZOG
Men tend to pick those with whom they feel most comfortable, and men feel comfortable with other men. ... The selection process is very male-oriented.” —Assistant Principal Lynda Beck, on the lack of women in Exeter’s faculty, November 1983
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Exeter is strong enough that it need not hesitate at appointing a woman to the position. It is a recognition that the Academy is moving with the times.” —Chairman of the Trustee Search Committee Chauncey C. Loomis ’48, on the selection of Kendra Stearns O’Donnell as the school's 12th principal, Feb. 21, 1987
Girls Comprise 43% of Student Body The school year begins with a student enrollment of 985, including 424 girls.
SEP 22, 1988
Stewart Makes StuCo History Carmen Stewart ’92, a rising senior from South Carolina, is the first girl to be elected president of the Student Council.
MAY 1991
FEB 21, 1987
SEPT 21, 1987
JUL 1993
O’Donnell Chosen as 12th Principal
’A Place in History’
Kendrick Honored as First Emerita
Trustees announce the appointment of Kendra Stearns O’Donnell as Exeter’s 12th principal, the first woman to hold this position.
Kendra Stearns O’Donnell delivers Opening Assembly remarks, welcoming students and faculty ”not just to this lovely school ... but to a place in history.”
Dolores Kendrick, the Vira I. Heinz Instructor in English, becomes Exeter’s first retiring woman instructor to be extended emerita status.
Dolores Kendrick in 1980
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Coeducation Anniversary Honored
Academy Building Gets Face-lift
The Academy kicks off a yearlong celebration of coeducation’s 25 years with an assembly that pays tribute to some of the first women who joined the faculty.
Academy Building lintel receives a new Latin inscription honoring the first quarter-century of coeducation: “HIC QUAERITE PUERI PUELLAEQUE VIRTUTEM ET SCIENTIAM.” (“Here, boys and girls, seek goodness and knowledge.”)
SEP 25, 1995
APR 16, 1996
It was very disappointing to see that no one acknowledged during Coeducation Weekend that women brought more to the school than dresses and field hockey — namely, intelligence and a drive that was equal to that of the boys.”
Student Enrollment Reaches 50-50 Split The 2000-01 school year is the first in which enrollment is evenly distributed between boys and girls, reports then-Director of Admissions Thomas Hassan.
SEP 2000 JUL 1, 2000 Eggers Takes Over as Dean of Faculty Barbara Eggers, an instructor in history, becomes dean of faculty. She is the first woman to hold this position.
—Marissa King ’97 and Reyhan Harmanci ’97, in an Exonian op-ed, Oct. 21, 1995, after the school’s reflection on coeducation.
We are really still evolving. … Each year we learn a little bit more about living and working together in a coed environment.” —Susan Herney, September 1995
To see the full coeducation timeline, visit exeter.edu/coeducation. 4 6 • T H E
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Exeter’s 12th Principal By Patrick Garrity
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I especially want to examine just what it means to be a coeducational school today. I am going to listen a lot ... to listen and to learn. This is a school that knows where it wants to go."
ther than the groundbreaking decision to enroll girls, few milestones in the Academy’s coeducational journey measure up to the hiring of Kendra Stearns O’Donnell as the first woman to serve as Exeter’s principal. The Trustees announced to the campus community on Feb. 21, 1987, that O’Donnell would be assuming the role upon Principal Stephen Kurtz’s retirement that June. The announcement concluded a search process that O’Donnell nearly won after one interview. “Why don’t we stop the search right now? Why are we looking anymore?” a member of the nine-person search committee is reported to have asked. History is not so hasty, however, and this decision was unquestionably historic. After all, no formerly all-boys preparatory school in the United States had chosen a woman to run things. O’Donnell had won over the search committee; but the committee had to convince the Trustees. Another finalist, a man with a more traditional résumé, was a safer choice than O’Donnell, who at the time was not in academia but rather working at a private philanthropy. A story about O’Donnell’s first months on the job merited 3,000 words in the Sunday New York Times and recounted how the selection ultimately came to pass: “In the end, the search committee prevailed. At a meeting in the fusty downstairs billiard parlor of the Century Association (which does not yet admit women as members), the committee members persuaded the board of trustees to see things their way. ‘The trustees decided that if this is the way the school feels, we don’t dare not take her,’ one participant said.” O’Donnell told The Exonian on the day of her appointment, “Exeter is in a period where it is examining the old ways, and seeing how it can make things work better. I especially want to examine just what it means to be a coeducational school today. I am going to listen a lot,” she said, “to listen and to learn. This is a school that knows where it wants to go.” Last fall, in a conversation with Principal Bill Rawson ’71; P’08, O’Donnell spoke about her selection. “I think I felt like every new student at Exeter: I was full of imagining all the great things ahead and also some nervousness about everything being so new. “I was excited to be a part of Exeter’s history. I was less wrapped up in being the first woman and more conscious, I think, of being the 12th principal at this ancient and revered institution.” E
Watch O’Donnell and Rawson’s conversation at exeter.edu/principalstalk
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Her Voice ... in Action ALUMNAE WHO ARE MAKING THEIR VOICE S H E A R D, E M P OW E R I N G OT H E R S A N D A D V O C AT I N G F O R C H A N G E
Shirley Jennifer Lim ‘86 By Debbie Kane
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hirley Jennifer Lim ’86 discovered the focus of her life’s work in a stack of films in UCLA’s Paramount Pictures archives. A doctoral candidate at the time, Lim was researching the history of Asian American women in film. She was especially fascinated by Anna May Wong, an elegant Asian American actress whose career spanned silent films, talking pictures, stage, radio and television. While reviewing Wong’s films in the Paramount archives, Lim was struck by her performance in King of Chinatown, a 1939 black-and-white film. “She was speaking in a British accent, portraying a surgeon,” Lim
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says. Asian female characters at the time were often portrayed as prostitutes or evil temptresses. “Wong’s portrayal blew the customary narrative out of the water,” Lim says. “My interest was piqued.” Lim, now a history professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, has long been interested in the history of Asian Americans, especially women. The daughter of Indonesian immigrants, she grew up in Bakersfield, California. (Her family had previously lived in Libya and Scotland.) When her family moved to China for her father’s job, she headed east to attend Exeter, the first in her family to go to boarding school.
