Hotchkiss Magazine

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45 Years in Asian Art LEIGHTON R. LONGHI ’63

Fall 2019

BOARD OF TRUSTEES

ALUMNI ASSOCIATION BOARD OF GOVERNORS

AS OF NOVEMBER 1, 2019

AS OF NOVEMBER 1, 2019

Robert R. Gould ’77, Co-President Elizabeth G. Hines ’93, Co-President Robert Chartener ’76, P’18, Vice President Raymond J. McGuire ’75, Vice President David B. Wyshner ’85, Treasurer Roger K. Smith ’78, P’08, Secretary Craig W. Bradley Head of School, Ex Offico Charles Ayres ’77 Austin M. Beutner P’20,’22 John Coumantaros ’80, P’16,’19 Anne Matlock Dinneen ’95 Elizabeth Ford P’11,’13 John Grube ’65, P’00 Nisa Leung Lin ’88 Kendra O’Donnell Carlos Peréz ’81 Thomas S. Quinn ’71, P’15,’17,’19 Christopher R. Redlich Jr. ’68 Susan Green Roberson ’87, President, The Hotchkiss Fund, Ex Officio

Thomas R. Seidenstein ’91, President, Alumni Association, Ex Officio Timothy P. Sullivan ’81, P’13,’16 Rhonda Trotter ’79 Rebecca van der Bogert U. Gwyn Williams ’84, P’17,’19 EMERITI

Howard C. Bissell ’55, P’82 John R. Chandler Jr. ’53, P’82, P’85,’87, GP’10,’14,’16,’22 Thomas J. Edelman ’69, P’06,’07 William R. Elfers ’67 Lawrence Flinn Jr. ’53, GP’22 Frederick Frank ’50, P’12 Dan W. Lufkin ’49, P’80,’82,’88,’23 Robert H. Mattoon Jr. Robert A. Oden Jr. P’97 Jean Weinberg Rose ’80, P’18 John L. Thornton ’72, P’10,’11,’16 Francis T. Vincent Jr. ’56, P’85

Tom Seidenstein ’91, President Natalie Boyse ’09 Rafael Carbonell ’93 Weijen Chang ’86, P’22 Nathalie Pierrepont Danilovich ’03, VP and Chair, Gender Committee Marita Bell Fairbanks ’84 Danielle Ferguson ’97 Carlos Garcia ’77 Peter Gifford ’93 Brooke Harlow ’92, Vice Chair Caldwell Hart ’87, P’16,’20, Secretary and Chair, Nominating Committee for Membership Annika Lescott ’06 Barrett Lester ’81 Nick Moore ’71, P’89,’01,’06 Paul Mutter ’87, Vice Chair, Chair of Nominating Committee for Awards Steve O’Brien ’62, P’87,’01, GP’17 Emily Pressman ’98 Chip Quarrier ’90, VP and Co-chair, Alumni Services and Communications Committee Charlotte Dillon Ross ’10, VP and Co-chair, Alumni Services and Communications Committee Blake Ruddock ’12 Bill Sandberg ’65 Adam Sharp ’96 Sheria Smith ’01, VP and Chair, Alumni of Color Committee Richard Staples ’74, P’10,’12 Tom Terbell ’95 EX-OFFICIO MEMBERS

Front row (L to R): Kendra S. O’Donnell, Elizabeth G. Hines ’93, Robert R. Gould ’77, and U. Gwyn Williams ’84, P’17,’19; middle row (L to R): Elizabeth J. Ford P’11,13, Head of School Craig W. Bradley, Susan Green Roberson ’87, Nisa Leung Lin ’88, and Anne Matlock Dinneen ’95; Back row (L to R): Roger K. Smith ’78, P’08, David B. Wyshner ’85, John P. Grube ’65, P’00, Charles Ayres ’77, Christopher R. Redlich Jr. ’68, Robert Chartener ’76, P’18, and Thomas S. Quinn III ’71, P’15,’17,’19 Missing from photo: Austin Beutner P’20,’22, John Coumantaros ’80, P’16,’19, Raymond McGuire ’75, Carlos Peréz ’81, Thomas Seidenstein ’91, Timothy Sullivan ’81, P’13,’16, Rhonda Trotter ’79, and Rebecca van der Bogert

Craig Bradley, Head of School Ed Greenberg ’55, Past President, Alumni Association Robert R. Gould ’77, Co-President, Board of Trustees Elizabeth G. Hines ’93, Co-President, Board of Trustees Susan Green Roberson ’87, President, The Hotchkiss Fund

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FALL 2019 FEATURES

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A Passion for Teaching

HEAD OF SCHOOL

Craig W. Bradley

Three Young Alumni Share Why They Became Educators

INTERIM DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS

Danielle Sinclair

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EDITOR

Wendy Carlson

Leighton Longhi ’63

MAGAZINE DESIGNER

Julie Hammill

On the Hunt for Masterpieces

COPY EDITOR

Chelsea Edgar

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VIDEOGRAPHER AND DIGITAL MEDIA SPECIALIST

Tyler Wosleger

The 1960s at Hotchkiss

WEBSITE AND DESIGN MANAGER

The Times They are a-Changin’

Margaret Szubra CONTRIBUTORS

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Roberta Jenckes, Robert Miller, Robin Provey, and Tyler Wosleger

Hank Wesselman ’59

PLEASE SEND INQUIRIES & COMMENTS TO:

The Hotchkiss School 11 Interlaken Road Lakeville, CT 06039-2141 Email: magazine@hotchkiss.org Phone: (860) 435-3122 The Hotchkiss School does not discriminate on the basis of age, sex, religion, race, color, sexual orientation, or national orientation in the administration of its educational policies, athletics, or other School-administered programs, or in the administration of its hiring and employment practices.

Hotchkiss Magazine is produced by the Office of Communications for alumni, parents, members of the faculty and staff, and friends of the School. Letters are welcome. Please keep under 400 words. We reserve the right to edit and publish letters.

Shaman, Scientist, and a bit Indiana Jones

DEPARTMENTS 2 From the Head of School 4

From the Board of Trustees

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Campus Connection

15 Student Spotlight

Noam Ginsparg ’22

16 Seeking Better Paths

Brian Young ’05

39 Class Notes 60 In Memoriam 64 Parting Shot

ON THE COVER

Cover photo from Forty-five Years in Asain Art, Leighton Longhi FALL 2019

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FROM THE HEAD OF SCHOOL

What Trees Can Teach Us M

Y THINKING AND PERSPECTIVE

on the world have been influenced by a number of wonderful teachers at different stages of my education. Among them are those who taught me the craft of woodworking, beginning in seventhgrade shop class at McCall Middle School in my hometown of Winchester, MA. Over the years, I’ve honed my interest and skills, thanks to the outstanding instructors at the woodworking workshop in the Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth and other courses. This July, I attended a week-long Windsor chairmaking class at the North Bennet Street School, a school dedicated to artisanal trades in Boston.

For the past few years, I have enjoyed learning how to make Windsor chairs, a traditional form of woodworking done

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primarily using hand tools and a lathe.

Working wood by hand leads one to learn about the characteristics of various species of trees — their strength, density, flexibility, and structure, as well as their smell when first cut. In New England, Windsor chairs are typically made from red or white oak, sugar maple, and white pine. Different woods are used for the different parts of the chair — hard maple for the legs, light yet strong and sculptable white pine for the seat, and flexible yet sturdy oak for the spindles, arm rests, and crest.

Much of what I know about trees I gained from my late father, who grew up in a small New Hampshire town and loved nothing more than a good walk in the woods. He seemed to know every plant in the New England forest. I am eternally grateful for all he taught me, and will always wish I had paid more attention during our times in the woods.

Last winter, I read The Overstory by Richard Powers, an expansive, synoptic work of fiction that introduces multiple main characters of diverse origins, who ultimately converge to save the trees.

True Blue Society

PH OTO: WENDY C A R L S O N

Hotchkiss is pleased to announce the launch of the True Blue Society to recognize our loyal donors!

Opening Days

Reading The Overstory led me to two other nonfiction works: Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees, first published in Germany in 2015, and Robert Macfarlane’s Underland, published earlier this year.

One of the major concepts that Powers, Wohlleben, and Macfarlane describe is that trees can, in effect, communicate with one another through underground networks formed by mycorrhizal fungi, called mycelial networks. These function as a sort of mutualistic social network, which enables all trees within a given area to survive, grow, and thrive — a phenomenon known as The Wood Wide Web. This cooperation leads to better overall health, more photosynthesis, and greater resilience in the face of disturbance for the entire forest.

As I reflect on our mission and motto — “Guided by each other, let us seek better paths” — I think about how the surrounding woods, sustained by an invisible, essential matrix, are a metaphor for what we continually and intentionally build at Hotchkiss: a community of diverse members, young and old, who depend on one another for safety, support, nourishment, and growth. We thrive and succeed by recognizing our interdependency, our interconnectedness, and by celebrating the beauty of the community we create, sustain, and enjoy.

True Blue Society members include alumni, parents, faculty and staff members, and friends of Hotchkiss who have given to the School consecutively for two or more years. Gifts of any amount qualify donors for inclusion in the Society.

Congratulations to the nearly 4,000 True Blue Society members who will be notified by mail in November, and thank you for your past, present, and future commitment to Hotchkiss!

We also invite all members of the Hotchkiss community to consider becoming a member of the True Blue Society. All gifts, both large and small, are meaningful and have a direct impact on the people and programs that define Hotchkiss.

FALL 2019

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A LE T TER FROM THE CO-PRESIDENTS OF THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES

Dear Members of the Hotchkiss Community, The start of a new school year is an exciting time full of promise and opportunity. It is an especially exciting time for us as the new co-presidents of the Hotchkiss Board. As proud alumni, we could not be more honored to serve the community that played such a pivotal role in our intellectual and personal development, and to which we remain deeply committed.

As we think about our co-presidency, a first for Hotchkiss, we think about partnership — a partnership with each other, with our fellow Board members and with our head of school, Craig Bradley. We are also informed by our recently retranslated School motto, “Guided by each other, let us seek better paths,” which suggests a mutuality of learning and teaching and serves as an apt description for all we want to accomplish together and how we intend to do it.

The concept of partnership extends to all of our relationships in the Hotchkiss community and what we can achieve with a shared vision. Together, we seek to gather guidance from students, faculty and staff, alumni, parents, and local community members that will help make Hotchkiss better in countless ways. By operating transparently and guided by each other, we greatly enhance our ability to successfully confront challenging issues and make decisions that will propel the School forward.

Through conversations and interactions with Craig and his colleagues, students, alumni of all generations, parents, and countless others over the last few months, our confidence grows that Hotchkiss is fulfilling its mission each and every day.

We are indeed, as our mission instructs

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us, cultivating the highest standards of excellence among a diverse range of students committed to the betterment of self and society. Excellence remains the relevant standard, and it applies to all aspects of the intellectual and personal development of every student entrusted in the School’s care.

Even as we retain our commitment to the values that have defined Hotchkiss since its founding, we can also see the future challenges, and solutions, coming into sharper focus. Our challenges include declining numbers of families that can afford the full cost of a Hotchkiss education; day schools raising the standards of their offerings; and the recognized need for us to provide not only outstanding academic preparation, but also to cultivate an immersive learning environment that prioritizes the safety, well-being, and personal growth of every student.

