CM Winter 2026

CM Commonwealth School Magazine Winter 2026

THROUGHLINES

In This Issue, Our History Teachers Deconstruct Their Discipline; Our Alums Share How Public Service Has Evolved; Our Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Taps into Commonwealth's Roots; and Our Admissions Team Revisits Our Founding Commitments

WHY I MADE IT

BY MIRABEL HAN ’26

REPAIR WORK I have always enjoyed taking photos, but I was shy about having people as the main characters of my pictures. It took a lot of encouragement from our photography teacher, Mx. Korman, for me to feel comfortable taking photos of people. I took this photo last summer at a Chinese fishing port—one of the last in its area, according to a local man. I had wanted to capture daily life at the fishing ports, especially since I had heard that other ports were being filled in to make parks and resorts for out-of-state tourists. Immediately, I was drawn to the repair work happening around the shipping yard, and I took this photo of a man engrossed in his occupation. The black-and-red ship towers over him, and the green of his clothes provided an interesting contrast with the darker colors around him. But initially, the man seemed to blend into the busy background; I tried to crop the photo so that the man could be at the center, but that didn’t separate him from the background either. Luckily, Mx. Korman was able to help me by using the masking function in Lightroom. By darkening and saturating the red in the background, and desaturating the red everywhere else, while increasing the saturation of the man’s green shirt, we were able to make him more distinct from the ships around him.

DRAMATIC STATIONERY This photo was created for our Still Life & Formatting assignment in Advancing Photography. I didn’t start out with a concrete idea of what I was going to make. I got my scissors and an eraser, and I set about trying to make them look good in front of my desk light. Eventually I decided that it would be interesting to stab one of the scissors into the eraser. Then, I thought about all the other things that I could also stick into my eraser.

This resulted in the addition of a compass and a Swiss Army knife that I didn’t know I had to the list of things embedded in the poor eraser. The first few pictures that I took were far too warm-toned for my liking, so I added a green book to the mix. I ended up taking several photos of the setup at different angles, both because our assignment required it and because it would have been rude to my valiant eraser if I only took a single photo.

Later, in class, we were told to organize some of our individual shots onto a larger canvas, and format them using the power of Photoshop. Given that the background of my photos were all very dark, I didn’t want to leave a lot of white space between individual photos. I settled on stitching three (two, really) photos together. Photo A would be given the place of honor, while Photo B would be duplicated, with one photo on either side of A. The editing process was tedious, and I could not have done it without a lot of help from Mx. Korman. But I was able to get a very good result in the end.

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ad I not had Polly Chatfield as my ninth-grade history teacher, I would have had a very different life, at Commonwealth and beyond. Entering Commonwealth, I had big hopes and a weak grasp of basic skills. My first-quarter grades were disastrous.

Mrs. Chatfield met with me outside of class, week after week, to carefully teach me how to recognize a sentence fragment, how to build a paragraph, and how to turn my swirl of half-thought thoughts into a coherent outline. Peering over her half-moon glasses with shining eyes, Mrs. Chatfield telegraphed utter faith in my ability to learn what I needed to learn. My progress was slow, but it was progress. Her artful guidance and loving attention helped put me on a path where I could then become a competent student.

One of the great joys of returning to Commonwealth as Head of School was reconnecting with Polly after so many decades (though I still find it hard not to call her “Mrs. Chatfield” in my brain). Each year, we carefully reviewed faculty proposals for Hughes/Wharton grants and senior proposals for capstones. Her visible excitement about each piece of proposed work generated a bibliography of related scholarship, literature, painting, or music. Every time I visited her, she shared a new book with me, from poetry to biography. Her memory was still far better than mine as she relayed stories about students, colleagues, and events across her long tenure at Commonwealth. As you will find in these pages, we’ll be holding an event to appreciate her legacy in April and hope you can join us. You can also read wonderful testimonials and appreciative memories on our website (commschool.org/polly).

And so it feels fitting that this issue of CM focuses on throughlines, the past rippling into the present. Its stories illuminate so many of Commonwealth’s deeply held values and how we enact them at this particular moment in time: diversity, equity, and inclusion in our profile of Clinton Williams; rigorous engagement within academic disciplines and the arts from the first page to the last; an inspiring piece on public service; and woven throughout, our commitment to the pursuit of truth.

At Commonwealth, these values come alive through our extraordinary teachers as well as in the lives of our alumni/ae. You’ll read about ceramics at Commonwealth, past and present, and the faculty who have patiently guided our hands. In “History Under Construction,” you’ll hear from several Commonwealth history teachers, current and former. In their telling, our curriculum has included and excluded various regions, eras, voices, and texts over the years but has always engaged with the biggest question of all: how do we know what we think we know?

That question surfaces, too, in our story featuring alumni/ae working in journalism in this era of disinformation, bombast, and a fraying consensus about the nature and virtue of truth.

Their work is heroic. Like many students at Commonwealth, I read George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” and unpacked the ways that inflated writing does political harm.

By contrast, a disciplined commitment to saying what you mean, with precision and clarity, helps us avoid lazy thinking and manipulation. Though we may not still teach his essay as consistently, we daily teach our students what I experienced in Polly Chatfield’s classroom: to weigh the quality of evidence, to write a precise paragraph, to unpack conflicting perspectives, and to prove what can be proved. Those, indeed, are our throughlines.

Jennifer Borman ’81 Head of School 2 CM Winter 2026

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Commonwealth School Alumni/ae Magazine Issue 29 Winter 2026 Editor-in-Chief Jessica Tomer Editor Catherine Brewster Contributing Writers Jennifer Borman ’81 Catherine Brewster Becca Gillis Mirabel Han ’26 Claire Jeantheau Jessica Tomer Lillien Waller Contributing Art and Design Tia Chapman Mirabel Han ’26 derin korman Ciaran Murphy Simon Pan Tim Daw Photography Tony Rinaldo Photography Ryan Wang ’28 Printing Cummings Printing Co., Inc.

CM is published twice a year by Commonwealth School, 151 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02116, and distributed without charge to alumni/ae, current and former parents, and other members of the Commonwealth community. Opinions expressed in CM are those of the authors and subjects, and do not necessarily represent the views of the School or its faculty and students.

We welcome feedback: communications@ commschool.org. Letters and notes may be edited for style, length, clarity, and grammar.

Printed on recycled paper. Please recycle. @commonwealthalumniae commonwealthschool commonwealthschool commonwealthschool

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CONTENTS

Commonwealth School Magazine Winter 2026

Why I Made It: Repair Work and Dramatic Stationery

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Mirabel Han ’26 walks readers through her approach to focused photography

News of Commonwealth

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Remembering Polly Chatfield, celebrating Diwali, autumn athletic accomplishments, National Merit® scholars, and alumni/ae giving back

Conversations with the Head

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Director of Admissions and Financial Aid Carrie Healy reflects on how her work furthers Commonwealth’s founding mission, even as it has evolved

History Under Construction

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The story of how history is and has been taught at Commonwealth, told by teachers past and present

Will It Work?

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Alumni/ae politicians, politicos, and policy wonks discuss their work and the state of public service today

How Science Gets Done

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The fruitful friendship between two alumni/ae scientists

Searching for Truth in the Age of Misinformation

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Commonwealth-educated journalists fight to preserve trust in the Fourth Estate

Meet Commonwealth Staff: D. Clinton Williams, Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

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Follow the path that led D. Clinton Williams from Chicago’s South Side to Charles Merrill’s Walled Garden

Alumni/ae Connections

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“Bringing in the Sheaves” with alums across five decades, plus a special save-the-date announcement...

20 Questions with Sue Trupin ’62 A study in joy and suffering

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Cover Art: Kathya Sareddy '27 Correction: In our last issue, readers of Arabic and Hebrew likely noticed that those translations of “In Other Words” on page 22 were backwards. Apologies for the error, and thank you to Rachael Rosner P’23 ’25 for pointing it out!

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IN MEMORIAM

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erhaps more so than any other member of Commonwealth’s community, Polly Chatfield inspires talk of love—for her as a teacher, a mentor, a role model—reflecting the love she put into her work and into the world. On Saturday, October 11, 2025, Polly passed away. We remember her loving presence even as we mourn it deeply.

Part of Commonwealth’s beating heart for more than half a century, Polly Chatfield joined the faculty in 1968 and “retired” from Commonwealth three times: as a teacher (in 1990), Board chair (in 2002), and trustee (in 2021). Commonwealth was a family enterprise for Polly; her husband, Charlie Chatfield, taught English and then served as Headmaster. Between them they had seven children, two of whom attended Commonwealth: Barbara Post ’71 and Hugh Chatfield ’79. She remained a champion of the school, particularly Dive In Commonwealth, Hughes/ Wharton grants to faculty, and her namesake Chatfield Cultural Scholarships, until the last.

Polly was an educator par excellence—of English, Latin, Renaissance History, Art History, Greek, and other subjects that piqued her prodigious intellect. She remembered not just students’ names from fifty years ago but their goals, interests, even papers. Polly transformed her students into rigorous thinkers, elegant writers, and more confident versions of themselves. And she did so with seemingly inexhaustible wells of love, for them and for the mission of our school. Her warmth and wisdom will be profoundly missed.

Please save the date for a celebration of Polly’s life, happening Saturday, April 25, 2026, at Old South Church in Boston, a short walk from Commonwealth. Until then, you can visit commschool.org/polly to learn more about her legacy and share a memory of your own.

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Mary “Polly” Chatfield 1929–2025

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N E W S of Co m m o nwe a l t h

Shining a Light on Diwali

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his fall, our community had the pleasure of celebrating and learning more about the festival of Diwali as Kathya Sareddy ’27, Koki Cameron ’26, and Ramya Ramanathan ’27 shared some of their cultural history and experiences in a student-organized assembly. Koki, who is currently working on a Capstone project focused on Indian ceramics, then led us in sculpting diya lamps, cultural and religious fixtures commonly found in Indian homes and temples. Thanks to Koki and ceramics teacher Ms. Toomey, students were able to enjoy their handiwork (pictured here) in its finished, fired form the following week.

Hancock: The Herald of Autumn

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utumn truly arrived over the course of our days in New Hampshire this September as we returned to Camp Kingswood for fall Hancock. We left a warm, summery Boston, but before we knew it, we were cozied around fires, pulling on hats, and drinking hot cocoa. From card games to close-up magic, pumpkin carving to carving up the dance floor, it was the perfect start to the season and school year. Winners of this fall’s Hancock Photo Contest include the following (shown here left to right, top to bottom): Grand Prize: “Venus,” by Mirabel Han ’26 Best Atmosphere: “Dust,” by Millie Amster ’28 Best Bird: “Grumpy Bird,” by Natan Shapiro ’27 Best Rocks: “Stony Companion,” by Siri Cox ’27 Best Hancock Bonding: “Carnival Full of Clowns,” by Ryan Wang ’28 Best Lake: “Untitled,” by Will Stokes ’27 Best Portrait: “aasya,” by Happy Liang ’26 Best Tent: “Untitled,” by Aasya Tahir ’26 Best Splash: “Ripples,” by Kate Bruel ’26 n

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Words of Wisdom from Muadi Dibinga ’84

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e were thrilled to welcome back Muadi Dibinga ’84, choreographer, mentor, author, and motivational speaker, who came in to connect with our ninth-grade students. She encouraged them to get to know themselves on a deeper level and learn to seek validation from internal rather than external sources. Echoing what she told our school community last year, Ms. Dibinga reminded nines to “get your mind right, keep your game tight, and watch your crew.” Thank you, Muadi, for an inspirational morning!

National Merit® Accolades

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wenty-five of the thirty-eight members of the senior class have been recognized for their achievements in the 2026 National Merit Scholarship Program, as either Semifinalists or Commended students. Our six Semifinalists are: Mirabel Han ’26 Happy Liang ’26 Anna Lu ’26 Jacob Signorovitch ’26 Brandon Zhou ’26 Thomas Zhou ’26 n

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They join a nationwide pool of more than 16,000 students, representing less than 1% of graduating seniors in the U.S. and including the highest-scoring entrants in each state.

Finalists will be announced in February 2026, and National Merit Scholarship winners will be announced between April and July.