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Her first book, A Feeling of Belonging: Asian American Women’s Public Culture, 1930-1960, is the book she says she wished she’d read while attending Exeter and, later, Cornell University. “Coming from an immigrant family, from the Central Valley of California, and having parents who’d escaped mass murders in Indonesia in the 1960s, it was very hard to be there (at Exeter). I didn’t feel at home or understood,” Lim says. She singles out English instructor Peter Greer ’58, Exeter’s first BatesRussell Distinguished Professor, as a supportive teacher who inspired her to write. A Feeling of Belonging examines how Asian Pacific American women established identities in Southern California by creating their own sorority, beauty pageants and more. “Most Americans think of racism as being white versus Black, but on the West Coast, it was Asian Pacific Americans that were segregated from society, especially from the 1930s to the 1960s,” Lim says. (That included being barred in California from marrying a white person.) “Asian American women’s history is very understudied. History and historical sources accrue around famous, elite people, especially men. It’s harder to come up with records about women.” Lim’s most recent book, Anna May Wong: Performing the Modern, is getting acclaim at the same time that Wong is being recognized as the first prominent Asian American film star and for creating a 20th-century persona not defined by ethnicity. Lim examines the actress in the larger context of race, contrasting her work with other prominent actresses of color who played Asian
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roles in films from the 1920s through the 1940s, including Black actress Josephine Baker and Mexican actress Dolores Del Rio. “It’s a more interesting and complete way to think about Wong — that race is developed in conjunction with other races,” Lim says. “The Modern” in her book title refers to the way Wong fought typecasting of Asian characters and made them modern; she humanized Asian Americans during a time of intense racism, when laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred Chinese immigration to the United States, discriminated against Chinese immigration and citizenship. The national conversation around racial diversity and equity is enabling Lim to share Wong with larger audiences through television and radio. She’s also writing another book about the actress. “It’s great from a scholarly perspective but also a political perspective to foster greater gender and racial equality,” she says. “It’s why I get up in the morning and why I teach. I hope my work is having an impact.”
Most Americans think of racism as being white versus Black, but on the West Coast, it was Asian Pacific Americans that were segregated from society ... ."
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Madelyn Postman ’90 By Sarah Pruitt '95
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or Madelyn Postman ’90, a commitment to protecting the planet goes back to her years at Exeter, when her friend Scott Heald ’88 made an offhand comment — “Out of sight, out of mind” — as Postman threw something in a nearby trash can. “I realized that our waste doesn’t just disappear when you throw it away,” Postman says. “That has stuck with me all these years.” More than three decades later — after experience working as an in-house creative at Gucci Group and consulting for brands such as Burberry, Sunglass Hut and Nokia — Postman has merged her core interest in sustainability with her expertise in branding and marketing as co-founder and director of Grain Sustainability, a management consultancy with a mission to help businesses “become champions for the planet.” The new company builds on Grain Creative, a branding and design agency Postman ran alongside her husband, Christoph Geppert. The agency merged
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Often with tech, you think there can't be a big impact — everything's in the cloud. ... But there can be both environmental and social impacts ... ."
with Leidar, an international communications consultancy, in 2018, and Postman began working as the managing director there. But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and Postman found herself in lockdown with Geppert and their two children in their home near London, she realized she needed to make a change. “I was able to step back a bit and think, do I really want to be doing this?” Postman recalls. “There’s always this desire to not just be a vessel for clients’ work, but to really try to change things more fundamentally.” In late 2020, Postman and Geppert left Leidar to found Grain Sustainability. In their new roles, she says, “we can really work with the fundamental day-to-day operations of a company to ensure that it’s more sustainable.” Clients include companies in the education, technology and transportation fields, both in the United Kingdom and abroad. “Often with tech, you think there can’t be a big impact — everything’s in the cloud,” Postman says. “But there can be both environmental and social impacts, depending on what the company is doing.” That lightbulb moment by the trash can wasn’t Postman’s first exposure to the concept of sustainability.
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Growing up in San Francisco, she became aware early on that water was a scarce, valuable natural resource. During her four years at Exeter, she remembers joining Amnesty International and participating in protests against the newly constructed nuclear plant in Seabrook, New Hampshire. Postman considered pursuing environmental studies at Brown University before deciding instead on a double major in visual arts and art history. She spent her junior year abroad in Bologna and ended up staying for the next eight years, working for various design firms before landing the job at Gucci. She returned to the United States only to complete her degree at Brown in late 1994. Her experience in Italy introduced Postman to what seemed like a more sustainable way of life — one that felt less tied to the ubiquitous consumption that she had come to find oppressive. “I remember just feeling a bit depressed when I walked into a big store full of stuff,” she says. “In Italy, you go to the market and buy fresh fruit and vegetables in paper bags. There aren’t as many big chain stores as in the U.S. and the U.K. I look back on those years a bit wistfully, thinking that’s the way we should all be shopping now.”
Postman moved to London with Gucci Group in 2000, but left two years later to co-found the design firm Vivian Cipolla. Before joining Grain Creative, she established her own agency, Madomat, which focused on providing art direction, graphic design and 3D design with a focus on eco-friendly materials. In addition to her work with Grain Sustainability, Postman is on the U.K. steering committee for 1% for the Planet, a movement that encourages businesses and individuals to contribute at least 1% of their annual turnover or income to environmental causes. She’s also working on a narrative nonfiction book, Sixteen Stories, based on her family’s roots in China, Poland, Lithuania and California. Postman credits her Harkness experience with preparing her as a frequent commentator on branding and business for BBC World and a public speaker at universities, business schools and other venues — and in the corporate world in general. “As a woman, being articulate and having the confidence to speak up really helps,” she says. Harkness also helped her understand early on the different ways people can show leadership. “Saying what you think is part of it, but you don’t always have to be talking just for the sake of it either,” Postman points out. “It’s about knowing when to say something: I believe in ‘quiet leadership.’ ”
Camilla Norman Field ’93; P’24 By Jennifer Wagner
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amilla Norman Field ’93; P’24 remembers vividly the first time she visited San Quentin Prison. “There was that jarring moment when I heard the clank of the door, when I was in the sally port between the outside and the inside,” she says. “You notice your nervous system responding to that and you also recognize that you’re coming in with a certain bias. I’ve seen Shawshank Redemption, but I thought, is that really reflective of what I am walking into?” Turns out, it wasn’t. As a professional certified coach with the Enneagram Prison Project, Field regularly meets with incarcerated individuals in correctional facilities across Northern California. “I don’t see people who are nothing like me because of the lives and choices they made,” she says. “I see human beings who are in the condition and position they are in as a result of tremendous childhood trauma.” In courses that span up to five months, Field teaches an eight-module curriculum designed to help inmates
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It is not OK to just sit back and coast and enjoy the ride. It's a much more enriching and wonderful life knowing that I'm both receiving support and giving support ... ."
