The Lawrentian - Winter 2015

Lawrentian THE

WINTER 2015

Departments 2 From the Head Master 3 Editor’s Note 4 1,000 Words

Features 12 Before Alibaba On the Cover:

Joseph Tsai ’82, the vice chairman of Alibaba, learned many of his leadership skills on Lawrenceville’s campus.

Joseph Tsai ’82, the vice chairman of Alibaba.

Photo by Carsten Schael.

28 Our Scientific Method In a special “Ask the Archivist” feature, The Lawrentian explores the history of the School’s science curriculum.

32 Blinded with Science A lot goes on in the F.M. Kirby Science Center. We’ll prove it.

Students show their true colors.

6 News in Brief Duffy cultivates kudos, Al-Faisal earns an Aldo, and L-10 gives you all the news that’s fit to broadcast.

11 Funding the Future Abbott hews to its history.

16 Sports roundup Fall sports stats.

18 Go big red!

Lavino displays an Olympian memento.

TAKE THIS JOB AND LOVE IT

20 On the Arts How does Periwig’s garden grow? Quite well, actually.

22 Cover to Cover Laubach chronicles a Leopold legacy.

24 Take This Job and Love It Peter Gould ’78 cooks up great stories.

80 By the Numbers ood figures.

F 81 Student Shot Joon Choe ’15 does some Seoul searching.

ON THE ARTS

24 S p o r ts r o u nd u p

20

16

Alumni 42 Financial Report 2013 - 2014 46 Alumni News

47 Class Notes

9 From the Head Master “Science cannot be organized and forced; it must be free to go where the next question leads.”

That is the thesis of Lewis Thomas’s essay about natural science in Lives of a Cell, an awardwinning book that I was required to read as an entering student at Princeton. This book – at least in part – inspired me to major in molecular biology. As described in a feature story in this issue of The Lawrentian, that is also a key lesson that Lawrenceville’s science department hopes today’s students learn and a major reason why the department continues to expand opportunities for students to conduct science research in the classroom, in the field, and in university and other professional laboratory settings.

In his essay, Thomas also marvels at the scientific enterprise. “The most mysterious aspect of difficult science is the way it is done,” he writes. “The central mystery [of science research]…is that we do it at all, and that we do it under such compulsion. I don’t know of any other human occupation… in which the people engaged in it are so caught up, so totally preoccupied, so driven beyond their strength and resources… It sometimes looks like a lonely activity, but it is as much the opposite of lonely as human behavior can be. There is nothing so social, so communal, and so interdependent.”

Thomas died in 1993 and never got to see just how ubiquitous the internet would become. If he were alive, I suspect Thomas would recognize the commitment and zeal of many of today’s internet entrepreneurs, including trustee Joe Tsai ’82, who is also profiled in this issue. As executive vice chairman of Alibaba, Tsai has helped to shepherd the growth of Alibaba from its modest beginning in Jack Ma’s apartment in 1999 to its status today as one of the world’s leading companies.

Alibaba’s mission is to “make it easy to do business anywhere” by leveraging innovation and technology to enable small businesses in even remote regions of the world to participate in the global economy. In addition to putting the interests of its customers first and embracing change, the core values of Alibaba include three that would particularly resonate with Thomas because they echo his description of engaged scientists: Teamwork: “We believe teamwork enables ordinary people to achieve extraordinary things.”

Passion: “We expect our people to approach everything with fire in their belly and never give up on doing what they believe is right.”

Commitment: “Nothing should be taken lightly as we encourage our people to work happily and live seriously.”

Those values are certainly ones that Tsai embodies and ones that I hope all Lawrenceville graduates will embrace as they decide how they will use their Lawrenceville education to become responsible leaders – whether as scientists, entrepreneurs, educators, or the myriad other ways to make a difference in the world.

Sincerely,

Elizabeth A. Duffy H’43 ’79 The Shelby Cullom Davis ’26 Head Master

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Lawrentian THE

Winter 2015

|

Volume 79 Number 1

publisher Jennifer Szwalek editor Mike Allegra art director Phyllis Lerner proofreaders Rob Reinalda ’76 Linda Hlavacek Silver H’59 61 ’62 ’63 ’64 GP’06 ’08 contributors Joon Choe ’15 Gary Giberson H’11 P’10 Lisa M. Gillard Hanson Joanna Harmonosky H’49 Jacqueline Haun Barbara Horn Karla Johannes Emma Morrow Jacob Morrow Selena Smith Paloma Torres

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.

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

The Lawrentian welcomes letters from readers. Please send all correspondence to mallegra@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.

From the Editor

T

he concept of a sciencethemed issue of The Lawrentian first came to mind some years ago when I accompanied then Science Master Catherine Boczkowski H’80 ’11 P’89 ’91 and her Advanced Chemistry class on an evening trip to Princeton University. Once there, we were led into a much-too-warm classroom, where a few graduate students lectured us on concepts so complex they made my head spin.

At the time, I blamed my bewilderment on the hour and the sleep-inducing warmth of the room. Those things may have played a role, but the real reason I was bewildered was because of my brain. I just didn’t get it.

One thing about that evening stayed with me, however. As the grad students continued, as the chalkboard filled up with long, incomprehensible equations, I snuck sideways glances at the Lawrenceville students in attendance. There were about eight of them. All were wide awake. All of them nodded at the correct times. Most of them asked questions – and none of those questions was a permutation of the one I would’ve asked: “What are you guys talking about?”

The Lawrenceville students understood what was being said. And they all seemed grateful and enthusiastic to spend an evening hearing about it. Their passion dazzled me.

In this issue’s feature story, “Blinded with Science,” that passion is on bold display. Lawrenceville faculty members and students, inside and outside of the science classroom, love what they do. They also have the dynamic ability to explain what they do in layman’s terms. (And thank goodness for that.)

In a corresponding feature, “Our Scientific Method,” archivist Jacqueline Haun writes about the history of the School’s always forward-thinking Science Department. Her story is so good, I wish someone would clone her.

And we also have a story about Peter Gould ’78 P’18, who was a writer, producer, and director for the superlative television series Breaking Bad (which, ahem, sometimes talked about chemistry).

Even if you don’t consider yourself science-minded, I’m sure you’ll find something of interest here. The passion of a Lawrentian scientist is contagious.

Visit us on the web at www.lawrenceville.org. www.lawrenceville.org/thelawrentian

Warmest wishes,

Postmaster

Mike Allegra Editor

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.

P.S. I have one last bit of news. After nearly 11 years at the helm of The Lawrentian, I have decided to step down to pursue a freelance writing career.

I cannot begin to express my gratitude to the School and to The Lawrentian’s loyal readers for their boundless support and enthusiasm. It was a great pleasure to meet so many of you and to write about your marvelous alma mater. You will be missed but never forgotten. M.A.

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9 1000 Words

Mad about

HUE More than 250 members of the School community ran in Lawrenceville's Run for Color to support the Williams Syndrome Association. The event was organized by the Student Council and the Big Red Running Club

Photograph by Paloma Torres

and raised more than $1,200 for the cause.

9 News in Brief

An Integration Celebration

L

awrenceville’s eagerly anticipated 50 Years of Black Students Celebration attracted more than 300 guests this past fall. The weekend-long event featured panel discussions, lectures, and receptions, providing attendees with an uplifting yet unvarnished view of the School’s first steps toward integration.

A special School Meeting on Friday morning helped set the tone. A panel discussion, “Paving the Way to Change,” led

by Trustee Marcus Mabry ’85, featured Paul Dry ’62, one of three boys who wrote a letter in 1961 calling for the School to integrate; Darrell Fitzgerald ’68 and Lyals Battle ’67, the first African-American students to be admitted to Lawrenceville; Trustee Emeritus David Ottaway ’57 P’86 ’91, who, as head of the Board’s Admissions and Financial Aid Committee, led the initiative to admit larger numbers of African-American students; and Max Maxwell H’74 ’81 ’91, one of the School’s first black faculty members.

In Saturday’s opening panel, “Lawrenceville Today: Reflections on Diversity,” both Director of Multicultural Affairs and Senior Associate Dean of Admission Sam Washington ’81 P’14 ’17 and Head Master Liz Duffy H’43 ’79 identified inclusion as the primary goal of current diversity efforts. “When everybody feels like they can fully be themselves here, we will have achieved our mission,” said Duffy.

Kennedy Guest Pritchett ’15, the presi-

dent of the student club the Alliance of Black Cultures (ABC) and one of two student members on the panel, listed new initiatives to involve students, faculty, and staff in discussing the issues surrounding diversity and racism.

In Saturday’s four afternoon panels, participants shared their perspectives on “Life After Lawrenceville,” “Campus Life: Student and Faculty Conversation,” “Intercultural Competency: A Conversation About Intercultural Awareness,” and “Then and Now: The Black Student Experience.” The discussions provided an opportunity for many voices to be heard among current students, alumni, and current and former faculty members, including former His-

tory Master Bob Ainspac H’76 P’77 ’85.

Time and again discussions focused on the skills and character assets acquired at Lawrenceville that helped alumni navigate the challenges they would encounter later in life. Nat Queen ’73, a Eucharistic minister and former banker and nonprofit executive, spoke of the inspiration to “give back.” When another panelist, Garry Howard ’77 was asked if there is “a legacy we want to leave as a black community at Lawrenceville,” he replied, “Success.”

One of the highpoints of the weekend was the screening of Black and White in Perspective, a video about Lawrenceville’s integration, produced and directed by alumnus Paul Dewey ’80. The video sparked nearly an hour’s worth of comments from the audience and questions for Battle and Fitzgerald, who were instrumental in its production; Battle’s parents and Fitzgerald’s mother, who were interviewed in the film and present for the screening; and Dewey, who was also present to field questions. During the post-film discussion, one audience member marveled, “This is not happening everywhere.”

In short, Lawrenceville has distinguished itself by its willingness to confront its history and move forward.

Al-Faisal Honored

T

his past fall, His Royal

Center for Science and Internation-

Highness Prince Turki Al-

al Affairs at Harvard University. He

Faisal ’63 P’94 ’07 was

is a well-known commentator on

presented the Aldo Leopold Award, the School’s highest honor that recognizes “brilliant, lifelong work in a significant field of endeavor.” Past recipients have included captains of industry, philanthropists, college presidents, jurists, physicians, Pulitzer Prize winners, Nobel Laureates, the president of Honduras, and a rock ‘n’ roll star.

Middle Eastern affairs.

“Now I know how the gold medal winner in the Olympics feels.” AlFaisal said upon receiving the honor. Quoting Lawrenceville’s mission, he focused on its themes of leader-

counter to “any rules or traditions

H’64 ’65.

of Islam” or the Quran.

ship, global understanding, and

“My son had the Weedens as

In her welcome to Prince Turki and

commitment to personal, commu-

housemasters 30 years later,” he

the approximately 200 guests at

nity, and environmental responsibil-

noted. “I am pleased that two of my

the award ceremony, Head Master

ity. “Aldo Leopold exemplified these

Prince Turki was Saudi Arabia’s

characteristics. His work pioneered

chief of intelligence for more than Arabian ambassador to the United

an international movement. His Sand County Almanac became a classic.”

Kingdom, Ireland, and the United

During his talk, Al-Faisal provided

25 years and has served as Saudi

Chuck H’65 ’92 and Mary Weeden

sons chose to come to Lawrenceville

Liz Duffy H’43 ’79 provided context

and we can share that experience.”

for Lawrenceville’s distinguished

Prince Turki also discussed the Islamic State. He compared IS to the

history as a school that educates responsible global leaders.

