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Milton Magazine
Studying Economics: A First Encounter
Making Poverty History: Becky Buell ’78 helps lead Oxfam’s effort, page 13 A Timely Risk: Gaining expertise in the western Siberian basin, page 16 Race: An Economic Reality: The ‘extra cost’ of blackness, page 21 Microfinance: The little engine that could, page 26 Mr. Mall: The man who knows your shopping secrets, page 28 Graduation 2004: Pictures and awards, page 38
Fall 2004
Milton Academy Board of Trustees, 2004
Bradley M. Bloom Wellesley, Massachusetts William T. Burgin ’61 Dover, Massachusetts Jorge Castro ’75 Pasadena, California Edward Dugger III Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts James M. Fitzgibbons ’52 Emeritus Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts
George A. Kellner Vice President New York, New York Helen Lin ’80 Hong Kong F. Warren McFarlan ’55 Belmont, Massachusetts Carol Smith Miller Boston, Massachusetts Tracy Pun Palandjian ’89 Belmont, Massachusetts
Victoria Hall Graham ’81 Haverford, Pennsylvania
Richard C. Perry ’73 New York, New York
Margaret Jewett Greer ’47 Emerita Chevy Chase, Maryland
John P. Reardon ’56 Vice President Cohasset, Massachusetts
Antonia Monroe Grumbach ’61 Secretary New York, New York
John S. Reidy '56 New York, New York
J. Tomilson Hill ’66 New York, New York Franklin W. Hobbs IV ’65 President New York, New York Barbara Hostetter Boston, Massachusetts Ogden M. Hunnewell ’70 Vice President Brookline, Massachusetts Harold W. Janeway ’54 Emeritus Webster, New Hampshire David B. Jenkins ’49 Duxbury, Massachusetts
Kevin Reilly Jr. ’73 Baton Rouge, Louisiana Robin Robertson Head of School Milton, Massachusetts H. Marshall Schwarz ’54 Emeritus New York, New York Karan Sheldon ’73 Blue Hill Falls, Maine Frederick G. Sykes ’65 Rye, New York Jide J. Zeitlin ’81 Treasurer New York, New York
Editor Cathleen Everett Associate Editor Heather Sullivan Photography AP Wide World, Michael Dwyer, Khanty Mansiysk Oil Corporation, Michael Lutch, Milton Academy Archives, Nicki Pardo, Martha Stewart, Heather Sullivan Design Moore & Associates Printed on Recycled Paper Milton Magazine is published twice a year by Milton Academy. Editorial and business offices are located at Milton Academy where change-of-address notifications should be sent. As an institution committed to diversity, Milton Academy welcomes the opportunity to admit academically qualified students of any gender, race, color, handicapped status, sexual orientation, religion, national or ethnic origin to all the rights, privileges, programs and activities generally available to its students. It does not discriminate on the basis of gender, race, color, handicapped status, sexual orientation, religion, national or ethnic origin in the administration of its educational policies, admission policies, scholarship programs, and athletic or other school-administered activities.
Milton Magazine Features 2 Studying Economics: A First Encounter Cathleen Everett
8 Responses from the Ivory Tower
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Why do politicians speak so simplistically? Why are they focused on short-term goals? Milton students studying economics raised these and other shared concerns. We asked two Milton graduates—economists, professors and researchers—to respond to their questions. Cathleen Everett
13 Making Poverty History Leading Oxfam’s effort Becky Buell ’78
16 A Timely Risk: Gaining Expertise in the Western Siberian Basin 13
John Fitzgibbons ’87 finds his decade of experience yields business opportunities Cathleen Everett
21 Race: An Economic Reality Housing policies and patterns, the roots of lasting inequity Rod Skinner ’72
26 Microfinance: The Little Engine That Could? Jared Miller ’97 explains how small financial services add up Heather Sullivan 16
28 Mr. Mall: The Man Who Knows Your Shopping Secrets Paco Underhill ’70 knows more about shopping than arguably any man alive. On a tour of a London shopping mall, he reveals the science and the psychology behind how we shop.
36 Dedication of the Schwarz Student Center 38 Commencement and Prizes, 2004 42 Graduates Weekend, 2004 28
Departments 32 The Milton Classroom Economics is not so dismal a science David Ball ’88
34 The Head of School Faculty and the world of work Robin Robertson
48 Sports New leadership for Milton sports
50 Faculty Perspective EU membership for Cyprus Andreas Evriviades
52 Post Script Teaching at Fort Apache Peter Curran ’97 Running for Congress Ted Ladd ’87
55 In•Sight 56 On Centre News and notes from the campus and beyond
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Studying Economics: A First Encounter Economics seems boring. Once you get into it, though, how do you think about anything else? —Austan Goolsbee ’87, Professor of Economics, University of Chicago Graduate School of Business
Class I students from among those growing numbers who elect Milton’s Economics course. Their opinions play out on the pages ahead, about the role of the course and the discipline in their approach to understanding their world. Growing interest in taking economics has resulted in increased sections, a redesign of course structure, and a new option for studying global economics.
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Why do students choose to study
Epiphanies, or at least surprises
What surprises do they uncover?
Two sides Students found themselves drawn to the objectivity of economic analysis—judging a case on its own merits. Examining factors, policies and outcomes over time with dispassionate rigor was a revealing exercise and an intellectually maturing experience.
economics?
What are the abiding lessons? Definitions of economics vary, and reveal the influence of certain perceptual lenses, but they all deal with allocation of resources among competing uses. Adults have long acknowledged the fundamental role of economic forces in world, local and even personal events. Students taking economics, however, are just beginning to ponder those forces, and the related interdependencies: philosophy, politics, ethics, environment, law and social conditions.
A ‘how-to’ course for entrepreneurs? During the late ’90s, some students thought taking economics would help them nail down the steps to earning their first fortune, divulges history department faculty member David Ball ’88. That theme ebbed as the economy slowed; but David, who teaches economics, still asks new students what their expectations of the course are, and begins the course with a definition of economics, lest they think the course is a practicum on investment management.
“Very intelligent people can utterly disagree,” Josh Bone ’04 notes. “Mr. Ball so eloquently states both sides,” he says. “We honestly get the best articulation of two opposing points of view.” “We had lots of hard-core conservatives and hard-core liberals in our class,” Armeen Poor ’04 remembers. “Mr. Ball would respond counter to both arguments. He taught us the importance of giving credit to both sides. You learn from both, and it’s possible that what you learn can strengthen your own argument.” “There are always several sides to an issue that you don’t always understand. Often, though, you need to make a statement or offer a thesis. I learned that the most obvious thesis is not necessarily the correct or even most defensible thesis.” —Greg Kantrowitz ’04
Today, Class I students decide to dip a toe into economics because they have sensed its relevance to a larger, intricate web. They’re searching for the missing piece of a number of nagging puzzles. Even without a working knowledge of the principles, they know that economic issues have been causal agents in the history they’ve studied and forces influencing today’s choices. Students who find history and law and politics compelling want to reckon with economics, so also do those who imagine being film directors, sports managers, philosophers or professors.
Google query: ‘the definition of economics’ The study of how limited resources, goods and services are allocated among competing uses. www.fs.fed.us/r1/bdnf/deis/ postfirevegfuels/glossary.htm The study of choice and decisionmaking in a world with limited resources. pittsford.monroe.edu/jefferson/calfieri/ economics/EcoGlossary.html The science that deals with the production, distribution, and consumption of the world’s resources and the management of state income and expenditures in terms of money. www.sba.gov/young/columbiacollege/ k_12.nsf/vwHTMLPages/glossaryindex.html The study of how individuals and societies choose to allocate scarce productive resources among competing alternative uses and to distribute the products from these uses among the members of the society. www.worldbank.org/hsr/class/ module1/glossary.htm Study of how individuals, businesses and governments use their limited resources to satisfy unlimited wants. www.turnerlearning.com/efts/bball/ econglos.htm The social science that studies how individuals, firms, governments, and other organizations make choices, and how those choices determine the way the resources of society are used. wellspring.isinj.com/sample/econ/ micro/glosse.htm
David Ball ’88, History and Social Sciences Department
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Andrew Baird ’04
Greg Kantrowitz ’04
Jelena Djordjevic ’04
“Between the articles we read and [Mr. Ball’s] skill,” we are forced to confront both sides. Economists are smart; they’re not making value judgments about things, rather they are asking some good questions. It’s not that they think in a dehumanizing way; they think comparatively. People enjoy grasping for an ideal plan, and, ultimately, you have to make a choice. At the core, two opposing groups or individuals can share a set of values, or at least be working for the same thing. That’s the point of talking about all this. It’s easy to brush off details and generalize if you’re driven by ideological considerations, but you can’t do that when you’re faced with the details of an economic argument.” —Dina Guzovsky ’04
though, that any economic theory will work. Economics helps you understand that each individual piece can function separately, but it’s how the pieces work together that’s the key. No theoretical model can show the full equation. There are just too many factors to graph. There’s always some unknown, and then there’s the whole moral side. Every concept fits into a short-term model and into a longer term model: Choosing what outcome you want is the key to the policy choice.” —Jordan Raphel ’04
cuts. There are all these grand theories, but reality always bucks the theory in numerous ways. Therefore, both theories on tax policy are flawed in their ability to predict growth. There’s no such thing as a cut-and-dried case in economics.” —Josh Bone ’04
Microeconomic models work. Macroeconomic theories are flawed.
“Microeconomics in particular was intuitive, like a game. You could see how this works, with the math involved.” —Armeen Poor ’04
The relative certainty of predicting human behavioral responses within microeconomic situations was startling to students, especially compared to their perception that theoretical constructs inadequately predict macroeconomic outcomes. “Sort of in the same way science can be applied knowledge, economics can be applied to the real world. With mathematical analysis you can predict behavior and decisions. There’s no guarantee,
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“‘Micro’ provided a structured form for you to think about, observe and predict rational behavior—the dynamics of individual decision-making.” —Dina
“‘Micro’ is really cool. You read a problem and you interpret it with a diagram, represent it graphically. You quantify the abstract. It’s clean and you have an enclosed world, so that you can come up with a reliable plan, a solution, and you can pinpoint events in the short and long term. But I needed to understand ‘macro’ to reference political decisions in my speech competitions—like the Reagan tax
“Economic realities have to play a part in decisions; you can’t depend upon a model or a system that will not work. But ideology counts; it is best, for instance, if our relationship with other countries is taken into account.” —Jelena Djordjevic ’04 Things are not what they seem. Understanding the substrata beneath economic news or arguments, they found, is a crucial tool for those seeking a more sophisticated awareness. “Even if you read the newspapers, you may not get the right understanding. Take the unemployment numbers, for instance. How would the average person know what’s measured, and what’s not? “I am very environmentally oriented, but now I am shocked at how shallow and ideologically driven the arguments are from some of the major national environmental organizations, in support of one initiative or another.” —Jelena
“Although the Great Depression was not in my world, I did see the technology bust. This course helped me understand why it wouldn’t work, why the factors were out of whack, why the bubble couldn’t be sustained.” —Josh “When you change any one thing, it’s amazing, but the whole system moves.” —Jordan Even a little bit helps. Studying economics provides another strategy or approach for thinking about things, and even an entry-level contact with the fundamentals significantly improves a person’s competence. “I’m astonished at what a big impact just a little exposure to economics has, like in reading the newspaper. I didn’t think it would have such a big impact.” —Jelena “Now when I read things written for public consumption, I can decode them so much better. I know what happened, on another level.” —Jordan
Dina Guzovsky ’04
“I needed the economics fundamentals to decipher the context of history—the social and political problems, especially the macroeconomic, theories that played out in the ’80s and ’90s. It was easy to see the connections between economic principles and historical events. Now I have a whole different context for looking at history. My perspective will be different for the history I study from this point forward.” —Andrew Baird ’04 “Economics helped me clarify my thinking. I was already prone to this ‘rational weighing,’ but in class I was able to apply it much more formally. Asking economics questions (like the cost-benefit analysis of something) becomes the way you reflexively think about things.” —Dina “Listening to opposing points of view could be painful—like listening to my grandparents’ political opinions—but now I have some understanding of why they’re passionate about their issues. They, too, are grounded in principle.” —Greg
D.J. Mauch ’04
Major changes in outlook We asked students what questions the course raised for them, and whether studying economics changed or challenged any of their beliefs. Since they had all witnessed the collapse of the technology bubble, they were understandably sanguine about economic cycles: the market’s ups and downs. Each of them, however, carried deep, big-picture concerns. Our role as a nation within a global community; the underappreciated complexity of most contemporary problems; the intellectual apathy Americans demonstrate; the potential effect of a degraded environment; the confrontation of ethical considerations and economic policy—each senior paired a general faith in “the system” with an abiding concern about our shared future. “This course made me far less optimistic about the role of economics in politics. Rather than help organize issues that relate to a problem, politicians use the shock factor. They throw out numbers without acknowledging the source or the implications, without following through on the meaning. I am discouraged by how simplistic politicians on both sides are.
Jordan Raphel ’04
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What would your topic be, if you had to write a major paper now? • How will developing nations get on their feet? —D.J. Mauch • One of the big economic arguments, like protectionism vs. free trade—to what extent government intervention helps or hurts the economy; or a test of human behavior in a micro model—how much people would change their behavior relative to cost. —Dina Guzovsky • How the economic model of a professional baseball team works, how it makes financial decisions and the people behind the model. —Andrew Baird • How a monopoly works: Within some industries it seems like a monopoly might work best, like in the case of a utility, it might be a better way to provide service and sustain an expensive infrastructure. —Josh Bone • Regarding the economics of the film industry, how one spectacular year of good films can affect the economy, and the social and cultural ramifications of that. —Greg Kantrowitz • How the economic policies of different national administrations affected the country. —Armeen Poor • The economic model of a black market. —Jordan Raphel • Energy and the debate surrounding finite resources and alternative energy development. —Jelena Djordjevic
Josh Bone ’04
Armeen Poor ’04
“They do a disservice to their supporters. And the average American doesn’t understand: He doesn’t have the will or the information. Our problems are impossibly big; the set of costs and benefits is so complex. People just don’t see how complex it is. Everything is so interrelated; predicting full outcomes is impossible.” —D.J. Mauch ’04
“I’m a budding politician, so I’m interested in the impact and the intersection of decision-making. I come away asking how someone measures the validity of an argument. How can I use what I know to compare arguments—for instance, whether a corporate tax cut or a sales tax increase is best to increase revenue. Decisions on a national level will make a big difference. This course challenged lots of my beliefs.” —Josh
“I’m not a set Democrat or Republican, but this course has changed the way I look at policies. There are different ways to examine certain things. I can look at a policy and predict how one person, or another, would interpret it. Economics is helping me understand more fully what’s happening now.” —Andrew “I’ve always been interested in where financial and political issues intersect. I find the debates among economists on the big questions of the era interesting. Questioning what politicians say, their black-and-white positions, is always important. But I have a basic faith in the American system. The models are idealistic and on some levels, they’re flawed, but all these disparate forces keep moving along, and the system works pretty well. “My big worry is how big corporations are getting. It’s hard to imagine that could be a good thing.” —Dina
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“I have a better feeling now for how important the environment is to the economy. It should move to one of our top national priorities. After all, oil is a finite resource. Why aren’t we investing millions of dollars in alternative energy sources, research that could change the economies of the world forever? Maybe alternative energy is ‘the next big thing’ that will set off a new economic cycle, like trains, cars, planes and computers did in the past.” —Greg “I went into economics caring deeply about politics, but accepting my own ignorance about economics. I couldn’t develop my own opinion about politically relevant economic views. I needed to have the tools, and this course was my opportunity to begin to have a point of view. This is where you start, and I am definitely going to continue.” —Armeen
“Our general economic situation, when it comes to our relationships with other countries, and the economies of other countries, is scary. The linkages between us and the global economy are very clear. Our destinies are connected. What is the U.S. deciding to support and why?” —Jordan “It’s not that politicians are ignorant or simplistic; the list of what they need to be conversant in is long. How many topics can they know deeply and discuss fully? Also, every American is apathetic except about issues that directly affect him. Your everyday person may listen to negative comments about the impact of Wal-Mart on his community, but he won’t support action against Wal-Mart because WalMart represents his job. “I worry about the issue of energy; scientists, economists and politicians are all missing certain bases in their arguments. Energy issues are complex, economically volatile, and relate directly to political stability. Any country dependent on a single industry—like oil or another natural resource—is very vulnerable.” —Jelena
Milton seniors began the course with the sense that they would explore the connections among numerous disciplines, and their sense was confirmed. They were excited by the concrete and practical applications of economics, as they were chastened by the long-term implications of economic policy decisions. Each of them was thrilled by the intellectual exercise and attributed their ongoing interest and study plans to the extraordinary quality of David Ball’s teaching. Watch for the names of these politicians, writers, filmmakers, entrepreneurs, social activists and economists in the future. “My biggest reaction to economics is that there’s so much to learn. It’s not difficult to grasp but to use it you need to take much more. You can apply economics; it’s a great way to look at things.” —Andrew Cathleen Everett
What do you predict your college major will be? • Economics, or Ethics/Politics/ Economics, an interdisciplinary major, or Applied Math at Yale —Josh Bone • Economics at Boston College —Andrew Baird • Economics at Cornell —D.J. Mauch • Considering Economics at Harvard —Dina • Economics and Film at Vassar —Greg Kantrowitz • Economics or Political Science at Dartmouth —Armeen Poor • Engineering at Cornell —Jordan Raphel • Something in liberal arts, or possibly the interdisciplinary major, Politics/Philosophy/Economics, at University of Pennsylvania —Jelena Djordjevic
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Responses from the Ivory Tower Why do politicians speak so simplistically? Why are they focused on short-term goals? A consensus of Milton students studying economics raised these and other shared concerns. We asked two Milton graduates—economists, professors and researchers—to respond to their questions.
Austan Goolsbee ’87 Austan Goolsbee is professor of economics at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. Named one of the 100 Global Leaders for Tomorrow in 2002 by the World Economic Forum, a Switzerland-based group that builds partnerships between business and society, Austan has focused on major public-policy issues of the new economy, including the economics of the Internet. His research and writings have covered diverse areas, including Internet commerce, technology adoption, stock options and executive compensation, and government policy.
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In addition to teaching at the University of Chicago, Austan is an editor of the Journal of Law and Economics, a research fellow at the American Bar Foundation and at the National Bureau of Economic Research and recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. He has served as a special consultant to the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice for Internet Policy, and has advised Congress on issues of Internet taxation. His work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Business Week, the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Economist, and many others. Austan graduated summa cum laude with both a bachelor’s and master’s in economics from Yale University, and with a doctorate in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Reach Austan at goolsbee@gsb.uchicago.edu.
Helen F. “Sunny” Ladd ’63 Sunny Ladd is the Edgar Thompson Professor of Policy Studies and Professor of Economics at Duke University. Prior to joining the faculty at Duke, she taught at Dartmouth College, Wellesley College and Harvard University. An expert on state and local public finance and education policy, Sunny has written extensively on local tax policy, intergovernmental aid, the fiscal problems of U.S. cities, and education finance and policy. She recently chaired a three-year National Academy of Sciences committee on education finance.
Sunny’s most recent book, which she wrote with her husband, Edward B. Fiske, is Elusive Equity: Educational Reform in Post-Apartheid South Africa. She has also authored or co-authored books on school competition in New Zealand, school-based accountability, tax and land use policies, school finance and the fiscal problems of U.S. cities. In 2002, she received the Steven Gold award for work in state and local public finance and, in 2003, the Wildavsky award for lifetime achievement in budgeting and finance. She earned the Howard Johnson Teaching Award at Duke in 1994 and the Manuel Carballo Excellence in Teaching Award at the John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1986. Sunny earned a bachelor’s from Wellesley College in 1967, received a master’s degree from the London School of Economics in 1968, and earned a doctorate in economics from Harvard University in 1974. Reach Sunny at hladd@pps.duke.edu.
What questions about economic issues should Americans be asking the presidential candidates? Austan: The most important economic issues tend to be things that are not pressing matters of the moment so they don’t get discussed. The U.S. budget is totally unsustainable on its current path. The baby boomers will retire soon, and just paying Social Security and Medicare will cost us more than $20 trillion. The gap between what we will need and what we will have is large, and how that gap is closed makes a huge difference in the quality of life for all Americans. We can reduce spending, raise the net age of retirement, cut benefits or institute means testing. If we wait until then, benefits will need to be cut in half or taxes will need to double. Thinking right now about putting something away would not hurt nearly as much as the drastic action we would have to take when the crisis occurs. Hopefully, someone will ask candidates what they will do to prevent it. But, I wouldn’t cross your fingers for a complete answer. Sunny: The most important question Americans should be asking of the presidential candidates this year is whose interests are being served by their policies and platforms. The need to balance many competing interests as we develop policy and spending priorities is crucial. Politics plays an important role in a democratic system because it is the process by which conflicting values are reconciled. Economic analysis is essential in that it provides the framework and tools to predict who gains and who loses from various policy options. Thus, economics helps voters determine whose interests are being served and, with that information, to make judgments as to whether the distributional outcomes of the proposed policies are consistent with one’s values.
How do economists think about environmental issues? Austan: A lot of economists are environmentalists but they tend to be the kind of environmentalists that “real” environmentalists find aggravating. Economists mainly think about costs and tradeoffs so they are inclined to say “we need to balance the value of saving the environment against the costs of closing down industry.” Usually neither side likes that.
Sunny: As long as anyone cares about aspects of the environment such as clean air and water—and as long as these are in short supply—they are of concern to economists. The problem is that actions that contaminate the air or water are often not “priced.” Economists would call this lack of a price a “market failure,” and they would agree with environmentalists that there is probably a role for government action. Economists, however, would call for a cost-benefit analysis. Because maintaining the environment uses scarce resources, the benefits of maintaining the environment need to weighed against the costs. For environmentalists, costs are not an issue; for economists, attention to costs is important. Are there overarching principles that should guide our country’s approach to international policy as the interdependencies among global economies increase? Austan: Competition is good. Every one of the countries that has escaped from abject poverty has done so with an open economy model—that is, low tariffs, low barriers
to entry, openness to products that are produced cheaply elsewhere, and without excessive regulations preventing firms from investing or beginning companies there. In the U.S., our most productive industries are the ones that face competition. If your first thought is “What is best for consumers?” you are on the right track. Economists tend to make the argument that free entry for goods and compensation at a market rate for those goods is better than keeping things inefficient, which is what you have with our giant farm subsidies or protection of textiles. While competition is good, the majority of professionals believe that we should do much more to relieve the process of transition toward the openly competitive model. Sunny: Economists naturally emphasize the concept of comparative advantage, which leads them to support open economies and free trade. We cannot and should not fight against the view that free trade is advantageous to society as a whole—it has been in the past and will be in the future. Nonetheless, free trade policies inevitably hurt some people, and the pain to those groups is particularly severe during a period of economic recession or slow economic growth. In pursuing a free trade policy, we need to relieve the burden of adjustments across groups by, for example, reducing trade barriers gradually rather than precipitously and by providing opportunities for retraining. We need to give people time to adjust; it’s a mistake to ignore the pain of real people in real situations. What general policies would you advise to help move developing countries toward stability and economic progress? Austan: They can’t get out of poverty by closing themselves off to the world. That’s first. They also need to establish some property rights and eliminate excessive restrictions on entry and reduce corruption. All of these problems are big taxes on productive activity. Entrepreneurs won’t bother to start companies if they have to face such obstacles. 9 Milton Magazine
With that as a starting point, though, it’s also clear that developed countries need to open their markets to the kinds of products these countries are selling. Too often they are telling the countries to do better while blockading their every move for the sake of some domestic company. We now have several examples of poor countries that increased their wealth and improved the welfare of the people: Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Chile, and in Africa, Botswana did well in comparison with its neighbor countries. Some countries are picking winners (i.e., specializing in industries); others are very decentralized. Every country that adopted a blockout strategy seems to do terribly; the economy remains at a subsistence level. While criticism of the IMF policy toward developing countries has an element of truth, the problems stem from dictators who line their pockets, saddle their country with debts, and then force the people to pay with major structural adjustments. The welfare of people goes down, but blaming the situation totally on the IMF is misleading. The debate about forgiving the debts is active, but would that encourage other dictators? Sunny: Applying the solutions of abstract economic models—which are typically tightly structured—to messy real-world issues is hard. Normative economic models, those that focus on what ought to be, often emphasize economic efficiency, which is only one of many important values. Policymakers need to rely on more than economic efficiency to build good policy; process and equity issues are also important. The problem is that economic efficiency is often easier to address within the context of an economic model than is equity or process. What’s known as the “Washington consensus” view that favors austere budgets and no deficit spending has posed problems for developing countries with compelling equity agendas. Those countries are being told to address social welfare agendas without much money because they are not allowed to run deficits.
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Increasingly, however, policymakers are recognizing the importance for development not only of being open to the world, but also of having a strong legal and political infrastructure and adequate human capital through investments in education and training. An educated work force is central to an economic development strategy, either through providing the human capacity to develop new technology or by facilitating the transfer of existing technology from other countries. Capital moves around in a global marketplace; investors can move capital at will. Countries need to be nimble, and an educated population makes it possible for an economy to respond to the movement of capital.
policymakers to jump on just one part of a larger reform initiative, in this case, state-wide testing. Test-based accountability can be dangerous if not fully embedded in a larger standards-based reform strategy that includes attention to building the capacity needed to make sure no child is left behind. The second issue is school choice. Good arguments can be made for providing more choice of schools for low-income families, but there remains an important role for policy in assuring that choice provides broad-based benefits. Low-income families currently have far less choice of school than higher-income families, but a voucher program for private schools is not a good solution to the educational challenges facing such families. I would prefer to see more controlled choice within the public school system so that the interests of all groups can be balanced. My vision is for all children, regardless of their income, to have fair access to racially and socioeconomically balanced schools. What about the study of economics do you particularly enjoy?
What is your biggest concern within the focus of your specialized work? Austan: I focus on two things: taxes/government policy and competition within specific industries like the Internet and media. My major concern within the area I study is the issue I raised earlier: that unsustainable federal budget. Action now, although difficult, could help offset the huge implications of not dealing with it that will affect our country and our lives in 20 or 30 years. If you look at the budget numbers, the biggest contributors to the total are the entitlement programs, which are all growing, like Medicare. The joke in the profession is that in 25 years everyone is going to be a health economist, because that’s the only job there will be. Sunny: Two policy issues are of major concern in the field of education. The first, as exemplified by the federal legislation “No Child Left Behind,” is the tendency for
Austan: I am a data guy. Day-to-day what I like best is getting the numbers and trying to figure out how things relate to each other —how sales tax rates affect people’s online buying behavior, say, or how the rise of satellite television affects cable television subscriptions: something practical. The other thing I like about the field, though, is that it is so broad. While a lot of our academic research is on very specific topics, we also get to spend time thinking about bigger issues, like how we will pay for the retirement of the baby boom and how emerging markets can become rich to outsiders. You can get deeply into things to which people want answers, answers for specific questions that are either policy relevant or industry relevant. Economics seems boring. Once you get into it, though, how do you think about anything else? Sunny: While Milton gave me a terrific background in math, I didn’t want to major in math in college. Economics intrigued me
Sunny Ladd’s analysis of education policy includes books about South Africa and New Zealand Sunny Ladd’s chosen research “turf ” is frequently the substance of public debate. Initially, that included topics such as state and local taxes, fiscal disparities among local governments, and the design of aid formulas for cities. More recently, her work has focused on education policy, both in the U.S. and in other countries. Her current research on minority achievement gaps, which is based on administrative data for 1.3 million students and their teachers in North Carolina, has interested educational and political leaders throughout the country. She and her colleagues find a clear causal link between student achievement and certain characteristics of teachers. Teacher experience emerges as the consistently most important characteristic from among a set that includes the quality of the teacher’s undergraduate institution, having an advanced degree, teacher’s scores on licensure tests, and years of experience. Half the positive effect of experience on student achievement arises during the first few years of teaching. This finding regarding the importance of teacher experience helps explain the gap in achievement between minority and other students, because another part of Sunny’s research shows that black students in North Carolina are more likely than white students to be taught by a novice teacher. For example, in 2001, a black seventhgrade math student was more than 50 percent more likely than a white student to be taught by a teacher with no prior experience. Further, her research shows that North Carolina’s incentive program for schools—one that is relatively sophisticated in that it rewards teachers in schools with larger than expected gains in test scores— exacerbates the problems that schools with many low-performing and minority students face in retaining teachers.
“Our statistical analysis has contributed to the policy discussion largely because of the quality of the data. We have been able to move beyond correlations to evidence of causation,” Sunny says. “Some economists say that resources don’t matter. Our evidence counters that assertion.” Jointly with her husband, educational writer Edward “Ted” Fiske, Sunny has also evaluated major educational reform efforts in both New Zealand and South Africa. The boldness of the reforms in each country—one oriented toward efficiency and the other toward racial equity—make them ideal natural experiments for drawing insights for the U.S. and other countries. Their work was supported by two Fulbright grants to Sunny that allowed this husband-wife team to live for six months in New Zealand in 1998 and in South Africa in 2002. In 1989 New Zealand’s Labour government abolished its highly bureaucratic centralized school system and turned operational control of each of the country’s 2,700 primary and secondary schools over to locally elected boards of trustees dominated by parents. Two years later, a newly elected National government, pursuing an aggressive New Right agenda, ratcheted the reform stakes up a notch by abolishing enrollment zones and giving parents the right to seek to enroll their child in any public school. Fiske and Ladd’s book When Schools Compete: A Cautionary Tale (Brookings Institution Press, 2000) provides a comprehensive evaluation of the reforms.
