The Exeter Bulletin, fall 2011

The Exeter Bulletin

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Exonians are going far and wide for opportunities to grow Fall 2011

ExpandingHorizons

Lamont

Gallery

2011-2012 Exhibition Schedule FALL 2011 William Daley Selected Works: 1967–2010 September 14-October 22, 2011

Version 7 Works by Phillips Exeter Academy Art Department

C-Venture Vesica Unglazed Stoneware, 2008 William Daley

October 28-December 14, 2011 Revlon Lipsticks oil on canvas, 2010 Tara Misenheimer

Reception: Friday, October 28, 6:30-8pm Gallery Talk: Saturday, October 29, 10am

WINTER 2012 Into the Woods Works by Antonio Frasconi This exhibition was organized by The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art

January 11-February 22, 2012

Brooklyn Bridge digital photograph, 2010 Steve Lewis

SPRING 2012 Works by Photographer Joyce Tenneson Illustration © 1950 by Antonio Frasconi This exhibition was organized

by The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art

March 26-May 4, 2012 Reception: Friday, April 27, 6:30-8pm Gallery Talk: Saturday, April 28, 10am

Annual Senior Art Show May 25-June 9, 2012 Reception: Friday, May 25, 12:00-1:30pm

Lamont Gallery • Frederick R. Mayer ’45 Art Center

Wise Women photograph © Joyce Tenneson

Phillips Exeter Academy • 11 Tan Lane, Exeter, NH 03833 • 603-777-3461 Gallery Hours (school year): Monday 1-5 p.m., Tuesday-Saturday 9 a.m.-5 p.m. (closed Sunday and school holidays) Free and open to the public. Call for accessibility information.

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Contents

Principal ThomasE.Hassan’56,’66,’70,’06(Hon.);P’11 Director of Communications Julie Quinn Editor Karen Ingraham Staff Writers Mike Catano, Alice Gray, Nicole Pellaton, Famebridge Witherspoon Class Notes Editor Janice M. Reiter Editorial Assistant Susan Goraczkowski Creative Director/Design David Nelson, Nelson Design Contributing Editor Edouard L. Desrochers ’45, ’62 (Hon.) Communications Advisory Committee Daniel G. Brown ’82, Robert C. Burtman ’74, Dorinda Elliott ’76, Alison Freeland ’72, Keith Johnson ’52, Yvonne M. Lopez ’93 TRUSTEES President G. Thompson Hutton ’73 Vice President Eunice Johnson Panetta ’84 David O. Beim ’58, Flobelle Burden Davis ’87, Marc C. de La Bruyère ’77, Walter C. Donovan ’81, John A. Downer ’75, Jonathan W. Galassi ’67, Thomas E. Hassan ’56, ’66, ’70, ’06 (Hon.); P’11, Jen Holleran ’86, David R. Horn ’85, Alan R. Jones ’72, Sally Jutabha Michaels ’82, William K. Rawson ’71, Dr. Nina D. Russell ’82, Robert S. Silberman ’76, J. Douglas Smith ’83, Remy White Trafelet ’88, Morrison DeSoto Webb ’65 The Exeter Bulletin (ISSN No. 01950207) is published four times each year: fall, winter, spring, and summer, by Phillips Exeter Academy, 20 Main Street, Exeter NH 03833-2460, 603-772-4311.

Periodicals postage paid at Exeter, NH, and at additional mailing offices. Printed in the USA by Cummings Printing.

The Exeter Bulletin is printed on recycled paper and sent free of charge to alumni/ae, parents, grandparents, friends, and educational institutions by Phillips Exeter Academy, Exeter, NH. Communications may be addressed to the editor; email bulletin@exeter.edu.

Copyright 2011 by the Trustees of Phillips Exeter Academy.

ISSN-0195-0207 Postmasters: Send address changes to: Phillips Exeter Academy, Records Office, 20 Main Street, Exeter, NH 03833-2460.

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Features 20 | INTO AFRICA Faculty members tour Morocco and Ghana Compiled by Karen Ingraham

28 | REPORTERS-AT-LARGE IN BOSNIA How one alumna used an Exeter assignment in her classroom

By Zoe Brennan-Krohn ’03

Departments

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4 Around the Table: Opening Assembly highlights, ESSO summer service trips, Trustees welcome new member, and more.

12 Table Talk with Gen. Charles C. Krulak ’60 16 Exoniana 19 Exonians in Review: 101 Quantum Questions: What You Need to Know About the World You Can’t See

by Kenneth W. Ford ’44. Reviewed by Scott S. Saltman

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32 Sports:Twincredible: 2006 Alums Nick and Chris Downer reflect on Life, Exeter and a Rugby National Championship by Matt Heid. Plus, girls crew news.

34 Connections: News and Notes from the Alumni/ae Community 36 Profiles: Richard Zorza ’68, Dr. Anne Hallward ’83 and Jonathan Ortloff ’03 47 2010-11 Report of Giving 104 Finis Origine Pendet: Bringing Exeter Expectations to Rural Tanzania

by Alex Hasbach ’06

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Visit Exeter on the web at www. exeter.edu / Email us at bulletin@ exeter.edu THE EXETER BULLETIN IS PRINTED ON PAPER WITH 10% POST-CONSUMER CONTENT, USING SOY-BASED INKS.

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A Warm Welcome The 333 new students entering PEA this year stood during the Opening Assembly to be acknowledged and welcomed by returning students, faculty and staff members. —Photo by Cheryl Senter

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The View from Here

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What’s new and notable at the Academy

Enlarging Minds T H E I M P O RTA N C E O F L E AV I N G O N E ’ S C O M F O RT Z O N E

By Principal Thomas E. Hassan ’56, ’66, ’70, ’06 (Hon.); P’11

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from Principal Hassan’s Opening of School Address, delivered on September 9, 2011.To watch Hassan deliver his speech, go to www.exeter.edu/bulletinextras.

The first lesson for me is simply how very, very fortunate we are in the Exeter community to have the resources we have. Public schools in Morocco and Ghana routinely have classes of 50-55 students in rooms with none of the audiovisual equipment that we have and, in science classes, none of the lab equipment.We met one teacher who spoke of teaching French to 55 first-graders in one class, seated three to a desk so that they could share textbooks. The contrast between these conditions and our Harkness classes could not be more stark. Yet we spoke with many impassioned, committed teachers and school heads who are cheerfully determined to do the best they can for their students with the resources they have.

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CHERYL SENTER

n keeping with my charge to expand our community’s appreciation of the Deed of Gift, I’d like to spend a bit of time talking about a less familiar provision, one that talks about Exeter’s responsibilities to its students. John Phillips wrote, “It shall ever be considered as a principal duty of the instructors to regulate the tempers, to enlarge the minds, and form the morals of the youth committed to their care.”

It is not possible to know exactly what our founder had in mind when he penned those words 231 years ago. But this morning, let me concentrate on the part of the phrase that speaks to enlarging the minds of students, and offer some thoughts of how we might interpret it today.

Our faculty know their role is to not simply polish what you bring to us but develop and deepen your intellectual, emotional and social selves. And they, too, are constantly exploring their subject matter from other viewpoints Principal Hassan through research, travel and collaboration with their peers. In turn, faculty members make valuable and powopens PEA’s 231st erful contributions not only to their Exeter students, but also within their disciplines and to their colleagues school year. and communities outside of our school.

I am deeply committed to sustaining the culture of continuous learning, for students and faculty alike, in every discipline. This summer, the Academy supported 10 of our teachers—from a cross section of academic disciplines—to travel to Morocco and Ghana. (See story on page 20.) There they experienced firsthand how learning takes place in those African nations. Science Instructor Townley Chisholm P’10, P’11, P’14, who was one of the Exeter teachers on the trip, wrote to me this Shared with you here are excerpts summer with his observations:

CHERYL SENTER

English Instructor Johnny Griffith and Math Instructor Tom Seidenberg P’93, P’99, the BatesRussell Distinguished Faculty Professor, had a similar experience closer to home. In New York City, Mr. Seidenberg and Mr. Griffith worked with a group of 15 students from The Urban Assembly, a nonprofit organization that created and now manages a community of small New York City public schools dedicated to preparing students from underresourced neighborhoods for success in college.They met with the students 12 times over the course of two-and-a-half weeks and sought to give them some exposure to, and practice in, Harkness learning.

Mr. Griffith says, “The experience of introducing Harkness pedagogy to students more accustomed to receiving infor mation from their instructors and then watching how quickly they embraced the opportunity to explore and discuss texts with their peers only reinforced my faith in what we do every day around the Harkness table.”

Enthusiasm for the But it wasn’t only Exeter faculty members who were able to expand their own horizons on Academy-spon- new school year sored trips this summer. Several groups of students did so as well. permeated the Caitlin Andrews ’12 was in Hawaii at the Student Global Leadership Institute, our collaboration with Puna- Assembly Hall. hou School that involves students from several high schools worldwide. Caitlin explained her experience with a word in the Hawaiian language. (See story on page 8.)

She says, “The Hawaiian word ‘kuleana’ combines the ideas of privilege and responsibility. For me, ‘kuleana’ was one of the main themes of SGLI. I feel that, with the privileges I have been fortunate to receive, there also comes a sense of responsibility; my ‘kuleana’ is to use these opportunities—like SGLI and my experience at Exeter—to give back to the world, even if in a simple way, and to help make a difference.”

[Each] of these experiences involved moving Exonians and faculty members out of their comfort zones.

There is an old adage: “There is no teaching in the comfort zone and no comfort in the teaching zone.” A Google search confirms the adage, but not its source. Regardless of who said it first, it’s a popular concept among educators and those who consider themselves serious students. It is, however, one thing to admire a concept and another to abide by it. How comfortable are we, truly, with the idea of opening ourselves to new ideas? More importantly, how prepared are we—as teachers or as students—to reconsider past conclusions or approach a topic that we think we have already mastered from a fresh perspective? How comfortable are we with the feeling—and I emphasize the word feeling here because our intellectual and emotional selves are intertwined—that descends when someone artfully and compellingly challenges one of our own foundational beliefs? Words at a Harkness table are pretty meaningless if they are unaccompanied by a willingness to learn and a degree of self-confidence that balances an appreciation for one’s self with those sitting around the table.

We live in a world of instant communication dominated by people telling us what to think Watch the Opening Assembly at or who’s important. Lost in that noisy, cluttered and largely superficial space is the ability to ask www.exeter.edu/ questions and digest answers in a way that will truly allow us to enlighten each other and make bulletinextras. progress. This Digital Age—still pretty new to those in my generation—poses an exceptional challenge. The means of communicating our thoughts can be much faster than the process of developing meaningful ideas.This is a gap that I hope your generation will help address: How do we give ourselves the intellectual, emotional and social space to develop ideas that matter and advocate for their adoption? How do we save space in the digital public square for the ongoing process of enlarging our minds?

So as we begin this, the 231st year of Phillips Exeter Academy, I hope that each of us will push beyond the familiar and the comfortable and expand our horizons here on campus and in the communities and the world beyond our school. Godspeed to us all as we embark on this challenge.

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Campus Life at a Glance First Days of School (A) Leaving the Academy Building after Opening Assembly. (B) Science Instructor Betsy Stevens greets returning students.

(C) Bound for the Phelps Academy Center to reconnect with friends. (D) First hellos after summer break. (E) Enjoying the last moments of idleness before school resumes. (F) Catching up in the Academy Center’s Agora.

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PHOTOS BY CHERYL SENTER

231st year 1,062 students 333 new students 45 states 34 foreign countries

80 Things about Harkness This academic year marks the 80th anniversary of the Harkness Gift.To celebrate, The Exeter Bulletin is compiling a list of 80 things that over the years have helped to define Harkness learning and teaching for Exonians, and we need your help.

Think about a particular moment or moments that characterize Harkness best or have special significance to you. Harkness isn’t limited to inside the classroom, the playing fields or other traditional spaces. Maybe it’s an extracurricular activity, club or special event where the collaborative atmosphere was meaningful or memorable. It could even be an off-campus experience like a study-abroad trip. Perhaps your Harkness moment came years after you left the Academy—in your profession, at a meeting or in a social setting.

Send us a brief description (100 words or less) of your Harkness moment and help us commemorate the philosophy that transformed our school. Supporting photos are welcome and encouraged.

We are collecting ideas from alumni/ae, faculty, students and staff members. Submit yours to bulletin@exeter.edu or mail it to: The Exeter Bulletin, 20 Main Street, Exeter, NH 03833. We’ll share 80 of the top entries in the next issue of the Bulletin.

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Global Institute Sparks Local Action

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f seniors Calvin Willett, Caitlin Andrews and

Abigail McGarey have their way, every dorm on campus will be monitored for electricity usage in the near future. Even better, students will be able to go to a website to see how their dorm compares with others, creating—these three Exonians hope—a better awareness of energy consumption and a friendly competitiveness that yields an overall reduction in the amount of electricity used on campus.

The idea is one that Willett, Andrews and McGarey devised during their participation in the Student Global Leadership Institute (SGLI) summit held at Punahou School in Honolulu, HI, at the end of July. The three seniors were selected to attend the second annual institute, which brought together 48 students from 15 schools in China, Japan, Jordan, Singapore and the United States.

Computer Science Instructor Kenney Chan P’13 also attended the conference as Exeter’s faculty point person.

The global theme for this year’s SGLI was energy, and student participants spent an intensive two weeks learning about the challenges and possible solutions to global energy use through field trips, workshops and guest speakers, which included U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu. Students used the knowledge they gained to craft community-action projects to enact on a local level.

Willett sees the viewable electricity usage by dorm as ideally suited to Exeter.

“We wanted a system that would educate as well as conserve,” he says. “We also wanted to find a project that would use a big-picture approach but with small steps. Students can see exactly how much energy they are responsible for using and can compete to conserve. For a group of competitive students, it’s the perfect fit.”

Relationship building is another key aspect of the SGLI, which is the result of collaboration between Principal Tom Hassan and Punahou President Jim Scott. A program goal is to build cross-cultural connections amongst student participants that not only inform their time in Hawaii but also foster long-term friendships and associations.

For Andrews, this happened in spades. She shared a dorm room with girls from Hawaii, China and Japan and is already back in touch with some of the Chinese students, including those who attend PEA’s sister school, the High School Affiliated to Renmin University of China.

“This is the second off-campus program I’ve participated in with Exeter,” Andrews says. “I think it’s always important to step outside of your routine—to expose yourself to different people and different ideas. . . . SGLI brought together 48 students from five countries with 48 different perspectives of the world. I know that my perspective has changed since I returned home, and I’m sure we all came out with new experiences and new ideas about the world.”

