The Exeter Bulletin, spring 2025

ACHIEVING EXCELLENCE

SPRING 2025 / CONTENTS

FEATURES

Curiosity and hard work earn students accolades in computer science, math, music and more.

Adam Loyd and Sarah Pruitt ’95

30 Artificial Intelligence

Alumni share how technology is reshaping everything we do.

Debbie Kane

36 History in Focus

Examining the Academy’s connection to slavery and its path forward.

Sarah Pruitt ’95

42

“Exeter has always been this place that I’ve felt has magical powers to push you to discover more you didn’t know you were capable of doing.”

Byran

Huang ’25, p. 30

Byran Huang '25 built a custom open-source laptop dubbed “anyon_e” from scratch. p. 30

Covers: Photography by Yoon S. Byun

The View From Here

5

Around the Table

Principal’s letter ∙ Heard in Assembly Hall ∙ History Instructor Bill Jordan on educating for civility ∙ Robert Lutes ’73 and the role of class correspondent ∙ Inside History Instructor Meg Foley’s classroom ∙ A conversation with statesman Thomas Ehrlich ’52 ∙ Exonians in review ∙ What Daniel Connelly ’25 learned from a member of the Wampanoag nation ∙ Exoniana

19

The Academy

Jay Tilton retires from basketball coaching ∙ Girls wrestling ∙ Secret societies ∙ Dr. Emery N. Brown ’74 receives National Medal of Science ∙ Science Instructor John Blackwell honored with presidential award ∙ Global Initiatives ∙ Lamont Gallery exhibition ∙ Behind the scenes of the winter musical ∙ Winter sports

49

Connections

Autism research pioneer Dr. James Adams ’80 ∙ Impact investor Laura Callanan ’83 ∙ Cinematographer Julia Liu ’02 ∙ Architect Nate McBride ’70 ∙ Events from around the world

61

Class News and Notes

102 Memorial Minute John Bascom Heath

104 Finis Origine Pendet

The Exeter Bulletin Volume CXXIX, Issue no. 3

Principal

William K. Rawson ’71; P’08

Director of Communications

Robin Giampa

Editor in Chief

Jennifer Wagner P’24

Class Notes Editor

Cathy Webber

Contributing Editor

Patrick Garrity

Staff Writers

Adam Loyd, Sarah Pruitt ’95

Production Coordinator

Ben Harriton

Designers

Frank Webster, Jacqueline Trimmer

Photography Editor

Christian Harrison

Communications

Advisory Committee

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

TRUSTEES

President Kristyn A. McLeod Van Ostern ’96

Vice President Suzi Kwon Cohen ’88

Bradford “Brad” Briner ’95, Samuel “Sam” Brown ’92, Elizabeth A. “Betsy” Fleming ’86, Scott S.W. Hahn ’90, Ira D. Helfand, M.D. ’67, Paulina L. Jerez ’91, Giles “Gil” Kemp ’68, Eric A. Logan ’92, Eugene “Gene” Lynch ’79, Cornelia “Cia” Buckley Marakovits ’83, William K. Rawson ’71, Christine M. Robson Weaver ’99, Genisha Saverimuthu ’02, Michael J. Schmidtberger ’78, Peter M. Scocimara ’82, Sanjay K. Shetty, M.D. ’92, Leroy Sims, M.D. ’97, Rhoda K. Tamakloe ’01, Belinda A. Tate ’90, Janney Wilson ’83

THE EXETER BULLETIN (ISSN No. 0195-0207) is published four times each year: fall, winter, spring and summer, by Phillips Exeter Academy, 20 Main Street, Exeter, NH 03833-2460 Tel: 603-772-4311

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The Exeter Bulletin is sent free of charge to alumni, parents, grandparents, friends and educational institutions by Phillips Exeter Academy, Exeter, NH. Communications may be emailed to the editor at bulletin@exeter.edu.

Copyright 2025 by the Trustees of Phillips Exeter Academy. ISSN-0195-0207

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Winter sports highlights: Girls swimming secured its third New England Championship title. p. 29

Cinematographer Julia Liu ’02, p. 53

The Good Life

During a recent session of REL540: Happiness, Fana, Eudaemonia, Nirvana, students and Principal Bill Rawson ’71 — who announced his decision to retire in June 2026 — engaged in a lively conversation about the roles of happiness and purpose in our lives.

“We were discussing whether happiness or purpose should be our main goal,” Religion, Ethics and Philosophy Instructor Peter Dziedzic says. “That is, should we set happiness as our ultimate goal, or should we aim for a life of purpose, and happiness comes as a result of this quest?”

Through thoughtprovoking readings, reflective writing and activities, Dziedzic aims to equip students with the tools to cultivate a deeper, more resilient understanding of happiness.

“Rather than telling students what to think,” Dziedzic says, “we expose them to a range of different ways of thinking about questions like these so they can continue discovering their own senses of self, community and meaning at Exeter and beyond.” ●

The Community Exchange

Letters to the Editor

Thank you for publishing Lauren Josef’s meditation in The Exeter Bulletin (“Song of Thyself,” winter 2025). It brought back the following vivid memory: The summer before my daughter Emily began kindergarten, she was only 4 years old. Her birthday was in October, so she turned 5 a month after school began. Beginning in June, to prepare her for that first day of school in September, I began telling her, “Emily, you’re a big girl now.” As the first day of school drew near, she repeated the chant to me, “Daddy, I’m a big girl.” Her excitement was palpable in her demeanor and smile.

The morning of her first day arrived. I waited to leave for work until her bus pulled up. Emily was still upstairs putting on her beautiful summer dress with my wife. She came down, sat next to me and began to cry. I held her close and whispered, “What’s wrong?” She gazed into my eyes and cried out, “Daddy, it’s hard being a big girl!”

I hugged her tightly. We then walked hand in hand to the bus stop. When the bus arrived she gave me a kiss, smiled and said, “I love you, Daddy.” I began to cry, realizing that my little girl was growing up and would eventually leave me.

Twenty-five years later, Emily is now a director at Target in Minneapolis living with my future son-in-law.

Looking back, I can now say, “Emily, it’s hard being a big girl’s dad!”

Maynard Timm ’70

I am writing with reference to the Bulletin in which a 1957 prank was mentioned (“Clipped from The Exonian,” fall 2024). That lifting of a VW Beetle onto the stage of the large assembly hall was not an original stunt. In 1948 or 1949, a racing green MG roadster belonging to a French language instructor with the unlikely name of Eli Fish was hoisted onto that same stage prior to the morning chapel service that began five days a week at 8:05 a.m.

Charles Moizeau ’51

I just need to tell you that I am blown away by the quality of the winter issue of the Bulletin. Every aspect of the magazine is top notch — the articles, the photos, the layout. I really appreciate the pieces that highlight the life and work of alumni that have followed their own path to find meaning and purpose. Keep up the great work!

Tracy

Burrows ’80

QWhat is New Hampshire?

That was the correct response to a Jeopardy! clue during the Feb. 18 episode of the popular TV Show. When contestant Jaskaran Singh chose “Libraries for $1,200” an image of the iconic Class of 1945 library was revealed. The clue: A library at Phillips Exeter Academy in this state is considered a master work of modern American architecture. We agree. It is a master work!

Watch the Jeopardy! clip on Instagram @phillipsexeter

We want to hear from you! The Exeter Bulletin welcomes story ideas and letters related to articles published in recent issues. Please send your remarks for consideration to bulletin@exeter.edu or Phillips Exeter Academy, The Exeter Bulletin, 20 Main Street, Exeter, NH 03833.

Around the Table

Academy Building Take a tour of Instructor in History Meg Foley’s classroom. P. 12

Prayer flags hang over the doorway in Foley’s classroom offering a colorful nod to her home state of Minnesota.

A Tradition of Caring

It is our custom at Exeter to publish a Memorial Minute when an emeritus faculty member dies. These are read in their entirety in faculty meeting and published in condensed form in the Bulletin. You will find a Memorial Minute for Jack Heath, instructor emeritus in English, included in this issue.

These are deeply moving tributes. We often are surprised to learn about aspects of a former faculty member’s life that we did not know, and amused by the anecdotes that former colleagues tell. Perhaps more than anything, we are inspired by the stories alumni share about the way their lives were impacted by their former teachers.

Alumni describe how these faculty members demanded the best of their students, helped them grow in confidence, and in many cases helped them develop passions that they carried forward in college and beyond. I have contributed a few stories myself

“The adults in our community — in whatever capacity they serve — lead purposeful lives right here, as they care for our students.”

about the way Exeter teachers affected my life as a student. Fundamentally, the alumni stories included in Memorial Minutes show how Exeter faculty care for and about their students. We are moved by these stories, and we are inspired to do all we can to have similar impacts on the lives of our students today.

Teachers, of course, are not the only adults on our campus who influence our students in positive and profound ways. During my Senior year, my dormmates and I were told that Dunbar Hall would be closed midyear for renovation and that we would be distributed across several other dormitories. My group, headed for Peabody Hall, had just one question: “Who gets Mr. Johnson?” Mr. Johnson was our custodian, and it meant a lot to us when we learned that he would be working in Peabody with us.

For three years, Eddie Wilber handed me my gym clothes before every soccer, hockey and lacrosse practice, and he gave me my uniform on game days. Mr. Wilber knew my name and he knew my size. He made me feel good about myself, and good about being at Exeter. I think of him every time I see the plaque that bears his name by the equipment room in the gym.

Dr. Heyl stitched me up after I took a skate in the eye during my Lower year. To this day, I don’t understand how he managed to do that without leaving any visible evidence of a scar. It was a pretty serious injury, but he made me relax and feel as if everything was going to be OK. He did more than close the wound; he took all the worry out of the experience. He cared.

Alumni across all generations have similar stories to tell about adults who were important to them during their time at Exeter — teachers and other adults who touched their lives in important ways and who made them feel at home when far away from home.

Our school’s mission is to “unite goodness and knowledge and inspire youth from every quarter to lead purposeful lives.” The adults in our community — in whatever capacity they serve — lead purposeful lives right here, as they care for our students and prepare them to lead their own purposeful lives. New stories are created every year. It all starts with caring. — Bill Rawson ’71; P’08

Heard in Assembly Hall

Sound

bites from this winter’s speaker series

“I’m sure being at a school like this, you live with a lot of pretty intense parental expectations … . There is a way, if you’re smart and you’re disciplined about your time, to take your own dreams as seriously as you take your parents’ expectations. If you have something that’s burning inside of you, don’t let go of it.”

Gene Luen Yang Graphic novelist and author of Dragon Hoops, this year’s ninth-grade common read

“Wilderness is not just about the animals or the beauty or the adventure. It’s about what it teaches us, what it makes us realize. It offers us a way to reconnect with something real. There’s no cellphone service, no stores, little comfort or conveniences — it strips things down to the basics. When I’m out there, I remember who I am without all the distractions. With only myself to rely on, I rediscover my strength through my ability to endure.”

Tia Shoemaker Registered Alaska hunting guide, writer and conservation advocate

“Creativity is enhanced in teams, particularly teams with diverse ways of thinking. The more diversity and thinking you have in a team, the more ideas you generate and the more creative that team will be. You have to be impervious to the fear of being wrong. Those scientists that said, ‘You can’t do this; this is impossible’ — you have to keep that at bay.”

Michael Strano Professor in chemical engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

“We all have aspirations we’re chasing — whether it’s a dream, a goal, a career, or a role on a team — and in pursuit of those goals we’re all going to face challenges [and] obstacles. It’s inevitable. Unfortunately, those challenges can be a deterrence for pursuing our aspirations. It can stop us in our tracks, causing a fear of failure and/ or doubt. But we also have the choice to endure and commit the effort to chase that dream.”

Scott “Kidd” Poteet Retired lieutenant colonel and mission pilot in the United States Air Force; commercial astronaut and triathlete

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

Democracy Through Dialogue

Instructor in History Bill Jordan reflects on educating for civility

Exeter doesn’t have a required civics course, but for the past 20 years or so, I’ve been teaching one that comes close: HIS550:American Politics and Public Policy . So I’ve given some thought to what an American civics course should do.

The nuts and bolts of government and the U.S. Constitution are obviously essential to learn, and students should discuss contemporary policy issues. Some teachers think it’s more important to instill a passion for “social justice,” and to foster a sense of political efficacy and encourage civic engagement.

I’ve come to the conclusion that to prepare students for democratic citizenship at a time when Americans are splitting into antagonistic political tribes and mutually incomprehensible information bubbles, and credible commentators talk seriously about a coming civil war, it’s even more important to cultivate certain dispositions toward fellow citizens and the truth.

Over the years I’ve been influenced by others who have been asking the same question: teachers I met at the Exeter Humanities Institute, Harvard Professor Danielle Allen and her writings on citizenship, assembly speakers, a presenter at a National Association of Independent Schools conference and a number of “civic dialogue” organizations.

I read about one of these, Braver Angels, in a 2019 Atlantic article, “Can Marriage Counseling Save America.” Its mission statement, “The Braver Angels Way,” could hang comfortably above our Harkness tables. It reads:

• We state our views freely and fully, without fear.

• We treat people who disagree with us with honesty, dignity and respect.

• We welcome opportunities to engage those with whom we disagree.

• We believe all of us have blind spots and none of us are not worth talking to.

• We seek to disagree accurately, avoiding exaggeration and stereotypes.

• We look for common ground where it exists and, if possible, find ways to work together.

• We believe that, in disagreements, both sides share and learn.

• In Braver Angels, neither side is teaching the other or giving feedback on how to think or say things differently.

No one may be teaching, but everyone is learning. One of the priorities I adopted from that NAIS presenter for teaching citizenship is to cultivate the skill and inclination to practice “cognitive empathy,” understanding why other people think the way they do. That, combined with epistemic humility — appreciating our own intellectual limitations — leads to political curiosity, and the aha! moments for which Braver Angels leader (and Exeter assembly speaker) Mónica Guzmán named her 2022 book, I Never Thought of It That Way.

After I met Guzmán at a principal’s dinner in the fall of 2023, I decided to finally join Braver Angels and attend its June 2024 convention in Kenosha, Wisconsin. When I registered for the convention on the lovely lakeside campus of Carthage College, I was handed a name tag with a blue lanyard. Like all the civic dialogue groups, the 15,000 paying members of Braver Angels skew left — or blue in the Braver Angels argot. But unique to the Braver Angels, every convention, debate and workshop must be equally divided between blues and reds (righties), with a few (somehow unaligned or centrist) yellows mixed in.

Over the next three days I encountered the three Braver Angels approaches to conflict: dialogue, debate and communion. Most of my experience at the conference involved dialogue and communion.

This was the friendliest group of people. Guzmán’s political curiosity infused every interaction: We chatted across the lanyard line while waiting for a session to begin, while walking the paths between sessions and during meals in the dining hall. These encounters confirmed the argument of another depolarization outfit, that Americans on opposite sides of our great divide have “More in Common” than our differences. I even made some friends — yellow lanyards who write for conservative publications — that I’ve kept in touch with.

If all Americans could attend one of these conventions, we might not solve all of our problems, but we would stop hating each other.

I sat in on different kinds of Braver Angels debates, one in which “the point isn’t to win; it’s to understand the other side a little better”; and another in which the goal was to come up with a list of policy ideas both sides could agree on. The most momentous debate took place at a plenary session among all the convention goers to choose an issue to focus on in the coming year. Immigration won after a vigorous — but civil — discourse.

The only disappointing debate was the one between Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump, which happened on the first night of the convention. We gathered to watch in the assembly hall. It led all

750 attendees to agree on one emotion: dissatisfaction with the options our two major political parties were offering us.

Of course, there’s a selection bias that made this group unrepresentative of the American electorate. Not likely to attend: Twitter trolls and others who see the solution to America’s problems in defeating political “enemies,” not in finding common ground or reaching compromise with “rivals.” But they make up only 33 percent of us, according to a More in Common poll.

I agree with David Blankenhorn, Braver Angels’ founder and president, who said in his plenary address, “Democracy is government by talk, and when conversation ends, the only thing left to advance your argument is force.”

Maybe if every high school in the country would teach cognitive empathy, along with epistemic humility and other elements of “The Braver Angels Way,” we could produce a generation of citizens that might reverse the tide of polarization and save democracy.

