Good morning, Exeter.

Thank you, Dean Page, for welcoming and recognizing our emeriti faculty this morning, and for introducing our new faculty. It has been a great pleasure getting to know our new faculty over the past couple of weeks.

I would like to extend a special, warm welcome to all our new students. You are 369 in number and come from 31 states and 28 countries. You bring a wonderful diversity of backgrounds, experiences, talents and interests to our school. We are delighted that you are here, ready to begin your Exeter journey.

Many of you know that I too once sat in this assembly hall as a new student. I was a financial aid student, as roughly half of you are. I worked hard, played sports, had fun, and made lifelong friends. Attending Exeter was a transformative experience for me.

But sitting in this assembly hall for the first time as a new Lower, many years ago, I was a bit nervous. I felt uncertain. I had questions. Would I fit in? Did I really belong at Exeter? Would I be able to do the work?

I like to tell our new students what I would have appreciated hearing as a new Lower. Returning students know this well because they have heard it before:

• You can do the work.
• You will make lifelong friends.
• Absolutely, you belong here.

A few of you – 43 to be exact – are living off campus in a hotel for a couple of weeks while we complete the renovation of Langdell Hall. We appreciate your patience and understanding. You will be settled into a newly renovated dorm very soon. In the meantime, we will have a surprise or two for you along the way to make the wait a little more enjoyable.

The new dining hall will be completed near the end of fall term. Until then, we have the tent outside Elm and we have added serving lines and adjusted our daily schedule to even out the flow a bit. As you go through the lines, please let the dining staff know how much you appreciate all their efforts on your behalf, and please show your appreciation by clearing your tables properly. The new dining hall is going to be terrific and well worth the wait.

It is our tradition at Opening Assembly to revisit the Academy’s Deed of Gift and reflect on the mission of our school. The Deed of Gift was signed by John and Elizabeth Phillips in 1781, seven years before the State of New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the U.S. Constitution. Our Deed of Gift is a remarkable document.

It states that Phillips Exeter Academy “shall ever be equally open to youth of requisite qualifications from every quarter.”

It also states,

“Above all, it is expected that the attention of instructors to the disposition of the minds and morals of the youth under their charge will exceed every other care; well considering that though goodness without knowledge is weak and feeble, yet knowledge without goodness is dangerous, and that both, united, form the noblest character, and lay the surest foundation of usefulness to mankind.”

From these passages, we derive our mission statement. Our mission is to unite goodness and knowledge and inspire youth from every quarter to lead purposeful lives.

In the very first paragraph of the Deed of Gift, our Founders also wrote, “the time of youth is the important period, on the improvement or neglect of which depend the most weighty consequences, to individuals themselves and the community.” In essence, John and Elizabeth Phillips were saying that your time here matters. It matters to your personal development as human beings, and it matters to the world, because the education you receive here will provide the foundation for your purposeful lives.

We give expression to these ideas on our school seal with the Latin words finis origine pendet, which translated mean “the end depends upon the beginning.” These words express our belief that what you will accomplish in life, and how you will make a difference in the world, will be shaped by what you learn and how you grow here at Exeter. Graduates return to campus every year and tell us that the education they received at Exeter made the greatest difference in their lives. Time and again they say it all started here.

The Latin words “non sibi,” which mean “not for oneself,” also appear on our school seal and signify our belief that the education gained here should be used for the benefit of others as well as for oneself. Our core value of non sibi proclaims that we “seek to graduate students whose ambitions and actions are inspired by their interest in others and the world around them.” Non sibi represents the very spirit and ethos of our school.

With these thoughts in mind, I would like to share three goals that I have for you and for our school this academic year.

Have Fun and Find Joy

My first goal is that you have fun. This might not seem like something special, since we have fun every year, but it is still a good place to start. I want you to have fun and find joy in your classes, dorms, clubs, co-curricular and extra-curricular activities, performances, teams, ensembles, affinity groups – everything you do and everywhere you go.

I want you to find joy in knowing that you belong here, in discovering that there are other students here with similar interests and passions, and in building lasting friendships with students who initially might seem very different from you.

Without a doubt you will grow academically, thrive in the arts, compete hard athletically, and excel in various clubs and activities, as students do every year. You will earn some honors and likely win a few competitions and championships. But the fun and joy do not depend on winning. The fun and joy are in the doing, in the learning and growth that occurs, and in the friendships that you make along the way.

To have fun and find joy in these various ways, you need to be healthy. To be healthy, you need to eat well and get your sleep. Please eat well and maintain good, consistent sleep habits. You do not have to do everything. Please do not try to do too much.

