The Exeter Bulletin, spring 2020

The Exeter Bulletin SPRING 2020

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NEW DATES. OLD FRIENDS. SAME CONNECTIONS. Celebrate the Exeter community at Reunions 2020.

Please join us in September!

Classes 1970–2015 | 5th–50th Reunions: Sept. 25–27, 2020 (1970’s 50th reunion will start on Wednesday, Sept. 23) Classes 1945–1965 | 55th–70th Reunions: Sept. 29–Oct. 1, 2020

exeter.edu/reunions

The Exeter Bulletin Principal William K. Rawson ’71; P’08 Executive Editor Karen Ingraham Managing Editor Patrick Garrity Senior Editor Jennifer Wagner Class Notes Editor Cathy Webber Editorial Coordinator Maxine Weed Creative Director/Design David Nelson, Nelson Design Communications Advisory Committee Daniel G. Brown ’82, Robert C. Burtman ’74, Dorinda Elliott ’76, Alison Freeland ’72, Keith Johnson ’52, Yvonne M. Lopez ’93 Trustees President John A. Downer ’75 Vice President Wole C. Coaxum ’88 Ciatta Z. Baysah ’97, Suzi Kwon Cohen ’88, Walter C. Donovan ’81, Mark A. Edwards ’78, Claudine Gay ’88, Peter A. Georgescu ’57, Jacqueline J. Hayes ’85, Jennifer P. Holleran ’86, Cia Buckley Marakovits ’83, Sally J. Michaels ’82, Daniel C. Oakley ’80, Deidre G. O’Byrne ’84, William K. Rawson ’71, Peter M. Scocimara ’82, Serena Wille Sides ’89, Morgan C. Sze ’83, Kristyn M. Van Ostern ’96 and E. Janney Wilson ’83 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 Telephone 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 2020 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

SPRING

“I HAD TO FIND A WAY TO EXERT MY VOICE.” —page 30

IN THIS ISSUE

Volume CXXIV, Issue no. 3

To mark the 50th anniversary of Earth Day on April 22, we dedicated the Bulletin’s features to stories about sustainability and environmental activism.

Features 30 The Changemakers Meet Exeter’s next generation of environmentalists.

By Patrick Garrity, Sandra Guzmán and Jennifer Wagner

36 The Environmental Donor John Warner ’72 boosts Exeter’s sustainability initiatives

By Karen Ingraham

38 How Green is Exeter?

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15 facts about the school’s sustainability efforts today.

By Nicole Pellaton

42 Snapshot in Time Hal Thomas ’70 was there on Exeter’s first Earth Day.

By Sarah Pruitt

Departments 6

Around the Table: Table Talk, Exeter Annotated, Heard in Assembly and more

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Inside the Writing Life: James Meyer ’80

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Sports: The Oldest Record on the Books

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Connections: Catching up with our alumni —Cover illustration by Michael Austin

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English Instructor Tyler Caldwell (with his puppy, Roger) conducts a video conference with his advisees.

PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRISTIAN HARRISON

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AROUND THE TABLE

What’s new and notable at the Academy

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The Community Within Us

By Principal William K. Rawson ’71; P’08

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write to you during a historic moment in time for the Academy, our country and the

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world. Nearly 4 billion people around the globe are under orders to shelter at home to combat the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Our federal government has approved the largest economic relief package in the history of our country. We see daily on the news and social media the impact of the virus and the heroics of those on the front lines, and we feel the fragility of this moment. More than ever, we have sought new ways of building and sustaining community, and we derive inspiration, strength and comfort from those around us. It’s no different at Exeter.

When we made the decision in March to adopt a remote learning plan for the entirety of the spring term, we did not doubt it was the right choice to protect the health and well-being of our community members. It was, nevertheless, a difficult one. Exeter thrives because of the people it brings together, the community they create, and what they learn from each other around the Harkness table, in the dorms, or on the fields or stage. How do we replicate that online? The short answer is that we cannot, not exactly. As we urge our students and employees to practice self-care and to put their families first, and as we strive to create an equitable online experience for students around the world, our virtual spring term will be entirely unique. And yet, it will also be entirely Exeter.

I believe our Harkness pedagogy gives us an enormous advantage, in that our students are accustomed to taking responsibility for their own learning. They like to do so, and they like to learn from each other. Our faculty has also stepped up in extraordinary ways under a compressed timeline to build an online experience centered on academic excellence, equity and inclusion. Their predominantly asynchronous learning model maximizes student and teacher flexibility and student independence, and our teachers are working hard to ensure each student has the resources they need to succeed.

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Music Department Chair Kris Johnson is shipping instruments to students to conduct lessons and rehearsals online. Art Department Chair Carla Collins mailed miniature pottery wheels to her Advanced Ceramics students. In the sciences, instructor Sydnee Goddard has incorporated software into her curriculum that allows her Marine Biology students to see her classroom microscope, while many of our physics instructors are designing labs based on common household goods that students are likely to have on hand. These are but a few of many examples early in the term, and I have no doubt our talented faculty’s efforts will continue to provide engaging learning opportunities that excite and challenge our students in true Exeter fashion. I know Exonians will rise to the challenge. They already are.

Sanath Govindarajan ’20 is continuing with his senior project this term to conduct whole genome sequencing on fruit fly strains, as part of Exeter’s ongoing collaboration with Stanford University. Sanath is using data gathered by several sections of winter term’s Molecular Genetics class, where students had extracted fruit fly DNA fragments and submitted them to an outside lab for analysis. Their hard work is now fueling Sanath’s research. Meanwhile, his classmates Rose Coviello and Lilly Pinciaro are studying whiteness and white supremacy this term. Their goal is to create a learning guide and a draft course outline for a high school course that will address topics of racism through a peer-developed lens. And, The Exonian Editor-in-Chief Anne Brandes ’21 and the paper’s Chief Digital Editor Maegan Paul ’21 are leading the effort to keep America’s oldest continuously run preparatory school newspaper in circulation. It is an impressive effort, and I encourage you to visit theexonian.com to see how our students are reporting on the virtual term and keeping their classmates connected.

The bonds within the Exeter community are proving to be stronger than ever. I have been moved by how Exonians are rising to this unprecedented challenge across digital mediums that are so native to them. I am especially touched by how our seniors are coping with The COVID-19 pandemic unfolded during the middle this virtual term and the loss of an on-campus senior of our production cycle for this magazine. Our story spring. They are gracefully leading the charge on many fronts to celebrate their bonds and to practice acts of lineup, which is dedicated to the 50th anniversary of non sibi.

Earth Day, and Class Notes were already well underway Madeline Huh ’20 and Caroline Huang ’21 have as we moved to a virtual term. We chose to continue launched a podcast to help Exonians stay connected with those stories in this issue, but we also adjusted to this term, as Billy Menken ’20 has provided us with humor through funny and touching YouTube videos. accommodate some initial coverage of the pandemic’s Senior Emma Cerrato and peers from the Academy and impact on our school, and our community’s response.

Exeter High School began offering free online tutoring The story is far from over, and the summer Exeter to elementary and middle school students in the greater Bulletin will feature more complete coverage of the Exeter area to keep, she says, their connection to the town. And sisters Anjali and Meili Gupta ’20 hosted an virtual spring term, and how students, faculty and staff artificial intelligence virtual summit for teenagers this have worked to meet the challenges of remote learning, month, where panelists discussed their professional and grow from them, while continuing to ensure that work in the computer science and AI fields.

Exeter remains Exeter.

Our Exeter community is strong, and it is resilient.

Despite the speed at which we have had to adjust to We would also like to include stories from alumni our current reality and the great personal hardship this pandemic has inflicted upon so many, the mission of our who are on the front lines fighting this pandemic. school continues. The ideals on which it was founded — If you are one of those alums, thank you. We are to unite goodness and knowledge and prepare students deeply grateful for your sacrifice and service, and to live purposeful lives — remain the beacons that guide we would love to hear your story. Or, if you know of everything we do together. The Exeter experience will be an alum who is doing life-saving work, please let us different this term, but it will be no less transformative, know. You can email us at bulletin@exeter.edu. and I am confident that our school will be stronger for it. E

Editor’s Note

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Exeter’s COVID-19 Response H OW A V I RT UA L S P R I N G T E R M U N FO L D E D

By Adam Loyd

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n March 18, Principal Bill Rawson ’71; P’08

informed the Exeter community that spring term would be conducted entirely through online learning, an extraordinary step necessitated by the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak worldwide.

In a letter and video message to students, parents, faculty and staff, Rawson said the difficult decision was “compelled by the current public health crisis, by our need to keep you and our community safe, and by our obligation to do our part not to contribute to the spread of the coronavirus.”

“As eager as we are to have our students return to their classes, practices, rehearsals, and friends, we cannot do that until we are sure it is safe for them and all members of our community.”

On the same day, Rawson announced in a letter to alumni that reunions scheduled for May would be postponed until September.

The decisive action was taken as it became clear to Academy leadership that the crisis was only worsening across the United States and that its impact would be long-lasting. Even before winter term ended on March 6 and the Exeter community prepared to scatter across the country and around the world for a two-week break, it seemed inevitable that spring term would be unlike any other in the Academy’s 239-year history.

Academy administrators watched as the global situation rapidly devolved and began discussing contingency plans for the remainder of the school year. Schoolsponsored experiential-learning trips were canceled, and the administration made lodging arrangements for international students who would be unable to travel home for the two-week break. Quarantine guidelines were put in place for those who would be returning to campus after traveling to areas with high rates of infection during the break. A campus visit program for new students accepted for the 2020-21 academic year was canceled, and employee business travel was suspended.

The Incident Response Team, led by Principal Rawson and including deans, department heads and campus medical director Dr. Katy Lilly, met daily to discuss the

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For the latest news on COVID-19’s impact on Exeter, visit exeter.edu/covid19.

latest developments from global, national and local perspectives while following guidelines put forth by the World Health Organization, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services.

On March 11, Rawson informed the campus community that the start of spring term would be delayed. A week later, it became apparent that any resumption of a regular term was impossible.

Faculty and staff coordinated efforts to accommodate online learning. Providing an equitable experience was essential and the Academy worked to ensure that all students would have the resources necessary to participate virtually. The plan called for traditional Harkness discussions to be modified with students and instructors meeting online using a videoconferencing program.

In an email to students, Dean of Students Brooks Moriarty ’87 acknowledged the challenges presented by the unprecedented situation and made students aware that the term would be graded on a “pass/no-pass basis.”

Considering the time-zone differences for students now spread around the world, Moriarty laid out a weekly schedule and guidelines for class participation.

Moriarty explained that students are to have three weekly “touchpoints” with instructors, which he defined as attendance during the scheduled class time, a one-onone conference with an instructor, or “engagement with or contribution to a class activity at a time of the student’s choice, other than the scheduled class time.”

Most affected by alteration of the spring term is the graduating class of 2020. In his video address to the students, Principal Rawson highlighted the class, saying the seniors have “had a remarkable impact on our school” and that he hopes to find a way to have the class come together one last time before departing from Exeter.

Rawson closed his message with a call for unity among the students in the days and weeks ahead: “Let’s do everything we can to stay connected, even as we learn to build community apart.” E

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SPRING DETOUR When members of the class of 2020 learned they would not be returning to campus for their senior spring term, they turned to Instagram to commiserate. They expressed sorrow and frustration and anger — but the most common messages were those of gratitude and love. For each other. For their instructors. For the school and community that changed their lives.

Jill Cloonan’s words represented her classmates’ prevailing sentiments: “Exeter allowed me to meet some of the most impressive and beautiful people I will ever encounter in my life. … Hopefully, we are all able to see each [other] soon and have a proper end to this wonderful chapter.” E

Follow Exeter’s virtual spring term at Instagram.com/phillipsexeter.

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Forward Thinking TONY DOWNER ’75 AND HIS EXETER EXPERIENCE

By Daneet Steffens ’82

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ony Downer ’75; P’06, P’06, P’07 spent more

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[those] positions today. And I’m very proud of that to the degree that I’ve had any participation in the assemblage or cultivation or retention of that team.”

It was one of his earliest supporting roles for Exeter, however, that had the biggest impact on Downer himself.

In 1985, he was participating in a phone-a-thon for the Academy in the Boston offices of Kidder Peabody. “I got a stack of index cards of classmates,” he recalls, “and I’m calling them for dollars for Exeter. Lo and behold, up comes the index card of a young lady whom I remembered very well: When I arrived at Exeter in 1972, the ratio was approximately 10 boys to every girl, so it wasn’t difficult for guys to at least be familiar with every girl. … That call was in October. We had our first date on November 16, and I proposed marriage on New Year’s Eve.” His former classmate was Amy Chan ’75. In September, they will celebrate their 34th anniversary.

Chan’s story is also one of the elemental reasons that Downer is so proactively involved with Exeter. “My wife came to this country in 1967 at the age of 10, the youngest of four kids,” he says. “At that time, she spoke two words in English: ‘orange’ and ‘juice.’ ” Chan’s parents brought their family to the United States from Hong Kong, having fled mainland China, and Chan enrolled in the Stamford, Connecticut, public school system. Her mom had a cleaning job on the local hospital’s maternity ward and her father was the night janitor at the Pitney Bowes factory. When an opportunity arose for Chan to participate in what’s now called the Horizons National Student Enrichment Program, a free academic and athletic program for low-income children, she grabbed it. After two years of enrollment, she earned a full scholarship to the New Canaan Country

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than 30 years in private equity and venture capital investing in technology companies, with a particular question in mind.

“You’re always peering into the future,” he says.

“You’re trying to answer the question of what lies on the horizon and beyond: How do you take action today, make decisions today, so as to anticipate and capture that future?”

It’s a mindset that’s served him well in his many volunteer roles for Exeter, actively and pragmatically supporting the Academy’s leadership through years of critical change and future-focused developments. Downer, who will step down after 13 years as an Academy trustee on June 30 — having also completed three years as that body’s president — has been integral to the Phillips Exeter Academy community in myriad ways.

His previous volunteer roles have included serving as class president and class reunions gifts chair and acting as the director and then vice president of the General Alumni Association. In addition, Downer has served on the Academy’s Investment Committee, and chaired the Governance Review Task Force and the Budget and Finance Committee. But it’s his recent leadership role he points to in terms of its noteworthy results. “One of the things I’m most proud of,” Downer says, “is the quality — in terms of character, integrity, competency, devotion and commitment — on the part of the leadership team in place today at the Academy. The school community is uncommonly well served by the people that we have in

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School, a private school she attended through ninth grade. “She had to transition to another high school at that point,” Downer says, “and her older brother shepherded that process. He had heard about a school in New Hampshire which was meant to be very good and had just gone coed. It was past the deadline for applications and Amy needed very substantial financial aid, but Exeter — God bless them! — said, ‘Yes.’” The Downers’ children — Nick ’06, Chris ’06 and Caroline ’07 — added to the family’s legacy at the Academy. And, in 2015, thanks to a gift from this family of alumni, the Downer Family Fitness Center opened its doors within the Thompson Gym. “It was a privilege to help realize the fitness center,” Downer notes. “It’s a real ‘crossroads’ piece of the community because you see both students and faculty there. It’s a democratizing, leveling place in the sense that your math teacher is not nearly as intimidating in gym shorts.

