FEATURE
A School to Be Respected
Ben Williams, head of school from 1969 to 1984
by Joseph Sheppard
The man mostly responsible for shaping the Lawrence Academy we know today arrived in Groton in the fall of 1969 as an energetic and idealistic 33-year-old. Ben Williams had always known he wanted to teach, and following a stint as an instructor in the Marines’ Officer Candidate School, he landed a job in Pomfret, Connecticut. After a few years, running a school became an aspiration. “I was young and ambitious, and I went after the Lawrence Academy job like a crocodile,” he told us in a recent conversation at his home in Pomfret. Williams had visited the campus and, being an outdoorsman, loved it. “Angus on the hillside, green everywhere. It was my kind of territory,” he recounted. “It seemed too good to be true.” It did come true, though, and Williams admitted that the job was a bit overwhelming at first. “On opening day, when I saw the students running on the lower
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fields, it dawned on me that they were now my responsibility. It was daunting." Williams decided that Lawrence Academy would become coeducational as soon as possible, a change that the board of trustees supported. Beyond coeducation, though, Ben had no “grandiose idea” about what he was going to do with his new job. “I was flying by the seat of my pants,” he smiled, recalling his and his wife Nan’s early days in Groton. Having recently experienced the move to coeducation in Pomfret, he knew that in 1970 coeducation “just made good sense.” Williams continued, “We wanted to move into the modern world, and that meant coeducation. It was an opportunity to raise the bar academically and to increase the applicant pool. Women had a lot to contribute to the school academically, athletically, and in extracurricular activities.” Coeducation inspired curricular innovations, and Williams’ dreams for Lawrence’s future gradually took