But do try new things. An Exeter alum rowed in the Olympics just a few weeks ago. I saw her say on Instagram that she first learned how to row at Exeter. She tried something new and ended up in the Olympics. That might not happen very often, but every year Exonians graduate with passions that they discovered here. I encourage you to try new things.

Having fun does not mean you will not work hard. You have come here to be challenged, and with challenge comes hard work. As you rise to the challenges that come your way, you will begin to understand your capacity to meet those challenges. You will grow in confidence. You will develop self-belief. I hope that too will give you joy.

Lastly, on this point, please keep in mind that we have many kinds of support here – formal and informal. When you do face challenges, you will not be alone. We have these supports – counselors, advisers, learning centers, peer tutors, student listeners, and more — because we all need support from time to time. Using them will propel your growth and increase your joy.

Seek Complex Truths

My second hope for the year is that you embrace fully our commitment at Exeter to seeking complex truths.

Academic excellence is a defining strength and core value of our school, and one of the reasons why you chose to come here. Our statement of that core value states, “In every discipline, and at every level within our curriculum, we seek to inspire students to develop critical thinking skills and seek complex truths.”

Our goal is to teach you how to think, not what to think.

We are committed to helping you learn how to seek complex truths that take into consideration all relevant facts and that respect the dignity and equal worth of all human beings equally. So how do we do that? How do you do that?

The learning we seek at Exeter starts with being open to different points of view. It starts with being curious why people from different backgrounds and experiences, or maybe similar backgrounds and experiences, might think differently. It requires listening to other perspectives with empathy, humility and respect, and with the understanding that learning at Exeter is a collaborative process, a communal effort.

This kind of learning requires a certain measure of resilience. It requires understanding the difference between being uncomfortable and being unsafe. At Exeter, we want you to learn how to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. This will enable you to engage with facts and perspectives that might not seem to fit your worldview. It will enable you to plumb the depths of an issue and seek complex truths. This is what we mean by “rigorous inquiry and thoughtful discourse” in our core value statement of academic excellence.

Listening with curiosity, empathy and humility; being resilient; being open to different points of view; being comfortable engaging with facts that challenge your thinking – these are all skills. Skills that you can develop and practice. You might call them Harkness skills. Or goodness and knowledge skills. These skills are essential to your learning at Exeter and will provide a foundation for everything you do and everything you achieve in life.

The learning that we seek to encourage extends beyond the classroom. When you leave an assembly during the course of the year, rather than comparing reactions with students with whom you might expect to agree, seek students with whom you might disagree. Share your thinking not to persuade but to understand, and thereby deepen the bonds of respect and friendship that come from learning together.

Importantly, our diversity at Exeter – our commitment to youth from every quarter – also is a defining strength of our school that propels our learning. We celebrate our diversity across all dimensions and cherish the rich learning environment that it creates.

We delight in our diverse identities, but we are not defined by them. We are defined by how we think, how we act, what we do, and by our qualities as human beings.

I am reminded of a passage in A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L’Engle. In this passage, aliens who don’t have eyes and cannot see find it unhelpful when earthlings try to give a visual description of other beings. The aliens say, “Think about what they are. This look doesn’t help us at all.”

This last point is critical, because there is a large body of literature that tells us that we sometimes tend to have less empathy for persons whom we perceive as different. That is the opposite of what we should be striving for, because our learning and growth are not advanced by engaging with persons who think just like us. Our learning and growth are advanced by engaging with persons who think differently.

We understand that the promise of our diverse community is realized fully only when we commit ourselves to rigorous inquiry and thoughtful discourse in this way.

By contrast, anything that narrows our thinking, or closes our mind to different points of view, will inhibit our learning as individuals and as a community. When we stop being curious, we stop learning.

I said earlier that learning at Exeter is a collaborative process, a communal effort. Interestingly, the word “competition” is derived from the Latin word competere, which means to strive together. Even when we think we are competing against our archrival to the south, in reality we are competing with them. Here at Exeter, in the classroom, in the dorm, on team buses, in the theater, at Grill, you are learning and striving together. You are learning with and from each other, and together pursuing a common goal to prepare yourselves to lead purposeful lives.

Gratitude

I would like to close this morning with a few words about gratitude. Gratitude is a common theme at graduations, but it is important to start the year with some of the same thoughts in mind. My third goal for the year is that you nurture a culture of gratitude, grounded in our core value of non sibi, and share your gratitude with those around you.

