Opportunities for Excellence
Good morning, and welcome to our Spring Family Weekend. My thanks to each of you for your support and trust, for your partnership with us, and, most importantly, for sharing the lives of your children with us.
I thought I would do three things this morning: give you a brief update; offer a few reflections on the future of Deerfield; and, time permitting, answer a few questions.
The feeling on campus turns with the change of every season. With spring, a new energy is released as the days lengthen, the weather warms, and the greenness of our campus and the surrounding hills come alive again. You can see students sunbathing on the Lower Level, walking and hiking to the Rock, and “shriving” in the River. And, of course, our seniors bring a mixture of feelings to these final weeks as they reflect on their experiences here, savor time with friends, and look with excitement and a sense of opportunity to the years ahead.
I always say that the success of any school year depends on the leadership and engagement of its senior class; they set the tone, they lead the way, and they create the goodness of this school. And this year’s class has been exceptional. By chance, my youngest daughter, Maia, graduates from her school on the same day at the same time as Deerfield’s Commencement, so I will be recording a video message for our Commencement this year. And I have to say: This was not an easy choice for me. This class entered with Monica and me. We have journeyed through the last four extraordinary years together, shoulder to shoulder, and they will always have a special place in my heart.
Last week, Deerfield hosted the annual spring meeting of trustees and heads of the Eight Schools Association—our peer boarding schools in New England and the Mid-Atlantic. Many of those in attendance mentioned to me how friendly and welcoming our students are, and how impressed they were by the positive energy on campus. They could see and feel our strong and powerful sense of community. That is always gratifying to hear, and even more so when it comes from respected colleagues such as fellow heads of school.
I think I have been able to see every team play this spring. A highlight for me, thus far, was a testy, competitive mid-week Ultimate Frisbee match against one of our peer schools. One of the reasons I love watching Ultimate is that players serve as their own referees. This makes for some entertaining on-field discussion, especially when our opponents seem to be playing a sport more akin to ice hockey or football than Ultimate, as our opponent was on this particular afternoon. Occasionally, the game just stops, as players debate a called foul and resolve disagreements of interpretation.
I’m still working out the rules, which is ok; I have been working out the rules for girls field hockey for 42 years, but it did seem to me that we lost more than one discussion that should have properly gone our way. I attribute this to our magnificent sportsmanship, our flexibility of mind, and willingness to compromise. It may have also had something to do with the size of our lead; we won this game by a considerable margin, so the stakes were much lower with each contested call. As an aside, we are working to align our athletic schedule with family weekends next year so that we have more games on campus!
Our spring arts performances build slowly over the course of the term, and we have already had some wonderful performances and concerts; at least one performance is a staple of our School Meetings. I’m always in awe of our student artists’ talent and commitment to craft, so I hope you will be able to attend the Arts Showcase this evening.
Over the previous few years, we have welcomed to campus some extraordinary speakers: presidents of colleges and universities, a Nobel Prize winner, military and civic leaders, authors, scientists, and artists, and this year is no exception. In January, we heard from Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and former US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith and National Book Award winner and poet Terrance Hayes. You don’t often get a Pulitzer Prize and National Book winner in the span of four days: but we did. Last week we heard from Maya and Denley Delaney, sisters and Deerfield graduates from the Class of 2013, who received the Ashley Award for outstanding service to their communities. As one student said to a member of the faculty, it was like hearing two Commencement addresses in row—and in less than 20 minutes. They spoke on their work in the fields of oceanography and environmental sustainability in the Caribbean, and offered students incredibly wise advice. Earlier this week, Hussain Aga Khan, Class of 1992, spoke to students about his conservation efforts and his extraordinary ocean photography, which you can see on display in the Hess Lobby and above the Starfield in the Koch Center.
We also hosted our second annual Deerfield Forum on the topic of “Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Learning.” The purpose of the Forum is to model constructive and scholarly debate and stage respective and searching civic dialogue for students. This year’s Forum featured Dr. Stuart Russell, a professor of computers, science, and engineering at UC Berkeley—he recently delivered the prestigious BBC Reith Lectures—and researcher, professor, and writer Melanie Mitchell. Both are leading experts on generative artificial intelligence and machine learning. The panel was moderated by the author Steven Johnson.
The Forum was a wide-ranging discussion that touched on the nature of intelligence and cognition; possible impacts of AI on how we think and learn; the risks artificial intelligence poses to the integrity of our political and economic systems; and debates about how it should be regulated. Dr. Russell, just prior
to his appearance at Deerfield, spearheaded an effort to place a moratorium on the development of AI systems more powerful than ChatGPT4. That debate will likely continue, but two things seem certain: first, that the development of generative artificial intelligence is moving at an extraordinary pace, and second, that it will have a dramatic impact on teaching, learning, and human creativity —indeed, on all work. I was incredibly impressed by the engagement of our students in this discussion.