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validate their self-worth and foster self-awareness. “Starting from week one, it’s always some combination of self-acceptance, self-regulation, self-compassion, understanding that there’s actually nothing wrong with them,” Field says. “They’ve done some things that have certainly caused harm to themselves, to individuals, to communities and they’re very aware of that. It’s not about erasing that, but there are things that happened to them that led them to those choices and there’s redemption. There’s a way forward. No one is too far gone.” Field first became passionate about reforming the criminal justice system after one of her dearest friends from Exeter was arrested on a drug distribution charge. “Through him, I learned about mandatory minimums and asset forfeiture and the inherent racism in the drug war,” she says. Field helped her friend acquire an attorney and, after his conviction, a commutation from then-President George W. Bush. He served eight and a half years of a 14-year sentence. “Even though I couldn’t fix my friend’s issue directly, I could work on the policies around the country,” she says. For five years before joining Enneagram Prison Project, Field advocated with the Drug Policy Alliance to address failed drug war policies. While reckoning with America’s history of mass incarceration was new for Field, a natural inclination to help others wasn’t. At Exeter, she was an active member of ESSO and recalls tutoring a local woman in math in order to help her earn her GED. “That sense of agency, that sense that even at that age, I had an important role to play to make my local community better really landed with me,” she says. Field continued on this path at Princeton, studying history and taking on a leading role within the university’s Big Brother Big Sister program. After graduation, she worked in finance and held a series of temp jobs before joining buildOn, a nonprofit committed to ending poverty through service and education. “It is not OK to just sit back and coast and enjoy the ride,” she says.
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“It’s a much more enriching and wonderful life knowing that I’m both receiving support and giving support and just feeling that connection.” It is that sense of connection that keeps Field motivated. “I remember one student at San Quentin,” she says. “We asked everyone to write their names and he wrote his surname. So, I said, ‘Write your first name.’ Over the course of the class, I kept saying his name. At the end of class, he said to me, ‘You said my name. You said it a lot.’ I said, ‘I did. How did that feel?’ He said, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been seen before.’ That was just heartbreaking to hear. But it makes me remember that just being present with someone is such a gift no matter what the circumstance.”
Meredith Hitchcock ’06 By Sandra Guzmán
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eredith Hitchcock ’06 grew up near Capitol Hill, and every morning on her drive to grade school her parents were extremely enthusiastic about wanting to teach her the history that had been made in her backyard. She remembers when her father pointed to Constitution Hall and told her how in 1939 opera superstar Marian Anderson was barred from performing there because the building, owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution, banned Black performers. “I would hear them and think, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, more history,’” Hitchcock says with a laugh. “I thought government was boring.” Of course, she adds, “I appreciate with distance and time how foundational growing up in D.C. and the center of government was, and how the city and my parents’ seeds helped shape me.” For the past six years, Hitchcock has used her skills to develop technological solutions in the service of social justice. “I work with people who do the coding and help guide them in terms of the technology by making sure that anything being built is oriented toward solving real problems for real people, not just to increase revenue by x percent.” Her interest in technology was first piqued during her lower year at the Academy when she learned simple programming, as well as the importance of being a role model for others. “It’s ironic that the experience of being one of two women and the only Black student in Java and HTML classes at Exeter prepared me for Silicon Valley,” she says. “I learned that I must occupy spaces even if no one else looks like me and not feel intimidated. It also left me with a sense that I have to always pull up an extra chair and mentor women and young people of color.”
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" Hitchcock studied comparative literature at Yale University, then went to work at Google, where she spent five years as a product specialist in digital publishing while pursuing a master’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in information management and systems. Hitchcock’s tech activism began after she read Michelle Alexander’s groundbreaking book, The New Jim Crow. “I am, by nature, a risk-averse person,” she says, “but a friend pushed me to think about what kind of decisions I would make in my career if I weren’t afraid.” The question led the 32-year-old to quit her lucrative job at Google and become a justice design fellow for Code for America, a government technology nonprofit where she began developing RideAlong with another fellow. The data-driven criminal justice app helps first responders and police officers de-escalate situations with people who are having a mental health crisis and connect them with social services. So far, 11 American cities, including Seattle, are using the interface to great success. “It’s gratifying to help police departments re-envision what technology can do and help support this shift from the warrior mentality to the guardian mentality,” explains the entrepreneur.
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I learned that I must occupy spaces even if no one else looks like me and not feel intimidated."
After the app was sold to OpenLattice in 2018, Hitchcock worked at Promise, a cash bail-reform startup. Now she is at Airbnb, where she is a design and user-experience researcher focusing on inclusion, accessibility and equity. During the earlier part of the last year, she collaborated with the company’s philanthropic arm to launch a global initiative to provide free or subsidized housing for COVID-19 health care providers, relief workers and first responders. Hitchcock, who lives in San Francisco, spent hours on virtual calls interviewing hosts. “To be a witness to all the highs and lows people are going through was very powerful,” she says. During her free time, Hitchcock volunteers with U.S. Digital Response, a nonprofit that works to improve local and state governments’ responses to the COVID19 pandemic. “I really believe in government now, but in local government in particular, because it has the most immediate impact on the quality of life for people,” she says. E
To read and hear more stories from Exeter alumnae, visit exeter.edu/coeducation.
