Phillips Exeter Academy
Phillips Exeter Academy
Phillips Exeter Academy
Phillips Exeter Academy

Emma Ward

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.

The famous World War I-era U.S. Army recruiting poster gets a new tag line and hangs outside of History Instructor Alexa Caldwell

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

A look into the life of a plein air painter in Down East Maine.

As a plein air painter — one who paints outdoors with particular focus on conveying the quality of light and atmosphere — John Schmidtberger ’79 is particularly subject to nature’s vagaries. A gust can top plea canvas, a squall can darken the sky. Once, a team of draft horses, escapees from a county fair, nearly ran him down in a Maine blueberry barren. (After a farmer collected the run aways, Schmidtberger resumed painting, trepidatiously.)

John Schmidtberger ’79 at the easel in Down East Maine.

And, of course, the environment itself must move him.

“I start out just looking around a lot,” he says. “I try to keep a journal of places and things.” He maintains a supply of canvases and panels, primed to a brilliant white via many coats of Gesso. He likes how white underpins the translucent colors he layers on top, and if he leaves an area unpainted, he wants it to be a “very strong, pure white so it can function as a color.”

His work often features water and earth, with some houses and the occasional human figure. Some landscapes, awash in lavender, seem painted just at the moment they’re waking up; others incandesce under a high sun. Many depict Down East Maine, where he and his wife, also an artist, have visited for decades.  “Artists have been going to Maine forever for the light,” he says. “It’s a very hard, clear but warm light, with very little atmospheric perspective, meaning that as things disappear into the distance, they don’t have that blueing haze.”

He paints outdoors for one to three hours, and tries to finish in one session “because of conditions, but also be causeof my nature,” he says. “I need to be in this incredibly intensively focused state… to gather and fortify myself and really get ready, almost like training for a marathon. I have to bring really good energy to it.”

It’s joyful, yet lonely, work. He misses the hubbub of Exeter — a “whole new world” — where he took sculpture and filmmaking, and the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied painting under Neil Welliver, chairman of the university’s Graduate School of Fine Art.

Milbridge Commons at Low Tide oil on canvas.

“You’ve had all this camaraderie and constant critiques and input from people, and you get out and it just vanishes,” he says. For decades after graduating, he and his wife ran a decorative-painting business while raising two children. It was hard enough painting on his own, let alone building an artists’ community.

“It was a real struggle, and a very alone struggle,” he says. Serendipity struck in 2011, when a friend mentioned a small down town storefront only 90 minutes from New York. Their exchange was brief:

Friend: “You should rent it.”

Schmidtberger: “What for?”

Friend: “It’s a good deal. Figure it out later.”

And so he did, opening SFA Gallery in picturesque Frenchtown, New Jersey. Since then, a community has coalesced, including long-lost graduate school friends, other artists he has followed for years and finally contacted, and new artists seeking a venue. Having established a loyal clientele, he has found more time to paint on his own. Occasionally, he’ll head a few blocks away to paint street scenes, leaving a hand-drawn map on the gallery door for visitors to find him.

“I never intended to be a gallerist, but I’m very happy I am,” he says. Like all artists, Schmidtberger sometimes hits a wall. “They tell people in art school (and it’s really terrible advice), ‘Never stop working,’” he says.

But he has found he cannot force the creative intensity painting entails. If inspiration wanes, he’ll focus his artistic energy elsewhere— cartooning, preparing canvases, figure-drawing — until sooner or later, his emotional weather shifts, and he’s ready to head outdoors and court serendipity again.

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

William Wreden ’58: Sincerely Yours

A collection more than 20 years in the making centered around the art of letter writing.

William Wreden ’58

When was the last time you wrote a proper letter to someone? You’ll be forgiven if it has been too long to recall. To lifelong book collector William “Bo” Wreden ’58, however, handwritten correspondence remains endlessly fascinating, even in our digital times.

Wreden spent more than 20 years assembling a trove of books, articles, comic strips and more addressing the art of letter writing. The inspiration? A book he bought from a catalogue: The Polite Letter-writer, published in London in 1804. This past spring, he organized the collection into a 10-week exhibition titled “Correspondence & Letter Writing,” on view at The Book Club of California.

Among the exhibition’s treasures was an item Wreden acquired during a 1952 visit to Exeter as a prospective student .While Wreden was on a tour, the chair of the English Department, D’Arcy Curwen, gave him stapled mimeographed pages titled “Putting Your Best Foot Forward on Note Paper.” In 1954, soon after his arrival at Exeter — some 3,200 miles from his home in Menlo Park, California — Wreden felt the importance of letter writing.