Communist threat of the Cold War

“Lawrenceville today,” she noted,

in that both represent an existential

“includes 115 international students

threat to the monarchy of Saudi

from 40 countries. Their presence

Arabia. “We have lived through ad-

enriches everyone’s experiences

versity before, and with the help of

here and ensures that today’s Law-

the United States and our Arab

rentians will graduate with a truly

friends, we have managed to sur-

global network of friends and con-

vive and thrive.” He believes inter-

nections. As alumni know, the ties

preciated that his education was

national leadership is lacking in the

and friendships developed at Law-

not confined to the classroom and

current situation, however, urging

renceville last a lifetime, which

Arab Studies at Georgetown Uni-

recalled the outstanding quality of

“a collective effort on the part of

gives me great hope that this gen-

versity (his other alma mater),

his teachers and housemasters,

the world community.” Referring to

eration of Lawrentians will be able

Prince Turki is a visiting Distin-

particularly History Master Frank

IS as “an aberration,” he predicted it

to effectively address some of the

guished Professor at Georgetown

Heyniger ’36, English Master Ben

would have only short-term suc-

complex issues that face our inter-

and a Lamont Lecturer at the Belfer

Briggs H’61, and his housemasters

cess because the movement runs

connected, global world.”

States. He is a founder and trustee of the King Faisal Foundation, which focuses on investments in education in Saudi Arabia, and chairman of the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh. A trustee of the Oxford Islamic Center at Oxford University and the Center for Contemporary

anecdotes from his Lawrenceville years. He pointed out that one of his

greatest

challenges

as

a

14-year-old Lawentian was getting to know the ways of Americans, citing the informality in greetings like, “Hey, man, how are you?” He ap-

Give Us Ten Minutes, We’ll Give You The School Move over The Lawrence, there’s a new news outlet in town. L-10, now playing on Lawrenceville’s YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/user/LawrencevilleVideo) is a 10-minute twice-a-month news broadcast, shot and edited in Pop Hall’s lower level broadcast studio. Helmed by anchor Ghael Fobes ’17, each episode of L-10 offers a fast-paced assortment of interviews, hard news, features, and fun.

Be sure to catch the latest broadcast!

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Murray Meets and Greets

W

hen Stephen Murray accepted the offer to be Lawrenceville’s 13th Head Master, he did so before he had a chance to visit the School’s campus. Because of this, he was eager to get the most out of every minute of his recent whirlwind visit to the School. He sat in on classes, met faculty, and posed for pictures with gaggles of students donning fake moustaches (none of which came close to matching the grandness of Murray’s own). Murray also gave a speech before the School community at a morning meeting in which he expressed just how happy he was—at long last—to see Lawrenceville in person.

“I can only learn so much about you from YouTube,” Murray said, drawing a hearty laugh out of his student audience. “I caught the 2013 video of Stanley House’s win in House Olympics. I saw a faculty group do a cover version of a Miley Cyrus tune. I saw a clip of a Lawrenceville/Hill boys’ lacrosse game where Hill was getting schooled. So I got some glimpses of you, but it is so nice to actually be here and begin the process of meeting all of you.”

The visit and the speech were intended to provide students and faculty a sense of who Murray is and a hint about how he might lead once he moves into Foundation House next year. A longtime administrator at Deerfield Academy and the current headmaster of the University

G Future Head Master Stephen Murray and Woodhull students show off their upper lips.

School, a K-12 school in Ohio, Murray told the assembled how much he admires Lawrenceville’s reputation and how eager he is to return to the 24/7 boarding school experience.

“It is a return to an environment I love,” he said.

“I love the coaching, teaching, and residential life. I love the games, and you can expect to see me on the sidelines of as many games as I can possibly make. I look forward to swinging through the Houses in the evenings and seeing where you come home to roost at the end of the day.”

But what Murray finds most admirable about Lawrenceville is its sense of community. “On a good day, the world is full of bewildering differences,” he observed, but there is no better way to reinforce that sense of community than though Harkness teaching. “There you are not only taught to listen to your peers but also to

hear them. It isn’t always like this in the world, but

we

have

a

chance

to

practice

this level of respect and to see for ourselves that it works. Respect is the only thing that can work.”

Photo Finish Lawrenceville is a picturesque place; our Instagram account proves it. The page offers up hundreds of photos of School events as well as a number of those campus beauty shots.

Check it out at www.instagram.com/lvilleschool, or go to www.lawrenceville.org and click the Instagram icon at the top of the page.

Bath House Freshens Up

T

hroughout most of its history, the Bath House has been a building in search of a purpose.

When it was constructed in 1885, it was true to its name; it served as a place where stinky Lawrentians took their once-a-week baths – eight tubs, no waiting. If a boy missed his scheduled 20-minute bath time, he would have to wait another week before he could scrub himself clean, a punishment that affected not only the unwashed, but also the unfortunate boys who were forced to sit next to him in class.

By the time the Bath House celebrated its 25th anniversary, however, the building was obsolete. Showers in the then-new gymnasium in 1906 put the tubs out to pasture. For the next century, the building became a multipurpose room of sorts. At different points in its history it served as a music building, smoking lounge, barber shop, administrative office,

classroom, the home of the Black Student Society (a forerunner of today’s Alliance of Black Cultures), and the School’s radio station – among other things – before settling into its most recent use as the home for Outdoor Programs and Sustainability.

Few would assert that any of these incarnations was a perfect fit – especially when one considered the Bath House’s central location. Nestled in the sweet spot between the Circle and Crescent houses and the Bunn Library, the Bath House was seen

by School administrators as an ideal place to serve as a quasi-student union where Lawrentians could informally socialize and eat.

As part of a $2.5 million campaign, construction has begun to redesign and expand the building to serve as a 64-seat café, complete with kitchen facilities, new bathrooms, and a flagstone patio to accommodate outdoor seating and gas barbecues. The most striking aspect of the repurposed

building will be the period-appropriate glass conservatory that will seat 32 and adjoin the original building via a short hallway. Construction is scheduled to be completed by the end of the 2014-15 school year.

Sustainable Fare, the company that supplies and prepares the food served in the Irwin and Abbott dining centers, will take over kitchen operations at the Bath House, but opportunities for students to cook there will be available for special events and fundraisers. It is also anticipated that the Bath House could serve as an ideal venue for spring and summer wedding receptions – as it is just a short walk from the School’s Edith Memorial Chapel, where so many alumni have exchanged vows over the years.

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Head Master Wins Design Challenge

F

or the past five years, Head Master Liz Duffy H’43 ’79 has co-taught a course on design thinking, called “Design for Social Impact.” This past summer, as she was preparing for the course, she learned of OpenIDEO, an online forum that poses design challenges for people around the world to solve collaboratively.

“I read about the site when I was doing background reading,” she said. “I started participating so that I could learn new tools for our class. I never imagined that I would be one of the challenge winners.”

But win she did. Duffy was named one of seven winners of the Youth Employment Design Challenge co-sponsored by OpenIDEO and the Clinton Global Initiative. In answer to the challenge, “How might we build better employment opportunities and pathways for young people around the world?” Duffy proposed the Millennial TechCorps. Modeled after Americorps, her initiative would place young adults in one-year paid internships with non-profit organizations in need of technical expertise. “Millennials are both tech savvy and purpose driven. Many nonprofits need help with social media, web 2.0 tools, basic programming, and other technology initiatives. It seemed like a natural match.”

Participating in the challenge allowed Duffy to put into practice many of the processes and skills she teaches her students, including innovation, critical thinking, and collaboration.

“It was incredibly rewarding to have absolute strangers with so many different areas of expertise be enthusiastic with their feedback, as well as generous with their time,” said Duffy.

Duffy’s class benefitted from her participation in the OpenIDEO challenge, too. “We introduced a few new tools this year and modified our syllabus,” she said. “I hope that Lawrenceville students will consider participating in the future, because it’s a great way to use the skills we teach in class to make a real difference in the world.”

W

No. 1 in the Sun

hat Lawrenceville has long suspected has been proven true. A new study conducted by the Solar Foundation and funded in part by the U.S.

Department of Energy has determined that Lawrenceville has the largest solar array of any K-12 school in the nation.

The study, titled “Brighter Future: A Study on Solar in U.S. Schools,” noted that 3,752 schools in the country have arrays – but the foundation credits Lawrenceville with pushing New Jersey to the No. 2 spot in overall solar energy production.

Lawrenceville’s array, which went live in 2012, serves as the boldest and most visible representation of Lawrenceville’s ongoing commitment to sustainability. It is made up of 24,934 panels over a 30-acre tract of School-owned farmland. These panels, which are on single-axis trackers – meaning that the panels reposition themselves at different times of the day to better absorb the most sunlight – generate 6.1 megawatts of power, providing approximately 90 percent of the School’s electrical needs. It also offsets 6,388 metric tons of carbon dioxide, which is the equivalent of taking 1,253 cars off the road every year.

Photograph copyright KDC

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9

Funding the Future

A Historic Makeover

T

hanks to $10.8 million in new gifts, Abbott Dining Hall is going to soon serve as a testament to Lawrenceville’s storied history.

The gift was provided by John J. Stephan ’59 and his wife, Barbara, who gave $8 million, and the Mario Family Foundation, which has committed $1 million to the project.

Built in 1962 and named for former Head Master Mather Abbott, who served from 1919 to 1934, Abbott Dining Hall, in addition to feeding Fifth Form students, also serves as the oncampus site of many alumni and parent receptions.

One of the goals of the renovation is to use the space to tell Lawrenceville’s archival stories, from the display of House flags to the installation of cases filled with trophies and other School artifacts. Though some of the design decisions have yet to be finalized, the renovated space is expected to reflect the woodpaneled elegance of Edith Memorial Chapel and the architectural style of the Circle Houses. The redesign of the kitchen/serving area will enable the removal of all service equipment from the main dining room, both opening up the space and delivering a more classic feel. Renovations are expected to begin in early 2016, with completion expected by fall 2016.

In addition to their $8 million gift, the Stephans also gave $1.8 million to go toward other initiatives that preserve Lawrenceville’s history. This gift will be divided into two endowed funds, one to support the permanent position of a historical exhibition specialist at the School, and the other to support the work of student House historians. The Stephans have been funding the historical exhibition specialist position on an annual basis for the past several years.

“For a school as steeped in tradition as Lawrenceville, knowing we have a lasting means of recording our history as it happens and making it visible to our community is a remarkable gift,”

commented Head Master Liz Duffy H’43 ’79. “This emphasis on the historical nature of Lawrenceville’s present as well as its past will help our students appreciate the significance of their own place in the continuum.”

This is the second large gift the Stephans have made to projects that protect and showcase Lawrenceville’s archival heritage. In 2009, they made a $6 million gift to The Bicentennial Campaign to fund the creation of the Stephan Archives, a state of the art physical and digital repository for Lawrenceville’s extensive collection of documents, images, and artifacts. John Stephan, a professor of history emeritus at the University of Hawaii, worked closely with Jacqueline Haun, the School’s archivist, to ensure that materials would be appropriately preserved and easily accessible to researchers – particularly Lawrenceville students.

The Mario family has also contributed significantly to a number of projects and programs at Lawrenceville, including the construction of a fifth Crescent House, the renovation of the Fathers Building, and the Mario Courtyard that occupies the space between the Fathers Building and Woods Memorial Hall.

Jeremy Mario ’88 P’16 has served on the Lawrenceville Board of Trustees since 2005.

Lawrenceville is grateful to the Stephan and Mario families for their generosity and commitment to the School and its history.

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BY MIKE ALLEGRA

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t h e l aw r e n t i a n

O

n September 19, the China-based online company Alibaba launched its initial public offering at the New York Stock Exchange. It was, to say the least, an eagerly anticipated event.

Founded in 1999 by Jack Ma, Alibaba was created as a business-to-business portal to connect Chinese manufacturers with overseas buyers – a service it still provides.

But over the past dozen years, Alibaba’s role in the global marketplace has expanded dramatically and branched out to include a dozen other affiliated companies that corner the market on Chinese consumer sales, online auctions, and other platforms. As of 2014, Alibaba accounted for 80 percent of China’s online sales. The company is larger than Amazon and eBay combined.