Bill Jordan has been an instructor in history at Exeter since 1997. He has been adviser to The Exonian student newspaper, dorm head of Amen Hall and chair of the History Department. He has directed Exeter’s Washington Intern Program since 2020.

What is Braver Angels?

A nonprofit dedicated to political depolarization. Its mission is “bringing Americans together to bridge the partisan divide and strengthen our democratic republic.”

Recorder of the Ages

Robert Lutes ’73 remembers 20-plus years of writing the Class

News and Notes column

Possibly the best decision I have ever made, in my long affiliation with Exeter, was when I volunteered, during my 30th reunion, to become a class correspondent. That is, to gather the news and notes from my fellow 1973 classmates quarterly and write a column for The Exeter Bulletin. I had attended every one of my reunions since graduation, and I had always had an immensely good time, visiting with old friends, making new ones and spending time on the campus of the school I love dearly. So the opportunity to communicate with classmates more often seemed like a great idea. And I have never regretted it.

My co-correspondent in those early years was Sally Spoerl, who has been one of my best friends since

seventh grade, and more recently I have shared the duties with Robert Barnett, another close friend who was a fellow Abbot Hall hooligan.

Gathering news from classmates is not without its challenges. In my first few years as a correspondent, a number of classmates didn’t have email. Instead, the Academy provided stamped postcards to send to them. Somewhat tenuously attached to each postcard was a blank card, also stamped and affixed with my address label. Rather frequently the two cards became separated in the mail and the postal service would dutifully send the blank card back to me. When I received the first of these blank cards, I thought a classmate was sending it back anonymously, silently telling me, “This is what I think of your request for news.”

But I always hear back from a few classmates, sometimes quite a few, and receiving those messages is always a bit of a dopamine hit. Nowadays all the correspondence is through email, and the Alumni Office makes it easy by sending a blast email to the class, containing whatever begging, cajoling or threatening message we wish to use in order to solicit contributions from our friends.

The most common reason that classmates give

Robert Lutes ’73 at home in Pueblo, Colorado, with his vast collection of The Exeter Bulletin magazines. The oldest edition dates to October 1972.

me for not sending in news is the feeling that they have not done anything worth speaking about, compared with what others have done. One time I sent out my request for news, saying that they need not have won an Olympic medal or a Nobel Prize for their lives to be newsworthy. Then one of our classmates, Paul Romer, won a Nobel Prize. Now I have to say that Paul never wrote to tell me about the award, but I felt it was newsworthy enough to be included in the class notes. And I am sure that some classmates felt even more intimidated and became even less likely to send in their family news. But I am equally certain that Paul wanted to hear about his friends’ grandchildren and vacations just as much as they wanted to read about his Nobel Prize.

As we get older, I receive lots of news about children, grandchildren and travels. Hearing about these moments of pride and excitement provides me with a feeling of intimacy with classmates that I could not otherwise experience. Sometimes classmates reminisce about their time at Exeter, and those memories will take me back as well. Suddenly I’m that awkward teenager again, worrying about, in increasing order of importance, that English paper I still haven’t written, or the upcoming track meet, or why that one girl doesn’t like me back. (After all, I stood there, leaning against the wall of the Davis Student Center all evening, staring at her, so what more could she want from me?)

Only once did I find my work being censored. My classmate Susan had written about her sporty new car, which was faster than every other car around. Anticipating further midlife needs for excitement and inspired by a popular television show called “Pimp My Ride,” I speculated that soon she would be driving a “pimped-up truck,” before ending up riding a Harley as she approached old age. The Academy couldn’t abide such a suggestive term, and “pimped-up truck” became simply “pickup truck,” and the message I was trying to convey became somewhat deflated.

Exonians don’t just have amazing careers and wonderful families and do things that fascinate us. Sometimes they die. I wasn’t quite prepared for the emotional strain of reporting on a classmate’s death the first time. I was glad that I was not a class correspondent when my best friend died at a far-too-young age in the late 1980s. That was devastating, and I don’t know how I could have written about it.

But I have learned that death, however sad, is also an opportunity to celebrate life. Honoring people with little stories about their lives, from my memories or those of classmates who were closer to them, or from things I learned online, allows me to get past the sadness of their passing and appreciate all that they did, and all the lives that they touched, while they were still with us.

An unexpected benefit of being a class correspondent is being invited to the annual Alumni Council Weekend, which is now known as Exeter Leadership Weekend. Every fall, representatives of all the classes gather at Exeter for meetings, lectures and school activities, with the goals of updating us on new developments at the school and gleaning ideas for further improvements.

“One time I sent out my request for news, saying that they need not have won...a Nobel Prize for their lives to be newsworthy. Then one of our classmates, Paul Romer, won a Nobel Prize.”

Among the initiatives we have learned about over the years are improvements in diversity at Exeter, the concept of non sibi, increased importance of the arts at the school (so now the focus is on three A’s: academics, athletics and arts), and need-blind admissions (so financial concerns are never an obstacle to attending the Academy).

For me the highlight of the weekend is the Friday evening dinner with the senior class. These students are really what Exeter is all about, and they never fail to impress me with their enthusiasm for and love of the school. They always seem to be far more intelligent, mature and well-rounded than we ever were as students, and we alumni always come away from that dinner thinking that we would never be able to get into Exeter today. The students always want to know about our days at Exeter, and especially about the early days of coeducation.

Sometimes you really connect with a student. One year I was walking to the dinner in the gymnasium with two classmates, Sally and Kris. Walking toward us was a student with a big smile. We decided we wanted to sit with this happy young woman. She told us how much she loved Exeter and couldn’t imagine what it would be like to no longer be a student there.

I shared the story of my last few hours as a student. Graduation was over and my family had to leave right away. I stayed behind to say goodbye to friends. One by one they drove off with their parents, and after a few hours everyone was gone. The campus was eerily deserted. I took my stuff out of my room and piled it in front of Abbot Hall. And then it hit me. My time as an Exeter student was really over, and a wave of sadness, the profundity of which shocked me, overcame me. “Oh my,” the student said, “that’s exactly how I’m going to feel. I don’t know how I’m going to bear it!”

Being a class representative helps you to bear it. Hearing from classmates is sort of like being back at school with them. And rewriting their stories for the Class Notes enables me to appreciate their adventures. Visiting campus, I feel like a student again, but without the stress of exams or papers or broken hearts. Just the joy of seeing old friends, making new ones, visiting with students or attending an athletic event or a dance recital is a reminder of what an unbelievably special place Phillips Exeter Academy really is.

Robert Lutes ’73 has been a class correspondent since 2003. He holds a degree in art history from McGill, a master’s degree in public health from Harvard and a medical degree from the Medical University of South Carolina. He has worked in emergency medicine for the past 34 years.

Interested in becoming a class correspondent? Contact Cathy Webber at cmwebber@exeter.edu

Presence of the Past

Inside the classroom of Meg Foley, the Michael Ridder, class of 1958, distinguished professor in history

You would forgive Meg Foley if at some point during the next academic year she started her workday by walking to the northeast corner of the Academy Building — and into somebody else’s classroom. That kind of muscle memory develops from teaching in the same space for nearly two

and a half decades.

But in July, Foley will transition to a new role, dean of faculty, and away from her corner room with the views into two quads. “I’ve had the chance to switch rooms over time, but I’ve always stuck with this room because I love the classic features,” she says. “And I love the vantage point. As people are leaving the building,

especially after assembly, students or colleagues from other departments will pop in to chat. I’ll really miss that.”

Foley says she’ll also miss those moments of connection around the Harkness table, where — for 50 minutes each class — everything outside Room 030 fades away and meaningful discussion takes over. ●

↑

“That time of really deep attention that we all give to each other when we sit with the text and we talk about history, I feel like, ‘What could be more important?’ I’m very lucky to meet these kids at this moment in their life and this moment in time. They’re still coming to terms with what they value, and sometimes they might approach something ideologically and then a few weeks later it seems like they’ve changed their mind. It’s a time when they’re trying out a lot of different ideas, and I love to give them a chance to do that.”

→

“There are various tributes to my home state of Minnesota sprinkled around the room. I’ve got the ‘Purple Rain’ cover of The New Yorker from when Prince died, the Minnesota Twins Homer Hanky and Boundary Waters prayer flags.”

→

“These maps are so old; this one is from 1954. The country borders have changed, of course, but when you’re teaching history, that can be useful! They’re so fragile, I’m always worried that they’re going to rip.”

→

“I like to have a few little toys out that kids will sometimes play with or just hold while they’re talking or at the table. I started the course Why Are Poor Nations Poor? and a student who lived in Bangladesh came back from winter break and brought me this tiny rickshaw. She told me all about the marketplace where she bought it and the artisan who had made and sold it to her. So much of her story aligned with themes in the course.”

→

“These are document readers for two courses, one from 1998 and one from this year. With our teaching, there’s kind of a lineage to it. You start by working with somebody off of their syllabus and then you make changes and adjustments and slowly it becomes your own. Or maybe you make a radical break and it becomes your own suddenly. Then someone else starts teaching the course and you share your syllabus with them and they make their additions and you add some of their additions to your own. When you look back at these readers, you can see that lineage.”

THE TABLE / INSIDE THE WRITING LIFE

Public Service

A conversation with statesman, educator and attorney Thomas Ehrlich ’52

Thomas Ehrlich ’52 has served in the administrations of six U.S. presidents — including as the first president of the Legal Services Corporation and the first director of the International Development Cooperation Agency, reporting directly to President Jimmy Carter. He was also dean of Stanford Law School, provost of the University of Pennsylvania and president of Indiana University.

He has authored, co-authored or edited 15 nonfiction books, written two novels and is finishing a third, Jewels

We spoke with Ehrlich, 91, about his memoir, Learn, Lead, Serve: A Civic Life, released in December.

You talk about mentorship throughout the book. Is there one mentor who had the largest impact on you?

My father. We were as close as father and son could

be — we skied together, played together, read novels together. I can still remember reading The Once and Future King with him. He was always there, always supporting me and a model of what a father, a husband and a caring civic person should be. Other mentors have had a shaping influence on my life including Judge Learned Hand, for whom I was a law clerk, and Under Secretary of State George W. Ball, for whom I was a special assistant during the escalation of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

You tell a story about your grandmother giving you a biography of Louis Brandeis, an attorney and associate justice of the Supreme Court. Did that shape your decision to use your abilities for the public good?

Yes, I still have that blue-bound copy of that biography. Brandeis was a great public servant in the best sense. And service was an important part of Exeter for me as well. In my memoir, I call Exeter my ‘best education’, and that’s not hyperbole. Harvard and Harvard Law School were wonderful, but Exeter and the dedication of the teachers 24/7 to their students, of whom I was privileged to be one, was just amazing and transformative for me. Non sibi was at the core, and that really shaped me — it shaped my sense of who I am, how I want to relate to the world around me. I think of the times when I have had the good fortune to be involved in public service, and I really owe much of that to Exeter. This is what Exeter expected of us as students — to think not just about ourselves, alone — and that’s just the way you behaved. When you learn that and behave that way, or try to at least, as an adolescent, it’s built into your character as you grow up and grow older.

It seems like Exeter shaped you emotionally, as well as intellectually.

It did very much, yes. Intellectually, it certainly did in history and in English. We wrote a lot and I’m still writing now. I’m 91 years old, and here I am, writing away, working on my third novel. Exeter is where I learned to read and write, to write and enjoy.

For your Harvard thesis, you researched a survey of family farmers that was done by the Department of Agriculture. You say it was an early awakening for you to the importance of public policy shaped by public opinion. How does it frame the way you look at what’s happening in our country today?

I’m deeply disturbed by what’s happening now. The Trump administration’s assault on our democracy is terrifying. I taught for many years a course called “Democracy in Crisis” at Stanford, so I’m familiar with past crises. And of course, we did have a civil war. This is not a civil war, but I am devastated by seeing what’s happening in terms of an elected president seeking to destroy much of the social fabric of our country, as well as its leadership in the world. Since I oversaw the Agency for International Development, its destruction is a particular blow to me. Millions of people are dying because of that action.

“It’s important not just to serve in a community kitchen, but to ask: ‘What public policy changes are needed so that community kitchens are no longer necessary?’”

Do you see a future way of managing our way out of this?

I have hope. I quote one of my professors, Sam Huntington at Harvard, who wrote a terrific book American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony. He ends by saying, “Critics say that America is a lie because its reality falls so far short of its ideal. They are wrong. America is not a lie; it is a disappointment. But it can be a disappointment only because it is also a hope.” I have hope. I believe we will have a pendulum that swings back toward the middle, that those in Congress will say, “We’ve got to stand up and stop what’s happening.” But the carnage that’s happening — America’s place in the world will never be the same.

In your many roles in six administrations, was there one in particular that has stayed with you? Well, they all stay with me. But the one that shaped me most was the Legal Services Corporation, because when I became dean at Stanford Law School, I had no real idea that 40-plus million poor people had no access to justice. It concerned me, which is why I thought, “If I can have a chance to do something about that, I want to do it.” I spent three-plus years listening to poor people all over the country, hearing their stories of how a crisis would happen if they didn’t get a Social Security check or got evicted, and how important it was to have a lawyer, and what a difference that person could make by listening and devoting their lives to helping poor people. That also shaped my approach to others less fortunate and my character.

You’ve become particularly focused on instilling young people with awareness around community service, public service and civic learning. Do you think that that’s our most hopeful way forward?

I do. I think it’s essential. That has been my passion since the mid-’80s when I was at the University of Pennsylvania, but it’s certainly increased in that the only significant organizations outside of the universities that I’ve helped to run are ones dedicated to preparing college students to be actively, responsibly engaged in public policy and politics. If we don’t do a better job of that, we’re going to suffer more. It’s important not just to serve in a community kitchen, but to ask: “What public policy changes are needed so that community kitchens are no longer necessary?”

— Daneet Steffens ’82 is a books-focused journalist. She has contributed to The Exeter Bulletin since 2013.

Learn, Lead, Serve: A Civic Life, by Thomas Ehrlich ’52.

AROUND THE TABLE / WORKS

Exonians in Review

The latest publications, recordings and films by Exeter alumni and faculty

The Etruscans and the Jews: New Orleans Echoes, Sardinian Shadows, Roman Shame

Peter M. Wolf ’53 Xlibris, 2025

“Postmortem Neuropathology in Early Huntington Disease,” article

John Hedreen ’56 with Sabina Berretta and Charles L White III Journal of Neuropathology and Experimental Neurology, Volume 83, March 2024

The Helper’s Apprentice: The Jackson Skye Mysteries

Carl Pickhardt ’57 WP Lighthouse, 2024

Breath Lines: How Poems Work and Why They Matter

Jan Schreiber ’59 LSU Press, 2025

Winter Light: On Late Life’s Radiance

Douglas J. Penick ’62 Punctum Books, 2025

The Wind in the Trees

Gordie Chase ’66

Self-published, 2025

Diversity Dysfunction: The DEI Threat to National Security Intelligence

John A. Gentry ’68 Academica Press, 2024

Long Short Fiction Truth

Tony Seton ’68

Self-published, 2024

Wallace Stegner: Dean of Western Writers

Alex Beam ’71

Signature Books, 2025

Racquets & Rivalries: Tales and Profiles from 100 Years of New York City Squash

Rob Dinerman ’72

Self-published, 2024

“What Should Health Professions Students Learn About Data Bias?,” article

Douglas Shenson ’73 with Beverley J. Sheares and Chelesa Fearce

AMA Journal of Ethics, Volume 27, January 2025

The Silenced

Mer Boel ’74 and Lucy Pantaleoni Bernier ’74

Self-published, 2024

Grandpa Used to Drive Big Trucks

Martha Nance ’76 with Steve Witebsky Wise Ink Creative Publishing, 2024

“A Closer Look at the Russell Paradox,” article

Flash (Kenneth J.)