“When I was at Exeter, we were not allowed to have or use telephones,” Wreden says. “All communication with family and friends was by letter writing, which set me on the path of becoming a correspondent.” Wreden still has letter she wrote and received while he was a student at the Academy.

Wreden has been a member of The Book Club, a San Francisco institution celebrating the book arts and western history, for about 32 years. The first exhibition he organized there, in 2004, was called “A Joint Show” and featured psychedelic posters. In 2015, a second exhibition showcased 70 years of playful and festive fine press holiday cards, many of which were commissioned by his family from some of California’s most important printers. Like those, “Correspondence & Letter Writing” offered unique historical perspectives and plenty of wit. A friend who attended wrote to Wreden, “The whole experience was like going through a magic keyhole.”

To speak with Wreden on the topic of collecting is not unlike the experience of exploring an old bookshop. He recalls details — names, dates, titles, publishers — with ease, as he shares memories from his past. A holiday card printed by the Grace Hopper Press, featuring an illustration labeled “California, the Baloon [sic] Railway,” by a man named

John Browne from the 1849 issue of Mechanics Magazine. A 1958 Sports Illustrated article titled “Baseball’s for the Birds,” covered a thrilling rowing race in which Wreden and his crewmates competed during his senior year at Exeter. A psychedelic poster printed for a 1967 meeting of the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers with the motto “Amor Librorum Nos Unit.” In this way, he reveals fascinating pockets of publishing history that are permanently intertwined with his own.

The Polite Letter-writer, published in 1804, is the oldest book in William Wreden’s collection.

Wreden was born into the literary world. His father, William P. Wreden Sr., was an antiquarian book dealer with a shop in Palo Alto, California. As a boy, Bo was often in the store; as an adult he managed a second outpost the family opened in San Francisco in 1963. At Princeton, where he majored in early and modern European history, Wreden found his way into a job in the university’s rare book room. After graduation, he went abroad, studying 18th-century literature at the University of Edinburgh. He then traveled to France to work as an apprentice at Aux Amateurs de Livres, an antiquarian bookshop owned by Marcel Blancheteau.

 

Today, Wreden’s library in Berkeley, California, spans centuries and includes books, correspondence, pamphlets, posters, greeting cards, bookmarks and more sourced primarily from bookshops and catalogues. He has collections by and about California authors Joan Didion and Richard Brautigan, who wrote an introduction to a limited edition the Wredens published. His largest collection, consisting of a few hundred books and ephemeral items, is devoted to Buddhism, sensory awareness, yoga and Zen, with some emphasis on publications relating to the San Francisco Zen Center.

“What can I say about collecting?” he muses. “There’s a certain thrill to finding things that you know fit into your collection, and it’s a way of connecting with people.”

Like so many of us, Wreden relies heavily on email these days. But he still maintains letter-writing relationships with many people, preparing first drafts in a notebook before he sends a final version into the world. Properly, politely, he remains a man of letters.

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

Ayush Noori ’20: The Love of Discovery

How the Harvard College senior is moving neurological science forward with empathy and AI.

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.

Unearthing joy

Tom Simpson on the all-faculty summer reading, what he read and what he’ll bring into the classroom

Each year, the Dean of Faculty recommends one or two books for Exeter faculty to read over the summer. It’s a way of bringing us together to think about various topics relating to our work in the classroom and community. The common read I chose this summer was Gholdy Muhammad’s Unearthing Joy: A Guide to Culturally and Historically Responsive Teaching and Learning. It is a vibrant, exuberant book. When I thumbed through it and saw a QR code for a playlist that includes musicians John Coltrane, Stevie Wonder, Janet Jackson, Nas featuring Lauryn Hill, Bob Dylan and Nina Simone — with the Langston Hughes poems “Oppression” and “Freedom” on the facing page — I knew this would be my kind of summer read.

I don’t remember much joy accompanying my time in school as a kid. I often felt anxious about having to spend the day with teachers who didn’t seem to enjoy kids all that much, or getting caught up in recess games that took a page from Lord of the Flies. Joy was elsewhere: in the best satire of Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons, in hearing Run DMC and Tracy Chapman for the first time, or in my friends’ pitch-perfect imitations of our tormentors.

