A tradition of caring

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

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

Alumni describe how these faculty members demanded the best of their students, helped them grow in confidence, and in many cases helped them develop passions that they carried forward in college and beyond. I have contributed a few stories myself about the way Exeter teachers affected my life as a student. Fundamentally, the alumni stories included in Memorial Minutes show how Exeter faculty care for and about their students. We are moved by these stories, and we are inspired to do all we can to have similar impacts on the lives of our students today.

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

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

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

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

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

I, Too, Miss Rice

Finis Origine Pendet

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

His desk was cluttered with empty Haitai chip bags.

“Kimchi soup and rice?” I asked.

The umami smell filled the room.

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

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

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

This article was first published in the spring 2025 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.

John Bascom Heath: A Memorial Minute

John Bascom Heath was born in 1923 in Lawrenceville, New Jersey to Mary Darwin and Harley Willis Heath. Jack grew up on the campus of the Lawrenceville School from which he graduated and where his father taught science for many years. His undergraduate career at Yale was interrupted by a three-year stint in the military where he rose to the rank of Staff Sergeant in Patton’s Third Army and earned the Bronze Star. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale in 1946 and began his teaching career, first at Exeter in 1947 and then at Germantown Academy for one year, before returning to Exeter for good in 1949. For nearly 40 years, Jack certainly was a force for good at the Academy.

Principal Kendra Stearns O’Donnell described his exemplary service at Exeter as “rooted on traditional school ground: the classroom, the dormitory, the playing fields.” He was the “consummate school man.” History instructor Jack Herney recalls the figure Jack cut on campus: with his “rumpled sartorial style. . . he looked the picture of the absentminded, disheveled but wise savant.” Heath once wrote that “teaching, coaching, and doing dorm and committee work are demanding; but we do get good vacations, and ought to work hard in term time. The happiest people,” he continued, “work the hardest, or, to put it a better way, are the most involved, and I think the involvement causes rather than results from the happiness.” Jack was certainly involved at the Academy and in the Exeter community at large. By his own accounting, then, Jack was a very happy man, always looking to “put” the world he inhabited “a better way.”

Jack’s numerous titles at the Academy reflect the range of his contributions. He was appointed the Thomas S. and Elinor B. Lamont Professor of English. He served as English Department Chair from 1973-1983, the Dean of Faculty from 1983-1987, and Acting Principal for one year when Principal Stephen Kurtz took a sabbatical. From 1956-1971 he was varsity head coach of the soccer team, where his wing players would often hear him shouting “Gotta have it” from the sidelines, pushing them to hustle after every ball. He also coached basketball and baseball, serving as Commissioner of Club Baseball from 1962 1973. He spent the 1967-1968 school year teaching in Barcelona, Spain with the School Year Abroad program. Jack also served as adviser to the Exonian and on countless committees: the Academy Planning Committee, the Faculty Affairs Committee, the Appointments and Leaves Committee, and the Student-Faculty Committee on Student Life, to name just a few. He received the Faculty Prize for Academic Excellence in 1967 and the Rupert Radford Faculty Fellowship Award for distinguished and faithful service in 1988. It is no wonder that Jack was also an honorary member of the Class of 1952 and was recognized in 1991 with the Founders’ Day Award.

Jack was also a distinguished public servant in the town of Exeter, and he was once called “the most respected man in town.” He and his wife Patty ran the Cub Scouts for two decades. Jack brought soccer to Exeter, founding the first youth soccer program and introducing it to Exeter school system. He was a School Board member, spokesperson for the Exeter Voter League, president of the Rockingham County Trust, secretary and board member of the New Hampshire Farm Museum, and Secretary of the Exeter River Watershed Association. He served in the New Hampshire House of Representatives, as well.

For many summers he ran Kamp Kill Kare, a summer camp for boys in St. Albans, VT, where his father had also worked.

After those summers in Vermont, from 1979-1983, Jack worked as director of the Exeter Writing Project, a precursor to many of our summer institutes for educators. Barbara Ganley, an attendee who was also a former student of Jack’s at the Academy, describes his impact in that summer program:

And so once again I became his student, but this time of his secrets to teaching. How unexpected. How remarkable. He likened teaching to coaching sports, helping students learn to love the practice, to open up the sentence itself to learn about the full essay. Just as a pitcher throws pitch after lousy pitch day after day to get any good – a writer must stand out in that field to be struck by lightning.