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Her Voice ... in Reflection B R I N G W H AT Y O U ’ V E G O T . . . By Trustee Jennifer Holleran ’86
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Editor’s Note: The following meditation was shared with the campus community on October 26, 2020.
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ello from afar. I picture us in Phillips Church, music just ending. I am standing in front of you, but actually the setup is different — as so many things are these days. I am in my living room, recording and thinking of you there at Exeter, and hoping it is a beautiful fall day and you are doing well. I will imagine I am there with you. I’m very cognizant of this incredibly strange and endlessly challenging moment in which we find ourselves. There is so much for us to meditate on right now — really, too much. So, before I proceed, I want to acknowledge that many of you are in pain today, and all of us know other people in great pain. Pain from the health and economic impacts of the pandemic, which are being borne disproportionately at every turn by communities of color; from the fact of and reckoning with widespread racial injustice in our country; from the stress on our democracy and the polarization of our country and our communities; and from so many losses of people we cherish. Before I share more, I hope you’ll join me in acknowledging our individual and shared pain, here in community ... . My name is Jen Holleran; I am class of 1986, from the great dorm Wheelwright, and I am a trustee in my 10th year of service. It is my honor to get to carry on the tradition of a retiring trustee giving a meditation. I may not be your first-choice candidate to do so in this moment in history — I am a white middle-aged woman who grew up with enough privilege that my father is an alum of Exeter from the 1950s, and all three of my sisters also attended. Nonetheless, here I am to share with you the story of my love of schools, how my experience at Exeter helped shape that love, and of the journey of focusing on working toward quality education for every child. Let’s start with some context. Exeter is an extraordinary place, as you know, with its centuries-long commitment to “youth from every quarter” and the social mobility that implies, and with alums that hold that commitment as their highest priority. While not perfect, we have a clear purpose and we work to continuously improve. And, by virtue of being here, all of us have some degree of privilege. For each person, the privilege and the challenges are meted out by life in different measure, with little consideration of fairness. Both make us who we are. This fall, after six months of virtual school and a very long summer break, dropping my twin sons off at school has been a different experience than in the past. Often, I find myself close to tears as I drive in and see kids
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playing or talking, and I send my boys off with an “I love you, have a great day” as they close the door, with their eyes focused on their community, the other sixth graders around them. My heart swells with joy that they are able to go to school and be with their peers, to be with their amazingly dedicated teachers and school leaders. That they are able to leave me behind without a word if they choose, to set off on their own and take on their own challenges. Who knows how long school will stay open, but every day on campus with their classmates is precious — and we treat it as such. One son’s comment at the end of that first day — “Mom, that was a good day” — let me know they appreciate what is going on here and how lucky they are to be back. It is a privilege only a small percentage of the country is experiencing. I think of you, coming back to Exeter, which for so many of you has become home, the place your friends are; the place where your academic, athletic, arts and other pursuits await you; where your teachers, coaches, advisers, D hall staff, school leaders and others work so hard to enable these opportunities for you. Many of the adults around you have worked tirelessly all summer and wrestled with incredibly difficult decisions, all so that you could come back here to be together safely. The many changes in this time have made clear to the whole world the critical role of school for students’ academic, social and emotional growth, how incredibly essential teachers are, and what an art it is to be a good teacher. You are surrounded by such teachers. Some of you have been here for seven weeks now; for others, you may be newly arrived and are just starting to make it your place. For all, I hope, it is an amazing year. One thing I ask you to consider during this meditation and in the days to come is: “What makes a good day for you?” This year stands out for so much loss of opportunity in schools that haven’t opened. For students who don’t get to be with their peers. For the millions of students who don’t even get to go school. For the many who are doing hybrid or online learning, and particularly those who don’t even have the connectivity to make remote learning a meaningful reality. Research shows the impact is most dramatic for the students who were most behind to start with, and each week of the school closures widens the divide. The pandemic has put on full display what has been true all along: Our education system is not equitable, those with the least are often given the least, and those with the most find an abundance of options.
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50 Y E A RS O F C O E D U CAT I O N AT E X E T E R
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nd now a bit of my story. My appreciation for Exeter started before I ever arrived, with truly terrible fifth and sixth grades. Middle school may be tough on everyone; my version of that particular agony was moving to a new state and showing up at my new school at close to my full adult height of almost 5-foot-10, well on the way to becoming one of the strongest and bigger-boned women you are likely to meet. Since stores presumed 10-year-old girls were small and there was no internet shopping, I had to shop at middle-aged ladies stores or in the boys department. I was new, stood out, and felt unwelcome. Fifth grade was terrible: being made fun of daily to the point of what we know today as real bullying, not making a single friend, and teachers not showing any sign of noticing. Despite the seventh and eighth grades being much better, my experience had left an indelible mark. Thankfully, Exeter was different; I knew it right away. When I arrived here that gorgeous fall day in 1983, my family pulled up in our car loaded with my stuff to the sidewalk outside of Wheelwright. I looked up at the brick building and breathed a sigh of excitement and relief. This was my dorm, my community. This would be the place where I would live with other students and they would get to know me; no early judgments would carry much weight because they would get to know me, the substance of me, and they would like me. It was an intense realization. I was not disappointed. It was a transformational fall, and a transformational three years. The proctors and older girls opened their arms to the new lowers and preps, and we dove into dorm life. We got to know each other fast and intensely, the doors of our rooms becoming permeable boundaries where we crossed in and out of each other’s spaces with ease, complaining about chem labs or getting homework help, borrowing sweaters, and delving into deep conversations until late in the night. Mr. Hertig would chase us out of each other’s rooms, working hard to try to demonstrate he was annoyed that we were up late talking, but you could see that the power of the bonding going on was not lost on him. I had found my second home. In classes, I was intimidated by Harkness at first, amazed by the returning lowers who had such clear opinions and the ability to share their ideas. Then by late fall, I realized they were just experienced at Harkness (Harknessing, I think you say), and I found my voice around the table and started having fun in class. Homework and classes every Saturday seemed endless but purposeful, and there were all of my dormmates to commiserate with, so we were happily resigned to both. Mr. Polychronis opened my eyes with his genetics course and Mr. Tremallo brought short stories to life, even in a new course called “Writing on the Computer.”
