A yearlong renovation transforms a 113-year-old campus building into a home for ancient texts and modern gatherings.

The Davis building, nestled between the contemporary Class of 1945 Library and the Colonial-style Nathaniel Gilman House, is a campus landmark. This Neoclassical structure, with its symmetrical red brick and granite façade and grand central entrance topped by tall multi-pane windows and ionic columns, bridges the past and future of education and community at Exeter.

It was completed in 1912 and served as the Academy’s library, then became a bustling student center and administrative hub in the 1970s. Beginning this fall, the newly named Davis Hall is now home to the Classical Languages Department, the Latin Study and a community gathering space.

Following a thoughtful yearlong renovation led by the Boston architecture firm designLAB, Davis again hums with activity — and a new purpose. Instructors are settling into sunny new classrooms on the first floor. The original grand marble staircase, slightly worn by the footsteps of generations of Exonians, leads up to bright, freshly painted and restored reading rooms. Standing on the second floor, gazing up at the ornate plaster ceilings or out the windows toward the front lawn, one can sense that Davis’ latest renewal is another exciting opportunity.

The renovated and renamed Mary Amen Study holds the Classical Languages Department’s collection of Latin and Greek texts.

“It’s a great story of reuse, sustainability and reimagining resources for different generations, which are all part of the Exeter ethos,” Campus Planner and Architect Heather Taylor says.

The Davis Library

Exeter’s first library was housed comfortably in two rooms in the Academy Building. By the early 20th century, however, space was at a premium. The school’s book collection topped 2,000 titles, and a dedicated library building was necessary. Fortunately, Harlan P. Amen, Exeter’s seventh principal, was a prodigious fundraiser who engaged in an ambitious building campaign to enlarge the school’s footprint. Thanks in part to his enthusiastic alumni outreach, a surprise $50,000 bequest for construction of a library came in 1907 from Benjamin Price Davis, class of 1862.

Davis entered the Academy in 1859, planning to go to college. But he dis-agreed with his father, a prosperous wholesale and retail grocer in Brooklyn, New York, about which college to attend. Davis wanted Harvard; his father preferred Columbia. So, Davis went directly into business and became a successful coffee importer. He considered the Academy his higher education, regularly attending alumni dinners in New York City.

It’s a great story of reuse, sustainability and reimagining resources for different generations.

Heather Taylor, campus planner and architect

Friends recalled that Davis was modest, quiet and friendly, and that he was committed to education — sometimes paying for promising students to attend college. His bequest reflected his commitment to education at Exeter. A world traveler and an extensive reader, Davis also enjoyed fine art and the outdoors, often visiting his camp in the Adirondacks, where he would ride, fish and hunt.

Davis Library broke ground in October 1911. It was designed by Boston architect Ralph Adams Cram, noted for his reinvention of American church and college architecture. A champion of the American Gothic Revival movement, Cram believed the Gothic style best reflected the spiritual and community ideals of late 19th- to early 20th-century American schools and colleges.

Cram, born a few miles from the Academy in Hampton Falls, attended Exeter briefly, then left before graduation to start an apprenticeship with the Boston architectural firm Rotch & Tilden. A profound religious awakening on Christmas Eve 1887, during a trip to Rome, may have inspired his preference for Gothic design. Still in business today, Cram’s architectural firm, Cram & Ferguson, has designed 19 Academy buildings, including Phillips Church and the current Academy Building.

Davis Hall has always been a wonderful place for students to study and relax.

Cram’s design for the Davis Library was a departure from his more famous work, like the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. Davis was inspired by the 18th-century Merley House in Dorset, England. With origins in British architecture, the Neoclassical style was considered orderly and refined, a perfect context for building that represented classical learning.

Unlike any other secondary school library of its time, the 14,000-square-foot Davis Library was designed to hold 5,000 books in four floors of stacks. Classroom space on the first floor included an art studio, and the second-floor library featured a large librarian’s desk at the top of a marble staircase. The Mary Rawson Amen Room, named for the principal’s wife, Mary, contained books and display cases for rare collections on two levels connected by a spiral staircase. At the time, The Exeter Bulletin hailed the building’s exquisite beauty, noting, “it will lack no convenience for the safekeeping and use of its books and other treasures.”

Davis Library was a popular student retreat. Fred Roe ’39 remembered it as the place where he could indulge in his lifelong fascination with cars — a highlight of his years at Exeter. “Miss Vroom, the librarian, ordered at least two foreign books on automotive history for me,” he wrote in a letter published in the spring 2008 Bulletin. “I tried to spend time at Davis every day.”

