The Exeter Bulletin, spring 2013

Reunion_Ad_IFC_2013_2_Final 4/4/13 12:33 PM Page 1

There’s a world of opportunities to explore.

Help make the journey possible.

China

Ecuador

Vermont

Italy

Exeter students can choose to attend any one of 1 7 off-campus curricular programs.

Japan

Germany

On or off campus, the Academy invests more resources per student than any of its peer schools. The Exeter Fund helps make that possible.

Simplify your life and maximize the impact of your support with a monthly recurring gift. When you give, Exeter uses your support immediately to enhance the student experience on campus and around the world: www.exeter.edu/give4

The Exeter Fund

Around the Table

V O L U M E

C V I I I ,

N O. 3

S P R I N G

Contents

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

2 0 1 3

Features 21 | ON WITH THE SHOW! Spotlight on Exeter’s performing arts

By Nicole Pellaton

Class Notes Editor Janice M. Reiter Editorial Assistant Susan Goraczkowski Creative Director/Design David Nelson, Nelson Design Contributing Editors Edouard L. Desrochers Karen Stewart Communications Advisory Committee Daniel G. Brown ’82, Robert C. Burtman ’74, Dorinda Elliott ’76, Alison Freeland ’72, Keith Johnson ’52, Yvonne M. Lopez ’93

28 | SHARING SACRED GROUND Students build a community around their diverse faiths

By Katherine Towler

21

Departments 4 Around the Table: Exeter’s four governors, new lives for old tables, a pastry chef’s sweet lessons, in the Assembly Hall, and more.

TRUSTEES President G. Thompson Hutton ’73

10 Table Talk with James F. Hoge Jr. ’54, chairman of Human Rights Watch

Vice President Eunice Johnson Panetta ’84

14 Exoniana: Principal’s Day

Wole C. Coaxum ’88, Flobelle Burden Davis ’87, Marc C. de La Bruyère ’77, Walter C. Donovan ’81, John A. Downer ’75, Mark A. Edwards ’78, Jonathan W. Galassi ’67, Thomas E. Hassan ’56, ’66, ’70, ’06 (Hon.); P’11, Jennifer P. Holleran ’86, David R. Horn ’85, Alan R. Jones ’72, William K. Rawson ’71, Dr. Nina D. Russell ’82, Robert S. Silberman ’76, J. Douglas Smith ’83, Della Spring ’79, Morgan C. Sze ’83, and Remy White Trafelet ’88 The Exeter Bulletin (ISSN No. 0195-0207) is published four times each year: fall, winter, spring, and summer, by Phillips Exeter Academy, 20 Main Street, Exeter NH 03833-2460, 603-772-4311.

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

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

Copyright 2013 by the Trustees of Phillips Exeter Academy.

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

18 Exonians in Review: The Constant Choice by Peter Georgescu ’57. Reviewed by Melissa Orlov ’77

28

The People of Forever Are Not Afraid by Shani Boianjiu ’05. Reviewed by Lindsey Mead Russell ’92 32 A Champion of Young Athletes: Sports anchor Mike Lynch ’72 and his High Fives by Craig Morgan ’84.

Plus, winter sports roundup.

36 Connections: News and Notes from the Alumni Community 38 Profiles: Dr. John Harvey ’41, A. Clayton Spencer ’73 and Andrew Yang ’92 100 Finis Origine Pendet: A Historic Sojourn

By Barbara Rimkunas, the Exeter Historical Society curator

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

Email us at bulletin@exeter.edu.

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

COVER PHOTO BY CHERYL SENTER

SPRING 2013

The Exeter Bulletin

1

“Spring” Time!

Emily Moore ’14, a pole-vaulter on the girls track and field team, warms up with a backflip on the mat at the beginning of spring term.

—Photo by Damian Strohmeyer

2

The Exeter Bulletin

S PRING 2013

The View from Here

SPRING 2013

The Exeter Bulletin

3

Around theTable

What’s new and notable at the Academy

Global Independent Schools Talk Shop

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

CHERYL SENTER

Principal Hassan and students in the Academy Building.

4

The Exeter Bulletin

S

chool heads like me typically focus most of our attention on our schools’ individual concerns. It is therefore refreshing—and important—to meet regularly with other educational leaders to discuss a deeper and broader set of topics affecting secondary education today. Oftentimes, it means meeting with colleagues from regional peer schools or from independent schools nationwide. Fortunately, for the past three years, I have also had the opportunity to join other school heads of top-tier institutions from around the globe at gatherings known informally as the G20 Schools.

Founded in 2006, this association of schools addresses questions and issues that have universal impact on secondary schools, regardless of geography. Exeter, along with Buckingham, Browne & Nichols in Cambridge,

S PRING 2013

MA, hosted the group last spring. And in February, 26 school heads and their guests came together in Indore, India, for a conference organized by The Daly College.

Participants traveled from Australia, Canada, China, Ghana, Hong Kong, Kenya, Singapore, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States for this important event.

For several days, we participated in interactive sessions with some of India’s eminent educational leaders, and we engaged in formal and informal exchanges of ideas with fellow G20 members.We were even inspired by a group of grade school children at our host school whose training in “mental math” allowed them to calculate in their minds—rather than with a calculator—extraordinarily complicated math calculations. Amazingly, they visual-

ized an abacus to correctly arrive at each solution—in with the old, I guess!

Exposure to the host culture is a lively and inspiring aspect of the conference. The G20 toured several sites of interest including India’s Agra Fort, an ancient brick fortress and walled city. Last year, I was able to treat the group to a New England clambake after a tour of the Strawbery Banke Museum in Portsmouth, NH. The group also listened to Emeritus History Instructor Jack Herney talk about the history of Harkness teaching before they sat in on several Harkness classes.

The class visits prompted another exciting global partnership. Titi Ofei, the head of the SOS-Hermann Gmeiner International College in Ghana, sat in on History Instructor Kwasi Boadi’s history class. Kwasi had been part of a group of Academy teachers who visited Ghana the previous summer to broaden their professional and curricular development, as part of Exeter’s ongoing initiative to expose faculty and students to other parts of the world. After class, the two educators conversed about Kwasi’s travels and the fact that Academy faculty members were interested in partnering with a school in Africa for a study abroad program.

The friendly exchange quickly evolved into serious planning. SOS-Hermann Gmeiner International College is a rigorous school and seemed like a perfect match for Exeter. It supports the International Baccalaureate (IB) program and brings together a diverse

group of students, 20 percent of whom are African orphans, in a strong boarding school program. Kwasi worked with his faculty colleagues at Exeter and in Ghana to present a proposal to the Academy for a new

We participated in interactive sessions with some of India’s eminent educational leaders.

term study abroad program in Ghana. The faculty voted to approve the program, and this fall six Academy seniors will study in Africa for the first time.

Opportunities to forge relationships between and among schools globally, exposure to thinking about larger educational issues and trends, and camaraderie among fellow school heads are just several of the key things I take away each year from my time with fellow G20 heads. Next year, we travel to South America, and no doubt you will be hearing about the new ideas and potential programs that emanate from the gathering.

Three Exonians Earn National Awards Senior Ruslan Lucero, from Amesbury, MA, is one of three Academy students to receive national honors in the 2013 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards competition—the nation’s longest-running recognition program for creative teenagers.

Lucero’s oil on canvas self-portrait, A Mother’s Touch, was awarded a Silver Medal.

In this year’s writing competition, June Han ’15, from Bryn Mawr, PA, was awarded a Silver Medal in the Flash Fiction category for her piece, “Red Blindness.” Catherine Zhu ’15, from Morris Plains, NJ, earned an American Voices Medal for her short story entry, “The Ways In Which We Vanish.”

The trio will travel to New York City to receive their honors on May 31 during a live webcast of the National Awards Ceremony at Carnegie Hall.

Lucero will be among Scholastic’s graduating senior award recipients eligible to share in the more than $8 million in scholarships from approximately 60 U.S. colleges, universities and art institutions. Lucero, Han and Zhu are among the more than 1,600 students in grades 7–12 chosen to receive national medals.They represent 47 U.S. states, Washington, DC, and American schools abroad. More than 230,000 submissions were received this year—the 90th anniversary of the awards—in 28 categories including dramatic script, humor, novel-writing, science fiction, sculpture, fashion design and video game design.

A Mother’s Touch, oil on canvas self-portrait, 18” x 24,” by Ruslan Lucero ’13.

SPRING 2013

The Exeter Bulletin

5

Around the Table

In the Assembly Hall A S A M P L I N G O F S P E A K E R S W H O C A M E TO C A M P U S January 8: Maribel Hernandez Rivera ’00 Attorney and litigator

January 15: Bobby Valentine Former Boston Red Sox manager

MIKE CATANO

6

The Exeter Bulletin

S PRING 2013

Litigation attorney

Matthew McGill, who has participated in 15 U.S. Supreme Court cases (and helped draft the winning brief in 10 of them), spoke at assembly about two landmark cases: 2010’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and this year’s Hollingsworth v. Perry.

Both cases, McGill said, represent abuse of government power.

In the first case, McGill represented Citizens United. The court ruled in favor of the plaintiff, stating in its decision that the First Amendment allows companies and unions to fund independent political advertising. McGill said the case was largely misunderstood.

“I think most people think Citizens United is responsible for Super PACs, which is not true,” McGill said. “People have a sense that corporations are influencing our elections in ways they don’t understand and, in fact, that has not been borne out.”

McGill is currently arguing on behalf of the plaintiff in Hollingsworth v. Perry. The case challenges California’s Proposition 8, which prohibits same-sex couples from marrying, and is among several notable civil rights cases on the court’s 2013 docket.

McGill refrained from making predictions about the forthcoming decision, but said that he felt “privileged to be a part of [the case] and I’m hopeful that things are going to turn out right for our clients.”

Watch a short video interview of McGill at www.exeter.edu/bulletinextras.

February 1: Sarah Milkovich ’96 Science operations systems engineer

Sarah Milkovich returned to campus to talk about Mars. She talked in scientific terms—about landers, lasers, temperatures and craters—and in human terms. “This is why I get up in the morning,” Milkovich said with pleasure after talking about her job at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she serves as an interface between scientists and engineers who are orchestrating the experiments of NASA’s Curiosity rover on Mars.

Students were intrigued by everyNICOLE PELLATON

“I’m sure of one thing: that the 3 million seconds here at Exeter will be the most impressionable 3 million seconds of your life,” Bobby Valentine told students. “I ask you not to waste them.

These are the days you’ll carry forward the ideas, friendships and feelings that will last the rest of your life.”

Valentine drew on lessons he learned as a player and successful manager of professional baseball teams that included the New York Mets, the Texas Rangers, the Japanese Chiba Lotte Marines and the Boston Red Sox. He led the Mets to the 2000 World Series and led the Chiba Lotte Marines to a victory in the Japan Series (equivalent to the U.S. World Series) for the first time since 1974.

“I’m the only guy in the world to have managed at the major league level in the U.S. American League, National League and the Professional Baseball league in Japan,” he said.

“I’m also the only guy fired [from] the American League,

January 29: Matthew McGill ’92

MIKE NAGEL

MAXINE WEED

“Some people refer to undocumented immigrants as ‘illegals.’ I prefer not to use that term because I do not believe that a human being can be illegal,” Maribel Hernandez Rivera told students.

“They may commit unlawful acts, but that result does not make the person illegal.The first thing I want to encourage you to do is to take the word ‘illegal’ out of your vocabulary when referring to an undocumented person.”

Hernandez Rivera attended the Academy as an undocumented student. Born in Mexico, she moved to the United States when she was 13 while visiting her father, also an undocumented immig rant. She stayed because “I did not want to be fatherless again.”

Dur ing her talk, Her nandez Rivera described her teenage years living in fear, scared of raids from government officials and ashamed at the thought of others discovering her history. “I worked very hard in school with the hope that if anyone ever learned about my immigration status, they would forgive me,” she said. Hernandez Rivera nearly chose not to apply to Exeter out of fear that she would be “found out.”

After assembly, she visited several classrooms to discuss immigration issues with students.

National League and [the] Professional league in Japan!”

Valentine concluded assembly with a Q-and-A session, answering questions about his coaching in Japan and his more infamous moments managing teams like the Mets.

thing from Mars’ temperatures—a low of -66 degrees Celsius on the day preceding the assembly talk—to funding for major projects like Curiosity.

Milkovich met with four science classes during her visit, and students peppered her with questions, including how to get a job at NASA and who gets to drive a rover. Here’s a sample of what they learned: Curiosity goes to sleep at night (it has a “dream mode”),Curiosity computes the route to the next experiment location based on waypoints, and Curiosity can ascend slopes but can’t climb over rocks (which could hurt its bottom).

Milkovich ascribes much of her success in landing a NASA job to persistence and making contacts. As for jobs as rover drivers, they’re very sought after, she explained, but there’s a high burnout rate.

COURTESY PHOTO

Around the Table

Watch a short video interview of Milkovich at www.exeter.edu/bulletinextras.

February 8: Tina Rosenberg

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Tina Rosenberg opened assembly by asking, “How many of you have ever heard your parents say, ‘Peer pressure is great, make sure you give into it as often as you can’?”

When few hands were raised, Rosenberg added, “When our kids get into trouble we tend to blame it on peer pressure; but what happens when our kids don’t get into trouble? We don’t tend to think of peer pressure as a factor in that.”

According to Rosenberg, however, peer pressure is “a positive force for good in many ways.” She cited Alcoholics Anonymous as a prime example: “They have a group of peers who support them and hold them accountable in making a change the entire group is focused on, and that’s an example of positive peer pressure.”

Rosenberg offered other examples of how beneficial the “join the club strategy” can be, talking in detail about efforts to curb teen smoking in the 1990s and the political demise of Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic. She is the author of Children of Cain: Violence and the Violent in Latin America, and The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

February 15: Humberto Mata Jr. ’86 Co-founder of Fundacion VIHDA

Humberto Mata, a native of Guayaquil, Ecuador, began his assembly talk with a special nod to Jim Samiljan, instructor emeritus in Modern Languages, who was in the audience. Mata said, “I dedi-

Read the 2010 Bulletin profile on Mata at www.exeter.edu/bulletinextras.

February 22: Dr. Stephany Rose Spaulding Assistant professor of women’s and ethnic studies

NICOLE PELLATON

COURTESY PHOTO

Author, Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World

cate to you, Jim, and to Cecelia, who were my parents while I was here [for] four years. …Thank you Jim for your love and support.”