We are confident that Hotchkiss can meet these challenges head on by focusing our efforts on improving two specific areas of school life: community building and access and affordability.

First, it is helpful to remember who we are: we are a mid-sized, almost exclusively residential learning community, located in a rare and beautiful natural setting. We are blessed with spectacular facilities and resources, and continue to be bolstered by a reputation for excellence in both academics and a broad range of co-curricular pursuits.

The high percentage of students and faculty living on campus is a distinctive feature of the Hotchkiss community and enables us to focus on the inclusiveness of our community in a way that many of

the schools we compete with for students simply cannot. We attract a diverse and extraordinarily talented group of students to campus each year, and we believe that every student in the School’s care must feel safe, seen, and supported — and inspired to become the best version of themselves.

We know that our community is strong — and we must continue to make it stronger. Craig and his team are working to strengthen Hotchkiss’s position as a student-centered learning community — one where there is consistent, intentional focus on our residential life and student advising programs; faculty recruitment and professional development in support of the student experience; and the safety and well-being of the students in our care. By focusing our efforts on this aspect of school life, our goal is to support the growth of a learning environment where students and teachers alike are inspired to do their best, and to help nurture a community where all are welcomed, included, and celebrated. Our hope is that when our students’ Hotchkiss days are done, they will leave these 827 acres of woods, fields, and farmland ready to approach the world in unique and compassionate ways — to be leaders, helpers, and agents of change who will make their communities — and the world — better for their efforts.

As we commit ourselves to this evermore thoughtful approach to how we build community, we must also be realistic about the determinants that affect who is able to join this community. The reality is that every year we have to make the painful choice of denying admission to many exceptional and deserving students due to

the limits of our financial aid resources.

And even though Hotchkiss was the first choice for many, those students end up matriculating at other institutions. We are committed to shifting that reality.

Our focus on access and affordability directly honors the partnership between our founder, Maria Bissell Hotchkiss, and Yale President Timothy Dwight. Mrs. Hotchkiss knew that access to an extraordinary education should not hinge on the ability to pay alone; now, as then, attracting the most promising young students, regardless of their ability to pay, remains critical to our continued success. That is why we are dedicated to raising the capital necessary to ensure that the Hotchkiss experience continues to be accessible to exceptional students, irrespective of their means.

This will further solidify our relevance as a leading institution that is educating tomorrow’s leaders; we owe as much to our founder and her legacy and to the generations of Hotchkiss students to come.

Our aim as co-presidents is to do our part to support Craig and his administration and to inspire the entire Hotchkiss community to help the School live up to its highest purpose. The goals we have committed to are ambitious, and we believe strongly that Hotchkiss is well-equipped to achieve them if we place the principles of cooperation and collaboration at the center of all we do. We look forward to meeting with and hearing from members of our community, and working together to seize the exciting opportunities ahead to make Hotchkiss an even better version of the extraordinary and flourishing institution we know it to be.

Sincerely,

LIZ HINES ’93 AND BOB GOULD ’77

A COMMITMENT TO SAFET Y AND WELL-BEING As we step into our new role as co-presidents, we remain ever-mindful of the historic instances where our School community failed to protect students in its care. We are committed to continued vigilance on this issue, and we must vow, collectively, to never again allow such events to occur at Hotchkiss. To that end, we have developed several guiding principles that will inform our actions going forward: Ensuring Student Safety and Well-being: While we have made much recent progress, including boundary training for faculty, educating students on consent, and creating a culture of awareness, there is much more to be done. As a critical next step, we are working closely with Craig to implement the recommendations we received in the recent audit by RAINN — an organization that supports sexual assault survivors — of our sexual misconduct program and will provide future updates on our progress. You can expect to hear from Craig and the School about the important steps we are taking as a community to strengthen our overall wellness programs, such as the recently announced appointment of Christy Cooper P’08,’11 as the School’s sexual misconduct prevention and response coordinator.

Supporting Our Community’s Survivors of Sexual Misconduct: We are committed to supporting our community’s survivors through their healing processes and understand and respect that the process is different for each individual. We are pursuing various means of assisting in this regard, such as offering independent counseling for survivors at no cost to them and with no disclosure requirements. The School has also waived any confidentiality provisions that might have prevented survivors from speaking about their experiences in the past.

While we appreciate these deeply personal matters are extraordinarily difficult to discuss, we also want to support those survivors who feel that telling their stories is central to their healing process, and we want to learn from those stories. Should any other alumni wish to come forward with an additional report of abuse by an adult member of the Hotchkiss community, our lead independent investigator, Allison O’Neil, remains available and can be contacted by telephone at (800) 403-7138 or (617) 239-0729, or by email at hotchkissinvestigation@lockelord.com.

Creating a Culture of Transparency: We have already benefited greatly from our conversations with alumni and others and will continue those conversations in earnest. We will be scheduling a time on campus, and through a livestream, for members of the Hotchkiss community to gather, so we can introduce ourselves to discuss our priorities in greater detail and answer your questions. We are also establishing a link on the Hotchkiss website as another communication vehicle that will allow you to share your questions, comments, and concerns with us.

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A MESSAGE FROM THE THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES

BY ROBERT CHARTENER ’76, P’18 In early October, The Board of Trustees met in Lakeville to discuss the following: School Opening – Hotchkiss began its academic year with 603 students, slightly above the 595 students sought as a result of a higher yield. The enrollment target for 2020-21 is 590 students. Senior administrative changes include Steve McKibben P’22, who is the new dean of community life, and Sandy Lynch, who was previously the director of finance and administration at the Yale Divinity School and is now Hotchkiss’s CFO. Instructor in Chemistry and Director of the EFX Lab Paul Oberto will be taking Steve’s place as dean of summer programs.

Admission – The Admission Office laid the groundwork for the year’s admission cycle.

Erby Mitchell P’21 worked over the summer with Stanford University to develop a program to attract and enable the success of Pell Granteligible students, and Hotchkiss will host its first fly-in program for high-achieving, lowincome students in November.

Advancement – A recruitment firm has been hired to identify a group of chief advancement officer (CAO) candidates this fall. Work continues on assessing the School’s giving capacity, on goals for the various elements of a capital campaign, and on staffing needs. Assuming that a new CAO is named within the next few months, it is likely that goals will be defined and staffing needs determined by the end of the academic year.

Athletics – The Board spent considerable time discussing athletics and extracurricular activities at Hotchkiss, participating in a productive workshop led

by Associate Head of School and Dean of Faculty Merrilee Mardon and Dean of Community Life Steve McKibben.

Recognizing that Hotchkiss’s programs aspire to be competitive with those at leading New England peer institutions, the Board focused on recruiting and college placement, hiring outstanding coaches,

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and providing financial aid during the admission process. The discussion was not on individual sports but rather on conceptual issues like opportunities for each student, excellence of supervision, school spirit, and the distinction of Hotchkiss’s programs. Merrilee and Steve will report back at the winter meeting with an update on their progress.

Buehler Renovations – The first stage of the School’s ten-summer continuous improvement plan to renovate Buehler, Tinker, and Coy went well. The top two floors of Buehler were renovated, and the project came in under budget and within schedule. Students and their families appreciate the facelift and will be particularly grateful during colder weather when students can control the heat in individual rooms.

Investment Results – In fiscal 201819, the endowment’s total net return was 5.0 percent, placing it at the top of the second quartile of Cambridge Associates’s independent schools universe, and the market value was $488.1 million. The endowment’s compound annual return for three, five, and ten years stood at 9.7 percent, 5.5 percent, and 8.3 percent, respectively, placing Hotchkiss solidly in the top quartile. Performance has been driven by investments in venture capital and global equities, with particularly strong manager performance in both asset classes.

Manager selection remains a priority for the Investment Committee with the goal of securing access to top quartile performers with demonstrated consistent results, while being mindful of the overall liquidity needs of the School.

Credit Rating – Standard & Poor’s reviewed Hotchkiss’s credit rating and reconfirmed the School’s AAA/A-1+ rating.

Hotchkiss is one of only five schools carrying the highest rating on its debt.

Community – The trustees took time to meet with students and the

Hotchkiss community. During one lunch, a current senior told the story of how his life has been changed because of the financial aid that enabled him to attend Hotchkiss; it was a compelling and moving discussion. That evening, trustees had dinner with proctors and then attended dormitory feeds, witnessing the decimation of cookies at the enthusiastic hands of preps and lower mids. On Friday evening, trustees watched the first performance of the Hotchkiss Philharmonic Orchestra, an extraordinary evening featuring a remarkable solo by cellist Noam Ginsparg ’22. These simple interactions with students showed their exceptional character and spoke strongly about the value of a Hotchkiss education.

RAINN Audit – Following the recommendation of The Rape and Incest National Network (RAINN) Hotchkiss appointed Christy Cooper P’08,’11 as the School’s sexual misconduct prevention and response coordinator. An experienced instructor with more than 30 years as a member of the Hotchkiss faculty, Christy will work closely with RAINN, Craig Bradley, and Merrilee Mardon on a plan for the new position. Allison O’Neil of Locke Lord remains available to receive reports of adult sexual misconduct occurring at any point in the School’s history and can be contacted at (800) 403-7138 or (617) 239-0729.

Board of Trustees – The meetings were chaired by Co-Presidents Liz Hines ’93 and Bob Gould ’77. With Bob Gould’s transition to Board co-president, Anne Matlock Dinneen ’95 became chair of the Investment Committee and was elected a Hotchkiss trustee. Anne is a graduate of Princeton and the Wharton School, and she serves as chief investment officer for Hamilton College. Susan Green Roberson ’87 began an ex-officio trustee term as president of The Hotchkiss Fund; she is chief financial officer and treasurer of the Markle Foundation.

CAMPUS CONNECTION

Hotchkiss Volunteers Recognized ELIZABETH AND MARK GORMLEY P’19

GYWN WILLIAMS ’84, P’17,’19 Thomas W. Armitage ’25 Award

2019 McKee Award

Gywn Williams ’84, P’17,’19 is the recipient of the 2019 Thomas W. Armitage ’25 Award, given annually to a member of the Hotchkiss alumni body for distinguished service to The Hotchkiss Fund. Gwyn has set an admirable example of what it means to be a Hotchkiss alum and volunteer. She has served the School as a member of the Board of Governors from 2015 to 2017 and most recently, as the president of The Hotchkiss Fund from 2017 to 2019. Under Gwyn’s leadership, the School hosted two successful Days of Giving which, combined, resulted in nearly $2.9M of support for our students and faculty. She has extended her generosity of time and support in her role as the parent of two recent alumni and as a Reunion Committee member for the Class of 1984, which celebrated its 35th Reunion in June 2019. Gwyn’s belief in the transformative and unique experience that Hotchkiss has offered throughout its history is exemplified in the time, thought, and support that she has shared with the School and will continue to exercise as she steps into her position on the Board of Trustees.

We are delighted to present the 2019 Armitage Award to Gwyn in recognition of her inspiring and impactful volunteer service to Hotchkiss and its alumni and students.