In the same Bulletin issue, John C. Stone II ’49 credits the library with helping shape his love of hiking and camping. “When I arrived as a prep, I discovered the mountaineering collection and devoured it,” he wrote. “It really ignited a latent passion” for the outdoors.

Rodney Armstrong ’68 (Hon.), who served as librarian from 1950–73, wrote in the winter 2006 Bulletin that he remembered Davis “as a very welcoming, pleasant building to be in. Whether it was very functional as a library … was another matter.”

The Davis Library collection expanded over the decades, so Exeter planned a larger building. The Class of 1945 Library, designed by Louis Kahn, opened in 1971. Moving 60,000 books out of Davis was a campuswide affair. Students, including Judith Hall Howard ’73, gathered with faculty to form a human chain passing books from Davis to the new library. “Box by box we passed the contents of the Davis Library from one set of student hands to the next,” Howard recalled in the spring 2008 Bulletin.

The Davis Student Center

When the new library opened, Davis Library evolved into the Davis Student Center, a space for all types of student activities and clubs. The Mary Rawson Amen Room, known simply as the Amen Room, remained a place for quiet study. Principal Bill Rawson ’71, who remembers writing history papers there, notes another attractive feature: comfortable leather chairs. “Most honest students would admit to falling asleep in Amen,” he says. “The chairs were almost designed for sleep.”

In a throwback of sorts to Davis’ literary history, PEAN, The Exonian and Academy Publications were housed in offices on the first floor, where book stacks once stood. The first-floor Cushwa Room was converted into a room for video games and pinball machines. After the games were moved to the basement, the room was divided into a student lounge and a TV room. A member of the Student Center Student-Faculty Committee at the time told The Exonian, “Though students feel that some place is needed for more private encounters between students … some have complained that this scheme seems unnatural.”

The Davis Student Center days were filled with student activities.

Clubs met in the second-floor reading room, and students could prepare dinner in the first-floor kitchen or use the three photography darkrooms in the basement. For 15 years, WPEA broadcast from a basement studio in Davis, with a brief off-the-air interlude after thieves stole the station’s broadcasting equipment in 1991. Later, the building became a home base for prep and lower day students.

In 2006, when the Phelps Academy Center opened, Davis was repurposed again. The Admissions and Financial Aid offices moved into the first floor. The Amen Room housed a student lending library. The large reading room was transformed into a studio for the Theater and Dance Department with new sprung floors and floor-to-ceiling mirrors that covered the large windows.

“It was loud, but it brought students in and out of the space regularly,” says Dean of Enrollment John Hutchins, who worked in the building at the time. The dance studio moved when The David E. and Stacey L. Goel Center for Theater and Dance opened in 2018. “We missed the interaction when students weren’t there,” Hutchins says.

Davis Hall

Exeter’s Campus Master Plan, developed in 2019–20, called for renovating Davis for administrative offices. Instead, Principal Rawson suggested preserving Davis for aca-demic use by relocating the Classical Languages Department to the ﬁrst ﬂoor while returning the second ﬂoor to study and community gathering spaces. “The Classics were so important to the founding of the Academy,” Taylor, the campus planner, says. “With its beautiful architecture, it makes so much sense for the Classics Department to be in Davis.”

The renovations were made possible, in part, through The Allison S. and Lucile M. Behr Fund, established by the late Charles Allison Behr ’52 to support “the study of the Ancient Greek and Latin languages, culture and history.”

The newly renamed Davis Hall balances old and new. The ﬁrst ﬂoor holds four Harkness classrooms and new instructors’ offices. One classroom is carved from space that used to be book stacks. Several retain their original oak floors. Display cases for department collections line one wall of the main hallway, facing the original 1911 bronze plaque commemorating Benjamin Price Davis, which hangs in a niche above a seating area.

The Mary Rawson Reading Room (left) will serve as a quiet place for study and repose. The grand marble staircase to the century-old build (above) was preserved.

The librarian’s desk is long gone from the top of the marble staircase, but the ornate gold clock, a gift from the class of 1912, remains. Visitors still pass through Corinthian columns into the second-ﬂoor reading room, although the dance studio’s sprung ﬂoors have been removed, revealing the original hardwood under-neath. The light and airy space is now named the Mary Homeier Rawson Reading Room in honor of Principal Rawson’s late wife, a talented teacher and former Exeter Summer instructor. Students use the wood-paneled space for quiet study and reading, or furnishings can be rearranged for community events. “The room brings together students of the Classics and academics from around campus to study,” Jinmin Lee ’26 says. “It’s the place to study on campus now.”