Mata continued to reflect on how Exeter, and the Assembly Hall in particular, served as the inspiration behind his now 7-year-old nonprofit, Fundacion VIHDA, which he cofounded with his husband, Maximiliano Novoa. The organization, based in his hometown and Ecuador’s largest city, is dedicated to the prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV/AIDS. To date, VIHDA’s work has ensured that 1,000 babies have been born HIV-free to mothers who received treatment, thanks to Mata’s nonprofit.

“It’s very important to know that this started right here, in this Assembly Hall,” Mata told students. “I want all of you who have dreams, I want all of you to know how this can happen, and how the impact that this will have in the world around you, once you leave Exeter…once you do all the academic stuff you’ve got to do…once you go out there in the real world, how important it is to bring your heart into it.”

Dr. Stephany Rose Spaulding, who specializes in race, gender and American popular culture at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, gave an assembly talk entitled, “What Makes Black Art Black Art.” She began by stating, “Much of U.S. expressive culture is rooted in the music and artistic phenomena of black people,” and then asked, “What is unique about the esthetic of African art?”

It is functional, collective and committed, Spaulding explained.

Many examples of black art forms and artists were integrated into the presentation, including the negro spiritual “Wade in the Water,” which she sang a cappella to the entire assembly; singer-songwriter Nicki Minaj; and Ernie Barnes, who painted “Sugar Shack.”

Spaulding’s writings include “Miscegenated Nation: Adam Mansbach’s Angry Black White Boy” in the CLA Journal and “Black Market Whiteness: From Hustler to HNIC” in Jay-Z: Essays on Hip Hop’s Philosopher King. She is editor of The Lion Speaks: An Anthology for Hurricane Katrina and the poet/author of Stilettoed Roses Bleed.

SPRING 2013

The Exeter Bulletin

7

Around the Table

PEA Students Go On Tour C O N C E RT C H O I R A N D C H A M B E R O R C H E S T R A P E R F O R M I N B O S T O N A N D N E W YO R K C I T Y

D

DAVE JAMROG

uring the first Sunday of spring break, members of PEA’s Concer t Choir and Chamber Orchestra rehearsed in The Church of St. Mary the Virgin, in New York City’s Times Square.Their music brought tears to one bystander’s eyes. Before leaving, he thankedVanessa Holroyd, PEA’s tour and concert series manager, who was standing nearby, for the unexpected gift.

The public performance that followed in the church was no less moving.

Holroyd, who coordinated the tour to Boston and New York, says, “The students performed the best that I have ever heard them,” and they did so before an audience of more than 100 people at Saint Mary’s. It was the final stop for the group, which was under the direction of Music Department Chair Rohan Smith P’15, Music Instructor and Michael V. Forrestal ’45 Chair Peter Schultz P’13, and Choral Director Robert St. Cyr. The students and faculty kicked off their biennial spring concert tour on the previous Thursday, March 7, with a private concert for the Boston Arts Academy, Boston’s only public school for the performing and visual arts. Later in the day, the group played the first of their public concerts at the First Church in Cambridge, MA. Afterward, they traveled to New York, where the PEA musicians

gave their second private performance, for the Bronx Preparatory Charter School, in the Bronx. Sightseeing followed, before the concert in Times Square.

The final public performance of the program, which featured pieces by Haydn, Pfautsch, Brahms, Chydenius, Paulus, Togni and Schubert, was saved for Exeter. An audience of faculty, students and staff gathered in Phillips Church on March 24 to listen to and celebrate the musical talents of these Exonians.

Alumnus Delivers Rousing Keynote Address Kenji Yoshino ’87 Opens PEA’s MLK Day

8

The Exeter Bulletin

S PRING 2013

as decades after MLK, racial minorities are still asked to downplay their identities.”

Yoshino, who is gay, explained, “All of these words have to do with assimilation, and had to do with my experience.”

Yoshino believes the battle for equality will not be won in courtrooms, but by individuals participating in honest, open conversations with one another.

“Every single person has a stake in what we are doing here today. This is not some minority issue. This is not some issue that concerns somebody else. This is something that every person in this room is affected by,” he said.

Following Yoshino’s keynote address, students selected from nine workshops to attend. Each workshop focused on a range of issues, including assimilation, social justice, inclusion and forgiveness.

NICOLE PELLATON

Forty-five years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Exeter students paused from their classes and assignments in mid-January to honor the fallen civil rights leader and participate in a day of presentations, workshops and seminars.

This year’s theme, “Keeping the Dream Alive: Identity and Justice in the 21st Century,” featured a keynote address by New York University School of Law’s Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law Kenji Yoshino ’87, who spoke on one of his recent books, Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights.

During his 50-minute address,Yoshino, a civil rights activist and legal scholar, defined “covering” as a means to downplay an individual’s characteristics in order to be accepted into society’s mainstream.

“I want you to take away from this talk three words: conversion, passing and covering,” he said. “I love this word, ‘covering,’

Around the Table

Trustee Roundup

T

he Trustees of the Academy met on campus Wednesday, January 23, through Saturday, January 26. On Wednesday afternoon,Trustee Doug Smith ’83, as part of his work with the Composition of the School Committee, met with dorm heads to discuss the characteristics they look for in incoming students.The next evening, all trustees, armed with plates of cookies, fanned out to several dormitories to ask similar questions of the students.

Principal Tom Hassan and his wife, New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan ’70 (Hon.); P’11, hosted a dinner at Saltonstall House for the trustees who had arrived that day.

The evening included a Harkness discussion about women in political leadership roles, and referenced the good work Student Council President Max Freedman ’13 is doing to spotlight that issue within our own student government.

On Thursday morning, Trustee Alan Jones ’72 delivered his meditation to the community in Phillips Church. Jones will be retiring this spring as he completes his term of service as an Academy trustee. Following the meditation, the Trustees began their official meetings and heard from Director of Facilities Management Roger Wakeman P’09, P’11 about several projects that are currently under way or planned. He noted that this is the fifth year of a six-year initiative to renew and upgrade the campus’ steam distribution system. The upcoming work will be concentrated in the Elliot Street area.Wakeman also outlined the long-anticipated renovation of the Lamont Health and Wellness Center.

This extensive renovation will begin in the spring and is scheduled for completion by the start of the 2013–14 academic year. In order to abide by this timeline, faculty and staff using the Lamont facilities will be relocated to other areas prior to construction. Additionally, two dormitories will undergo renovations this summer: Williams House will be completely refurbished, and the exterior of Webster Hall will be upgraded. Webster Hall’s interior will be renovated during summer 2014, following the completion of additional design work over the next year.

The Trustees then discussed the work of the Performing Arts Review Committee. That committee, comprised of faculty, staff and trustees, has been evaluating a project that will not only meet the deficiencies cited in our last reaccreditation report, but also provide the teaching and perfor mance spaces essential to the Academy’s vibrant performing arts program.The committee is also considering an addition to the music building, as well as new theater and dance performance spaces. Current discussions are focused on the location of new performance facilities and fundraising, which will be necessary for the success of the project.

The Trustees and Principal Hassan agree that the performing arts project is a top priority of the Academy. The Trustees also heard a brief report on the condition of the

Thompson Cage and agreed to study its probable life expectancy and future alternatives for that space.

The next session was devoted to budget and finance discussions. As is customary at the winter meeting, the Trustees set tuition for the following academic year, which will be announced in the spring. It should be noted that even with an approved increase, Exeter’s tuition is likely to remain lower than many of its peers. In fact, Exeter’s tuition for 2013–14 will be lower than this year’s tuitions at most of those schools.

Later on Thursday, the Trustees discussed several issues related to our institutional advancement efforts, among them The Exeter Fund, formerly known as the Annual Giving Fund, and our outreach efforts to parents and to our Academy communities overseas. Director of Institutional Advancement Ted Probert P’12 is working with his team to structure the office to best connect with and to serve our alumni in these challenging economic times. Thursday meetings concluded with the Trustees approving the nominees for the Founder’s Day and John Phillips awards. In May, emerita dean of students Susan Herney ’69, ’74, ’83 (Hon.) will be honored with the Founder’s Day Award for her incredible devotion to Exeter in many different and important capacities, from PEA’s earliest days of coeducation until her retirement. In October, Bob Mundheim ’50 will receive the John Phillips Award, which honors an Exeter graduate for contributions to the welfare of community, country and humanity. He will be recognized for his various leadership roles in government, the private sector and academia.

At dinner on Thursday and lunch on Friday, the Trustees had the opportunity to dine and converse with a random selection of staff members. These gatherings are similar to those that have taken place with faculty members, and the Trustees look forward to continuing associations with both groups in the years to come.

Several trustees met with students over breakfast in Wetherell Dining Hall early Friday morning regarding the Academy’s advising system—something currently under review by an on-campus committee chaired by Russell Weatherspoon ’01, ’03, ’08, ’11 (Hon.); P’92, P’95, P’97, P’01, interim dean of multicultural affairs. Later that day, the Trustees described their breakfast conversations to Weatherspoon and Dean of Students Melissa Mischke, who then described how they and other members of the Advising Committee are approaching their important task. The Trustees were pleased to hear examples of warm and effective connections happening between students and faculty outside the classroom and strongly encourage and support efforts to ensure that such positive bonds will be uniform across all adviser-advisee relationships. They agreed that (continued on page 99) SPRING 2013

The Exeter Bulletin

9

Around the Table

Leading with Purpose TA B L E TA L K W I T H J A M E S F. H O G E J R . ’ 5 4

By Craig Morgan ’84

N

early two decades into Jim Hoge’s tenure as the editor of Foreign Affairs, a magazine on internation-

10

The Exeter Bulletin

S PRING 2013

FRED CARLSON

al relations and U.S. foreign policy published by the Council on Foreign Relations, his wife, Kathleen Lacey, posed a question: “Is there anything else you want to do in life before I deliver you [to] assisted living?”

Hoge’s resume certainly wasn’t lacking. After graduating from Yale in 1958, he served as a Washington correspondent for the Chicago Sun-Times before becoming its editor-in-chief and publisher. During his tenure there, the Sun-Times won six Pulitzer Prizes.

He was the president and publisher of the New York Daily News from 1984-91; he has been a Fellow at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center at Columbia University and the American Political Science Association’s Congressional program. He is currently the chairman of the International Center for Journalists and a director of the Center for Global Affairs at New York University.

But these notable achievements aren’t mileposts in a race Hoge was trying to finish. They are, rather, the foundation that informs his current work and focuses a lifelong passion.

“I’ve always wanted to be involved with public agenda— local, national and international,” he says. “My father was a journalist who became a lawyer and never lost his enthusiasm for investigative and challenging journalism. He used to come home with three or four newspapers under his arm, spread them out on the floor and have an argument—sometimes with the open air—as to why they played stories the way they did.

“I wanted to spend this chapter in my history more on the substance that I had developed over these years—on international problems, challenges and opportunities,” he adds. “It was logical. It had been at the core of my experience for the past 18 years at Foreign Affairs.”

Hoge now serves as the chairman of Human Rights Watch, an independent organization whose mission is to protect human rights around the world primarily by investigating and exposing violations. It holds abusers accountable and challenges governments and those in power to end abuses and uphold international human rights law.

The organization operates 17 offices overseas with 250 people in the field—a number Hoge hopes will increase to 400 soon. Its focus is in two main areas: documenting human rights violations using highly trained investigators and advocating for change in international law. Hoge’s more than five decades as a journalist provides Human Rights Watch with a wealth of knowledge, experience and exposure for the organization to draw upon, including an issue of Foreign Affairs Hoge built around the 1989 uprising at Tiananmen Square.

“That one I’m particularly proud of because we got hold of a transcript from the Chinese Politburo and it was fascinating stuff,” Hoge says. “We developed almost an entire issue on who did what and how the decision was made to clamp down.

“Tiananmen Square is one of those events that would seem to die but it won’t. It sticks in the craw of a culture. It’s a reference point for younger Chinese on what should have happened and what needs to happen in modernizing Chinese society.”

As you might imagine, the investigative portion of HRW’s work is an arduous, time-consuming and often

dangerous process “where you can’t overreach and put your own people in peril,” Hoge says.The work is carried out by veteran journalists, lawyers and officials who have undergone rigorous training in acquiring documentation and double-checking sources.

“We are a dependable source of information for world media and it is vitally important we don’t undermine that credibility through misinformation, wrong or inadequate information,” Hoge says. “We issue full reports, task-force releases, press releases. I can’t think of a single example where people stood up and said ‘Human Rights Watch got it wrong.’”

Human Rights Watch helped bring about an indictment of former Liberian President Charles Taylor; it has had a long-standing role in the Balkans; and it is still conducting an investigation of Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir’s alleged crimes in Darfur. The organization has been a major force in securing bans on indiscriminate weapons like cluster bombs, land mines and the use of child soldiers. It has also issued highly specific reports on recent abuses in Syria—on torture camps and on officials or forces that must be held accountable for their actions.

“We want to be very careful that we don’t use our mandate beyond our purview,” Hoge explains. “We don’t get involved in saying whether a war should or shouldn’t be fought, but when there are opposing forces, we make sure they live up to the requirements of international law. The primary part of our work is done without collaboration but we very much want to cooperate with media because amplification of our findings is a very major part of our operation.”

Social media has proven to be instrumental in that regard.

“We certainly want to join and cooperate with the world press, but social media and video can take advocacy to a much larger audience in the world,” says Hoge, noting the critical role that Twitter played in the Arab Spring, particularly in Egypt where authorities shut down the Internet and clamped down on information coming from traditional news sources.

“It’s all in the interest of exposure, so we are very sympathetic to other human rights organizations, as well,” Hoge says. “It’s very important to us that, in as many places as possible, there are local organizations growing in strength and capabilities. We are there for advice and to pass on information because exposure is an important and powerful tool in ending human rights violations.”

While Hoge doesn’t cite one campaign or one project as either validation for, or a shining example of, his life’s pursuit, he does say, “There are certain areas that come to the fore. The situation for women and girls worldwide, in places like Afghanistan or the rape issues we’re dealing with in the Cote d’Ivoire, is a more tended issue than it was. When I see that

occurring I want to know we’re playing a major role in bringing that information to light and doing something about it.”

On May 4, 2011, Human Rights Watch published a report on domestic violence in Turkey that spurred the establishment of the groundbreaking new Council of Europe Convention, which focuses on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence. The ensuing treaty has been signed by 25 countries.

In light of the increasing economic, political and social globalization, it is glaringly obvious to Hoge that “the U.S. must, in one way or the other, be deeply

“The U.S. must...be deeply engaged in the world for its own prosperity and that of others.”

engaged in the world for its own prosperity and that of others.” But at age 77, his attention is on today.