For McGarey, it was also about discovering her own personal qualities. She says, “The institute’s focus on both leadership and a global topic meant that over the course of the two weeks, I developed an understanding of a universal issue that affects everyone, and I also discovered the personal assets and setbacks I have as a leader. The two components of the program [combined] made it a unique experience that I had to undergo outside of Exeter.”

The three seniors will spend this year working with administration, faculty and students to implement their vision for the dorms. They’ll be sharing their progress with other SGLI participants online, in an ongoing global conversation.

(Left to right) Three Beijing middle school students and PEA seniors Caitlin Andrews, Calvin Willett and Abigail McGarey.

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A Summer of Service S T U D E N T S A N D F AC U LT Y L E AV E H O M E T O L E N D A H A N D

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he sun is up and you awaken to the calls of howler monkeys outside your open window. Or, after lunch you sit down at a table to begin dissecting a cow’s heart. Maybe in the evening, you don a white robe and join dozens of able and disabled people in song about light overcoming darkness.

These are just some of the experiences students and faculty members had this summer on three separate service trips to Costa Rica, South Dakota and Ireland. Though each trip differed greatly in geography and culture, all shared a common purpose of offering assistance—in whatever form was requested—to the communities visited.

This is the first year that the Exeter Social Service Organization (ESSO) has offered summer service trips, thanks largely to the generous support of the Iscol Public Service Fund. ESSO Community Service Coordinator Laurie Loosigian P’99, P’01, P’05 believes that providing such opportunities outside of the school year is essential.

“Students have very little time during the year to volunteer even if they have a passion for [it],” Loosigian says. “The chance to immerse themselves in another culture is typically life changing, and learning a new perspective on the world community can help inform our students about their own lives.”

Brief highlights of each service trip follow, told largely through the voices of the participants.

Costa Rica (June 6-15)

With a base camp at the 5,000-acre Ario Ranch— owned by the Grew family, which includes alums Nicholas ’01 and Daniel ’06—nine students and PEA

two village schools, cleaning up a nature reserve and planting trees. For several of the Exonians, the connections they made with the children and adults from Quebradas de Nando, a village where they spent two nights as homestays, were the most impactful.

I can say with full confidence that I have never experienced a greater sense of joy or accomplishment from an academic pursuit as I felt when 8-year-old Andre smiled up at me and introduced himself in English for the first time. In teaching and living with the children of Quebradas de Nando, we learned so much: how patience and kindness are essential when breaking down a language barrier and how the standard of education we have in the States—textbooks, electricity, a computer in every classroom—is a privilege, not a right.

We sit in assembly and hear that we are the future leaders of the world, but how can we lead a world if our knowledge of it is contained to brick buildings and library books?

Summer service allows one to attach a concrete experience to abstract concepts, like “culture shock” or “climate change,” and to take what you have learned in the classroom and use it to help someone, and I think that’s wonderful.

—Allie O’Keefe ’13 When I first walked down the dirt road in Quebradas de Nando, it took me an entire hour to walk a fifth of a mile because everyone in the community invited me into their homes to talk. … It struck me as amazing that they would so readily welcome strangers into their homes, no less someone like me, for some had never seen a Chinese person before. … After my experience with this community, I realized just how easy it is to be friendly and to make anyone feel welcome. I hope to bring back this sense of community with me and continue the tradition of saying “hi” to everyone I see. —Jason Kang ’12 Teaching English had the greatest impact on me because I think this will affect [the students’] future lives the most.

If they are willing to pursue English, then I think this will open up many more opportunities for them, and this really matters to me. Also, the kids were very fun to be with and were eager to learn, which made teaching English very enjoyable. —Michael Rothstein ’14 Campbell Slough, South Dakota (July 3-17)

Gissel Espinoza ’13 teaches English to Costa Rican schoolchildren.

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Science Instructors Chris Matlack P’08 and Rich Aaronian ’76, ’97 (Hon.); P’94, P’97 spent 10 days on the western coast of the Nicoya Peninsula. Most of those days were spent teaching English to children in FALL 2011

They built tepees and an outdoor shower. They also practiced suturing on banana peels and dissected a cow’s heart. Senior Anna Barr and uppers Rachel Schneider and Emma Lamarche spent their two

Around the Table

weeks at Odepi Park learning how to live outdoors while working side-by-side with Harvard medical students. The Exonians, who were chaperoned by PEA Admissions Officer Linda Daley, not only had the opportunity to immerse themselves in science and medicine but also to assist the Harvard students in teaching those lessons to Native American middle schoolers in a weeklong science camp.

On the last day of camp, we visited an anatomy lab at the University of South Dakota.We were able to see human brains, lungs and hearts, and even had the opportunity of examining a cadaver. It was there that the kids really displayed how much they had learned throughout the week.

They asked and answered many questions about the body and demonstrated genuine interest in the lab. That was a really significant moment for me, because it told me that what we were doing there was worthwhile.

Volunteering is a big part of my life at school, but I’ve never been able to take community service out of my immediate surroundings.This trip was the first time I was able to help and learn from a group of people that I would normally never be able to interact with. It becomes a very different experience when a service trip is so far away from your own home, and I loved being immersed in Native American culture and the South Dakotan way of life. —Anna Barr ’12

Anna Barr ’12 and Emma Lamarche ’13 (left) learn how to suture on banana peels.

The residents were moderately to severely disabled and did not speak. But the group soon discovered words aren’t always necessary to communicate, or to create a moving piece of theater. They ultimately impressed their audiences with a performance that featured song and dance inspired by the festival’s theme: moving from darkness into light.

Through the course of the week, we developed our performance piece, based on songs and movement along the fes-

Callan, Ireland (July 21-31)

When the group of six first arrived in Callan, Ireland, they had only a broad sense of their mission: Create a piece of theater with a group from a local residential community for people with disabilities. The service project had been arranged by Patrick Lydon ’68, the director of Ballytobin, a small residential farming community for youths with special needs.The theater performance was for the second annual Abhainn Rí Festival, created by Lydon, which celebrated the arts and community in Callan by featuring events for and by both those able and disabled.

Sarah Ream ’75; P’09, P’11, chair of the Department of Theater and Dance, came armed with ideas and materials. She was accompanied by Connie Morse P’03, counselor and student listener coordinator, and seniors Rebecca Millstein, Catherine Closmore, Marina Altschiller and Pria Balasuriya.

Previous plans were quickly abandoned when the Exeter group met the four residents of the St. Patrick’s community with whom they would work.

tival’s themes of inclusion and enlightenment. When we needed to stop rehearsing, as we often did, to accommodate someone’s spontaneous behavior (Martin, for instance, had a tendency to zip wordlessly out of the rehearsal room when the spirit moved him), we would improvise. When the St. Patrick’s group arrived for [the] performance with new caregivers, and therefore new cast members half an hour before our first show, we just kept going. I learned to be more flexible and more improvisational as a director than I have ever been before.

But more than that, the students and I realized that this was not a group of people (continued on page 10)

(Back row) Connie Morse, Rebecca Millstein ’12, Sarah Ream ’75, Pria Balasuriya ’12, St. Patrick’s resident Patricia, and Catherine Closmore ’12. (Front) Marina Altschiller ’12 and St. Patrick’s resident Sarah.

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Summer of Service we would reach through intellectual banter. We knew we would only make real and meaningful contact by opening up our hearts to them. As it happens, each of our four students made a special connection with one of the four St. Patrick’s residents. And it was, perhaps, the highlight of the whole trip when Martin, whom no one had ever heard speak, joined Becca as she rehearsed her song one day. “This little light of mine,” she began. And Martin continued softly, “I’m goin’ to let it shine.” —Sarah Ream One of the most poignant experiences of the trip for me was working with Michael, one of St. Patrick’s residents. Michael really enjoyed clapping, especially when we put on music. And I remember one time when the music was on Michael tapped me on the shoulder with his hands raised. He was looking at me expectantly and I realized he wanted me to clap with him. We started clapping together and ever since that moment for the rest of the trip whenever he tapped me on the shoulder, I knew he wanted to clap together.

I discovered that most of the time limitations like having no legs or being in a wheelchair, or not being able to talk are not disadvantages they are just differences. And everybody is different, in the same [way] that everybody is special. I now know someone who doesn’t have legs, but loves to swim in the ocean. I now know someone who is in a wheelchair, but dances in an incredibly moving way. And I now know someone who prefers not to talk, but rather to express himself through his art, which speaks volumes to me.

—Pria Balasuriya Mischievous teens held up painted puppets, the girl that cooked fries at the chipper danced with fire.With a small nudge...Callan displayed what could be accomplished with a spark of creativity and the combined efforts of the townspeople. —Becca Millstein I had the chance to see in action what our wonderful alum, Patrick Lydon, is doing for his community. He has strengthened and developed a sense of community among the townspeople of Callan. He has worked endlessly to help integrate the “disabled” with the able-bodied, and to help instill a sense of history, hope, community and collaboration in the area.

—Connie Morse

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Gail Scanlon Named PEA’s New Academy Librarian Exeter welcomes Gail G. Scanlon as the new Academy librarian. Scanlon previously served as director of Access and Technical Services at Mount Holyoke College, and brings more than 15 years of experience to her new position. She has served on local, regional and statewide library supervisory boards in Massachusetts for more than 23 years.

“I have always loved libraries,” Scanlon says. “I can clearly remember getting my first library card as a child and being allowed to choose my ‘own’ books to check out. I always participated in summer reading programs and had books with me wherever I went.”

After her family relocated from Jacksonville, FL, to western Massachusetts in the mid-1980s, Scanlon was asked to serve as a trustee on the town of South Hadley’s library board of directors. At the time, she was working as a registered nurse. “As technology became more integrated into the day-to-day activities of libraries, my interest in librarianship grew,” she says.

A graduate of Mount Holyoke College, Scanlon earned her master’s degree in library science in 1999 from the University of Albany, SUNY, and was named a fellow with the Frye Leadership Institute at Emory University in 2002.

As the Academy’s fifth official librarian, Scanlon is excited about her new post. “I see my role as part educator, part counselor, part accountant, part space planner, part technologist, with a bit of a cruise director thrown in for good measure,” she says. “The best part of being a librarian is coming to work each day in a spectacular building filled with collections of printed books, periodicals, videos, audiobooks, archives, and the technology to access electronic resources. I feel like a kid in a candy store because I want to read or view it all.”

Scanlon looks forward to joining forces with community members on exhibits, performances and events in the library and across campus.

Preparations are already under way for a 40th anniversary of “The Moving of the Books,” featuring a performance by PEA Adjunct Music Instructors Jung Mi Lee and Jonathan Sakata and an architectural exhibit designed and mounted by the faculty at Wentworth Institute of Technology.

FAMEBRIDGE WITHERSPOON

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From Birding to Biotechnology P E A L AU N C H E S N E W B I O L O G Y I N S T I T U T E F O R T E AC H E R S

Biology Institute participants focus in on some birds at a wildlife refuge.

Non Sibi Spotlight BRYAN SEACHRIST

CHERYL SENTER

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n a brilliant, blue-sky morning in June, 30 people piled out of Red Dragon buses, binoculars at the ready. Attention was trained on a marsh, where Science Instructors Chris Matlack and Rich Aaronian described the feeding behaviors of an egret and a least tern.

The birding tour on Plum Island, MA, was one of four field trips offered during the weeklong Biology Institute that debuted at PEA this summer. A component of the Anja S. Greer Conference on Secondary School Mathematics, Science and Technology, the new institute was created to provide high school biology teachers with specialized training in their field.

“What we designed is the course we would want to take,” Matlack says. “What biologists like us want to do in a week.”

Pedagogy sessions included Teaching Biology Around the Table: Hands-On, Discussion-Based Learning, led by Matlack and Rich Benz, a science curriculum specialist at the Lake Metroparks Environmental Learning Center in Ohio. Jeremy Kovacs, a science educator at Noble and Greenough School in Massachusetts, also led a course, Teaching Biology to the Adolescent Mind, which addressed topics such as the effect of stress on the brain and neuroplasticity. Advanced technique courses included Microscopy and Using Forensic Science in a Biology Course.

The group also visited Odiorne Point State Park, in Rye, NH, to study marine biology. In tandem, participants got to see how live specimens are kept and studied in the Phelps Science Center’s marine tank.

“I was fascinated with Rich Aaronian’s cold tank in which he keeps saltwater invertebrates and some fish,” John Gallo, a science teacher from Dallas, says. “I am tinkering with the idea of building a similar freshwater (smaller version) of the tank that will allow us to keep and study invertebrates that we can capture from our pond.”

Matlack says the field trip to the Harvard Museum of Natural History was another highlight for many of the participants, including himself, given the “backstage access” they were granted. They were shown many of the preserved bird specimens that John James Audubon first drew for his book, Birds of America, as well as a first printing of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species.

Science teacher David Miller, from the Jefferson Community School in Port Townsend, WA, summed up his experience this way: “I’ve taught for 36 years and it’s not often I come into contact with teachers I feel I can really learn from. I found the Harkness table discussions to be profoundly interesting and the focused classes to be amazingly informative. I can’t wait to come back!”

In September, the Admissions Office staff spent a day volunteering for the St. Vincent de Paul Society’s food pantry, which provides food and other services to many families in the Exeter area.The pantry will soon be moving into a new space, so the team disassembled and moved shelving donated by Exeter Hospital from the hospital to the new location. They also spread four truckloads of loam around the property, cleaned up trash and pruned shrubs.

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The Importance of Being Agile TA B L E TA L K W I T H G E N . C H A R L E S C . K RU L A K ’ 6 0

By Karen Ingraham

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n Iraq and Afghanistan today, there is a particular type of

Bringing Harkness to the Corps

Krulak, the son of a Marine Corps officer, entered Exeter as a lower in 1958, leaving in 1960 to enroll at the U.S. Naval Academy, where he graduated four years later with an engineering degree. Krulak did two tours of duty in Vietnam commanding a platoon and two rifle companies. In 1973, he earned a master’s degree in labor relations from George Washington University.

In his 36 years of active military duty, Krulak held a number 12

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of senior command positions, including deputy director of the White House Military Office, where he coordinated military support for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and Commanding General of the U.S. Mar ine Cor ps Forces, Pacific in Hawaii—the largest theater of operations for the U.S. Marine Corps. His military career culminated in his appointment as commandant of the Marine Corps, where he also served as a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and had overall responsibility for more than 220,000 active and reserve forces and 20,000 civilian employees until his retirement in 1999.

Krulak points to two key lessons he learned at Exeter that helped shape his approach to leadership.