An additional nineteen Commonwealth seniors received notice of the National Merit Letter of Commendation. These are students whose PSAT scores put them in the top 3% of test takers nationally: Jake Alexander ’26 Auren Amster ’26 Alyssa Beach ’26 Kate Bruel ’26 Koki Cameron ’26 Mira Haber ’26 Jake Hurwitz ’26 Brian Li ’26 Juliana Li ’26 Danny McDonnell ’26 Steph McMasters ’26 Will Papp ’26 Aasya Tahir ’26 Kevin Wang ’26 Emi Weinberg ’26 Tomás Wright-Katz ’26 Iris Yang ’26 Addie Zha ’26 Olivia Zhou ’26 n

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Athletic Accomplishments

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t’s always a joy to cheer on our Mermaids, and this fall sports season was no exception. Both the Boys’ and Girls’ Varsity Soccer teams returned to the playoffs, ending their seasons with valiant efforts in the semifinals. Alyssa Beach ’26, Elsie Shoemaker ’26 (left), and goalkeeper Jake Alexander ’26 were named to the all-league team for their outstanding performances on their respective teams. Our Cross Country teams competed in the championship race, with the Girls’ team finishing in sixth place and the Boys’ team finishing in eighth. Runner Mira Haber ’26 was also named to the all-league team. Kudos to all of our fall athletes for their hard work, determination, and good sportsmanship throughout the season!

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Our congratulations to these and all of our hardworking seniors!

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A School Teeming with Student Clubs

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s our enrollment has hit record heights this year, so, too, has the number of student-run organizations, with new clubs sprouting up to meet ever-growing and diversifying needs and interests. Some new organizations build on academic interests, such as Military History Club.

Run by Andy Ji ’28 and Raphael Bockman ’28, the club has offered presentations on historical events like the 1953 coup d’etat in Iran and battles fought by China’s Tower Ship Navy.

Others create a space for discussion and camaraderie around a shared passion or hobby. Musical Club, run by Evana Zelalem ’29 and Lucy Petrovick ’29, meets every other week to “watch, discuss, and/or sing along to songs from a musical.” Bilal Ibrahim ’29 and Gianni Santos ’29 have founded Sports Debate Club, where members engage in friendly debate on everything sports related. For the artistically inclined, Comic Art Club, headed by Caro Taylor ’27, gathers to workshop and create comics with the goal of producing an anthology by the end of the school year. Comic Art Club is not to be confused, however, with Comic Book Club, run by Aiden Mendes ’27 and Mira Haber ’26, in which members discuss and present on their favorite comic book characters and stories. And some clubs, by nature, defy description: ____ Club, led by Luca Choly ’27, changes its name on a weekly basis, existing as a space for students to share “short, humorous presentations based on a weekly theme.” Two of this year’s new clubs take their activities beyond usual lunchtime meetings. SCREAM (Sports Commentary, Recaps, Events, And Media) Club, created by Andrew Sloan ’28 and Ryan Wang ’28, organizes and streams live broadcasts of Commonwealth’s home sports games. The club also crafts various promotional materials for our sports teams, which they share on social media.

(Check out @cwssports on Instagram to see their work and catch the livestreams!) In a different vein, Amanda Trogolo ’26, Maia McKneally ’26, and Jake Hurwitz ’26 founded Outing Club, which meets up outside of school to go on hikes to locales like Webster Conversation Area in Chestnut Hill.

With the addition of these new student-run organizations to the many already at Commonwealth, there certainly seems to be something for everyone—yet we have no doubt there will be even more to enjoy before the end of the year!

Commonwealth Theater Channels the Master of Suspense in The 39 Steps

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n November 21 and 22, 2025, audiences filled the Multicultural Arts Center in Cambridge for two sold-out performances of The 39 Steps, a theatrical parody of the Hitchcock classic. Featuring ten crew members and fourteen actors (taking on dozens of characters in total!), the play swept up eager viewers in a whirlwind of mystery, murder, double agents, secret organizations, romantic entanglements, and more than enough hijinks to keep them enthralled and clamoring for more. Bravo to all involved, especially director Susan Thompson and assistant director Maggie Elsen.

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Louise Hughes Finch P’66 ’67 ’71 ’73 Endowed Scholarship Fund

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ouise Hughes Finch, of Saint Louis, Missouri (1915–2014), was a devoted mother who raised seven children with her husband, Army psychiatrist Charles S. Finch, M.D. She took great pleasure in motivating her children to pursue education and professional careers.

She was remarkably successful in this endeavor—four of her children attended Commonwealth School, and of these four, three became medical doctors and one a lawyer. She held a deep gratitude to Charles Merrill and Commonwealth for the outstanding, unique education her children received. To her delight, the long-established tradition and cherished relationship with the school continued through her grandson, who attended Commonwealth and later became an aerospace engineer.

To honor Louise Hughes Finch’s memory and her fondness for the school, her daughter, Marilyn Finch Üçok, and sonin-law, Hikmet Üçok, Ph.D., established an endowed scholarship fund to support future Commonwealth students. The intent of the endowment is to provide grants for students to participate in summer internships, learn languages, or engage in cultural studies in developing countries.

We extend our deepest gratitude to Ms. Finch Üçok and Dr. Üçok, and look forward to seeing where in our wide world this scholarship takes Commonwealth students. To learn more, reach out to Director of Advancement Alisha Elliott ’01 (aelliott@commschool.org).

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CENTERING CERAMICS 10 CM Winter 2026

Opposite page: Amanda Trogolo ’26 throws at one of eight new “whisper” wheels; above left, ceramics teacher Kyla Toomey uses the new industrial sink; above center, new adjustable shelving built by Michael Bonadio; below, Catherine Merrill’s “I'll Fly Away,” a piece featured in her most recent show, Drawn from Life

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or more than thirty years, the same eight wheels revved in Commonwealth’s ceramics studio, helping hundreds of students throw thousands of cups, bowls, vases, plates, and sculptures—and it showed. When Catherine Merrill saw the need to replace those well-loved wheels and renovate the studio, her response was simple: “How can I help?”

“The hand speaks to the brain as surely as the brain speaks to the hand,” says ceramic artist and teacher Catherine Merrill, invoking neurologist Frank R. Wilson. This, she says, “is the key to everything,” including the impact of the technology that now occupies much (if not a majority) of our time. Catherine worries about how devices are shaping the thought patterns of today’s children and thereby the human brain of the future, she says, as the simple repetitive motion of working at a computer or typing on a smartphone replaces the complex motor activity of, say, writing or drawing. Or working with clay.

“When I’m working at the wheel,” she says, “it’s very grounding and very centering, because in order to center the clay and find that still point around which everything moves, you have to center yourself.” The clay then speaks to her hands, her hands speak to her brain, and her brain tells her fingers how to respond.

Pinch, pull up, shift just so.

To Catherine, the arts are one antidote to the attention-snatching, brain-altering influence of smartphones and other devices. And it’s one of many reasons why she decided to generously fund renovations in Commonwealth’s ceramics studio, a sacred space where generations of students have centered themselves and found joy in creating under the care of ceramics teacher Kyla Toomey now and Jean Segaloff and Bob Lucas before her.

The ceramics studio is almost as old as Commonwealth itself, dating back to 1966. Catherine remembers visiting the school in those days.

She was performing with the radical Bread & Puppet Theater when her father, school founder Charles Merrill, invited the troupe to Commonwealth. They chose a piece called “Fire,” dedicating it to the memory of the monks who had recently died through self-immolation in protest of the Vietnam War. Through dance and puppetry, they brought a monster to life in the Cafegymnatorium to the sounds of Gregorian chant. The performance ended with Catherine, a lone figure in white, silently wrapping herself in red tape. Afterwards, Catherine remembers “going upstairs and seeing a ceramic studio,” she says. “That made me really happy that he decided that was important.” To her, the studio spoke to their shared values as much as the invitation to perform did, she says. “He never said that in words to me, [but] as they say, actions speak louder.”

Decades passed between that performance and a 2022 visit with Head of School Jennifer Borman ’81 and Director of Advancement Alisha Elliott ’01, where the conversation ultimately (perhaps inevitably) turned to ceramics at Commonwealth. The trio discussed the arts and Catherine’s practice while poring over pictures of student work and the ceramics studio—well-worn with use, as well-loved places are wont to be. Impressed by Commonwealth’s

ceramics curriculum and inspired by students’ work, Catherine saw the need for studio upgrades. “How can I help?” she asked, sparking a conversation of what could be accomplished with an infusion of funds. Together, the three started imagining the possibilities, as Catherine pulled out ceramics catalogues with examples of optimized studio shelving and walked Jennifer and Alisha down to her studio to show them the kind of sink they might consider.

When Jennifer and Alisha next met with Catherine, they had turned their imaginings into a wishlist of everything Kyla confirmed the studio needed to sustain future generations of student work. By investing in Commonwealth’s ceramics program, Catherine turned that wishlist into a reality: eight new “whisper” quiet wheels, heavy-duty steel tables, custom-built wooden shelves, and an industrial sink that can stand up to the mini mudslides after class.

“It’s fulfilling for me to reconnect and be so impressed with what a great school it is,” says Catherine. “It’s the first time in my very long life I feel that my vision and my father’s vision have merged in such a positive way.”

Continue reading at commschool.org/ceramics

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CONVERSATIONS WITH THE HEAD

Carrie Healy

Director of Admissions and Financial Aid 12 CM Winter 2026

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hat do you look for in applicants?” It’s a question Carrie Healy has fielded throughout her thirteen years as Commonwealth’s Director of Admissions and Financial Aid—and it’s one more and more prospective students and families are asking. When you look at the 163 students who make up Commonwealth’s record enrollment this year, there is no “cookie-cutter” student, Carrie says, though you can see the same universal qualities. “Inquisitiveness, curiosity, a love of learning, and a willingness to do hard work”: those fundamentals haven’t changed, says Head of School Jennifer Borman ’81, though the admissions process has become much more strategic and bespoke, and not just at Commonwealth. Here, Jennifer and Carrie trace the evolution of admissions at Commonwealth, from the post-pandemic pivots to their work with Dive In (Commonwealth’s free academic enrichment program for high-achieving students from low-income backgrounds) to their mission to keep Commonwealth affordable and the other founding principles still at play.

You’ve both talked about how we remake our community every autumn, as we welcome new students (and faculty and staff). What drew you to this work, and what keeps you here?

Carrie Healy: Well, I have been involved in admissions since I myself was a tour guide in high school and then as an information-session leader through college. So even though I didn’t know that this would be my path, it didn’t surprise me or anyone who’s close to me that I veered in this direction.

What drew me to admissions is the ability to really get to know a community and environment, to really feel connected to that place and to those people, and then to be able to share that enthusiasm with people who are just discovering it and help them along in their journey of exploration. What brought me to Commonwealth? A lot of things, but one thing that both brought and has kept me here is that we are not trying to be everything to everyone. We’re in a market of incredible schools, and we are very clear about who we are. So, even though I didn’t go to Commonwealth, advocating for our people and our programs has always felt very natural to me because of that focus.

Another thing that’s kept me at Commonwealth is the school’s mission, particularly the long-standing commitment to serving students of all backgrounds. That really resonates with me, both as an educator and as a human being, and I take very seriously the importance of and our commitment to continuing to diversify this community in all ways. This has always been a place where every student has a voice, and we aim to cultivate an environment in which they feel comfortable using it. I’ve seen that in action every single day I’ve been here. And to help carry that legacy forward and be a part of it is just exciting.

Jennifer Borman: Like just about every Commonwealth alum I know, this school had a transformative effect on my life. I was a pretty inquisitive and occasionally thoughtful eighth grader, but I did not have a great academic foundation underneath my feet. For whatever reason somebody took a chance on me at Commonwealth, and I learned so many things I could use in so many ways and, ultimately, I could open the doors I wanted to walk through. I also learned so much from my classmates’ varied backgrounds, and there is even more diversity now. I love partnering with Carrie because I know she feels that part of our mission down to her bone marrow, too: the more broadly we cast our net to find kids from all kinds of identities, the more interesting and impactful a school we are.

CH: Students and families often ask me this question, too: why Commonwealth for you? And I tend to say, “All of it!” But the ability to, on a daily basis, interact with students who are so wholly and joyfully themselves and with colleagues who work harder than most people I know, and with such care and compassion, is just a pleasure.

When you were a student, Jennifer, admissions was a more decentralized process, and, Carrie, your tenure is almost perfectly split between pre- and post-pandemic eras. Can you talk about how admissions has evolved, at Commonwealth and in a broader sense?