Drawing on Ted’s perceptive observations as an education journalist and Sunny’s analytical skills as an economist, the authors describe the consequences of the new program and its relevance for policy debates in the U.S. and elsewhere about parental choice, voucher programs and charter schools. They conclude that the New Zealand experience raises some fundamental concerns about self-governing schools and competition. These include greater ethnic and socioeconomic polarization and the creation of winners and losers, or, in the New Zealand parlance, downwardly spiraling schools. They conclude that “reformers in other countries who are tempted to put their faith in simple governance solutions to complex questions of educational quality are likely to find them wanting.” Their second book, Elusive Equity: Education Reform in Post-Apartheid South Africa, which was published in September by the Brookings Institution Press, describes South Africa’s efforts to fashion a racially equitable education system out of the ashes of apartheid. The new black-controlled democratic government elected in 1994 faced the massive challenge of transforming the apartheid system with its 15 separate racially defined departments of education into one that would offer quality education to all persons, regardless of their race. “If you define equity in terms of race-blind treatment, the country has made remarkable progress,” Sunny said. ‘Nonetheless, the country has a long way to go to achieve equal educational opportunity or to assure that education is adequate in the sense of permitting all students to participate fully in the political and economic life of the country.” Emphasizing that history matters, Sunny Ladd and Ted Fiske draw parallels with affirmative action in the U.S. and suggest that, with an entrenched history of inequity, “race-blind reform is not enough.”
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Austan Goolsbee’s research helps direct industry strategy and public policy “Every economist likes the fact that while you work on specific, narrow issues, you also think about big questions. Economics is a merger of science and policymaking, and it’s extremely useful as an approach in thinking about the world,” Austan Goolsbee says about his career. Clues to some of those specific issues that relate to big-picture strategies are available at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Web site, http://www.nber.org, where a number of Austan’s research projects are listed among the “Working Papers.” NBER defines itself as “the nation’s leading nonprofit economic research organization. Twelve of the 31 American Nobel prize winners in economics and three of the past chairmen of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers have been researchers at the NBER.” As a research associate, Austan joins many other university professors in “disseminating unbiased economic research among public policymakers, business professionals and the academic community.” For the NBER, research associates concentrate on four types of empirical research: developing new statistical measurements, estimating quantitative models of economic behavior, assessing the effects of public policies on the U.S. economy, and projecting the effects of alternative policy proposals. Under this umbrella fit the titles of Austan’s working papers, such as: “The Impact and Inefficiency of the Corporate Income Tax: Evidence from State Organizational Form Data”; “The Consumer Gains from Direct Broadcast Satellites and the Competition with Cable Television”; or “Taxes and the Quality of Capital.” He focuses on public finance and industrial organization. Some recent areas of interest
because of its usefulness for policy. I began by teaching economics at Dartmouth and Wellesley, but then moved to a more explicit policy orientation at Harvard, first in city and regional planning and then at the Kennedy School of Government. I am currently in a policy program at Duke. I thoroughly enjoy
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include the impact of taxes on individuals and small businesses, the spread of technology and new goods, the way online competition affects offline industrial structure, and the recent behavior of capital investment.
“I enjoy getting deeply into the answer to a question that is either policy-related or industry-related. For instance, with the deregulation of cable television, we asked questions about how much of a check satellite television is on cable television. From the consumer’s point of view, we ask how many subscribers would switch to satellite television if the cost of cable television increased? On the industry side, if the penetration of satellite broadcast increases, how much should cable television change its pricing to adjust to the competition? Application of mathematical modeling to predict how people will make decisions is based in economic theory. “In the area of taxation, we have taken a close look at cigarette taxes. Governments raise cigarette taxes when they need revenue because that’s a win-win proposition: if cigarettes sales go down, people get healthier and if the sales don’t go down, states get wealthier. Cigarettes have been available since 1995 on Internet sites at lower prices—without the taxes. As
doing policy-relevant research. For the past decade, I have focused my research and writing on educational policy. We’ve carried out a broad-based longitudinal study of the outcomes for teaching and learning of state educational policy in North Carolina that has helped assess its effectiveness and will help design new pol-
Internet use grows, so has the price sensitivity for cigarettes sold in stores. In the last two years, states have doubled the cigarette tax, and because of the Internet availability, the state can’t bring in enough in revenue, and rather than buying less, people are buying more—from the Internet. That’s a lose-lose proposition. “Another industry-related question we explored had to do with the airline industry. We looked at how airlines respond to the threat of Southwest Airlines entering certain routes—alternative ways of reaching the same destination, but operating on either side of the endpoints of an established route. That is, Southwest operates on both sides of a specific route, but not between the exact destinations. How do the incumbent airlines that have managed the established routes respond? We found that they start cutting prices.” In line with the concrete and reliable information Austan shares through his research, as Milton’s graduation speaker, he offered the Class of 2004 down-to-earth advice at their graduation last June. “The thing I want to tell you,” he said, “is you have to trade off. I can do what I love or I can do this thing that makes money. I wouldn’t be an economist if I didn’t have something depressing to tell you so I will tell you this. By the time that your parents retire, the budget indicates that we are going to be about 21 trillion dollars underfunded. So taxes are going to be very, very high and there is never going to have been a more tax-advantaged time to do what you love rather than doing what’s going to make you money.”
icy. I enjoy the confluence of econometrics—sophisticated analysis aided by today’s advanced technology and ability to manipulate huge data sets—and policy evaluation. It’s fun to have the skills to do important work that may improve people’s lives. Cathleen Everett
Making Poverty History Becky Buell ’78 helps lead Oxfam’s effort
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To understand the hopes for Kibera, we should look at poverty trends globally. The most common lens on world poverty is the tracking done in relation to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a set of U.N. targets for poverty reduction by the year 2015 agreed upon by the world’s nations. These eight targets included: halving the numbers of people living in extreme poverty; significantly reducing maternal and infant mortality; and achieving universal primary education. Another target committed northern governments to redressing the huge imbalances in economic opportunity by reducing trade barriers, eliminating debt and meeting their aid commitments.
The world’s progress on MDGs includes good news and bad news. Good news is that globally, the 2015 poverty target may be met.1 Overall, the number of poor people in the world is decreasing. The number of extremely poor has fallen from 1.5
1The World Bank’s calculation of extreme poverty is the most common; it estimates the number of people with income of less than $1 per day, adjusted to allow for comparisons across economies. There are significant debates on the accuracy of this calculation. One group of analysts (Chan and Ravallion) assert that these figures grossly underestimate the levels of poverty reduction. Others (Reddy and Pogge) believe the calculation overestimates the progress made. For the purposes of this article, I’ve used the World Bank figures.
Ami Vitale/Oxfam
t the heart of Kibera slum in Nairobi, the prospect of a world without poverty seems hopeless. In Kibera, “Africa’s biggest slum,” over one million people live in a vast extension of tin and mud structures, with no electricity, water or sewage. Children in Kibera have a onein-ten chance of dying before they reach their fifth birthdays. If they survive, they are unlikely to go to school, and will probably be caring for someone in their household dying from AIDS. At least seven other slums like this in Nairobi, hundreds more in other African cities, and thousands across the globe compound Kibera’s impact.
Kibera, “Africa’s biggest slum,” in Nairobi, Kenya
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Ami Vitale/Oxfam
Kibera residents
billion to 1.1 billion. East Asia has already halved extreme poverty, 15 years ahead of time. On current trends, the poverty rate for the developing world as a whole will fall from 40 percent to 15 percent by 2015. High levels of economic growth in China actually mask the bad news: China accounts for most of the progress in decreasing poverty over the last 10 years. Outside China the number of poor people has risen. The poor in sub-Saharan Africa have almost doubled from 164 million to 316 million since the early 1980s. Life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa has fallen from 50 to 46 years of age since 1990, largely due to HIV/AIDS. Other sobering figures come from South Asia. Poverty levels have declined due to strong economic growth in India and other countries, but nearly half of all children under 5 are malnourished and illiteracy is high—23 percent for males and 39 percent for females. Even meeting the MDG for global poverty reduction leaves 900 million people living in poverty.
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Is it possible to hope for a world without poverty in our lifetimes? The easy answer is no. We will not come close to meeting the MDGs if we continue on our current course. Developing countries, largely dependent on commodity exports, will not achieve the growth levels needed for wider economic development. They will not be able to fund education and health care, key investments in human capital required for development. Inequalities will continue for women and girls due to domestic violence, prejudice and lack of investment in social services. HIV/AIDS will take an additional 45 million lives in Africa; South and Central Asia will see falling life expectancy levels due to the disease. Millions will lose their homes and agricultural lands due to flooding and droughts brought on by climate change and deforestation. For our generation, the more challenging answer is yes, not only can the world meet the MDGs, we can make world poverty a chapter of history. The data reveal that we can shift the perspective toward a different scenario. If we can eliminate poverty, why aren’t we doing everything in our power to make it happen? What is required is not a secret. First, we know that poverty reduction will cost money. Oxfam estimates that it will cost $150 billion per year from now to 2015 to meet the MDGs. This compares with $57 billion in current aid commitments. When we look at $956 billion in global military spending in 2003, we can surely find an additional $100 billion for development assistance, depending on our priorities. Wealthy northern countries have already committed to dedicating 0.7 percent of their GNP to development assistance. If countries honored their commitments $165 billion would be available for poverty reduction. A further $100 billion would be available for development if commitments to debt relief were met for the poorest countries.
Second, economic development requires economic growth, which requires investments in infrastructure for small-scale producers, as well as increasing trade. If Africa increased its share of global trade by just 1 percent, millions of people would be lifted out of poverty. But southern countries are at a structural disadvantage in the global trade arena. Oxfam estimates that developing countries lose $100 billion per year in potential income due to tariff barriers in the north. In a most striking example, Oxfam calculated that U.S. subsidies on cotton in 2001–02 resulted in losses to West African farmers of nearly $200 million. This also translates into a significant negative impact on national economies, and the chances for investment in health and education. Burkina Faso, for example, saw a 1 percent decline in its GDP and 12 percent drop in its export earnings due to unfair competition; Mali lost 1.7 percent of its GDP and dropped 9 percent in its export earnings. Third, we need immediate action on climate change. Although poor people have benefited the least from fossil fuel combustion, they are now the most vulnerable to the impact of global warming. Levels of food production in the developing world are predicted to decline significantly over the coming decade due to environmental change. Environmental risk factors—poor water quality, pollution, toxic waste—are also estimated to cause 20 to 30 percent of the entire disease burden in the developing world. A recent World Bank report asserts little likelihood, now, of reversing global warming, but we can slow it down and take steps to protect the most vulnerable. This will require increasing the efficiency of and decreasing the dependency on fossil fuels, investing in renewable energy and in restoring forests and watersheds. Politicians and the public express skepticism about increasing development assistance. Corruption and mismanagement within governments and institutions leads not only to waste, but to boosting the power of the most corrupt. These are real
• In China, the government gave financial assistance to upgrade infrastructure in rural areas, particularly for transportation and power. Farmers were given greater control over their land and production. As a result, rural poverty fell from 31 percent to 11 percent between 1990 and 1998. • India has made remarkable progress in education. Between 1992 and 1998, net enrollment of 6- to 10-year-olds increased from 68 percent to 82 percent. Much of this expansion was attributed to improved access, especially for girls and rural children. • In Iran, an innovative public health program, based on a network of state-supported “health houses” and the training of local health promoters, contributed to the reduction of child mortality rates from 120 to 30 deaths per thousand live births over a 20-year period. • In Brazil, the “Bolsa Familia” program has targeted 11 million extremely poor families with cash payments in exchange for school attendance, vaccinations and participation in adult vocation training. By 2003, 32 percent of Brazil’s families had received benefits from the program. • Uganda has brought down the HIV prevalence rate from 30 percent in 1986 to 6 percent in 2002. This is a huge achievement, accomplished through broad public awareness campaigns, strong presidential leadership and an effective ministry of health. • In northern Pakistan, per capita income in some poor rural areas has increased by 84 percent through increased investments in services and programs that involve community members in local level planning and monitoring public expenditure.
• The Loess Plateau Watershed Project in China successfully rehabilitated 1.5 million hectares of degraded land through investments in sustainable crop production, reforestation, terracing and water management. The project vastly improved water and soil conservation and the percentage of people living under the poverty line fell from 59 percent to 27 percent in 7 years. Other examples like these exist around the world. They show that with political will, proper resources and good management, we can turn poverty indicators around. Our generation—through our jobs, our votes, our influence and our resources— will decide whether ending poverty will be a political priority, or whether we are willing to let the downward trends take their course. Next year is crucial: In 2005, the U.N. will mark the 10-year countdown to the target date for achieving the MDGs. The United Kingdom will host the G-8, the meeting of the leaders of the world’s largest economies, with a commitment to put poverty on the agenda in a serious way. The world’s media will reflect back on the tenth anniversary of “Live Aid.” Approaching this historic moment is our opportunity to garner the political commitment and resources to make poverty history.
Ami Vitale/Oxfam
risks, but we can use the substantial experience about how to direct aid effectively. We just need to build from the many positive examples from around the world. For instance:
Expanse of Kibera rooftops
Reach Becky at rbuell@ntlworld.com. Becky Buell ’78
Becky Buell ’78 is the head of program policy for Oxfam, leading Oxfam’s global program and policy development, research and learning. She has worked as a researcher with the Institute for Food and Development Policy, served as the director of the International Development Exchange, and was Oxfam’s representative in Central America and Mexico from 1992 to 1998.
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Risk:
A Timely Gaining Expertise in the Western Siberian Basin John Fitzgibbons ’87 finds his decade of experience yields business opportunities
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ARCTIC OCEAN
Greenland Sea
Torshavn
Norwegian Sea
U. K.
Chukchi Sea
Bering Sea
North Sea NORWAY NETH. SWEDEN
Barents Sea Kara Sea
Klaipeda POLAND
ESTONIA
LITHUANIA LATVIA
St. Petersburg
LOVAKIA
Dniepe r
MOLDOVA
Voronez
Volgograd
Sochi
Shevchenko Aral Sea
KAZAKHSTAN Aralsk
Bodaybo
Juzno Sachalinsk
Khabarovsk
Sapporo
Krasnojarsk Chita
Novosibirsk Pavlodar
16 Milton Magazine TURKEY AZERBAIJAN
Mirnyj
L. Baykal
Atbassar Caspian Sea
ARMENIA
Sea of Okhotsk
Angara
Omsk
Krasnodar
GEORGIA
Sangar Jakutsk
Nizhnevartovsk
Izevsk Sverdlovsk Ufa Chelyabinsk
Volga
Black Sea
Perm
Petropavlo
Magadan
Norilsk
R U S S I A
Kirov
Kazan
Simferopol
Batagay
Syktyvkar
Gorkiy
Orol
Frunze
Adana
Igarka
Moscow
Kaluga
Vinnitsa
Dudinka Ob'
Vologda
Smolensk
UKRAINE
OMANIA
Volochanka Vorkuta
Yenisey
BELARUS
Lutsk
Khatanga
Severodvinsk
Novgorod
Lida
NGARY
Ust-Olenek Lena
Sovietsk
Olsztyn
Belaja Gora
Amur
CZECH
IA
Leptev Sea
FINLAND
Baltic Sea
GERMANY
Aldan
DENMARK
Le na
M
Irkutsk
Qiqihar
Choybalsan
Qaraghandy
L. Balkhash Balqash
Irtys h
Jixi
Hailar
Ulan Ude
Ulaangom Hovd
Ulaanbaatar
Akita
Vladivostok
Changchun Fushun
Bayanhongor
Harbin Jilin
NORTH KOREA
Sea of Japan
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W
hile on vacation over New Year’s Eve 1990, John Fitzgibbons ’87 and his family were among the throngs of celebrating Czechs whose palpable energy and optimism about a new, free future was irresistible and memorable. Struck then by the momentum of an emerging era, John came back to Harvard intent upon studying Eastern Europe and Central Europe during his final 18 months of college. From that point on, John seized opportunities, and parlayed risk and acumen into a business experience rare for a seasoned entrepreneur, let alone an inexperienced 20-something. John’s coursework in spring 1991 incited a senior thesis proposal about privatization of the Czech economy. While John was writing, several Harvard economics professors were providing technical assistance to the Russian government, helping to formulate aspects of a plan for economic reform. John’s timely research and writing on Czechoslovakia were relevant to the conversations in Moscow. The Russian strategy needed to address the difficult question of how to privatize hundreds of thousands of large companies in the aftermath of hyperinflation, which during the prior two years had devastated the currency and wiped away the savings available to potential indigenous buyers. To add complexity, the government and its advisors believed that economic reforms, such as
privatization, needed to be implemented as quickly as possible to minimize the potential of a rollback prior to completion. The government ultimately decided to implement a voucher privatization program, which in many fundamental ways mirrored the program that had been undertaken in Czechoslovakia. John was hired, initially by the World Bank and then by the U.S. Agency for International Development, to go to Moscow right after graduation (June 1992) and join the team of advisors in the ministry of privatization. He focused particularly on elements of the privatization program that offered opportunities for foreign participation. The year culminated in a trip with the Russian vice prime minister and another aide to London, Frankfurt, New York and Washington to meet with large prospective foreign investors and government officials. By then, the opportunities John had witnessed emerging in the private sector beckoned. Then 23 years old, and without capital, he started an oil advisory company with Peter Kellner, a Milton classmate, and a third partner. “With such a large resource base, oil was an obvious investment opportunity in Russia, and foreign investors in the oil industry had expressed clear and significant interest in pursuing ways to participate. We concluded we could provide local expertise that many Westerners needed without presuming that we had any more general expertise in the running of their businesses.” Between 1994 and 1996, the company assisted several Western oil companies in pursuing joint venture opportunities in Russia. By 1996, John felt he had gained enough expertise “to begin to raise capital and pursue Russian oil investment opportunities more efficiently as a principal rather than advisor.” He and his partners amica-
bly went their separate ways, and John began to raise capital. Over the subsequent five years he raised $125 million in private equity from U.S. and European financial institutions and two oil companies. By 2000, his company, Khanty Mansiysk Oil Corporation (KMOC), owned and operated 10 oil fields in the western Siberian basin with more than 500 million barrels of crude oil reserves and 1,200 employees. Production grew to 20,000 barrels of crude oil per day, of which over half was exported to Europe and the remainder sold in Russia. By this time KMOC had developed into a mature business and John’s focus migrated increasingly to cost of capital concerns. “We had sufficient drilling locations to employ as much capital as we could raise,” John explains, “but we were limited instead by the implied cost of that capital in private equity markets, which approached the returns we were able to generate on our capital employed. Therefore, in an effort to lower our cost of capital, we filed in 2001 for an initial public offering of stock in the U.S. and were ready to begin a mid-September road show when the 9/11 terrorist attack occurred, and the capital markets came to a standstill.” Following the uncertainty that resulted, Enterprise Oil, the U.K. oil company and an existing KMOC shareholder, raised its stake to 30 percent share of KMOC by privately acquiring stock from other KMOC shareholders in transactions that were approved by John and his management team. Shortly thereafter, Enterprise was unexpectedly acquired in a hostile takeover by Royal Dutch Shell. John’s plans to remain aggressive and nimble and to grow quickly were at odds with Royal Dutch Shell’s approach to decisionmaking. Shell indicated to John that it
John Fitzgibbons ’87
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John Fitzgibbons’s company, Khanty Mansiysk Oil Corporation, operated in Siberia from 1996 until it was purchased by Marathon Oil in 2003.
would take its time in deciding what to do with its inherited stake in KMOC, and this created uncertainty and anxiety for the rest of KMOC’s shareholders that quickly proved unmanageable. Partly because of these conflicting goals, John retained the investment bank Credit Suisse First Boston to explore strategic alternatives. Ultimately, in May 2003, Marathon Oil bought 100 percent of KMOC in a cash transaction that “suited my objectives perfectly. On the day of the close, I resigned as CEO, as did our COO, CFO and general counsel, but Marathon retained the rest of the organization and very few jobs were lost. It was a very satisfying result given my personal interest in seeing the preservation of a company that took many years and much hardship to build. At the same time, the terms of the exit were very attractive for our shareholders.” In reinvesting subsequent to the KMOC sale, John has geographically diversified his interests, but Russia remains a favorite focus. “I think I gained a certain amount of intuition and learned how to operate in a very high stress environment, following
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this rather atypical route in Russia during a chaotic time. The lessons learned on the ground by trial and error, and often huge error, proved both valuable and indelible. Many of those I will never forget.” Among other endeavors, John is today chairman and CEO of Integra Group, which is a new company “embarking on a roll-up consolidation of the Russian oilfield services sector. We expect to complete several acquisitions of Russian oilfield drilling companies over the next couple of years.” He is also the chairman of Atticus Publishing, which publishes children’s books and reference books—half with Russian content and half with Western content translated into Russian —for what John calls “a very interesting market opportunity: a large population with an extraordinarily high literacy rate that is just now earning sufficient discretionary income to begin spending on non-staple goods such as books. Among a market of avid readers, the book penetration has historically been very low, and we are participating in the correction of that imbalance.” The saga of Russian democratization continues to fascinate the world, as does the defense and critique of the economic reform program that resulted in such concentration of wealth in the hands of a few.
“During Yeltsin’s administration there was always talk of a communist rollback,” John recalls. “In its concern over a communist election victory, I think the West lost sight of the fact that relatively free and fair elections in the first place was a huge victory for reformers. After forcing the Communist Party to have to openly campaign for support in competitive elections, the fact that it campaigned so effectively and challenged reformists in power was an ironic achievement for the reformers. While the elections may not have been fully free and fair by Western standards, the peaceful transfer of power from Yeltsin to his successor was historic, and I believe there will be a similarly peaceful transfer to Putin’s successor.” John points out that under Putin both stability and the perception of stability have significantly increased, thus diminishing perceptions of political risk based on expected political volatility. The degree of repression is a concern, particularly recently, and “questions about whether Putin is resorting to strong-arm tactics to enforce civil law or consolidate his personal power are legitimate,” John feels.
Khanty Mansiysk oilfield
“Russia is at a stage of development where a firm hand is needed. The difficult question is how much is too much, and when are too many civil liberties sacrificed in the name of political stability?” In John’s opinion, Putin’s stewardship of the economic reform program has been impressive, but at the same time, the wind has been at his back, especially with regard to the commodity price cycle. “Over his tenure, commodity prices have been high enough that he has avoided having to make many structural changes and spending cutbacks that would have been socially wrenching and quickly eroded Yeltsin’s popularity. Nevertheless, fundamental and effective reforms have been implemented, and hopefully these will remain in place as Russia inevitably confronts more fiscally constraining circumstances in the future. “When I first got to Russia the expectation of violence (uprisings) prevailed, in response to inadequate means to distribute food, support industry or pay the military. None of that happened, not even in 1998 when Russia went through a cataclysmic economic crisis,” John says.
While violence in the private sector was more likely, and did happen, John believes treatment of that in the world press has always been exaggerated. His experience was similar with regard to corruption. His company, by choice and by law, was completely compliant with the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. His approach was that he would rather absorb any opportunity cost (i.e., walk away from any opportunity) rather than break the law, but “somewhat unexpectedly my opportunity cost was essentially zero,” he said. “We were never pressured to give bribes; we never saw organized crime. Perhaps the oil industry is too high profile and too politicized to be targeted by organized crime, which was probably focused on small cash transaction businesses. We simply never saw them.” Business planning for John’s ventures involved forecasting challenges that carried huge fiscal risks. In the early 1990s, there was little fiscal and tax transparency. “When we started, there were two taxes levied on our business; by the end, there were 15. For a while, the government introduced new and often contradictory taxes each year, but during the late ’90s they focused on making their unwieldy system efficient. Their strategy was to optimize compliance and absolute tax
receipts; they opted for a simple and low burdensome flat tax—one that stimulated compliance. The Russians that we hired used to be very focused on avoiding taxes; it was a real priority for them and a real problem for us. The tax reform completely changed their attitudes, causing them to insist on the opposite—full onshore compliance. This was a great benefit to employer, employee and country.” There is legitimate criticism, John acknowledges, that the voucher privatization system created a concentration of wealth, that billionaires emerged within a couple of years. Isn’t that a sign, critics point out, that the plan was corrupt and exploited, that the shock therapy and acceleration of privatization was wrong because it created such social and economic inequity? John argues that the economic advice from the Western team was largely correct. He points out that economic theories—always logical, intuitive and neat—must always be tailored to political and social realities, which were unprecedented in post-Soviet Russia. Russia was trying to do things that made sense from
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Khanty Mansiysk operations
an economic perspective, but the environment lacked the infrastructure to fully implement privatization. “Given the inevitability of emerging wage and wealth disparity, which exists to different degrees in every free market, would it have been possible to undertake privatization and other reforms slowly—to drag them out over many years and potentially through political turnover?” John asks, “Had privatization not been quickly completed, then other longer-term macroeconomic reforms would have had to have been undertaken with government resolve alone in the absence of any private sector support and pressure. The private sector became a potent political constituent that introduced critical balance of power. Given the lack of understanding among Russia’s new political constituency, it seems almost impossible to imagine that all of Russia’s progress over the last 15 years could have
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been possible without a vibrant private sector. Privatization both created that vibrancy and ensured the irreversibility of the broader reform momentum. Without these reforms, the alternative economic deterioration would have been worse for everyone. In this context, the emergence of wealth disparity could be viewed as an acceptable tradeoff.” As recent events have demonstrated, much hangs in the balance in Russia. Putin’s course of action, how he manages the dynamics of power, opposition, individual rights—the critical system of law now under stress and moving into new territory—will speak volumes to an international community whose attention is riveted. For investors like John, the adventure continues. Reach John at jbf@brkln.com. Cathleen Everett
Race:
AP Photo/George Nikitin
An Economic Reality—not a Biological Reality
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ith the Democratic National Convention showcasing Boston to the world and with the Big Dig knocking down literal and social barriers to once insulated, self-contained neighborhoods, much has been made of the new Boston. But, as Callie Crossley, a producer and regular panelist on PBS Boston affiliate WGBH’s “Beat the Press,” reminded us in a convention-week editorial, racial tension lies just below the surface. “Boston’s reputation as racist persists even as the mayor proclaims diversity is the strength of the city,” but, says Crossley, “the population has always been diverse; that is not the issue.” The issue is about having a place and an equal voice at the tables of power. Crossley notes that the heroism of Crispus Attucks makes him “part of the very foundation of this city. Yet his descendants have yet to find a permanent place in the decision-making structure here. Asians
and Latinos, too, are nearly invisible in the top ranks of business and political leadership. It is still unusual to see crossfertilization of the races in any business or social setting.” Creating a true new Boston is “about changing Boston’s reality.” And increasingly researchers are finding that that reality, the reality of racism, not only in Boston but across the nation, has its deepest roots in economics. In one of the profound ironies that make race such a complex and inextricable part of our national psyche, the Declaration of Independence gave rise to the idea of race. Because the economy of the colonies depended primarily on slavery, and because a significant number of the signers of the Declaration were themselves slave owners, the declaration that “All men are created equal” was, to say the least, problematic for our founders. By establishing whites as superior and “prov-
ing” that some men were, in effect, not men after all, the idea of race helped reconcile the Declaration of Independence with the inequities of colonial society. It institutionalized racial practices, justified them as natural, god-given. As the United States grew as a nation, those practices became more widespread and more imbedded in our culture. (So imbedded, in fact, that, in his essay “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks,” Ralph Ellison noted that “one of the first epithets that many European immigrants learned when they got off the boat was the term nigger—it made them feel instantly American.”) Much of the information in the preceding paragraph comes from numbers 7 and 8 of “Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Race,” background information for RACE: The Power of an Illusion, a three-
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AP Photo/Mike Fiala
This is an overview of a neighborhood off Desert Foothills Parkway in south Phoenix on Thursday May 6, 1998. Statistics show there’s an ever-widening gap between personal income and the cost of housing around Arizona. That means more and more residents are finding they can’t afford to buy a home or even rent an upscale apartment.
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part PBS documentary that came out in 2003. Filmmaker Llew Smith ’72 produced the third part of that series, “The House We Live In,” an examination of the “racialized nature of our laws, courts, customs, and, perhaps most pertinently, housing.” The film shows that, while slavery has passed, racism has not lost its economic roots. Says Llew, “The big challenge is not small groups burning crosses. The big challenge is invisible, institutions that apply values based on race.” The centerpiece of the documentary is a stunning example of this invisible, institutionalized racism: the inequalities that prevailed in the 20th-century housing boom, especially after World War II. From 1934 to 1962 the federal government underwrote $120 billion in new home loans but nonwhites received less than 2 percent of those loans. While the economic fortunes of whites soared with the housing markets, nonwhites lived in neighborhoods classified, or “redlined,” by the government and by lenders as bad risks. This monumental inequity set in motion a terrible spiral effect of inequities. Confined to “bad risk” neighborhoods, nonwhites were unable to secure credit for starting businesses or buying homes; they could not build equity. Lack of equity meant lower tax base which meant weaker funding for schools which meant fewer resources in the classroom which meant weaker education which meant less likelihood of advancement to higher education which meant less likelihood of reaching the earning power needed to buy out of the ‘bad risk’ neighborhood.