And we included ‘Family’ in the name because we wanted to send a message that says that Exeter is a place where families can have a common intergenerational experience.

That’s certainly been the case for us.” [In a fun bit of Exonian synergy, Downer’s family history with that particular campus building dates to 1939 when Downer’s father, a local freshman college basketball player, was tasked with guarding Exeter student Bud Palmer ’40 (subsequently captain of the New York Knicks).

As Downer’s dad liked to describe it, “That day I held Bud Palmer to 63 points.”]

Looking ahead, Downer notes that Exeter’s future holds challenges, opportunities and promise.

“Demographically, in the United States, those areas which are growing are generally in the South and Southwest, and neither of those regions have a particularly strong heritage with boarding schools,” says the man who built a career being future-focused. “And if you think about which segments of the population are growing most rapidly, it tends to be demographic groups who do not have a strong legacy or connection with boarding schools.

We need to be very intentional in terms of reaching out to those regions and those population groups, and impressing upon them the unique opportunities, the very special offering that Exeter provides.”

The Academy has robust endowment resources thanks to a conservative investment strategy, he continues,

and has a strong commitment to financial aid. Still, he says, “we are ever mindful of two considerations: at best, secondary school is going to be a fourth-order priority. It’s going to be behind savings for college, for housing and for retirement. And we are keenly aware that less than 5% of American households can afford an Exeter education without financial aid. The good news is we’ve got nearly half of our student body on financial aid. The other side of that is that a little over half of our student body come from a tiny percentage of the population. If you believe, as we do, in the importance and value of views from every quarter, we still have a ways to go.”

Downer also notes that Exeter’s tuition has increased at a rate that exceeds U.S. household income growth, despite it

“WE CAN SAY WITH CERTAIN CONFIDENCE THAT THOSE WHO HAVE COME BEFORE WILL CONTINUE TO ENABLE THOSE WHO COME TO EXETER IN THE FUTURE.”

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being the lowest among its peer schools. “The good news is that our community has been very supportive and responsive when we’ve reached out to them with campaigns that prioritize financial aid, so we can say with certain confidence that those who have come before will continue to enable those who come to Exeter in the future.”

The brightest aspect of Exeter’s future remains the extraordinary nature of its offerings. “I had the opportunity to travel extensively on behalf of the Academy and sit down with alumni of all manner of ages, careers and places on the map,” Downer says. “And what I heard time and time again from them was that while they attended other schools, they got educated at Exeter, and that Exeter transformed their lives.”

That level of appreciation and recognition speaks for itself, Downer points out. “I think our recipe of a residential experience, the Harkness pedagogy, our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, our commitment to financial aid, and our standard of excellence provides an unmatched experience. I think that was true when I was coming through, and I feel confident that it’s true today.” E

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Rich Aaronian’s Classroom Under the Microscope

By Wes LaFountain ’69

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Richard S. Aaronian P’94, P’97, taught his first class here in 1971. During his 49-year tenure, he has personalized his spacious Phelps Science Center lab with gathered specimens and memories: a vintage Red Sox pennant he picked up as a boy; a sea fan from his honeymoon in St. Croix; sand gathered on the Galapagos Islands. “This classroom is a microcosm of my life,” he says with a soft voice and grandfatherly demeanor that belies the intense curiosity of a scientist.

Hired to teach biology, the Harlan Page Amen Professor in Science soon introduced marine biology and ornithology into the Exeter curriculum — popular courses since their inception. This progression seemed natural for him: “They’re all connected,” he says simply.

Aaronian will retire at the end of this academic year, leaving behind a rich and enduring legacy. In his newfound free time, he is considering volunteering at the Southeast Land Trust in New Hampshire and the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge in Maine.

“Retirement is going to be a work in progress,” he says.

“I like having things to go to and do.” E

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xeter’s longest-serving faculty member, Science Instructor

This loggerhead sea turtle skull was unearthed in the attic of the old science building in 1978, Aaronian says, but its history traces to far earlier times. The USS Warren was a sloop-ofwar built in Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 1799, and some believe the engraved initials “B.F.K.” refer to Bartholomew Kimball, a 1786 Academy student. “When we do marine biology with the kids, we always bring it out,” Aaronian says.

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Racks of wings, and warblers, falcons and hawks preserved in test tubes — some dating as far back as the 1800s — serve as hands-on tutorials in Aaronian’s ornithology class. “We get these ‘Study Skins’ out,” he says, “ to ask [students] if they notice anything unusual. … How does form fit function?”

Aaronian has led six student trips abroad, including one memorable visit to the Amazon rainforest in Peru. “That was such a great trip for us,” he says.

“One student, Eddie Williams [’08], has become an important player in conservation nationally.

You could see that coming.”

Some of Aaronian’s most cherished artifacts are handmade thank-you notes former students gave him: “It makes me happy and pleased that I’ve touched them in a way that is important to a teacher. I’ve opened their eyes to something.”

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Examining the Dream E X E T E R E M B R A C E S M L K D AY

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xeter gathered again this winter to honor the life and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., galvanized by an all-school keynote by Ibram X. Kendi, author of groundbreaking books on racism, including How to Be an Antiracist.

Introducing the day, Principal Bill Rawson ’71; P’08 said, “We come together to consider where we are in the struggle to create a more just and equitable world. A world in which every person has equal self-worth, equal dignity, and to consider our own places and our own roles in that struggle.”

PEA has celebrated MLK Day for 30 years, using the occasion to study through a variety of lenses the slain civil rights leader’s message of peaceful social progress.

In a powerful keynote speech, Kendi, founding director of the Antiracist Research & Policy Center at American University, talked about the lessons we can learn from “the King they don’t teach us”: the King who was transformed during the last year of his life as he perceived “a nation approaching spiritual death” against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and increasing violence and oppression in America.

To define King by his “I have a dream” speech ignores the rest of his story, Kendi told a rapt Love Gym audience. It ignores King’s “nightmare” of racism’s evolution alongside racial progress. “We want to focus on his dream,” Kendi said. “We should recognize progress and we should also recognize his nightmares,” he concluded, as the crowd rose for a standing ovation. E

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Clockwise from far left: Ibram X. Kendi speaks with students following his keynote address; presenter Janine Fondon leads a workshop in the Forum; Jocelyn Sides ’22 and Adam Belew ’22 (right) take part in an exercise; Marina Ruiz de Lobera ’20 expresses a point; the Concert Choir performs James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.”

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Dan-El Padilla Peralta

Princeton University Classics professor “Thinking about one’s own evolving sense of citizenship as an immigrant is inseparable from a broader and more textured understanding of the histories of geopolitical projection that define the United States’ many, many incursions in Latin America and throughout the world over the course of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.”

To watch videos of these assemblies, go to exeter.edu/exeterlive.

Quade

Heard in Assembly SOUND BITES FROM THE WINTER SPEAKER SERIES Compiled by Jennifer Wagner Kirstin Valdez Quade ’98, author “Literature is a conversation between reader and writer, and reader and reader. A piece of writing is an extended hand. It’s a way of saying, ‘Can we recognize ourselves in each other?’ And even if we struggle to, can we find a way to care about each other regardless?”

Ibram X. Kendi, author, founding director of the Antiracist Research & Policy Center at American University “What an antiracist recognizes is that biologically and behaviorally people are people. The imperfections of groups, just like the imperfections of individuals, is precisely what makes those groups equals. When I see imperfections in you, I’m actually seeing your humanity.”

Charles Blow, op-ed columnist for The New York Times

Kendi

“We are in an age where the powerful want truth not to be true, and want the pursuers of truth not to pursue it.

And yet, truth stands, rigid and sharp, unforgiving and unafraid. It is our only guardian against tyranny. … A free, fearless, adversarial, in-your-face press is the best friend a democracy can have.”

Blow

Dr. David Sakura, Japanese-American internment camp

survivor “The government only gave us two weeks to prepare for our departure to the internment camps. … There were no tears. No protests. No friends. Just a trail of sorrow as we left our beloved town. … I remember as we approached the assembly center of the detention camp, I can recall seeing the driveway lined with barbed wire. … I can remember seeing masses of people lined up against the fence and all of them had Asian faces. We were processed and fingerprinted by the FBI. I still have a record in the FBI files. Fingerprinted at the age of 6.”

Jeremiah Vernon, owner of Vernon Family Farm

Sakura

Lukianoff

“Farming is very hard. Net profits are in the single digits.

You live at the will of the weather. But the life is rich. It’s starting the day early, ending the day late. It’s exhaustion and exhilaration. It’s all you’ve got and still not enough.

It’s ideas, actions and results. This is our purpose, and happiness has definitely been a result.”

Greg Lukianoff, attorney, author of The Coddling of the

American Mind “The point of the First Amendment is to protect minorities of opinion in society. … There is no legal requirement for you to be nice. And this is actually a good thing, because if there were a requirement to be nice, we’d have to always be nice to the people in charge.”

Maurice Ashley, chess grand master

“I wake up every day believing that I am nowhere near my full potential. I’m 53 years young, about to turn 54, and I still think the next 10 years are going to be my best years ever. That’s how you should wake up. But the most important word in my lexicon is gratefulness. Each step, each breath, each chance to live another day is a blessing I don’t take for granted. That’s my essence of living.” E

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Action!

Exeter’s actors, dancers and musicians shined throughout winter term to put on a series of spectacular performances in The David E. and Stacey L. Goel Center for Theater and Dance and in the Class of 1959 Music Center Addition’s “The Bowld.”

HI-TECH: The Winter Dance Company performs in Technology in the Goel Center.

FOCUSED: Sophie Calvalcanti ’21 in Technology.

SHALL WE DANCE? Paula Perez-Glassner ’20 and Oliver Hess ’21 waltz in The Secret Garden.

STRINGS: Violinists Anjali Gupta ’20 and Dacha Thurber ’20.

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PREP BRAVURA: Petra Orloff ’23, Zoe Chang ’23, Kiara Odums ’23, Brooke Ottaway ’23 and Jennifer Finkelstein ’23 take a bow.

CENTER STAGE: Charlie Knight ’23 and Hannah Lee ’21 in a scene from the Winter Mainstage production of The Secret Garden.

GLI SCALATORI: Members of the vocal ensemble Sam Chang ’20 (from left), Liam Walsh ’20, Kilin Tang ’21 and Evie Houston ’21.

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EXETER DECONSTRUCTED

T H E S C H O O L W E L O V E I N D E TA I L

By Patrick Garrity

THE EXONIAN

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he Exonian has published continuously through two world wars, three presidential assassinations, the Great Depression and myriad other maladies to befall the nation since 1878. The COVID-19 virus is no different.

So, when the decision came in March to close down campus and move spring term entirely online, the 142nd editorial board saw it not as a breaking point but as breaking news.

Hours after that landmark announcement, the editorial staff, stretched across the country and around the globe, reported the story on a newly revamped website. In the weeks since, the newspaper has continued to cover the impact and inform the community from afar.

Editor-in-chief Anne Brandes ’21 and the new editorial board took the reins in early January with a three-pronged plan to improve the publication: retain writers, diversify the newsroom, and grease the gears between the print, digital and business operations. The most obvious of the changes were makeovers of both the printed newspaper and the website.

“I think the root of the idea is that no matter how good your content is, people will not read it if it doesn’t look nice and there’s not some kind of graphic or picture that attracts your attention initially,” Brandes says in explaining the redesigns. “I think especially as media becomes more digital and becomes more visually focused, that The Exonian really needed to step up our game.”

Brandes, who grew up in New York reading the city’s papers as well as digital news sites such as ProPublica and The Marshall Project, worked with Otto Do ’22 on the new look. She sought a clean, minimalist approach that supports but doesn’t compete with the writing.

“Anne’s vision to revive the print really inspired me,” Do says.

“I feel very passionate about this. I’m using design to revive the paper and so it’s more than just something fun or a hobby.”

The editors respect the newspaper’s place in history — it’s the oldest continuously operating high school newspaper in the country — and tapped into the past even as they pushed ahead. Part of that nod to history was to resurrect the original banner design that graced the first edition on April 6, 1878.

“This is our 142nd year,” Brandes says. “The original logo I think is strong and simple, but also switching it to the old logo as opposed to [a] new one shows that we really care about our heritage and we care about our legacy.

We’re not just starting something completely new. We’re building off of a really strong and rich history.

“This is very much The Exonian,” she says. “It’s just easier to read, more accessible.” E Anne Brandes ’21

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In Pursuit of Truth-telling

By Erica Plouffe Lazure “We are in an age where the powerful want truth not to be true and want the pursuers of truth not to pursue it. And yet, truth stands, rigid and sharp, unforgiving and unafraid.

It is our only guardian against tyranny. …. A free, fearless, adversarial, in-your-face press is the best friend a democracy can have.” — Charles M. Blow

T

he words of The Exonian Strickler lecturer and

New York Times columnist Charles Blow struck a chord with the campus newspaper’s writers and editors, who consistently face challenges and responsibilities in producing a weekly publication, and doing so truthfully. The editors I’ve had the pleasure to work with over the past eight years of The Exonian’s 142-year history are dedicated to this noble pursuit. They take pride in being the inheritors of the nation’s oldest continuously running preparatory school newspaper and take seriously the charge to safeguard their role on campus as an independent forum for student and community voices. They’ve covered difficult stories about sexual assault.

They’ve explored gender, racial and socioeconomic disparities in clubs and classrooms. They’ve dispelled myths about the college counseling process. They’ve reported on the Women’s March, climate-action rallies, Black Lives Matter and Afro-Latinx Exonian Society protests, and the impact of local and national politics.

And just as The Exonian is committed to editorial independence, it also strives to remain financially independent in the wake of the removal of the student subscription fee several years ago. On par with publishing trends nationally, The Exonian has seen financial and cultural shifts: a reduction in local ad sales, fewer subscriptions and declining print readership. My co-adviser, Ellee Dean ’01, watched her former employer, The Boston Phoenix, cease publication in 2013. Our newest student executive board is hard at work developing marketing plans to keep the paper solvent and help it grow, from enhancing subscription and advertising outreach to improving the design and features in both the newspaper and on our website. Meanwhile, every

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Wednesday, our production deadline looms. In normal times, as reporters’ articles filter in, the editors work from noon to 10 p.m. to edit and lay out articles, debate hot-button topics and news angles, and nab a slice or two of pizza, thanks to The Exonian Pizza Fund. A weekly visit from Barbara and David Bohn ’57 further sustains us with homemade cake and cream puffs. As our deadline approaches, the cream puffs and pizza gone, the seriousness of the work kicks in — the final page proofs, the headline writing, the typo-catching. And embedded in everything the editors do is a desire to get it right. They want to tell the truth. Former editor Suan Lee ’20 wrote that Blow’s comments about a rigorous press “was a pressing reminder that we must all be active truth-seekers to build a connected, informed, and progressive society.”