This was my dorm, my community. This would be the place where I would live with other students and they would get to know me ... the substance of me, and they would like me."
I loved the challenge of sports and got to know upper-class women as I played on the field hockey, squash and lacrosse teams. What at first seemed a crazy expectation — that we were going to run Drinkwater as just a warm-up — quickly became the norm, and I learned to push myself. Mrs. Anderson was one of the best coaches I ever had, even after I played two Division I sports in college. She taught us to prepare well, rise to the challenge of the moment, and be honorable in victory or defeat, and she showed us how much better we could be when we truly played together. As we celebrate 50 years of coeducation this year, I think back and can only imagine all that she, Mrs. Nekton and others did to make us not even notice that we were only in the first decade of girls’ sports teams.
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hen I reflect on my experience at Exeter, it was really formative in three main ways: The first was the great gift of making lifelong friends. Those friendships have become my sustaining relationships, the bedrock in my life along with my family. From those friendships, I have one clichéd piece of advice, simple but hard to do: Keep in touch with your close friends even when it is inconvenient, enjoy the things that bond you, work through your differences, push each other and find the time to get together in person! That seems easy now, but a decade or two out, living in different cities or even different countries, with pressures of jobs and children, getting together in person can be a challenge. Every year for the past 35 years, my close friends and I have met somewhere fun, with restaurants to go to, mountains to hike, or arts to explore. But despite whatever great attractions there are, we often end up having the best times of the weekend sitting on the floor in pajamas or sweats, laughing ridiculously, looking a bit like teenagers in a dorm.
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I M PACT
The second way Exeter was transformational for me was the plethora of small communities within the school, whether the dorm, teams or classes, that enabled me to be seen and heard and belong. This reality was particularly pronounced for me, set against those awful early middle school years. One of the exceptional things at Exeter is that there are so many opportunities to join small communities that allow each person to find their place to belong. I hope you each find your place. The sense of myself I developed at Exeter around the Harkness table and in leadership positions in the dorm and on the field built a formidable foundation. My sister and several professionally successful women friends from the class of ’91 reflected recently on all they had taken for granted about what being at the Harkness table did to set them up to enter the working world with the presumption that they had a full voice at any table, and the confidence and skills to take on the many battles in their careers as women. Finally, my experience at Exeter catalyzed what has become a lifelong drive to create school communities and growth and learning experiences like those I found here at Exeter — but doing so at scale, often in more challenging circumstances and on more limited public funding, so that all children can get a quality education.
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fter college, I started teaching at Deerfield Academy. It was 1990 — long before you were born. I was a 22-year-old, brought in to help integrate girls in what was only the 12th month of coeducation at a school that was deeply rooted in tradition, so I got more experience trying to shift a culture than I had bargained for. I loved teaching, coaching and even being on duty five nights a week in the dorm. I found myself drawn to the students who had to work hardest to fit in, for whom I wanted to create a bridge. Often these were students who were low income, or people of color, or gay or lesbian students.
Right: Jen Holleran in 1985. Below: Holleran, top row and third from left, with the Exeter field hockey team and Coach Anderson in 1985.
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50 Y E A RS O F C O E D U CAT I O N AT E X E T E R
In my mid- and late 20s, like many, I explored around a bit. During graduate school, curious about the broader world of public education, I tried an internship with a principal in an urban high school. I saw crowded classrooms, often disengaged students, a range of teachers from good to horrible, and a system where I couldn’t figure out how to even enter in an impactful way. I ended up limiting my job search to independent schools, and went on to lead a high school division of a private day school — a place I recognized and comfortably slid right into. While my responsibilities had broadened considerably, my world had not. Later, I had the opportunity to work on a short consulting project with the superintendent in the Oakland (California) Unified School District, who was aggressively opening small schools in an effort to replace poorly performing elementary schools and high schools that had such bad results that researchers refer to them as “dropout factories.” When I went to visit the new small schools and met the school leaders from the community, I was deeply moved by the engaged, joyous belonging happening for students, almost all of whom were students of color, many living below the poverty line. I saw enough resonance with what I had experienced at Exeter, I could finally see that I might be able to apply what I knew of quality small-school communities to a school with students with broader needs in a more resource-constrained setting.
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t was 2002, and as that consulting project was wrapping up, a woman named Katrina Scott George asked to meet. She was just joining the district to lead the office of school reform. She had a clear idea, I realized in retrospect, that I might be useful. She handed me a book instead of engaging in traditional interview questions. It was titled The Answer to How Is Yes. She challenged me with the question: How do we
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She wanted to know Was I in? How hard would I fight for kids?' And in that moment, I realized I wanted to do that work, this work that had broad reaching purpose ... ."
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make equitable schools? How do we battle the injustices all around us. She let me know that in her mind, the answer is you do something, you start somewhere, you bring what you have, and you work to see where you can find an opening to make the next step of progress, because no opening is likely to show itself until you are in the fight. She wanted to know, “Was I In? How hard would I fight for kids?” And in that moment, I realized I wanted to do that work, this work that had broad reaching purpose, to dive into the world of educational equity and of systemically broken districts. It wasn’t at all comfortable, but I knew that if we could be successful it could be trajectory-altering for thousands of students. Katrina was a Jamaican-born woman who had seen big change in her country and believed significant progress was possible. She came to the U.S. to study engineering, got a good job and stayed. When she had her own kids and started to see how badly underserved the Black and brown students in her East Bay neighborhood were, she adapted her engineering skills into focused work to transform underserved schools. She was the mastermind behind our work. We became focused on how to build more equitable schools, give principals the training and autonomy they needed, and work with communities to meet families’ needs. We recruited and helped develop dozens of school leaders for the movement, each of whom was committed to creating equitable, caring, rigorous education communities. We made lots of progress — built some great schools, helped improve others, trained many leaders who today lead schools or whole networks of schools. At the same time, we had our gaps and made plenty of mistakes. It is work whose results are measured not in weeks or months, but in years or sometimes decades. And so we persevered, did all we could, and are still, almost two decades later, seeing results unfold.