THANK YOU For Supporting Hotchkiss in 2018-19

The generous support of the Hotchkiss community is critical to our mission. Gifts to the School are an essential component in the recruitment and retention of talented and committed faculty; the maintenance and improvement of our incredible facilities; and the support of bright and deserving students through financial aid and all students via the endowment. We hope that we can count on your continued generosity and enthusiasm for the education and experience that being a student at Hotchkiss affords for many years to come.

Elizabeth and Mark Gormley P’19 are our honored recipients of the McKee Award this year.

Named in honor of Hugh and Judy McKee P’78,’80,’84,’89 in recognition of their tireless work for The Hotchkiss Fund, this award is presented annually to a Hotchkiss parent for distinguished service to The Hotchkiss Parents Fund. The Gormleys began volunteering for the Hotchkiss Parents Fund in 2015, when their son Will, Class of 2019, joined Hotchkiss as a prep. They have been dedicated and passionate volunteers for four years and have served as the Hotchkiss Parents Fund Chairs for the past two years. Their extraordinary leadership has resulted in parent contributions of over $2M per year for the School. In addition, their enthusiastic outreach to other families has created a wonderful sense of community and motivated other parents to support Hotchkiss and achieve overall parent participation of 80%. Hotchkiss is very grateful to the Gormley family for all of their contributions to the School.

$20,774,437 Total funds raised for Hotchkiss in 2018–19 (This amount is an increase of $2,534,831 over the previous year.)

3,800+

$5,570,902

Donors to the School

Raised by The Hotchkiss Fund

33%

80%

Alumni Participation

Parent Participation

Raised $3,249,051 for The Hotchkiss Fund

Raised $1,850,390 for The Hotchkiss Fund

FALL 2019

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CAMPUS CONNECTION

Hotchkiss by the Numbers

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dogs reside on campus, according to Campus Security. Over the years, all manner of pets has taken up residence on campus, from rescued baby raccoons to pet snakes that often slithered away unnoticed. Owning a dog has almost been a requirement for heads of school. Headmaster George Van Santvoord, Class of 1908, owned a Great Dane and a horse; current Head of School Craig Bradley and his wife, Elizabeth Webb, own a Portuguese Water Dog named Nessie.

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time capsule from 1994 is stored in Archives to be unlocked on the School’s Bicentennial in 2091.

There’s a slight problem, though: The key is missing!

pianos are in the Esther Eastman Music Center, including 16 Steinways and 1 Fazioli.

of wood chips are used to heat the School for one winter, which reduces the carbon footprint by 40 percent and saves the School approximately $650,000 annually.

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volumes are housed in the Edsel Ford Memorial Library.

27 5,500 tons

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miles of wooded trails run through the School’s 827-acre campus.

25,000 pounds of chicken

are served in the Dining Hall in a year. Chicken parmesan, known as “Parmageddon,” tops the list as the ongoing favorite dish among students, with chicken piccata weighing in a close second, according to Mike Webster, director of dining services.

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flags hang in the Dining Hall, representing the home nations of students, staff, and faculty at Hotchkiss. Nine additional flags are displayed representing distinct geographic regions that have partial political autonomy within their nations, including Hong Kong.

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books in Hotchkiss’s Rare Book Collection were published before 1600, among them, The Odes of Horace. With a publication date of 1573, it is a little more than a century older than the Collection’s page from the Gutenberg Bible. The Collection is comprised of nearly 1,000 volumes, gifts from alumni, friends, former faculty, and heads of school.

cows are required to feed the Hotchkiss community for one month. Hotchkiss owns a herd of grass-fed Black Angus that are pastured at the Fairfield Farm.

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CAMPUS CONNECTION

Edward V. Nunes ’73, P’08

2019 Alumni Award Winner S T O R Y B Y R O B E R TA J E N C K E S • P H OT O S B Y W E N DY C A R L S O N

D

URING AN ALL-SCHOOL MEETING

on Oct. 18, Edward V. “Ned” Nunes Jr. ’73, P’08 accepted the Hotchkiss Alumni Award, the School’s highest alumni honor. Nunes has devoted his medical career to developing and testing treatments for substance use disorders, including, in recent years, opioid addiction.

A professor of psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center and New York State Psychiatric Institute, he currently co-leads clinical trials that are part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) HEAL Initiative (Help End Addiction in our Lifetime). In his acceptance address, Nunes shared observations from his threedecade career as a physician, researcher, and member of the Columbia faculty.

Working in the late 1980s at a Queens, NY methadone clinic for heroin addicts, he found that the typical client was a male in his forties, who had dropped out of school and eventually ended up trying alcohol, then cocaine, and finally heroin.

He always asked the clinic clients how they felt when they first tried heroin. “The response was really quite remarkable,” he said. “They’d say, ‘I never felt better. I had energy. I could think clearly. I could focus.

I could get things done.’ Of course, this is not at all what I expected.

“There’s just a fraction of the population that is vulnerable to heroin, people who have an outsized reaction to the drug,” he explained. “It’s an inherited difference in their framed response to the drug, and they’re unlucky to have it. Their lives become devastated.”

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Head of School Craig Bradley and President of the Alumni Association Board of Governors Tom Seidenstein ’91 present Nunes with the 2019 Alumni Award.

In addition to struggling with their addiction, some of these patients were also depressed, Nunes said. They may have been depressed from early on in their lives, he said, but they had both disorders.

He joined a group studying medications for depression, and he and his mentors became interested in depression among patients with addictions. At the time, attention to depression was discouraged by most clinicians, considered just another manifestation of the addiction and a distraction from treating the addiction.

Nunes and his colleagues showed that depression could be identified and treated in patients with alcohol or drug problems,

improving the outcome of the addiction as well.

“Keep your eyes open for this kind of accident or serendipitous observation,” he said in his talk at Hotchkiss, addressing especially the students in the audience. “Then, go with it. Stay attentive to these observations.

“A good scientist tries to kill his or her own hypothesis. You should really be your own strongest critic,” he said.

For Nunes, Hotchkiss provided an essential grounding in critical thinking and writing. His interest in research and psychiatry crystallized then, he says. “I particularly enjoyed English, and the faculty members made the characters we read about

come alive. I wanted to know what made these characters tick. That experience in the English classroom and in other humanities courses, including religion, philosophy, and history, presented similar questions and kindled my interest. I liken this to the work I do today.”

After earning an A.B. in psychology and chemistry at Dartmouth, Nunes received his M.D. from the University of Connecticut and then trained in internal medicine at St. Elizabeth Hospital in Boston and psychiatry and psychopharmacology research at Columbia before joining the faculty there in 1987. A longtime colleague at Columbia, Dr. Frances Levin, who introduced him at the Alumni Award presentation, described Nunes as “both innovative and pragmatic.”

He spends his time generously mentoring younger trainees and faculty members and helping them shape their research ideas.

“When it comes to that, nothing has been

more important than my training in writing at Hotchkiss. In science, if you can’t write your ideas out clearly, then your thinking probably isn’t clear.”

His enthusiasm for Hotchkiss clear and heartfelt, in his award speech Nunes expressed his appreciation for the skill and dedication of all the faculty. He reserved special praise for longtime English instructor, Robert Hawkins, citing his still-remembered “comma rule”* as classmates and other alumni in the audience nodded approval.

Nunes and his wife, Kate Stiassni, are the parents of Sanford “Max” Nunes and Francesca Nunes ’08. His father, Edward V. “Ed” Nunes, was a member of the Class of 1938.

Since 1931, the Hotchkiss Alumni Association has honored notable alumni with the Alumni Award. Selected by the Nominating Committee of the Board of Governors of the Alumni Association, every recipient has brought honor and distinction to him or herself and Hotchkiss through their achievements. The nominating committee seeks candidates who have made significant contributions in their fields and earned the recognition of their peers on a national or international level.

*“Hawkins’s Rule One”: Two main clauses joined by and, but, for, neither, nor, or yet are separated by a comma, and “Rule Two”: Two main clauses not joined by and, but, for, neither, nor, or yet are separated by a semicolon.

From left to right: Classmates Richard Rosenbaum, Peter Thorne, Ross Schmucki, and Jonathan Agnew congratulate Ned Nunes ’73, P’08 (center) following the award ceremony.

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CAMPUS CONNECTION

Bearcats in College We caught up with several young alumni to find out what they’ve been pursuing in college — and how their Hotchkiss experience helped guide them on their chosen path.

ABA SAM ’17

HARVARD UNIVERSITY “During my time at Hotchkiss, I was involved in student government and creating programming for all students to have fun.

I was particularly passionate about finding ways to make students of color feel at home on campus. At Harvard, I have been pretty involved in the Black Students Association. I started as a freshman representative my first year and have subsequently served as vice president, then president. I love planning and executing events and discussions that make people enjoy their days at Harvard just a little bit more. Looking back, I developed that love throughout my time at Hotchkiss.

“During my first two years at Harvard, I missed the lessons that I had learned in my capacity as a proctor, so I applied to be a peer counselor, and I really love it so far! My

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role is to serve as a listening ear and support for any student that needs it.

“At Harvard, I am a neuroscience major, which means I have been able to take a ton of really great classes solely about the brain.

I am on the ‘Mind, Brain, and Behavior’ track, so I’ve focused on the more cognitive aspect of neuroscience. This semester, I took two classes about music and the brain, and one about the science behind emotions.

Long-term, I hope to go to medical school.

“I really believe that Hotchkiss prepared me for life in college. I mean, Hotchkiss was a very academically challenging environment, so I had developed solid study and time management skills by the time I started college. Beyond that, though, Hotchkiss taught me the value of interacting with those around me.

There were so many incredible students at Hotchkiss, and I learned from them how important it is to appreciate others. I also learned how to interact with faculty, staff, and administrators in a way that adds to my educational experience. Hotchkiss had so many incredible adults, and my relationships with them inspired me to create new ones when I arrived at Harvard.”

CHRIS PARK ’18

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY “I’m pursuing a major in the history of science. I cannot understate the impact of my Hotchkiss career in my collegiate life. As a Hotchkiss prep, I had my first encounter with philosophy and the value of uncertainty. This was a refreshing paradigm in juxtaposition to the set ideals I had for myself, which usually had minimal flexibility for failure or alternatives.

“During my four years in Hotchkiss, I was constantly grappling with philosophy’s lack of a correct path, which helped expand my horizons. I took Constitutional Law and the Supreme Court with Instructor in History Paula Russo my senior year. I’d never had an interest in politics or law up until that point, but that class inspired a new perspective regarding the ‘story’ in history. Reading Supreme Court briefs revealed the notable decisions that shape our current view of American identity and social dynamics, as well as the forgotten moments that constitute the foundation for those decisions.

“I approach the history of science with the same affinity for experimentation. As a major that requires knowledge in both humanities and STEM subjects, I have the opportunity to see the social forces that

drive the technological developments that contribute to the world.

“At Hotchkiss, I was a bass and a leader of the Hotchkiss Blue Notes, as well as a member of Hotchkiss’s Dance Company. I’m currently a bass in the Princeton Footnotes. In addition to campus performances, I’ve recorded albums and performed on U.S. and international tours.