As a former reporter myself, I understand that, given the limitations of time and sources, uncovering the “truth” isn’t always easy. It takes practice and dedication. It takes getting it wrong to figure out how to get it right. The Class of ’73 Fund and The Exonian Fund have enabled us to attend the Harvard Crimson journalism conference each spring and offer a summer study scholarship for promising reporters. For many young writers, The Exonian has been a space where they can learn the value of telling the truth and practice, word by word, how to tell the truth and how to bring those core values into their daily lives and future professions. I see it as an extension of the values and skills at the core of Harkness — speaking up, listening, asking useful questions, seeking and sharing the truth.

In a culture where claims of fake news and skepticism of the media are at an all-time high, The Exonian’s charge of pursuing the truth is more important than ever. Our editors know that 142 years of independent journalism is an excellent legacy to build on, and Ellee and I are confident, guiding them from the sidelines, that the futures of journalism, and humanity, and the truth-telling required for the longevity and success of both, are in good hands. E Erica Plouffe Lazure is an instructor in English and co-adviser of The Exonian.

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Young Physicists’ Super Bowl E X E T E R P L AY S H O S T T O I N T E R N AT I O N A L C O M P E T I T I O N

By Debbie Kane

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t’s a frigid Saturday morning, and five members of

Exeter’s Physics Club are sitting in a Phelps Science Center hallway, eyes glued to their laptops. It’s the first day of the 13th annual United States Invitational Young Physicists Tournament (USIYPT) and, as tournament hosts and the 2018 and 2019 champions, the pressure is on.

Brian Liu ’20 does a practice run through his presentation on investigating stable configurations of spherical magnets as Alex Morand ’22 and Tony Yu ’20 offer feedback. Neil Chowdhury ’22 double-checks the math of team captain Penny Brant ’22 on her presentation measuring the length of an astronomical unit. Teammates Lucy Cai ’21, Tony Cai ’23, Jacob David ’22, Ellie Griffin ’21, Jonathan Meng ’21, Jocelyn Sides ’22, Celine Tan ’22, Max Tan ’21 and Lucy Xiao ’22 are scattered throughout the classrooms, watching other schools’ presentations and collecting intel on their strengths and weaknesses.

The Exeter presenters — Brant, Liu, Morand and Yu — stayed up into the wee hours fine-tuning their reports (including research, theory and scientific analysis) on USIYPT’s four physics problems. During the tournament, they’ll present, and defend, their work to opposing schools and a jury of physicists; they must also be prepared to challenge other schools’ findings.

Brant turns to Yu, who, together with Morand, Chowdhury and Liu, are the remaining members from Exeter’s 2019 team, and asks, “How awake are you?

What’s 17 + 67?”

Yu pauses. “80.”

“You’re definitely not awake,” Brant laughs. “I’ll challenge first,” she says, referring to their opening round against Cary Academy of Cary, North Carolina.

Tony Cai returns to report on one school’s presentation about calculating the weight of an hourglass. Yu, who will present on this topic, peppers him with questions: “How heavy was the sand?” “Did they use an actual hourglass?” Brant notes the time. They gather up laptops and backpacks and head upstairs for the first round.

Strategy, camaraderie, competition and spirited discussion are all part of USIYPT’s appeal to young physicists. Exeter finished third in this year’s tournament, which was held Feb. 8-9 and featured 11 schools from around the U.S., Europe and Latin America. Teams are judged on their problem-solving methods and ability to clearly communicate solutions as well as evaluate other

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The Exeter presenters: Morand, Brant, Liu and Yu.

schools’ presentations. The goal isn’t entirely about winning, it’s also to have an informed, respectful conversation about physics.

“The essence of science is communication,” says Greg Jacobs, president of the U.S. Association for Young Physicists Tournaments. “You can’t win the competition without a substantive presentation, but we want to see students who know the science and can communicate their findings. It makes them better physicists.”

Exposure to Harkness benefits the Exeter team and not just because they’re comfortable presenting in front of peers, says team adviser Scott Saltman, director of studies and John E. Smith Jr. Distinguished Instructor in Science.

“Harkness fits so well with the tournament motto — ‘The search for the truth.’ They view each round as a way to demonstrate what they understand and to learn more.”

In a crowded physics classroom, Liu, the first Exeter team member to present, leads his audience through a 10-minute slide presentation demonstrating the stable configurations of spherical magnets. Afterward, an opponent from The Harker School of San Jose, California, engages him in a spirited conversation about his results.

Brant, who opposed a friend from Andover during the competition, believes mutual respect contributes to a better conversation and better science. “I think that was my best match,” she says. “We had a friendly discussion.

I really wanted to offer constructive ways to improve her method and further her research.” E

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A Kaleidoscopic View of the ’60s A C O N V E R S AT I O N W I T H S C H O L A R A N D W R I T E R J A M E S M E Y E R ’8 0

By Wes LaFountain ’69

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TIMOTHY GREENFIELD-SANDERS

hat does it mean to “return”? In James Meyer’s new book, The Art of Return: The Sixties and Contemporary Culture, to return means to revisit a time, a society, or an event that defines and transforms that society.

Much more than a mere study of the visual arts of the 1960s, The Art of Return draws on memoir, fiction, literary criticism, philosophy and science. “The book took years to complete,” Meyer ’80 says, “because of the different disciplines involved in its conceptualization.”

Meyer’s wide-ranging volume highlights several historic events — not only in America, but also in select European, Asian and African countries heavily impacted during the ’60s — and their political and essential artistic correlations.

Vietnam and the Kent State student shootings of 1970 figure prominently, as does the Cultural Revolution in China, and other moments of global societal crisis that continue to resonate. Meyer deftly distills the politics of the time and the art that may have instigated, accompanied or memorialized each of these moments.

Drawing on decades of museum experience — Meyer is currently curator of modern art at Washington’s National Gallery — he offers more than 130 images of works produced by various artistic means during and since the ’60s to explore the ramifications of “return,” and how the process interrogates and differentiates history, memory and nostalgia. While the ’60s have passed, he illustrates how their impact is with us still.

We spoke with him recently to inquire about his book, its Exonian origins and its cultural import.

How did your Exeter experience help to prepare you to write this book — your third and most personal?

My education at Exeter was fundamental to writing this book and to my writing in general. For example, Donald Cole led a course on Chinese history my senior year. I have a chapter called “Red Scarf Children” about Chinese artists and writers born during the period of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976, who experienced that era as children and are now trying to understand it. I conducted research in China and spoke there.

I spoke in a place called Tianjin, a large city not far from Beijing. I first learned about Tianjin in Donald Cole’s class. It was one of the cities that was opened up by Western imperial exploration and trading in the 19th century; as he taught us, the attempt to overcome this colonial legacy precipitated the rise of Mao and still impacts China’s interactions with the West.

Did you see yourself moving into the writing life as a student at Exeter?

It was all I hoped. I found my way into writing as an academic and a critic. In the new book, my interest in narrative, in storytelling — how we write the past — has come to the fore. And in a sense it loops back to the kind of expressive and experimental writing I

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was encouraged to do by David Weber, Robert Grey, Peter Greer, Charles Pratt and Norval Rindfleisch. The book is an attempt to make good on the extraordinary training and encouragement I received in the Exeter English Department.

You’ve stated that this book is “At long last, a work of writing rather than straight art history.” What do you mean by that?

Any work of writing is writing. A seemingly “straight” historical narrative tells a story. In my earlier work, the narrative was diachronic, chronological. I am an omniscient narrator. The “I” is absent. In this book, my experience is central. The opening scene is set in 1971. I am 9 and hitchhiking on Martha’s Vineyard with another boy. We are picked up by a man who looked as if he had stepped out of the cast of Hair. I am old enough to have glimpsed the ’60s without understanding what that meant. The book ends at the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington in 2013. I listen to Myrlie Evers-Williams recall the murder of her husband Medgar a half-century ago. John Lewis describes Bloody Sunday. At that moment we are in the ’60s and in the present, simultaneously. The book tries to capture these returns: my memories and those of more than 20 artists and writers who revisit that time.

“THE BOOK IS AN ATTEMPT TO MAKE GOOD ON THE EXTRAORDINARY TRAINING AND ENCOURAGEMENT I RECEIVED IN THE EXETER ENGLISH DEPARTMENT.”

The Art of Return utilizes a variety of literary devices to tell its stories.

Was it difficult to tie them all together in a cultural history?

It was a great challenge to find a form of writing that could capture what I was after. The focus of my study would not only be visual art, it would include memoir and fiction, literary criticism, philosophy, even science.

Entropy, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, is central to my discussion of the Kent State shootings and American decline. I call this the “bad ’60s.” Fiction surfaces in the book where I’m writing about novels that returned to the ’60s and ’70s. Novels like Jennifer Egan’s The Invisible Circus, an outstanding work about nostalgia for that time and the costs of nostalgia; of always wanting to get back to a time that you feel is somehow better than the one you are living in.

The “Long Sixties,” as you call the period from roughly 1955 to 1975, were tumultuous. What turned out to be the most difficult aspect to cover in the book?

There were two particularly difficult parts. Simply trying to define the concept of “’60s return” — my claim that history is not static; that the past isn’t past, it keeps affecting us. Revolutionary eras like the ’60s especially have a longer afterlife. It takes a long time for their impact to be absorbed. The other great challenge was writing scenes including my father, one of which has to do with an argument over a book titled The Greening of America [by Charles Reich, 1970]. It’s a book that supports the counterculture of the ’60s and it inspired an argument at the family table. My father had fought in World War II; he didn’t understand the antiwar movement. He didn’t appreciate the sexual revolution either. His dislike of “the ’60s” made that era fascinating. But writing about my father, who died in 1993, was challenging. Return is an act of salvage: one remembers who and what one has lost.

The Art of Return represents a journey, if not a quest. Have you satisfied your youthful curiosity about a historical moment, glimpsed and missed?

I think I will always continue to be fascinated by that time. But my next exhibition at the National Gallery, on the “Double” in modern art, will go back to 1900 and forward to the present. The ’60s and ’70s will always stay with me, but there are other stories to tell. E

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Alumni are encouraged to advise the Bulletin editor (bulletin@exeter.edu) of their own publications, recordings, films, etc., in any field, and those of their classmates, for inclusion in future Exonians in Review columns. Please send a review copy of your published work to the editor to be considered for an extended profile or review in future issues. Works can be sent to: Phillips Exeter Academy, The Exeter Bulletin, 20 Main Street, Exeter, NH 03833.

ALUMNI 1961—Geoffrey Craig. Shakespeare’s Younger Sister. (Golden Antelope Press, 2019) 1976—Frank Daykin. Bloodwork: (new poems 2018/2019). (self-published, 2020) 1986—Wendy Holt Francis. Best Behavior. (Graydon House, 2020) 1987—Katherine Dauge-Roth.

Signing the Body: Marks on Skin in Early Modern France. (Routledge, 2019) 1991—Bryan Mark Rigg.

Flamethrower: Medal of Honor Recipient Woody Williams, Iwo Jima, and World War II in the Pacific.

(Stackpole Books, 2020) 1998—Intisar Khanani.

Thorn. (HarperTeen, 2020) 1998—Paul Yoon. Run Me to Earth. (Simon & Schuster, 2020) 2002—Rufi Thorpe.

The Knockout Queen: A Novel. (Knopf, 2020) BEYOND BOOKS 1969—Michael Fossel. “A Unified Model of Dementias and Age-Related Neurodegeneration.” (Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association, January 2020) 1987—Tom Loughlin. Loughlin’s Signal, a 22-ton public sculpture made from salvaged steel, was installed on California’s Treasure Island last fall.

1988—Burke Ingraffia, singer/songwriter. Waves, music album. (March 2020)

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2001—Emma Wynn.

“Moving Day,” poem.

(Prime Number Magazine, Issue 163, 2019) —“Settled,” Pushcart Prize-nominated poem.

(Sky Island Journal, Issue 10, 2019) —“Our Predators” and “Drought,” poems. (Coffin Bell, Volume 2, Issue Number 4, 2019) 2005—Nick Curcio, vocalist. “The Drawing EP.” (Ephemeral Fires, December 2019) FAC U LT Y Todd Hearon. “Passed Out Drunk Reading Robert Penn Warren,” poem. (Birmingham Poetry Review, spring 2020) — Crows in Eden, poetry collection. (Salmon Poetry, spring 2020) Tara Lewis. “Hell Yes!” solo exhibition of paintings at New York City’s Lyons Wier Gallery. (2020) Willie Perdomo, editor with Felicia Rose Chavez and José Olivarez. LatiNext: The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4.

(Haymarket Books, 2020) Tom Simpson. “Alina Stefanescu in Conversation with Tom Simpson,” “Bunkong Tuon in Conversation with Tom Simpson,” and “Shara Lessley in Conversation with Tom Simpson.” (American Microreviews & Interviews, Issue 50, fall 2019) — “Claire Wahmanholm in Conversation with Tom Simpson” and “Faylita Hicks in Conversation with Tom Simpson.” (American Microreviews & Interviews, Issue 51, winter 2020) Ralph Sneeden. “Memory and the First Coast: California Revisited,” essay. (The Surfer’s Journal, Volume 29, Issue 2, April/May 2020)

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The Oldest Record on the Books J E R R Y H I N K L E ’6 1 H A S A NEW CHALLENGER TO HIS

record back home, so it didn’t have as much sentiment put toward it,” Mancini says before a training session at the William Boyce Thompson Field House. “Fifty-nine years … I don’t really know how I feel about that.”

Mancini spent the winter indoors, honing his technique with throwing coach Steve Holmes and looking ahead to an outdoor season that was ultimately canceled because of the COVID-19 crisis. He must wait until next spring to compete for Big Red, but sooner or later, Mancini will get his shot.

A QUICK STUDY

Jerry Hinkle grew up in northwestern Pennsylvania.

Neither the javelin nor Exeter was on his radar the day he 5 9 -Y E A R - O L D J AV E L I N M A R K traveled to watch a track meet of a friend who attended The Kiski School, a private boys school east of Pittsburgh.

By Patrick Garrity Hinkle was dazzled by the facilities there, and his friend introduced him to the headmaster.

“He asked me if I’d be in need of financing, and I told he first time Jerry Hinkle ’61 launched a javelin him absolutely, there was no way my parents could afford in Exeter red, he set the school record. private school,” Hinkle recalls. “He Over three seasons, Hinkle said, ‘Then you should apply to broke and reset his own record so Exeter and Andover. If you qualify, many times that he doesn’t recall the specific they can help.’” throw that stands today. That mark — 207 Hinkle entered PEA in the fall feet, 5 inches — appears to have come on April of 1958 on scholarship and threw himself into Exeter life, joining several clubs and serving on the Student Council Dorm Committee and as a chapel monitor. In athletics, he stood out in football and captained the basketball team, but it was the track-and-field program Jerry Hinkle ’61 where Hinkle shined brightest after he met Exeter’s legendary coach Ralph Lovshin and throwing coach Dan Fowler.