So, not surprisingly, the Wall Street traders were buzzing – eager to snap up any common stock they could get their mitts on.

When the closing bell rang that day, Alibaba’s market value was $231 billion. It was the biggest IPO in Wall Street history and made two individuals instant multibillionaires. The first, of course, was Ma, the founder, chairman, and visionary of the company. The second was Alibaba’s vice chairman, Joseph Tsai ’82, who, for much of Alibaba’s history, was responsible for attracting investors and making merger and acquisition deals that helped turn the company into the juggernaut it is today.

Tsai is perhaps the most courteous billionaire on Earth. He is soft-spoken and more than happy (eager, actually) to sidestep the spotlight. He prefers working behind the scenes, putting his instinctive drive and boundless intellect to work for the good of something larger than himself.

“Tsai is known as the guy who gets stuff done,” noted an August 24 story for Bloomberg News. “Most who know Tsai describe him as low-key, even-keeled, and humble.”

It turns out that Tsai’s personality has been more or less consistent throughout his adult life. A typical Lawrenceville Fifth Form housemaster report proves it: “Joe is extremely modest and goes about fulfilling his numerous responsibilities efficiently and with a minimum of fanfare,” wrote History Master Marty Doggett H’82 ’86 ’87 ’88 ’92 ’98 P’00.

“I have been impressed with his drive and prodigious energy.”

Tsai arrived on Lawrenceville’s campus in September 1977 under less than ideal circumstances. He was a quiet, 13-year-old first former who had never been away from home. His family and friends – his entire support system – were half a world away in Taiwan. And he held only a tenuous grasp of the English language.

If Tsai was fretful about the situation he found himself in, so were a few Lawrenceville educators. “It is risky to take in a foreign student who is so young,” observed Art Master Jack Garver H’71 in a March 1977 assessment of Tsai. “Life in Lower School is ROUGH.” The idea also seemed to give Admissions Director Ben Briggs H’61 pause. “It’s hard to know whether we can put together a good program for him,” Briggs wrote. “He does seem more able than most, but he has had little time to assimilate English.”

This was true – but it was not due to a lack of effort. After Tsai completed the sixth grade in Taiwan, his parents pulled him out of school so the boy could take a rigorous year of English instruction.

His tutor, Mrs. Chao of the Chao School for Intensive English Training, “made a lot of money from anxious parents who wanted to send their kids to the States,” Tsai says with a laugh.

True to the school’s name, the English training was intensive. It was not, however, very helpful. Chao’s curriculum focused almost exclusively on vocabulary memorization. By year’s end, Tsai knew long, long lists of Eng-

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t h e l aw r e n t i a n

lish words, but had no idea how to put those words together into coherent sentences.

Tsai had a little more luck with another English class – this one stateside. In the summer before he was to start at Lawrenceville, he enrolled in an ESL course at Northfield Mount Hermon School, in Massachusetts. There he learned the basics of conversational English. It wasn’t much, but it was certainly better than parroting a list of nouns.

Tsai’s parents considered it essential for Tsai to get his education overseas. “They believed that if I went to high school in Taiwan it would be very difficult for me to get into a

boys turned 14, they weren’t allowed to travel. The government didn’t want boys leaving the country to avoid the military. My parents knew that if they wanted to send me to school in the States, they had to do it when I was 13.

That was the cutoff.”

Though he and his family considered boarding schools around the world, including one in Switzerland, Tsai fell in love with the Lawrenceville campus and the fact that it was picturesque without being in the middle of nowhere. To this day, however, Tsai still marvels that he gave up Swiss chocolate for “Lawrenceville mystery meat.”

U.S. college,” Tsai says.

That said, his parents were not eager to send him overseas at such a young age. They had little choice in the matter, however.

“I had to leave the country at 13 because the Taiwanese government had a rule at that time.

Young men growing up in Taiwan had to either go to college or go into military service. When

Upon his arrival on campus, Tsai was pleasantly surprised to find something that resembled an international community – students from Iran, Sweden, and France. None of these kids from overseas, however, shared Tsai’s language barrier. In addition to his regular coursework, Tsai took ESL classes with Shirley Garver, which helped a great deal, but the boy

did not want to wait until he was fluent to become “one of the guys.”

“I figured that if I wanted to be more a part of the community, I would need to participate in sports.”

For the fall seasons Tsai found a home on the JV and, later, varsity football teams. In the spring, however, Tsai failed to make the cut for baseball. (“Baseball is everywhere in Taiwan,” he says with a laugh.

“How can a kid from Taiwan get cut from the baseball team?”) But that disappointment turned out to be serendipitous. The following year, still stinging from his baseball snub, he

tried his hand at another spring sport. (“The kids with the sticks in their hands seemed to be having fun,” he observed.) He tried out for lacrosse and got on the team. He had never played the game before, but he (and his teammates) soon discovered that he had a natural affinity for it. The following year he made JV and, as a fourth former, was one

of only a handful of juniors to make varsity.

It was, he says, the “highlight of my playing career.”

“But I didn’t develop as much as I should have,” he admits.

This lack of improvement caught the attention of his coach, Marshall Chambers H’62 P’77. “In the off-season between junior year and senior year, Mr. Chambers told me to work on my game. But I was distracted and had other things going on. When I came back my senior year, I tried out for the team, but I didn’t get on. That was a life lesson I would never forget: You can’t ever be complacent.

“That, I think, gave me the motivation to try out for the team at Yale. I just had to prove it to myself that Lawrenceville was not the end of my lacrosse career.” He did make the Yale team. “I wasn’t a shining star there; I think my total playing time in the four years I was there was 20 minutes, but it was great to be a part of that team.”

As for his Lawrenceville academic studies, Tsai earned his teachers’ awe by distinguishing himself for his tireless work ethic. He also was a quick study. With the extra English instruction and the benefits of full immersion, Tsai’s writing and speaking skills improved dramatically. At the end of Tsai’s First Form year, the School considered additional English instruction over the summer to be “not necessary.” (Tsai took summer classes anyway.)

By the time he became an upperclassman, Tsai was popular with his housemates, pretty near fluent, and able to hold his own around a Harkness table – a skill that proved to be invaluable later, as his professors at Yale Law taught using the Socratic Method.

Also, to Tsai’s surprise, The Lawrence recruited him as its sports editor. His grades in all subjects were excellent – something, noted Chambers (Tsai’s housemaster in Cleve), “that we have routinely come to expect.”

After Yale, Tsai became a tax attorney before making the switch to private equity, where he found great success.

In 1999 he was introduced to Jack Ma through a mutual friend. Alibaba was little more than a website at that time, with no real revenue stream, but Tsai could see that the company held great promise. More important, he could see that Ma was an incredible leader. He wanted to work with the man. So he gave up his high-six-figure salary to join Alibaba at a salary of $600 a year.

It was an incredible risk that, in retrospect, Tsai didn’t consider to be very risky at all.

“Jack is the best leader I have ever seen,” he says, “and the best leaders have the ability to bring a lot of talent to one place and have everyone work toward the same goal.”

He credits Ma’s leadership skills to his background as a teacher. “It may seem counterintuitive, but I find that teachers make very good business leaders. There are three reasons for this. For one, they have the ability to command attention from their students.

Teachers know how to communicate to give people vision and hope. Jack is a very good communicator.

“The second characteristic of a teacher is they always care a lot about developing you.

I remember a lot of teachers at Lawrenceville who cared a lot about the progress I was making. That translates into the business environment because, as a business leader, the most important thing you can do for your company is not to do everything yourself but to develop other people so they can take on more responsibility. That’s the only way a company can grow.

“The third characteristic is that teachers have no ego. I can’t think of a teacher at Lawrenceville who had a huge ego because you can’t connect with your students if you have a big ego. Teachers are always happy if their students become successful. Teachers feel very proud when this happens. The best business executives also know how to keep their egos in check, for they have to be willing to hire a lot of people who are smarter than they are to help the company grow. Jack has an incredible ability to hire smart people and bring them in to work for him.”

These days Tsai resides in Hong Kong while Ma lives in mainland China. The two men speak every day, and the respect for each other continues to grow.

Tsai’s love for Lawrenceville continues to grow as well. He is a member of Lawrenceville’s Board of Trustees and, over the years, has generously contributed to a number of School campaigns.

“One of the most important things about being a leader is respect for the team. You always want to give credit to the team. Like I learned at Lawrenceville with lacrosse, the team is more important than the individual.

It’s all about the team.”

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15

9 Sports Roundup Boys’ Cross Country Record: 5-0 Coach: Ed Poreda allen Fullerton ’15 Captains: C Daniel Goldman ’15 Patrick McLaughlin ’15

Girls’ Cross Country Record: 10-3 Coach: Melissa Kreppel Captains: K elly Kong ’15 Tacy Wagner ’15

Field Hockey M.A.P.L. Champions N.J.I.S.A.A. Champions Mercer County Champions Record: 18-2 Coach: Lisa Ewanchyna Captains: Evelyn Bird ’15

Grace Hillman ’15

Football

FALL Season STATS

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t h e l aw r e n t i a n

Record: 5-4 Coach: Danny O’Dea Captains: Jameson DeMarco ’15

By Karla Guido

Nicholas Duncan ’15 Peter Firestone ’15 Grant Keller ’15 Grant Newsome ’15

Boys’ Soccer Record: 11-7-1 Coach: Blake Eldridge ’96 Captains: Nick John ’15

Grant Keller ’15

Girls’ Soccer M.A.P.L. Champions Record: 9-6-1 Coach: Jessica Magnusson Captains: Sarah Hollinger ’15

Katelyn Long ’15

Girls’ Tennis M.A.P.L. Champions N.J.I.S.A.A. Champions Record: 12-0 Coach: David Cantlay Captain: J ennie Daisak ’15

Girls’ Volleyball Record: 10-5 Coach: Katie O’Malley Captain: K ennedy Guest-Pritchett ’15

Boys’ Water Polo Record: 10-7 Coach: Ramon Olivier Captain: R obert Lincoln ’15

Girls’ Water Polo Record: 6-9 Coach: Harold Wilder Captains: S amantha McDonough ’15 Shannon McKinnon ’15

For the most current athletic news visit www.lawrenceville.org/athletics. sp r i n g 2 0 1 3 17

9 Go Big Red!

BISS’S

GIFT

I

n many ways, George “Biss” Moore ’37 P’69 ’71 is the quintessential Lawrenceville alumnus. In addition to showing academic and moral distinction as a student (he was named “Head Boy,” the highest accolade a student could receive), from 1969-1984 he served as the School’s business manager. In that post he proved to be not only a loyal Lawrentian, but also a great leader who inspired loyalty in others. “We all loved Biss,” noted retired Lawrenceville mason Ed Murphy P’79.

“He was a wonderful man.”

In between these Lawrenceville milestones was a career devoted to the United States military. Moore went to West Point and, upon his graduation in 1941, served in the First Armored Division in World War II, earning two Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart. After the war, he returned to West Point to teach English.

Though by all accounts he was an excellent teacher at the Academy, what he did outside the classroom – particularly his passion for running – attracted the most notice. Moore was approached by a member of the United States Olympic Committee, who asked him if he would like to represent his country in the 1948 Olympic Games to be held in London.

Moore said yes.

He earned a spot on the Modern Pentathalon team – which, says longtime friend and fellow West Pointer David Schorr P’80 ’82 ’88 H’02, was an event that dovetailed nicely with the abilities of a career military man. Competitors are judged on their skills in riding, marksmanship, running, swimming, and fenc-

18

t h e l aw r e n t i a n

George “Biss” Moore ’37 gives Lawrenceville his Olympic honors.

ing. Despite an accelerated training schedule, and performing jumps on an unfamiliar horse (“He drew the nag of the bunch,” says Schorr with a laugh), Moore earned the silver medal.