It is an extraordinary privilege to be a part of this community. We know this, but in the pressure of our daily business, and in moments of disappointment, we can sometimes forget and take things for granted. When we do that, we disrespect the privileges that we all enjoy as members of this community, and we disrespect the sacrifices of all those persons who have made our time here possible.

I hope you will always be grateful to your teachers and all the other adults, here and at home, who support you during your time at Exeter. I hope your gratitude will extend to prior generations of teachers and students who have helped create and shape the Exeter of today, and who have thereby made your experiences possible.

I am very excited about the year ahead. Walking about the campus these last few days, it has been great fun seeing the energy and joy that you all bring to a new school year. It certainly will be exciting to see all that you will do and accomplish this year. It will be fun to watch you carry on old traditions and perhaps start new ones. It will be fun simply seeing the many ways you have fun.

Lastly, remember, you are all Exonians. One way we recognize this is to hand out a new school shirt each year following Opening Assembly. This is another way we welcome new students, and a reminder to all students that you all belong here. Your shirts await you in the Academic Quad. Please take a shirt with your class year on the front.

By tradition, we end all assemblies with the words “Senior Class.” At Opening Assembly, all who are not seniors keep their seats while we allow seniors to leave the assembly hall first.

Senior class!

>> Read the story

Ship ahoy!

Exonians for a century have peeked anxiously toward the Academy Building’s bell-tower clock as they’ve scurried to get to class on time. And for just as long, the Sidney S. has sailed quietly above the fray.

The triple-masted ship perched atop the bell tower has served as the Academy’s weather vane since the school’s fourth and current Academy Building was completed in 1915. Given by an anonymous donor, the ship bears the name “Sidney S,” a reference to Sanford Sidney Smith, class of 1866, who was the president of the Trustees at the time.

Why a ship? According to Myron Williams, in his 1957 book, The Story of Philips Exeter, the ship is an homage to the great seal of the State of New Hampshire, which features the Raleigh, one of the original 13 warships commissioned by the Continental Congress for a new American navy, built in 1776 in Portsmouth. The weather vane is also believed to be recognition of the town of Exeter’s once-vibrant role as a mercantile seaport and shipbuilding center.

In 2000, the weather vane received a fresh gilding with 23-karat gold leaf when the clock and bell were restored. The Sidney S. sails on, more than a century after her maiden voyage.

Architect Billie Tsien taps a key on her laptop and a single photograph of an amethyst geode appears on the boardroom wall. There’s no accompanying 3D, balsa-wood building model or life-size posters recounting her firm’s architectural awards, although they have won many.

She’s focusing her audience’s attention on the geode. The rock is bumpy and fairly plain on the outside. Inside, it’s dazzling. Thousands of sparkling crystals erupt in all directions, exuding a deep purple glow. “That’s adolescence,” Tsien says.

It is also her parti, or conceptual big idea. For the next hour, she and partner Tod Williams explain their vision for a new performing arts center at Exeter that, like a geode, will feature a quiet exterior and a dynamic interior that encourage the free expression of another, more hidden sense of self.

Tsien’s elegantly simple presentation resonates with the Academy trustees, faculty, alumni and administration in attendance. “We left that meeting and I think it took us about 45 minutes to make a decision,” recalls Theater and Dance Instructor Sarah Ream ’75; P’09, P’11 of the New York City meetup back in 2014. “It was not difficult to decide that they were the people we wanted to go with for this project.”

Architects Tod Williams (seated) and Billie Tsien hope their building will inspire curiosity, enable experimentation, and take students on a creative journey that will last a lifetime.

Fast-forward four years, and The David E. and Stacey L. Goel Center for Theater and Dance officially opens to the first students. True to concept, the stark, modern cube, clad in muted gray brick, houses vibrant, highly sophisticated interior spaces where Exonians can take creative risks, refine their craft, and collaborate in formerly impossible ways.

Aesthetically and functionally, the Goel Center fits the husband-and-wife team’s body of institutional work — including the Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago and the U.S. Embassy complex in Mexico City — which puts a building’s users above architectural whimsy. Despite having two performing arts centers on their architectural CV, for their firm, TWBTA, there’s no such thing as a generic theater building; each one tells its own story. The Goel Center tells a uniquely Exeter story. It’s one of optimism, of the power of Harkness, and of the belief that the arts play a critical role in education.

The ethos of the Exeter community is inherent in the scale, the geometry and the technical capabilities of the Goel Center, says consultant Martin Vinik, brought on in the early days of the project to help configure the building’s theatrical requirements. “It’s not loud, it’s not self-congratulatory,” Vinik explains. “It emphasizes depth, quality and that approach to teaching at Exeter that is both intimate and collaborative.”