Income vs. wealth But even nonwhites who do manage to break the cycle of redlining face significant obstacles. In a 2002 article by the National Education Association, entitled “The Wealth Factor,” Dalton Conley, sociologist and author of Being Black, Living in the Red, drew a sharp distinction between income and wealth. Income is the money families earn; wealth includes everything a family owns: a home, other property, stocks, savings, etc. Wealth provides deeper economic security than income. Young adults from families with
wealth can borrow from their parents to begin the process of accumulating their own wealth. Families with wealth have a cushion against hard times. They have assets to draw on if a breadwinner loses a job or if a family member faces serious illness. With those assets they can continue to pay the mortgage and build equity. In a background interview for RACE: The Power of an Illusion, sociologist Melvin Oliver called assets “the social capital that makes life easier for the next generation.” Income, he said, “feeds your stomach, but assets change your head. That is, you really do act differently when you have a cushion of assets so that you can strategize around important opportunities in life. When you are living from paycheck to paycheck, you just think about how you are making the next day or the next week or the next month happen. But, when you have a set of resources that allow you to think about your future in a positive way, you can strategize about the future, create and take advantage of opportunity.” On the other hand, families without assets, who depend solely on income, have no economic resilience; they can be wiped out by a job loss. Without income to pay the mortgage, they can lose the house and end up renting in a much poorer neighborhood. To many sociologists, the exclusion of nonwhites from wealth continues to form the core of modern-day racism. Conley found that black families actually save more of their income than whites, yet they own less. A 1998 study showed that nonwhite families have less than one fifth the median net worth of white families. Says Conley, “Wealth is both the pot at the end of the rainbow and the means for getting there.” It is no accident that a revival of A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 chronicle of a black family’s struggles with identity and property, riveted audiences this year, more
than 40 years after it first appeared on Broadway. Not much has changed. Or as Prince writes in his new song “Dear Mr. Man,” “Same song with a different name/Might not be in the back of the bus/But it sho’ feel just the same.”
The ‘extra cost’ of blackness Patricia Williams, a lawyer, a Columbia University professor of law, a columnist for the Nation, and winner of a MacArthur genius grant, described buying a house in a speech to the DuBois Institute in 1997. Because Professor Williams was “not only middle class but matched the stereotype of a good white person,” the loan officer at the bank, who had never met her, checked the box for white on the Fair Housing form. When Professor Williams then returned the form with white crossed out and black checked off, “the deal came to a screeching halt. The bank wanted more money as a down payment, they wanted me to pay more points…they wanted to raise the rate of interest.” And when, in response to these changes, Professor Williams threatened to sue under the Fair Housing Act, she came face to face with what she calls “the new rhetoric of racism.” It was not a matter of
race, she was told, it was a matter of financial risk, of economics. Demographics show that, when blacks move into a neighborhood, whites leave, taking municipal resources with them, and property values drop. To compensate for this anticipated drop in value, banks charge blacks higher prices. So, the new rhetoric goes, even though race is never mentioned, “the ingredient of blackness is cast not just as a social toll, but as an actual tax, a fee, an extra contribution at the door, an admission price, the higher costs of handling my dangerous propensities, my inherently unsavory properties.” Some researchers and intellectuals could point to Professor Williams and her career as proof positive that racial injustice no longer exists, but her story shows that there are still powerful forces working against equality. Says Llew, “It’s not so much a conspiracy to elevate white Americans. It’s that we have so long made assumptions about parity. We have to realize its mythology.”
Race: no genetic basis In RACE: The Power of an Illusion, we learn that there is no biological basis for race, that, in fact, two people of different
AP Photo/Steven Senne
Income is the money families earn; wealth includes everything a family owns: a home, other property, stocks, savings, etc. Wealth provides deeper economic security than income.
Passersby walk past the Bromley-Heath Housing Complex in the Jamica Plain district of Boston.
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AP Photo/John Heller
In the former Liberty Park housing development in Pittsburgh on Thursday, June 17, 2004. Gwendolyn Venay and her two children are the last of 160 families who live in the last row of townhouses of a federally subsidized housing project that is slated to be torn down. Venay has refused to move, claiming she has been unable to find a comparable three-bedroom townhouse.
skin color might have more in common genetically than two people of the same skin color. Race, then, is a social construct. In a background interview for “The House We Live In,” John Powell, director of the Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in the Americas at Ohio State University, notes that in the United States during the 1700s and 1800s blackness varied from state to state. In one state, you were black if you looked black. In others, you were black if you had onequarter black in your lineage. “There’s this curious thing about the way we’ve defined race in the U.S., where a white woman can have a black child but a black woman can’t have a white child. Obviously, that’s a social construction; it doesn’t make any sense biologically.” Dalton Conley’s research on wealth points to another way in which blacks and whites are more similar than different. Debunking the “achievement gap” between black and white students, Conley found that, while black students are more likely to be expelled from school than white students, that difference “evaporates” when comparing families with similar wealth and parental education. Similarly, black students are overall much less likely than
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whites to graduate from college, but, when family wealth is similar, they are more likely than whites to graduate. In short, economic and social factors, not biology, predict success. This new way of analyzing race, of seeing it as an economic, social reality, extends into medicine and health. Troy Duster, professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley and New York University, looks carefully at the biological effects of racism. Is it that blacks have a genetic predisposition for certain diseases or is it that, because of unfair housing practices, diminished educational opportunities, etc., blacks are, as Llew Smith puts it, “in an ocean where the water is polluted?” Is it possible to calculate the psychological and physiological toll that widespread, often invisible, racial prejudice takes on the nonwhite communities? Duster would argue that, on a number of significant levels, race is a health issue. He cautions that we should not assume that racism magically disappears just because race does not have biological origins. In fact, he says, we can better understand the full reality of institutionalized racism by examining its biological consequences.
“Health disparities between different groups must be studied more…Prostate and breast cancers constitute biological conditions that might well be affected by societal forces and conditions, from different patterns of nutritional intake to systematic exposure to toxic waste.” In other words, where you are able to live and what you are able to eat can have significant impact on your health. Seen in this light, the insidious, far-reaching impact of inequitable practices like redlining become even more disturbing. In his article “Unlikely Mix—Race, Biology, and Drugs” for the San Francisco Chronicle, Duster cites research by Michael Klag that further corroborates the notion of the polluted ocean. Klag found that “the darker the skin color, the higher the rate of hypertension for American blacks, even inside the African-American community.” Seemingly race-specific health issues were “not biological or genetic in origin, but biological in effect (my italics) due to stress-related outcomes of reduced access to valued goods such as employment, promotion, housing stock, etc.” Health issues, then, could be laid directly at the feet of social and economic issues.
Experiencing whiteness As the post–World War II housing boom described in “The House We Live In” would indicate, any consideration about race must also take into account what the documentary calls the “unmarked” race: whiteness. For instance, affirmative action, Smith says, “makes most sense when you understand how other communities have been supported. It’s not just who gets locked out; it’s who gets promoted.” A 1997 conference “The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness” held at the University of California at Berkeley examined “how white people experience and maintain their social positions in a nation deeply fragmented by inequality” and “how whiteness underpins racial division and inequality in the U.S. and in the global economy.” “An important starting point,” the conference report noted, “is to acknowledge that the color of your skin, your gender, and the status of your job (or lack of one) largely determine your place
in society. All too often, whites fail to recognize that their whiteness is a racial category that carries with it a number of unspoken and largely unchallenged social benefits…As a racial group, whites, even those who are not actively prejudicial or discriminatory, are the passive inheritors of a system of privilege and wealth.” In an interview that served as background for RACE: The Power of an Illusion, Beverly Daniel Tatum, president of Spelman College, observed that whites “sometimes struggle with the concept of white privilege…If you are a person who has that privilege, you don’t necessarily notice it. It is sometimes taken for granted.” Using the example of racial profiling, Tatum muses that a white person does not pull into his driveway at the end of a drive and say, “Gee, I wasn’t randomly stopped today.” Nor, after renting an apartment, does he say, “Gee, I benefited from being white today. I got that apartment I wanted.” As the Berkeley conference report stated, “That the reality of these privileges is often not accepted or understood is due partly to the fact that this uneven distribution has been around for so long that no one can be held directly responsible for making it.” So what is to be done? In her editorial about the underlying racism of Boston, Callie Crossley states that meaningful, long-lasting change requires not “tidying up” but “deep cleaning.” Both Colorblind Racism by Sally Lehrman and Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Colorblind Society, coauthored by Troy Duster, look pointedly at “the legacy of accumulated preferential treatment” for whites. The Whitewashing authors cite George Lipsitz, who argues that the myriad benefits of being white encourage white Americans, knowingly or unknowingly, “to invest in whiteness as if it were a form of venture capital and to work at increasing its value. When it comes to race, white Americans’ social choices are very often molded by the relationship between whiteness and accumulated racial advantages.” For Beverly Tatum the issue is not “Are you racist?” but “Are you actively working against that system of advantage”? In Race Matters, author and profes-
Llewelyn Smith ’72 is a documentary filmmaker; project director of the Peabody and Emmy Award–winning series Africans in America; developer of 70 programs for PBS’s American Experience; and writer, director and producer of Part III, “The House We Live In,” of RACE, The Power of an Illusion.
sor Cornel West advocates a grassroots politics of conversion “among the toiling everyday people.” He says that we must replace racial reasoning with moral reasoning: Is it fair? That notion of fairness should, in turn, dictate institutional practice. The authors of the Berkeley conference report believe that research is the key: “it can lead whites of all classes to conclude that the social and psychic tolls of social inequality are too costly for whites to sustain…But, clearly, ignoring or dismissing race and class is not the answer—withdrawal gets us nowhere. Another and more productive option is to reject both guilt and denial and instead make space for ongoing public discussion about the social relations that divide us all.” Llew Smith credits Duster with
bringing these imbedded, too long unspoken, advantages and prejudices to light. “The research is tremendous. He’s arguing for a different view of race. It’s a matter of looking closely at the statistics. The one thing I’m seeing in this whole question is that inequalities are continuing in ways that we are only beginning to understand.” It is important, adds Llew, for all of us “to step up, to become part of the discourse.” Documentaries like “The House We Live In” show the way. They bring us closer to the realities of economic practice and racism and, in so doing, closer to a necessary understanding of who we really are. Reach Llew at Llewsmith@yahoo.com. Rod Skinner ’72 25 Milton Magazine
Microfinance: The Little Engine That Could? Jared Miller ’97 explains how small financial services add up
I
s the impact of microfinance on the global economy powerful enough to change the world? “We’ve got the financial measurements down pretty well, but the social return is harder to measure,” Jared says. As an analyst with Microfinance Information eXchange (MIX) at the World Bank— spun off from the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP)—Jared Miller ’97 wants to find the answer. “Microfinance—small-scale financial services, generally for the self-employed poor—can make a tremendous difference in a person’s life, and some of the financial institutions that serve poor people are also immensely profitable,” says Jared, who collects and analyzes microfinance information for the global industry and studies the market’s infrastructure. The interaction of social impact and financial self-sufficiency make microfinance a hot topic on the left and the right of the political spectrum, Jared says. “Some people see it as a social intervention, and others see it purely as a commercial exercise. The emergent idea is that these are complementary, not mutually exclusive goals,” he says.
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Jared cites stories of microfinance helping individuals mitigate risk and emerge from poverty, but reaching enough of them to make the collective impact improve the macroeconomic outlook remains an enormous challenge. “Un-banked” people are about three billion strong worldwide— most of them have no access to banks and subsist on less than $2 a day. “Microfinance attempts to bridge the absurd gap between supply and demand for microfinance. If you serve more people, the institutions can make economies of scale, lower their operating costs and expand, relying more on investment and less on donations to sustain themselves.” Careers are often rooted in unlikely mixes of incidents and dispositions, and Jared’s love of surfing is fundamentally connected to his work in microfinance. “While I’m not sure I was a very mature student at Milton,” he says, “during my time at Milton I went to Costa Rica to do a month of community service and to surf. I spent a lot of time with the locals, and in the water, too. I didn’t know what I wanted to do—but I did know that I wanted to return to Latin America.” Later, as a student at Middlebury College in Vermont, Jared developed an interest in geography and then finance; after an internship study-abroad experience in
Chile with the Chilean govenment’s Poverty Alleviation Fund (FOSIS), he returned to campus to design his own course in microfinance; before graduating with a bachelor’s in geography and Spanish with a minor in economics, he earned a grant that allowed a research stint with Acción International and Banco Solidario in Cayambe, Ecuador, which intensified his interests. Now, he manages MIX’s relationships with 80 Latin American microfinance institutions (MFIs). “What first inspired me about microfinance is that it gives people the power to make economic decisions that can change their lives,” Jared says. “It’s far different than telling a whole town, for example, that they are now going to plant yams to make a living because that’s what some aid agency has decided for them.” Microfinance success stories are plentiful and powerful: a man in Uganda needs only several hundred dollars to stock the parts he needs to make his motorcycle repair shop viable; a man in Guatemala, who has worked in the fields his whole life, begins to make furniture—a microloan allows him to buy appropriate tools and establish a full-time business; a woman in Ecuador wants to send her children to school instead of work—she uses a
AP Photo/Sayyid Azim
Members of the Fikina Kibiashara business group make payments on loans a bank would never have given. Tailors, vegetable and grain vendors used clothing and wastepaper dealers, are the members of the Fikina Kibiashara business group.
microloan to pay off a loan shark whose interest has been outstripping her profit at her crafts stand, and she is able to buy a small house. The stories are many and, notes Jared, women are statistically more likely than men to take a microloan, which averages $580 in most countries, and make it work for them.
“Credit and savings are two sides of the same coin,” says Jared. “With someone who can save—if he suddenly needs money, it’s available. With credit, however, that person is engaged in a contract that’s not easily broken. The need for savings is universal, but the need for credit is sporadic.”
Jared points out that serving small depositors is as important as making microloans to the same constituency. Mobilizing savings allows poor people to plan for crises, seize an opportunity before it passes, accumulate enough money to pay for children’s schooling or respond to other family needs or emergencies; savings can also allow people to accumulate money that needy relatives might wrestle from them, if the money were not secured at a reputable institution, Jared says. These same savers need simple access to their bank, as well as liquidity of funds and returns. On the macro level here, the catch is that many microfinance institutions (MFIs) find that the operational costs associated with small depositors are formidable if they are legally allowed to offer the service in the first place. Likewise, donors often find offering credit to be a more compelling way to boost clients’ standard of living.
Microfinance will not end global poverty, Jared says, but when combined with improved health care, education and other services, it could be part of a larger solution to strengthen standards of living and human dignity. While microfinance is relevant everywhere—including in the United States, most notably through Acción International (www.accion.org)—it has seen particular success in Bangladesh and Bolivia. Jared notes that many Eastern European countries with transitional economies are the latest hot spots for microfinance, helping financially underserved people. Jared reiterates part of why microfinance can elevate human dignity where pure charity does not: “It’s not a gift—it’s a loan contract, and it must be repaid,” he says.
Most of the world's three billion poor people cannot get jobs in the mainstream economy. Instead, they survive by starting their own tiny businesses, or microenterprises. Many microentrepreneurs are women. In Latin America and Africa, 65 percent of borrowers are women—many of them attempting to provide necessities for their children and pay for schooling. Acción International, a private nonprofit organization that facilitates microlending worldwide, reports a historical loan repayment rate of 97 percent.
Reach Jared at jaredwmiller@earthlink.net. Heather Sullivan
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Mr. Mall:
The Man Who Knows Your Shopping Secrets Paco Underhill ’70 knows more about shopping than arguably any man alive. On a tour of a London shopping mall he reveals to Sarah Vine, writer for The Times of London, the science and the psychology behind how we shop. We are on our way to Brent Cross shopping centre, Paco Underhill and me. Paco is squeezed into the passenger seat of my Skoda Estate, holding on tight to the door strap and trying not to look too worried as we negotiate the A40/A406 interchange. Perhaps it’s the small matter of a missing driver’s wing-mirror (a bus, I wasn’t even in the car, OK?) that’s making him look so uncomfortable, or perhaps it’s just the fact that at home in New York he drives an Audi: being seen in a Skoda must be traumatic. Or it could just be that he is just plain uncomfortable: Paco is over 6 ft (1.83m) tall, most of it in the leg.
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Paco’s job, indeed his life, is retail. His company, Envirosell, sounds like something out of a Philip K. Dick novel, but it’s not as sinister as that. Well, perhaps only a little bit. Envirosell specializes in the science of selling. It studies the patterns and trends of our purchasing habits, analyzes them and then applies the results to the high street. You may think you’re popping into Boots for a new lipstick, but it’s more complicated than that. The shade you choose, the mirror you use, the type of brand that attracts you, the positioning of the display, all these are quantifiable factors and, more importantly, ones that once measured can be tweaked and tailored to maximize the retail environment. But let’s get back to the A406. A while ago we passed the giant North London branch of IKEA. As it happens, Envirosell has been working with IKEA, although Paco is not at liberty to reveal in what specific capacity. Can he at least explain, I wonder, how it is that while IKEA cus-
tomers invariably describe the experience as hellish, they keep coming back? “Two reasons,” he says. “Firstly, the product is immediately accessible. How many furniture stores do you know where you can take the product home there and then, with no six- to eight-week delivery time and no extra charges? And secondly [he pauses for effect, something he does quite a lot. It’s his way of letting you know that he’s getting ready to expound a theory], the computerization of the automobile. Up until around 1983, men kept themselves busy on weekends by tinkering with their cars. Now that the car engine is run by computer, the male of the species is looking around for other places to be useful.” Simple: self-assembly furniture is not just a cheap way of filling your home, it also keeps your inner caveman out of trouble. This is what Paco is about: On the one hand, he understands the dynamics of commerce; on the other, he is transfixed by shopper psychology. It’s the basis of his
new book, engagingly entitled The Call of the Mall, in which he takes the reader on a journey through the archetypal American mall, from motorway slip road all the way to the ladies’ loo and back again. The tone, like the man himself, is confident, assertive, straightforward and occasionally unnerving. As a book, it reads itself; as a manifesto for a global shopping philosophy, it’s fascinating. The purpose of our visit to Brent Cross is to ascertain the health or otherwise of the shopping center. So far, the signs are not good. Paco is incensed by the difficulty of the approach from the road, which he describes as “criminal.” For him, access is almost as crucial as to what lies inside. “I’m glad it’s you doing the driving,” he says, which I don’t take as a compliment. As we approach the building itself, Paco’s first rule of mallery is amply demonstrated. “Most malls are eyesores, at least from the outside.” Brent Cross appears to the visitor as a large, grey concrete box surrounded by car parks. So far, it has scored zero points: hard to get to, and ugly to boot.
quickly as possible: that’s where the money gets spent. Also, the car park is full of ugly little kiosks selling tat, which lowers the general tone, as well as a Metropolitan Police help point. It’s not very encouraging. Through the double doors and we enter what Paco calls “the landing strip.” Most shopping malls have several of these, usually situated near the big, familiar stores, in this case John Lewis. This is
What more could we want? Let’s go inside. Strolling the few yards to the entrance, Paco explains his parking lot theory to me. Parking lots, or car parks as we like to call them in the U.K., are an integral part of the out-of-town shopping experience. “The entrance to the parking lot is where the mall really begins.” It follows, therefore, that some attention should be paid to them. In the case of Brent Cross, the shoppers should be directed to the nearest spot, to speed things up and keep tempers from fraying. Besides, you want to get people out of their cars and inside as
This, Paco tells me, is where so many malls get it wrong: parking for blokes. Shopping is primarily a female pastime; for every enthusiastic female shopper, there’s a man dragging his feet. This is partly because when men do shop, they do it differently. They know what they want, they get it, they leave. Women, on the other hand, like to take their time, drift around, try on several choices. It’s to do with the way their brains work, he explains: “For example, men and women orient themselves differently: men move from A to B in a logical, linear fashion; women orient themselves according to familiar landmarks.” He’s right: when I drive I don’t necessarily take the most direct route, I take the one that’s most familiar to me, even if it’s a little longer. It invariably infuriates my male passengers.
As I steer into the car park and head straight for the nearest door, Paco chuckles knowingly. I am, he explains, behaving like a typical shopper: I want a space right in front of the entrance, and I’m prepared to drive around until I find one. Which I won’t. Ha, I say, just watch me. By some extraordinary fluke, I turn the corner and there it is: a space right outside the John Lewis entrance to the mall.
“There,” he says, indicating a cluster of benches, “is a perfect example of mediumterm parking being used as long-term.” Ahead of us, in the middle of the “landing strip,” a bored middle-aged man stares at the television screens in the electronics shop; behind him, the father of four sweet little boys and a baby girl struggles to keep them all in one place. Their mother, presumably, is off exercising the family credit card.
where the customer adjusts to the change in light, slows to a more leisurely walking speed and generally shifts into shopping gear. Paco explains that the stores closest to the entrance are not, as you might expect, prime sites. People are too busy getting used to the new environment to start spending—yet. For this reason, the plum sites are in the bowels of the mall; the losers cluster around the outside. Here, we have a Toni & Guy and an entirely customer-free electronics store on one side and an uninspiring John Lewis window display on the right. Paco bounds over to the corner of the John Lewis display and beckons me to join him.
By not providing anything more than a few benches to keep blokes amused, Brent Cross is making a large chunk of its visiting public feel unwanted and uncomfortable. It’s also limiting the spending potential of women who, worried that their other halves are bored out of their minds and getting tetchier by the minute, will curtail their visits in the interests of domestic harmony. Much of what Paco says in his book, and indeed during our tour of Brent Cross, would appear to be straightforward common sense. Yet it’s astonishing how little retailers seem to understand—or indeed care—about the minds of shoppers. Brent Cross is full of glaring omissions: there are no store directories at the entrances; no food court (a hungry customer is going to run out of stamina faster than one with a full tummy); no trolleys or buggies for
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hire at the entrances (there were some shopping trolleys with toy cars attached but they were in the heart of the center, and at the top of the escalators, so anyone with shopping and/or children in tow would have had to go a long way before finding them). By the time we arrive at Fenwick, Paco is feeling quite chipper. Brent Cross is a master class in all that is mediocre in the world of retail: all his theories are being
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demonstrated, one by one. We stand outside the entrance to Fenwick and survey the higgledy-piggledy array of Easter bunnies, brightly colored bathing costumes and random homewares that greet us. The place is a mess. I point out that this strikes me as odd, as Fenwick in Bond Street is quite a chichi affair, perhaps a little dated nowadays, but a classy spot nonetheless. Paco explains that department stores with high-profile flagships often translate tattily to malls, as all of the quality control and effort goes into the fancy branch.
By way of demonstration, he puts his hands on my shoulders and points out, one by one, the contrasting typefaces and resulting cacophony of messages facing us. We count at least 40 brands, each struggling to assert itself. It’s exhausting, and we haven’t even crossed the threshold. Paco deftly sidesteps some beach thongs and draws my attention to the store guide, with its Hyacinth Bucket–style language pretensions. “What on earth is ‘Occasionwear’?” he asks. Evening dresses, I say, and we head off in search. “Hello, how are you today,” he asks the saleslady in Occasionwear. Fortunately, she’s one of those unfazeable types in which department stores such as Fenwick specialize. She’s not intimidated by Paco, unlike the manageress of a small jewelry store we entered earlier, who practically threatened to call security if we didn’t stop discussing her window displays. “Why is your department called Occasionwear?” Paco asks, and the lady explains that they aim to cater for all formal occasions, day or evening. This response seems to satisfy Paco, but he is not impressed by the changing rooms. Bad lighting, and too small. Also, where are the relevant accessories? Hats are just visible in the distance, but—and now the saleslady joins in—shoes and handbags are downstairs. It’s an awful nuisance, she explains, it would be much
Paco Underhill ’70
easier if the customer could try a whole outfit on together. Another missed retail opportunity. Before we leave, Paco urges me to try one last thing: the loos. Paco is a firm believer in loos. Used correctly, a loo is not only a place to relieve oneself, but somewhere to gather information. After all, you have a captive audience. Why not get the local bathroom store to furnish it? The ultimate in product placement. Or ask the Body Shop to provide the soap; or get Estée Lauder to site a lipstick sampler in there. “I often force my male executives into the ladies’ restrooms,” Paco says, “and I say to them: ‘Do you think your wife would like to pee here?’” Afterwards, we order a coffee at Costa, and Paco talks about how little retailers really communicate with the staff on the ground. He gives the example of one client who, determined to work out why some of their car washes did better than others, got someone at head office to come up with a list of the top performers, and sent Paco off to check them out. On arriving at the No. 1 car wash, the reason for its success soon became obvious. The garage was a popular haunt for local hookers,
who conducted their business amid the swoosh and hum of the brushes. As Paco pointed out, a simple phone call would have saved them the trip, not to mention the blushes. Back on the A406, I ask Paco to give Brent Cross marks out of ten. “I’d give it a three and a half, maybe a four. It’s a typically bland mall, aimed primarily at women with children. It’s actually a very good example of what’s wrong with British retailing: on Oxford Street or Bond Street, Britain is world-class, very hard to beat. But away from that center, as we’ve seen, it’s a different story.” Brent Cross may be shambolic, but it’s by no means alone. The standard mall, of which Brent Cross is a perfect example, is in decline. Even in America, where they were invented, the public is falling out of love with them. We are, according to Paco, living in a postmall era. Sure, we still spend money in malls. But they don’t excite us as they used to. Culturally, they don’t preoccupy us in the same way, either. George A. Romero set his cult 1978 zombie flick Dawn of the Dead (remade for 2004 by Zack Snyder, currently at a screen, possibly one in a mall, near you) in a shopping mall, the message being that malls were the natural habitat of the brain-dead. I can’t imagine Bluewater exciting such sentiment—it’s far too mundane to be culturally threatening.
To survive, the mall will have to evolve. In America, some malls are being converted into government buildings and recreation centers. One mall in North Carolina has been taken over by the First Wesleyan Church, which has made it into a religious complex including a sanctuary, a bookshop and a nursing home. The most impressive new mall that Paco has seen lately is in Russia, just outside Moscow. It has a very efficient cloakroom as you walk in, stylish trolleys at all entrances, a well-managed car park and an ethnic food court representing all culinary aspects of the former Soviet Union. But above all it is a fine example of what Paco calls “a global concept with a totally local execution.” By which he means, it’s world-class, yet distinctly Russian. It has a local flavor without being parochial, and it provides global brands, but not in a homogenized global setting. In other words, a local shop for local people. Sarah Vine Reprinted with permission.
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The Milton Classroom Not so Dismal a Science Addressing public issues in ways many policymakers do not
Every Sunday coaches in the National
Football League must make high-stakes decisions under intense public scrutiny. What, for example, should a team do when faced with a particular fourth-down situation? A bad choice could end a season, even a coaching career. David Romer, a professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley, thinks he can help. To be sure, there are more pressing economic issues facing the world—Romer himself writes extensively on monetary policy—but in a paper entitled “It’s Fourth Down and What Does the Bellman Equation Say?” Romer has come to the rescue of the oft-besieged head coach. Be aggressive, Romer counsels. Where, Red Sox fans cry out, was baseball’s equivalent to David Romer when Grady Little most needed him? In late September, just as the energy accompanying the opening of school begins to dissipate, I give students in my economics class a New York Times article about David Romer’s analysis. I use this short piece in part to change pace, to start a discussion that can at once be academic and anything but academic. My deeper purpose, though, is to ensure that studying the dismal science does not seem so dismal. My experience teaching economics at Milton has shown me that it doesn’t have to be. Economics students, even those who will not pursue further study in the field, can grow intellectually in ways that permit them to be engaged, critical participants in public life.
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As Romer’s work suggests, many economists seem increasingly eager to apply their skills and understanding to issues that seem far from the realm of gross domestic product figures and the latest NASDAQ numbers. Cruise through the list of working papers at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and you can find titles like “Catholic Schools and Bad Behavior,” “Choosing between War and Peace,” and “Carrots, Sticks and Broken Windows.” The authors of these studies are not engaged in some quest to capture someone else’s academic turf. Rather, they are addressing important public issues in ways that many policymakers do not. Although Milton students are not typically ready for the more complex quantitative analysis that characterizes professional work, they too can begin applying fundamental economic concepts to seemingly non-economic issues. For example, the basic notion of opportunity cost, an idea covered in the first few weeks of the course, comes as a near revelation to many students. In much the same way, the essential elements of the supply-anddemand model open some students’ eyes to a new way of thinking. With just those ideas in mind, they can read Nobel Prize winner Gary Becker’s analysis of drug legalization and engage in vociferous and intellectually vibrant debate over the nation’s drug policy. Or they can begin conceptualizing the ways in which we can reform the organ transplant system. Should we pay people to donate organs? Should we reward needy patients who have lived healthy lives?
