The Exeter Bulletin, fall 2013

The Exeter Bulletin

FA L L 2013

Connections in the

Gap Fall 2013

Exonians take a break from academia for real-world exploration

Lamont Gallery Frederick R. Mayer ’45 Art Center 2013 & 2014 EXHIBITS

Melanie Mowinski

On & Off the Page Peter Beaman ’63 (with Elizabeth Whiteley), Lesley Dill, Juan Manuel Echavarría, Liz Maugans, Maureen Mills, Melanie Mowinski, Lisa Occhipinti, and Nicola Vruwink September 9-October 19, 2013

Alaska Book-a-Day Project

Catalyst: Work from Community-Based Arts Organizations Arts in Reach, Community Access to the Arts, Mudflat Studio and ESSO November 4-December 13, 2013 Opening Reception: November 8, 6:30-8 pm

David, Community Access to the Arts

Open Hearts Open Doors: Reflections on China’s Past & Future Photographs by Elizabeth Gill Lui P’95 Also on view: Living Hula & Building Diplomacy: Elizabeth Gill Lui & Keya (Lui) Guimaraes ’95 January 15-March 1, 2014 Opening Reception: January 24, 6:30-8 pm A Whole New Game: Sports & Games in Art March 24-May 3, 2014 Opening Reception: March 28, 6:30-8 pm Next Generation: The Annual Senior Art Show May 15-June 7, 2014 Opening Reception: May 16, 6:30-8 pm

Student at Mudflat Studio

Elizabeth Gill Lui West Lake, Hangzhou

Carlin Zia ’13 Eat Our Dust

Senior Art Show 2013 Lamont Gallery

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

Around the Table

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Contents

Principal Thomas E.Hassan ’56,’66,’70,’06(Hon.);P’11 Director of Communications Robin Giampa Editor Karen Ingraham Staff Writers Mike Catano, Alice Gray, Nicole Pellaton, Famebridge Witherspoon

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Features 20 | CONNECTIONS IN THE GAP

Exonians take a break from academia for real-world exploration

By Sarah Zobel

Class Notes Editor Janice M. Reiter Editorial Assistant Susan Goraczkowski Creative Director/Design David Nelson, Nelson Design Contributing Editors Edouard L. Desrochers Karen Stewart

26 | 35,000 MILES, 6,000 BOOKS One alumna takes her two children on an unforgettable journey

By Karen Ingraham

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Departments

Communications Advisory Committee Daniel G. Brown ’82, Robert C. Burtman ’74, Dorinda Elliott ’76, Alison Freeland ’72, Keith Johnson ’52, Yvonne M. Lopez ’93

10 Table Talk with Tarek Masoud ’93

TRUSTEES President G. Thompson Hutton ’73

14 Exoniana: Test your knowledge about the Academy’s Deed of Gift and seal

Vice President Eunice Johnson Panetta ’84

18 Exonians in Review: The Virgins by Pamela Erens ’81.

Reviewed by Daneet Steffens ’82

Wole C. Coaxum ’88, Flobelle Burden Davis ’87, Marc C. de La Bruyère ’77, Walter C. Donovan ’81, John A. Downer ’75, Mark A. Edwards ’78, Jonathan W. Galassi ’67, David E. Goel ’89,Thomas E. Hassan, Jennifer P. Holleran ’86, David R. Horn ’85, William K. Rawson ’71, Kerry Landreth Reed ’91, Dr. Nina D. Russell ’82, J. Douglas Smith ’83, Della Spring ’79, Morgan C. Sze ’83, and Remy White Trafelet ’88 The Exeter Bulletin (ISSN No. 0195-0207) is published four times each year: fall, winter, spring, and summer, by Phillips Exeter Academy, 20 Main Street, Exeter NH 03833-2460, 603-772-4311.

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

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

Copyright 2013 by the Trustees of Phillips Exeter Academy.

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

4 Around the Table: Opening of school, summer internships, new charter school collaboration, and more.

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30 A Rugby Rising Star: PEA girls basketball captain can also tackle by Craig Morgan ’84.

32 Connections: News and Notes from the Alumni Community 34 Profiles: G. Allan Forsyth ’49, Dr. Harrison Pope ’65 and Shannon O’Halloran ’01 92 Memorial Minute: Rick Parris, instructor in mathematics 96 Finis Origine Pendet: Returning Home to Exeter

By Joe Bain ’41

Visit Exeter on the web at www.exeter.edu.

Email us at bulletin@exeter.edu.

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THE EXETER BULLETIN IS PRINTED ON PAPER WITH 10% POST-CONSUMER CONTENT, USING SOY-BASED INKS.

COVER ILLUSTRATION BY DAN PAGE.

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New Outdoor Harkness Classroom An English class uses the new granite oval installed this summer on Ford Quad, in between Phillips Hall and Wetherell Dining Hall. A gift from the class of 2013, the oval is already a popular gathering place. —Photo by Nicole Pellaton

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The Exeter Bulletin

FALL 2013

The View from Here

FALL 2013

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Around theTable

What’s new and notable at the Academy

Pushing the Boundaries E X E T E R ’ S AC A D E M I C M I S S I O N I N T H E 2 1 S T C E N T U RY

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

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raditionally, Exeter students have been suit-

ably prepared for the world they are about to enter. Today that world is extraordinarily more complex, and what is considered “knowledge” has expanded over time as technology has evolved— not always adding to the body of erudition.

In the face of this information overload, Exeter remains true to its original calling and offers an education that not only prepares students for college but provides them with a balance of enriching experiences on and off campus. By sending both teachers and students out into the world beyond our campus, we believe that they will bring back what they have 4

The Exeter Bulletin

FALL 2013

NICOLE PELLATON

Editor’s Note:The following is excerpted from Principal Hassan’s Opening of School address, delivered on September 6.The principal spoke about the expectations founder John Phillips had for the school’s community—particularly “. . . the improvements of which the mind is capable, both in knowledge and virtue. . . .” Hassan addressed how the Academy today continues the long tradition of helping students and teachers expand their opportunities for learning and personal growth.

experienced and learned, and enhance the classroom conversation and education. We trust that students involved in these off-campus opportunities will apply that knowledge within their own lives and for the benefit of others.

We also seek to help our students find balance in their daily lives—not only by maintaining Exeter’s academic rigor, which is rightly a hallmark of this school—but also by supporting our young people in and out of the classroom. We must continue to focus our efforts on educating today’s and tomorrow’s students for what another oft-quoted section of the Deed of Gift calls, “the real business of living.”

As part of this commitment, the Academy’s offerings continue to challenge and to prepare our students . . . to discover “the improvements of which the mind is capable.” I suspect that many students here today, both old and new, were drawn to Exeter after looking at our Courses of Instruction, a book that has greatly expanded and evolved [over the years]. It outlines academic offerings in 16 different disciplines, from the study of Islam, to dance to quantum mechanics— more than 450 courses in all. I hope you take your Exeter opportunity to challenge yourself, to explore areas that might be new to you—even if they stretch your confidence beyond what you think possible right now. It was Robert F. Kennedy who said, “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” I assure you that you’ll get more from this experience if

you begin with that mindset and with the knowledge that Exeter faculty and staff are here to provide you with a safety net as you take on these challenges.

But this variety. . .the depth and breadth of subject matter. . .is only part of the equation. Any school can offer courses, can create standards. At Exeter, it continues to be how we learn, where we learn, and who we learn from that sets an Exeter education apart.

In fact, a very hot topic in education today—covered by both the popular press and academic journals—is student-centered and customized learning.

Both concepts encourage students to come to class prepared, to discuss a subject in ways that help them internalize and understand it. The concept is to forgo lectures and the requirement to memorize facts without context. Sound familiar?

I’m reminded of a passage from the foreward of a superb compilation of essays by former students. This introduction to Exeter Remembered was written in 1965 and it captures what some are espousing today as a new way to teach and learn: “The boy who comes to Exeter expects to acquire knowledge, of course, but knowledge he can find in most schools. . . .

More important is the fact that he is constantly under compulsion to make mental efforts . . . to develop the habit of attention, to regard minute points of accuracy, to work out what is possible. . . .”

Now, in an era when daily screen time may often outweigh real face time, the skills of dialogue, engagement and critical thinking are even more crucial. In a New York Times column from earlier this year, journalist Thomas Friedman wrote, “The more sophisticated and high-speed the Internet becomes, the more the basics matter: good judgment, respect for others who are different and basic values of right and wrong.

Those you can’t download.They have to be uploaded, the old-fashioned way, by parents around the dinner table, by caring but demanding teachers at school, and by responsible spiritual leaders in a church, synagogue, temple or mosque.”

Exeter’s traditional commitment to its academic mission and rigor—what I have termed Intellectual Ambition in the Immediate Priorities I have outlined for the school—relies heavily on the quality of our faculty, those whom Friedman terms the “caring but demanding teachers.” Exeter faculty dedicate their academic, and often much of their personal and family lives, to ensuring all Exeter graduates are prepared to think critically and offer a positive contribution to the community around them.

But in the 21st century, these contributions by students and faculty cannot take place only in the “Exeter Bubble.” They must affect people and places that are both inside and outside the traditional Exeter

experience. As we seek out youth from every quarter, so too do we seek out opportunities in every quarter.

In recent weeks, [for example] six Exonians left for Ghana, Africa, for our first study-abroad program in that country.

Providing opportunities that challenge how we think and engage with the world around us extends

“It continues to be how we learn, where we learn, and who we learn from that sets an Exeter education apart.”

beyond our students and our school. We also recognize the value in sharing with and learning from other educational institutions and systems. We are pleased to host, for the first time, two doctoral students as part of Exeter’s new Dissertation Year Fellowship program, which supports individuals in their academic pursuits as well as expands opportunities for our community to further access the research being done on the college and university level. And in Chicago, a new charter school supporting an underserved group of students is preparing to open, with Harkness teaching at its core.

These examples are just a few among many, throughout the history of our school, that illustrate the degree to which our academic mission remains at the core of all we do. As the school moves ahead and connects us more to the world beyond our campus, we will remain true to that mission.

Watch video I began this talk by referring to the openof the Opening ing lines of the Deed of Gift and I’d like to Assembly and hear close today’s remarks by drawing your attenPrincipal Hassan’s full remarks at tion to another opening: All of you will enter www.exeter.edu/ this Academy Building at one time or anothbulletinextras. er through the main door. As you do, be sure to look up and read the inscription over the entrance to our signature building. Those who have studied Latin will have an easier time. The English translation of the inscription is, “Here boys and girls seek goodness and knowledge.” I believe that all of us here, adults and students, are united in that search and that each one of us has the capacity and the eagerness to find the goodness and knowledge that are the promise of the Exeter experience.

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Around the Table

New Chicago Charter School Will Use Harkness Method P E A W I L L P ROV I D E T E AC H E R T R A I N I N G A N D M E N T O R S H I P

By Ethan Shapiro, director of Summer School

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n the fall of 2007, Associate Dean of Faculty Rosanna Salcedo P’16 and I made a Summer School recruiting trip to Chicago. One of the main stops on our itinerary was a visit to The Noble Network of Charter Schools. Noble began in 1999 as Noble Street Charter School, which was founded by two former Chicago Public Schools teachers; by 2007 it had expanded to three schools. We were drawn to Noble by its mission and success: In a few short years it had achieved the highest average ACT scores and college matriculation rates of any nonselective school in Chicago.

Our school visits confirmed for us that Noble had created something special. We met highly engaged and energetic teachers and administrators, the culture was one of academic rigor and accountability, and the students were unfailingly polite and motivated.

Everyone seemed to buy in to the mission that through hard work, discipline and scholarship, every Noble student could succeed beyond high school.

We recruited two Noble students to come to Exeter Summer School in 2008 and have maintained a close partnership with Noble ever since. Noble works hard to give its students summertime educational opportunities and 22 students from Noble have attended Exeter Summer School in the past six years.

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COURTESY OF NOBLE

Noble students in Chicago gather around a table to discuss Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.

It’s been a perfect fit for top Noble students because it provides them with academic rigor and challenge in a diverse boarding environment. Students who thrive at Exeter—even for five weeks in the summer—are more likely to develop the skills and mindset to succeed in college.

Two years ago, one of Noble’s principals, Pablo Sierra, brought his entire faculty to Exeter Summer School. That trip convinced the leadership of Noble that the Harkness method can and should be implemented in one of their own schools.

They see it as a game changer in urban public education—as a way to advance critical thinking skills, academic independence and maturity in their students. They asked for our help in realizing that vision.

For more than 20 years, Exeter has been committed to sharing our Harkness pedagogy with teachers and schools across the country and around the world. In the spirit of non sibi, Exeter teachers have introduced thousands of peers to student-centered learning, mostly in the context of weeklong summer workshops on and off campus.

Recently, Principal Tom Hassan has emphasized a commitment to extending the reach of Harkness beyond the campus. Beginning this year, Exeter will take a more comprehensive approach to sharing our teaching philosophy when we collaborate to help Noble implement Harkness teaching in a new school, slated to open in Chicago in the fall of 2014. Exeter will work with Noble to provide initial and ongoing teacher training in the Harkness method. We will go beyond the traditional one-week workshops and mentor teachers over time, helping them to create a school environment where student-centered learning and critical thinking become a part of the Noble culture.

Exeter and Noble are excited by this project because both sides recognize that we have much to learn from one another. The collaboration provides a great opportunity for us to test assumptions about Harkness teaching and learning, to come up with metrics for measuring the success of the project, and most importantly to share the Harkness gift in the best tradition of non sibi.

Around the Table

Reinterpreting the Bard DA N C E I N S T RU C T O R S P E R F O R M I N A H I G H LY M O D E R N V E R S I O N O F RO M E O A N D J U L I E T

NICOLE PELLATON

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taying still is not commonplace for Sarah Duclos.This summer the PEA dance instructor and founder of Neoteric Dance Collaborative put her relentless energy to use—and caused no end of audience appreciation—when she choreographed and performed in a very unusual production of Romeo and Juliet, staged outdoors in nearby Portsmouth, NH. Duclos was joined

by Allison Duke, director of Exeter’s dance program; Seven Stages Shakespeare Company (7SSC), which conceived the show; and several part-time and former dance teachers and choreographers at Exeter.

7SSC came to Duclos with a simple request: We want a vibrant reinterpretation of Romeo and Juliet with dance throughout. After an intense period of choreography and rehearsal, 7SSC and Duclos launched the show to standout reviews by critics and spectators.