CH: Just in my thirteen years here, admissions, as a field, has become much more strategic, data-driven, and customer-service-oriented, especially as the cost of tuition has risen across the board. Families expect more from the process, and rightly so. All of the schools in our market, Commonwealth included, now do much more in terms of admissions programming and providing opportunities for families to connect with schools than they did even five or ten years ago. Whether it’s a huge school with a huge admissions team or a smaller shop like Commonwealth, we’re all trying to give families the best sense of our schools and as much information as we can about the kinds of students we best serve.

Admissions has changed a lot at Commonwealth, too. Some of it has been circumstantial, like everything we did to pivot throughout the pandemic. But it’s all been very intentional. A lot of what we see in our admissions process today has its origins in the innovation and the flexibility the pandemic required of us. It obviously had its challenges, but it really forced us to think creatively about our process and break it down to its essentials, while still giving students and families what they wanted and needed. We’ve held on to a number of practices that worked well, like virtual events and interviews, both because they provide easier access for families and because they really helped us manage and keep pace with the demand we’ve seen since.

There has been such an increase in interest from families, particularly in recent years. If you look at our average 13

Associate Director of Admissions Natasha Matthews (left) and Admissions and Advancement Coordinator Sasha Himeno-Price join Director of Admissions and Financial Aid Carrie Healy

number of prospective student inquiries, event attendance, applications, interviews, and the like, we’re working with bigger numbers than ever before. It requires a lot of time and resources, but it is an amazing problem to have.

JB: I would say one change I have seen and supported is continuing to intensify our long-standing efforts to do outreach to communities and schools that might not have heard of us. Carrie and the Admissions team have been doing that for a long time: nurturing relationships with schools that serve the kinds of kids we’d love to have consider Commonwealth as an option.

Now, we also have our Dive In team, who are helping with community outreach, and Clinton Williams, our Director of DEI (meet him on page 32), who gets out of the building as much as he can to connect with prospective students from schools, organizations, and community contexts that wouldn’t necessarily be thinking about private schools as an option. We’ve continued to turn up the dial and get smarter and more active about how we connect with people outside of our building.

CH: Absolutely. The admissions collaboration with Dive In has been incredibly fruitful. We’ve witnessed that program’s growth—not just in terms of the number of students in each cohort but also in terms of the kind of students Dive In attracts. A good number of those students have gone on to matriculate at Commonwealth. It’s not our only outreach effort by any means, but it is a very meaningful connection for us.

I’d also say, relatedly, that our applicant pool and, really, our pipeline, have become more diverse. Like you mentioned, Jennifer, that has 14 CM Winter 2026

“ [ Financial aid] is one of my most bedrock commitments, and it shows up in all the financial work I do here... Those allocations are sacrosanct, and having an economically diverse student body is part of what makes Commonwealth, Commonwealth. Full stop.” always been part of our mission: we strive to be a place where students of any socioeconomic background—and any gender, any race, any ethnicity—can come and feel welcome.

We’ve had a reputation as a “hidden gem” amongst Greater Boston’s many (and many high-profile) independent schools. Can you talk about what recruitment looks like for us? Are we still “hidden,” per se?

JB: Well, as Carrie said, we are just about as big as we can manage right now. So I think we’re still a gem; I don’t think we’re that hidden.

CH: I agree completely. I attribute it to a number of things: One is our growing alumni/ae community—and alumni/ae who graciously go out in their own communities and talk about Commonwealth’s strengths. That’s given us more footing in the Boston area, as well as more recognition out in the wider world. Word-of-mouth outreach is huge for us. Most families still find out about Commonwealth through people they know. We rely so much on our Commonwealth families, past and present, not just to spread the word about us but to connect with prospective families during the admissions process and then help welcome them after they enroll.

Our students are also out there, telling their friends about us, hosting visiting students, and doing it all with a real sense of ownership of this place. These are our best marketers, and we couldn’t do what we do without their enthusiastic involvement. When I started here, it was rarer to hear of someone who had a Commonwealth connection. Now, even just over my tenure, it’s become really common for, say, the parent of a prospective student to list off four or five different connections to Commonwealth: “my daughter’s pediatrician has a student here,” “my neighbor went there.” You’ll see a Commonwealth sign in a yard miles and miles away. So I don’t think we’re as hidden as we once were, and that visibility serves us well.

Can you talk about the financial aid piece of admissions? How do we keep Commonwealth affordable?

JB: It is one of my most bedrock commitments, and it shows up in all the financial work I do here—with our finance committee, with our Board, with my colleagues. Those allocations are sacrosanct, and having an economically diverse student body is part of what makes Commonwealth, Commonwealth. Full stop. I would only add that it would not be possible to the same level if we didn’t have such generous

alums and alum parents and trustees, people who give to make those commitments fully possible. And one of my goals, and I know many share it, is to grow our endowment so we can honor our aspirations around affordability and economic diversity and access over the long haul.

CH: While accessibility and affordability were some of our founding priorities, they may be even more important now. With the high cost of living, it’s critical for us to meet families where they are financially in order to, as Jennifer said, continue to be able to attract more and more students from a wide range of backgrounds.

The sticker price of a school like Commonwealth—and, really, any of our peer schools— can be intimidating and downright impossible for many families. So it’s imperative that we do whatever we can to make sure families understand that, for many of them, that sticker price is just a starting point. There’s this myth about financial aid: that you have to be in the lowest income bracket to qualify for it. That could not be further from the truth. We will do whatever we can to make Commonwealth as affordable as possible for each family given their particular financial circumstances, through need-based aid.

JB: To just add onto that: our financial-aid grants are really broad spectrum, and we make sure families know that we also work with them to meet the related costs of a Commonwealth education—textbooks, technology, transportation, tutoring, travel, and even prom—so no student feels like they can’t fully participate once they’re here.

CH: We’ve really tried to make the full cost of attendance more visible to all families, regardless of if they have a financial aid grant, to give them the information they need to plan. You know, we call it “financial aid” because it’s a recognizable term and a searchable term, but we really view it as a partnership; we don’t see it as onesided. Every family is paying what they should be paying, what fits their financial circumstances.

From in-school application essays to class visits, Commonwealth does admissions a little differently from other independent schools. Why this unique approach?

CH: Two reasons: one, our process is really centered on the student, and, two, we rely on our entire community to make that personalized process possible. Each one of our applicants spends most of a school day at Com-

monwealth, visiting classes, going to recess, having lunch, and completing an admission essay, alongside a student host. The visit is really important to our process—and it means our full school is welcoming these guests.

JB: Our faculty and staff really play a huge role. They host students in their classes, day in and day out, which is not common at most schools. Plus, they’re interviewing, they’re reading applications, they’re evaluating admission essays. We wouldn’t get to know applicants to the same degree as we do without their support.

Every single person in this building—from the staff in the front office to our chefs to our building team—is contributing to make this place shine in all the ways that it can and does.

I especially love seeing our students do admissions tours. You can just see the older students’ enthusiasm for the school and the ways they want to explain it to newcomers. And our ninth graders, who just went through this process themselves twelve months ago, have a wonderful mother-hen vibe: “I’m going to show you all parts of my school and introduce you to my friend and take you to my English class and show you how the salad bar works.” They all have such a sense of pride.

CH: Over the years, we’ve found that students are increasingly in the driver’s seat when it comes to making decisions about which school they’ll attend. We really feel like we need to give them a genuine opportunity to experience the life of the school, the community, the academic excitement here, not just in the spring, once decisions have been made, but in the fall when they’re actively engaged in this fact-finding mission. We really want students to get a real sense of what they might experience here, so we show folks who we are and what we offer, and allow them to really make up their minds for themselves.

JB: One of the hallmarks of a Commonwealth education is a high degree of personalization and connection between the amazing adults in the building and our students. There is a climate of mutual respect. And, Carrie, you and your staff work incredibly hard to provide that experience to our prospective families as emblematic of what it’s like to be here after they enroll—and, again, you do it with a really small team. You get to know every applicant and their family and their needs. If there’s a family who doesn’t speak English as a first language, if there’s a family who’s new to financial aid forms, if there’s a family who has a student with a learning difference, you really try to con-

nect, create trust, ease the way. That’s who we are once a student enrolls, but that takes a ton of time and care and sensitivity. In that way, you are fostering the relationships that we will then build on once the student is enrolled and the family is part of our community.

CH: Thanks, Jennifer. That’s been easier to do since we’ve grown our admissions staff, but we still punch way above our weight. I feel really fortunate to have a team of incredibly capable and dedicated people, who, like me, connect with the mission of the school and care very deeply, as all of our colleagues do, about doing whatever we can to serve the students.

JB: I was really happy to see from a survey we did recently that 100 percent of current parents felt like we painted a realistic picture of our school during the admissions process that has been borne out in their child’s experience.

That’s always the aim for me.

Finally, the question on everyone’s (well, at least applicants’) minds: what are you looking for in future Commonwealth students?

JB: The fundamentals are inquisitiveness, curiosity, a love of learning, and a willingness to do hard work. Beyond that, there are so many wonderful talents, temperaments, backgrounds, and interests that we love to include in our community.

CH: I couldn’t have said it better! In many ways, what we’re looking for in future students hasn’t changed all that much over time. As you mentioned, Jennifer, we’re still looking for kids who have insatiable curiosity and care very deeply about contributing to our community, not just participating in it.

We really try to impress upon people that, while there are definitely commonalities among our students, there isn’t a cookie-cutter type of applicant we’re looking for. There are certainly characteristics that suggest to us that a student would thrive here. At the same time, our students are wonderfully different along all the lines you listed and more.

One of the comments I hear every single year during our admissions-committee meetings is “Wow, that kid sure would be fun to teach.”

Every year, without fail. Ultimately, we’re able to get that sense of these students through all the elements of our process. It’s amazing how, even after all of these years, we’re still surprised and amazed by the kids we’re bringing in. t 15

History Under Construction

BY CATHERINE BREWSTER

16 CM Winter 2026

W

hile Commonwealth students are busy

riculum and the history that happens to unfold during their time in

writing history research papers, throwing

high school. In turn, the teaching of history at Commonwealth has

pots, and playing soccer, “current events”

its own history. If anything unites the distinct, impassioned voices

(as one mid-aughts elective was called)

of these scholars and teachers, it’s a determination to help students

march on outside our walls. In Decem-

learn to listen carefully to past voices: the primary sources they

ber 2024, a student tells her classmates at announcements that the

examine, from the first days of ninth grade through the research

South Korean president has declared martial law. A month before

papers they write each year, culminating in U.S. History. As Barb

that, after Donald Trump is elected, U.S. History teacher Melissa

Grant, now retired from decades of teaching tenth-grade Medieval

Glenn Haber and a group of students sit on the Commonwealth

World History, expressed it, “to think critically you have to know

Avenue mall, eating lunch and talking about how to understand

how to find out what you don’t know, be able to assess evidence,

the results. After Russia invades Ukraine in 2022, Audrey Bud-

and know that not everyone is thinking like you with the same

ding, a history teacher who served in the Foreign Service in 1980s

values.” Current Medieval History teacher Sonia Aparicio hopes

Belgrade, gives a talk challenging Vladimir Putin’s claims about

the course gives students “enough nuance and conflicting sources to

Ukrainian identity. In early November 2025, Diversity Day keynote

realize that societies are complicated and that many questions don’t

speaker Evan Milligan, the named plaintiff in a voting-rights case

have simple answers.” Writing assignments involve learning “to

in Alabama, patiently walks the whole school through the theory

incorporate that complexity into their thinking and not cherry-pick

behind redistricting and the relationship between Supreme Court

evidence to create the argument or narrative that fits into a perfect

justices’ opinions and the presidents who have nominated them

little box with no tension or contradictions.” More succinctly,

over the last fifty years. These are just a few of the voices Common-

Audrey Budding cites a Buddhist saying: “Don’t believe

wealth students hear as they move through both our history cur-

everything you think.”

17

Ninth Grade

B

efore he began his twenty-one years as Head of School, Bill Wharton was hired to teach Ancient History and Latin in 1985, a few years after Charles Merrill retired. I’d always assumed that Mr. Merrill ordained Ancient as the first history course Commonwealth students take; in fact, according to Bill, “he was more interested in modern history and languages, like Russian. But he had hired Seymour Alden, who was a great medievalist and got a following of kids who wanted Latin.” So ninth graders studied Greek, Roman, and medieval European history before embarking on Polly Chatfield’s tenth-grade Renaissance course.