“I’m very much involved in the now, in finding ways to get others operating better, rather than spending too much time in the upper reaches of thinking about where the world is headed,” he says.

“Of course, just because all of these good ideas have been codified, that doesn’t mean people will live up to them, but it creates a framework. One thing is clear in human rights advocacy and accountability: You must have resilience because it takes time. Some of our reports are six, seven, eight years in the making. I don’t know of another organization that has the same capacity to stick with these issues.”

So what fuels Hoge’s own nonstop engine? Perhaps the passion was instilled in those childhood moments watching his father. Certainly his own, vast journalism experience plays a role, as does the thrill of developing a challenging investigative piece. Since he left the Academy, he has harbored at the core of his philosophy a genuine and deep-seated desire for public service and the belief that you’re supposed to do something with the tremendous resources and efforts Exeter has placed at your disposal.

“I get a sense of satisfaction in leading a life of purpose, of making a difference, however modest it may be,” he says. “You don’t get success, ipso facto.You’ve got to keep at it. But I am realistically optimistic or I wouldn’t get involved in work like this.”

SPRING 2013

The Exeter Bulletin

11

ADELA LOCSIN ’13

Around the Table

Campus Life at a Glance Snapshots from winter term

JOANNE LEMBO

ADELA LOCSIN

A

NICOLE PELLATON

B

MIKE CATANO

LAURIE LOOSIGIAN

E

ADELA LOCSIN

SARA ZELA

D

(A) Students made bones out of clay for the One Million Bones project, a collaborative art installation designed to raise global awareness about genocide and humanitarian crises in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia and Myanmar. (B) February’s blizzard, “Nemo,” prompted a “Snow Giant” competition on campus, and Principal Hassan stopped by to check out Webster Hall’s creation. (C) Students prepared C dumplings and rice paper rolls for a special Lunar New Year dinner enjoyed by the entire school.

(D) Faculty went “Gangnam Style” for their surprise biennial “Faculty Follies” assembly, which included a video of dance highlights, viewable at www.exeter.edu/bulletinextras. (E) The Lamont Gallery sponsored a “Create Your Own Valentine!” event for the PEA community on the day before Valentine’s Day. (F) Kids Karnival head Emily Palmer ’14 with a well-adorned friend during ESSO’s annual day of games and fun, put on for the children and grandchildren of PEA employees. (G) Principal Hassan accepts a trophy from Exeter’s Model United Nations board, which placed second in the annual Boston Invitational Model United Nations Conference. (H) During exam week, students had the chance to relax with dogs in the Academy Library. Everyone, including the dogs, enjoyed the chance for a refreshing break.

F

12

G The Exeter Bulletin

S PRING 2013

H

Around the Table

Exeter’s Fourth Governor M A G G I E H A S S A N C O N T I N U E S A T OW N , A N D A N A C A D E M Y, T R A D I T I O N

Gilman

I

n January, Maggie Hassan was sworn in as

the 81st governor of New Hampshire. She is the fourth governor from Exeter, NH—a source of pride for many of the town’s citizens.

The PEA community can also celebrate this distinction, as Gov. Hassan and the town’s three previous governors all share ties to the Academy.

Hassan is, of course, the wife of Principal Tom Hassan; they have lived on campus for more than 20 years, raising their two children, Ben and Meg ’11. Gov. Hassan has been in public service since 1999 and served as the majority leader of the state Senate prior to running for the governorship.

At the Academy, most employees know Gov. Hassan simply as “Maggie.” The gracious cohost of many PEA employee events, she continues to make time to connect with both adults and students. Most recently, Gov. Hassan, at the invitation of the Student Council, met informally with about 50 students to discuss women in leadership positions. (Visit www.exeter.edu/ bulletinextras to read more about this event.)

Exeter’s first governor was John Taylor Gilman, elected in 1794. He held that position for 11 years, the longest run in the state’s history.

In 1795, John Phillips, PEA’s founder, appointed Gilman to serve as president of the Academy’s Board of Trustees. It was a position Phillips had held since founding the school in 1781, but he relinquished it to Gilman once his health began to fail. Gilman served as trustee president until 1827, concurrently serving as Academy treasurer

Smith

Bell

Hassan

from 1793-1805. During his tenure, Gilman donated the land where the Academy Building now stands and oversaw the construction of a second recitation building.

Jeremiah Smith was Exeter’s next governor, serving from 1809-10. Smith, a Revolutionary War veteran, was an instructor at Phillips Academy Andover in 1783, where he taught a young More PEA Governors Benjamin Abbot, who became The Academy is proud to have three PEA’s second principal in 1788. more New Hampshire governors in its Smith served as Academy treasfamily who attended the Academy but urer under Abbot, from 1828 were not residents of the town of Exeter until Smith’s death in 1842. He during their public service: was also trustee president from Gov. Benjamin Prescott, 1830-42. During that time, class of 1850 (1877-79) Abbot ceded the admissions Gov. Hugh Gregg ’35 (1953-55) process to Smith, who—accordGov. Judd Gregg ’65 (1989-93) ing to historical accounts—was a source of emotional and, at times, financial support to the young men in his charge.

Charles H. Bell holds the distinction of being the only “townie” who was not only governor of the state (1881-83) but also an alumnus, having graduated from PEA in 1837. Bell was the author of several historical books, most notably History of the town of Exeter, New Hampshire and Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire: a historical sketch. Like his predecessors, Bell served as a trustee from 1879-93 and was appointed to a committee in 1885 that oversaw the construction of PEA’s first gymnasium.

SPRING 2013

The Exeter Bulletin

13

Around the Table

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

A

Answers to the winter 2013 issue:

We have two winners for this issue, which illustrated a few winter scenes on campus.

Exonians were quick to identify classmates and share memories of outside skating, “skitching,” snow fort-building, hockey and more.

Carmichael ’39—good guy, baseball team shortstop.”

A

PEA ARCHIVES (3)

Our two randomly selected winners are: George M. “Bill” Sanford ’39, Greenwich, CT, who received an Exeter pen.

“The person in (B) is John E. ‘Snapper’

B

Stephan C. “Steve” Hansbury ’64, Chester, NJ, who received an Exeter pen.

“The outdoor skating rink was present during my years, 1960–64. As to winter activities, there was usually a pickup hockey game at the rink on Sundays. One of the most unforgettable winter activities at Exeter or anywhere was skating down the river by the athletic fields. At certain times, you could skate for miles. I have never experienced anything so peaceful and memorable. Coming from New Jersey, we could skate on lakes and ponds but rivers rarely froze. I can still see that experience and remember the black ice untouched by skaters before me.”

The Good Old Days

Growing up in Exeter in the ’60s (preComputer Age), there was no end to the activities winter provided us.These included public skating, photo (A) ; hockey 14

The Exeter Bulletin

S PRING 2013

PEA ARCHIVES (2)

Principal’s Day is always a welcome spring surprise on campus, giving students an extra day to relax, have fun…or get caught up with sleep or homework. Originally the brainchild of PEA’s ninth principal, William Gurdon Saltonstall ’24 (1946–63), the day was first known as “St. Gurdon’s Day.” With the actual date of Principal’s Day a secret until the day before, announcing it has become a creative, fun challenge over the years—from flying planes to cryptic messages from Dan Brown ’82. How was your Principal’s Day announced? How did it feel to have an extra day off, and what did you do with your time? Please share your reflections and/or photographs with us.

Email us at Exoniana@exeter.edu. Or, send your responses to Exoniana, c/o The Exeter Bulletin, Phillips Exeter Academy, Communications Office, 20 Main Street, Exeter, NH 03833-2460. Entries may be edited for length and clarity.

C (upper rink, lower rink, river); skiing; sledding; bobsledding (with Dr. Heyl); snow fort-building; and in the ’70s, “skitching.”

If you wanted a change of pace, there were ways to sneak into the pool, art gallery/studios, gym, the Cage—always a favorite of mine—and even the science building. As a skater, my typical weekend consisted of Friday night: public skate. Saturday a.m.: peewee hockey, breakfast, then public skating. Saturday afternoon: varsity hockey game, dinner, then public skating.

Sunday morning was the best—open

B pickup hockey which could include notable varsity alumni—Stevens, Gillespie, Clark and others, townsfolk, students and us—the “fac brats.” That about did us in, but for the adventurous among us, there was stealing onto the ice during offhours, often to be rerouted by none other than “Gramps” Carbonneau—the keeper of the ice. Countless hours were also spent warming our bones, spying on the figure skaters during public skating, or lamenting the loss of a game as the opposing team cheered next door in the old warming rooms. The sadness of watching this iconic facility being razed was soon eclipsed by the fabulous new facility—the likes of which not seen before. Gone were days of patiently awaiting the weather, scraping the ice by hand, or having the ice to yourself. The new rinks operated well, and gave ample opportunity to both skaters and audience. In my senior year (1970), the JV hockey team traveled to Holderness where I got my last chance to skate on our old rink. It had been sold for $1, and was resurrected at that school. How great it felt to shoot, and hear the muffled thud of those venerable old boards, as opposed to the loud crack heard at most new facilities.

Following our victory, the team celebrated in the locker room without me. Once more, I had the ice to myself—so familiar—so many memories! Coach Drummey had to yell at me several times before I could bear to leave.

Alexander G. “Lexi” Krause ’70 Rockport, ME

Around the Table Engineering Challenge The piled snow in photo (B) of your lat-

1950s Science

Ray M. “Nibs” Lauerman Jr. is our classmate leaning over the lab desk (A). The fellow in the light-colored sport coat is handsome enough to be another class-

PEA ARCHIVES

est “Do You Remember?” and the dumping of snow you all received last night and today, got me to thinking not just of the Blizzard of ’78 (for which we all were enlisted to shovel walks), but of a longlasting memory of an introduction to engineer ing type of class. The challenge: build a marble-maze Rube Goldberg. The winner would be [whosever] marble took the longest to complete its course. The winner in our class was Bill Furber ’78, whose marble ran a predictable course—until plunking into a snow-filled Coke can. The snow had to melt before the marble landed at its endpoint. Even if not a response to your question, thanks for the musing!

Eleanor Nimick Hay ’78 Oakton,VA

Answers to the fall 2012 Exoniana’s lab photos:

A mate, Jim Alley; or another possibility, Deke Smith. The photo would be vintage 1953–54, taken in one of the science labs.

Dr. George R. Roth Jr. ’54; P’87 Woolwich, ME

Snowdrift

From Winter to Spring Picture (C) is from winter ’06–’07 (I

think). It looks like Annie Pope ’08 (left), Rachel Granetz ’08 (center), and Joey Derosa ’07 (right). I can’t identify the other two in the picture. Hoping to see at least the two from the class of 2008’s Exonians at our five-year reunion in May! Sarah A. Fenn ’08 Cherry Hill, CO “Langdellian”

The tall girl with the scarf in the middle of picture (C) is Rachel Granetz ’08. She was a year ahead of me and a fellow “Langdellian” at Exeter!

Ariella Park ’09 Washington, D.C.

That’s Me!

Imagine my surprise to open up the fall 2012 Bulletin and see myself pictured there on the page that I thought was reserved for, shall we say, the older set of alumni? I

PEA ARCHIVES

For photo (B): It looks like the photo was taken right in front of the door to Merrill Hall, which was a boys’ dorm when I was a student there from ’82 to ’85. Merrill is connected to Wentworth Dining Hall there. The snow often piled up so high that it was sometimes difficult to open the door in the morning after a big storm. We would often prop the door open so we wouldn’t be trapped in by the snowdrift.

If it was still snowing, we would come back later in the day to see a huge snowdrift in the foyer of Merrill. As punishment, our resident teachers would make us shovel it out.

Michael I. Song ’85 Santa Monica, CA

B am pictured in the white top in photo (B). I wish I could recall my physics lab partners’ names, but the memory fails on that. I do recall fond (?) memories of Mr. Brinckerhoff assuring me, when the physics labs got me down: “Ah, but physics is frustration!”

It was with equal shock that I read the caption below the picture of the phone booth on the same page about it being a “relic”! Wow—to all in the class of ’79—I guess we are now officially part of the “older set”! Thanks for the trip back in time!

Suzanne M. (Brubaker) Yale ’79 Ambler, PA

Letter to the Editor On the proper usage of ‘transgender’

In Mary Rindfleisch’s review of In One Person by John Irving ’61 (winter 2013 Bulletin), she refers to the way the novel presents “gender identity and preference...as human rights protected by law and custom...”

In this spirit, I must educate you regarding your language so that you can improve your editorial practices. I can assure you that it is neither customary nor respectful to use the term as Ms. Rindfleisch ’73 does in the following sentence: “He is also resented by gay men for his affairs with women and by transgenders for not giving up his maleness.” (p. 16) Just as you would not refer to an older person as “an old,” you should remember that “transgender” is an adjective, not a noun.

Should the Bulletin have occasion to discuss transgender issues again (and I certainly hope you do), please acknowledge your subjects’ humanity by discussing transgender men, women and people, not “transgenders.” GLAAD’s excellent style manual (www.glaad.org/ reference) has up-to-date information on standards for writing about the GLBTQ community.

On a side note, I have not yet read Mr. Irving’s book (and Ms. Rindfleisch’s review makes me want to); I do hope, however, that the author does not depict transgender characters as resenting the protagonist for “not giving up his maleness.” In my experience, transgender people (including my beloved partner) understand, better than most, the sacred right of individuals to express their gender as they see fit.

Abigail G. “Abby” Henderson ’99 Minneapolis, MN

SPRING 2013

The Exeter Bulletin

15

Around the Table

‘Sweet’ Skills in the Kitchen P E A H O S T S PAT ˆ ISSIER-IN-RESIDENCE

C

CONNOR BLOOM ’15

alled the “pastry guru” and the “fixer of bakeries,” internationally celebrated pastry chef Jörg Amsler squared his broad shoulders and, in a move that belied his stout physique, gingerly folded and rolled out dough. As he worked— kneading, folding and rolling—he explained each step, anticipating questions from the Dining Services staff gathered for his demonstration in January. Almost mechanically, Amsler expertly used a dough cutter to carve out what would soon become delicious bread portions.

Earlier in the week, he had led a class in chocolate truffle making for students and employees. Inspired by Principal Hassan’s initiative to build community connections, Associate Director of Dining Services Melinda Leonard thought such a class would be more than palatable. She also invited Amsler to campus so that his baking tips and techniques could stimulate even more creativity in the work of the Dining Services staff.

“We are always looking for ways to elevate our services and our skills, and keeping that education piece for our staff is very important,” Leonard says. “Whenever we can offer new and different services to PEA students, we are excited.”