The play was a riot of dance, with dubstep and rock bringing the bard’s classic to the 21st century.

Dubbed Romeo + Juliet for the print program and #ahranjay for social media, the players instructed audience members to leave their cell phones on and use them to interact with the perform-

PEA’s Performing Arts: How Did They Impact You?

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hether you were a stagehand, a capella singer in a student musical group, star of a mainstage performance or musician in a band or orchestra during your time at Exeter, we want to hear how the performing arts influenced you— then and now.

Maybe becoming comfortable on a stage in front of large audiences has helped you become a leader in the boardroom.

Or, dance rehearsals and performances led you to discover new ways of expressing yourself.Your chair in the orchestra may have even led to a notable career in music.

We are eager to hear your stories and share them with the broader alumni community to help us celebrate why the performing arts are such an integral part of the curriculum, and the Exeter experience.

Stories and anecdotes can be emailed to arts@exeter.edu.

Letters can also be mailed to The Exeter Bulletin, 20 Main Street, Exeter, NH, 03833.

ers, each of whom had an online in-character identity and actively tweeted, Vined and Instagrammed during the production.

“I firmly believe that as a teacher, you never stop learning,” says Duke, who enjoyed bringing her dancing to a Seacoast audience. “With the Romeo and Juliet project, I have grown incredibly as an artist. I have been challenged outside my comfort zones, but have also had the opportunity to help others learn outside theirs…. If teachers don’t make conscious efforts to improve and stretch their skills and knowledge, their teaching can become stagnant.”

7SSC, founded by Dan Beaulieu and Christine Penney, along with CJ Lewis, who played Lord Capulet in Romeo + Juliet, came to Exeter’s campus last June for a Shakespeare workshop with students. “It was nothing short of remarkable,” says Duke. “Students asked the 7SSC theater professionals specific Harkness-style questions, and 7SSC’s collective youthful energy activated a seemingly newfound appreciation for Shakespeare.”

Masked performers Allison Duke, director of Exeter's dance program, and PEA Dance Instructor Sarah Duclos perform in Romeo and Juliet.

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Around the Table

Exeter Welcomes New Trustees

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Goel

Reed

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he Academy welcomed new trustees David Goel ’89 and Kerry Landreth Reed ’91 during the Trustees’ fall meeting in October. Like so many who have the opportunity to experience Exeter, they’ve been shaped by their time here in profound ways.

“It is so hard for me to know whether the professors who instilled in me a lifelong love of learning would ever realize how much I would come to appreciate their efforts,” says Goel. “I suppose it’s an unfortunate fact that our professors give us our most precious gifts when we are too young to appreciate them. As a trustee, I feel like I finally have my chance to start making up for that.”

It’s a sentiment echoed by Landreth Reed. “Tom Hassan was my college adviser and Jack Herney interviewed me for Admissions. These two people were invaluable to my experience at Exeter, and if there’s anything I can do to support the next generation of people who are going to change the world, I want to do it in partnership with them.”

A cum laude graduate of Exeter, Goel lived in Wentworth Hall and was a member of the debate team. After Exeter, Goel attended Harvard University, earning magna cum laude honors in 1993 with an A.B. in government.

After college, Goel began his career as a financial analyst in the technology investment banking division of Morgan Stanley & Co. before moving to General Atlantic Partners and Tiger Management. In 1999, he started his own company, Matrix Capital Management.

Goel’s volunteerism with the Academy includes serving on both the Edward S. Harkness Society and the Leadership Committee of The Exeter Initiatives campaign. He is also currently involved in the school’s Global Initiatives program and has been an adjunct member of the Investment Committee since 2003.

A recipient of financial aid during his years at PEA, Goel considers his enrollment as “not just an opportunity to better myself, but a gift I was given. It impressed upon me the value of delivering scarce resources to where they can be most useful. I have spent my professional life in the area of understanding capital allocation—achieving the optimal return on capital—and I see my job as trustee in part a charge to bring that skill set…back to the school.”

Goel is a trustee of The Meadowbrook School in Weston, MA, and of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He is vice chairman of Boston’s Citi Performing Arts Center and a former director of Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

Goel and his wife, Stacey, were married in 2000. They live in Weston, MA, with their two children, Elizabeth-Grace, 8, and Noah, 5.

A managing director at Goldman Sachs, Kerry Landreth Reed says, “My experience at the Harkness table has had a direct and lasting impact on my career every day.”

Landreth Reed, then a Londoner, entered Exeter as a lower and lived in Hoyt Hall. She loved her time on the junior varsity field hockey and tennis teams. She also sang a cappella with the PEADQUACS and was an editor of The Exonian. A 1995 graduate from Stanford University with a B.A. in history, she says the history classes at Stanford were only a close second to those taught by PEA history instructors Jack Herney and Steve Smith.

Landreth Reed joined Goldman Sachs in Los Angeles immediately after Stanford, worked in Hong Kong, and is now based in San Francisco running the Equity Sales desk and overseeing West Coast hedge funds and mutual funds.

Currently president of her PEA class, she has been active in fundraising for Exeter and chaired several of her class’s reunion committees. She also heads the Leadership Council for The Nature Conservancy of California and is active with Tipping Point, an organization working to eliminate poverty in the Bay Area, and with the UCSF’s Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center.

Landreth Reed married fellow Exonian Creighton Reed ’90 in 2001.They live in San Francisco with their two children, Will, 8, and Bebe, 5.

Around the Table

The Other Side of the Table FIVE ALUMS INTERN WITH PEA’S SUMMER SCHOOL

LEELA WOODY ’13

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his summer, a group of alumni returned to campus to assume an unfamiliar role at the Harkness table—that of instructor. Chosen from more than 200 applicants for the Summer School Intern Program, five alumni joined the 14 other interns selected and immersed themselves in five weeks of guiding the middle school and high school students in their charge.

In making the leap from student to teacher at the Harkness table, the alums quickly discovered the nuances of leading a discussion, and the rewards and challenges inherent in that mentor role.

“Now that I’ve actually experienced teaching and trying to direct a class in a certain direction, I’ve realized how exciting it can be, but you have to wait and listen,” says Alexander Braile ’10, currently studying English literature at the University of New Hampshire.

Katherine Burd ’10, an English major at Davidson College, regularly checked herself with scribbled notes: “I used to write ‘restrain yourself ’ in the margins of my notebook every time I needed to [not] talk.”

“It’s challenging to accept that they would get more out of the time they spent struggling than having me just sort of hand them the answers,” adds Braile.

Elizabeth Honorato ’10, a junior at Mount Holyoke College majoring in math, taught trigonometry, geometry and painting, and says she often contemplated inserting herself into a learning moment with the students, which at times made sense. “I realized that it wasn’t wrong for me to say something,” she explains, “because they were struggling past the point of learning.”

Kendrick Campbell ’09, a physics major at Middlebury College, was struck by how much more she learned about quantum physics in order to prepare for each of her 12 students. “Before, you approached it from maybe two angles—your teacher’s and your own,” she says. “Now, you had to approach it from 12 different angles. I did the reading, but then I researched different avenues that might help them understand and relate more easily to quantum physics.”

Each intern’s discovery—an experience familiar to every seasoned Harkness instructor—underscores the complexity and skill behind igniting a discussion and encouraging the ideas that surface. Burd found wisdom early on in the advice she received from her internship mentor, PEA English Instructor Jason BreMiller: “He says that tension is always there. . . . He taught me the first day [that] one of the most important things as a teacher is just being interested . . . in who this student is . . . in what you’re teaching and reading every day.You have to figure out how to share your passion about something with students without just pointing them in a direction to it. Share your passion but not every opinion you have, that is a real skill.”

Lisa Marshall ’10, a senior at Elmira College pursuing a BA in English literature, adds, “I learned a tremendous amount about myself. I was so surprised with my ability to accept [being the] authority around these kids.”

For the alumni, internalizing sage advice went hand in hand with overcoming the awkwardness of working with former instructors. Braile, who worked with Chair of the Department of Modern Languages Richard Schieber P’16, says, “It became sort of fun. I’m working with [him] and we already know each other. But I couldn’t call him ‘Richard’; I called him ‘Herr Schieber.’ ” “Honestly,” offers Burd,“the weirdest thing about being around your old teachers is drinking a beer with them!”

The five alumni all say they grew from this experience and learned a lot about the real work behind being an instructor at the Harkness table and in the dorm. In fact, four of the five are planning to make teaching their life’s work.

(Left to right) Class of 2010 alums Elizabeth Honorato, Lisa Marshall, Alexander Braile, and Katherine Burd, with Kendrick Campbell ’09.

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Around the Table

Inside the Egyptian Revolution TA B L E TA L K W I T H TA R E K M A S O U D ’ 9 3

By Julie Quinn

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FRED CARLSON

arek Masoud studies one of the world’s most dynamic—and volatile—regions, the Middle East, in particular Egypt.

An associate professor of public policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and a Middle East specialist, Masoud focuses his research on political development in countries that are poor and, as he puts it, “unfree.”

Armed with an A.B. from Brown and a Ph.D. in political science from Yale, he wages an intellectual battle to uncover the processes by which governments can become more accountable and responsive to the needs of their citizens. The so-called Arab Spring, a series of popular uprisings that began in 2011, has provided him equal measures of hope and frustration: As fledgling democracies fight for their lives in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen, democracy has failed to take root at all in several of the region’s other countries.

The origins of Masoud’s interest in the politics and development of the Middle East can be found in his experience as a student at Exeter. “My parents are both from Egypt, and though I was born in the U.S., I spent my formative years, from 9 to 16, in Saudi Arabia,” he says. “I have always been very deeply interested in the politics of that part of the world. Though my parents sent me to Exeter expecting that I would become a doctor, it was Exeter more than anything else that planted the seeds of my current career.

“My favorite classes at Exeter were in writing and history. I still remember, and in my teaching try to emulate, Jack Herney and Arthur Gilchrist, both of whom were masters at fostering constructive debate. Outside of the classroom, I spent a lot of time arguing with my friends about the Middle East— this was right after the first Gulf War—and defending my [Muslim] religion, which even then was associated in American minds with terrorism and violence. Those arguments were sometimes painful, but they were painful because I was clearly most passionate about them. By the time I was a sophomore at Brown, I had worked up the courage to tell my parents that I was probably not going to be a doctor.

Their response was that I could abandon medicine if I got a doctorate.

“I love my career—teaching and writing about Arab and Muslim politics—because I believe it is critical for people in what is still the world’s most powerful nation to have a proper understanding of the people and politics of the region. The United States has a long history of intervention in that part of the world, sometimes for good, and sometimes for ill. It’s axiomatic that we’d do better by the region, and ourselves, if we understood it better.”

Masoud’s scholarly and popular writings all further that goal. He has just finished a book on political Islam in Egypt, which explores how the Muslim Brotherhood steadily rose to power over 80-odd

years, and how it lost that power so precipitously this past summer. He has also written articles on Arab and Egyptian politics for the Journal of Democracy, Newsweek, Slate, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Foreign Policy, among other publications.

Today the major focus of Masoud’s research is the revolution in Egypt. In January and February 2011, Egyptians took to the streets by the millions to demand the ouster of the longtime president, Hosni Mubarak. When Mubarak resigned in February 2011, many observers were hopeful the country was on the way to becoming a liberal democracy. But highly illiberal religious parties won most of the elected offices. Then, in July 2013, President Mohamed Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, was overthrown in a military coup that came on the heels of protests that dwarfed those that had unseated Mubarak two-and-a-half years earlier. Scholars, journalists and policy-makers are all trying to understand what went wrong, and whether Egypt still has a chance to make it to democracy.

According to Masoud, achieving democracy in Egypt has always been a long shot. Egypt, he says, is a poor country with a high degree of illiteracy, which doesn’t make it particularly fertile ground for liberal democracy. The vast majority of Egypt’s 81 million people want security and economic opportunity, and “It’s axiomatic that we’d would support authoritarianism if it provided those things, Masoud says. If true democracy is going to do better by the region, emerge in Egypt, it will not be the organic result of and ourselves, if we popular yearnings, but rather because political elites decide it is the best means of settling their differences. understood it better.”

That would require an extraordinarily enlightened political leadership—something, Masoud laments, that Egypt does not appear to have. Instead, political leaders of all stripes seem intent on routing their opponents rather than working with them.

Masoud points out that in the aftermath of Mubarak’s ouster, the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies captured power, and they used it to purge supporters of Mubarak from the government. “They even included an article in the constitution that would ban Mubarak cronies from political life altogether,” he explains. “As a result, instead of participating in the democratic process, these Mubarak supporters decided to subvert it. Mubarak-affiliated businessmen used their newspapers and television stations to broadcast a steady stream of invective against the government, and loyalists in the state apparatus, particularly the police, dragged their heels on the job, leading to a deterioration of public order.”

Masoud says that Egypt’s genuine liberals, who could have been allies of the Muslim Brotherhood in its fight against the Mubarak regime, were alienated by the Islamists, who rammed through a highly conservative constitution, and who did little to include liberals in government. As a result, a coalition of Mubarak loyalists and more-liberal politicians eventually called on the military to overthrow President Morsi and purge the Muslim Brotherhood from power.

If the Muslim Brotherhood’s sin was excluding political opponents from government, those opponents, now ascendant, seem intent on replicating the error. Returning from Egypt in September, Masoud reports that “the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies are currently being hounded on the streets of Cairo, President Morsi and senior Muslim Brotherhood leaders languish in jail and are soon to be brought up on charges of treason, and state media is working overtime to portray them as terrorists out to destroy Egypt.”

Masoud adds, “There is no surer way to really turn them into terrorists than by continuing to deny them a seat at the table. They may reject any overtures at first, but the door to reintegration has to remain open if Egypt is to have a fighting chance at democracy.”

In a recent article for Foreign Policy, Masoud argued that Egyptian political leaders need to take a lesson “from their Muslim brothers 5,000 miles away, in Indonesia. In 1998, that country’s strongman, Suharto, who had ruled since 1967, was forced to step down by protests remarkably similar to those that brought down Mubarak. … But their willingness to forgo retribution and work with supporters of the old regime is what allowed that country’s nascent democracy to take root despite its endemic poverty and vast ethnic diversity.”

Masoud does not know whether it’s too late for Egyptians to change course, but he hopes other Arab countries that are currently experiencing their own revolutionary and counter-revolutionary upheavals will be able to learn from Egypt’s example, and perhaps avoid its fate.