Bill remembers Ancient History as good for “teaching kids how to encounter primary sources that were strange. For a lot of them, the material challenged their preconceptions about how the world and politics worked. In Archaic Greece, the tyrants were champions of the poor, and the creation of Athenian democracy was an accident, the result of aristocratic factions cultivating support to advance their own interests.” In Audrey Budding’s words, “for understanding how much of our current world is contingent, there’s nothing like ancient history.” “Whatever country you’re living in,” says Barb Grant, “a lot of cultural ideas go back to antiquity.”

For Audrey, starting with Ancient also works “to very quickly demonstrate to students that our knowledge of the past is a tiny fraction of what actually happened.” It’s an accident of climate and technology—papyrus survives well in deserts—that we have so many texts from Ptolemaic Egypt. In ancient cultures who made inscriptions on stone, if they happened to be the right shape to be used later in a wall, the text was preserved, but not if the stone was more useful as part of a floor: “that has nothing to do with the value of that text” for understanding the people who made it. Over the years, different teachers have curated sequences of texts that Don Conolly calls “particularly fun to do together.” From when he taught the course, one such set included “fragments of the sophists, excerpts of Thucydides, the law court speech ‘On the Murder of Eratosthenes’ (because of the insight it gives into Athenian women), and Medea.” Themes “bounce between these works: speech-making in democratic Athens, the erosion of traditional values, naked imperialism, Greek and parochial identity, and women’s status.”

The current version of Ancient History includes material on ancient China and northern India as well as Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean basin. To counter what Audrey calls the “if it’s Tuesday, this must be India” problem, she focuses, for instance, not on a whole set of law codes from different cultures but on a contrasting pair that students can dig into. At the same time, the new material on China means “you can ask questions you wouldn’t have thought of about Rome,” adding new ways to show how people in different cultures, ancient and modern, “take different things for granted.”

Tenth Grade

A

ccording to Bill, if Ancient History found a secure perch partly because Charles Merrill happened to hire a lot of classicists, Medieval World History began to take definite shape in the 1990s, when Head of School Judith Keenan, “a historian, started hiring historians.” It was time, she felt, for a less “Plato to NATO” curriculum, and Bill recalls “teachers pointing out that 18 CM Winter 2026

Europe was not where the most interesting things were happening between 500 and 1500.” A medieval history course with more non-Western material “seemed like a good idea to everyone, and then we found Barb Grant,” the perfect fit. She remembers being told, “We want a medieval course, but a world medieval course, particularly Africa and China.”

Medieval, for which Barb eventually wrote the textbook students used until this year, continues the campaign of displacing familiar, straightforward stories. Current teacher César Pérez makes a point of objecting when students use the word “medieval” itself to mean “barbaric, cruel, or relating to torture, noticing that people from ancient times, early modern times, and even contemporary times can and have been crueler and more creative when it comes to torture than medieval people.” Africa, often thought of and taught in postcolonial terms, hit an economic peak during the Middle Ages. Muslim jurists over centuries debated whether jihad meant military or internal, offensive or defensive, struggle; after September 11, 2001, Barb added an essay on some of those sources. “Buddhism is not a monolith,” wrote current teacher Sonia Aparicio after she spent a summer developing new readings on East Asia. The new course includes, in César’s words, “new literary texts such as a juicy selection of pre-Islamic poetry and passages from the Kitab al-Bukhalā’ (The Book of Misers), the satirical masterpiece written by the learned Al-Jahiz in the ninth century.”

Sonia cites some enchanting tales from Korea’s Silla period— “bodhisattvas, mountain gods, monks, spies, beautiful youths (hwarang) who travel around in groups making music and practicing swordsmanship”—that she sees partly as a counterweight to texts like the one she says is her favorite to teach, a section of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa contra gentiles. “He argues that human reason is limited, and thus—while reason might be useful in understanding many things—there are truths beyond the comprehension of our reason. While I’m sure some students probably like Aquinas, the most vocal ones are often the ones who didn’t enjoy the reading.

If, by the end of class, I’ve gotten them to understand his argument enough that their position has changed to something like ‘He’s got a point, but I still don’t like it,’ then I feel like I’ve done my job.”

Spring brings research paper season for history students—trained as ninth graders to scour our local libraries for sources, then given less scaffolding and more freedom for their second such adventure.

Looking ahead, they choose between eleventh-grade history courses: “standard” AP U.S. History, beginning with the founding of the colonies, and U.S. History Since 1865, “best for students who like to go deeper,” says the course catalog, “into issues of race, class, gender, and the tensions between democracy and capitalism.”

Eleventh Grade and Beyond

M

elissa Glenn Haber ’87 was writing a book when Commonwealth suddenly needed a history teacher in 2008.

Though she has taught U.S. History since then, she says she still thinks “like a novelist more than a historian. I want U.S. History students to engage with the tension between the radical heartfelt belief that all men are created equal and our economic realities—slavery, displacement of Native Americans.” She’s particularly struck by the ways in which “being forced to take a side moves people.” The eighteenth-century colonists who were upset with the British “kept getting pushback until they articulated a political

Primary Sources Since 2001, has taught Ancient History, Latin, and now English, along with electives ranging from Philosophy to Mesoamerica

SONIA APARICIO M.A., EAST ASIAN STUDIES (UCLA) Since 2022, has taught Ancient and Medieval World History

AUDREY BUDDING PH.D., HISTORY (HARVARD) Since 2005, has taught Ancient History and electives including Modern European History, The Rise and Fall of Communism, Empires and Nationalism, and The World Since 1945

DON CONOLLY M.A., CLASSICS (UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON)

BARBARA HURWITZ GRANT PH.D., MEDIEVAL STUDIES (YALE) From 1997–2021, designed, taught, and finally wrote the textbook for Medieval World History at Commonwealth, along with developing electives on the histories of India, China, and Japan and another on Modern Islamic Societies

MELISSA GLENN HABER ’87 M.A., HISTORY (BRANDEIS), MASTER OF PUBLIC POLICY (UC BERKELEY) Since 2008, has taught Ancient History, Medieval History, U.S. History, and electives including Bible-asHistory and U.S. Politics and Policy in the 21st Century

CÉSAR PÉREZ A.M., ROMANCE LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES (HARVARD), M.A., SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE (UNIVERSITY OF IOWA) Since 2018, has taught Spanish and Medieval World History, along with electives like South of the Border: the Other Americas

BILL WHARTON B.A., CLASSICS (BROWN) From 1985–2021, taught Ancient History, Latin, and electives including Language and Ethics and Readings in Ethics as Head of School (2000–2021)

19

philosophy that they did not believe until they were forced to justify it.” In the nineteenth century, a similar process led defenders of slavery to the point of calling it “an active good.”

Having taken Ancient History, she adds, means students have read some of “what the founders of the U.S. read” about the fall of the Roman Republic: “they thought of themselves as part of a continuous story.” Audrey Budding sees “unbroken lines” from Alexander the Great through thousands of years of artists depicting him and in English soldiers finding consolation in the Iliad in the trenches during World War I. Audrey, who majored in Greek in college, remembers being mesmerized as she listened to a professor reading Priam’s speech to Achilles.

In wanting students to get out of history “what I’d want them to feel at the most poignant moment of a novel,” Melissa has always had company in the department. Barb Grant recalls that “Charles Merrill thought we should have a course on modern China, so I read Jonathan Spence,” who “writes history that reads like literature.” In 20th- and 21st-century Chinese history, she sees “a Russian novel, 1950s Hindi cinema, all kinds of epic, idealism and corruption, and then a capitalist Communist state.” Many Hughes (now Hughes/Wharton) Grants for developing new courses followed: in various years, Commonwealth students in Barb’s time could take electives on Japan, India, and “six countries that are predominantly Muslim but had diverse and fairly lengthy histories before they became Islamic: Turkey, Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia.”

Juniors and seniors in U.S. History and a shifting array of electives are ready to be caught up in such sweeping narratives without being seduced into oversimplifying the forces at work within them.

Teaching Modern European History, says Audrey, illustrates that “the problem with lessons from history is that people are always trying to apply the lesson from the last thing to the next thing. After World War II, you say, ‘Okay, appeasement is bad, so let’s fight the Vietnam War.’” And, she warns, the familiar phrase “ancient ethnic hatreds” is never an adequate explanation for violence. In her Empires and Nationalism course, students read one scholar’s analysis of what he calls “ethnic times,” in which “parts of your identity that have never been especially salient to you suddenly determine who lives and who dies.”

“ When do you start the history of, say, Pearl Harbor? When the Japanese islands emerged from the sea is too early and when the planes took off is too late.”

20 CM Winter 2026

Citizens of 2026

A

nyone hoping our history teachers will supply reassurance about “the moral arc of the universe” bending toward justice, or even practical advice about how to live through our historical moment, will have to look elsewhere. As a history teacher, Bill Wharton saw his job as challenging students’ expectations of “stories with good guys and bad guys and an inexorable advance toward the present, when we know everything.” Barb Grant, who marched on Washington in the 1960s even though she wasn’t a U.S. citizen, reflects that those formative years mean “the violence right now” isn’t that stunning to her; she’s puzzled that people seem more shocked by it “than by erosion of freedoms and deportations. I’m always comparing what’s happening here to what I know about India, China, the Middle East: after Tiananmen Square, Deng promised people economic prosperity if they would give up this stupid idea about democracy.”

All history can give us, Bill emphasizes, is perspective: as Audrey says, it “lets you look at patterns and ask what’s normal for the time and place.”

Melissa adds that “the past allows you to say, okay, things are really not so fun right now; when would you rather have lived?” Bill, who taught some material on medieval Europe in earlier versions of Ancient History, remembers students who were “shocked by the notion that people accepted their lot and hoped for nothing better than avoiding being starved or brutalized.” He remembers one puzzled question: “Didn’t anyone think about the equivalent of getting into a good college?” César adds that one student this year “keeps asking me about how people identified back then in ethnic terms, which I love because we are so used to the current terms that we sometimes forget that Byzantines did not call themselves Byzantines, and that Indians called themselves Hindustani and many other terms.”

César, echoing Barb’s principle that too much attention to politics “flattens people out into just ideologies and theories,” prizes “texts that give us a glimpse into the daily lives or even the private lives of medieval people, like the letters of Heloise, the Lives of Eminent Monks compiled

by Shi Huijiao during the sixth century, or the incredibly modern-sounding descriptions of city life” during the Song dynasty, the Record of the Splendors of the Capitol, written in 1235 by someone using the pseudonym “Codger who irrigates his own garden.” In her elective on Modern Islamic Societies, Barb included “great Turkish TV,” the ways in which “Hinduism affects Islam in Indonesia,” and an Al-Jazeera series called Witness that featured women truck drivers in Egypt and historic sites in Iran whose preservation was precluded by Western sanctions. Bill remembers a “tough” account of plague and civil war in Thucydides, an exploration of “what happened to people who were otherwise decent when the rug was pulled out from under them,” as well as The Aeneid, in which “each advance toward Rome involves some loss of humanity.” In Modern European History, Audrey’s students encounter John Lewis Gaddis’ thinking about historians’ work. In Audrey’s words, “When do you start the history of, say, Pearl Harbor? When the Japanese islands emerged from the sea is too early and when the planes took off is too late, but between those extremes, where you start the story makes a tremendous difference.” t Catherine Brewster has taught English at Commonwealth since 2000.

Will It Work?

Dispatches from Alumni/ae in Public Service

T

BY CLAIRE JEANTHEAU

he day of the last conversation for this article marked five days until an odd-year Election Day, thirty days of the soonto-be longest federal government shutdown in American history, 1,344 days of the Russo-Ukrainian war—and found six Commonwealth alumni/ae with a lot on their minds.

In Government Center, a mile’s walk from his old high school, Matt Costas ’14, Chief of Staff to City Councilor Liz Breadon, kept tabs on grassroots efforts to feed residents in the face of impending cuts to food benefits. At the Massachusetts State House, Senator Will Brownsberger ’74 worked to pass limits on the eviction of federal workers affected by the shutdown. Across the Charles River, Kevin Ballen ’16—current Harvard Law student, former White House staffer—was already anticipating the 2026 midterms. (“Elections are long,” he notes.) In New York, Camille Simoneau ’10 joined a State Department delegation at the United Nations General Assembly; in Michigan, State Senator Erika (Swanson) Geiss ’89 moderated a ses-

sion of complex procedural discussions as president pro tempore. And overseas, longtime diplomat Peter Galbraith ’69 delivered a speech in Croatia, where he was once ambassador, while observing signs of weakness in American institutions that alarmed him.