Thanks to the generosity of Moore, this medal, along with photographs and other mementos from his Olympic career were presented to the School upon Moore’s death in 2014.

ceeded him as business manager. Moore lived his post-Lawrenceville life quietly at Hilton Head and, later, in Connecticut.

Toward the end of Moore’s life, Pressler contacted Schorr on behalf of her father.

Moore, said Pressler, wanted Schorr’s opinion on which school should be willed the Olympic medal, West Point or Lawrenceville?

This donation was arranged by Schorr and by Moore’s daughter, Kimberly Moore Pressler.

Schorr and George Moore had known each other since the 1970s when Schorr, then a young military cadet, would frequently visit the Lawrenceville campus to see his father-inlaw, French Master Arthur Peck. Moore and Schorr, with their common West Point experiences, fell into an easy rapport. When Moore decided to retire from Lawrenceville in 1984, he put in a good word for Schorr, who suc-

“West Point and Lawrenceville would appreciate it,” replied Schorr, who was devoted to both institutions. “But I think Lawrenceville would appreciate it more.”

Schorr was right.

The School is grateful to Moore – as well as Pressler and Schorr. Moore’s silver medal and the rest of his Olympic collection can be found on proud display in the office of the School’s Lavino Field House.

WINTER

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19

9 On the Arts

Periwig’s Garden

L

Bears Fruit

awrenceville’s fall musical, The Secret Garden, opens in India, where a young girl’s entire family dies of cholera. This turns out to be only the first of Mary’s many problems. Mary (Nina Kalkus ’15) is sent off to a large manor house to live with her only living relative, a hunchbacked uncle named Archibald (Jay Lee ’16). He is not capable of soothing the child’s grief, however, for he is still lamenting the passing of his wife, Lily (Madison Daniels ’15), who died many years before. The manor house reflects this pervasive mood of loneliness and despair – as do the many ghosts who roam the halls. Lily is one of these ghosts and, upon the child’s arrival, Mary’s dead family takes up residence there, too.

Lily died in childbirth. Though the child, Colin (Kyler Fullerton ’15), survived, Archibald fears that the boy might have inherited his own spinal deformities and demands that the boy remain bedridden. Because the child reminds Archibald of his dead wife (and because Archibald may subconsciously blame the boy for her death), Colin is banished to the mansion’s abandoned west wing to live alone and lonely, cared for by the cold and distant Dr. Neville Craven (Lewis Chapman ’15), Archibald’s brother.

Mary soon discovers a garden, snarled with underbrush and untended since Lily’s death. She is intrigued by it and decides to till the soil once again. It is her hope that by cultivating new life on this sad plot of land she might be able to rid the manor of its physical and metaphorical ghosts.

The Secret Garden, which performed to large crowds in October over Parents’ Weekend, was directed by Performing Arts Department Chair Christopher Cull. The show kicks off an impressive lineup of theatre performances planned for the 2014-15 school year, including Winterfest, the School’s annual slate of student-written and -directed plays; a Second Form production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth; and the thriller Wait Until Dark by Frederick Knott.

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WINTER

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9 Cover to Cover

SELF

PRESERVATION I

n 1935, noted ecologist and Lawrenceville alumnus Aldo Leopold, Class of 1905, purchased a several-hundred-acre parcel of abandoned farmland near the Wisconsin River. It was not an attractive piece of property.

Wisconsin was in the middle of a localized dust bowl at the time, and Leopold’s land had been almost irreparably over-farmed by the previous owners. Regardless, Leopold and his family fell in love with the place. They set up residence in the only structure that remained standing, a 10x20-foot chicken coop.

This coop, affectionately christened “The Shack,” soon became the base of operations for a series of experiments in land management and restoration. Over the ensuing years, Leopold, through controlled burns and other practices, restored the barren farmland to its original topography. His revitalization practices were so successful that the property became the inspiration for Leopold’s masterwork, A Sand County Almanac.

The property’s greatest legacy, however, came nearly 20 years after Aldo Leopold’s death. In 1967, Leopold’s children and four neighbors entered into a unique ecological arrangement. The five families signed a legal document asserting that their properties – totaling about 1,600 acres – would be maintained in accordance with Aldo Leopold’s land management philosophy. The properties were still owned by the original families; the only real stipulation was that any alteration to any individual property had to be approved by The Sand County Foundation, an organization run by the five families.

For the first time, a large parcel of land was protected from development without the aid of any government oversight or funding.

Though nothing of this sort had been attempted on as large a scale, this agreement was not entirely without precedent.

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t h e l aw r e n t i a n

Former Science Master Stephen Laubach chronicles the next generation of Leopold land management.

Conservation on the Leopold Memorial Reserve, the idea of cooperative conservation is neither easy to implement nor likely to stand the test of time. The agreements brokered by Aldo Leopold in the 1930s, for example, dissolved shortly after his death. Also, The Sand County Foundation has had its share of troubles over the years, occasionally coming into conflict with The Leopold Foundation, a separate organization set up in 1982 by the Leopold family to better manage The Shack property.

“Cooperative conservation can be messy,” Laubach notes. “You might have

Photograph by Todd Maughan

“Aldo Leopold was a pioneer,” notes former Lawrenceville Science Master Stephen Laubach. “He would do these cooperative ventures dating back to his days in the U.S. Forestry Service. He would interact with private land owners – so he was well versed with the idea of bringing people together to arrive at a common vision that could be implemented in a cooperative way. He believed that government could not solve all of our conservation challenges; we need private citizens to step up to the plate, too.”

But as Laubach notes in his new book, Living a Land Ethic, A History of Cooperative

more stakeholders involved, but there’s an advantage, too. When locals manage the land, it better serves the surrounding community.

[Government-owned and -managed] land can get out of touch with the interests of the people who live and work in the area.”

Laubach first became familiar with the Leopold Reserve in 1999, when he conducted research on the property for his master’s degree in ecology at the University of Wisconsin.

(The land – then as now – is privately owned, so Laubach needed permission from the family to work there.) For a time Laubach lived at The Shack, which has improved since its humbler days – a 10x15 “west wing” was added, as were electricity and plumbing – but the place still proudly, defiantly, retains its shacky charm.

“It’s pretty rustic,” he says. “It still has the same kitchenware and furniture. There’s a ledge for pet owls and falcons to sit on. It all was very similar to what was there in Aldo Leopold’s day. When you stay there, there is this indescribable feeling that Leopold is right there next to you.”

During his stay, Laubach cultivated friendships with the Leopold family and their neighbors. He also became fascinated with the 1967 cooperative conservation agreement.

When Laubach moved to New Jersey to teach at Lawrenceville, he never lost contact with the family. He led annual student trips to the reserve until he left the School in 2007.

When an opportunity to create a comprehensive history of the reserve presented itself in 2009, Laubach was eager to get started. He also had to work fast. “When I got back to Wisconsin there were four key elders who were all in their 80s and 90s. If I didn’t record an oral history, that knowledge would disappear forever,” he explains. “Not long after I started the project two of those elders did pass away.”

The resulting book is a compact but surprisingly thorough history of the property that unflinchingly reports on the challenges and conflicts that followed in the wake of the historic 1967 agreement. On the whole, however, Living a Land Ethic serves as chronicle of and an ode to a unique and empowering way to protect the environment.

“These two foundations created a conservation-oriented organization that ensures its long term preservation of the land,” Laubach says. “No matter how the reserve may evolve over time, there will always be that core, that spirit of the original agreement that will persist.”

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9 Take This Job & Love It

Heisenberg and the

HARKNESS

T

he life of a writer is, more often than not, a solitary one. Peter Gould ’78 P’18 understood that existence firsthand, spending the better part of his early career chained to his desk – first by writing screenplays for independent and big studio flicks and, later, scripts for HBO. One such HBO-intended effort, a pilot for a dark procedural about the IRS, attracted the notice of Vince Gilligan. Before long, Gould’s life – and writing process – would change forever.

Gilligan was on the hunt for staff writers for his upcoming series, Breaking Bad, and was sure that Gould would be a perfect addition to the team. Gould was invited to view the Breaking Bad pilot and was blown away by what he saw. “I couldn’t believe how well the characters were drawn,” he recalls, gushing. “And I was really impressed with Vince’s shooting style; it was far more cinematic and visual than anything else on television.”

Gould couldn’t sign on fast enough. A few months later he was in a roomful of other talented writers, all intent on chronicling the twoyear downward spiral of Walter White, a mildmannered high school chemistry teacher, husband, and father, who becomes a notorious methamphetamine kingpin known in the underworld as Heisenberg. The man’s transformation is total and uncomfortably plausible – and the product of countless hours of discussion and debate in the writers’ room.

“This was my first foray into series television. It was the first time I ever wrote anybody else’s characters,” Gould explains. “And it was the first time I was ever in a room with a bunch of other writers trying to figure out a story. It felt right to me, though. I enjoyed the give-andtake, the exploration of an idea, and the opportunity to look at a situation from every angle.”

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t h e l aw r e n t i a n

Peter Gould ’78 P’18 cooks up high-quality television.

D Peter Gould’s University of American Samoa sweatshirt is the (fictional) alma mater of Better Call Saul's Saul Goodman. Gould used a certain prep school's seal as inspiration for the design.

me that my workplace has a lot in common with the Harkness table. That was the reason why I was so comfortable sitting around a large table kicking around ideas.”

Although his experiences around the Harkness helped Gould in the writer’s room, his Lawrenceville science education did not. “My only chemistry experience was an ecology class,” he says with a laugh. “We determined the pH levels of pond water.” To get that needed dose of authenticity for Breaking Bad’s science-minded main character, Gould and the other writers pored over science textbooks (including some underground and/or illegal titles on meth manufacturing) and consulted an on-

staff chemistry professor.

The writing process behind each episode of Breaking Bad was long and required a great deal of planning. The story outline was mapped out in great detail before any writer got down to putting words on a page. The brainstorming for each episode could take anywhere from a week-and-a-half to – in a few unfortunate cases – a couple of months.

“Vince ran a ‘safe room,’ a place where people could feel comfortable voicing ideas – even if they aren’t great ideas,” Gould explains. “That environment really got things going and encouraged us. The idea was to use all the brainpower up front – build on great

Photograph by Steve Anderson

How he so easily transitioned from that of a solitary writer to this exciting, collaborative environment was a bit of a mystery to Gould.

The reason wouldn’t dawn on him until many years later, during the filming of “Granite State,” the penultimate episode of Breaking Bad’s final season that Gould both wrote and directed. In that episode, a brief scene was shot in New York City on the set of The Charlie Rose Show. “I took my daughter with me,” Gould says, “and said to her, ‘Since we’re in the area, why don’t we take a look at Dad’s old school?’”

They did so, and, on the Lawrenceville campus, Gould had his epiphany. “It dawned on

ideas and make them better. Only when those ideas were fully formed did the writer go off with this outline and turn it into a full script with dialogue and a soul.”

Gould’s first script for Breaking Bad was the first-season finale “A-No-Rough-StuffType-Deal,” an episode that can serve as a model as to why Breaking Bad became such a phenomenon that attracted both slavish fans and armloads of Emmys. Gould’s script, like many of the show’s episodes, blends humor (Walt and his partner, Jesse, cook meth in a basement while an unknowing real estate agent hosts an open house upstairs); a MacGyver-like use of science to solve a problem (Walt whips up a batch of thermite to blow the lock at a chemical warehouse); and gripping, unpredictable drama (a local drug lord beats one of his loyal henchmen to death moments after completing a lucrative deal with Walt).

Breaking Bad also generated a lot of buzz by employing a non-linear story structure – using flashbacks to flesh out characters, and flash-forwards to keep fans guessing as to what might happen next. It turns out that most of those flash-forwards weren’t just keeping fans guessing; the writers, as a kind of selfimposed challenge, were willfully painting themselves into corners.