We continue to think creatively about our academic program, and our faculty continues to update our course offerings. Even as we limit access to cell phones —a trend I think you will see at more and more schools over the next few years—we also seek to build into our curriculum emerging topics in science and technology and leverage new technologies for learning. Next year, we’ve expanded our course catalog to include advanced courses in the fields of data science and engineering, as well as new offerings in a range of other disciplines.
During an early April faculty meeting, each of our academic departments shared with colleagues the defining learning outcomes of their disciplines as well as the instructional practices that support those outcomes. This important work was a charge given to us by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges as part of our upcoming accreditation process, which will happen next fall. It was the best faculty meeting I’ve been to in my four years. These outcomes reflect and reinforce the mindsets and capacities we have outlined in our portrait of a Deerfield Student, and their explicit articulation will enable us to become more intentional in how we teach and construct curriculum; they will provide a framework for collaboration and future interdisciplinary efforts; and will support mentoring, appraisal, and professional learning at Deerfield.
We were also informed at the end of March that the E. E. Ford Foundation, the leading educational foundation serving American independent schools, has awarded Deerfield Academy an Educational Leadership Grant. Grants are awarded to schools offering proposals that promise a significant impact on the practice and thinking of independent schools; that are innovative and replicable; that address challenges faced by independent schools; and that encourage bold new ideas, catalyzing change. The grant will support the development and writing of a practical, school-based framework of principles that will:
• foster an intellectual culture for students that actively promote expressive freedom, inquiry,and curiosity without fear;
• develop guidelines to help schools determine when—and if—to assert neutrality on matters of politics and social action;
• promote impartial, nonpartisan teaching in support of student agency and the development of their personal views on matters of public interest;
• and integrate diverse arguments and perspectives in the design of teaching and courses, and in all school activities.
The goals of the framework, which will be written by a nationally representative working group of secondary school heads, are to deepen the national conversation about the critical importance of expressive freedom and open inquiry; provide schools with a meaningful tool for institutional reflection and assessment; and create a vehicle for shared understanding and consensus building among boards, school leaders, teachers, students, and parents.
I believe that it is more important now than ever for schools to develop—and institutionalize— principles of teaching and instruction that support viewpoint diversity, protect the autonomy and independence of students, and equip them to engage with others across difference. Many colleges and professional schools are now moving forcefully in this direction. Over the past two weeks we have seen important statements and initiatives come out of Stanford Law School, Vanderbilt, Harvard, and Cornell. Independent schools such as Deerfield have an obligation to prepare students for a life of pluralistic contention by embracing practices that support inquiry and expressive freedom and discarding those that do not.
We have also been hard at work defining future priorities for the Academy and a comprehensive campaign in support of them. We will stage a number of conversations next year about these priorities. I look forward to sharing them with you in greater detail and, most importantly, getting your insight and feedback and hearing about your hopes for your children and for our school.
Great schools—those, like Deerfield, that sustain excellence in learning and leadership over many generations—are confident in their ethos and values, building outward from their defining strengths and distinctive histories. They are also agile, open to change, and attentive to future opportunity. Deerfield’s next campaign will seek to build on our legacy strengths even as we look to the future. In many ways, it will be a campaign about people, about culture, and about community, firmly centered on our students and their experience.
We will seek to increase access and opportunity by fully endowing our existing financial aid commitments and additional resources for families across income levels. Over the last decades increases in tuition have dramatically outpaced income; according to the National Center for Education Statistics, tuition, fees, and room and board for college have increased 59 percent since the year 2000. In contrast, inflation-adjusted median income for people with a BA has risen by 5 percent over the same time period.
It is critically important that Deerfield ensure access to future generations of students irrespective of their financial resources. That kind of diversity is central to the kinds of learning and interactions that happen at Deerfield, and it’s the best possible preparations for every student’s future. And that commitment to affordability and access has always been part of Deerfield’s DNA—a commitment beautifully articulated by Mr. Boyden’s idea that families
should simply “pay what you can.” Deerfield was one of the first American independent schools to extend its reach in this way, and it’s one way that we will seek to be worthy of our heritage.
We will invest in spaces at the school that unite, connect, and create community. We will invest in the renewal of existing residential spaces and additional faculty housing in, or in close proximity to, those spaces. This will enable us to ensure a strong, visible presence of adults on campus and a lower ratio of students to adults in the dorms. We will invest in the renewal of historic buildings, including the Main School Building and Arms, to create spaces for team teaching, interdisciplinary learning, and collaboration. A great faculty is a learning faculty, and this kind of collaboration fuels creative teaching and instructional design.