Monica Torrisi, a Dining Services production manager who attended all of Amsler’s workshops, is a chocolate fanatic, so making chocolate truffles for the first time was especially sweet.

“Most fascinating were the origins of chocolate and the techniques to making truffles,” she says. “There’s so much you can do, starting with a cream ganache and adding all sorts of flavors— liqueurs, sweets, or fruit. [It’s what] makes this simple but delectable chocolate so wonderful.”

During Amsler’s two-week visit, employees and students alike watched in awe as he carved a large, floral design into the base of watermelon and made chocolate jewelry from silicone molds—

Jörg Amsler shows students and employees how to make truffles.

each class began with a smile and a few jokes from the pˆatissier.

“Jörg’s techniques are like what you see on TV and wonder if you can do that too,” says Cindy Amabile, one of PEA’s two bakers. “And you realize it looks complicated but it’s easy—takes longer but it’s easy.

“He totally changed our bakery around, moving our workbenches closer to our tables and making things much more functional,” Amabile adds. “It really saves time. And it’s easier now for us to get more work done. Instead of working with just 20 pounds of dough, I can now manage 50 pounds by having an entire workbench to myself. We have more room.”

Amsler says he enjoyed working with the school’s community and appreciates its diversity—a critical ingredient, he adds, for a happy environment. He loves to see people from all nations eating good food together.

—Famebridge Witherspoon

Exeter Expands Its Summer Programs Diversity institute added to professional development conferences

16

The Exeter Bulletin

S PRING 2013

omy—all with Harkness pedagogy as the foundational element.

The Exeter Diversity Institute is the brainchild of English Instructor John Daves, whose program aims to answer a singular question: How do diverse texts offer students more opportunities to deepen their understanding of American literature and history? In tandem, Daves hopes teachers will learn how to facilitate student conversations that ultimately demonstrate the value of understanding multicultural perspectives, in order to better interpret their experiences, as well as the writers’ worldviews.

The Academy’s summer teacher programs run from June 23-28, with partici-

PEA FILES

In the past five years, nearly 1,400 high school teachers from around the country have come to Exeter to spend a week participating in discipline-specific, peer-led workshops on how to create student-centered classrooms.

In June the Academy’s newest offering, the Exeter Diversity Institute, will premiere. It is the eighth institute created by an Academy faculty member—a tradition that spans almost 30 years when, in 1985, Math Instructor Anja Greer launched Exeter’s first mathematics and computer conference. Since then, faculty members have established conferences on teaching Shakespeare, writing, biology and astron-

pants living and attending classes on campus. For detailed information about the programs, go to www.exeter.edu/summer programs.

Around the Table

New Lives for Old Harkness Tables

NANCY SHIPLEY

The Gift of A Wooden Pen Wood from an original Harkness table that could not be salvaged survives in a unique and personal way.The slender rectangular block of oak now serves as an ink pen and resides on Principal Tom Hassan’s desk.

Robert Sullivan, a carpenter who has worked at the Academy for nearly 44 years, crafted the working stylograph by carving it with a small metal shaft, or mandrel. After the wood was twisted and pressed on a lathe, Sullivan inserted a standard ink refill so that it will be usable for many years.

Sullivan has “turned out” many pens from scrap wood at his home, and these he sells at craft fairs.The table presented an opportunity to preserve a piece of history at a place to which he is deeply connected. “I thought it would be kind of neat to make one out of scrap Harkness wood,” he says. “The tree will live on in [Tom’s] hands.”

The gift was also a personal gesture, emblematic of the relationships forged within PEA’s community. Sullivan explains, “I have known Tom and his wife since they arrived at PEA.Tom and I share the same love for antique autos, and I consider him a friend. I felt he would appreciate the pen.”

Hassan does. “I was deeply touched by Bob’s one-of-a-kind gift,” he says. “To have a piece of an original table like this is a nice reminder of the enduring nature of Harkness, and of the friendships I’ve been lucky to form while at the Academy.”

A Table Travels Overseas

COURTESY OF ANDY LOCSIN ’80

When Martha Taft Elkins ’75; P’04 visited Exeter last spring, Principal Hassan asked her if she would like to have a Harkness table.

Elkins, the daughter of Dudley Taft, emeritus chair of the Science Department, is the head of school at The Beacon Academy, an independent, coeducational secondary school in the Philippines founded in 2009 by Leandro “Andy” Locsin Jr. ’80; P’13. Elkins jumped at the chance to provide a new home to one of the Academy’s original Harkness tables, which was being replaced during renovations to Phillips Hall.

The table would not only serve the school’s Harkness-inspired pedagogy, but it would keep the table in the family, so to speak. Elkins wanted Hassan’s gift to be a surprise to Locsin, and she hoped the gesture would “celebrate the legacy of the Harkness table, share its history and promote its presence in Asia.” Preparations for the transport began almost immediately.

The 80-year-old solid American oak table, weighing more than 700 pounds, was dismantled, wrapped, packed and delivered by cargo freight—over the span of 8,420 miles and almost 40 days—to Manila Bay, Philippines.The unveiling in December was memorable.

Locsin, who was left nearly speechless by the surprise, described the table in a letter to The Beacon Academy’s trustees, as “the real deal—a decades-old table that has been a silent witness to thousands of animated discussions, arguments, and discourse— complete with all physical evidence intact.... the spots where jacket sleeves, pounding fists, and sliding books have worn down the finish, the scribblings and etchings of thousands of Exonians…All the soul and mojo is there.

You can hear the voices.”

One voice, in particular, emerged as Locsin studied, in his words, the “charming minor vandalism…foisted on the slides around the table.” To his utter surprise, he found his daughter, Adela ’13, had carved her name on the table while taking a Spanish class at PEA from Emeritus Modern Languages Instructor Jim Samiljan P’85, P’90. “A venue for countless language struggles over the years,” including his own daughter’s, Locsin hopes the table will serve as a palpable link between the two academies.

SPRING 2013

The Exeter Bulletin

17

Exonians in Review

Reflections on Good and Evil T H E C O N S TA N T C H O I C E , B Y P E T E R G E O R G E S C U ’ 5 7 A review by Melissa Orlov ’77

A

18

The Exeter Bulletin

S PRING 2013

COURTESY OF PETER GEORGESCU

Peter Georgescu, former CEO of Young & Rubicam, also wrote The Source of Success, a book on leadership.

s a group, Exonians spend a lot of time thinking about “goodness.” From thoughtful principals’ assemblies to trustee meetings to classrooms, we engage in regular conversations about goodness, and how we might live a life that is good while adopting the idea of non sibi. Peter Georgescu’s new book, The Constant Choice: An Everyday Journey From Evil Toward Good, is a meaningful addition to that conversation.

Georgescu’s story is both exceptional and ordinary, which is what makes it so important. The Constant Choice is an autobiography about an incredible journey—the American dream on steroids. At the same time, Georgescu wrestles with questions about goodness that we all face. How does one recognize good and evil? How do we respond when faced with temptation? What happens when good people hurt others?

What does it mean to be “good”? What obligations do we carry when we are the recipients of kindness from others?

Most important, The Constant Choice, as the name implies, is a call to action. We have an opportunity to abandon cynicism, complacency and “me first” instincts to both relocate our personal moral compass and find a collective voice for making difficult decisions for the common good.

When Georgescu was 2 years old, the Romanian government arrested his father for working with the U.S. Office of Strategic Services to help defeat the fascists during World War II. Released in 1944, the senior Georgescu and his wife were in the U.S. on business three years later when Romania came under communist rule. They were immediately declared enemies of the state, unable to return to their homeland or to their two young sons.

Georgescu notes that as a young child, “I had a simplistic, youthful assurance that good and evil were easily recognized and that eventually God would intervene . . .These earliest experiences of the darker side of human nature were The Constant Choice is an showing me one of its most subtle and signifiautobiography about an cant characteristics: [Evil] is often hard to see, especially when your personal life doesn’t incredible journey—the appear to be immediately disrupted by it. Evil American dream on steroids. can be at its worst, and most dangerous, when you don’t even know it’s changing you or your life.”

Evil became all too evident when Georgescu’s grandfather was imprisoned by the Romanian Communist Party. Locked into solitary confinement, he was kicked in the mouth until he died. When he was nine, Georgescu and his older brother, Constantine, were also arrested as political prisoners and put into a labor camp, forced to take on some of the dirtiest and most dangerous work on inadequate food rations each day.

From my perspective as a parent, it was during this period that one of the most (continued on page 97)

Life In-between T H E P E O P L E O F F O R E V E R A R E N OT A F R A I D , B Y S H A N I B O I A N J I U ’ 0 5 A review by Lindsey Mead Russell ’92

S ALON SIGAVI

hani Boianjiu’s first novel, The People of Forever Are Not Afraid, is a dreamlike evo-

cation of the ways in which service in the Israel Defense Forces alters forever the lives of three young women. This Israeli writer’s debut book is by turns beautiful and brutal. Military service, and the war whose ebb and flow necessitate it, hover over The People of Forever Are Not Afraid like a dark cloud. As the three girls—whose alternating voices tell the story—grow up in a small Israeli village, the specter of their service hangs on the horizon. Their time as soldiers is at once grotesquely lurid and ridiculously boring. And after their commitment to the army is up and they are released, they realize all the ways in which they have been forever changed.

Much of The People of Forever Are Not Afraid is concerned with the borders of things.

Boianjiu, who is the youngest writer ever to receive the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award, beautifully evokes life at the border’s checkpoints, where the daily tedium is occasionally shattered by an explosion of unexpected violence. Lea, who is stationed at the checkpoint, demonstrates the destructive power of life there when she observes, early in her service, “I couldn’t realize I was a soldier. I thought I was still a person.” Later in the book she is identified as “Lea, the officer,” and it is clear that she has allowed herself to be subsumed into the role of soldier, An excerpt of Shani relinquishing that early hold on personhood.

Boianjiu’s first novel The line between “here” and “there” is also where appeared in The Avishag stands guard, patrolling her country’s margin for New Yorker last year. long, boring, eight-hour shifts. She is numbed by her service, opening one chapter with the dry, emotionless mention that “the Sudanese’s body is still skewered on the barbed-wire fence.” The anesthetic effect of life in the army is made clearer still when Avishag describes having an abortion as “just this thing I had to do, like all of regular life, like the army.”

Yael’s role in the army is less explicitly about defending Israel’s borders, but she walks the line between intimacy and violence more than her This Israeli writer’s debut book two friends. She sleeps with a boy, Boris, whom is by turns beautiful and brutal. she’s training to shoot a rifle and moments after they finish, he fires at the young boys who teasMilitary service, and the ingly steal things from the border guards. And war...hover over [it] like a then a character named Ari, for whom Yael has real romantic feelings, is killed seven hours after dark cloud. arriving in Lebanon to fight. In Yael’s life we see evidence of the vanishingly thin line between sex and death, of the constant threat that thrums through every day.

Boianjiu makes the most of the dissonance between the brutality of what the girls regularly witness—a fatal stabbing of an officer at a checkpoint, a van full of women, soiled, filthy and, trapped—and the mundane reality of the rest of their lives in the army. (continued on page 97) SPRING 2013

The Exeter Bulletin

19

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

ALUMNI 1951—George E. Vaillant.

Triumphs of Experience:The Men of the Harvard Grant Study. (Belknap Press, 2012) 1953—Chris Crowley and Jen Sacheck. Thinner This Year: A Younger Next Year Book.

(Workman Publishing Co., 2012) 1953—Lee Ann P. Etscovitz. Let the Dandelions

Grow: A Poetic Portrait of a Transsexual Journey and the Human Condition.

(CreateSpace, 2012) 1955—Hoyt Ammidon Jr.

Latvian Revenge. (self-published, 2013) —Random Walks on Roads Well Traveled. (self-published, 2013) 1955—Charles D. Ellis.

What It Takes: Seven Secrets of Success from the World’s Greatest Professional Firms.

(Wiley, 2013) 1955—Robert W. Parson.

Every Word You Write . . .Vichy Will Be Watching You: Surveillance of Public Opinion in the Gard Department 1940– 1944:The Postal Control System During Vichy France.

(Wheatmark, 2013)

Good. (Greenleaf Book Group Press, 2013) 1957—Carl Pickhardt.

Surviving Your Child’s Adolescence: How to Understand, and Even Enjoy, the Rocky Road to Independence.

(Jossey-Bass, 2013) 1959—Terrence Murphy.

Assumption City. (iUniverse, 2012) 1960—David Watson Kruger. A Family Becoming

American,Volume 2: Foisy dit Freniere/Frenyear [Books 1 and 2]. (NEHGS/Newbury Street Press, 2012) 1961—Stuart Rawlings.

Delusions. (Sierra Dreams Press, 2012) 1963—Bill Schubart. Panhead: A Journey Home. (Magic Hill Press LLC, 2012) 1968—John A. Gentry. How Wars Are Won and Lost:Vulnerability and Military Power.

(Praeger, 2011)

1968—Christopher Peterson, translator. My Formative

1956—William Peace.

Efraim’s Eye. (Strategic Book Publishing, 2012) —The Iranian Scorpion.

(Strategic Book Publishing, 2012) 1957—Peter Georgescu.

The Constant Choice: An Everyday Journey From Evil Toward 20

The Exeter Bulletin

S PRING 2013

Years, by Joaquim Nabuco.

(Signal Books, 2012) 1969—Peter Boody.

Thomas Jefferson, Rachel & Me. (CreateSpace, 2012) 1971—Roland Merullo.

Lunch with Buddha. (AJAR Contemporaries, 2012) 1975—Robin Gowen Tiffney [Robin Winter, pseu-

donym]. Night Must Wait.

(Imajin Books, 2012) 1982—Kirstin Scott. Motherlunge [AWP Award Series in the Novel]. (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2013)

1983—Charles Ludington.

The Politics of Wine in Britain: A New Cultural History.

(Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) 1988—Julia B. Greer. The Anti-Breast Cancer Cookbook: How to Cut Your Risk with the Most Powerful Cancer-Fighting Foods. (Sunrise River Press, 2013) 1989—John M. “Mac” Blewer. Wyoming’s Outlaw

Trail. (Arcadia Publishing, 2013) 2001—Rebekah Weatherspoon. Better Off Red:Vam-

pire Sorority Sisters [Book 1].

(Bold Strokes Books, 2011) —Blacker Than Blue:Vampire Sorority Sisters [Book 2].