The Mary Amen Study, formerly the Mary Rawson Amen Room, with its spectacular circular staircase, floor-to-ceiling bookcases and mezzanine, now serves as the Latin Study. The Kirtland Society, Exeter’s Classics Club, hosts meetings and gatherings there as well. “I appreciate having that room for Kirtland Society meetings,” Lee says. “We use the second floor for orations and speeches.”

Assistant Principal Eimer Page, who was involved in the decision-making about the space, points out: “It’s an odd turn of fate that Principal Amen’s spouse and Principal Rawson’s spouse shared such similar names — with one Mary having the name Rawson by birth and the other acquiring it by marriage — but the values and contemplative spirit of each woman live on in this place of such beauty and calm.”

The beauty and majesty of the space are inspirational. The students can’t believe their luck.

Sally Morris, chair of the Classical Languages Department

Page also notes that Principal Lewis Perry’s wife, Margaret Hubbell Perry, is honored in the reading room as well, with furnishings given in her name by the class of 1929. “It’s interesting that the second floor of Davis was perceived as the ideal location to honor the foundational support of our principals’ life partners,” Page says. “The room holds that legacy with a gentle touch.”

Davis has also been modernized with new building systems, including HVAC equipment that relies on geothermal heating and cooling. Audiovisual and technology upgrades support modern learning. Space once occupied by book stacks has been reconfigured to accommodate a new stairwell and elevator, making the second floor fully accessible.

Instructors and students are struck by Davis Hall’s transformation and excited by its potential. “To me, it’s similar to the ancient Great Library of Alexandria where people came together and shared ideas,” Lee says. “It’s an interdisciplinary hub of learning.”

Classical Languages Department Chair Sally Morris says: “The beauty and majesty of the space are inspirational. The students can’t believe their luck. They’re close to the gym and dining hall. It feels like an oasis.”

Davis Hall has come full circle, becoming an intellectual center once again. Morris says: “When the classroom doors are propped open, you can hear teachers teaching, you can hear the conversations, the competitions … the sounds of an intellectual community working together. We feel very lucky.”

Debbie Kane is a longtime contributor to the Bulletin. Her work also appears in UNH Magazine, New Hampshire Home and Forum, the publication of the American Institute of Architects New Hampshire.

The story was originally published in the fall 2025 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.

Field, House

English Instructor Erica Plouffe Lazure tracks the morning light in Thompson Field House.

The beams from the east arrive most mornings at Thompson Field House, carving light and shadow into secret, fleeting architecture. As the “giver of all presences,” the interplay of light begins just after sunup, when the long column windows facing the fields refract into golden portal doors that span the court’s fish-net scrim, landing finally in translucence along the gymnasium’s tall “EXETER” wall.

Here, beyond the more constant, girder logic of physics, the fact of gravity, and the function of cement and stone, lies another gift, one that the architects must have anticipated, as they accounted for the layers of purpose in this space: one that marks the morning’s natural arc of time and path, pattern and pace, light and shadow.

And on this one morning, it’s just past six, and soon the overhead fluorescence will cast its film onto the quiet, constant geometry of the crimson track that measures pace in meters. By then, the sun will have landed its golden gaze elsewhere and the space will teem with relay runners and catchers, rowers and cross-train-ers, dashers and hurdlers. Later it will lure Academy families with wobbling tots drawn to the long-jump sand pit, to the stretch of red that lets them run and run and run until naptime, until the big kids come for their splits and drills.

But now, in the morning quiet, a solitary runner lopes along the ovular path, observing the cathedral-height walls, the exposed rafters and impossibly gleaming windows, the pairs of slanted support beams that offer the unmistakable mark of masons: the sacred tools of learning and precision. And then she spots a neon ball beneath a bleacher, a spin-dly shadow cast by a pair of chairs near the tennis court. She notices how each edge of sand in the jump pit ripples liquid-like in shadow, how the layers of netted scrim lend an echo to a Louise Bourgeois creation. There’s possibility in this space. And then, as the last compass and ruler are everywhere, in fast-fading scalene crosshatch of morning light sprawls a butterscotch pattern across the tennis court, evidence of and oblong, as the shadow and light fade, inevitably, into one.

Erica Plouffe Lazure came to Exeter as the Bennett Fellow in 2009 and has taught English at the Academy since 2010. She is the author of a short story collection, Proof of Me and Other Stories. Her faculty reflection was originally published in the fall 2025 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.

Exonians in Review: Fall 2025

The latest publications, recordings, exhibitions and films by Exeter alumni and faculty.