In my own teaching over the last 25 years, a central motivation and commitment has been to make it clear to students right out of the gate that the best classrooms are spaces of love. We will laugh together; we will be curious together; and when we encounter some of the best literature and film related to the human struggle for wisdom, compassion, justice and peace, we will probably shed a tear together.

Attempting to strike this kind of balance is so urgent, and so necessary, because these are such turbulent times. We know that students are increasingly anxious, and sometimes we imagine that we could fix it for them if we simply took away their screens. There’s some truth to that. What’s truly ailing this generation, however, is deeper than stress, deeper than anxiety, deeper than loneliness. It’s alienation, caused by the profound moral injury and cognitive dissonance of knowing that the power brokers of the world see them as disposable — as worth something only insofar as they offer labor that can be extracted and exploited, with no reliable guarantees of the most basic human rights, dignity and justice.

How can we blame young people for looking at their world and concluding that normalized mass death — from COVID, from the climate emergency and from war — is simply the cost of doing business?

Schools, therefore, must be not only a refuge from the madness and cruelty of the world, but also a place where students can speak and hear the truth about the world. Only then can we imagine ethical and just alternative futures together. Muhammad has some beautiful words for the importance of navigating these troubled waters skillfully and with love. For the best teachers, she writes, “love [means] interrupting the numbness and distance we feel when others are oppressed, hurt, or harmed.” She adds:

“[J]oy cannot be embraced fully if oppression is present … . This is why a balance of criticality and joy is essential. Joy also balances out the teaching of hard truths and histories, such as Indigenous boarding schools, Asian hate, Islamophobia, the Holocaust, and crimes against women and LGBTQ+ people (to name just a few of so many examples). Groups that experienced those truths and histories had joy before injustices were inflicted upon them. They often used the joy found in painting, music, fashion, and other artistic endeavors not to be overcome with pain.”

Authentic joy thus cannot be a matter of merely escaping what’s painful about the world. Joy comes through acknowledging our shared pain with straightforward honesty and courage. But once that honesty, connection and trust are established between teachers and students, look out. Liberation ensues, with its attendant joy. Such joy is so much deeper and more beautiful than the quick little hits of happiness that are constantly packaged and sold to us. It’s the big-hearted, full-throated joy of reconnecting with one another in shared beauty, imagination and play. It’s the abiding joy we feel when we can be part of teaching and learning at their best.

Listen to the playlist from the Unearthing Joy – this summer’s all-faculty read.

The Other Faculty Read

Exeter faculty had another choice for the common summer read: The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, by Jonathan Haidt. The book, which shot straight to the top of bestseller lists, looks at the impact that the rise of smartphones and overprotective parenting has had on children and teenagers, particularly in the realm of mental health. In the wake of the book’s success, at least 13 states have passed laws banning or restricting smartphone use in schools.

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Tom Simpson is chair of Exeter’s Religion, Ethics and Philosophy Department. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in religious studies with a specialization in modern U.S. religious history. He has been teaching at the Academy since 2008 and is the author of the book American Universities and the Birth of Modern Mormonism, 1867–1940 and multiple essays about postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Faculty

Faculty

Passions

Instructor in Science Summer Morrill ’11 in her classroom.

Genetics of Cancer

Summer Morrill ’11

Instructor in Science

Summer Morrill ’11 fell in love with studying biology and genetics while a student at Exeter. But it was her family history of breast cancer that inspired her to study genetics at Tufts, then in graduate school at MIT. “I’ve had the experience of meeting with a genetic counselor to try to understand what’s going on,” she says. “The things I’ve researched and discovered may not make a conscious impact during my lifetime, but there’s something empowering about studying it.”

While Morrill considered becoming a genetic counselor, she decided she was more suited to the academic side of science, especially after gaining teaching experience during graduate school. She teaches a course in cancer biology, BIO586: Molecular Genetics. She proposed it as a special course based on several students’ initial interest, but when she offered it, 25 students signed up. “So many students approached me asking for this course,” Morrill says.

Why so much interest? “Cancer research is a huge field with really interesting biology happening now,” she says. “Also, students personally are interested in learning more about cancer research. The disease touches a lot of families, friends and, at this point in their lives, they probably know someone who has cancer.”

Students in Morrill’s course read current research on cancer genetics and do lab work focused on learning techniques of DNA isolation, analysis and manipulation. Morrill also organizes a panel of biologists — representing organizations including Boston Children’s Hospital, the National Institutes of Health, and Merck — to meet students and answer questions. “The questions the students ask are what researchers are currently asking in the field, which is amazing,” she says.