On the practice field of Jack’s English classroom, students encountered a teacher who pushed and encouraged them to stand out in that field day after day. He held his students to high standards, and his compassion guided them to become more competent writers and more perceptive readers. Philip H. Loughlin ’57 credits Jack for instilling in him a lifelong love of literature. And Tom Gross ’70 shares that Jack “was always very kind to me and seemed to take a genuine interest in trying to help a not-very-good student.”

Reflecting on her time as a Prep in Jack’s English class, Barbara Ganley shares: “Without him, I wouldn’t have made it through my Prep year much less go on to teach writing or to become a writer myself. . . . [A]s I sit at my writing desk, I remember his urging me to reach for a sentence as clean as a bone. To work for it. And of his quiet encouragement that of course I could do it.” Vinson Bankoski ’81 recalled similar guidance.

“Mr. Heath’s English class,” he writes, “helped me identify what Exeter was really about and why I was really there.” After reading aloud in class a draft of a paper he had written about his grandfather who recently passed away, Vinson took in Jack’s feedback and sat down to work at his revision:

Jack’s son Sam relates the experiences of author Dan Brown ’82 his Lower year in Jack’s class. On Dan’s first composition, alongside the red C-minus, Jack had written in all capital letters “KEEP IT SIMPLE.” This was Jack’s “essential philosophy,” Sam explains. You can hear echoes of that philosophy each fall when Dan Brown speaks to the Prep class about writing.

“Sometimes,” Jack wrote in 1956, “when a class is just right – the boys are attentive, even the silent member of the class has something to say, and the bell rings unnoticed, [I am] sure there is no better way to make a living.” Other former students recall Jack’s sense of humor. David Lamb ’58 visited campus on a whim while passing through in 1981, twenty-three years after he had been kicked out during his senior year for running a gambling ring in his dormitory. David, a successful journalist at the time, was invited to sit in on a faculty meeting. He writes: “Several heads, now covered with gray hair or little hair, turned toward my seat in the back of the room. ‘Why, Lamb,’ said my former English teacher, Mr. Heath, as though he had seen me only yesterday, ‘I thought you’d be at the dog track today.’”

I loved and respected him, not for the 'A' but for making me realize how hard and important it is to write well.

That sense of humor served Jack well in his administrative roles. Former counselor, Mike Diamonti, remembers his interview for a faculty position in 1983: “Knowing I had no prior boarding school experience, Jack explained the core teaching, coaching, and dorm responsibilities. I replied that although I liked sports I had never coached and wasn’t sure I could take on that responsibility, even at the club level. Jack replied by saying, ‘there are only two things you need to know about coaching. When you win you say, coaching shows, and when you lose, you say coaching isn’t everything.’

Former Chief Financial Officer Jim Theisen spoke about working with Jack in the year when Principal Steve Kurtz was on sabbatical, leaving the Academy in Jack’s capable hands. Jim went to Jack on a delicate personnel matter. “Jack listened intently and confirmed it was a big issue,” Thiesen explains. “He said let us both sleep on it and confer tomorrow. I left and slept like a baby knowing it was now on his plate. Returning the next day I could tell him the problem resolved itself and did not need his help. He said, ‘Good, I forgot you talked to me.’ It was the best MBA management lesson I got…and from an English teacher!” Jack Herney confirms that Jack’s style was to “never rush into any decision. He made decisions based on the evidence he had at hand, and he didn’t look back or second-guess himself.”

A father-figure to many students and a mentor to many colleagues, Jack was also a devoted husband and father to four boys. In 1947, he married his beloved wife Patricia Espy Kreutzer. All four Heath sons (Jeffrey ’67, John ’70, Samuel ’72, and Harley ’75) attended the Academy and played varsity soccer. Jack served as dorm head of Wheelwright Hall for twenty-three years. When Jack dug out a piece of lawn in front of the faculty entrance to plant irises, he may have been the first faculty member to plant a garden on campus. Colleagues marveled at his green thumb and stewardship of natural spaces, qualities that guided his work on the first piece of property he ever owned – a house and nine acres in Newfields where the family moved in 1968. “People would be amazed,” Jack once told his son Sam, “at what happens when you put a seed in the ground and you water it.”