Sheridan ’78

Logique et Analyse, Volume 262, 2023

“Parallel Line,” art exhibition

Ralston Fox Smith ’83, painter

Upstairs Artspace, Tryon, North Carolina, March 16 to April 25, 2025

I Commissioned Some Wooden Luggage: and other poems

Nicholas Benson ’84 Agincourt Press, 2024

Murder in Rockport Massachusetts: Terror in a Small Town

Rob Fitzgibbon ’86 with Wayne Soini

The History Press, 2025

Betting on Good: A Novel Wendy Francis (Holt) ’86 Lake Union Publishing, 2025

Penitence: A Novel Kristin Koval ’88 Celadon Books, 2025

La Motte-Feuilly: Un château de familles en Berry; Son histoire, son architecture & ses secrets Christophe Charlier ’90 with Marie-Pierre Terrien Simarre, 2024

Against the Grain: Mass Timber in the Home

William Richards ’00 Schiffer, 2024

“North American Red Fox Rabies Immunity Gene Drive for Safer (sub)urban Rewilding,” paper

Vixey Foxwish Douglas ’11  Rio Journal, 2024

Space to Grow: Unlocking the Final Economic Frontier

Brendan Rosseau ’15 with Matthew Weinzierl Harvard Business Review Press, 2025

FACULTY

“Jus Post Bellum and the Moral Imperatives of Reconstruction,” chapter in Teaching Emancipation and Reconstruction, 1861-1876

Kent A. McConnell, Instructor in History

Peter Lang, 2024

Submit your work

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

Student Club Meeting

What Daniel Connelly ’25 learned from a member of the Wampanoag nation

Walking into the Office of Multicultural Affairs on the ground floor of Jeremiah Smith Hall, my senses were immediately delighted by the smell of sweetgrass and delicious Three Sisters Soup and cornbread provided by the dining hall. Images of Maciah Stasis tattooing a woman’s face and of gorgeous works of white and purple quahog shell jewelry were projected on a TV screen.

The Indigenous Reconciliation Club (IRC) and OMA had invited Stasis, a Herring Pond Wampanoag wampum worker, tattooist, regalia maker, storyteller and singer-dancer to campus to give two workshops and celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day. She was seated at the head of the Harkness table and engaged in deep discussion. As co-head of the IRC, it filled me with joy to see faculty and students packed around the table to learn from Stasis.

She began by telling us a bit about herself. We learned that she is a citizen of the Herring Pond Wampanoag tribe, and was born in the land of her ancestors, Plymouth, Massachusetts, where she graduated from Plymouth North High School. Since the age of 15, she has been educating others about her people, delivering keynote addresses at a number of museums and other Indigenous events throughout the U.S. and Canada. Interestingly, she had just returned from a traditional tattooing conference in Canada, where she learned from Inuit tattooists, whose tattooing customs have remained more intact than those of Northeastern Indigenous nations in the U.S.

She shared many details about her work as a wampum jeweler. The quahog clam used to make wampum is endemic to the waters around the Wamapanoag’s land and is believed to be a gift to the Wampanoag as it existed nowhere else. Wampum was greatly valued by Northeastern tribes, and the Wampanoag traded it with surrounding tribes such as the Haudenosaunee, who used it to create treaty belts, among other items. In addition to a form of currency, wampum was and is made into jewelry. Stasis said the work is laborious but worth it. Her pieces include rings, necklaces, bracelets and carvings of wildlife. But, she warned, the dust shed by quahog shells is toxic and has been known to kill ill-prepared artisans.

Stasis then spoke on quillwork, a rare and complicated form of art that uses the quills of porcupines.

Quillwork predates beadwork and is used to ornament regalia in much the same way. It is painstaking: Make one mistake and you have to start over, even after multiple hours, or days, of work.

Last, she spoke about her story and process as an Indigenous poke tattooist. She said that tattooing is practiced around the world, and the most common and ancient form is stick-and-poke. This refers to using a sharp needle, or thorn, to insert pigment such as soot into the skin. The method was used across the continent, including in the Wampanoag Nation. Although the custom varied from nation to nation, tattoos generally marked events like childbirth, ages, deaths and accomplishments. But this practice has been suppressed and vilified throughout the history of our country; as a result, few Indigenous cultures continue to practice traditional tattooing.

I learned that Stasis, who has tattooed herself and others for a variety of reasons, is truly a trailblazer in revitalizing this important cultural custom. She says the process is extremely intimate and exhausting, and emphasizes the importance of the environment, the energy and the tattooist during the procedure.

By the end, all of us around the table were brimming with questions, which Stasis answered. She gave each of the attendees a small satchel that contained part of a quahog shell, cedar, deer sinew and sweetgrass, each of which provides protections and properties, she said. I left with a wealth of knowledge and a deep sense of gratitude. This was a truly transformative and mind-expanding event unlike any other I’ve attended in my time at Exeter, and I am extremely grateful for the knowledge Stasis shared, and the space she created in OMA that day.

Daniel Connelly ’25 is a proctor in the Office of Multicultural Affairs and co-head of the Academy’s Indigenous Reconciliation Club.

Daniel Connelly ’25 holds a shelf mushroom.

The Indigenous Reconciliation Club’s spring book club selection is Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants, by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

ALL ABOOOOOOARD!

Did you ever take the train to or from school? Do you have a fond (or funny) memory of a day trip to Boston?

Left my cellphone on the train on the way to school. Thankfully the lovely folks found it and I was able to get it back! Haha, my mom was gunna kill me.

Catherine Shipps ’13

Probably apocryphal, but my dad told a story about [famed blues singer] Lead Belly coming to perform at Exeter, and when the teacher who invited him walked Lead Belly to the station, he hopped a freight train out of town.

Patrick Cahn ’88

Lead Belly did perform at Exeter in the fall or winter of 1948-49. I heard him. Of interest is the fact that the program in the arts series which preceded his by a few weeks was an organ recital by the world-famous Marcel Dupré on the Aeolian-Skinner organ in Phillips Church.

Hoyt Winslett ’52

In the fall of 1963, I took the train so I could go to a doctor’s appointment in Boston. I was 13 at the time. I think the train went to

Do

You Remember?

North Station. I took a cab to Children’s Hospital from there. I don’t remember telling anyone about my trip.

Nicholas Volkman ’67

My dad took the train from Florida to Exeter as a student in the late ’40s.

Alexis Mead Walker

— All responses originally posted on social media

From the Editor

Exonians have been riding the rails ever since passenger train service arrived in Exeter in the 1880s. For the first half of the 20th century, a student could board the State of Maine Express at New York’s Penn Station at 9 p.m. and arrive at the Exeter train station at 4:52 the next morning — well before morning “chapel.”

These days, Amtrak’s Downeaster stops in town 10 times daily on its runs between Brunswick, Maine, and Boston’s North Station.

This photo of the Exeter train station was taken by David Nimick ’42 on May 16, 1942. As for why the train station was so crowded the day Nimick snapped this photo, we believe current upper Shay Kashif ’26 nailed it when he guessed “maybe something to do with the gasoline rationing put into place the previous day?”

On May 15, 1942, the federal government ordered gas to be rationed across 17 states in the eastern U.S. in support of American armed forces fighting World War II. This most likely explains the crowd.●

The Hill Bridge has spanned the Exeter River for a century. It’s a beloved landmark — and has also seen its share of mischief through the years. Have a memory to share? Don’t worry, alumni. We’re pretty sure the statute of limitations has expired. Email your reminiscences to bulletin@exeter.edu/. Responses will be published in the next issue of the Bulletin

The Exeter train station on May 16, 1942. Photograph by David Nimick ’42.

The Academy

The site-specific installation features abstract acrylic

Exhibition Visiting artist transforms Lamont Gallery into a conservatory. P. 25

flowers.

THE ACADEMY / RETIREMENT

The Final Quarter

Jay Tilton retires from coaching Exeter boys basketball after 23 years

The 2012-13 Exeter boys basketball team was riding high when it returned from the holiday break. The team was 7-0 as it prepared for a game at Kimball Union to tip off the second half of the season.

“Sure enough, we got our brains beat in and we were brought back down to earth,” Harry Rafferty ’13 recalls. “The loss reminded us that we were a special group, but we still had to get off the bus and compete. We had to hold true to the principles our coach had laid out for us.”

In case anyone had forgotten one of those principles, coach Jay Tilton had T-shirts printed to remind them: HUMBLE PIE. EAT IT.

“It was not a fancy font or anything like that,” Rafferty says, laughing. “True to Jay form, it was black font on a white shirt; as basic as it gets.”

Exeter didn’t lose another game the rest of the season, going 25-1 and capturing the first NEPSAC Class A title in program history. The Big Red went on to win four more

titles during Tilton’s tenure as coach.

But his 210-96 career record and seven championship game appearances are just part of the legacy he leaves behind as he retires from coaching to become regional director of major gifts in the school’s Office of Institutional Advancement.

“Coach T could always see the bigger picture,” Emmett Shell ’18 says. “He left a lot of us with life lessons that have been invaluable. He got me to see a way of approaching not just basketball, but life with a little more toughness, a little more consistency, and a little more energy, which I think can make all the difference.”

Tilton began leading the program in 2009 after nine seasons as an assistant coach under Malcolm Wesselink. Tilton’s father, Mark, coached for 21 years at New Hampton School, where the basketball court is named in his honor. “I grew up watching the modeling of coaches and student-athletes, so that has always been in my blood,” says Tilton, 56, who was born in Berlin, New Hampshire, and spent four years as an assistant at Dartmouth College.

“Life lessons were taught through athletics, and my greatest mentors in my life were coaches, but they were also educators.”

When Tilton was considering the move to Exeter, his peers told him he couldn’t win there because of the Academy’s academic standards. He took that as a challenge — one he passed on to his team.

“Coach T was really good at making sure everyone was producing and contributing at their highest capacity,” says Shell, who was a co-captain his senior year. “He pushed me in ways that I never thought I could be pushed.”

Tilton describes himself as an emotional coach, but Rafferty says that emotion never turned negative. “He has this Ted Lasso-like sensibility or optimism that makes guys really want to play for him,” Rafferty says. “Aside from him being a great coach, he’s genuine and he has every one of his players’ backs, long after they played for him.”

Tilton began pondering retirement a couple of years ago. He felt he had accomplished all he could, and he wanted to spend more time with his wife, Darcy, and his son, Cameron. They had sacrificed so much, he says, because of the demands of coaching. When Rafferty joined his staff as an assistant coach this season, a succession plan was in place.

“I knew I was on the back nine,” Tilton says. “I just wasn’t sure if I was on 16, 17 or 18. When Harry told me was getting out of the college coaching world and coming back to the area, I was like: ‘Wow. What are the odds this is happening right now?’

“Harry Rafferty was the best teammate I’ve ever coached because he really understood people, he is an exceptional motivator and, of course, he really knows how to coach. The program will be in good hands.”

Before the team boarded the bus to head to the 2025 NEPSAC title game in March, Tilton spent a quiet and poignant moment in the gym. It took him back to the 2012-13 season when, just before his team claimed its first title and altered the trajectory of the program, he sat in the gym by himself and thought, “We’ve arrived.”

“This time around, I knew it was going to be my last bus ride with the team,” he says. “It was an emotional moment because it was a reflection of everybody that’s been through that journey with me. I remember the big wins and the trophies, but the highs and lows that you share with a group of young men who are committed to working together — whether you achieved or you fell just short — those are the things that I will remember the most. I feel so incredibly grateful to have had those moments with these young men, these Exonians.” —Craig Morgan

Big Red basketball won five NEPSAC Class A titles under the leadership of coach Jay Tilton.

Girls Wrestling

Female athletes take the mat in growing numbers

This season Big Red wrestling’s roster featured 10 girls, the most in the history of the program. A traditionally male-dominated sport, wrestling at Exeter is rapidly growing into a competitive arena for female athletes — a trend that’s happening around the country. The National Federation of State High School Associations reports that girls wrestling has experienced significant growth in participation, increasing 102% since 2021.

“There are multiple teams with double-digit numbers of girls on their roster this year,” says head wrestling coach Justin Muchnick. “There are girls divisions at both the league and New England tournaments, as well as several girls-only invitationals throughout the season.”

The rise of girls wrestling can be attributed in part to top-down efforts. The inclusion of women’s wrestling in the Olympics in 2004, the expansion of women’s college programs and the NCAA’s decision to recognize women’s wrestling as an official championship sport in 2025–26 have provided clear pathways for female athletes to compete at higher levels.

“In the world of New England prep

schools, a lot of this has been driven from the bottom up, by individual coaches and programs committing to girls wrestling,”

Muchnick says. “You have to give a ton of credit to Andover for being the prime mover here: Kassie Bateman and Rich Gorham have spent a decade-plus making this vision a reality. But at this point there are quite a few other programs — Choate, St. Paul’s, Hyde, Northfield Mount Hermon and now us — that have made girls wrestling a priority.”

Exeter ranks in the top third of NEPSAC wrestling programs in terms of girls participation. The focus moving forward is on retention, recruitment and building a team capable of filling all 12 weight classes.

“I really want to use our current momentum to add as many girls as we can to our program!” Muchnick says. “Beyond competition, the growth of girls wrestling is reshaping the culture of the sport itself. The camaraderie among female wrestlers, even between competitors from different schools, is setting a new standard. As girls wrestling continues to flourish, it is clear that the sport is becoming stronger, more inclusive and more dynamic than ever before.” —Brian Muldoon

Evolution of a Super Fan

Tripp Whitbeck ’99 on his journey from Big Red booster to the Mayor of Natstown

I’ve always been someone who likes to support my place. Pride of place is something that’s important to me, and it’s something that was catalyzed at Exeter.

1998

Here I am at Exeter/Andover my senior year. We won! Prior to the weekend, they were passing out tubes of red paint. I certainly took full advantage of that. I didn’t really go to a lot of games as a kid so the ability to be a fan on the front lines — no matter how the team was doing — was something I quickly embraced.

CIRCA 2000

I became Lord Jeff, former mascot of Amherst College. The president of the college came up to me at the homecoming football game my freshman fall and said they hadn’t had a mascot in 10 years. He asked me, “Would you do it?” I said, “Of course!” That was my main extracurricular activity for the next four years.

2019

I grew up a Mets fan, but when I moved to the D.C. area, I got season tickets to the Washington Nationals. We were a horrible team and I was one of the only fans there on many nights. The beer vendors nicknamed me the Mayor of Natstown. When the beer vendors give you a nickname, you kind of go with it.

Tripp Whitbeck ’99 is the founder of I Bourbon, an independently labeled straight bourbon whiskey brand bottled in Bardsville, Kentucky.

Exeter ranks in the top third of NEPSAC wrestling programs in terms of girls participation.

The Secret Societies

Fraternities once stirred intrigue and controversy on campus

Skulls, crossed bones, swords and smoke — these are just some of the iconic symbols that represented Exeter’s early secret societies, or fraternities. Their origins trace back to 1818, when the Golden Branch Literary Society emerged as a secret organization. The first fraternity, Pi Kappa Delta, was started about 1870, but not until the 1890s did a growing number of these groups begin to stir intrigue, mystery and controversy.

As a 1935 article in The Exonian described, the secret societies distressed some faculty and the administration: “They openly opposed faculty authority. The initiations were held late at night, and in some cases, all night, and the candidates were injured both mentally and physically, so that their class work began to drop.”

The initiation ceremonies, as chronicled in the article, were both eerie and humiliating. One society, for instance, took initiates to an old burial vault lit only by candles. Other societies, it recounted, were notorious for their physical tests, including branding candidates with a cigar and requiring candidates to appear in “fantastic and almost no clothes at classes, sell peanuts to the faculty and townspeople, and make speeches from a soap box at what is now the town bandstand.”

The growing tensions between the societies and the administration culminated in 1891, when Principal Charles E. Fish explicitly banned their existence and forbade students from participating in them. Enforcing those rules proved none too easy and the effort to root out fraternities ultimately failed.

In 1896 Principal Harlan Page Amen took a different approach. He granted official sanction to the fraternities with increased faculty supervision. This was a turning point, marking the beginning of a more controlled and formalized era for the organizations. At the time, there were six fraternities, each of which rented rooms in various homes near the Academy.

In 1908, Exeter established the Interfraternity Council, which brought all the fraternities under a centralized governing body — a move intended to further bring order and oversight to the secret societies.

But by the mid-20th century, the face of Exeter had changed. In June 1942, the Committee on Fraternities recommended the abolition of all fraternities, citing two key reasons. First, the school’s updated environment — with all students living and eating in dormitories — created a new social dynamic that diminished the need for secret societies. Close friendships could be formed more naturally, without the artificial divisions created by fraternities, they argued. Extracurricular groups that were more inclusive and diverse in purpose had also begun to take on the social roles that fraternities had once held.

