The Lawrentian Winter 2019

WINTER 2019

THE

The Relentless Search for Truth

In a time of divisive “fake news” and political polarization, the role of Harkness matters more than ever

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12 TAKE A BYTE

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FEATURES

30 30 A Place at the Table On the Cover: The Harkness table is

In a polarizing era, the relentless search for truth that takes place at the Harkness table matters more than ever.

democracy in action.

Illustration by Ellice Weaver

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2 From the

Head Master

3 From the

TAKE THIS JOB AND LOVE IT

20 Go Big Red!

Years of excellence are rooted in field hockey’s esprit de corps.

22 Take this Job and Love It

Basement of Pop Hall

Take a tummy-tickling tour with Lynne Mullervy Staartjes ’07.

4 A Thousand Words

A bowl made whole.

24 Table Talk

Q&A with science master John L. Clark P’20 ’22

6 News in Brief

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Making a makerspace, Middle Eastern strife explained, New heights on Big Red Giving Day

26 Ask the Archivist

The planned Athletics and Wellness Complex will be the most recent in a series of “gym dandies.”

12 By the Numbers Lawrenceville’s Informational Technology Service department is wired for innovation.

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16 On the Arts

Oh, you’re in town? So is Urinetown!

18 Sports Roundup

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38 Class Notes 84 Old School 85 Student Snap

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KEEP UP WITH LAWRENCEVILLE EVERY DAY! YOU CAN FOLLOW MORE THAN 25 LAWRENCEVILLE SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS! GET CONNECTED TO ALL OF THEM AT HTTP://BIT.LY/SMDIRECT.

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FROM THE HEAD MASTER

Y

“I tell Paul’s story not simply because voices of authority are attacking the credibility and legitimacy of the press in our own country, but to remind us of the voices that have served as a conscience, urging us to resist cynicism, believe in freedom, and have faith in humanity.”

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ou’ve probably never heard of Paul Klebnikov.

He was an American journalist who was shot four times as he left work one summer evening in Moscow 14 years ago. He was the editor in chief of Forbes Russia, and he had moved to Moscow to found the Russian edition of the American magazine. He was a staunch defender of a free and independent press, a courageous investigative journalist – and he was a high school classmate of mine. In fact, my wife and I had dinner with him at our reunion three years before he was killed.

Paul spoke truth to power, to borrow a phrase. And he died for it.

If Paul’s death teaches us anything, it is that the practice of civil discourse around the Harkness table is profoundly important. This daily Lawrenceville exercise in careful, respectful listening, this expectation that all voices have a right to be heard, is a fundamental value of our democracy, enshrined in the First Amendment. It is the best protection of our concept of citizenship and of our free and open society.

Democratic ideals do not persist on their own, and erosion is inevitable if we do not work at these freedoms, practice them here at Lawrenceville around our wooden tables, and actively defend them out in the world. And this to me is why Paul’s story is relevant, even urgent, at this point in time.

Paul’s family had originally fled the Bolshevik Revolution and immigrated to America in the early part of the 20th century. His father was an interpreter at the United Nations, and Paul maintained a deep and abiding interest in Russian language and culture. His investigative reporting, critical of Russia as it emerged from the Soviet era, was guided by his strong moral compass and was aimed at holding the country accountable through the establishment of a free press during that very fragile transition period.

Some of his reporting was on the rise of organized crime in post-Soviet Russia, or what he called “gangster capitalism.” He was also investigating corruption in Chechnya, which may well have led to his murder, while another theory is that it may have been the mere publication of an article, which appeared the same month that he died, listing the net worth of the 100 wealthiest Russians. In it, Paul wrote about the accumulation of vast wealth in the few short years following the fall of the Berlin Wall, implying that it would be nearly impossible, through legitimate means, to become a billionaire in Russia at that time.

His death occurred during a time of heightened restriction on news reporting that coincided with the 2000 election of President Vladimir Putin, former agent of the KGB. Knowing Paul, this likely would only have inspired him to push back harder against anything that impeded the free flow of ideas, especially if Russia was to have a chance at developing into a free and open society.

At dinner with Paul that evening in 2001, he told stories of investigative reporting with a kind of hardnosed, determined idealism that drove him to take on the corruption that was undermining a precarious and faltering system. His murder remains unsolved and was hardly an aberration. The Wall Street Journal reports that 36 Russiabased journalists have been murdered during Putin’s regime.

So, I tell Paul’s story not simply because voices of authority are attacking the credibility and legitimacy of the press in our own country, but to remind us of the voices that have served as a conscience, urging us to resist cynicism, believe in freedom, and have faith in humanity.

Of course, as Paul understood, an independent press requires something of us. Unless we prefer to live as sheep with someone telling us what to believe, this independence requires us to be educated and discerning in order to sift through the sometimes chaotic range of perspectives. If this leads to frustration, especially when partisan views are strongly expressed, it is hardly a new frustration.

Paul Klebnikov and I, as high school students, both sat around Harkness tables and learned to listen, realizing the importance of the free and respectful exchange of ideas. That was where Paul developed his voice, the voice he used to speak truth to power. He’d have been greatly reassured to know that we continue to uphold this core belief in developing strong voices, and that the free flow of ideas around the table remains a guiding principle at Lawrenceville. And he’d have been proud of all of you who work at this every day.

– Adapted from the head master’s Convocation address in September Sincerely,

Stephen S. Murray H’55 ’65 ’16 P’16 ’21 The Shelby Cullom Davis ’26 Head Master

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FROM THE BASEMENT OF POP HALL WINTER 2019 VOLUME 83 | NUMBER 1 PUBLISHER Jennifer Szwalek

EDITOR Sean Ramsden

ART DIRECTOR Phyllis Lerner

STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER Paloma Torres

PROOFREADERS Rob Reinalda ’76 Linda Hlavacek Silver H’59 ’61 ’62 ’63 ’64 GP’06 ’08

CONTRIBUTORS Erik Chaput Andrea Fereshteh Katelyn Ge ’21 Lisa M. Gillard Hanson Jacqueline Haun Barbara Horn Joel Kimmel Pier Kooistra P’19 Selena Smith Nicole Stock Brittany Sun ’19 Ellice Weaver The Lawrentian (USPS #306-700) is published quarterly (winter, spring, summer, and fall) by The Lawrenceville School, P.O. Box 6008, Lawrenceville, NJ 08648, for alumni, parents, grandparents, and friends.

F

rom my desk in the lower level of the Fathers Building, through the allglass door of my office, I see many student tour guides leading families of prospective Lawrenceville students down the long corridor, apprising them of the activities and opportunities available to them along its length. As these children and their parents eagerly absorb information about The Lawrence, Olla Podrida, and L10, I frequently catch their eye as they pass and give them a reassuring smile.

Sometimes, I’ll imagine they stop the tour for a moment, open my door, and ask me what I think about Lawrenceville. Mind you, it’s never happened, and it’s not likely to, but if it did, this is what I’d tell them: Do it. If you can make Lawrenceville happen, please come here.

However, my zeal isn’t fueled by the access they’ll have to fine colleges and universities nor the stunning network of alumni they’ll join upon graduation.

That’s all built in, of course, assuming they’re willing to do the work. But what I really want to say to these students who never actually open my door to learn my opinion is that by coming to Lawrenceville, you’ll learn how to learn. How to think. How to discern good data from junk, analyze information, consider diverse and divergent perspectives, and synthesize well-informed, reasonable, evidence-based opinions – those which may be properly classified as “truth.” This is the gift of Harkness, and in an era of boundless online content and polarizing opinions amplified by social media, it’s about as valuable now as it’s ever been.

In this issue of The Lawrentian, two of our fine subject masters, Pier Kooistra P’19 and Erik Chaput, provide a glimpse into the ways their students have used their classrooms to share their varied perspectives, listen with empathy, and come to mutual conclusions about some truly troubling, divisive events, both recent and historical. I think you’ll be proud to read about the way these students embraced their vulnerabilities, checked their respective biases, considered the nuance, and scrutinized evidence in order to reach a thoughtful consensus. It really is, as Pier writes, democracy in action, a way of getting as close to the truth as we possibly can.

And it’s exactly what I always want to tell those touring families.

All the best,

Periodical postage paid at Trenton, NJ, and additional mailing offices.

The Lawrentian welcomes letters from readers. Please send all correspondence to sramsden@lawrenceville.org or to the above address, care of The Lawrentian Editor.

Letters may be edited for publication.

The Lawrentian welcomes submissions and suggestions for magazine departments. If you have an idea for a feature story, please query first to The Lawrentian Editor.

Visit us on the web at www.lawrenceville.org. www.lawrenceville.org/alumni/the-lawrentian

POSTMASTER Please send address corrections to: The Lawrentian The Lawrenceville School P.O. Box 6008 Lawrenceville, NJ 08648 ©The Lawrenceville School Lawrenceville, New Jersey All rights reserved.

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Sean Ramsden Editor sramsden@lawrenceville.org Setting the Record Straight In our fall coverage of Commencement 2018, we regretfully neglected to include what are perhaps the two most prestigious Fifth Form awards. Brianna Thompson ’18 received the Edward Sutliffe Brainard Prize, given annually by the faculty to the Fifth Form student whom they hold in the highest esteem, and Charles Christoffersen ’18 was presented the Trustees’ Cup, awarded annually by the head master on behalf of the Board of Trustees to that student who has most influenced the School for good.

In addition, Rishi Bagaria ’19 and Lisa Miller ’19 received the 2018 Jeremy K. Mario ’88 Award. The editor apologizes for these key omissions.

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A THOUSAND WORDS

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A BOUNTIFUL BOWL

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Lawrenceville officially dedicated the beautifully refurbished Bowl, one of its most iconic outdoor spaces, on a brisk autumn evening in October. A gift from the Davis family, the upgraded space features new lighting, fresh landscaping, new marble stairs, and a reconstructed brick wall

Photograh by Nicole Lantz

embedded with five inspirational quotes, each selected by Chris Davis P’06 ’07 ’18.