“I played baseball and had quite a strong arm,” Hinkle says. “They used to say I could throw the ball through the backstop — if I could only hit the backstop.” Fowler took Hinkle’s raw power and center fielder’s mechanics and molded them into a smooth javelin approach and release.

Access to quality equipment helped polish David Mancini ’21 Hinkle’s technique. The first javelin he’d used back in Pennsylvania had doubled as a towel rack. “It had a big bow in it,” he recalls. When he got to Exeter, he encoun29, 1961, in a lopsided win over the University of New tered the “Cadillac of javelins.”

Hampshire freshmen.

It took Hinkle all of one meet to erase a 23-year-old Hinkle’s record has withstood six decades’ worth of challengers. It is the oldest one on Exeter’s athletic books. school record. His throw of 190 feet, 1 ½ inches in April of his lower year set the new standard. From there, he spent Now, a new contender is emerging. David Mancini ’21, three years writing records. He set the shot-put record, too, a first-year upper from Beaconsfield, Quebec, has a throw and partnered with classmates Peter Lamp and Gary Wilson of more than 220 feet to his credit — a Canadian under-18 to create a Big Red throwing trio unrivaled in New England. national mark — and very realistic chances of writing his “Ralph Lovshin was an amazing guy. He made it a own name in the record book before he’s through. team sport,” Hinkle says of the man who coached the “The only record I’ve broken was an 11-year-old

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track-and-field team for decades and for whom Exeter’s 400-meter oval is named. “People think of it as an individual sport, but he really emphasized the team mentality, and we pushed each other.”

Hinkle’s best throw in red came midway through his final season. Fifty-nine years later, he recalls nothing about that particular throw but fondly remembers competing with his teammates and his time at Exeter.

“Wonderful. Absolutely spectacular,” he says of his three years at PEA. “To be there for those formative years was everything.”

‘THROW AS FAR AS I CAN’

David Mancini was a self-described unathletic bench-sitter for his high school rugby team in Quebec. He ditched the rugby bench for the track-and-field team.

“I was doing long-distance [events] and jav[elin] — really two complete opposites in terms of training. But as soon as I picked up the jav, I knew it was something I wanted to do, something I could be good at,” he says. “I really just absolutely love the sport.”

He found a kindred spirit in Steve Holmes, the Big Red throwing coach. “I knew right away, after talking to coach Holmes the first couple of times, that we both had this passion for the jav,” Mancini says. “That’s what brought me here over every other school. Just having the opportunity to work with different coaches was a big draw. I’m really open to seeing what other people have to say to help my technique improve.

SPEAKING OF RECORDS …

Exeter athletes spent the winter proving the adage that records are made to be broken.

Swimmer Andrew Benson ’20 was the lead recordsmasher, seemingly setting marks each time he touched the water. Benson set or reset 35 pool, school and/or New England records throughout the season, including in some of the biggest competitions.

The University of Wisconsin-bound senior set three New England records and captured a pair of titles against some of the top high school swimmers in the country at the Eastern States Championships. He won both the 100-yard butterfly (47.65) and the 100 breaststroke (55.00) while also setting the 50 freestyle record (20.11). He followed up that performance with a pair of New England titles at Interschols, claiming first in the 100 butterfly and setting school, pool and meet records in the 200 freestyle (1:36.88). He also broke the New England record in the 100 freestyle (44.10) at the same meet.

Fellow co-captain Charlie Venci ’20 added a school record and a second-place finish in the 100 backstroke (49.01). On the girls’ side, Sydney Kang ’22 set school records

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“My goal is to have fun in the process, and throw as far as I can.”

Last spring and summer, shortly after he was accepted to Exeter, Mancini went on a tear. He seemed to improve on his personal best in every competition. The roll culminated in August at the Canadian national youth championships in Nova Scotia and a heave of 67.35 meters — more than 220 feet. Along with a national record, the throw earned Mancini provincial track athlete of the year recognition.

That was with a javelin that weighed 700 grams, about 1.5 pounds. At Exeter, he will compete using an 800-gram javelin, slightly more difficult to throw. Furthermore, design changes to javelins through the years that made them less aerodynamic — allowing competitions to safely remain inside track infields — has also prolonged the life spans of records such as Hinkle’s. None of that seems likely to greatly impede Mancini’s record pursuit.

Not that he’s worried about it. Records come and go, Mancini says with a shrug. “I know my record will eventually be broken, too.”

Hinkle feels the same way. His javelin days are behind him, but not too far. He held Yale’s javelin record for 11 years. He continued to compete into his 50s and once finished third at a senior national competition.

“Records are made to be broken,” Hinkle says, “especially when it’s been hanging around that long. I wish [David] well. Please tell him I hope he does it.” E

in the 100 butterfly (55.88) and the 200 individual medley (2:03.91).

Exeter track-and-field athletes have flourished in the twoyear-old William Boyce Thompson Field House, and it has shown in their performances. Will Coogan ’20 capped his phenomenal career with a trio of school records: in the 1 mile (4:11.30), 800 meters (1:53.57) and 1,000 meters (2:31.56). Matthew Wabunoha ’20 put his name at the top of the 60-meter hurdles record board (8.15), while Varun Oberai ’21 established the program record in the 3,000 meters (8:42.99).

Audrey Malila ’21, Evie Houston ’21, Marymegan Wright ’21 and Ifeoma Ajufo ’22 set a new bar in the 4x200-meter relay with a time of 1:46.71, and Jackson Giampa ’23 broke a 48-year-old Exeter prep record in the long jump (21 feet, 4 inches).

—Brian Muldoon

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WINTER SPORTS HIGHLIGHTS BOYS VARSITY BASKETBALL RECORD: 16-6

Head Coach: Jay Tilton Assistant Coaches: Rick Brault, Phil Rowe Captains: Lucas Grandison ’20, Jasper Ludington ’20, Niko Rocak ’20, Kerick Walker ’20 MVP: Lucas Grandison

GIRLS VARSITY HOCKEY RECORD: 11-13-1

Head Coach: Sally Komarek Assistant Coaches: Alexis Revkin, Jim Tufts Captains: Jenna Brooks ’20, Abby Smith ’20, Keaghan Tierney ’20, Alyssa Xu ’21 MVP: Abby Smith

GIRLS VARSITY INDOOR TRACK & FIELD RECORD: 0-1

Head Coach: Hilary Hall Assistant Coaches: Toyin Augustus, Ron Edmiston, Steve Holmes, Josh Peterson, Brandon Newbould, Mustafa Abdur-Rahim Captains: Erin Ahern ’20, Emy Li ’20, Tise Okeremi ’20 MVP: Audrey Malila ’21

BOYS VARSITY INDOOR TRACK & FIELD RECORD: 1-0

Head Coach: Hilary Hall Assistant Coaches: Toyin Augustus, Ron Edmiston, Steve Holmes, Josh Peterson, Brandon Newbould, Mustafa Abdur-Rahim Captains: Deniz Akman ’20, Will Coogan ’20, Jinwoo Kang ’20, Matthew Wabunoha ’20 MVP: Will Coogan

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BOYS VARSITY WRESTLING RECORD: 8-3 SECOND PLACE NEPSAC CLASS A

Head Coach: David Hudson Assistant Coaches: Bob Brown, Ted Davis, Brandon Thomas Captains: Grant Goodall ’20, Tyler Morris ’20 MVP: Tyler Morris

GIRLS VARSITY SQUASH RECORD: 6-13

Head Coach: Bruce Shang Assistant Coach: Mercy Carbonell Captains: Asha Alla ’20, Anne Brandes ’21, Catherine Fortin ’21 MVP: Leandra Sze ’22

BOYS VARSITY SQUASH RECORD: 12-11

Head Coach: Fred Brussel Assistant Coach: Paul Langford Captains: Samuel Lew ’20, Ryan Xie ’20 MVPs: Alex Alexandrovskiy ’21, Samuel Lew

GIRLS VARSITY SWIMMING & DIVING RECORD: 4-4

Head Coach: Lundy Smith Assistant Coaches: Chelsea Davidson, Julie Van Wright, Steve Altieri Captains: Maddie Machado ’20, Wynter Sands ’20 MVP: Sydney Kang ’22

BOYS VARSITY HOCKEY RECORD: 16-13-2

Head Coach: Dana Barbin Assistant Coaches: Mark Evans, Brandon Hew, Tim Mitropoulos ’10 Captains: Danny Colon ’20, Reese Ramirez ’20, Ryan Welch ’20 MVP: Ryan Welch

GIRLS VARSITY BASKETBALL RECORD: 4-19

Head Coach: Hadley Camilus Assistant Coaches: Liz Hurley, Russell Weatherspoon Captains: Eva Carchidi ’20, Claudia Lee ’20, Bethany Lucey ’20 MVPs: Eva Carchidi, Bethany Lucey

A L L P H O T O S M A R Y S C H WA L M , E X C E P T B OY S A N D GIRLS SWIMMING/DIVING: BRIAN MULDOON

BOYS VARSITY SWIMMING & DIVING RECORD: 5-3 THIRD PLACE AT INTERSCHOLS

Head Coach: Don Mills Assistant Coaches: Avery Reavill ’12, Julie Van Wright, Steve Altieri Captains: Andrew Benson ’20, Charlie Venci ’20 MVP: Andrew Benson

The Changemakers E X E T E R’S N E XT

T

he first Earth Day was celebrated across

America on April 22, 1970. Thousands of colleges, universities and schools participated in the nationwide “teach-in.”

A half-century later, the effort to raise awareness about the environment and promote direct action to safeguard our planet continues.

Here we recognize a few of Exeter’s next-generation environmentalists taking up the cause. These are the young people, fueled by their own personal stories, intellectual ambitions and bravery, who see opportunity in the face of enormous climate challenges.

Scientist Lucy Sun ’20 has spent the past three years working toward solving a worldwide worry — access to clean drinking water.

This past February, climate lobbyists Beatrice Burack ’21, Saskia Braden ’20 and Sadie DiCarlo ’21 joined New Hampshire voters in a crowded Concord concert hall to press presidential hopefuls on how they can effect change.

Advocate Louis Mukama ’21 believes fighting climate change requires recognizing and addressing the social injustices that exist alongside it.

And Mai Hoang ’20 uses her voice as a writer to inform and educate her peers about climate issues in her native Vietnam and around the world. “I know that this is dangerous journalism,” she says, “but the alternative — to stay quiet — is not an option.”

Earth Day 2020 took place in the midst of a global pandemic, brought on by the rapid spread of a deadly, novel coronavirus. This threat is a keen reminder that we all share one planet. We breathe the same air and succumb to the same ills. And when we come together as a global society, all people, and the Earth, are better for it.

G E N E R AT I O N O F

E N V I R O N M E N TA L I S T S

THE ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENTIST

By Jennifer Wagner

Water. The most plentiful compound on Earth. Vital to every human’s survival. And Lucy Sun’s intellectual preoccupation.

The senior has spent the past three years working toward solving a worldwide worry — access to clean drinking water. “I want to be able to bring innovation from the lab into the household,” Sun says. “My goal is to make a consumer-based product, a portable water filter, like a Brita, with improved efficiency.”

Growing up in New York City, Sun says, she took water for granted. “We have really fresh water from the Catskills, but [at Exeter] we hear a lot about how the water is dangerous, don’t drink the tap water,” she says. “So, I was really curious about it and obviously, if it’s a health concern, I wanted to help address it.”

As a start, Sun enrolled in a Green Umbrella Learning Lab class her lower year. “I worked with a group of students to try to get a new water disinfection system for the town of Exeter,” Sun says. Her class tested water all over campus and town and proved that much of it violated EPA standards and contained high levels of trihalomethanes,

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or THMs, which have been linked to increased risks of cancer and miscarriages. “Dr. [Jon] Sakata’s house had 90 parts per billion,” she says. “When you have a purifier, like in Bancroft, there was only 23 parts per billion. … But those are expensive.”

Sun approached Science Department Chair Alison Hobbie her upper year about pursuing an independent scientific project that would expand upon the work she had begun in her GULL class. Her idea: Design an affordable, chemistry-based water filtration system that would remove THMs and help communities struggling with contamination. With little chemistry training under her belt, this would be tough.

“It was a lot of self-learning, self-teaching concepts, a lot of review,” Sun says.

Following some positive initial experiments, Sun applied to continue her research during her senior year. Hobbie agreed and offered her an office across the hall from her own as a supervised research base. Sun quickly found she needed access to more specialized equipment and arranged to work with chemistry, material science and environmental engineering professors in a lab at the University of New Hampshire.

Every week over winter term, Sun took the train from Exeter to Durham to test samples. The 30-hour workweek was a grind. “Being a scientist, it’s really tedious, because a lot of times you’re doing the same thing over and over again,” Sun says. “But seeing the results gets me excited. If they’re bad, I can get a little bit stressed out, but I think about how I can do better. That gives me the adrenaline. If I can see my project moving forward, if I can see its potential in society, I am very happy.”

Sun presented her results in the Sinha Room of the Phelps Science Center in March.

She had indeed succeeded. Her new, photocatalytic filter system utilizes a novel titanium dioxide and activated carbon composite to not only remove fungi, bacteria, chloroform and THMs from water, but break down the pollutants into non-harmful components.

“The coolest part is not the low cost, or how to make money out of [the discovery],” says Science Instructor Tatiana Waterman. “But the fact that the harmful molecule is killed, Lucy killed it.”

Sun has applied for a provisional patent on her work that will protect it for a year. She is also planning to pursue an environmental science major in college. “I’ll always have this valuable environmentally conscious mindset going forward,” she says. “It’s something that I’ve taken from high school and will take with me for the rest of my life.”

Lucy Sun ’20 put in hundreds of hours in a lab over winter term, determined to design a better water filtration system for communities.

“I WANT TO BE ABLE TO BRING INNOVATION FROM THE LAB INTO THE HOUSEHOLD”

THE CLIMATE LOBBYISTS

By Patrick Garrity

An audience of New Hampshire voters has crowded a Concord concert hall in early February to hear from eight presidential hopefuls on the issues of climate change and clean energy. The first drop-the-mic moment, however, belongs to a 16-year-old Exonian.

As she ticks off examples of climate change’s impacts across the country, Beatrice Burack ’21 says, “In the face of bleak prospects like those, it’s easy to lose hope.

“How will you inspire Americans who have given up hope in our nation’s ability to tackle

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Saskia Braden ’20 asks a question of South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg right before the New Hampshire Democratic primary.

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the climate crisis, and how will you yourself remain hopeful when things get tough?”