“What the Harkness plan taught me is the value of unleashing people, and I use the term ‘unleash’ deliberately because it recognizes the fact that like a German shepherd dog, most individuals are straining at the leash to make their views known, to participate in discussions . . . to articulate solutions verbally and in writing,” he says. “Exeter and Harkness do that in spades.”

Coupled with this, Krulak says, is having the freedom to fail, to speak your mind with the understanding that there will be those who may disagree with you, or who may prove your point wrong, but in a manner that encourages dialogue and discovery.

“You don’t want to make the mistake again,” Krulak says, “but you never feel that you can’t step out again.”

His philosophy, one that has contributed to dozens of honors and high-level appointments, can be boiled down to this: “Unleash your people and give them the freedom to fail . . . then pick them up, dust them off and set them on the right track again.”

It’s how Krulak structured his warfighting laboratory, by taking some of his “best and brightest” and sitting them down

FRED CARLSON

soldier on the ground: a junior officer who must think quickly and independently of his superiors, who can’t wait for the chain of command, and who must render well-reasoned decisions that may have far-reaching consequences both tactically and politically.

The “strategic corporal” is a concept fathered by Gen. Charles C. Krulak ’60 during his tenure as the 31st commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, and it has become a guiding principle in the recruitment and training of Mar ines, who now face battle zones and enemies unique to the 21st century.

The concept first took shape in the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, an organization Krulak formed four months after his June 1995 appointment as commandant. The singular purpose of the laboratory is to test warfighting concepts that anticipate and shape modern warfare, what Krulak terms “fighting an asymmetric enemy.”

The strategic corporal and other now-entrenched military concepts, like the “Three Block War”—the idea that soldiers often must engage in firefights and deliver humanitarian aid in the same neighborhood—were born in part from the general’s use of the Harkness plan.

Around the Table

Returning to His Roots

After the Marines, Krulak entered the private sector, serving as chairman and chief executive officer for MBNA Europe Bank for three years before becoming vice chairman of MBNA America Bank in 2004. He retired in 2005, and continues to serve on the board of directors for major corporations, as well as the Aston Villa Football Club, an English professional association football club in the United Kingdom.

Now, Krulak and his wife of 47 years, Zandi Meyers Krulak, live in student housing, a small one-bedroom apartment with a kitchenette on the grounds of Birmingham-Southern College (BSC). Football players live next door and two young ladies occupy the floor above them.Their lifestyle is deliberate, a decision the couple made when, the general says, he “flunked retirement for a third time.”

In March of this year, Krulak was appointed the 13th president of BSC, and he has continued with his hands-on, pragmatic approach to leadership, which includes living arrangements that provide him with direct access to the campus, students, faculty and staff now under his helm. It also includes blocking off at least two hours in his daily schedule to simply roam the campus of BSC, where he chats with those he meets on the pathways or sits in on classroom discussions. Krulak has also opted to forgo his first year’s salary and other presidential perks, like a car, to demonstrate his commitment to the private liberal arts college, which has been struggling with revenue shortfalls, budget deficits, and a shrinking endowment. All things he plans to remedy during his tenure.

When news of Krulak’s appointment came, there was some head-scratching amongst members of the media and higher education professionals. The Chronicle of Higher Education labeled him “nontraditional,” a term he embraces.

“I think most of the people, if not everybody on this campus, have been surprised by the fact that my attitude is one of shared governance,” Krulak says. “I have always tried to make my people part of the thought process. . . .You can be dogmatic in your approach, but at the end of the day, that strategy doesn’t have any legs because sooner or later people feel disenfranchised. They feel like chess pieces. They are not being asked their opinion; they are not given the respect of being asked their opinion. You do that and in a short time, you fail.”

Krulak hopes to impart his values to the next generation of

leaders, “to mentor young men and women both morally, mentally and physically”—a return, he says, to his roots.

Educating versus Training

When asked to define a good leader, Krulak’s response is unequivocal. “At the top of your game, you need to be a person of character,” he says. “I would define character as being selfless, non sibi, having great moral courage, the willingness to tell the emperor he has no clothes, the willingness to do the right thing when no one is watching . . . and then integrity, that your word is your bond. That when you say something, people can take it to the bank.”

He points to two people at Exeter who made particular and lasting impressions on his own character. His wrestling coach was one. “He taught me how to believe in myself,” Krulak reflects. “I had never wrestled before. Along comes Ted Seabrooke. He says, ‘You can do anything you put your mind to.’ At the time, I was 5’4” and weighed 118 pounds. He taught me to believe in myself and in the value of teamwork . . . how important it is to not let the team down.”

Krulak’s best friend at Exeter, someone whom he refers to as “one of my heroes,” was John Irving ’61. Liberal-minded and the son of a professor, Irving seemed to Krulak “totally different from me but so supportive and caring. He reinforced the importance of friendship and what it means to really be a friend. To take the good and the bad, to provide support no matter what’s going on. . . . That’s the kind of boy John Irving was. . . . [He] set such a great example.”

With character as the foundational element, Krulak says young people—tomorrow’s leaders—need to be educated versus trained, and the distinction between the two is significant.

“Training is preparation for the expected,” he explains.

“Education is preparation for the unexpected, and the world we are facing today is a world of uncertainty—a world that requires the Exeter graduate or BSC graduate to be agile versus adaptable. Adapting is reactive; you are reacting to something. We need to be agile. We need to be at a point where we can anticipate something happening and take action to either make it positive in our light . . . or at least less negative.

“If we can develop students and young Americans who are men and women of character and then provide them with the education . . . the ability to be agile and to anticipate, the ability to have a reservoir of knowledge to draw upon to make good [decisions], then we’re going to be very successful.”

It’s an approach he stresses now as BSC’s president; and it is one that framed his military career and one he feels defines the Academy.

“The strength of the ethos of Exeter, you can’t touch it,” he concludes. “You’re not even sure you can recognize it when it pops up but it’s always there. It’s in the soul of the place. . . . It’s not until you’re faced with the real tough choices that you understand how deep it runs.”

NICOLE PELLATON

together. He said to them, “We are going to face a chaotic world; we’re going to be fighting an asymmetric enemy that puts their strengths against our weaknesses. . . . I want you to produce concepts; when you get the concepts, I want you to test them until they fail. When they fail, I want you to determine what that failure point was and how you fix it.” Krulak urged his team to continue finding failure points until they reached the nexus, or the “bull’s-eye,” a concept like the strategic corporal.

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Around the Table

Faculty Wire Tara Misenheimer’s Art Career Thrives t’s a banner year for Art Instructor Tara Misenheimer. Throughout

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STEVE LEWIS

2011, the working artist has shown her paintings and prints in seven art exhibits held in Massachusetts, New York and Copenhagen, Denmark.

In January, she participated in “Some Girls,” an exhibit at Lawrence Academy in Groton, MA; in March, her works were displayed in “The Pool Art Fair” and “Dual” art exhibits during Armory Arts Week in New York City. In June, Misenheimer was selected to be a part of the group exhibit “In Portrait,” which showcased seven artists’ different approaches to portraiture. In July, Misenheimer presented her works in “Chelsea Art Walk 2011,” a cooperative event of more than 125 galleries and art institutions in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City. In August, she held a show of her printed paintings at the Black Pop Contemporary Art Gallery in Copenhagen. And in October, her work was selected for exhibition at the Chelsea Art Museum for the NURTUREart 2011 Benefit.

Misenheimer is enjoying all aspects of her dual careers: “I am both ecstatic and honored that I had the opportunity to participate in uniquely curated exhibits in New York and beyond. This year has been a creative whirlwind of fantastic gallery experiences that have challenged me to create more engaging works for a wider audience and better understand the professional pulse of my field and the art world. It is critical for me as a teacher to have a thriving art career. It better informs me as an artist and instructor, and the students benefit in huge ways. I am freshly motivated to keep building my portfolio of paintings, drawings and prints,” she says.

To view Misenheimer’s artwork, visit www.taramisenheimer.com.

Dana Barbin Named a NH Hockey Legend thletic Instructor and Boys Varsity Hockey Coach Dana Barbin will be

A

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TED KEATING

inducted into the New Hampshire Legends of Hockey Hall of Fame Class of 2011 for his record/performance as a high school and college hockey player.

As a student at Exeter High School, Barbin played four seasons for the Blue Hawks. During his junior year, he helped the team to the New Hampshire Interscholastic Athletic Association state finals. He served as captain his senior year and was named Most Valuable Player.

Barbin attended the University of New Hampshire and played four seasons for the Wildcats, primarily as a forward. As a sophomore, he helped the Wildcats to the league championship, and during his senior year was named co-captain. He finished his UNH hockey career with 127 points in 125 games, one of only three New Hampshire natives to score 100 or more points during their careers.

Barbin later played professional hockey for seven seasons in Denmark and Sweden. This spring, he finished his 19th season as head coach of the Big Red boys hockey program. Barbin will be among six nominees honored during the Annual Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony and Luncheon on October 30 in Concord, NH.

Around the Table

Notable Finishes S T U D E N T S P L AC E H I G H AT PRESTIGIOUS COMPETITIONS Latin Vocabulary Champion

Seung “Daniel” Kim ’12 won first place in an advanced Latin vocabulary examination during the 58th Annual National Junior Classical League Convention, held in Richmond, KY, in July. Kim was awarded a $200 prize and placed fourth in the all-category decathlon—the convention’s most highly contested competition. He also was among a handful of top winners in advanced-level mythology, poetry comprehension, Roman history, Greek derivatives, Latin grammar and the academic heptathlon competition.

Having studied Latin since the eighth grade, Kim says he initially struggled but persevered to grasp the concepts of the ancient language. “I noticed from the first day of Latin class that such an in-depth analysis of syntax and grammar gave me a greater appreciation for languages in general,” he says. “The language was difficult and at the same time, clear . . . .The beauty of the ablative absolute, the double dative, and the accusative of respect resonates with me more powerfully than the simple structure of the English language.”

Kim was joined in the contest by two other PEA students: Oishi Banerjee ’14 and Gene Young Chang ’13.

Competing in more than 15 examinations, Banerjee finished in the top-10 results in prose comprehension, Roman life and creative arts. Chang finished in the top three in an advanced poetry comprehension challenge.

High Scores at International Math Competition

David Yang ’13 tied for fourth best score in the 52nd International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO). Yang was a member of the six-person USA team, which placed second in this year’s highly competitive global mathematics contest for students. For the first time since 1994, all six members earned gold medals.

This year’s IMO was held in July in Amsterdam. Team members were selected to compete following their participation in the American Mathematics Competitions’ Mathematical Olympiad Summer Program (MOSP), a three-week, invitation-only training camp.

The IMO is a two-day, annual math competition consisting of six problems. More than 105 nations compete in the event, the oldest of the International Science Olympiads.

Each day, participants take a 4.5-hour, three-problem essay exam that covers a wide range of mathematics.

Trustees Welcome a New Member At their fall meeting theTrustees welcomed Jen Holleran ’86; P’11 to the group. During her time at Exeter, Holleran was a proctor in Wheelwright Hall and captained the field hockey, squash and lacrosse teams. She served as class president, and a reunion program chair and attendance chair for her fifth and 15th reunions.

Holleran graduated from Harvard University in 1990, where she also earned her M.Ed. in 1995. In 2001 she earned an M.B.A. from Yale University with a focus on management of nonprofit organizations. As an undergraduate at Harvard, she was twotime captain of the squash team, four-time All-American, four-time First Team All-Ivy, and individual and team national title winner.

Her time at Exeter formed the foundation of her love of schools—a love and commitment that has led her to devote her career to working in schools, and now with schools, school leaders and school systems across the country.

Holleran spent the first years of her career in private schools, first as a teacher, coach and dorm head at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts and then as head of the upper school at the Bullis School in Maryland.

For the last 10 years, Holleran has been dedicated to improving our country’s urban schools so that all children, regardless of background, can one day get a quality education that affords them the full range of options in life from college to career and family. She assisted the superintendent of Oakland Unified School District in California in launching small schools, reforming central office departments and training school leaders.This included serving as founding executive director of the Bay Area region of New Leaders for New Schools, a nonprofit group whose mission is to attract, prepare and support school leaders to lead urban public schools so that all students have the opportunity to achieve at high levels.

Holleran currently runs Startup: Education, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s (class of ’02) education foundation that was started in 2010 with an initial $100 million commitment to dramatically improve public schools in Newark, NJ. Holleran and her husband, Andy Clark P’11, live outside of Boston with their young twin sons. She shares Exeter with her father Romer Holleran ’58; her sisters Demer ’85, Lauren ’91 and Alexa ’00; and her stepdaughter Zoe Clark ’11.

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Around the Table

PEA ARCHIVES

Exoniana D O YO U R E M E M B E R ?

The Exeter-Andover sports rivalry began 133 years ago with the first football game in 1878. Since then, more sports teams have joined the friendly fray, which reaches a fever pitch every fall during Homecoming Weekend.

B

PEAN

The E-A games are nothing without the rallying cries and cheers from die-hard Big Red fans. Can you identify any of the people photographed or the years of the games? (Hint: Four decades are represented.) Please be sure to share memories of your own experiences at these classic matchups.Email us at Exoniana@exeter.edu. Or, send your responses to Exoniana, c/o The Exeter Bulletin, Phillips Exeter Academy, Communications Office, 20 Main Street, Exeter, NH 038332460. Entries may be edited for length and clarity.

A

C

RALPH MORANG

D PEA ARCHIVES

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PEA ARCHIVES (3)

Around the Table

A

B

D

Answers to the Summer 2011 Issue:

E

All Smiles

xonians made the right moves

John E. Gepson ’61, Northbrook, IL, who

when they correctly identified themselves and classmates, and shared their own memories of big bands and meaningful connections.

received an Exeter pen.

“Photo A is of Charlie Dean, class of 1961. It was a pleasure to see Charlie in May at our 50th reunion.”

Our two randomly selected winners are: John J. Boehrer III ’61, Seattle, WA, who

Man with the moves

received an Exeter pen.

“Your feature is always a neat nostalgic moment for readers of the Bulletin.Thanks for doing the digging that it must require.

Still enjoying the glow of my 50th reunion, I was amused to see the summer 2011 entry. The somewhat manic grin above the bow tie in frame A can belong to none other than Charlie Dean ’61, and the whole dance theme brings to mind the pro forma Exonian story that always included the phrase, ‘tired but happy couples. . . .’

Thanks.”

I’m pretty confident that the suave young man in photo D sweeping his dance partner off her feet is the late Mike Cady ’50 who lived on the second floor of Gilman House in ’49-’50, along with such luminaries as Jim Ladd ’50, Larry Dwight ’50, Jim Branson ’49, and last and least, among others, yours truly. I believe Mike was a NRU [non-returning upper]. He was a faithful reunion attendee, a fine fellow and a good friend.