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Around the Table

Campus Life at a Glance DAMIAN STROHMEYER

Snapshots from the first weeks of school (A) 352 new students arrive at Exeter in September, joining 755 returning students for the 2013-14 school year. (B) The boys cross-country teams begin their season with a practice session on the Academy fields. (C) Boys varsity soccer captain Henry Stevens ’14 drives the ball during a game against St. Paul’s School. Exeter won 2-1. (D) Artist Melanie Mowinski discusses one of her pieces during the Lamont Gallery’s opening reception of “On and Off the Page,” which features the works of Mowinski and eight other artists. (E) September sun brought the girls from Hoyt Hall out for egg-and-spoon races during Academy Life Day. (F) The Chemistry Club makes a colorful pitch for new members during Club Night, the annual two-hour fair showcasing PEA’s student organizations. (G) Students and employees build bird houses to hang within the Academy Woods as part of the school’s participation in the national Green Apple Day of Service.

STEFAN KOHLI ’14

MIKE CATANO

A

B

C

MIKE CATANO

NICOLE PELLATON

D

E JOANNE LEMBO

MIKE CATANO

F

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Around the Table

An International Stage I S A A C S C H U LT Z ’ 1 3 T R AV E L S W I T H C A R N E G I E H A L L’ S F I R S T N AT I O N A L YO U T H O R C H E S T R A

CARNEGIE HALL NYO

L

ast spring Isaac Schultz ’13 was the only musician from New Hampshire chosen from 10,000 U.S. applicants to be among the first 120 performers of Carnegie Hall’s National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America.

The experience, he says, was life altering.

Seven-hour daily rehearsals in July before the 11-day, five-city tour of musical capitals worldwide were challenging, but Schultz— no stranger to this type of musical preparation—was excited to be working with an elite, diverse group of what could be future professional musicians. The choice of conductor was also significant: Maestro Valery Gergiev is the artistic and general director of the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russia, and the principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra.

“Maestro was one of the greatest musicians I’ve ever played for,” Schultz says. “When he was on the podium, the orchestra was dead silent out of respect and awe. He lifted the orchestra to a [higher] level, and we felt like professionals when we played for him. He conducted with a pencil during every rehearsal, but could express every emotion of the music with his hands.”

Schultz also played with featured soloist Joshua Bell, a violinist and music director of the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields. Schultz’s own musical career began when he picked up the bassoon at age 9. Before he graduated from PEA, Schultz had served as principal bassoonist of the Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra and performed with the New England Conservatory’s Youth Philharmonic Orchestra, as well as with a number of area youth and festival orchestras.

Schultz and the other NYO-USA orchestra members, serving as international youth ambassadors as well as musicians, performed in July at Purchase College’s Performing Arts Center in Purchase, NY; the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.; the Great Hall of Moscow Conservatory in Moscow, Russia; Mariinsky II (New Theatre) in St. Petersburg, Russia; and Royal Albert Hall in London.

“The greatest moment of our tour was our final concert in the Royal Albert Hall,” Schultz says. “People started waiting in line in the morning, bringing lawn chairs and lunch. By the time I went to the stage entrance midafternoon, the line was more than a block long.

“I felt like a rock star; I’d never imagined there would be people willing to wait that long to hear my orchestra,” Schultz says, recalling the enormous concert hall of more than 5,200. The orchestra’s encore—a suite from Porgy and Bess—“dripped with emotion,” he adds.

Schultz’s summer experience is, no doubt, something he draws from this fall as a first-year conservatory student at The Shepherd School of Music at Rice University.

(Top) Bassoonist Isaac Schultz ’13 speaks with conductor James Ross.

(Bottom) Schultz during a rehearsal.

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Around the Table

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

There will be two prizes awarded at random from the correct responses received.

Email us at Exoniana@exeter.edu. Or, send your responses to Exoniana, c/o The Exeter Bulletin, Phillips Exeter Academy, Communications Office, 20 Main Street, Exeter, NH 03833.

Entries may be edited for length and clarity.

Do you know: Which curricular imperatives John Phillips cited in his incorporation of the school? a) Geography and navigation b) Music and the art of speaking c) Zoology and biology The designer of the original school seal? a) Benjamin Franklin b) Daniel Webster c) Paul Revere The symbolism behind the bees on the Academy seal? a) A group of industrious scholars b) The importance of science as a discipline c) The prominence of agriculture when the school was founded The co-signer of the original Deed of Gift? a) Daniel Webster b) John Taylor Gilman c) Elizabeth Phillips What the lion rampant, now PEA’s mascot, first appeared on? a) A 1915 issue of the student literary magazine, The Phillips Exeter Monthly b) Amen Hall’s flagpole when the dormitory first opened in 1925 c) A book plate designed for John Phillips in 1775

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Answers to the summer 2013 issue:

The sundial is located between three dorms—Amen, Cilley and Wentworth—with the inscription, “Built in 1925 with gifts from the alumni and friends of the Academy whose names are inscribed hereon.” Two alumni correctly identified its location, and each received an Exeter passport holder.

Our winners are: Jonathan M. “Jon” Kiger ’81; P’14, Dunwoody, GA

“My father,Tom Kiger ’51, had his photo taken there when he was a student in Cilley Hall and took mine there when I lived in Cilley.We felt it was only fitting that my son, David ’14, have his photo taken there as well.When discussing the sundial with longtime Amen faculty member Rick Schubart, he thought that the whole sundial and stand were moved at one point to allow more room for faculty children to play in the area adjacent to the dorms. For those with a keen eye, that would explain the different location between my father’s photo and David’s (mine for some reason was taken with Amen in the background). So, we basically have photos of our family members at the sundial that cover a range of more than 60 years!”

Russell S. “Russ” Washington ’89, Mableton, GA

“If my memory properly serves me, this item is sitting outside of Amen Hall, in the quad it shares with Cilley and Wentworth. (Cue the Wentworth chants if one must—but hey, I’m a tried and true Cilleyite.)

I must state sadly that I only vaguely remember this item as “that thing over there” rather than as a sundial. I never really got close enough to figure out that it is what it was, but I definitely remember noticing the pedestal-thing from afar, and I now realize, as I inch forward toward my 25th reunion, that I had better get back for a closer look.”

PEA ARCHIVES

To honor the start of another school year, PEA’s 233rd, a little trivia for you: Test your knowledge about the Academy’s Deed of Gift, the seal and the lion rampant by choosing the right answers below.

Letters Modern Exeter

The picture on pages 20 and 21 of the summer 2013 issue showing the classical diploma graduates is fantastic. This truly is not your grandfathers’ Exeter!

Richard M. “Dick” Locke ’61 Walnut Creek, CA More to the Story

Thank you for the article “From One Principal to Another” by Susannah Clark ’83. I have known Zack Lehman ’91 for many years, starting in Baltimore at the beginning of his Exeter tenure, and I reconnected with him in 2000 while he was tending goal at the Exeter/Andover alumni lacrosse game. Following that event, Zack told me of his plans to leave his nascent law practice and start a new nonprofit called MetroLacrosse. Aggressive and entrepreneurial as ever, Zack was adventurous enough to ask me to chair its new board of directors. Zack served as founder and chief executive officer for an extraordinarily successful seven years, during which approximately 5,000 young girls and boys participated in the program.

As stated in its mission, “MetroLacrosse provides youth from historically underserved urban communities with a sportsbased character education program.

Through its character education curriculum, which builds upon the lessons learned while participating in team sports, MetroLacrosse youth develop strong communication skills, learn to live a healthy lifestyle, resolve conflicts and disputes in a positive way, and discover their ability to lead and work effectively with others.

MetroLacrosse provides opportunities that similarly help participants become more self-confident, motivated and active members of their community. In all, MetroLacrosse teaches youth to take an active role in ensuring their own success in life.”

I bring this to your attention having noted the significant gap in Zack Lehman’s career as reported in the [summer] Bulletin’s article. Zack’s vision for MetroLacrosse and his execution of its mission demonstrated

many of the skill sets and fundamental objectives that later led to Zack’s success at Gould Academy and the enthusiasm with which he has been received at The Hill School. Coincidentally, a few months ago I crossed paths with Kendra Stearns O’Donnell and received a brief first-hand report on her productive counselor relationship with Zack at The Hill. I fully expect to hear more about Zack Lehman and his contributions to secondary education as the years progress. Stay tuned!

Stephen H. Gardiner ’66 Cambridge, MA Secular Representation?

One could read “Sharing Sacred Ground” in your spring 2013 issue and conclude not only that the practice of religious faith is an important component of the educational experience at Exeter, but that it has become an essential one.

I hope it is not. Surely in addition to Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish and Christian practitioners, there are at Exeter one or two thoughtful students who have concluded—or at least questioned—the idea that there exists an all-powerful prime mover, a basic tenet for at least three of the religions cited.

No atheist clubs? No group of students who question the existence of God? Seems very unlikely to me. While I was fairly blatant about my religion when I was at Exeter, I was regularly questioned about it by thoughtful, skeptical non-believers whose intellectual acumen I now think probably exceeded my own.

If Exeter’s atheists, agnostics and other secularists choose not to form groups and meet at the Phillips Church that’s fine.

But perhaps they should cook up some tasty meals once in a while, like those clever folks who host the Shabbat dinners.

They could share their food with members of the believers’ clubs, just to keep their hand in, and perhaps earn a mention in The Exeter Bulletin’s articles about religion on campus.

Phil Harvey ’56 Cabin John, MD

CHERYL SENTER

Around the Table

PEA Closes for a Day of Service More than 400 employees volunteer at three nonprofits In late August, right before students returned to campus, Academy classrooms and offices were vacated so that more than 400 employees could join together for a day of community service.

The first Academy-sponsored “Community Connection Day,” launched by Principal Tom Hassan, provided an opportunity for employees from every administrative and academic department to experience, enjoy and share in an act of non sibi, as well as pause in their busy schedules to form new connections with colleagues and strengthen existing ones.

Dozens of teams assisted in initiatives at the Seacoast Science Center in Rye, NH; Wings & Hooves Therapeutic Riding in East Kingston, NH; and YMCA Camp Lincoln in Kingston, NH.The day was organized with help from the City Year Care Force, which oversaw the on-site work.View a gallery of images from Community Connection Day at www.exeter.edu/bulletinextras.

Corrections In the summer 2013 issue of The Exeter Bulletin, on page 27 of the graduation feature, we mistakenly identified the graduate as Antigone Valen ’13. A classmate was quick to correct us and provide the proper ID: Olivia Jackson ’13. We apologize for the mix-up.

Carlin Zia ’13 should have been listed as one of the girls varsity lacrosse co-captains on page 37 in the summer 2013 issue.

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Around the Table

From a Physics Lab in Japan to the Arctic Sea S T U D E N T S E X P L O R E D I S C I P L I N E S , PA S S I O N S A N D H I G H P E A K S

E

Nikhil Raman ’14 and Saaketh Krosuri ’14 at the RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science in Japan.

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xonians explored the world this summer:They studied language and science in Japan, presented research to foundation executives in Boston, attended leadership courses in Hawaii and New York, dissected fruit flies in California and trod the Arctic’s ice collecting cores. Others enjoyed different turns at experiential learning—hiking the Himalaya, getting immersed in poetry, teaching English in rural China, and exploring new countries and cities.

All returned to campus with insights to share. “I will remember this internship as one of the best experiences of my life,” says Saaketh Krosuri ’14, who studied physics in Japan. For many, like Elle MacAlpine ’14, who worked in a research lab at Stanford School of Medicine, led by Dr. Seung Kim ’81, these off-campus experiences help frame future choices. “I can’t wait to get back to the lab bench again,” MacAlpine says, “whether it’s with Dr. Kim or in a whole different field.” Anika Ayyar ’14, who worked alongside MacAlpine this summer and whose initial contact with Dr. Kim during a summer science program at Stanford ultimately led to the fruitful Stanford/Exeter collaboration called “StanEx,” says this about her internship: “The experience has reinvigorated my excitement for research and has introduced me to so many intelligent, kind people.”

Alice Ju ’14, who interned at the Conservation Law Foundation in Concord, NH, and Stefan Kohli ’14, who interned at the CLF in Boston, both received the full intern experience: They did everything from stuffing envelopes to preparing comments for submission to the Environmental Protection Agency on low-impact stormwater drainage strategies (Ju), and a presentation to the president and directors on effective storytelling approaches for the CLF’s message (Kohli).

“I have learned that some ideas that may sound good in theory would not work in practice, and vice versa,” says Ju, who brings her stormwater expertise back to PEA, where she plans to work on the Lamont Health & Wellness Center’s new green roof and rain garden. “I have also gotten a glimpse of the amount of work and research necessary to institute any policy change, and the strategies and concessions one must make when doing so.”

“I found myself loving Japan,” says Krosuri, who with classmate Nikhil Raman ’14, traveled to the RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science outside Tokyo. They studied with leading researchers, alongside undergraduate and graduate students from major universities in China, Japan and Korea. Krosuri’s best moment came on the last day, when he and Raman presented their experiment findings: “We found ourselves actually being able to present something to our much more qualified peers that captured their interest in addition to teaching them something new!” Krosuri and Raman maintained a blog during their trip, starting with their first impressions of Tokyo and RIKEN (“surreal but exhausting”) and culminating with an experiment involving one of RIKEN’s heavy ion-particle accelerators.

Davis Leonard ’14 was propelled by a passion for poetry to an internship at the Academy of American Poets.

“It was my job to read through hundreds of poems and pick 20 for the academy’s monthly newsletters,” she says. She worked with several MFA students from Columbia University School of the Arts, and helped with a

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(Top) Yongbeom “Eric” Kwon ’14 (right) and his father in the Himilaya. (Bottom) Elle MacAlpine ’14 at work in a Stanford research lab.

workshop in New York City high schools. “I left the workshop with the exquisite knowledge that I had weeks of work left at the academy to let this poetry adrenaline now whistling through my veins get a chance to work itself down.”

MacAlpine’s summer focused on fruit flies: dissecting the rice-sized larvae and imaging their tissues. “We did not do experiments written out in a high school textbook with a predetermined outcome.We performed real experiments where we didn’t know what would happen,” she says. Her project is an ongoing collaboration between Exeter and Stanford, where Kim spearheads research into how pancreatic islet cells develop, function, regenerate and change in disease. MacAlpine worked on fruit fly stocks that had been developed at Exeter during spring term. Dissections were a favorite activity.