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y own life was disconcertingly divided; after long days in the Oakland schools I would drive across the Bay Bridge, which separated the two cities, my two worlds, to San Francisco. By that point, I felt I no longer fully fit in either world. In San Francisco, my mind was often questioning the things around me — the excess of fancy restaurants, second homes, and private schools with unrivaled views of the Golden Gate Bridge. In Oakland, I stuck out visually and otherwise. Often the only white person in a room, I faced people who looked at me askance, wondering why I was in this work, people who at times pointed out how little I had experienced of injustice and how limited my language was around racism. I learned so much as I worked directly with families in Oakland and learned about the power of parent community organizing groups, about getting policy passed at school board
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We all have strengths and gaps and pain, each in different measure. These things aren't evenly distributed, but each one of us can do all that we can."
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meetings, saw teachers who taught kids to be activist citizens, met hundreds of families willing to do anything to get their children a good education. I brought technical tools like how to budget, what the role of autonomy for teachers and leaders is, and how to access strong professional development. Often I worried I didn’t know enough, didn’t have grounding in the right things. Katrina told me to keep learning, to keep taking action and to stay in the fight. When I doubted myself, didn’t have the words to express the things I saw, Katrina would insist, “You must stay in the work — bring what you’ve got.” She recognized that I brought a vision of excellence from my past experience with high-performing schools, where each student was seen as an individual; a belief that it could be different; and the drive to make it so. I could use my whole self to bridge the two worlds. Unlike fifth grade, I could lean into my discomfort, even while growing and learning. I still have a lot to learn, a lot to improve, and I am working to do so. Though I lost my close friend and wonderful colleague, Katrina, to cancer several years ago, I often reflect on what she said: “Bring what you’ve got to the work.” What I’ve got is such a mix. … Mostly I have incredible privilege and a lifetime of schools, like Exeter, that work very well. I have access to a world with tremendous resources. I have the risk tolerance to say difficult things that need to be said. In addition, though, I have blind spots and weaknesses; I have my own pain. We all have strengths and gaps and pain, each in different measure. These things aren’t evenly distributed, but each one of us can do all that we can. The idea of bringing what you have to fight for what you believe resonates deeply with me. I ask you to take a moment today to think: What is it that you have got — both the positive and the difficult — and what problems matter to you?
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decade ago, I got an opportunity to work with another Exeter alum, Mark Zuckerberg ’02, who had just committed to giving Newark, New Jersey, $100 million to improve its schools. This time, I knew enough to be very aware of the layers of challenge ahead, and I also know the impact could be great. The work was highly political and took a lot of heat, especially early on; now the midterm results look very promising, with improved and new schools delivering significantly better results for kids. That led to powerful work over seven years with Mark and his wife, Priscilla Chan (a pediatrician, and the first member of her family to attend college), to think about what the future of education could look like with students at the center of their own learning across the country. I have continued this kind of work as an adviser to help other philanthropists deploy their resources to improve education. I find myself at the nexus of almost unimaginable wealth of donors and the most promising work to bring great learning to all kids. The tension inherent in wealthy philanthropists’ resources driving change in low-income schools is real, and yet the work is sincere and powerful. Today, I think of most of my work as forming a bridge between people with significant resources and a genuine desire to improve education, and the world of amazing education leaders who are leading in underserved communities to create schools and systems that reach every child. As we speak, those leaders are working nonstop to open their school doors again to all of their students. In the past six years, I have led with a strong lens that we need to fund the entrepreneurial leaders who have proximity to the work and lived experience in the schools, mainly leaders of color. For these leaders, it is often much harder to get in the door to get the resources they need. The ultimate goal of my work is to make the kind of work I do obsolete — to not be needed in the very long run because we have no chasm to overcome, and in the shorter run because people from underserved communities, with lived experience in the schools, are seen and heard directly. Given the widening economic inequality today, the very long-range goal feels far off indeed; however, with the right work, and given an awakening around racial injustice, I hope the short-term goal of direct access may not be so far off. While I recognize and embrace my good fortune of having my kids back at school, enough that I tear up at the mere thought of it, I will only be happy when all students are able to go to school, set out on their own to learn and grow, then come home and say, “That was a good day.” E
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CONNECTIONS
News and notes from the alumni community
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The Exeter Bond By Morgan W. Dudley ’77 Director of Institutional Advancement
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hank you to everyone
who has reached out to express support for our Exeter community during this extraordinary year. Your encouragement and continued faith in Exeter’s people, mission and values have been welcome and appreciated as we work together to keep our community strong. The COVID-19 pandemic has required us to postpone, cancel or reinvent many of Exeter’s time-honored traditions over the past year. In true Exeter fashion, you have risen to the occasion and embraced the opportunity to connect, reflect, learn from and honor our shared experiences in new and creative ways. From late-night (or early morning) class Zoom calls and industry-focused panel discussions, to webinars honoring coeducation and virtual conversations with alumni authors, artists, activists and more, we have found meaningful ways to come together, even as we remain apart. To put it in numbers, more than 3,700 Exonians representing nine decades and 48 countries have participated in 135 virtual events over the last 11 months. These numbers are not only impressive but also reflective of the strength of the Exeter bond and our spirit of non sibi. We know these next few months undoubtedly will be full of change, challenges and sacrifice. Yet, I know we will continue to derive comfort and hope in our shared commitment to learn and grow together as we support one another in every way possible. For those who were looking forward to joining us on campus this spring for reunions and celebrations, please know we are poised, eager and committed to providing special opportunities for you to reunite with classmates, engage with faculty and connect with current students through a special virtual reunions event in May. We invite all alumni to join us in June for a one-of-a-kind online celebration of Exeter’s 50th anniversary of coeducation. More details will be forthcoming on these opportunities and other alumni virtual programming. As we embrace the year 2021, together, we will find ways to strengthen existing connections and forge new ones within our Exeter community. We hope you are safe and healthy during this challenging time. E www.exeter.edu/alumni
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C O N N ECT I O N S
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3 QUESTIONS WITH ...