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NEWS IN BRIEF

Lawrenceville Tops $1.5 Million in Donations to LTEF Head Master Stephen Murray H’55 ’65 ’16 P’16 ’21 presented a check for $65,000 to the Lawrence Township Education Foundation (LTEF) in September. Rick Smith, LTEF vice president; Amy Davis, LTEF president; and Karen Faiman, LTEF executive director, were on hand to receive the School’s annual donation from Murray. Since 1995, the School has donated a total of $1,505,000 to LTEF, as well as event sponsorship and numerous in-kind services, including office space.

Houses Lauded for Scholarship, Service, Spirit These Lawrentians scored in the top 1 percent of the PSAT/NMSQT last year.

Sixteen Vie for Nat’l Merit Scholarships Sixteen Lawrentians are among the fewer than 1 percent of U.S. high school seniors selected as semifinalists in the 64th annual National Merit Scholarship (NMS) Program competition. Current Fifth Formers Sarawati Dasgupta,

Zain Fazal, Ben Fiske, Charles Foster,

Residents of the Circle and Crescent Houses compete annually for four prestigious awards – and Stephens House was the winner of two for the 201718 academic year. The girls of Stephens won the Chivers Cup, presented to the House with the highest GPA, and the Adams Cup, given to the House with the greatest commitment to community service. The House Cup, awarded to the residence with the most spirit, went to Hamill House, and Kennedy House claimed the inaugural Green Cup, presented to the House with the most-improved GPA.

Hutchinson Honored Few members of the Lawrenceville community were as deeply fixed at the School as Harrison “Harry” Hutchinson ’70 P’97 ’99, and a newly planted oak tree will now stand in memory of the 37-year member of the Grounds Department, who died August 1. Dozens of colleagues, friends, and family members, including daughters Jennifer Chernoski ’97, Kelly Johnson ’97, and Kristy Pylypshyn ’99, gathered beside the Class of ’49 Field to dedicate the tree and a brass plaque honoring the fifth-generation Lawrentian on October 5.

Emily Guo, Charlie Jiang, Lucas Kinder, Brandon Li, Rishi Mago, Andrew Ni, Cary Wang, Danya Wang, Jacob Wu, Kevin Xiao, Katherine Xiong, and Ivy Zhang were among more than 1.6 million high school juniors who entered the NMS Program last year by taking the Preliminary SAT/National

7, (second Chernoski ’9 n so in ch ho ut Jennifer H colleagues w d the many ke an n th so t) ri from righ father, Har nor her late ho er. to t ob ct ou turned ’97 ’99, in O inson ’70 P ch ut H ” ry “Har

Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test.

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GIRLS’ TENNIS NETS PREP A CHAMPIONSHIP

THE BIG RED GIRLS’ TENNIS TEAM CAME UP ACES, DEFEATING PINGRY, 3-2, TO WIN THE N.J.I.S.A.A. PREP

A CHAMPIONSHIP IN OCTOBER. KHAT TUCHSCHERER ’19 AND PIPER HARRELL ’22 ROUTED THEIR OPPONENTS IN FIRST AND THIRD SINGLES, RESPECTIVELY, AND THE PAIRING OF ANNIE HAIT ’19 AND SABRINA YEUNG ’22 CAPTURED THE FIRST-DOUBLES CROWN.

Ferguson Explains Middle East Strife Jane Ferguson ’04 has lived in the Middle East for ten years, reporting for such news outlets as PBS NewsHour, The New Yorker, CBS and Al-Jazeera English. Returning to Lawrenceville in September, Ferguson shared her insights on the reality of life in the region, and how her Lawrenceville experience prepared her for the challenges of international reporting.

Speaking to a crowd of students, faculty, and alumni in the Heely Room, she discussed nuances of life in the Middle East beyond primetime news soundbites.

Ferguson said that what really impacts dayto-day life in the Middle East – beyond sectarian differences or terrorism – is pervasive corruption.

“Bribing officials is normal,” she said. “Systematic corruption exists everywhere, from access to medical treatment to getting a job, and having access to clean water.”

Earlier in the day, Ferguson spoke to students at School Meeting about her formative year at Lawrenceville as a Northern Ireland Scholar.

Coming from a small hometown school in rural County Armagh, she recalled the “enormous culture shock” she experienced arriving on campus.

“Everything I learned here has been extremely valuable to me,” she said, adding that she earned “a master’s degree in grit” at Lawrenceville.

’04 ne Ferguson journalist Ja st y life a m E le on d ck id M I look ba en h “W , ts ere.” told studen nect back h the dots con so far, I see

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NEWS IN BRIEF

Something Sweet with a Sting School carpenter and apiarist Ryan Yura sees beekeeping as a way to bring people together.

Facilities’ Ryan Yura does double duty as the Big Red Farm’s resident beekeeper.

Most Lawrenceville employees wear multiple hats: teacher and coach, librarian and housemaster, carpenter and beekeeper … wait, what was that last one?

Carpenter Ryan Yura, a member of Lawrenceville’s Facilities Department, also volunteers as the School’s beekeeper, caring

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for the nearly 100,000 honeybees that help pollinate the Big Red Farm. The amateur apiarist keeps seven hives (and growing) at his own home in Bucks County, Pa., as well as two at the farm.

“It’s an addicting hobby,” he said.

Yura maintains Lawrenceville’s two hives, home to a mix of Carniolan and Italian honeybees. Both species, he said, are gentle, but the Carniolans are better suited for New Jersey winters.

Unseasonable spring weather got the Big Red bees off to a slow start this year, as did the departure of a queen bee that left to start a

new hive. The farm’s bees were forced to then “requeen,” Yura explained, adding that it is a rather cutthroat process.

“Before she left, the bees made lots of other queens. They then selected one – just one – as their new queen,” Yura said. It takes two to three weeks for the new leader to establish herself and for the bees to resume their normal activities. Honey production won’t be quite where he had hoped this year due to these setbacks, but Yura’s top priority is keeping the hives healthy and thriving through the winter.

Yura is a diligent caretaker, visiting the hives weekly to check on his charges. Although his supervisors have cleared him to spend time tending to the bees, Yura prefers to visit the hives during his lunch hour or at the end of his workday.

“I like to get things done,” he said, expressing his appreciation to his supervisors, Dan Peterson, manager of structural trades, and carpenter Tim McElroy, for their support of his farm endeavors, as well as to farm operations manager Ian MacDonald; farm program manager and science master Steve Laubach; and John Hughes, director of experiential education.

A number of Lawrentians have learned about beekeeping from Yura, who hopes even more will become interested.

“I want the hives to grow and expand so more people can get involved and learn more about bees,” he said. “Working together brings people together on campus.”

– Lisa M. Gillard Hanson

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Supporting Lit Lovers The new Merrill Scholars Program enables students to dive deep into authors’ archives.

Lawrenceville’s newly created James Merrill ’43 Scholarship Program will not only support budding lovers of literature and writing but also offer them a unique opportunity to produce original scholarly research mined from the Special Collections at Princeton University.

Students selected for the program will divide their time between doing archival research in Princeton on an author of their choice and composing their original creative works before designing, building, and binding a book to showcase their creativity.

Because Princeton’s collections are so vast and not all have been thoroughly mined, the Merrill Scholars have a good chance of producing original, even groundbreaking research, according to English masters Jeffrey Blevins and Maggie Ray. They will share their work with the School community at an academic-style conference and reading of their creative writing each fall.

Blevins, who formulated the program, and Ray will select the first cohort of Merrill Scholars this spring and oversee the students during their research. They are seeking Lawrentians who are curious, creative, and independent thinkers.

“We want students who are interested in seeing what they can make from their minds,” Ray explained of the selection criteria. “They

will be students who feel competent finding their way around a library and who are good readers.”

Merrill Scholars need not have an extensive writing portfolio, but should be willing to be creative.

“

We want people who are not only producing good work in their English classes,” Blevins said, “but who are also producing original thoughts and arguments throughout their work – ideas that don’t necessarily fit into patterns that have been discussed in class.

”

Students will begin meeting with Blevins and Ray in the spring to brainstorm ideas for their summer research project.

“I’m going to encourage them to really think and reflect on what they love, look at what

Princeton has, and choose something they think they’ll be passionate about,” Blevins said.

Work will begin in earnest in June, when Scholars return to campus for two weeks.

Mornings will spent doing research at Princeton with Blevins and afternoons dedicated to creating their own work with Ray. On the weekends, students will work with local bookmakers on time-honored skills such as papermaking and bookbinding.

Lawrenceville’s location provides easy access not only to Princeton’s Special Collections but also to resources in New York City, allowing the Scholars to take behindthe-scenes tours of The Morgan Library and Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Ray hopes that seeing the works in progress of legendary authors – the stops and starts, the many revisions – will remind students that writing is an extensive process.

“Writing is rarely perfect in your first draft,” she said. Students will also meet with local book preservationists, antiquarians, and sellers, seeing firsthand how to turn their creative works into a physical book.

“By making their own books as ‘vessels’ for their creative works, students will experience firsthand what they work on in their English classes every day: the marriage of form and content,” Blevins said.

– Lisa M. Gillard Hanson

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Breaking Ground on Gruss Center for Art and Design Lawrenceville celebrated the official groundbreaking of the Gruss Center for Art and Design (GCAD), a state-of-the-art creative design center and makerspace, and the planned renovation of the Center’s Hutchins Galleries in October.

Martin ’60 and Audrey Gruss are the principal benefactors of the project and participated in the groundbreaking, as did Glenn Hutchins ’73, benefactor of the Hutchins Galleries through the Hutchins Family Foundation. Mr. Gruss and Mr. Hutchins are trustees emeriti of the School. Jean Fang ’90 joins Mr. Hutchins and his wife, Deborah, in supporting the gallery renovations.

The project scope encompasses a comprehensive renovation of the existing Gruss Center of Visual Arts, a fine arts classroom building and gallery space, and a 15,000-square-foot expansion of the building footprint. The design reflects best practices in STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) education, informed by site visits to corporate innovation hubs, Stanford University’s d.School (the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design), and similar facilities at Yale and MIT. The project also incorporates improvements to the Center’s Hutchins Galleries and the creation of climatecontrolled storage space for the School’s extensive fine art collection.

“The vision for this renovation reflects

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our commitment to STEAM instruction as preparation for the way our students will need to think in the 21st century,” Head Master Steve Murray H’55 ’65 ’16 P’16 ’21 said.