“I am also a choreographer, which bridges vocal performance with my other favorite art form: dance. At Hotchkiss, I mostly trained in the Horton technique under Ms. Sarkissian-Wolf. That experience gave me a basic technical foundation as well as a unique approach toward the art, in contrast to most of my fellow Princeton dancers, whose backgrounds are rooted in either ballet or hip-hop. At Princeton, I’ve embraced a variety of dance forms, ranging from African dance to floor barre to Forsythe ballet and improvisation.

“In September, I took a break from college to serve in South Korea’s national military in the Korean Air Force. (The South Korean government requires all male citizens to serve 21 months in the South Korea military when they turn 19.) So I spent the summer rejuvenating, as well as catching up on reading and traveling with family.”

NOAH AHMED ’16

GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY “After I graduated from Hotchkiss, and before starting at Georgetown, I took a gap year. I wanted to venture out into the world, to step into the unknown. I decided to move to China, where I spent nine months in Beijing, Shanghai, and Dongguan, learning a new language, exploring an unfamiliar culture, and interning in a factory.

“I’ve been involved in Georgetown Global Consulting, a social impact group that works with international NGOs. I recently led a team that consulted with a Togolese nonprofit to help them develop sustainable fundraising and impact assessment strategies. Last spring, I interned in U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren’s congressional office, where I helped manage constituent communication and aided legislative teams with policy research.

“Last summer, I worked at the Milken Institute in Singapore, conducting research and organizing programming for the think tank’s global leadership conference. This summer, I spent five weeks in Indonesia consulting for a nonprofit that operates in Jakarta’s low-income housing projects. I

then participated in Princeton in Beijing, an eight-week intensive Chinese language course. This fall, I am heading back to China, where I will study in Kunming.

“My four years at Hotchkiss profoundly shaped me as a person, and they — in some way or another — have shaped every experience I have had since graduating. Whether it has been living with Hotchkiss classmates abroad or following the guidance of my closest mentors (thank you, Mr. Drake and Ms. Beck), I owe a lot to my fellow Bearcats.”

CLAIRE HAWTHORNE ’17 AMHERST COLLEGE

“When I came to Hotchkiss, I had a minor interest in performing, and all of that flew out the window once I became part of the Hotchkiss Dramatic Association technical crew. I really enjoyed working with and learning from Mr. Brashears, Mr. Olson, Mr. Reed, and all of my peers to put together some phenomenal sets and run amazing performances. I was able to bring my burgeoning interest in technical theater to the Amherst College Theater and

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CAMPUS CONNECTION

Dance department, where I continue to help with set construction and show running with a great crew.

“I was also able to find a wonderfully supportive community in BaHSA, Hotchkiss’s Black and Hispanic Student Alliance. I do terribly miss the little family we created, but I have been able to find an equally supportive group of motivated peers as a member of Amherst’s Black Student Union. As a board member of the BSU, I have been helping to foster a welcoming, community-oriented space for Black students and allies to discuss social justice movements, exciting pop culture phenomena, and living as a student of color in a private institution like Amherst. I love being able to support my peers in this way.

“I was always interested in science and biological processes. At Amherst, I have been able to explore that interest as a research assistant in one of the biology labs on campus. It’s exciting to work through the scientific process, from coming up with a research question to carrying out the experiment. My current project focuses on insulin-production fission yeast, which is exciting for me. I’m interested in diabetes research, in particular, because I’ve seen the toll it can have on someone’s quality of life.

“I also decided to major in Black Studies, a discipline within the humanities, instead of a more traditional pre-medical major, such as biology or neuroscience. I strongly believe that the cultural competency and the increased respect for personhood that you gain within such a field of study have prepared me for a career in caring for people

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just as much as my organic chemistry or microbiology classes have.

“The biggest thing that I gained at Hotchkiss is the sense of maturity and responsibility that come with living 600-plus miles away from home. That experience prepared me for the complete freedom and control I have over my day-to-day life as a college student. I also believe that going to Hotchkiss exposed me to a diverse, global community that I may have never experienced if I stayed in my predominantly African American environment. Though my parents taught me to be open-minded, I learned so much about different cultures and how to live with people who hold different beliefs, while also embracing and being proud of my own culture.

“Finally, Hotchkiss’s humanities-driven curriculum also prepared me for a liberal arts education at Amherst. Learning how to think holistically and see the connections between disciplines has helped me in both my humanities and STEM courses.

“After I graduate, I plan on going to medical school and becoming a physicianscientist. I am currently interested in specializing in diabetes care within the field of endocrinology, while also conducting research to help improve current diabetes treatment. Really far down the line, I’d also like to help children in marginalized communities access quality health education and healthy meals to help combat the current obesity and Type 2 diabetes epidemic in the U.S.”

THUNDER JUSTICE KECK ’17

STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Keck was recruited to Stanford University’s football team after playing only one year of football at Hotchkiss. The Cardinals’ linebacker quickly became a valuable member of the team.

At the time of this publication, Keck had played in six games for the Cardinals, forcing a fumble and recording three solo tackles.

“I don’t really have any free time during the football season, but I think Hotchkiss prepared me for that because of how tightly everything is scheduled there. Because Hotchkiss isn’t as much of a footballoriented school as many of my teammates’ high schools, and because I started playing the game so late in my high school career, I had a lot to learn when I got to Stanford.

But many of the same management and study skills I developed at Hotchkiss helped me with that as well.

“I took my first computer science class with Mr. Wistar, which really piqued my interest.

At Stanford, I am majoring in computer science with a minor in symbolic systems. I feel like the intersection of these two studies is going to be a really exciting field to be in during our lifetime. It will be fun to see how we’ll start to utilize technology that interacts directly with the brain and create technology that emulates the brain. At Stanford, I have also become a lot more interested in how noncolonial societies function and establish their views of the world.”

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

Rocking to a Different Beat Noam Ginsparg ’22 has been playing classical cello since he was seven.

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HE HOTCHKISS PHILHARMONIC

PH OTO: A NNE DAY

Orchestra kicked off its premiere season this fall with a Tchaikovsky concert in the Katherine M. Elfers Hall. The performance featured a solo by cellist Noam Ginsparg ’22, who played “Variations on a Rococo Theme, op. 22 for Cello and Orchestra.”

Ginsparg, an Ithaca, NY native, has been playing cello since age seven. Both he and violinist Angela Choi ’21 are enrolled in The Julliard School’s pre-college program.

From an early age, Ginsparg was drawn to the sound and look of the cello. He also admired his older sister, a violist, and he wanted to do something similar. “Luckily for me, the cello is one of the more versatile string instruments. It has both a unique voice and, given the skill of the player, the ability to produce incredible sound in all of its range,” Ginsparg says.

Before studying at Juilliard, Ginsparg was a longtime student of cellist Zachary Sweet at Ithaca Talent Education. He’s also an alumnus of the Perlman Music Program, Meadowmount Music School, the Kinhaven and Greenwood Junior programs, and the Bowdoin and Sewanee Summer Music festivals. He has garnered many awards, including first place in The Spectrum Symphony of New York Youth Concerto Competition in 2017 and third place in The Chappaqua Concerto Competition in 2018.

You might think this cellist phenom is all about classical music. But, says Ginsparg, “I love to listen to all kinds of music. If I were to only listen to classical music, I would very quickly tire of it; I listen to everything that I can. I like A Tribe Called Quest, which one might consider radically different

from classical. The only genre I deeply despise is heavy metal. Maybe one of these days, I’ll give it another chance.”

The Hotchkiss Philharmonic Orchestra was established in 2018 through the generosity of Barbara Walsh Hostetter ’77 and her husband, Amos. The Orchestra is comprised of 57 musicians, including nine instructors from the music department, 20 music students, and 28 professional musicians from the Hartford Symphony, the New Haven Symphony, the Wallingford Symphony, and others. The Orchestra’s gala concert was conducted by Marc Moncusi, who has worked with both professional and youth orchestras. The department will host three concerts with the Philharmonic Orchestra every year.

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SEEKING BETTER PATHS

Recasting a New Native American Narrative At Hotchkiss, Brian Young ’05 Held onto His Native American Culture. Now He’s Writing About It. B Y W E N DY C A R L S O N

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arrived on the lush green campus of Hotchkiss as a lower mid, he left behind the familiar red stone plateaus of Arizona and the only culture he had ever known.

A Native American and a member of the Navajo Nation, Young was raised on a reservation in Fort Defiance, a small town in northern Arizona. Gang violence was so pervasive in his community that his older brother drilled him to hit the ground if he heard gunshots. Many of Young’s classmates at Window Rock High School either dropped out or joined the military; few went on to attend college.

Classrooms at his high school were often so crowded that Young had to sprint from one to the other just to make sure he could get a seat. But among his peers, academics weren’t always the focus. His wrestling coach would shut the windows in the gym during practice so the heat index would spike. “Essentially, he was training us to be Marines.

He’d turn up the heat, and he’d say, ‘If you think this is hot, think how hot it will be in Iraq,’” recalls Young.

So when Pat Redd Johnson, a former member of Hotchkiss’s admission team, visited Window Rock one day to meet with potential scholarship students, Young saw a way out.

He was bright, excelled in math, and had taught himself to read music and play the piano.

But, at 13, Young says, he was clinically depressed following the suicide of a cousin.

Even though the reservation had become “emotionally unsafe” for him, he dreaded leaving his family and his tribe behind and moving to an unfamiliar place that seemed worlds away from home.

So Young came to Hotchkiss, with the simple goal of surviving. Instead, he thrived. His Hotchkiss experience led him to Yale, where he graduated with a degree in film studies; last spring, he earned an MFA in creative writing from Columbia. Now living in Brooklyn, he is finalizing a contract with HarperCollins to publish his first novel for young readers.

Still, his journey from the reservation to Hotchkiss to Columbia was not without significant hurdles. At Hotchkiss, Young faced life-changing challenges. He had come from a place where nearly the entire population was Navajo to Hotchkiss, where he was one of just a few Native Americans on campus.

Young struggled against stereotypes, which often left him feeling alienated and angry.

He was shocked to find his classmates so uninformed about contemporary Native culture.

“They’d ask me questions like: ‘Why aren’t you wearing feathers or turquoise?’, and whether I lived in teepees and hunted buffalo,” says Young.

His upper-mid year was especially difficult. As the conflict in Iraq intensified, many of his friends from the reservation who had enlisted were stationed there. As the war continued, he says, it seemed like every week would bring news of one of his tribal

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members dying in the conflict. Meanwhile, his Hotchkiss peers seemed totally oblivious and unaffected by the war.

“I was angry a lot during that year,” recalls Young. Playing piano and wrestling helped him cope with the frustration. But at times, that wasn’t enough. One day, Pat Redd Johnson, who had first introduced Young to the prospect of Hotchkiss while he was at Window Rock, pulled him aside after hearing a rumor from his football coach that he was planning to drop out and join the Marines.

Johnson, whom students fondly called “Mama Pat,” had a stern talk with him.

“She essentially told me that I would be a much more valuable and powerful asset to my people if I got my education,” says Young.