Louis “Lou” Browning ’50 Maysville, KY

That happy dude in Photo A has got to be my cool classmate Charlie Dean. The girl looks happy too.

John J. Martin ’61 Exeter, NH Roll up that rug

The two people in panel [B] are Chuck Paris ’81 of Wilmington, DE, and Merrill [Hall] and Nina Loewenstein ’81 of Binghamton, NY, and Bancroft. I grew up in Vestal, NY, near Binghamton, and so it was natural to seek out and meet Nina when I arrived at Exeter in 1978.

The most memorable dance for me was in the Class of 1945 Library on the bicentennial weekend in the spring of 1981. The band played swing music and we tried to swing, jitterbug, two-step, etc. I think they rolled up the central rug in the atrium of the library so we could dance on the stone floor.

Dr. Seung K. Kim ’81 Stanford, CA

COURTESY OF JOHNNY GRIFFITH

Harkness in NYC English Instructor Johnny Griffith and Math Instructor Tom Seidenberg stand behind a group of students from New York City public schools managed by The Urban Assembly, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preparing students from under-resourced neighborhoods for college.The PEA instructors spent two weeks with the students, introducing them to the concept and practice of Harkness learning. Griffith says, “Many of the students indicated the experience [was] positive and satisfying, offering them the chance to learn actively and take away more personal knowledge of the texts than when they simply receive information.”

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Exonians in Review

A Physics Guide to the Very Small 1 0 1 Q U A N T U M Q U E S T I O N S : W H AT Y O U N E E D T O K N OW A B O U T T H E W O R L D Y O U C A N ’ T S E E , B Y K E N N E T H W. F O R D ’ 4 4 A review by Scott S. Saltman

F

Kenneth W. Ford ’44 is also the author of The Quantum World: Quantum Physics for Everyone.

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ew ideas in science stretch our understanding and imagination as quantum physics does.

Richard Feynman, a master of quantum physics and one of the deepest thinkers in the field, claimed, “I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” Attempts to visualize the ideas of the quantum world generally fail, as do attempts to provide commonplace analogies from the macroscopic world that illustrate how quantum physics works on microscopic scales. Some of the ideas are so counterintuitive that many scientists have refused to believe that they could be true. Albert Einstein, a pioneer in the field, didn’t believe in the validity of the central tenets of quantum physics. Yet quantum physics has passed every test experimenters have thrown at it to the extent that it can be considered one of the most successful theories humanity has developed. The ideas may be strange, but they certainly seem to be true.

Scientists and nonscientists alike have long shared a desire to understand nature’s behavior at the most fundamental level, and quantum physics has been at the core of that understanding for about a century.

Many books have been written on the subject aimed at the lay reader. These books uniformly omit the complex mathematical apparatus needed to “do the science,” but often offer tremendous insight into the ideas. Kenneth W. Ford ’44; P’75, P’80 has written several such books. His latest effort, 101 Quantum Questions: What You Need to Know About the World You Can’t See, takes a refreshing approach to this endeavor by organizing the ideas in a Q-and-A format. This arrangement frees him from the chronological devel-

FALL 2011

opment that, while fascinating, doesn’t always lead to a strong understanding. It also avoids the approach that many teachers take, developing the ideas from the bottom up and not introducing a new idea without fully explaining it. For example, Ford freely uses the term “wave” throughout the book, but only introduces the critical properties of waves in Question 64. Ford’s novel approach in this book is to organize the ideas thematically, as a logical progression of questions. At times, he refers the reader to later chapters where the new ideas are explored in more depth.

101 Quantum Questions takes on a broad array of topics, focusing on the quantum mechanics of atoms and particle physics and briefly introducing ideas such as quantum entanglement and the Higgs particle.The major questions require several pages of explanation, while some minor questions (such as “How Big is an Atom?”) require only a brief paragraph. The final chapter devotes each question to a separate topic and Ford acknowledges that entire books have been written about each of them (and recommends some of those books). Ford’s simple and elegant presentation allows the reader to appreciate the simplicity and elegance with which quantum physics applies a handful of ideas to a multitude of topics. The introduction to the book lays out the 12 central ideas that underlie physicists’ understanding of the microscopic world. I found his treatment of the Pauli exclusion principle to be particularly illuminating, as he applied it in ways I had not considered before. Like most books of this type, little background in physics is expected of the reader, but it does demand close attention and willingness to follow several steps in a logical argument.

While no calculations are performed and there are few references to equations, the book uses scientific notation liberally, as that is the only way to truly appreciate the numbers and scales involved in the physics of the ultrasmall.

Ford’s ease at communicating challenging ideas comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with his background. He has spent much of his career in physics education at both the university and high school levels, as well as serving as director of the American Institute of Physics. Of particular note is Ford’s close work

Alumni/ae are urged to advise the Exonians in Review editor of their own publications, recordings, films, etc., in any field, and those of classmates. Whenever possible, authors and composers are encouraged to send one copy of their books and original copies of articles to Edouard Desrochers ’45, ’62 (Hon.), the editor of Exonians in Review, Phillips Exeter Academy, 20 Main Street, Exeter, NH 03833.

ALUMNI/AE 1939—Arthur E. Rowse

1959—Donald W. Light Jr., editor. The Risks of Pre-

and John G. Doherty.

Amglish in, Like,Ten Easy Lessons: A Celebration of the New World Lingo. (Rowman & Littlefield, 2011)

scription Drugs. (Columbia University Press, 2010)

1944—Tom B. Pearson.

Exceptional Fortitude:The Life of Tom B. Pearson, Del Mar’s 5-Time Mayor.

(AuthorHouse, 2010)

1966—Meir Z. Ribalow, editor. Plays from New River I [includes Ribalow’s play, Masterpiece]. (Mcfarland, 2011) 1968—Tony Seton. The

Autobiography of John Dough, Gigolo. (CreateSpace, 2011) —Mayhem. (CreateSpace, 2011) —The Omega Crystal.

(CreateSpace, 2011) 1969—Allan S. “Chip” Teel. Alone and Invisible No

1955—Philip H. Woods.

Bath, Maine’s Charlie Morse: Ice King & Wall Street Scoundrel. (The History Press, 2011) 1957—Carl E. Pickhardt III. Boomerang Kids: A Re-

vealing Look at Why So Many of Our Children Are Failing on Their Own, and How Parents Can Help.

(Sourcebooks, 2011) —Faces: Illustrated Limericks Portraying People You May Know. (Xlibris, 2010) 1959—Wendell A. Duffield and Bronze

Black. What’s So Hot About Volcanoes? (Mountain Press, 2011)

BRIEFLY NOTED 1944—Franklin A. Dorman. Phillips Exeter Acad-

emy Alumni in the Civil War 1861–65 [revision and expansion of original 1995 edition]. (Self-published, 2011) 1946—David C. Purdy.

“Moscoso Ships.” IN Sea History. (no. 134, spring 2011) 1962—Peter C. Aldrich, illustrator. Pump Prout: A Little League Story, by A.R. Pressman. (CreateSpace, 2011) 1972—Martha B.G. Lufkin. “What Schedule F

More. (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2011)

Told.” [short story] IN Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. (Dell Magazines, June 2011)

1973—Anthony P. Robinson. The Boundary Layer:

FACULTY

Poems. (Ekstasis Editions, 2011) 1982—Chloë G.K. Atkins

and others. My Imaginary Illness: A Journey into Uncertainty and Prejudice in Medical Diagnosis. (ILR Press, 2010) 2001—Katie Farris. Boys-

Girls. (Marick Press, 2011)

Richard Parris. “Lattice Cubes.” IN The College Mathematics Journal.

(Mathematical Association of America, March 2011)

with John Archibald Wheeler, a central character in the development of both quantum physics and general relativity. Wheeler was a mentor of many of the important figures in physics for almost 60 years, including Feynman. Ford co-authored Wheeler’s autobiography, Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics.

(Wheeler was also known as the creator of many terms that are now part of the popular lexicon, including geons, black holes and quantum foam.) Wheeler is referred to often in 101 Quantum Questions, indicating the profound influence he had on Ford, as well as Ford’s familiarity with the stories and insights of this legend of physics.

In my mind, a book about science is successful if it provokes my thinking and leaves me wanting to learn more. 101 Quantum Questions has moved forward my understanding of quantum physics, given me new insights into some ideas, and renewed in me the sense of mystery that underlies the quantum. Niels Bohr reportedly once said, “If your head doesn’t swim when you think about quantum physics, you aren’t understanding it.”

Scott S. Saltman is the John E. Smith Jr.

FORMER BENNETT FELLOW Charlotte Bacon. The

Twisted Thread. (Voice, 2011)

Memorial Distinguished Professor in Science and former chair of the Department of Science at Exeter.

Calling all reviewers!

If you are a book, music or film buff interested in the latest works by fellow Exonians, then consider becoming a reviewer for the Bulletin.You can pick the genre and medium to review. Email edesrochers@exeter.edu for more information.

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Faculty members tour Morocco and Ghana

Africa

Into

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JOAN HEISEY

n June, a multidisciplinary group of 10 PEA faculty members embarked on a two-week journey through the African countries of Morocco and Ghana to immerse themselves in the histories and cultures of these regions. They traveled with 14 instructors from the Punahou School, an independent school in Honolulu, HI, which partners with Exeter on initiatives that enable both faculty and students to make global connections.

The goals of the trip—which was made possible in part by the generous support of Phil Loughlin ’57; ’76 (Hon.); P’87—were many: to visit schools and explore opportunities for cross-continent student exchanges; to gain greater awareness about life in these countries and then share that knowledge with students in the classroom; and to forge relationships with both domestic and African colleagues to continue fostering international collaboration.

What follows are excerpts from narratives written by eight Exeter instructors about the African experiences that resonated most profoundly with them. Each vignette offers a unique, personal look at a vibrant and complex area of the world.

To read the pieces in their entirety, visit the Africa blog at http://kwasiboadiafrica2011.blogspot.com.

Understanding Culture Through Literature Evelyn Christoph, Percy C. Rogers Professor in Romance Languages and instructor in modern languages

S

ince my arrival on campus in 1985, I have been reading L’étranger by Camus in my French 320 classes. I had never been to Northern Africa, and while we were headed to Morocco rather than Algeria, I was eager to understand more about the countryside and the culture of a former French colony. Camus was passionate about Algeria, and his character Meursault reflects many of the inner struggles the author perceived in a country he loved 20

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: EVELYN CHRISTOPH

as simultaneously foreign and homeland. As the bus rolled through the hills littered with ramshackle dwellings, I saw farmers under the blazing heat working in the fields with their donkeys.

In my mind’s eye, I reread the scene where Meursault walks from the nursing home to the cemetery to bury his mother: grass on the hills turning from green to brown under the dry heat; Cypress trees (a symbol of death) looming on the horizon; the sun growing hotter by the second as it rises in the sky; red soil contrasting with white roots as shovels of dirt cover the casket.

After our visit to the vestiges of a lost culture in the Roman ruins at Volubilis, we took turns waiting in the rest area. There was neither toilet paper nor running water, but a wizened attendant waited nonetheless for his tip. Change in our pockets was not always a guarantee, and Linda offered to pay this round. As I waited for her, I explained in French she would pay for us both. He suddenly asked me in broken French if I had a pen, and with gestures interspersed with the words for pen and girl, he pleaded he would take instead a pen for his daughter. I handed him the only pen in my bag, and his face beamed with delight as he thanked me profusely. I will never again take for granted the power of a pen.

I enjoy teaching a number of West African texts and films. Ghana provided an opportunity for me to internalize remote cultural references, including the practice of polygamy and the irony of “négritude” in

francophone literature that celebrates African identity within the context of colonial rule. In my French 220 class we routinely work on a film and children’s book called Kirikou et la Sorcière written by Michel Ocelot, a French citizen who spent his childhood in Guinea.

In Cape Coast, I had the opportunity to speak to a class of high school students taking French. At the end of the conversation, I told them I taught a film/book called Kirikou et la Sorcière. One boy looked at me with incredulity in his big eyes. “Kirikou?” he repeated until we firmly established it was in fact the same Kirikou, and he told me he had seen the movie. I could not resist asking if the movie was an accurate representation of Africa, and he resolutely affirmed it was. I continued, “I will be able to tell my students they are not wasting their time?” “Not at all,” he insisted, and I will be certain to tell them.

Touring Morocco: Who Feels It Knows It Kwasi Boadi, instructor in history

T

he one-week tour of Morocco—from Casablanca to Rabat, Fes, Meknes, Volubilis and Kenitra—raised my consciousness about the central place the country occupies in world history to a level no book alone could ever have. Mainstream academia and international bodies, such as the World Bank, have always decoupled North Africa from the rest of the continent to the extent that the so-called “subSahara Africa” has come to mean Africa, in general.

(Left) PEA and Punahou faculty in Meknes, Morocco.

(Below) History Instructor Kwasi Boadi joins a Moroccan street musician.

And yet, Morocco is, perhaps, surpassed only by ancient Egypt in any consideration of Africa in world history during antiquity and the medieval era.

As an instructor of African history, I knew quite a bit about the history of Morocco, but only from the distance of written texts. Since our return from Africa, I have gone back to my books, reread them, and have come to a better understanding of the central place of Morocco and Islam in the nearly thousand-year-long (from about mid-seventh century to the mid-17th century) history of the region that stretches all the way from Spain through Morocco to the ancient empires of Ghana, Mali and Songhai.

To walk through the imperial cities of Fes, Rabat and Meknes is to appreciate the power of the Arab dynasties—from the founding Idrissids through the Merinids to the current ruling Alaouites. By leaps and bounds, Fes, a city of three cities, is the place to visit if one really wishes to know what I might call Arabic Morocco.

Its g randeur is matched only by Marrakech to the south, the other imperial city that gave Morocco its modern name. It is unfortunate that, for security reasons, we had to skip going there. Founded by the Almoravids, an African dynasty from the Senegal River valley whose hegemony : EVELYN CHRISTOPH

Marrakech is its African equivalent.

Although French is currently the European component of the multicultural character of Morocco, historically, that distinction primarily belongs to Spain. I cannot count the number of times our tour guides kept mentioning “Andalusia,” the generic name given to Muslim Spain. It was there that, with Arabic, African, Jewish, Greek, Roman and Chinese influences, the revival of higher education blossomed and laid the foundations, in part, for the subsequent European Renaissance centuries later.