Second, the committee took issue with the undemocratic nature of fraternities. “They segregate school leaders, foster snobbishness, and divide rather than unite the school,” the committee wrote. “In a nation and a school that champion democracy, it is not appropriate to condone such undemocratic institutions.”

The recommendation to formally abolish fraternities was passed by a vote of the faculty, signaling the end of an era.●

The Academy archives hold many pieces of ephemera related to the secret societies, including meeting notes, letters, banquet menus and books featuring iconography (shown above), rituals and membership ranks.

National Medal of Science

Emery N. Brown ’74 lauded as innovative neuroscientist, statistician and anesthesiologist

Dr. Emery N. Brown ’74 received the National Medal of Science, the nation’s highest honor for achievement in science and engineering, for his work studying anesthesia’s effect on the brain. The award was presented at a White House ceremony in January.

Brown is a professor in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, a member of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, a professor of anesthesia at Harvard Medical School and an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital.

“Brown is at the forefront of the Institute’s collaborations among neuroscience, medicine and patient care,” says Nergis Mavalvala, dean of MIT’s School of Science. “His research has shifted the paradigm for brain monitoring during

general anesthesia for surgery.”

Over the last 20 years, Brown has focused much of his signal-processing research to studying the neurophysiology of how anesthesia acts in the brain. His goal is to improve anesthesiology patient care and to use his understanding of how anesthesia works to gain a deeper understanding of brain function and to improve brain health.

“I’m extremely excited and quite honored to receive such an award because it is one of the pinnacles of recognition in the scientific field in the United States,” says Brown, who shares this year’s honor with 23 colleagues around the country. ●

Presidential Award for Excellence

Science Instructor John Blackwell recognized as outstanding educator

John Blackwell, a longtime instructor in science, has been honored by the Presidential Awards for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching. The program recognizes outstanding educators from across the country who teach science, technology, engineering or mathematics in elementary or secondary school. Thousands of top teachers have been recognized since the program was established by Congress in 1983, including Emeritus Instructor Richard Brown in 1989.

Each awardee received $10,000 from the National Science Foundation and a certificate signed by President Joe Biden.

Blackwell has taught astronomy and physics at Exeter since 2004. As the

school’s Grainger Observatory director, he manages the curriculum and instrument needs of the astronomy program, in addition to teaching four classes per term. His recent projects include working with Exeter students and the University of New Hampshire in the design and implementation of magnetometers to study minute changes in the Earth’s magnetic field due to solar activity.

“Through my own learning, I am able to improve the learning of my students and mentees,” he says. “This process is continual; the more I learn, the more my students have access to, and the more engaged and informed they will be about the sciences. Receiving this award is truly an honor.” ●

“His research has shifted the paradigm for brain monitoring during general anesthesia for surgery.”

“The more I learn, the more my students have access to, and the more engaged and informed they will be.”

Emery N. Brown ’74

Read more about Brown’s life and work by scanning this QR code.

FACULTY NEWS

Instructor in Science John Blackwell

Spring Break, World Edition

Students expand their horizons and perspectives on travel trips

All told, 85 students plus faculty members traveled together over March break to learn and grow.

One group explored Andean culture in the Secret Valley of Peru while another headed to the nation’s capital to learn about programs that address poverty, food access, housing and homelessness. In Alabama, a group studied civil rights, justice and the ongoing legacy of slavery. Latin and Greek students visited the ancient cities, temples, amphitheaters

Travel Trip Destinations

Washington, D.C.

Montgomery, Alabama

Northern Italy

Sicily and Campania

Machu Picchu, Peru

and markets of Sicily and Campania where the primary Latin and ancient Greek authors they study lived or worked.

But the most vocal group of Exonians of them all was the Concert Choir. Music Instructor Kris Johnson and 39 students made a weeklong trek through Northern Italy. Stopping in San Gimignano, Florence, Verona, Mantua and Venice, the group performed in stunning venues along the way — all while exploring both historic and contemporary Italian art, cuisine and culture. ●

Overheard on Instagram

@pea_choir_italy

“Today was action packed! Starting off with a viewing of the David and other masterworks, then moving over to Mantua to see the church in the palace of the duke where Monteverdi worked for over 20 years, then a tour of the palace itself, ending in the room he composed in. We sang in both the church and his workroom, and it was magical.”

To hear the choir singing in Italy scan this QR code.

The Exeter Concert Choir performing in Italy’s Duomo di Santa Maria Assunta in San Gimignano.

Identity and Reality

Artist Jeffrey Songco’s work reflects his personal and cultural origin story

If we could peek inside someone’s mind, what would we see?

Jeffrey Augustine Songco gives us a glimpse. His immersive work Society of 23’s Conservatory, which recently concluded a two-month run at Lamont Gallery, offers a tangible stream of consciousness for visitors to ponder. It is a conservatory in the greenhouse sense, replete with living foliage, but the plants are only one element of a multisensory installment that explores Songco’s complicated relationship between his identity as an American of Filipino ethnicity and U.S. colonization of the Philippines for a half-century.

The Society of 23 comprises a fictional brotherhood of 23 mysterious gentlemen, all portrayed by the artist — a play on Songco’s days in a fraternity as an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon University.

The installment was host to several

PEA visiting classes and served as one of the workshops in the Academy’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day programming.

Songco says: “My artwork is a celebration of life. I work with a variety of media including large-scale installation, self-portrait photography, sculpture and video. My practice is rooted in a considered set of conceptual parameters that guide my thought and labor towards the final outcome of my autobiographical artwork. I share my reflections on how my mind and body are shaped by the identities and realities I have inherited and constructed myself. This dense layering of things reveals the forest of ideas I navigate and the conflicts I continue to resolve. Each of my artworks relate to one another in particular ways and evolve in their meaning as I continue to create the grand nonlinear narrative of my life.” ●

(Above) Acrylic flower sculptures in artist Jeffrey Augustine Songco's installation (Below) Songco in the Lamont Gallery

Immersive Theater

Behind the scenes of the winter term musical

“NEW ENGLAND WINTERS are tough,” says Lauren Josef, chair of the Theater and Dance Department. “We need joy. We need weird.”

Exeter’s performance of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee brought all that and more to The David E. and Stacey L. Goel Center for Theater and Dance. The fast-paced and riotous musical featured six “middle schoolers” and audience participants who spelled their way through vexing vocabulary while sharing hilarious and poignant personal stories.

“I think one of the reasons this show has felt so special is because early on we said, ‘This is not going to be a traditional show,’ ” says Josef, the production’s director. “We told the students: ‘You’re going to be interacting with the audience. You might be throwing things. You’re going to be in character preshow and bringing everybody into this environment.”

Delivering such an immersive experience took creativity and collaboration. Here’s a behindthe-scenes look at the way the show took shape.

SETTING THE SCENE

Instructor in Theater and Dance Anthony Reed, the show’s technician, set designer and lighting designer, created an immersive environment outside and inside the Goel Center’s mainstage theater. “The phrase that we were working off of was ‘absurdity that looks like reality,’ ” he says. “Everything is just a little bit cartoonish, almost like a long-form SNL skit.” Reed designed the set to look like a middle school gym with lighting fixtures, a basketball court, even a Lost and Found bin. He also created the Screamin’ Squirrels mascot for the fictional school.

AUDIENCE IMMERSION

Some attendees were seated onstage (on bleachers hauled in from Hatch Field) and called to participate in the spelling bee. Student performers walked through the theater seating area, breaking the “fourth wall.”

CREW WARDROBE

Working with Instructor in Art Heather Hernon, Reed designed and screen-printed T-shirts for the crew.

STAGE

To make the stage look like a basketball court, Reed built a center circle that extended into the audience. He also hand-painted the floor to resemble hardwood. Visiting alumna Emma Aldrich Jordan ’17 pitched in to help. As a student, Jordan was a stage manager. She is now a scenic painter and props artisan.

MUSIC

With audience seating in the orchestra pit, Instructor in Music Kristofer Johnson and six musicians performed on stage. Computer monitors streamed live video of Johnson’s conducting so the actors could follow his direction. “The characters needed to be able to know when to sing or when to stop,” Reed says.

SOUND

“Each student actor has a body mic, so there are 22 mics,” Josef says. “ We have one student [Audrey Dent ’25] who is mixing. Audrey has to listen carefully. If

80 hours to paint a gym floor onstage

46 cast and crew members

22 body microphones

200 lighting cues

90 minutes running time

Faux hardwood helps transform the stage into a court.

Student actors interact with the live audience.

Custom T-shirts feature the fictional school’s mascot.

one student is being especially quiet during a scene or especially loud, she is live-mixing that. And then we have another sound person backstage, Angelina Wang ’27. If something malfunctions, if we need to fix a microphone, she fixes that.”

APPLIED SCIENCE

“A lot of the work that we do relies on computer science, on physics and these different technologies that students are learning about in the classroom,” Reed says. “In theater tech, they get to see how the light at a different angle is going to cast a pool of light on the stage and how big that pool will be. These are real-life applications for a lot of things they are learning.”

LIGHTING

Light operator Jiayu Wang ’25 was tasked with about 200 lighting cues: visual indicators to the performers that specific actions are supposed to happen at precise times. During the performance, actors rely on prompts to hit their marks and keep the show running smoothly. “So much of the storytelling in this show relies on lights,” Josef says. “Tony has a really stark difference between what the lighting looks like when you’re in the real world and in the character’s mind.” ●

Tech crew control light and sound from the booth.

Instructors in Theater Lauren Josef and Anthony Reed

Winter Highlights

→ BOYS BASKETBALL

Second in New England Class A Record: 20-4

Head Coach: Jay Tilton

Assistant Coaches: Rick Brault, Harry Rafferty, Phil Rowe

Captains: Max Albinson ’25, Tyler Bike ’25, Ryder Frost ’25

MVPs: Tyler Bike ’25, Ryder Frost ’25

↑ GIRLS BASKETBALL

Record: 5-16

Head Coach: Katie Brule

Assistant Coaches: Mireya Boutin, Kerry McBrearty

MVP: Ava Bryan ’25

← BOYS HOCKEY

Record: 13-15-1

Head Coach: Peter Ferriero

Assistant Coaches: Brandon Hew, Tim Mitropoulos ’10

Captains: Will Cavanagh ’25, Dryden Dervish ’25, Cam Fiasconaro ’26, Luke Zucker ’26

MVP: Will Cavanagh ’25

↓ GIRLS HOCKEY

Record: 14-9-2

Head Coach: Sally Komarek

Assistant Coaches: Adam Loyd, Jim Tufts

Captains: Allie Bell ’25, Grace Benson ’25, Maria Gray ’26

MVP: Allie Bell ’25

→

BOYS SQUASH

Record: 11-9

Head Coach: Bruce Shang

Assistant Coach: Paul Langford

Captains: Max Liu ’26, Bryan Huang ’25

MVP: Evan Chen ’28

→

GIRLS SQUASH

Record: 7-7

Head Coach: Lovey Oliff

Assistant Coach: Mercy Carbonell

Captains: Erin Chen ’25, Aria Suchak ’25, Paloma Sze ’25

MVP: Mathilde Senter ’26

←

BOYS SWIMMING & DIVING Record: 8-1

2nd place in New England

New England Diving Champion (Nick Limoli ’26)

Head Swimming Coach: Don Mills

Assistant Swimming Coaches: Nicole Benson, Meg Blitzshaw, Kate D’Ambrosio

Head Diving Coach: Julie Van Wright

Assistant Diving Coach: Steve Altieri

Captains: Ethan Guo ’25, Winston Wang ’25, Nick Limoli ’26

Swim MVP: Ethan Guo ’25

↑

BOYS INDOOR TRACK & FIELD

Head Coach: Hilary Hall

Assistant Coaches: Marvin

Bennett, Steve Holmes, John Hoogasian, Patrick Kelly, Brandon Newbould, Xiana Twombley, Panos Voulgaris

Captains: Jaylen Bennett ’25, Pearce Covert ’25

MVP: Jaylen Bennett ’25

←

GIRLS INDOOR TRACK & FIELD

Head Coach: Hilary Hall

Assistant Coaches: Marvin

Bennett, Steve Holmes, John Hoogasian, Patrick Kelly, Brandon Newbould, Xiana Twombley, Panos Voulgaris

Captains: Leta Griffith ’25, Jannah Maguire ’25

MVPs: Jannah Maguire ’25, Gianna Phipps ’25

↑

GIRLS SWIMMING & DIVING New England Champions Record: 9-0

Head Swimming Coach: Don Mills

Assistant Swimming Coaches: Nicole Benson, Meg Blitzshaw, Kate D’Ambrosio

Head Diving Coach: Julie Van Wright

Assistant Diving Coach: Steve Altieri

Captains: Briana Cong ’25, Sophie Phelps ’25, Ellie Colman ’26

Swim MVP: Mena Boardman ’26

Dive MVP: Alison Benson ’25

↑ WRESTLING Record: 8-10

Head Coach: Justin Muchnick

Assistant Coaches: Bob Brown, Tom Darrin

Captains: Jack Breaks ’25, Becket Moore ’25

MVP: Bella Bueno ’25

Byran Huang ’25 spent “a couple thousand” hours building his open-source laptop.

Achieving Excellence

Curiosity and hard work earn students accolades in computer science, math, music and more

By Adam Loyd and Sarah Pruitt ’95

Computer Science

Senior Builds Laptop from Scratch

What started as “betcha can’t” on a team bus trip to a squash match turned into a yearlong passion project for Byran Huang ’25. After accepting a teammate’s challenge to build a computer from scratch, he says he spent “a couple thousand” hours meticulously planning, building and testing nearly every element of his custom opensource laptop. Huang calls it anyon_e.

“I thought about all the projects I’d done in the past — building circuit boards, power systems and data systems,” he says. “This felt like a capstone to all that, a magnum opus.”

Huang parlayed his pursuit into a sanctioned senior project, receiving support from the Academy. He worked extensively in the Design Lab in the Phelps Science Center and spread his materials in the back of Steyer Distinguished Professor Brad Robinson’s physics classroom. “I received amazing funding,” Huang adds. “I blew my budget two and a half times over and nobody batted an eye. The school was constantly there to support me.”

It was important to Huang not only that his laptop be fully functional, but also that his process was easy for others to replicate. “This is a time when technology is innovating so fast, but people don’t get access to how to create things openly,” he says. “I wanted to go on this journey to publish everything I had made for the world to share.”

Huang produced a YouTube video, “How I Made a Laptop From Scratch – anyon_e,” detailing every step of his building process. Among the more than 1 million views was a Neuralink engineering lead who recruited Huang to intern with the Robot Surgery Electrical Engineering team this summer.

Like any good scientist, Huang is taking what he learned from this experience and hoping to refine the process. “I’m really looking forward to building a second version of this laptop that’s affordable,” he says. “Something you can build in your house from scratch.”

Huang is quick to credit the Academy as an inspiration, saying, “Exeter has always been this place that I’ve felt has magical powers to push you to discover more you didn’t know you were capable of doing.”

Civics

Debater Heads to Global Championship

For the third consecutive year, an Exonian competed on the global debate stage. Andrew Gould ’26 headed to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in late March for the World Individual Debating and Public Speaking Championship.

Co-head of the Academy’s Daniel Webster Debate Society, Gould qualified for the international tournament through his stellar performance at various debate events throughout the school year, including a first-place duo team finish alongside Jinmin Lee ’26 at

St. Paul’s School, where they debated a resolution stating that the United States should increase its military presence abroad.

“We ran a counterplan to throw off our opponents,” Gould says. “As the opposition, we argued that the U.S. should increase its military presence to uphold global prestige, especially in the face of revisionist states like Russia or China. We also argued that if countries currently reliant on U.S. military and nuclear protection were to be abandoned by the U.S., they would develop their own defenses, and even potentially their own nuclear arsenal. Those aren’t necessarily our personal views, but researching and building that

counterplan was incredibly eye-opening. It gave me a deeper appreciation for the delicate balancing act that is foreign policy.”

To prepare for world competition, Gould received coaching and encouragement from teammate Emma Sordi ’25, who competed at the event last year and placed second in the impromptu speaking event, as well as former teammate Colin Jung ’24, who finished fourth in the debate category in 2023.

In Kuala Lumpur, Gould reached the finals in three of the four categories in which he competed: parliamentary debate, impromptu speaking, interpretive reading and after-dinner speaking. He finished in sixth place overall among 120 competitors and won further distinction as the first-place male speaker and debater.