Power Unleashed: Trailblazers Who Energised Engines with Supercharging and Turbocharging
Karl Ludvigsen ’52, Evro Publishing Limited, 2025

Old-Time Kentucky Farmsteading, Ways and Means: From the Journals of Herbert Lee Clark
Lou DeLuca ’53, editor Acclaim Press, 2024

Portraits in a Nutshell: The Art and History of Coquilla Nut Snuff Boxes and Bottles
David Badger ’54 with Donna S. Sanzone, Matthew Francis Rarey and Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Brandeis University Press, 2025

Rethinking American Art: Collectors, Critics, and the Changing Canon
Theodore E. Stebbins Jr. ’56, David R. Godine, 2025

The Killing Season: The Autumn of 1914, Ypres, and the Afternoon That Cost Germany a War
Robert Cowley ’52, Random House, 2025

Hijacked: Our Republic, Unless We Can Save It
Peter Calfee ’69, with J. Kevin Dolan, Polinomics Press, 2025

The Friends and Family Guide to the Opioid Epidemic: Including How to Recognize and Treat an Overdose
Peter Canning ’76, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025

William Dieterle: A Forgotten Giant (The Hollywood Films: 1931–57)
Tommy Krasker ’77, self-published, 2025

The Belgian Friendship Building: From the New York World’s Fair to a Virginia HBCU
Kathleen James-Chakraborty ’78, with Katherine M. Kuenzli and Bryan Clark Green, University of Virginia Press, 2025

“What I Learned From Hiring Hundreds of Inmates,” speech
Margo Walsh ’82 TEDxPortsmouth, July 2025

Processing: 21 Days with God to Make it Make Sense
Anthony L. Riley ’04, self-published, 2025

Hourly: Empowering the Invisible Workforce for Shared Success
AJ Richichi ’13, Forbes Books, 2024

FACULTY

“The Reading Life: You’re Going to Hear the Pages Turn” essay
Willie Perdomo, Instructor in English, The Common, August 14, 2025

BENNETT FELLOW

“Echoes from the Copper Canyon”
Tim Norris, Woodbridge Publishers, 2025

Submit your work
Alumni are encouraged to advise the Bulletin editor (bulletin@exeter.edu) of their own publications, recordings, films, etc., and those of their classmates, for inclusion in future Exonians in Review columns.

Summer, when the stars come out

Exeter Summer program boasts faculty filled with passion and real-world experience.

Every summer, Exeter’s classrooms are guided by a roster without rival: veteran educators who can’t resist a return year after year, Academy instructors who bring the Harkness spirit into July, and professionals from beyond campus who step out of their real worlds to step into ours.

Together, they contribute to the dynamic mix that makes Exeter Summer unforgettable. We spoke with three Exeter Summer instructors: a familiar face who’s been returning for decades, an Academy faculty member who brings her regular-session expertise into summer, and a professional who presses pause on his career to join the classroom. Their stories show just how many paths can lead to Exeter — and how each teacher adds something special to the program.

Dennis Murphy: Long may you run

The French Alps and the New Hampshire seacoast share little in common; perhaps only Dennis Murphy, a native to neither region who nonetheless calls each home. A full-time resident of Chamonix, Murphy has spent his last 46 summers living and teaching in Exeter, as reliable a campus sight in July as the belltower.

Murphy was born and raised on Massachusetts’ North Shore and matriculated at Andover, then Dartmouth, honing his hockey prowess at both schools while earning a history degree. Invited to attend rookie camp with the NHL’s Chicago Blackhawks, Murphy instead went abroad. He signed an eight-month contract to play professional hockey in Denmark in 1980.

So began an annual migration that has spanned decades. Each winter, Murphy would play hockey in Europe — after Denmark came France. Each summer, he would return to New England — more specifically Exeter — where he originally signed on to work a hockey camp run by longtime Exeter coach Bill Dennehy.

“He said, ‘OK, how many?’ Because it was a two-week session, times four, so it was eight weeks,” recalls Murphy. “And I said, ‘How many what?’ And he said, ‘How many weeks.’ So, I said, ‘Well, I’d like to do all eight if that’s possible.’”

For a young hockey player subsisting on a series of eight-month contracts, it was a sweet gig.

“I came in for the summer, we would coach, then we’d play tennis. We had free golf at the Portsmouth Country Club. That was part of the deal.

“And we got to skate. We had the key to the rink. So, we’d put the [campers] to bed, and then we’d go back to the rink and skate at night.”

As they get on, they don't want to leave. … It's incredible how close they become.

Dennis Murphy

Murphy’s intercontinental existence evolved on both sides of the Atlantic. Coaching followed his playing days, all in his adopted France, where he earned master’s degrees in French and English. He taught English at the University of Grenoble from 2008 until his recent retirement.

His role at Exeter evolved, as well. The sports programs were absorbed into Exeter Summer programming, and Murphy came along, too. He has taught languages, history and physical education during the five-week session through the years. He recently wrapped up a summer session coaching cross-country running and Ultimate and serving as a dorm head.