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota on the receiving end of the question, smiles wryly. It’s only six days until the state’s first-in-the-nation primary. The senator turns to the crowd at the New Hampshire Youth Climate and Clean Energy Town Hall and declares, “These are literally — I’m not just saying this to suck up — these are the best questions that I’ve ever had at a forum.”

Burack has been pushing people to confront tough questions about the environment since the issue of climate change “really hit home for me” during her prep-year biology class with Eben Bein. The science instructor has since departed PEA for a position at Our Climate, a nonprofit created to empower and mobilize young people to educate the public and elected officials about science-based, equitable climate policy solutions. Burack spent last summer working with Our Climate, lobbying for former Massachusetts State Rep. Jen Benson’s legislation to promote green infrastructure and reduce carbon emissions, with big carbon polluters paying a tax that would benefit the most vulnerable communities.

Two other Exeter students, both passionate for the cause of a sustainable future, are part of the forum. Saskia Braden ’20 sits on a panel questioning South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg; Sadie DiCarlo ’21 queries former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld.

DiCarlo, whose father, Jim, is a longtime teacher in the Science Department, asks Weld about how he would incentivize and help people pay for making substantive but often costly changes toward sustainability. She later tells the candidate about how she and some Exeter classmates fought and failed to get the Trustees to divest the Academy’s financial interests in the fossil fuel industry.

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“It’s scary to realize how great an influence those industries have on our lives and how little influence we have on them,” she says to a roomful of agreeing nods.

Braden, a senior from Potomac, Maryland, quizzes Buttigieg about how he would help poor communities affected the most by environmental crises like lead in public drinking water. She says that climate education is the first step toward building resolve around environmental causes — on campus and beyond.

“In general, people are very passionate once they know about the issue,” she says.

“There’s a surprising number of people who don’t know very much about the science of climate change and don’t know much about how it impacts so many other areas of their lives.”

Last fall, Burack and classmates Alicia Coble, Scarlett Lin and Erin McCann founded Exeter Climate Lobby, joining a stable of clubs on campus devoted to sustainability and environmental causes, from the Environmental Action Committee and E-Proctors to Matter and Sustain magazines. Exeter Climate Lobby’s stated goal is to empower students to help promote meaningful climate solutions in their communities and regional governments.

Just days after the club’s formation in September, the founders led two dozen students to Portsmouth to take part in a local event of the worldwide Global Climate Strike. In January, club members rallied at the Massachusetts State House during Lobby Day, which focused on three bills promoting greener business and lowering carbon emissions.

Burack says that during club sign-up night, a classmate expressed the resignation many teenagers feel when it comes to the topic of climate change and the world they’re about to inherit.

“He said, ‘We’re screwed either way,’” Burack recalls. “I think that’s the sentiment a lot of people have.”

Klobuchar offers a more optimistic perspective on Burack’s question about hope. She calls it “the critical question for this election,” and says that it is crucial for Americans to stay engaged and not accept current policy that ignores the science of a warming planet.

“We lost an election in 2016, but we didn’t lose hope,” she says.

After the senator has left for Washington and another presidential candidate has taken the stage, Burack reflects on her own feelings of hope — and despair. “It’s definitely something I struggle with,” she admits. “I try to remain hopeful, but it’s tough when you look at our government today and we’re not seeing a lot of progress.”

She is committed to changing that, perhaps best represented by the sign she carried during the Global Climate Strike last September. It read: “One year, nine months + twenty-five days until I can vote.”

“I TRY TO REMAIN HOPEFUL, BUT IT’S TOUGH. ...

WE’RE NOT SEEING A LOT OF PROGRESS.”

THE E-PROCTOR

By Patrick Garrity

Louis Mukama ’21 has seen plenty in his short life of how humans treat — and mistreat — the planet.

He spent his early childhood living in a slum in his native Lusaka, Zambia, then moved to a rice farm in the Zambian countryside before emigrating to Chicago.

“In Lusaka, a block away from my house was a landfill,” Mukama says. “I still don’t know where all the stuff came from, but when it would rain, the streets would flood and the garbage would come out on the streets. For some reason, somebody used to dump toys in the landfill and even though my parents told us not to go there, my friends and I would always go there and forage for toys.”

On the farm, his family ate what it grew. Mukama was free to roam the woods and connect with nature. Chicago, where the family moved in 2011, presented an extreme opposite: urban life with very little time spent outdoors. “My routine was basically: go to school, come back home, go to school, come back home, and I never got to interact with my environment,” he says.

These disparate experiences have left a mark. “I’ve had the chance to live in a lot

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Louis Mukama ’21 serves as an E proctor in Soule Hall, where he helps his dorm mates adopt greener habits.

“IT’S DAUNTING TO REALIZE HOW BIG AN ISSUE THIS IS. TO WONDER ‘HOW MUCH CAN I DO?’”

of different places and see the many ways in which people are attracted to nature and how they take care of their environment or don’t take care of their environment,” Mukama says. He has come to appreciate the cause of environmental justice and understands that where you live and what financial means you have affect how much pollution you experience every day.

“We might all want to address a problem and do our part,” he says, “but we don’t have the same means to help the issue, or some people don’t even have the choice on how they can choose to live.”

Since coming to Exeter as a prep nearly three years ago, Mukama has sought ways to help educate his classmates. He joined the Environmental Action Committee and became an environmental proctor — E-proctor — to instill sustainable habits in his Soule Hall dorm mates.

The E-proctor program began informally in the 1990s and was revived in 2003 to become part of the school’s student-driven sustainability effort. More than 60 E-proctors are chosen through an application process to work with their dorm mates and classmates to encourage composting, energy savings, recycling and waste reduction.

Some students need a little more motivation than others. Mukama held a successful competition in Soule Hall, splitting the dorm in half to see who could reduce their papertowel use more. He and his fellow E-proctors helped spearhead a composting effort in each dorm, urging students to separate compostable material from their recycling and trash. E-proctors also led an effort to collect gently used clothes for a local clothing drive. And they generally serve to remind their dorm mates that their daily decisions and actions will have a long-term impact on the planet they will inherit. When the message comes from their peers — rather than just being another rule to follow — students are more engaged, Mukama says.

“I feel like sometimes it’s daunting to realize how big an issue this is,” he says. “To wonder, ‘How much can I do?’ But change does start on a small scale, and if we can change a peer’s mind or reduce waste by even a small proportion, then I do find that fulfilling and I’m happy to continue with that.

“It all starts right here, right?”

THE CLIMATE JOURNALIST

By Sandra Guzmán

When Mai Hoang was 13, there was a devastating toxic chemical spill in her native Vietnam. It spanned four provinces and killed 70 tons of fish that washed up along 125 miles of coastline.

Distraught, Hoang wanted to do something. When she heard whispers that a group of her English Center classmates and teachers were going to protest the government’s inaction, the nascent climate activist pushed past her fears and joined the group carrying

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banners that asked questions and demanded a response.

The event changed her life. “I remember walking past a row of police and being really scared,” she says. “But it showed me that I have a voice.”

Protesting the environmental damage caused by the Formosa Ha Tinh Steel Corporation was the start. Journalism would come a year later, after she arrived at Exeter. “I had to find a way to exert my voice beyond the street,” Hoang recalls. “I see fact-based climate journalism as a form of activism.”

Hoang began to pitch stories to Vietnam’s leading newspapers — all government-run — from her dorm room in Amen Hall as a lower. One of her first published articles was about a planned expansion of a $5 billion thermal power plant in the southern province of Long An. Hoang’s piece shed light on the ways the plant’s growth would increase emissions and have devastating effects on the residents of the region as well as the environment. “I had to keep my sources anonymous,” she explains. “I know that this is dangerous journalism, but the alternative — to stay quiet — is not an option.”

In 2018, after Hoang’s article was published, the plant altered its plans and switched from coal to gas. It was a small victory for a teen worried about the existential threat of climate crisis in Vietnam and the world. “I will never know for sure if my piece had anything to do with the decision, but I feel very proud that I contributed to the conversation,” she says.

Hoang has continued to hone her writing and researching skills at the Academy as the former managing editor of The Exonian, secretary general for the Model UN Club, and a member of the Climate Action Day Committee.

Hoang also writes poetry on the side. She won the Lamont Younger Poet Prize in 2018 and received a silver medal with distinction for her writing portfolio in the 2020 National Scholastic Art and Writing Awards.

Beyond campus, Hoang has become a powerful voice on the global stage. During her upper year, she traveled to Poland with the climate journalism nonprofit Climate Tracker to cover COP24 — the 24th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change — for Vietnamese newspapers.

As a part-time Climate Tracker employee, Hoang records the climate action of Paris Agreement participant nations and holds governments around the world accountable.

In her role as a youth coordinator she has also created digital guidebooks for high schoolers interested in covering the climate. In August, she will be organizing Climate Tracker’s second climate reporting training for professional journalists in Vietnam.

Hoang is a recipient of the 2020 Perrin Fellowship and will take a gap year upon graduation to work at Cát Tiên National Park in southern Vietnam, as well as volunteer in other climate-vulnerable countries including Bangladesh, Madagascar and Senegal.

Meanwhile, she keeps pitching stories to newspapers in her native land, where her editors have no idea that she is so young. “I don’t advertise that I am still in high school,” she chuckles. E

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“I KNOW THAT THIS IS DANGEROUS JOURNALISM, BUT THE ALTERNATIVE ... IS NOT AN OPTION.”

Mai Hoang ’20 believes in the power of good journalism to make change happen, and has the byline to prove it.

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THE

Environmental

DONOR

J O H N WA R N E R ’ 7 2 B O O S T S E X E T E R ’S S U S TA I N A B I L I T Y I N I T I AT I V E S

By Karen Ingraham

O

n a rolling farm in southern Illinois, gullies would form at the bottom of rain-soaked hills as precious topsoil eroded and washed away.

Agricultural consultant John Warner ’72 and his farm manager had a solution.

They created land breaks and terraces to drain the water in a step-by-step process, replanted grass, and reseeded what was lost. It will become, Warner says, a natural waterway, working in concert with the environment that surrounds it.

For Warner, it is his “raison d’être.”

An ardent supporter of the Academy’s sustainability initiatives for more than 25 years, Warner has taken his lifelong love for farming and a pioneering mindset to successfully manage agricultural lands with an ethos of environmental stewardship.

“On most of the farms that we manage,” the founder of Moore & Warner Ag Group says, “we’re promoting conservation farming techniques. … We want to apply the most innovative thinking and up-to-date science, and get the most food production from this land in harmony with stewardship and long-term farming … so that a hundred years from now, people will still be living there, producing food and doing their part to feed the world.”

It’s no small feat in the face of a changing climate.

Warner’s company, which provides farm management and consulting services to families and businesses in the U.S. and around the world, is based in the middle of America’s “breadbasket.” The Midwest is famous for its ability to feed this country, and the global population. It grows most of the corn and soybeans consumed in the U.S. and a large share of what is traded on the world’s markets. The erratic effects of climate change have increasingly impacted the ability of many farms to sustain their crop yields, or even remain in business, as more flooding, prolonged droughts and other weather events

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occur alongside ongoing urbanization and farmland conversion.

Twenty years ago, Warner could see that these issues “were coming like a freight train,” he says. “Well, as you know, here we are, and they’re here.” In 2019, for example, more than 19 million acres of farmland in the U.S. went unplanted due to unusually high amounts of rain and snow, a record-setting year since the USDA began tracking the data in 2007.

Warner grew up in the farming community of Clinton, Illinois,

before he attended Exeter.

On the Academy’s inaugural Earth Day celebration in 1970, he recalls, “As a practical matter, nobody knew what to do with [it] the first time it came around.” He and his buddies were busy “outside communing with the earth” by way of Frisbee throwing. The day itself did not impact his life’s direction, but his Exeter education as a whole did. “Exeter [taught] me the willingness to take on ‘the new,’ ” he says. “[That] has a lot to do with this.

Issues of caring for the earth and long-term stewardship [were] new issues, in a certain way, and ones that we socially [had] not given a lot of consideration to.” Warner developed a keen ability to see things from different perspectives and consider the impact his own actions might have on any outcomes.

After he graduated from the Academy and earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Dartmouth College, he returned to Illinois and to the farming communities that he loved, becoming the fifth generation of his family to work in the John Warner Bank of Clinton. After rising to the role of bank chairman and CEO, a position he held for 10 years, Warner became a trustee for the C.H. Moore Trust Estate, where he managed farm properties across John Warner ’72

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The seeds of environmentalism in the United States were planted by an Exonian

By Patrick Garrity Gifford Pinchot is considered a founder of conservationism in this country, his name often mentioned with Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir as an early advocate for protecting America’s natural resources. As The Exonian succinctly summarized in a profile in 1939: “Pinchot has three achievements to his credit: He is America’s first and greatest conservationist, he is a darn good politician and he is a graduate of P.E.A.” Pinchot was the grandson of Amos Eno, a real-estate developer who amassed a fortune building New York City. He came to Exeter at 16 in spring of 1883 and later attended Gifford Pinchot Yale, where he became deeply interested in the field of forestry. Upon graduation, he traveled to Europe to study sustainable forest management practices.

Pinchot was appointed by President William McKinley as the head of the Division of Forestry in 1898 and became the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service in 1905 under Roosevelt.

He later was elected governor of Pennsylvania twice and was considered a potential Republican candidate for the presidency in the 1920s, but his enduring legacy is that of a conservationist.

Though he spent just 19 months as a student at PEA, he returned frequently as an adult to speak about his work and the merit of public service. During a visit in 1912, Pinchot toured the property south of the Exeter River that had recently been gifted to the Academy by the Plimpton family.

The gift made a strong impression on Pinchot and moved him to endow a small annual prize for proficiency in woodcraft and forestry, a prize that is awarded regularly to graduating seniors to this day.

During a visit to his alma mater in 1919, Pinchot told an Exeter assembly that “unless all the American people turn now from wasters to conservators, [our natural] resources will disappear from the face of the earth.”

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

six Midwestern states. In 2000, he founded his company, Moore & Warner. By then, he was actively supporting the Academy’s efforts to promote concepts of environmentalism and resource management within its community.

Warner’s support of The Exeter Fund expanded to include a historic gift of sorts: a donation to the Gifford Pinchot Fund, established in 1913 by its namesake, a legendary conservationist and class of 1884 alumnus (see sidebar). The fund awards a small cash prize in the spring to a student who has demonstrated an interest in environmental conservation. Warner’s great-grandfather had served in Theodore Roosevelt’s administration alongside Pinchot, the country’s first U.S. Forest Service chief, and was good friends with the man.

Warner has since become a consistent champion of Academy programs that expand sustainability education curriculum and reduce the school’s environmental impact. During Principal Emerita Kendra Stearns O’Donnell’s tenure, for example, Warner collaborated with faculty members to create a cross-disciplinary educational series for students on emerging topics, including environmental law and sustainable land management. He even traveled to Exeter to share with students his real-world knowledge of American agriculture and its history.