Without a doubt, the most indelible experience of all for me took place in Kasbah des Oudaïas, a fortress enclave near Sala. Upon turning a corner during a tour of the kasbah’s narrow but pristine streets, we suddenly came upon a colorfully dressed traditional street musician seated on a pavement chanting and strumming on a guitar. I was so moved by the spectacle that before I knew it I had joined him on his mini-cymbals, at which point Ali, our tour guide, proceeded to adorn my head with some of the musician’s headgear.The spontaneity of it all was a thrill of a lifetime!

Well, the thrill may be gone now, but certainly not my new consciousness. I look forward to teaching the “Islam in Africa” unit of our pre-colonial African history course this fall with more enthusiasm and confidence than I could ever have gained without the trip to Morocco. How true the maxim that, “Who feels it knows it.”

Bound by Hope An excerpt from a sermon delivered by Jamie Hamilton, instructor in religion

M GIORGIO SECONDI

Ghanaian business names often reference God, as an expression of hopefulness and faith.

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stretched all the way from Spain to the Ghana Empire during the 11th century, Marrakech was retained as the imperial capital by the succeeding Almohad and Saadian dynasties, both of which were also African. It is hardly a stretch, therefore, to say that, if Fes is the spiritual and cultural center of Arabic Morocco, then FALL 2011

y first tears came on my first day, as we visited the Grand Mosque of Casablanca. Built over the Atlantic Ocean, with part of the floor as glass over the deep waters because as the Quran describes, “God’s throne was built on water,” this mosque dominated the skyscape. Within her walls 25,000 worshippers can pray, while outside in the courts 80,000 can pray. With the vast height of the arches and the deep reach into the sea, I felt simultaneously insignificant and held.

Another time, it was the slave castle, deep in the dungeons that held the captives like goods, or up the coast, in the stream where the slaves took their last bath before being put on the auction block, forever separated from their children and husbands and wives.

Another moving experience was when we visited the SOS [Children’s] Village in Tema, just beyond Accra, the capital of Ghana. One hundred and fifty children of all ages—abandoned, orphaned or destitute—are living within the walls of this institution.

The “mamas” don’t call it an orphanage, but a village.

I lingered back from the group tour, slipped behind a building and sat down in the grass. And two

JOAN HEISEY

little girls poked their heads out from a hiding place of bushes. I gestured and with unbridled joy, they came running out and sat on my lap. Their bright green and yellow school uniforms were pressed with a light starch and the smell of lavender. Their wide white smiles flashed against their blue-black skin as they poked me and ran their hands through my hair.

One girl rubbed my skin hard and I finally realized that she was convinced that the white powder would come off.

As a friend once wrote to me, “we are called by hope, bound by it, unreasonable, unfulfilled, essential, elusive, demanding, sometimes more than we think we have in us to believe in the possible, in the despair of the present tense.” Yet if the lunar eclipse of the moon over the sea of Rabat can hold its orbit in some mystery of the divine or some other orange-red pattern witnessed in the sky on a clear night, why doubt the power of hope to save us?

Or another way to put it, as one of our guides of Cape Coast did, “You see, we Ghanaians are ‘incurably religious.’ ” “Can you please explain what you mean by being ‘incurably religious’?”

“Of course. If you are in a hospital bed, sick, with IVs coming out of your arms and someone asks you, ‘How are you?’ you respond, ‘Nyame Be Kyere,’ God

will make the way. We Ghanaians know that no one religion has the answer; we love them all because we are all filled with the spirit of hope.”

You can see this hope along the main roads between Accra, Kumasi and Cape Coast. Often in bright-orange Vodafone crates, edged on the roads, little businesses vie for their entrepreneurial edge with their appealing names: God is Able Aluminum Enterprise God is Alive with Vitamins In Him We Move, Trucking Enterprise God is Good Furniture Fear Not Fashion House, Paradise Fitting Miracle Touch Salon I Shall Not Die Motors And maybe my favorite, In His Own Time Cosmetics.

Is It Poverty?

Giorgio Secondi, instructor in history

T

he two men pictured are dyeing agave silk in the medina of Fes, Morocco. The medina is an intricate and fascinating maze of narrow alleyways bustling with commerce. Skilled craftsmen work on their products while shopkeepers display their mer-

Silk dyeing in Morocco’s former capital, Fes, founded in the ninth century.

JOAN HEISEY

economic security, as well as having the ability to participate in the life of the community and pursue interests and endeavors considered valuable. Morocco has undoubtedly made great strides toward removing poverty. A mere 2.5 percent of the population now lives on less than $1.25 a day; this compares to over 50 percent in the average sub-Saharan African country. Life expectancy, now over 71 years, is not far from the levels achieved in North American and Western European countr ies (and nearly 20 years longer than in the average subSaharan African country).Yet literacy levels remain remarkably low and access to health care limited. And there isn’t much of a social safety net to catch those hit by unemployment or a sudden drop in incomes.

While the merchants in the medina may get by when things are good, their livelihoods are not secure; an illness, accident or economic downturn will quickly push them below the poverty line. And their ability to see the next generation move into higher-paying, more secure jobs is drastically limited by an educational system that leaves over 40 percent of adults unable to read and write.

It is intriguing for the tourist to observe the tanneries in the medina and learn that work conditions here have changed little since medieval times; but chances are that the people who work here hope that their kids will have a better life—one that frees them from the harsh toil of manual labor and affords them more economic security and peace of mind.

A Moroccan guide explains the meaning behind the mosaic.

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chandise and compete for customers. Children run around, family members chat with each other, friends share a laugh. The tourist is struck by the vitality of the place and may wonder whether this can be considered “poverty.” The lives of the people in the medina are simple; yet they often appear happy and dignified. There’s no starvation here, and the many expert artisans take obvious pride in their work.

These families are undoubtedly better off than the many we saw in the rural areas of Ghana. But we shouldn’t be misled into romanticizing the lives of these Moroccan households. What they experience, every day, is poverty indeed.

Poverty is best understood as a condition that limits people’s choices. Such choices include not only feeding oneself and one’s family, but also having access to health care, education and some degree of

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The Beauty of Geometry Joan Heisey, instructor in mathematics

I

n Morocco, there was layer upon layer of geometry in the architecture and interior design. Clay tiles are used to create intricate mosaics that decorate many fountains, walls and graves. Our guide pointed out how patterns and colors in these mosaics represented aspects of the spiritual and cultural traditions in Morocco. One of the circular patterns was a representation of the medina—a walled old-city area comprised of thousands of maze-like passages—with the spiritual center marked in yellow and colored rings that depicted forms of business and trade as well as residential areas. Beyond the ring of tiles that marked

the wall was a series of floral tiles representing the gardens just outside the walls of the medina.When we saw workers hand-chiseling tiles to shape them and a large mosaic being assembled piece by piece on the floor of a tile factory, we gained an appreciation for the painstaking labor required of this age-old process.

Chance Encounters, Lasting Impressions

JAMIE HAMILTON

Alison Hobbie, Alfred Hayes ’25 and Jean M. Hayes Instructor in Science

What was most compelling for me in Morocco was being immersed in a Muslim society with social aspects so different from our own.The streetside cafes were filled with men in the evenings relaxing together, or men walked toward the mosque at the “call to prayer� in full conversation, their prayer shawls on their heads so that they could continue to use their

hands in their active conversation with each other. I was struck by the absence of women at such times.

Though we were told that many women attend the call to prayer, most apparently observe this rite in their homes. Images of women that have stayed with me are those of women and children together, especially of women sitting together outside in the cool of the evening, talking and sharing the role of watching the children. And the memory of young women, some with head scarves and some without, walking hand in hand down the street, confident in their own choices on how to express their Muslim identity.

On my last day in Ghana, we had traveled far to visit a botanical garden, and I was feeling overwhelmed by the trip so opted to walk on my own, needing some time for reflection. Upon turning a corner near the far wall of the garden I heard the voices of schoolchildren, and a few moments later I

These Ghanaian schoolchildren were eager and excited to be attending school.

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JAMIE HAMILTON

Adolescents aged 10 to 19 make up about 22 percent of Ghana’s population.

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found myself peering out of a division in the wall into a schoolyard. It was clearly recess time and many girls were playing a clapping/jumping game together in a circle. As soon as they saw me they came running, surrounding me with these huge white smiles in faces that were as black as any I had ever seen. They wanted to know all about me, where I was from in the States, what my impressions of Ghana had been, what my favorite ice cream flavor and movie was. They tried to teach me a few words of the local language and laughed at my feeble attempts. And as the school bell rang and they ran back into class, none of their smiles dropped. They were eager, excited to go back to the classroom. There was no sign of sadness or worry on their faces, and suddenly my impression of where Ghana was going, where it might be in 10-20 years, looked a lot brighter.

Another chance meeting in Ghana was with a Peace Corps volunteer. Stephanie Mack Harmon, along with her husband, teaches chemistry in a remote area in northeast Ghana. She teaches more than 500 students over the course of a week, with nothing more than one textbook and a whiteboard in her classroom. After talking with her for a while it became clear that it would be easy for me to send her very helpful materials: a thumb drive with useful

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videos for teaching chemistry, laminated periodic tables that she could disseminate to her classes each day, and perhaps some simple lab equipment that would allow her students to perform some hands-on activities on a small scale. We also agreed to keep in communication through a Peace Corps program that connects U.S. educators with volunteers in the field. I am eager to see how this program can be of help to her and to my students in the months ahead.

The Next Generation Townley Chisholm, instructor in science

I have never seen so many young people as in these countries. Education is a booming business there because such a high proportion of the population is in [their] child-bearing years and there are so many, many kids. I am thinking now about how best to present this striking difference in demographics to my students, but you can see the difference between the aging population of Europe or Japan and the booming populations of Ghana and Morocco just by walking down the street. A lasting image for me came from walking through a packed street market in Accra; we wandered down one of the tiny side alleys that were roofed and just wide enough for one person to pass between the dark shops on either side.

There, in an empty stall, we saw a girl of 8 or 10 sitting on the ground and doing her math homework with her arm wrapped around her head in total concentration while a stream of people passed by less than 2 feet away.

Were We Really In Africa?

EVELYN CHRISTOPH

Linda Luca, director of the Dance Program

What was my favorite part? The easy answer would be, of course, the dancing and drumming at the Centre for National Culture, in Ghana—that was pure frosting on the cake! It was not only a thrill to see but also immensely rewarding to know that the African dance segment of PEA’s Dance Program is right on target. And talk about serendipity: Kwasi, a native of Ghana, has been telling me about a particular dance, “Adowa,” which would be perfect for our dancers,

and they did that dance!

I jump from one “favorite” image to another.Was it the anthropology lecture, the Grand Mosque, the sights and sounds of the various marketplaces, or sitting on the floor with two babies on my lap at the crèche? Was it the tapestries of color in the architecture of Morocco and the dresses of Ghana, wandering the streets in search of an eclipse, the kindnesses and good humor of traveling companions, the Roman ruins, or counting off in Arabic (I will never forget that ‘khamsat’ashar’ is 15)? No, I think the visit to SOS Children’s Village was the best; or perhaps it was the eye-opening visits to schools and the excitement of possible connections, collecting Moroccan and Ghanaian music for my dance classes, or the indomitable spirit and pride of the people we met.

Dancers and drummers perform at Ghana’s Centre for National Culture.

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Reporters-At-Large

in

Bosnia

How one alumna used an Exeter assignment in her classroom

By Zoe BrennanKrohn ’03

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s soon as I began to explain the first part of the reporter-at-large assignment—to shadow someone for a whole day—I wondered if I had made a mistake. My students looked horrified.

The idea of asking someone, especially someone they didn’t know well, to agree to be followed and observed for a day seemed both strange and scary. An even bigger problem, one whose magnitude I only fully realized as I stood in front of the students and described the project, was that this assignment sounded remarkably like spying. When I did my reporter-at-large at Exeter, this notion never crossed my mind, and I imagine that in most contexts, this interpretation of the assignment would not come up. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, though, it did.

I assign some type of extended writing project every semester to my students, who are majoring in English at the University of Banja Luka in Bosnia. I like to center each semester on a project that combines creativity with form and structure. My students are highly proficient in English, so I can ask a lot of them in terms of language use. The reporter-at-large, as a form of extended journalism that provides a great deal of flexibility for the writer, seemed like a good challenge for my students, who are in their third and fourth years of college.

Banja Luka, where I have lived and taught for two years, is the second-largest city in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It is also the largest city of the Serb-majority political entity, Republika Srpska, of the Bosnia that was formed by the Dayton Peace Agreement in 1995. Most of my students are Bosnian Serbs. The conventional Serb perspective—although there are, of course, many who do not subscribe to this view—is that the United States and NATO unfairly punished the Serbs both during and after the Yugoslav Wars.

Many Serbs view the international peacekeeping missions and ongoing oversight of the Bosnian government as humiliating and unfair, and Americans and other foreigners in Bosnia are commonly suspected of working as spies.

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ZOE BRENNAN-KROHN

DON KROHN

In this context, as an American teacher requiring my students to report on the details of another person using as many specifics and vivid images as possible, I realized how much this must seem to my students like a requirement to spy.

I was lucky that I didn’t think of this project in my first semester, or even my first year of teaching in Banja Luka. I had been working with these same students for three semesters by the time I apparently asked them to start providing me with intelligence, and I had built up a strong rapport and a sense of trust.

So as strange as this assignment seemed to them, they were willing to give me the benefit of the doubt that my intentions were good and give it a try.

The R-a-L, one of the few nearly universal assignments of Exeter English classes, was to choose a person to observe for an entire day. This subject was supposed to be someone we did not know well. During winter break of upper year, we were required to do our observation, and then in the winter semester our assignment was a journalistic “reporter-at-large” piece.The actual writing of my R-a-L did not leave a big impression on me, but I have very vivid memories of my observation.

The first day of my upper year was September 12, 2001. In the months of that fall term, I spent a great deal of time trying to grapple with a world that had suddenly collapsed and been replaced by an almost identical and yet sickeningly different one. I didn’t know anyone directly affected by the terrorist attacks, and so during winter break, for my R-a-L observation, I decided to go to New York and try somehow to feel or understand this transformation. I spent a day observing a volunteer who was working in a makeshift nonprofit office, helping people who had lost family members, or their jobs, apply for benefits and find the support services they needed.

There were still “Missing” posters layered on the telephone poles that winter, and dust covering the shelves in the abandoned shops near ground zero. I met three people that day who had lost family members on 9/11. The small experience of meeting those people and the volunteer who had come from the Midwest to lend her time grounded September 11 for me, made this ghostly change somehow human and real and, in some way, more manageable.

Although the specifics of my own R-a-L experience were not immediately relevant to my students’ lives, I hoped that in some way the importance of the project for me could find a parallel for them.