“The kids are excellent,” he says. “It’s five weeks. It’s a concentrated experience. They come in; there’s fear. They’re shy. Then you can see everything just becomes a melting pot. As they get on, they don’t want to leave. Even the boys will start crying at the end of the last week and they’ll hug. It’s incredible how close they become.”

Murphy turns 69 in June, but his summer sojourns will continue. He learned recently that Ralph Blumenthal taught journalism in the Exeter Summer program into his 80s.

“He worked until he was 82,” Murphy says. “I want to beat him by a year.”

Susan Park: At home in the classroom

Susan Park teaches four classes of chemistry, five days a week through three terms of Exeter’s regular session. You can see how she’d want to reset over summer break.

So, she teaches biology.

“I’ve been doing summer gardening and there’s really only so long you can be pulling weeds in the sun,” Park jokes.

It’s more than air conditioning that keeps Park in the classroom. She arrived at Exeter in 2021 after a 10-year hitch at Hotchkiss School, where she regularly pulled summer duty. She also has taught high school summer programs at Harvard, Cal-Berkeley and Northwestern.

“I think it’s a great opportunity, especially for students who want to invest themselves in things that just come naturally to them,” she says. Park also appreciates the freedom of the Exeter Summer curriculum that allows students to explore topics that interest them without the pressure of trying to achieve a grade. “It allows students to test their ideas and not hesitate.”

We're developing their talents, getting them interested, developing their passions. It's all there.

Susan Park

She’s in good company among her colleagues: Of Exeter Summer’s 120 teachers, roughly half are regular-session teachers.

“What I find that is neat about summer programs is that you learn how different school systems, even different countries, approach learning. And you see that there’s a lot of overlap.”

Park has spent a lifetime learning. She has a bachelor’s in science from MIT and a doctorate in philosophy from Northwestern. Whether its chemistry in the regular session or biology in the summer, she finds the students share a deep interest in discovery.

“The kids are still very inquisitive,” she says of the Exeter Summer enrollees in comparison to the regular-session students. “They want to figure out how things work. I think it’s very similar in that we’re developing their talents, getting them interested, developing their passions. It’s all there.”

Brian Murphy: Tapping into the creative side

The narrow design space on the top floor of Mayer Art Building can feel close on hot days, but the Upper School students in Brian Murphy’s Architectural Design Process class don’t seem to notice or mind. They are immersed in a project to design their own studios, and Murphy bounces from one table to the next to inspect their progress.

He’s moonlighting. His day job is with Placework, a Portsmouth design firm he and his wife founded in 2010. He began teaching at Exeter Summer in 2023.

“I have a really great team and a really great partner, and it allows me some flexibility,” Murphy says after his students wrap up for the day. “I’m on my way back to Portsmouth now to catch up with my other job.

“That’s something I happen to share with students here: that the work is never done. If you’re tapping into your creative self, you’re always thinking there’s always more to do.”

Murphy recalls one of his own instructors in high school asking him to consider teaching as a career, a suggestion that seemed dubious to him at the time. But today he teaches an introductory architecture course at the University of New Hampshire along with his five-week stint at Exeter Summer. He also has worked with area middle and high school students on projects centered around climate education.

Being creative and being passionate and being compelled to do the work, I think that that rests within most human beings if you tap it the right way.

Brian Murphy

Murphy says he gets as much as he gives in the classroom. “That’s part of the reason why I’m doing this. I can help kids by sharing my experience and the things that I’ve learned, but I’m here to learn more. I’m here to learn how people work together. I’m here to learn what is important to people in their sense of place. I work with adults all the time in contracted projects, and I feel there’s a lot to learn there. But here in this environment, there’s so much to learn from the adolescent mind and where they are in development and the way that they can tap or maybe inadvertently share what they’re feeling or what their way of knowing is.”

He has found Exeter Summer students as typical teens in many ways but with a spark to be kindled.

“I’ve worked with a lot of different kids, and these are definitely normal kids, but there’s something else,” he says. “I think that the thing that compels them to come to a program like this speaks to some other dimension that any human being has. … Being creative and being passionate and being compelled to do the work, I think that that rests within most human beings if you tap it the right way.”

Ambassador extols the art of empathy

Former U.S. Senator Jeff Flake urges Exonians to embrace their lessons of listening to understand.

Jeff Flake has arm-twisted congressmen and senators and earned the gratitude and admiration of presidents on two continents. He’s even been knighted by the king of Sweden.

But when the former politician and diplomat spoke to the Exeter community Monday, he drew upon the words and wisdom of prominent Exonians to underscore his messages of empathy and unity.