“I wish I could say that all the foreshadowing was planned out in great detail, but it wasn’t,” Gould says. “At the beginning of

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season five, we have a flash-forward where we showed Walt with an M-60 machine gun in the trunk of a car. The car had New Hampshire plates. Walt had a beard, he was wearing a different pair of glasses, and he wasn’t wearing his wedding ring. When we wrote that scene, we had no idea how he got into that situation or who he was going to use that gun on. We had to work it all out later so all those elements could logically and emotionally come together.”

Another Gould-penned script was season two’s “Better Call Saul,” an episode that introduced fan favorite, Saul Goodman, a sleazy criminal lawyer (that is to say, a lawyer who is also a criminal). Played by Bob Odenkirk, Saul was initially a comic foil for Walter White. As the series progressed, however, he often served as the show’s pragmatic Voice of Reason.

“I think Saul was so popular because he was one of the only characters on the show who was actually enjoying himself,” Gould says.

“He often takes pleasure in what he does, and that creates such a contrast with the rest of these tormented characters. And, of course, there’s the way Bob embodies the character.

The guy is a slickster, but Bob brings an air of humanity to him. Saul is the one character who is not lying about what he is doing. He walks these dangerous moral lines, but still there’s a lightness to him.

“Over the years we learned that Bob was

a deeper actor than we knew – that he could go places we didn’t at first appreciate. So the character became more complex as the show went on.”

Because of this, Saul will soon be the center of his own series, Better Call Saul, which is now in production with Gilligan and Gould as the show’s co-creators. It’s a role for Gould that is at once familiar and newly challenging.

“When I was working on Breaking Bad, I would be in the writers’ room working out episodes and then leaving to write an episode on my own. I got a sense of the whole series and how I fit into it,” he says. “Later in the series, when I became a writer/producer, I got to focus with a laser-like intensity on a single Breaking Bad episode and all the moments in it. Now, with Better Call Saul, Vince and I have to be laser-like on all the moments in all the episodes. I’m still learning how to do this.

Vince is the master, of course, and I’m learning a lot from him.”

One thing Gould doesn’t need to learn, however, is the power of creative collaboration.

“Listening to those writers’ room ideas build on one another is just wonderful. ‘We’ll kill the informant!’ ‘By cutting off his head!’ ‘And the head is crawling through the grass on the back of a turtle!’ ‘And then the turtle explodes!’ ‘No, that’s going too far…Or is it? Hmm…’” Gould can’t help but giggle at the memory. “Nothing beats that,” he says finally.

“Nothing.”

Planned Giving

is for Young Alumni/ae, too!

Victoria Von Hessert ’91 came to Lawrenceville as a second former in the fall of 1987 – the first year of coeducation. It was a love affair from day one. “Lawrenceville was the best four years of my life,” she says. That’s why she has supported the Annual Fund consistently, including when she was a graduating fifth former in 1991, and every year since graduating from Middlebury College.

But she also recently completed an estate plan in which a percentage of her estate comes directly to Lawrenceville, even if she’s survived by her husband and children. Victoria knows how important planning is – she experienced the tragic loss of a dear Lawrenceville classmate, and her gift is in memory of him.

“Lawrenceville is such a special place. I want it to be available to the most deserving students regardless of their families’ financial circumstances. So my bequest is designated for financial aid.”

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

ouR

Scientific

Method

By Jacqueline Haun

From the vantage point of the 21st century, it is difficult to imagine a time when science was not considered an essential aspect of a good education. It was not until the 20th century that science education became the major influence it is today.

The Lawrenceville School (which was founded 25 years before the term “scientist” even existed in the English language) was ahead of the curve; the School offered science-based coursework as early as the 1830s. “The more advanced pupils may attend to Natural Philosophy [physics], Chemistry, Astronomy, Mental Philosophy [psychology], and Botany,” boasted an early catalogue.

Lawrenceville was even progressive in its science facilities, as “lectures in Natural Sciences are accompanied with practical illustrations with the aid of apparatus

procured for the purpose.” (The catalogue neglected, however, to explain exactly what that apparatus might be.) Lawrenceville even had its own natural science display in the Lyceum, the main meeting room in Hamill House, which contained “a respectable cabinet of mineral specimens and numerous collections in Natural History.”

By 1860, the Lawrenceville Classic and Commercial High School offered two educational “tracks”: the “classical,” emphasizing the students’ master of Greek and Latin in preparation for college studies, and the “commercial,” later known as the “scientific,” for boys who planned to go into engineering or commerce – with boys in the latter category spending more of their study time devoted to natural science, primarily physics.

Although Lawrenceville lost the “Classic and Commercial” part of its name following the reorganization of the School under the John Cleve Green Foundation, the distinction between the classical and scientific educational tracks continued for several decades thereafter. Major curricular changes were afoot, however; in 1883 courses were organized into six different departments: Latin, Greek, Mathematics, Science, English, and Modern Languages, with Jotham Potter as the first Continued on page 27

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t h e l aw r e n t i a n

G Before Noyes housed history, it was home to chemical reactions.

W endell T aylor : S cientist and C riminal M astermind The creation of a modern

ties. When he came to Law-

committee to study general

renceville can be largely at-

committed

of high school and the first two

science department at Lawtributed to Wendell H. Taylor,

who served as the chair of

the department from 1943 until his retirement in 1970.

Taylor’s passion for science pedagogy

translated

into

a curriculum that not only transformed

Lawrenceville,

but also influenced secondary schools across the United States.

Taylor came to Lawrenceville from Princeton University, where he taught chemistry and an innovative class on the history of chemistry that was the first of its kind

Taylor came to Lawrence-

ville from Princeton University, where he taught chemistry and an innovative class

on the history of chemistry that was the first of its kind

among Northeastern universi-

renceville in 1943, he quickly to

reorganizing

the curriculum, creating a

education in the final two years

years of college. This commit-

logical sequence of sciences

tee’s recommendations, docu-

grade levels, beginning with

eral Education in School and

that advanced through the Earth sciences, proceeding

through physics and chemistry, and culminating in the

life sciences. In order to support this scaffolded science knowledge, he collaborated

with colleagues Otto Rosner and George Diehl to write the

textbook, The Fundamentals of Science, which served the

School as its introductory science text well into the 1960s.

During his tenure, Taylor

was appointed to a national

mented in a report titled, GenCollege, planted the seeds

of what would eventually become the Advanced Placement Program. Taylor’s vision of science education – building

level to level and bridging the

gap between high school and

college – remains a fundamental principle of secondary education to this day.

To honor his contributions, The Wendell Hertig Taylor Award is given annually to a

Fifth Form student who has “bridged the two worlds of science and the humanities.”

The award recognizes not only Taylor’s commitment to

science, but also his interest in crime fiction. Taylor,

among Northeastern

in collaboration with author

universities.

zun, compiled and edited A

and professor Jacques BarCatalogue of Crime: Being

a Reader’s Guide to the Literature of Mystery Detection and Related Genres (Harper

& Row, 1971) a massive (952-page!) compendium of

the genre, offering overviews and reviews on more than

5,000 titles. He spent the last few years of his life working

with Barzun on compiling,

editing, and writing the pref-

aces to the book series Fifty Classics of Crime Fiction, 1900-1950.

30

t h e l aw r e n t i a n

Science Department head. Under the guidance of Head Master James Cameron Mackenzie, who would go on to national educational fame as one of the members of the Committee of Ten that established a recommended curriculum for all American high schools in 1892, the School, for the first time, provided a justification for the scientific segment of the curriculum, which was “to fit students for the first class of any American Scientific or Technical School” following Lawrenceville.

Under the invigorated curriculum, the new Science Department offered an ambitious range of classes: Physics, Chemistry, Botany, Astronomy, Physical Geography, and Physiology and Hygiene (the equivalent of today’s Personal Development classes). The department also offered a few curious curricular outliers such as Freehand, Outline and Perspective Drawing, and Bookkeeping.

Due to the School’s close relationship with the John Cleve Green Foundation and Princeton University, Lawrenceville urged its students of the 1880s to draw on the “extensive and valuable collections of the Museums of Geology, Mineralogy, and Zoology connected with the John C. Green School of Science at Princeton” rather than be limited to that cabinet in the Lyceum.

The wealth of science offerings proved to be too rich for most students, however; by the mid-1890s, the School had settled into a pattern that would hold sway for several years, with a somewhat more limited range of science choices. Students in First Form spent a period each week learning about physiology and hygiene. The Second Form studied botany. From there, most students had no more science classes until their Fourth and Fifth Form years, when they could take electives in either physics or chemistry. Lab periods were introduced in 1902, with the understanding that a typical four-credit science class would include two lectures and four labs per week.

World War I brought with it a new awareness of the need for science education, and public schools began to implement a schema of science at all grade levels over the next two decades. At the same time, college admissions procedures changed so that all incoming students were required to have a high school diploma. (This rule had been optional until the 1920s, provided that the applicants could pass the college’s entrance exam). Aware of the increased importance of scientific knowledge, in 1924 Lawrenceville made a year of science – either physics or chemistry – required for

graduation. By 1933, Lawrenceville opted to expand its offerings by adding six new electives, including one-period science classes for the Second through Fifth forms, Second Form Physiography (which covered physical geography, astronomy, meteorology, and geology), and Third Form Biology.

From its formation in the 1880s, the Science Department had consisted of two and then three instructors. The new science schedule of the 1930s, however, was not sustainable with such a small cadre of teachers. In 1935, the Science Department grew to six instructors, but this newfound commitment to the discipline was tempered somewhat by the fact that the School did not yet have a science building. Science masters were scattered all over campus – in Haskell (known then as The Lab), Pop Hall’s basement, and in the Old Infirmary Annex. By 1945, the School had determined that a separate building to house the Science Department was crucial.

The Noyes Science Building, which was funded by Jansen Noyes of the Class of 1905 and designed by Delano and Aldrich, opened in autumn 1951, and was state of the art for its day. In addition to the increased classroom and lab space, the building featured air-conditioning units – a great innovation for the chemistry labs and their noxious fumes – and a sloped-floor lecture room (now known as the Ambrecht Room) that was considered ideal

for supplementing lectures with films.

By the mid-1990s, however, science education, which had once focused on lectures and teacher demonstrations, began to trend toward highly interactive lab work, which required more space for students.

To address this need, the 56,000-squarefoot F.M. Kirby Science Center, roughly three times the size of Noyes, was completed in May 1998. Funded by F.M. Kirby ’38 and designed by Robert Hillier ’55, the new facility combined the Mathematics and Science departments, and included innovative “lab/ classrooms” (which enabled teachers to set up labs at a moment’s notice), as well as computer labs. It also brought with it sophisticated new equipment such as a PCR machine, which enabled students to work with DNA samples, something few college labs of the time were equipped to do.

The breadth and depth of the Lawrentian science education continues to grow. The School offers more than 25 diverse courses, including research electives in molecular biology, field ecology, and engineering, and a seminar in environmental sustainability. Outside the classroom, the Hutchins Scholars program provides a rich experience for the most science-minded Lawrenceville students.

Just as it has from the beginning, the School continues to prepare students for the everevolving world that surrounds them.

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Blinded with Science

BY MIKE ALLEGRA • PHOTOGRAPHY BY PALOMA TORRES

Lawrenceville’s science program caters to the most esoteric of interests.

Human Evolution As the sun begins to peek over the eastern horizon, students form an irregular line along the School pond’s northern shore. They do their best to ignore the chill in the air and the muddy ground beneath their feet.

Giving away their location is an arrhythmic, almost musical, “ping” that echoes across the surface of the water. The source of that sound is Jack Cresson – or, rather, the rocks he bangs together.

Clad in denim and flannel, with a gray beard and thickly callused hands, Cresson looks as if he could disappear into the woods and, with little trouble, live there forever.