“The new facility will provide them with the tools and opportunities to become inspired problem-solvers and creative explorers of art,

innovation offered a thrilling opportunity,” Mr. Gruss said. “The visual arts building provided the ideal site for this exciting new venture, and Audrey and I feel fortunate to be able to support the School’s vision.”

Mr. Hutchins also expressed enthusiasm for the School’s direction. “I want to congratulate

From left to right, Head Master Steve Murray H’55 ’65 ’16 P’16 ’21, Audrey and Martin Gruss ’60, Glenn Hutchins ’73, and Board of Trustees President Michael Chae ’86 participated in the groundbreaking.

science, and technology. We are enormously grateful for this significant investment in the future of learning at Lawrenceville.”

The expansion will transform the facade of the Gruss Center with floor-to-ceiling glass panels and the interior with new wood and metal finishes, creating a cutting-edge workspace flanked by the galleries at one end and studio space at the other. New facilities will include a clean fabrication lab, digital design rooms, and a large flexible project room for ideation and rapid prototyping; wood and metal shops; and collaborative workstations to support team projects.

“Lawrenceville’s plan to blend the principles of technology and design to create a center for

and thank Martin and Audrey Gruss on this amazing contribution and their long history of support for art and design at Lawrenceville,” he said. “My wife, Debbie, and I are pleased to be their partners in creating this place where Lawrentians can quite literally build the future.”

This groundbreaking marks the fourth iteration of the building, which will reopen in January 2020 as the Gruss Center for Art and Design. It began as the much smaller John Dixon Library, which opened in 1931. In 1960, the Carpenter Wing was added to expand the library. The Gruss Center of Visual Arts, also funded by Mr. and Mrs. Gruss, opened in 1998 to provide a home for the Visual Arts Department.

– Barbara Horn

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BOYS’ CROSS COUNTRY WINS SHORE INVITATIONAL THE BOYS’ CROSS-COUNTRY TEAM TOOK FIRST PLACE AT THE PRESTIGIOUS SHORE INVITATIONAL IN HOLMDEL, NEW JERSEY, IN OCTOBER, AVERAGING 17:38 OVER THE 3.1-MILE COURSE. BIG RED CRUSHED THE COMPETITION WITH 67 POINTS, OUTPACING SECOND-PLACE FINISHER HASBROUCK HEIGHTS (N.J.) HIGH SCHOOL’S 99, AND NEWARK ACADEMY’S 182. TOP THREE LAWRENCEVILLE FINISHERS WERE CAPTAIN ROBERT ENCK ’19 (SECOND PLACE IN 16:58), FOLLOWED BY VISHNU RAJAKANNAN ’20 (THIRD, 17:09), AND CHRIS CRANE ’21 (EIGHTH, 17:31).

Big Red Giving Day Goes Over the Top Lawrentians Tout Scientific Research

Three Lawrentians presented their research at the Gesneriad Society’s 62nd Annual Convention in Framingham, Mass. The students presented at a symposium on plant conservation, joined by a broad range of plant enthusiasts from a doctoral student from China to horticulturalists.

The students also received the Society’s Student Convention Grant in recognition of their contributions to promote plant diversity.

Brandon Li ’19, who delivered a presentation on “The Biodiversity of the Cordillera del Cóndor;” Sid Sharma ’20, who presented a video blog about the Lawrenceville School’s Harkness Travel Program trip to Ecuador this past spring; and Emily Guo ’19, who presented “Laboratory-and FieldBased Approaches for Studying Plant Diversity,” were the grant recipients.

All three were part of Lawrenceville’s 2018 biodiversity research expedition to Ecuador, led by science master John Clark, along with science master Steven Laubach and English master Rebecca Findlay. Guo and Li also participated in a co-curricular club on DNA sequencing with Clark during the 2018 winter and spring terms. (Please see related article on

Lawrentians established an exciting new standard this year, digging deep to support The Lawrenceville Fund/ Parents Fund on the sixth annual Big Red Giving Day. Between midnight and 11:59 p.m. on November 1, Lawrenceville alumni, parents and friends came through in unprecedented fashion, making 1,132 gifts and pledges totaling $1,448,312. These donors easily met a generous Trustee Challenge, which promised $100,000 for each 200 gifts or pledges, up to $500,000 for 1,000 gifts. This

brought the total dollar amount for the day to an outstanding $1,948,312, a new Big Red Giving Day record.

pages 24-25.)

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BY THE NUMBERS

Wired for Innovation

From troubleshooting for the not-

so-tech-savvy to managing cybersecurity and keeping Lawrenceville at the fore of curricular innovation, the School’s robust Informational Technology Service department always saves the day. Headed by new chief technology officer Marquis Scott, ITS works closely with departments across the School to support teaching and administrative systems, while ensuring that students have the technological tools to thrive.

6,000 Average number of emails sent from Lawrenceville email accounts on a typical weekday.

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ITS employees at Lawrenceville.

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435 70 Total number of desk telephones on campus.

the School first made computer 1996 Year labs available to students.

2 , 029 20

Computer labs on campus.

3

Number of ITS employees who staff the ITS Helpdesk.

2

Number of fish residing in the ITS Helpdesk’s fish tank in the lower level of Pop Hall.

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Constant temperature, in degrees Fahrenheit, of the room where the School’s server is stored, with 40 percent humidity.

1.25 The estimated capacity of a human being’s functional memory in Terabytes, according to futurist Ray Kurzweil.

Terabytes (TB) of data stored on School-owned Google accounts, such as Gmail, Google Drive, etc.

This is equal to approximately a billion bytes of data, or 1,024 Gigabytes (GB). One Terabyte can hold 472 hours of broadcast-quality video or 130,000 digital photos.

Requests for assistance handled by the ITS Helpdesk during the 2017-18 academic year.

634

Desktop workstations on campus (or total, including employees).

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LAWRENCEVILLE LEGACY LEAVE A

John Hover ’61 P’91, a former private banker, and his wife, Jacqueline, are

knowledgeable world travelers. Through the years, they have witnessed first-

“I came to Lawrenceville in 1957 as a young boy and graduated

hand the ongoing timelines of civilization and of nature. Recently, following a trek to the Mendenhall Glacier in Alaska, John observed that the glacier, like The Lawrenceville School, is always carving new paths. This sense of time

in 1961 as an aspiring young man.

and progress has led John and Jaqui to create charitable remainder trusts

Lawrenceville and its amazing

at both John’s college alma mater and at Lawrenceville. These gifts have

masters made that happen. My

provided the Hovers with current tax benefits and an income stream for their

wife’s and my goal, with every gift

lives. When they are both gone, the remainders of the trusts will pass to the

we make to Lawrenceville, is to

institutions the Hover family holds dear, enabling them, like the glacier, to

help sustain its legendary faculty

continue carving new paths.

for current and future generations of students.”

– John Hover ’61 P’91

For more information on leaving a bequest to Lawrenceville or for other planned giving opportunities, or if you have included Lawrenceville in your will but have not yet informed the School, please contact Jerry Muntz at the Lawrenceville Office of Planned Giving at 609-620-6064 or jmuntz@lawrenceville.org, or go to www.lawrenceville.planyourlegacy.org.

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INSIDE THE GATES

ONE TO WATCH

His Stock is Rising Name: Rishi Bagaria ’19 Age: 18

5Q4

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Rishi was selected as a junior partner at Thessalus Capital, LLC, a global investment firm specializing in U.S. and international life-science industries.

questions for

Makayla Boxley ’20,

president of Stephens House, L10 senior news correspondent, and Ropes Course instructor What class are you most enjoying this year?

Fourth Form English and its three terms of The Novel, Poetry, and Essay Writing.

I’m interested in gaining nuanced approaches and knowledge to apply to these parts of English that I often believe I am so familiar with.

What is your best tip for not being scared atop the Ropes Course tower?

Trust! Trust yourself for having gotten yourself to your goal and trust your RCIs, who have worked hard to ensure that they can properly support you on your journey up. Also, trust the experience you are having at the Ropes Course, which can take you into an uncomfortable zone where your best learning happens.

If you could interview anyone in the world for L10 News, who would it be?

Brandon Stanton, creator of Humans of New York. I admire his originality and simple passion for telling the simple

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He will help oversee the efforts of the highperforming fund, which posted a 47 percent return last year, to increase the fund’s size.

stories and giving a voice to those who are often overlooked or taken for granted.

His work has taught me to remember that there is, without exception, great value in everyone’s story.

What is your favorite thing to eat or drink at the Bath House Café?

Probably a strawberry-mango smoothie and a quinoa shaker, because it tastes great but is also quick to grab on my way to practice when I don’t have time to sit down at Irwin.

If you took a gap year between Lawrenceville and college, what would you like to do with the time?

I could imagine pursuing an experience that allows me to use and improve my Chinese, because I hope to one day become fluent. In any case, my larger goals for a gap year would involve taking the time I have to help others in need and to learn more about myself before I take on the challenge of college.

An honor roll student, Rishi is president of Lawrenceville’s Big Red Investment Club and the Debate Club.

He also serves co-editor of The First Amendment, the School’s student political opinions magazine.

Last year, Rishi was one of three Lawrentians honored as an Outstanding Delegate at the Yale Model United Nations competition.

OFTEN OVERLOOKED It’s been a full century since World War I came to an end, so it’s not hard to forget the way the deadly conflict personally touched the lives of the era’s Lawrentians. The Class of 1921 chose to plant commemorative ivy from the battlefield of Château-Thierry, a conflict considered the turning point of the war. The 1918 battle, which claimed the lives of some 67,000 American servicemen, was waged the summer before the class’s Third Form year. This dedication stone, hidden for years behind shrubbery, sits near the base of Edith Memorial Chapel.

Its corresponding ivy was removed some time ago due to concerns for the stonework.

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THEY SAID IT “The collapse of community journalism isn’t about an industry falling to a convenient alternative – think Barnes & Noble in the wake of Amazon – but about how in the expanding news vacuum, little quality coverage has taken its place.”

– Andrew Ni ’19, “Starving Papers: The Full Course Meal We Lost,” in The Lawrence, September 26, 2018.

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IN THE CLUB

Things we learned producing this issue of

The Lawrentian

1. Even in 1890,

Lawrenceville students were eager for the School to build them a new gymnasium.