“A wise man, your principal, gave an address just a few weeks ago,” Flake said of Principal Bill Rawson’s Opening Assembly speech. “He said ‘empathy enables us to see ourselves and others as learners. It helps us learn to be comfortable having our thoughts and ideas tested by others whose ideas, perspectives, experiences or identities are different from our own.’”

Flake delivered his remarks Monday during Exeter’s all-school assembly, temporarily homed in Love Gym during the Academy Building’s renovation. The six-term congressman and former U.S. Senator from Arizona also served as U.S. Ambassador to Turkey in the Biden Administration. His assembly was titled “The Art of Negotiation,” and his message was shaped by growing up in a large family that taught him “a lot about getting along” and a political career spent reaching across the aisle.

Flake said the lessons Exeter students are learning around the Harkness table about listening with empathy will serve them well.

“The experiences that you have in this institution, and the skills you develop in this environment, will largely determine how you live in this political world,” he said.

“Some people try to disengage and get off social media. That’s difficult. I would encourage you to use it in positive ways. Compliment a politician when he or she does the right thing. Be understanding when somebody as an opinion different than yours. Learn the skills that are necessary to go through life being able to lower the political volume and do better as a country and as a people.”

Flake closed his visit by citing the words of another Exonian, Daniel Webster, class of 1796, that made the Massachusetts senator a national figure.

“’Liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable,’” Flake said.

“I hope that we can all be that way.”

Principal Rawson rings in the school’s 245th year — and his last at the Academy.

A buzz filled Love Gymnasium on Friday as Principal Bill Rawson ’71; ’65, ’70 (Hon.); P’08 welcomed students, faculty, staff and emeriti to the Opening Assembly of Exeter’s 245th school year. Students rose to their feet and applauded as the faculty proceeded into the gymnasium to start the ceremony, followed by a line of students bearing flags from the 40 countries represented in Exeter’s student body.

Assistant Principal Eimer Page, Dean of Faculty Meg Foley and Dean of Students Ashley Taylor joined the principal onstage for the assembly. Foley introduced this year’s new faculty members and the five longest-serving faculty members, while Page honored some of the Academy’s distinguished emeriti faculty, all of whom stood to be recognized by the audience.

Principal Bill Rawson ’71; ’65, ’70 (Hon.); P’08 encouraged the Academy to lead with empathy throughout the school year. Rawson, retiring at year’s end, delivered his final Opening Assembly address as principal.

Rawson began his remarks by welcoming this year’s 336 new students, who hail from 36 states and 26 countries. He offered students his now-familiar advice for both new and returning students, which he said he himself would have appreciated hearing when he arrived at the Academy as a new lower: “You can do the work. You will make lifelong friends. Absolutely, you belong here.”

I hope you embrace what you find hard, expand your reach, and find joy in your personal growth and development.

Principal Rawson

This Opening Assembly marked Rawson’s last as principal, as he announced in February that he would be retiring at the end of the 2025-26 school year. He was appointed Exeter’s 16th principal in January 2019 after six months of leadership as interim principal, following a long career at the international law firm of Latham & Watkins in Washington, D.C. As an Exeter alum, Rawson has served in nearly every alumni volunteer capacity, including serving as a trustee from 2004 to 2016. Before beginning his law career, he also worked as an admissions officer at the Academy, where he lived on campus, advised students and coached lacrosse.

Changes on campus

“Each year at Exeter is a little different,” Rawson said, addressing the fact that the assembly was held in Love Gymnasium due to the ongoing renewal of the Academy Building and Assembly Hall, which began at the conclusion of last school year. Rawson went on to outline some of the other adjustments that have been made to class schedules and locations due to the renovation.

“Your patience will be rewarded with a beautifully restored Academy Building, a new Assembly Hall that will seat more than 1,300, a new design lab — and, importantly, air conditioning,” he said, to a hearty round of applause from the audience.

The new school year also marks the opening of the renovated Davis Hall, built in 1911 and formerly used as a library and a student center. The building, adjacent to the Class of 1945 Library and Elm Street Dining Hall, is the new home of the Classical Languages Department, but it also houses a spacious reading room and smaller meeting room that are open to all students. “You don’t have to study Latin or Greek to go into this building,” Rawson stressed.

Core values and the year ahead

As is customary in Opening Assembly, Rawson reflected on the school’s Deed of Gift, and the core values that can be traced to that founding document: knowledge and goodness, academic excellence, youth from every quarter, non sibi and “youth is the important period.”

Empathy enables us to see ourselves and others as learners. It helps us learn to be comfortable having our thoughts and ideas tested by others whose ideas, perspectives, experiences or identities are different from our own.