It was a turbulent denouement to a year variously described by these six in government and politics as “uncertain,” “a roller coaster,” and “a constant inferno.” But in their careers and study, they had to continue to address what Peter calls the “first question about any proposed policy or law”: “Will it work? If it won’t work, you don’t need to consider whether it is the right thing to do.”

If you’ve been pondering that question around something you care about, you’re at the same starting point as the alumni/ae you’ll meet here: several never thought they’d enter their roles until they ran up against a problem they wanted to tackle. They all attest that one critical step in finding any solution is listening deeply to others’ experiences.

Start now by hearing theirs.

21

Peter Galbraith ’69 (right) signing the Erdut Agreement, which he negotiated and wrote, on November 12, 1995. The agreement established peace between Croatia and Serbia.

The Internationals

“P

aris to Stuttgart to Nuremberg…Warsaw to Brest-Litovsk to Smolensk, Moscow, Novgorod, Leningrad…” Peter Galbraith can still rattle off the names of the cities he passed through on a transcontinental Volkswagen bus trip with two classmates from Natasha Grieg’s Russian class at Commonwealth. Since then, he says, “so much of my career has concerned places that didn’t exist on the map” at that time—places like Kurdistan, where as a U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations staff member, he documented Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons; Croatia, where he was the first U.S. ambassador to the newly independent country; or the Southeast Asian country of East Timor, where he covered foreign affairs and constitutional issues as a minister in the country’s first cabinet during its transition to independence.

Over the last decade, Peter has moved from diplomatic posts like these to two terms in the Vermont Senate to serving as Chairman of the Board of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. (“We can say we’ve been wildly successful—the world hasn’t blown up,” Peter quips of this last role. “But there’s always a danger that it will.”) Above all, he leverages his past connections and knowledge for humanitarian aims through his self-titled “freelance diplomacy” work.

As Peter was working on behalf of emerging nations, a younger Camille Simoneau was preparing to do so, too, as a Model United Nations delegate. The Commonwealth team ventured to Cambridge to compete at Harvard, where Camille and her classmates jockeyed with the “powerhouse schools.” “They all stayed in the same hotel, and we all stayed at home,” she remembers. “We always got tiny countries…we were not going to get the United States.”

It was, perhaps, a sign of things to come, even as Camille prepared for a career in science. Following a Ph.D. and years in virology labs, an American Association for the Advancement of Science fellowship brought her into the U.S. Department of State. (“When I was going to my first trip to the UN in Geneva,” she says, “I suddenly was like, Oh my God, it’s real.”) As a Foreign Affairs Officer, she specializes in biological and chemical weapons policy, drawing on her research background as she consults with governments and businesses.

Both alumni/ae—one still early in her time in foreign service, the other eager to pass on his lessons from the field—attribute their success22 CM Winter 2026

es to the same quality. Social awareness (not necessarily, as Peter says, “international relations theory”) is vital in a high-stakes situation.

“People skills in all of this are really undersold,” Camille says.

“People think scientists are just people who work alone in a dark corner; that’s not really how a lot of science is done these days. Also, in a diplomatic setting…everything runs on relationships.” One collaboration, for instance, required her team to be attentive to the unique needs of Congolese engineers handling Ebola pathogens in a high-containment lab. “Being able to respond to these deadly viruses at their source requires capacity there,” she notes, “and often in countries that don’t have reliable electricity—things that we don’t think about in our labs [in America].”

“Listening to people is the most important quality for a diplomat— listening and empathy,” says Peter. Those skills have been critical to his freelance diplomacy, which makes up some of the work most meaningful to him. In 2021, his negotiations enabled young Yazidi women from Iraq to reunite with the children they bore while held captive by ISIS members in Syria. He’s also worked to resettle dozens of children—some orphans, others relations of dead and missing ISIS members—from Syrian camps. “Thirty years ago, I negotiated the peace agreement that ended the Croatia War, still Europe’s longest war since 1945. A peace agreement saves lots of lives, but there’s not necessarily a personal connection. With these [Yazidi] girls—and I say ‘girls’ because the youngest of them was ten when she was enslaved… it’s very personal,” he says.

Peter and Camille also both think through the arcs of long-term threats daily. For Camille, that’s weaponized disease. One of her office’s most important aims is to enforce the bans of the Biological Weapons Convention of 1975. “We saw what COVID-19 did to the world,” she says—speaking from the expertise of her time as a researcher studying how the virus replicated. “I think someone doing something like that deliberately, as either a lone actor or state, would be far, far worse.

[The Weapons Convention] is one of those things that people don’t necessarily know underpins a huge part of their safety and security… because we’ve seen diseases have no borders.”

Peter is concerned about another kind of border incursion in Ukraine, believing that Russia’s invasion of the country will lead to a return to the kind of wars that took place for “thousands of years…

Camille Simoneau ’10

where a tribal leader, a prince, or a country tries to seize and annex the territory of another,” overriding international law on sovereignty. Right now, however, his focus has been on what he views as “the decline in democracy” within his own country.

“The Congress in which I worked for fourteen years shaped foreign policy as well as domestic policy,” he says. “We passed sanctions on South Africa over Ronald Reagan’s veto. After I uncovered the genocide against the Kurds, I was able to get the U.S. Senate to pass comprehensive sanctions on Iraq in just a few days.” He contrasts that with the prior year’s controversies on the limits of executive over legislative power—whether the Trump administration can impose tariffs without congressional action, for example. “The Congress does nothing today,” Peter argues. “Our institutions are really weak.”

really concerned about making sure that they get the best of the best,” he observes. “You want to make sure the streets are safe for them. You want to make sure they’re getting a good education.”

Senator Erika Geiss could relate. “I never in a million years…would have imagined being in office at all for any reason,” she says. “It was really accidental.” She was teaching humanities at a Michigan community college following an art and architectural history M.A. at Tufts, plus years of museum work in both states. (“There are alumni/ae who will probably say, ‘No surprise there,’” she laughs, recalling classes in the discipline with Judith Siporin and Polly Chatfield.) Then two dates suddenly loomed: the term expiration of her husband, Doug, a legislator in the House of Representatives, and an upcoming merger between two local school districts.

The Senators

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s Peter Galbraith warns of legislative weaknesses at the national level, in Massachusetts, Senator Will Brownsberger is navigating the downstream effects of federal actions. A freeze on federal grant funding could have a pronounced effect on Boston’s ecosystem of hospitals, universities, and biotechnology research, while policy on immigration and visa issues could impact area workers. “There’s a lot of concern around immigration issues, and we’re feeling our way on those, working with federal law,” he says. “It has the potential to really reduce economic activity in this area. I think we’re going to see job loss.”

Artificial intelligence also occupies him: “I graduated from Commonwealth just a little over fifty years ago. If I look back on my career—I’ve been a lawyer, I’ve done software development, I do a lot of public-policy research,” Will says, “all of those things that have been such a big part of my life are things that artificial intelligence really makes a difference in.” The level of research needed to parse a dense legislative proposal used to take weeks; with a large-language model like ChatGPT, it can be done in seconds. That will bring undeniable economic changes: “If you don’t have some kind of physical basis for what you’re doing,” he predicts, “the jobs are just going to get scarcer.”

It’s not the first season of change, personal or institutional, over his two decades as a Massachusetts legislator, first as a representative in 2007, then as senator beginning in 2012. “I’ve grown through a lot of issues; I can think about the trajectory I’ve taken on each one,” he says.

He thinks of balancing the preservation of parks and public lands with addressing the state’s mounting need for housing, and of expanding virtual school options for educational flexibility while trying to encourage face-to-face socialization (a need made particularly evident during the COVID-19 pandemic).

He thinks especially of the legal complexities surrounding substance abuse and drug crimes, a problem he studied extensively on a Harvard working group and addressed through a statewide elimination of mandatory minimum sentencing in 2018. “I spent some time…thinking that the solution was using the criminal justice system to force people to be in treatment or to abstain,” Will says. “But now…I think there’s a role for punishment in the criminal justice system, but that should primarily be focused on the things that people do that hurt the community, not their drug use.”

Will’s high-school self was not expecting to enter politics. “I was sort of a hippie, and I thought maybe I’d be a farmer,” he recalls (though he ended up applying to study mathematics at college). Starting a family and settling in Belmont was one key catalyst. “I think the thing that really forces your engagement is when you do have children and you’re

Will Brownsberger ’74

Expecting an influx of new students at her oldest child’s elementary school—“How are we going to welcome these kids and families?”—Erika first planned to follow the situation through parent-teacher organization meetings. After thinking more deeply, though—“Who is going to be able to handle it if something [like this] arises again?”—she sought, then won, the House seat her husband represented at his term’s end. That was in 2014. She’s now approaching her own term limit of twelve total years in the legislature, serving, like Will, in the state’s House and then Senate.

Michigan is a “vast state,” Erika says; she holds her palm outward in mimicry of its mitten shape as she speaks about various regions, motioning to them on her fingers. Her current First Senate District includes a large portion of metro Detroit, while more rural areas lack easy access to resources like public transportation or hospitals. “These are the things that we have to mitigate when we’re coming up with policy decisions,” she says. “I think you get more well-rounded legislators when you have folks who are farmers and doctors and lawyers and accountants and teachers from all different areas and walks of life.”

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Erika Geiss ’89

“ The divisive rhetoric has definitely amped up over the last few years.

There was a time when people could disagree on issues, on policies. There were always going to be certain core things that you were never going to get the majority and minority to agree upon. But there were basic elements of doing the right thing for our constituents you could get people to agree on, and it seems there’s less of that now.”

Her legislative successes include a consumer-protection law requiring ID numbers for anyone preparing taxes for remuneration, a bill package on address confidentiality for survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault, creating standards of care for pregnant prisoners at the state’s only women’s prison, and Michigan’s Clean and Renewable Energy and Energy Waste Reduction Act. “I think about my residents, the people who I see picking up my kids at band practice and see at the market,” she says, reflecting on who she works to represent. “And I think about the people who don’t have a voice or feel they don’t. How do we make sure that they have resources?”

Along with Will, Erika was anxious in November about the consequences of the government shutdown, including the loss of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. “This is going to break my heart,” she recalls. Now, “we’re trying to navigate what we can do on the state level to help stem some of this pain that is coming.

It did not have to happen this way.”

24 CM Winter 2026

Another less tangible loss hangs over her time in the state Senate: “The divisive rhetoric has definitely amped up over the last few years,” she says. “There was a time when people could disagree on issues, on policies. There were always going to be certain core things that you were never going to get the majority and minority to agree upon. But there were basic elements of doing the right thing for our constituents you could get people to agree on, and it seems there’s less of that now… and it doesn’t end just because the gavel has indicated that session is over. It bleeds into everywhere else, much of which unfortunately comes from social media.”

From his seat, Will sees an inverse. “There’s a narrative…that the [state] legislature is not transparent or is not productive. It’s stuff coming from outside with people not understanding how we see each other inside,” he says. When he was first elected, people would ask what surprised him on the job. His go-to answer: “I really like my colleagues. I’m impressed with them. They’re pretty sharp, and almost all of them are there for the right reason, even if they might come from a very different place than I do.”

“We’re supposed to be here to do good—the common good, because I’m speaking like a true Commonwealth alumna,” Erika echoes.

The Locals

T

he drive for productive conversation is felt just as keenly by alumni/ae running the ground game of local politics. “Money in politics nowadays has an impact…but the data shows it doesn’t compare to that face-to-face conversation with somebody,” Matt Costas argues. “You can spend $100 million on targeted ads or text blasts or super PAC ads, and it doesn’t necessarily compare to a conversation with somebody that genuinely is passionate about an issue.

That’s the most persuasive thing.”

Take Matt’s first campaign experience in 2018. Unsure of his next steps after studying history in college, a friend pulled him onto the No side of the Massachusetts ballot’s Question 1, which would have mandated particular staffing levels of patients per nurse in the state’s hospitals. As a drizzly election night drew to a close, he set out for eleventh-hour canvassing near a voting site in the Boston suburbs.

