by PETER B. FAYROIAN, Head of School
leading lines
The Lay of the Land
Twenty-one home-cooked meals, five pies, and two bags of dog biscuits made me feel welcome. Your passion for NMH makes me feel inspired.
There is something to be said for geographic disposition. As I write, it’s been only one month since I stepped onto campus for the first time with my wife, Rachael, our daughter, Sofia, and our two dogs—but already, this place is home. The dark green of the hills across the Connecticut River in the morning and the deep red of the barns in the evening light feel awfully familiar to these Midwesterners, and not just because I studied at Middlebury and the University of Vermont. Rachael and I recently recalled one of our first trips together a few years ago, touring New England and hiking in the Green Mountains. Looking south from the summit of Camel’s Hump, we imagined a life together on a boarding-school campus in this neck of the woods, long before Northfield Mount Hermon came into our view. Timing, as they say, is everything. The grandeur of the campus and its setting, unsurpassed by any school I’ve seen, is only barely responsible for our easy transition from Michigan to Massachusetts. The people who live here—teachers, staff members, and their families—and the people who have lived here in the past—specifically, alumni— have embraced and supported us in NMH faculty and ways that are, in fact, stereotypically Midwestern. Twenty-one meals, five staff make me feel pies, and two bags of dog biscuits later, we are fat and happy in Mount proud to call this Hermon, and that would be more community home than just an expression if it weren’t for my own family, also for the great recommendations for hiking trails. and motivated I’ve already spent a good deal to begin the work of time visiting with NMH comthat lies ahead. munity members who live within a few hours of campus. Whether they are Northfield alumnae or Mount Hermon alumni, no matter which side of the river they called home if they graduated from the two-campus Northfield Mount Hermon, and regardless of the year they received their diplomas (I’ve already broken bread with alums from nine different decades), their passion for this school is astounding—but not surprising. Every story I hear
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Photo: Glenn Minshall
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has the three threads of head, heart, and hand running through it. Every memory embraces the shared experiences, the spirit of fellowship among peers and with teachers, and the unique setting for work and play. There is an enduring quality of the NMH experience that reaches beyond place and still resides in so many of you. In many ways, this reach of mission is exactly what D.L. Moody intended. The campuses he conceived became spiritual and intellectual epicenters, but they were not meant to be ends in themselves. After “engag[ing] the intellect, compassion, and talents of our students,” NMH has for centuries “empower[ed] them to act with humanity and purpose,” not just in these verdant Massachusetts hills, but from Wall Street to Hollywood, from the towers of Taipei to the streets of Shanghai. I’ve had the opportunity to extend my hand to only a small fraction of you so far, but already I’ve met people in just about every enterprise—artists, academics, businessmen and -women, farmers, politicians—and they each carry into their professional and personal lives NMH’s core values of excellence, respect, integrity, persistence, creativity, and teamwork. Moody would be particularly fond of the school’s commitment to cultivating its students to be meaningful contributors rather than mere consumers. I encourage you to consider these core values of NMH. I think you will agree that if you are an alumnus or an alumna, these are values you carry within yourself and find in your fellow graduates. If you are a parent, you will see them manifested in the lives of your children. I’m finding them in our teachers and their families, in the men and women who care for our grounds and buildings and who keep the school running smoothly. They make me feel proud to call this community home for my own family, and motivated to begin the work that lies ahead. I will do my best to exemplify NMH’s core values. They existed when we were two schools; they existed when we were one school on two campuses; and they exist today on our onecampus home for 650 students. Like the green on the hills and the red on the barns, those values are a light that has shined on this school for 134 years.
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