Music

Exeter Musicians Join Acclaimed Classical Ensemble

On March 2, Sofia Gonzalez-Gulick ’26 joined the Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra in a performance of Symphony No. 6, a notoriously difficult work by composer Gustav Mahler. As a member of the orchestra’s percussion section, Gonzalez-Gulick played a distinctive part in the symphony, which includes a motif of cow and church bell sounds in the distance. Standing on a Symphony Hall balcony, GonzalezGulick played cowbells and chimes.

“I got to work with a monitor so I could watch” conductor Benjamin Zander, she says. “And I had the conductor’s assistant backstage reading the score and helping me to cut off at the right time. I had never done anything like it before.”

Now in its 12th season, the BPYO is a tuition-free, highly selective orchestra that includes high school and college students ages 12-21. “The goal of the orchestra is ‘shaping future leaders through music,’ ” Gonzalez-Gulick says. “I feel lucky to be surrounded by students in college who act as mentors and are pursuing what I want to pursue.”

Ethan Ding ’25, Tristan Price ’26 and Martin Yau ’26 are also members of the youth orchestra, which will perform works by Debussy, Walton and Rachmaninoff in another live concert at Symphony Hall in May. In June, the orchestra will tour Mexico, performing in León, Veracruz, Puebla and Mexico City.

Daniel Webster Debate Society co-head Andrew Gould ’26

Sofia GonzalezGulick ’26 plays cowbells on the balcony of Boston's Symphony Hall.

STEM

VERTEX Heads to World Robotics Championship

Exeter’s Robotics Club’s team VERTEX started strong at the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Tech Challenge New Hampshire Championship. The team posted an undefeated record in the qualification rounds during the February event in Concord. But a loss in the first elimination match put VERTEX under pressure to survive among 28 other teams in contention.

“I could see the looks of stress on their faces,” says VERTEX Outreach team member Jade Yoo ’27. “But they all worked very well under pressure” to fix the robot for the next round of competition.

Thanks to their adjustments — and a skillful alliance with Team Tesseract of Nashua, New Hampshire — VERTEX rebounded. The team won its next three matches and captured victory in the finals as captain of the winning alliance, along with a spot at the 2025 FIRST Championship, considered the world championship, in Houston in April.

Members of the other Exonian teams, EDGE, SURFACE and APEX, cheered on

VERTEX at the state event, along with some Robotics Club alumni.

“How we transfer our knowledge from year to year is central to our success and is a key reason why being on the team is so fulfilling,” Teddy Duncker ’25, captain of VERTEX, told The Exonian “It always feels like you are learning something from others.”

Beyond the programming, building and deploying of the robot, VERTEX team members like Yoo work to spread awareness of robotics and STEM by building a broad community including middle school students and government officials. At the state competition, the Outreach team took on the additional task of scouting the other teams and choosing an alliance partner — an effort Yoo says paid off big this year.

VERTEX also took home the Inspire Award, the highest team honor given at the event. The award combines robot performance with community service and work to spread awareness, a key part of the mission of the FTC organization.

After a win in New Hampshire, Yoo and her VERTEX teammates are preparing for the next level of competition. “We see what went wrong and change it to make the robot better,” Yoo says. “We can’t afford many mistakes in Worlds.”

“Perhaps one day in real life you’ll see an algorithm related to this math,” Davido Zhang ’25 says of his research.

Science

Exonian Recognized by Regeneron Science Talent Search

Last summer, Davido Zhang ’25 spent six weeks at the Research Science Institute, an intensive program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for 100 of the world’s most accomplished high school science, math and engineering students. He began researching optimal transport, the mathematical concept that involves determining how to most efficiently move things from one place to another. As Zhang explains it, his project considered not only the transport of material resources — how companies like Amazon might optimize their shipping routes — but also data, in situations like training artificial intelligence models.

Zhang continued his research during the school year at Exeter, under the direction of his mentor in the MIT program. The resulting project, “Lipschitz Optimal Transport Maps,” earned him a $2,000 prize as one of 300 finalists — out of nearly 2,000 entrants — in the 2025 Regeneron Science Talent Search. Exonians have made impressive showings recently in that prestigious national competition: Achyuta Rajaram ’24 captured the $250,000 first prize last year, and Alan Bu ’24 and Riya Tyagi ’24 made the top 40.

“Perhaps one day in real life you’ll see an algorithm related to this math,” Zhang says of his research into optimal transport. “The idea is that the real solution is really complicated, and you’ve got to spend days with a computer just to find [it]. But there are ways to use significantly less time to find a solution that’s good enough, and that’s what I was working on.”

Team VERTEX, Exeter's top Robotics Club team, placed first in the FIRST Tech Challenge New Hampshire Championship.

Math

Math Mastery on the International Stage

By the time Oron Wang ’27 showed up to compete for the United States in the 16th Romanian Master of Mathematics, he had been preparing for nearly a year. The lengthy selection process for the global contest began with a series of invitational competitions and continued with the Mathematical Olympiad Program, an intensive summer training camp in Pittsburgh. “The preparation process is kind of constant,” Wang says. “You’re always just slowly improving.”

Finally, Wang and five compatriots headed to Bucharest in February, where they tackled two complex problem sets (six total problems) demonstrating sophisticated mathematical reasoning and proof techniques. After two intense days, the U.S. team captured third place among 16 teams. Wang won a silver medal, earning an individual ranking of 19 out of some 85 competitors.

He also met students from 19 other countries and spent time with his teammates from across the United States.

“The most fun part was getting to see the city,” Wang says. “We only had about a day of free time. But the six of us walked around Bucharest and found this cool museum, the Museum of Communism, which had all the details about life under communist rule in Romania. We all enjoyed it.”

History

Senior Publishes History Paper in The Concord Review

Following an early interest in child welfare, Amy Lin ’25 began researching the origins of America’s foster care system last year as part of Exeter’s U.S. history course sequence. She focused her “333” — the capstone term paper assigned in the spring term History 430 course — on the orphan train movement, a welfare program that transported children from Eastern cities to rural Midwest foster homes from the mid-19th century through the 1920s.

“I’ve always been interested in things related to children, and in writing and literature, and I carried that into the U.S. history requirement,” Lin says.“I learned a lot about structure, how to write a history paper, as well as how to do research and how to utilize the library.”

Lin worked over the summer and the school year to expand her research into a longer project, mining the wealth of electronic resources available through the Class of 1945 Library. The result was “The Origins of the Foster Care System: The Evolution of the Child Welfare System, 1850-1950,” a work that appears in the spring 2025 issue of The Concord Review, the nation’s leading publication for high school students doing research in history and social sciences.

ADAM

LOYD AND SARAH PRUITT ’95 are staff writers for The Exeter Bulletin

Oron Wang '27 (far right) and the U.S. team at the 16th Romanian Master of Mathematics event in Bucharest.

Amy Lin's scholarly work on the foster care system was published in The Concord Review.

Artificial Intelligence

How New Technology Is Reshaping Everything We Do

By Debbie Kane

ILLUSTRATIONS BY

In 1994, Jimmy Lin ’97 predicted that artificial intelligence, or AI, would become a reality during his lifetime. He was 15 and competing against a small group of engineers and computer scientists for the Loebner Prize, awarded to the person who creates the most human-like computer program. Lin’s program was designed to recognize and respond to familiar key words in human speech. “I hesitate to call it artificial intelligence,” he told reporters at the time. “I like to refer to it as a bag of tricks.”

Although Lin didn’t win the prize, his comment that his “bag of tricks” was a precursor to something bigger was prescient. “In the late 1990s, chatbots were weird,” Lin says. “Now, chatbots are just chatbots and of course we can talk to machines.”

Computer programming has been part of Lin’s life since he was a child. “Among my earliest memories are sitting on my dad’s lap in front of an Apple II computer, and that was back when you had to hook the phone line up to a modem,” he says.

Today he’s recognized globally for his AI research, focused on natural language processing and building out data systems. A professor in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo in Canada, Lin also co-directs the Waterloo Data and AI Institute. He’s chief scientist at Primal, a startup creating AI solutions for the legal and health care industries. “It’s my passion to share the power of generative AI,” he says.

The path to navigating the technology he says, is becoming AI literate. Lin coaches business and government leaders as well as educators — he has visited with Exeter students over the years — to understand AI and learn to use it. “The impact of generative AI will be no less than electricity and the steam engine,” he says. “As a society, we’ll be far richer for it.”

STEPHANIE DALTON COWAN

WHAT IS AI?

Once the purview of science fiction and dystopian movies, AI has become an integral part of our daily lives. Even if you don’t realize it, you have interacted with AI. It powers many behind-the-scenes processes, such as providing directions on your smartphone, assisting with online customer service or recommending movies on streaming services.

At its core, AI refers to a computer’s ability to mimic human capabilities like learning, problem solving and decision making. It can range from simple rule-based systems that follow basic "if-then" logic to more sophisticated algorithms that use reasoning to draw conclusions and make inferences from data.

Large language models like ChatGPT are a type of AI designed to recognize, summarize, translate, predict and generate text and other content — including poems and college essays — based on user prompts or questions.

AI has also evolved to incorporate machine learning, in which computers can identify patterns in data and apply them to new tasks without being explicitly programmed for each one. In the case of a self-driving car, the car’s AI doesn’t just follow a preset route; it can assess traffic conditions, identify road hazards, recognize lights and pedestrians, and predict the fastest or safest route — all while making real-time decisions.

“What we thought of as AI in the 1950s and 1960s was based on algorithms: a sequence of steps to solve a problem,” says Vasu Parameswaran, chief technology officer and vice president of advanced development and science at percipient.ai. “But the real world is messy. It’s very difficult to mathematically model images. As computers became cheaper and data became more ubiquitous, the paradigm shifted to using neural networks to process information.”

A neural network is a machine learning model that makes decisions in a way that imitates the

human brain. By simulating how biological neurons work together, it can identify patterns, weigh options and draw conclusions.

Exeter alumni are at the forefront of the AI transformation. This winter, more than 200 alumni gathered remotely for an industry panel about AI. Hosted by the Office of Institutional Advancement and moderated by Director of Studies Jeanette Lovett, the panel featured Joseph Ahn ’05, Ayush Noori ’20 and Trustee Christine Robson Weaver ’99. They had a lively discussion about the implications of AI as well as its benefits and risks. “AI is a huge democratization force,” Ahn says. “Its ability to equalize opportunities for people by giving them more information is exciting.”

We spoke with the panelists and others about the ways the technology is reshaping their professions as well as its promises and challenges.

AI AND FINANCE

AI has the potential to democratize financial processes, minimize paperwork and make Wall Street knowledge available to more people, Ahn says. For years, the finance industry has leveraged sophisticated analytics and data from AI to improve efficiency. The technology gives stock traders additional knowledge to inform decisions; it’s also used to detect and enhance consumer credit card fraud by monitoring for unusual usage patterns. But AI’s ability to collect and analyze large amounts of data makes it particularly useful to an industry that thrives on information.

Ahn and his brother, Daniel, run Delfi, what Ahn calls “the first AI investment bank.” The AI financial “copilot” they developed enables Delfi to deliver balance sheet hedging strategies and analytics for banks, credit unions and asset managers. “AI and machine learning risk management algorithms makes this type of analysis available to everyone, enabling them to make better investment

A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence

1796

Jonathan Swift’s satiric novel, Gulliver’s Travels, refers to the Engine, a large contraption used by scholars to generate new ideas, sentences and books.

1950

British mathematician Alan Turing publishes an academic paper addressing whether machines can think. He developed the Turing Test, a way to measure machine intelligence by assessing its ability to mimic human conversation and behavior. (The Loebner Prize competition is based on the Turing Test.)

1956

Dartmouth College mathematics professor John McCarthy coins the term “artificial intelligence” during the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, a conference exploring how machines could simulate human intelligence.

1958

Perceptron, the first artificial neural network, is developed by American psychologist Frank Rosenblatt.

The program makes decisions in a way similar to the human brain. It can distinguish between punch cards marked on the left and right and is described by its creator as the first machine capable of having an original idea.

1960

Adaline (Adaptive Linear Neuron), a single-layer artificial neural network, is developed by Stanford University professor Bernard Widrow and his student Marcian Hoff. It’s an adaptive system for pattern recognition and the foundation for future advances in neural network and machine learning.

Joseph Ahn ’05

Jimmy Lin ’97

Vasu Parameswaren

decisions,” Ahn says. “Our business model wouldn’t exist without AI.” Currently, he says, 50% of the world's GDP does not engage in capital markets. “That’s a missed opportunity,” he adds. “We can expand that up to at least 75%.”

AI also automates tasks like risk identification and quantification in the field of mergers and acquisitions (M&A). Generative AI can examine public sources (like press releases, financial reports, prospectuses and more) for information on a specific company; it can also organize uploaded documents and screen for sensitive information, and analyze legal documents. With the increase in data access and resulting transactions, “I predict we’ll see smaller M&A firms created and more division of functions,” Ahn says.

He believes that AI’s greatest opportunity in financial services is financial literacy, enabling people to trade more effectively and make better investment decisions. More people than ever are participating in the stock market. “They should be given the tools to engage in it using best practices,” Ahn says. “A financial AI can tell you what choice to make and why. You’ll learn something from it even if you don’t agree.”

One challenge with using generative AI in the financial arena is overcoming privacy issues — for example, accessing sensitive financial data or exposing it through security breaches — and large language models’ tendency to “hallucinate,” or invent facts. Uneven access to the technology could expand the digital divide between modern and developing economies.

“I don’t know if we ever will be at the point where we'll just trust financial AI to make all the decisions for us,” Ahn says. “But what it can do is democratize knowledge and best practices, and allow people to deal with the overwhelming amount of logistics and paperwork needed to execute a transaction.”

AI AND NATIONAL SECURITY

For decades, the American intelligence community has considered AI a critical tool to address national security threats. The U.S. military uses AI to create efficiencies in data analysis, procurement and more, says Creighton Reed ’90, a former Marine and a consultant in national security technology. “There’s been AI and machine learning to help sift and sort things in the intelligence world for a long time,” Reed says. “A lot of the technologies used by us now, such as GPS, email and the internet, was created by the military.”

The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) started researching AI in 1958, when it formed the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (known now as DARPA). In the 1990s, the U.S. military used an AI program called DART (Dynamic Analysis and Replanning Tool) to solve logistical challenges like moving supplies or personnel and saving millions of dollars. The military has also funded research into the development of autonomous cars as well as robots, and has used autonomous weapons like mines, torpedoes and heat-guided missiles in warfare.

More recently, DOD’s Project Maven uses machine learning and deep learning (algorithms that help computers recognize objects and text in images and videos) to help intelligence analysts sift through thousands of hours of video or photographs to find objects of interest. “AI doesn’t replace the analysts that review this information,” Reed says. “It helps them with the huge amounts of data they get on a daily basis and saves them time going through it.”

AI-powered weapons — drones and robots — are actively deployed in warfare. The U.S. military is also building unmanned aircraft, ground vehicles and submersibles for data collection and, potentially, strike capabilities. Because this technology is developed by industry and academic AI experts outside the military, it raises ethical questions about the ways AI research is used.

1997

Deep Blue, developed by IBM, is the first computer system to defeat a reigning world chess champion, Garry Kasparov. The computer’s underlying technology advances the ability of supercomputers to tackle complex calculations to perform tasks like uncovering patterns in databases.

2012

AlexNet, a deep learning neural network with eight layers, is a breakthrough in image recognition, identifying images of dogs and cars at a level similar to humans.

2017

Google Research develops Transformer, a neural network architecture that can train a computer to recognize the next word in a chain of words.

2019

OpenAI’s Generative Pretrained Transformer 2 (or GPT-2) demonstrates the power of natural language processing. GPT-2 is able to predict the next item in a sequence, perform tasks such as summarizing and translating text. GPT-3, introduced in 2020, is able to produce text often indistinguishable from human writing.

2021

DALL-E, a neural network that creates pictures from language prompts is introduced by Open AI.

2022

ChatGPT, Open AI’s chatbot, built on a large language model, introduces generative AI, which can create new content based on existing data. It can produce text, images, videos, audio and more.

2023

Google Labs releases Notebook LM, which summarizes up to 50 sources, including documents, videos and books.

2024

Using Google’s AI algorithms, Google Research and Harvard publish the first synaptic resolution of the human brain.