“I was standing outside of the poll with my sign,” Matt remembers, “and a guy pulled up and got out of his car to vote.” After greeting Matt and asking what cause he was outside for, the voter said, “‘I’m gonna do that [vote No on Question 1] because you’re standing out here in the rain.’” That kind of effort “does go a long way with people,” he says. (The No vote ultimately won.)

Groundwork on other campaigns, including Senator Elizabeth Warren’s 2020 run for president, followed over the years. But it’s never forever, Matt says: “You’re working your butt off for months, and then the election happens and you’re out of work, and it’s on to the next thing.

Working sixteen-hour days is not something I miss.” Then a Chief-of-Staff position opened with Liz Breadon, a Boston City Councilor he admired representing his neighborhood of Allston-Brighton, and he landed it.

Working for city government has sharpened Matt’s perceptions of the place he calls home. Allston-Brighton’s nearly 80,000 residents are often mischaracterized as temporary occupants in a neighborhood where students and young people disappear from short-term rentals.

In his view, there are deeper structural issues at play keeping residents from putting down roots.

“The vast majority of people my age want to stay there, but it’s increasingly difficult. You talk to anybody, and far and away, their

biggest issue is ‘my rent is too high,’” he explains. Matt counts a lack of housing supply and an “archaic and Byzantine” Boston zoning code among his obstacles. And right now, there are “big existential threats at the national level,” he says, “that are impacting neighbors at the ground level,” like the fall’s mixed federal messaging on food assistance and fears of mass deportation sweeps. “It makes it hard to focus on what you want,” he continues, “like delivering city services to people and fixing potholes.”

The time Matt spends hearing from his neighbors one-on-one is deeply valuable to him and to combatting those obstacles: “You’re not sitting around debating the great questions of our age. It’s very face-toface and local, and that’s what I appreciate about it.” That’s the kind of work that Kevin Ballen loves, too. A student leader of the Harvard Votes Challenge as an undergraduate, Kevin learned that to encourage his classmates’ attention in races at all levels—whether in Cambridge, statewide, or national—he needed to zero in on their specific interests.

“A lot of [issues] have super-local implications,” he observes. “While change might seem very incremental…it’s happening at a local level.”

After graduation, Kevin shifted from the local to the national, serving as both Deputy Chief of Staff and speechwriter at the White House National Economic Council under the Biden administration.

He sought “an opportunity to be a part of social change at the highest level” and believes he found one: “I loved it.” Tasked with tracking economic policy work across the government each week, he remembers feeling “exhilarated” by the breadth of initiatives: eliminating ticketing junk fees, manufacturing and clean-energy investments, semiconductor funding through the CHIPS and Science Act. “We were providing incentives of hundreds of millions and billions of dollars that were going to drastically change communities,” Kevin says.

He will readily share, though, that before reaching that “highest level,” his work began in Boston—first, in fact, at Commonwealth. He entered high school with a “service lens,” he says, but what he terms the school’s “environment of civic purpose” truly nurtured that instinct. For Kevin, that wasn’t just present in classes like City of Boston or friendly debates. It was created by traditions like Hancock, where students learned collaboration over van loading and meal prep, and a baby-goods supply drive for families in need, the latter led one year by Kevin with the encouragement of his advisor, Frédérique Thiebault-Adjout.

Matt Costas ’14

Former President Joe Biden with Kevin Ballen ’16

“I remember feeling a huge sense of agency: I can lead a project.

I can do something that’s going to impact people’s lives. I can lead a team,” he recalls. “As a young person…you often don’t feel that kind of agency in your life. So a lot of the work that I was doing was about how we get people to feel that civic spark, to think about the things around them that they care about and realize that they have a lot of skills and passions to partake in change.”

From there, his endeavor to build a civics-focused curriculum for students across Boston expanded from one Project Week at Commonwealth to two pre-college gap years. As Kevin points out, “[Students] spend thousands of hours on math throughout their K–12 careers,” while “things like civic engagement, learning about social issues, [and] engaging in leadership do not get much dedicated time.” Now in his first year at Harvard Law School, he’s focused on the kind of political and economic systems he analyzed at the White House, but he won’t discount the effect that talking to one person can have.

“It’s hard for people to have political conversations right now, and I get it,” Kevin says. “I also think those are the types of conversations that we need to have to continue to move forward—to reduce polarization, but also to have conversations about what kind of country, what kind of cities and towns, [we] want to live in.”

Matt Costas offers similar guidance to those who feel “disillusioned”: get out there. “It’s the people who show up to every public meeting that are the ones who dominate the conversation,” he says.

“Find an issue you care about, find a candidate you care about, and get involved at that grassroots local level—because there’s something going on in your town.” t Claire Jeantheau served as Commonwealth’s Communications Coordinator before becoming the Marketing Manager for the American Exchange Project.

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BY LILLIEN WALLER

How Science Gets Done Lauren Moo, M.D., ’84 and Marc Weisskopf, Ph.D., Sc.D., ’84 are two self-identified nerds who met at Commonwealth and went on to distinguished, and distinct, careers as scientists: Lauren as a cognitive behavioral neurologist and Marc as a neuroscientist and epidemiologist. Here they share what happens when the foundation you build on is not only shared research concerns, such as the human brain, aging, and dementia, but also a lifetime of friendship.

The prevalence of neurodegenerative diseases in the United States—including Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)—has been steadily rising for decades. ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, affects some 30,000 people, and the life expectancy from the time of diagnosis is a mere two to five years. The impact of Alzheimer’s is even more staggering: as the seventh leading cause of death in the United States, it affects eleven percent of adults over the age of 65. That’s 7.2 million Americans.

This is a tale of two studies conducted by Lauren Moo, M.D., and Marc Weisskopf, Ph.D., Sc.D.: the first focused on Alzheimer’s; the other, on ALS. Regarding the earlier research, Lauren and Marc point out that our understanding of Alzheimer’s has changed dramatically in the last twenty years. The scientific community no longer assumes that people are cognitively healthy until they develop dementia later in life, Lauren says. It is, in all likelihood, tied to an earlier set of life circumstances—health conditions like long-term hypertension, yes, but also environmental exposures. They asked: what if we could trace the onset of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s to environmental factors that occurred during a window of exposure decades earlier?

How It Started

Lauren and Marc both recall that theirs was a small class, and their friend group comprised close-knit kids who, as Lauren says, “were all math and science-y. Marc and I did our homework together on the phone, but our extracurriculars were different. He was doing baseball and theater, and I was always 26 CM Winter 2026

doing dance.” Marc interjects with an update about a mutual friend; Lauren notes that until recent years, their careers have taken them to different regions of the country or the world.

They crosstalk and edit each other’s recollections the way lifetime friends tend to do.

After Commonwealth, Lauren attended Cornell University, graduating with a degree in chemistry. Marc graduated from Brown University, studying neuroscience. She went on to medical school and a residency in neurology, and he studied for his doctorate in neuroscience and a Doctor of Science in epidemiology. They remained in touch over the years, visiting periodically and running into each other at professional conferences.

A cognitive behavioral neurologist, Lauren’s current research focuses on dementia caregivers and how the use of telehealth and other technologies might support them and the older veterans they serve. Marc’s epidemiological research examines the influence of environmental risk factors on such health outcomes as autism spectrum disorders, ALS, cognitive function and dementia, and psychiatric conditions. When they began working together nearly fifteen years ago, their individual research interests didn’t overlap (and still mostly don’t).

“Our research was not at all amenable to collaboration,” Lauren recalls, “before I moved from working full time at Mass General—at which point I had been doing a lot of functional MRI and cognitive neuroscience research—to working most of the time as a researcher at the VA [Bedford Veterans Affairs Medical Center]. But being a researcher at the VA opened the door for me to do more with big datasets and clinical-trials research.” It was then that Marc noticed that this new direction in Lauren’s research, which included her connection to the Bedford VA’s Alzheimer’s patient ward, might offer an opportunity for the two to work together, because, as Lauren notes, the Bedford VA has the largest in-patient dementia unit population of any VA in the country.

“Her work aligned perfectly with something I was trying to do with Alzheimer’s disease,” Marc explains. “Then we realized that maybe we could do a study within the VA system that could benefit from her access to a large number of Alzheimer’s patients. The research involved teeth, too, and there was a dental clinic there. I had come across this idea of using teeth much earlier, because your teeth are a little fossil record of what was going on when you were in utero, if it’s a baby tooth, or, if it’s an adult tooth, in the very early years of life.”

Marc and Lauren received an NIH grant to conduct the research, but the study was fraught with a number of logistical challenges, not least of which was how to obtain the teeth. If an Alzheimer’s patient came into the dental clinic and needed

a tooth extracted for other reasons, they would need to have a system in place for obtaining it. Similarly, once someone had passed away, they would need to coordinate with the staff performing the autopsy procedure in order to obtain a tooth. The study was complicated and unwieldy on a number of levels. But this initial Alzheimer’s study, while not exactly successful, inspired related research—including a current study by Marc that relies on information extracted from tens of thousands of baby teeth, the owners of which are now in their late sixties. It also, albeit indirectly, led to Lauren and Marc’s current ALS research.

How It’s Going

Twenty years ago, Marc led a study that was the first to identify the connection between military service broadly (rather than just Gulf War service that had previously been noted) and the onset of ALS later in life. Other researchers have since found the same thing, Marc says, but no one has conclusively determined why.

Their current project uses extensive VA data to look at why military service is correlated with an increased risk of ALS. “This is a different study that is not fraught with the kinds of challenges that we had with the Alzheimer’s study,” Lauren explains. “We’re not trying to recruit people. We’re not reliant on dentists or medical examiners to perform autopsies. We don’t need to coordinate with funeral homes or enroll individual participants. This ALS study is what we call a big data study; it looks at existing data across the whole VA, which is the largest single healthcare network in the country.

“Some of this is about timing. The Alzheimer’s study was in response to a particular call for proposals from the NIH about environmental exposures and the risk factors for Alzheimer’s. This new study took advantage of the fact that for the first time, there is an attempt to integrate information in the VA database with the Department of Defense database, which for whatever reason had never been linked. They weren’t previously ‘talking to each other.’ That happened a year or so before we submitted our ALS proposal to the CDC. I told Marc that this was a new opportunity for us to connect the dots between military service and patients’ current health outcomes.” A few days before the two spoke with CM, they had just submitted their first paper on the research for publication. But if we now generally accept that dementia and cognitive decline begin earlier in life, how are Lauren’s and Marc’s research any different?

First, Lauren notes, most current modeling of these diseases don’t begin the timeline for environmental exposure as far back as Marc has done in his research—that is, as far back as the womb. But, more significantly, they also believe that “cognitive reserve” holds the key. “We now know that it’s not just something that happens to you in your fifties or sixties,” Lauren says. “The degree to which you will actually manifest symptoms that we would categorize as either mild cognitive impairment or dementia is mitigated by how intellectually resilient you are.”

Marc illustrates the point by citing the Nun Study, a famous longitudinal study begun in 1986 that, among other results, found that those who had achieved a bachelor’s degree or higher and those who wrote with more linguistic complexity when young were less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease later in life.

“We know, for example, that there is a significant percentage of people who are autopsied after they pass away who don’t clinically have dementia but who do have Alzheimer’s pathology,” Lauren says. “When they have looked at those people, there is a greater percentage who have higher academic or occupational achievement. That’s where this idea of cognitive reserve comes in,” Lauren says, referring to the so-called buffer of intellectual ability. “Some people can weather the storm better.” t Lauren Moo, M.D., is Associate Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School, staff of the Neurology Department at Massachusetts General Hospital, and Site Director of the Bedford Division of the New England Geriatric Research Education and Clinical Center, U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs. Marc Weisskopf, Ph.D., Sc.D., is the Cecil K. and Philip Drinker Professor of Environmental Epidemiology and Physiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in the departments of Environmental Health and Epidemiology, Director of the Harvard T.H. Chan NIEHS Center for Environmental Health, and Director of Epidemiological Studies for the Football Players Health Study at Harvard. Lillien Waller is a poet, essayist, and editor. Her essays focus primarily on the intersection of art and personal history. In 2023, she was awarded an Arts Writers Grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to profile interdisciplinary artists of color in her hometown, Detroit.

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28 CM Winter 2026

Searching for Truth in the Age of s Misinformation i

BY BECCA GILLIS

H

ow many times have you realized that something you were reading or watching wasn’t entirely accurate? How many times have you failed to?