And we will invest in a renovated, upgraded, and expanded Dining Hall that can comfortably seat and bring together our entire community. In many ways that space is the beating heart and soul of the school. Our sit-down meals connect students to students and students and faculty in ways that are the envy of our peers, and it is a powerful and enduring bridge between generations of alumni and between Deerfield’s past and present.
We will invest in programmatic renewal and innovation in the form of a Center for the Study of the Liberal Arts. This Center will seek to renew and invigorate the liberal arts as a lasting source of wisdom and inspiration even as it reimagines them for the 21st century so that our students can meet the challenges and complexities of a future we cannot predict or fully anticipate; it will seek to identify high-impact practices consistent with our philosophy of education; practices that will supercharge the classroom experience for students; it will sponsor the Deerfield Forum—our effort to promote inquiry and expressive freedom; and support summer institutes for professional learning that will bring faculty from other schools to campus (and that, we hope, will strengthen our recruitment efforts) and provide opportunities for growth and renewal.
And we will invest in the high-engagement model of teaching, coaching, and mentoring that has stood at the center of Deerfield for well over a century and that drives the goodness and the excellence of the Academy. If asked what is the greatest challenge facing boarding schools today, I would answer in the form of a question: How do we create opportunities for excellence, challenge, and achievement for students and at the same time forge a community characterized by joy, optimism, care and mutual obligation, and connection? After one of our three recent visit back days, a prospective parent wrote to Dean of Admission Chip Davis and said that Deerfield was the happiest school they had seen in their many campus visits. Happiness—students thriving and flourishing— is not an accident. It’s the result of careful design, intention, and a deeply engaged faculty.
Deerfield was founded on the idea that young people can fully flourish while embracing challenge, excellence, and achievement at the highest levels. These are mutually supportive goals, and the principal means by which we these are achieved is through the faculty. So, we must invest in their renewal and their growth. We have a long tradition of school leaders and administrators who teach, and of teachers who coach, mentor, and share their lives generously and widely with students across multiple dimensions of school life. I want to sustain this model.
As I said to prospective parents, everything—absolutely everything—depends upon the deep, broad, and caring engagement of our faculty and staff. There are, it is true, considerable pressures bearing down on this model of engagement: changing attitudes toward work, increased pressure on faculty time, increased demands for programmatic excellence everywhere and in every facet of school life, among others. For all of these reasons, it’s critically important that we continue to think creatively about how we support, compensate, renew, and invest in our faculty, and I believe that Deerfield has a unique opportunity to do this better than any other school in the country. With your wisdom and support, I know that we can accomplish that. Thank you.
Legacy Strengths and Future Aspirations
Good afternoon, everyone. I hope you’ve had a great day of classes. I speak on behalf of the entire faculty and staff when I say how glad we are that you were able to join us for Fall Family Weekend. The first thing I want to do is thank you.
Thank you for your continued support, partnership, and trust. Thank you for sharing the lives of your children with us. And thank you, as well, for the questions you submitted. We received a grand total of: eight. Not a lot, admittedly, which is perhaps a good thing.
We plan on getting back to each and every one of you who asked a question. As I have often said, your questions make us better and help us to become more intentional, so I am grateful to those of you who took the time to write.
Your feedback also helps us to do something which is very, very important for schools: and that is, to sharpen and deepen our existing strengths—even as we look to the future—and that is my theme for this afternoon, the relationship between what we might think of as “legacy strengths” and future aspirations.
A few years ago, I read a short op-ed by the Canadian journalist David Sax. The title brilliantly captures his argument: “End the Innovation Obsession: some of our best ideas are in the rearview mirror.”
“True innovation,” he writes, “isn’t just some magic carnival of invention . . . . It is a continuing process of gradual improvement and assessment that every institution and business experiences in some way.”
“Often,” he goes on to say, “that actually means adopting ideas and tools that already exist but make sense in a new context, or even returning to methods that worked in the past.” This idea of what he calls “rearview innovation” resonated with me, especially as we emerge from the disruptions of the past few years, take stock, and chart a path into the future.
Don’t get me wrong. Schools—great schools, like Deerfield—are never complacent; they evolve and they change; they are attentive to future opportunities; they are alive to new ideas; and they strive, always, for continual improvement, and we made a number of great adjustments over the last few years. But I was struck by Sax’s distinction between fads and trends, on the one hand, and authentic innovation, on the other; innovation that in his words “reflects where we’ve been, what we’ve learned, and how we actually want to live.”
I was also struck by his comment that “this type of reflective innovation requires courage, because it calls into question the assumption that newer is necessarily better.” Schools sometimes seem particularly vulnerable to this mistake. Too often what looks like innovation turns out to be a short-lived fad.