“My first couple resulted in rather mangled organs,” MacAlpine says, “but when I finally dissected a larva gracefully, I felt incredibly successful.”

MacAlpine and the interns at RIKEN, AAP and CLF took part in some of the experiential-learning projects organized through Exeter’s Global Initiatives program; others explored on their own.

Yongbeom “Eric” Kwon ’14 hiked the mountains of Nepal with his father, traveling from an altitude of 6,250 feet above sea level at the start of their journey to a high of 23,494 feet at Kala Patthar. “[After] weeks of walking and thinking, I came to personal revelations and worldly ideas that wouldn’t come to me in the midst of the distractions of the modernized world,” he says.

Alan Guo ’14, meanwhile, took to the sea and traveled with climate change researchers aboard the polar icebreaker USCGC Healy to the Arctic, where they gathered sediment cores to analyze. His experience evolved from a 2012 Student Council Summer Fellowship he did at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts.

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Exonians in Review

The Inbetween of Innocence Lost T H E V I R G I N S , B Y PA M E L A E R E N S ’ 8 1 A review by Daneet Steffens ’82

P

amela Erens’ The Virgins, set at elite boarding school

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effective scene, is gripped by childlike fear in the face of his alcoholic mother’s public drinking. Bruce’s family legacy is one of blue-blooded privilege, but in reality he’s horrifyingly sleazy, harboring a disquieting amount of rage and a distinct lack of empathy, a young man who seems to care more for his Discraft Sky-Styler Frisbee than he does for other people. Will he, you can’t help thinking, grow up into American Psycho-style adulthood? In The Virgins, Bruce is Erens’ finest achievement—a character both relentlessly riveting and endlessly disturbing.

But wait, there’s more: Erens peppers her text pleasurably with time-sensitive identifiers both redolent and amusing, from Farrah Fawcett haircuts, Wella Balsam shampoo, clove cigarettes and peasant skirts, to The Thorn Birds, Noxzema and Tab. She’s also a dab hand at terrific turns of phrase and evocative imagery that inject real joy and life into the narrative. During a New York City sojourn, for example, “[t]he indifferent, skeptical gaze of the city has worn Aviva down; she feels tiny, like a child calling out to be heard at a parade.” Aviva’s childhood bed’s mattress “lay so high up for the six-yearold girl that to get into bed she had to make a running leap from the other side of the room”; Seung, swimming, “covers the length of the pool in a few hard strokes, curls, and like a circus tumbler reverses direction”; and one highstrung character is captured as a perpetual human vibration: “Even when she is still she seems to be in frenetic motion, like a humming bird whose wings must beat thousands of times a minute just so it can stay in place.”

That Erens has the clear-eyed hindsight of boarding school life’s details down pat almost goes without saying: As a fellow alumna, I could nod and giggle along to the familiar references— the ratty, worn furniture and décor of the basement butt room, the stigmatization of having to stay in your dorm over Thanksgiving, the parent-sponsored expensive dinners at the fancy inn down the road—but the complexity and specificity of Erens’ characters, and the palpably raw tenderness with which she evokes their fraught experiences, elevate this book beyond the boarding school setting into wider readerly territory. And the zingiest icing on this particular literary cake? One of the funniest takedowns of Wuthering Heights—a book Aviva considers “an embarrassment to anyone female”—ever recorded.

MIRIAM BERKLEY

Auburn Academy in 1979, is poignant, funny and sly.Teens Aviva Rossner and Seung Jung are a hot-and-heavy couple enjoyably as well as anxiously caught in the grip of their burgeoning sexuality and their social awakening. Partly a coming-of-age novel, The Virgins dispenses with a certain amount of adolescent innocence—there are seriously unfunny and chilling glimpses of one young couple already fully immersed in an abusive relationship— in exchange for a disturbing scandal with an apparently undetected crime at its heart, and a narrator who manages to be both quintessentially unreliable as well as hands down the most compelling character in the book.

A deft and skilled writer, Erens ’81 imbues the story with quietly vibrant life. Her precision-perfect prose and immaculate pacing cast a mesmerizing, reader-friendly spell, and her characters thrum and thrive on their intense teen passions, heartfelt friendships and hometown family complications. Cannily managing her army of adolescents and the all-too-familiar distance between their perceptions of appear- The Virgins is Pamela ance and reality, Erens exposes their Erens’ second novel. deepest insecur ities with lightly turned, heart-stabbing sentences that always hit their mark: Aviva, generally admired and popular, is a recognizable mess of contradictions who “fears that if she speaks, her feelings will be found wanting. . . . She wants to be giddy and silly. . . . At the same time she does not want to say something that cannot be unsaid.”

This is “a girl who fears what is inside of her.” Meanwhile, Seung, a golden boy in his own right, is interiorly crippled by self-perceived failure: “It’s the feeling most familiar to him. That sinking down, that scrabbling in the dirt, never finding purchase . . . the failure to be a normal American boy with a normal American dog that romped and played and fetched sticks.”

Then there’s narrator Bruce Bennett-Jones, who hails from the same hometown as Seung and has a thing for Aviva from the first moment he sees her. A distinctly odd mix, he pursues his theater director-focused dreams, secretly defying his disciplinarian father when it comes to college applications. He is perceptive and controlling enough to keep his Dungeons & Dragons and New Wave music passions under the social-scene radar, but, in one painfully

Alumni are urged to advise the Exonians in Review editor of their own publications, recordings, films, etc., in any field, and those of classmates. Whenever possible, authors and composers are encouraged to send one copy of their books and original copies of articles to Edouard Desrochers ’45, ’62 (Hon.); P’94, P’97, the editor of Exonians in Review, Phillips Exeter Academy, 20 Main Street, Exeter, NH 03833.

ALUMNI

1955—Douglas M. Bowden. American Letters from Khrushchev’s Russia: Surprising Impressions of Life Behind the Iron Curtain 1961–62.

(CreateSpace, 2013)

1981—Leslie Bangs Thomas and A. Agliardi, illustrator. New York, New York: Una guida per tutta la famiglia. (Feltrinelli, 2013)

1956—William Bayer.

City of Knives: A Novel of Buenos Aires. (Crossroad Press, 2013)

BRIEFLY NOTED

1954—John Felstiner.

“Chile’s Golpe and Neruda’s Deathbed Poem.” IN The American Poetry Review. (v. 42, no. 5, September/ October 2013)

1971—Joyce Maynard.

After Her: A Novel. (William Morrow, 2013) 1984—Nicholas Benson, translator. The Arsonist. [L’incendiario: Col rapporto sulla vittoria futurista di Trieste (Italian Edition), by Aldo Palazzeschi.] (Otis Books/ Seismicity Editions, 2013)

1977—Kathleen C. Engel and Patricia A. McCoy. “Federal Preemption and Consumer Financial Protection: Past and Future.”

IN Banking & Financial Services Policy Report. (v. 3, 25, March 2012)

1976—Frank W. Daykin III. Encyclopedia of French Art Song: Faure, Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc. (Pendragon Press, 2013)

1996—Jasmine Dreame Wagner. Rewilding.

(Ahsahta Press, 2013)

—Sound Bites: A Novel about Politics and the Media. (Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2012) William Jordan. [Afterword] IN The Voice of the Negro (1919):The Classic African American Account of Riots and Lynching in America After the First World War, by Robert T. Kerlin [and others]. (Mellen Press, 2013)

1996—Ketch Secor, Old Crow Medicine Show [band]. Carry Me Back to Virginia [CD]. (ATO Records, 2013)

1975—John O. McGinnis.

Accelerating Democracy:Transforming Governance through Technology. (Princeton University Press, 2012)

Victor L. Cahn and others. Polishing Your Prose: How to Turn First Drafts into Finished Work. (Columbia University Press, 2013)

1972—Juliet P. Kostritsky.

“The Law and Economics of Norms.” IN Texas International Law Journal. (v. 48, no.

3, 465-505, summer 2013)

1965—Charlie O. Smith.

Men in Miami Hotels: A Novel.

(Harper Perennial, 2013)

1973—Mark Hathaway.

World Locked In: Six Weeks in Coma and Beyond. (Maine Authors Publishing, 2013)

FACULTY/ FORMER FACULTY

1978—Warren Botnick and others. “An integrated analysis of the efficacy of fluticasone furoate nasal spray versus placebo on the nasal symptoms of perennial allergic rhinitis.” IN Allergy & Asthma Proceedings. (v. 34, no.

3, 283-291, May-June 2013) 1996—Jasmine Dreame Wagner. “Black Water Black Swans.” [poem] IN The Seattle Review [University of Washington]. (v. 5, no.

2, 2012)

—“Cosmopolitans, ‘Townies,’ and the rise of conservative populism.” IN Writing from the Inside Out [IWT/ Bard College]. (v. 7, 2012) Matt W. Miller. “On the Rocks.” [essay] IN The Rumpus. (July 2013) Ralph Sneeden. “Physical Fitness.” [poem] IN The Prague Revue. (v. 9, June 2013) —“Shinkawa’s Problem.” [poem] IN Zócalo Public Square. (June 2013) —“Boys riding bicycles to school.” [poem] IN The American Poetry Review. (v.

42, no. 4, July/August 2013)

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hile his former classmates were wrapping up their freshman year of college, Jan Shi ’12 was stranded on Kakaban, an uninhabited island in the heart of Indonesia.

He’d made careful arrangements to travel to the island and assumed a tourist boat would be in the area when he needed to leave. Shi had brought food and supplies to last four days, but an unexpected storm meant no boats and no tourists, so a week came and went.While he waited, Shi swam with nonstinging jellyfish, used a makeshift wooden spear to fish, foraged for vegetation and coconuts, and tasted his first land crabs. After 11 days, just when he couldn’t stomach another crab, a sympathetic boat captain offered him a lift.

That was just one of many memorable episodes Shi experienced in the 14-month period between his Exeter graduation and his departure for the University of Virginia, where he’s currently a freshman. That year between studies gave Shi, of Boston, a chance to see up close some of the things he’d only read about—the birds of paradise and other creatures endemic to Southeast Asia that he’d studied in his Animal Behavior class, for example—while learning firsthand through stays with local families what daily life is like in that part of the world.

The idea of academic downtime between high school and college has changed over the past 40 years.What was once a break from the classroom to be a ski bum or wait tables has evolved into living in other cultures within U.S. borders or, more often, outside of them. Students who take a “gap” or “bridge” year may travel,

Gap

Connections Exonians take a break from academia for real-world exploration

By Sarah Zobel Illustration by Dan Page

in the

staying with local families and learning or polishing foreign language skills; they may test themselves by traveling solo, as Shi did, or journey with an organized group. The flavor is different from the traditional college junior year abroad program: Exonians who’ve taken gap years have gone on service trips, taught English, worked with disadvantaged youth and their families, and harvested crops. Inherent in the gap-year concept is time for reflection, a chance to look both behind and ahead before stepping onto the college stage.While some students have to convince their parents it’s a good idea, others have been encouraged to take the time to catch their academic breath or save money.

The best candidates for a gap year are students who are open-minded, recognize the value of experiential learning, and are confident enough to know they are capable of getting off and then back on the academic treadmill, says Gretchen Bergill, PEA’s associate director of college counseling. While not every student is like the Exonian whose gap year included spending time in a monastery in Nepal, “That student represents this other way of learning and seeking knowledge,” says Bergill. “That’s part of what’s so remarkable about the [gap year]: It’s an adventure, but it’s also recognizing the power of various cultures and the connections that come from that, and how it moves the soul and the spirit.”

Sometimes that sense can be stirred unexpectedly. Shi, who kept a blog with photos during his travels, was disturbed by the lack of refuse management in Indonesia, describing floating piles of garbage in the ocean and the routine sight of trash burning alongside roads. In Sulawesi, Indonesia, home to some of the most interesting scuba diving in the world, Shi says locals joke that it’s cancerous tumors that make the sea life so distinctive in appearance. He was also struck by the poverty he encountered there and elsewhere. In parts of Indonesia, Shi was able to buy a meal for the equivalent of one U.S. dollar, but says, “It feels weird to walk around knowing you have more money than the locals.”

That sentiment was shared by Evan Gastman ’12, who covered an estimated 30,000 kilometers (18,600 miles) of ground travel around China, Tibet and India, as well as Laos, Cambodia and Thailand. In the latter

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Jan Shi ’12 on the summit of Pulau Wayag, in Papua, a province of Indonesia.

three countries in particular Gastman was aware that as a tall, white American, he was an obvious target for beggars, something the resident of Great Neck, NY, hadn’t really experienced before.While he wanted to help, he wondered where to draw the line—in giving the equivalent of a U.S. dollar to a Cambodian, for example, in a country that was still feeling the effects of the Khmer Rouge, was he doing any real good?

“There was a natural feeling of guilt for having the privileges that I’ve had,” says Gastman, “in the context of this country that so recently was almost broken.” At the same time, he recognized the gift of what he calls an “active history lesson,” the chance to be on the ground rather than just reading about a country in a textbook.

The decision to take a year away from academia came fairly late for Gastman, who was accepted at Harvard and opted to defer just three days before the May 1 final-decision cutoff.With a choice of “accept,” “reject,” or “defer” on the verification page of its website, Harvard requests that students who select the latter send a letter describing potential plans for the year. Harvard is one school that actively encourages students to take a year off, says Betsy Dolan, Exeter’s director of college counseling; Princeton is another. Its fiveyear-old, tuition-free Bridge Year Program is open to incoming freshmen. Each year, Princeton selects seven students to go on service trips to Brazil, China, India, Peru or Senegal; over the past three years, three Exonians have been among them. Dolan says colleges want to know that students are going to use the gap year to do something productive. Given that U.S. society tends to encourage staying busy—“we do, do, do,” says Dolan—some selective colleges encourage the time off, as does Exeter, because, she says, it “allows kids to be grounded in a way different than how they’ve lived for the past four years. It’s a very healthy thing to do.”

Adds Mark Hoven, associate director of college counseling, “Students come out of a gap year saying, ‘OK, now I know where my focus is,’ and they can approach things with a more mature mind because they’ve had that time to think, versus being in the race. It gives them that moment to pause.” For many, says Hoven, it helps them solidify the reasons why they’re going to college, and what they’d like to focus on in their course work.

Exeter students are encouraged to apply for two generous gap-year resources: the Robert W. Kesler Schol-

“[It] allows kids to be

grounded

in a way different than how they’ve lived for the past four years.”