Cresson isn’t a mountain man, however – or if he is, he is also a whole lot more. A widely

F Neel Ajjararapu ’15 and Leon Smith ’16 lend a hand.

published archeologist, he is on the Executive Board of the Archaeological Society of New Jersey, chairman of its Research Grants Committee, and, in 2013, the recipient of the ASNJ Lifetime Achievement Award. He is also a founding board member of the Society of Primitive Technology, an international organization dedicated to recording, preserving, and teaching all facets of primitive technology.

In short, he is the ideal guest speaker for Human Evolution, Science Master Lea Domb’s P’17 upper form course that explores how our species lived, adapted, and biologically changed over the past several million years. This morning Cresson provides some insight by demonstrating how to make tools the old-fashioned way, through a process

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called flintknapping. He kneels on a plastic tarp surrounded by an assortment of stones, some not much larger than a balled fist, others about the size of a frozen turkey.

“If you use a larger hammer,” he tells the students. “You can let gravity do most of the work.”

The “hammer” he speaks of is a spherical stone about the size and texture of a coconut.

With an expert’s eye, he scans the surface of a larger, flat stone on the ground before him.

“You have to look for the facets. The blemishes. The weaknesses,” he says. And then: “There.”

He points out the imperfection to his audience, all leaning in with interest. “See that?

We’re going to use that to our advantage.”

Without any preliminaries, he raises his rock hammer and hits the larger stone on an oblique angle. It isn’t a forceful hit by any means, but it is accurate and does the job. On contact, we hear that familiar “ping,” and a wedge from the flat stone is sheared off. This wedge, or “flake” as Cresson calls it, is the size of an axe blade and nearly as sharp. This edge will be shaped and strengthened – and will come in handy later on.

The flaking process isn’t always that easy.

A rock’s outer layer, the cortex, can be thick

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and unforgiving, and some rocks are far more accommodating than others. Flatter, bumpier ignatius rocks are easier to flake than round, smooth ones.

“How do you break into one of the big rounded ones?” asks Will Bernicke ’15.

“You curse a lot,” Cresson responds.

But the archaeologist takes the bait, and, four whacks later, produces a flake revealing a cortex a centimeter thick and the round stone’s shiny, black core.

“It can be a challenge,” he says, “but if it wasn’t a challenge it wouldn’t be fun.”

As if to prove it, a few minutes later he hands the students gloves and protective goggles. They take up positions on their own tarps, and soon the stone chips start flying.

None has the precision or control of Cresson, of course, but it isn’t long before each student boasts a few sharp stone wedges of his own.

It isn’t a moment too soon. At 10:30, Gary Giberson H’11 P’10, the head of Lawrenceville’s Dining Services, arrives with the pig.

The pig is not alive, but it is an entire pig that must be properly butchered for grilling. It turns out that the stone tool demonstration that Domb arranged includes lunch.

Giberson pauses in his delivery long enough to point out the choice cuts of meat.

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The sharpened rocks that the students had been so industriously creating are the only tools that will be used to cut up the meat for the barbecue.

The students don’t attack their quarry with zeal, but they don’t flinch either. The larger blades pierce the stubborn cartilage and separate the pig’s joints. The smaller blades perform the more surgical task of separating meat from bone. It is a near perfect imitation of how such tasks were performed by ancient peoples hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Before long, the meat is sizzling on the grill. Making tools out of rocks builds an appetite, apparently, and the students happily accept their entrée.

They also accept forks. After all, a person can go overboard with this stone tool business.

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Hutchins Scholars Program The beginning of summer doesn’t always mean a pause in a Lawrenceville student’s science education. The Hutchins Scholars Program makes sure of that. In the summer before their Fifth Form years, a few of the School’s most gifted science students work alongside professors and graduate students at top university laboratories – for eight hours a day for a minimum of six weeks.

These Lawrentians are not fetching coffee or working the copy machine. They are donning lab coats and actively contributing to research that would make most people’s heads spin.

“This summer I isolated a novel lasso pep-

tide produced by caulobactor crescentus CB15 bacteria,” says Karen Zhang ’15, “using methods of DNA extraction and expression, high performance chromatography (HPLC), and MALDA mass spectrometry.”

Veena Bhagavathi ’15, on the other hand, studied a genetic mutation that protects against the adverse effects of sleeping sickness. “I’ve worked with transgenic mice,” she notes. “First genotyping them, then breeding them, then sacrificing them and performing RNA analysis and looking at their kidneys under IHC, PAS, and IF staining.”

So summer as a Hutchins Scholar is not exactly a day at the beach.

As one might imagine, it is not easy to become a Hutchins Scholar. To be selected for the program, students must be nominated by a teacher and are required to meet a host of

criteria to determine if they have the necessary passion, work ethic, organizational skills, and ability. This past year 50 third formers applied for the program’s 10 available spots.

Those who are accepted have a long road to travel before finding their way into a university lab. In the summer between the scholars’ Third and Fourth Form years, they are required to take a three-week course at Lawrenceville on laboratory skills and etiquette. This class is taught by Science Master Elizabeth Fox (who oversees the Hutchins program) and other Lawrenceville masters.

This training is essential. Not only does it prepare students for university lab work, it also protects the reputation of the program.

Every Hutchins Scholar is a representative of The Lawrenceville School, Fox explains, and every representative of The Lawrenceville School is expected to maintain the high-

est standards of competence and professionalism. So far, so good.

“After university professors work with our kids,” Fox says with a smile. “They are always eager to work with our kids again.”

Once the scholars begin their Fourth Form year, they take a yearlong class with Fox. In it, they research scientists that they wish to work with. They write proposals and, with a little luck, persuade the scientist to take him or her on for the summer.

“I’ve been looking into Professor Ridky at Penn,” Eric Hyson ’16 says to Fox at their weekly meeting in the Kirby Science Center’s computer lab. Two other fourth formers, Connor Duwan ’16 and Matthew Brecher ’16, are also there, but silent, intently studying their laptops for their own Hutchins leads.

Todd W. Ridky is an assistant professor at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, a dermatologist with a focus on skin cancer.

“He does microscopy, which could be interesting,” Fox says, conducting a quick computer search of her own. “Have you checked out his publications?”

“Some,” Hyson replies. “I can’t get access to all of them.”

Fox types a quick note to herself. “Let me see what I can do about that.”

She then leans over to the fourth student in the room. Unlike the others, Jennie Daisak ’15 is a fifth former. She had already done her Hutchins work the previous summer, commuting daily to the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Medicine. There she studied arginase 2 (ARG2) and argininosuccinate synthase 1 (ASS1), two genes that suppress tumor formations in clear cell renal cell carcinoma, a form of cancer resistant to radiation and chemotherapy. Daisak is attending Fox’s class for a different reason: to prepare the final part of her Hutchins work, a poster and presentation documenting her work for a group of masters, professors, and other invited guests.

Daisak’s challenge is to whittle down her research into a poster-friendly format. Clear cell renal cell carcinoma research doesn’t lend itself to sound bites, however, and the text is much too long.

“You could make two posters and still not have enough room to fit it all,” Fox says with an understanding smile.

“I know it,” Daisak says, smiling back, trimming away at her text with a furrowed brow.

It’s a painful experience, but it will be good practice. There is a lot more science-based ed-

iting in Diasak’s future; after she finishes her poster and gives her presentation, she will be taking on a new role as the founder and editorin-chief of The Lawrencium, Lawrenceville’s new academic science journal.

Honors Ecology “Does everybody have closed-toed shoes?”

Science Master Jennifer Mayr asks the class.

The question is an important one.

Today in Mayr’s P’15 ’17 Honors Ecology class the students are going to do some lab work to see whether the sheep roaming the School’s Big Red Farm have parasites. To do this, the students need to analyze the sheep’s feces – so flip-flops will just not do.

A few girls in the class are not properly shod, but Mayr, true to character, is prepared.

In one of her classroom’s many cabinets is an assortment of rain boots. She invites each of the girls to select a pair and, that done, the class is off to the lab.

There among the lab tables, microscopes, test tubes, and a jug labeled “fecal float,” everyone is issued rubber smocks, latex gloves, and goggles. Seeing them decked out in this protective garb sends a tingle of fear up and down one’s spine. Just what exactly are these teens supposed to do?

Fortunately nothing very messy, but a person must take every precaution with work like this. The samples, collected by the students at the Big Red Farm the week before, are mixed in test tubes with the fecal float (sodium nitrate, for those following along at home).

The sample has to sit for a few minutes before the formal analysis can begin, but a pause in the action doesn’t mean the young scientists get a break. Mayr, a whirligig of kinetic energy, expects her students to follow her example when they are in her charge. The class breaks into two halves. The first group heads out to the Kirby Science Center’s greenhouse to examine and record data about their okra plants, an experiment on how neighboring plants compete for natural resources.

The remaining students pick up magnifying glasses and are sent to another lab table where two trays, covered with a dried, grainy sticky substance, are waiting for them. “OK, OK,” Mayr says, herding them over, making sure not a single moment is squandered. “Let’s see what you can find. One thing we know we’re going to see are mites.”

Sure enough one young woman, using her

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of pep talk.

“Last year we only found one parasite egg,” she announces as the students begin to remove their protective gear and cover their microscopes. “The fact of the matter is these sheep are pretty darn clean. And that’s a good thing.”

Duly consoled, the students file out. The term is young. There will be more labs. Just next week they will head out to the golf course pond to be on the lookout for more creepy crawlies. Have no fear; if there’s something gross out there, they’ll find it.

Observational Astronomy pen tip as a pointer, asks about a brownish blob in the center of one tray. It is no longer than a millimeter.

“Yes. That’s one!” Mayr replies, her enthusiasm contagious.

The trays, coated in mineral oil (to serve as a kind of glue), contain the detritus of honeybees. They were placed under the on-campus beehives that Mayr and her husband, Rudi, have raised as a hobby. What dropped from the hives—waste, drips of honey, those parasites, and what Mayr describes as “background crud”—sticks to the board for later examination. Soon a few other mites are found, as is a waxworm, but otherwise the bee samples are clean.

The fecal samples are ready. In short order, the students suit back up and make slides from the slurry from the test tubes. The microscopes are lit up, and the analysis begins.

The class up to this point has been lively and focused. Now it is just focused, as each student stares intently at his or her samples, scanning for anything irregular.

Occasionally the silence is broken as Mayr is called over to confirm whether something that looks out of the ordinary might be a parasite egg.

“No,” Mayr says every time she peers through the eyepiece. “That’s a little bit of plant fiber.”

This news is met with a groan, followed by Mayr’s sympathetic, “I know. Keep looking.”

The irony is that the students are essentially disappointed that the sheep are in good health.

Still, as a scientist, Mayr gets it. She understands just how cool it would be to find a parasite egg. So she concludes the lab with a kind

It seems only natural that a class titled Observational Astronomy would conduct some classes at night. It’s all well and good to identify constellations on a chart, but true expertise comes with being able to pick those star systems out of the night sky without the aid of those imaginary lines.

Unfortunately, the night sky has not been cooperating lately. On two separate occasions night classes were postponed because of clouds. Even October’s partial eclipse of the moon was obscured by cloud cover. Science Master Cindy Taylor, whose friendly, chipper manner burns as brightly as Venus (on a clear night), takes it all in stride.

“It’s a problem that comes with the job,” she notes with a smile and a shrug.

Her acceptance of misfortune doesn’t mean she isn’t going to look for stellar opportunities when they arise, however.

The early afternoon sunlight floods through her classroom windows, and Taylor sees her chance – an opportunity for a lab exercise that ties in to a previous lesson on ancient Greek astronomy. Today, students will use crude equipment and a simple trigonometry formula to measure the diameter of the sun. The only problem with the plan is that this class isn’t a lab period.

The students will have 55 minutes to learn the process, conduct the experiment, and do the calculations. And Taylor also has to go over a recently returned test. No problem.