I want to mention four “innovations” from the past, tested by time and made all the more relevant by the lessons learned during the past few years, that I hope will endure in Deerfield. Along the way, I hope to answer a couple of the questions that I received from you, and finally, give you a sense of the opening weeks of school.
The first is perhaps the oldest—it’s ancient, in fact. It is the idea of the liberal arts.
At Deerfield, we have taken steps to re-dedicate ourselves to the idea of the liberal arts. As I said at this time last year when I spoke to you, our challenge is to reinvent them to meet the challenges of the historical moment in which we are living.
The liberal arts—a well-rounded education in the major disciplines of arts, science, and social science that exposes students to diverse modes of thought and tradition that resists early over-specialization—have proved to be remarkably durable, but they have never been static; they have continually evolved over two and a half millennia—rediscovered, reinvented, renewed by new scholarship and discovery and, as importantly, rescued from neglect. Over recent decades, and under pressure from a range of forces, the number of students pursuing a liberal arts education has declined precipitously (interesting enough, even as they are being embraced across the globe).
The liberal arts are truly a global accomplishment, and they have been enriched by many different cultural traditions. Yet despite differences across history and geography, certain core commitments of the liberal arts have endured and stood the test of time.
Here are a few ideas at the core of the liberal arts that shape our work here and will continue to shape it into the future. I am confident you saw them in action today across our classrooms.
The Discursive Arts:
Since the invention of the classical trivium—grammar, logic, and rhetoric— the liberal arts have embraced as central an emphasis on communication—on speech and writing and particularly the discursive arts: discussion, dialogue, disputation, argument, and debate.
It’s not accidental that the Greeks pioneered both democracy and the philosophical dialogue; those go hand-in-hand. There is a deep connection between citizenship and the attendant skills of listening, discussing, and debating—all essential preparation for a life of pluralistic contention and civic engagement.
Deep Reading:
Related to this is a commitment not simply to literacy but to deep forms of reading: reading deeply, with absorption, appreciation, pleasure, and concentration; reading generously and with an open mind; and, of course, reading critically, analytically, and skeptically.
Today that skepticism includes the ability to navigate a media environment characterized by an over-abundance of information and data—much of it unreliable, questionable, doubtful. As technological change accelerates, deep reading skills, already in precipitous decline, will become more and more important.
Ways of Knowing:
Last year at this time, I suggested that the liberal arts are, at their core, an education in different ways of knowing the world. That begins with an introduction to—and induction into—the core disciplines that shape scientific and humanistic investigation.
We divide the curriculum up into discrete disciplines for a reason: because they each offer a unique set of tools for making sense of our worlds. There will always be debates about which disciplines matter and which ones schools should emphasize, and that is as it should be; the ferment and interest in STEM-related fields is one of the most important developments of the last few decades. Stanford University, I’m told, has recently introduced a major in data science—a study our math department is also considering adding to the curriculum.
But what’s not up for debate—at least if you believe in the liberal arts as an enduring curricular structure—is the central importance of introducing high school students to a range of different ways of knowing and understanding.
Inquiry:
With this emphasis on multiple disciplinary lenses comes a similar commitment to unfettered curiosity, inquiry, question-asking, and a robust skepticism of received truths and orthodoxies, and, with that a deep skepticism of practices that obstruct and slow that quest.
A commitment to courageous question-asking and expressive freedom runs like a vein of iron thread through diverse learning traditions. Frederick Douglass, in an essay I assigned to my seniors earlier in the year, calls speech and dialogue “the great renovator of society”; they are also the great renovator of the human mind, and schools need to champion that idea of expressive freedom and inquiry. I will have more to say about this—and the role that Deerfield can play in promoting those values—later in the year.
The Past as a Source of Wisdom:
You also find in the liberal arts a deep commitment to the past as a source of wisdom and knowledge—through works of art, literature, philosophy, and ethics, and the competing values and perspectives they offer. In 1969, the media scholar and educator Neil Postman wrote a book with the wonderful title: Teaching as a Subversive Activity. After all, it was 1969. Ten years later, in 1979, he wrote another book with the title: Teaching as a Conserving Activity. What he meant by this is that much of what we do as educators and teachers is to transmit, rescue, and reclaim traditions of learning and art that would otherwise slowly decay and disappear without the active stewardship of teachers and schools.
These ideas remain vital elements of our educational philosophy and practice —they inform how we think about our curriculum, how we think about our teaching, and how we will think about the future of our faculty. Given trends in higher education, secondary schools such as Deerfield have a unique and leading role in cultivating the mindsets and habits that have long defined the liberal arts.
This been one of the best opening of schools I can remember—the tone, the positive energy have been palpable—which brings me to my second rearview innovation. It’s the most difficult to put a finger on. Let’s just call it school spirit.