Morrill is creating further iterations of the course, giving students more opportunities to tie together different elements they have learned, such as thinking how gene mutation works and what the human body can and can’t do in response. “If they understand a problem at multiple levels, that’s going to benefit their problem-solving ability when it comes to thinking about human disease and how we’re treating patients,” she says.

“A course like this can teach students that science is more than just memorizing a set of facts. It’s about being comfortable with the unknown and asking the right questions to further your understanding of the field. I think there’s huge value in that for students — even one who doesn’t want to go into cancer biology — to have the experience of connecting pieces together and doing research of your own to figure out what’s going on in such a new field.”

Instructor in English Jason BreMiller teaching in the Academy woodlands.

Wild About Nature

Jason BreMiller

Instructor in English

Jason BreMiller is as passionate about the outdoors as he is about literature. Last winter, to illustrate concepts discussed in his ENG420 course, he led students on a walk through the woods to build a fire, cook, then taste a deer heart from an animal he had humanely harvested.

At different points in his teaching career — before and after arriving at Exeter in 2012 — BreMiller has guided students through ice caves in Iceland, up Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro and through the Serengeti because he believes place-based education helps students learn. “I’ve tried in my pedagogy to set a high bar of traditional academic rigor but explore different possibilities for its delivery,” BreMiller says.

His ENG572: Literature and the Land course is centered around weekly field trips — hikes through forests, visits to local orchards, explorations of the New Hampshire Seacoast — connected to the stories students read and discuss in class. “Literature and the Land is really built around deepening students’ awareness of and connection to place, and relying on the body of literature that’s conducive to that,” BreMiller says. “It’s perfect for seniors who are poised to reflect about transition. We visit places designed to prompt them to think about what it means to have a relationship to place that’s both good for human and biological communities.”

BreMiller spent much of his childhood exploring the outdoors, observing animals and learning to bow hunt with the help of his father, a wildlife enthusiast who often brought animals into the house. “My childhood was unusual in the sense that you’d go get ice cream and all these bird specimens would just spill out of the freezer,” he says. “I also remember we glued a turtle back together that had cracked its shell on the road. I grew up with a deep affinity for natural spaces and a comfort with being outdoors.”

After pursuing studies in environmental humanities in college and graduate school, BreMiller gravitated to mountaineering and backpacking, completing a NOLS outdoor educator mountaineering course and becoming a field instructor. “These pieces fit in my teaching career, where I saw the value of being outdoors with students and observing firsthand the magic that is both intellectual and deeply internal by teaching in wild places,” he says.

BreMiller is the founder and director of Exeter’s Environmental Literature Institute, a weeklong conference for teachers, and established INT519: Green Umbrella Learning Lab, an integrated studies course which gives students an opportunity to dig into sustainability projects on and off campus. Among its successes were the introduction of RedBikes, a campus bike share program, and an initiative to raise the awareness of local drinking water quality. “The kids are developing the skills to execute high stakes, complex projects with real outcomes for the community, which in mymind is the logical extension of Harkness pedagogy,” he says.

One idea BreMiller is contemplating is a field-based, interdisciplinary course on the philosophy and ethics of hunting. It invites many complex questions but, most important to BreMiller, it takes those conversations outdoors.

Instructor in Art Tara Lewis with her painting “Batman” in her home studio.

Drawing on Experience

Tara Lewis

Instructor in Art and the Clowes Teaching Chair in Art

Tara Lewis believes all students are artists, whether they have been sketching for years or have not picked up a paint brush since elementary school. A painter who often shows her work in New York City galleries, Lewis has taught painting, drawing, 3D design, printmaking and photography at all levels around a Harkness table in the Frederick R. Mayer Art Center. She draws on her dual passions in contemporary art (especially pop art) and portraiture to inspire students. “I love to weave the contemporary art world into my course content in a very impactful and tangible way,” she says.

Lewis regularly invites working artists to meet and work alongside students. American artist William Wegman visited campus to discuss the whimsical compositions he creates featuring dogs — mostly his Weimaraners in various costumes. Casey Cadwallader ’97, creative director for the fashion brand Mugler, made a guest appearance. Portrait artist Nicolas Coleman ’16 set up a mini studio in Lewis’s classroom and painted in tandem with students.

Some of these visits lead to further inspiration and connection. After hosting painter Will Cotton, several of Lewis’s former students went on to become studio assistants and interns. “The students gain technical inspiration that enhances their own studio practice,” Lewis says. “But it’s great when alumni come into the art classroom because I have them talk about what they were creating in high school or simply what they were like then. I want the students to realize that artists were actually 16 once too.”