“To a certain extent, we could make the argument that Exeter kids, a certain number of [them], are going to be world leaders,” he says. “Personally, I’m more interested in the efforts of individuals … in Exonians becoming thoughtful, educated stewards of the earth and doing the best they can on their own efforts. That, actually, is how we make change. It’s incremental. It’s citizen-based. It’s good sense and good-judgment-based. That’s the side of the education program that I wanted to emphasize.”

He reinforced that commitment in 2015 by establishing the John Warner, Class of 1972, Sustainability Initiatives Fund, which now serves as the primary source of support for Exeter’s annual Climate Action Day programming. Over the past three years, Warner’s generosity has enabled the school to invite world-renowned experts in the fields of climate change and environmental sustainability to speak to the community. His fund has also provided students with opportunities for off-campus field work, such as dune-grass planting, visits to local farms, and invasive-species removal.

Warner becomes more animated as he thinks about the educational possibilities for Exeter students today. “The sky’s the limit on this one,” he says. “In every way, it’s time for other generations to get involved.” E

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I How Green is Exeter?

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By Nicole Pellaton

53% waste diversion

Between compost, recycling and donated goods, Exeter diverted 270 tons of its total 648 tons of refuse (for the period July 1, 2018, to June 30, 2019), an emissions equivalent of taking 228 cars off the road or planting 248 acres of pine trees.

n May 1927, the Academy’s first Nature Club formed, offering Saturday morning nature walks every other week. “For admission to the Nature Club,” The Exonian reported that spring, “a student must describe 25 trees, 25 flowers or 30 birds,” with faculty members serving as “examiners” of these findings.

The club is one example among many of the school community’s long-held interest in the environment and, increasingly in recent decades, the conservation and protection of natural resources. As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Earth Day and consider more urgently the global impact of our individual actions on the planet, we look at some of the work happening on campus — oftentimes behind the scenes — to limit our footprint.

No list could capture everyone’s efforts, and there is of course still much more to do to achieve greater carbon emissions reductions and increased community-wide education. But here are 15 ways the Academy is already moving in the right direction.

Reduced emissions associated with electricity use on campus (scope 2)

Construction of the 1,552-panel solar array on the William Boyce Thompson Field House and ongoing programs to reduce demand (smart lighting, high-efficiency appliances) have helped Exeter control electricity use while expanding its built footprint. Since 2014, emissions associated with the electricity bought for use in campus buildings have been offset through the purchase of national wind Renewable Energy Certificates.

Electricity used in the faculty houses that border campus is not offset, and represents 6% of the school’s total usage. Exeter is researching ways to further reduce scope 2 emissions, including metering all campus buildings; performing building audits and energy retrofits; increasing on-campus solar; and investing in solar power purchase agreements.

497,201 visits to dining hall each year

Dining Services is on the attack against food waste. The staff monitors all waste (including weighing kitchen refuse such as produce peels and meat fats) and closely tracks each dish served: portions prepared, consumed and uneaten. This detailed auditing cuts waste in two ways: informed buying minimizes food prep discards, and revised portion estimates reflect actual need, helping to eliminate leftovers. Since 2015, the school has avoided more than 84 tons of food waste by changing purchasing, prep and serving methods. In emissions terms, that’s the equivalent of keeping 546 metric tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere or saving 57,800 gallons of gasoline. It’s also a $226,000 cost savings.

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32,000 pounds of fish That number reflects the amount consumed in the Academy’s dining halls in the past five years. It’s all part of a plan to move away from environmentally wasteful foods to responsible foods. Dining Services follows the Menus of Change initiative, which focuses on healthy, plant-forward eating and environmental stewardship.

Benefits of adopting this program, founded by The Culinary Institute of America and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, are reduced consumption of foods with significant environmental impact; better quality through organics and locally sourced items; and purchasing from vendors who share our commitment to the environment. Exeter’s fisheries partners protect the waters for future fishing through the types of fish they catch and by following sustainability practices. Other food is sourced from local suppliers whenever possible: 75 percent of produce in season; 100 percent of dairy, eggs and flour year-round.

5,432 RedBike rides

Ground transportation represents a small portion of Exeter’s emissions exposure, but it may be the most accessible source of real-world problemsolving for Exonians.

The student-designed RedBikes project hit campus In 2019. For the 43 days of fall term during which they were available to the Academy community, 20 RedBikes sprinted from the athletics complex to academic buildings, dining halls and dorms. They logged an average of 126 rides per day with more than 300 regular bikers.

A smartphone app locks the bikes when parked and tracks their locations.

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vehicle charging stations

44.7%

reduction in scope 1 emissions (natural gas and fuel) Exeter’s campus is heated by 2-plus miles of underground pipe, originally laid in the 1930s, that deliver steam to the majority of the school’s buildings. Renovations completed in 2013, including replacement of nearly 40 percent of the system, and the elimination of number 6 fuel oil in favor of natural gas in 2009, are major contributors to the reduction in scope 1 emissions from 2005 to today. Number 6 fuel oil is the dirtiest grade of fuel oil (when burned it emits soot pollution, high carbon dioxide levels and sulfur).

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Electric chargers in the Thompson Field House parking garage were installed to be able to service six vehicles simultaneously.

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FORTY GULLS

That’s the number of students who have taken Green Umbrella Learning Lab, one of four sustainability-focused courses and

an incubator for environmental projects. Out of this class have emerged RedBikes, reusable pizza boxes, a clothing exchange program, and cardboard box breakdown stations designed to highlight the impacts of online shopping. Exeter offers an additional 15 sustainability-inclusive courses and is planning to integrate the topic into more.

70%

of emissions come from campus buildings Heating and cooling buildings have the biggest environmental impact. Exeter is investigating alternative, environmentally friendly fuels for the central plant that heats the majority of campus buildings. High on the list is Renewable Fuel Oil, a liquid made by vaporizing sawdust. The Academy continues to research solutions for smaller emissions sources: employee commuting (10 percent); and student commuting, fertilizer and refrigerants (each representing less than 2 percent).

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134 geothermal wells The 49 geothermal wells installed under the Academy Building lawn in 2012 have improved energy efficiency in Phillips Hall by as much as 30 percent. Space under the lawn is reserved for additional wells that will service the Academy Building when it undergoes renovation. In 2015, the Downer Family Fitness Center opened in the athletics complex, with heating and cooling supplied by 15 geothermal wells.

Sixty geothermal wells were also installed near the baseball diamond in 2018 to heat and cool the Goel Center for Theater and Dance. The first use of geothermal energy came in 2007 and 2008, when the Academy constructed four faculty houses with 10 geothermal wells.

acres of natural habitat

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Exonians benefit from an eco-learning lab composed of streams, fields, forests and wetlands. Students are increasingly spending time on these acres, both independently and as part of coursework.

Updates include construction of a bird blind and planned improvements to the trails (bog bridging and boardwalks, improved signage).

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Environmentally

responsible

construction practices Minimizing environmental impact is a priority in each campus construction project and has been at the forefront since Exeter opened the Phelps Academy Center in 2006 (since renamed the Elizabeth Phillips Academy Center).

EPAC was constructed using the principles of Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, a green building certification program developed by the U.S. Green Building Council. Exeter’s efforts resulted in Silver LEED certification

146 tons of compost last year

Exeter collects compost from dining facilities (Elm Street, Wetherell and Grill), special event meals (including graduation and reunions) and 17 dorms. This waste goes to an anaerobic digester in Maine that converts the methane gas released from the composted food into electricity, further reducing our carbon footprint. Byproducts of the digestion process are used for animal bedding, soil enhancement and liquid fertilizer.

Trying hard to imagine what 146 tons looks like?

Think: one blue whale.

for EPAC. Since then, the school has gained four LEED Golds (Thompson Field House, three faculty houses) and anticipates a fifth LEED Gold for the David E. and Stacey L. Goel Center for Theater and Dance. Facilities Management staff are currently reviewing additional green building certification standards that will allow the Academy to adapt responsibly to every situation.

1.12 GWh (gigawatt hours)

That’s the lifetime energy creation from the 1,552 solar panels atop Thompson Field House. It’s also the daily electricity usage of New York City. On sunny cloudless days, the energy produced by the panels can top out at 3,500 kilowatt-hours. The array generates about 3 percent of the Academy’s electricity and is projected to save the school $2 million over the system’s lifetime of 25-plus years.

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of donated goods Sheets, clothes, books, lights, you name it. If they’re unwanted, these useful items are collected on move-out days for regular year and Exeter Summer students. They get a second life through Goodwill of Northern New England.

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Snapshot in Time R E F L E C T I O N S O F A N E A R T H D AY A C T I V I S T

By Sarah Pruitt ’95

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he film was short — no more than eight minutes — but the images it contained

Hal Thomas ’70 has spent his life fighting for a cleaner environment.

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were shocking, Hal Thomas ’70 thought. The red-brick smokestack of the Milliken textile mill belching streams of dark smoke into the air over downtown Exeter flickered on the screen, as did shots of the orange effluent the plant would dump into a holding pond along the Squamscott River bordering Swasey Parkway.

It was 1970, and Thomas, a senior in Hoyt Hall, served as chairman of Ecology Action, or Eco-Action, the leading environmental group on campus at the time. As part of efforts to commemorate the first Earth Day at the Academy and in the surrounding community, he and fellow student environmentalists had lobbied successfully for $200 from the Student Council to make the 8-millimeter short film depicting examples of pollution around town. They showed it in Assembly Hall, as well as in Exeter’s local churches and at civic group meetings.

“It wasn’t like there were PowerPoint projectors in every church,” Thomas says. “You ended up bringing speakers and an old-fashioned projector with two reels. It was a big deal, and it was quite rare at that time that students would be out making movies.”

The film was part of Eco-Action’s multipronged campaign that first Earth Day (April 22, 1970). Exonians also joined Exeter High School and Exeter Junior High students in cleaning up roadside litter and trash around town, handing out informational material on pollution to local residents, and canvassing for signatures on a petition to install an incinerator and sewage treatment plant in Exeter.

As quoted in The Exonian at the time, Thomas, along with other club members, aimed to “make citizens of Exeter aware that the problem of pollution, which may seem very distant in Los Angeles or Lake Erie, exists right here in Exeter.”

They had some help, and inspiration, from members of the faculty.

Eco-Action’s adviser, Science Instructor David Walker, helped Thomas and his peers sample and test local water sources to demonstrate that contamination existed from coliform bacteria, among other pollutants.

Walker’s mentorship had a major impact on Thomas. “He was a biology teacher who taught ecology,” he marvels. “No one in 1970 taught a class called ‘ecology’ to high school students.

“It was just so empowering,” Thomas continues, “when you’re nearly failing French and you take a science class, and all of a sudden everything makes such good sense.”

Now living in Sacramento, Thomas is (mostly) retired after a long legal career, including 16 years as an environmental prosecutor in Butte County, California. Exeter “really sparked my interest in the law as a way of making change,” Thomas says. He remembers well an assembly given by Thurgood Marshall, then a newly minted justice on the Supreme Court. (Marshall’s son Thurgood Jr., known as Goody, is a member of the class of ’74.) Later, Marshall sat in on Thomas’ history class.

“He talked about how lawyers, starting in the late ’30s and early ’40s, plotted the strategy to get Brown v. Board of Education,” Thomas says. “He’s sitting in our class telling us how he started out working in a back-office NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and

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[how] they brought an end to segregation in the United States.”

After graduation, Thomas headed west and launched his own legal career. In his first job, as a lawyer for California’s Department of Fish and Game, he joined the legal team arguing the plaintiffs’ side in the landmark Mono Lake Case. The state supreme court’s verdict in their favor applied the public trust doctrine (the principle that natural resources like air and water belong collectively to the people) for the first time to water use in California, allowing the government to regulate private water use according to the needs of the general public.

“The idea that the government could impair your property interest because [there] was a public right is revolutionary,” Thomas says of the case. “We were able to collectively get the public trust doctrine adopted as California law, and eventually [it spread] all over the world.”

Later in his career, Thomas developed and participated in a state program called at the time the Rural Prosecutor’s Association, which placed specialty prosecutors of environmental crime in rural counties around the state. As a deputy district attorney in Butte County, which is home to Lake Oroville, one of the state’s largest man-made reservoirs, Thomas prosecuted more than 300 cases. One of the most important involved shutting down three large biomass power plants that were burning garbage from San Francisco and other cities.

“It was nominally environmentally clean RPS [renewable portfolio standard] power,” Thomas says. “But in fact, when you’re burning wood waste contaminated with garbage, you’re basically polluting the community you’re in.”

The ash that comes out of those plants is toxic, he explains, and the company was paying local farmers to use it as a soil amendment. The local case ended up as part of a statewide civil suit that lasted some five years, ending with the shutdown of the three Butte County plants, among others.

Thomas could trace that victory over industrial polluters all the way back to the first Earth Day at Exeter, and his efforts to make more people aware of what was happening in their own neighborhoods and towns — efforts he’s still passionate about today, given the worsening effects of global warming and climate change.

“We all have a duty to our children and to the world to not pollute,” Thomas says. “That’s the 1970 guy talking, and it’s sort of disappointing 50 years later that we’re not a little bit further along.” E

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From top: Milliken textile mill; signs indicating polluted water near Exeter; and an example of the dumping Thomas fought against while a student; all circa 1970.

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CONNECTIONS

News and notes from the alumni community

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A Special Community

By Jean Maginnis, director of donor relations and stewardship

O

ne evening in February, I enjoyed time with Dean of Students Emerita

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PATRICK GARRIT Y

Susan Herney and her husband, History Instructor Emeritus Jack Herney, in a special bird-watching class taught to a group of adults Harkness-style.

Through the years, many of you may have heard from Susan Herney, as she was the first to write endowed fund reports about the meaningful community Exonians have built together.

Through a lively Harkness discussion about birds, Science Instructor Rich Aaronian, who holds the Harlan Page Amen Professor in Science endowed chair, demonstrated his unique and warm teaching style. The next morning, in 8-degree weather, he led us out into the field to see what we had learned.

In addition to identifying three types of local seagulls, what I learned is the many ways in which Phillips Exeter Academy builds community. First, the Harkness pedagogy gives every student an opportunity to share their viewpoint, their voice.

Second, instructors with deep expertise and an encouraging style make students feel excited, challenged, resilient and grateful.

One of our scholarship students expressed it best in a recent thank-you letter to a donor: “I took Russian because my brother’s friend told me to. I asked her why, and she said, ‘Just trust me.’

After the first class, I went to the library and burst out crying, overwhelmed by the Russian alphabet and the extremely fast-paced class. Again, she said, ‘Just trust me.’ After four years, I am here to say, I am glad I [did so]. Russian class didn’t just teach me the language and allow me to go on a three-week trip to Russia; it gave me a lifelong bond with our teacher, [Ms. Inna Sysevich]. She will talk with us about anything on our minds, and even make us blinis after a hard week. I know, in college, I will greatly miss having a faculty that is so deeply invested in my life, but for now I am grateful I have that relationship.”