One of the seeds that was planted for Jack in his youth was the power of community. He lost both of his parents by the time he was eighteen, and the Lawrenceville School community was there for him. As you have heard this morning, Jack brought his full self to serve the Academy community. One Thursday morning as he neared retirement, Jack opened up to the community in a Meditation delivered in Phillips Church on December 10, 1987. He spoke of his relationship with death, referring to himself throughout in the third person:

I have a dear friend who all his life has known that he is going to die. At age twelve he learned that mothers die of breast cancer, and at eighteen that fathers die of strokes. By the time he was eighteen, two of his high school classmates had already been shot down flying in the Canadian Royal Air Force. . . . A man in his sixties is a fool not to realize he is going to die. Most of the time my friend. . . knows it logically but not emotionally. He does not constantly or often think about death in the abstract or even of his impending death. For example, on the day he suddenly and soberly realized that he had lived longer than his father, he went out into his woods as usual, as he had done four or five times a week for ten years, even in winter, and worked for an hour or two by himself chain-sawing red-oak logs and hauling them out by hand one at a time to the sunning place. He is a quiet but serious woodsman—a pure amateur who believes in self-sufficiency without land-abuse, and in silent, solitary meditation….. But now when he is about to go out in the woodlot to cut and haul firewood he tells his wife that he is going out. Or, if she is not home yet, he leaves a note on the clipboard in the kitchen: ‘in woods sawing 2:45.’ He could not have done that ten years before. And even now he thinks it more considerate than practical. She worries about chainsaws.

Whether he was caring for his family, students, colleagues, town, country, or for the land, Jack committed his whole self. He believed, Sam tells us, that we “must accept people as they are” and “hold everyone,” including ourselves, “to the highest standards of integrity.” In closing, an image of Jack moving between the work that he loved seems fitting. This, too, comes from his son, Sam: “How many times did I watch him come home between classes, switch into muddy overalls, and hoe a few rows of beans or take down a couple of trees before putting back on his khakis, tying his bow tie, and returning to campus for a 5:25 class. He never raced, he puttered, with purpose, and he finished what he began.”

Jack died May 28, 2018, at the age of 95. He is survived by his sons Jeffrey, of Ann Arbor MI and Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso; Samuel, of Exeter, with Sandra del Alczaar and their children Aymara and Santiago; and Harley, of Wolfeboro NH, with Stacey Lessard and his children Rory and Addie.

I move that this Memorial Minute be spread upon the minutes of the faculty and a copy sent to the family.

Respectfully submitted,

Brooks Moriarty

This Memorial Minute was first published in the spring 2025 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.

Spring break, world edition

Students expand their horizons and perspectives on travel trips

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

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

But the most vocal group of Exonians of them all was the Concert Choir. Thirty-nine students and Music Instructor Kris Johnson made a weeklong trek through Northern Italy. Stopping in Florence, Verona, Mantua and Venice, the group performed in stunning venues along the way — all while exploring both historic and contemporary Italian art, cuisine and culture. Hear their voices and see more behind the scenes from the trip on their Instagram – @PEA_Choir_Italy.

In total, five groups traveled to Washington, D.C., Montgomery, Alabama, Northern Italy, Sicily and Campania and Machu Picchu, Peru. Swipe through to see photos from the trips.

This article was originally published in the spring 2025 edition of The Exeter Bulletin.

Behind the scenes of the winter term musical

“New England winters are tough,” says Lauren Josef, chair of the Theater and Dance Department. “We need joy. We need weird.” Exeter’s performance of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee brought all that and more to The David E. and Stacey L. Goel Center for Theater and Dance. The fast-paced and riotous musical featured six “middle schoolers” and audience participants who spelled their way through vexing vocabulary while sharing hilarious and poignant personal stories.

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

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

SETTING THE SCENE

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

Student actors interact with the live audience.

AUDIENCE IMMERSION

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

CREW WARDROBE

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

STAGE

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

MUSIC

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

SOUND

“Each student actor has a body mic, so there are 22 mics,” Josef says. “ We have one student [Audrey Dent ’25] who is mixing. Audrey has to listen carefully. If one student is being especially quiet during a scene or especially loud, she is live-mixing that. And then we have another sound person backstage, Angelina Wang ’27. If something malfunctions, if we need to fix a microphone, she fixes that.”