2. The amount of data stored

L Magazine Founded: 2010 Current Membership: 10 Purpose: Fashion and lifestyle magazine that examines pop culture, including fashion, music, art, athletics, and news through a Lawrenceville lens.

Lawrenceville never goes out of style, but no one showcases its casual verve like L Magazine. Each issue is anchored by a themed fashion shoot – “A Picnic in the Bowl,” for example – and is rounded out by a School-centric scan of what music, art, food, and even classes have earned their way into the students’ consciousness. “We focus on capturing the Lawrenceville community as a whole,” says executive editor Caroline Friedman ’19, who adds that the fashion shoot always draws interested onlookers. “It’s truly a fun process, and when people do watch or walk by and look, it’s exciting for the models and for us. It’s great to know that people are interested in seeing what the process of creating L Mag entails!”

on Lawrenceville-owned Google accounts is about equal to the capacity of 16 human beings’ functional memories, measured in Terabytes.

3. Queen bees sometimes

abandon their hives, forcing the remaining bees to “requeen” – a highly competitive, even cutthroat process.

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Oh, You’re in Town? Come See the Show! he Periwig Club opened its 2018-19 season in October with its production of the three-time Tony Award-winning musical Urinetown. The stage of the Kirby Arts Center came to life around the comedic musical satire, which lampoons bureaucracy, local politics, capitalism, and even Broadway musicals as an art form.

With talented actors and singers, a brilliant stage crew, skilled instrumentalists, and dedicated faculty members, the fall musical is a perennial favorite, and this year’s installment did not disappoint. Thirtythree students played roles in Urinetown, including Casey Rogerson ’20, who portrayed Bobby Strong; Shreya Kumar ’20 as Hope Cladwell; Owen Bird ’19 as Caldwell B. Cladwell; and Cate Levy ’20 as Penelope Pennywise. They were backed by seven students in the orchestra and dozens more who lent their efforts to supporting technical roles.

Christopher Cull P’20, who directed Urinetown, expressed the wonders of the process involved with putting on the musical each fall.

“Every year the students who do the musical give 100 percent,” Cull said. “I don’t even hope for it anymore.

They just do it because of love and pride.”

That love and pride do not make up for the time spent making sure everything is right when the curtain rises, according to stage manager Hunter Korn ’19.

“The musical is obviously a very time-consuming endeavor, but it is a lot of fun,” she said, noting that the time demands of being a Fifth Former required her sharpest focus, “but there’s nowhere else I would want to spend my time.”

- Katelyn Ge ’21 contributed to this report.

Picture This Student works displayed at the Watershed Center.

Photographs by Lachlan Getz ’20, Josh Hemmings ’20, Carl Klepper ’19, Kantapong Kotchum ’19, Tom Rattner ’19, and Taylor Zahirnyi ’19 were displayed this past fall at The Garden Club of Princeton Gallery at the Watershed Center in nearby Pennington, New Jersey. The exhibit, “Reflection and the Environment,” was the Association’s first student show. Images selected for the exhibit were taken as part of Lawrenceville’s Photography I class, taught by sustainability director Sam Kosoff ’88 H’96 P’19.

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SPORTS ROUNDUP

FALL

SEASON STATS Compiled by NICOLE STOCK

For the most current athletic news visit www.lawrenceville.org/athletics.

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Boys’ Cross Country Record: 6-1 Briarwood Invitational Champions Shore Invitational Champions Individual N.J.I.S.A.A. Champion: Robert Enck ’19 Individual M.A.P.L. Champion: Robert Enck ’19 Coach: Chris Hyson P’14 ’16 ’21 Captains: Robert Enck ’19 Dev Chhokra ’19 Aidan Duffy ’19 Girls’ Cross Country Record: 6-1 N.J.I.S.A.A. Champions M.A.P.L. Champions Coach: Katie Chaput Captains: Julia Davis ’19 Mayeli Santos ’19 Margaux Terrasson ’19 Field Hockey Record: 15-5 N.J.I.S.A.A. Champions Mercer County Champions Prep A All-State Team: Meg Barnes ’19, Meg Hillman ’19, Audrey Lazar ’19, Lizzie Huesman ’20, Lydia Wilcox ’19 Coach: Lisa Ewanchyna Captains: Meg Barnes ’19 Meg Hillman ’19

Girls’ Volleyball Record: 15-3 Prep A All-Star: Ashley Warren ’20 Coach: Katherine O’Malley H’07 Captains: Amanda Pieringer ’19 Victoria Dugan ’20 Ashley Warren ’20 Boys’ Water Polo Record: 17-11 Garden State Champions Coach: Julio Alcantara Martin Captains: Harry Foster ’19 Owen Oulundsen ’19 Girls’ Water Polo Record: 9-6 Beast of the East Tournament Champions (Flight Three) Coaches: Stefanie Harrison, Misha Klochkov Captains: Allison Chou ’19 Isabelle Monaghan ‘20

Football Record: 1-8 Coach: Harry Flaherty Captains: Diassa Diakite ’19 Michael O’Keefe ’19 Boys’ Soccer Record: 6-9-1 Prep A All-State Team: Tom Ehret ’19, Xavier Lacoste ’20 , Thomas Ehret ’19 Coach: Blake Eldridge ’96 H’12 Captains: Tom Ehret ’19 Cameron Desnoes ’19 Girls’ Soccer Record: 6-6-1 M.A.P.L. Co-champions Prep A All-State Team: Maggie Ross ’20 All-M.A.P.L.: Maggie Ross ’20, Marcia Ojo ’21, Paige Gillen ’21 Coach: Jessica Magnuson Captains: Ashley Chun ’19 Lucy Gutman ’19 Girls’ Tennis Record: 10-1 N.J.I.S.A.A Champions M.A.P.L. Champions Coach: Dave Cantlay H’89 ’91 ’93 ’94 ’15 P’07 ’09 ’11 Captains: Khatumu Tuchscherer ’19 Annie Hait ’19

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GO BIG RED

STICKING TOGETHER

E

very fall, there are certain things you can count on seeing at Lawrenceville: The trees turning magnificent shades of red, yellow, and orange; student excitement building in the days leading into Thanksgiving break …

And another set of championships for Big Red field hockey. This past autumn was no exception, as head coach Lisa Ewanchyna’s squad added yet another New Jersey Independent Schools Athletic Association (N.J.I.S.A.A.) state championship and Mercer County Tournament title to its collection. In fact, a first-place finish in the Mid-Atlantic Prep League (M.A.P.L.) was all that stood between field hockey and the vaunted “Triple Crown” – the trio of state, county, and league championships. Even that came down to a clash in the season finale with … oh, you know what, the opponent isn’t important. (OK, it was Hill.)

Ewanchyna, who took the reins of the program in 2007, has strung together what might be called a decade of dominance. In the past ten seasons, she has shepherded the team to seven state titles, three of which came in Triple Crown seasons.

Add to that seven county and four M.A.P.L. championships, and it becomes clear why

matches against Lawrenceville have become days to dread for opposing teams.

“I just think I have great kids who want to work really hard with and for each other,” says Ewanchyna, who doubles as

Lawrenceville’s senior associate dean of admission for recruitment. “They set goals for themselves, and they put those expectations on themselves.”

To be clear, Big Red field hockey was hardly down when Ewanchyna arrived from Deerfield Academy. The team posted a sparkling 12-12 record in 2006, winning the league and its fourth consecutive state championship, before former head coach Martha Gracey H’92 ’93 ’98 ’07 P’18 departed for Groton School.

Ewanchyna’s debut season was highlighted by an N.J.I.S.A.A. title before the program endured a short championship drought in 2008 and 2009.

Though her teams still dominated long stretches of those two seasons – they outscored opponents by a 37-to-4 margin over nine games in 2009 – Ewanchyna said she still had things to learn as a head coach making a gradual transition from her own days as a competitive athlete.

“I was still in the mindset of, ‘this is what this kind of athlete should be,’” says Ewanchyna, who

FOR BIG RED FIELD HOCKEY, YEARS OF EXCELLENCE ARE ROOTED IN THE TEAM’S ESPRIT DE CORPS.

played the sport at Princeton, followed by a stint with the U.S. Field Hockey Development Squad.

“That’s a hard switch to flip, because some of these kids are coming in at 13 or 14, and I have to remember the 13-year-old and the 18-year-old are at really different places.”

Part of that is making sure the young newcomers feel welcomed by their more seasoned teammates, something Ewanchyna says she found reflected in Lawrenceville’s House System.

“We try to make sure that the Houses are pretty diverse and then have the students find a way to make it work, right? Much like with a team, it takes a little while to figure it out,” she says, nodding to the idea of students from disparate backgrounds and cultures finding shared values and meaning.

Ewanchyna, the housemaster in Stephens, says part of her growth as a coach stems from opening herself up to new and varied perspectives, too.

“I’m always looking to improve, so if a kid has something to share with me that they’ve learned, I’m never going to say, ‘It has to be my way or the highway,’” she says. “I’m like, Show me.”

To say that her field hockey teams have responded positively to Ewanchyna’s brand of empowerment would be an understatement.

Over the past ten seasons, they have won an

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Winning another Mercer County Tournament had Big Red field hockey jumping for joy in October. (Credit: Dave Barnes ’77 P’11 ’13 ’19)

astonishing 77 percent of their games (156 out of 201). This past season’s captains, Meg Barnes ’19 and Meg Hillman ’19, are quick to agree that their team camaraderie helps fuel their winning ways.

“My favorite part about this team is that all the girls always come out focused on

whatever drill or skill set we’re working on in practice and applying that in the games,” says Barnes, who will continue to play at Dartmouth.

“But at the same time, we always have fun and support each other. This makes the games, goals, and overall successes that much better.”

Her co-captain, Hillman, agrees, saying her

YEAR

OF DECADE CE DOMINAN

ST TEN O ER THE PA IG RED SEASONS B EY HAS FIELD HO ISTORI BEEN ON A H ROLL

HAMPIONSHIPS

RE ORD

201

STATE OUNTY

15 5

2017

STATE OUNTY LEAGUE

16 5

2016

STATE OUNTY

15 5

2015

STATE LEAGUE

12 6

2014

STATE OUNTY LEAGUE

1 2

201 2012

OUNTY STATE OUNTY LEAGUE

2011 2010

1 71 17 4

OUNTY

15 4

STATE

1

2009

TOTALS 7 STATE

1

12 4

7 OUNTY

4 LEAGUE

156 4 2

enjoyment transcends the game itself.