Already, in this student’s letter and in Mr. Aaronian’s class, I have seen and felt firsthand how meaningful your generous gifts of time and money have been to the special brand of education that is Exeter’s. The funds created by your philanthropy support teaching, financial aid, dorm life, global programs, the arts and athletics, which help to build interwoven relationships that endure through generations.

As I continue to discover how to be part of this community and to share the stories of your generous spirit and foresight, I welcome your inquiries. Thank you for including Phillips Exeter Academy as a worthwhile place to give. I am honored to maintain the tradition of stewarding the Academy’s funds as Susan Herney and Bonnie Weeks did so loyally over the last several decades. You can still find Bonnie at the Academy serving as senior philanthropic adviser.

To learn more about endowed funds, please feel free to write to me at jmaginnis@ exeter.edu. E

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Lloyd Campbell III ’14

By Sarah Zobel Exeter as a lower, he furthered his studies in Japanese and took up Arabic.

At Williams College, he earned a degree in economics and Asian studies — taking a semester in Hong Kong and a summer job in Shanghai that allowed him to polish his Mandarin skills (he also speaks conversational Spanish).

After graduation, Campbell returned to Minnesota to be near his family. He’s now a marketing and product associate for the gaming company CogReps, where he continues to embrace the interplay between video games and communication by developing interactive sports apps.

Can you describe the app you’re working on?

Smash Routes helps players learn basic football skills so coaches don’t have to spend valuable practice time covering information again and again. It teaches player positions and what they do, and lets you go through plays to see how they’ll work out on the field. Coaches can see how everyone is doing and what they’ve learned. It’s a fun, interactive way for players, parents, coaches — anyone — to learn football. Our goal is to get into other sports. Basketball is next.

How did you get started in this line of work?

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rowing up, Lloyd Campbell III spent a lot of time on a Game Boy gaming system he shared with his brother, Gent, who has autism and was nonverbal to age 4. While awaiting his turn, Campbell began to notice patterns in Gent’s behavior. “I was able to read him because of his interaction with the video games,” says Campbell, who helped his parents learn to recognize when Gent was tired, sad, overwhelmed or just plain hungry.

Campbell’s parents always encouraged him to learn from those around him, no matter where he was. His mother was a Navy physician, so before he was 10, that “where” included Italy and Japan. When he arrived at

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After I graduated from Williams, I realized I wanted to pursue a career in the video game industry, so I taught myself how to code in C# and how to use the Unity gaming engine. I attended Video Game Development Club meetings at the University of Minnesota, two and a half hours from home, whenever my dad had meetings in the Twin Cities. I found CogReps through a job board — they didn’t have an opening that fit my skill set, but I got an internship with them in 2019 and eventually created the role I have today.

What do you enjoy most about your job?

I really like wearing multiple hats. I played football at Exeter and Williams, and I’m using my knowledge of the game to challenge players but still make it fun. My longterm goal is to run my own company, but right now I’m getting great experience learning on the back end what goes into making a game, and on the front end, sales.

Seeing how my work affects others — especially how it’s helping youth players be more engaged and excited about football — means a lot. E

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Driving Change

By Jennifer Wagner

N

eed a lift? That’s a simple question that

Veronica Juarez ’00 takes very seriously. As the vice president of social enterprise at the ride-sharing company Lyft, her job is, quite literally, to figure out how to get the most vulnerable among us from Point A to Point B. “When you don’t have access to transportation, you don’t have access to jobs or health care or after-school programs,” Juarez says. “My team is committed to providing access to rides that really change lives.”

Juarez started her career in politics, working for a decade with Houston’s Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs and for a Texas state senator. As a high-level political aide, she learned to collaborate with elected officials, community leaders and business representatives to overcome bureaucratic red tape and advance common goals.

Those experiences and her training at the Academy proved critical, she says, when she began leading negotiations with federal, state and municipal government officials to bring Lyft to cities across the country. “It’s through the experience that I had at the Harkness table that I always have the confidence to speak up in a room and to know that my voice matters,” she says. “And that can be daunting when you’re oftentimes the only woman or maybe the only person of color.”

Juarez joined Lyft in 2013 as one of its first 60 employees. Under her leadership, Lyft services were adopted in 50 new markets. In June 2015, just two years into her position, the tech exec was recognized by Fast Company magazine as one of the Most Creative People in Business.

But Juarez has accomplished much deeper goals. Not only has she expanded Lyft’s geographic reach, she has bolstered its inclusivity efforts by forging new partnerships with nonprofits. Lyft currently works with over 50 organizations, for example, to provide free or discounted transportation for immigrants and refugees to get to health appointments, legal hearings or job trainings.

Juarez credits Exeter with her deep-seated desire to

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connect communities and give back. “The motto of non sibi, the commitment [Exonians] have to serve others … I knew it was important,” Juarez says. “But I didn’t realize at the time what a big part of my life and my career that those values would become. It’s how I spend all of my professional time now, in service to others.”

Growing up in Houston as the daughter of a hardworking plumber, Juarez says, taught her to be a straightforward go-getter. “I remember I saw a video of snow and people rowing and the Harkness table,” she says of a recruiting movie she watched in middle school. “It was so different than anything I had seen before that I applied [to Exeter] without telling my parents. … I knew, coming from where I came from, that if I was able to take full advantage of this opportunity, it would change the course of my life. What I didn’t appreciate then is that it actually gave me the ability to change the course of my entire family and the future generations that come after me.”

Juarez, a fifth-generation Mexican-American, was the first in her family to attend boarding school and college. She graduated with honors from Stanford University, earning a degree in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. In 2018, she attended the Leadership Consortium as part of Harvard Business School’s Executive Education program and she sits on the board of Silicon Valley’s Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana, an inclusive contemporary arts space informed by the Chicano/Latino experience. Juarez also advises a venture capital fund, Vamos Ventures, that is committed to supporting Latinx entrepreneurs.

As a business leader, Juarez continues to build connections the same way she learned to around the Harkness table: “Every person’s voice matters, and if you leave the space for somebody to participate, they will know and they’ll contribute. It’s so important to me that my team and the work that we do, that we don’t just have results, but we really enjoy the process.” E

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Teaching for All

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By Debbie Kane he words “responsibility” and “stewardship”

come up frequently as Clarissa Delgado ’04 discusses her work. As co-founder and chief executive officer of Teach for the Philippines, Delgado partners with her home country’s Department of Education to improve the quality of public education on the archipelago of 7,641 islands.

Over the past seven years, she and her team have developed and implemented teacher formation and coaching programs that have reached more than 300 teachers and almost 80,000 students. For her efforts, she has been recognized by numerous national and international organizations and, in 2018, was selected as one of 21 members of the inaugural class of Obama Foundation Fellows.

The 34-year-old believes her dedication to community service was first nurtured around the dinner table while she was growing up. “Dinner table conversation was about the responsibility you have if you have the privilege of being educated,” Delgado says.

Delgado jokes that her family members are community leaders with “a long history of not following instructions.” Her grandmother, a cardiologist, interrupted her college studies to become a guerrilla medic and captain of her unit during World War II. Her grandfather served in the war as an intelligence officer and then in peacetime as the Philippines’ ambassador to the Vatican.

Her mother participated in student protests against President Ferdinand Marcos in the 1970s and 1980s and in the 1990s established Sa Aklat Sisikat Foundation, a nonprofit organization focusing on functional literacy for fourth-grade students. Delgado likens her family to an inabel blanket, a traditional hand-loomed textile from the Ilocos region of the Philippines that she’s had on her bed since birth: Their lives are intertwined into a larger legacy, one that led her to Exeter, as well as her career.

In seventh grade, Delgado launched a vigorous campaign to attend boarding school in the U.S. like her

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Exonian cousins, Rashid Delgado ’95 and Zaki Delgado ’97. She got in to Exeter, but being so far from home was difficult. She was unfamiliar with American culture; had no family in the U.S., nor other Filipino students to empathize with; not to mention had never experienced New England winters. “It took most of my time at Exeter to feel like I fit in culturally,” she says. Exposure to Harkness learning, so different from her Asian education, ultimately inspired her, as did this tenet from Exeter’s mission: “Goodness without knowledge is weak and feeble, yet knowledge without goodness is dangerous.”

“I can recite that phrase by memory after over 16 years,” Delgado says. “It’s not enough to just ‘do good’ or ‘be smart.’ I want to live a life that’s in service to something bigger than me.”

Delgado received a bachelor’s degree in history and art history from the College of William & Mary, then started her career as a project manager with MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab and Sa Aklat Sisikat Foundation. There, she worked in conjunction with her mother’s literacy organization to measure its impact in the Philippines. In 2012, Sa Aklat Sisikat transitioned into Teach for the Philippines, and Delgado was named co-founder. She has subsequently completed her master’s degree in education from Ateneo de Manila University.

While her organization has seen its share of successes, Delgado feels there is more to do. Challenged by the country’s systemic poverty and diverse geography, she is focusing her work on wellness efforts, for students as well as educators, and on better understanding where relevant contemporary education fits in the context of the Philippines’ complex history.

Not surprisingly, Delgado attributes her success to others, the interwoven threads that create a collective pattern of connection. “I’m a sum of all these parts — my family, mentors, board and staff,” she says. “I’m very lucky.” E

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Uncharted Waters

By Juliet Eastland ’86

J

ohn K. Hall ’58 has vivid memories from his Academy days: the prep beanie, for one. Hoyt Hall. Bicycling to Hampton Beach. And the dress code. “After Exeter,” he jokes, “I didn’t ever want to wear a necktie again.”

This sartorial intransigence, along with scientific aptitude and an explorer’s curiosity, ultimately led to a five-decade career mapping the ocean’s depths.

“It’s ludicrous that we know far more about the surface of the moon and Mars than we know about the seafloor,” he says.

Oceans cover 71 percent of our planet and wash up against 150 countries. Yet only 17 percent of the seafloor has been mapped.

Currently, Hall is working up to 13 hours a day on Nippon-GEBCO Seabed 2030, an international effort to map the remaining uncharted ocean floor. He has no desire for a firsthand deep-sea dive; TV nature films will suffice.

Instead, he’s digitizing roughly 700 maps in his 430-squarefoot, scanner-filled garage office, “accompanied by a ‘discontinued’ street cat named Kartzi (‘Tick’ in Hebrew, because she attached herself to us years ago),” he says.

With their colors and swirls, Hall’s maps evoke abstract art. His latest, “British Chart 722,” features yellow Seychelles landmasses floating in a white-and-blue Indian Ocean, veined with green contour lines and mottled by thousands of black dots — digitized by Hall at about 10 per minute — representing depth-sounding values.

Hall is driven by intellectual curiosity and by his mother’s maxim: “Be useful.” Mapping underwater topography is “critical to understanding mankind’s environment on the planet’s surface,” he says. Mapping can help us decode Earth’s past and forecast areas prone to tectonic damage in the future, since seafloor-sediment buildup causes tsunami-generating slides. He cites the 68-foot seafloor shift underlying Japan’s 2011 tsunami and numerous Indonesian-island slides.

If not for a serendipitous undergraduate encounter, Hall’s explorations might have remained above ground. Late during his senior year at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute,

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where he was studying geophysics, he happened to hear a lecture on seismic profiling by a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution scientist. Intrigued, he joined WHOI that summer and stayed for three years. “I’d found what I wanted to do, thank God,” he says.

In 1964, Hall began graduate work at Columbia’s Lamont Geological Observatory. His studies entailed three seasons in a U.S. Navy research station on Fletcher’s Ice Island, or “T-3,” an iceberg drifting over the Arctic Ocean. There, using largely homebuilt equipment and handcrafted computer programs, he produced samples and data from the western Arctic’s Amerasian Basin.

After completing his thesis in 1970 on the Arctic’s AlphaMendeleev Ridge, Hall and his Israeli physicist wife, Dr. Chava Fischler, headed to Israel, where he joined the Marine Geology Division of the Geological Survey of Israel (GSI) as the country’s first marine geophysicist.

At GSI, Hall founded the National Bathymetric Survey and compiled local and regional bathymetric sea maps.

Using pioneering computer-gridding techniques, he created a digital terrain model map of Israel and its above- and below-water environs. In 2020, he received the Medallion of the Israel Geological Society for his life’s contributions.

In 2006, he retired … somewhat. Rather than stop working altogether, he co-founded Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Neev Center for Geoinfomatics, where the next generation of students can access geophysical instruments for seismic data collection, photogrammetry and other projects. Even now, he enjoys mentoring his “Neevers.”

Not only is Hall decoding Earth’s submarine floor, he’s developing ways to explore the planet’s more inaccessible surfaces. In 2007, he designed and funded construction of R/H Sabvabaa, a research hovercraft in Norway. Unlike typical marine-research colossi, Sabvabaa is small and nimble. It recently completed a 50-week geophysical drift across the highest Arctic.

The craft is innovative, educative and resilient — like Hall himself. E

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FROM EVERY QUARTER E XO N I A N S M A K E C O N N E C T I O N S AT H O M E A N D A R O U N D T H E WO R L D Please note, all photos are identified left to right unless otherwise indicated.

NEW YORK CITY The Exeter Association of Greater New York welcomed more than 400 members of the Exeter family to its annual reception.

C.T. Tamura ’92, Lauren Waterman ’94, Christine Shim ’93, Carter Vance ’93, Heather Kollar ’93 and Christina Sethi ’95 enjoyed an opportunity to connect.

Cia (Buckley) Marakovits ’83 and Roger Tennent ’84

Tiffany Tuedor ’13, Selah Hampton ’13 and Ky Ma ’14

Brandon Reynolds ’99 and Pete Bowley ’00

Heidi Lichtl ’19 and Philip Kalikman ’04

Tyler Goddard ’12, Andy Craighead ’79; P’12, P’22, Laurie Cameron-Craighead P’12, P’22 and Dominique Rouge ’12

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Sydney Lamb ’17 and Chandler JeanJacques ’19

Cornelia Clay ’11, Jocelyn Bohn ’11, Alistair Fatheazam ’09, Katherine Burd ’11, Tom Guthrie ’11 and Trip Eggert ’11

Classmates from ’97 Laura Laufer, Zachary Iscol, Chris Hung and Julia Gray

Katie Quan ’10, Ved Ragkumar ’11, Kevin Chen ’11 and Harold Li ’11

Denise Bricker ’81; P’17 and Marc Fleuette ’81

Charanya Rangamannar, Jonathan Barbee and Sartaj Narang, all class of ’04

David Goodrich ’59; P’93, P’98, Priya Wadhera ’90, Frederic Sater ’52 and John Lane ’52

Heather Brandes P’21, P’23, Julio Peterson ’86, Jenny (Young) duPont ’78; P’08, P’12, P’14, P’15, Jay Hunt ’78; P’14, P’17 and Phil Brandes ’86; P’21, P’23

HAROLD HECHLER PHOTOGRAPHERS

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EAST COAST Alumni gatherings brought Exonians together for fun activities, good conversations and great company.