Stage crew perched in the mainstage control booth command a complex array of audio and video boards to manipulate a show’s sound, projection and light. A pipe-grid of 100 LED lights make technicolor magic on the 40-foot proscenium, while rigging hoists fly scenery and trap doors invite actor trickery. Able to heft 33,000 pounds, the movable orchestra pit sinks 12 feet below the stage to carry an entire orchestra or heavy scenery from the garden level to the stage.

Fitting the Exeter experience into a 143-foot-by-143-foot cube was a high-stakes game of Tetris. Vinik, the architects, former Director of Facilities Roger Wakeman and members of the theater and dance faculty all shared thoughts on how to place the necessary blocks of performance, teaching, rehearsal, technical and public spaces inside the building’s box.

“We knew that the theaters, due to their sheer size, would be the rulers of space,” Williams says. Spanning all four levels and seating 350, the mainstage theater fills the bulk of the 63,130-square-foot building and is large enough to host complex productions in theater or dance. Appointed with the latest high-tech machinery, it also provides the flexibility, versatility and ease  of operation required for Exonians to perform as their most imaginative selves. Students can manipulate an intricate web of LED lights to produce limitless color combinations from the theater’s control room or take to the catwalks to make above-stage adjustments. There’s also a movable orchestra pit for musicians and advanced rigging hoists for the stage crew to fly curtains, lights or scenery.

For limited-cast productions with simple sets, solo shows, or multidisciplinary collaborations that would be dwarfed on the mainstage, students can premier work in the smaller thrust stage theater. With seats for 150 and a rectangular forestage that extends into the audience on three sides, the interaction between performer and spectator is palpable. “It’s reminiscent of Fisher Theater in that way,” says Theater and Dance Chair Rob Richards, “because the action comes right to the audience.” The additional performance venue also means that two productions can happen simultaneously — one on the mainstage and one on the thrust stage.

And finally, the Goel Center is home to the Academy’s very first performance space designed specifically for dancers’ needs. Up until 2017, dance classes were taught on the second floor of the former Davis library, and before that in the basement of Thompson Gym. The new studio stars a classic three-layer basket-weave sprung floor with heat-sealed seams and Marley-finish surfaces; appropriate sightlines for choreography; and a ceiling-mounted projector to add video or animation to the show.

The 120-seat dance performance studio puts a dancer’s needs first, with its sprung floor, full-length mirrors and natural light.

This wide variety of venue type and size offers all students — from the most focused and talented to the casual neophyte — a place to explore and perform. “The theaters themselves are meant to be laboratories in which all sorts of work, new and old, realistic, formalistic, presentational or otherwise, can be produced,” Vinik says.

The size differential is aspirational as well. “Depending on your level of comfort, you can decide where you want to perform,” says John Skillern, TWBTA’s on-site project manager. “I think a lot of kids will look at the mainstage and think it’s phenomenal, it’s a big deal. Just knowing there is that stage, that they can at some point step onto, I think that’s very inspiring.”

Of course, every on-stage performance is the result of an ensemble’s effort. And much of that work happens before the curtain ever goes up on opening night. “It was really important to us, as an educational institution,” Ream says, “that half the building’s real estate belonged to all of the other work that happens off stage — thinking, rehearsing, costuming and set design.”

The architects responded, providing ample area for stagecraft, or the technical aspects of theatrical production, including a workroom to build scenery, a sewing room for garment design and a video-editing suite. “The difference between a Broadway theater and this teaching facility,” Williams says, “is that you’re actually building your sets here, not out in Staten Island. … The teaching occurs in the shop just as well as it occurs in the classroom or on the stage.”

These well-equipped back-of-house spaces enhance the scope and quality of classes for students, bolstering and broadening the Academy’s existing curriculum of 23 dance and theater courses. They also support an alternative framework for understanding and appreciating the arts. “We wanted to make sure that this world is a world that’s balanced between the hand, the mind, the individual and the technology,” Williams says.

The dramatic tension between actor and audience is heightened in the thrust stage theater, where the forestage reaches out into the crowd.

Bringing the mind into the building in a very literal way meant the installation of actual Harkness tables (albeit with a slightly more modern design). There are now two Harkness classrooms devoted to theater and dance — a first for the Academy. This spring, Dance Instructor Allison Duke will teach her first hybrid theory and practice course, Dance in Society. Examining movement in a sociocultural context, Duke will have students write an analytical paper and choreograph a dance. “The students will be thinking critically while they are rehearsing and improving their technique,” she says, “but also writing papers and using a completely different part of their brain.”