Bosnia is an unusual and complex place. For many

people who know about the country primarily from its wartime infamy in the 1990s, one of the most striking things about seeing it is how normal it is. In Banja Luka, a city that suffered very little physical damage during the war, you can sit in an outdoor cafe

in the summer, drinking a cappuccino under the shade of old majestic trees, surrounded by Banja Lukans of all ages, and have no idea that this was a city at war only 16 years ago.

In Sarajevo, the site of the nearly four-year siege from 1992–95, the physical scars of the war are more noticeable, in the mortar blast “flowers” that mark the sidewalks and building facades, the destroyed buildings that gape throughout the city, and the frequent clusters of memorial plaques for children and civilians killed in the siege. Yet even Sarajevo, with its lingering scars, does not feel like a war-torn city. Its streets are full of people, locals and tourists; the ubiquitous Balkan cafes are full and cheerful; and the Muslim call to prayer echoes from countless minarets in a breathtaking chorus five times a day. There are four shopping malls that have been built in recent years, and, in spite of the widespread unemployment and great economic insecurity, they teem with people.

Bosnia is a surprisingly beautiful, lively and lush country—one that I have grown to love.Yet beneath this very real beauty and apparent peace, it remains a deeply troubled country. Sixteen years after the Dayton Peace Agreement ended the fighting, mistrust, hatred and prejudice still run deep. Wartime ethnic cleansing has meant that most cities and regions are

Bosnia is a surprisingly beautiful, lively and lush country—one that I have grown to love.

more or less ethnically “pure,” effectively limiting interactions or understanding among ethnicities.

Once common and unremarkable, intermarriage among the country’s three ethnic groups—Croats, Serbs and Bosnian Muslims—has become rare, and the genuine interethnic coexistence that marked the better part of the 20th century here has come to seem like a historical relic.

(Left) Zoe BrennanKrohn ’03 with her students. (Above) Summertime in Banja Luka.

Most of my students were very young children dur-

ing the war, remember little of it, and yet there is no doubt that they have been deeply influenced by it.

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Some lost fathers or brothers in the war, and many were refugees or internally displaced persons. As schoolchildren, many of my students learned their national history based on their ethnic affiliation—a highly effective and insidious method of reaffirming hatred and begetting a new generation of ethnically conscious and xenophobic Serbs, Bosniaks or Croats.

Postwar Bosnia is governed by a bloated mixture of politicians and international peacekeepers. The delicate and unwieldy balance established at the end of the war still exists today, in the form of five presidents, multiple parliaments and tremendous inefficiency. International peacekeeping authorities and representatives maintain ultimate authority over many aspects of the country’s structure and laws.

Beneath this highly circuitous official structure, a deep strain of corruption threatens to undermine Bosnia’s projects and policies.

Taken together, these factors are a recipe for disengagement and a sense of learned helplessness among young people. Few of my students are old enough to remember the relative normalcy of prewar Yugoslavia.

Their memories are limited to the war and the tense postwar balance that continues today. Before the 2010 Bosnian elections, I discovered in one of my classes that only one student was planning to vote, and only because voting was a stipulation of a scholarship she received. Political and civic engagement seemed futile and naive.

None of these deep-rooted and critical issues were

solved, or even directly addressed, in the course of my students’ R-a-L writing. But the mindset that I remember from my own post-9/11 experiences, and the importance that the assignment had for me, seemed as though it might resonate in some way for my students.

For them, the task of asking someone to agree to be observed for a day was perhaps the greatest challenge, a marked contrast to my experience as an Exonian. As I remember, students at Exeter were comfortable with staking their claims as young intellectuals and asking someone, even a stranger, to agree to be observed for a day as part of a high school project was probably among the least of the R-a-L difficulties.

My Bosnian students, though, brought a different set of experiences and challenges to this project. They had little or no experience asserting themselves academically, and they felt almost certain that no one would agree to be observed, although I had broadened the assignment and allowed their subjects to be family or friends. Several students asked me if I would agree to be their subject in case they didn’t succeed finding one elsewhere.

As it turned out, though, no one needed to observe me. Their creativity in this pursuit was remarkable, and I ended up reading R-a-Ls about 30

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teachers, infants, handymen, landlords, retirees, beauticians, mothers, neurosurgeons, and rocket hail-prevention experts. Several of their essays described the process of choosing a subject, often with humor and honesty. One student’s essay began: At the beginning of my spy assignment, I had no idea who I was going to spy on. And then, suddenly, my landlord came to my door and brought three portions of kebabs for me and my roommates. That was the moment when I realized that a perfect person for my assignment would be him.

Many of my students’ early drafts fell into what I began calling the “police report” trap, detailing a minute-by-minute chronology of what happened over the course of the observation, exactly what the person did and when. While reading these reports, I began to understand exactly what the missing piece of the assignment was for my students—their job as framers of their subjects’ days and lives. The most interesting life could be rendered boring, and the most mundane day made fascinating, all based on the writer’s choices, themes and structure. This became one of the key issues I discussed with my students, and one that I came to see as an important “real life” application from the classroom.

There is a great deal of power in the hands of a reporter-at-large writer; my students held in their pens the possibility of bringing to light the most interesting, unusual or captivating elements of their day as observers. This was a stark contrast to most of their lives, educationally and beyond. Professors generally highlight what is important in classes and textbooks, while politicians and the international community take it upon themselves to dictate the priorities of Bosnia-Herzegovina on a large scale.

Taken together, this environment has made many of my students cautious and highly memorization-oriented learners.

For the R-a-L, though, the highlighting was theirs.

Only the students could sort through the day’s observations and find the themes and threads that worked best for them as writers. The moments that resonated or mattered or intrigued the students most were the moments that they wrote about—no one else had been there.

At the university, I struggled to apply some of the

Harkness principles in my large classes. As an Exonian, I have been moved by Harkness. I have found myself trying to re-create that atmosphere throughout my post-high school life: in college seminars, in informal discussion groups, and now in the classes I teach. In the case of my Bosnian students, I introduced Harkness because of the inherent empowerment of a democratic discussion where students’ opinions matter.

Harkness, though, is a very hard philosophy to

DEJAN MILINOVIC

implement. Many European-education systems, Bosnia included, focus on memorization and acquisition of great sums of knowledge as the keys to becoming well educated. An American teacher suggesting that students sit in a circle and have a discussion with each other, not with their teacher, is not exactly an easy transition. I persevered in classroom techniques to try to adopt some of the principles of discussion and critical listening and thinking that I have found so useful from my Harkness days.

Although I enjoyed the challenge, I had only fleeting moments of meaningful student-led discussions: my students were deeply conditioned to look at me, the professor, when they spoke; and they are so accustomed to right and wrong answers that they rarely ventured bold or uncertain ideas of the sort that Exonians tend to put forth with confident abandon.

I realized early on that simply asking an open-ended, “What do you think?” question and hoping for a lively discussion was not enough. So I explored ways to encourage critical thinking in less direct ways. My students and I had debates; we played games and discussed beliefs and culture in more structured settings. It was only when reading my students’ initial R-a-L drafts that I realized how fully this assignment could be shaped to work with my broader, Harkness-inspired aims.

Through their observations, often of family members, several of my students described some of their own experiences of the war. After more than 15 years of outsiders interested in talking about ethnic hatred, collective responsibility and genocide, many Bosnians—especially Bosnian Serbs—are uninterested in discussing the war. So it felt like an acknowledgement of trust when several students chose to describe these elements of their lives for me. One student observed a childhood friend for her R-a-L, framing her essay in the context of the war: During the war my family fled to Serbia and we spent 8 years there.We returned home in 2000. But we were not welcomed as we had hoped—a great number of my family’s friends turned their backs on us.The people from the building where my father grew up . . . treated us like some strangers and worse—like we were intruders. But there was one family or to be precise one person who welcomed us instantly.

Another student described her memories of her father’s months as a prisoner of war in the context of her own childhood and her mother’s sacrifices for her family.

Many of my students described a change in their understanding of the person they observed. For me, this was a prime example of the active role that a reporter in this type of assignment can and should have,

and one particularly important for my Bosnian students. One student observed a mean neighbor who had tormented her during her childhood. “She always found a way to make at least one child cry, daily. She offended, yelled, spied on us, in such [a] way that we even thought she was a witch,” she recalled.While observing this crotchety woman as an adult, though, the student saw the situation differently and began to think that the woman was actually lonely and sad: I realized she was actually looking forward to seeing [the] children. It was her ‘game’ with them, and made her feel less lonely. The truth is that . . . no one liked her, but after all these years, for the first time I felt sorry for her. She actually liked those children, she actually liked us as well, just that we were too young to see that.

It is impossible to draw neat conclusions from any single assignment, and the R-a-L was no exception. As the assignment progressed over the course of the semester, though, I began to understand it differently for myself, and see its broader potential more clearly. In more or less subtle ways, the reporter-at-large seemed to fit into my Harkness-based goals of fostering confidence and critical thinking among my students. Perhaps this is why it was one of only two universal Exeter English assignments when I was a student, or perhaps it is simply a broad enough assignment that it can be guided in many directions.

As a teacher, the R-a-L forced me to articulate my goals in order to frame the assignment clearly for my students. It also gave me a chance, nearly 10 years later, to reflect on my own R-a-L experience and how it impacted me. For my students, it was a small opportunity to assess creatively for themselves what mattered and why, in the complex and troubled world around them.

Brennan-Krohn (third from right, second-to-last row) with her students at an end-of-the-year picnic.

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Sports

Twincredible 2 0 0 6 A L U M S N I C K A N D C H R I S D OW N E R R E F L E C T O N L I F E , E X E T E R A N D A RU G B Y N AT I O N A L C H A M P I O N S H I P

By Matt Heid

O

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JOHN A. DOWNER ’75

Nick Downer readies to catch the ball with brother Chris behind him.

n June 5, 2011, Nick ’06 and Chris Downer ’06 co-captained Dartmouth to a rugby national championship, the first in the school’s history. It was a stunning accomplishment, one made all the more remarkable by this single fact: Nick and Chris had never seen a rugby ball—much less played the sport—prior to their freshman year of college.

Nick and Chris are identical twins. In many ways they have also led identical lives, especially in their athletic pursuits. Since joining the same soccer team at age 7 in their hometown of Stamford, CT, they have been together, without exception, on every team and in every sport they’ve played. “We grew up on the rink and on the field together,” Nick reflects. At Exeter, they played sports year-round—soccer, hockey and lacrosse—thriving on the competition and camaraderie it provided.

But it was hockey that most inspired them. After graduating from Exeter, both recipients of the Yale Cup, the pair took a year off to play junior league hockey in Burlington,VT. They hoped to continue their skating passion the following year at their college of choice, Dartmouth. Bad news arrived the spring before their freshman year—the team had no available slots for them.

Despite this setback, the duo remained determined to continue their athletic careers. “We’re competitive people,” Chris notes.

“We wanted to find an outlet that allowed us to compete at a high level.” It wasn’t an easy decision. “We spent the summer scratching our heads on what we wanted to pursue,” Nick says. After much thought—and recommendations from several Exeter alums at Dartmouth—they focused on rugby.

The team’s coach, Alex Magleby, encouraged them to try out. “Learning a new sport from scratch was not the easiest thing,” Chris notes. “A lot of the time, both [the] players and the referees were yelling at us to get where we were supposed to be.” Nick adds an analogy: “It was like getting dumped in the deep end, trying to figure out which way was up.” But they quickly caught on, gaining starting spots on the roster by the end of their freshman years.

Nick and Chris credit their Exeter coaches for this quick success. “At Exeter, we came across some great coaches who taught us lessons that were applicable both on and off the field,” Nick recounts. “Problem-solving, communicating, working with others . . . each sport helped prepare us for the challenges we faced.”

Chris echoes the sentiment. “We learned a lot from those team sports and from our peers on how to work hard and compete.” The pair particularly thanks Coaches Bill Dennehy, Dana Barbin and AJ Cosgrove for their guidance.

JOHN A. DOWNER ’75

But the benefits of Exeter went far beyond the rugby field.

“One of the big things Exeter gave me was confidence,” Chris reflects, “By the time I got to college, I felt sure of my abilities to do well in a new situation. Going to Exeter challenged me to become a better student, a better friend, a better person. Until I got to Dartmouth, I didn’t really appreciate how well Exeter had set me up to succeed.”

By their senior year, Nick and Chris had become co-captains of Dartmouth’s Rugby 7s team. Traditional rugby features 15 players on a side, a mass of muscle that can reduce the game to a grinding pace. Rugby 7s is a faster-paced variation of the sport with only seven players per side on the samesized field.

The Rugby 7s national championship is a grueling twoday event. Teams play three games on the first day in roundrobin group play, then up to three more on Day Two during elimination play. Few people gave Dartmouth much chance to win. “Going into the tournament, a lot of people wrote us off,” Nick explains. “We were a school of 4,000 going up against schools of 10,000-plus, including traditional rugby powerhouses like Cal and Utah.”

In its first game, Dartmouth faced Utah, the defending national champion. After falling behind 12–0, it seemed as if the pundits were right. But Dartmouth rallied to win 17–12.

For Nick and Chris, the game was one of the tournament’s defining moments. “That game really set us on the right path,” Chris reflects. “It showed that we could compete with anyone.”

After advancing through elimination play, Dartmouth faced Army in the final, a team it had not defeated in 11 years.The game wasn’t even close. Dartmouth crushed Army 32–10; Nick and Chris were named co-MVPs of the tournament for their outstanding play and leadership.

The Downers graduated from Dartmouth a week later and soon headed to Manhattan for similar, if not identical, jobs in finance. Today Nick works at Jefferies as an analyst in its investment banking division, while Chris is with Goldman Sachs in asset management. They share a small apartment and have both signed twoyear contracts with their respective firms. Neither can say what might happen after that, though both expect their lives to diverge at some point in the future. “Hopefully we won’t be living together 10 years from now,” Chris laughs.

As for rugby? They both adamantly declare their careers to be over. Rugby is a taxing sport; both Nick and Chris have required surgery for injuries suffered on the pitch and have sustained several concussions. “That’s it,” Chris concludes. “I can’t show up for work with a black eye or sprained ankle.” Nick concurs. “Yeah, more than anything else, my body is happy that I’ve stopped playing.”

Chris Downer looks to outrun his Penn State opponents.

Two Exonians Bring Home Bronze Crew members compete at World Rowing Junior Championships In early August, Abigayle Young ’12 and Christine Devlin ’11 traveled to Eton Dorney, Great Britain as members of the U.S. Junior Women’s Eight crew boat.The team ultimately finished third behind Germany and Romania. Finish times were: Germany 6:20.16, Romania 6:23.66 and USA 6:32.28.

