Phillips Exeter Academy

Serving up history

Wild about nature

Global Initiatives:

Global Initiatives:

Live to learn

Travel the world with your fellow Exonians. Explore Global Opportunities

Embracing change

Kristyn McLeod Van Ostern ’96 began her term as president of the Trustees on July 1. She also serves on the Executive and the Governance and Nominations committees as well as the Student Safety Committee. Outside of Exeter, Van Ostern serves as an outsourced chief financial officer and owns a small business, Wash Street, which she co-founded to make laundry easier for busy families.

This feature was originally published in the Fall 2024 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.

Exonians in Review: Fall 2024

Songs of myself

What is a second act?

The Road Not (Yet) Taken

Changing Course

A Musical Life

More Alumni Second Acts

Seeking Complex Truths

Principal Rawson stands at podium on Assembly Hall stage

Academic excellence is a defining strength of our school and one of the reasons students choose Exeter. Our core value of academic excellence states: “In every discipline and at every level within our curriculum we inspire students to develop critical thinking skills and seek complex truths.”

At Opening Assembly this year, I talked about what it means to seek complex truths, why that is important, and how we do it. 

We grapple with complex truths because we understand that simple narratives often are false, and false narratives often are simple. We are not at Exeter to pursue simple truths when complex truths are required to understand the world. We are committed to helping students learn how to seek complex truths that take into consideration all relevant facts and respect the dignity and equal worth of all human beings.

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

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 students to learn to become comfortable with being uncomfortable, so they can engage with facts and perspectives that might not seem to fit their worldview, 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.

As I said in Opening Assembly, the qualities that we seek to encourage in our students — listening with curiosity, empathy and humility; being resilient; being open to different viewpoints; and being comfortable engaging with facts that challenge their thinking — are skills that will provide a foundation for everything they will do and achieve in life. We think of them as Harkness skills, or goodness and knowledge skills, but they also are life skills.

Our diversity at Exeter — our commitment to youth from every quarter — also is a defining strength of our school that propels our learning. We understand that the promise of our diverse community is realized fully only when we commit ourselves to rigorous inquiry and thoughtful discourse.

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.

History Instructor Alexa Caldwell has a poster outside her classroom — a variation on the famous World War I-era U.S. Army recruiting poster — that shows Uncle Sam pointing his finger at the viewer and saying, “You Could Be Wrong.” Her colleague in the History Department, Bill Jordan, created the poster after reading the award-winning book The Political Classroom; in a similar spirit, he hands out stickers to his students that read, “I could be wrong.” And in the classroom next door to Bill’s, History Instructor Aykut Kilinc greets his students with a sign that quotes my remarks from Opening Assembly in 2022: “We should expect a diversity of viewpoints on almost every subject worth exploring.”

These are just some of the ways that we aim to teach students how to think, not what to think, and how we seek to inspire them at all levels to develop critical thinking skills and seek complex truths.

John Schmidtberger ’79: Canvasing Light

William Wreden ’58: Sincerely Yours

Ayush Noori ’20: The Love of Discovery

Ayush Noori ’20, a senior at Harvard College, is pursuing both a bachelor’s degree in computer science and neuroscience and a master’s degree in computer science, all in four years. The catalyst: for many years, Noori cared for his grandmother, who had progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare neurological disorder. Noori now aspires to develop AI tools that can customize diagnostic and treatment plans for people with PSP and other neurological disorders.

His research on this topic began when he was an Exonian. “When I was in Mr. Chisholm’s BIO510: Advanced Biology class, we would get breakfast in the dining hall many mornings,” he says. “I’d bring a stack of highlighted and annotated papers, well beyond what we were discussing in class, and he was generous enough to indulge all my crazy questions.

“That’s really how you foster someone’s intellectual curiosity,” he continues. “It’s by giving them permission to ask audacious questions that might defy the textbook, but that allow you to go deeper into the truth of the matter.”

While at Exeter, Noori presented a TEDx talk called “The Neuroscience of Non Sibi.” In it he discussed kindness and empathy, which he asserted to be the foundation on which human brains are formed. He believes the topic is worth continued exploration. “When we’re interacting with machines, sometimes it’s easier than interacting face-to-face with people,” Noori says. But “what do we lose when we start to think about AI-human collaboration? What do we lose in the value of sitting in a classroom, around the Harkness table, without electronics, reading from paperback texts and thinking about the human experience?”

Recently, Noori has conducted his hybrid explorations at the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School; the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, also at Harvard; and the Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease at Massachusetts General Hospital. At each institution, his collaboration with experts in a variety of disciplines has been built upon AI’s rapid acceleration. “The scale, complexity and modeling ability of large-scale AI models has really propelled our research forward,” he says. “I love the day to day of what I do, the simple, mundane experience of discovery, working with some of the smartest people I know and the promise that the work that we’re doing can potentially be impactful to people, now and into the future.”

All his work is grounded in the work he was doing at Exeter, he says, adding: “Exeter is one of the greatest gifts of my life.”

This feature was originally published in the Fall 2024 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.