We have lots of that. We see it at every week’s School Meeting. We see it at theatrical and musical performances when students show up in droves to support their friends—as you will see tonight. We saw it a couple weekends of ago when all of our teams were playing St. Paul’s, and we will see it a couple of weeks from now when we all go to Choate and celebrate, with one of our historic rivals, 100 years of interscholastic competition. It’s easy to dismiss or to trivialize school spirit, but it’s much more than cheerleaders and bonfires and natty letter sweaters, though all of those are important.
At its best, school spirit is students celebrating one another; students cheering for one another; students inspiring one another. Taking pride in one another, challenging and pulling for one another. Lifting one another up in search of their best performance and their best self. It also offers young people a common identity, a sense of shared purpose. The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who is an insightful student of schools and their cultures, often invokes the great civil rights leader Pauli Murray, who spoke of expanding circles of connection, inclusion, and care. These centripetal energies, pulling students together into community and promoting shared experiences, are powerful and formative.
And for many students experiencing that sense of shared purpose and excitement is their first lesson in meaningful citizenship—of what it means to have responsibilities and duties to other members of the community. So school spirit is really the idea that each of us is a member of this specific community,
and that students have unique obligations to one another: to support and care for one another.
This summer, in announcing the adjustment to our new approach to smart phones, I mentioned Mr. Boyden’s insistence that there be no signs on campus as a way of encouraging students to actively help greet and guide lost guests. And that stands as a symbol of “innovation” number three: our commitment to a heads-up, friendly, welcoming culture with face-to-face interaction.
Not surprisingly, a few of your questions addressed the adjustment we made to our smart phone policy. Is it working? What has been its impact on students? Has the adjustment met our hopes and expectations? Does it apply to parents?
My sense from talking with students and closely observing their interactions is that it has been an overwhelming success. I can say without qualification that students have embraced the policy, and our worry that faculty might have to work overtime to enforce it has not come to pass.
Thus far this year, I’ve only had to remind one student of our expectations. (I think he was truly mortified!) Students appear to be using their phones less and connecting more. And some have told me it has reduced time on social media. If you walk around during community time—into the Dining Hall, the Hess lobby, the library, the café in the Koch—you see students studying, reading, and interacting with one another. And I like to think that this hiatus from cell phones during the academic day has helped our students rediscover what everyday life can be like when untethered from their phones.
At the height of the pandemic, I came across an article in the Washington Post about what has been called the “humane technology” movement among former Silicon Valley insiders. The article profiled a small Amish community in Michigan wrestling with new kinds of technology. The idea that the Amish reflexively shun modern technology, it turns out appears to be greatly exaggerated. The article mentions an Amish-owned factory in Ohio featuring sophisticated design software, laser technology, and advanced robotics. They have some latitude in whether or not they adopt new technologies, and they are quite intentional about these decisions. When a church member asks permission to use a new technology, the Amish ask a simple question: Will the adoption of the device strengthen or weaken relationships within the community?
In one case, they voted down the purchase of a hay baler. Yes, it might increase productivity, but they concluded that their connections among one another would be adversely affected if they began haying without the help of others.
I can honestly say I have no view on hay balers, so expect no policy change on those anytime soon. But I do love the question. I love the fact that they’re carefully considering the impact of certain practices on their community life, because I believe that schools have a unique opportunity to create conditions where young people can thrive and flourish.
Number four is closely connected to two and three—and it’s probably not surprising to anyone in this room. It also happens to be one of my favorite times of the day: sit-down meals.
A parent recently sent me an article with the title: “Family dinners are key to children’s health. So why don’t we eat together more?” It cites research demonstrating a strong correlation between dinners spent with friends and family and the well-being of young people. The article also noted how difficult it is for many families to do this: working families, busy professional families, single parent families. The author describes one young woman, a student at a day school with a long commute, and her mother, who eat dinner together in the car so she can participate in her robotics club. And I should say that the effort that we make—that faculty and dining staff make—to pull this off seven times a week (even as other schools have all but abandoned this practice) is considerable, but it goes directly to who we are as a school, and it has a powerful impact on our students and their experience here. Our Dining Hall at sit-down is really a kind of classroom, where important lessons are imparted.
What do you see at sit-down meals? You see a certain degree of formality. A simple grace of thanksgiving. You see students serving one another and cleaning up after one another. You see students working with—and beside— staff: setting tables, refilling the water, retrieving seconds, filling in for absent waiters and second waiters, friends helping friends. And that, really, is the point: You can’t have a sit-down meal unless everyone is contributing.