Milton students recognize that economists alone can’t tell us whether to legalize marijuana or to pay for a particular kidney transplant—we need the help of political theorists, philosophers, perhaps even theologians to resolve vexing social problems. It is therefore beneficial that Milton’s economics courses are part of the history and social sciences department’s broader examination of the human experience. Still, the economist can provide new insights and fresh evidence that is useful to all of us as we make individual and collective decisions. Sunny Ladd’s work, for example, may not provide the very last word on education reform, but we ignore her work and work like it at our own peril. The point is not to elevate the work or tools of economists above all else, but rather to expand the intellectual repertoire of students. We say that we want students to ask tough questions; an introduction to economics helps them to do just that. We would prefer, of course, that students could answer some questions as well. In accomplishing this goal, an introductory economics course is only partially successful. A few core principles provide the basis for most good answers, but the complexity and interdependence that characterize the global economy can at times make simple answers elusive. I often suggest, only partially in jest, that there are always two possible answers to any economic question: “opportunity cost” and “it depends.” (When pressed I sometimes add a third—“I don’t know”—but I have great difficulty finding professional economists who have made a career by admitting as much in print.) Part of the trouble
lies in human behavior. Economic models often rest on assumptions about how people will behave, and certain folks just don’t meet the models’ expectations. It’s no surprise that behavioral economists and professors of psychology now push the field forward, and each year Milton students engage in a series of exercises designed to test assumptions underlying game theory. In an effort to introduce some new interdisciplinary approaches, several years ago I collaborated with my colleague Ellie Griffin, teacher of Milton’s Advanced Placement Pyschology course, to develop material appropriate for both economics and psychology students. For most economics students, though, it’s not the mystery of human nature but the mystery of public discourse that can be most confusing. Take the terminology of macroeconomics. Most of us bemoan high levels of unemployment. But what does it take to be unemployed in the government’s eyes? And once we know what the standards are for being “unemployed,” what does the “unemployment rate” tell us? I typically give students a series of articles about the calculation of the unemployment rate, including Austan Goolsbee’s article “The Unemployment Myth” in which he contends that “the government has cooked the books” by reclassifying some unemployed people as disabled. Students read similar pieces when we examine the terms “growth,” “inflation” and “poverty.” The meaning of an apparently simple statistic is not always simple, its significance is not
David Ball ’88
always straightforward. The selective, deceptive usage of numbers in public debate only confuses matters further. Thus, students find that simply describing current conditions in a single nation can be rather challenging. Moving beyond description adds complexity. World-renowned economists argue bitterly about the causes and consequences of certain economic phenomena, and their disputes over recommended policy are no less passionate. Such differences could discourage the budding student of economics, but most Milton students seem to avoid disillusionment. Rather, they begin to ask difficult questions about the causes of the disagreements. Are some economists blinded by ideological commitments? Are some economists making unreasonable assumptions? Do all economists give credence to the same body of evidence? Here, of course, Milton students are playing to their strength, once again asking questions. With the experts in disagreement, though, students (and teachers) must ask those questions with a healthy degree of humility. Understanding the world, never mind recasting it, is pretty hard work.
Indeed, despite the limits inherent in a brief introduction to economic thinking, my commitment to teaching this material has only increased. Milton at its best instills in its students a desire to engage with rather than retreat from the world beyond. No shortage of challenges—or to put it in a more positive way, no shortage of opportunities—greet Milton students as they look to the future. And though it is commonplace to advance the specious claim that forces beyond our control dictate our fate now and forever, most of the economics students that I teach leave the course energized, not enervated. They know that decisions about taxing and spending matter, and they can articulate why. They know that decisions to embrace and restrain market forces matter, and they can articulate why. They know that decisions about international trade matter, and they can articulate why. (They also know that according to one recent study, children raised in neater houses are likely to enjoy higher earnings. Not a crucial bit of knowledge for them, but parents take note!) These students know that they—and we—can make better choices. With that knowledge, and with a whole host of good questions, the future filmmakers, the future investment bankers, and—especially—the future football coaches who graduate from Milton are a bit better prepared to take seriously the responsibilities of citizenship. David Ball History and Social Sciences Department
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The Head of School Faculty, and the world of work If you describe economics as the study of choice and decision-making in a world with limited resources, Milton has a crucial economic question to resolve. I think about “limited resources” as the precious pool of talented, committed teachers we need to recruit, motivate, manage and retain.
Schools are not immune from the challenges that all organizations are experiencing with regard to cultivating the best possible work force. After all, at Milton four “generations” of workers—faculty members—come together to forge an extraordinary education for young people. How will we recruit the most skilled young teachers, and build a work environment in which they feel rewarded for an extraordinary level of dedication; at the same time how will we value the expertise of our most experienced, veteran colleagues? Our answers to both sides of the question will profoundly affect our future. I consider this question so important that I asked the Head of School’s Council, a group of roughly 60 alumni and parents, to reflect on the facts and consider strategies at their annual meeting. As I write, we are preparing for that discussion. I believe that with focus and creativity we can help Milton shape a working environment sufficiently innovative to attract talented young faculty while we provide our veteran faculty with a rich, challenging professional life.
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Each so-called generation of workers brings its own set of values, beliefs, life experiences and attitudes to the workplace. Recent titles from the Harvard Business School press, as well as articles from The Economist and Time magazine, the Wall Street Journal and Fast Company, reflect a shared perception that generational differences in the workplace require attention if individuals are going to pull together to accomplish a mission, and at the same time find their work rewarding. Research has confirmed anecdotal perceptions that a person’s age and social experience affect how he or she perceives key aspects of work: loyalty, rewards, security, success, the relationship between you and the person to whom you report, and between your job and your family. When they entered the world of work, the most senior colleagues among us welcomed what one consultant calls “the protective patriarchal wing of the institution.” Next in seniority, and the largest group in absolute numbers, the baby boomers in our schools have demonstrated great loyalty; nearly 40 percent of this age group has been at Milton for more than 15 years. These folks justifiably seek the rewards of longevity and respect based on seniority. The younger generations of workers bring a new set of rules. So-called “Gen-Xers,” those born between 1965 and 1980, have been described as skeptical, resourceful and independent. Having watched the
implosion of the technology-driven economy, they interpret security as gaining skills and ensuring their own marketability. Many of them would describe loyalty as a negotiated reciprocity: when the organization’s goals and my individual goals align, we can work together to achieve them.
The recent changes in the workplace are not short term, they are driven by great forces that are here to stay—technology and globalization. The newest members of our school communities, the youngest workers that are sometimes called “the millennial generation,” have been exposed, continually, to new ideas, technologies and methods of getting things done. They embrace both diversity and constant change. The recent changes in the workplace are not short term; they are driven by great forces that are here to stay—technology and globalization. What organizational structure successfully supports and cultivates these quite disparate groups? Can schools build in the flexibility and responsiveness to meet the expectations of those who rely extensively on new technology, who routinely embrace change and take risks, who are willing to market their skills in other settings? Can we at the same time effectively
reward and value the wealth of experience that our senior faculty members provide in the art and craft of teaching, in developing young people, in devoting themselves to an ideal? Consider this definition of the late 20- to late 30-year-olds; it comes from a heretofore non-existent—but now recognized— strand of public media, a blog (shortened form for personal Web log): “Just like most Boomers weren’t potsmoking hippies, most Gen-Xers aren’t ‘slackers.’ Most are decent, pragmatic, creative, strongly independent, self-reliant, and hard working. We have a surprisingly good work ethic—including a strong sense of company loyalty, as long as it’s reciprocal—and we want to get ahead, even though we aren’t as concerned with the trappings of ‘success’ as earlier generations were. However, we’re very concerned with financial and emotional security. We’re hopeful that the future will be good to us, but we’re also shockingly realistic and honest about the struggles we’re going to face in a rapidly changing world of diminishing resources, an elderly society, and a culture dominated by, and designed for, ‘baby boomers.’” How will we make sure that the needs of schools and the needs of several generations of faculty members are in sync? Milton has thrived in large measure because of the full and loyal commitment of faculty members to the life and culture of the School. We’ve depended on faculty flexibility, energy and motivation. Faculty members have felt gratified to work with diverse, able, eager students. They have been dedicated to Milton’s reality and promise, and have supported and modeled a core set of values. Will that kind of professional life inspire the faculty of the future? Our newer and younger faculty members value a sense of belonging, and expect to be respected members of a team right away, based on their good ideas and fine work, rather than on length of service. They expect professional challenge, active, expert mentoring, and chances to reinvent
Head of School Robin Robertson with co-head monitors Gladys Girabantu and Anthony (Buddy) Calitri, Class of 2005
themselves—to broaden their experience— within the school terrain. Achieving a sense of balance between work and family commitments is crucial, and Milton, in their view, ought to facilitate their ability to care for their personal lives: their partners, spouses, children, older parents. That may involve innovative job-sharing arrangements, extra time for professional development, or help with child care costs. One study called this set of issues “a snapshot of the future of work.” From the faculty members who have been at Milton longest—and many are reaching their retirement years now—to the newest members of the staff, Milton students benefit from teachers, house parents, coaches and advisors who reach far beyond the call of duty. Accessible, talented, insightful and caring, they enter into the lives of young people and help provide the unique input that will fuel each child. Faculty at Milton regularly use parenting skills as well as coaching and teaching skills. They are willing to take on the formative task of disciplining students. They create the experiences for which we are known, on which our tradition rests and our future depends.
As an organization whose staff is the core of its identity and its future, we are excited and challenged to take up this crucial examination of our work environment. In their recent “War for Talent” study, McKinsey & Company estimated that over the next 15 years, the demand for bright, talented 35–45-year-olds will increase by 25 percent, while the supply is predicted to decrease by 15 percent. We need to make sure that Milton is an institution that inspires older and younger teachers, house parents, coaches and advisors. What risks should we take in policies and programs to harness the power of at least four different sets of perceptions along with astounding skills? Let us know what thoughts you have about balancing the many elements in the mix: high expectations, resources to support faculty, continuity for students, gratification for skilled professionals, a sense of caring for people’s lives. We’ll be working on it. Robin Robertson
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Dedication of the Schwarz Student Center “G
iven with pride and gratitude,” the plaque in the Schwarz Student Center reads, “to the students of Milton Academy.” Marshall Schwarz ’54 and his wife, Rae Paige Schwarz, greeted trustees, alumni, parents, students and faculty at the dedication of the Center on April 23, 2004. Head of School Robin Robertson hailed Marshall as the man with the vision and the leadership to realize this transformative idea. “He imagined a space in which the challenging and exciting intellectual environment that is Milton’s hallmark would be enhanced and strengthened by the personal growth that students experience in one another’s good company and the company of caring adults. Students’ steady movement toward mature confidence…is fueled by deep and powerful relationships: student to student, adult to student and student to adult.
“In making this space possible, Marshall has put students at the center,” she said. The Student Center is the result of a longtime dream, developing visiting schools with my son,” Marshall remarked, “where I saw the advantages of a student gathering place. This Center became part of our focus on what was needed at Milton to preserve its excellence and its leadership role, nationally. Without the teamwork of trustees, faculty, administration, students and parents, the Center would not be here today…. This was a top-down and bottom-up effort of a spectacular Milton team.” To a crowd of people who had happily made the Student Center an important part of daily life, he stressed the importance of philanthropy and service. “I’ll virtually guarantee that some of you will become trustees of Milton in the years
Schwarz Student Center architect William Rawn, describes the architectural decisions that shape the elements of the structure.
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ahead, working to preserve the excellence and formulate the strategies for Milton at that time. And in addition to your ties to Milton, I hope you…all find some institution that serves others, that you can get involved with and help. Getting involved in helping others will make you a better person and a happier person, and it will help others less fortunate—and all of you are so fortunate to be here at Milton, gaining from its heritage and, hopefully, leaving with the intent of giving back where you can.” We thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Schwarz, for sharing your name with us and honoring your great memories of friendships at Milton with a place for students forever to experience the power and potential of meeting and knowing others.
Congratulations and thank you
Fritz Hobbs, president of the board, Rae Paige Schwarz and Marshall Schwarz
Head of School Robin Robertson honors Marshall’s leadership and vision.
Chamber singers signal a celebration.
Co-head monitors Tom Myers and Sophie Suberman, Class of 2004, gratefully receive the gift of the Student Center on behalf of the students.
Students ponder the story behind their new space.
Marshall Schwarz’s message reaches students, alumni, faculty and friends.
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Milton Academy 2004 Awards and Prizes Cum Laude Class I Megan English Bailey Joanna Rae Berliner Megan Zoe Billman Joshua James Bone Julia Scott Carey Scott Louis Chaloff Michelle Mizhi Chen Emma Sarah Zea Clippinger Katherine Emery Cooper Jesse Daniel Keith Drummond Lui Du Dina Guzovsky Richard Matthew Humphreys William JinSoo Joo Sophie Charlotte Kargman Jessica Weinman Kerry Alyssa Elizabeth Stimson King Haley Smith Kingsland Katherine Poornima Kirby Ilana Katherine Klarman Peter Charles Kozodoy Albert Hyukjae Kwon Hannah Fox Larkin Colleen Ritzau Leth *Suzanne Leonor Levy Saloni Pareek Malik Catherine Elizabeth MorrisseyBickerton Rachel Anne Newman Louise Verriest Place Kristina Luise Pyclik *Parker Andrew Rider-Longmaid Cristina Mercedes Ros Ilana Rachel Sclar Meredith Kimberly Weber Nicholas Jay Werner Abigail Bowen Wright Class II Julia Elizabeth Schlozman Jason Kram Yeager
The Head of School Award The Head of School Award is presented each year to honor and celebrate certain members of Class I for their demonstrated spirit of self-sacrifice, community concern, leadership, integrity, fairness, kindliness and respect for others. Katherine Emery Cooper Beatriz Mogoll贸n Regina Kankinza Pritchett Alexander Lucas Seitz-Wald Hunter Hobbs Stone Sarah Lynne Wooten
The James S. Willis Memorial Award To the Headmonitors. Thomas Alton Myers Sophie Halle Suberman
The William Bacon Lovering Award To a boy and a girl, chosen by their classmates, who have helped most by their sense of duty to perpetuate the memory of a gallant gentleman and officer. Ian George Kalafatis Emily Grace Tsanotelis
The Louis Andrews Memorial Scholarship Award To a student in Class II who has best fulfilled his or her potential in the areas of intelligence, selfdiscipline, physical ability, concern for others and integrity. Sara Leslie Pulit
*Elected to Cum Laude in 2003
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The Korean War Memorial Scholarship Award Created in 1956 in memory of Frederick Sprague Barbour ’46, Thomas Amory Hubbard ’47, George Cabot Lee Jr. ’47 and Sherrod Emerson Skinner Jr. ’47, who gave their lives for their country and the United Nations. Awarded to a boy or girl from a developing region to further his or her education at Milton Academy, while enriching the school by their presence. Dilshoda Yergasheva (Uzbekistan)
The Leo Maza Award Awarded to a student or students in Classes I–IV, who, in working within one of the culture or identity groups at the school, has made an outstanding contribution to the community by promoting the appreciation of that group throughout the rest of the school.
The A. Howard Abell Prize Established by Dr. and Mrs. Eric Oldberg for students deemed exceptionally proficient or talented in instrumental or vocal music or in composition. Julia Scott Carey Peter Stephen Kruskall
Harrison Otis Apthorp Music Prize Awarded in recognition of helpful activity in furthering in the school an interest and joy in music. Katherine Poornima Kirby Emily Littlefield Phelps
The George Sloan Oldberg Memorial Prize Awarded in memory of George Oldberg ’54, to members of the school who have been a unique influence in the field of music. Colin Christopher Baker William JinSoo Joo
Jessica Weinman Kerry Sarah Lynne Wooten
The Science Prize
The H. Adams Carter Prize
Awarded to students who have demonstrated outstanding scientific ability in physics, chemistry and biology.
Awarded to the student or students who, in their years at Milton, have shown a dedication to the pursuit of outdoor skills, demonstrated strong leadership, and reached high levels of personal achievement in one or more outdoor activities.
Alyssa Elizabeth Stimson King Albert Hyukjae Kwon
The Wales Prize Awarded in honor of Donald Wales, who taught Class IV science for more than 36 years. It recognizes students in Class IV who have consistently demonstrated interest and excitement in science. Amanda Pfaltzgraff Appell Warren
The Robert Saltonstall Medal For pre-eminence in physical efficiency and observance of the code of the true sportsman. Bennet Reynolds Hayes
The A. O. Smith Prize Awarded by the English Department to students who display unusual talent in expository writing. Amy Rebecca Kaufman Jessica Weinman Kerry Catherine Elizabeth MorrisseyBickerton
The Dorothy J. Sullivan Award To senior girls who have demonstrated good sportsmanship, leadership, dedication and commitment to athletics at Milton. Through their spirit, selflessness and concern for the team, they served as an incentive and a model for others. Madeline Wolcott Hurst
The Donald Cameron Duncan Prize for Mathematics Awarded to students in Class I who have achieved excellence in the study of mathematics while demonstrating the kind of love of the subject and joy in promoting its understanding which will be the lasting legacy of Donald Duncan’s extraordinary contributions to the teaching of mathematics at Milton. Peter Stephen Kruskall
The Markham and Pierpont Stackpole Prize Awarded in honor of two English teachers, father and son, to authors of unusual talent in creative writing. Richard Matthew Humphreys Rowan Amelia Elise Swanson
Thomas Alton Myers 39 Milton Magazine
The Performing Arts Award Presented by the Performing Arts Department for outstanding contributions in production work, acting, speech, audiovisuals, and dance throughout his or her Milton career. Joshua James Bone Jared Ross Dubin Robert William Frantz Annabelle Elizabeth Haynes Alyssa Elizabeth Stimson King Katherine Poornima Kirby Joshua Howard Rothenberg Margaret Hudson Smith Jonathan Chee Hynn Wong
The Kiki Rice-Gray Prize Awarded for outstanding contributions to Milton Performing Arts throughout his or her career in both performance and production. Meredith Kimberly Weber
The Priscilla Bailey Award To a senior girl who has been a most valuable asset to Milton Academy athletics and to the Milton Academy Community—an athlete who has demonstrated exceptional individual skills and teamwork, as well as true sportsmanship. Natalie Maria Curtis
The Henry Warder Carey Prize To members of the First Class, who, in Public Speaking and Oral Interpretation, have shown consistent effort, thoroughness of preparation, and concern for others. Joshua James Bone Scott Louis Chaloff Sami Anne Kriegstein
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The Robert L. Daley Prize Created by his students of 1984 in his memory and honor, this prize in Classics is awarded to the student from Latin 4 or beyond who best exemplifies Mr. Daley’s love of languages. Catherine Elizabeth MorrisseyBickerton
The Richard Lawrence Derby Memorial Award To an outstanding student of the Second Class in Mathematics, Astronomy or Physics. Neil Phillip Katuna Julia Elizabeth Schlozman
The Alfred Elliott Memorial Trophy For self-sacrifice and devotion to the best interests of his teams, regardless of skill. Omar Sekou Longus
The Modern Languages Prizes Awarded to those students who, in the opinion of the department, most exhibit the qualities of academic excellence, enthusiastic participation, and support of fellow students, both in class and outside. Matthew Ross Bloom Elizabeth Jane Campbell Jacqueline Rose Kelly Alyssa Elizabeth Stimson King Suzanne Leonor Levy
The Milton Academy Art Prizes Awarded for imagination and technical excellence in his or her art and for independent and creative spirit of endeavor. Eliza Morgan Brown John Dae-Kyu Choi Haley Smith Kingsland Rowan Amelia Elise Swanson
The Gorham Palfrey Faucon Prize Established in 1911 and awarded to members of Class I for demonstrated interest and outstanding achievement in history and social science. Joshua James Bone Dina Guzovsky Alyssa Elizabeth Stimson King Sarah Jane Marriott Lorber Cristina Mercedes Ros
The Benjamin Fosdick Harding Latin Prizes Awarded on the basis of a separate test at each prize level. Level 5: Casey McCourt Level 4: Caitlin Allegra BarryHeffernan Level 3: Reshmi Paul
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Graduates’ Weekend 2004 42 Milton Magazine
Hugh D.S. Greenway ’54, Honored Speaker at the Annual ‘Dare to Be True’ Luncheon David Greenway is a career journalist who has worked for Time Life, and the Washington Post in London, Washington, Saigon, Hong Kong and at the United Nations. In addition, David served as foreign editor, national editor and editorial page editor at the Boston Globe. David Greenway’s inkling that he would become a writer— influenced in his Milton days by O.A. Smith and studying Ernest Hemingway—began and culminated with journalism. “I loved newspapering,” he said to graduates. His remarks attested to the unclear pathways journalists confront in identifying what “news” is, what the truth is, and in making judgments about what to do with “the truth” you’ve found. He walked through the tough judgment calls about situations with major national and international impact made by the Time magazine editorial leaders, Ben Bradlee at the Washington Post, John Oakes at the New York Times, and the news editors at CBS. The following excerpt from his remarks reveals David’s sense of the crucial questions today, as the truth seeking is no less difficult. “News-gathering with all its faults and vulgarities has, I believe, had its moments of glory and most of them have involved daring to be true. The First Amendment, which states that Congress shall make no law inhibiting a free press, is unique in all the constitutions of all the world. A free press is not just a business. Most newspeople feel
Hugh D.S. Greenway ’54, annual ‘Dare to Be True’ luncheon speaker, tests ideas about truth-seeking and truth-telling.
there is an element of public service involved in being a reporter, the people’s right to know and all that, but even our free press has not lived up to its obligations. Polls have shown that viewers of FOX News, for example, are more likely to believe the falsehood that Iraqis were involved in 9/11 than viewers of other networks. “Our generation lived through some truthful moments and some tremendous lies. We lived through ‘The Scoundrel Time’ as Lillian Hellman called the McCarthy Era. And some of you may have been led out of class to watch the hearings on a grainy television set over at Wolcott House. “’Pay any price, bear any burden in the defense of liberty,’” said John Kennedy, but who could have imagined the number of dead soldiers that would follow
into his grave in Arlington Cemetery. We lived through Nixon, who sorely abused the truth, Ronald Reagan, who seemed to confuse the truth sometimes with his film roles, and Bill Clinton went through semantic contortions not to tell the truth. “George Bush, the present president, probably thought he was daring to be true when he put the U.S. into Iraq. He may have thought he was telling the truth about weapons of mass destruction, but thinking you were telling the truth when you ignored evidence to the contrary may in the end be the opposite of truth. “Religious truth is the most firmly held and, therefore, the most contentious and dangerous. And since the 11th of September 2001, we have
entered a new age in which daring to be true will have a central role. “Today the United States embarked on another idealistic mission. This time not to save Southeast Asia from communism but to bring democracy to the Middle East and the graveyards are once more filling. I have no doubt that both the architects of Vietnam and Iraq believed they were daring to be true to bring American democracy to the unenlightened. There is something of the missionary in the American soul. But there may be more truth to Graham Greene’s famous phrase about what recipients of American missionary zeal really want. They want enough rice. They don’t want to be shot at. They want one day to be much the same as the other. They don’t want our white skins around telling them what they want. Graham Greene was writing about Indochina but maybe he should still be alive today. “The famous Vietnam remark during our war there was made by an officer explaining the destruction by saying, ‘We had to destroy the village in order to save it.’ At home I’m sure many Americans will be willing to give up some privacies, some inconveniences, and even some of their liberties in the name of national security, but looking back now it seems inconceivable that Franklin Roosevelt would order the internment of Japanese Americans or that the Supreme Court would concur in World War II. “Future generations may look back in astonishment that the United States has 15-year-olds locked up in Guantanamo for years without trial or charges. This is a moment in which history is crying out dare to be true, but I’m not sure anyone is listening.”
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2 Larry Altman ’54 and Tom Gregg ‘54 3 Herbert Stokinger ‘24 chats with boys from the Class of 1959 4 Margaret Osgood ’29 listens to “Dare to Be True” speech by David Greenway ’54 5 Elizabeth Biddle Barrett '54 6 Holbrook Davis ’39 and his wife, Sarah Davis 7 Glenn Allen ’79 and Elizabeth Mueller ’79
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1 Class of 1979 gang: Ian McCutcheon, David Ketchum, George Kelly, Mark Rafael, Glenn Allen
4 Te and Charis, daughters of Tracy Pun Palandjian ’89
2 Alfred Douglass ’64 leads grads along Academy Road
6 Cynthia Hallowell ’54, Jack Connell ’54 and Marie Doebler ’54 embark on trolley tour led by faculty member Bryan Cheney
3 Margaret Osgood ’29 and Head of School Robin Robertson
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5 The next generation enjoys Pickles the Clown
7 The trolley tour underway
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1 Bryan Cheney (visual arts) leads trolley tour of campus
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2 Paul Ouellet ’79, emerging from portable planetarium 3 Sushi-making: Shimin Zhou (modern languages), Vivian WuWong (history) and (right) Pat Crosby
5 Mr. Millet and Alex Heitzmann ‘06 6 Todd Wyett ’84 and Asher Lipman ‘84 7 Leo Jordan, Emmett Dashiell and Fred Dashiell P’04 at the Athletic Tea
4 Susan Zaraysky and Amy Dickey ’94 at Glee Club sing
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1 Thomas Leung, ’99, David Pun ’99 and Stephen A. Elliott ‘99 2 Brooke Harris ’99, Kelly Forest (former faculty) and Jamie Berk ‘99 3 Jeff Hurst ’74, Leslie Will ’74, Mark Panarese ’74 4 Class of 1999 guys: Justin Walsh, Matthew Ford, Chris Chao, Joe Lyons
5 Class of 1999 girls: Sarah Schram, Alice Byrd, Amanda Drummond, Shira Milikowsky
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6 Pam Crowley ’74 7 Class of 1994 reunites: Heidi Wiemeyer, Theresa Conduah, Sadio Desmond, Katharine “Kit” Aldrich, Malessa Smith
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1 Larry Pollans (art history) and Doug Fricke (English) chat with Doug’s daughter, Anna Fricke ‘94
4 Julie Wallace Bennett ’79, Rebecca Spang Thomas ‘79 and CeCe Kaufmann Mead ’79
2 Martin Zinny ’89, Mark Paresky ’89, Julie Paresky
5 Rachel, Cece and Martin Zinny ’89; Peter Cervieri ’94 and David Foster (former faculty)
3 Mark Panarese ’74 and David Mead ‘74
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6 The Milton Mustang and Head of School Robin Robertson 7 Brad Richardson ’48 at the Dare to Be True lunch
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Sports All-American Milton keeper begins at Clemson this fall Ashley Phillips ’04 once told the Boston Globe that she sobbed the first time she was placed in goal. Now, she plays for the Boston Renegades of the W-League, the country’s top amateur women’s soccer league. In a July 18, 2004, article, the Globe noted that Ashley, at 18, is one of the league’s youngest goalkeepers. In summer of 2004, she helped the Renegades post an 11–5 record, advancing to the conference semifinals.
The team’s goalkeeper coach Lee Billiard told the Globe that Ashley is a “fantastic young keeper” who showed up to every practice and every game ready to play. Ashley, who heads to Clemson University in North Carolina this fall, twice earned a place as Parade High School AllAmerican. While a student at Milton, Ashley played and trained with the U.S. Soccer under-16, under-17, and under19 national teams, and traveled around the world playing soccer.
Milton Football — the team to watch, again In 2003, the Boston Globe pegged Milton’s football team as the one to watch. “Football is a game predicated on aggression,” wrote Globe correspondent Jason Dunbar. “But it’s also one based on talent, and that’s what [coach] Kevin MacDonald and Milton Academy are banking on. Blessed with savvy at each of the skill positions, Milton will rely on a high-powered offense to outscore opponents.” “This fall, our line is strong,” says Head Coach Kevin MacDonald. He also says that in Dan Zailskas ’06 Milton has one of the best—if not the best— quarterbacks in the state. Last year, mononucleosis kept Dan out for much of the season. Other standout players include Mike Greenberg ’06, a tough lineman, and co-captains Laurence Duggan ’05 and and Charlie Haydock ’05. Coach MacDonald knows how to take talented athletes and form a skillful team. His list of coaching accomplishments includes a 14-year tenure at Archbishop Williams High School in Braintree, Massachusetts, where his team took eight
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league championships, enjoyed three undefeated seasons, sent three players to the National Football League and, during a 10-year period, held a record of 90–10–1. At Milton, Coach MacDonald led his 1996 team to an undefeated ISL championship, and took the same team to the School’s first New England championship with a thrilling 21–20 win against Thayer. Over more than a decade at Milton, his teams have won more than 70 percent of their games. Coach MacDonald is assisted by Tom Flaherty, who has coached more than 30 years—formerly as head football coach at Milton, and still as head coach of the baseball team, which won the league title in 2003. Coach Flaherty, who is also a faculty member and served as dorm head for 21 years, is a member of the High School Football Hall of Fame. “We try to gear our team toward seniors, giving them the first chance to start,” Coach MacDonald says. “We’re also big on teaching the fundamentals of the game. And we stress being gentlemen—winning and losing with dignity.”
Michael Kinnealey ’82 Former athletic director is now assistant director of admissions and director of financial aid at Belmont Hill School. Milton faculty member from 1986 to 2004 Before wearing orange and blue became hip on teenage terrain, Mike Kinnealey paired the two and stood before the community season after season—the persuasive and articulat spokesperson for spirit coupled with sportsmanship. For students and adults, Mike defined the literate, creative athlete: the skilled and determined team player for whom each game was crucial, but for whom gamesmanship was an element in a larger definition of character. We were fortunate to experience the luxury of an athletic leader who made us proud.
Mike started at Milton in 1986, right after college, as an intern in the history and admission departments, and became a faculty member in history and admission the following year. Meeting the triple-threat standard, Mike taught, coached, helped recruit new classes, and lived in Robbins and Hallowell houses. Nighttime antics fell to an all-time low in Hallowell during that time, as Mike’s nightly rounds with the infant
Mike surprised many a transgressor. He was known, apparently, as the Baby Buster. In 1991 he and Maura moved to the end of the quad to become heads of Forbes House. In 1994, in response to a leadership crisis in Milton athletics, Mike stepped up as Interim Athletic Director, to the relief of an anxious community, and restored the department to a recognizable state. After one year as interim, a grateful Headmaster Ed Fredie named Mike the director. Mike coached baseball, girls’ and boys’ ice hockey, girls’ and boys’ soccer, and many other sub-varsity level teams. His girls’ ice hockey team won the ISL championship, and both his boys and girls’ soccer teams won New England championships (the girls’ teams won three straight ISL championships as well). Teaching is effective coaching, and coaching is powerful teaching; among Mike’s strengths is his essential understanding of that dynamic. Keenly aware of the developmental issues at stake in coaching relationships with students, Mike has always reached students at critical points and furthered their skills, their confidence and their character.