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arship, a $7,000 grant, and a $10,000 fellowship endowed by James Perrin ’46.

Perrin, who takes a personal interest in his fellows, steers clear of the term “gap year.” The purpose of his fellowship, he says, is to provide a bridge over the gap between high school and college; between adolescence and young adulthood. That transition is best achieved when a young person travels and lives independently, removed from the stress of academic life. “You get a clearer view of things when there is no pressure about grades or holding onto a scholarship,” he says. “Personal growth happens when you are free to fail.”

The opportunity for a bridge year might have been helpful in his own life, reflects Perrin, who graduated from Exeter at 16 and went straight to Harvard, where he struggled to keep up socially, given his age. “A year off, somewhere along the way, just might have given me time to find out a little more about myself and what I wanted to do with my life,” Perrin wrote in his deed of gift. His career—which included stints singing on cruise ships and in nightclubs before he landed in the U.S. Information Agency’s Foreign Service, where he spent 25 years—took him to what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Argentina, Chad, Indonesia, the Ivory Coast, France and Spain.

In outlining his eponymous fellowship, which, like the Kesler, goes to just one graduating senior annually, Perrin encouraged applicants to plan their activities as thoroughly as possible, although changes are allowed and encouraged.

“Valid projects should not be easy for the applicant to undertake,” he wrote, “but should stretch his or her capabilities as much as possible. They should convey a sense of adventure, as well as the challenge of dealing with unfamiliar situations. Facing the risks of the unknown can be a heady experience!”

Given that, Perrin would no doubt be satisfied to hear about the travels taken by Shi, the 2012 fellowship recipient. In addition to being stranded on Kakaban Island, Shi went to Komodo National Park, where he helped identify manta rays before venturing out on a solo nine-day kayak tour. He flipped on Day 6, lost his bailing cup, and had to be rescued by a luxury dive boat. Upon returning to the main port, he was informed that no one had ever successfully kayaked around the island. Recognizing a challenge, two weeks later Shi set out again. This time, swells rough enough to cancel all other boat traffic set in, catching up to Shi just as he reached southern Komodo and creating a 20-plus-foot wall of water that at times obscured both land and sun. Shi paddled for eight hours, barely stopping for a sip of water; when he at last made it around the island’s southernmost point and found safe harbor, he was initially unable to straighten his fingers.

“It was the happiest moment of my trip,” Shi says of reaching the cove, “because right before it was the scariest part of my trip.” It was also July 4, a month later than he’d expected to be abroad, so he made plans to spend two final weeks in a whaling village before heading home. He’d already been to Indonesia’s Papua province where he acquired some fluency in the language—despite the fact that there are some 350 dialects of Bahasa Indonesia spoken on that island alone. He’d also been stranded by a mudslide; spent time working with an NGO for teenage street children in Manila, Philippines, where, he says, “It was great to live with them and see how different our lives are, but how similarly we behave”; done field research on insects in Borneo; counted turtle eggs on Derawan Island; and posed for photos, the sole American on a cargo ship serving as a ferry for native Indonesians who seemed to know only two phrases in English: I don’t know and I love you.

(Top) Shi on his first solo dive off Raja Ampat, Papua.

(Bottom) Shi sits with juvenile hornbill birds at a sea turtle hatchery in Indonesia.

C

ommunication was not an issue for Amy Kao ’11, who had spent three months in the autumn of her senior year in Grenoble, France. From the moment she’d returned to Exeter, Kao had longed to be back in France, in part to continue working on her language skills.With an interest in sustainability and food production—she was a member of both the Farm and Garden Club and the Environmental Proctor Board— Kao decided to travel as a WWOOFer.World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms is an international organization that allows volunteers to work for four to six hours a day on a farm, in exchange for food and lodging, FALL 2013

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Amy Kao ’11 (right) works at a French cidery with another farm volunteer. (Below) Kao meets up with Kara Lessin ’11 in Lyon, France.

generally for two- or three-week stints. Kao hoped to learn more about sustainability while seeing a different side of French culture than she would in urban areas, and in October, after a brief internship with environmentalist Bill McKibben’s 350.org, she headed to France.Working in four distinct regions, Kao helped out at cideries and on a wild chestnut farm, and at one location encountered another Exonian, Isabelle Newlin ’08.

Kao also saw firsthand the effects of big agriculture: At the chestnut farm, a neighbor, a longtime farmer who was seeking organic certification, dropped by for a visit. He reported his land had been contaminated because another neighbor was spraying his own fields with pesticides. The farmer would have to wait several more years before reapplying for certification, during which time he’d lose money.

“These are a lot of issues that I was interested in during high school,” says Kao, the 2011 recipient of the Kesler, “and I wanted to understand them from not just a sustainability point of view, but also to see what people do in the real world. We talk about pesticides and fighting Monsanto, but what happens when it really affects someone’s livelihood?”

Kao, who plans to major in Environmental and French Studies at Tufts, where she’s a sophomore, also volunteered in Switzerland and Germany before accepting a four-month editorial internship in London at Green Futures, a publication of the nonprofit Forum for the Future. Though she’d written for The Exonian, she was hesitant to change her gap-year plans, until her Kesler scholarship adviser assured her that if she’d met her goals—to improve her French skills and learn about sustainability—she should not hesitate to move on.

“It was just so liberating when I realized, ‘It’s your year. Take what you want of it. Go do things,’” says Kao.“Just to be able to have those amazing experiences meant so much.”

“It was just so

liberating

when I realized, ‘It’s your year. Take what you want of it. Go do things.’ ”

M

innesotan Winnie Zwick ’08 came back from her gap-year experience with a profound interest in community development and social change. Her scholarly interlude began during an election year, and she spent the summer going door to door for Clean Water Action before taking a monthlong train trip to the West Coast. In February she left for Bolivia and Peru, supported by a Kesler scholarship and 24

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one from Where There Be Dragons, a gap-year organization whose theme is “Be a traveler, not a tourist.” Over the course of 13 weeks, Zwick and 11 other young people, ages 17 to 20, together with three group leaders, trekked through the Andes, with rural and urban homestays interspersed throughout the trail time. The program’s focus on leadership and personal development allowed participants to learn regional culture, history and politics, but also group dynamics and facilitation and conflict skills. Zwick, a two-year Exonian who had been homeschooled and also attended public school, had long planned on a gap year, both for the break and to sate her adventurous spirit.

“I wanted to be in the world and be challenged by what I was learning,” she says.“I wanted to connect what I was interested in during high school to real experiences before I went to college, to ground my education.” At Carleton College she majored in American Studies, largely in response to the recognition that the actions of more-developed countries can have negative repercussions elsewhere—as evidenced by the melting glaciers she observed in the Andes—and today she’s working for the Lutheran Volunteer Corps in north Minneapolis on transitional housing and community leadership development housing.

“There’s so much change to be done in the United States,” Zwick says.“I’ve inherited this culture, and I feel a responsibility to act in my home culture. But in South America I saw so much inspiration and so many innovations that you don’t see in the United States because of different cultures and situations.

There are so many possibilities—how do we access those?”

Evan Gastman finds himself asking similar questions.

He’d headed into his gap year eager to tackle a spoken language, after having studied Latin and Greek at Exeter.

Gastman spent part of his time with a Where There Be Dragons program on a scholarship in China. Initially, Gastman struggled to communicate, making do with gestures and body language. At the same time, all around him he observed many familiar sights, including kids wearing Kobe Bryant basketball jerseys and American fast food chains, things that signaled a shrinking world. The only child in one of his homestay families, a 15-year-old boy, wanted to be called “Bob,” in homage to the source of his English-language skills: the Nickelodeon TV program “SpongeBob SquarePants.” But Gastman felt “friction between this great traditional Chinese culture and all of what the development means, and the Westernization that comes with that development.” Referring to his interactions with locals, he says, “There are linkages that make the connection between an American like myself and a Chinese person who has some knowledge of the West. It makes it much easier, but at the same time, there’s a feeling that even though the worlds are coming together and coalescing in a way, there’s obviously going to be things that are lost in the transaction.”

A pivotal moment of awareness took place in India, where Gastman and classmate Nathaniel Haslett ’12 taught at a school in West Bengal for three weeks. They recognized that having learned around the Harkness table meant they could best contribute to local communities as educators, albeit temporarily. Even so, Gastman confronted limitations. Running alongside a canal one morning, he observed one of his star students collecting returnable bottles in the leech-infested waters, and he recognized immediately that the child’s future was confined to his environment—that despite being a standout in the classroom, he would likely end up a farmer like his classmates.

“Of course, that’s completely respectable,” says Gastman, “but the fact is that the room for choice is nonexistent. And realizing where I was in my life, and being told that I can do anything—it was tough to reconcile, and it still is.”

Gastman plans to focus on computer science at Harvard, and will further his Chinese studies. He’s now more aware of global energy and food constraints than before, and says of Southeast Asia,“Because I know people in these places, it doesn’t feel like there are borders to global problems. Everyone has to deal with them.

“The world felt bigger than it ever had,” Gastman says of his travels,“but at the same time, it felt more accessible than it ever had. That was one of the daunting but comforting takeaways.”

“I wanted to be in the world and be

challenged by what I was learning.”

Winnie Zwick ’08 and her group camp during a trek through Bolivia’s Apolobamba mountain region.

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W

hen Brenda Gustafson Berg ’90 arrived at Exeter on move-in day to begin her senior year as a new

student, she didn’t need to worry about lugging overstuffed suitcases into McConnell Hall. Her

clothes hung from a makeshift pole installed by her father in the back window of the family’s used RV. Berg likens her first moments on campus, of pulling up alongside luxury-brand cars with her wardrobe on full display, as “something like a more refined, Midwest version of the Beverly Hillbillies.”

35,000 Miles,6,0 Berg’s parents decided to drive her from Minnesota to New Hampshire because traveling by road was what they loved best—a venture akin to the dozens of road trips the family had taken during Berg’s youth. “[My parents] are nomads at heart, but they anchored themselves in a suburb of Minneapolis so we could attend a good public school,” she says. “To satisfy their (Clockwise from top) Brenda Berg ’90 with a happy book recipient in Seattle, WA; Berg’s daughter, Kelly, reads to kindergartners in Wyola, MT; Berg’s son, Anton, and Kelly at Gettysburg; Second-graders at a New Orleans charter school receive dictionaries to help with their “Word of the Day” challenges.

love of travel, we visited most of the U.S. in the back of the car, towing a camper. We took two-week loops around the country that forever impacted my love of travel.” By the time she moved into McConnell, Berg had visited 47 states.

Her roving childhood is largely what fueled Berg’s most recent trip through Exeter in an RV. On a day in early August, Berg proudly drove her 32-foot RV (nicknamed “Forrest,” based on the character Forrest Gump), with car in tow, down Front Street, past the library and the Academy Building, so that she could show her kids, Kelly, 11, and Anton, 8, her alma mater. New Hampshire was the 40th state the family was visiting on a 7.5-month trek, which they christened the “Gump Trip,” begun in December at the Berg home in Raleigh, NC. The family looped the country in order to visit the other 48 continental states before returning home to North Carolina in time for the kids to start school.

It was, as Berg describes it, much more than a vacation. It was

One alumna takes her two children on an unforgettable journey

By Karen Ingraham

00 Books a trip about discovery—both personal and terrestrial—a chance for her, Anton and Kelly to disconnect from all the scheduled activities and “embed” within cultures, to glimpse life through the lens of someone or somewhere else. It was also a trip deliberately framed around a singular act of non sibi: to raise money to purchase thousands of books that Berg and her family would hand-deliver to children all over the country who have none.

Changing Gears

A week after her daughter’s 10th birthday in 2012, Berg was standing in a factory in China when she realized she needed a change of course.“It just struck me,” she says, “that I needed to spend time with my kids before my oldest headed off to middle school, but shuttling them from school to activities wasn’t going to be enough for me.” Berg was then CEO of Scandinavian Child, a business she founded in 2002 that has since grown into an international FALL 2013

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company manufacturing and distributing high-quality children’s products.

She was also the past chair of the Juvenile Products Manufacturers Association board, and was a board member of two other juvenile industry associations, as well as Habitat for Humanity of Wake County and the education committee for her local chamber of commerce.

Berg describes her decision to travel around the country—a decision that itself took months to reach—as the “ultimate ‘two-fer,’ ensuring my kids got to see this great country from the road and getting quality time with them.” For Berg, it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to provide her children with on-the-ground experiences that would inform their viewpoints of people and cultures different from their own. The trip’s design was not unlike Berg’s time at Exeter.

“I worried that people would make fun of my modest background,” she says, remembering her first days on campus, “but that never happened.

If anything, everyone I met wanted to share their experiences so we could compare and contrast. Where you stand depends on where you sit, and we were able to figure that out at a very young age.

“My experience at Exeter gave me an entirely new perspective on the world, and I loved talking to classmates and learning how their backgrounds could bring them to a different but equally valid viewpoint. This is part of why I love to travel, because there is no way to really understand other perspectives if you don’t move your vantage point.”

So Berg decided to go for it—a decision fully supported by her husband, Christer, who would only be able to fly in for a few visits along the trip, due to professional obligations. She opened her laptop and created an Excel spreadsheet of places to visit, populating it with scads of research and input from family and friends. She also picked up some basic RV driving and maintenance tips from her dad. (It wouldn’t be until she was on the road, though, (Top to bottom) The Bergs arrive at Exeter; Kelly meets when she would pick up new mechanical race-car driver Melanie Snow; skills like how to rewire brake lights and Brenda Berg behind the pack grease into ball bearings.) Berg wheel; Mark Elbroch ’90 gives worked with her children’s school to the Bergs a primer on moundevelop a “road-school” curriculum for tain-lion tracking. the months they would miss, and she created a website and blog (“Gump Across America,” www.gumptrip.com) for the family, so Kelly’s and Anton’s classmates and the kids they met along the way could interact with them virtually. She stepped down as CEO of Scandinavian Child, put her other commitments on hold and embraced the wanderlust that has defined her parents. By then, her parents had retired and sold their house, choosing to live full time in an RV. Until recently, they volunteered about 10 weeks every year to build Habitat for Humanity homes with other RV families around the country.

To include a non sibi project during her travels felt necessary to Berg: “I remember working in soup kitchens at a ver y young age. My parents…instilled in me that it was important to give back, even at times when we had very little. It felt selfish to keep this trip to ourselves, so I wanted to find a way to share it with more than just my children.”