You also see all manner of goofy announcements: Classics Club announcements in Latin, organizational meetings for the Drone Club and the Meat Club. You see students singing happy birthday to one another, and on Sunday, the entire school singing the Evensong.
At our opening meeting, I said to faculty that our goal as teachers and advisors and coaches is not simply student well-being. Our goal—our aspiration—is human flourishing: to create a school that celebrates and promotes connection, inclusion, community—what sociologists and political scientists call “thick” or layered relationships. The kind of learning that we value at Deerfield is impossible without first creating the conditions where these kinds of relationships can seed and root, and they are one of the most important things we can do to ensure that young people will thrive.
I recently tried to sketch out for myself the qualities I most admire in our faculty: they are great collaborators and supportive, flexible, selfless colleagues. They are dedicated mentors committed to working closely with young people across multiple dimensions of school life. They bring joy, generosity, and a sense of humor to all of their interactions.
You might have noticed some things missing from that list. I should say that I take it as an absolute given that a teacher should have disciplinary expertise,
wide-ranging knowledge, a passion for learning, and skill in communicating that passion to young people; they have to be great facilitators, coaches of learning.
But I was not surprised that I found myself focusing on the very intangible qualities of character that help us create thick relationships. One of the best pieces of advice I was given when I became head of school was this: surround your yourself with energy producers, not energy consumers. A great community actively creates that kind of joyful, positive energy, and that, in turn, provides a foundation from which we can challenge our students, stretch our students, and ask more of them. I believe that Deerfield has a unique opportunity, and can do that in a way that colleges and day schools simply can’t. And by doing it we give our students—your children—an extraordinary gift: providing them with the kind of environment they need to thrive, meet challenges, and reach for excellence.
You, too, are a part of this—everything we do here is a team effort. So I do have a simple request: (I hope!)—and I know many of you are already doing this—but I hope you will take a moment to share a quick word of thanks to a member of our staff or faculty when you have the opportunity, especially now that you have, after a gap of three years, the chance to visit classes. It would mean a lot to them, I know.
One of our greatest hopes is that our graduates will leave here with the bridge-building and community-building skills of creating and caring that will enrich their lives and make the world and their communities—wherever they are—a better place. What they learn here will travel with them throughout their lives.
I ran into a prospective parent the other day in the Main School Building, a graduate of one of our peer schools. He was first introduced to Deerfield his sophomore year of college during a two-week stay in the hospital. Every day a classmate—a graduate of Deerfield—and someone he barely knew, regularly and without prompting but out of generosity, brought him his Greek homework, sharing notes, and ensuring that he did not fall behind. One little act. But remembered for a lifetime. I like to think that the culture we create here will engender a lifetime of thoughtfulness and care.
Each of these innovations from the past that I have described will find further expression at Deerfield in the months and years ahead.
We continue to think a great deal about Deerfield’s future: how we can deepen our commitment to the liberal arts, ensuring that our academic program is attentive to future possibilities; how we can secure the resources to support great teaching and ensure that our faculty remains a learning faculty—always striving for improvement to remain the very best in the country—both as mentors and teachers; how we can continue to build a community of connection, joy, optimism, and challenge. And how these aspirations find expression in our physical campus.
At the center of our Master Plan is the refurbishment and reinvention of the Dining Hall—the heart and soul of our community and a campus landmark. Built 75 years ago, it is in need of expansion and modernization. It’s a bold, exciting, and necessary project that will create new common spaces for students, a new servery, and a necessary expansion of our seating capacity so we can comfortably seat our entire community while also maintaining the existing footprint— preserving the classical feel of a building that has connected generations of Deerfield students while keeping school size at approximately 650 students— a number we believe allows us to provide a broad and expansive program and also a powerful sense of community.
I am thrilled about what this project will mean for us, and I can’t wait to share with you our most current ideas and plans as soon as possible. Again, thank you.
I hope you will join us at the Arts Showcase tonight at 7:30, and I hope you have a great weekend.
Married to Amazement: Some Reflections on Student Flourishing
Good morning and welcome, everyone. I am delighted that you are here to enjoy and participate in Deerfield’s Spring Family Weekend.
I know that many of you have traveled great distances, rearranged schedules, and jumped through various hoops to be here on a Friday. Thank you. I also want to welcome those of you who couldn’t be here in person but are joining us via the livestream.
The weekend offers an array of great programming, including our learning showcase, class receptions, cocurriculars and athletics practices, and games. Most importantly, this is a chance for you to get to know Deerfield better and spend time with your children. You will, I am sure, meet some of their teachers and friends and experience much of what they experience in their home away from home.
Each academic term has its own energy and feel. Spring at Deerfield begins, of course, with a shift in the weather. Which invariably leads to a shift in the mood across campus.