“OK, OK, we have a lot to do,” she says, settling down students who have already settled themselves. She returns the tests, revs up the smart board, and takes to the front of the classroom. There she gives her students a seriocomic “you should know better” look.

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“A lot of you got your Dippers confused,” she observes. “I needed a Big Dipper, not a Little Dipper.”

The students, staring at their tests, nod.

In the span of a few minutes, she covers all the test questions, from A to Z (Arcturus to zenith), as well as how to find the North Celestial Pole if you happen to be hanging out in Sweden.

Then it is on to the lab. The sun’s diameter will be calculated with the aid of a camera obscura, a pinhole camera made from an ordinary cardboard box. Positioning the pinhole toward the sun creates an inverted image of the sun on the back wall of the box. Students trace the size of the projected image. Then they measure the diameter of this image and the distance from this image to the pinhole on the opposite wall of the box. Since the distance from the Earth to the sun is 1.5 x 1011m, the sun’s diameter can be figured out with a (relatively) simple formula:

L = l D d

h to the sun from the Eart L= Distance of the sun e box to D= Diameter one end of th om fr l= Length the other e projection of the pinhol d= Diameter

Working off calculators the size of 1990s cell phones, the students arrive at their con-

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clusions as Taylor hops from table to table to check their progress. She predicts that the calculations will wildly diverge from the sun’s actual diameter of 1.39 x 109m, due to the crudeness of the cameras and the hastiness with which the lab had to be conducted, and she is not wrong.

Taylor is nonetheless happy. In a sprint, her students learned a mathematical formula, as well as the basic concepts behind a pinhole camera, and completed a lively, hands-on honest-to-goodness lab with Earth’s nearest star.

Taylor is also happy because she has not yet given up on night classes. In a few weeks’ time she and her charges are scheduled to travel to the Simpson Observatory in Washington Crossing State Park, Titusville, NJ. It’s a fantastic venue for stargazing.

Fingers are crossed for clear skies.

Clubs Night falls. The Kirby Science Center grows quiet, but it is certainly not without activity.

This is especially true on the second floor, where in the computer lab a half dozen members of the School’s Robotics Club scrutinize lines of computer code projected onto a smart board.

This code has been written (rewritten and rewritten again) for the Zero Robotics Autonomous Space Capture Challenge, an international programming tournament sponsored

by MIT, NASA, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The objective is for a team to write a program to control the movement of an autonomous sat-

ellite (called a “tender”) in order to examine and photograph an asteroid hurtling through space.

To succeed, a wide spectrum of factors must be taken into account. The computer simulator that responds to the code reflects the conditions of outer space, which makes the tender difficult to control, maneuver, and stop.

“There’s no friction in space,” Dean of Academics David Laws, the club’s advisor, notes with a smile. Once the tender is propelled in a direction, it needs a counterforce to keep it from moving in that direction in perpetuity.

“To write a program to move a satellite around an asteroid in three-dimensional space,” Laws adds, “requires a lot of trigonometry.”

Indeed it does; that code seems to scroll on and on forever.

There are other considerations students have to take into account. The tender has a finite amount of fuel, so every movement must be made as efficient as possible. If the tender floats a bit too far afield or runs out of fuel, the team is penalized. The asteroid also must be photographed at three very specific points, as indicated by red dots. If the tender misses the mark or doesn’t have enough memory to download the images, the team is penalized.

If the satellite absorbs a solar flare, the team is penalized.

And if these tasks are not completed in less than four minutes, the team loses. It’s grueling, repetitive work, but the grand prize offered by the contest sponsors serves as incredible motivation. The winning program will be tested in zero gravity on the real SPHERES satellites aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

“We’re constantly reworking the code,” says Neel Ajjarapu ’15 with a tired smile. He and Aulden Foltz ’15 are co-presidents of the club.

He shows off the program in the computer simulator. It’s not finished – nowhere near finished – but that tender is still doing a fine job of maneuvering around that satellite, avoiding those solar flares.

Ajjarapu and Foltz are robotics celebrities of sorts. They distinguished themselves by reviving the defunct Robotics Club last year and helming the fledgling Lawreneville team at the New York/New Jersey Regional Botball Tournament. Botball teams are required to design, build, and program robots to perform a series of complicated tasks autonomously.

Though this was the first time Lawrenceville sent a team to the tourney, Big Red Robotics left quite an impression, ranking fourth overall

and earning a special judges prize for “Outstanding Rookie Team.”

Botball is a spring event, so Ajjarapu and Foltz decided to enter Zero Robotics to keep the club active and nimble during the fall and winter months. The only problem with this strategy is that Zero Robotics keeps only programmers busy. Robotics Club members who possess a more engineering-based mindset must find a way to occupy themselves until the Botball competition begins.

Fortunately, the Robotics Club offers plenty of opportunities for individual experimentation.

Leon Smith ’16 strides down the Kirby Science Center’s second-floor hallway a half-step behind Laws. Both master and student walk almost in lockstep, with a uniform sense of eagerness, toward the building’s collaborative classroom. Laws, decked out in a dress shirt and navy blue sports coat, his polished shoes clicking against the cement floor, looks as if he should be reaching for hors d’oeuvres at a semiformal reception.

In truth, Laws did just sneak out of a reception. When science is concerned, however, bacon-wrapped shrimp has to wait.

“Check that out,” Laws says, handing Smith a small, red plastic triangle.

“Oh that’s nice,” Smith replies turning it over in his hands as they continue down the hall.

Laws unlocks the door to reveal a classroom-sized toy box for the mechanically inclined. Tables and workbenches are piled high with tools, circuitry, off-the-shelf gadgets, and handmade constructs of PVC pipe, wood, foam board, and duct tape. One corner of the room is dominated by a maze built last spring to test-run Lawrenceville’s Botball entry. On

another table are large metal boxes with tiny drawers, containing bits and pieces of Godknows-what to be used God-knows-where.

Once inside, Laws reaches for a baggie of red plastic pieces and tosses it to Smith, who scrutinizes its contents with a trained eye.

“Oh, these are beautiful,” Smith gushes.

“Just beautiful.”

They are – even if the uninitiated might be hard pressed to figure out what the pieces might be for. Smith places the bag near another baggie filled with a similar assortment of plastic pieces. Smith boots up his laptop as the two men discuss what’s coming next.

“I got another one going now,” Laws says, nodding to the 3-D printer whirring away next to him. Inside, a nozzle extrudes a fine ribbon of molten styrene into a roughly triangular shape. Slowly, almost microscopically, the shape begins to grow with each steady and precise pass.

Laws glances at the clock and makes an effort not to groan. He’s been missing from the party for too long. “I can’t stay,” he says by way of apology. “It is my night to mingle with the trustees. Lock up when you’re done, Leon, OK?” Smith agrees, and Laws disappears down the quiet hall, the clacking of his shoes fading with each step.

The pieces with which Smith is working are the intricate joints of a prosthetic arm. They are part of a robot design that Smith discovered online through the website inmoov.fr.

These plans, once downloaded, can be built, piece by piece, in a 3-D printer. That is the easy part.

The challenge is to get these parts, once printed, to move. Videos of engineers both young and old experimenting with the inmoov robot exoskeleton are all over YouTube. Suc-

cess rates vary. Smith has his own unique approach to the challenge; he is writing code and constructing circuitry that would respond to a headpiece that records electrical impulses in the brain.

“My plan,” Smith says, his eyes aglow, “is to create a hand that can be moved with the mind.”

He puts the headpiece on by way of demonstration. It’s an off-the-shelf device that looks as if a Google Glass and a TimeLife operator headset had a baby. “I know it makes me look like a geek,” he says. Then Smith offers up a wide smile. “But I am a geek, so there it is.

“This club is fantastic,” he continues. “You can work on a group project, or, if you take the initiative, you can work on something else on your own and you’ll get the support to do it.”

At the opposite end of the KSC hallway is a meeting of the Biology Club. David Xin ’15, the club’s president, leads the gathering in a talk on the similarities and differences in micro- and macromolecules. Aside from the student-initiated discussions, the vibe in the room feels more like an academic class than a club. That, says Xin, is the idea.

“The Biology Club is set up to facilitate a concrete understanding of the material,” he says. “We’ll have units on cells, genetics, evolution, and plants and animals. We’ll assign readings and then discuss them.”

The Biology Club was created with one specific goal in mind: to train students to compete in the Biology Olympiad. Sponsored by the Center of Excellence in Education, the Biology Olympiad consists of a series of rigorous tests designed to find the best biology students the country has to offer.

If the students do well enough on this test, as Xin and Neil Menghani ’15 did last year, they are allowed to take another, more difficult, test. The tests and the weeding process continue until the CEE determines the top 20 young biologists to compete in the finals at Purdue University. There those 20 are narrowed down to four – and those four will represent the U.S. in the world finals to be held in Bali, Indonesia.

In short, it is a club created for the purpose of studying for a test. If the club members do well on the test, they are invited to take more tests. And if that doesn’t demonstrate a commitment to science, then nothing does.

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Financial Report Q 2013 - 2014

G

reetings from the Finance, Investment, and Operations teams at Lawrenceville. We are pleased to report that the fiscal year of 2013-14 was another good one for our School. Ongoing fiscal discipline on campus, strong investment results, and significant philanthropy each helped us manage the operating budget to a surplus, build reserves in the endowment, pay down debt, and bring tuition increases in line with those of our peers.

Improving the School’s footing has been a unifying theme of Head Master Duffy’s 12-year tenure at Lawrenceville. With her announcement to leave us, we wish to thank her for her highly effective financial and operating leadership skills that are evident in these financial statistics, the condition of the campus, and the increased professionalism of School operations. She leaves us a much stronger school than when she arrived. We are grateful, and we wish her and her family much success in the years to come.

Endowment Report The School’s endowment was $379.7 million as of June 30, a record high for Lawrenceville and a $43 million increase from the previous fiscal year. The total reflects performance gains on our managed portfolio of 14.1 percent for the year, which follows a year in which our return was 10.7 percent.

Over the last five years, the average return for the endowment has been 11.9 percent.

Since our long-term goal is to achieve at least an average return of 6 percent over the rate of inflation, which will cover our intended draw, plus allow the endowment

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to retain or grow its real purchasing power over time, the last five years have been very satisfactory. In addition, the endowment continued to benefit from gifts to support financial aid, special programs, and other operating needs.

The endowment has enjoyed an annual growth rate of 8.3 percent per annum over the past decade, versus an annual inflation rate of just over 2 percent. This growth reflects both the generous gifts made to the School, and our positive investment results, enabling such an increase while annual distributions slightly in excess of 5 percent have supported operations.

As in the recent past, we continue to have a broadly diversified portfolio. In view of the strength of equity markets, particularly in the U.S., we were somewhat overweight in long-only equities, at 37 percent of the portfolio, in 2013-14. We also had a significant commitment to hedged equities at 18 percent of the portfolio, private equity at 12 percent, absolute return managers at 14 percent, and commodities and real estate at 12 percent. We maintained an underweight to fixed income. This diversification has enabled us over the last 10-20 years to match global equity returns with much less risk and volatility, as measured by annualized standard deviations.

Nonetheless, when the markets are as strongly positive as they were in 2013-14, we will – and did – meaningfully trail equity markets, because our “all weather” portfolio is designed to preserve capital in downturns, with reduced volatility in all markets. Our market volatility is in fact the equivalent of the volatility of a 45/55 equity/fixed income portfolio, although we have less than 10 percent of the portfolio in fixed income and cash.

In the past year, positive contributors to our returns included good performance from private investments; strong natural resource and commodities results; and good, consistent absolute return experience.

Primary detractors from performance were somewhat disappointing results from our hedged equity portfolio. Although over a 10-year period this asset class has outperformed equity markets, with much less volatility, in recent years these managers have been unable to match the very strong returns in the equity markets.

In addition, although we were correct to be overweight in long-only equities, our conservative manager structure slightly detracted from our returns.