“It’s the times in the locker room before a game, seeing each other in the hallways, sharing awkward stories in the stretching circle, and our rituals before the games,” says Hillman, also a lacrosse standout who will play collegiately at Loyola University in Maryland.

“Each relationship built on the field immediately transfers to a relationship off the field as well.”

Ewanchyna believes her players’ openness to her coaching and strategy stems from their experiences around the Harkness table, where they learn to analyze information and construct informed opinions.

“We hash it out on the field when we’re working on the corner play. I’ll ask, ‘Where do you think this will go?’” she says. “Then someone will say, That girl is too fast, or, This girl doesn’t handle the ball well. And nobody takes offense to it. We want to score, so we have to come up with the best unit.

“I think that’s what you buy into at a place like Lawrenceville,” Ewanchyna continues. “You have to be all in around the table, or your team, or on the housing, because whether it’s your grade, or a victory, or just your own fun, it all depends on that.”

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TAKE THIS JOB AND LOVE IT

AFTER FOUNDING SWEET TOOTH TOURS IN LONDON, LYNNE MULLERVY STAARTJES ’07 IS EXPANDING HER CONFECTIONARY TOUR BUSINESS.

TOURS TO TICKLE YOUR TUMMY

By ANDREA FERESHTEH

A

group of people gathers in the Belgravia section of southwest London, mouths watering at the prospect of sampling some of the city’s sweetest confections.

Guided by Lynne Mullervy Staartjes ’07, a trained pastry chef and connoisseur of the most decadent and unique British sweets, the group will make carefully selected stops at some of the city’s sweetest shops during their afternoon of indulgence.

First, they choose from ten flavors of hot chocolate – Staartjes’ favorite is hazelnut – before meeting with the chef in his kitchen and chatting about the process of making it. Next, they pose for a photo in front of the Instagrammable cotton candy pink storefront of Peggy Porschen before biting into one of her signature cupcakes. Up next is a stop at Olivogelo, an Italian gelateria owned by a couple who make everything onsite, before moving on to sample macarons – while blindfolded – in flavors like asparagus and

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hazelnut oil and strawberry rhubarb mixed with passion fruit. The tour concludes on a savory note at a British cheese shop.

“I travel with my stomach,” says the effervescent Staartjes, founder of London-based Sweet Tooth Tours. “After people have seen Big Ben and the Tower of London, they are looking for a more authentic, unusual experience.”

Staartjes, who served as a head tour guide during her days as a Lawrenceville student, says she tries to make the tour as educational – and delicious – as possible.

“People see the kitchen, learn how things are made, and try scooping ice cream themselves,” she says. “It’s a great way for different people to come together on a tour.”

After a successful first year of giving tours in London, one of which included a group of Lawrenceville and Hill alumni, Staartjes is working to expand the business to Paris – the mecca of pastry. She hopes to launch her bespoke Parisian tours early in 2019 and is carefully selecting locations that are smaller, independent and unknown but that meet her discerning palate and criteria for inclusion on the tour.

“French patisserie is at the basis of a lot of the desserts we enjoy,” she says. “People go to Paris as tourists with an interest in food and pastry. Part of the culture is gastronomy.”

Staartjes is intimately familiar with the cities where she works, having lived in England since she was 9 years old. After graduating from Lawrenceville, where she formed the Cross Culture Club to express her love for cultural diversity, she attended École hôtelière de Lausanne in Switzerland, where she studied hospitality management. Internships took her to pastry shops in Paris and a job at a hotel whose restaurant earned its first Michelin star while she was there. After college, Staartjes worked

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at bakeries and cake shops in London before deciding to pursue a diploma in patisserie at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris.

Since its inception, Sweet Tooth Tours has been featured in the British daily newspaper The Guardian, as well as publications such as Town and Country, British Airways Magazine, and Conde Nast Traveler, leading to a surge in business.

Staartjes attributes her success to pursuing her passion with a combination of hard work and tenacity.

“To know how to write is so important and how to express yourself and sell yourself. That’s something I did every day at the Harkness table –

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learn to make your ideas clear,” she says.

Staartjes also says her ability to think outside the box and chase her dream of starting a confectionary tour company – despite any doubts – helped get her where she is today.

“You have to sell yourself in whatever you do and have the confidence in what you’re doing,” she says. “If you believe in it, you’ll take others on the journey.”

For this career in particular, it helps that Staartjes thrives on meeting new people and fulfilling a customer service role.

“You’re smiling, making sure people are happy.

The more you get into it, you get more intuitive,

more natural. So much of it revolves around personality,” she says, explaining that the tour components can happen independently, but having a charismatic and knowledgeable tour guide curate an experience is the icing on the cake.

“You get a more educational component with my tour,” she says. “It’s an indulgent afternoon, and you want to spend time with someone fun.”

When it comes to sampling London’s best macarons, Lynne Mullervy Staartjes ’07 (left) always points her customers in the right direction.

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TABLE TALK Q&A

ROOTED IN RESEARCH You might call John L. Clark, Ph.D., P’20 ’22 Lawrenceville’s Pied Piper of Plants. When he’s not in the lab, you’ll find the Aldo Leopold Distinguished Teaching Chair in Environmental Science and Ethics leading groups around campus – or even well beyond it – enthusiastically identifying anything from seedlings to sturdy trees.

Clark spoke to The Lawrentian about traveling to the far reaches of the planet with students to study and even discover several new species of plants, and how his annual flora-and-fauna-spotting contest has them competing to learn more.

Why do you take both of your classes, Field Botany and Field Ecology, around campus to identify flora?

In order to relate to your natural environment you have to understand it, and one of the best ways to do that is learning to identify the local flora.

What’s the most unusual or surprising plant you’ve found on campus?

Black birch [Betula lenta] trees. It’s a relatively rare species and a great one, too. It smells like wintergreen.

You’ve led three Harkness Travel Program trips to Ecuador. Why there?

The Ecuadorians are very friendly, and the country is an amazing place for biodiversity. It influenced me in a special way, and I love sharing my passion for Ecuador with our students.

What kind of background do you have there?

I lived there for six years through the U.S. Peace

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Corps and as a high school exchange student. I also did research there on a National Geographic grant and as a Fulbright Scholar. The areas we travel to now were disputed between Ecuador and Peru when I was volunteering in the 1990s, so no researchers could go there. It’s one of the most botanically diverse, unexplored areas in South America.

What are the Harkness Travel trips like?

Our trips to collect plants have actually been to forests that no botanists have ever been to.

Everything we document is a potential discovery.

Our collections are curated for museums where future generations of biologists will have access to them. In a hundred years, researchers will look at those samples with the Lawrenceville School name attached to them.

Wow! In the meantime, where are those samples kept?

Our collections are deposited at major research institutions including the Missouri Botanical

Garden, New York Botanical Garden, Marie Selby Botanical Garden, and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History.

Do these trips to Ecuador bring any economic assistance to the people there?

Yes. Before we go, I hire ten people to build trails for the campsite and us, and when we’re there, we hire another five to ten people as porters, cooks, and guides. It’s a direct benefit to the local community and allows them to see the forests as an economic long-term interest.

Is the area you study there in danger of development?

The Cordillera del Cóndor harbors one of the largest untouched gold mines in the world, and there are also huge deposits of copper.

There are also several indigenous communities who oppose the economic development of the region, so it will be interesting to see how the Ecuadorian government juggles a broad range of interests.

Before coming to Lawrenceville, you were part of an academic exchange program with the University of Havana. Could you discuss that experience?

With Cuban botanists, I explored most of the island. I’m still working on that research and have a book coming out in 2019 on the taxonomy of the flowering plant family Gesneriaceae.

Another important aspect of that research was to understand the evolution of Caribbean plants, and that is an ongoing project with several collaborators.

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You returned in 2016 when you led a Lawrenceville research trip to Cuba. What was that like?

Cuba has amazing biodiversity, and the local people embraced us as visitors in a way that’s really unique. My background in research has allowed us to interact with and hire highly qualified biologists for our expeditions. Our contact in Cuba is also someone whom I have collaborated with on several papers on Cuban plant diversity, and we have a mutual goal of finding rare plant species.

How did the trip come about?

The trip I designed for our students was an idea that we discussed several years ago, to trek from the south – Guantánamo – to the northern coast through the Alejandro de Humboldt National Park. Several of the plants along that trek are only known from one or two collections and have never been photographed.

What an incredible opportunity for the students. Is this research part of the cocurricular you teach in addition to your two classes?

Yes. We use plant samples from current and previous expeditions to Ecuador, Cuba, and other countries in the New World tropics. Students extract and PCR [Polymerase Chain Reaction] amplify DNA, which allows us to generate evolutionary trees. Then we can figure out how species evolved and diversified. It’s exciting,

because a lot of the plants we’re working with haven’t been sequenced.

Your students’ work has been published in several journals, and one even presented at the Botany 2018 conference in Minnesota – the only high-schooler to do so.

Mentoring and working with that student, Jonny Yue ’19, was definitely a highlight of the research co-curricular from last year. The sample that we sequenced was collected from a remote region of southern Ecuador. Jonny and the students in the co-curricular helped solve the mystery of its phylogenetic placement. The new species is a tree, and all of its close relatives are tiny herbs.

How did the trip come about?

In 2017, I helped establish a collaborative research initiative between the Hutchins Scholars and the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Four of our students trained in the lab during the summer with the goal of generating molecular sequence data of poorly known plants from the Neotropics [an area primarily comprising South America, parts of Central America and Mexico, and the Caribbean].

What is your research goal there?

Ultimately, to combine data with closely related species from the Paleotropics to better understand diversification and evolution of the flowering plant family, Gesneraceae. This project takes advantage of their molecular

sequencing facility, museum collections, and a broad spectrum of taxonomic expertise of leading scientists from Scotland.

Did you have any previous relationship with the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh?

The center has supported several generations of plant taxonomists with expertise in the group of plants that we study, Gesneriaceae. My first presentation as a graduate student was in 2002, when I interacted with and met several researchers from the Botanic Garden. Returning there on a regular basis with our students is an honor.