Paradoxically, spring also marks the beginning of an end, at least for our seniors, who sense, very keenly, that these are the last of their Deerfield days. And this awareness encourages reflection on their part as they think about and appreciate the opportunities they’ve had and the relationships they’ve created in their time here. They are also very excited about all that lies ahead, and we share that excitement, knowing that they are prepared to head into the next chapter of their lives with confidence and pride.
I do want to recognize our seniors’ leadership and resilience, their generosity of spirit, as they set an example this year for their fellow students. Each class learns from those that precede it, creating a virtuous cycle across generations that supports our traditions and core values.
I am happy to report that the term is off to a fantastic start. Our studentathletes have taken to the fields, courts, pool, and river with enthusiasm and tremendous school spirit. We’ve already seen extraordinary athletics performances, and our student-artists have moved and entertained us with their creativity, passion, and imagination. We ended the winter with an absolutely amazing performance of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. I also hope you will spend some time exploring this building, the Hess Center for the Arts—including the von Auersperg Gallery just next door—to see our students’ extraordinary work.
I am grateful to my colleagues—our exceptional faculty and staff—as well as to our parent and alumni bodies. We simply could not do what we do without your participation, support, and feedback, and certainly not without the trust that you place in us.
Spring is always busy, and this spring is no exception, with Admission’s visit back days after a record year in inquiries and applications, a visit from the New England Association of Schools and Colleges reaccreditation team—a process on which we are about to embark—and continued planning for the future.
We’ve finalized a Vision for “The Deerfield Student” that will ground and shape our work as teachers, support innovation, and deepen conversations among faculty about learning at the Academy—more about that later.
Just last week at School Meeting, we heard from filmmaker Ken Burns. He shared with students clips from his most recent documentary on Benjamin Franklin, and discussed the art of historical documentary filmmaking.
We also heard from Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Quiara Hudes. And this past Tuesday, we held our inaugural Deerfield Forum, featuring journalist and author Jonathan Rauch, author of The Constitution of Knowledge; The New Yorker writer and Deerfield graduate, Jiayang Fan, Class of 2002; and the president emeritus of the University of Richmond, Dr. Ronald Crutcher.
During the Forum, we explored issues of speech, inquiry, and civic discourse, as well as the question of principled neutrality on campus. You’ll be happy to know students asked some pointed questions about some of my thoughts on that. The Forum was brilliantly moderated by Libby Leist, Class of 1997.
As you know, the Forum is intended to promote viewpoint diversity on campus, model constructive and searching civic engagement, and stage for students spirited conversation among educators, journalists, scholars, and civic leaders. That’s just what it did. I was proud, not simply of the level of engagement, but of the high quality of the questions our students asked.
We’ve also been moving forward on a number of on campus initiatives. As I look at many of these, I realize they share a common concern, namely, the health and well-being of students.
Well-being and Happiness
You’ve probably read some of the many articles and news items about declining levels of student health and well-being on our college and high school campuses.
The CDC and the American Academy of Pediatricians have both posted recent reports on declining levels of student well-being, and a number of recent articles have drawn our attention to a range of factors that are impacting student well-being.
In one recent article in The Atlantic, “Why American Teens Are So Sad,” Derek Thompson notes that “Almost every measure of mental health is getting worse for every teenage demographic, and it’s happening all across the country.”
The pandemic, of course, both deepened these trends and placed a spotlight on questions of public health, particularly adolescent health, as so many students, absent from school for long stretches and disconnected from friends and peers, have struggled with isolation and loneliness.
The reasons for this are complex. And those who study these trends have mentioned a variety of factors, including the impact of social media; a news cycle that besieges them with a stream of negative news; the decline of play among children, and a culture of what some call “safetyism”; and changing styles of parenting. Professor Laurie Santos, who taught the most popular course in the history of Yale University, “Psychology and the Good Life,” speculated that interest in her course was the result of a high school experience in which students had to deprioritize their happiness to compete in the college admission process.
Our students have been very, very fortunate in this way over the last two years. Deerfield has always aspired to be a school of joy, friendship, and optimism. This has always been incredibly important for the Academy, and it’s been important to me as an educator. It’s a strength that I hope we can build on in the coming months and years as a defining institutional objective.
I offer three broad areas where we seek to do that.
A Holistic Approach
First, we’re trying to think about student well-being holistically and comprehensively. No single initiative or effort can address the challenges facing young people today.
We have to look comprehensively at everything we do across the school: our efforts at inclusion, our efforts in the classroom, our efforts in the arts and athletics, our residential program, and, of course, the support we provide students on campus through our advising program, our health program, our counseling program, and through all of the support we provide through the D.S. Chen Health and Wellness Center.