Devlin (coxswain) and Young (stroke) cap a three-year run of Exeter girls going to the championships, where nearly 50 nations and more than 600 athletes compete annually. Last year’s JW8 national team won silver, with Devlin and Louise Breen ’10 (seat 7). In 2009, the JW8 won gold, with Breen on board.

Devlin and Young were also on Exeter’s varsity girls crew G1 boat last spring, which had an undefeated season with a gold medal win at the New England Interscholastic Rowing Association (NEIRA) Championships in Worcester, MA, and a fourth-place finish at the USRowing Youth National Championships in Oak Ridge,TN.

Christine Devlin and Abigayle Young at the Princeton boathouse.

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President to President During Alumni/ae Council Weekend (ACW), September 16-17, Senior Class President Adam Grounds ’12 connected with Dan Hogan ’61, who recently completed his second term as class president. During ACW, Hogan received one of two President’s Awards in recognition of the key role he played in the class of ’61’s successful 50th reunion last May.The other award recipient was Jonathan Bean ’81, who in July completed a three-year term as national chair of the Annual Giving Fund. For more photos from ACW and other alumni/ae events, visit www.exeter.edu/alumniphotos.

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Connections News & Notes from the Alumni/ae Community

The Next Chapter TA K I N G S T E P S T O S T R E N G T H E N T I E S A N D A DVA N C E E X E T E R ’ S MISSION

By Ted Probert P’12, Director of Institutional Advancement

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or the first time in 35 years, the Institutional Advancement Office (formerly Alumni/ae Affairs and Development) has begun an academic year without Jim Theisen ’40, ’45, ’52, ’66 (Hon.); P’97 at the helm. Jim’s accomplishments, however, continue to be felt daily in Advancement and resound in the lives of students and faculty members. As I begin my tenure as Jim’s successor, I want to express my admiration for his legacy and gratitude for the example of leadership he set from 1976 to his retirement last March.

I feel extraordinarily fortunate to have been asked to lead Exeter’s advancement efforts. From the impressive team of professionals in Gilman House to the success of The Exeter Initiatives campaign, from the generous support of our alumni/ae and parents to the contributions of hundreds of dedicated volunteers, Exeter stands as a model for development operations in both secondary and higher education.

That said, we are working hard to better serve you and the Academy: • This summer, we identified ways to increase the efficiency of Advancement’s processes and secure resources that will enable Exeter to carry out its mission now and in the future.

• This year, we will collaborate and communicate more effectively, internally and externally, in pursuit of a dual objective: enhance our current relationships and forge connections with more of our alumni/ae and parents.

• We will strengthen our partnerships with faculty members and students while continuing to remind and inform our global extended family of what makes an Exeter education unique—and why it’s vital to keep our programs vibrant and innovative.

Allow me to extend my heartfelt thanks for your dedication, loyalty and support. You are instrumental to Exeter’s ability to prepare young men and women for distinction in college and for effective, principled leadership in their professions and communities.

My heartfelt thanks for your dedication, loyalty and support.

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Connections

EXONIAN PROFILE

RICHARD ZORZA ’68

Making the Courts More Hospitable

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of automating the public defender system. He created electronic tools for public defenders to manage their caseload in order to better serve the public, but Zorza soon realized that technology could equip and empower the public as well. His early work led to a career in domestic and overseas consulting on the use of technology to improve access to justice in civil cases.

In 2007, Zorza became the first recipient, after its namesake, of the Kathleen M. Sampson Access to Justice Award from the American Judicature Society, an award given to recognize “extraordinary contributions to ensuring access to justice for all.”

Today, he is encouraged that his work may be helping to effect change. In June 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Turner v. Rogers, which involved an unrepresented man jailed for failing to pay child support. Turner argued for a constitutional right to appointed counsel because the penalty he faced included jail time. The Supreme Court rejected this argument. The court reversed the contempt order, however, because Turner had not been given due process rights, such as forms to help him present information to the court and questioning by the judge on his ability to pay. In other words, Turner had not been given just the kinds of assistance Zorza believes the unrepresented should have and has sought to help courts and nonprofits offer through technology and in other ways.

“This is really the first time the Supreme Court has ever addressed the issue of people without lawyers in civil cases,” he says. “We are in a pivotal moment where a lot of work by a lot of people that has been going on for the last 10 or 15 years—while not actually referenced by the Supreme Court—maybe influenced the intellectual climate that’s led to the court now starting to make some statements about what trial courts have to do when people don’t have lawyers.”

—Taline Manassian ’92

COURTESY OF RICHARD ZORZA

ost people try to stay out of the court system. Richard Zorza ’68 works to ensure, should the need arise, that people are welcome in it.

Zorza, an attorney, has pursued access to justice for more than 15 years. He created the Self-Represented Litigation Network, a group of judicial and legal services organizations committed to giving people who cannot hire lawyers the resources to represent themselves in court. The organization promotes accessibility of information, including the provision of forms and staffed self-help offices in courthouses. Zorza also helped develop the vision of Pro Bono Net, a national nonprofit that built LawHelp.org, a website that identifies, by state, free legal aid programs and provides answers to questions about legal rights. Zorza aims to “use technology to give people, who would otherwise have no help at all, assistance in preparing court documents and preparing for court.”

“I think I’ve always cared about fairness,” Zorza adds.

He says that about half the cases in civil courts involve the unrepresented and that number is greater in family, housing and small-claims matters. He wants court staff and judges to make sure people are fully heard, rather than penalize them for being without legal counsel. “I’ve never worked other than for nonprofits or the government,” he says. “Ever since law school, I’d like to think my career has been about trying to make sure the legal system works for people without money.”

Zorza graduated from Harvard with a degree in social studies. After some time serving as a staff aide to a U.S. senator, Zorza began advising people interested in social justice on how to live their politics in their work, a role that ultimately exposed him to unemployment issues and workers’ rights. While enrolled at Harvard Law School in the late 1970s, Zorza worked to help set up the school’s Legal Services Center and learned firsthand the challenges faced when people enter the legal system without lawyers.

After law school, Zorza became an appellate public defender in Massachusetts, where he began the process

Connections

EXONIAN PROFILE

D R . A N N E H A L LWA R D ’ 8 3

Private Healing Through Public Radio

COURTESY OF ANNE HALLWARD

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t would seem counterintuitive that people would find the very public medium of radio a place where they were comfortable sharing their most private and painful thoughts and stories, but that is precisely what Dr.Anne Hallward ’83 has discovered.

Hallward is the host of a half-hour talk show on Safe Space Radio and every Wednesday starting at 7:30 p.m., she conducts discussions about topics that many would speak of only in whispers. Even a partial list of the subjects covered on the program, which airs on radio station WMPG-FM in Portland, ME, and is available via podcast, reveals some of life’s most thorny and potentially shameful subjects: addiction, eating disorders, failure, life-threatening illnesses and grief.

She calls her program “A Live Forum for Courageous Conversations,” and Hallward says it can have great therapeutic value for those who listen and for her guests. “As a therapist, I observed that shame is a great obstacle to getting help and it can block many earnest attempts at healing,” she adds.

The Harvard-educated psychiatrist began this project three years ago with no training in radio broadcasting or journalism but with this idea: “Radio doesn’t involve being seen. It is a nonsensationalist, respectful forum where people can learn that others share their feelings and it can help reduce the humiliation of isolation. It is also a way to help listeners find the resources that they may need.”

This approach has had some powerful results. Last spring Hallward hosted a series on transgender issues. She recalls, “One of my guests taught me that in order for a person to undergo sexual reassignment surgery, they need two letters from mental health professionals, one at the doctoral level. He said there were no psychiatrists in all of Maine qualified to do this assessment. He asked me if I were willing to become qualified and offered to set up a panel to instruct me.”

Hallward put out an invitation to psychiatrists in Maine to listen to the radio series and to join her in being trained. Last May, 12 psychiatrists attended an educational session and learned more about transgender issues and mental health. “I was so delighted that in this small way, a marginalized group of people who have been unable to access help will now be able to get the resources they need,” she says.

The show has provided Hallward with some surprises. “I get quite a bit of intimate and emotional email from long-distance truckers who listen to the radio on their extended drives. They will say things like, ‘Your guest really made me understand what my son is going through.’ ” She was also surprised by the subject that received the most response from her listeners. “A series on bad mother anxiety engen-

dered an enormous outpouring from mothers who feel a huge responsibility for their child’s emotional well-being,” she says.

Hallward says her ideal guest is “a person who has wrestled with an issue and is courageous and generous enough to share their hard-won wisdom and thoughts with others.”

She remembers that at Exeter she was first asked to share her own thoughts while writing a journal in English Instructor Christine Robinson’s class. “Ms. Robinson encouraged us to combine the personal and the academic, as well as the emotional and the intellectual. That had a tremendous influence on me and has influenced the way I interview my guests on Safe Space, as well as the patients in my private practice.”

Hallward hopes to expand her reach to a larger National Public Radio audience. “I want to have a broader impact.

Radio is my form of public service psychiatry,” she says.

You can listen to podcasts of her show at www.safespaceradio.com.

—Julie Quinn

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EXONIAN PROFILE

J O N AT H A N O RT L O F F ’ 0 3

Pipe Organ Musician and Craftsman

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designed to mimic orchestras and accompany silent movies during the early 20th century. Theatre organs died off with the advent of “talking pictures,” but a renaissance has created renewed interest in and preservation of these special instruments.

Ortloff’s first organ teacher introduced him to the theatre organ, but Ortloff did not have regular access to an instrument until his college years. He has since won the American Theatre Organ Society’s 2008 Young Theatre Organist Competition and produced two recordings, “Clang, Clang, Clang” (2009) and “Roll Out The Big Guns” (2010).

Like other theatre organists, Ortloff often plays music from the great American songbook, choosing works by George Gershwin, Cole Porter or Irving Berlin—the orchestral music best suited to showcase a theatre organ’s qualities. But Ortloff also introduces contemporary music to prevent the instrument from appearing “old and stodgy.” Enter FOX TV’s “Family Guy.” Ortloff says the music used on the hit TV show is well suited for theatre organs, and it appeals to young people in the audience, who “find it pretty cool.”

This summer, Ortloff worked directly with teens when he served as technical program director of Pipe Organ Encounters, a weeklong camp in Boston for high school-aged children. “[There was] an incredible enthusiasm for the instrument,” Ortloff says, “which was inspirational for me to see that there are young people who are just as enthusiastic about the organ as I was at that age.”

—Karen Ingraham

THOMAS BERGERON

hen Jonathan Ortloff ’03 became an upper, it was time to tackle the infamous reporterat-large (R-a-L) assignment. Like many of his peers, he first thought, “Who am I going to interview?” His choice would have repercussions far beyond his English classroom.

A piano player since age 3, Ortloff had grown a bit bored with the instrument at about the time a new pipe organ was being installed in his church in Plattsburgh, NY. The curious 10-year-old was immediately enthralled by the size and scope of the organ. “To be able to see thousands of pipes behind the façade pipes was revelatory to me,” Ortloff recalls. “It was much more complex than I had imagined.”

He kept at the piano but began organ lessons that same year, and the organ soon dominated Ortloff’s musical interests.When it was time to begin the R-a-L project at Exeter, Ortloff chose to shadow Stephen J. Russell, founder and director of Russell & Co. Organ Builders in Chester,VT, the company that had built the pipe organ in Ortloff’s church.

“At the end of the interview, he offered me a job [for] the summer,” Ortloff says. “Within three weeks of working there, it clicked. I knew that’s what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.”

Despite the menial nature of his first summer’s work, Ortloff felt part of the creative process—one that takes, on average, a full year to produce a single pipe organ, or nearly three years for a large instrument with as many as 5,000 individual pipes. The painstaking craftsmanship, Ortloff discovered, was synergistic with his music.

“I had only really experienced the [organ] from the artistic side,” he explains. “To be able to become so engrossed on the mechanical side . . . my left brain and right brain were lit up simultaneously.”

After graduating from Exeter, Ortloff earned degrees from the Eastman School of Music and the University of Rochester in organ performance and interdisciplinary engineering. He has had apprenticeships with Russell & Co., as well as with several other renowned U.S. organ builders and restorers since his schooling, with the goal of opening his own shop in the near future. Ortloff’s current “9-to-5 job” is working on organ restorations for Spencer Organ Company of Waltham, MA. His free time, however, is usually spent breathing new life into a bygone musical era—theatre organ music.

In the past seven months, Ortloff has performed 15 concerts around the country on restored theatre organs—unique offshoots of traditional organs that were

Connections

VOLUNTEER PROFILE

B R E T T L AW R E N C E ’ 8 4

Celebrating a Shared History

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lass Agent Brett Lawrence ’84 vividly recalls the admissions interview that began his threedecade-long relationship with Exeter. It was October 1980, and he and John D. “Jack” Herney ’46, ’69, ’71, ’74, ’92, ’95 (Hon.), the Robert Shaw White Professor in History, emeritus, who was then serving as director of admissions, sat together on a bench outside Bell House and chatted. When Soccer Captain Scott Mellen ’81 walked by, Herney stopped him to make an introduction. Lawrence couldn’t get over how friendly the community seemed and how comfortable it felt to talk with Herney, how unlike an interview it was.

“I remember it as clear as day,” says Lawrence. “I loved the place from the get-go. My parents had this whole three-day prep school trip set up, and I was ready to go straight home after Exeter. I wasn’t going to school anywhere else.”

Lawrence, now a partner at Stroock & Stroock & Lavan LLP in New York, cherished many aspects of life at the Academy: the camaraderie that united him and the other residents of Browning House; the family-style dinners at classmate Brad Bohn’s house on Sunday nights; and his experiences on the soccer, tennis and squash teams.

But he was struck most by the respectfulness that teachers and administrators exemplified—and that students showed to one another. Even the usual high school labeling was good-natured: “The respect for all the different subcultures was fundamental,” he says.

No wonder then that when his sister arrived at Exeter his senior year, a stronger connection began to form between them. “The minute she arrived, we turned a page in our relationship,” he says. The New Jersey natives decided their shared year at Exeter wasn’t enough. “We both went to the same college,” he says. “We liked being in the same school.”

Lawrence didn’t become an Exeter class agent until a year after graduating from Yale University, when his classmate Jenny Niles and PEA Associate Director of Annual Giving Nancy MacDonald asked him to help out with an upcoming phonathon. “I made a few follow-up calls, and before I knew it, I was a class agent,” he says. More than 20 years later, Lawrence and MacDonald are still organizing phonathons, and Lawrence still feels that same connection to Exeter he experienced from the start.