The answer came from a friend’s son, working with Teach for America in New Orleans. He said that what the kids needed there were books, lots of books. Berg jumped on the idea and put her entrepreneurial skills to work, launching a service project that would become, according to a blog post by Anton, “our favorite thing on this trip.”

Book-by-Book

In May, between visiting Yellowstone National Park and Little Big Horn Monument (two of the 60 national parks where Kelly and Anton earned

Junior Ranger badges), the Bergs visited a school serving Crow Indian students in Wyola, MT, an experience that made Anton “sad,” he later wrote in a reflection.“For a long time they only had a book cart as a library. I think everyone should have the possibility to read books. Every kid should read books because it gives kids the possibility to imagine and learn about new things.”

Kelly wrote in her notes, “These book gives are special because to us books are everyday things, but to [these children] they are like getting a [Nintendo] DS or a Wii. The smiles on the kids’ faces when they are handed the books are magical and turns a bad day good.”

Bringing in boxes and boxes of new books for children to pick from—with each child receiving as many as five or six titles—was eye-opening for the Bergs and fostered moments that trumped even the most dazzling displays of scenic beauty. Echoing Kelly, Berg says, “You would have thought we were giving out iPads. Several kids were stunned. ‘These are for me? To take home? Really?’” In fact, by partnering with First Book (www.FirstBook.org), a nonprofit that puts new, high-quality books into the hands of children from low-income families, Berg had discovered just how great the need is within this country.

“We assume children have access to books—at least in schools and libraries—but even if they do have books in their schools, they need books in their homes....,” Berg says. “Forty-two percent of children in the U.S. live in low-income households, and many of these children do not have a single age-appropriate book. Some of the lowest income communities have one book for every 300 children. I thought I knew about the need but these are stunning statistics that shocked me.”

The Crow school was the fifth of six stops Berg made in partnership with First Book.

With the organization’s guidance and logistical support, Berg began a fundraiser before the trip to collect money and purchase new books for children in Memphis, New Orleans, San Diego, Seattle, Omaha, NE, and Wyola. Her efforts continue today, despite being back at home, thanks to a generous grant from ChildTrust, a foundation of the Golden Corral Buffet & Grill restaurant chain based in Raleigh, which offered a $15,000 match when the Bergs began their trip. At press time, Berg had raised more than $10,000, and she hopes to secure the remaining funds in order to achieve or surpass the matching grant.

Learning to “Just Ask”

In late January, just one month into the trip, the Bergs were in Florida watching the 24hour race at Daytona International Speedway. Afterward, Kelly spied Melanie Snow, the only female race-car driver there, and with little hesitation, decided to ask Snow for an interview to post on her blog. She not only landed the interview but saw firsthand that any profession can be accessible to women. It is a story that she eagerly repeated to the schoolchildren she and Anton spoke with at the book-give locations.“I didn’t know this person; I just walked up to her,” Kelly would say, an empowering thought for any child, particularly, Berg says, for the at-risk students they met along the way.

Kelly’s anecdote is an example of a habit Berg worked hard to instill in her children during their trip, to “just ask.” “So many of our adventures happened because we took the time to reach out to someone,” Berg says. It’s what, for example, led them to spend a spring day tramping through Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming in search of mountain lions. Berg had contacted Mark Elbroch ’90 to “catch up,” and he invited them to join him in his field work. Elbroch, a longtime wildlife consultant, is currently the project leader for the Teton Cougar Project in Kelly,WY. An expert tracker, Elbroch gave the Bergs an introduction on how to sleuth for signs of the big cats and other animals like elk and bears. Berg’s Facebook post afterward expresses the impact of that experience: “Kelly and Anton have decided that this was the best day of the trip (other than giving books)…and that is considering some seriously stiff competition.”

Berg says her kids “learned ‘just ask’ is a way of life.” As time progressed, they became more assertive, talking to people about what they were doing or volunteering during ranger-led programs at the national parks. For Berg, her personal philosophy also evolved, to include something like, “just ask yourself.” Although she had an exchange student, Marina, to help with the children, Berg drove (continued on page 91)

Ground Covered Duration: 7.5 months States: 49 Canadian provinces: 2 Miles: 32,000 by road, 3,000 by sea Places visited: 205 Campsites and driveways: 77 Average stay: 3 days Words blogged: 60,000 per child Brenda’s journal: >100,000 words Photos taken: ~20,000 Books given: 6,000, so far!

Non Sibi Rolls On The RV is parked, but Brenda Berg hasn’t stopped her fundraising efforts on behalf of First Book. She is still accepting donations to purchase books for children in low-income communities. If you’d like to help, visit www.firstbook.org/gumptrip, and go to www.GumpTrip.com to read more about her family’s adventures.

Trip Ideas— for Seven Days, or Seven Months Having traveled with her children before and during the trip by air, boat, car and train, Berg recommends making sure you take at least some of your trips by road.The best take-aways from the trip, Berg says, didn’t come from the pictureperfect view of the Grand Canyon but from the people they met along the way.

Resources National Parks – www.nps.gov UN World Heritage Sites http://whc.unesco.org/en/statesparties/us Frommer’s 500 Places to Take Your Kids Before They Grow Up, by Holly Hughes Watch it Made in the U.S.A.,

by Karen Axelrod The Next Exit, by Mark Watson

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Sports

A Rugby Rising Star P E A G I R L S B A S K E T B A L L C A P TA I N C A N A L S O TAC K L E

By Craig Morgan ’84

“You start checking the boxes for all the things you want in a player and she has them all... .”

COURTESY OF LANCE HEAVIRLAND P’14, P’14

Nicole Heavirland ’14 was a starting player in a U.S. rugby match against Canada during the U20 Nations Cup in England.

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R MIKE CATANO

ic Suggitt rolled his eyes when

Trevor, used to play another coach suggested he take a when he was little and I look at Nicole Heavirland ’14. came home one day and “I had to laugh because he’s telling me took a look outside,” about all her potential as an athlete and I’m Kenkel says. “I said to thinking to myself, ‘Yeah, everybody’s got my wife, ‘It looks like potential,’” says Suggitt, the coach of the Trevor’s getting in a fight USA Women’s Sevens Olympic Rugby with one of his friends team. “But I decided to go on YouTube, and he’s getting thrown and bang! Up popped her in a basketball in the sand.’ I thought it highlight reel with all this vision and was Nicole’s twin brother, good footwork, and she’s so calm but so Ryan. It wasn’t. It was aggressive on the court.

Nicole.”

“You started checking the boxes for Heavirland’s first love all the things you want in a player and has always been basketball. she has them all, so I thought,‘Hmm, this She was the MVP of could have potential.’”

Exeter’s girls team last Heavirland may even have the winter and she has already potential that Suggitt, a former Canadiverbally committed to the an rugby union footballer, is looking for United States Military in an Olympian. She recently competed Academy at West Point, in the U20 Nations Cup in England as where she took an official a member of the USA Rugby AIG visit at the end of August.

Women’s Junior All-Americans, a trip But a difficult decision for which Exeter funded $1,000 of the $2,400 cost. Captain of PEA girls varsity may be looming. Suggitt has She was a starter in the first match, which the U.S. basketball, Heavirland says already invited her to camps in September and lost to Canada. that sport is her first love.

October at the national team’s training site in After a series of regional and national tryouts, ChulaVista, CA. If all goes well, she could be invitHeavirland was one of just five high school athletes chosen for the ed to play in Fiji from November 10-17 in a tournament that, in the 26-player All-American team, an impressive feat in its own right. past, has included teams from Australia, New Zealand and France.

Toss in the facts that Heavirland has been playing the sport for “You never want to put much pressure on a high school kid but about three-and-a-half years and that she plays only part time I called her dad and told him,‘Look, this is what I see in her,’” Sugbecause Exeter doesn’t offer rugby, and it’s a wonder she has gitt says. “I know she has a lot to worry about, so if she can’t fit it reached this stage. in, that’s fine, but if she can, that’s great.

“It’s amazing when you think about what might be ahead for “We want to take a combination of developmental players, her,” Suggitt says. “The only ceiling she has right now would be crossover athletes and a couple experienced players we had at the one she creates for herself because of other commitments.”

World Cup. Given where she’s at, she very much could be a potenHeavirland’s entrance into the sport came rather abruptly and tial Olympian.” unexpectedly.

Heavirland has to weigh that opportunity against the possibili“Basically, one day my dad was like, ‘You’re going to play ty of West Point and maybe more basketball scholarship offers— rugby,’” says Heavirland, who is from Whitefish, MT. “I asked why not to mention her senior year at Exeter. If a player makes a and he said, ‘Because you’re going to be good at it.’ commitment to train for the Olympics, it generally means living at “My brother played on the men’s team and we didn’t have a the training site, where athletes often take online college courses. girls team in my area so I just practiced with the boys and played Heavirland said she will decide about Olympic training when with the girls on weekends in tournaments in Missoula or even and if that opportunity presents itself. As for the Fiji trip… farther away.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea to miss that much school at “I played tackle football in fourth and fifth grade and it was Exeter,” says Heavirland, who learned of Exeter’s existence and that same concept, except without pads, so I liked it right away. decided to apply only after her brother attended football camp in Rugby girls are just different. They’re so tough and that’s kind of Boston. “But I love the atmosphere around rugby. It was a lot of how I am.” fun hanging out with the players for two weeks in England. I grew Her first coach, Dave Kenkel, a longtime family friend, insists strong relationships, I still talk to them and I’m looking forward to he knew early that Heavirland could handle herself in such a phys- seeing them again. ical sport.

“If I had a chance to play in the Olympics in 2016 or even “We have a sand volleyball court at our house where our son, 2020, that would be a hard thing to pass up.”

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Connections

EXONIAN PROFILE

G. A L L A N F O R S Y T H ’ 4 9

Helping Girls to Find Their Feet

T

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BERT TANNER

he choreographer George Balanchine famously said, “See the music, hear the dance.” For Allan Forsyth ’49, an apt paraphrase might be, “See the dance, hear the opportunity.” Forsyth has dedicated his life to education and, for more than a decade now, his efforts have centered in large part on promoting education and personal improvement through the medium of dance.

“During my time at Exeter, I spent two years in Darcy Curwen’s English classes,” Forsyth recalls with a smile in his voice. “He was a big man and a powerful character who scared a lot of his students. But he loved poetry, as I did, and I learned from him that a passion for the arts could enrich your life.” It was a lesson that Forsyth never forgot.

From Exeter, Forsyth entered Princeton University, graduating in 1953 with an English degree and a major in poetry. Drafted into the Army, he was sent to photography school. “To my surprise, I was assigned to do something I actually enjoyed,” Forsyth says. Less enjoyable were the five months he spent at the Atomic Energy Commission’s Nevada Proving Grounds, processing film badges after atomic weapons tests.

After his military service, Forsyth moved to New York and found a position with a new college textbook company. Forsyth’s facility with language and keen eye for images landed him a position as an editor, a job that he loved.“Textbook authors tended to write in their professional jargon,” Forsyth explains, “and it was my job to translate their writing into language that 17-year-olds could understand.” He also chose photographs for the books, using them as visual reinforcements for the text.

Forsyth worked for several publishers over the next three decades, but left the office world in 1987 and freelanced for 10 years after that. “That’s how I got into fundraising,” Forsyth notes. “I was working at home when I got a call from my daughter’s school, asking if I’d be willing to ask fellow parents to contribute to the annual fund. I said ‘Yes,’ and I’ve been fundraising ever since!”

As soon as people hear that you have been fundraising, Forsyth says, they want to enlist your help. After taking that fateful call more than 25 years ago, he participated in capital campaigns for all three of his children’s schools and their summer camp, and served on their boards as well. When his children departed for college, Forsyth found himself wondering what to do next.

Not surprisingly, the thought passed quickly. While reading The New York Times one morning in May 2000, Forsyth came across an interview with Abigail Rosin, a young Brown University graduate who had just been awarded the Montblanc International Arts Patronage Award for launching Groove With Me, Inc., an innovative after-school program for girls in underserved neighborhoods. Rosin’s program offered these at-risk girls free dance classes and performance opportunities artfully designed to instill the self-respect, spirit of cooperation, joy and discipline they need to prosper despite the adversity in their lives. A devotee of the New York City Ballet and a proponent for the transformative power of dance, Forsyth was captivated.

“I read the interview and was incredibly impressed with Abby and her imaginative program,” Forsyth recalls. “In the interview, she said that she didn’t know how to fundraise, and I thought, ‘Well, I can help with that!’” Forsyth arranged to attend the awards ceremony, where he introduced himself to Rosin and offered his assistance. By 2001, he was Groove With Me’s first board chairman. By the time he retired from this position in 2007, Groove With Me had its own studio, nearly 300 students and three dozen dedicated volunteer teachers.

Forsyth continues to serve on the board; watching young participants blossom into self-reliant young women still thrills him. “I see our girls taking charge of their lives,” Forsyth says, “and it fills me with joy.”

—Lori Ferguson

Connections

EXONIAN PROFILE

DR. HARRISON POPE JR. ’65

Steroid Use in the G.I. Joe Era

H

arrison Pope Jr. ’65, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a psychiatrist at McLean Hospital, is a leading researcher and speaker on steroid use—an issue that has dominated major league baseball headlines in recent months.

Yet, Pope points out, “Contrary to popular belief, the high-profile athletes in the newspapers account for only a fraction of a percent of steroid users. The great majority are ordinary guys at the gym who just want to get bigger.”

Those “ordinary guys” are the ones who first piqued Pope’s interest in the 1980s after he began witnessing steroid use at the gym where he lifted weights six days a week, a regimen he continues today. At the time, Pope was studying eating disorders and the psychiatric effects of marijuana, hallucinogens and Ecstasy, but he began focusing more and more of his research on the psychology of men who believe they are not muscular enough, a condition he termed “reverse anorexia nervosa.”

One of the most cited psychiatrists of the 20th century with more than 300 papers published, Pope touched a nerve with the public in 1997 with a paper in Psychosomatics on the phenomena of muscular men who thought they looked small. The paper, “Muscle dysmorphia: An underrecognized form of body dysmorphic disorder,” landed Pope on the cover of USA Today and helped ignite a national conversation about male body image, one that Pope flamed two years later with another paper.