“Actually, I wasn’t thinking of dropping out, but I was seriously set on graduating and then enlisting. After Mama Pat’s talk, I let go of my tenacity to enlist. With all the teachers constantly telling me to apply to colleges, especially to Yale, I put more effort into my applications.”

While academics at Hotchkiss were challenging for Young, he learned how to better manage his time. His instructors helped him succeed academically, socially, and artistically, pushing him in ways he couldn’t have imagined. Under Instructor in Piano Gisele Witkowski, he advanced his piano skills and learned to play several of Beethoven’s sonatas. His biggest accomplishment was playing Rachmaninov’s Opus 23 No. 5, “Prelude in G Minor,” for his senior recital. Former English instructor Marilyn “Sam” Coughlin P’91,’93, inspired his interest in creative writing by pushing him to think critically about what he read.

By his senior year, Young had found an emotional outlet through the Hotchkiss Dramatic Association, where he was encouraged by English Instructor Sarah Tames. After graduating from Yale, Young pursued acting, modeling, and working in production. But he became frustrated when the majority of roles required him to conform to the stereotypes he had fought against.

Eventually, he left the acting world and applied to Columbia’s creative writing MFA program, inspired by a dream to write fiction for and about Native kids.

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His tribe’s mythology, along with his experience growing up on a reservation, have formed the basis of his fiction. Set in contemporary times, his upcoming book tells the story of a young Navajo boy named Nathan, who is sent to live temporarily with his grandmother, who has no running water or electricity. One day, Nathan wanders into the desert and meets a being called the Water Monster, whose illness has resulted in a 30-year drought. The plot unfolds as Nathan tries to cure the monster and end the drought.

“AS A YOUTH, I WAS DESPERATELY SEARCHING FOR DEPICTIONS OF MYSELF IN THE WORLD.” Growing up, Young himself spent summers with his grandparents on a remote part of the reservation. In addition to his fiction, his relationship with his grandmother may become the basis for another writing project — a memoir contrasting his own experience at Hotchkiss with the life of his grandmother, who, he believes, was taken at an early age from the reservation by the U.S. government. Like tens of thousands of Native American children at that time, she may have been placed in an “assimilation” boarding school, where students were forced to abandon their culture, language, and traditions, and were often beaten and abused.

Young says his grandmother, now 88, never talks about what happened to her. “We don’t even know where she was sent,” says Young. “We just know that she disappeared for a number of years and no one knew where she went, and then one

day, she was back at the reservation.”

Young only learned recently about his grandmother’s mysterious disappearance.

But he sensed a ghost of her past when she came to visit him one Parents’ Weekend while he was at Hotchkiss. As they were sharing a pizza in Lakeville, she leaned toward him and asked how he was being treated at school. Did he want to leave? If he did, she said, they would need to leave then and there.

At the time, he chalked up her concern to his appearance: “I had shaved my head for football season, and I had some bruises and welts from playing,” Young says. But looking back, he thinks she may have revealed a clue to her past.

For now, he has put the task of untangling that mystery on hold as he focuses on his upcoming book and a parttime gig as a physical trainer at Columbia University’s Dodge Fitness Center. If his novel succeeds, he plans to write several similar books, with a long-term goal of taking them to Hollywood.

And his timing may be right. With Native American writer Tommy Orange’s There, There, which follows the struggles of Oakland Indians as their lives converge at a powwow, and a new PBS animated children’s series released this fall, Molly of Denali, the first children’s series to feature an Alaska Native lead character, a new Native Renaissance is underway.

But more importantly, Young is recasting a narrative for young Native Americans. “I wrote my book not to be a part of the wave of modern Native literature, but because as a youth, I was desperately searching for depictions of myself in the world,” he says.

“I write for the Native kids who need stories that have protagonists that are like them. Native kids encounter many obstacles towards achieving success and happiness — poverty, depression, suicide, alcoholism, substance abuse, neglect, racism, and stereotypes. It is my hope that my stories will show Native kids that they can overcome whatever is in their way to find success and happiness.”

A Passion for Teaching Three Young Alumni Share Why They Became Educators S T O R Y A N D P H O T O S B Y W E N DY C A R L S O N FALL 2019

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The Education Bug Madeline Nam ’14

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HEN SHE GRADUATED FROM

Harvard, Madeline Nam ’14 could have pursued any number of lucrative career paths. Instead, she followed her heart. Even before she attended Hotchkiss, Nam felt at home in the classroom. As far back as she can remember, Nam, a New Jersey native, loved books and learning, and she cherished the positive experiences she had with her teachers.

After graduating from Hotchkiss, Nam returned to campus for three consecutive summers to teach debate in Summer Portals. In her senior year at Harvard, she applied to be a Harvard Teacher Fellow, which allowed her to earn her master’s in education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education while completing a teaching residency in Boston. For Nam, it was a natural transition.

At first, she considered launching her career at a boarding school, but during her junior year at Harvard, she interned with Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), a New York network of the national charter school organization.

That experience opened her eyes to how she could make a difference teaching in a public school system. A course in educational inequality she took her senior year sealed her resolve.

“I learned that there is a such a huge need for quality education for so many in the United States, and I thought, if I am going to teach, I’ll have the most impact in public education,” she said.

This past summer, Nam completed her master’s in education; this fall she began teaching AP English Language

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“I learned that there is such a huge need for quality education for so many in the United States, and I thought, if I am going to teach, I’ll have the most impact in public education.”

—MADELINE NAM ’14

to 11th-graders at Roxbury Prep High School, where she had done her fellowship residency. The charter school is housed in a converted office building in Boston’s predominantly black and Hispanic Roxbury neighborhood, and a majority of the students come from lowincome families.

While the Fellows program only requires a two-year teaching residency, its mission is to train lifelong educators.

Most teachers don’t hit their stride until at least their third year, according to Nam. “I felt it was only fair to the students I had my first year. I learned from them, and my teaching practice

grew, so now I could come back and do better with the next group of students,” she said.

Nam has a booming voice, and she taps into her short-lived experience in standup comedy to guide her students with equal parts enthusiasm and humor.

At Hotchkiss, Nam captained the debate team her senior year; she competed in Worlds her upper mid and senior years. Last year she started a debate club at Roxbury Prep, and she helped to organize a debate league among Boston’s charter high schools.

Debate, said Nam, fosters “real-world skills, like how to stand up and argue your ideas logically, how to structure argument, and how to speak confidently in front of a group, which is just invaluable for my students,” Nam added.

Last summer, she helped nine kids from her school apply for scholarships to attend Harvard Model Congress, a government conference that Nam helped run when she was an undergraduate.

The conference — similar to Yale Model United Nations, which Nam competed in when she was at Hotchkiss — is attended by more than 1500 students from across the country.

“I had one student who was far and away passionate about debate, but she got frustrated in the beginning of the conference because she wasn’t being acknowledged. I encouraged her to

be more assertive about speaking up and presenting her ideas, which was a challenge because she was competing against kids from very prestigious schools with a lot more experience.

“But she stepped up and ended up winning an honorable mention at the conference, the only award a charter school student had won in the past four years of the tournament. So I was super-proud of her; she just crushed it,” said Nam. She credits several of her Hotchkiss instructors, including former Instructor in English Liz Buckles, with inspiring her.

“My upper mid year in English class, Ms. Buckles would always be so unabashedly excited about the book she was teaching.

She would wave the book in the air and shout — she really got into it,” said Nam. “Ms. Buckles showed me that she just loved what she did, which made me excited as a student, and she held us to a high standard in terms of our writing.”

Beyond the classroom, Nam often turned to her Hotchkiss instructors for advice and engaged in meaningful conversations with them.

“It broadened my horizons about what the role of teacher could be, and I thought that was unique to a boarding school environment. But at my current school that are student-teacher relationships that are deeply valuable.”

Nam is interested in working in curriculum development, but for now she loves being a classroom teacher.

“It’s challenging and a lot of work, but then there are those moments like today when my students had an awesome discussion about how to apply a feminist lens to a short story we were reading. The class was running over, but there were still kids jumping out of their seats to be heard,” she said.

That’s the kind of experience that makes teaching so rewarding for Nam. “When something clicks for a student, that’s what keeps me coming back every single day,” she said.

“I just have the education bug.”

A Teacher’s Teacher Heather Krieger ’10

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in Heather Krieger’s life when she knew without a doubt that she wanted to pursue a career in education. Nature and the environment were always front and center for the Pawling, NY native.

She had more experience plodding through mucky streams than standing in front of a classroom of squirming elementary students. But after she earned a B.A. in environmental studies from Hamilton College, she decided to apply to the Teach For America program. Through her time teaching and working toward her master’s in curriculum and teaching from Boston University, she found a way to merge her love of the outdoors with teaching.

“In college, I studied social justice through an environmental lens. As graduation approached, I started thinking more seriously about education as an essential lever for equity. Teaching seemed like a perfect fit,” Krieger explained.

Teach For America requires teachers to commit to working for two years in a public school in an underserved community. Krieger was placed in a charter school in Fall River, MA. She found out that she loved working with her students so much that she opted to continue teaching for an additional year. Now, she works coaching teachers with Teach for America as a manager of teacher leadership development.

Krieger works closely with first- and second-year teachers in Fall River and New Bedford, MA public schools, helping them to develop management plans and strategies to advocate for students.

Although she loves teaching kids, Krieger took her current position as a way “to learn more about the educational landscape in Massachusetts and take a step HERE WAS NEVER AN ‘AHA’ MOMENT

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“I love teaching in Portals because I believe that this is how all children should learn — through place-based education.”

—HEATHER KRIEGER ’10

outside of the classroom and think about the different ways one can impact educational equity.”

When she was at Hotchkiss, she was active in Fairfield Farm Ecosystems and Adventure Team (FFEAT), and one of her favorite courses was a nature course taught by former English instructor Geoff Marchant, during which students spent a lot of time outdoors.

“When I think back on my Hotchkiss experience, those two experiences, plus growing up and spending time with my family outdoors, had the most impact on my career,” said Krieger, who has taught environmental science in Summer Portals for six years.

“I love teaching in Portals because I believe that this is how all children should learn — through place-based education,” she said.

But finding ways for teachers to bring students closer to nature without having the skills, knowledge, and resources is tough, she said. She plans to use the experience she has gained teaching in Portals to create curricula and opportunities that can be implemented in more urban public school systems.

From her own experience teaching at Portals, she has learned from her colleagues, and she passes on that knowledge to the teachers she coaches.

“Once I’ve got it all figured out, I may find myself back in the classroom yet,’’ she said.

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From the Soccer Pitch to the Classroom Mario Williams ’12

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A R I O WI LLI A M S ’12 H A S T E AC H I NG I N H I S B LO OD. Both his parents are teachers: His mother is a high school English instructor in Jamaica, and his father heads the science department at a secondary school on Grand Cayman Island.

So a career in education was a natural step for Williams, who taught environmental science in Summer Portals last summer and joined the Hotchkiss faculty as a Penn Fellow this fall.

The fellowship is a two-year program between the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education and nine of the country’s top boarding schools that enables early-career teachers like Williams to receive a master’s degree in education.