Marijke Alsbach, Interim Athletic Director Marijke Alsbach, the well-loved, successful teacher and coach with a 22-year history at Milton, has stepped into the position of athletic director at on an interim basis. Marijke has coached soccer, field hockey, volleyball and tennis. Many, but not all, of her teams have been girls’ teams. Girls’ teams at Milton have a remarkable 12year success record. Soccer, field hockey, ice hockey, basketball, volleyball, squash, track and tennis, in particular, have frequently earned top league standing, along with division and even national championships. Marijke’s coaching style is welldefined and familiar to hundreds of alumni. She believes in a deep feeder system as a key element of successful varsity teams. In an interview for this magazine in 2001, Marijke said, “Most people think you should put your best coaches at the varsity level. Putting your best coaches at the Middle School level where they can teach the correct skills early is probably better. Then students have time to build upon those important basic skills throughout the years. By varsity level, they have a solid foundation and know what to do. “Team building, participation, winning and excellence are what I look at,” Marijke said. “All coaches are supposed to do that. I coached girls’ tennis for 10 years—1983 to 1993—and in that time we were the ISL champions six times, the New England champions six times, and national champions twice. I love to coach and winning championships is great, but it’s not the end of the world if the team doesn’t do well. I’m a suc-
cessful coach if the players are happy and have learned from and enjoyed each other. “Teams do well when a good coach comes back, year after year; the team benefits from the consistency. Our goal should be to have more coaches return year after year, or season after season.” Marijke will guide the athletics and physical education department and participate on a committee charged with identifying the next strategic steps for athletics at Milton. Consultant Dan Covell will assist the committee; Dan has helped a number of New England colleges with outstanding academic programs define a clear mission for their athletic program. Marijke’s work, and that of the committee, will give clear direction to the search process for the new athletic director.
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Faculty Perspective EU Membership Awards
Cyprus a New Stature and Identity Cyprus is an ancient land. Homeric
Greeks who found their return to mainland Greece from the Trojan War less than hospitable primarily settled Cyprus. Since then, Cyprus has had many rulers: Phoenicians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Assyrians, Saracens, Crusaders, Venetians, Turks, British; all of them took their turns. Powers that wanted to move east or west subjugated the Cypriot people. The Ottomans came onto the Cyprus scene in 1573. They “leased” Cyprus to the British until the late 1800s and ultimately Cyprus was annexed to the British Empire. In 1974 the ruling military junta in Greece engineered a coup in Cyprus to depose Archbishop Makarios, the elected president of the Republic. A week later, the Turkish Army invaded the island, captured 37 percent of the land, killed 1 percent of the Cyprus population (650,000: 82 percent Greek, 18 percent Turkish). A dividing line was then established (the Green Line), which is maintained to this day by 35,000 Turkish troops.
As a result of the division, one third of the Greek-Cypriot population of Cyprus was forced to leave their homes and properties, and become refugees in their own country. For decades, futile negotiations toward reunification have been going on under the good auspices of the United Nations which, by and large, the Turkish side rejected. The northern part of Cyprus is now ruled by a Turkish puppet regime.
Rizokarpaso
Mediterranean Sea Kyrenia UN buffer zone Turkish Cypriot-administered area Morphou Nicosia
Famagusta UN buffer zone
Polis Area controlled by Cyprus Government (Greek area)
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Recently, Cyprus has been the focus of the international community’s interest because on May 1, 2004, Cyprus gained admission to the European Union. The European Union has decided that Cyprus will be admitted in any case: If reunification occurs before accession, the whole island joins the EU; if negotiations fail, only the Greek part, represented by the legitimate Republic of Cyprus, will become a member.
Limassol
Dhekelia Sovereign Base Area (U.K.)
Mediterranean Sea
Vasilikos
Akrotini Sovereign Base Area (U.K.)
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Andreas Evriviades celebrates Cyprus’s admission to the EU in Wigglesworth Hall’s new faculty room.
The reunification effort is in the form of a referendum, called the Annan Plan, put forth by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. The plan’s fifth version was put to a vote in April 2004: the Greek side rejected it by 76 percent and the Turkish side accepted it by 65 percent. Why did the Greek Cypriots defeat it so resoundingly? Why not vote for reunification? First, under the U.N.-sponsored Annan Plan, every citizen of the EU—whether Polish, French, Estonian or Irish—would have been free to settle in northern Cyprus except the Greek Cypriots! They could go and work and buy a home in Finland but were not allowed to go and live in the ancestral homes they had been forced to leave. Because they were wealthier citizens, the argument goes, they would have quickly “dominated” their poorer brothers of the north. Secondly, the occupation force of 35,000 Turkish troops would have stayed on the island, ostensibly to protect the rights of the Turkish minority, and only be “phased out” by the year 2018. In other words, the Cypriots, a full member state of the
European Union, would remain under occupation! The EU, so eager to condemn the Turkish occupation for the last 30 years, would now be sanctioning it. Lastly, the first provision of the U.N. Annan Plan for membership in the reunited nation was that the Republic of Cyprus would cease to exist. The entity approved for membership would henceforth be known as the United Republic of Cyprus. Suppose certain sections of the Plan, like the removal of all foreign troops from the island, run into implementation problems. Who would plead the case for the Cypriots? No legal entity would exist to process a claim. All legal agreements, including a dozen U.N. resolutions condemning the Turkish invasion, would have been null and void. The state that signed the resolutions would no longer exist.
of Peace.” On the other hand, now, for the first time in its 3,000-year history, Cyprus—as an EU member—will not be invaded and its citizens will not be subjects of any other state. The night Cyprus became a provisional member of the EU I could not sleep; I wanted the sun to come up quickly so I could celebrate with my friends. Cyprus is now something bigger. The day will come when all Cypriots will live in peace and prosper as free citizens of the European Union. Andreas Evriviades Mathematics Department
For me, the situation is bittersweet. I grew up under British colonial rule and lived through the Turkish invasion and its aftermath. Nothing in this world would make me happier than to see the “Island of Aphrodite” united again. I miss my Turkish classmates, halloum cheese and the warmth of the “salepi” drink. I miss the picturesque harbor at Kyrenia, the castle and the lovely cloisters of the “Abbey
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Post Script Post Script is a department that opens windows into the lives and experiences of your fellow Milton alumni. Graduates may author the pieces, or they may react to our interview questions. Opinions, memories, explorations, reactions to political or educational issues are all fair game. We believe you will find your Milton peers informative, provocative and entertaining. Please email us with your reactions and your ideas—cathy_everett@milton.edu.
Learning from sixth-graders Fort Apache, Whiteriver, Arizona
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ast August, I embarked upon a journey, teaching on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation in Whiteriver, Arizona. I learned from my sixth-grade students and reflected upon my own privileged experiences as a student. Many of my students suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) and others’ attitudes towards school and learning reflected the long-term effects of the poverty and dislocation their families had experienced. I found my job challenging and adjusted both my expectations and my classroom techniques. One student in particular kept me motivated to invent new ways of reaching my students. Michael is a gifted and engaged student with an uncertain future. Brimming with enthusiasm, Michael arrived early and wanted a seat at the front of the room so that he could see the board well. He had an insatiable thirst for mathematics and led a crusade at the end of the first day for more. While the final bell was ringing, Michael came asking for homework. I had not planned to assign any. By the time I found extra worksheets, the entire class was following his lead, demanding homework. This work gave them something to do, they said. Michael was the only one to return his completed assignments and everything was correct. I continued the tradition Michael started, and as the homework catalyst, Michael remained dedicated all year to completing it.
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On a Sunday afternoon at a pizza party I organized for my students, they tired of our kickball game and decided to swim in the nearby river. Michael, at my side, tried hard to ease my anxiety, asking me riddles and then grinning largely every time he stumped me. His quest for intellectual stimulation continued; more riddles kept him challenged.
a different world. In return, Michael promised to stay in school, work hard and never give up. Michael has never been on an airplane, and rarely travels far from the reservation. He and his mother were very excited; though he is only in seventh grade, seeing the world outside the reservation and the opportunities available to him is important. Members of his Apache tribe rarely move far from home. I hope that if he realizes that college can be in his future, he will make it a reality. Michael has stayed away from drinking and drugs, and has a healthy attitude. He is constantly surrounded, however, by poverty and the associated realities of reservation life. So much is out of his control. I hope to follow Michael’s life and hope he will achieve a bright future of which he’s capable.
Michael, with his mother, approached me before school one morning and asked me the name of the best college in the country, because “that is where I am going,” he said. He was confident in spite of the many difficulties in his life: his father, recently released from jail, does not play a role in his life, and his mother has cancer. As I begin at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education this fall, my fiancée and I decided to fly Michael to Cambridge, visit the admissions office with him, and show him around Boston. I hope also to bring him to Milton for a day of classes; he’ll see
Peter Curran ’97
Post Script
Running for Congress Aiming at Prosperity for Wyoming
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hen I graduated from Milton in 1987, I did not want to go to college. I wasn’t ready. I had been ranching in Wyoming for several summers, and so decided to spend a full year in the saddle. When the weather in Wyoming got too cold, I went to Australia for six months until it thawed back home. During that year, two conclusions emerged. First: Ranching is hard on the back. I figured that I had better educate myself so that I could make a living and expand my intellectual curiosity before my back gave out. After majoring in biology, government and sociology at Cornell and receiving an MBA from Wharton and another master’s in international economics from Johns Hopkins, my curiosity stills runs rampant. Second: I had found my spiritual home in Wyoming. The ruggedness of the terrain and of the people do not tolerate false motives. The vastness of the open spaces requires a self-sufficiency that cannot be learned elsewhere. In the process of searching for (and often finding) my limits, I fell in love with this part of the world. As is true in other rural areas in the nation, Wyoming faces a debilitating and undeniable kind of “outsourcing”: Our young people leave immediately upon graduation and do not return. Ever. My
and I’d like to help.” (With only 510,000 people in the entire state, we call all of our elected officials by their first names.) He appointed me to the Wyoming Business Council, a group of 15 people from around the state who set Wyoming’s economic policy.
own search for employment kept me away from home for many years. Finally, I could wait no longer. My wife and I moved back to Wyoming to start our own company which, not coincidentally, helps aspiring entrepreneurs to start their own businesses by complementing their passions with traditional business skills like marketing or finance. Even though we bucked the trend, the leaving trend continues. Our state faces what some have called a “demographic death spiral.” Dependent upon the vagaries of the international energy market (Wyoming produces 7 percent of our nation’s needs and contains 55 percent of our domestic reserves), our state economy threatens to capsize with even the smallest of ripples in the price of a gallon of gas. So I asked our governor if I could help. No kidding, I just walked into his office and said, “Dave, my name is Ted Ladd
At 35, I’m the “young Turk” on the Council. We have reinvigorated our emphasis on entrepreneurship, taking the message and skills into high school and college classrooms across the state. We are providing new tools to aspirants. And we are sowing seeds. We’re seeing signs of success and on that basis, I was hopeful. Then I looked at the predictions for interest rates over the next five years. (For those who are squeamish about statistics, this portion will end quickly.) The consensus projections of an increase of 5 to 10 percent will unravel everything we’ve worked to accomplish. Small businesses will sink quickly, shackled to a cement block called the federal deficit. Simultaneously, Wyoming has also soured its relationship with the federal government. Hear about wolves, Yellowstone snow mobiles, coal-bed methane development or crystal methamphetamine? That’s us. For such a small state, we certainly create a swath of negative publicity.
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Ted and Laura
Not only can we not afford to undermine our small-business economy, we cannot afford antagonism with any federal agency. We need all the help we can get! But I fear that you are getting a sour picture of Wyoming. These stories miss the glory and potential of Wyoming. A man without even a high school diploma will spend four hours fixing your car, only asking for some conversation and a sip of your soda, because “that’s what we do here.” An entire town will empty its pockets to send the valedictorian to the Model U.N. in New York. Grown men will wrestle greased pigs to make their neighbors laugh. (Usually, only the pig is not amused.) New technology and manufacturing companies spring alive from the high desert plain. Hundreds of “citizen legislators” and other experts contribute their time without compensation because we are fiercely proud of what we could accomplish in the “Cowboy State.” From the Grand Teton to a mine shaft that descends 1,500 feet, this state is one marvel after another.
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Six months ago, I decided to run for Wyoming’s lone seat in the U.S. House of Representatives to continue and accelerate my efforts to improve our small-business opportunities. I saw massive economic obstacles in the way of Wyoming’s prosperity and sought to remove them. Now I see a group of people ready to explode, if only someone would look them in the eye, remind them of Wyoming’s legacy of self-sufficiency, and give them a nudge. After 15,000 miles in the car, hundreds of gatherings, and thousands of conversations, I’m running for Congress because the people I have met and the ideas they have discussed with me make me even more confident that we need a single spark to become the place that we have dreamed about for so long. Ted Ladd ’87 To learn more about Ted’s campaign, go to:
http://www.laddforwyoming.com.
In•Sight
On September 8, 2004, varsity teams—including football—practiced in the rain, as nearly 80 students moved into the new west campus residences, Norris House (boys) and Centre House (girls). Auditions for fall productions began immediately.
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OnCentre Milton in the News
Milton in the News
Milton’s ROV Team Performs Well Under Pressure, Says MSNBC.com
National Radio Program Features Milton Saxophonist
While some high school students spend summer lounging poolside, Milton’s remotely operated underwater vehicle team (MAROV) members competed poolside in this year’s National Student ROV Competition.
National Public Radio’s “From the Top,” which showcases the nation’s top young classical musicians, featured saxophonist Jessica Lawrence ’05 on April 18, 2004.
After winning first place overall in the New England Regional ROV Competition, the MAROV team traveled in June to Santa Barbara, California, for the Nationals. Despite a prelaunch camera and engine failure of their remotely operated vehicle, affectionately named “Herbie,” the Milton team pulled together and not only placed 10th out of 23 nationally recognized teams from schools, colleges and universities, including MIT—but also took home top prize for design and use of their ROV’s grippers.
“The bright blue pool is ringed with clusters of teenagers and adults who’ve come here representing high school and college robotics clubs from Hawaii to Newfoundland,” wrote John Schoen, MSNBC.com senior producer. “In the water, tethered to elaborate homemade control stations, underwater robots dive, spin and dart through the water like brook trout. Divers follow their progress with underwater cameras. Jimmy Buffett is blaring from speakers…The mood is part physics lab, part pool party.” MAROV members at Nationals included Will Joo ’04, Dan Lee ’05, Sam Minkoff ’06, Matt Schoen ’06, Kristen Tsai ’05, Alice Tin ’06, Seo Hyung Kim ’06 and faculty advisor, Tom Gagnon.
“From the Top” is heard on 250 radio stations each week and presents five young performers or ensembles.
Milton in the News
Amy Kaufman ’04 Wins National Gold Portfolio Writing Prize Other writing prizes in 2003–2004 A May 30, 2004, Boston Globe article reported that Amy Kaufman ’04 won the National Gold Portfolio Award, a single, unrestricted $10,000 cash grant scholarship for the most outstanding nonfiction portfolio and the highest honor bestowed by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards program. The 81-year-old program also recognized Truman Capote and Joyce Carol Oates when they were teenagers. Other Milton students won national awards for excellence in writing creative fiction or incisive nonfiction in spring 2004:
Preparing “Herbie” for launch in Santa Barbara, California
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The program is taped before a live audience in major performance centers across the country, such as Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, Boston’s Symphony Hall and New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall.
Three of the Princeton Poetry Prize contest’s 23 winners were from the Class of 2005: Emily Cunningham, Yi Li and SeifEldeine (Dean) Och each won honorable mention in the contest that attracts thousands of entries.
Another seven Milton students won writing awards in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards of 2004, which gives about 300 prizes to studentwriters nationwide. Other national Scholastic winners are Noah Lawrence ’05, who earned a Silver Award in the journalism category; Eliza Brown ’04 and Amanda Warren ’07, each of whom won a Gold Award in the personal essay/memoir category; Kate Lovely ’07 with a Silver Award in the same category. Meredith Weber ’04 and Marguerite (Meg) Weisman ’05 won Gold Awards in poetry and the short story category, respectively. A National Awards Celebration in New York City in June 2004 recognized the winners.
Milton in the News
2 Takes on Iraq War Come in for Scrutiny June 13, 2004 Fifteen months ago, as the United States was on the verge of war against Iraq, Jehane Noujaim took a chance and flew to Qatar, where she hoped to make a documentary about media coverage of the conflict. Qatar was the perfect place to be. Not only is the Persian Gulf country home to Al Jazeera, but it also became the site of Central Command—the U.S. base where Army commanders gave a daily war briefing for hundreds of TV and print journalists from around the world. Though Noujaim met people from both Al Jazeera and the U.S. military who discouraged her from the project (American officials rejected her initial application for accreditation, while one Al Jazeera staffer advised her to switch focus and do a film on Qatar’s gay community), Noujaim persisted and got what she wanted: an unconventional documentary about war reporting. Control Room, which opened in Bay Area theaters on Friday, follows two Al Jazeera journalists, as well as a U.S. Army spokesman who’s paid to relay the U.S. government’s view to the Arab media. CNN correspondent Tom Mintier, NBC correspondent David Shuster and other journalists are also key figures in Control Room, which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, then went on to acclaim at other film festivals. The film has hit a nerve with U.S. audiences because it gives a behind-the-scenes look at a news network that Washington officials have vilified for its allegedly biased reporting.
who, at one point in Control Room, upbraids a colleague for booking a U.S. anti-war activist instead of an American with a more balanced perspective.
Jehane Noujaim ’92
“In Qatar,” says Noujaim in a phone interview, “I felt like I could have made a film completely on Al Jazeera, and that would have been interesting, but the fact that Central Command was located only 10 miles away, and you had a completely different perspective on what was happening during the war—that was fascinating to me.” Noujaim’s documentary will surprise people who believe that Al Jazeera’s coverage is intrinsically biased against the U.S. government. The Arab world’s most popular and influential network (it’s watched by more than 35 million people), Al Jazeera is staffed by people like Samir Khader, a senior producer
Hassan Ibrahim, the other Al Jazeera staffer who figures prominently in Control Room, is a Sudanese man who was schooled in Saudi Arabia (where one of his classmates was Osama bin Laden) and Arizona, where he became a big fan of the Grateful Dead. In a discussion that Noujaim captures on film, Ibrahim tells other Arab men they can’t blame Israel for every problem in the Middle East— that “Arab incompetence” is also a factor. Noujaim shows that Al Jazeera’s journalists have multifaceted views on politics and their own profession, but perhaps it was inevitable that people have suggested that Noujaim brought her own biases into the film. Noujaim is Arab-American. Born in Washington, D.C., she was raised in Kuwait and Egypt, where her parents still live. In an interview about Control Room, a writer with IndieWire.com asked Noujaim, “Would you say you were objective in this film?” then followed that up with, “Didn’t you bring your own political bias to the mix?” An interviewer with the New York
Times told Noujaim, “As an Egyptian American, it sounds as if you have divided loyalties.” Noujaim says her background in the Arab world and the United States (she went to high school in Boston, graduated from Harvard and now lives in New York) helped her approach the story in an evenhanded way. For example, Lt. Josh Rushing, the Central Command press officer who works with the Arab media, comes across in Control Room as multidimensional, sympathetic and open to different viewpoints. (At one point, Rushing admits he’s “upset” that he wasn’t more bothered by images of dead Iraqis shown on Al Jazeera.) Noujaim says she could easily have edited the film to make Rushing seem like a didactic, ignorant or otherwise stereotypical military spokesman. “I was very concerned with presenting him in a fair light,” says Noujaim, whose most notable previous work was the documentary Startup.com, which she co-directed with Chris Hegedus. “If I’m biased, it’s toward the characters I follow and representing them as fairly as possible. I follow people whom I like and whom I find interesting and charismatic and who surprise
Scenes from Control Room
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Milton in the News
2 takes, continued me. I’m not following Al Jazeera people who I don’t find interesting, or the press officers at Central Command who I didn’t find that likable or interesting.” By juxtaposing footage of Al Jazeera with footage of U.S. reporters working at Central Command, Noujaim raises questions about the way the West and the Arab world interpret the same events. This, at a time when spotting bias in the media seems to have become a national obsession. Khader, who flew to New York last month to attend several screenings of the Control Room (and to participate in question-and-answer sessions), says Control Room has been released at an ideal time. “The film is a good opportunity for the American public to know things that they were
unaware of during the war,” says Khader in a phone interview from Qatar. “The film raises issues (about bias and objectivity) without giving answers, because it’s very difficult to answer questions about, ‘What is objectivity?’ There are too many answers depending on whether you’re in Europe or the United States or other parts of the world. Everyone has his own concept of these issues like objectivity.” The buzz around Control Room has taken Noujaim by surprise. When she shot the footage in Qatar, Noujaim didn’t have preconceived notions about what the final movie would look like —and she wasn’t even sure the film could get a U.S. distribution deal. Even Khader told Noujaim she shouldn’t expect
anything to come of the project. Fifteen months later, Control Room not only has a distribution deal in the United States but in Britain, Japan and Denmark. Noujaim has experienced a series of successes in her brief career. After graduating from Harvard in 1996, she took a job with MTV as a producer in its documentary and news division. She worked on the network’s “MTV News: Unfiltered” series, which gave cameras to viewers who wanted to tell unusual and underreported stories. A year later, she left to co-direct Startup.com, which followed two dot-com entrepreneurs who tried to start the Web site GovWorks.com. The film was a critical and box-office success, paving the way for Noujaim to undertake a project as the sole director.
Noujaim is just 30 years old. With a whole career ahead of her, it’s easy to assume she’ll continue to make documentaries about real-life characters whose lives speak about important subjects. “I’ve been open to following what interests me,” she says, “and connecting with people who I feel I’m learning something from.” Editor’s note: Interviews with Jehane about Control Room have appeared in or aired on National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air,” on “NOW with Bill Moyers,” in the Chicago Tribune, LA Weekly, IndieWire, Democracy Now, Village Voice, New York Times and TV Guide, among others. Reprinted with the permission of the San Francisco Chronicle, June 13, 2004, Sunday, by Jonathan Curiel
Milton in the News
Milton in the News
Seeing Green: Colin Cheney ’96 Tells NPR About Rooftop Gardens
Injured Soldier Jim Meeks ‘97 Speaks on Iraq, Just War
Colin Cheney ’96 was a guest of Linda Wertheimer on National Public Radio’s “Weekend Edition Saturday” in April 2004.
tion. Turning rooftops into gardens could minimize runoff pollution, improve air quality and cool cities in the summertime.
As the initiative director for Earth Pledge, an organization that identifies and promotes innovative techniques and technologies that restore the balance between human and natural systems, Colin and his team use New York as their laboratory for implementing replicable solutions that encourage sustainability. Rooftop gardens are one move toward sustainability exercised and endorsed by the organiza-
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Colin Cheney on the rooftop
On Memorial Day 2004, soldier Jim Meeks ’97 returned from Iraq after the truck he was driving struck a mine. With shrapnel up and down the right side of his body, a burst eardrum and an earlobe torn off, Jim found himself in the hospital alongside one of his detainees, who was critically injured, he told Dick Gordon on National Public Radio’s “The Connection.”
“I hope very much that Iraq will become a democratic nation,” Jim said. “That’s a dream for all soldiers who are over there… I hope that even those who are fighting against us, whether for religious [or other] reasons will come to let go of that hatred [and that we can do the same.]”
Milton in the News
Honoring Inventor Buckminster Fuller, Class of 1913 A 1973 black-and-white photograph of Buckminster Fuller, Class of 1913, hangs in the Milton Academy admission office. He signed it, “To: Wonderful Milton Academy, where I learned how to organize thought and was urged to ‘Dare to be true’ to what I learned from organized thoughts.” Since Buckminster’s death in 1983, appreciation for the legendary American inventor, architect, engineer, designer, geometrician, cartographer and philosopher has grown. The Palisadian-Post (Pacific Palisades, California) was among media to deliver news of a United States commemorative postage stamp to honor R. Buckminster Fuller, whose bestknown invention is the geodesic dome. “He felt that we had the knowhow and the technology to really make life better for all humanity,” Buckminster’s daughter, Allegra Fuller Snyder, told the Post. “He talked about doing more and more with less and less. He felt that…we had the tools and material to build a lightweight and inexpensive home that would provide more than adequate real shelter for people. Issues that are central now—energy, sustainability, education—he explored very early on. He urged us to know about them, when people weren’t paying attention to them at all.” Buckminster is hailed as one of the greatest minds of our time and known for his comprehensive perspective on world issues. The stamp artwork is a painting of Buckminster by Boris Artzybasheff (1899–1965). The painting, which originally appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1964, depicts
single flat map without visible distortion of the relative shapes and sizes of the continents.
Bucky’s head in the pattern of a geodesic dome. Geodesic domes and a number of his other inventions surround Buckminster, including the Dymaxion Car, the 4D Apartment House, and several objects and models that reflect the geometric and structural principles he discovered. Buckminster served in the U.S. Navy from 1917 to 1919, where he demonstrated an aptitude for engineering. In 1926, when his father-in-law, James Monroe Hewlett, developed a new way of manufacturing reinforced concrete buildings, he and Buckminster patented the invention together, earning the first of Buckminster’s 25 patents. Buckminster’s lifelong interests included using technology to revolutionize construction and improve housing. In 1927, Fuller made a now-prophetic sketch of the total earth which depicted his concept for transporting cargo by air “over the pole” to Europe. He entitled the sketch “a one-town world.” In 1946, he received a patent for another breakthrough invention: the Dymaxion Map, which depicted the entire planet on a
After 1947, the geodesic dome dominated Buckminster’s life and career. Lightweight, costeffective and easy to assemble, geodesic domes enclose more space without intrusive supporting columns than any other structure, efficiently distribute stress, and can withstand extremely harsh conditions. Based on Fuller’s “synergetic geometry,” his lifelong exploration of nature’s principles of design, the geodesic dome was the result of his revolutionary discoveries about balancing compression and tension forces in building. After being spurned early in his career, Buckminster was later recognized with major architectural, scientific, industrial and design awards, and he received 47 honorary doctoral degrees. Shortly before his death, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, with a citation acknowledging that his “contributions as a geometrician, educator and architect-designer are benchmarks of accomplishment in their fields.” Also in the news is the digitization of Buckminster’s papers at Stanford University. The archive was acquired by the university in 1999 and is now available online:
Cultural Diversity Institute Celebrates 10th Anniversary 60 participants annually from 30 states In July 2004, the Cultural Diversity Institute of the National Institute for Administrators, Teachers and Trustees celebrated its 10th anniversary session. Christine Savini, director of diversity planning, developed the institute, and directs it each year on the Milton campus. The first two students of color joined Milton’s student body in 1964. By 1982, with a diverse student body, a group of faculty members formed the Cultural Diversity Committee, aiming to recruit a more diverse faculty, too, and develop at the School a genuinely multicultural environment. Under the leadership of Jerry Pieh, former headmaster, diversity planning and community relations (now multicultural) offices were established, institutionalizing that commitment. “Other schools began requesting information about Milton’s approach,” Christine explained. In summer 1994, Christine began developing a framework in which colleagues could talk
Stanford Library: www-sul.stanford.edu/ depts/spc/fuller/index.html Stanford Humanities Lab www.stanford.edu/group/shl/ research/bucky.html Editor’s note: Some information appearing here is courtesy of the U.S. Postal Service.
Christine Savini
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Cultural Diversity, continued with each other about obstacles and solutions to building cohesive, supportive environments in which multicultural students and faculty members could thrive and contribute to the vitality of their schools. “In the first year, we tried to do too much by addressing diversity in its many forms. We talked about anti-Semitism and classism and homophobia. We needed to focus, and we decided to focus on race and culture because most of the questions from attendees were related to those issues.” Now, the institute enrolls 60 administrators and faculty from schools that span 30 states. The six-day institute gives educators the philosophical, intellectual and practical resources for implementing a diversity plan in their schools. The institute boasts well-known writers and researchers as speakers, such as Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum, president of Spelman College and author of Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria. Attendees plunge into issues of hiring, training, supporting the student body, developing curriculum, teaching and planning. “We wanted to present a program that empowered its participants,” Christine says. That requires their achieving depth and trust. “People should be challenged without being damaged, so they can return to their schools and effectively talk with their colleagues about culture and race. They need the tools to have those conversations become transformative. “Part of the process is in sharing what each of us brings to our organization. We can’t be disassociated as cultural beings. We ask participants to talk about 60 Milton Magazine
themselves. We call it ‘telling your cultural story’ and this can mean talking about who you are in terms of religion, or growing up in a single-parent family or whatever. “At first, there’s resistance, but then I think most people feel an enormous sense of relief,” Christine says. “In the end, I think we give participants a virtual camera and help them focus a cultural wideangle lens. They recognize that that they have discretionary power in choosing what to teach or hiring, or the selecting of a trustee.”
‘Corporate’ Fifth-Graders Practice Give and Take The fifth-grade corporation unit, taught by the fifth-grade team of Scott Ford and Matthew Reed, is a highlight each spring. “It’s cool. We learn about raising capital and how stock works,” says one member of the 2004 corporation. Raising capital, establishing and managing inventory, and developing advertising are keys to the project’s success. Students begin by deciding where to direct their corporate proceeds, listing funds to rebuild Iraqi schools, food pantries and the local animal shelter among their 15 options.
The diversity institute benefits from a detailed curriculum and brings expert facilitators to present on topics including preparing the adult community for diversity; strategic planning; teaching about privilege; teaching children from other cultures effectively; and examining AsianAmerican identity.