One of the School’s annual highlights is BioBlitz, in which students, faculty, and staff take and share photos of plants or animals, and the person with the most identifiable images wins.

I think BioBlitz works well for this generation – the iGeneration – because we use iNaturalist, which shares information similar to a social media platform. Also, it’s a competition, and I love giving away prizes.

Everyone loves the prizes.

We have necklaces and bracelets hand carved by an artisan I know in Ecuador. They are made from Tagua [Phytelephas aequatorialis], which is hardened endosperm from a relative of the coconut, but it’s a special coconut that only grows in equatorial regions of South America. Wait until you see what I’ve got for this year!

For Science Master John L. Clark, Ph.D., P’20 ’22, the classroom extends well beyond the Lawrenceville campus. He has led multiple student expeditions to the tropics to research how various species of flora have evolved and diversified.

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ASK THE ARCHIVIST ARCHIVIST

Dandies

GYM

By JACQUELINE HAUN

when completed, the

new dining and Athletics Complex will be the most recent in a series of bigger, better, and brighter places to play.

ouses d Haskell H nd Hamill an hi be ugh ilt ho T bu . n, gymnasium The Old Bar eville’s first nc r, re te en aw C L Loucks Ice in 1865, was behind the ol’s since stood t for the Scho en it has long uses equipm ho ill st e ur the struct partment.

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hen the upcoming Dining and Athletics Complex is completed, it will be the fifth athletic facility used by Lawrenceville students in the past century and a half, with each new “gym” marking a step up in the quality of what it provides to student athletes.

In the early years of the school, activities such as skating on the student-dug pond, gymnastics, and carriage and horseback rides sufficed for exercise, with outdoor sports such as baseball gradually gaining a place of prominence in the latter half of the 1800s. It was not until 1865, after the Civil War caused a decline in enrollment, that the School lured students back with an indoor athletics site in the form of a wooden barn located about where Kennedy House stands today. Indeed, sports proved so popular on campus that it wasn’t long before students were complaining about the need for a new and larger space to perform their exercises.

When the John Cleve Green Foundation purchased the School from Rev. Samuel Hamill in the early 1880s, a new gymnasium was one of the needs identified by the newly established Board of Trustees. However, construction of such a building took a back seat to more pressing improvements, such as the construction of the Circle. In the interim, the former Hamill-era classroom building now known as Haskell was adapted into a gymnasium. However, winters brought with them the challenge of too many students competing for too little space, and calls for a new gymnasium continued.

These were spurred on, at least in part, by envious commentary The “Old Gym ” was consider by writers in The ed a quantum le ap forward as an Lawrence about new indoor athlet ics center whe n it athletics facilities was completed in 1902 on th e site currently occu being built at peer pied by Irwin Dining Center. Note schools and on Ivy the baseball di amond in the foregrou League campuses. nd.

In time, the unfulfilled promise of a new gym became a running joke on campus, as a sarcastic ditty published in The Lawrence on December 6, 1890, illustrated. It read, in part:

“Wait ’till there’s no more study-hour, And our Fem. Seminary hath come; Wait ’till our new road is finished, Then our much-talked-of Gym will be done.”

Perhaps abashed by this ribbing, the administration attempted to alleviate the overcrowding issue by retrofitting the upper level of the Old Barn building into another space for athletic activities. It was not enough, however, and complaints continued among the student body about whose needs should prevail in the competitive use of the facilities. The destruction of Woodhull House by fire in 1892 did not help matters, as Woodhull boys were consequently divided among other houses or put up in the Haskell gym while their House was rebuilt.

The patience of the students was finally – and generously – rewarded when the Board of Trustees moved forward in 1901 with the construction of a facility that would be considered for several years to be the “best school gymnasium in the country.” Designed by Circle architects Peabody & Stearns for approximately $55,000, the new gymnasium was located at the eastern edge of campus on the approximate site of today’s Irwin Dining Center when it opened in 1902.

The new three-floor gymnasium featured a main room that was 100 by 60 feet and could be divided into two basketball courts or serve double duty as a location for prom and other large social events.

On the floor below the main gym was a 75-by-26-foot swimming “tank” that included a diving board, while an indoor running track was suspended upon a balcony above the main floor, with a large adjacent room set aside for boxing and fencing. In addition, the new sports facility featured two bowling alleys, a trophy room, various meeting and team rooms, an office for the newly hired director of athletics, equipment from the top-of-the-line A.G. Spalding Co., and 425 lockers for students. The new gym also boasted one particularly life-changing addition – showers – though students still needed also to rely on the Bath House tubs until showers were installed in the Houses in 1906.

The “Old Gym,” as it is still recalled by some, remained in use for nearly 60 years, although it was clear by the late 1930s that once again the growth of the student body and expansion of the School’s athletics program had outstripped the resources of the physical space. Funding was established for a field house, but construction was delayed until the end of World War II.

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bed Gym succum use, the Old of s ar o ye in t 60 1959. Lav After almos ber night in as the frigid Decem a on e structure e th fir to y displaced ad re al d ha Field House complex. n athletics School’s mai

Its distinctiv e steel arch su pports remai House’s sign n one of Lavi ature archite no Field ctural traits.

By 1946, the funds were raised, including a significant gift from the Edward Joseph Lavino Foundation, named for the father of a longtime member of the Board of Trustees, Edwin M. Lavino, Class of 1905. Still, the School opted to wait until an urgently needed new boiler plant was completed before commencing on the $1.2 million athletic project.

The new field house, designed by Walter T. Karcher and Livingston Smith of Philadelphia, was finally dedicated in 1951 and was fêted in The New York Times for being the largest such facility at any secondary school of the time. The expansive floor plan focused around an arena area 313 feet long and 134 feet wide with a 44-foot-high ceiling at its maximum point and featuring a removable indoor wooden track.

Adjacent to the competitive centerpiece were spaces for both home and visiting teams, a large trophy room and lounge, a first-aid room, numerous office spaces, a 75-by-42foot pool with 12 feet of depth at its deepest point, a varsity basketball court, and adequate showers and lockers for more than 500 students. Room was left in the plans for additional growth, which by 1954, would include an attached ice rink.

With the Old Gym becoming the domain of the Lower School, the addition of the new Lavino Field House finally provided enough space for Lawrenceville’s student athletes.

Unfortunately, the life of the Old Gym was waning more quickly than anyone anticipated. On December 23, 1959, at 3:56 a.m., with students gone for winter break, the proud brick structure caught fire and was gutted. Despite the frigid,

5-degrees Fahrenheit weather, more than 100 local firefighters fought the blaze for three hours, but by daylight, only the shell of the building, covered in ice from the firehoses, remained.

Following the demolition of the ruins, all indoor athletics moved to the Lavino Field House.

Since Lavino’s construction nearly 70 years ago, it has faced periodic renovations to keep it a vital center of campus life.

The original dirt floor was replaced in the 1980s (and refreshed in 2000) with a rubberized Mondo surface that included three combination basketball-volleyball-tennis courts, a four-lane, banked 200-meter track, and an eight-lane straightaway.

The addition of other buildings such as the Al-Rashid Fitness Center and Semans Lawson-Johnston Squash Courts have brought modern, dedicated training spaces for students, but the more things change, the more they stay the same: Students, and the contexts in which they learn and live, constantly evolve.

With an increasing emphasis being placed on celebrating and reinforcing community, the Dining and Athletics Complex will be a multidimensional facility based on wellness, fitness, and healthy eating. More than a field house, it will also be a campus hub where students will train and compete, but also gather for the social experience of cheering for their friends, bolstering that vital sense of community.

Jacqueline Haun is the archivist at the Stephan Archives in Bunn Library.

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In a time of divisive “fake news” and metastasizing political polarization, the relentless search for truth that takes place at the Harkness table matters more than ever.

By ERIK CHAPUT, History Master PIER KOOISTRA P’19, English Master Illustration: ELLICE WEAVER

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ince 1936, Lawrenceville has embraced the tenets of Harkness education to help students discuss critical issues in a manner that leads to thoughtful deliberation. In recent years, Lawrenceville has charted a course for the 21st century. We have renewed our dedication to inquiry – fearless and unflinching – and to purposeful sharing of information around the table by faculty and students. The goal is to provide students with the necessary skill set to think broadly, pragmatically and deeply in a democratic environment.

“Learned Institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people,” wrote President James Madison in 1822. “They throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty & dangerous encroachments on the public liberty.”

Democracy, in Madison’s analysis, could work in the long run only if the knowledge base of its citizens could combat ignorance, the principles of civility stem the tide of unruly discourse, and reason overcome prejudice and bias. Today Madison’s conception of democracy is under assault.

A recent poll – conducted by the George W. Bush Institute, the University of Pennsylvania’s Biden Center, and Freedom House under the umbrella of the newly constituted Democracy Project – revealed that over 55 percent of Americans currently see “democracy” as weak and under threat.

In a statement, President George W. Bush maintained “the health of the democratic spirit itself is at issue. And the renewal of that spirit is the urgent task at hand.” The study confirms the widespread degradation of our civil discourse that has seemingly become a mainstay of our politics threatens the vitality of our democratic society. Conflict and hostility have always been a part of our political system, but the increasing lack of respect and consideration that has become so commonplace is something new, a sea change in the way citizens interact with

each other. Vitriol, caustic racial and sexual comments, and the dissemination of gross misinformation and outright falsehoods have become all too frequent.

Though modern technology has on one hand helped to bridge gaps in American society, social media platforms in particular have tended only to bolster communication between like-minded citizens and to inflame partisan political differences. To borrow a phrase from Thomas Paine, a “new era for politics” is now upon us. However, Paine would likely not argue that a “new method of thinking has arisen” in American political culture. He would surely like to see more “common sense” in our politics achieved through collective endeavors.

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hrough Harkness, Lawrenceville masters strive to create a culture in which inquiry is embraced not because it is easy or comforting, but because it is demanding – and, because of the hard work it requires, responsibly enlightening.

The demands of critical, dialogical inquiry are worthwhile because they have the potential to deliver us from what might otherwise be a chronic state of conflict into diagnoses and prescriptions on which reasonable parties can agree. Political and societal differences, tempered and clarified by deliberation, are hallmarks of truly democratic politics and are often key components of the experience around a Harkness table.