“Fake news,” a once-Trumpism that has now become a more ubiquitous term, has shown no signs of disappearing since it entered the popular lexicon around the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Between debates over bias in mainstream media outlets, the prevalence of inaccurate information online, and the increasing number of bots on social media, Americans’ trust in the information they consume has waned, accelerating a downward trend that has been observed since the 1990s. A Pew Research survey from late 2016 found that one-third of Americans said they often saw false information about politics online, and twenty-three percent said they had, whether knowingly or unknowingly, shared false information online themselves.

Nearly a decade later, we’re no closer to putting a cap on the spread of fake news. While by nature difficult to measure, misinformation (inaccurate information from a mistaken source) and disinformation (inaccurate information deliberately shared with the intent to manipulate) seem increasingly unavoidable, especially on social media. Reporting in October 2025, Gallup found that twenty-eight percent of Americans express trust in mass media, down from forty percent just five years earlier, in 2020.

But who is “the media,” and what has this era of misinformation meant for them? For Commonwealth alumni/ae working in newsrooms, there’s a clear imperative to face the evolving realities of our times head-on—and to carry on delivering good journalism to a public that needs and deserves it.

The Internet: Great Democratizer or Misinformation Breeding Ground?

I

t’s one of the most iconic journalism scenes in fiction: Ben Bradlee leaps up from his desk, marches across the newsroom of The Washington Post, and demands of Woodward and Bernstein, “Come on, we have to nail the Twitter copy for this!” Well, not quite. But the Internet has fundamentally transformed the Fourth Estate since Bradlee’s era. In today’s predominately digital media landscape, a one- or two-sentence social media post—or a headline—might be all an audience reads of a given news story.

“We put a ton of emphasis on thinking through how to present a story in a way that’s engaging, gets people to click, and doesn’t lose crucial nuance,” says Kate Cray ’15, senior associate editor at The Atlantic. Editing and occasionally writing for the magazine’s family 29

section, Kate works with stories that tap into the phenomena of people’s day-to-day lives, touching on parenting, education, social trends, and community issues. How to frame those stories, she explains, has become a vital part of the writing process in an ever more online world.

According to a 2025 Pew Research Center report, more than half of American adults say they at least sometimes get their news from social media, and eighty-six percent say they at least sometimes get their news on a smartphone or another digital device—compared to the seven percent who say they get news from printed newspapers or magazines. When readers encounter news online, they’re often “not seeing that full packaging,” as Kate puts it; stories are isolated rather than set within the context of surrounding stories in a physical newspaper or even a news-media homepage, and readers often quickly click away from articles, whether due to lack of time, lack of interest, or paywalls. The result: increased opportunity for misunderstanding and the subsequent spread of misinformation. “Any time you’re trying to summarize a 2,000-word story into a five-word headline, something’s going to be lost,” Kate acknowledges. “But there are a lot of conversations and a lot of care put into making sure that nothing too important is lost.… With headlines, for one story, you’ll sometimes have fifteen people brainstorming. You could probably make the case that it’s the most important text you’re coming up with.”

It’s not all bad news. Cara Bayles ’03, reporter for online legal news source Law360 and former Commonwealth teacher, has seen the benefits of digitized journalism, for reporters and readers alike.

“The Internet has democratized access to publishing; Law360 wouldn’t exist without the Internet,” she says. “It’s also allowed reporters to update readers as new information becomes available— that’s something that was formerly only available to broadcasters or to newspapers with evening editions. It’s also increased public access to the government to some extent. I can listen live to Supreme Court oral arguments and watch the judiciary hearings from my living room.… All of that would have required a lot more legwork fifty years ago.” But that easy access also means mis- and disinformation can spread like wildfire in a world where everyone is connected and few are held accountable for what they share online. “I fear the proliferation of artificial intelligence will worsen the effect of this, both for bad actors and for innocent people who simply take whatever ChatGPT spews out as gospel,” Cara adds.

At Boston public radio station WBUR, News Executive Editor Dan Mauzy ’01 says journalists are more skeptical than ever about what they find online, especially when it comes to images. As major news events unfold, journalists (like all of us) are flooded with photos and videos on social media “purporting to be documentary evidence when in fact they are from entirely different locations and time periods”—and that’s if the images are even real. Methods for identifying AI-generated photos are struggling to keep up with the increasingly sophisticated technology, Dan warns, making many images found online too risky for journalists to use. “If it’s not taken by one of our journalists, we need to be 100 percent confident in the provenance of a photo or video to consider using it in our work,” he says. “For instance, the video of ICE agents arresting Rümeysa Öztürk on a Somerville [Massachusetts] street that became one of the central flash points of the Trump administration’s detention of international students. Our journalist went to the home of the resident whose security camera captured the video, interviewed them, and obtained the footage directly from them.

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“The fracturing of our information systems, combined with some online communities retreating deeper into silos, and the ability of people to create false and misleading information with just a few keystrokes: that all is at least partly to blame [for misinformation],” Dan posits.

C

The Newsroom Where It Happens

onsidering the proliferation of dubious if not outright fake “news” in today’s world, it’s no surprise that Americans’ trust in the media is abysmally low. But is it warranted?

Have journalistic standards truly declined?

“No, I don’t think so,” Dan argues. “At least not broadly. Are there some journalism institutions—including major ones—that have seen a slackening of standards, or an intentional shift in standards, perhaps to curry favor with the current administration? Undoubtedly. But I think by and large the frontline reporters and editors who get into journalism do so because they want to report the truth and report it well.”

Kate agrees, noting that the fact-checking process at The Atlantic has only grown more rigorous as misinformation soars, and she challenges her writers and herself to think twice about cultural trends and phenomena. “We have these things that sort of sound right, so we just keep on repeating them,” she explains. “But when you interrogate it a little deeper, it’s a bit more complicated.” A trend that social media would have you believe is dominating the nation, she suggests, might only be popular among wealthy East Coasters or Silicon Valley tech enthusiasts. “Is that quite disinfo? Maybe not. But it is a way that you have to be skeptical of whether what seems true to you really is, before you start presenting that to readers.”

While many institutions are tightening standards in the pursuit of high-quality journalism, the field as a whole has come under fire for failing to live up to its ideals. Issues faced by marginalized communities have historically been underreported or reported disrespectfully, Cara notes, and the media has frequently failed to take seriously political candidates who deviate from the mainstream, including figures like Donald Trump and newly elected New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Dan Mauzy ’01

“It’s also the case that professional journalists can be careless,” Cara says. Reflecting on the 2012 Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act, she recalls how several news outlets jumped the gun and reported (incorrectly) that the individual mandate had been found unconstitutional. “I think they were basically reporting this breaking news before they’d finished reading the thing, while their fingers were still tracing the words on the page. I understand the impulse to get information out there, but sometimes, in the rush to be first, we forget our mandate to be correct.”

The field is not immune to the allures and pitfalls of generative AI, either. In May of 2025, for example, the Chicago Sun-Times suffered embarrassment as they published a summer reading list of fifteen books—only five of which were real. The paper quickly retracted the largely AI-generated article and clarified that it was purchased through an outside organization, not written by one of their staff. But how did it make it to print in the first place?

“I don’t think journalistic standards are declining across the board, but I do think there are new threats to them,” says Kate, citing AI as a looming concern. “Given how tough of an economic situation many [news] outlets are in, I think it just takes a lot of resources to properly fact check, properly edit, properly report. And I think many outlets don’t have that to the same degree anymore.”

For Dan, tackling ethical issues and offering guidance to WBUR’s reporters and editors is core to his work; in fact, he wrote the book on it (an expansive, though not exhaustive, ethical handbook for WBUR reporters). Dan sees an increase in anonymous sources as one recent ethical dilemma, as journalists weigh public trust against the need to protect sources. “It’s a constant struggle, and there are no clear right answers,” he says. In the absence of clear right answers, however, the need to continue asking the questions has never been more urgent.

A Business Model Problem

L

arge-scale solutions to tamp down misinformation remain elusive. Social media companies Meta and X have both moved to a “community notes” method of flagging misinformation, meaning that rather than employ third-party fact-checking agencies, the platforms rely on users to police the sites themselves by flagging posts they think are incorrect or misleading. These companies have called for prioritizing free speech and limited censorship (both politically loaded terms), and while they limit some content, misinformation remains rife. It seems unlikely, too, that the U.S. government will make any moves to combat misinformation given its purported concerns over First Amendment violations, relationships with tech CEOs like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and legislative gridlock in general. And then there’s AI, which remains a legal Wild West.

So how do we become more savvy consumers and news readers— and how do journalists build trust with an audience that’s lost faith in the media? “It’s not something I’m equipped to do, to change the public’s perception on whether media is trustworthy,” Kate admits. “But what I can do is be sure to be trustworthy and really earn that label.”

Dan agrees. “Newsrooms are made up of humans. They are engines fueled by the diversity of thought and experience of the journalists who work together,” he says. “The rigor of our editorial process, the independence of our journalism, and our show-our-work transparency are what I believe foster trust.”

One potential road to regrowing that trust lies close to home: local news organizations, despite their being hit hard by budget cuts and declining readership. “When you had a small-town paper, there was

Kate Cray ’15

a greater likelihood that you might have spoken to a reporter from it, seen a reporter from it,” says Kate. “Bringing that back to whatever degree you can is going to be good for increasing trust.” As an editor for a local news organization, Dan echoes the importance of people actually seeing and interacting with reporters, noting that his newsroom frequently discusses one particular Pew Research statistic: more than seventy-five percent of Americans say they have never spoken to a journalist. Bridging that gap between reporters and the community they serve, Dan says, is key, “whether it’s through in-person community engagement to being radically transparent about how and why we do our work to even short-form vertical video where you get to see a journalist help you understand an issue in the news in a conversational, straightforward manner.” True community representation is a vital component of this, Dan adds; seeing oneself in the news can radically increase trust in its content. “We need to do a better job ensuring that the sources in our stories reflect the vibrant diversity of our region.”

Media literacy, however, is a two-way street. Consumers share the responsibility of staying alert and aware. “I think the only antidote to bad information is good information, and we all have a role to play,” says Cara. She urges readers to “check [their] news hygiene”: verify that you’re consuming work from journalists who do their due diligence, think critically about what you read or hear, and make sure to differentiate between journalism and opinion writing. Simply having an awareness of the prevalence of misinformation, Kate says, “puts you ahead of a lot of people.”

It would be an understatement to say that journalism faces a complex set of challenges in this moment. And yet, a determination to keep fighting remains. “Journalism isn’t going anywhere,” says Dan. “Our industry is resilient and innovative. What we’re facing right now is a business model problem that is frustratingly hard to solve.

But as long as the news is providing value in people’s lives, journalism organizations will find a way to continue.” t Becca Gillis is the Communications Coordinator at Commonwealth.

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Meet Commonwealth Staff

D. Clinton Williams, Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

G

rowing up in Chicago’s “Black Metropolis,” the South Side, and going to the posh Hyde Park neighborhood for school, D. Clinton Williams saw socioeconomic divides first hand.

“Why can’t African Americans have all that?” he remembers thinking. “And how can I fight for that? The throughline of social justice has always been a part of my life.” He has since mentored and supported students in the same way he was once mentored and supported, including now as Commonwealth’s Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

What do you love most about working at Commonwealth?

I love the energy of Commonwealth. It really reminds me of my whole undergraduate experience at Oberlin College. I love the fact that people are not defined by what they’re wearing, where they live, or the 32 CM Winter 2026

resources they have. People come to Commonwealth to challenge those norms. The school gives students the chance to explore—whether it’s socially, whether it’s intellectually, whether it’s academically. When students get here, they say, “Oh, I found my crew. I found my cohort. I can be free to try new things.” That’s really exciting to me. And I love the fact that students are free-spirited! That was me in high school.

What led you to teaching?

I grew up in the racially segregated South Side of Chicago. You were defined by your identity, so that was always something that mattered to me. Even as a kid, I always wondered about the roots of economic inequality and racial segregation. Why does one community have less than another? School always gave me spaces where I could challenge those ideas and ask those questions.

I went to Kenwood Academy, a public magnet high school in Hyde Park, Chicago. At Kenwood and in Hyde Park, I met friends and had opportunities that expanded my worldview. I explored the University of Chicago after school, saw a young Barack Obama run for state senate, bought coffee next to Senator Carol Moseley Braun, and witnessed Jesse Jackson lead Operation PUSH. My school and the Hyde Park community helped me imagine a new world for myself but also instilled in me a desire to fight for the liberation of people from the African diaspora. Why can’t African Americans have all that? And how can I fight for that? The throughline of social justice has always been a part of my life.