Positioning these Harkness classrooms close to the performance and rehearsal spaces was a guiding principle of the architectural design. Teachers now can easily do intensive textual work at the table one minute and quickly transition to kinesthetic work the next, without hoofing it across campus. Convenient, yes. But more importantly, it meets students where they are in terms of their style of learning. “There are students who just can’t get Shakespeare at all if they’re sitting around reading it,” Ream says. “But if you let them get up and on their feet, then you see that ‘Aha!’ moment when suddenly it begins to make sense to them.”

The circulation of people and things is very clearly thought out in the Goel Center. “You need to be able to move things around in this box,” Williams says, “which takes a lot of planning. You need to be able to build a set and take it right onto the stage, then straight to storage or out to the dumpster.” The center’s scenery production shop is located directly behind the mainstage — placement that makes practical sense — especially when ferrying large-scale props to and fro.

In the same way, the first-floor dramatic rehearsal studio matches the exact footprint of the mainstage (minus the wing space) and includes similar, but scaled-down technical AV instruments. This mirroring means that performers can move seamlessly from rehearsal to the performance space without missing a step, and that a production’s different constituents — actors, stage crew, dancers — can work concurrently.

Plus, the building’s connective tissue, its unfettered passageways — behind the stage, over the stage on the catwalks, up to the control room — all allow straightforward access from one area to the next. “I think that flow, that’s an important thing to communicate to the students,” Skillern says. “They have access to it all.” A building-wide paging and communication system reinforces the interplay between spaces by making conversations among the tech crew, faculty and performers a button push away. “There is visual connectivity and a physical connectivity in all aspects of the design,” Skillern adds.

Connecting not just the people and parts of a theatrical production process together, but the theater department to the dance department, drove the architectural design as well. “When Billie and I started to think about these components going together,” Williams says, “we thought you could have them connect, they could have this vertical relationship.” Hence, the central staircase in the main lobby, which is a physical link from the theater performance spaces on the main floor to the dance performance space on the third floor. This key form offers landing points, views and access to all levels of the performing arts. Each program fits in the same shell but retains its own identity, affording interdisciplinary collaboration. “The stair connects you to the dance level but the dance also has its own world,” Skillern says.

The Goel Center not only provides an unmatched, professional-grade experience for every student, its very existence is a visible recognition of the value of the arts as a rigorous academic pursuit at Exeter. “I think there has been a major shift among educators,” Ream says, “from seeing the arts as a charming addition to the curriculum, to seeing it as part of the bedrock of an ideal education.” Indeed, the importance of arts training in adolescent development is reinforced by current educational theory and brain research.

That’s not to say that the arts haven’t been valued at Exeter for centuries. In fact, from the earliest days of the school’s founding in 1781, “Musick” and “the Art of Speaking” were listed among the “Liberal Arts and Sciences” that the Academy would promote. It is just that student participation was constrained by the limits of the school’s facilities. There are now three separate departments devoted to the arts, including studio art, music, and theater and dance. More than half the student body is involved in a dozen dance clubs, drama clubs that perform weekly productions, and formal music ensembles.

“I’m really hoping that some of the traffic from the gym — the people who think the last thing in the world they would ever do is anything to do with theater — are going to find themselves kind of wandering over and hanging out and getting involved,” Ream says. It appears to be working. Twice the number of students, compared to last year, auditioned for this fall’s production, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

On a crisp September day, backpacks and kicked-off shoes line the hallways of the Goel Center. Faculty and staff breeze through the building, chattering and lounging on the comfy red chairs scattered about the lobby. Among the passersby are architects Williams and Tsien. “I love seeing kids in the space,” Tsien says. The bustle, apparently, is the one thing you can never simulate in renderings. This is their first visit since the academic year began. They walk into each room, inspect each wall, outlet, fixture — no detail goes unnoticed. “I’m thinking like a dancer,” Williams says, dressed in signature black, as he enters the dance rehearsal space. He eyes the pop of gray paint on an interior window frame. He wonders out loud if, perhaps, it should be painted white. Shouldn’t the whole room be white, ethereal, he muses, to make the dancers feel freer to explore creatively? Tsien shares her thoughts. Williams listens. The conversation continues. They’re thinking and talking about the students and how they’ll inhabit and occupy this space they’ve created. It’s the architecture of Harkness. 

Editor’s note: This article first appeared in the fall 2018 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.