His initial fundraising calls in the early 1990s were more difficult, he notes, as classmates settled into their lives and their addresses shifted, and with no email to locate those who were harder to find. Over the years, improvements in technology have helped enhance the relationships he has with his classmates, which are at the heart of what makes his volunteering so rewarding. “You’ve got a history with them,” he says. “It’s a special thing. When you arrive at Exeter, you’re kids.You all change so much in those two, three, four years.”

But more than history binds these Exonians. “The thing that changes your perspective on the school is having children,” Lawrence says. “It’s a place you want to support. You want your child or someone else’s to get the same kind of experience you had.” While Lawrence’s children aren’t old enough to attend Exeter, many of his classmates’ are, or will be soon.

Two years ago, at his 25th reunion, Lawrence noticed that something had shifted among the peers with whom he had joked at Browning House, competed on soccer and squash teams and debated in class.

“It feels now like we all grew up together,” he says.

—Leah Williams

The Lawrence family: Aidan, Gerri, Sadie, Brett and dog Scout. Exeter is “a place you want to support,” Brett says.

“You want your child or someone else’s to get the same kind of experience you had.”

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Connections

PHILANTHROPY

Forming Effective Leaders E N D OW E D S U P P O RT F RO M C H A R L E S J . H A M M ’ 5 5 ; P ’ 8 7 P R E PA R E S S U M M E R S C H O O L S T U D E N T S F O R L I V E S O F I M PAC T

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“At Exeter, I learned to deeply respect the quotient of leadership.”

—Charlie Hamm

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MAXINE WEED

n the summer of 1951, Charlie Hamm sat alone on his bed in Dunbar Hall and listened to footsteps creak in the hallway as they moved closer to his room.

The Summer School term was over, and all the boys waited to see if they had performed well enough to enroll for the Fall Term. Their instructors moved from door to door. If a boy hadn’t made the cut, a faculty member knocked and delivered the bad news. Boys who had earned entrance were passed by—a sort of silent acceptance letter.

“Oh please, God, let them pass me by,” Hamm thought.

“I don’t want to be informed I’m not eligible.”

Like many students in the 1950s, Hamm attended Exeter’s summer program in an attempt to qualify for the regular session. His learning disability—dyslexia—made a demanding Exeter curriculum even more challenging.

The footsteps passed by his door without stopping. He was admitted and, despite his difficulties, successfully completed four years at the Harkness table. Hamm recalls that many of his happiest moments took place outside of the classroom—particularly on the squash courts, where he captained the varsity squad his senior year.

After Exeter, Hamm attended Harvard before leading two successful though vastly different careers.

He spent 21 years in marketing, eventually becoming an executive vice president, worldwide, at McCann Erickson. In search of new challenges, Hamm left advertising to lead the Independence Community Bank for 20 years. During his tenure as president and chief executive officer, the bank grew from an organization with eight branches and 200 employees to a 150-branch, 2,000-employee community-banking leader.

Hamm credits his success in large part to his challenging yet formative experience at the Academy.

“At Exeter, I learned to deeply respect the quotient of leadership,” says Hamm, whose daughter Liza graduated from Exeter in 1987. “Without leadership, there really is very little chance of much happening in life.”

A desire to encourage students to develop their own leadership qualities led Hamm and his wife, Irene, to fund a new Summer School offering in 2008. Now three years old, the Charles J. Hamm ’55 Leadership Program has become an attractive option for prospective Summer School applicants and a seminal experience for accepted students. In September, Hamm chose to fully endow the program, ensuring it will benefit students in perpetuity.

“There is no other major endowed component of the Summer School,” says Ethan Shapiro, director of the Summer School. “So this is a big deal for us. We are really excited about the opportunity Charlie has given Exeter to continue offering this new and important program to our students.”

L. GENE HOWARD

Connections

Within the program, students study theory and examine the lives of leaders throughout Students in the Summer School’s Charles J. history.They also develop their own leadership abilities through practical team-based projects. Hamm ’55 Leadership Program enroll in This summer, one group organized a multicultural event at a local community center and anothtwo courses: Leadership & Society and The er produced a digital yearbook for the Summer School.

Practical Leadership Seminar.

“It may sound cliché but, more and more, students are leading lives in which longstanding models of leadership are being questioned and challenged,” says Kent McConnell, instructor in history, who teaches in the Hamm Leadership Program. “Students of the 21st century, like it or not, will be continually pressed to think for themselves about the topic of leadership given the fluid nature and subtle Students in the Charles J. Hamm ’55 Leadership Program are required to comnuances of international diplomacy.” plete a group project that emphasizes leadership in action. This summer, stuHamm hopes the program will shape generations dents worked on the following initiatives: of students, helping them, he says, to “begin a never-ending process of thinking about appropriate leadership” Breast Cancer Awareness that encourages them to create better lives for others.

One group designed and executed a campaign to encourage support for breast “Not ‘better’ as in just ‘helping people,’ but ‘better’ cancer research. as in showing people how to do things, taking better risks, understanding what risk means, understanding that Interactive Performance there are going to come times when people will look International students performed dances and songs from their cultural tradito you for betterment and you won’t have an answer, tions at a local retirement center. but you have to make a decision,” Hamm says. “LearnElectronic Yearbook ing what those things are and what you fall back on to Several students compiled a yearbook for the 2011 session as a thank-you gift make better decisions—it’s a process of thinking.” to contributors to the Summer School’s general scholarship fund.

Thanks to the Hamm Leadership Program, that process is ignited for many students each summer at Video Promo the Academy—all because one student was passed by Another group directed, shot and edited a promotional video that showcased in the summer of 1951.

—Mike Nagel the student experience at Exeter’s Summer School.

2011 Capstone Projects

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1990 Jee Sun Lee and Henry R. Haggard ’90 Esmé Lee Haggard January 29, 2011 Uncle: Andrew R. Haggard ’88 Katherine and Aidan J. Riordan ’90 Hadley Klingel June 14, 2011 Uncle: Patrick Q. Riordan ’87 Brendan H. Riordan ’95 Aunt: Meghan E. Jarvis ’92 1992 Blayre Farkas Davis and Sean A. Davis ’92 Siena K. March 2, 2011 Claudia Gonzalez and Benjamin D. Eugrin ’92 Maximilian George Lee Eugrin February 11, 2011

Justin and Darcy Schubart Wilcox ’96 Alexa Nelson April 11, 2011 Grandfather: Richard D. Schubart ’50, ’56, ’78, ’79, ’93, ’03, ’08 (Hon.) Aunt: Lindsey N. Hendricks ’00 Uncle: Nelson B. Schubart ’04 Cousin: Kenneth C.W. Nelson III ’93 Casey N. Nelson ’96 Ryan T. Nelson ’07 1997 Robert J. and Ginelle Desrochers Harbeson ’97 Patrick Robert February 26, 2011 Grandfather: Edouard L. Desrochers ’45, ’62 (Hon.) Aunt: Nicole D. Payne ’94 Mitchell Akiyama and Jenna Berman Robertson ’97 Eloise Leigh Robertson Akiyama Finley Racine Robertson Akiyama April 2, 2011

Tricia and Christopher M. Frank ’92 Kathryn Olivia December 1, 2010 Aunt: Caroline Frank Lapidus ’94 Uncle: William P. Frank ’96

1998 Timothy J. C. and Joy Fahrenkrog Foster ’98 Asher Liam June 28, 2011

Monica L. and Alexander C. Robinson ’92 Genevieve Gabrielle March 28, 2011 Grandfather: Edward L. Robinson ’63

2002 Russell A. and Serena Hanor Aldrich ’02 Serena Louise May 10, 2011

1994 Alexandra and Christopher R. Clark ’94 Hudson Robert April 12, 2011 Uncle: Nathaniel R. Hathorn ’07 Richard S. and Caroline Frank Lapidus ’94 Juniper Marilyn Nikolai Quirke October 29, 2010 Uncle: Christopher M. Frank ’92 William P. Frank ’96 James M. and Nicole Desrochers Payne ’94 Nathan Foster August 23, 2011 Grandfather: Eduard L. Desrochers ’45, ’62 (Hon.) Aunt: Ginelle Desrochers Harbeson ’97 1995 Robert and Vivian Shen Corwin ’95 Camilla March 30, 2011 Katherine and Michael C. Creedon Jr. ’95 Charles Birdseye May 23, 2011 Grandfather: Michael C. Creedon ’65 Uncle: Edward B. Creedon ’96 Cousin: Brendan P. Creedon ’96 Sally Creedon Mooney ’97 1996 Jeffrey Edwards and Cameron A. Smith ’96 Maximilian Adorno Edwards-Smith July 2, 2011

2003 Kurt R. and Fonya Lord Schallock ’03 Carter William June 7, 2011 Grandfather: Carter U. Lord ’64

Finis (continued from page 104) ties, but only a very driven few were actively looking for what needed to be done to correct those problems. Many different explanations might be offered here: Perhaps the scale of the need was psychologically overwhelming; national history and colonialism probably played a role in the current culture; and certainly finances were a limiting factor. The number one thing that people seemed to be lacking, however, was the confidence to question the status quo and demand more of their neighbors, peers and civil servants.

In collaboration with some very hardworking local partners in Lutindi village, my teammates and I were able to accomplish more than I ever

thought possible in such a short time. It helped that we could speak Swahili, and that we were willing not just to sit down for meetings but also to eat local foods; attend weddings and funerals; transplant seedlings; and carry buckets of manure. It became clear to the villagers that we were seeking a humble partnership with their community, and I think that sentiment set us apart from other development organizations they had encountered in the past. Still, I attribute the greatest part of our success to our desire and ability to ask tough questions, listen well, and rethink our ideas on the fly—all of which are skills I honed at the Harkness table and across the Exeter campus.

The humility I learned by struggling through an Exeter math class a few levels above my ability helped me face an important interview in Swahili with confidence and poise.The quiet strength and endurance I cultivated with my crewmates on the Squamscott River helped me to not get discouraged when cultural or financial obstacles felt insurmountable.

Most importantly, the high expectations that both my teachers and peers held for my work at Exeter carried over into my own expectations for our local partners in Tanzania. My belief in their ability to do better helped provide the push that they needed to feel empowered to improve their own lives.

It took a lot of translating, patience and bargaining, but eventually my teammates and I were able to co-design both a weeklong classroom training course and a series of hands-on field trips in collaboration with the local agricultural extension officers. Our challenge was not just in conveying the necessary business- and market-related skills the farmers wanted to learn, but also in encouraging

farmers to share information with one another and to participate in activities conducted in a style that was new to most students (and local trainers). For example, before my colleagues and I could conduct a written survey of crops that group members were currently cultivating, we had to explain what a survey actually was, and why the results would be valuable to the group. We were also mindful of the wide variation in reading and writing abilities within the farmer group.While some members were proficient writers, others could not read even basic sentences and required extra help from their peers. In spite of these challenges, I am very proud of the cooperation and innovation we were able to foster within Lutindi’s farmer group. I also became more grateful for the life-changing education I received at Exeter each time I encountered my own pedagogical obstacles firsthand.

I encourage current Exeter students and recent graduates embarking on new and intimidating projects like the one I began in Tanzania to be confident in the quality of the preparation you have already done. Don’t underestimate how much you can accomplish just by setting high expectations for yourself and for others around you, wherever you work. Even if you are at the very beginning of a career in international development, you already have so much to offer people around the world who have not had the opportunity to push their own educational limits in the way that we have as Exonians. With the right combination of humility and perseverance, you can raise people’s expectations of themselves and one another, and make a significant contribution in keeping with the non sibi motto that we hold so dear.

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Finis Origine Pendet

Bringing Exeter Expectations to Rural Tanzania

By Alex Hasbach ’06

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he summer before my upper year at Exeter, I spent a month teaching science and English

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The Exeter Bulletin

FALL 2011

FRED CARLSON

in a small village in western Kenya. At that time, the country was suffering the effects of a major drought, and nearly all of the families I met suffered from food insecurity. As the maize crop failed and hunger ran rampant, my own professional aspirations began to solidify: I would return to East Africa and work to improve agriculture and food security.

After my Exeter graduation, I enrolled at Stanford University, where I majored in Earth Systems with a focus on land management. My list of classes included such titles as Pathways Out of Rural Poverty, The World Food Economy and Sustainable Agriculture. I also studied Swahili, with the hope of finding work in East Africa after I graduated. In the spring of 2010, I was accepted by the 2Seeds Network to work as a project coordinator on a new initiative in northeastern Tanzania.

2Seeds is a nonprofit with a mission to establish and support efficient and community-based agricultural development projects in Tanzania. The organization works in partnership with local farmers to design customized projects that will best address a community’s needs. In Lutindi, Tanzania, my objective was to help farmers form a collective that would share agricultural skills, coordinate planting times, and sell produce at more distant and profitable markets. My work also involved helping the farmers secure both practical and theoretical training in business skills, market access and economics, record-keeping, farm planning, and managing group dynamics.

I spent four months living in Lutindi—a small village served by a single dirt road where I woke up each morning to the sounds of roosters crowing and old women singing. It often felt like I had been transported back to a different time. When I received a vertical postcard of New York City’s Fifth Avenue, my closest friend in the village studied it for minutes horizontally before I corrected the orientation. Even in the “different world” of Lutindi, much of what I learned at Exeter was critical to the success of our project.

My time at PEA taught me about the value of high expectations. I prepared for every class and crew race with the hopes of exceeding the expectations of my teachers, classmates, coaches and family. The longer I stayed at Exeter, the higher my expectations of myself and others began to climb. I was aware of this at the time, too, but never has the value of high expectations been made as salient to me as it was in Tanzania.

A major part of my work with the Lutindi farmers was in helping them see what was possible with the resources they already had. It was about showing them how to “raise the bar” in their own communities regarding agricultural practices, and about encouraging neighbors to share information and learn from one another. Farmers said that market access was a problem, but few had the confidence to conduct any “market research” of their own. Many were unsure of how to negotiate with buyers and had never taken the initiative to ask questions about aspects of the supply chain they did not understand. Instead, most farmers assumed there was no viable alternative to selling their crops to the middlemen who came to the village and offered extremely low prices for the crops that farmers had labored to grow. Many farmers had low expectations of themselves, their neighbors and their government. As a result, they held themselves back from viable market opportunities already within their reach.

My 2Seeds teammates and I met with government extension officers, officials in charge of transportation and agricultural cooperatives, leaders in the local village governments, school teachers and groups of village elders.The theme we noticed in nearly every meeting was the passivity with which people approached the task of lifting farmers out of poverty. Most people seemed to be waiting for someone else to propose a solution, rather than taking the initiative to create change themselves. Any(continued on page 103) one could point out a number of problems within their communi-