Principal Rawson

“I want you to aim high, have fun, and find joy in everything you do,” Rawson urged the students. “I hope you embrace what you find hard, expand your reach, and find joy in your personal growth and development.”

The principal also encouraged students to focus on empathy, which he said was the key to deep learning, effective leadership and meaningful contributions to the lives of others. “Empathy enables us to see ourselves and others as learners,” Rawson said. “It helps us learn to be comfortable having our thoughts and ideas tested by others whose ideas, perspectives, experiences or identities are different from our own.”

“As most of you know, this will be my last year as principal,” Rawson said near the end of his remarks. “Like our seniors, I will be doing a lot of things for the last time this year, including this Opening Assembly. I am sure there will be some wistful moments, but I am very excited about this year and anxious to get started.”

After Rawson issued the traditional closing — “Senior class” — the rest of the audience waited as members of the Class of 2026 rose from their seats and filed out of the gymnasium.

Read the remarks

For the record: Beatlemania sweeps through Exeter

Eric Schultz brings the 'Fab Four' to life in studying the history of pop music.

Late in the spring term, students trickling into the round room on the second floor of the Forrestal-Bowld Music Center are greeted by the sounds of side one of the Beatles’ Revolver. The iconic album, the group’s seventh full-length release, is the focus of the period’s discussion in MUS202: History of American Popular Music.

Manning the turntable, Instructor in Music Eric Schultz lifts needle from vinyl as the class reaches critical mass. This is the second of two periods devoted to the biggest act in pop music history and, more specifically, the album that cemented the change of the band’s image from boy-next-door pop stars to long-haired psychedelic pioneers.

This senior-level course explores trends in popular music in the United States and how that music reflects the cultural and political landscape in which it was made. Students are graded on “needle-drop quizzes” in which a song from a previously discussed album is played and they must name the artist, title and the year it was released. Schultz says he has been teaching some version of this class for more than two decades. The class syllabus covers a period of nearly 100 years, and he laments being able to give the Beatles only two days of conversation, noting that the University of Liverpool offers a master’s degree program on the so-called Fab Four.

Throughout the period, Schultz weaves in the historical context of Beatlemania and the immeasurable influence on not only pop music, but also the fabric of Western culture. He cues up archival footage of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr arriving in the U.S. for the first time, landing at New York’s newly named John F. Kennedy International Airport in February 1964, greeted by thousands of frenzied fans.

“What was the major event in U.S. history that happened before this that had a real impact on people?” Schultz asks.

“J.F.K. gets assassinated,” Dhruv Nagarajan ’25 quickly responds.

“November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy, a very popular president, assassinated in front of onlookers in Dallas,” Schultz continues. “So, then trauma, drama, bad vibes. Then Christmas. Then the new year. Then the winter. People want to be happy and the country is sick of not being happy, and then these guys show up. Look at these guys: matching haircuts, matching suits, all designed to make your dad want to hang out with them. And — it worked.”

Schultz chronicles two other important Beatles-centric cultural waypoints: the group’s first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show — estimated to have been watched live by half the country — and their chance encounter with Bob Dylan in a New York City hotel.

“We’ve talked about the drug culture of the ’60s,” Schultz says, “and this is where we really start to see that come to the fore, because Bob Dylan shows up and gives the Beatles their first marijuana joint.”

Eric Schultz deconstructs the allure of The Beatles during a meeting of his senior elective, MUS202: History of American Popular Music.

Schultz plays The Ed Sullivan Show performance as heads around the Harkness table begin to bob and feet begin to tap to the beat of “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” “This is 1964,” he says. “There are no hallucinogens involved in this. This is clean as a whisper.”

“The biggest change happens between these two albums,” Schultz says, motioning between projections of 1965’s Rubber Soul and 1966’s Revolver.

“The song ‘Yellow Submarine’ is on Revolver; you should know that yellow submarine is street slang for a type of illegal drug in London — think of the shape of a pill,” Schultz says to stunned students.

“My kindergarten class sang that song,” one replies.

Schultz goes on to explain that the change in style wasn’t the only massive shift in the band’s output. As the complexity of their sound continued to expand with the 1967 release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the group had not played a concert for nearly a year and would play live only once more — in 1969 on the rooftop of their recording studio in London.

“The Beatles spent eight hours recording their first album. They spent 900 hours in the studio for this one,” Schultz says, holding up a copy of Sgt. Pepper’s. “This is them saying: ‘We’re not doing live music anymore. We’re only going to make albums in the studio. And that way, we don’t have to worry about whether or not we can play it live.’”