(FGTM). They discuss the merits of proposed products such as key rings and estimate profit margin. With the Lower School as their market, they discuss whether a first-grader would need a key ring and, if so, what price they could put on it. Seventy-five cents? Maybe. Five dollars? No way. For mini-totes from a craft store, should they decorate with embroidery or fabric paint? What about using images from linoleum block prints made in art class for magnets or a poster or note cards?
Christine earned a bachelor’s degree at Emmanuel College and a master’s in American racial and ethnic studies at Boston College. Milton’s effort to sustain a thriving multicultural community is “explicit, conscious and long term,” Christine says. “We give new faculty a tool kit for working in a multicultural community.” How does “embracing diversity” translate to day-to-day experience at Milton? At least three individuals focus their professional lives on cultivating a rich and rewarding multicultural campus environment. Classrooms are one powerful venue, and the extracurricular and residential life of the School also provides key opportunities for learning that matters to young people.
The list on the corporate whiteboard grows and will require a vote—a commitment from each member of the corporation. The students choose the animal shelter this year and move on to what they might like to sell. The ideas tumble forth: milkshakes, tote bags, umbrellas, bookmarks. Weeks later, students have identified sources of investment and named this year’s company the Fifth-Grade Thinga Majigs
Children learn that consensus is not always possible and disagreeing with a friend is OK. They learn basic concepts of market analysis, “sweat equity,” stocks, and gross and net earnings. In 2004, they also earned nearly $500 to benefit the animal shelter.
First-Grade Students Sling Hash and Talk Math The Lower School’s approach to math is collaborative and intuitive: Faculty members help students think of numbers as quantities instead of mere digits, and they discourage use of algorithms that may interfere with a child’s understanding of place value. Children think first about what makes sense, and strategize ways to solve a problem, often inspiring classmates as they go, says Principal Annette Raphel. Each year, first-grade students study money. The year ends with the operation of a mock restaurant, led by teachers Jerrie Moffett and Ruth Wilson. For the 2004 restaurant, “The Food Palace,” students planned menus, painted walls and chose table linens and ambient music; they also studied math: The server and the chef worked together to compute the bill using base-10 blocks; the patron counted coins to pay the check.
Alumni and Faculty Authors Recently published works Independent Nation: How the Vital Center is Changing American Politics John P. (Fipp) Avlon ’91 Fifty percent of American voters define themselves as political moderates, two-thirds favor political solutions that come from the center of the political spectrum, and Independents outnumber both Democrats and Republicans, asserts the Web site for Independent Nation (Harmony Books, 2004). Bill Clinton and George W. Bush each explicitly used centrist strategies to win the White House—and 21st-century candidates will be compelled to do the same. “Centrism is the most effective means for achieving the classic mission of politics: the peaceful reconciliation of competing interests. Extremists and ideological purists on either side of the political aisle condemn compromise,” writes Fipp in the book’s introduction. “But inflexibility either creates deadlock or dooms a cause to irrelevance.
Making Freedom: African Americans in U.S. History
“Idealism without realism is impotent. Realism without idealism is empty. By effectively balancing idealism and realism, centrism offers both a principled vision of governing and a successful strategy for winning elections.”
Focusing on the volatile decades that led to the Civil War, Lift Ev’ry Voice (Heinemann, 2004) and its companion CD recount, like no others, the AfricanAmerican experience through contemporaneous documents, diaries, visuals and texts. As a tool for educators, these primary sources give insight into the public and private worlds of people who shaped the United
Independent Nation documents the rich history of the defining political movement of our time. Organized as a series of short and colorful political biographies, it offers an analysis of the successes and failures of key centrist leaders throughout the 20th century.
Lift Ev’ry Voice 1830–1860 With a chapter by Laurel Starks, History and Social Sciences Department
States. The documents clarify the importance of race in the formation of a common American culture. They pay tribute to the strength, endurance, creativity and contributions of those often ignored in conventional textbooks. Lift Ev’ry Voice offers an inclusive American history, revealing the interracial, multicultural heritage that became the foundation of our nation.
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Alumni and Faculty Authors Recently published works
What to Wear to See the Pope Christine Lehner ’70 What to Wear to See the Pope (Avalon Publishing Group, 2004) introduces the Codwell family, a jovial, tight-knit clan that dines together often and for whom dinner-table conversation is repartee as art form. But subtext runs deep, patience wears thin and recriminations run rampant in the 10-story collection. A conflicted Catholic and amateur linguist, protagonist Ursula Codwell’s passion for saints and semantics is surpassed only by the affection that she feels for her family—including her bulldog. A touch of the exotic in Ursula’s background—a European grandmother, a beautiful mother born in Belgium and once resident in French Saigon, and schooling under a lusciously repressive Catholicism—juxtaposes with Ursula’s suburban New York life in which she hones in on minutiae, seeking meaning and spiritual certainty there. Brought up in what she refers to as the “fraught and schizoid tradition of Belgian Catholicism,” Ursula is also fraught and schizoid, personality traits that threaten to overwhelm her children and her ostensibly tolerant Unitarian husband. Christine’s What to Wear to See the Pope is a dead-on portrait of fragile family connections and crises of the soul, brought to life in interconnected stories. “[Here are] 10 debut stories that are ambitious and skillful indeed,” lauds Kirkus Reviews.
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Girls Rock! Fifty Years of Women Making Music Mina Carson ’70, Tisa Lewis and Susan M. Shaw In Girls Rock! (University of Kentucky Press, 2004), Mina Carson and coauthors Tisa Lewis and Susan M. Shaw examine the evolution of women’s roles in rock music since the 1950s. Although women wrote and performed rock music for decades, little has been written about their relationship to the industry and how they construct identities as rock ‘n’ roll artists. Girls Rock! examines the deter-
The Persky Awards: 25 years of saying ‘well done’ to student writers mination, motivation and passion of the female rock and rollers working in a male-dominated field. Whether learning an instrument, starting a garage band, or headlining a stadium concert, women are taking a visible and feminist stand in the music business, and inspiring audiences, other musicians and fans all over the world. Organized around thematic chapters such as “Sex, Race and Rock ‘n’ Roll” or “The Business,” Girls Rock! is based on interviews with women performers—from Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls, Ani Difranco and the Shirelles, to female musicians who play at coffeehouses and auditoriums around the corner. An Oregon State University history professor and a musician, Mina approaches women in rock music as an academic subject, exploring the influence of women on the music industry and how women have defined themselves in the male-dominated world of rock music.
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riting is a solitary pursuit. There is the keyboard, the idea, the inspiration or lack thereof, the late hour, the quiet room. It is highly personal yet ultimately public. It can emerge with little effort, but is more often accompanied by labor and contractions. When the result is good, validation is important. For 25 years, student writers at Milton have had the blessing of such validation through the Persky Awards. The Laurence S. Persky Memorial Awards were established to honor the memory of a Milton student writer who passed away just prior to his Class I year. His family and former friends endowed a fund to provide for a guest speaker from the writing world, awards for the best work appearing in Milton Academy student publications, and a dessert reception in the Cox Library in the spring of each year. Awards are given in creative writing, including poetry and fiction; in journalism, for editorial writing, commentary, news, features, arts stories, and sports; in photography, for both news and artistic photographs; in yearbook production, commendations are given for commitment and dedication; there is also an award for the best work of art. Outside experts judge each field; faculty advisors of Milton Academy school publications may not serve as judges. In the course of 25 years there have been speakers of great renown: author Stephen King, journalist Morley Safer, poet laureate Robert Pinsky, former governor and novelist William Weld, Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha), George V. Higgins, Milton parents, authors James
Carroll and Alexandra Marshall on two separate occasions, Bella English of the Boston Globe, and our own Emily Franklin ’90. In Emily’s words, “I certainly appreciate all that the Persky Awards have meant in my life, especially having been last year’s keynote speaker—I really felt that my writing and my life had come full circle, all leading back to Milton and the excellent direction I received there.” Young Laurence Persky had been inspired and guided, critiqued and cajoled by caring teachers in the craft of writing; those closest to him chose to honor his life by celebrating that tradition. Behind every tradition is a person who attends to the internal mechanism of keeping it going. Former faculty member Dale DeLetis, Laurence’s advisor and speech teacher, helped establish the award, and Jim Connolly has assured the awards since his arrival on the English faculty in 1983. He lines up the field of judges, selects and secures the
Persky Award guest speaker Donald Johnson with Jim Connolly, English department
speaker, arranges for the reception, brings judges and student publications together, invites the Persky family and special guests, involves the writing faculty, purchases the stack of books that are the Persky prizes, and more details that only he can know. Jim is among those who prepare student writers not only for their roles on the yearbook staff and Milton Measure, but for a lifetime of writing performance.
Elinor Persky shared points of view with student award winners at the 2004 Persky Award Ceremony.
“When I entered the ninth grade, I hated writing. But by the time I had completed freshman English and English workshop, I was committed to the craft. I realized that the ability to write is not an abstract talent a lucky few are born with,” said Margot Pollans ’00, a former Persky winner and graduate of Columbia University, “Rather, it is a concrete skill that can be taught to almost anyone. And, at Milton, it is taught exceptionally well. We learned to write from the ground up—from parts of speech, to megablunders, to multi-shelved sentences, to critical essays. Not a step was skipped.” Miriam Lawrence ’02, a junior at Williams College and recent winner of the Wainwright Award for the best student short story, called from her summer post at Skidmore College where she works for the school’s literary publication. She captured two Perskys while at Milton and remembers being inspired by
Arthur Golden, the speaker that year. Her regard for the preparation she received at Milton can only be compared to the pride she feels for her younger brother, Noah ’05, this year’s Persky winner and editor of the Milton Measure. After 25 years, the impact of the Laurence S. Persky Memorial Awards is clear. Emily Franklin says, “As an adult, and more importantly, as one whose career is writing, I find the award even more important. Somehow, the Persky signified in my 17-yearold brain that writing for a living was possible, that despite my doubts, I could be a real writer.” Thank you Alan and Elinor Persky and friends. Thank you Dale DeLetis and Jim Connolly. Catherine L. Farrington, Director of Stewardship
Persky award winners at the 2004 ceremony and reception
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The Mountain School Program celebrates Jerry Pieh, and its 20th year
Board of Trustees Welcomes New Members
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n celebration of its 20th year, the Mountain School hosted 10 events in one year, beginning in August 2003 with the raising of a new barn in Vermont, and ending in August 2004 with a celebration involving 250 graduates and parents in New York City. A highlight among these events was a May 15 dinner celebrating Jerry Pieh’s 20 years of commitment to the Mountain School. Jerry’s rotation off the Advisory Board this year allowed us to reflect on his 20 years of leadership—both as the headmaster of Milton Academy when the Mountain School was launched, and as the chair of the Mountain School Advisory Board from 1988 through 2004. Milton Head of School Robin Robertson saluted Jerry’s role, “When The Mountain School was a fledgling idea in Nancy’s and David Grant’s imagination, Jerry Pieh knew a vision worth the courage and ingenuity it would take to put in motion. Today Jerry’s willingness and his wise guidance has helped shape a remarkable program—one true to a vital and evolving mission that includes challenging academics, rigorous respect for the environment, and remarkable personal development.” It’s a wonder that the Mountain School ever happened at all. Now with over a dozen semester programs scattered around the country—all modeled in one form or another on the Mountain School—it’s important to remember that in 1983 no blueprint existed for such an idea. Two young Milton Academy teachers, David and Nancy Grant, stood on a beautiful Vermont hilltop farm and saw a remarkable educational opportunity. Our gathering in the Mountain School dining hall 64 Milton Magazine
on May 15, 2004 celebrated the people who helped to make the Grants’ vision possible. David Grant said it best that night: “There would be no Mountain School without Jerry Pieh.” Looking around the room, I saw a unique constellation of personalities. There was Jerry Pieh, Milton Academy’s headmaster when the Mountain School was founded; Jim Fitzgibbons, president of the Milton Academy Board of Trustees, who encouraged Milton to purchase the land and launch the program; Harold Janeway, another Milton board president who implicitly understood the Grants’ vision; Mac and Doris Conard, who sold the land to Milton; an array of early donors; and many of the founding faculty members, including the Grants, Mattinglys, Kruses and Gerry Coleman. Today it is difficult to imagine any school daring to risk such a bold adventure in education. The 1,730 graduates of the Mountain School—as well as the thousands of graduates of other semester programs inspired into existence by the Mountain
School’s success—owe their lifechanging experience to Jerry Pieh’s original vision. Purchasing a farm in Vermont and launching the Mountain School was an accomplishment unto itself; but perhaps Jerry’s most important contribution, as chair of the Advisory Board from 1998 through 2004, was leading the Mountain School toward an evolving philosophy of innovation and financial viability. We ended the evening with a gift in the form of a promise to Jerry and Lucy Pieh: a lifetime supply of maple syrup. Like our sugar bush, which continues to produce gallons of syrup year after year without harming the trees, Jerry’s ongoing leadership has enabled this educational experiment to become something lasting and sustainable. Whenever Jerry and Lucy run out of syrup, we will always have plenty more to send. Meanwhile, with the arrival of students in August, the Mountain School is carrying Jerry’s vision into its third decade. Alden Smith Director of the Mountain School
he Board of Trustees welcomes two new members, Bradley M. Bloom P ’06 ’08, of Wellesley, Massachusetts, and Karan Sheldon ’73, P ’04 ’10, of Blue Hill Falls, Maine, and Milton, Massachusetts.
Bradley M. Bloom Brad has served Milton as a member of the Head of School Council and on the Special Gifts Committee. He has also been a volunteer and supporter of organizations including the United Way and Harvard University and served as board treasurer for Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston. “Milton combines the best of a boarding school with a topnotch day school community,” Brad says. “The faculty are dedicated, and the activities are wide ranging.” He added that Milton’s three divisions—Upper School, Middle School and Lower School—combine and share their resources to strengthen the School overall.
Jerry Pieh, headmaster from 1973–1991, who supported the idea, then the implementation of the Mountain School Program.
“So much work has already been done,” says Brad, pointing to the clear vision of the master plan and the board’s commitment to enhance science and
Retiring from the Board of Trustees Jean Angell visual arts facilities. He looks forward to helping shape the next steps. Brad earned a bachelor’s and a master’s of business administration from Harvard University. He is managing director of Berkshire Partners, a private equity investment firm.
boarding student; her daughter, a 2004 graduate, was a boarding student, while her son entered Milton as a day student this fall. Karan says that Milton Academy was key to her intellectual development, and cited a former Milton philosophy teacher as well as English faculty member, Walter McCloskey (also her daughter’s teacher), as forces in that development. “I was at the School when the current science building appeared,” she says. “Seeing what solutions we come up with for the new building and other opportunities ahead of us will be interesting.”
Karan Sheldon ’73 Karan is co-founder and board member of Northeast Historic Film, an archive for northern New England’s moving-image heritage in Bucksport, Maine. She is managing editor for their publications, including www.oldfilm.org and Moving Image Review. Karan calls the board “hardworking” and attributes a sense of humor to its members. “When I talk about a sense of humor, I mean that human warmth that allows you to laugh about things, and use that as a problem-solving mode.” Karan brings to the board many perspectives: She attended the School as a day student and a
In the late 1990s, Karan was cochair of the Committee on the U.S. National Moving Image Preservation Plans for the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA), an advising body to the Library of Congress (LOC) on audiovisual preservation; she also served on the National Film Preservation Board. She now serves on the Steering Committee of the Moving Image Collections initiative at the LOC, funded by a National Science Foundation grant. Karan is a graduate of Brown University.
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e have missed Jean’s lively voice and astute opinions at our meetings for some time now, but she has continued to give her insights and we have continued to follow her advice. Jean, who had already been serving Milton as a member of the Mountain School Advisory Board, was elected as a trustee in 1996 while her son Chris was a Milton student. She launched her board service promoting the idea that the quality of student life deserved concentrated focus and action. Along with the notion that students living at School needed increased access to laboratories, art rooms, computer centers and gymnasiums, Jean made the case for a greater financial and organizational commitment to weekend activities for students. Jean was one of the earliest proponents of a student center at Milton—well before the findings of the trustee study validated her conviction. Impressed with Chris’s experience at Milton, eager to tell Milton’s story more aggressively and effectively, Jean chaired the Enrollment Committee just as the admission office began developing new plans for more targeted marketing. Milton’s admission efforts benefited from her energy and generosity in New York, particularly. Jean’s financial acumen had been tapped by other boards prior to her Milton service, and we lost no time in asking Jean to apply her analytical and strategic capabilities to our budget process and fiscal management.
from home. She was thrilled to review the master plan in detail and to offer her commentary. Jean coupled her affection for the Mountain School and for Milton by helping move the governance issues to satisfactory resolution—hosting numerous luncheons and teas in her lovely Central Park West apartment, where a vibrant red living room added another dimension to Jean’s dignified public persona. Robin relied greatly upon Jean’s valued advice, which she gave regularly, applying her intellect and experience to all manner of challenges. In short, Jean has been an active, engaged trustee, whose fondness and appreciation for Milton came through—whether she was holding our feet to the fire, brainstorming ideas, facilitating progress or helping to implement new plans. For the historical record, Jean served on the Budget and Student Life committees and chaired the Enrollment Committee; in addition she was a member of the Trustee Committee, the Executive Committee and the 1999 Head of School Search Committee. We are enormously grateful for Jean’s vigorous commitment to Milton, and thank her for insights and actions that have helped shape the direction of the School in the 21st century. Franklin W. Hobbs President, Board of Trustees Robin Robertson Head of School
Jean’s bravery and great spirit deeply moved us all, as she surmounted difficulties to attend board meetings and then to follow meetings by conference calls
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Retiring from the Board of Trustees Madeline Lee Gregory ’49
Retiring Faculty Edward G. Siegfried Mathematics Department, 1981–2004
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adeline had been a loyal alumna and an early volunteer leader for The Challenge to Lead, when we asked her—in 1998—to join the board. For Madeline, being a board member meant intensifying her attention to Milton, agreeing to the many requests for her presence on numerous standing and ad hoc committees. Along with her grace and warmth, we knew Madeline would bring a steady hand and sound reasoning to all kinds of Milton projects. In an earlier life as an alumni association trustee, Madeline had focused on Milton’s facilities issues, and she was therefore a natural choice for an active Buildings and Grounds Committee with a challenging agenda. As a subset of that focus, Madeline was a key member of the architectural steering committee that persevered through months of meetings guiding the Caroline Saltonstall, Warren Hall, Student Center, Wigglesworth Hall and dormitory projects. She brought steadfast energy and important insights to that work. “Don’t give up,” she urged Robin, on the prospect of a landmark Student Center as the group wrestled with architectural selections and interior design. Madeline brought a valuable historical perspective to the deliberations, and she applied a standard of Yankee practicality. That did not limit her vision, however, and she was always open to new possibilities and daring designs. The defense of a cork floor in the lower Student Center, for instance, was Madeline’s cause: She brought her own kitchen to the designers convened at Milton. Madeline’s broad interest in Milton’s direction also figured in her work on the Enrollment Com66 Milton Magazine
mittee and the External Relations Committee. Her trustee peers on these committees could count on honesty, common sense, and an optimistic perspective. Fully aware of the role of philanthropy in strengthening a school’s ability to fulfill its mission, Madeline, along with her family, developed an innovative faculty chair. The George C. Lee Family Teaching Chair is designed to build a sense of community among the younger, newer faculty at Milton while supporting excellence in their teaching. The Lee Family Teaching Chair grew out of previous Lee family funds honoring Madeline’s brother and father, and was inspired by the desire of the Lee children to honor Mrs. George C. Lee’s longtime loyalty to Milton. Milton graduates from the Lee family have been active and generous friends of Milton for decades. Our particular pleasure has been to work closely with Madeline, and she has played an important role in Milton’s extraordinary achievements in recent years. Her words may be few, but they are well placed and powerful. We will miss Madeline’s bright jackets and flowered skirts, not to mention her dependable wisdom and ready smile. We will celebrate with her, however, a continuing Lee tradition, as her grandson George graduates with the Milton Academy Class of 2004. Franklin W. Hobbs President, Board of Trustees Robin Robertson Head of School
ertical Leap,” Ed Siegfried named one of his collections of colleagues, indicating the challenge ahead of us—and that we had both the imagination and the muscle to get where we needed to be. Ed’s technology vision has outdistanced ours for roughly 25 years. We now hold our own in the technology netherworld, and we owe that to Ed’s unflagging faith in us, in our intellectual capacity, in our role as educators, in our sense of adventure. Ed came to Milton to teach mathematics. While his teaching skill inspired some of our most capable and vigorous students to brave uncharted territory, computer programming in its earliest form, for instance, his affability and non-judgmental approach supported other students for whom grasping the coursework was challenge enough. He founded ad hoc groups interested in mathematics or computing or the combination of both, and gave them the license to roam and the guidance to experience success. Other faculty members responded to Ed’s magnetic tug; he taught us often, and he led the mathematics department’s development of an Algebra II curriculum that improved upon the textbook option. Sharing ideas is a sine qua non principle for Ed, characterizing a true learner, a teacher, a responsible thinker and community citizen. What irony that he should be an educational leader when computing and Internet communication were changing daily how we connected with one another. Ed viewed the role
of computers as a cultural phenomenon as much as a technological one. Gathering ideas and making them available were linked, noble pursuits. He managed a widely used online conference, for instance, for sharing policy and problem-solving ideas among independent school educators. Ed could see the power of computing beyond even his own ability to describe it, or beyond our ability to understand what he described. He marshaled slim resources: first to equip students with computers; then to jury-rig a LAN for Milton’s first network; to set up an email system that prioritized online conferencing; and finally, to establish our Web presence at www.milton.edu. Ed initiated a “distance learning” programming course with Milton and Noble and Greenough students. Along the route, Ed’s title addressed what had long been his commitment: He became director of academic computing in 1998. Ed trusted that with access to the tools, we’d figure out the great applications. He created all
David D. Foster Milton Academy Faculty, 1983–2004 English Department, 1995–2004 kinds of organizations to stimulate the progress he hoped was inevitable. That’s where the MAC Rangers, and Vertical Leap, and the Long-Range Technology Committee and the Technology Forums came in. Ed’s instinct, as John Banderob puts it, “to see over the horizon,” was indefatigable. Ed’s belief in the capability of individuals migrated naturally to a confidence in collective action, and as Faculty Committee chair Ed helped the faculty and the administration work through complex issues, including compensation. Ed coupled his “big picture” vision with a sense for the important details of a teaching life, gently encouraging all voices to be part of the conversation. Ed loves nothing better than a good conversation, and he can guide it masterfully toward insights for all participants. One of the best things Ed shared with us was his family. He and Margaret, John, Lucy and Tom opened their home, their hearts and their kitchen to streams of Milton students and faculty who relished the care, the warmth, the sense of belonging to an open-ended family. We will miss Ed’s intellect, charm, wit, honesty and patience. Ed’s messages to us— in word and deed—arose from the clear conscience of an educator; and we have already seen how much staying power those messages have. John Warren Special Assistant to the Head of School
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wenty-one years ago, David arrived at Milton as the director of development, fresh from Princeton and before that, Deerfield, looking every inch the preppy. He still dresses almost exclusively in khakis, button-down shirts, jackets and bow ties, but appearances, as we well know, can be deceiving. Though he still favors the Brooks Brothers look, he is anything but a typical prep school English teacher. David is the consummate school person, but he wears his accomplishments lightly. Over the course of his time at Milton, he has been a dorm head (Faulkner House), dean of students, coach (swimming), volunteer (with Community Service), a trusted advisor to countless students, and a skilled, devoted English teacher. He has done what the school has needed time after time—never complaining, never begging off—and in the process modeled for a generation of students and colleagues what commitment really means. Those who know him delight in his wicked sense of humor—one that is assuredly not “politically correct.” Countless freshmen can attest to Mr. Foster’s fondness for mock-seriousness; he has been known to freeze his quarry with a bizarre question, his eyes glowering over his glasses for a beat or two, then giving way to a hint of a smile that tells the student he has been had. A colleague in the English department says, “Sometimes when I see David in the hall and a student of mine walks by, David will say, ‘Oh, you have So-andSo in your class, right?’ and I
his classmates “respected each other; we listened carefully and commented thoughtfully. We didn’t compete; we collaborated. We worked together to help each other understand these great pieces of literature, and in this way, the whole was definitely far greater than the sum of its parts.”
will answer ‘Yes,’ and he will respond (loudly enough for the student to hear), ‘Oh, that’s too bad. I’m sorry.’ Then he will let loose with his trademark roaring laugh.” As David himself put it in an interview this fall, “You tease the ones you love.” One learns fairly quickly not to take himself too seriously in David’s presence. He has always believed that humor should puncture, if possible, the ego’s balloon. There is, he might suggest, something healthy in that. What distinguishes David most is his deep love of teaching, his devotion to his students, and the sheer joy he takes in both. Sitting at his Harkness table, he is very much at home, whether he is teaching a lesson on mega blunders or leading a discussion about Othello, one of his favorite plays. After his return from summer study at Oxford several years ago, his voice contained that excitement of discovery that represents learning at its best. As David himself put it, in a piece for the Milton Magazine, studying at Oxford was “the most valuable academic experience I’ve ever had,” because he and
When David decided to leave Milton at the end of this year, who knew what he would do? After all, he will not qualify for his AARP card for a couple of years yet, he does not own any white shoes with a matching belt, and his idea of an earlybird special would likely feature binoculars rather than a buffet. He did not know, he said, but he was hoping to volunteer in some way for the various organizations—the Epiphany School, City School, the MFA—to which he had been drawn over the past two decades and to which he had already given so much of his time. Next fall, David will step in as director of admissions for The Epiphany School, a school for underprivileged children, adding another chapter to a remarkable academic career. Some of us, when we contemplate our exit from teaching, imagine golf courses or exotic trips or a house near the ocean. Not David. He will surely find time for some travel, but David has never been one to indulge himself excessively. That his departure from teaching should afford him more time to give to others is very much in character.
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Joyce B. Atkins Science Department, 1990–2001 Assistant Dean for Community Relations, 1999–2004 The closing passage from one of his favorite books, Stuart Little, by E.B. White, read by Mr. Foster at the Junior Leadership Retreat in April, will serve as a partial answer to the question about what the future holds for him. After a conversation with a repairman, who reminds Stuart that “a person who is looking for something doesn’t travel very fast,” Stuart rose from the ditch, climbed into his car, and started up the road that led toward the north. The sun was just coming up over the hills on his right. As he peered into the great land that stretched before him, the way seemed long. But the sky was bright, and he somehow felt he was headed in the right direction. We wish David “fair skies” as he journeys north. We will miss his energy, his laughter and his gentlemanly kindness. Rick Hardy (with thanks for material from a profile written by Emilia Rinaldini, Class IV) Chair, English Department
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oyce Atkins’s Milton Academy career began in 1990 when Jerry Pieh invited her to teach Middle School Life Science and Upper School Biology. Following that year, she became a fulltime member of the faculty, first in the science department and more recently as assistant dean for community relations.
Joyce regularly enlivened the science department faculty room with her geniality, candor and incisive wit. Science teachers remember Joyce graciously offering her lovely home in Westwood as the venue for department dinners, with Joyce playfully referring to herself as “Martha Stewart with a twist.”
Joyce generously and patiently guided her students through the intricacies of life processes in Biology as well as through the complexities of adolescence. In her Middle School teaching, Joyce moved from a traditional curriculum to a more inquirybased model. She designed the curriculum for the Class VI Life Science course, attentive to content and committed to allowing students to generate the questions. Joyce also helped create interdisciplinary work in math and science in Class VI, in the design and implementation of common math and science exams, and in extended interdisciplinary units.
In 1999, Headmaster Ed Fredie asked Joyce to serve as assistant dean for community relations, which she did while teaching one Middle School science class for several years. Most recently, she has assisted with the admission of students of color. Joyce has served as assistant dean with passion, compassion and a deep commitment to students of color. We have been blessed by her strong organizational skills, and her courage in helping us confront issues of race and class or challenge our assumptions, while also tempering that with her warm, frank Virginia humor. Assisting with Upper and Middle School admission, Joyce has served on admission committees and as Milton’s liaison to visiting representatives from Prep for Prep, ABC, Albert Oliver and other programs for talented students of color. As assistant dean for community relations, Joyce led the valuable Transition Program each summer. Joyce carefully locked in all the organizational aspects of the program long before the students arrived, so she could fully enjoy getting to know them and serving as an indispensable resource for their families. Joyce also worked with the various culture and identity groups at Milton, coordinating their
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attendance at annual student diversity conferences around New England, and driving students, as a chaperone, to the numerous diversity dances at other schools. After each dance, Joyce has been seen shaking her head and heard expressing one or two of her famous wry comments at the extent of the “dirty dancing.” Together with her close friend and fellow science teacher Lida Famili, Joyce has ably co-directed the Host Family Program. Each summer Joyce spent hours matching new students with local families who support the students’ cultures and assist them in their second home. Each fall, Joyce organized a kickoff dinner for the program. This year, Joyce served as faculty advisor to Onyx, helping black students organize their annual assembly, Chapel, and Kwaanza celebrations, as well as their community service project at Brookview House. Added to her long list of commitments at Milton is Joyce’s service on the Cultural Diversity Committee and her membership in the reading group SEED (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity). For helping us over these 14 years to realize our deeply felt commitment to teaching, learning and living in a diverse community, we give Joyce our deep thanks. Hugh Silbaugh Upper School Principal
David A. Eastburn Modern Languages Department, 1966–2004
William F. Sattherwaite Science Department, 1989–2004
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O
avid has the stuff of a master teacher, in the best Milton tradition. David embodies the passion, the extraordinary skills, the caring and the sacrifice that such a distinction implies…. The first chair of the modern languages department after the Boys’ and Girls’ schools merged, David was its driving force, inspiration, motivator and innovator for 14 years. He initiated our Chinese program as well as the foreign exchanges, now in their 34th year. His recognition of the importance of oral work and oral assessment led to our first language lab, and his expertise in the field of technology both pushed and empowered the timid among us to explore a new world. David also worked to attract gifted high school students to teaching. Following a Klingenstein fellowship in 1980 and a doctorate in education in 1985, he led a series of workshops at Milton that helped foster many a teaching vocation. David is at his best and happiest in the classroom, teaching a language and a culture with intensity and passion. French language, French culture and France have been central to who he is, even though his relationship with France is probably as complex as America’s is. I have never seen a teacher in France resonate as profoundly with the mysterious beauty of the classical alexandrine, or marvel at the intricacy of the prose of the “nouveau roman.” Unable to contain his enthusiasm, he would barge into the Webster room to share the beautiful rhythm of a verse or another typically French perverse use of syntax….
proudly remember how he made them feel “like intellectuals, like creators.” Many of them have stayed in touch with David; as one of them observed, “He knows so much about life.” He continues to write to them, long after he has taught them or advised them. Students have been David’s joy, his inspiration, his fountain of youth….