Lewis enthusiastically shares personal experiences and insight in her ART408: Advanced Projects: Painting Portraits course. “My own studio practice is rooted in portraiture, and I love collaborations due to the unexpected and rewarding outcomes that can occur,” Lewis says. “I can’t help but let who I am spill into the classroom!” Early in the course, Lewis introduces possible portrait subjects through music videos, photography, literature, other artists’ work and more. Students develop a concept for the portrait they want to create, find a model, then create a portrait throughout the term.

Last spring in New York, a chance collaboration with model Brooke Shields led to an exhibition of Lewis’s pop culture-infused portraits of her and her daughters. She uses that example to motivate students.

“I love to share tips about the portrait process,” Lewis says. “I tell students to be present in the moment — know your concept, idea and subject you wish to portray. Make a documentary on canvas!”

Clara Peng ’24 and Instructor in History Troy Samuels explore artifacts.

Serving Up History

Troy Samuels

Instructor in History

Troy Samuels is known for making learning history a whole-body experience. Students in his HIS568: History Through Food course, for example, examine the relationship between cultures and food around the world through readings, then prepare a meal based on the concepts they’re discussing. “We have Harkness in the classroom, then we have Harkness in the kitchen,” Samuels says.

The course was inspired by a student project in one of Samuels’ 300-level European history classes. “A student from Venezuela researched the creation of Venezuelan food at the intersection of European and South American culture, which I thought was really cool,” Samuels says. “There are so many rich intersections between how food and the everyday lives of people interact with history.”

Based on themes provided by Samuels, each week two student “chefs” create a menu around a recipe they select and join Samuels in the basement of the Elizabeth Phillips Academy Center to cook a three-course meal. Exploring various themes such as food and economy, or food and empire, students prepare a variety of dishes — for example, lamb stew using ingredients adapted from a Babylonian cuneiform tablet or lobster rolls after discussing food and social status. They’re urged to taste everything (barring dietary restrictions or allergies). And, under Samuels’s supervision, they’re learning real cooking skills. “One of the broader trends we explore is how interconnected our world is,” he says. The class becomes a community event, especially on cooking days. “People invite their friends to help cook, to try things, to understand what they’re doing, and it becomes a little party,” he says.

In addition to cooking, Samuels encourages his students to engage with the active work of historians: digging. He is an archaeologist and a specialist in the material culture of understudied people in the ancient world. As a senior staff member on the Gabii Project, an international archaeological initiative in Italy, he has offered Exeter students the opportunity to work with him at the site outside Rome for the past two summers. “They’re the only high school students there, and they really distinguish themselves because they’re so insightful and energized,” Samuels says. “It’s also a great opportunity for them to experience a different side of being a historian.”

Samuels jokes that, “with a name like Troy, I was doomed to be an ancient historian,” but his hope is for students to find joy in learning history. “It’s about finding engagement with the past and that search for complexity and understanding and how that can be really rewarding,” he says.

Math Instructor Jeff Ibbotson peers through a dodecahedron.

Calculated Fun

Jeff Ibbotson

Instructor in Mathematics

Learning advanced mathematics concepts isn’t necessarily fun and games — except in Instructor Jeff Ibbotson’s MAT690: Selected Topics in Mathematics course, where games are the point. In it, students explore how game theory — the study of strategic interactions whose outcome for each participant depends on choices of all involved — is an effective way to apply mathematical calculations to strategic thinking.

“Game theory allows students to see applications of mathematics in a different way because the concept is based on the idea of agents playing a game against one another or as part of a group,” Ibbotson says. “Games like the Prisoner’s Dilemma have aspects of conflict and cooperation, and can apply to situations in politics and economics.” Two of his students applied the game theory model of cooperation to show how hermit crabs trade shells, writing and illustrating a picture book to explain their findings.

Ibbotson aspires to teach mathematics beyond theorems and formulas, and attract a broad range of students, some who enjoy math and others who feel they should give math another try. Maybe because Ibbotson didn’t always know mathematics would be his route to happiness.

“When I was in college, I was a physics major and I wound up completing a physics program,” he says. “I took English classes, but eventually the style of arguments got to me. I was like I want something where there’s a provable answer. Not that I didn’t enjoy arguing, I do. … but it was when I was in real analysis that I fell in love with the mathematics of infinity.”