Lena Papadakis ’17 By Sarah Zobel Today and as babies (L-R): Alexandra, Lena, Joanna
What was the origin of Preemie to Pre-Med?
I got the idea for Preemie to Pre-Med in March while shadowing a doctor in the hospital. I realized how difficult it would be to explain to a child why only one parent could be there and why the playroom was off-limits. I also got involved in COVID-19 advocacy and learned pediatric hospitals and programs were losing money and suspending volunteer programs. I knew I needed to do something. … We launched in October and raised $3,300 for the John Hancock Child Life and Wellness Program at Mass General Hospital in the first month! What are child life and wellness programs?
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ena Papadakis ’17 is no stranger to hospitals. She and her sisters, Joanna ’17 and Alexandra ’17, were born two months prematurely. By age 10, she had undergone some 40 medical procedures — one of which left her in a monthlong, medically induced coma. Doctors determined the triplet had tracheoesophageal fistula, an abnormal opening between her esophagus and her trachea. Over time, they built her a new GI tract from her stomach up. Given her past, Papadakis could be forgiven for never voluntarily entering a hospital again. Yet the Boston University senior has found inspiration in her childhood experiences. She’s prepping for medical school and working remotely as a clinical research intern in Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s maternal-fetal health department while running the nonprofit she founded, Preemie to Pre-Med. We spoke with Papadakis while she was temporarily quarantining at her parents’ home in North Hampton, New Hampshire.
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They encourage learning and exploration through play while a child is in the hospital — they let kids be kids. That’s something I attribute my non-fear of hospitals to. I don’t remember a lot because I was so young, but the parts I do are good, like going to events such as Queen for a Day or being invited to ride in a helicopter to normalize it because I’d been medevacked once. … Hospitals are amazing institutions — all I’ve ever wanted is to work in one, and I think a large portion of that was encouraged by child life programs. The hospital was never terrifying. I never felt alone. I understand your nonprofit had its beginnings at Exeter.
In our upper year, Joanna and I created an ESSO club called Just Keep Smiling to donate blankets and stuffed animals to child life programs at Boston Children’s Hospital and Mass General. That evolved into Preemie to Pre-Med, and some of the first people I reached out to in starting this were Exeter friends. It was important for me to come full circle and have these individuals help create this. We now have eight Exonians and 20 other college students working to bring our organization’s mission to life. E
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C O N N ECT I O N S
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Building Inclusion By Sandra Guzmán
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hen Julio Peterson ’86 was a teenager,
he worked as a delivery boy for a highend pharmacy and was awed by the universe of worlds that existed outside his neighborhood. “I walked everywhere and was intrigued by the multidimensional space of the city — the architecture, layout of the streets, the movement and energy, the people, cultures, races, the grit, and the wealth gap between the rich and poor,” he says. In 1970s New York, he recalls there were a lot of vacant lots and abandoned buildings. “My mother and a group of other poor families took over an abandoned building and fixed it up,” says the 54-year-old, who is one of six children born in northern Manhattan to parents from the Dominican Republic. “We were poor, but we had agency. We were squatters fighting for housing and human rights.” Going to protests with his mother as a child and learning about housing rights, development and urban politics cemented Peterson’s passion for building and uplifting distressed communities. He went to Cornell to study city and regional planning with hopes of becoming mayor of New York City. After eight years of work in community development, he was awarded the John L. Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, where his studies focused on real estate development and finance. His first job in 1990 was with the New York City Public Development Corporation, which was in charge of development of commercial, city-owned properties under David Dinkins, the city’s first Black mayor. Neighborhoods like Harlem, El Barrio and Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, needed significant public and private investment after years of neglect. “I saw how hard it was to be a Black mayor and the many compromises made,” Peterson says. He decided that he didn’t have the diplomatic skills or patience to be mayor. The experience of helping to save from demolition the Audubon Ballroom, the site where Malcolm X was assassinated, inspired the Afro Latino urban planner to remain in real estate and development. “I was born across the street from the Audubon Ballroom, and when I was 13 reading Malcolm X’s autobiography changed my life,” he says. “It made me pursue learning at a higher level and one reason that motivated me to attend Phillips Exeter.”
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Since then, Peterson has managed the development of a throng of commercial and cultural projects, including East Harlem’s Julia de Burgos Latino Cultural Arts Center, Harlem’s first major supermarket and Columbia University’s Biomedical Research Building. “What motivates me is that I can walk around the city and say I was involved in this building and that project,” he says. Today he is vice president of real estate for the Shubert Organization, the largest theater owner on Broadway. Peterson manages Shubert’s substantial corporate real estate, including the Boch Center Shubert Theater in Boston, Times Square outdoor signage, office and retail leasing, and development. He also acts as the organization’s liaison with elected officials and other stakeholders. Serving on the board of organizations like The Public Theatre, the Association for a Better New York and the City Parks Foundation, among others, allows Peterson to give back to a city that has nurtured him. As one of the few BIPOC executives in theater, Peterson is also using his voice to bring attention to the whiteness of the industry and calling for changes. “The industry needs to be more inclusive, and that means not just Black and Brown people tap dancing and singing on stage,” he says. “We need to find a pathway to jobs for Black and Brown people in all spaces, jobs that are locked up in the institutional white vacuum.” Last year, he took on what he says was one of the most exciting projects of his career, working with Malcolm X’s daughter, Ilyasah Shabazz, as co-chair of Harlem’s Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center at the site of the Audubon Ballroom. “Malcolm is one of my heroes. It feels great to return to a place after having helped save it and help create a worldclass center for the community and the world.” E
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A Shared Experience By Sarah Pruitt ’95
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Shapiro
rowing up in Houston, Texas, Helen Xiu ’20 remembers being a “really talkative kid,” which wasn’t always a welcome characteristic in a traditional classroom. “I had been taught that speaking too much in class was a bad thing,” she remembers. When she arrived at Exeter as a prep in the fall of 2016, Xiu had to acclimate to a new kind of classroom experience. “I was [accustomed] to not being noticed by the teacher that much,” she says. “I had to learn Harkness etiquette, and how to present yourself at the table.” One year later, Xiu roomed with a new lower in Wheelwright Hall. As she watched her roommate go through a similar adjustment, Xiu appreciated how far she had come on her own journey, and how fully she had embraced the Harkness method. It was a meaningful revelation, one that she had the chance to share with former trustee Robert N. Shapiro ’68 when he was on campus for his 50th class reunion that May. Shapiro had established the Robert N. Shapiro, Class of 1968, Financial Aid Fund in 2012 to provide greater access and opportunity to deserving students. Xiu was the fund’s first beneficiary, and when she wrote a letter of thanks to Shapiro via the school’s Financial Xiu Aid Office, he replied to her, suggesting that they connect in person at his reunion so that he could hear firsthand about Xiu’s Exeter experience. They met in Elm Street Dining Hall and have kept in touch by email since then.