David brought to the classroom the same blend of excitement, discipline and lightness that made him such an inspiring coach…. A longtime soccer and ski coach, he instilled in his players both deference and a sense of playfulness. While he found ways to get the best out of them, he also reminded them never to take him too seriously. His former players speak fondly of his teasing and cajoling at the same time, of how he excelled at communicating. [His] expertise, hard work and fun produced many a winning team and ISL and New England titles. Along with David Britton, David introduced modern coaching techniques, starting the girls’ skiing program and strengthening the entire ISL….
It is symbolic that David has learned to build houses, that he has become a sailor and more recently a pilgrim. He has built sturdy foundations in many lives, but at the same time he has taught us that the beauty of life has a lot to do with the various paces with which we progress through it. From the inner peace of prayer, to his slow, contemplative walk toward Santiago, to his blazing off the marked trails on ski slopes, David has indeed shown that he knows a lot about life, that the thrill of the quest matters more than the destination, that the ultimate goal is never to arrive. Thank you and Godspeed, David.
ne late afternoon, when most department faculty had begun their Memorial Day weekend, Bill had invited four students into the faculty room. Comfortably sitting in the blue department chairs, notebooks and lab books spread open on the table before them; they were deeply involved in a conversation about physics. Bill, walking about offering Fig Newtons to the students and passersby, was embroiled in conversation about their physics problems and about learning in general— teaching them about physics, and about how to learn. The conversation was focused on the students, who worked through their ideas in a relaxed atmosphere. Bill is one of the most committed, hard working, warm-hearted teachers with whom anyone could have had the pleasure to work. Since 1989, when Bill arrived at Milton from the Kingsley School, and the Park School, he has been a strong member of the
Bernard Planchon Chair, Modern Languages Department
As someone who inherited [David’s] students in AP classes, I can attest that through the Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, one of his most popular vehicles to teach writing, he has unfailingly produced confident writers. His students
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Christopher R. Brown Science Department, 1998–2004 science faculty. He has taught courses across our curriculum including IPS, Methods of Scientific Research, Physics and Honors Physics. He provided his considerable skills to “hack soccer,” and to ultimate Frisbee. Excellent teaching, a deep compassion for his students and colleagues, and great generosity have marked Bill’s years at Milton. He is a man of character, deep kindness and sharp intelligence. He has made Milton a better place and we will miss him. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and affection of children; to earn appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.” By Emerson’s criteria Bill has succeeded, at Milton and in the world. My first year in the science department left me thinking that I knew the lay of the land, but once Bill had returned from sabbatical, I realized the real science department was the one with Bill. He is omnipresent in the department; he has given us his laughter, deep intellect, wonderful dithering, caring concern, love of learning, witty banter, love of physics, compassion for students, and love of life. Bill is constitutionally incapable of speaking anything but what he
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believes is the truth. While many know the difference between right and wrong, and few act on that, Bill’s life is a powerful example of goodness. As one of his colleagues says, “He’s the best Christian I know, even though he does not believe in God.” Members of the science department can always talk science with Bill, unwind with him after a long day, and seek the solace in his kind soul. Bill has enriched countless students since he began teaching in 1966, helping shape their minds and characters. He approaches teaching with a diligence and enthusiasm, thoughtfully crafting his lesson plans each day, thinking about more effective approaches to the subject matter and about reaching students at their core. Bill’s philosophical tenets illustrate his teaching style: “Think and figure out” (his directive to students when he confronts them with what he calls necessary ambiguity), and “correct practice.” Bill elevated our department and our teaching, and equally important, he is a dear friend to us all. He is a true colleague, an elegant teacher, and a wonderful person. We know that Bill will be back to visit, and we can’t wait. We will look forward to conversations, and the Fig Newtons. Michael Edgar Chair, Science Department
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hen he came in 1998, Chris brought aspects of his different professional lives— as a teacher and an engineer—to Milton. We have benefited from his experience, his intellect, his caring nature, and his love of physics and astronomy. Chris is a talented teacher; a relaxed feeling permeates his teaching. Chris’s students know that they will have the time to reflect and to think about the material in a non-threatening atmosphere; they can rely upon the careful patience of their teacher. Chris’s classes communicate the feeling that you, as a student, are there to “un-cover” a subject. His is master of his subject and relates it elegantly to his students. John Dewey wrote that a clear thinker is able “…to resolve a complex subject into its component parts…; to take in a word, any ‘chaos’ of experience and reduce it to harmony and system. This analytic power is the prime qualification of the clear teacher.” Chris’s students have experienced the “clear thinker.” Chris helped students reach theoretical understanding through labs that dealt with the practical. He showed students physics ideas at work in the world — what wattage means, or how much it costs to run a television set each month. He designed labs that were fun; students were rewarded for their precision. Chris brought his experiences as an engineer into the classroom to show the applications of physics. Students marched onto fields to hear the interference of sound waves, they witnessed a mirror setting fire to wood, and
learned to read resistor codes. He taught students to solder, to think like an engineer, to play with electronics. The department’s technological guru, Chris answered questions about electronics from everyone. Chris always stopped, listened and helped. He loves to work oneon-one with people. The girls of Hallowell know that after classes, Chris is focused on life in the house. Chris adds a sense of humor to his interactions with the girls, and a musical twist to house gatherings with his saxophone. He welcomes all to his home. Chris’s innate sense of when things are just a little bit “off ” with a student keeps the rest of the house staff up to date on issues that arise. His concern for the wellbeing of every member of the house is heartfelt. Chris’s wife Connie is his perfect match, filling in for Chris and serving as a maternal figure. Her strengths in the kitchen are well known,
Derek F. Stolp Mathematics Department, 1975–2004 and Hallowell girls check in on time when Connie bakes bread. She shows thoughtfulness toward all students, particularly those that need a little extra TLC. Connie began the tradition of the Hallowell cape, awarded to the girl who commits a selfless act for the betterment of the dorm and others. Alumni who return to Hallowell head straight to the Browns’ apartment to reminisce and share their lives. Many of us look forward to hearing what Chris has done with his summer. Whether he learned negotiation skills during an Elder Hostel retreat, or worked on a cheap and precise way to photograph a light spectrum from paper-towel rolls, he shows that he loves life. Our next news will be what involves Chris during his retirement. We will miss Chris; he enriched us through his teaching, his music, his relationship with us and his quiet, kind nature. Michael Edgar Chair, Science Department
I
n his 29 years at Milton Academy, Derek Stolp filled many roles. He taught mathematics in all grades, seven through twelve; he taught economics; he coached lacrosse and soccer; for 10 years, he chaired the mathematics department; he advised (in fact, he advised one group, in the Class of 2001, for six consecutive years through the Middle and Upper schools!); he sat on many committees. The differences that Derek has made in the mathematics department, in the Middle School, in the lives of his students, and in the lives of the many teachers for whom he has been a mentor, are immeasurable. Derek is, first and foremost, a teacher, and he does all of the things that make a great teacher. He is extremely well versed in his subject. He reads widely and thoughtfully on the art of teaching and on the experiences of students in schools. He knows
how and when to push his students to think for themselves, and how and when to explain carefully. For Derek, teaching is very much a process of cultivation. By providing his students with interesting questions and problems, he plants the seeds that encourage and support growth and learning. In his classroom all students—those for whom mathematics is a passion, as well as those for whom the discipline is to be endured— are challenged and encouraged. Through exploration and further inquiry, Derek’s students come to see and understand the beauty and power of mathematics, as well as its importance and usefulness in the world.
education is and/or should be. The same set of beliefs that makes him a legendarily patient teacher guided his leadership of the department and continues to guide his contributions to the Academy. Derek trusts, in a most profound way, that in any group of well-meaning individuals, the process of presenting ideas clearly and asking thoughtful and thought-provoking questions will, in time, produce good thinking and correct results. In all spheres, Derek has always led by example. Neither expediency nor current popularity has ever really been able to compete, in Derek’s way of thinking, with what he believed to be simply right.
Under Derek’s leadership as mathematics department chair, the curriculum evolved to emphasize the application of mathematics more fully. Derek encouraged teachers to talk about mathematics in the context of teaching and learning in the 21st century, and to consider the changing needs of young people in this age of technology. Rather than attempt to mold our students to a published textbook, Derek encouraged us to write curricula that we could more appropriately mold to our students’ needs and capabilities. He provided the leadership and support that enabled us to take on this task, and we are a better department for having done so.
Now, it is that very set of beliefs that guides him away from Milton Academy, seeking a new set of challenges and opportunities, because that is where his thinking has led him. While his decision deeply saddens us, we have faith in and deep respect for the process by which he reached it, and we wish him the very best.
Everything that Derek has done and that he has stood for at Milton has been grounded in a consistent yet ever-evolving set of basic principles about what
We shall miss his wisdom, his humor, and his steadfast friendship and support. Thank you, Derek, for 29 years of thoughtful, creative and heartfelt contributions to the life of Milton Academy. John Banderob Jackie Bonenfant, Chair Mathematics Department
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Class Notes 1932 Lewis Perry, Jr. was awarded the Masters Award at Lawrenceville Academy, where he taught for 20 years before becoming headmaster of Fountain Valley School in Colorado. Lewis, at 91, plays golf.
1934 John “Chip” Harkness, who captured the national wrestling title in 1938 as a Harvard senior, saw Harvard senior, Jesse Jantzen, do likewise in March 2004. Cheered on by Chip, Jesse was the first Harvard wrestler to match Chip’s achievement in the NCAA in the last 66 years. Henry Moulton ’42 (a basketball player at Milton) reported the wrestling news, which appeared in the Harvard University Gazette. Henry remembers that Peter Fuller ’42 was “perhaps the next most excellent wrestler after Chip in Milton annals.”
1935 Eleanor Blackall Read is an active volunteer. She is moving into Stone Ridge, a new retirement complex in Mystic, Connecticut, in November.
The “Boys of 1939” enjoy a get-together. Front row (left to right): Stephen Wellington, David Place, Galen Stone, Herb Stokinger ’24, N. Rulison Knox, Oliver Biddle, George Richardson; row 2: P. Dudley Lamson, William Apthorp, Holbrook R. Davis, Oliver F. Ames, Evan Calkins
1937
1938
In January 2004, Daphne Adams moved to a continuous care retirement community in Fort Worth, Texas, to be near her daughter, grandchildren and great-granddaughter.
Doris Ritchie Walker moved to Noble Horizons, a retirement village in Salisbury, Connecticut.
Katharine Warner Cook is chugging along at 83 and keeps up with the world through the “Off the Record” program at the Foreign Policy Association in New York City.
1939 Alice Judson Hayes teaches a poetry writing class at the retirement community where she lives in Chicago. Her husband, Albert, is fine at 94. She and Albert relish the offerings of a great city. They took a boat tour last summer, starting from the Navy Pier and arriving in Warren, Rhode Island, two weeks later. Albert’s son and his wife kept them company. “It was a great trip for aged travelers.”
1943 Thomas Hale lives quietly on the Vineyard. Having lost two wonderfully loving and beloved wives (to a stroke and cancer), he married his third wife, Marge Haven, in September 2002, and the couple is very happy. They have a “shuttle marriage”: they have kept both houses and slip back and forth between as the spirit moves Class of 1944, (left to right): Julia O’Connor, Fiona Stockwell, Jean Dougherty
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them. Thomas researches and writes maritime history, builds ship models from scratch and is active in the historical society, which is about to undertake a major expansion. With eight grandchildren and four stepgrandchildren, Thomas believes that he supports every educational establishment in the U.S. singlehandedly!
1944 W.F. Ingersoll had an enjoyable evening at his 60th reunion at Milton in May: “Dinner was lots of fun and very good.” Ethel Thurber Ortenburger works at the University of New Mexico Law School and has no plans for retirement. She has five horses, and rides and teaches an occasional dressage lesson.
1946 Katharine Little Heigham and her husband, Jim Heigham ’47, traveled last summer to Spitzbergen, Norway, where they saw polar bears and many walruses.
Katharine enjoyed being so far north among so many ice floes and icebergs.
1950 Grace Farrar Knowlton had a show of her sculpture, photography and drawing in May at the John Davis Gallery in New York City. She teaches at the Art Students League.
1951 Lumina Greenway moved from New Mexico to New Hampshire in November 2003.
1955 Priscilla Rand Baker is busy with volunteer work. She writes, “When do we get to rest?” Catherine Stinson Carleton reports that life is good despite two operations. She works as a volunteer for a children’s literacy program and is as busy as she was when she worked full time. Three of four of Anne Roth Magendantz’s children are married. Last summer, she disappeared in planning Elisa’s wedding. Elisa lives in London, where Anne planned to visit her. Her older two sons have one child each: a 6-year-old boy for Eric and 1-year-old Ian, for Chris. They are both in Connecticut. Anne’s youngest son will be married in the coming months. She enjoys her time weaving, journaling, volunteering at her church and keeping up with family and friends. Paul Toulmin works full time, but his desire to retire is very strong. He plans to spend part of his summer at his house on the Maine coast, with the balance of the year in San Francisco or traveling. He remains involved in wine judging, which has now expanded to include spirits, such as single malt scotch. Paul is in good health, as is his outlook and attitude for the future.
1956 Elizabeth Emerson writes, “Hooray for Massachusetts and the SJC. My partner Jane Van Landingham and I hold a marriage license and will be legally married by mid-June [2004]. We were actually spiritually married on April 17 in Dover, New Hampshire, at the Friends’ Meeting in the presence of our extended families and friends, including our collective five children, their spouses and two grandsons—a wonderful day! A civil marriage will make us legal in Massachusetts. We are so happy that our commitment to each other can be recognized in the same way as every other loving couple.” Margaret Sheffield Mannoni teaches at Bard College and is almost finished writing a book on modern sculpture and has a publisher. She has been delighted to catch up with Rupert Hitzig, Jane Genth Wylie ’54 and Cornelia Thomas Carroll ’54.
Lucy Wendell-Thorpe is busy traveling, volunteering and spending time with friends and family in retirement. She visited her nieces, Liddy Wendell ’94 and Ellie Wendell ’98, in Spain. Last year, Ellie accompanied Lucy to the Ecuadorian Amazon to camp in an Achuar Indian community. This was Lucy’s third visit to the community, to photograph and learn how they live: make pottery, baskets, weave, fish, garden and more.
1958
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Anne Reynolds Skinner’s research interest in archaeological chemistry has recently taken her to South Africa and Brazil. In January, she took Williams College students digging in India. Anne misses Harry Stubbs [former faculty, deceased], who got her interested in chemistry. On other fronts, Anne’s children are all married and the grandchild count is up to four.
Christina Morris Helm declares that life is wonderful in New Hampshire, where she and her husband, Bill, are busy with community outreach, family, racquet sports and gardening. They delight in their growing family, adding another son-in-law this summer, and a fifth grandchild in September. In March, they traveled to China, Thailand and Cambodia. Christina was sorry to miss reunion!
Georgia Anne Bradley Zaborowski is getting back on her feet after an illness that kept her from her Milton reunion in 2003. She is doing well. Her husband, Stan, was relocated to Sudbury, Massachusetts, for business, but they have no plans to leave their happy place in Groton. Georgia writes, “Life is good here with the animals and visits from grandchildren.”
Class of 1954, (left to right): Ed Ofgant, Bill Hartmann, John Wylde, Jeremy Gowing, Constance Trowbridge, Martha Chatterjee, Martha Smith, Kadie Staples, Sally Flynn, Jean Childs, Lilla Lyon, James Mumford; row 2: Ross Sherbrooke, Tom Gregg, George Smith, Kit Bingham, Liz Barrett, Marie Doebler, Duffy Schade, Rosamond van der Linde, Louie Hays, Jane Wylie Genth, Cynthia Kennedy Sam; row 3: Ted Raymond, Dave Carr, Craig Haines, Steve Heard, Jack Cannell, Richard Beckwith, Humphrey Nichols, Margaret “Peggy” Huguley Law, Jean Whitham, Cynthia Hallowell, Sarah Lovett; row 4: James Perkins, John Deknatel, Marshall Schwarz, David Ehrlich, John Ames, Sidney Graves, Harold Janeway, Larry Altman, Henry Stone, Ned Crosby, Frederic Lawrence
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Class of 1959, front row (left to right): Martha Woodworth Honeywell, Laina Wylde Swiny, Pam Wolcott Fingleton, Nathaniel (Sandy) Greene, Chris Lehman; row 2: Bonnie Bonnet Akins, Erica Cutler Labouisse, Brin Ford, Fred Churchill, Steve Jones, Duffy Monahon; row 3: Christina Converse Jackson, Sissel FalckJorgensen, Tom Claflin, Tim Williams, Minturn Chace, Arthur Weed, Stephen B. Parker, Philip Kinnicutt; row 4: Charlton Ames, Nick Bancroft, Tony Gaenslen, Dave Brown, Timothy Clark, Jack Pappas
Class of 1964, (left to right): John Straus, Peter Holmes, Ed Brown, Lindley G. Thomasset, Ed Schwartz (and dog Reilly), George Hilton, Jim Pappas; row 2: Nick Hinch
daughter (1). One of her other daughters is living and working at home, and the youngest is a freshman at Villanova University. Catherine’s life has been a balance of homemaking, helping Rogelio in various business ventures, and social and community activities (charities and garden club). Catherine reports that they lead an active life without a dull moment.
1971
A gathering of the Class of 1959 during Grads’ Weekend 2004 included David Ames, Caroline Bonnet Akins, Charlton H. Ames, Spencer Borden, Lloyd D. Brown, Paul M. Fine, Pamela Wolcott Fingleton, Joseph A. Gaenslen, Erica Cutler Labouisse, Thomas B. Williams, Katherine Blodgett Winter, Frederick J. Butler, Christina Converse Jackson, Wendy Cutter Maynard, Mary MacNaught Monahon, Stephen B. Parker, Christopher M. Lehman, William H. Thaxter , Minturn V. Chace, Jane Sheldon Chatfield, Timothy B. Clark, Martha Woodworth Honeywell, Frederic E. Churchill, Philip H. Kinnicutt, William N. Bancroft, E. Procter, Arthur H. Weed, W.G. Wood, Thomas M. Claflin , Helena Wylde Swiny , Nathanael B. Greene. T. Stephen Jones, Sissel M. Falck-Jorgensen, Leon M. Cangiano, Brin R. Ford, John C. Pappas, Richard A. Howard, Lewis A. Carter, Walter Channing.
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A couple of days after his 59th birthday, Robert “Chip” Vincent ran his first marathon in Madrid with his daughter! Chip enjoyed seeing everyone at the 40th reunion last May.
Catherine Cinelli Henriquez has lived in Panama for 34 years, which has been an interesting life experience for her, her husband, Rogelio, and their four daughters. Two of Catherine’s daughters are married and she has two grandsons (4 and 3) and one grand-
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Sylvie Peron enjoys the pressure of editing a French magazine dedicated to supersail and yachting. The magazine is based in Cannes. Following trips to New Zealand and Malaysia, Sylvie covered regattas and yacht shows in the Caribbean. She has sailed on board some of the world’s largest sailing yachts to Malta, Capri, Porto Cervo and a few other fun spots. Sylvie writes, “It is hard work, indeed! My partner, Luc Blanchard, joined us a year ago; he’s now editing for both Yachting Life and Yachts, published in Russia as well as Italy. Our sister publication in the States is Yachts International—good excuse for us to throw a party at our “cabanon” in the olive orchard off Fayence. “We still have not been able to collect enough olives to press our own oil as the birds usually eat them all before we get a chance to harvest! We enjoyed the visit of
Letitia O’Connor Levy, and her husband and sons, Dana and Connor Levy, last June and look forward to the return visit of Rosanna Warren Scully next May 25.”
1972 Robert Baldwin is an associate professor of history at Connecticut College. In a recent essay available at http://oak.conncoll.edu/ ~rwbal or by emailing rwbal@ conncoll.edu, Robert examines historical distortions in the bestselling murder mystery, The Da Vinci Code.
1975 Louise Preston Werden graduated from Antioch New England Graduate School with a master’s in education on May 1, 2004.
1976 Kathryn Moseley Kristofik reports that her daughter, Nina, will attend Milton Academy this fall. Nina will be a boarding student in the Class of 2007.
1977 Kelly Connelly Evans writes, “As we evaluate educational opportunities for our daughter Lily (10), I realize the opportunities a Milton education presents and regret that we don’t have anything that comes close to it in our area.”
Class of 1969, Steven Newman, Chris White, Eleanor King, Vivian Stein, David Dudley, Wells Pile
Class of 1974, (left to right): Pam Crowley, David Mohr, Annette BuchananJohnson; row 2: Sam Dennis with Alexandra, Anna L. Waring, Mary Anne Sgarlat Baumgartner; row 3: H.A. “Nick“ Nichols, Cassandra Perry, Jeff Hurst
Susan Rogers Moehlmann loves living in London and works part time at the Royal Academy of Art. Susan credits Milton for developing her interest in art history. She has a daughter, Sophia (6), and a stepson, Maxi (18).
source of delight and frustration. Benjamin practices wildlife law at the Department of the Interior and bird watching when he can. He took a trip to Belize over Christmas, spending 10 days there. “Beautiful country, great birds.”
1979 Emily Baker lives in London with her husband and two children, Zoe (10) and Quinlan (7). They travel frequently, but have recently been busy renovating a house in New Forest (southwest of London), which they bought two years ago. They were thrilled to see Beth Farrington Statman and her family last spring. Emily is a prolific writer. Derek Gilman was deployed to the Office of the General Counsel of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. He is the assistant general counsel for commercial law reform and is responsible for supervising the amendment, replacement or initial drafting of over 30 Iraqi laws, including the securities law, company law, tax law, bankruptcy law, budget law, NGO law, secured transactions law, commercial leasing law, patent law, copyright law, trademark law and public procurement law. David Ketchum and his wife, Jane, welcomed their fourth child, Henry David Ketchum,
on May 20, 2004, at Matilda Hospital in Hong Kong. Christopher Rahill is awash in diapers. His three beautiful and brilliant children, Jack (3), Reilly (2) and Connor (1) continually re-prove the “what goes in must come out” theorem. Chris writes, “Paula and I (thanks to our fine education) remain gainfully employed. Our health is fine, our days and nights are full—what more could you ask? All the best to my Class of ’79 pals!” Douglas Schwalbe Jr. and his wife, Fabienne, welcomed a daughter, Lucy, on January 27, 2004.
Veronique Choa Pittman has two children, Andrew and Lucy. She spends time traveling, painting and occasionally working on graphic design and Web projects. Rob Radtke, his wife, Maryl and daughter, Eva, are thriving in New York. Rob runs the Asia Society’s policy and business program.
1983 Elisabeth Donohue sent a family update. Her sister Laura Donohue ’81, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she enjoys rowing and rehabbing her Victorian house. Her sister Carolyn Donohue Grant ’80, lives in Chicago with her husband, Jerry, and two sons: Sean (7) and Duncan (3). She is senior vice president at Northern Trust. In July 2004, Randall Dunn assumed his responsibilities as head of school at The Roeper School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
Elizabeth Farrington Statman is married with two children, Matthew (10) and Olivia (8). She was vice president and head of European sales trading at Northwest Markets. Beth was in a terrible car accident in December 1996, and after being in a coma for four days, she came out if it and was in a rehabilitation hospital for two months. It has been a struggle ever since, but she has truly appreciated her family and friends.
1982 Benjamin Jesup’s daughter, Sarah, just completed kindergarten, and he reports that she, like all kids, is a continuous
Class of 1982 friends celebrate the 40th birthday of Toby Cabot ’82. From left to right, Jim Ward, John DeMatteo, Toby Cabot, Fran McLean, Tom Kenny, Rick Wise, Phil Milot, Tom Farrell, Ted Stikeleather and Bill Galvin.
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Elizabeth Strekalovsky enjoys the challenge of balancing work and mommyhood. Marina (2) keeps her busy and young, for the most part! Gwenna Toncre Williamson claims there must have been something in the water at her 20th Milton reunion. Two weeks after she returned home, she found out that she was pregnant. Zachary Randall Williamson was born January 5, 2004. She would be happy to hear from people: gwennaw@hotmail.com.
Class of 1979, front row (left to right): Tim Bradley, Glenn Allen, Paul Ouellet, Linda Thomas Terhune, Julie Wallace Bennett, Edie de Vegvar Rowland, Kathy Raymond Elkind, David Rabkin; row 2: Mary Hamlen Drew, Beth Zonis, Elizabeth Rogers Sisson, Tedd Saunders, Kacey Rudduck, Todd Saunders; Bunny Mauran Merrill, David Ketchum, Sarah Felton, Frank Dooley, Justin Aborn, Liz Mueller, Malcolm MacDougall, Bryan Austin; row 4: Ian McCutcheon, Jim Griffin, John Arena, Glenn Macura, George Kelly, Kevin Harrison, Mark Rafael, Matt Panarese, Ned Handy, Tad Walker
Sara Burdick Wood teaches English at Mississippi State and is trying with her husband, Rob, to keep their girls, Caroline (8) and Becca (5,) from getting thick Southern accents. They honor Sara’s Yankee roots by loving lobster. Sara’s brother, Tim Burdick ’85 is a physician and lives in Auburn, Maine, with wife Kristen and daughter Hannah (1).
1984 Ligia Brickus returned to Elite Model Management as a senior executive to be part of a major restructuring effort. She says that “It’s been and continues to be a wonderful challenge. I still love the fashion world.” In May 2003, Douglas Cabot earned a master’s at Emerson College in audio and documentary video production. For his thesis project, he made a onehour film, The Man Who Would Be Viking, which has been accepted to film festivals in Woods Hole and San Francisco so far. He has a new job in production, working on a series for the Discovery Channel. Doug plays drums for the Boston band, Chroma.
Class of 1984, front row (left to right): Kathleen Flatley Ix with Emily, Robbie, Libby and Jim, Susan Evans Bohan, Sally Wright Waxman with Elizabeth and Wayne, Kim Doulos, Melissa Glen, Gretchen Cole, Asher Lipman, Flynn Monks, Rhea Zervas Brubaker with Lucy, Frank Quinn; row 2: Jim Karp, Katie Andrews, Sarah Hoit with Wesley; row 3: Lucie Cooper Greer, Joe Swirbalus, Matt Bradley, Jeff Wayne, Jennifer Jewell, Amy Eldridge, Todd Wyett, Ligia Brickus, Ed Foley with Aidan, Mar Deneen; row 4: S.S. Hobbs, Stephen McCarthy, Adam Gould, Dan Horan, Lisa Jones, Barak Rosenbloom, Geoff Theobald
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From September 10 through October 10, Sheila Gallagher’s solo exhibition, “Chase,” was open the Clifford/Smith Gallery on Harrison Avenue in Boston. Through a variety of mixed media, including painting, installation art and automated technology, Sheila explores what we as a
culture are running towards or being chased by. Sheila teaches at Boston College and lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.
Class of 1989, front row (left to right): Eliot Merrill with Maggie, Emily Fenster with Ella, Tracy Pun Palandjian with Charis and Te, Jay Sullivan with Wyatt; row 2: Jason Dunn, Eliza Dunn, Jen Drohan, Damon Horowitz; row 3: Brian Martin, Norman Roye, Owen Stearns, Sam Williamson, Jenny Ford Barrett with Sam, Peter Barrett
Robert Goldson III is married to Tory Goldson. The couple has one child. Robert opened his own law practice three years ago after some time at a midsize law firm and the public defender’s office. Robert was elected to the city council two years ago in Webster Groves, Missouri, a town of 20,000. He formed a real estate partnership and purchased a building for his law practice last year. Lisa Jones and her husband, Kenneth Mack, welcomed Sophia Andrea Mack, on April 27, 2004. In June, Lisa received a master’s in public administration from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. James Karp returned to Darien, Connecticut, from London last year. He bumped into Holly Gates in the neighborhood and would love to hear from other classmates in the area.