Open AI releases Sora, an AI tool that creates videos from text, images and other video.

Creighton Reed ’90

A Student Perspective on AI

When Sofiya Goncharova ’25 noticed how immersed her peers and teachers were in AI, she decided to demystify the technology for others. For her senior project, she created Co[de]pendent: Living Alongside AI, a podcast she describes as a place “where we explore the quirks, questions and quiet revolutions of living in a world that’s not just human anymore.”

Goncharova’s interest in AI stemmed from research she did over the summer at Yale University’s Social Robotics Lab. Working on a study about human responses toward robots, she learned how manipulative AI technology can be. “We wanted to understand how people adjust their feedback based on how competent they think the robot is,” she says. “People’s sentiment about the robot would change depending upon the robot’s behavior. That got me thinking about AI and how it impacts us.”

An example of AI’s manipulative power are the algorithms used on platforms like YouTube and TikTok, she says, and how they shape what users see. “They actively steer our behavior by amplifying content that boosts engagement often in subtle or emotional ways,” Goncharova says. “I see that kind of influence in how quickly narratives or trends catch on with my peers, often without them realizing it. That deeply impacted how I view AI and inspired me to create the podcast.”

Goncharova’s podcasts, developed in consultation with Computer Science Instructor El Kaplan and Religion, Ethics and Philosophy Chair Tom Simpson, address timely AI topics. She examines the effect of AI on art with photographer and artist Derin Korman, a photography teacher at the Commonwealth School in Boston. Korman trained a machine learning model to compare his original work with the AI-generated work. “The takeaway is that you need to know your intention with using AI and acknowledge that it’s part of your work,” Goncharova says.

In other episodes, she tackles the influence of AI on politics (“The EU is much further ahead of the U.S. in terms of legal controls on AI,” she says) and has a conversation with Director of Studies Jeanette Lovett on AI’s effects on education and the workforce. “My goal is not to lead to conclusions,” Goncharova says. “I just want to inform people about the concepts.”

“There's a growing understanding that we need to invest in AI because we are up against adversaries, or what we call peer competitors, who are rapidly advancing their capabilities in this realm,” Reed says. “The fear is that you’re taking a human out of the decision loop. What happens if that decision making is done by a computer?”

Now and for the immediate future, Reed says, humans are making those decisions.

AI AND HEALTH CARE

AI is being used in the health care industry in increasingly novel ways. With 4.5 billion people worldwide lacking access to essential medical services and a health worker shortage of 11 million anticipated by 2030, according to the World Health Organization, AI can help bridge the gaps.

“I’m excited about how we can use AI to advance scientific discovery and enable personalized, effective health care,” says Ayush Noori ’20, a Harvard University senior and Rhodes scholar, who is developing AI tools to personalize diagnostics for people with neurological disorders and participated in the Exeter panel. “AI will better help us understand disease pathobiology and work towards novel diagnostic and therapeutic options.”

This work is being done at the MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease, where Noori and a team of researchers developed machine learning-based methods (called a natural language processing-powered annotation tool) to review data a nd clinical notes, creating a faster, more reliable method of determining whether a patient has dementia or other types of cognitive impairment. A team of scientists and clinicians at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, including Noori, are training large AI models to predict drug repurposing and develop more effective treatments for bipolar disorder.

In addition to breakthroughs in diagnoses and treatments, AI is being leveraged to improve clinical care. “Eighty-one percent of doctors say they’re overworked; that affects their patient care,” Noori says. An AI model can be used as a clinical assistant to handle paperwork or do deep research on medical abstracts and more. As of this year, Noori says, 183 health care systems and providers across the U.S. have piloted or adopted 70 generative AI applications for tasks including clinical decision support, patient

To listen to Goncharova’s podcast, scan this QR code.

Ayush Noori ’20

“I’m excited about how we can use AI to advance scientific discoveries and enable personalized, effective health care.”

communication, clinical documentation, claims processing and health care administration.

For all its advances, AI-based clinical support systems that advance the quality and delivery of health care are still works in progress. “There’s always a human component to medicine,” Noori says. “AI won’t replace doctors, but it can make their jobs easier.” It will potentially relieve doctors of paperwork and other burdens, and help patients better navigate the medical system — paradoxically, making it more human.

AI AND THE FUTURE

AI is here and it’s changing everything we do, including how we bank, interact with our doctors and shop. (The use of AI in retail is predicted to grow to $54.92 billion by 2033 from $11.83 billion in 2024). As with any disruptive societal change, the technology raises questions about inaccuracy, biases, privacy, copyright and more. “What happens if generative artificial intelligence improves things across the board but creates a gap in access, for example, between men and women?” says Trustee Christine Robson Weaver ’99, a data product lead at Google who was a panelist. “You have to set a higher bar for the technology.”

Most of the leading companies creating AI technologies — including Google, Microsoft and OpenAI — have developed mission statements that outline their goals for using AI. Weaver was on an internal Google team that developed the firm’s AI principles based on improving the user experience while protecting their safety. “There is so much science fiction around AI and so many issues that people think about,” she says. “I favor AI safety decisions that are tactical, like AI alignment. Does the model do what I say it’s going to do most of the time? I’m interested in how it interacts with users.”

She favors the use of policy “layers” that define safety at different levels, both at the corporate level and through individual product policies. Those

layers act as a final check before exposing the product to end users. “Having access to quality data is important for the development of AI models,” Weaver says. “Having compliant-safe data and the right tools to work with that data and track what’s being done is critical.”

Karl Cobbe ’09, a research scientist at Open AI, which created ChatGPT, shares Weaver’s concerns about the data that feeds the AI models and the validity of what the models churn out. “A big issue with large learning models are hallucinations: They make up facts,” Cobbe says. “We’re trying to make the models better at reasoning.”

AI development also taxes natural resources. According to the Allen Institute for AI, one query to ChatGPT uses approximately as much electricity as one lightbulb for 20 minutes. Each question a chatbot receives is routed to a data center, which uses a lot of energy and contributes to greenhouse emissions. Google and other tech companies are still engaging with that problem.

Exeter alumni working in and around AI are excited about its potential and cognizant of its risks. “We as a society need to grapple with the question of whether AI will take people’s jobs,” Cobbe says. “Progress made in the last four years is astonishing, and no one says it’s going to slow down.”

As the technology rapidly evolves, everyone should be familiar with what it is and offers, Jimmy Lin ’97 says. “The moment you hand your child an iPad, you’re giving them a tool with AI on it. You need to be aware of the potentially toxic content and the biases the technology has. Everyone from kindergarten age up to seniors needs to know how AI works and its effect on them.”

DEBBIE KANE is a longtime contributor to The Exeter Bulletin. Her work has also appeared in AIA NH Forum, New Hampshire Home and New Hampshire Magazine

Christine Robson Weaver ’99

Karl Cobbe ’09

IN FOCUS HISTORY

Examining the Academy’s connections to slavery and its path forward

BY SARAH PRUITT ’95

HER NAME WAS DINAH, AND SHE LIVED with a man named Cuffee on the edge of the thick woodland that once covered the Academy fields, just steps from where The David E. and Stacey L. Goel Center for Theater and Dance now stands. In the mid-19th century, the elderly Dinah made a living selling cake and ale to the boys who attended the Academy, as well as any others who made the pleasant walk from the center of town to Cuffee’s Woods, as they were known.

By 1879, when a local resident recounted his memories of Dinah and Cuffee in the Exeter News-Letter, the couple had long since died, leaving few traces of their presence behind. But Dinah’s story is worth remembering not only for its connection to the history of Exeter — the town and the school — and her role in the day-to-day lives of some of the earliest students at Phillips Exeter Academy. As a young woman, she was one of several individuals previously acknowledged in Academy histories to have been enslaved by Exeter’s founder, John Phillips.

In January 2020, with the support of Exeter’s Trustees, Principal Bill Rawson ’71 announced the formation of a steering committee to examine the ties between Phillips Exeter Academy and the institution of slavery. At the time, he wrote, “The work contemplated by this charge will provide a more complete and complex understanding of the early history of our school, will expand the voices involved in helping us understand and tell that history, and thereby will advance the mission and values of our school and our commitment to diversity, equity and

A stereograph image of the third Academy building from the 1880s

I.

inclusion and a deep sense of belonging for all members of our community.”

But the COVID-19 pandemic delayed the committee’s progress. In May 2023, Rawson issued an expanded charge for the Committee to Study Slavery and Its Legacy at Exeter, co-led by Director of Equity and Inclusion Stephanie Bramlett and Magee Lawhorn, head of Archives and Special Collections, and made up of Exeter faculty, staff, alumni and students. That fall, the committee embarked on the first phase of that charge, which included reporting on the known information about Exeter’s history and connection with enslaved people; developing recommendations for appropriate recognition to help the community understand this history; and collaborating with the Exeter Historical Society to incorporate the history of enslaved people in the town of Exeter.

“Telling these stories is a way to honor the people who made Exeter what it is today,” Bramlett says. “It’s powerful to know the stories of the people who came before us, and to consider the way their legacy shapes our current experiences.”

In undertaking this effort, Exeter joined a growing movement among educational institutions. When Universities Studying Slavery, a consortium led by the University of Virginia, expanded its membership to private high schools, the Academy signed up, as did peer schools including Andover and Loomis Chaffee. The consortium has more than 100 members in six countries, including Brown, Georgetown and Harvard.

II.

HISTORIES OF THE ACADEMY HAVE documented John Phillips’ ownership of several individuals during much of his life, including 1781, the year he founded Exeter with his second wife, Elizabeth. Although slavery does not appear to have been associated with the physical construction of the school and he was not an enslaver at the time of his death, “that [John Phillips] owned and kept slaves for at least a part of his life, with no thought of there being anything morally wrong about it, is a matter of record,” Laurence M. Crosbie wrote in The Phillips Exeter Academy: A History, published in 1923.

In 1743, Phillips married his first wife, Sarah Gilman, the widow of his cousin Nathaniel Gilman, who had owned and operated a general store. Sarah, who was 16 years older than Phillips, brought her significant estate into the marriage, including three enslaved individuals:

Robin, Phillis and Dinah.

Among wealthy white New Englanders of his time, Phillips was far from unique. As historian Wendy Warren wrote in her 2016 book, New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America, by the early 18th century “slavery was embedded in the New England colonies, an accepted and familiar part of the society.”

Instructor in History Kent McConnell, a member of the Exeter steering committee to study slavery, says, “Many men of [Phillips’] stature would have owned enslaved persons.” He adds that many men would have similarly inherited them as part of their wives’ dowries, a common way of ensuring financial security at the time. “There’s so much profit being generated around chattel slavery,” he says. “It’s part of a global economic system that deeply reaches into the lives of the colonies in so many ways.”

As the Revolutionary War dawned, attitudes toward the institution of slavery began to change. “White enslavers are struggling — in varying degrees, obviously, but they can’t ignore the realities of the proclamation of ‘all men are created equal,’ ” McConnell says. Antislavery sentiment built across New England in the 1770s, and individual states — beginning with Vermont in 1777 — passed laws to restrict slavery.

Sometime in the late 1770s, Phillips most likely joined a growing movement among New England slave owners by

manumitting, or granting freedom to, at least some of his enslaved people. By 1778 — three years before he and Elizabeth signed the founding documents of the Academy — neither Phillis nor Dinah was part of the Phillips household. Crosbie wrote that town records show Phillips was taxed for two male enslaved people from 1778 to 1780, and for one from 1781 to 1785. When he died in 1795, Phillips owned no enslaved people; his will stated, “I give to my man-servant (Slave I have none) such part of my wearing apparel as my Executor shall think fit.”

Among the untold stories the steering committee seeks to illuminate are the lives of the men and woman Phillips enslaved. From the Exeter News-Letter article and other contemporary accounts, we know a fair amount about Dinah’s later life and interactions with early Academy students. The historical record contains less information about the two other individuals Phillips acquired in the 1740s with his first wife’s estate. Phillis, described in Nathaniel Gilman’s will as “my Negro woman,” was most likely older than Dinah, who was described in that will as “the Negro girl named Dinah.” A Gilman family history later stated that Phillis was a gift to another Gilman relative in Yarmouth, Massachusetts, around 1771.

Information is notably lacking about Robin. Unlike Phillis and Dinah, he does not appear in the Gilman family genealogy but was probably enslaved by Phillips for

Oil painting of John Phillips by Joseph Steward

“Telling these stories is a way to honor the people who made Exeter what it is today.”

more than three decades. Judging from Exeter tax records, Robin was most likely the last individual Phillips enslaved, and he was either emancipated or died around 1785.

The fourth individual Phillips enslaved — believed to be the second enslaved person he paid taxes on in the late 1770s — was a man named Corydon. No records have been found to indicate when or where Corydon was born, and how Phillips came to enslave him. Corydon was not among the individuals Sarah Gilman inherited from her late husband.

Crosbie wrote, “In his day-book, kept late in life, [Phillips] speaks frequently … of his black man, Corydon, whom he hired out at various times to the Gilmans, when he himself had no work for him.” After Phillips granted him his freedom, likely around 1780 or 1781, Corydon appears to have lived as a boarder in Exeter with Hannah (Merrill) Holland, a free Black woman, and her daughter, Catherine.

Corydon, who survived Phillips by more than two decades, is believed to have lived more than 100 years. In Corydon’s later life, Crosbie recorded, Phillips Exeter Academy and Phillips Academy paid his living expenses; Exeter paid two-thirds of the total cost and Andover the remaining one-third. Records in the Academy archives show invoices related to this financial support, with the last one dated April 1, 1818, the date of Corydon’s death.

In investigating the stories of these four enslaved individuals linked to Exeter’s early history, the committee relied not only on previously published histories of the Academy, but also on the work of Barbara Rimkunas, curator of the Exeter Historical Society, who has worked with her staff to compile numerous stories about Black residents of Exeter in the Revolutionary War period and beyond. As a commercial and political center of the region at the time, Exeter had a relatively large free Black community after the war, reaching nearly 5% of the town’s population — the largest percentage in New Hampshire at the time.

Committee resources also included research by Alexanderia Baker Haidara ’99 and a senior project by Andrew Yuan ’24, titled “Legacy of Slavery at Phillips Exeter Academy, 1770-1870.” Yuan, who completed the project as part of a

research-focused history course during his upper year and served on the student branch of the committee on slavery, was inspired by similar efforts at Harvard and other institutions to begin looking into Exeter’s connections to slavery, both around the time of its founding and through its early decades.

“It’s a part of history that has not been recognized as it should have been,” Yuan said in 2024. “There was a need to really get down in the archives to know what went down during the years of Exeter’s founding as an institution, how slavery shaped it and how we as a community are reconciling with that fact.”

III.

JUST AS CROSBIE IN 1923 ACKNOWLEDGED John Phillips’ ownership of enslaved people, later chroniclers of the school’s history have shed light on sometimes difficult truths about minority representation at Exeter through the years. The Committee to Study Slavery and Its Legacy at Exeter has also made efforts to further illuminate the experiences of early generations of Black students at Exeter, and to share some of their largely untold stories.

Moses Uriah Hall, who came to the Academy in 1858 and fought in the Civil War after his graduation in 1861, was previously reported (including in this magazine) to be Exeter’s first Black student. But as Julia Heskel and Davis Dyer wrote in After the Harkness Gift: A History of Phillips Exeter Academy Since 1930 (2008), “many believe that blacks were enrolled in the school as early as 1790.” They note that formal student records were lacking until the mid-19th century.And current Academy archivists say that explicit collection of student racial identification data did not begin until the late 1990s.

By the late 19th century, Exeter saw a growing number of Black students, many of whom lived in a boardinghouse owned by J.W. Field. They represented a small minority of the student population, but a number of these early Black Exonians became leaders on campus and went on to distinguished careers. (See sidebar, “A Home for Early Black Exonians, p. 47”)

Although it’s difficult to cite exact figures, given the nature of student records

at the time, the number of Black Exonians appears to have declined after the first decade of the 20th century and did not begin to rise until the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s.

This lack of racial diversity at Exeter reflected a much larger societal shift in the country. After the collapse of Reconstruction, many Southern states enacted legislation that restricted the freedom, safety and economic opportunity of Black citizens. As a result, beginning in 1910, millions of African Americans left the South and moved to urban centers in the North, Midwest and West, a so-called Great Migration that transformed the country.