APPLIED SCIENCE

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

LIGHTING

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

Instructors in Theater Lauren Josef and Anthony Reed stand in the lighting and sound booth.

By the numbers

hours to paint a gym floor onstage

cast and crew members

body microphones

200

lighting cues

minutes running time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article was first published in the spring 2025 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article was originally published in the spring 2025 edition of The Exeter Bulletin

The Final Quarter

Jay Tilton retires from coaching Exeter boys basketball after 23 years

The 2012-13 Exeter boys basketball team was riding high when it returned from the holiday break. The team was7-0 as it prepared for a game at Kimball Union to tip off the second half of the season.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exeter boys basketball team wearing t-shirts printed by Tilton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Craig Morgan

This article was originally published in spring edition 2025 edition of The Exeter

How technology is shaping everything we do

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

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

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

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

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

What is AI?

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

At its core, AI refers to a computer’s ability to mimic human capabilities like learning, problem solving and decision making. It can range from simple rule-based systems that follow basic “if-then” logic to more sophisticated algorithms that use reasoning to draw conclusions and make inferences from data. Large language models like ChatGPT are a type of AI designed to recognize, summarize, translate, predict and generate text and other content — including poems and college essays — based on user prompts or questions.

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

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

A neural network is a machine learning model that makes decisions in a way that imitates the human brain. By simulating how biological neurons work together, it can identify patterns, weigh options and draw conclusions.

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

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

AI and finance

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

Ahn and his brother, Daniel, run Delfi, what Ahn calls “the first AI investment bank.” The AI financial “copilot” they developed enables Delfi to deliver balance sheet hedging strategies and analytics for banks, credit unions and asset managers. “AI and machine learning risk management algorithms makes this type of analysis available to everyone, enabling them to make better investment decisions,” Ahn says. “Our business model wouldn’t exist without AI.” Currently, he says, 50% of the world’s GDP does not engage in capital markets. “That’s a missed opportunity,” he adds. “We can expand that up to at least 75%.”

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

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

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

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

AI and national security

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

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

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

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

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

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

A student perspective on AI

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

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

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

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

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

Listen to the Co[de]pendent: Living Alongside AI podcast

AI and healthcare

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

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

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

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

Ayush Noori ’20

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

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

AI and the future

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

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

She favors the use of policy “layers” that define safety at different levels, both at the corporate level and through individual product policies. Those layers act as a final check before exposing the product to end users. “Having access to quality data is important for the development of AI models,” Weaver says. “Having compliant-safe data and the right tools to work with that data and track what’s being done is critical.”

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

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

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

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

A brief history of artificial intelligence

1796

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

1950

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

1956

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

1958

Perceptron, the first artificial neural network, is developed by American psychologist Frank Rosenblatt. The program makes decisions in a way similar to the human brain. It can distinguish between punch cards marked on the left and right and is described by its creator as the first machine capable of having an original idea.

1960

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

1997

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

2012

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

2017

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

2019

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

2021

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

2022

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

2023

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

2024

Using Google’s AI algorithms, Google Research and Harvard publish the first synaptic resolution of the human brain. Open AI releases Sora, an AI tool that creates videos from text, images and other video.

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

This article was originally published in the spring 2025 edition of The Exeter Bulletin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oil painting of John Phillips by Joseph Steward

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

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

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

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

Sometime in the late 1770s, Phillips most likely joined a growing movement among New England slave owners by manumitting, or granting freedom to, at least some of his enslaved people. By 1778 — three years before he and Elizabeth signed the founding documents of theAcademy — neither Phillis nor Dinah was part of the Phillips household. Crosbie wrote that town records show Phillips was taxed for two male enslaved people from 1778 to 1780, and for one from 1781to 1785. When he died in 1795, Phillips owned no enslaved people; his will stated, “I give to my man-servant (Slave I have none) such part of my wearing apparel as my Executor shall think fit.”

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

Information is notably lacking about Robin. Unlike Phillis and Dinah, he does not appear in the Gilman family genealogy but was probably enslaved by Phillips for more than three decades. Judging from Exeter tax records, Robin was most likely the last individual Phillips enslaved, and he was either emancipated or died around 1785.