Class of 1994, front row (left to right): Kate Dunton, Fred Melo, Rachel Peck, Nika Thayer, Anna Rosefsky, Samantha Drohan, Susanna Zaraysky, Lara (Martin) Armitage; row 2: Sean Westmoreland, Lynn Rasic, Jesse Robinson, Susannah Bancroft, Vanessa Hynes, A.J. Simon, Mary Lisio; row 3: Devon White, Leslie Eckel, Ally Field, Amy Dickie, Dune Thorne, Heidi Wiemeyer, Sarah Schechter; row 4: Charlie Everett, Leslie Garrett, Michael Ford, Ethan Sigman, Peter Cervieri, Evan Hughes, Dan Sarles, Andy Tapkins, Jesse Baer, John Curran
Elisabeth Walcott had a wonderful time seeing classmates at Summershack over Graduates’ Weekend. She wants to stay in touch: ewalcott@cox.net.
1985 Michael Choi is a senior art director with Harrison and Star in New York City. He and his wife also run a graphic design business, Open Mind Design (www.openminddesign.com), out of their home in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
Miltonians Erin Steimle ‘95 and Peter Brooks ‘95 welcomed Milton friends to their July 2004 wedding. Pictured in front row (left to right) are: Fran McInnis (staff), Mickey Steimle (faculty), Chip Steimle ‘65, Erin Steimle Brooks ‘95, Peter Brooks ‘95, Kim (Steimle) Gori ‘92; row 2: Dale Deletis (former faculty), Sheila O’Marah (former faculty), Paul Lyons ‘95, Meave O’Marah ‘82, Katherine Bernheim ‘80, Diane Popeo ‘92, Lauren Dwyer ‘95, Josh Friedman ‘95; row 3: Marijke Alsbach (faculty), Victoria Davis ‘94, Jason Bolton ‘95, Sam Shaw ‘95, Lyle Bradley ‘95, Nick Simonds ‘95, Walter Hinton ‘95, John Charles Smith (faculty) and Bob Tyler (faculty).
Mark Tribe married Emily Eakin on July 19, 2003. He started a new position as director of art and technology at Columbia University’s School of the Arts the same month. Mark and Emily welcomed a daughter, Isabel Gibson Tribe, on April 3, 2004. “Hello Class of ’85,” writes Ed Sugrue. “I hope this message finds everybody happy. As for me, I have been reviewing educational products for several magazines in
recent years, and am beginning to look for opportunities to contribute in some way toward designing new ones. This has brought me a lot of happiness.” Ed also reports that he has been tutoring students in English. Ed also shares his diagnosis of Asperger’s Disorder, which amounts to a social disability, he says. “Over the years I’ve basically been aware that there is something odd about my wiring, without knowing what it was,” he says. “There’s no cure, but I’m very fortunate to live in Boston.” Ed also reports that he’s happily back in touch with Valerie, a woman he met through the French Exchange.
1987 Annie Libby married Bernard H. Gustin last year. The couple lives in New York City and Newport in the summer. Margaret Rousseau lives in Jacksonville. She has joined households with her partner, Karen Elliott. She writes, “Out of sheer perversity, I have become a member of the Junior League.” Christine Turner White and her husband, Colin, are delighted to announce the birth of their first child, Duncan John White, born April 24, 2004, and weighing 7 lbs, 13 oz. Mom planned to enjoy a summer of maternity leave and can be reached at whitect@aol.com. Sarah White lost her husband, Stefan Bournakel, on February 13, 2004. Stefan was killed by a reckless driver on Kula, Maui, Hawaii. A month prior to Stefan’s death, Sarah and Stefan welcomed a baby boy, Nicos Robert Bournakel, on January 12, 2004.
1988 Alexandra Langlois Dubois and her husband, Chris, joyfully announce the birth of their first child, William Aidan, born September 6, 2003.
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Class of 1999, front row (left to right): Brooke Harris, Thomas Leung. Leslie Kwok, Diana McCarley, David Pun, Sarah Schram; row 2: Stephen Elliott, Adele Burnes, Shira Milikowsky, Jamie Berk; row 3: Michael O’Neill, Daniel Krupp, Andy Houston; row 4: Amanda Drummond, Andy Walker, Luke White
Thomas Wang and his wife, Linda, welcomed son Adam JueWen Wang, on September 4, 2003.
1989 Hello to the Milton Academy community from Alexis Chen Johnson and Kyle Johnson. The couple lives in Montclair, New Jersey, with their three beautiful children, Isaiah (6), Becca (3), and Caleb, who was born January 21, 2004. Kyle works for Domini Social Investments, Inc., and Lex is a stay-at-home mom involved as a La Leche League leader to provide breastfeeding education and support. Anil Thomas is busy with MetaChain, working on supply chain management software and a consulting company. He looked forward to moving into a new place this past summer.
1990 Austen Bailly is working toward a Ph.D. in art history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She works part time as
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an assistant curator of American Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her husband, Jonathan, graduated from the Anderson School of UCLA with a master’s in business administration in June 2003. They are hooked on California, but they do get hit with pangs of nostalgia for the East Coast. David Bergan was busy in 2003: He was admitted as an attorney to the New York bar and married Braden Cleveland in North Carolina. On a sad note, his mother passed away. Kimberly Langworthy Blair and Marc Blair announce the birth of Samuel Harris Blair, on November 28, 2003. Ellen Casey Boyd and her husband, Steven Boyd, welcomed a daughter, Abigail Blake Boyd, on March 15, 2004. Andrew Wiemeyer is the proud father of Katherine Davies Wiemeyer, born December 12, 2002.
Les Marshall, Jr. ‘89 and his wife, Armida, welcomed twin girls, Jasmine and Leia, on March 30, 2004. Jasmine was born 4 lbs. 1 oz. and Leia was 5 lb. 1 oz. “Both babies are doing well and growing fast,” writes Les, “while Mom and Dad are excited but exhausted from newfound parenthood.”
1991
1992
Maureen Dolan writes, “Hey folks, please feel free to drop me an email if you’re visiting or living in Los Angeles.”
Ryan Plotner married Gretchen Isla Steinkampf on October 18, 2003, in Tucson, Arizona. Milton Academy alumni in attendance included Cameron Stephenson Barthmaier, Molly Walsh, R. Mason Smith, Daniel Stanzler, Thomas Reardon, and Michael Flaherty.
Alexander Morss completed his residency in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital this summer as did Meghan Baker. Alexander anticipates a career in cardiology.
1993 Spencer Dickinson successfully completed his first year of business school at the University of Virginia. He spent the summer in New York City and returned to Charlottesville, Virginia, for his second year. M. Fell Ogden produces theater off Broadway and was thrilled to be a part of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama, I Am My Own Wife, by Doug Wright, and the Obie winner, Small Tragedy, by Craig Lucas. She recently celebrated with John “Fipp” Avlon ’91 the launch of his book, Independent Nation. Alexander Orlovsky co-produced a film shown at the 2004 Tribune Film Festival.
1994 Katharine Orlovsky finished her first year of law school at Hastings Law School in San Francisco.
1995 Robert “Nat” Kreamer graduated from Rice University’s Jesse Jones Graduate School of Management in May with an MBA. He then moved to New York to join PricewaterhouseCoopers as a financial strategy consultant. Nat hangs out occasionally with Jesse Dubreuil, who is working at Rice while finishing a doctorate at the University of Virginia. Laura Snydman graduated from Tufts University School of Medicine and, as class president, delivered the graduation speech. She will be a resident in internal medicine at Tufts–New England Medical Center. “Hi Milton Academy!” Adam Rosenblatt writes, “I just wanted to let you know that on August 28, on the seashore at Cape Ann, Massachusetts, I married my comics-drawing, immigrantrights-advocating sweetheart, Amanda Levinson.”
Classmates in attendance were Colin Cheney (who played music for the ceremony), Douglas Housman and Clark Friefeld.
1997 Peter Curran married Sarah Farmer in Old Town, Virginia, on July 31, 2004. Sarah was in the class of 2001 at Bowdoin with Peter. The couple will live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Peter will attend Harvard Graduate School of Education. Peter and Sarah will serve as freshman proctors in the dorm where they live. Peter is excited to be back in Boston after being away for a few years and he looks forward to reconnecting with many people.
Peter Curran ’97 married Sarah Farmer on July 31, 2004, in Old Town Alexandria in Northern Virginia at a the Torpedo Factory, a modern art museum, directly on the Potomac River. From left to right in this photo are Josh Frank ’97, Brian Haley ’97, Jack Donahue ’97, Sarah Farmer (the bride, now Sarah Curran), Peter, Jeff Cooper ’97, Glen Harnish ’97, David Rand ’97 and Ethan Kurzweil ’97.
Eno Sarris lives in London and is finishing his screenplay and scratching by in one of the most expensive cities in the world.
Winter Ball, December 21, 2003, Park Plaza, Boston. Front row (left to right): Sarah Case ‘97, Marissa Miley ‘98, Frances Tilney ‘97, Leslie Mann ‘98, Sydney Johnston ‘98; row 2: John Birkett ‘98, Jack Donahue ‘97, Jonas Akins ‘97, Ted Noon ‘97, Kerry Hughes ‘97, Andrew Pappas ‘97, Sam Raymond ’99, Macy Raymond ‘96
1999 Rachel Allen will begin the University of Vermont’s MD/PhD program in fall 2004. Stephen Elliott is an ensign in the U.S. Navy and started submarine training last summer. He is going through Yale withdrawal and trying to read as much as possible to pretend he is still a student. Before he became a naval officer, and just after his college graduation, Stephen spent three months on a world tour with his singing group, the Whiffenpoofs of Yale. Abigail Drachman-Jones graduated from Dartmouth in June 2003, and is working toward a master’s in education at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. She’ll be back in Boston in fall 2004. James Miller graduated from Bowdoin College (May 2003) and took a job at ICF Consulting in Fairfax, Virginia. He is a research assistant in the Emergency Management and Homeland Security practice. His favorite part
of the job is helping to design and conduct exercises for first responders. Leigh Pascavage is publicity manager for Let’s Go Publications. Let’s Go Publications is the world’s bestselling budget travel guide series, and it is entirely written and produced by students. Leigh was also the associate editor of Let’s Go: Germany 2004, which hit shelves nationwide in January. Brandon Wall was really disappointed that he missed the fifth reunion, but he was in the midst of a road trip across the U.S. with Tze Chun ’98. He has started working as a research associate at the Public Policy Institute of California in San Francisco. He is at work on a project that assesses the impact of living wages on
ation 4 gradu 0 0 2 e h eoT y was vid ceremon ehalf of b taped on ademy. To c A n Milto a copy, e s a or purch as DVD available the online isit VHS, v inside re o t s book mni and lu A the “ of section Friends” s Web site: ol’ the Scho n.edu. ilto www.m
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business dynamics, and another project that considers the relationship between the arts and the economy.
2000 Thomas Colclough is going into his senior year at Princeton University, and his last year of college hockey. Shannon Gulliver enjoyed her last semester at Yale and looks forward to taking a year off before attending medical school in 2005.
2002 Caitlin Flint loves Middlebury. She is busy playing varsity squash, mentoring a young girl as part of the “Big Sister” program and teaching a Spanish class in a local school. Caitlin reports that the classes are amazing, and she enjoys the great skiing and her wonderful friends.
Deceased 1919 Thomas Wyatt Norris Sr. 1926 Alice Graves Dejonge 1929 Nancy Fitzwilliams Barbara Warner Noble Hallowell 1930 Llewellyn Howland Jr. 1933 Rachel Brooks Evans 1934 Stewart Maurice Dall 1935 Helen Crocker Harrison 1936 John Keppel 1937 Edward Phelps Allis IV Arthur Lincoln Bartlett Granger Farwell Kenly Duncan Longcope Florence Dalton Mills Henry Arthur Newton Jr. Johnston Torney 1938 Eleanor Kammerer Spence 1940 Houghton P. Metcalf 1941 Dr. William R. MacAusland Jr. Philip H. Suter 1943 Dr. Francis Raymond Boyd Jr. David Lord Richardson Jr. 1944 Thomas Drake Meyer 1949 David Stevenson Morgan 1950 Lisa Blau Hagerty 1951 Albert Sauveur Eaton Lorna Sagendorph Trowbridge 1953 Seth Crews Mary Raymond Maloney 1969 William Stephen Bradford Jr. 2003 Gina Marie DiCienzo
Faculty, Staff and Friends Joseph Adams Frank Fall Mary Hartmann Cynthia Hilgendorf Johnston Torney Mary Della Peck
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Johnston Torney ’37 1919–2004 An overcautious skipper of a Maine coasting schooner was sailing from Mount Desert to Boston on a threatening March day in the early part of the 20th century. He was apprehensive about the worsening weather and suggested to his more experienced mate that it might be a good idea to seek shelter in Portland. The mate slowly shifted his tobacco to the other cheek and replied, “Be ye bound thar?” John used this story in a chapel service during the turbulent days of the early ’70s. John knew exactly where he was bound. His moral compass was never out of adjustment, and he helped hundreds of Milton students to adjust their own.
He served the Academy in a wide variety of roles: Teacher of English and Latin, Dorm Master, Technical Theater Director, Director of Warren Hall, Housemaster, Coach, Dean of Students, Acting Principal, Advisor, College Counselor, Director of the Educational Enrichment Program, Member of the Graduates Council, and doubtless many more of which I am not aware. He was a devoted husband, father and grandfather. He graduated from Milton in the Class of 1937 and from Harvard in 1941. After serving as a lieutenant with the Navy, he joined the Boys’ School Faculty in 1946. We were young bache-
lors then, he in Upton House with Brad and Hilda Sturges, and I in Robbins with Reggie and Rebecca Nash. Together with John Pocock, Frank Millet and others we instigated what was called The Bachelor’s Party, a cocktail party at the MiltonHoosic Club, through which the single men sought to repay the hospitality they had received from their married colleagues. John was a genial host and everyone enjoyed his effervescent company. I succeeded him in Upton House in the fall of 1950. When Brad Sturges felt I was making too much noise, he commented that he “missed the Torney tones.” John had set very high standards and very low decibels! He worked tirelessly in the old Hathaway House Theater, building sets, arranging lights and gathering props for Sally Sedgwick’s annual plays. Everyone was impressed with his boundless energy and his ability to pull all the details together into a successful performance. After an exchange year in England in 1953–54, John went to Wolcott House as Housemaster, but soon succumbed to the fair Joan Williamson, then teaching in the Lower School. They were married in 1961 and together ran Wolcott House until 1965, providing a warm family atmosphere much appreciated and well remembered by many students. One of the graces he used at dinner is vintage Torney: “Lord, when we are wrong, make us easy to change and when we are right make us easy to live with.” Then came the challenging late ’60s and early ’70s when running a school and a dormitory
became a challenging balancing act. Prior to that, smoking tobacco or being late to Chapel or making noise after lights were the prime offenses. After that, we faced alcohol, drugs, political turmoil and civil disobedience. Cap Hall retired in 1969 and John took over as dean of the Boys’ School under the headmastership of David Wicks. John’s patient and steady hand was reassuring to us all in those turbulent times. He ran the Discipline Committee with that same quiet determination and dealt with problems as they arose, never angry, always calm, logical, fair and caring. When Jerry Pieh became Headmaster, it was decided to separate the roles of Headmaster and Boys’ School Principal, and John became Acting Principal, yet another example of his willingness and ability to serve wherever he was needed. In 1976 he returned to the class-
room, his true delight, where he was a living example of the New England virtues extolled by his favorite poet, Robert Frost. He was truly an educator. No one more deserved the title of “school man.” His skill in writing and his breadth of school knowledge made him a natural for publications director for and work with the Graduates Association. He retired in 1985. In light of his signal contributions, he was awarded the Milton Medal in 1992. He played an active role in St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, serving as a lector and twice on the vestry. Particularly in his years of retirement, he visited in parish homes and provided the same warm and outgoing companionship that he had previously given to so many Milton students and colleagues. He loved and respected people and had a wonderful knack for making them feel cared for and
important. He always emphasized their strengths, doubtless feeling that the weaknesses were obvious enough already. He loved to organize things and I will always think of him in his role as an usher standing in the aisle of the Academy Chapel, pointing to a vacant seat with one hand and welcoming a late arrival with the other. I am sure that those of us who make it to the Heavenly Gates will be greeted by Johnston’s cheerful smile and warm handshake as he assists us to our places in the angelic array. Yea, verily, he “goes to prepare a place” for us. Farewell, O good and faithful servant Donald Duncan August 2004
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Sadness at the Academy Milton Academy suffered two losses late in the winter of 2004, Mary Della Peck, wife of David Peck of the performing arts department, and Cindy Hilgendorf, wife of Mark Hilgendorf of the history department. Head of School Robin Robertson’s words to the community about both of these women appear below, along with excerpts from tributes written in memoriam.
Mary Della Peck “Mary Della Peck died unexpectedly on Sunday evening, February 15, 2004. While she had been seriously ill a number of years ago, she had recuperated from her stroke with courage and determination, and continued to be a vital part of life on campus. Mary Della had worked for many years in women’s shelters, counseling women who were the victims of domestic abuse. Actively involved in women’s issues throughout her life, she served as president of chapters of the National Organization for Women in Florida and in Pennsylvania before coming to Milton Academy with David. Here in Massachusetts, she worked as a paralegal and legal secretary at Davis, Malm and D’Agostine. Most recently, she had been a member of the staff in our bookstore. A natural salesperson, Mary Della was full of ideas and always ready with a kind word and gentle laugh for students and faculty alike.” —Robin Robertson “The usual facts, that Mary Della Rogers was born in 1949 in Wallingford, Connecticut, tell so little of the story. That David Peck and Mary Della met while they were students at
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Barrington College and that they were married for 30 years; that they have been at Milton for 17 years, and that they have two daughters, Rachel ’94 and Morgen ’97 and that the family has acquired another member in Sean Westmoreland ’94—these begin to tell important truths. Add her devotion to that family, a deep-seated love of Maine and the Boston Red Sox, and you may begin to get the picture…. The things still missing from the picture are her warm smile, her quiet and subtle, but utterly unerring sense of humor, and the strength and the heart of a lioness within the partially broken body in which I came to know her best…. It took no psychic to see the strength and the determination that carried her on through infirmity and frustration, but I never heard her complain, or even state a goal—she simply DID what needed doing. I learned at her memorial service of her love of playing the piano, and of so many things that she must have missed terribly, but to talk of such would have been complaining, and that was not her way. She was clearly a person who gave so much of herself to those around her—generous in every dimension (well, except to the Yankees, of course) and I saw, too, a rare grace in accepting help that she needed, especially after her illness. “Some of you were lucky enough to know her through David’s advising in Forbes House, others through theatre, but for most of you, she was one of the women who worked in the bookstore. Her smiling greeting and her slightly slower, but efficient mode of doing her job always brightened the trip for me….
We should all take some lessons from her life and death. First is the lesson of keeping things in perspective…. Second is the lesson of the nearly miraculous effects of steady determination and humor and love in the face of real adversity. In the wake of her illness, Mary Della Peck taught us that real progress happens slowly, and that it comes to those who will it to happen by expending the focus and the effort that all real growth requires, and, perhaps more importantly, that that growth is best accompanied by a smile and a laugh than by a grimace and a groan… “Goodbye, my friend.” From “In Memoriam: Mary Della Peck,” by John Banderob, Mathematics Department, March 2, 2004
Cynthia Bricker Hilgendorf “This afternoon [February 29, 2004], Cindy Hilgendorf lost her long battle with cancer and died peacefully. Her son and daughter and Mark were by her side. Encircling the room were the brilliantly colored 1,000 origami cranes folded by the girls of Hathaway, capturing the love and care with which this community embraced her and her family in life and in death. A gifted artist, a superb spinner on wheel and by whorl and a sophisticated knitter of the most difficult of patterns and fibers, Cindy brought beauty and knowledge to this community. She shared her talents unstintingly, often with a welltold story, an unusual fact, or a clever observation. She was a teacher in everything she did.” —Robin Robertson
“Cynthia (Bricker) Hilgendorf, 54, applied her creativity to both art and teaching…. She created paintings and sculptures out of common items and taught her students to do the same. ‘She had a different perspective on life and she encouraged her students to have one, too,’ Susan Bricker Sullivan of Milton said yesterday of her sister, who died Sunday…. “‘She had three loves: her children, her art and life. That was the essence of who she was,’ said her husband, Mark. Born in New Hampshire, Mrs. Hilgendorf spent her early childhood in New York before moving with her family to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, when she was 14. After high school she earned a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree in fiber art, and a master of fine arts degree in weaving, all from the University of Wisconsin. In college she learned to create unconventional sculptures and paintings. She was a texture artist, using materials such as fiber, fabric, and stained tea bags….She studied the work of Eva Hesse, a German-American minimalist painter. Inspired by Hesse’s work, Mrs. Hilgendorf found her own distinct style. “In 1981, Mark Hilgendorf joined the history faculty at Milton Academy and the couple moved to the campus, where they raised their children. Mrs. Hilgendorf taught art classes at the School for a time and at the Rhode Island School of Design. She often acted as a surrogate mother for the boarding school’s students, baking cookies and offering moral support. “Mrs. Hilgendorf also made what she called ‘wearable art,’ which she designed and sold at
Mary Hartmann, 98; Taught Music at Milton Academy By Gloria Negri, Globe Staff Bloomingdale’s and in several art galleries in Massachusetts and New York…. “Even while suffering from breast cancer, Mrs. Hilgendorf was always optimistic, and she continued to create art until the last few weeks of her life. ‘What was so incredible about her was that she was never diminished by the disease,’ Mark said. ‘She kept her love of life and passed it on to her children.’” “Cynthia Bricker Hilgendorf, 54; artist and Milton Academy teacher,” by Andrea Levene, March 4, 2004 © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company © Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
Mary Rhoades Atwater Hartmann taught music in the lower school of Milton Academy for almost four decades, putting music into the lives of generations of children any way she could. “Mother would take stories like ‘The Bear’s Picnic,’ would put it to music, and have the children act it out,” Mrs. Hartmann’s daughter Lisa Blake, of West Chesterfield, New Hampshire, recalled yesterday. …Until two months ago, Mrs. Hartmann was still putting music into people’s lives, playing Mozart and Bach for other residents under nursing care at Carleton-Willard Village in Bedford, where she died Tuesday at 98. “Mother used a walker and was pretty up and around until the end,” Blake said. “Her spirit was just amazing. She never complained and had a wonderful attitude toward life. She was totally moderate in everything and enjoyed a good belly laugh.” Music had been a big part of Mrs. Hartmann’s life since she was a child, said her son William of Weston. While she was teaching kindergarten through sixth grade at Milton Academy, Mrs. Hartmann was also giving private piano lessons at her home, which she continued to do until she was 65, her daughter said. Mrs. Hartmann was born in New Canaan, Connecticut, one of two children of Henry Day Atwater Jr. and Jessie Rhoades (Clarke). Her son said one of her ancestors was David Atwater, who arrived in Boston in 1637 and was one of the founders of New Haven, Connecticut.
In “A Sketch of the Life of Mary Rhoades Hartmann,” written in 1992, Mrs. Hartmann told of attending Shady Hill School in Cambridge. She recalled having classes in rooms where “there was only a pot-bellied stove for heat. Sleeping bags kept our feet warm, and we learned to write with mittens on. …“It was there that I learned to love music and started piano lessons. We also put on plays in Latin and in French, but didn’t learn any grammar.” After Shady Hill, Mrs. Hartmann went to Wellesley College, where she was a soprano and studied voice, piano and organ. She graduated in 1927. She first worked for the Wellesley information office and then with the North End Settlement House in Boston, where she taught a music class for children, before taking the job at Milton Academy in 1929. At the Academy she met Eric Hartmann, who was teaching German, math and French. They were married in 1934 and continued to teach there while living in school housing. “The years at Milton were very happy ones,” Mrs. Hartmann wrote in her journal.” …“Mother saved and saved to buy her baby grand Steinway piano and taught her students on it,” Mrs. Hartmann’s daughter Erica of Portland, Oregon, said yesterday. “Everyone liked mother because she was kind and fair. She was supportive and not pushy. She and my father were truly, truly in love.”
group in Milton called the Potholders, said Mrs. Hartmann’s son. The family spent summers and weekends in a cabin that the Hartmanns built in 1936 in Norwell. When Japan surrendered to the United States in 1945, the Hartmanns were at the cabin. “We could hear the pealing of church bells from Norwell center,” William Hartmann said. “Mother put me in the car, and we drove to the church in town, and she sat down at the organ and played music; it might have been hymns or Bach to celebrate our victory.” After Mr. Hartmann died in 1965 and after her retirement three years later, Mrs. Hartmann lived for a while as custodian at the Suffolk Resolves House in Milton, maintained by the Milton Historical Commission. …In another house in Milton, she continued to teach her piano students for eight more years before settling in a retirement home. She lived at Carleton-Willard Village for the last 10 years, entertaining residents with her music. Besides her son and her two daughters, she leaves nine grandchildren and six greatgrandchildren. A celebration of Mrs. Hartmann’s life will be held at a later date. © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company. The Boston Globe Reprinted with permission
…In deference to her passion, Mr. Hartmann learned to play the cello and was often accompanied by his wife. For a time, they played with an amateur
83 Milton Magazine
Planned Giving Tools Offer Creative Options for Giving
Betsy and Harold Janeway enjoy the summer with their grandchildren.
“Leaders are expected to lead. As a
trustee, I decided to make a pacesetting gift to the Challenge to Lead capital campaign launched in 1995. I also needed to consider my own retirement needs and my hope to pass something along to my family. In addition to my outright gift, I discovered that I could achieve my objectives with not one but two of what are known in the trade as ‘planned giving tools.’ “I established a deferred gift annuity and a charitable lead trust. I funded the annuity with a gift of low-cost stock. Milton sold the stock, putting the proceeds to work for the School immediately. At the time of the gift, I received a charitable deduction of roughly 60 percent of its value. At the end of the 10-
84 Milton Magazine
year period, when I turn 70, I will begin receiving a significant annual distribution from the School, some of which is taxed at the lower capital gains rate. (Think of a gift annuity as an alternative to an IRA but with no ceiling on the amount you can set aside.) “The second gift was a charitable lead trust (CLT). In this case, the School receives a set amount of annual income from the trust based on its initial value. The distribution rate is set by the donor. Mine was set to provide payments to Milton for 15 years, at which point the trust distributes to my children, perhaps in time to help them with their tuition bills. The assets were removed from my estate at the time of the gift. In the meantime, I am able to manage the
investments of the trust. Any appreciation accrues to the eventual benefit of my children. A CLT is slightly more of a job to establish and requires filing an annual tax return but these are minor inconveniences, in my view. “I encourage other graduates and friends to think about creative ways in which you can help Milton. You may find, as I did, that you can do more than you think. The School deserves it.” —Harold W. Janeway ’54, donor and trustee emeritus For information on planned giving options at Milton Academy, please contact Suzie Hurd Greenup ’75 in the development office at 617-898-2376 or suzie_greenup@milton.edu.
Milton Academy Board of Trustees, 2004
Bradley M. Bloom Wellesley, Massachusetts William T. Burgin ’61 Dover, Massachusetts Jorge Castro ’75 Pasadena, California Edward Dugger III Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts James M. Fitzgibbons ’52 Emeritus Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts
George A. Kellner Vice President New York, New York Helen Lin ’80 Hong Kong F. Warren McFarlan ’55 Belmont, Massachusetts Carol Smith Miller Boston, Massachusetts Tracy Pun Palandjian ’89 Belmont, Massachusetts
Victoria Hall Graham ’81 Haverford, Pennsylvania
Richard C. Perry ’73 New York, New York
Margaret Jewett Greer ’47 Emerita Chevy Chase, Maryland
John P. Reardon ’56 Vice President Cohasset, Massachusetts
Antonia Monroe Grumbach ’61 Secretary New York, New York
John S. Reidy '56 New York, New York
J. Tomilson Hill ’66 New York, New York Franklin W. Hobbs IV ’65 President New York, New York Barbara Hostetter Boston, Massachusetts Ogden M. Hunnewell ’70 Vice President Brookline, Massachusetts Harold W. Janeway ’54 Emeritus Webster, New Hampshire David B. Jenkins ’49 Duxbury, Massachusetts
Kevin Reilly Jr. ’73 Baton Rouge, Louisiana Robin Robertson Head of School Milton, Massachusetts H. Marshall Schwarz ’54 Emeritus New York, New York Karan Sheldon ’73 Blue Hill Falls, Maine Frederick G. Sykes ’65 Rye, New York Jide J. Zeitlin ’81 Treasurer New York, New York
Editor Cathleen Everett Associate Editor Heather Sullivan Photography AP Wide World, Michael Dwyer, Khanty Mansiysk Oil Corporation, Michael Lutch, Milton Academy Archives, Nicki Pardo, Martha Stewart, Heather Sullivan Design Moore & Associates Printed on Recycled Paper Milton Magazine is published twice a year by Milton Academy. Editorial and business offices are located at Milton Academy where change-of-address notifications should be sent. As an institution committed to diversity, Milton Academy welcomes the opportunity to admit academically qualified students of any gender, race, color, handicapped status, sexual orientation, religion, national or ethnic origin to all the rights, privileges, programs and activities generally available to its students. It does not discriminate on the basis of gender, race, color, handicapped status, sexual orientation, religion, national or ethnic origin in the administration of its educational policies, admission policies, scholarship programs, and athletic or other school-administered activities.
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Milton Magazine
Studying Economics: A First Encounter
Making Poverty History: Becky Buell ’78 helps lead Oxfam’s effort, page 13 A Timely Risk: Gaining expertise in the western Siberian basin, page 16 Race: An Economic Reality: The ‘extra cost’ of blackness, page 21 Microfinance: The little engine that could, page 26 Mr. Mall: The man who knows your shopping secrets, page 28 Graduation 2004: Pictures and awards, page 38
Fall 2004