Drawing on his vast interests in art, religion and history, he uses spherical paintings on a globe to illustrate six-point perspective or passes around a graspable dodecahedron to help students visualize complex ideas. In another course he developed,

MAT40H: History of Mathematics, students study numbering systems from ancient Egypt, Babylon, China, India and other non-Western cultures — and have an opportunity to build their own. “They invent their own symbols and the stories behind the symbols,” Ibbotson says.

Ibbotson has been able to share his fondness for physics in an integrated studies course about the intersection of mathematics and sound. Using content based on his research into distribution theory and partial differential equations, students use trigonometric functions like sine and cosine to model complex sound waves (which correspond to musical concepts like pitch and volume). An avid Marvel and DC comic book fan, Ibbotson hasn’t integrated comics into his math courses, but he plans to.

In everything he teaches, Ibbotson strives to impart that learning mathematics is an effective way to learn to think, especially around the Harkness table. “That pedagogy feels right to me,” he says. “We want students engaged as soon as possible in doing mathematics. We have all sorts of problems that can go in various directions and sometimes the students find original ways to solve them. We celebrate that.”

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

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

Finis Origine Pendet: A Look Back

Rich Calvert ’50 recently sent his class correspondents a copy of his Look magazine from January 6, 1948, highlighting an article titled “Exeter Drops the Old School Tie: The 116-Year-Old Boys School Has a Tradition of Democracy.” We felt it was worth sharing with a wider audience.

In words and pictures of classrooms, debate meetings, sports practices and pillow fights, the article provides an intimate snapshot of the school at a time when the world at large was concerned with the Cold War, the Nuremberg trials and Gary Cooper.

Look also printed a poll taken among 659 students, including Calvert. Here are a couple of the questions and the responses: Do you think religious training is an essential part of your education?” Yes: 502. No: 184. Which is most important in your future — money, fame or the respect of your community? Money: 87. Fame: 44. Community respect: 534.

“Students’ opinions are conservative,” it declares.

Flip through the pages of Look Magazine from 1948

Lamont Gallery

Behind the scene of the performative drawing I am Alewife by August Ventimiglia.

The process of creating it really is a conversation between the two people. The process unfolds over days. I have to trust the other person on the end of the line. It’s like having a dance partner.

August Ventimiglia

Inspiration August Ventimiglia took inspiration for his large wall mural from the Gulf of Maine — its coastal shape, sea life and ocean water data, like wave height, over time. “Those silhouettes of fish are the alewives schooling, and they’re all pointed radially to Portsmouth Harbor, which is the ocean entrance to the Exeter River,” Ventimiglia says. “The great dam on the Exeter River was taken down in 2016 and the alewives started to come back.” Alewife are small fish that migrate between fresh and saltwater.

Execution The 20-foot-long drawing is made with a snap line and a chalk reel, which is used in construction sites to lay a straight line over a long distance. “There’s one person at one side of the string and one person at the other side of the string, and the string is pulled taut,” Ventimiglia says. “Then you pluck it like a string of a big double bass, and  it snaps the line against the wall. … The process of creating it really is a conversation between the two people. The process unfolds over days. I have to trust the other person on the end of the line. It’s like having a dance partner. [Exhibitions and Collections Manager Dustin Schuetz] and I started snapping on Monday. It took maybe 16 hours, just the snapping.”

Contradictions “The idea of using a dry medium to represent a liquid form is one of those contradictions I’m interested in,” Ventimiglia says. “And then playing with the idea of a construction tool to evoke a natural phenomenon is also a contradiction. The contradiction isn’t a bad thing. It’s something to ponder.”

Teaching Moment “I think of this [mural] not just as a teaching tool in the Art Department, but it can also be used as a backdrop for a conversation about ecology, science, about social and environmental responsibility. It’s more than just an abstract art form; it tells a story, in a broader critique of human activity.”

August Ventimiglia creates the chalk drawing I am Alewife on the Lamont Gallery’s walls.
Drawing, sculpture, light and sound elements combine in Katherine Mitchell DiRico’s multimedia installation.
Patricia Rangel and her assistant pour dirt gathered from Academy grounds to form abstract landscapes of compacted earth.
In-process pictures of the string piece New Hampshire-based artist Carly Glovinski installed on the Lamont Gallery walls as part of her Landsline Stack series.

Opening Assembly 2024

Principal Rawson stands on Assembly Hall stage clapping surrounded by an Assembly Hall full of students

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!

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Exeter Deconstructed: The Academy weather vane

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.