Going forward, we will maintain our strategy of a broadly diversified portfolio.

We are cognizant of the risks of the extended bull market in equities, and are looking to balance our public market equity exposure with investments and asset class exposures, which have less correlation to those markets.

The endowment is overseen by the Investment Committee of the Board of Trustees. Its chairman is Michael Chae ’86, and the other members of the committee are Jeff Dishner ’83, Jeremy Mario ’88, Rob Rosner ’77, Dan Tapiero ’86, John Waldron ’87, and Seth Waugh ’76. Bill Bardel ’57 is an advisor to the committee, which typically meets at least five times a year.

Operating Performance For the fiscal year ending on June 30, 2014, the School planned to grow our cash operating budget by 3.7 percent over fiscal 2013 to $55.1 million. Driving this relatively tame growth is the fact that, even in this low-inflation environment, our costs

are concentrated in people and property maintenance whose costs rise more quickly than the consumer price index, whereas the benefits of deflating costs, such as through automation, only accrue to us marginally.

Since close student-faculty relationships set in a historic campus form the essence of Lawrenceville, bending down our cost curve is not an easy or attractive option. Instead, we work to keep our cost increases as close to inflation as we can while we strive every day to make Lawrenceville desirable to students, parents, and donors.

As evidenced by the record number and quality of applications we received in fiscal 2014, as well as it being our second best philanthropic year on record, we appear to be justifying our mission. It was especially gratifying that Moody’s Rating Agency, when they re-affirmed their allimportant rating of our bonds at Aa3 during fiscal 2014, rested their case heavily on Lawrenceville’s enduring appeal and how this transfers to financial resilience.

Against a revenue budget of $55.1 million, we hit this target. Of this amount, net tuition represented 56 percent of income; 28 percent was provided by

our annual draw on our endowment; 11 percent was provided by new philanthropy, mainly via The Lawrenceville Fund and The Lawrenceville Parents Fund; and the 5 percent balance was provided by auxiliary and other activity such as our summer programs. These proportions are normal for our School, but, relative to our wealthier peers, our endowment is smaller and provides less income, which makes us relatively more dependent upon our day and boarding tuitions, which have reached peerleading levels. Greater financial strength and resiliency for Lawrenceville, as well as reduced pressure on our tuitions, will come with a larger endowment.

While we met our budget for revenue, we spent $1.4 million less than planned and closed the year with a very helpful surplus. The primary contributor to our surplus was an over-budgeting of our employee health insurance program, whose cost is particularly challenging to forecast in the current era. Our lower cost likely represents a one-time savings, and we are bracing for future 10+ percent increases in this benefit cost in future years, hindering our efforts to keep people costs at or near

inflation. Meanwhile, the balance of our savings in fiscal 2014 came from a variety of budget lines, none of which represents a fundamental aberration.

As with our revenues, our cost categories are quite stable year in and year out. In fiscal 2014 we spent 32 percent of our budget on direct educational expenses; 28 percent on the cost of maintaining our plant and facilities; 21 percent on general and institutional costs such as employee benefits, protective insurance, and professional services; 16 percent on administration costs including predominantly IT, development, and admissions; with the remaining 3 percent spent on auxiliary operations. Cut differently, 59 percent of our 2014 budget was spent on people and their associated benefits and costs, and 18 percent was spent on non-people plant cost, confirming the point made earlier about our heavy exposure to inflation-sensitive sectors.

Following the close of the fiscal year, the Board of Trustees agreed with the School to commit the $1.4 million of earned surplus to a new “unrestricted reserve,” which, by remaining exempt from our annual draw, will grow quickly. We established this

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reserve to ensure that the School is able to meet its bullet debt repayments in 2026 and 2031 should the interest rate climate then make refinancing unattractive, as well as to put more distance between our financial health and the risk of future market disruptions that will periodically occur as they did in 2002-03 and again in 2008-09. We plan to add to this reserve each year through small budgeted surpluses, by committing bequests to it that are received by the School that are not directed by the donor to a particular purpose, and through new donations that might be directed to this super-charged fund within our endowment.

Over recent years, the School has faced other priorities than building reserves, including replacing aging infrastructure and reducing our operating draw rate, and we hope the creation and steady feeding of this unrestricted reserve will mark another step toward financial strength.

As referenced, Moody’s conducted a periodic review of Lawrenceville’s credit quality during fiscal 2014 to determine whether its Aa3 rating, which supports our $56 million of bonds held by the public, should be affirmed or lowered in line with the “negative watch” it had assigned to us a year earlier. In affirming our rating, Moody’s noted our admissions strength, our decade of successful fundraising, and our conservative fiscal management that has allowed us to steadily repay debt. It cited our smaller endowment, our shortage of unrestricted net assets, and our already high tuition as risks that they will monitor.

We thank our trustees and other key donors who helped us add to our unrestricted net assets as our rating process unfolded and ultimately concluded successfully.

Campus Operations After completing our Pop Hall renovation and the extensive six-year infrastructure repair program in fiscal 2013, we were nonetheless busy in fiscal 2014 planning future projects. Consistent with our priority to restore our physical assets rather than add new facilities, we worked to design three projects that will take shape over the next

44

t h e l aw r e n t i a n

several fiscal years.

Working with the Kirby family and other prominent Lawrenceville donors, we are preparing to replace the Corby Building, which was purpose-built in the early 1970s to house a mainframe computer. Though it served this purpose well, it converted suboptimally to a classroom building once mainframes were replaced by more compact systems. In its footprint, we will build a math wing onto the Kirby Science Building, creating the Kirby Math & Science Building, which will help us better integrate the teaching of math, science, technology, and engineering. This project will also fund the movement of our IT hub to the facilities area of campus, providing us with more

security and flexibility in the IT arena. We plan to break ground on this project in June 2015 and to complete it one year later.

Another nearly exhausted facility, Abbott Dining Hall, drew the attention of the donors of our Stephan Archives, John ’59 and Barbara Stephan, as well as the Mario family, which has contributed materially to other School projects over the last five years. The concept that intrigued them is to reuse the existing building in its entirety but to convert the interior to a rich portrayal of Lawrenceville School history and images so that our fifth formers better understand and appreciate the gift of Lawrenceville they have received. In addition to creating grand interior spaces that echo the Circle and the Chapel, this project will bring a restored kitchen facility to Abbott, which has long been defunct and, for more than a decade, has necessitated the trucking of meals from Irwin. The design phase of this project is underway and should leave us ready to

begin construction late in 2015.

Soonest to break ground is the Bath House, which we will convert within fiscal 2015 to a student café in a perfect social location between the Circle and the Crescent. Tables for more than 60 diners inside the enlarged Bath House and adjacent terrace will give the facility critical mass. The purpose is to provide a neutral, fun, gathering spot for students on campus without building a large student center that would draw energy away from our treasured House system. To save an original Circle building in this way will give the Bath House another 100 years of life and make it more vital to our school culture than it has ever been.

These projects will further shorten the list of neglected campus buildings – with two of our largest projects, the Field House and Irwin, waiting their turn. Meanwhile, however, the last 10 years have seen significant renewal of the physical assets of our campus. This will, of course, benefit the School for decades to come and burnish our image at a time when the competition for qualified, financially able families is especially strong. We are proud of our work to restore the School and thereby to honor the gifts from devoted Lawrentians, their families, and friends of the School that enable this forward momentum.

At the start of this, my ninth year at Lawrenceville, and on the verge of a transition from our 12th to 13th Head Master, I am very pleased to confirm that our School is arguably in the best condition overall that it has been in decades. We have much work ahead to fortify the gains we have made, and, meanwhile, we remain vulnerable to economic environments less benign than this one, but as we take the measure of the last dozen years, it is easy to conclude that our great School is now ready to move into the future with pace.

With best wishes for fiscal 2015, Wesley R. Brooks ’71 H’09 P’03 ’05 CFO

Statement of Activities Year End June 30, 2014 (with comparative financial information for the year ended June 30, 2013)

Revenue, Gains (Losses), Other Support

2013

2014

Student tuition and fees

$29,991.999 $31,470,025

Contributions

19,879,267 24,954,240

Net realized and unrealized gains on investments

31,061,588

Net (depreciation) appreciation in fair value of

47,213,014

5,563,477

(83,127)

Interest and dividends

1,145,995

698,523

Special programs

2,289,882 2,352,097

Interest rate swaps

Other revenue Total revenue, gains/losses, and other support

218,584

43,109

$90,150,792 $106,647,881

Expenses Program services: Instruction Student services Institutional support Total program services Supporting services Total expenses

$19,030,586 $19,499,326 22,680,145 23,991,020 7,973,558 7,928,836 49,684,289 51,419,182 6,612,861 6,786,915 $56,297,150

$ 58,206,097

Change in net assets Increase in net assets

$ 33,853,642 $48,441,784

Net assets as of beginning of year

429,555,709 463,409,351

Net assets as of end of year

$463,409,351

$511,851,135

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9 Alumni News F L awrentians gathered for a Boston Red Sox vs.

Kansas City Royals game and pre-game reception.

The Alumni Association Executive Committee 2014/2015

A Lawrentians, parents, and their guests gathered for a

President

reception at the

Jennifer Ridley Staikos ’91

Rayburn Office Building

First Vice President

in Washington, DC.

Ian Rice ’95 Second Vice President

U.S. Representative

David B. Stephens ’78 P’06

Patrick Murphy ’02

Executive Committee

was the guest speaker.

Scott A. Belair ’65 P’08 ’09 Catherine E. Bramhall ’88 Milano Graves Buckley ’98 Biff Cahill Jr. ’68 P’09 Bruce Hager ’72 Charlie C. Keller ’95 J. Gregg Miller ’62 Brendan T. O’Reilly ’83 P’16 Anastacia Gordon ’07 Alumni Trustees

Hyman J. Brody ’75 P’07 ’08 ’11 Joseph B. Frumkin ’76 P’11 Leigh Lockwood ’65 P’97 ’02 Kathleen W. McMahon ’92 selectors

George Arnett ’79 P’16 Meghan Hall Donaldson ’90 Charles M. Fleischman ’76 Elizabeth M. Gough ’03 Heather Elliott Hoover ’91 John C. Hover II ’61 P’91 Shannon Halleran McIntosh ’93 Paul T. Sweeney ’82 faculty liaison

Timothy C. Doyle ’69 H’79 P’99

46

t h e l aw r e n t i a n

G Alumni, parents, and friends gathered in Rumson, NJ, for a reception at the home of Denise and Fritz Thomas ’83 P’18.

yards

9 By The Numbers

appetizing edition

by Gary Giberson H’11 P’10 Emma Morrow Jake Morrow

152

The

2

Shortest distance food travels to The

Number of

Lawrenceville

tractors

School

on the

(Vegetables

Big Red Farm

harvested from the

49

Stuart R. Deans ’74

2,808

Organic Garden)

Age difference (in years) between the

miles

Pounds of kitchen scraps – melon rind, carrot peels, potato peels, lettuce leaves – used to feed the vermiculture worms (Worm waste is used

Local organic

Gallons of homemade soup served per

7,904

21,600

2,520

for fertilizer. So now you know.)

two Big Red Farm tractors (1953

Longest

Farmall Cub and a

distance food

2002 Kubota B2910)

travels to The Lawrenceville School (Basmati from India)

school year

eggs procured per school

15

345,237 Number of meals

year

425 675 Pounds of slicing

Pounds of slicing

tomatoes harvested at

tomatoes harvested

the Big Red Farm

at the Big Red Farm

in 2013

in 2014

served at The

Number of fruit-tree

Lawrenceville

varieties in the Class

School last year

of 2014 Orchard

17,424 Bowls of cereal consumed per school year

9

Student Shot

by Joon Choe ’15

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 e-mail us at vavanisko@lawrenceville.org with his or her new address. Thank you!