With the final minutes of class dwindling, Schultz races through the band’s final albums and slow unraveling, again lamenting, “There’s never enough time to talk about the Beatles.”

This story was originally published in the Summer 2025 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.

Sarah Varney ’91: Reporter at large

Sarah Varney ’91 tells stories at the intersection of law and women’s health.

As a youth in the early 1980s, Sarah Varney ’91 spent hours lying on her liv-ing room floor, listening to New Hampshire Public Radio. Radio was the sole entertainment at home and, unlike most contemporary media, it featured women’s voices: Linda Wertheimer, Susan Stamberg and eventually Nina Totenberg, “the founding grandmothers of NPR,” she says.

“It wasn’t just that I was hearing their voices,” she says of NPR’s women. “It was that the stories they were interested in were totally different than the stories men were interested in.

… I didn’t know exactly what a journalist was. But whatever it was they were doing, that’s what I wanted to do.”

After studying public policy and political science at Brown, she covered news and health for public radio, ultimately becoming a special health care correspondent for PBS NewsHour and a contributing health reporter for NPR. Collectively, her reportage covers modern American medical history, including the HIV and opioid epidemics and the Affordable Care Act.

… I didn’t know exactly what a journalist was. But whatever it was they were doing, that’s what I wanted to do.

Susan Varney '91 on listening to women journalists on NPR as a child.

Her pieces put personal narratives within a larger context, taking into account the broader chessboard at play. “We’re taking on these big ideas,” she says, “then rooting them in actual day-to-day stories.”

For one segment, she interviewed a woman who, prevented by Tennessee law from ending her pregnancy, delivered an infant with organs outside the body. It was a profoundly poignant tale. “Even for people opposed to abortion, I think hearing this woman’s story couldn’t not be moving,” Varney says.

At the same time, the story highlighted the intersection of state law and women’s health. “We talk about abortion bans in the abstract,” Varney says. “I’m in the field trying to find real people impacted by these policies.” Because some 2 mil-lion viewers watch NewsHour nightly, including members of Congress and Supreme Court justices, she can “share these stories with people who make really important decisions.”

Varney sees her role as a “collector of stories,” entrusted with people’s experiences at moments of extreme vulnerability. “I think human beings are inherently wired to want to listen,” she says. “Hearing people’s stories and why they make the decisions they make, or believe what they believe, then sharing these stories with [others] is extremely important. It’s how we’re connected as human beings, through storytelling.”

Reporters must also ask difficult questions. For one piece, Varney interviewed an influential anti-abortion activist who didn’t want to discuss her opposition to contraception. “That’s why it’s even more important,” Varney says, “to have a journalist sit down and say: ‘Your logic is that if a form of contraception prevents a fertilized egg from possibly implanting in the uterus, that’s an abortion. Under Texas law, that makes any form of birth control an abortifacient. Is that true?’ It’s up to them to say, ‘Yes, that’s my logic.’ I think the reason journalists are really important at this moment is we’re not activists.”

Last year, after completing a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, Varney created Fountain Productions, a nonprofit dedicated to independent journalism on the consequences of the 2022 Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade. Roe v. Wade established the constitutional right to abortion in 1973.

“There’s been a lot of great journalism about the seismic shift in reproductive rights in American life in print and radio, but [no] consistent place to do this on television,” she says. She and her small team produce NewsHour segments and are creating two podcasts, Caged: The Origins of Patriarchy and Body and State, based on NewsHour interviews.

Varney is also gathering stories of women affected by abortion bans into a multimedia repository that will be available to news organizations. “You’ll have extraordinary reporting done about one person in Texas, then another powerful story about one person in Tennessee,” she says. “How do you start to pull them together?”

Her work may help to inspire the next generation of reporters covering women’s health.

This story was originally published in the Summer 2025 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.

The Art of Engineering

Ideas take shape at Exeter's annual MakerFest Showcase.

The MakerFest Showcase at the Lamont Gallery this spring featured work by the Academy community made in the Design Lab using precision tools often controlled by computers.

The exhibition, supported in part by the Lynda K. Beck Design Thinking Fund, “seeks to highlight creative problem-solving and methods of making that intertwine research, education and innovation with engineering, design and manufacturing,” Design Lab Coordinator and Instructor in Computer Science Sean Campbell writes in the exhibit’s catalog.

“These creative endeavors, while perhaps not immediately celebrated as modes of art-making or creative expression, reveal themselves to be tools and/or explora-tions of topical themes that identify the potential for innovation and solutions that can spark social impact.”

Patrick Garrity

What’s all the buzz about?

Live crickets, leaf-cutter ants and robotic bees swarm the Lamont Gallery.

Preserved in stone,

reimagined in spirit