Prompted by his daughter’s school project involving a Barbie doll, Pope collected and analyzed G.I. Joe action figures made between the 1960s and 1990s. He found they mutated from an average man with a normal chest and biceps to a Hulk-like, anatomically impossible figure. Pope published his findings in the International Journal of Eating Disorders in 1999, and soon followed with The Adonis Complex: How to Identify, Treat and Prevent Body Obsession in Men and Boys, a book he co-authored that has been published in six languages. Pope has also testified before Congress and appeared in news programs and documentaries, including The Man Whose Arms Exploded (2005) and Bigger, Stronger, Faster (2008). He travels globally to present the findings from his body of work.

In 2010, Pope received a grant of nearly $2.5 million to study the long-term dangers of steroids. Pope’s research is critical, as steroids do not have the long history of cocaine, opium or marijuana, which have existed for centuries.

According to Pope, the first synthetic derivatives of testosterone were created in the 1940s, thereby creating the family of drugs known as anabolic steroids.Though used by athletes since the 1950s, steroids were not widely used by the general public in the U.S. until the 1980s.

Many of the men who began using steroids 30 years ago are only now entering their 50s. Pope cautions, “We don’t know very much about the long-term effects of these drugs because most of the [early users] are not yet old enough to have experienced them fully.” Pope has noted heart problems, hardening of the arteries, and possible effects on brain function with steroid use, including memory loss. The study will conclude in 2015, but Pope expects to continue research. “We may see a lot of pathologies, especially cardiac pathologies, as these guys grow older. It’s beginning to look rather ominous.”

Pope continues to be concerned about public perception: “Steroids differ from almost all other forms of drug abuse in that they have a positive spin on them. A manufacturer might advertise by saying, ‘This is our sedan on steroids,’ but they would never advertise saying, ‘This is our sedan on cocaine.’ This positive spin causes people to forgive steroid use or classify it as more benign than other forms of drug use.” Pope hopes his ongoing work in biological psychiatry will continue to shape the public dialogue regarding steroids and ultimately mitigate their use.

—Taline Manassian ’92

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Connections

EXONIAN PROFILE

SHANNON O’HALLORAN ’01

Making Educational Travel Accessible

D

uring her senior year at Exeter, Shannon O’Halloran ’01 spent her winter semester in Cuernavaca, Mexico— a trip she wouldn’t have been able to take had it not been part of her regular tuition.The impact of her time abroad provided O’Halloran with the germ of an idea that eventually led to her co-founding The Wandering Scholar, a program designed to provide low-income students with opportunities for global educational travel.

“While the Mexico trip planted the seed, the light bulb came later, when I was a Spanish teacher at a day school outside of New York City,” O’Halloran recalls. “I found myself always making the same basic point: A language comes to life when you immerse yourself through travel. But this begged the obvious question: What would I tell the majority of students all over the country who do not have the financial resources? So the spark that is now The Wandering Scholar was lit.”

Founded in 2010, the program offers students from families of incomes less than $50,000 for a family of four ($60,000 for a larger family) the opportunity to spend four to eight weeks in a foreign country working on their intercultural communication skills, learning more about a topic that they have chosen prior to the trip, and documenting their travel through blog entries and any other media they choose. When they return home, they do a presentation to their home communities to continue practicing their communication skills and to share their international travel experiences.

This final presentation is an integral part of The Wandering Scholar (www.thewanderingscholar.org) experience, O’Halloran says. As participants return home, they can spread the idea of international travel and activism to others. “We envision The Wandering Scholar as a starting point for a lifetime of meaningful engagement with the world,” she explains. “A key lesson we want students to learn is that being a Wandering Scholar is a way to approach every new situation with an eye toward what can you do to prepare yourself, what can you learn from it, and how can you take those experiences and learning and communicate them in a meaningful way with others. The point being, should [the students] never travel internationally again, they will still be able to approach each new, challenging experience as an opportunity for discovery and growth, even when it’s taking place outside of a traditional classroom context.”

O’Halloran’s career has been rooted in education, both in and out of the classroom, since she received her B.S. from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. In addition to teaching at independent schools, she has worked with adult learners, led service-learning trips in Costa Rica, and recently completed her master’s degree in education at Boston University. Currently working at General Assembly, an educational startup, O’Halloran notes that building her own venture has been as much of a learning experience as the scholars’ experiences overseas.

“Co-founder Tamara Walker and I started The Wandering Scholar in our ‘spare time’ with very few resources,” O’Halloran says. “And at the end of the day, some important lessons have been learned from having to balance multiple priorities: I’ve learned that there is a lot more time in a day, in a week, than you realize, especially once you kick the TV to the curb. I’ve learned that I can do it—build a site, recruit a board, host a webinar—myself. And I’ve learned when to admit when I can’t. Most importantly, I’ve learned that a new venture does not have to take off and be fully funded immediately to be meaningful.

“Of course, we would much rather be working with 500 percent more students every summer, and we can only do this with more…support…from people who value our mission, but this does not mean our current approach is not valuable. We are contributing to a conversation about the importance of global travel for students of all socioeconomic backgrounds, we are showing students that there are opportunities out there to make their dream a possibility, and hopefully we are inspiring other people to start something good.”

—Susannah Clark ’84

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Connections

A Warm Welcome on Check-In Day PA R E N T VO L U N T E E R S A S S I S T S T U D E N T S A N D T H E I R F A M I L I E S W I T H R E G I S T R AT I O N

DAMIAN STROHMEYER

Charlotte deJong (left) is a five-time volunteer for Exeter’s student registration day. “This school has given so much to my family,” she says. “I feel the least I can do is give back my time.”

C

harlotte deJong P’11, P’14, of Dover, NH, doesn’t often place herself on the front lines in social settings. The mother of Exonians Emily and Samantha describes herself as shy and someone who hangs back in groups.

But this year, for her fifth time, deJong joined 15 other current and past parents who volunteer their time to Exeter during back-to-school student registration.Working in shifts, the volunteers greet new and returning students— and frequently their parents and siblings—as well as field questions and provide directions for newcomers. “It isn’t in my comfort zone,” deJong says, “but it gets me out there . . . and Exeter is such a nice community I can’t imagine not wanting to do it.”

The Dean of Students Office manages the annual on-site registration. In addition to checking in, students collect their Lion Cards—the multipurpose photo identification, security access and debit cards issued by Campus Safety.The first students to return during the three-day registration are preseason student athletes, proctors and international students. New students arrive the second day; the third day is devoted to returning students.

“It was loud, boisterous and exciting,” says Kathy Scheu, mom of Carlyn ’14, from North Hampton, NH. “As a parent it is great to see that energy and to be a part of what is going on at the school.” And, she adds, volunteering provided her and other day-student parents with a way to connect with the school while respecting their children’s unique Exeter experiences.

Kacey Morris of Hampton, NH, appreciates that connection now more than ever. Since her daughters, Katrina ’13 and Michaela ’15, started driving themselves to school, Morris has had fewer opportunities to be on campus. Taking time from work to help out at Exeter provided a worthwhile reminder, she says, of the engagement and the diversity of the campus community. “Everyone has their challenges, whether you live far away or you work full time, but when I have the opportunity, I really do enjoy the connection with Exeter.”

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Finis (continued from page 96) When I visit the Assembly Hall, I always pause at the plaque listing those who lost their lives in the Second World War; four are from 1941.The portraits of past faculty evoke memories of the qualities of our leaders.

It’s a shrinking minority who remember the old Exeter described here. The advent of coeducation in 1970 changed the very soul of the Academy, along with “youth from every quarter” and a far broader faculty.While the Exeter of my day seemed an astonishing value, I’m envious of the breadth of the curriculum, the diversity and tolerance, and the concerns for those less fortunate. Non sibi has been taken to a new level.

I do wonder what became of the collection of mounted African animal heads—shot by an alumnus—that once decorated the Elting Room in Phillips Hall. The animal rights people prevailed! Were they burned?

Can they be brought back?

When our son George ’69 was born, I notified Dr. Perry, telling him, of course, that I hoped he’d go to Exeter. “You tell Carol he’s in Exeter,” he said.

I’d heard of registering newborns at Groton and St. Paul’s but had assumed that Exeter had broader requirements.We think George made it on his own, but who knows; perhaps there’s a handwritten note in his folder!

At assembly, it lifts my spirits to hear Principal Hassan greet his audience with,“Good morning, Exeter.” Our move to RiverWoods four years ago strengthened my ties to PEA and affirmed what many classmates have told me: “My best years of education were at Exeter.”The Academy is part of our lives, and I’ve come to appreciate the gentle New Hampshire tax code: no sales tax, no capital gains or estate tax. Some of us can live here free!

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Columns were submitted on June 1 (nonreunion classes) and July 1 (reunion classes).

35,000 Miles, 6,000 Books (continued from page 29) nearly every mile of the 17,000 logged by RV and 15,000 by car. (The family would do satellite excursions by car from each campground. They logged another 3,000 miles by boat to visit Alaska.) She says her palms had calluses on them by the time she pulled the RV into the driveway in Raleigh. But, she adds, “I now know I can do anything, sometimes after a brief cry.

The logistics of this trip were more challenging than I expected and driving was very difficult. We had any number of challenges, from evacuating our campsite less than an hour before a major flood left our site three feet deep in water, to shredded tires, blown-out electricity, broken

First-graders in New Orleans greet the Bergs with eager smiles and questions.

jacks, and more. Without my usual support that being at home affords, I had to tackle this on my own, and in every case I was able to get the job done.”

Rearview Reflections

The empowerment Berg and her children have gained from their travels is complemented by the discoveries made along the way, and by returning home.

“I had not appreciated how great the national parks are for children, educationally,” Berg says. “If I could share one piece of advice with every parent in America, it would be to go to the national parks and do the Junior Ranger park programs.”

The Bergs visited 63 national parks, including the Lincoln Boyhood National

Memorial in southwestern Indiana. There, they learned that Abraham Lincoln’s stepmother had given him three books, which he credited with changing his life. “This is why we give books,” Berg reminded her children, “If we can influence just one child’s life, it will be worth it.”

After visiting Gettysburg and other war memorials, Anton has decided that he wants to design robots that can fight in wars, “so people don’t have to die.” For her part, Kelly says, “I have learned to appreciate my life more, because I have realized that not everybody has the same possibilities and opportunities as I have.” This was demonstrated in many different encounters but most notably during a class visit in New Orleans during a book give, when

she complained about having to wash dishes by hand in the RV, only to learn that most of the children have that chore every day in their homes. This moment was followed more than a month later by the discovery of a family with two small children living in a pickup truck.

Kelly, assisted by her brother, brought out bags of food from the RV to give to the family.

There were, of course, countless moments of excitement and spectacular beauty too. From swimming with manatees in Florida to cresting the ridge at Cabrillo National Monument at Point Loma and spying the

The Bergs bike at Yosemite National Park, with Half Dome as backdrop.

Pacific Ocean for the first time. And everything—the 205 parks, forests, museums, factories, amusement parks, historic sites and events—in between. These are moments captured by photo or blog post that Berg and her children are still processing internally as they acclimate back to home life.

There is one road trip activity they haven’t let go of. Berg had begun reading aloud to Kelly and Anton to help them unwind from the day’s activities, something she hadn’t done since they started reading on their own.Together, they read all nine of the Little House on the Prairie books, finishing the last one less than a week before they returned to Raleigh. Now, they’ve moved on to Mark Twain, and it is giving Berg the chance to have her children close for just a little longer at night.“I miss having my kids sleeping at the foot of my bed in their bunks,” she says.“They feel so far away now that we are home and they are up in their bedrooms.”

Anton and Kelly each earn a 50th Junior Ranger badge at Mammoth Cave National Park.

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Memorial Minute

Richard Lee “Rick” Parris G E O R G E A L B E RT W E N T WO RT H P RO F E S S O R O F M AT H E M AT I C S A N D I N S T RU C T O R I N M AT H E M AT I C S ( 1 9 4 5 – 2 0 1 2 )

R

ichard Lee Parris ’95, ’97 (Hon.); P’97, P’01 was born in Boston on August 18,

1945. He grew up in Natick, MA, and was educated in the public school system of that city, graduating from Natick High in 1963. He then matriculated at Tufts University, graduating summa cum laude and earning his B.S. in 1967. The following year, he tutored underserved students through the Upward Bound Program, thereby marking his interest in stimulating all students in their understanding and appreciation of mathematics.

Other short teaching stints followed, but a year at Princeton University earning an M.A. led him to decide to pursue a Ph.D. there.While doing coursework at Princeton, he taught at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, then at Princeton as a teaching assistant until 1977, when he was conferred his Ph.D. In September of 1978, he joined the Phillips Exeter Academy Mathematics Department after a year at The Lawrenceville School.

Rick’s inventiveness as a math teacher and his generosity as a colleague were evident from the beginning. In the 1980 Math Department letter in support of reappointment for Rick, Math Chair Don Dunbar ’45, ’59, ’62 (Hon.); P’71, P’73, P’76 wrote: “If Rick Parris were not in the Exeter Mathematics Department, we should have to invent him.We are fortunate to have the original.” Also already clear were Rick’s talent and commitment as a cross-country coach. In his first year at the Academy, he had organized and overseen the very first girls varsity cross-country program. Except for the year that he and his family spent in Rennes, France, teaching in School Year Abroad, he coached in that program until 2009. For each of these years, he compiled and kept a spiral notebook containing an astonishing wealth of detailed information about each of his runners, each of their races, each of the team’s competitive efforts, and so forth. But as comprehensive as those notebooks were, Rick’s own memory was more impressive.Years after a meet, he was able to relive and recall for another a key moment here or a key performance there.

He never forgot his girls, either collectively or individually, and countless testimonials following his death make it fair to say that they never forgot him either. His opponents often remembered him as well. On a rainy day at the InterRick’s inventiveness as a math schols, the 7-year-old daughter of a rival cross-country teacher and his generosity as a coach watched Rick as his runners passed by. Later she said to her father: “He was different. He didn’t yell at his girls at colleague were evident from all, and everything he said was positive. He was the nicest the beginning. coach at the race.”