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

The fourth individual Phillips enslaved— believed to be the second enslaved person he paid taxes on in the late 1770s —was a man named Corydon. No records have been found to indicate when or where Corydon was born, and how Phillips came to enslave him. Corydon was not among the individuals Sarah Gilman inherited from her late husband. Crosbie wrote, “In his day-book, kept late in life, [Phillips] speaks frequently … of his black man, Corydon, whom he hired out at various times to the Gilmans, when he himself had no work for him.” After Phillips granted him his freedom, likely around1780 or 1781, Corydon appears to have lived as a boarder in Exeter with Hannah (Merrill) Holland, a free Black woman, and her daughter, Catherine.

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

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

Committee resources also included research by Alexanderia Baker Haidara ’99 and a senior project by Andrew Yuan ’24, titled “Legacy of Slavery at Phillips Exeter Academy, 1770-1870.” Yuan, who completed the project as part of a research-focused history course during his upper year and served on the student branch of the committee on slavery, was inspired by similar efforts at Harvard and other institutions to begin looking into Exeter’s connections to slavery, both around the time of its founding and through its early decades.

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

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

Stephanie Bramlett, director of Equity and Inclusion

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

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

After the Harkness Gift: A History of Phillips Exeter Academy Since 1930, by Julia Heskel and Davis Dyer

By the late 19th century, Exeter saw a growing number of Black students, many of whom lived in a boarding house owned by J.W. Field. They represented a small minority of the student population, but a number of these early Black Exonians became leaders on campus and went onto distinguished careers.

Although it’s difficult to cite exact figures, given the nature of student records at the time, the number of Black Exonians appears to have declined after the first decade of the 20th century and did not begin to rise until the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Youth From Every Quarter: A Bicentennial History of Phillips Academy Andover (1979), Frederick S. Allis cited a letter Stearns wrote in 1928. In it, Stearns explained that in his early years as principal, he “fought vigorously for the colored boys in our midst and for those who sought to enter.” Later, Stearns began to doubt that position, writing that it seemed “these fellows were being harmed more than helped by the school.”

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

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

Yet when it came to the “question of minority representation at Exeter,” Saltonstall was no less direct. “Even within the context of [Perry’s] day this was a blind spot,” he wrote. “While it may not be fair to judge a person by the standards of a different age, Perry denied Exeter’s democratic tradition in permitting limits on the numbers of blacks and Jews in the academy. He never specifically discussed quotas of any kind, but he did suggest that limits would be advisable.

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

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

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

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

On April 16, 1941, The Exonian published a letter to the editors from Maurice Rashbaum Jr. ’41. “A week ago Saturday, Rashbaum wrote, “an event happened which I believe should be brought to the attention of every Exonian who believes… that men of all races, creeds, and colors should be treated alike.” Rashbaum referred to the Harvard lacrosse team’s trip to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. The Navy coach refused to let his team play against Harvard if Alexis was on the field. The Harvard coach stood his ground, but the university’s athletic director overruled him, and Alexis was forced to head back to Cambridge while his teammates took the field without him (Navy won, 12-0).

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

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

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

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

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

A Home for Early Black Exonians

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

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

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

Roscoe Conkling Bruce, class of 1898

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

John Tazewell Jones, class of 1900

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

Ernest Marshall, class of 1904

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

Benjamin Seldon, class of 1907

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

— Panos Voulgaris

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

This includes an effort — begun at the 55th anniversary celebration for the Afro-Latinx Exonian Society in2023 — to record the oral histories of students of color to include in Exeter’s institutional memory. Magee Lawhorn, co-head of the committee and director of Archives and Special Collections, is spearheading this endeavor.

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

Eric Logan ’92, chair of the Trustees’ Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee, says: “The idea of youth from every quarter, of Harkness — all of that is centered in having different people who can have broad discussions around a given fact basis. Being able to fill in gaps in the history of Exeter is critical to us being able to do what we do as Exonians, which is sit around a table and discuss the implications of that history, both then and now.”

A particular area of interest for the Trustees, Logan believes, is ensuring amore complete understanding of the school’s history as Exeter approaches the 250th anniversary of its founding in 2031. “It’s important for us to understand the facts, to know who we as an institution are,” Logan says. “When you look at a school with the history and legacy of Exeter, history means a lot, and it’s important that we can be as robust as possible with the history that we tell.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article was originally published in the spring edition of The Exeter Bulletin.