Hotchkiss has been on Williams’s radar ever since he graduated from Franklin and Marshall College in 2016. “My motivation to teach at an independent school is that Hotchkiss gave me an opportunity to come to a place where the standard and quality of education were very high, and I wanted to give other students who would not have that opportunity a chance to experience it, too,” he explains.

A scholar-athlete, Williams arrived at Hotchkiss as a lower mid. He was a talented soccer player in May Pen, Jamaica, where he was raised. When Christopher Downs P’12,’15, a former Hotchkiss varsity soccer coach, visited his high school to watch the team members during a trial game, Willams stood out from the rest of the players, even though he was very young at the time.

Williams was the first soccer player from his school to attend Hotchkiss, and on that particular day he was the only one recruited by Downs. The older students were selected to play at various Division 1 universities and colleges, and some would later play on the Jamaican National team.

“If I hadn’t been there that day, I would have never known about Hotchkiss; I tell everyone it was like hitting the lottery,” said Williams.

While he had dreams of playing professional soccer himself, he was deeply interested in the natural sciences.

Ultimately, he accepted a scholarship to play at Franklin and Marshall, where he studied environmental science and geoscience. During this time he developed a strong admiration for one of his science instructors, whose love of teaching inspired Williams to consider teaching as a career for himself. After graduating, he earned a master’s degree in ecology and environmental sciences from the University of Maine, where his graduate research focused on the use of lake sediments to reconstruct the environmental and climate history of Jamaica of the past several thousand years.

At Hotchkiss, he spent most of his time on the soccer field, although he was also president of BaHSA his senior year, where he became aware of social justice, and in particular, how different environmental

“My motivation to teach at an independent school is that Hotchkiss gave me an opportunity to come to a place where the standard and quality of education were very high, and I wanted to give other students who would not have that opportunity a chance to experience it, too.”

—MARIO WILLIAMS ’12

issues affect different groups of people in different ways. But he credits his teaching skills to his time on the team.

“Coach Downs demanded a lot from his players, but he understood athletes had different playing styles and personalities, and created a culture that made the whole team work well together,” he said.

This fall, Williams is looking forward to making greater use of the School’s natural environment, using the streams and lakes to help students study how landscapes change over time.

“Our classroom is going to be outdoors,” he said.

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LEIGHTON LONGHI ’63

ON THE HUNT FOR MASTERPIECES S T O R Y A N D P H OT O B Y W E N DY C A R L S O N

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Longhi at his Manhattan home, decorated with Japanese fine art and photographs.

HEN HE TALKS ABOUT FINE ART, Leighton Longhi has a habit of tipping his body forward and shifting his feet back and forth, a bit like a basketball player eyeing the rim before making a foul shot. He might eventually launch into a description of his favorite 16th-century Japanese screens, depicting wispy pampas grass bending gently in the breeze, or he might recount the story of when he stumbled upon a rare find at a backstreet antique store in Kyoto.

Longhi is the foremost dealer of Japanese fine art outside Asia. For him, acquiring art has never been solely a business; it has been an all-consuming passion. He is president of Leighton R. Longhi Oriental Fine Arts, a private gallery housed in his Upper East Side home that specializes in Japanese paintings, screens, sculpture, and ceramics. Numerous museums own pieces acquired from his galleries, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art; many more pieces are in major institutions or private collections.

Longhi lives within walking distance of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, so whenever the mood strikes him, he strolls over and takes a shortcut up the back staircase to the Asian Art wing, which contains more than 35,000 objects, ranging in date from the third millennium B.C. to the 21st century.

Nearly every curator and staff in the Asian department are familiar with Longhi, and someone invariably fetches him a cup of tea. He’ll share a few jokes, and then he gets down to business, which usually involves scanning exhibits for a piece that has passed through his hands as a dealer.

On a recent visit, he came across a 17th-century surcoat, a garment once worn by samurai over their armor, that he had acquired and sold to the Met. For Longhi it was a bit like meeting an old friend, although he was a little chagrined when he leaned closer to the glass case to examine it. To protect the fabric, the exhibit lighting was kept dim, making it difficult to appreciate the silk, metallic thread, felt, wool, and velvet stitching.

For Longhi, who has trained his eye to recognize quality and authenticity, studying the minute details of a work of art is critical. Yet, he would be the first to admit that he was the least likely student at Hotchkiss to pursue a career that would lead him to spend his spare time scrutinizing a centuries-

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“Great dealers behave like great collectors. I have acquired some really important pieces over the years that have never been shown to anyone, because if they were to go, I’d cry.”

“Rooster in a Storm,” So Shizan (1733-1805) Japan, Edo Period, 1783. Hanging scroll, ink, color, and gold on silk.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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Images courtesy of Leighton Longhi, Forty-five Years in Asian Art

old surcoat. At six-foot-six, he was athletic and played several sports, including basketball, which might explain his shifting stance. He first became interested in Asian art at Yale, where he majored in Japanese and Chinese civilizations. When one of his professors brought a cache of Japanese weaponry to class one day, he was especially intrigued with the swords. The sculptured arcs of steels have the sharpest cutting blades of virtually any weapons, but Longhi was more impressed by their sheer beauty and craftsmanship.

In some respects, that was when his real love of Japanese art began. But, ever since he was a kid, Longhi has had an eye for rare and beautiful objects. In grade school, he collected stamps, coins, and baseball cards. To pay for his hobby, he would go through his friends’ penny jars and look for valuable coins to sell, giving his friends half the profit. Collecting was his “connection as a child to the rest of the world,” he wrote in the introduction to Forty-five Years in Asian Art, a 360-page monograph published earlier this year that showcases the Asian and Eastern art he acquired throughout his career.

At his Manhattan home, which he shares with his wife, Rosemarie, he is immersed in fine art. “Great dealers behave like great collectors,” says Longhi. “I have acquired some really important pieces over the years that have never been shown to anyone, because if they were to go, I’d cry,” he adds.

The apartment is decorated a bit like a museum gallery: There is a pair of paneled Japanese screens, which together measure 24 feet long and run the length of the hallway. At one end of the hall, there is a surcoat displayed behind glass, and two candles beside it to view the coat on special occasions in the evening. “Gold leaf really comes to life when seen in a darkened atmosphere,” Longhi explains.

He designed a spectacular tea room, accented with a 17th-century scroll, and several living areas decorated with paintings and photography by famous Japanese artists. Some objects date back as far as 2,500 B.C., like the two plain clay vases that rest unassuming as common flowerpots on a window sill. Despite being surrounded by so much precious artwork, Longhi spends most of his time holed up in his library surrounded by books.

Every good art dealer has to have a good reference library, he says, which explains why he has four.

He grew up in Orange, CT, the son of Edward Longhi, a center for the Fighting Irish football team at Notre Dame and an AllAmerican who was drafted by the Pittsburgh professional team, then known as the Pirates. By the time Longhi arrived as an upper mid at Hotchkiss, he seemed destined to follow in his father’s footsteps. Back then, he was already a towering force, having cut his teeth playing football at Notre Dame High School in West Haven, CT. For Longhi, who was a scholarship student, Hotchkiss proved to be a seminal period in his life. Under the tutelage of instructors Charles Berry, Blair Torrey, Dick Gurney, and Art White, Longhi gained confidence in his studies. His father hoped that Hotchkiss would help his son improve his academic record enough to get into Yale, which he did, along with many of his classmates.

After graduating from Yale, Longhi took a job as a market analyst for a large Manhattan firm, but he soon realized it wasn’t the right fit. He credits his career shift to his mentor, the late Gordon Carroll, a journalist and collector of Revolutionary and Civil War memorabilia, whom Longhi first met when he was browsing at a Connecticut antique firearms shop.

Longhi recalls discussing his career with Carroll one day.

“I told him what I enjoyed the most was buying and selling collectibles, even though that was not what I went to Yale for.”

As Longhi remembers it, Carroll’s reply went something like, “To hell with how you were educated or what people will think. You have no idea of what you are really capable of doing, and you will be surprised how much it will change your life!”

Once Longhi made up his mind to change careers, he started poring over books on antique swords and learned how to read the artisans’ signatures on the handles and, eventually, how to discern an authentic signature from a fake. In the late ’60s, he

Surcoat (jinbaori) Japan. Momoyama period, late 16th-early 17th century. Silk, metallic thread, felt, wood, and velvet. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

purchased his first sword for $55.

By 1971, Longhi had left his job as an analyst and was traveling around the country weeks at a time, staying in Holiday Inns in cities and small towns, where he’d place ads for Samurai swords in the local papers and VFW halls. Following World War II, the American military had confiscated countless numbers of Japanese weaponry; for Longhi, it was a matter of tracking them down at gun shows, antique shows, and through classified ads. He even went so far as to visit the Pentagon, where officials there granted him access to American division records, enabling him to track down where most vets had settled in the United States after the war. By the time he returned to New York, his car trunk would be jam-packed with swords and armor.

Over a five-year period, he amassed more than 10,000 swords. His friends and family thought he had completely lost his mind. But, at the same time, he was building his business, selling his inventory through auction houses to Japanese dealers and collectors, who, in turn, brought the

items back to Japan.

Countless antique weapons and helmets passed through his hands: Among his many impressive acquisitions was a 17th-century, Edo-period sword, signed by Nagasone Okihisa Kotetsu Nyudo, with an inscription in gold inlay.

The sharpness of the blade had been tested by cutting through five human bodies in one stroke. (“They were dead criminals that had been executed already,” explains Longhi.)

By the late ’70s, Longhi had segued into dealing Japanese fine art, from paintings to screens to hanging scrolls.

The Japanese art dealer Yabumoto helped Longhi refine his eye.

“If Yabumoto pointed out a beautiful painting and I asked why it was beautiful, he would say: ‘Please look!”’ He taught him to evaluate art in the Daoist tradition, with its emphasis on spontaneity and intuition, gained through self-reliance and selfknowledge.

Throughout his career, Longhi has held fast to one firm rule: He never sells to someone who lacks knowledge of how the piece should be stored and protected, or who does not have a collection that complements the piece, the subject matter, or the artist.

In doing so, he has played an important role in building significant collections of Asian art at major institutions and museums, including the Indianapolis Museum of Art and Cleveland Museum of Art. These days, the market for Asian art is tighter, and Longhi says it is more difficult to find rare pieces; he is lucky if he finds one or two masterpieces a year. Most of the coveted works have long disappeared from the market, having been sold to private collections and eventually acquired by museums. Still, Longhi can’t give up the hunt.

“When I see something wonderful, my heart speeds up. Part of this is recognizing the individual nature of a skilled artist, the unusual, the unexpected,” he says. “It’s also knowing that a piece that was once lost to the world won’t be lost any longer.”