His work in his dormitories was of a similar measure. In a letter to his wife, Pam P’97, P’01, a former student evokes the Parrises’ household on one of countless occasions: “My most vivid memories of Mr. Parris were those early mornings when we would have oatmeal at your house. I was there because I needed to work on my Spanish, and all the girls from his [cross-country] crew would be chomping down on berries and nuts in their steaming oatmeal bowls. He was always there, catching up with people around the table, helping with math homework, advising on issues with shin splints, and just being there.” Many of them called him “P,” a tag that allowed respectful informality and also had overtones of “parent.” In more official terms, the dean of students wrote in her report on Rick and Lamont Hall: “Both Rick and Pam take an active interest in the girls’ extracurricular activities and can be seen at events where Lamont girls are performing. Also, they do a great deal of entertaining in the dorm and arrange for trips, all of which the girls say makes the dorm feel like home.” No wonder that letter after letter from former students refer to Rick and Pam as family, father, mother, “P” and “Mrs. P.” 92

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CHERYL SENTER

In the meantime, Rick began developing supplementary mathematics problems for use in the traditional courses offered by the department. In doing so, he served his own imagination and ambition as well as his students. As he said in a summary of grant work written in 1984:“My interest in such problems is due in part to the pleasure I get from working them myself, but it also stems from my belief that the only students who really learn mathematics well are the ones who develop the staying power and imagination that it takes to be problem-solvers. Such students will have thus learned that being accomplished in mathematics is not simply a matter of learning enough formulas to pass tests; that creative, original thought requires living with some questions for extended periods of time, and that academic adventure can be found in the pursuit and discovery of patterns, more so than in the mere mastery of known formulas.” Some years later, and almost annually, a PEA alum recently matriculated at MIT would, at the invitation of the institution, name a secondary school teacher who had been “especially influential” in his or her development. So often was Rick named that in 1991, he received a special letter from MIT commending him on his remarkable effect on his students. Such letters went out only after five students had so honored a particular teacher; Rick received more than one such special letter.

But Rick’s indefatigable enthusiasm for teaching was not limited to the excellence of his students any more than his love of his cross-country teams depended on their competitive success. On the contrary, the file of tributes is full of reminiscences by students who struggled in math. One, who became a clergyman, wrote to Pam, “I was always lousy at math. I spent many evenings in your apartment, trying mightily to learn probability and statistics with your husband’s deep patience keeping me steady. I’ve never worked so hard for a [C-plus] in my life. But it was part of his particular genius that he was able to make me proud of it, and when I went ahead in Exeter fashion and asked him for a college recommendation, he accepted. I got to go forth into a life without much math in it, but with a whole lot of appreciation for patience, kindness and the power of humor. I’m confident he’s jawing with Fermat and Einstein, and having a grand old time.” For Rick, it was always about getting the student to see her or his own strengths, whatever they were. One student who became a physicist remembers above all how Rick helped her get past a mental block: “Mr. Parris has had an incredible influence on the way I understand the world. I still remember the day when I did not understand why, if you had a rotation matrix that did the correct thing for the [1,0] and [0,1] vectors, it would rotate any arbitrary vector correctly. Many teachers would have dismissed the question as trivial, but he listened, understood the conceptual hurdle in my head, and encouraged me to keep questioning things. Ten years later, I remember the chalky dry air, the heat being turned up a little too high, and the exact section of the blackboard that we were standing at.”

At the same time, Rick was serving his department colleagues. One spoke for many: “What still impresses me most is his manner of working with others to help them see and believe that they can do difficult mathematics. Rick could dominate all such sessions with his intellect and his tremendous background of knowledge. But he never allows that to happen. We always work together and develop exciting ways of looking at problems as a team.”The word “team” comes up again in a colleague’s description of working with Rick in the Exeter Math Institute: “We were a team, but of course it was Rick doing the lion’s share of the work, coming up with the most interesting ideas, and yet always making me feel good about any contributions I made.”

Meanwhile Rick was developing the Peanut software for which he became renowned.That software helped his PEA colleagues and students both teach and learn, but a remarkable additional feature to his service to colleagues and students came through his

Rick Parris’ passion for mathematics was equally matched by his desire to help each and every student at his table.

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distribution worldwide of the software, making it free for anyone who chose to use it. One Australian colleague highlights something easy to overlook: “Many of the users of Peanut software were teachers in [developing nations] who could afford some computers but not math software. To them, the free Peanut software was a blessing.” Electronically then, Rick worked closely with teachers whom he had never met in countries he had never visited, and he worked with them as a team as well. And of course these international colleagues taught international students, leading to many versions of the following: “[Rick] helped thousands of Brazilians to enjoy mathematics”; “[Rick’s] name is known to teachers and pupils in Russia”; and more countries from quite literally all quarters.

It is hard to keep the length of this document under control with the wealth of tributes from Exeter itself, so a couple of tributes must represent the many: “His mastery of the art of Harkness instruction struck the delicate balance between guiding us in the right direction and allowing us room to discover things for ourselves.”

“When we, your students, saw that passion not just for mathematics (which was obvious and infectious), but for teaching; when we saw all the effort and care that you put forth in pursuit of our understanding, it touched something inside of us.”

Girls cross-country head coach from 1978 to 2009, Parris often coached during the other seasons too, assisting in the springtime with softball.

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Rick was also a teacher who resisted getting a cell phone and hated calculators, yet commanded technology in a way that led to the ever-evolving brilliance of the Peanut software; a teacher who disliked the AP exams and their processes such that he would neither teach the exams nor correct them when asked to do so by the national organization; a teacher committed to recognizing the work of others while ducking the recognition he so r ightly received for his own work; and a teacher who as Chaucer might have described: “Not one word spoke he more than was his need/ And that was quick and full of high good sense/ Pregnant of moral virtue was his speech;/ And gladly would he learn and gladly teach.”

Let it be noted that Rick had a playful side: Taking delight at getting reprimanded for running up a “down” escalator at Jordan Marsh; becoming ecstatic when catching a foul ball for the only time in 40 years of watching Red Sox games at Fenway. And that playful side could reveal a competitive impulse: An EMI colleague remembers Rick taking off up 14 flights of stairs to the hotel floor where they were staying, always to meet his colleagues as they exited the elevator with “a giant grin on his face.”

Rick’s engagement in the life of the school went beyond his specific responsibilities. He routinely coached all three seasons, even when he was the head girls cross-country coach.

He always hoped for more volunteering from his colleagues for things the administration increasingly had to ask for. Believing that the faculty should play a central role in the selection of Exeter students, he served year after year on the Admissions Committee, reading astonishing numbers of folders. He was not interested in the size of his salary, but he was alert to fairness in establishing salary structures. And he certainly made his feelings known in articulate, sometimes trenchant prose that left no doubt as to where he stood on a given

matter. A crude assembly program led him to write to the dean of faculty: “As for the gratuitous violence, the disgraceful racist and sexist stereotyping, and the vapid and dangerous romanticizing of druggies, well . . . my blood is boiling right now.” He also had the cheek, if that’s what it was, to write on an annual workload update sheet under the category, “Other student-related activities”: “I make them up as I go along.”

As time passed, Rick and Pam emerged as a true partnership in this educational setting, particularly as Pam solidified her position as a study skills expert on campus, teaching groups of non-native speakers of English while tutoring individual students in all manner of academic challenges. It should come as no surprise that, in letters of tribute to Rick, came tributes to Pam as well, such as: “I can’t describe how pivotal your role was in [getting me through] my toughest years at Exeter” and “You are one of the sweetest, most loving people I have ever known.” The annual cookie party at the Parrises’ home literally brought people together from all parts of the campus and provided them delicious fare; but metaphorically, it ...the world of was their way of taking care of us all, a community they mathematics teaching saw as family.

As to their immediate family, Priscilla Parris McCorwas changed for the mack ’01 has introduced us to “the part of my father that better by Rick Parris. he reserved for his family.” His demeanor was as calm and logical at home as it was in the classroom, and he taught in short and loving lessons. On her chasing a ball into a street: “We can always get another ball; we can’t get another Priscilla.” On her claiming that “all classical music [was] so stupid”: “You’ll like it more as you grow up, [though] first you’ll like jazz.” And then there was “Vacation Dad”: the dad whom Rick became “for a precious few weeks each year”; the man who would emerge laughing frantically, even his lower teeth showing, when Donald O’Connor began his frenetic rendition of “Make ’Em Laugh” in Singin’ in the Rain. That was the dad who accompanied Pamela “Jane” Parris ’97 to the U.S. Open at Flushing Meadows so she could see in real life her beloved tennis heroes.That was the dad who reassured the girls when they worried that there would be “no scrap of him left for us.” Still the outpouring of tributes after Rick’s death produced from Priscilla the following thanks: “I know now that you all appreciated him.That every ounce of himself that he poured into the Academy was, in fact, as dear to you as it was to him.That none of this was in vain.That it all meant something. So I want to say thank you.Thank you, all—for allowing my dad to do exactly what he wanted to do.”

In a letter dated January 2012, Rick and Pam had made the following reassuring declaration: “We love our work and have no plans to retire.” Rick’s death intervened on October 23, 2012, but the school is fortunate that Pam is willing and able to continue her work on behalf of the students. And Rick’s legacy itself is still teaching us, from the array of materials he produced for the Math Department, which the department still uses, and in the way he lived his life.We have lost “the original” Rick Parris that Don Dunbar wrote of in 1980, but the influence of this brilliant and committed teacher lives on, both locally and globally. A self-effacing man from New England, who loved the landscape he grew up in, shaped the educational landscape of places known to him only electronically. It is not an overstatement to say that the world of mathematics teaching was changed for the better by Rick Parris. The physicist previously quoted summed up her gratitude for having Rick as her teacher: “An interesting thing about some giant stars is that when they die, they become millions of pieces that travel in all directions all across the universe. The extraordinary energy contained in that giant star allows the pieces to travel away with new chemical elements that form when smaller elements are combined.”

How lucky we were to have him as one of our “giant stars” for more than 30 years.

This Memorial Minute was written by Eric Bergofsky ’79, ’83 (Hon.); P’98, P’02, chair; David Arnold ’83 (Hon.); Dale Braile P’10; Gwyn Coogan ’83; P’11, P’17; Peter Greer ’58; ’71, ’81, ’83, ’97, ’00 (Hon.); P’81, P’83, P’94; and David Weber ’71, ’74, ’83 (Hon.); P’92, and was presented at faculty meeting on September 9, 2013.

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Finis Origine Pendet

Returning Home to Exeter

By Sherwood E. “Joe” Bain ’41; P’69

W

hen your kids make enough noise

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The Exeter Bulletin

FALL 2013

not considered faculty. This mattered little to me at the time, if, indeed, I even considered it. I was overwhelmed by Harkness, the advanced degrees of so many faculty, the facilities, the athletics, activities and, of course, my classmates, who seemed more worldly than me.The classy, professional ways in which things were done was new to me, coming from a small high school in Maine.

Robert Frost came to read poems to us, and there were visits by Gregor Piatigorsky, the von Trapp Family Singers, Igor Stravinsky, Katharine Hepburn, André Maurois, Stephen Vincent Benét and others.

There were “butt rooms” where boys could smoke and formal dances with big-name bands.

The Exonian carried ads for Camels and Chesterfields. Lunch at The Exeter Inn was 65 cents.There were Greek letter societies, long ago abolished. My ignorance of them caused me to be flustered when I received a “feeler.” I wasn’t tapped.

At morning chapel, now assembly, we sang songs (I first heard excerpts from The Pirates of Penzance and H.M.S. Pinafore); listened to visiting dignitaries; and carved our initials on the backs of the wooden benches in front of us. Even today, I shut my eyes and hear our male chorus of “Upidee, Idee, Ida” and “Funiculi, Funiculà.”

Of our 238 classmates, 90 percent of them chose Ivy League colleges.The rest went mostly to eastern colleges, including the service academies.

It was 1941.

RiverWoods—founded by two Exeter faculty wives, Rosemary Coffin and Maryanna Hatch, 20odd years ago—has three campuses in a woodland setting on Route 111, the extension of Front Street, just two miles from the Academy Building.

Proximity to PEA is a strong draw for many residents, thanks to Exeter’s policy of making most lectures and concerts open to the public. Savvy alums have moved in, doubtless for reasons similar to ours.The Exeter family is us, along with the faculty and students.

There are assemblies, classes to be visited, coffee at the Grill, and sports on Wednesdays and Saturdays. The town of Exeter seems to have grown even more beautiful over the years, as so many stately homes have been restored. (continued on page 90)

FRED CARLSON

about “time to move to a retirement community,” you begin to listen.

After 60 happy years in Cambridge, MA, my wife, Carol, and I wanted to be near the activities around Boston that we enjoy. We investigated several Continuing Care Retirement Communities (CCRCs) around Route 128. The apartments we were shown were too small, too far from the dining room, lacked sunlight, or didn’t accept dogs. We had also made a deposit at RiverWoods, in Exeter, NH—a bit farther from Boston, but reachable by train, bus or car. Carol and I made a pact: We’d move to whichever CCRC came up first with a unit we liked. In 2009, RiverWoods won hands down. Our living room has so much space that it can accommodate a grand piano, a big plus for me after putting up with a Yamaha upright in Cambridge.

Our ties to Exeter are strong. Carol had known Dr. [Lewis] Perry (Exeter’s eighth principal) well, having served as a secretary to him at his Beacon Hill retirement home. And, although I was a twoyear boy at the Academy, those were my most influential years, shaping the course of my life.

To my surprise, as a soldier in World War II, I received letters from Wells Kerr, then-retired dean of students and himself a World War I veteran. Over the years, I have grown to admire many faculty and classmates: Hammy Bissell ’29; Bill Saltonstall ’24, who once invited me to play squash when we ran into each other at the Harvard Club; the folks at Gilman House (I’ve been a class agent for The Exeter Fund for “forever,” it seems); Steve Kurtz; Kendra Stearns O’Donnell; and so many others.

When I was a young alum, Darcy Curwen and Leonard Pearl—both feared housemasters—asked me to call them “Darcy” and “Len.” Carol and I even spent our wedding night at The Exeter Inn! The Academy was a WASP society during my years as a student.The Christian Fraternity featured prominently. There were no minorities, although some had been enrolled in previous years. I learned later in life that the faculty had all been WASPs, except for Ralph Lovshin, the track coach, who was

Phillips Exeter Academy 20 Main Street Exeter, New Hampshire 03833-2460 Parents of Alumni: If this magazine is addressed to a son or daughter who no longer maintains a permanent address at your home, please email us (records@exeter.edu) with his or her new address. Thank you!

Come Home to Exeter E X E T E R /A N D O V E R

Saturday, November 9, 2013 路 Cheer on Big Red teams 路 Enjoy an all-campus picnic 路 Meet new students 路 Catch up with old friends

@exeteralums @phillipsexeter

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For a schedule of games and more information visit www.exeter.edu/EA

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