Additionally, we’re collecting comprehensive data about the student experience, particularly with an eye to measuring student happiness and flourishing. We’re in the midst of completing our second “pulse survey”—a quick six-question survey that students take—which allows us to get a sense of their feelings of belonging, engagement, resiliency, and self-efficacy. And, we’re finalizing a more comprehensive “campus climate” survey. This data, supplemented by important data from our own health center and other areas of student and academic life, will allow us to study our culture, identify areas of attention
and focus, and ensure that we’re asking the right questions and providing the kind of support that students need.
We’ve given a lot of thought to our approach with students—and this will always be the case as long as students are at Deerfield—who make mistakes or poor decisions. As we think about discipline, we want to stay focused on growth, and taking a supportive, educational approach, even as we maintain the highest standards of conduct at the school. Amie Creagh and the Student Life Office have done a lot of work over this past year to make our processes not simply more responsive and fairer, but also more supportive of kids. As you may recall, some substantial updates were made to our Rules and Expectations for Deerfield Students, and we will continue to study and think about best practices in this important area.
We will also pioneer a new grade dean model next year, and longtime faculty member Becca Melvoin will serve as our first Dean of Residential Life. This new model will allow us to sharpen and define educational programming for each grade in a way that’s developmentally specific and appropriate, and will better support the individual growth and development of each student at Deerfield. Obviously, a ninth-grader has quite different needs than a twelfth-grader, and we want to be attentive to those disparate needs. Our Peer Counselors continue to do great work throughout the school, and the Student Life Office has led— and will lead—a number of important initiatives and campaigns, including Move4Love, focusing on healthy relationships, the Be Worthy Program, which seeks to deter experimentation with drugs and alcohol, and for our seniors, the Transition to College series.
Encouraging Connection and Pro-Social Behavior
The second area that I believe is an important and powerful part of our students’ Deerfield Experience is the way we encourage what Derek Thompson calls “pro-social behavior.” That’s a fancy phrase for getting people together and promoting a sense of connectedness between students and between students and adults. An inclusive school is a school that intentionally multiplies social connection, and that actively cultivates—creates a culture—of deep and extensive relationships. Students at Deerfield have a tremendous opportunity to connect with other young people of diverse backgrounds and beliefs, and we should seek to leverage those.
If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s how important—and how powerful—our common rituals are, whether it’s School Meeting, gathering for artistic performances, sit-down meals and singing the Evensong together, or athletic events.
These are reasons why I feel it is so important for us to steward and to protect these incredibly important community rituals. Many schools have
allowed their rituals to lapse or simply given up on them. But these kinds of moments are more important now than ever before, and we need to be intentional in how we create and sustain them.
One of the most important findings of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which commenced in 1938, making it one of the longest research studies of human happiness ever conducted, is that people with strong social bonds are more likely to be happy, healthy, and live longer. Janice McCabe, professor of sociology at Dartmouth College, and author of Connecting in College: How Friendship Networks Matter for Academic and Social Success, has studied the role that friendship networks play in college, concluding that regular contact in shared physical spaces, opportunities for structured collaboration and “teaming,” and broad, diverse networks of friendship ultimately support success and well-being.
It’s also very important for us as a school—and as parents and teachers—to help students manage the enormous challenges and pitfalls that technology presents. The technological advances we have seen over our lifetime are truly amazing and transformative. It’s pretty clear that with the advent of artificial intelligence and virtual reality, we are on the cusp of a second great tsunami of technological change. It will undoubtedly have an immense impact on schools and on the lives of children. What do we do in the face of this challenge?
Writers such as Jean Twenge, Jonathan Haidt, and Sherry Turkle have described the extraordinary impact that technology, and particularly social media, have had on the lives of young people. Turkle’s book, Alone Together, describes beautifully the paradox of some of our more potent forms of social media. Derek Thompson puts it simply when he says, “Social media use displaces pro-social behaviors.”
What are schools to do? If you discover an answer to that question, I hope you’ll speak to me. I joked with a group of parents at one of our recent Spring Visit Days that if I had my way, I would confiscate every smart phone in the school and provide every student with a flip phone. This is probably not realistic, but I do think we can continue to emphasize and encourage “heads-up” behavior on campus. Truth be told, that has eroded somewhat over the course of this pandemic—for understandable reasons.
But the other day, at sit-down meal, I was happy to hear that some students had organized an early-morning walk to the Rock. For 5:45 am, I think it was. They said, “Let’s all leave our phones in our rooms.” That’s great advice. Sometimes we simply need to leave them behind, so that we can enjoy one another more immediately and authentically, and remain fully present to one another. And perhaps we can organize occasional fasts for students from their phones over the course of the year. Deerfield has a strong culture in this way. We need to continue to build it, even as we look to harness the tremendous power that these new forms of technology provide.