Since I was in seventh grade, I knew I wanted to work with students and in education. In high school I tutored classmates, and I was a member of Future Teachers of Chicago. After Oberlin, I went to graduate school so I could teach at the college level. Then the opportunity to work at Phillips Exeter Academy as a history teacher, dorm supervisor, and club squash coach changed that trajectory. At Exeter my perspective shifted from teaching to administration. As a teacher I wanted to support my students, but I also wondered, “How do I create policies and opportunities that focus on access and equity, not just for students in my classroom but for hundreds or even thousands of students?”

I work closely with our faculty and my colleagues in Admissions, Advancement, and Communications, and I support the Student Life team in creating a healthy and inclusive learning environment. For instance, this fall, Carrie Healy (our Director of Admissions and Financial Aid; turn to page 12 to spend more time with her) and I led a faculty discussion on ableism. Later in the semester, I provided faculty guidance on how to respond to microaggressions. I collaborate with senior administration to diversify our recruitment and hiring practices and build partnerships with community-based organizations and other schools as we work to diversify our student body.

With [English teacher] Catherine Brewster, I’m a faculty advisor for the ninth-grade class, and I am part of the team that teaches the Ninth-Grade Seminar. I also support students in our affinity and alliance groups, such as Asian Pacific Peoples Affinity Group, FAM for Black/African-American students, Gender-Sexuality Alliance, Latino-Hispanic Association, First Generation Low Income Group, and Jew Crew. Students come to these groups to find community, and I help them build structure and programming. Commonwealth is a welcoming community, but these affinity spaces enable students who share a common identity or lived experience to connect, build fellowship, and share mutual concerns.

What led you to working in diversity, equity, and inclusion? And then to Commonwealth in particular?

When and how can students expect to meet you? And how can they connect with you during the school year?

I never thought I was working in “DEI”; I thought I was just doing the work that came natural to me! I worked with students from unresourced communities and first-generation backgrounds at Exeter, Paul Quinn College, and the University of North Carolina Greensboro. As I became more and more involved in this work, my friends and colleagues said, “The stuff you’re doing with students of color, students from backgrounds of limited income, students who have accessibility concerns: that is DEI work.” My last job, at Williams College, provided me with a framework for DEI work that helped me think strategically and see new horizons.

I identified with Commonwealth’s history—the commitment to social justice Charles Merrill had when he founded the school and the ongoing commitment to enrolling students from various socioeconomic backgrounds. I fell in love with the school during my visit. I thought [Head of School Jennifer Borman] and my predecessor did an excellent job of building out that foundation, and I just wanted to add to it, see how I could support it. It is really important for me that we’re mission driven and that our mission talks about diversity: this is why we’re here.

What do students (and families) need to know about you and what you do?

Oh my gosh, DEI touches on many, if not all, aspects of life at Commonwealth! DEI, I believe, is a shared responsibility, and I think of my role as a chance to work with the entire Commonwealth community to foster a culture built on respect and civility, personal growth, civil dialogue, and honest self-examination. A lot of what I do is to listen—to make sure individuals feel heard and to create opportunities, strategies, and initiatives that foster a sense of belonging. As a school we work to ensure DEI facilitates dialogue. We are constantly asking: How do we learn to listen closely? How do we learn to express our concerns? How do we deal with conflict? Our annual Diversity Day, which I oversee, is an example of how our community of students and faculty come together to explore the many facets of diversity at Commonwealth while encouraging open discourse on questions of race, class, gender, religion, ability, and more.

I think the most important part of any DEI position is just to be in the space where students are, and I try to meet them where they are: I’m always available to meet during school hours or even after school. I’m always available for email conversation. My office is always open to anyone who wants to come in and just sit and chat. As part of the Student Life team, I meet with all the new families over the summer. And I lead sessions on building community at new-student orientation. I am looking forward to developing new ways to connect with families, too.

What does a typical day look like for you?

When you’re an administrator, your days might not turn out the way you planned them! On any given day, there’s a student who wants to talk about what they are learning in class or others who need comfort because of various issues occurring in the world. So I try to be nimble and open to whatever is coming through the door. I think Ms. Borman and the rest of our colleagues have given me space to do that, so I can really be present with individuals—students and faculty and staff. I especially enjoy recess and assembly, and I love Tuesdays, when there’s class meetings and I get to connect with our first-year students.

Anything you’d like to add?

It really means a lot that this school was one of the first to say, “We will admit Black students, we will admit students regardless of their gender, regardless of their income” in 1958. That was right on the heels of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954 and just before the flawed school desegregation efforts in Boston in the 1960s and 1970. There’s this one quote from The Walled Garden [Charles Merrill’s memoir of founding Commonwealth] that I love. Writing in 1982, Merrill reflected on how Commonwealth could help Black students “on to positions of power and influence. Perhaps in this way the destructive patterns of American racial relations could be broken.” Reading that, I started to breathe in the history of this school, and I thought, “Oh, this is not just about what we’re doing in this five-story building; it’s about being a model of what education can look like.” t 33

1

A LU M N I /A E co n n e c t i o n s

HARVEST ASSEMBLY AND ALUMNI/AE REUNION 2025

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There was much to be grateful for at our annual Harvest Assembly, where we reveled in works by such poets as Gerard Manley Hopkins and Glenda Cotter, sang of sheaves and bountiful tables, and, best of all, welcomed back some recent alums, who chatted with teachers and current seniors at a special reception.

1. H appy Liang ’26, Jay Park ’25 2. F elix Métral ’25, Oliver Grant ’25, Govind Velamoor ’25, Yiray Wang ’25 3. Brooks Sjostrom ’25 4. D irector of College Counseling Gena Rodriguez, Eli Denenberg ’25 5. Mellanie Rodriguez ’25 6. Noora Harake '21, Olga Kazarov '21 7. Alums singing “Bringing in the Sheaves” 8. Athena Kuhelj Bugaric ’24 9. Jon Bing ’86, Head of School Jennifer Borman ’81

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CLASS OF 1975 50TH REUNION We were delighted to welcome members of the Class of 1975 back to Commonwealth, so they could revisit and reminisce 34building CM Winter 2026 each others' company off campus. Come back any time! in the before enjoying

SAVE THE DATE

COMMONWEALTH Alumni/ae Reunion Weekend November 6–8, 2026 | Boston, Massachusetts Don’t miss your chance to reconnect with friends and former teachers at our inaugural Alumni/ae Reunion Weekend. Highlights include faculty-led masterclasses at school, cocktails with friends, milestone reunions, career connections, and more…

Learn more—or help make it happen—by emailing advancement@commschool.org.

COMMSCHOOL.ORG/REUNION 35

Q

20 Questions with Sue Trupin ’62

S

ue Trupin’s next stop after Commonwealth was 1962 UC Berkeley, “a really wild situation” at a “very exciting” time. She opted to take a break from formal education to get married, have kids, and become a “back-tothe-land hippie” before becoming an RN. More than thirty years at San Francisco General Hospital ultimately led her to the front line of the AIDS epidemic, as charge nurse for the hospital’s Infectious Disease Clinic. The disease ripped through her personal life as well, when she lost a son to AIDS in 1995. While that seismic loss ripples through her life to this day, her work as a nurse has allowed Sue to support others through their own suffering. Today, at eighty-one years old, she still works as a private nurse advocate. “It keeps me on my toes,” she says. And that’s just the beginning; visit our website for the unabridged version of this chat: commschool.org/news.

1. Who was your favorite Commonwealth teacher? John Hughes. He turned me into a great reader, a great critical thinker. All of my teachers were fabulous, but John Hughes told me, “You know, Sue, you’ve got the goods.”

2. What is a standout Commonwealth memory? After my first year, Mr. Merrill took me into his office and said, “You’re great, but if you repeated one year, you would be on the honor roll for the rest of your time at Commonwealth. You just need to catch up.” I started first grade at just five years old, so I was young for my grade, but it’s still unbelievable to me that as a fourteen-year-old I agreed to stay an extra year, because staying back had great stigma attached to it. But I just wanted to be really good at Commonwealth.

Buddhist thought. We are all just part of the history of living things. Human existence is joy and suffering; know which is which. Regret is hell on earth.

writing the great novel or that I could have been a doctor—things I did in my 40s, 50s, and 60s, even. I feel like I’m my best self at this age, and I’m actually having a really good time. I’m free.

6. What does your ideal afternoon entail? Hiking around and looking at birds,

11. How do you define success? It’s this weird

alone or with a friend. Birds have been a sustaining passion since my twenties, when I was living in the country with two little boys and going a little crazy. Watching the miraculous migration of birds never fails to make me completely, deliriously happy.

7. Which word or phrase do you most overuse? “The devil is in the details.”

8. If you could have studied any field aside from your own, what would it be?

thing, losing a son: through this experience, you learn what is most important. The only currency of any value in this world, in this lifetime, is love.

It’s the only thing that really matters.

12. What are people surprised to learn about you? My medical community, my old hippie community, and my music community are always surprised by different things, like that I started a music camp with my husband [jazz drummer Eddie Marshall].

13. Coffee or tea? I love coffee more than

I would have liked to have been a wildlife biologist, a Jane Goodall kind of existence.

anything. It’s my favorite drug.

9. What was your favorite aspect of your career? Becoming a nurse has given me

ability to hold two opposing truths in your mind at the same time is really a reflection of wisdom. Paradoxical truths coexist and make your understanding of the world more nuanced and useful.

superpowers of a sort, because in the face of unbelievable pain and suffering, I have been able to make people feel better. To be that presence for someone else and be helpful in some way is really the greatest privilege of my life.

10. What do you appreciate most about being semi-retired? Because I’m fit, more or less, and in my right mind, thank God, life is very good. I don’t have a grueling job anymore.

(I loved my job, but it was grueling.) I still take care of a lot of people, but they take care of me as well. I’m not beating myself up about not

14. What is your favorite paradox? The

15. What do you bring to a potluck? I brought a radicchio, blue cheese, and walnut pasta to a potluck recently. It was very cool.

16. What was your go-to Boston eatery? I used to get lobster rolls at Kelly’s in Revere.

17. If you could live as a local for 48 hours anywhere in the world, where would you go? Clarksdale, Mississippi, for the civil-rights

3. What habit sustains you? I’ve always

history, the food, the music. Clarksville was really a fascinating place to sit for a while. It’s been so rocked by history.

loved to write, and I write a lot in my job—all these really sensitive letters to family members and patients. Everything is a writing exercise.

18. If you could join any past or current music group, which would you join?

4. What’s your advice for Commonwealth students? Half of having a good life is just

Goodness, there are so many. But I’d like to join this women’s jazz group called ARTEMIS that is just so fabulous.

showing up. Be grateful for your education and use it to be a good person.

19. What is the best gift you ever received? I don’t think about things very

5. What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever received? The greatest sorrow of my life is losing my son. I’m not a Buddhist, but all the wisdom I needed to endure that experience and make sense of a lot of things has come from 36 CM Winter 2026

much. I don’t think people live lives for things.

But I will say my husband once gave me a really great pair of binoculars.

Sue Trupin ’62

20. What is your motto? Be here now.

Choose Your

LEGACY

Planned-Giving Tools, Designed for the Commonwealth Community Estate planning can be overwhelming. Whether you are early in your career, nearing retirement, or managing assets for the next generation, there are myriad factors to consider. When you include Commonwealth in your plans, you create possibilities for future students while minimizing your (and your heirs’) tax burdens and simplifying your estate. But where do you start?

Commonwealth is part of your life. Now, make it part of your legacy: commschool.org/legacy

Visit Commonwealth’s new, robust planned-giving website (commschool.org/legacy) for: Estate-Planning Guide: A downloadable, comprehensive resource that will walk you through the steps and help you organize your information, needs, and wishes. n Tools to Find the Best Gift and Asset: Not sure if a bequest, IRA QCD, or other approach will suit you?

What about appreciated securities and capital gains taxes? These tools will help you identify what fits best with your life and financial picture. n Gift Calculator: Curious about annuities or charitable trusts? This calculator will break down the figures and project your impact. n

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While history teachers examine their discipline on page 16, we did some digging to find relics of their and their fellow historians' time at Commonwealth. Who do you recognize here?