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Astronaut Yevgeny Khrunov successfully transfers between linked capsules as the Russian Soyuz 5 goes into orbit. January 25

The US-North Vietnamese peace talks begin in Paris. January 30: The Beatles give their last public performance, on the roof o

Apple Records. February 8: The Saturday Evening Post’s final edition is published, ending a century of publication. February

9: The Boeing 747, the world’s largest plane, makes its first commercial flight February 13: The Afro-American Society of Duke

University leads a student takeover of a campus building, citing a lack of opportunities for Afro-American students and the need

or more black faculty. March 2: The first test flight of The Concorde jet takes place in Bristol, England. March 3: Apollo 9 i

aunched from Cape Kennedy on a mission to test the lunar module and makes 151 Earth orbits over 10 days. Three astronaut

are on board. April 4: Dr. Denton Cooley implants the first temporary artificial heart in Houston, TX. April 6: On foot, covering

3,720 miles in 16 months, English explorer Sir Wally Herbert reaches the North Pole, crossing the frozen surface of the Arctic

Ocean. April 15: A U.S. plane is shot down by North Korea above the Sea of Japan; all 31 persons are believed to have died

April 19: In Ithaca, NY, some 80 armed, militant black students from Cornell University take over a campus building, demanding

a black studies program and making an agreement with University administrators for total amnesty. May 12: Placed in solitary

1960s

confinement for 17 months, Winnie Mandela is detained under South Africa’s Terrorism Act. May 13: Deadly race riots take place

n Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. May 14: Canada officially legalizes the use of contraception and the practice of abortion. May 15

California Gov. Ronald Reagan declares martial law on UC Berkeley and the entire city as they try to build dorm buildings on

People’s Park. 3,000 protesters try to seize it back but are deterred by riot police and tear gas. May 20: Nine days of fighting

cease, and U.S. troops of the 101st Airborne Division and South Vietnamese forces capture Ap Bia Mountain, Hill 937, following

THE

one of the bloodiest battles of the Vietnam War. June 2: 74 U.S. sailors are killed, as the destroyer USS Frank E. Evans is sliced in

half by the Australian aircraft carrier Melbourne during NATO maneuvers offshore in South Vietnam. June 6: The Gibraltar borde

with Spain, also known as “The Fence of Gibraltar,” is closed by dictator General Franco. June 7: ABC premieres “The Johnny

Cash Show” from the Grand Ole Opry. Bob Dylan is the special guest. June 17: William Brent, a member of the Black Panthe

hijacks a U.S. plane to Cuba, becoming the 28th person in this year to do so. June 22: The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio

catches fire due to pollution levels in the water. June 28: New York’s Stonewall Inn, an underground gay bar, is raided by police

on the grounds the bar refused to pay an increase in bribery. For three days, 400 to 1,000 patrons riot against police. In time, the

event comes to be known as The Stonewall Rebellion, considered the birth of the gay rights movement. July 7: Less than a month

AT HOTCHKISS

after President Nixon implements the removal of U.S. troops in Vietnam, the first U.S. troops leave South Vietnam. Jul 11: David

Bowie, music phenomenon and icon, releases his single “Space Oddity,” a great hit allegedly released in conjunction with the

moon landing. July 17: The “New Left and Extremist Movements” from the FBI surfaces, revealing Gov. Reagan’s plans to end the B Y R O B E R TA J E N C K E S

disruption on California’s campuses through “psychological warfare.” July 20: Neil Armstrong becomes the first man to walk on

he Moon. August 2: Richard Nixon becomes the first president to visit a communist nation, Romania, since the beginning of the

Cold War. August 12: A Protestant fraternal group known as the Apprentice Boys lead a parade in Northern Ireland, causing riots

Attacks on Loyalist Catholics lead to riots in Belfast also. The ongoing violent acts become known as “The Troubles.” August 15

The Woodstock Music and Art Fair opens with more than 400,000 young people in attendance. Performers feature Ravi Shankar

Crosby, Stills and Nash; Joan Baez; the Grateful Dead; Jimi Hendrix; and Janis Joplin. September 1: Disturbed by racial unres

and disputes between classes, race riots begin in Hartford, CT. September 1: In protest of the British government’s involvemen

with events in Biafra and its support of U.S. troops in Vietnam, John Lennon returns his OBE medal. September 1: King Idris i

overthrown by a coup in Libya. The revolutionary government is led by Muammar Gaddafi. September 2: Ho Chi Minh, the North

Vietnamese president, dies. He was a founder of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1945. September 4: A report by the U.S

Food and Drug Administration claims birth control pills are safe. There has been a concern of possible blood clotting associated

with the pills. September 24: Known for their anti-Vietnam War protests, “The Chicago Eight” begin their trial. October 5: In Britain

Monty Python’s Flying Circus” airs on BBC One for the first time. October 15: A candlelight march and other activities are staged

by peace demonstrators around the White House and in the city of Washington as part of Vietnam Moratorium Day. Novembe 28

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5: 250,000 thousand protesters stage a peaceful demonstration against the Vietnam War in Washington D.C. November 24

The My Lai Massacre, the mass murder of unarmed South Vietnamese civilians at the hands of U.S. troops, is investigated

“The Times They are a-Changin’”

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1960s THE

AT HOTCHKISS

In that momentous decade, from 1960 through 1969, change in the U.S. was a constant. From “hippie” lifestyles to widespread urban unrest, the mounting deaths in the Vietnam War and ongoing protests, and the tragedy of three shocking assassinations, those years left their mark on history.

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t Hotchkiss, too, change was taking place. The students voiced their frustration with the disciplinary system and a number of other School rules, including the policies on dress, hair, chapel attendance, and the curriculum. Jon Low ’69, editor of the 1969 Mischianza, recalls: “Several of our classmates were expelled for smoking cigarettes, which seems incredibly quaint in retrospect, though no less impactful on their lives for all that. The 50th reunion class my senior year was the Class of 1919, and we were still in the School’s original 1892 wooden building, so we were literally spanning the era from the horse and buggy to the space age.”

Some of the changes were more visible — especially from 1966 to 1968, when a new brick Main Building was being built to replace the decades-old wooden structure.

Architect Hugh Stubbins had been chosen to design the new building, which the trustees wanted to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the School. The new threelevel, Y-shaped structure encompassed the old Main, allowing it to function during

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construction. A much-needed new theater, Walker Auditorium, would be a highlight of the renovated Main Building. Stubbins’s design for Main, with its sleek lines and midcentury furnishings, spoke confidently to a new century. On the other side of Rte. 41, construction of Schmidt Rink, the School’s first indoor hockey rink, was underway.

In 1966, the first computer terminal, about the size of a small dorm refrigerator, was installed in the basement of the A. Whitney Griswold Building. Only a handful of students who had been properly trained were allowed to operate it. Hotchkiss was among the first secondary schools in the country selected by IBM to participate in the experimental computer-sharing program.

In addition to the physical changes around them, students and faculty were absorbing news of changes to come. Students returned to School after the March Break in 1968 to learn that their request to change the traditional morning Chapel service had been granted. Characterized by The Hotchkiss Record as “too lifeless, too rigid, and too standardized to have much meaning,” the

five-morning-a-week service was replaced by a less traditional service that incorporated readings from a variety of sources, music, and even film. Also, seniors had more freedom in the morning, after the faculty voted that breakfast attendance was optional.

Discussions about the School’s possible move to coeducation also were underway.

If the School were to go coeducational, it would be following in the footsteps of colleges in the Northeast, where the shift to coeducation was more concentrated after the late 1960s.

At their meeting in March 1969, the trustees announced the formation of a special trustee-faculty committee to study coeducation; they sought input from the students on the issue. A Hotchkiss Record headline in April 1969 offered this multiplechoice answer on the timing of the admission of girls: “Now? In five years? Never?”

The student body, which in the 196869 school year totaled 328, was also changing. The Record of April 19, 1969 reported: “There will be 40 black students at Hotchkiss by 1971.” The trustees’ decision

made earlier that year, the Record reported, would mean “the increase in the enrollment of black students to 6% of the student body next year, 8% the following year, and about 10% by 1971.”

The Hotchkiss Record also reflected in its pages some of the news of the world outside Hotchkiss. The October 7, 1960 issue of the Record announced a new feature that would cover world affairs. In the eventful ’60s, a panoply of voices was heard in the new Walker Auditorium and other venues on campus. Social activist and civil rights leader Julian Bond spoke, as did conservative author William F. Buckley, who debated issues with the students, and author and poet James Dickey. Black Panther Joudon Ford addressed the community in the winter of 1968. Midwesterner Tom Keating ’69, P’06,’09 recalls: “He carried a gun and spoke very differently than anyone I had ever heard before — but it was more the shock value, than the conversation.”

Other speakers in the winter of 1968 included CBS newsman Walter Cronkite and Tim Wheeler of the American

Communist Party and Joshua Muraychik from the American Socialist Party, both of whom were invited by the Current Events Club. The club also sponsored Vietnam Week, with programming that included movies and lectures aimed at giving students a broad perspective on the war. Jon Low ’69 recalled the visit of a recent alum, who had enlisted in the Army and came to campus “to talk about his reasoning and experience.

The reception he received was respectful and curious, in part because there was still a draft and we all expected to have to serve at some point. But then learning not long after that he had been killed in action was also shocking….”

The School had a ban on long hair (boys whose hair was judged too long were told by the headmaster to “sign up for the barber”); and dishonesty or cheating, or possession of tobacco or alcohol, were among the School rules that were grounds for immediate dismissal. Students were caught smoking marijuana at Hotchkiss for the first time around 1967, according to the School history written by Ernest Kolowrat ’53,

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STUDENT BODY during the 1968-69 school year

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black students by 1971

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Hotchkiss, A Chronicle of an American School.

He quotes Bill Olsen ’39, then headmaster: “What we were facing was what everybody else was facing: that was, that the world was changing radically, drugs were coming, the generation gap was upon us, the civil rights movement had burgeoned. What accelerated everything was the nastiness of the Vietnam War. We got the ripple effect from what was going on at college and university campuses. …” Kolowrat described a “new mood increasingly pervading the School — a mounting disillusionment and disaffection dating back perhaps to the shattering end of JFK’s Camelot …”

Jerry Sprole ’65, P’89,’91,’15,’20 remembers the day Kennedy was assassinated — November 22, 1963. “We all ate lunch together in the dining room at the same time then,” he says, “and we all knew at lunch that the assassination had happened. Nobody had any radios. We went back to our dorms, to the TV in the common room. But the TVs didn’t work well; the reception was awful. There was an All-School memorial service in the chapel that night. It was very somber. I remember some faculty wives crying.

“We all went home for Thanksgiving on Wednesday afternoon and came back Sunday. That’s when most people got connected and learned the gravity of the situation,” he says.

A little more than a year before, in October 1962, students had followed anxiously the announcements by President Kennedy regarding the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world stood for 13 days on the brink of war. Kevin O’Connell ’65 vividly recalls that time. “The missile crisis was discussed in general announcements in the Dining Hall by Mr. Olsen. There was the sense of foreboding, but again, not enough facts to create a ‘clear and present danger.’

Of course, when it was announced that the Soviet ships had turned around, there was relief and a quick return to ‘normal.’”

Amongst all the seemingly unrelenting bad news, the Greater Opportunity Program (G.O.) was one thing that “mattered,” in the words of Bill Newman ’68. Teenage 32

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“What we were facing was what everybody else was facing: that was, that the world was changing radically, drugs were coming, the generation gap was upon us, the civil rights movement had burgeoned. What accelerated everything was the nastiness of the Vietnam war.”