Day in and day out, Lawrenceville teachers continually strive to help students to engage differences of opinion productively, to discuss challenging issues with each other, not to talk past one another, and, most important, to discuss challenging issues collectively so that we can all build together toward higher, fuller, deeper – truer – understanding. Harkness has helped to reinforce and maintain the fundamentals of civility and of responsible information gathering and publication.

A true Harkness discussion is far more productive and satisfying – dramatically expanding vision and understanding Students are encouraged to bring attitudes of “responsibility” to what is a public and collective role around the table, rather than a perspective formed by words like “desire” or “self-interest.”

Young people who are not yet disciplined intellectuals – who are not yet committed to going wherever the evidence might take them, especially when it is forcing them to abandon some of their most cherished ideas – are prone to fall into “conversation” rather than “discussion” around the Harkness table.

The former means, at its most basic level, just going back and forth: You state your position, I state mine.

A true Harkness discussion is far more productive and satisfying – dramatically expanding vision and understanding – because it prioritizes listening and considering, opening up to ideas that one has not previously experienced, and, instead of rejecting them, doing everything in one’s power to venture into them. Discussion does not mean that one has to believe everything one hears. It means, however, that one does have to try to believe – through a reasonable degree of openness. And to try not just to believe but to subject all new ideas to a rigorous, methodical process of testing with and against evidence.

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The same process of critical review is crucial to reading well. Once students, especially younger ones, have put serious time and energy into forming a preliminary sense of a homework reading, they have a strong tendency to attach – not just intellectually, but emotionally – to their first inklings. Sometimes when they arrive for class, less experienced students put tremendous energy into defending even their most hastily formed initial impressions about what they have read. That is one of the chief reasons why it is so important for classes to discuss challenging texts at a Harkness table. The process of critical dialogue – of listening as our discussion colleagues alert us to details we have overlooked, of recognizing and considering previously unrecognized connections – helps students to read more thoroughly. It helps both teachers and students to understand more fully.

Perhaps most important, this process helps participants to change their minds.

The Harkness classroom can at times be best thought of as a laboratory, a space where teachers and students experiment openly and freely, to try new ideas in order to fully explore issues of contemporary importance.

In fall 2017, as our nation once again was grappling with issues of race and trying to come to grips with the original sin of slavery and its legacy, we decided to create situations in our History and English classrooms for students to critically engage with material that had a direct bearing on the America we are living in.

In summer 2017, the Honors U.S. History teaching team had to grapple with how to address the intense battle that was being waged in the media and on the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, and on the campus of the University of Virginia. A rally was organized in opposition to a plan by local officials to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from Emancipation Park.

Lines were drawn in the sand as citizens debated the meaning of the Civil War and America’s ongoing struggle with the meaning of liberty and equality. The ghost of Robert Penn Warren hung over the debate.

In a classic essay published in 1961 on the legacy of the Civil War, Warren, reflecting as well about the civil rights struggles of his day, declared firmly that the United States had “not yet achieved justice. We have not yet created a Union which is, in the deepest sense, a community. We have not yet resolved our deep dubieties or selfdeceptions. In other words, we are sadly human, and in our contemplation of the Civil War we see a dramatization of our humanity.”

Sixty years later not much had changed.

For white nationalists and neoConfederates, the statue of Lee took on, as the writer Tony Horwitz noted in his classic work Confederates in the Attic, a symbolic status as a “talisman” against the forces of liberalism and modernity. On August 12, James Alex Fields Jr., a 20-year-old white nationalist, drove his car into a crowd in the streets of Charlottesville, killing a woman and injuring nineteen others. (Fields was sentenced to life in prison in December for this crime.) The night before this tragedy, a large crowd of white nationalists under the banner of “Unite the Right” circled the statue of Thomas Jefferson on the University of Virginia campus and raised their torches high. Did they believe that Jefferson was

on their side? Were Jefferson and the immortal creed that he penned in 1776 now the rallying cry for those who believed the white race to be superior? The fact that the founding members of the Confederacy specifically repudiated Jefferson and the ideals embedded in his 1776 Declaration of Independence was likely lost on the white nationalists in attendance.

Tragically, as Americans with a wide range of agendas converged on Charlottesville, only a modest percentage of these people arrived with the purpose of congregating with one another. To a dangerous degree, many people arrived with their minds made up about what ought to happen. Recognizing the urgent importance of studying the history of Lee and his era as well as examining the forces still shaping the energies turned loose by the Civil War, we made sure to provide opportunities for Lawrentians to study these things with the necessary calm, patience, and discipline.

For some, the monuments in question symbolized the bravery of Confederate veterans who had fought and died for the House of Dixie in an epic struggle against an oppressive federal government. For others, the monuments represented a distorted view of history, one predicated on notions of white

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supremacy and the Lost Cause tradition that has remained remarkably popular despite decades of historical scholarship that has exposed its falsehoods. The Lost Cause has been used in service of preserving American innocence – a notion that America has remained pure and has been driven by notions of progress throughout its history.

And for some adherents to the faith, the Lost Cause was never genuinely lost at all.

It would rise again from the ashes when the time was ripe. For these Americans, Charlottesville was an attempt to reignite the embers.

The “Unite the Right” clan, a party of fear with defiantly populist overtones, likely clung to Jefferson’s belief in individual liberty and autonomy – and fear of an overarching government – to justify their “you will not

replace us” chants.

Keen observers at the time, most notably historian Jon Meacham, pointed out that the white-nationalist rhetoric at UVA bore a striking resemblance to the rhetoric of Sen. Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrats.

In 1948, ironically on UVA’s campus and in response to President Harry S. Truman’s civil rights program, Thurmond maintained that a federal program aimed at promoting racial justice and equality “would undermine the American way of life and outrage the Bill of Rights.”

At that time, counter-protesters encircled Jefferson’s statue in order to remind America that what the Sage of Monticello had promoted in the Declaration was, first of all, the proposition that “all men are created equal” and, flowing from that, the notion that

every one of us, of whatever background, is entitled to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

In a news conference just days after the deadly rally in Charlottesville, President Donald Trump, to the dismay of many, declared that there was blame on both sides.

He asked whether, if the statue of Lee were to be removed, statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson would have to be removed as well, because they too were slave owners. The president warned that by removing monuments, communities around the country would be “changing history.”

How would Lawrenceville students see the issue?

The Honors U.S. History teaching team felt that they had before them a powerful opportunity, in the form of the moment’s challenging questions, to reinforce the grand traditions of Harkness learning.

Students skillfully took on real-life issues and used their complexity and even their explosiveness to draw one another into genuine dialogical inquiry and close critical scrutiny of whatever responses their discussions might produce.

A preliminary discussion with students inside the Noyes History Building revealed the passion that existed around the tables.

Students were ready to dive deep. They were interested in the past but also in the present, in the ways in which citizens in the nation at large and on Lawrenceville’s campus were engaging issues of paramount concern, for the debate in Charlottesville raised a multitude of questions about race in America: What type of society do we want to live in? How can we make sense of the past?

And how should the past inform the future?

As Warren noted in The Legacy of the Civil War, an examination of the Civil War gave students an “awareness of the cost of having a history.”

Both students and teachers, following Warren’s lead, demanded a lot of themselves.

The classroom work required a trio of essential commitments: first, looking at a complex event from a variety of perspectives; second, engaging in close

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scrutiny of essential evidence; and, third, working together in order to form a common articulation of the essential dimensions of the situation. Disagreements were welcomed and encouraged, as there cannot be much dialogue without the confluence of a wide variety of perspectives and prevailing personal premises.

As a primer, a reading and lecture by Yale University historian David Blight, who was already scheduled to come to campus later in the fall as part of the prestigious Weeden Lecture Series, was assigned. Blight has written extensively on the Civil War era, in particular on the ways in which Americans have sought to remember and memorialize the war. Which version of the past best serves the needs of the present is something that Blight focused on in two groundbreaking works, Race and Reunion and American Oracle.

Blight’s works helped to provide students with the historical context for the creation of many of the Confederate monuments.

Students also had a chance to engage with scholarship on the causes of the Civil War and the formation of the Confederacy.

As excerpts from historians Charles Dew and Chandra Manning made clear, the cornerstone of the Confederacy was slavery.

Pure and simple. As one southern white Confederate soldier stated bluntly in 1862, “[A]ny man who pretends to believe that this is not a war for the emancipation of the blacks … is either a fool or a liar.” A quick read through a small sampling of southern secession documents revealed that Confederates did not mince words when it came to stating their intentions in 1860-61.

Contrary to many media reports, these monuments were actually constructed in the early 20th century, rather than in the immediate aftermath of the war. The statues, largely funded through private donations spearheaded by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, went up not with the Confederate battle flag flapping in the wind but with the Stars and Stripes flying overhead. They were part of the Jim Crow era, an era that witnessed a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan and directly connected to a

For some, the monuments in question symbolized the bravery of Confederate veterans who had fought and died for the House of Dixie in an epic struggle against an oppressive federal government. deliberate creation of public memorials to the Lost Cause understanding of the Civil War, a tradition predicated on whitewashing the actual history of slavery and of related issues of race. The notion that the Confederacy was led by men who organized a government to maintain a system of slavery and to destroy the American union was not part of this narrative. Over the summer, students had read Frederick Douglass’s powerful 1845 slave narrative and, consequently, had a deep understanding of what slavery was truly like in the 19th century.

By the end of the 19th century, white southerners struggled to explain the role of slavery in causing the war. Over time, a growing chorus of voices began to

proclaim that the true issue at hand was a constitutional struggle to maintain state control – a rehashing of the debate between Jefferson and Hamilton in early America over federal power. This understanding has had remarkable endurance. Indeed, in a 2011 study, the Pew Research Foundation found that just 38 percent of Americans believe that the Civil War was fought over slavery.

It was clear that students wanted to learn more about the era in which these Confederate statues were created and who was behind the fundraising efforts to build them. Once they had done so, they could share what they had found and debate the merits of removal. They shared newspaper coverage they uncovered. They read local and national papers to get a fuller perspective. They worked hard to understand what white southerners meant by “heritage and honor.”

Then came the tough part. Should the statues come down? Or should they be preserved and moved to a new location?

Multiple perspectives were offered on how to handle the problem.