A LIFELONG LOVE OF EDUCATION
Shapiro vividly remembers his own first class at Exeter, a second-level Latin course with David Thomas. As the only ninth-grade boy in the class, he arrived late after having to file out of the Assembly Hall by class, and there were no chairs left at the Harkness table. “There were three chairs with armrests on the sides,” Shapiro recalls. “I sat down in one, and I never moved from that chair. For the entire year, I never sat at the table.” He still managed to hold his own in that class, an achievement that set the tone for the rest of his Harkness career. “That was trial by fire, even though I didn’t realize it at the time,” Shapiro says. “I had a great time in the classroom at Exeter. It was just about the best experience one could imagine.” During his senior year, he and a friend convinced one of their teachers to let them lead the discussion in some lower-year English classes. Later, while still an undergrad at Harvard, Shapiro began teaching at Noble and Greenough School, where Ted Gleason, the former minister at Exeter and his Dunbar dorm master, had become the headmaster. After graduation, Shapiro returned to Nobles to teach English, and also taught at
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Exeter Summer School, grading his students’ papers in the new Louis Kahn-designed library on campus. Shortly after he completed law school, he became secretary of the Friends of the Academy Library at the invitation of Jackie Thomas, longtime Academy librarian and wife of his former Latin teacher. Shapiro later served as chairman for many years. Even as Shapiro spent decades practicing law, becoming a partner at the Boston firm Ropes & Gray, he never lost his connection with the world of education. In addition to serving on Exeter’s Board of Trustees from 1988 to 1998, he was a trustee at Nobles for 21 years and currently serves on the board of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. He is also a longtime trustee of the Peabody Essex Museum, and the new chair of the Handel and Haydn Society Board of Governors. “Because I admired my teachers so much, I’ve always been interested in teaching,” Shapiro says of his work with educational institutions ranging from the elementary to collegiate level. “All of that wasn’t a big conscious life plan, but grew organically from those first teaching experiences when I was an Exeter student.” When asked to explain why he chose to establish his namesake fund, Shapiro refers back to the school’s Deed of Gift, signed in 1781. John and Elizabeth Phillips donated their assets to lay the foundation for the Academy, recognizing even then, “the time of youth is the important period.” “We all know the phrase, ‘youth from every quarter,’” Shapiro adds. “That’s a wonderful late-18th-century phrase from a wonderful late-18th-century document, but it’s as modern now as it ever has been. It’s the heart of the place.”
A LASTING CONNECTION
“We all know the phrase, ‘youth from every quarter.’ ... it’s as modern now as it ever has been. It’s the heart of the place.”
During her four years at Exeter, Xiu dove into her studies and activities. She ran the hurdles during winter and spring track; joined Asian Voices; sang with the a cappella group In Essence; worked as a senior layout editor for the PEAN; and became co-head of Christian Fellowship by her senior year. She enjoyed her English and history classes in particular, writing her History 333 paper on the birth of hip-hop in the South Bronx. Her senior meditation, which drew on her research of child psychology during a fall-term course, focused on how our first memories from childhood can shape how we perceive our early lives. In December, Xiu and Shapiro were able to reconnect during a Zoom call. Now a freshman at Bryn Mawr, Xiu plans to pursue a career in educational equity, an interest she developed while participating in the Exeter Student Service Organization’s Diversity Club and the Exonian Encounter Committee. “I want to do the work to restructure the system,” she says, with an aim to provide all students with equal access to the opportunities, support and tools they need to thrive. Shapiro is thrilled with Xiu’s plans. “[The] questions of equality and access are burning hot right now,” he says. “Schools … are at the center, but libraries, museums [and] musical organizations ... are all public trusts, and making these amazing institutions truly open and inviting and welcoming — having everybody who’s interested feel a sense of belonging to them — those are really core concepts.” He and Xiu promised to keep in touch, and Shapiro anticipates meeting the next Exonian to benefit from his namesake fund. “You blazed a path,” he told Xiu. “Now I can tell your successor about what you’re doing.” E
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O R I G I N E
P E N D E T
The Meadow By Emma Wynn ’01
CHERYL CHALMERS
It was the one place my father never mowed when he was driven to cut whatever he could reach, that slow dip and broad basin of earth. So it grew tangled with wild roses, sharp grasses, cornflower and snakes, little furred animals rustling in the weeds, also whatever stalked them and grasshoppers thick as thumbs whirring a drone of invisible wings. On summer nights the air was flecked with sparks that settled and paired, mated and rose again. Our mother, who knew a cage, would not let us jar and keep them. In the spring, icy water poured off the hills, turned it to marsh, a loamy sponge eager to swallow small feet and goldfinches, which dropped to the swaybacked tips of seeding grasses like coins flipped from the sky. Barely grown ourselves, I bring you home to show the lightning bugs open the night under the weak mirror of stars. I point, but cannot say, look! this is my childhood field — poppies fat with heat, the starred sky so close, close too, the thorns and their embrace of blood, the curved teeth of the rattler and the warning of its tail. E Editor’s Note: Wynn’s poem first appeared in Sky Island Journal, issue 12 (spring 2020) and is included in her new chapbook, Help Me to Fall, published by Moonstone Arts Center last year.
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E X E T E R
B U L L E T I N
W I N T E R
20 21
CHRISTIAN HARRISON
Nora Sharma ’24 stands tall in the fall production of “The Short Tree and the Bird That Could Not Sing” at the Goel Center.
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