FROM HOTCHKISS, A CHRONICLE OF AN AMERICAN SCHOOL

boys from underprivileged communities in Connecticut and New York came to Lakeville during the summers of 1964-1970 at attend this enrichment camp. Many Hotchkiss students worked as proctors in the G.O. program, guiding and mentoring the young men.

“It was transformative,” Jerry Sprole says of his time working in the G.O. program during the summer of 1965. “Some of the greatest Hotchkiss faculty members were involved in the teaching. What was clear was how much more mature than we the students were. They understood life in a way that we didn’t. Relationships were easy, as long as we treated them not like a proctor.

You really had to back your way into it. You couldn’t say, ‘I’m in charge here.’ I think we learned more than they did. I know it helped me immensely when I got into the Navy. I don’t know how I would have handled it if I hadn’t had the G.O. Program experience.”

Many alumni from the 1960s share Sprole’s insights about the life-changing experiences of those years. Jon Low ’69 says the 1960s influenced his choice of career. “I wanted to be involved in public service somehow to address injustice and other issues facing our country as well as the world at large. … A significant number of our class became writers, filmmakers, or journalists, which I think was, in part, a

For the summers from 1964-1970, the Greater Opportunity Program was lifechanging for participants, as well as for Hotchkiss faculty and students.

reflection on our Hotchkiss education, but in part on the times.”

By the end of the decade, the School was recognizably different. Mac Gordon ’69 observes, “Within a few years, nearly every reform we proposed had been implemented and come to pass. The times indeed had changed, and Hotchkiss had changed as well.

“The fact that Hotchkiss today is a kinder, better, and more diverse school is,” Gordon says, “at least in part, a result of the changes that began in the late 1960s.”

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HANK WESSELMAN ’59 SHAMAN, SCIENTIST, AND A BIT INDIANA JONES S T O R Y A N D P H OT O B Y W E N DY C A R L S O N

Hank Wesselman, Ph.D., is an anthropologist, author, and former university and college professor who leads shamanistic workshops at retreats around the county, including the Esalen Institute at Big Sur, Breitenbush Hot Springs in Oregon, and The Omega Institute for Holistic Living in Rhinebeck, NY, where Hotchkiss Magazine caught up with him last summer.

H

ANK WESSELMAN IS SOMETHING OF A MODERN

shaman, though there’s nothing even remotely otherworldly about his appearance. His uniform is a T-shirt, khakis, and Birkenstocks with socks. He keeps his beard neatly trimmed and wears the de rigueur horn-rimmed glasses of a college English professor. A necklace strung with a single bead — a gift to him from a Masai tribesman in Kenya — speaks more to his years working as a paleontologist in Africa than his time spent delving into the spirit world.

But at 78, Wesselman has spent the better part of his life immersed in shamanism, a practice dating back to the Stone Age that seeks to heal individuals by connecting them with an invisible spirit world. Wesselman guides people on visionary journeys, where, he says, spirit forces have the power to help them if they are open and willing to connect with them. “I don’t tell them what to see, I simply give them the coordinates to the spirit world,” he says. “And they return with accounts that would pass muster at any aboriginal campfire.”

In his workshops, Wesselman shakes a rattle or taps on a mylar

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drum, and the steady rhythm helps the attendees reach an altered state of consciousness, much like what happens in the brain during meditation. In this dreamlike trance, individuals are more receptive to what Wesselman calls the “unseen” universe, a place teaming with spirits in the form of animals — and sometimes ancestors.

All this may sound wildly inconceivable; but, Wesselman is part of a current growing wellness movement that embraces modern shamanism with the same enthusiasm as crystals, Mayan sweat lodges, and ayurvedic massages. Still, Wesselman concedes that only a few of his Hotchkiss friends would understand his line of work.

Mark Gall ’59 is one. A former Board of Governors member, Gall was a friend of Wesselman’s while they were at Hotchkiss, and the two renewed their friendship while both of them were doctoral students at U.C. Berkeley. In 2014, Gall signed up for one of Wesselman’s workshops in Oregon, where Gall and other attendees were held spellbound by Wesselman’s command of shamanic rituals.

“Some Hotchkiss students and alumni might dismiss shamanism as a hippy-dippy cult,” says Gall. “But through his books and workshops, Hank has become an important guide for

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humanity into the hidden powers of the human mind,” adds Gall, who said Hank helped him find his “power animal,” which is a serpent.

As it turns out, Wesselman wasn’t the only member of the Class of ’59 who was drawn to mysticism. Alexander “Lex” Hixon Jr. ’59, who died in 1995, was a Yale graduate who earned a Ph.D. in comparative religion from Columbia.

A highly regarded scholar, Hixon wrote nine books on mysticism and hosted a popular weekly public radio show in New York City, where he interviewed healers, psychics, and spiritual leaders. Wesselman, too, has written nine books, mostly on shamanism, including his most recent, The Re-enchantment, The Shamanic Path to a Life of Wonder, which was published in 2016.

But unlike Hixon, Wesselman’s professional life is rooted in science, not religion. He is a biological anthropologist who, since 1971, has worked off-and-on in various scientific expeditions, which have taken him to remote places, including the remote areas of eastern Africa’s Great Rift Valley.

The son of a Harvard-educated New York lawyer, Wesselman gravitated toward the sciences after Hotchkiss. He earned a B.A. and an M.A. in zoology from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and spent two years in the U.S. Peace Corps teaching science in western Nigeria. There, he witnessed firsthand spirit possession and ritual healing among members of the Yoruba tribe.

By the early ’70s, Wesselman was pursuing graduate work in paleoanthropology at U.C. Berkeley, where he joined a team of scientists working at prehistoric sites in the southwestern Ethiopian desert. His days were spent searching extensive fossil beds for microvertebrate fossils — mostly jaws of bats, mice, rats, and insectivores that he used to reconstruct the paleoenvironment of early man.

“At that time, I worshiped solely at the altar of science,” he says.

The days were long and tedious, but not without adventure. Wesselman was the Indiana Jones of his day: He’d spend months in a tented safari camp on the eroded desert landscape, hundreds of miles from any creature comforts, where 36

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“Some Hotchkiss students and alumni might dismiss shamanism as a hippy-dippy cult.

But through his books and workshops, Hank has become an important guide for humanity into the hidden powers of the human mind.”

—MARK GALL ’59

temperatures often reached 115 degrees.

He worked closely with a team of African tribesmen who helped with the work, and among them was a shaman named Atiko, with whom Wesselman would experience his first spirit vision.

As Wesselman tells it, one sweltering hot day when the team broke for lunch, he noticed Atiko staring intently at something to the left of him. Wesselman turned to look in the same direction and in his peripheral vision, he saw a figure as large as himself that, in his words, “seemed to step through a rip of fabric in the air.” Seconds later, it vanished. Startled by what he saw, he asked Atiko in Swahili it was. “Shaitani,” Atiko replied — the Swahili word for spirit.

Wesselman’s scientific mind didn’t know what to make of what he’d seen. He was on his way to the top of his profession, working with a team of geologists, archeologists, and paleontologists, including Donald C. Johanson, who — several years later — discovered the world’s most famous early human ancestor, the 3.2-millionyear-old “Lucy.” Now, he had witnessed

something intangible. He remembers thinking to himself: “It’s time to go back to Nairobi and have a beer.”

Instead, he returned to camp and kept the experience to himself. He continued to have similar experiences, and his field work brought him in contact with indigenous tribes who believe that individuals who experienced visions were destined to become shamans.

Wesselman returned to California in the early 80s to finish his doctorate. There, he began to experience what he called “full-fledged, spontaneous altered states of consciousness” during which he had a direct experience with a spirit.

“Quite suddenly, my worldview changed rather dramatically,” he says.

Eventually, he moved to Hawaii, where he still lives on a small organic farm with his wife, Jill Kuykendall. In 1995, he published Spiritwalker, the first book of his autobiographical trilogy, based on a series of visionary experiences that began while he was living on the flank of the active volcano Mauna Loa. The book is now in its 22nd printing and has been published in 14 languages.

These days, Wesselman’s time is largely occupied with teaching workshops, yet he is also still actively involved in research. He defines himself as a “hard-headed scientist grounded in logos who became a wandering medicine man grounded in mythos.”

“Traditional peoples understand that the world is divided into two halves, the world of things seen and the world of things hidden,” he says.

Wesselman has managed to find a balance between the two worlds. Teaching workshops allows him to discuss the metaphysical world. His academic colleagues, preoccupied with the facts and figures, seem one-dimensional by comparison, he says.

“They don’t address the answer to the most important question: ‘Who are you?’” In the scientific realm, he says, “Our search for objective information has come at the cost of a deeper, intuitive rapport with nature and with our spiritual selves.”

Visit his website at www.sharedwisdom.com.

BOARD OF GOVERNORS

2019 Hotchkiss Board of Governors: Front row, left to right: Nathalie Pierrepont Danilovich ’03, Carlos Garcia ’77, Caldwell Hart ’87, P’16,’20, and Nick Moore ’71, P’89,’01,’06; middle row: Paul Mutter ’87, Weijen Chang ’86, P’22, Tom Seidenstein ’91, Rafael Carbonell ’93, and Natalie Boyse ’09; back row: Richard Staples ’74, P’10,’12, Peter Gifford ’93, Barrett Lester ’81, Danielle Ferguson ’97, Brooke Harlow ’92, and Chip Quarrier ’90. Not present for photo: Marita Bell Fairbanks ’84, Annika Lescott ’06, Steve O’Brien ’62, P’87, ’01, GP’17, Emily Pressman ’98, Charlotte Dillon Ross ’10, Blake Ruddock ’12, Bill Sandberg ’65, Adam Sharp ’96, Sheria Smith ’01, and Tom Terbell ’95.

We’ve updated the Hotchkiss Alumni App! The Hotchkiss Alumni App, previously powered by Evertrue, has moved to a new provider: Graduway. The new app provides many of the same features as the previous one, and we expect to roll out new features in the months to come, including opportunities for job postings and career networking.

FOR iOS:

If you have any questions or trouble during the process, please email Alumnet@hotchkiss.org

YOU CAN DOWNLOAD THE NEW APP USING THE INSTRUCTIONS BELOW:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ graduway-community/id1457549791 Once you’ve installed the Graduway Community app, search for “Hotchkiss” in the organization field.

That will bring you to the Hotchkiss Community.

a lu m n i

FOR ANDROID:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/ details?id=com.graduway.hotchkissalumnet

FOR WEB BROWSERS:

https://hotchkissalumnet.org

For security reasons, your previous Hotchkiss Alumni App credentials have not been transferred to the new app. You can register as a new user by linking your Facebook, Google, or LinkedIn accounts or using your email and a password you create.

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M AGA ZINE

CLASS NOTES

Moments in Time Last summer, photographs taken by William “Bill” Haussler ’30 were displayed in the Rotunda and Main Hallway. The images were reproduced from the original negatives, made between 1926 and 1930.

His daughter, Lynn Haussler Oakes, discovered them while cataloging her father’s photo collection and donated them to the Archives. In this photo, Hotchkiss students enjoy watermelon outside the general store in downtown Lakeville.

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