Many students argued that the statues should serve as a reminder of an era to which, as a nation, we should not return and of past sins that needed to be kept in the forefront of our collective memory. There was apprehension about removing the statues because, students feared, removal could lead to a purposeful forgetting of the past and, thereby, perhaps to future problems. Students arrived at this conclusion from a perspective prioritizing careful thinking about civic life. They recognized that the statues conjured hurtful memories that could indeed distract from the public good, but in their minds, it was a greater danger to change the historical landscape.

Others argued that the statues should be destroyed and replaced with others honoring the service of African Americans during the Civil War. As a nation we have removed vestiges of segregation, such as “white-only signs,” so why not remove statues of Confederate leaders? If the statues were meant to perpetuate white supremacy,

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then replace them with symbols honoring those who worked to effect an end to the slave system. Still others advocated for the relocation of Confederate statues to battlefield sites where they could become part of a park’s explanatory narrative.

The path forward was not clear at first, but through careful discussion, students began to see merits in each of the proposed solutions.

New statues and plaques honoring the service of African Americans in the Civil War could both easily be added to public spaces.

Testimonies to the lives of the enslaved men and women in the South were discussed as necessary to the public landscape. New parks designed to preserve the history of the Confederacy could also be set up and old statutes relocated to such locales. The full story of the construction of these statues could then be told, recognizing Confederate soldiers in terms of military exploits, but also to afford an opportunity to explain how statue construction was part of the process of cementing the era of Jim Crow in the early 20th century.

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hile students were grappling with the tragic events in Charlottesville and trying to make sense of slavery’s legacy in modern America, students of literature were inside Woods Memorial Hall, engaging with acclaimed author Colson Whitehead’s 2016 novel, The Underground Railroad. This Pulitzer Prizewinning work forced our students to think about the nation’s original sin and the shared history of freedom and bondage with which Americans in the 21st century need to reckon.

As one reviewer so aptly put it, Whitehead’s work “disrupts our settled sense of the past and stretches the ligaments of history right into our own era.”

Through fiction, Whitehead’s book forces students to confront one of the most pervasive myths of the Lost Cause tradition – that slaves were content and

generally accepting of their bonded state.

The history of clandestine escapes, of long, heroic treks to the North under the cover of darkness, of slave-catchers and their hounds, does not coincide with the idyllic image of southern culture created by many writers and journalists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The Underground Railroad required the students embarking on an examination of this massive lake of a book to cast long lines down into its shadowy depths and complicated currents. The little stretch of discussion quoted below emerged during an effort to determine what was happening in one tricky scene involving two young women. The first character is Cora, a young mid-19th-century African American woman on the run from vicious slave-catchers working feverishly to return her to the plantation she fled. For Cora, escaping a life so brutal, so unremittingly dominated by degradation and torture, left her little choice but to flee. In doing so, she understood she’d be exposed to the risk of being literally ripped apart by hounds or attacked by lethal snakes while taking flight through the neighboring swamp.

The second young woman involved in the scene is Ethel, a young white woman who has taken an interest in Cora, taking steps to help Cora recover from a bout of illness. The key question: Why? What exactly motivates Ethel as she interacts with Cora?

Student W: “Even though Ethel is taking care of Cora for her own reasons, doesn’t she, in a practical sense, help Cora to get better?”

Student X: “I would agree with you. Ethel is quite forward-thinking. Her parents tell her it’s not the job of white people ‘to go into deepest, darkest Africa,’ but that’s her goal anyway.”

Student Y: “Hmmm … I don’t know. Ethel does want to help people, and yet she wants to do so in a way that is patronizing, amplifying her own superiority.”

Student Z: “I also disagree that she was directly looking to help. I believe that there’s a level of sincerity there, but I also think that what Ethel

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is sincere about is her search for personal glory.

She was kind of worn down into her marriage.

He parents didn’t let her do what she wanted.

But now Ethel has discovered an opportunity to do something big. She pictures herself being ‘a white savior.’ She is helping Cora in a way that is actually about advancing herself. After all, the text shows Ethel picturing a future in which ‘the n------ lift her to the sky, praising her name: Ethel, Ethel’ (191).”

This discussion went on for considerably longer than the quick stretch of dialogue represented above, and involved all of the other students in the room. However, a quick reading of just these four contributions reveals the students directing themselves effectively according to the essential principles of constructive critical discourse.

Student W asked a question that stimulated exchange. Y answered substantively, pointing out how, in a pre-Civil-War America not widely interested in life in Africa, Ethel doesn’t just think about the place in some vague way, but, in fact, yearns to go there – establishing Ethel as, in some respects, quite authentically “forward-thinking” (or, at least, “thinking outside the box”).

Student Y then took the crucial step of complementing – and complicating – X’s take on what was happening, expressing the sense that Ethel’s motivation was perhaps not as outward-looking or altruistic as at first it seems. And Z did the essential work of connecting Y’s more complicated assessment of what Ethel was doing, outwardly, to what Ethel was thinking, privately, which did indeed suggest that her ultimate aim might not be Cora’s well-being but her own glorification. And, of course, what Ethel was thinking included the explicit use of the odious N-word, her use of which suggests strongly that this character does not see the imaginary Africans by whom she envisions being elevated as people moving through life with the same degree of humanity or possibility that she sees in herself.

What is the bigger picture here, the deeper process at work? Consultative, evidence-driven discussion. The students

The ultimate purpose of such dialogical interchange is really to listen. involved were welcomed to say whatever they genuinely believed. The teacher did not “police” the discussion, except to teach them that the ultimate arbiter of what is right or wrong is the evidence within a class’s common text. The students working together in a course all must read from the same book. Their inquiry into the book is openended – but not utterly wide open. As they venture various interpretive hypotheses and test them with and against the evidence of the text, as they find instances in which the evidence before them will not in fact uphold their first impressions, then they learn to let those impressions go and replace them with updated understandings that align with the facts before the group’s eyes.

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eople often refer casually to Harkness education as a system in which all students get to speak up in order to share their opinions. But the ultimate purpose of this mode of learning (which Edward Harkness, the visionary philanthropist who helped to institute what he called “The Conference Method”) is not to say something; that is merely where the system starts. The ultimate purpose of such dialogical interchange is really to listen. After all, at a table with roughly a dozen students

and a teacher, one should be listening well over 90 percent of the time. And, then, to think together – to confer in order to subject a wide range of possibilities to close, critical consideration.

What Harkness amounts to, really, is a system of collective critical thinking – a method by which we first work together to form a preliminary understanding of something complicated, then confer in order to identify the holes and errors in that first attempt at explaining. Finally, we keep conferring in order to arrive at an understanding that more fully, finely approximates the big, messy truth.

The Conference Method ultimately allows us to take advantage of the natural inclination of any group of people to see things from a wide variety of perspectives; to use those viewpoints to scrutinize evidence from a range of angles; to test those angles against evidence to see which can be confirmed. It is a way of learning that helps us to live up to our national motto: E pluribus unum, or, “from many, one.” It is a system that leads us past bias by consulting one another to identify the errors in our preferred ways of seeing things and then to replace our illusions with more carefully constructed explanations of the facts. It is, in short, the spirit of democracy in action. It is a method of getting as close to the truth as we possibly can by practicing “common sense.”

Erik Chaput, Ph.D., is a history master at Lawrenceville, where he also serves as leader of the Capstone Course. He earned his doctorate in early American history from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, where he also received a master of philosophy. Chaput is also the author of The People’s Martyr: Thomas Wilson Dorr and His 1842 Rhode Island Rebellion.

Pieter “Pier” Kooistra P’19 is the Robert S. and Christina Seix Dow Distinguished MasterTeaching Chair in Harkness Learning at Lawrenceville, as well as an English master at the School. He earned his bachelor of arts in English at Dartmouth College.

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OLD SCHOOL 75 YEARS AGO IN THE LAWRENTIAN WINTER 1944

50 YEARS AGO IN THE LAWRENTIAN WINTER 1969

STUMPED…

AFTER THE FIRE…

Another old landmark has gone – the enormous cottonwood between the Chapel and Cleve. The Head Master told the Work Administrator that the hole Leslie Fagan made for the cutting by the removal of the earth around the roots ought to be filled in at once – a mere job of an hour or two. Accordingly, Work Administrator [Leslie] Fagan put Head Master [Allan V.] Heely in charge of the job with six boys under him. It took them two hours, and then another hour the next day was needed. According to the best estimates of local tradition and of those who ought to know, the tree approximated 200 years old. The trunk at its base was fourteen feet in circumference

Repairs are proceeding well in the Upper House, and a temporary roof is now completed. Meanwhile crews are well along in the job of removing ruined Before the walls of Upper were repapered, students covered them plaster walls and ceilings, which will be replaced with in graffiti, captured here by Bill Cheswick ’70. wallboard. Present plans call for moving boys back into the first and second floors as soon as they are inhabitable again. Meanwhile the Fifth Form is scattered around School in a variety of places. … Even the “Music Rooms” of the Raymond and Dawes common rooms have been requisitioned.

These rooms were created by walling off a corner of each common room, which included the alcove, and were prompted in both cases by competition between TV and hi-fi.

– From “The Thirteenth Chair,” news of the faculty by Charles H. Raymond ’94, chair of the English Department.

– From the “Echoes of the Campus” news roundup. Upper House was

25 YEARS AGO IN THE LAWRENTIAN WINTER 1994 THE NEW LIBRARY ON FLAGPOLE GREEN The vast green surrounding the School’s yard-armed flagpole will soon be the site of a three-story brick and stone Victorian-style library complete with a tower and a satellite dish. Although the architectural inspiration is a century old, the interior promises to be thoroughly anchored in the Information Age – a time when librarians are watching mile-long stacks of texts being converted onto tiny compact discs.

– From a feature by Barbara Preston previewing plans for what would become Bunn Library upon its completion in 1996.

At one time, today’s Bunn Library was merely a sketch.

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STUDENT SNAP: JEFFREY TAO ’20

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T Lawrentian THE

usps no. 306-700 the Lawrenceville School Lawrenceville, New Jersey 08648 Parents of alumni: If this magazine is addressed to a son or daughter who no longer maintains a permanent address at your home, please email us at kzsenak@lawrenceville.org with his or her new address. Thank you!

#LifelongLawrentian

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