An escape from the Jim Crow South did not mean freedom from racial prejudice. The years after World War I saw a sharp increase in racial violence, with riots breaking out in Chicago and other cities. The widespread success of D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation — screened at the White House and praised by President Woodrow Wilson — helped legitimize the resurgent Ku Klux Klan. The Birth of a Nation was also the first film shown at the Ioka Theater in downtown Exeter when it opened in November 1915. As Rimkunas reported in the Exeter News-Letter in 2015, the advertising campaign for that debut featured several costumed Klansmen riding around town on horseback.

In addition to this complicated historical context, Heskel and Dyer explore one explanation for the limited number of Black students at Exeter during the first half of the 20th century: the personal views of Principal Lewis Perry, who led the Academy from 1914 to 1946. The authors drew on the words of Perry’s successor as principal, William G. Saltonstall, who weighed in on what he called the “sensitive” subject of minority representation at Exeter in his 1980 biography, Lewis Perry of Exeter: A Gentle Memoir

After the Harkness Gift:

A History of Phillips Exeter Academy Since 1930, by Julia Heskel and Davis Dyer

“Blacks had attended Exeter long before Perry’s time and done well,” Saltonstall wrote. He then quoted from a letter Perry wrote in March 1936 to his longtime correspondent Vernon Munroe, a graduate of the class of 1892 who served as president of Exeter’s General Alumni Association. Perry had received a missive from Lucien V. Alexis, a Black alumnus of the class of 1914 who appears to have inquired about sending his son to the Academy.

“We have not had any colored boys in school for eight or ten years,” Perry wrote to Munroe in the letter, which is included in Perry’s correspondence files in the Academy archives.“Now the intimacy of the Harkness Plan, with all the boys in our own dormitories, makes things still more difficult. Frankly, I have learned enough about the school since I have been here to be very sure that a colored boy is hurt rather than helped by his entrance into Exeter.”

To support his position, as chronicled by Saltonstall and later by Heskel and Dyer, Perry cited advice that he said Booker T. Washington, president of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, had once given Al Stearns, who was principal of Andover from 1903 to 1933. Washington, Perry wrote, had told Stearns that “it was a great mistake for colored boys to come to either Exeter or Andover.”

Washington, who died in 1915, was probably the most prominent Black thinker in the country when he gave that advice. Having shot to fame with the publication of his autobiography, Up From Slavery, he wrote and spoke extensively about his belief that Black Americans should pursue training in trades like carpentry, mechanics and farming. He saw this as a crucial way for them to attain employment and economic stability without actively challenging the segregationist systems of the time. (Washington’s own son, Booker T. Washington Jr., attended Exeter for a time but left in 1907 before graduating. According to a report in the New York Times, Principal Harlan Amen denied that his departure was due to racial discrimination, stating that the younger Washington had left after being ordered to “confine himself in his dormitory certain hours for study.”)

Washington’s views had put him at odds with Black leaders like W.E.B. Du Bois, who argued against racial segregation and co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). But they struck a chord with Stearns, who — like Perry — grappled with the question of minority students at the school he led.

In Youth From Every Quarter: A Bicentennial History of Phillips Academy Andover (1979), Frederick S. Allis

cited a letter Stearns wrote in 1928. In it, Stearns explained that in his early years as principal, he “fought vigorously for the colored boys in our midst and for those who sought to enter.” Later, Stearns began to doubt that position, writing that it seemed “these fellows were being harmed more than helped by the school.”

Stearns sought advice not only from Washington, but also from Hollis B. Frissell, a white Andover alumnus who served as principal of the historically Black Hampton Institute in Virginia; both men helped confirm his later perspective. From 1910 until Stearns’ tenure ended 23 years later, only one African American student graduated from Andover, according to “Our DEI History,” published on the school’s website. (In 2021, Andover introduced its Committee on Challenging Histories, the equivalent of Exeter’s committee.)

In his biography of Perry, Saltonstall wrote with warmth and admiration, calling him one of “the great headmasters who led their schools for decades and shaped much of independent secondary education in the twentieth century.” Thanks to Perry’s leadership, along with the revolutionary $5.8 million gift from the philanthropist Edward Harkness, Saltonstall wrote, Exeter embarked on “a new era of education,” transforming the school into what it would become today.

Yet when it came to the “question of minority representation at Exeter,” Saltonstall was no less direct. “Even within the context of [Perry’s] day this was a blind spot,” he wrote. “While it may not be fair to judge a person by the standards of a different age, Perry denied Exeter’s democratic tradition in permitting limits on the numbers of blacks and Jews in the

academy. He never specifically discussed quotas of any kind, but he did suggest that limits would be advisable.”

IV.

THIS DIFFICULT HISTORY IS REFLECTED in the stories of two early Black Exonians and their sons, who sought to attend the Academy during the later years of Perry’s principalship. The first was Lucien V. Alexis, the alumnus from the Academy’s class of 1914 whose letter to Perry prompted Perry’s correspondence with Munroe in March 1936. Then in early 1940, Eugene Clark, class of 1904, wrote to Perry regarding his son, Eugene Clark Jr. Alexis attended Exeter for one year before going to Harvard, where he graduated cum laude in 1917. When he wrote to Perry, Alexis was the founding principal of McDonogh 35 Senior High School, the first (and at the time only) public high school for Black students in Louisiana.

The Academy archives did not record Perry’s response, but Lucien V. Alexis Jr. ’38 arrived at Exeter not long after. Heskel and Dyer wrote that the younger Alexis was not permitted to live in a dormitory, so he lived with the track coach, Ralph Lovshin, who also experienced marginalization as a Roman Catholic during his early years at Exeter.

Alexis, who joined the fencing team, was the only Black student in his graduating class at Exeter. He then became the only Black student in Harvard’s class of 1942, and the first Black player on the university’s lacrosse team.

On April 16, 1941, The Exonian published a letter to the editors from Maurice Rashbaum Jr. ’41. “A week ago Saturday,”

The Alexis family: Lucien V. Alexis Jr., class of 1938; Lucien V. Alexis, class of 1914; and Lucien V. Alexis III, class of 1973

Rashbaum wrote, “an event happened which I believe should be brought to the attention of every Exonian who believes … that men of all races, creeds, and colors should be treated alike.” Rashbaum referred to the Harvard lacrosse team’s trip to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. The Navy coach refused to let his team play against Harvard if Alexis was on the field. The Harvard coach stood his ground, but the university’s athletic director overruled him, and Alexis was forced to head back to Cambridge while his teammates took the field without him (Navy won, 12-0).

The incident made national news, The Harvard Gazette reported, inspiring public recriminations against both Harvard and Navy. Rashbaum joined in this outcry, arguing that “there certainly ought to be published a public apology by Navy for this ineffaceable blot on the honor of our country.” When Alexis and his team traveled to West Point, New York, to play the U.S. Military Academy a week later, Black cadets led a cheering group that welcomed them.

Alexis was later accepted to Harvard Medical School but was told he could not attend because the incoming class had no other Black student for him to room with. He returned to New Orleans, where he ran a small business college — and sent two sons to Exeter, Lucien ’73 and Llewllyn ’74. Last fall, Harvard honored him with a portrait in its Agassiz Theatre as part of the Portraiture Project of the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations.

Two years after Alexis graduated from Exeter, Perry appears to have discouraged Clark from sending his son to the Academy. During his time there, Clark lived with other Black students in J.W. Field’s boardinghouse. After graduation, he began a distinguished career in education and retired in 1953 as president of Miner Teachers College, a historic center of Black education in Washington, D.C.

“My dear Dr. Perry,” Clark wrote. “I wish to acknowledge your kind letter of March 13, 1940, in which you very frankly explain the situation at Exeter with reference to colored students. From your description of conditions I agree with you that it would be unwise for me to send Eugene to the Academy.”

“However, as an alumnus of Exeter,” Clark continued, “I believe that it would be decidedly beneficial to the general student body at Exeter to have a few well-selected colored boys in their midst and living under normal conditions, for the boys at Exeter will ultimately be leaders in their various life activities and should have as part of their education an opportunity to develop tolerance and the democratic way of living.”

A Home for Early Black Exonians

By the 1890s, Exeter had two permanent dormitories on campus — Abbot Hall, opened in 1855, and Soule Hall, opened in 1894 — but was not yet a fully residential school. Those who did not live in the dorms rented rooms from families in and around Exeter.

Many of the Academy’s early Black students rented rooms in the same home, owned by local businessman James William Field, a member of Exeter’s class of 1890. Listed in student directories in the PEAN yearbook as “J.W. Field’s House,” the building also housed Field’s business, where he traded and sold furniture, carpets, rugs and other home goods and offered repair and packing services.

Here are a few of the Exonians who lived at 248 Water Street and some information about their lives.

ROSCOE CONKLING BRUCE, class of 1898

The son of a Reconstruction-era U.S. senator from Mississippi, Bruce arrived at Exeter in 1896 from Washington, D.C. In his two years at Exeter, he joined the Golden Branch debating society and was elected to The Exonian’s board of editors. He later won numerous awards for orating and debating at Harvard. After serving as academic director of the Tuskegee Institute, he worked as a principal in the District of Columbia public school system, eventually rising to assistant superintendent of the district’s African American schools.

JOHN TAZEWELL JONES, class of 1900

Jones, who hailed from Old Point Comfort, Virginia, is believed to be Exeter’s first Black four-year varsity athlete. He excelled in football and track at the Academy before going on to play football at Harvard College. At Harvard, Jones befriended Franklin D. Roosevelt, the future U.S. president, with whom he maintained a lifelong friendship. Around 1917, Jones moved to Brazil, where he worked for more than two decades as a business representative for U.S. firms.

ERNEST MARSHALL, class of 1904

Marshall came from Baltimore and spent three defining years at the Academy. He was highly regarded by his peers and was the first Black student to be elected as a captain of an athletic team in the Academy’s history. Marshall set records in track and field and captained the football team in 1903. He continued his education at Williams College, University of Michigan and the University of Chicago before becoming one of the first Black graduates of Northwestern Medical School. Marshall went on to find professional success as a professor, coach and physician. (For more about Marshall, read “Strength and Character” in the Fall 2023 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.)

BENJAMIN SELDON, class of 1907

A native of New Jersey, Seldon was a member of Exeter’s football team. During his time at Exeter, he wrote to prominent sociologist and writer W.E.B. Du Bois, author of the influential essay collection The Souls of Black Folk. “I feel it is just the book that every Negro should possess, therefore I am desirous of becoming an agent for it,” Seldon wrote. This correspondence led to decades of communication and collaboration, as Seldon joined Du Bois’ pursuit of PanAfricanism, or efforts to unify people of African descent around the world. After supporting U.S. troops as an executive secretary for the YMCA during World War I, Seldon spent time traveling in Europe and doing scholarly work at the University of Toulouse. Back in the United States, he oversaw the Negro Adult Education program of the Works Progress Administration in New Jersey in the 1930s, and later held a post in the War Finance Division of the U.S. Treasury Department. — Panos Voulgaris

THE COMMITTEE TO STUDY SLAVERY and Its Legacy at Exeter continues to explore and celebrate the stories of Black alumni like Lucien Alexis Sr. and Jr. and Eugene Clark, and to fully recognize their contributions to the life and history of Exeter. As it moves into the second phase of Rawson’s 2023 charge, the committee will study and acknowledge the early generations of Black students at Exeter, and offer suggestions for further examination of their experiences and those of other historically marginalized groups.

This includes an effort — begun at the 55th anniversary celebration for the Afro-Latinx Exonian Society in 2023 — to record the oral histories of students of color to include in Exeter’s institutional memory. Magee Lawhorn, co-head of the committee and director of Archives and Special Collections, is spearheading this endeavor.

“It’s really about capturing these stories for people who come after us,” Lawhorn says. “Often with history, you get photographs, you get paper, but you don’t always get the person talking about themselves, and I think that’s really important.”

Eric Logan ’92, chair of the Trustees’ Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee, says: “The idea of youth from every quarter, of Harkness — all

“Being able to fill in gaps in the history of Exeter is critical to us being able to do what we do as Exonians, which is sit around a table and discuss the implications of that history, both then and now.”

of that is centered in having different people who can have broad discussions around a given fact basis. Being able to fill in gaps in the history of Exeter is critical to us being able to do what we do as Exonians, which is sit around a table and discuss the implications of that history, both then and now.”

A particular area of interest for the Trustees, Logan believes, is ensuring a more complete understanding of the school’s history as Exeter approaches the 250th anniversary of its founding in 2031. “It’s important for us to understand the facts, to know who we as an institution are,” Logan says. “When you look

at a school with the history and legacy of Exeter, history means a lot, and it’s important that we can be as robust as possible with the history that we tell.”

The committee shared some of the results of its work in a school assembly in January that aimed to raise student awareness and understanding of Exeter’s history with slavery and its legacy. In the presentation, co-heads Stephanie Bramlett and Lawhorn, and other committee members, shared some of the “untold stories” they have been exploring. They include Robin, Phillis, Dinah and Corydon, as well as Moses Hall, class of 1861, and some of the Black Exonians from the late 19th and early 20th century. They also explained the committee’s charge, in the context of similar initiatives at institutions around the country, and emphasized the importance of every Exonian’s story.

“All of us have these stories that contribute to this broader Exeter legacy and Exeter experience,” Logan says. “I think it heightens every student’s experience to understand where they lie on this continuum of the history of the Academy.”

At the end of the assembly, students and faculty gathered in Elm Street Dining Hall to enjoy some cake and “ale” (cider) in tribute to Dinah. Lawhorn researched recipes for traditional African American dishes and worked with Dining Services to create the community event.

“It was powerful to learn about these stories,” Andrew Voulgarelis ’25 says, “and to see how the community was focused on trying to learn as much as possible about this small group of people who made a big difference at the Academy, and helped make it what it is today.”

Sarah Pruitt ’95 is a staff writer for The Exeter Bulletin and a member of the Committee to Study Slavery and Its Legacy at Exeter.

Members of the Committee to Study Slavery and Its Legacy at Exeter, or CSSLE: (back row) Sarah Pruitt '95; Panos Voulgaris, instructor in physical education and varsity football coach; Kent McConnell, instructor in history; Magee Lawhorn, CSSLE co-head and head of Archives and Special Collections; Kevin Pajaro-Mariñez, assistant director of equity and inclusion; (front row) Laura Wood, director of the Class of 1945 Library; Stephanie Bramlett, CSSLE co-head and director of equity and inclusion

Connections

Architecture Different spaces have the power to “engender profoundly different human exeriences,” Nate McBride ’70 says. P. 54

The majestic Himalayan mountains loom above this Buddhist monastery in Pokrah, Nepal, designed by Nate McBride ’70.

Searching for a Cure

Dr. James Adams ’80 gives the autism community reason to hope

For parents of children with autism, hope is everything, but it can be tough to come by. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has remained a chronic ailment since its conceptualization in the early 20th century. A definitive cause is still unknown, and few options exist to treat the one in every 36 children in the U.S. living with autism. The diagnosis can be heartbreaking.

But Dr. James Adams ’80 is working hard to give the autism community a reason for hope. As director of the Autism/ Asperger’s Research Program at Arizona State University, Adams has spent the last 25 years pioneering research with a focus on the disorder’s biological causes and treatments. His determination was born of his own despair after his oldest daughter’s autism diagnosis in 1994.

“To be told that she had a lifelong, incurable condition. At age 2½, she had an IQ of 32. She had no spoken language and did not respond to her name. We were told that it was just a matter of time until we would have to place her in an institution. They knew nothing.”

Adams, an accomplished materials engineer, had spent his career solving environmental problems: designing solar cells and fuel-efficient car engines. “Nothing you can do” was not good enough for him. He believed there must be a way to improve his daughter’s life.

“I thought, we’ve known about vitamins for 50 years,” Adams says. “How could it be possible that kids with autism could be deficient in vitamins?” But once he read the research, he understood the potential. This became the framework for his first study, designed to gauge vitamin deficiencies in children with autism.

“It was just devastating,” Adams says.

Around 2000, Adams’ wife attended conferences that explored what were, at the time, more radical ideas like nutritional therapy for managing ASD symptoms, which include health, social and behavioral challenges, as well as significant gastrointestinal problems.