(Bold Strokes Books, 2013) —The Fling. (Bold Strokes Books, 2012) BRIEFLY NOTED 1984—Greg Kostraba, piano,

and others [musicians]. “Sir Gawain & the Green Knight: A Christmas Legend.” IN A Christmas Gift: New Chamber Music for the Season [CD], composed by Rick Sowash.

(Rick Sowash, 2012) —and others [musicians].

“Four Places on the Appalachian Trail for violin, French horn, cello & piano.”

IN Vistas: Music Celebrating American Landscapes [CD], composed by Rick Sowash.

(Rick Sowash, 2012) 1985—David L. Phillips and others. “A Coin on the Tracks: Can Big Money and Politics Derail Judicial Impartiality Through Election Spending?” [Ninth Annual American Judicature Society Symposium: “Lawyers, Judges, and Money: Evolving

Legal Issues Surrounding Spending on Judicial Elections”] IN Drake Law Review. (v. 60, no. 3, spring 2012) 1987—Charles E. Ehrlich

and Armenika Kondi.

“Women’s Access to Property Rights on the Southern Coast of Albania.” [Study] IN OSCE Presence in Albania.

(Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, 2012) 2002—Michael Stefanilo Jr.

“Identity, Interrupted: The Parental Notification Requirement of the Massachusetts Anti-Bullying Law.” [National LGBT Bar Association Michael Greenberg Writing Competition] IN Tulane Journal of Law & Sexuality. (v. 21, 125-145, 2012) —“If You Can Play . . .You Can Play: An Exploration of the Current Culture Surrounding Gay Athletes in Professional Sports with a Particular Focus on Apilado v. NAGAAA.” IN The Sports Lawyers Journal. (v. 20, no. 1, spring 2013) 2008—Tara Isabella Burton. “Tbilisi: The Edge of the

Real.” [Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize] IN The Spectator.

(December 2012) FACULTY/ FORMER FACULTY Dolores Kendrick. “The

Healing.” [poem] IN ART(202) Journal. (DCCAH, December 2012) Betty Luther-Hillman. “ ‘The most profoundly revolutionary act a homosexual can engage in’: Drag and the Politics of Gender Presentation in the San Francisco Gay Liberation Movement, 1964–1972.” IN Journal of the History of Sexuality, edited

by Mathew Kuefler. (v. 20, no.

1, 153-181, January 2011) Matt W. Miller. Club Icarus [Winner 2012 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, judged by Major Jackson]. (University of North Texas Press, 2013)

On with the Show!

Spotlight on Exeter’s Performing Arts

By Nicole Pellaton

“We’ve seen a real explosion in the commitment of families to music in their children’s lives,” says Rohan Smith, director of Forrestal-Bowld Music Center and chair of the Music Department.

“It’s now accepted that exposure to and participation in music and the arts is part of a complete educaPHOTOGRAPHY BY ART DURITY, MIA HAGERTY ‘13, VALENTIN HERNANDEZ ’11, STEFAN KOHLI ’14, ISTOCK, ADELA LOCSIN ’13, NICOLE PELLATON, GIULIA OLSSON ’13, CHERYL SENTER, AND DAMIAN STROHMEYER.

tion. That has been the single biggest change over the last 10 years.”

This participation has propelled growth in all of the performing arts. Dance Company has more than doubled in just a few years, and innovative choreography by students is a program mainstay.

More than 50 percent of Exonians are making music, with peaks in recent years reaching 60 percent.

Theater students are reaching a level of skill and mastery that makes complex shows not only possible but expected by overflow audiences.

Students’ interests have also grown, driving expansion into world music, African drumming, and private lessons in dulcimer, country fiddle and Irish harp. Dance clubs move to everything from hiphop and Indian, jazz and step, ballet and swing. And thespians explore works from around the world, including traditional Chinese dramas and poetry from the Middle and Far East.

The following pages showcase some of the effort and reward behind the dance, theater and music curriculums at Exeter.

SPRING 2013

The Exeter Bulletin

21

Art and Soul A Year in Exeter’s Performing Arts

25% of students are involved in theater each term

2960

music opportunities

of students take oneon-one music lessons to supplement ensemble work

22

The Exeter Bulletin

dance opportunities

50%

4640 performing arts opportunities

S PRING 2013

50

student a cappella singers croon

26% of students perform in the Holiday Concert

students participate in Dramat

guest teachers and ensembles (some as large as 60 performers) host classes

8 240

50

248

students choreograph dance pieces

students express interest in dance when applying to Exeter

attend the Holiday Concert’s single performance in the nearby Exeter High School

bobby pins and 16 neo-Romantic tutus adorn the corps de ballet for Giselle

780 theater opportunities

43

Music Departmentsponsored concerts

SPRING 2013

The Exeter Bulletin

23

Laura Zawarski ’14 “Even though it may sound a little corny, it’s the ‘journey’ that I enjoy the most,” says Zawarski, a violinist, actress and dancer. “Rehearsals, lessons, meetings—they’re the places where all the learning happens, where all the fun happens. It’s the getting to know people and getting to learn with them that makes me love the performing arts here.

“The people involved in performing arts at Exeter are what define it.

You don’t get the stereotypical theater geeks who’ll cut your throat before an audition, the obsessive violinists who practice all hours of the day or the dancers who gossip about your arabesque in angry little cliques. They’re all their own people who just share a common passion for the arts, and they’re all in it together.”

Zawarski spends 26 hours per week on the performing arts. She plays in three ensembles: Symphony Orchestra, Chamber Orchestra and a smaller chamber group; participates in two ESSO clubs, Music for Life and Exeter Youth Strings; performs in major roles for Fisher Theater Main Stage and Dramat productions; is co-founder of the Gilbert Opera Society; and co-heads Rhythmics, the tap-dance club.

“I like to think of the ‘performing arts kids’ as the best sports team on campus,” Zawarski says. “They’re committed, they’re passionate, and they’re there to help.”

The Power of the

Performance Aaron Suduiko ’13 Co-head of Dramat, frequent actor in Fisher Theater Main Stage productions, and a theater proctor, Suduiko estimates that he spends upward of eight hours per week on theater. On busy weeks, he can reach 16 hours. “I crave it,” he says simply.

“Dramat has allowed me to hone all aspects of my craft,” Suduiko explains. “If it hadn’t been for the example of fellow students writing plays, I never would have looked at my affinity for writing and acting and decided to take a chance putting two and two together. Now I identify as a playwright. I owe that entirely to Exeter.”

Suduiko has acted in The Children’s Hour (Dr. Joseph Cardin), Antigone (Haemon) and Macbeth (Banquo). He has starred in several Dramat shows—notably Doubt (Father Flynn) and Oleanna (John)— and has written and directed eight plays for the club.

“Into each role I play, I imbue a different facet of myself,” Suduiko says. “Some roles have been more challenging than others, particularly roles in which I am not likable.” He adds, “It’s a heavy exercise in self-actualization.”

24

The Exeter Bulletin

S PRING 2013

Selah Hampton ’13 “There’s not a day that goes by that I’m not dancing or choreographing or doing something related to dance,” says Hampton, who has taken Dance Company every term, danced in more than 30 performances, and estimates she’ll spend 3,000 hours dancing before she graduates. “I wouldn’t have been able to be me here without dance.

“To be able to develop your own theme and your own idea is a very unique chance,” adds Hampton, whose interests expanded to choreography during prep year. “I really like when you can evoke emotion from someone or when someone understands the story line of what happened. That’s my main challenge: trying to fit a story into three to five minutes.

“It takes a different type of courage to perform in a dance club,” says Hampton, who participates in three.

Clubs often perform in front of large audiences, including the entire student body at assembly, and crowds at pep rallies and the fall Exeter/Andover football game. “A lot of the clubs are mixed between trained dancers and people who just like dancing,” she says. “Whether you’re teaching a friend, a classmate or a little kid, you have to be able to shift your thinking in order to make everyone look good.”

Jameel Mohammed ’13 “I’ve never been so committed to dance as I’ve been here,” says Mohammed, a towering presence on the dance floor at 6 feet 4 inches tall. “I’d been on other student dance companies before coming to Exeter, and the thing that struck me when I got here was the innovative nature of the work.”

Mohammed’s love of dance has permeated his activities at Exeter since he transferred as an upper. As a Red Bandit, he bounds with grand jetés. His dancelike mien stands out on the track team. He also sings and choreographs—a winning combination for Beauty and the Beast, in which he starred as Lumière, the candlestick, and was an assistant director, dance captain and choreographer.

“Our choreographers try their hardest to come up with amazing, fresh work,” Mohammed says, “and Ms. Duke [the dance program director] does a great job supporting us as we take on new feats. She really believes in us.The culture of innovation is evident in her dedication to pushing us outside our comfort zones. She always looks for opportunities for us to learn new techniques and explore new levels of dance.”

Orlando Kahan ’14 When asked what makes Exeter’s performing arts scene special, Kahan, a percussionist, replies, “The music itself. It links the musicians. I look forward to every rehearsal, because there are always new things that are accomplished. Sometimes, especially in Jazz Combo, we abandon all music and resolve to improvise for up to 15 minutes on a certain key.”

Kahan plays in Stage Band and Percussion Ensemble, and is a founding member of Exeter’s three-person Jazz Combo. His standout musical moment was Jazz Combo’s performance at the inauguration of New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan ’70 (Hon.); P’11 in January. “It was a wonderful experience,” Kahan says. “We performed a 20-minute set for both politicians and ordinary visitors to the State House.

“In classes, the intellectual side of your brain is strengthened and trained, but the performing arts at the Academy truly exercise the creative side, especially for drummers, because we have no set agenda for each song and instead have to think on the spot for each new rhythm.”

Lydia Watt ’13 “I used to be extremely shy and understated in my acting because I was afraid to take risks,” says Watt, who recently played Mrs. Kirk in Little Women. “I haven’t gotten over that fear, but I’m much more comfortable with taking risks onstage. That has a lot to do with trusting my directors and peers. I’ve found the PEA theater community kind, generous and welcoming.”

During her four years at Exeter, Watt has also performed in The Children’s Hour (Mary Tilford), Beauty and the Beast (Chorus), Antigone (Chorus), Sweeney Todd (Tobias) and Macbeth (Servant). She is also active in Dramat, starring in Doubt (Sister James) and Oleanna (Carol), and has directed a short play. She currently spends 300 hours per term in Fisher Theater, a far cry from her 60 hours as a prep.

SPRING 2013

The Exeter Bulletin

25

Anatomy of a

Musical: A Close-Up View

The annual musical goes up on the 209-seat Fisher Theater Main Stage at the end of winter term, “when students most need a pickme-up,” says Sarah Ream ’75; P’09, P’11, Theater and Dance Department chair. Recent musicals have included Little Women (2013), Beauty and the Beast (2012), Sweeney Todd (2011), The Fantasticks (2010), Fiddler on the Roof (2009) and Cabaret (2008). Students and faculty perform live orchestral accompaniment and develop original choreography. Here’s an exploration of Exeter musicals, from auditions to set breakdown.

80

students audition for large-cast musicals like Sweeney Todd and Beauty and the Beast. Approximately half get roles, with another 12 working as crew.

Planning

Casting

16

adults support the student cast and crew (director, music director, musicians, and set, costume and stage designers).

Rehearsal

55 % 50 of singers are involved in other musical activities at Exeter— either vocal or instrumental.

No previous singing experience is required to audition.

cast and crew members of Little Women visit Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House in Concord, MA, and meet with historian of the period Walter Stahr ’75; P’11, P’14, author of Seward: Lincoln’s Indispensable Man.

30 26

The Exeter Bulletin

S PRING 2013

complex songs make up Sweeney Todd—often performed by opera companies—with little dialog interlacing the numbers. For this exceptionally demanding show, virtually all rehearsals focus on the score.

836

1200 hours are spent on set design, building and lighting for Little Women.

people attend four sold-out performances of Beauty and the Beast.

Wednesday’s dress rehearsal becomes a full public performance.

Three others take place over the weekend, in a 46-hour period.

3

choreographers design dances for Beauty and the Beast, including one upper.

Stage building, more rehearsal

Performance

6600 5

hours of “tech run” the Sunday before a show goes up puts students in full costume for the first time, with full orchestral accompaniment.

rehearsal person-hours are logged. Starting with the musical score, rehearsals for Little Women progress to table-work discussion, to blocking actors’ movements, and ultimately to integration of the whole, including singing in corsets.

26

The End

24 hours given to break down the musical stage and install two layers of flexible flooring for Dance Concert rehearsals, which start Monday morning.

sticks of eyeliner and mascara, and 10 cans of hair spray are on hand for performances.To accommodate a large cast, students change in rooms throughout the building, including the dressing room, faculty offices and the conference room.

SPRING 2013

The Exeter Bulletin

27

Sharing Sacred Ground Students build a community around their diverse faiths

By Katherine Towler Photography by Cheryl Senter

n a typical Friday night at Phillips Church, the Exeter Jewish Community (EJC) meets for Shabbat dinner and prayers on the lower level while the Buddhist Meditation Society gathers for meditation upstairs. The members of both groups converge on the kitchen just as Christian Fellowship arrives for Bible study. In a world torn by religious conflict, it’s notable that these groups claim the same space as sacred ground, but perhaps more impressive is how these students from different traditions view one another as members of the same family, united in the practice of faith, whatever that faith may be, on the Exeter campus.

Exeter students represent a diversity of religious traditions and beliefs. Whether they are Hindu or Muslim, Catholic or Buddhist, many want to stay in touch with a religious heritage that is essential to their identity. This can be a challenge for young people far from home Exonians share aspects of their with full academic and extracurricular schedules. faiths with one another. Clockwise The religious clubs on campus give these students a from top left:Tina Safford, Anna way to worship and socialize together. The clubs Brown, Katie Tapper, Max Freedalso make important contributions to the Exeter man, Milton Syed and Tyler community as a whole through the events and edu- Hodges; Syed in the Salah Room; cational opportunities they offer.

Sumun Khetpal in the Puja Room; In the past decade, Exeter has taken a series of and Tapper at the Harkness table.

28

The Exeter Bulletin

S PRING 2013

steps to provide greater support for student religious groups, primarily through the programs and resources of Phillips Church, but it’s the initiative of the students themselves, more than anything else, that has made Exeter fertile ground for religious expression and exploration.

The Hindu Society, Muslim Student Association and Catholic Exonians, along with the groups already mentioned, are all student-led.The vitality of these groups, and the opportunities they offer students to express their faith, depend on student leadership.