EXETER The Seacoast Skating Party celebrated 25 years of tradition with alumni, parents and families enjoying the annual event on campus.

Skating party host Dan Brown ’82 with Neil Therrien P’80, P’84 and Paul Therrien ’80

Clint Frary ’80, Steve Therrien ’84, Paul Therrien ’80 and Barb Jenny ’84

Geoff Howell, Lisa (Zwearcan) Fox and Alec Beckett, all class of ’84

BOSTON Exonians gathered for a film and Harkness event coordinated by Trevor Marrero ’12. Attendees spanned 70 years, with alumni from 1944 to 2014 participating.

See more event photos at www.exeter.edu/receptions.

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NORTHAMPTON, MA A reception featured English Instructor Alex Meyers ’96, who joined a panel of authors to talk about their work.

Attendees included Jane Andresen, Fred Andresen ’76, Abby Benfield ’19, Charlotte Perkins, Sam Perkins ’71, Greg Brown ’93; P’20, P’23, Mary Hubbell P’20, P’23 and Roland Merullo ’71; P’16, P’19.

PHILADELPHIA Exeter faculty joined alumni for a conversation on Exeter’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. Andy Shea ’79, Bob Warner ’67 and host Bill Rhodes ’83 took part in the discussion.

Deb D’Arcangelo ’82, Kenneth Munroe ’95 and Andrew Susskind ’72

WASHINGTON, D.C. Stephanie Bramlett (right ), Exeter’s director of equity and inclusion, led a conversation about race at an event hosted by George Economy ’73; P’11. She is joined here by Margaret Liu P’19, P’22, P’22 and Bill Bennett ’68.

SOMERVILLE, MA The classes of ’06, ’07 and ’08 gathered for a night of bowling.

Vivian Nourse ’09, Sarah Fenn ’08, Brad Hennessy ’07, Jessie George ’04, Lawrence Young ’96 and Grace Huang ’18

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Reception hosts John Fuller ’86; P’22 and his wife, Michelle Fuller P’22 Eric and Angira Sceusi ’98, Roxann Smithers, Rod Brown ’88 and David Walker

ATLANTA The Exeter Association of Georgia invited alumni, parents and friends to a reception where Trustee President Tony Downer ’75; P’06, P’06, P’07 offered remarks.

Melanie Boulden P’22, Angel Cordle Coats ’89; P’22, and Cherry and Randolph Cordle P’22

Luis Ochoa ’17, Courtney Henrich ’15, Lauren Karr ’16, Jon Regenold ’15, Sage Mason ’15 and Josh Forbes ’16

CHICAGO Alumni gathered for a reception followed by a reading from Continental Divide, the new book by English Instructor Alex Myers ’96.

Guests included Jenny Keller P’20, Tammy Mittelstaedt, George Quinlan ’84, Marshall Wolfe ’96 and Jack Keller ’86; P’20

Grace Madden ’93 and Alex Myers

See more event photos at www.exeter.edu/receptions.

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WEST COAST Events included non sibi projects and a reception.

SAN FRANCISCO Exonians gathered for a non sibi opportunity at St. Anthony’s Free Clothing Program, the largest free clothing program serving the city. The group included Kit Leaning ’86; P’22, Mike Shim ’91, Stella Shim, Katherine Calvert ’91, Reeves Calvert, Per Oskar Casey, Kirsten Vernon ’84, Katharine Vernon, Bill McLeod ’79, Ify Ikpeazu ’14, Kendrick Morris ’14, Arlene Chan ’89; P’21, Robert Gee P’21 and Ian Gee.

The volunteers receive directions from the St. Anthony’s staff.

Lunch was hosted by Mike Shim ’91 (far left). Gary Tan P’14, P’19 (far right) welcomed the volunteers to his restaurant, Dragon Well.

SAN FRANCISCO A reception at The Book Club included the exhibition “Florence S. Walter: Pioneering American Bookbinder,” which featured a collection of Walter’s early work. Pictured here are Carl Jukkola ’58 and event host Bo Wreden ’58.

SEATTLE Winnie (Chapin) Young ‘72 (center in E hat) hosted a non sibi happy hour and book drive to benefit Mary’s Place, an organization providing shelter and services to families on their journey out of homelessness.

Bill Ferry ’65, Sarah Varney ’91, and Bettejean and Ed Varney P’91

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C O N N ECT I O N S

LONDON The Exeter Association of the United Kingdom welcomed Principal Bill Rawson ’71; P’08 to their reception at The Conduit.

Attendees included Margaret Shergalis ’90, Madelyn Postman ’90, Stephen Jasper ’60, Principal Bill Rawson ’71; P’08 and Christina Murdock ’05

Trustee Morgan Sze ’83; P’19, P’22 and Regional Association President Sara Cunningham ’02

Myles O’Connell ’21, Bronwen Mason ’97 and Kasey O’Connell P’21

Derek Chang ’85, Katie Chang ’85 and Dick Schumacher ’83

Dave McDougall ’98, Angelica Nierras ’05 and Fletcher Williams ’12

Cesar Grados, Adrienne Harrison and Sarah Appleby, all class of ’97

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PARENTS

EXETER The winter Coffee and Conversation event at Phillips Church included Exeter staff and Rev. Heidi Heath. Joining the event were Kerri Singh P’17, P’22, James McIlroy P’21, Andy Singh P’17, P’22 and Cheri McIlroy P’21.

On campus and across the country, parents had many opportunities to connect with each other.

EXETER Parents were invited to a college counseling reception on campus. Pictured here are Amy Puchalski P’21, P’23, P’23, Molly Delano P’21 and Carrol Steele-Smith P’21.

BEVERLY HILLS Parents participated in a Harkness discussion, hosted by Nir Toledano P’21 (fourth on left).

PALO ALTO Hilary Giles P’18, P’22 (second from right) hosted a Harkness discussion for parents.

A Special Message from Exeter Many events, receptions and gatherings were canceled or postponed worldwide this spring due to the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Please know that our thoughts are with our Exeter community, both locally and globally. We look forward to coming together in the future, but for now, we encourage you to stay connected virtually. Our online alumni and mentor directories are great resources. You may also contact us directly at alumni@exeter.edu.

SAN FRANCISCO Marie Hurabiell P’23 (third on left) and Mainul Mondal (front, center) hosted a parents Harkness event.

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We are always glad to hear from you.

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F I N I S

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P E N D E T

Into Place

By Jason BreMiller

I

’m homebound under the governor of New Hampshire’s Stay-at-Home order, and my

PETER JAMES FIELD / AGENCYRUSH.COM

kids are pin-ponging off the walls in the adjacent room. Something about He hit me first and the whack against flesh of the foam roller they’ve dubbed the “Monster Bonker.”

It’s the opening week of spring term, but instead of gathering with my students around the Harkness table, or heading with them into the field, I’m planted here in McConnell Hall with my wife and kids, trying to juggle full-time teaching and parenting my small children. Maybe it’s because I’ve just binged “The Tiger King,” but I’m starting to see bars on the windows.

In truth, I’m grieving the loss of my usual shtick, of the time outdoors with my senior English elective Literature and the Land class, which grounds me in the rhythms of the season. As if to drive this loss home, my mind is chock-full of newly acquired e-learning jargon; rather than contemplating the Squamscott River ice breakup or the alewife migration on the Exeter River, I’m thinking about Zoom and modules and touchpoints and asynchronicity. The words taste like hand sanitizer. I’ve been staring at the screen for so long, I feel like I might fall in.

Legendary English Instructor Peter Greer taught Lit and the Land for many years, and it’s now one of the longest-running secondary school environmental humanities courses in the country. I met Peter only once, when he took me to lunch to discuss his course and to pass along boxes of material he’d accumulated from teaching it since the late 1980s. I’ve always felt grateful for that conversation, for even a moment with this brilliant, deep-hearted man who fiercely loved the earth and his students. Peter died the following week. I hadn’t even known he was sick.

In the course’s design, I’ve tried to honor the connection to Peter and to the past. So, like Peter’s course, the current iteration involves weekly “walks.” We visit Apple Annie, the apple farm of former PEA English Instructor Charlie Pratt and his wife, Joanie, and Amy Robinson’s apiary, places Peter routinely took his classes. We talk about Donald Culross Peattie’s “slow turn of the seasons,” which Peter used as a frame to urge his students to watch closely for spring’s onset — worm castings in the lawn, or the arrival of redwing blackbirds and bobolinks. I think it would please Peter to know Lit and the Land’s pith is still this: fostering in our students an awareness of and connection to place.

Reading my notes from this date last year, I lean a bit deeper into my grief over what is lost: Yesterday, I took my Lit and the Land students into the field for an early morning observation at Colby Farm. A brisk morning with skims of ice sheathing wheelrut puddles and a stiff western breeze gusting across snowmatted hay. I cringe at what some of the kids show up wearing, sockless in sneakers, sweatshirts sans coats. Nary a hat or mitten to be seen despite my best attempts to ensure their preparation. But we head out anyway because it’ll be an hour or less, so the stakes are low, and besides, there’s poignancy in discomfort, a sharpening.

It’s a brilliant morning, full of myriad spontaneous discoveries. A tree gone silver in the sun across the fields. Grackles golden in the slanting light. The shock of warmth as we —continued on page 103

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Into Place

—continued from page 104

step from the hemlock shadows into the field’s open sun. The infinitesimal moment when a male bluebird glows iridescent. We kneel in the dirt together picking apart an owl pellet, deducing by a solitary blunted nail the species it contained. A rabbit. We squat by small impressions in the mud, in the duff, fingering their contours and asking questions: What animal is this? What direction did she walk? Where was he going?

Deer. Coyote. Turkey. We see them all. Peeling back strips of birch from a downed limb, we notice the pink layers, each finer and finer until you can barely feel anything at all against your fingertips. … We stumble across a porcupine tree, hollow at the bottom, scat piled high, identified by an astute student willing to get close enough to kneel in the scat and pick up the quills left as signposts. And we find a garter snake, the season’s first, torpid, sunning itself warm in the oak leaves. As a tribute to the snake or to Ed Abbey himself, whom we’ve read, Vinny acts out a passage from Desert Solitaire, dropping to his belly as his classmates chuckle and squirm, nosing his way forward until he’s eyeball to eyeball with the snake: Like a living caduceus they wind and unwind about each other in undulant, graceful, perpetual motion, moving slowly across a dome of sandstone. ... A shameless voyeur, I stare at the lovers, and then to get a closer view run outside and around the trailer to the back. There I get down on hands and knees and creep toward the dancing snakes, not wanting to frighten or disturb them. I crawl to within six feet of them and stop, flat on my belly, watching from the snake’s-eye level...

In our next class, we follow the river trail and arrange our Crazy Creeks in a makeshift Harkness table within a hemlock grove where I listen to the students speak with awe about yesterday’s hour in the woods. They S P R I N G

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name the details they encountered, and their sense of wonder is palpable. At first, they differentiate these moments from their experiences in science class (measure! record! quantify!), but slowly they circle back to the proximity between these epistemologies, how they are linked, maybe even wedded. Toby invokes Annie Dillard and her practice of lowering her threshold for what inspires wonder, thereby increasing the frequency of one’s possible encounters with wonder.

Hannah says,“It all makes me think about what unites us,” and Grace follows, “I hadn’t felt that peaceful in years.” As we let these words linger, we listen to the breeze soughing through the canopy.

Do you understand now what I mean when I speak of grief and loss? How can I re-create all this from afar, from behind the screen’s digital eye? How can any of us replicate the magic that happens when we gather around the table, indoors or out? I’ve tried to design opportunities for my students to connect to the natural world wherever they might be, in their own places, even if that means necessarily observing that world from behind a pane of glass.

The truth is this spring will be different. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, though, from almost two decades of leading students outside, it’s that the natural world works itself on them no matter the constraints. I think of Wordsworth’s “The Tables Turned”: Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher.

Get out of the way and let it happen has long been my teaching mantra, and right now, it’s what gives me hope. That maybe, in the midst of loss, this strange time might also contain possibilities we don’t yet see. That remote learning — maybe the pandemic itself — could be a doorway to deeper compassion for people and places unimaginable to us now.

On our yearly visit to Apple Annie we wander the orchard, the May bloom a lovely cloud of pink about us, and listen to Laurie Loosigian speak with love about the challenges and rewards of working

an orchard. Laurie and her husband, Wayne, took over the orchard from Charlie and Joanie Pratt after apprenticing with them for five seasons. The bloom arrives earlier each year, Laurie says, and the battle against pests is a losing fight.

Such is the plight of an orchardist in the Anthropocene. As if to prove her point, she squeezes a green pug between her fingernails, that destructive little budeater. “Take that!” But the students caress the joint where Wayne and Laurie’s daughter Emma, who took Literature and the Land from Peter Greer and who will take over Apple Annie’s from her parents, grafted new fruit onto an old limb, binding the joints and rubbing them with salve.

Joanie joins us, too, and before we head into the barn to devour the treats Laurie, Wayne and Emma have baked for us, we gather around Charlie’s rock and read aloud his poem “Into Place.” Our voices waver at first, then steady, joining the chorus of love that has come before, and that continues now.

“Into Place,” by Charlie Pratt It’s not so much a departure as an arrival, Or rather, a having arrived — as when, out driving, You pass an orchard on a southward hill, Old apple trees aslant in heaps of prunings.

For sale. What do you know of apples? Still, One morning you wake up under a different ceiling.

And feeling that you’ve not chosen but been chosen, Are something less than owner, more than guest.

You fertilize and mow, attend the slow Growth of apples readying for harvest, And settle into place like leaves or snow, Unfold like a letter delivered as addressed. E Editor’s Note: Jason BreMiller is an English instructor and the Academy’s sustainability education coordinator.

He is also director of the Exeter Environmental Literature Institute.

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IN THE MIDDLE OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, JOHN AND ELIZABETH PHILLIPS STARTED A REVOLUTION OF THEIR OWN. THEY BELIEVED IN THE FUTURE OF OUR NEW COUNTRY, AND IN THE POTENTIAL OF THOSE WHO WOULD SOMEDAY LEAD IT. THEIR BEQUEST HELPED A FLEDGLING ACADEMY PROSPER.

WHAT WILL BE THE LEGACY OF YOUR ESTATE PLAN?

Many Exonians choose to put Exeter in their wills.

Our Planned Giving Office will help you and your advisers as you consider a lasting gift to PEA. Please contact Phil Perham at 603-777-3594 or pperham@exeter.edu.

PHILLIPS EXETER ACADEMY 20 Main Street Exeter, NH 03833-2460

Parents of Alumni: If this magazine is addressed to an Exonian who no longer maintains a permanent address at your home, please email us (records@exeter.edu) with their new address. Thank you.

HONORING EXTRAORDINARY SERVICE Joh

llips Award is

bestowed upon an alumnus or alumna for outstanding contribution to the welfare of community, country and humanity.

Founders Day Award