Five more studies followed, with great success. Adams then used the results to formulate a comprehensive multivitamin and mineral supplement that would improve the nutritional status of autistic children. In 2015, he founded the Autism Nutrition Research Center, a nonprofit dedicated to pioneering research in dietary and nutritional support for ASD. The organization now distributes his supplement, called ANRC Essentials, around the world.

“It is not a cure,” Adams says. “But it helps about three-quarters of them in many ways, including improved language, cognition and social interaction.”

Dr. James Adams ’80 (far right) at the Zoowalk for Autism Research in Phoenix, Arizona

Jim Adams ’80

Through those early studies, Adams zeroed in on the gut microbiome-brain connection. “We’ve discovered now that more than 80 percent of kids with autism have serious bacterial and/or yeast infections in their gut that could last for years, even decades,” Adams says. “These infections produce toxins — such as paracresol, a bacterially derived metabolite — that affect not just gut symptoms but brain and body function by poisoning the key neurotransmitters, like dopamine and serotonin, involved in mood, learning and memory. It has been truly revolutionary. I won’t say it’s the cause of autism, but I will say it is a major contributing factor.”

What Dr. Adams cannot say just yet, but what the autism community is eager to find out: Could these bad gut bacteria, somehow introduced to a baby’s microbiome during birth, be one reason autism develops in a segment of the population? And could these toxins also be contributing factors for other ailments that develop later in life like Parkinson’s disease, or mood disorders like anxiety and depression?

“We know that when you administer these toxic metabolites to mice, it causes autistic symptoms,” Adams says. “But when you treat the mice with microbiotic transplants from a healthy mouse, it cures them.”

His team has been doing human trials of Microbiota Transplant Therapy (MTT). As of March, four clinical trials had been run, with the fifth and sixth under way.

MTT involves taking gut bacteria from super-healthy donors, purifying it, and giving it to children with autism in either pill or capsule form. Adams describes it as akin to taking a probiotic, except a probiotic typically has only a few species of gut bacteria; MTT provides more than

“Nothing you can do” was not good enough for him.

400 — all the species that would be present in a healthy gut, Adams says.

“We’ve seen 80 percent reductions in gastrointestinal problems — diarrhea, constipation, pain, reflux,” Adams says, “and major improvements in core autism symptoms such as language, social interactions and behavior.”

Parents report that their children are happier, with a reduction in the anxiety, irritability and depression that often come with autism. A federal grant allowed Adams to repeat the study with adults who have had gastrointestinal and autism symptoms for 20, 30, 40 years. Their improvements were similar, Adams says.

In 2023, Adams co-founded Gut-Brain Axis Therapeutics Inc. to achieve Federal Drug Administration approval of MTT. The company is funded by more than 80 families — parents and grandparents of autistic children and adults who believe

progress is possible. They need to raise $20 million for one final study.

In January, Adams’ gut-toxin research led to the release of a urine test for diagnosing autism, produced by Autism Diagnostics LLC, a commercial company he founded. Viable for children as young as 2, it measures the amount of toxic metabolites present in a sample. The test is awaiting F.D.A. approval in the U.S. but is available through a firm based in the U.K.

Adams is still pushing for progress, but he has found peace at home with his wife and three children.

“What matters really for people is not how successful we are financially or intellectually,” he says. “But are you happy with your life? Do you enjoy the work you do? My daughter is able to do meaningful work. She is a very loving person. What matters most to me is her health and happiness.” — Danielle Cantor

Adams’ daughter Kim at a dinosaur museum

The Creative Economy

Laura Callanan ’83 brings creative entrepreneurs and impact investors together

As stage manager at the Academy’s Fisher Theater, Laura Callanan ’83 ran productions of A Streetcar Named Desire and Night School using many of the same organizational skills that she later parlayed into key positions with the National Endowment for the Arts, McKinsey & Company and the United Nations. As chief of staff for the U.N. Development Programme’s Bureau of Crisis Prevention and Recovery, she collaborated with colleagues from around the world.

“We realized that every one of us had been a stage manager,” Callanan says of one U.N.D.P. working group. “There’s no better way to learn about deadlines and details than making sure the light goes on at the right time and in the right place.”

Today, Callanan, a Barnard College theater major who went on to earn a Master of Public Administration in public finance, has blended her many experiences into Upstart Co-Lab, of which she is founding partner. Upstart serves as a bridge between creatives who are entrepreneurs and impact investors who seek to achieve a social or environmental benefit alongside a financial return.

The idea for Upstart arose during Callanan’s time at the NEA, when she observed creatives were not just working alone in a studio or starting nonprofit organizations, but were increasingly launching for-profit social purpose businesses. She set out to connect these creative entrepreneurs to the trillions of dollars of impact capital in the U.S.

“A lot of transformation for the whole economy can begin in the creative industries,” Callanan says. “At Upstart, we’re not focused on funding ‘the arts.’ We’re focused on financing businesses in creative industries that provide products, services and platforms to customers. Businesses that hire people, that pay taxes — and that need investors to grow.”

Callanan finds creative entrepreneurs work in some 145 industries that span fashion, food, film, TV, video games and more. One such business is Making Space, whose founder, a 20-something serial entrepreneur who is living with

a disability herself, connects media and entertainment companies looking for staff with qualified, skilled disabled talent. In just under a decade, Upstart has mobilized some $45 million and is recognized as the leader in the field of impact investing for the U.S. creative economy. She is careful to point out that impact investing can play a role in anyone’s financial plan. And the creative economy, valued at more than $1.2 trillion in the United States, can be part of any impact investor's portfolio.

According to the U.N., the creative industries are expected to make up 10 percent of the global economy over the next decade. Countries around the world that have long relied on extractive industries and agriculture have grasped that it may just prove to be the golden egg for sustainable development and economic growth.

“A lot of transformation for the whole economy can begin in the creative industries.”

“Places like Indonesia with a very young population are intentionally leaning into the creative economy. They’re balancing tradition and innovation,” Callanan says. Given that, she and her team are routinely fielding inbound queries from community, state and international arts councils, and foundations exploring ways to invest in their local creative economies.

“That’s really exciting for us, because part of our work as a nonprofit is sharing what we’re learning to motivate and support other people who want to do this themselves,” she says of the process, now formalized as Upstart Consults.

Reflecting on her time at Fisher Theater, Callanan, who walked the boards in productions of Rashomon, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Equus, says acting, too, was pivotal to her career.

“I have no fear of public speaking. And I can translate between the creative people who are entrepreneurs and the investors,” she says, “and help people see where they’re talking about the same thing, just using different language. I would not have my deep appreciation of creativity and creative people without my experience in theater at Exeter.”

— Sarah Zobel

Laura Callanan ’83 speaks with cellist Yo-Yo Ma at the Rockefeller Foundation in 2023.

Laura Callanan ’83

Roll

One

Cinematographer Julia Liu ’02 captures perspective on set

As a little kid, I was always making art,” says director and cinematographer Julia Liu ’02. “I was obsessed with the scene in Cinderella where the animals make the dress for her. I must have drawn that 100 times. And I would take Calvin and Hobbes plotlines and rewrite and redraw them, putting in my childhood dog as the main character.” Creative storytelling was an

absorbing pastime in the Connecticut town of mostly white residents where Liu, who is Taiwanese, grew up and sometimes felt isolated. Arriving at Exeter was a “huge culture shock,” she says.

The diversity surprised and excited her — and so did the Academy’s emphasis on learning. “It was cool to be smart,” she says. “I had always loved school but had never experienced that. The Harkness method taught me

how to think and express myself.” She dived into filmmaking classes taught by Instructor Rob Richards. “He set me on a path that I’m still on today,” Liu says. “In my senior year, I shot a movie in New York. … Having an adult tell you that you actually have potential is important.”

Despite her love of film, Liu studied human biology at Brown University. “Part of me said that being an artist was not practical,” she says. “But I still made movies on my own.”

After graduation, she promised that she would give herself a year to see if she could make a living in film. “I didn’t want to give up on the dream,” Liu says. “I hustled. I’d ride my bike around town and any time I’d see a film crew shooting, I’d ask, ‘How do I get a job on this set?’ ” Her hustle led to a position as a camera production assistant for a television pilot that was shooting in Providence, Rhode Island. “I got my butt kicked, but I learned so much,” Liu says. She then moved to New York and landed a theatrical union job, working for several years on hit TV shows like Person of Interest, White Collar and Girls.

Now a contributing director for The New York Times’ Op-Doc series and an Emmy-nominated cinematographer for Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie in 2023, Liu is focusing her lens on promoting diversity in film. “To me, diversity is a matter of survival,” she says. “It’s making space for myself and people who look like me. It’s really important to be able to see someone who looks like you in a role where you want to be.”

Looking back, Liu appreciates that Exeter laid the foundation for her success. “I made amazing friendships, and I think the education there is the best in the world,” she says. “I’m really grateful for the way Exeter nurtured me.”

—Marisa Procopio

“The Harkness method taught me how to think and express myself.”

Julia Liu ’02 has worked on hit TV shows like Girls and Person of Interest.

Camera

Julia Liu ’02

Building by Listening

Architect “Nate” Donald Craig McBride ’70

When he was a child, Nate McBride ’70 asked his father, a doctor, what he did all day. “I listen,” his dad replied. “If I listen long enough and well enough, the patient will self-diagnose.”

As an architect, McBride doesn’t treat patients, but he likewise finds that he cannot do his job without careful listening. It’s a skill that comes naturally to someone who has always been curious and, in his own words, “compelled to understand more about human nature.”

During his two years at Exeter, McBride read Erich Fromm and Malcolm X in his (decidedly non-theocentric) religion class. As a Stanford undergraduate, he studied cultural anthropology, psychology, poetry and literature — “anything to help me understand what humankind is about,” he says.

At the same time, he was fascinated by the spaces and structures surrounding people. Exeter’s dorms prompted an epiphany: “My relationships with people in Hoyt — which were ‘What floor do you live on?’ — were entirely different from those I forged when I was in a cluster in Main Street B,” he says. Different spaces, he realized, had the power to “engender profoundly different human experiences.”

He ultimately earned a Master of Architecture degree at Yale School of Architecture and founded McBride Architects in 1983.

Now, 40-plus years later, McBride presides over an eclectic oeuvre. He has constructed snug seaside cottages and renovated palatial midtown Manhattan town houses. He has built art galleries and institutional spaces. He has designed houses of worship. His clients include homeowners, business moguls, artists, colleges and Tibetan monks, among others. Not bad for a guy who says half-jokingly that he hopes his epitaph will read, “He Almost

Crossed Everything Off His List.”

Differences notwithstanding, every project he undertakes relies on the same figurative foundation. “I have to be humble enough to listen,” he says. “To do a project, I need to understand who the person is that I’m sitting with and talking to, what their larger context is. If I’m going to make art and also make responsible buildings, I need to have a deep understanding of somebody other than myself.”

Gently but relentlessly, he mines his clients for insights: What do they do when they get up in the morning? How do they spend their days? What are their habits or rituals? What is their connection to or history with the physical site? How do they plan to use the space? And the underlying

“If I’m going to make art and also make responsible buildings, I need to have a deep understanding of somebody other than myself.”

critical question, “What is most important to you?”

“What we’re doing is a process of self-discovery, then building something that’s reflective of that,” McBride says. He is simply the self-described “trip guide,” asking the right questions, challenging preconceptions and offering suggestions (“sometimes s oftly and sometimes adamantly”) with the goal of creating a structure that reflects the client’s deepest self. He has discovered that uncomfortable budget conversations are a blessing, because “you really get to essentials. You can’t have all that, so what’s really important?”

When a friend offered him a pro bono job designing community, spiritual and educational buildings for Tibetans in Nepal and India, McBride, a native Iowan, knew he would have to educate himself. Harking back to the Harkness table, he turned the initial client meetings into lessons.

“You need to teach us first what Buddhism means,” he said. Visiting Tibetan monks in red robes (“Such

Nate McBride ’70

Architect Nate McBride ’70 designed this Buddhist monastery in Pokrah, Nepal.

pageantry!” McBride says) flowed into his Tribeca office, where they ate plain lettuce and taught McBride’s team about Buddhism, about the diaspora that landed Tibetans in Nepal and India, and about the importance of helping the next generations of Tibetans “understand their traditions, history, who they are and who they could be in a new world.”

As a result of such intensive cross-cultural lessons, McBride was able to design a Buddhist monastery in Pokhara, Nepal, and a school and community center in Mundgod, India, for which the Dalai Lama laid the cornerstone. The sites are quite different: The colorful Nepalese monastery manages to be both imposing and festive, while the low Indian buildings exude serenity, rising organically from the surrounding green. Both feel consistent with the equanimity that characterizes Tibetan Buddhism.

In obvious ways, these projects were anomalous for McBride. But at a deeper level, he says, they were simply “an extreme example of what should happen on every project.” Whether a house, a library or a spiritual center, he adds: “There’s an element of ritual to the day. Some of us call it habit, but you take it to another spiritual level and all of a sudden, it’s a religious set of traditions. Understanding and building the experience of the spaces around those rituals is essentially no different than what I do with a client at home.”

Depending on the project, McBride might need to consider yet another partner: the land itself. “I need not just a humility about whom I’m building for, but a humility about the place in which I’m building,” he says. “To do that sensitively and successfully requires listening to the land. It sounds very woo-woo. (I am a ’60s child, and I did do time in California!) But to feel the wind, and see how the sun grazes the land in the morning and evening, really informs how the building, as Louis Kahn would say, ‘wants to be.’ ”

Sometimes, he’ll have one idea but the land will have another. A few years ago, clients hired him to build a house on a particularly dramatic site: a tumble of undulating green, ribbed with piney

ridges, culminating in a spectacular precipice overlooking Penobscot Bay in Maine. Awed by the immense grandeur, McBride could not figure out a way to fulfill the clients’ request. “To build the [desired] square footage in a singular structure would have been in competition with what is astoundingly beautiful on its own, which is the landscape,” he says.“How to be reverent and meld with the landscape, instead of trying to command the landscape?”

As he explored the area, an unexpected mental image took shape. Inst ead of one massive structure, he envisioned a small compound of three wooden cabins, each with a unique view. “The cabins began to find their place in the land,” he says. “The land was informing the position of those places.”

These days, McBride lives in Connecticut with his wife, an interior designer and frequent collaborator, in an 18th-century wooden house: a cozy hobbit home, with low beamed ceilings and cheerful floral wallpaper, renovated and decorated by the couple. He’s considering collecting his thoughts in a book, “not because they’re necessarily original,” he says, but because it would “in a way be more meaningful to me than putting together the oeuvre because these thoughts are what’s led to the life’s work.”

And what is most important to him?

“Dreaming, imagining, seeing and understanding.” Also, an outdoor shower. “It will change your experience of yourself and your world,” he says. Take it from the architect. — Juliet Eastland ’86

Exterior and interior views of the multi-cabin compound McBride designed overlooking Penobscot Bay in Maine.

I, Too, Miss Rice

Yoon moved into the room across from mine, the second international student in our dorm. I was the first; packed up my life in Shanghai and came here for boarding school two years ago. Yoon often sat alone at lunch, staring at the rotisserie chicken before returning it barely touched. One night, I ordered from

Kaju and knocked on his door.

His desk was cluttered with empty Haitai chip bags.

“Kimchi soup and rice?” I asked.

The umami smell filled the room.

Yoon suddenly said, “I miss rice,” and burst into tears.

I nodded, shoving a chopsticks-full in my mouth.●

Oscar Zhu ’27 is in his lower year at the Academy. This piece was originally published in The New York Times on February 13, 2025, as one of 20 winners in the paper’s third annual 100-Word Personal Narrative Contest.

Sasha Kramer ’94

2022 John and Elizabeth Phillips Award Recipient

Kramer was honored with the John and Elizabeth Phillips Award in 2022 for her 20-year career as a public health advocate.

A champion of dignified and safe sanitation, she channels a passionate devotion to ecological research into the pursuit of basic human rights for people in Haiti and around the world.

Nominate a classmate or Exeter community member for one of the following alumni awards:

John and Elizabeth Phillips Award Founders’ Day Award President’s Award

Nominations for the President’s Award are due June 1, 2025. Nominations for the Phillips and Founders’ Day awards are due August 15, 2025.

20 MAIN STREET

Recipient: If this magazine is addressed to an Exonian who no longer maintains a permanent address at this home, please email us (records@exeter.edu) to update our records. Thank you.