Students choose to join religious clubs for a variety of reasons. Some are interested in trying a new practice or learning about another faith. Others want to continue with a religious practice that is part of their life at home. Max Freedman ’13, who serves as co-head of the EJC, falls into the second category, but many of those who regularly attend the Shabbat dinner do not. He estimates that only about half of the 25 students who usually attend are Jewish.The rest, he readily admits, come for the food.

“We call them ‘kitchen members’ of the club,” Freedman says of the non-Jewish attendees. “The home-cooked meal is a big draw. But every religious group on campus puts ‘all are welcome’ on notices about their meetings. Even if they’re only one-time members or ‘kitchen members,’ they’re welcome to come and learn about our religious practices.”

Tina Safford ’14, co-head of the Buddhist Meditation Society, attends meditation on Friday nights, but she has also, on occasion, participated in the Jewish Shabbat and the Sunday afternoon Protestant Worship Service at Phillips Church.

“There’s a very open environment here,” she says. “It allows you to get another perspective. A lot of students who attend meditation are not Buddhists.We have some Catholic and Jewish students who attend. They are rooted in their own practice, but they’re interested in what Buddhism offers.”

A day student from Exeter, Safford had never meditated before she came to the Academy, and went to the Friday night gathering out of simple curiosity. For the first time in her life, she sat still for 40 minutes and was entirely centered in herself, an experience she found revelatory. “Buddhism is individualized and more self-exploratory,” she says. “It’s about how to be present where you are. I now identify with Buddhism more than any other religion. It will take me anywhere I need to go.”

“Exeter forces you to think critically.You can’t hold nebulous beliefs here.”

Meaningful Respites For students who arrive at Exeter with a confirmed faith, their religious experience at the Academy may be just as revelatory. Milton Syed ’14 attended an inner-city public school in the Bronx before coming to Exeter and is head of the Muslim Student Association. Being away from home and following Muslim practice at Exeter has made him examine his faith in new ways. “In my community at home, Muslim practice is very rule-based,” he explains.

“There isn’t time to think about the religion much. At Exeter, my religion has become more of an intellectual exercise than a duty. Harkness encourages you to question things more critically. Now my religion is my choice. I am practicing because I want to.”

Syed follows the Muslim ritual of praying five times a day. The late-afternoon prayers are the hardest to fit in, but he can usually find 10 minutes to stop at the prayer room in Phillips Church if he is on that side of campus or to pray in his dorm room. He expected that practicing his faith might be difficult at Exeter, but has found the school accommodating.The first surprise was the discovery that the Muslim students have a dedicated space for prayer on the lower level of Phillips Church in the Salah Room, which they refer to as their mosque. This, he says, is something that makes Exeter different. His Muslim friends at other boarding schools do not have a place to pray.

Patrick Ahern, a senior from Lake Forest, IL, and co-head of Catholic Exonians, helped to revive the club and became one of its co-heads in his prep year. His experience has been similar to Syed’s. “Exeter forces you to think critically,” he notes. “You can’t hold nebulous beliefs here. This is positive because it makes Catholic students think more critically about their faith.

It’s not just in the air around them. They have to make an effort to hold on to their faith.”

Sumun Khetpal ’13, co-head of the Hindu Society, believes that the experience of being away from home has strengthened her faith. At Exeter, she has to make a more conscious effort 30

The Exeter Bulletin

S PRING 2013

to be observant. “I try to follow the holidays,” she says. “I don’t eat meat on the holidays, and I have an idol, the god of knowledge, in my room.”

For Tyler Hodges ’14, co-head of Christian Fellowship, being at Exeter has given him a context for understanding his faith. “I always enjoyed going to church, but I understood when I came here that I really had to commit now. There’s a lot going on at Exeter.You make the decision whether you wake up at 11 a.m. on Sunday and go to brunch with everyone else, or get up at 7:30 a.m. to go to church.You really have to mean it. It’s made me more confident in my faith.” Hodges has attended a local church while at the Academy and has participated in the Friday night Bible study sessions in the Seminar Room, located on the fourth floor of the Academy Library.

Students of all backgrounds agree that observing some religious practice while they are enrolled at Exeter helps them cope with the pressures of boarding school life. “Everyone gets caught up in the bustle. My religion does a good job of protecting me from that mindset,” Syed says. “Following the daily prayer schedule is a good way to take a break. I can say to myself, ‘I’m not going to care about class right now. I’m going to take time to reflect.’ ” Anna Brown, co-head of the Buddhist Meditation Society, finds that meditation functions in a similar way for her. An upper from Ipswich, MA, Brown had never meditated before she came to Exeter, but was intrigued when she heard an announcement at assembly about the Friday night gathering. She went in the fall of her prep year and loved it. “It’s nice to have 45 minutes of the day when you’re not trying to accomplish anything,” she says. “ You’re just experiencing sitting and breathing and not worrying about school or anything else.” Buddhist Meditation meets in the Wicks Room in Phillips Church.

For Freedman, the opportunity to connect to something outside of Exeter is a significant reason for his participation in EJC. “Shabbat is a pause in the week,” he explains. “Taking time for this breather, a reconnection to life outside the school, is essential. Students who belong to the religious groups are less stressed. It helps you to avoid getting caught up in the robotic schedule here.”

“...we have an opportunity to attempt to teach others about our religion, allowing us to understand it even better.”

Opportunities for Engagement In addition to the personal benefits they gain, many students become involved in a religious club because they want to educate others on campus about their traditions and beliefs. Khetpal helped to establish the Hindu celebration of the Holi festival as an annual event open to all students. A joyous “festival of colors” in the Hindu calendar, the spring celebration marks the arrival of the new season. Up to 100 students attend the event on the Academy Library lawn in May and shower one another with the traditional colored powder.

Saaketh Krosuri ’14, co-head of the Hindu Society with Khetpal, is proud of the collaborative work they have done to give Exeter students an experience of Hinduism. In addition to the Holi festival, the Hindu Society offers the Puja ritual on Sundays in the Puja Room at Phillips Church, and a dinner in celebration of Diwali—the Hindu festival of lights—in the fall, followed by a showing of a Bollywood film. Krosuri says, “As co-heads, we have an opportunity to attempt to teach others about our religion, allowing us to understand it even better.”

In his role with Catholic Exonians, Ahern organizes discussion groups for club members and serves as a liaison with St. Michael Parish in Exeter, NH, where students attend Mass.

Once a month, there’s a Sunday afternoon Mass in Phillips Church. Ahern also attends the Islamic Jummah Prayers on Fridays at 12:35 p.m. three or four times a term. As for the atmosphere surrounding religious practices on campus, he says, “In general, Exeter students show less curiosity about religion than they should. I would like to see more students dropping in on the different groups on campus. They underestimate the importance of understanding the world’s religions, not to mention the spiritual benefits they might experience personally. We have a fantastic Religion Department that teaches about religion from a sociological standpoint, but the exposure to different religious practices is also very significant. Anyone can (continued on page 98) SPRING 2013

The Exeter Bulletin

31

Sports

A ‘High Five’ for Mike Lynch ’72 M A S S . S P O RT S C A S T E R O F T H E Y E A R F O R T H E 1 6 T H T I M E

By Taline Manassian ’92

COURTESY OF MIKE LYNCH (2)

(Top)Mike Lynch reporting from the 2011 NBA finals in Los Angeles. (Bottom) Classmates Pete Rodis, Ernie Pisanelli, Jim Burns and Lynch after their 1971 win over Andover.

M

ike Lynch ’72; P’04 knows firsthand

the impact an experience or a person can have on high school students. He recalls a gathering during his postgraduate year at the home of Michael Drummey, an Academy English teacher and baseball coach. One Exonian showed Lynch and others family photos, which Lynch ridiculed for a laugh. Disappointed, Mr. Drummey later wrote to Lynch: I would like to see you gain some dignity this year to be the leader you can be. This must come from quiet example and not from clamorous exhibitionism….Finally, I prefer to have you throw this in the wastebasket and dismiss it as creeping senility than be offended or embarrassed by it. I see considerable potential in you and am vain and presumptuous enough to think I can advise you.

Lynch saw the letter as a “hard nudge towards becoming the person Mr. Drummey thought I could be,” and he keeps it in a top dresser drawer with

32

The Exeter Bulletin

S PRING 2013

“Don’t Quit,” a poem his father, a former high school coach, gave his team after they lost a championship.

Today, Lynch is the sports anchor for WCVB-TV Channel 5 in Boston. In 2013, the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association named him Massachusetts Sportscaster of the Year for the 16th time. Lynch, who first received the honor in 1985 and has won it every year since 2006, cherishes the industry recognition—given not for one good segment but for one’s everyday work.

During his first month as WCVB-TV’s sports

anchor, Lynch launched a segment that has thrived for more than 25 years. “High Five” is a weekly feature he created to honor local high school athletes, focusing on an athlete’s performance, career accomplishments, or efforts to overcome an injury or disability.

“A theme about High Five is that you don’t have to cross the finish line first to be a champion,” Lynch says. “Trying makes you a winner. Doing your best and never letting yourself or your teammates or classmates down makes you a champion.”

High Five first aired the day Hurricane Gloria hit eastern Massachusetts in 1985. Lynch did not expect his segment on a student who ran for four multiple touchdowns in one game to make it on air, but it did.

Afterward, Lynch’s phone line buzzed with suggestions for future honorees. Today, he continues to be inundated by emails.

Lynch selects the honorees and has visited each school since the segment’s inception. “I have three rules,” he explains. “I always interview the coach because my dad was a coach, and coaches are the most underpaid, underappreciated people in the educational system. Then I interview the High Five honoree. Then the closing scene is always the same: I have the whole team line up and scream, ‘High Five!’”

Lynch himself was an athlete. In 1971, he graduated high school in Swampscott, MA, where sports programs had winning traditions and a recent history of feeding the National Football League. Lynch was being recruited by football schools, but his father had other plans. Lynch remembers his father saying, “You’re not as smart as you think you are.You’re not as socially adept as you think you are. You’re not as good of an athlete as you think you are. I think you need a year of prep school.” Lynch disagreed, but after meeting Rick Mahoney ’61, the Academy’s dean of admissions, he withdrew his application to Harvard University and chose Exeter for a postgraduate year.

During his first week at PEA, Lynch called home from the phone booth outside of the campus bookstore ready to quit, but his father refused to let him.

Lynch worked through classes and played Big Red football and baseball—though he regrets not playing basketball under Mr. Mahoney. His performance during the New England Prep School Championship football game in 1971 earned the November 14 New York Times headline, “Lynch Rallies Exeter From a 20-3 Deficit to a 30-20 Triumph Over Andover.”

Before graduating, he also received the Robert C. Mason Trophy as MVP in football and the Dana J.P. Wingate Memorial Baseball Trophy.

After PEA, Lynch attended Harvard, where he was quarterback and kicker for the football team. On November 22, 1975, before 67,000 fans, with 33 sec-

onds left in the game, Lynch kicked a 26-yard field goal to beat Yale 10-7, giving Harvard its first outright Ivy League football championship.

Lynch fell into broadcasting through Ned Martin, the voice of the Red Sox who also did radio for Harvard Crimson football. Lynch badgered Martin about the Red Sox and was hired in 1977 as a statistician.

Lynch fetched coffee and passed notes until Martin handed him a microphone and a question about a complicated play. Two eloquent sentences led to a substitute position as the “color man” (the person next to the play-by-play announcer who offers commentary) and a position the next year as Martin’s partner. To make ends meet, he also worked as a substitute teacher, bartender, basketball referee, and baseball umpire.

Intoxicated by broadcasting, Lynch abandoned plans for law school in 1982 and joined WCVB-TV

“I had two dozen parents at Exeter. It was almost impossible to fail.”

part-time, taking every responsibility the station offered him. In 1983, he became the weekend sports anchor, and in 1985 he became principal anchor, covering sports at 5, 6 and 11 p.m. Sundays through Thursdays.

Lynch still marvels at the lengths to which Mr. Drummey and Academy families went to help him during his postgraduate year. “These teachers were like surrogate parents,” he says. “If you had girlfriend problems, you went to Cindy Dennehy. If you needed a meal and wanted to watch “Monday Night Football,” Mrs. [Marge] Estey would make popcorn and let you sit on her couch and watch the game before check-in. I had two dozen parents at Exeter. It was almost impossible to fail.”

His experience is part of why Lynch prefers high school athletic fields and gymnasiums to professional sports locker rooms: “A lot of people gave me opportunities. I’d like to see every young boy and girl get any opportunity they can because there are so many great kids out there with untapped potential. Sometimes all they need is a word of encouragement, a handshake, a pat on the back, or a high-five.”

SPRING 2013

The Exeter Bulletin

33

Sports

B A

Winter Sports C

D

E F 34

The Exeter Bulletin

S PRING 2013

(A) Boys Basketball Record: 25-1 New England Champions

Head Coach: Jay Tilton Assistant Coaches: Rick Brault, Jon Pierce ’05 Captains: Christopher Braley ’13, Harrison Rafferty ’13 MVPs: Christopher Braley, Harrison Rafferty (B) Girls Basketball Record: 13-10

Head Coach: Johnny Griffith Assistant Coach: Nat Hawkins Captains: Nicole Heavirland ’14, Gabriella Wozniak ’13 MVP: Nicole Heavirland

G

(C) Boys Ice Hockey Record: 15-9-5 Qualified for the New England semifinals

Head Coach: Dana Barbin Assistant Coaches: Bill Dennehy, Mark Evans Captains: John Cross ’13, Mackenzie Flaherty ’13, Christopher Keating ’13 MVPs: Colby Cretella ’13, Patrick Lackey ’13

H

(D) Girls Ice Hockey Record: 10-11-3

Head Coach: Melissa Pacific Assistant Coaches: Lee Young ’82, Jason BreMiller Captains:Yuna Evans ’13, Meghan Turner ’13, Carlin Zia ’13 MVP: Meghan Turner (E) Boys Squash Record: 6-9 11th at the New England Championships, Division A

I

Head Coach: Fred Brussel Assistant Coaches: Stefan Bergill, Paul Langford Captains: Sang Hoon Lee ’13, Justin So ’13 MVP: Sang Hoon Lee

(F) Girls Squash Record: 3-12 4th at the New England Championships, Division B

Head Coach: Fred Brussel Assistant Coaches: Stefan Bergill, Bruce Shang Captains: Marisa Bhargava ’13, Madeleine Tan ’14 MVP: Elizabeth Wei ’15 (G) Boys Swimming and Diving Record: 4-5 in regular season dual meets 3rd at the New England Prep School Championships

Head Coach: Don Mills Captains: Finn Meeks ’13, Joseph Shepley ’14 MVP: Joseph Shepley (H) Girls Swimming and Diving Record: 5-2 in regular season dual meets 2nd at the New England Prep School Championships

Head Coach: Jean Chase Farnum Captains: Olivia Jackson ’13, Catharine Shipps ’13 MVPs: Olivia Jackson, Catharine Shipps (I) Winter Track Record: Boys: 3-0; Girls: 2-1 in regular season dual meets

Head Coach: Hilary Coder Assistant Coaches: Hobart Hardej, Toyin Augustus-Ikwuakor, AK Ikwuakor, Brandon Newbould, Francis Ronan Captains: Haley Baker ’13, Alexander Yang ’13 MVPs: Haley Baker, Alexander Yang (J) Wrestling Record: 12-10 14th at the New England Championships

Head Coach: David Hudson Assistant Coaches: Ethan Shapiro, Ted Davis, Bob Brown Captain: Patrick O’Connell ’13 MVP: Jake Whalen ’13

J PHOTOS BY MIKE CATANO EXCEPT FOR (C) TED KEATING P’13 AND (G), (H) CONNOR BLOOM ’15.

SPRING 2013

The Exeter Bulletin

35

Connections

EXONIAN PROFILE

D R . J O H N H A RV E Y ’ 4 1

Providing Principled Care

D

Cardinal Donald Wueri, archbishop of Washington, D.C., congratulates Dr. John Harvey on his honorary degree.

38

The Exeter Bulletin

r. John Harvey ’41 is charmingly humble about the honorary degree he received from Georgetown University on December 3, 2012, for his contributions to medicine, bioethics, Catholicism, and the Jesuit concept of cura personalis—which means “care of the whole person.”

“It was a wonderful honor for me,” says the vibrant senior.

But to those familiar with his legacy, the award could not have come as a surprise. Harvey has, among other accolades, an eponymous lecture series, now in its 10th year. He is a former professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University and at Georgetown, chair of the bioethics committee at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital, a senior research scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, and a master of the American College of Physicians. “I did most of my work in bioethics at Georgetown, so I think that’s why they honored me,” Harvey says modestly.

His interest in bioethics—which he points out is the newest moniker of what used to be called “medical ethics”— began early in his career with the general guiding principle to always do the right and good thing for his patients.

“That became a shibboleth to me,” he says, “and I tried to do that in my own practice and to teach that to students.”

Early in Harvey’s career, when he was a professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, a friend and fellow physician at Georgetown, André Hellegers—whom Harvey credits as one of the founding fathers of bioethics— approached him about organizing a bioethics roundtable of sorts. “That was when abortion was becoming something that could be done not under the table,” Harvey explains. “[Hellegers] was a Roman Catholic, as I was, and we wanted to get together and discuss some of these issues that were predominant in medicine [during] that time. So the two of us asked if we could organize a Catholic think tank at the Johns Hopkins Medical School.

“Our idea of a Catholic center at the medical center to explore ethical situations and new ideas was quite successful,” he adds. “We had an awfully good time.”

Hellegers left Johns Hopkins for Georgetown, and there established the Kennedy Institute of Ethics in 1971.

Harvey was not long in joining him on the medical staff in 1973. “He thought it would be a wonderful place for us to practice our profession and our religion in a correct way,” Harvey says. After 15 years of working with a foot in each world, Harvey officially left clinical medicine in 1989 and devoted himself solely to bioethics.

He finds a great deal of similarity in the work of bioethics and the Harkness method. “I really learned how to get meat out of what I was studying at Exeter. It was the best experience I ever had,” Harvey says. “Those discussions around the round table were out of this world. We had our 70th reunion two summers ago, and I spent a good deal of time going to classrooms. Boy, those discussions were fantastic!”

Conversations about bioethics, he says, are similar: “You may come to different conclusions, but it’s a good exercise to try to bring together varying opinions [to] honor the independence and the wishes of the patient, which may not be what the doctor thinks is the best thing to do.”

Harvey retired from the bioethics committee last year, but still keeps busy with writing. Now that he is almost 90, he admits he’s slowing down, a bit.This he attributes to a recent illness that kept him bedridden for six weeks. “It was a tough thing for me to have to swallow,” he says. “Every doctor should have a serious illness so they can learn how to be a patient. It’s damn hard to be incapacitated when you have so much enthusiasm for activity.You have to say, this is a time to think back and ruminate. Always take advantage of the situation you’re in and don’t let it get you down.”

—Susannah Clark ’84

S PRING 2013

Connections

EXONIAN PROFILE

A . C L AY T O N S P E N C E R ’ 7 3

Addressing Life’s Perennial Questions

A

s a child in her Virginia home, Clayton Spencer ’73 would perch on a window seat in the living room and listen to the conversation swirling around her. Her father, Samuel Reid Spencer Jr., was the president of Mary Baldwin College, and the family home was where guests, visiting faculty and speakers were lodged, entertained and invited to share meals.

The family later moved to North Carolina, when Spencer’s father became president of Davidson College, and the talk turned to the key issues of the time, civil rights and the Vietnam War. By this time, Spencer had migrated to the dining room table and become a participant in those discussions.

“It was an incredible treat to live in a house that was a platform for community engagement and intellectual discourse,” she says. “I considered the convergence of ideas and people in my house to be one of the great joys of life.”

At Exeter Spencer honed her interpersonal skills during robust but respectful discussions around the Harkness table. “I think a Harkness discussion is the most fully realized liberal arts experience there is,” she adds, “and I was fortunate to have that opportunity early on in my education.”

During her years at Williams College, Oxford University, Harvard University and Yale Law School, and later while working for the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Spencer gained an even deeper respect and enthusiasm for tackling tough issues.This approach is predicated, she says, on confronting hard problems from an assumption of “good faith” on all sides.

In her recent post as vice president for policy at Harvard University, Spencer was characterized as “one of the most influential officials at Harvard” by The Harvard Crimson. Her leadership approach helped guide the university toward a number of achievements, from consolidating the 1999 merger of Harvard University and Radcliffe College to coordinating academic planning across the university. At Harvard, and during her concurrent time as an Academy trustee, Spencer also used her skills of persuasion and collaborative leadership to expand the financial aid programs at both institutions.

Now as president of Bates College in Lewiston, ME, she may figuratively sit at the head of the table, but she continues to bring people together and encourages good faith discussions to address the challenges facing students and faculty today—from campus climate and academic support to sustainability.

There is one topic, however, which Spencer terms “the hardy perennial”—a set of concerns that defined much of the discourse in her father’s home at Davidson College and is an oft-discussed issue in her home at Bates College.

Spencer says the common themes are questions posed by a majority of college students over the years: “They ask, ‘How will I build a meaningful and fulfilling life? How will I contribute to the world?’ I have heard a gazillion commencement and baccalaureate speeches during my life, and these are the topics most often addressed.”

In her inauguration speech as the eighth president of Bates College on October 26, 2012, Spencer communicated her vision for the school:

Clayton Spencer at her Bates College inauguration, with her father, Samuel Reid Spencer Jr., who gave her his academic cap to wear.

It is not our job to supply the answers to these questions, but it is our job to create the conditions under which our students will be inspired to ask them for themselves. Learning here occurs in community. We are situated in a particular place, with a particular culture, and a particular set of human beings who come to know each other face to face . . . so the most complete kind of human learning takes place in community, with the solidarity of companionship and the challenge of truth.

As Spencer continues her presidency, she will weave together many threads from the fabric of her background to help her students address these perennial questions—ones she first overheard as a girl perched on a window seat.

—Julie Quinn

SPRING 2013

The Exeter Bulletin

39

Connections

EXONIAN PROFILE

A N D R E W YA N G ’ 9 2

Creating the Next Class of CEOs

A

ndrew Yang ’92 became a corporate attorney at a New York City law firm because, he admits, “that’s what I thought success looked like.” A year into a job that wasn’t personally gratifying,Yang became enticed by the idea of entrepreneurship. He quit the firm and founded the dot-com Stargiving, which folded less than two years after its launch.

Yang, who started Stargiving in his 20s, says his first foray into business-building wasn’t easy, “but I have to say the experience was formative—you realize you can pick yourself up after failure.”

During his next venture—CEO of the test-prep company Manhattan GMAT (later acquired by Kaplan/The Washington Post Co. in 2009)— Yang discovered that other ambitious college graduates favor corporate jobs more for the job security and less for their passion for the work.

Entrepreneurship had once excited them in college, but they lacked the skills and outlets necessary to follow through with their aspirations.Yang had an idea.

Now CEO of Venture for America, Yang has founded an organization with a win-win model: Recent college graduates, or fellows, are linked with startup companies located in cities hit hard by the economic recession. Each Venture for America fellow commits to working at a company for two years and receives a salary and on-the-ground training in entrepreneurship. The top-performing fellows from each two-year session may also earn $100,000 in seed money to start businesses of their own.

“You provide growth companies and startups with the talent they need to expand and hire people . . . and you train your best and brightest grads so they themselves become business builders. It seems so obvious, doesn’t it?” Yang, 38, says with a chuckle.

The model is apparently working. To date, Venture for America has raised more than $3 million to support its efforts and has formed partnerships with companies that include dot-com juggernauts Zappos and LinkedIn. More than 40 grads have already been placed in startups in Cincinnati, Detroit, Las Vegas, New Orleans and Providence with an additional 60-plus set for this year (the program is expanding into Baltimore and Cleveland this summer).Venture’s ultimate goal is to create 100,000 new U.S. jobs by 2025.

When asked to counterargue the belief that assisting a handful of startups will do little to resurrect a city’s economy, Yang says, “This is a long-term solution to a very significant problem. Let’s say you bring in 10 to 20 young people to Detroit for two years. At the end of those two years, you have 40 to 60 new people in that city, and the first 20 are starting new companies and hiring new people through the program. You can imagine a long-term cycle where businesses start supporting each other.The goal is to give rise to this cycle.”

The cycle can only work by placing determined go-getters. Yang looks for “adaptive excellence” in applicants— people who have shined in an academic, athletic or leadership capacity. He credits his own professional drive, in part, to the Exeter experience.

“People graduate from Exeter with a duty to do what you can for the greater community,” he says. “I certainly feel that sense of obligation, and Exeter had a lot to do with it.”

Exeter’s network has also helped Yang with key organizational endeavors: One of his classmates, Jay Bockhaus ’92, serves on Venture for America’s board of directors. Mustafa Siddiqui ’96 linked Yang with the Blackstone Charitable Foundation, which recently contributed a grant of $150,000.

Yang may be living his entrepreneurial dream, but he remains humble about it. “I just wanted to solve this problem,” he says. “I sleep a lot better knowing I’ve done everything I could to bring this organization to light. I’m very fortunate that I have chosen a particular path for myself and I’ve gotten to pursue it.That’s one thing I really want for people—I want them to feel they have the liberty to pursue their professional aspirations.”

—Fred Durso Jr. 40

The Exeter Bulletin

S PRING 2013

Reflections on Good and Evil

Life In-between (continued from page 18)

(continued from page 19)

heart-wrenching decisions had to be made. In 1953, the Romanian communist regime attempted to blackmail Georgescu’s parents by offering to release the boys in return for intelligence about the U.S. The Georgescus refused, consigning the boys to continued pain, deprivation and possibly death.

After the intervention of U.S. Rep. Frances Payne Bolton and President Dwight D. Eisenhower and a national media uproar, the boys were finally released to the United States, where they landed as stunned celebrities in 1954. Both were unable to speak English, and, at age 15, Georgescu possessed the equivalent of a first-grade education.

Enter William Saltonstall ’24; ’63 (Hon.); P’55, P’59, then principal of Exeter. Moved by the story, he suggested Georgescu could have a place at the Academy that fall if he attended Summer School to learn English. Saltonstall’s terms? If Georgescu finished his first year (as a lower) and passed all of his courses, he could stay at the Academy. Ending with D-minuses and D’s, Georgescu stayed, eventually attending Princeton and Stanford Business School, and enjoying a long, prestigious career in advertising.

It’s easy to see how this life story could be the stuff of a great autobiography. What makes this one special, though, is Georgescu’s search for meaning—and goodness—in it all. He came to realize, for example, that evil was not confined to the obvious political atrocities of his past but could be found in the everyday life of corporate success and in the vast opportunities made available to him as he traversed the American dream.

This book is truly an Exonian journey. Georgescu wants answers, and he tries to learn in a recognizable mode—engaging those around him in conversation, reading, listening, asking questions, and exploring an array of opinions in the various summer lecture series at his beloved Chautauqua Institution. His is a spiritual journey as well as an intellectual one—not to justify the doctrine of a specific religion per se but because conversations about good and evil will, by their nature, engage one in thinking about the nature of God and, in Georgescu’s case, his relationship with Christianity.

The questions he asks are thought-provoking and worthy of considerable reflection. We are faced with choices, but how do we know which of these choices is “good” when we don’t know where the path of any decision might lead? In the end, Georgescu argues that when it comes to goodness and non sibi, we are each faced with constant choices—some big and some small. His journey to better understand his own choices—and those that others have made within his amazing life story—is illuminating.

He may not answer all of the difficult questions he poses, but his journey will inspire us to think more carefully and clearly about these decision points in our own lives.

She shows us scenes of the girls sunbathing, using IVs to put ice water into their veins because they are hot, and talking about sex into the night. Yael’s use of harsh words to describe the girls’ great boredom gestures to this porous line between daily life and shocking violence: “This was the way the army worked.We were all killing time.”

Then, suddenly, there come moments of tremendous, startling brutality.The book is strewn with them, not unlike bodies. Lovers die, shots are fired and misogyny runs rampant. Much of the power of The People of Forever Are Not Afraid comes from the juxtaposition of these two extremes.

The novel also asserts the life-changing power of story even as it reveals the girls’ profound anxieties about their own narratives. Stories—and story—recur over and over again. The three young women play a game called “story,” in which they write a story together, a sentence at a time, “like a fan of words that were in all of them, drowned in ink.” We see a depressed Avishag learning to drive with her father, and the way the strands of story slowly bring them together as they pull her back from the brink of despair and reconnect her with her dad. One of the stories from Lea’s military service echoes throughout her post-army life with strange, devastating consequences.

And then, at the very end of the book, the three women, reunited, argue in the middle of the night “…about whether or not what had happened to them was even interesting, about whether or not anything they did mattered. About their mattering or not.” This scene reveals Lea,Yael and Avishag’s deep concern about their value in the world, and the reader wonders how much of this uncertainty comes from their complicated, unforgettable experience in the army.

The three voices of The People of Forever Are Not Afraid weave a narrative that is blunt and yet poetic.The nonlinear story is told in alternating points of view and the effect is powerful, like a fever dream. At times as I read I couldn’t entirely follow the story, feeling a sense of unease about where I was in time or place or who was speaking, but I allowed the slipstream of narrative to carry me. Having finished Boianjiu’s novel, I can’t stop thinking about the three flawed, human, fascinating women who make up its beating heart. At one point,Yael muses upon waking that “my dream had hurt me, but I wanted to go back to it.” This book is like that—a gritty, intricate portrait of young womanhood on the border of violence, in a world saturated with uncertainty, fear and a penetrating numbness.

Lindsey Mead Russell is a mother, writer and headhunter who lives in Cambridge, MA. She graduated from Princeton with an A.B. in English in 1996 and received an MBA from Harvard in 2000. She is proud to count a few of

Melissa Orlov is a former PEA trustee and the author of the award-winning

her friends from Exeter as some of her closest friends more than 20 years later.

book, The ADHD Effect on Marriage. She, like Peter Georgescu, is at

She blogs at A Design So Vast.

Chautauqua, NY, during the summers and invites Exonians to experience the joy of the intellectual engagement Chautauqua Institution offers (and to look her up when visiting).

SPRING 2013

The Exeter Bulletin

97

Sharing Sacred Ground (continued from page 31) show up for [Jummah] Prayers or for Mass.”

In addition to the Hindu Puja, Islamic Jummah Prayers, Buddhist Meditation and Jewish services held in Phillips Church, there’s also a Protestant Worship Service and a nondenominational Evening Prayer once a week.The Thursday morning meditation given by a member of the community is another weekly event that brings a cross section of the community to the church for inspiration and reflection. Indaba, an open sharing of concerns modeled on a means of arriving at community consensus traditionally used by the Xhosa people of South Africa, takes place in the Phelps Sanctuary on Friday evenings.

The renovations to Phillips Church completed in 2003 have played a significant part in making the church more welcoming to students of all faiths and in supporting the religious clubs. The renovation made dedicated rooms possible for Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim and Jewish practice, and brought the groups together in one facility where they are able to mix freely. The accommodation of the different faiths under one roof has promoted greater understanding and awareness of their practices.

“Other clubs meet in the dining hall or library, where there are lots of distractions,” Hodges notes. “In Phillips Church, we have a separate space that is just for the religious groups. It’s incredibly important to have this dedicated space.”

Rev. Robert Thompson ’72; ’71, ’89, ’95 (Hon.), the Phelps Minister of Phillips Church, adds, “All the faith traditions were strengthened on campus as a result of the church renovation. It was important to me that you could practice your religion and not feel that you have to give up this part of yourself to be a good Exonian, whether you are Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish or Christian.”

Thompson readily admits that in theory it shouldn’t work to have all these people using the same building, especially when that building is dominated by a stained glass image of Jesus but says,“I think the students learn that their peers are not ‘the other.’ …It makes sense that we would have all these religious practices taking place in the same 98

The Exeter Bulletin

S PRING 2013

building because we’re part of the same community, and we love each other.”

Although the students are largely responsible for deciding which services and events a club will offer, they have support and logistical assistance from a faculty adviser. In the case of the Buddhist Meditation Society, Exeter brings in a teacher of Buddhist meditation from a local retreat center, who leads the meditation and a discussion of Buddhist teachings afterward. Rabbi Jennifer Marx Asch, religion instructor, serves as adviser for EJC and leads services. Thompson—or “the Rev.” as the students call him—is the adviser for a number of the other clubs.

“It’s been an education for me,” Thompson says of his involvement with the different groups. He cites as examples a Hindu student who helped him choose the paintings that now hang in the Puja Room and the acquisition of a Torah and ark. In the late 1990s,Thompson was challenged by Sarah Zeidel Greenberg ’02 and her twin sister, Rebecca Zeidel ’02, who told him that Exeter should have a Torah on campus. “I thought we were doing pretty well by allowing Jewish students to miss class to celebrate the High Holidays and by offering a Shabbat dinner. They showed me we needed to do more and taught me what I needed to know.”

As a result of the sisters’ efforts, a Torah was borrowed, and for the first time, the High Holidays were celebrated on campus in 1999, so that Jewish students did not have to travel to a synagogue in Boston.The Academy received its first Torah, donated by an alumnus, in 2004. In 2011, PEA’s carpentry shop designed and built an ark in the Stuckey Room in Phillips Church to house not only the original Torah but also a newly commissioned one. The ark’s construction was funded by Bruce Saber ’76 in memory of Scott Saber ’82, who died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Freedman says. “I cried when I first saw the ark. When my great-grandmother came to this country from Poland at the age of 8, she couldn’t imagine that I would be attending an elite boarding school like this and that it would accept Jews. …She would not be able to believe that there is a reverend who would have us in his church and that they would build an ark into the wall of that church.”

The acceptance of Jews and students of other faiths is indeed a more recent devel-

opment in the history of Exeter.The Academy was not founded as a school with a religious affiliation, but the original Deed of Gift penned by John Phillips reflects the values of Protestant Christianity and stipulates that “Protestants only shall ever be concerned in the trust or instruction of this Seminary. . . .”

A few Jewish and Catholic students attended Exeter prior to the 1950s, but it was not until Principal William Saltonstall made a deliberate commitment to fostering diversity that they began to enroll in larger numbers. In 1951, Saltonstall appointed the first Jewish instructor to the faculty and three years later introduced a Friday evening Shabbat service. In 1969, Principal Richard Day ’68 (Hon.); P’68 oversaw the revision of the Deed of Gift, officially ending the requirement that faculty members be Protestant, and appointed a Catholic priest as school minister.

Weekly church attendance was required of students until 1968, when the Trustees voted to abolish the requirement. By this time, Jewish students represented 10 percent of the student body. It was not until the late 1970s that a Catholic student group was formed.The diversity of religious groups on campus today, and their interaction with one another, would be unimaginable not just to Freedman’s great-grandmother but to many alumni. Today Exeter can claim to welcome “youth from every quarter” in regard to religious diversity, too.

For the students who come and go from Phillips Church on a regular basis, their involvement in a religious group is both grounding and a significant part of their education. Brown says, “I’ve been to the Muslim prayer meetings. I felt comfortable because they were held in a place I knew.

The people in the group were very open.

I couldn’t add a lot to their conversation, but it was neat that I could feel so welcome, and that they shared their food.”

This generation, one can hope, will take their experience of openness and sharing across religious lines beyond the Exeter campus.

Katherine Towler is a former Bennett Fellow and co-editor, with former Bennett Fellow Ilya Kaminsky, of A God in the House: Poets Talk About Faith.

Finis

Trustee Roundup (continued from page 100)

Bear Grylls, and if life was different from what he had anticipated, what must it have been like for his wife—who certainly didn’t choose this path. It would be interesting to have a talk with Wheelwright in the next life to find out about the experience, although surely Wheelwright, as a Puritan, is now abiding in a clubhouse reserved for the elect. I will most likely find myself in a place more like a bus station waiting room.

More likely, I would sit down for a chat with Mary Hutchinson Wheelwright. She was 33 when her husband was exiled from Massachusetts, most likely pregnant or nursing a new baby. Having traveled with a baby on a plane, I’d be interested to know how traveling across the Atlantic Ocean in an unstable wooden ship with five small children might have gone. At least on her arrival in Boston there would have been friends and a warm hearth waiting. The trip to Exeter —also by boat and most likely by canoe in the final miles—would have been more like an unwanted camping trip. And most likely as well, she was met with, “Greetings, wife.

What might thee be preparing for our sup tonight?” I understand, I’d say, gently patting her hand. We have more in common than you might imagine.

But did she fall in love with Exeter?

The first few years would have been ceaseless toil. Houses needed to be built and land broken for crops, and always there would have been shortages of very basic necessities. Wheelwright himself was committed to the task of leading his new congregation, because he was still a minister of God, and to leading the entire community. Two years after their arrival, Wheelwright penned an act of government called the Exeter Combination, which pledged the mutual support of the free townsmen and devotion to God and the king. Mary, of course, wasn’t specifically included in the document. As a wife, she was considered part of her husband and not a separate person.

The little town scratched along, and it became clear that instead of being a selfsufficient religious community they would have to build a solid economy. The fish were great, but the real source of wealth turned out to be the trees. Exeter was heavily wooded with forests of ancient

(continued from page 9) straight pines. To the British with their deforested lands, Exeter’s trees were like thousand-dollar bills sprouting from the ground. More Englishmen arrived to cut the trees, and within four years the townsmen petitioned the Massachusetts Bay Colony for annexation. There were problems with the natives in neighboring towns and Exeter wanted the protection— even if that meant giving up some autonomy. In 1643, the petition was accepted and Exeter became part of Massachusetts.

It is a period of time we rarely speak of in Exeter. For Wheelwright and his family, the decision was disastrous. Still an exile, it meant that he had to leave. Again Mary packed up her children and all their possessions to travel to untamed lands. They moved to Wells in the Province of Maine.

Four years later, after the order of banishment was lifted, they would move to Hampton, NH. In 1656, at the age of 64, Wheelwright returned to England for a six-year visit, returning to the colonies in 1662 when he was 70. Settling finally in Salisbury, MA, he remained there until his death at 87, in 1679. Mary died sometime during his wanderings, when or where we do not know.

Wheelwright’s town flourished even when he was gone.You have to wonder if he ever stopped in when he was living nearby in Hampton. “Just thought I’d check in, make sure you weren’t committing any heresy or anything. Just kidding, you look great.” Exeter has a strange way of leaving its mark on people who pass through. It’s difficult to forget the intensity of our seasons or the scent of the land, with the occasional waft of ocean air that blows through. I’ve spoken with countless PEA alums who remember the town with picture-perfect clarity. Sometimes, it is their first trip back since graduation and still they can recall where the old Kurtz’s Diner was located or that Wheelwright Hall was named for John Wheelwright.

Exeter endures, not only to those of us who continue to live here, but to all those who’ve spent time in town. If you find yourself far from Exeter, wish us a happy birthday this year. You will always be part of our history, even if, like John and Mary Wheelwright, your time here was a few short years.

sound, high-quality, consistent advising for all Exeter students must be a priority.

Toward that end, the Trustees look forward to hearing more this spring about our ongoing efforts and the committee’s eventual recommendations, and they have pledged to commit resources to ensure our vision of a strong, equitable advising system becomes a reality.

On Friday, the Trustees also spoke with Dean of Faculty Ron Kim and Director of Studies Laura Marshall to begin examining the exponential growth of online learning.

Marshall and Kim described the school’s early thinking in this area, and the Trustees believe the Academy should intentionally evaluate opportunities for Exeter to enter into this rapidly evolving arena.The group agreed that the initial focus of our efforts should be on enhancing the work we do with our students on campus, as well as exploring collaborative opportunities through our growing and successful global outreach programs. Kim and Marshall will be reaching out to faculty for further discussions. It was also agreed that the Academy would explore ways to employ online learning to connect our alumni and parents to Harkness opportunities.

The final session of the trustee meeting was devoted to a conversation about the Composition of the School Committee’s efforts, now in the early stages of data collection. Trustees Doug Smith and Bill Rawson ’71; P’08, who serve on the committee, joined Committee Chair and Science Instructor Anne Rankin ’92 and Director of Admissions Michael Gary P’06, P’11 to provide the Trustees with a prog ress report. They discussed the research being conducted within our community to discern what qualities of character and mind the Academy is seeking in students, as well as what it should be looking for in our future students.There is more work to be done in addressing the specifics contained in the charge to the committee and in the shaping of the resulting recommendations. The Trustees voiced their appreciation for the time and care being devoted to this critical work.

The Trustees were grateful for the warm welcome extended to them during a very frigid visit back to campus. They look forward to their next campus meeting in a balmier May. SPRING 2013

The Exeter Bulletin

99

Finis Origine Pendet

A Historic Sojourn

By Barbara Rimkunas, curator of the Exeter Historical Society

Editor’s Note: To help celebrate the Town of Exeter’s 375th anniversary, we invited Barbara to write a narrative about the town’s beginnings. Happy birthday Exeter!

R

100

The Exeter Bulletin

S PRING 2013

FRED CARLSON

everend John Wheelwright lived in Exeter, NH, for five years. Five years is a relatively short period of time to leave one’s mark, but Wheelwright, whom tradition holds as our town’s founder, has a special place in our history. As Exeter celebrates its 375th anniversary this year,Wheelwright’s contribution becomes a critical starting point in our observations.

Of course, there were people here long before 1638, when Wheelwright arrived. Native tribes had, for thousands of years, come to the falls of the Squamscott to fish and hunt during the warmer months. Archaeological evidence indicates that our first inhabitants rarely wintered over on the rivers, choosing instead to move inland and away from our fickle winter weather, which then as now dropped snow and rain in infuriating vacillations. The landscape was rich, however, and each spring would find the area bustling with people again. Exeter’s earliest history was passed from one generation to the next by willing elders who spoke to eager young ears. This system of oral transmission was a good one providing there were no gaps, but alas, in the early years of the 15th century a plague washed away upward of 80 percent of the region’s population. Now we can uncover our earliest history only by searching through the objects left behind. From this, we know about things that were used here, but not the interactions or observations of the people.

Sometime in the mid-1630s, a few Englishmen trickled into the place. Edward Hilton, Thomas Wilson, Ralph Hall and Thomas Leavitt were all said to be living on the east side of the falls before Wheelwright came. Wheelwright, of course, arrived under duress. He had been expelled from the MasExeter has a strange way of sachusetts Bay Colony for his antinomian leanings. His problematic teachings involved leaving its mark on people one’s relationship with God and whether who pass through. one could earn grace or simply receive it. If one was blessed with grace, did trivial rules still apply? Wheelwright and his sister-in-law, Anne Hutchinson, felt that those touched with God’s grace were above the nitty-gritty workings of daily regulation. Hutchinson, like Wheelwright, was expelled from the Bay Colony. She chose to go to Providence, but Wheelwright, perhaps concerned that Roger Williams’ new “freedom of conscience” plantation was a bit too freethinking, opted instead to travel to the wilderness of New Hampshire.

In 1637, Wheelwright spent his first winter with Edward Hilton. The following spring he headed up the Squamscott River to the falls and began to organize a town. His wife, Mary, several of his children and a small band of supporters arrived shortly thereafter. What must this experience have been like? Surely Wheelwright, a college-educated man, had few survival skills. Unlike in Boston, there were no buildings, no taverns, no roads waiting for them. Wheelwright was (continued on page 99) an egghead pitched into the world of