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Light reading

Measuring just 5 millimeters by 7 millimeters and weighing less than a gram, The Rose Garden of Omar Khayyam (pictured above) is the smallest book in the Class of 1945 Library’s vast collection. The volume’s crimson leather covers hold quatrains of lyric poetry about love, death and the afterlife — legible only with a magnifying glass. The book’s introduction states that the entire Rose Garden “could be covered by an ordinary U.S. postage stamp twice over.”

The hand-bound treasure was printed by Commonwealth Press in Worcester, Massachusetts. It was given to Exeter in 1936 by Frederick Vroom, brother of Davis Library Librarian Mildred Vroom. The Center for Archives and Special Collections currently houses 17 tiny books, including The Declaration of Independence, Paul Revere’s Ride: A Deposition and Henry David Thoreau’s Wild Apples: History of the Apple Tree.  

This story was originally published in the Spring 2023 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.

Exeter Deconstructed: The Davis Library

Everything old is new again, or so they say, which is particularly useful at a school celebrating 243 years. The expression is apt for the venerable Davis Library building, which is getting a renewed purpose in its second century.

Once a library, then a student center, then PEA Dance’s makeshift studio and finally office space for Admissions, the building is poised to become home to the Department of Classical Languages. Plans include four classrooms on the first floor and renovations to second-floor spaces to create a new Latin Study and a versatile hall for a variety of school functions.

Davis Library opened in 1912. It is named for Benjamin P. Davis, a member of the class of 1863 who bequeathed $50,000 to the school to fund a library. For 60 years, the building served as intended before yielding in 1971 to the much larger Class of 1945 Library erected beside it.

The space soon found a second life as the Davis Student Center, home to The Exonian, WPEA and clubs of every order. When the old Thompson Science Building was renovated in 2005 to become what today is the Elizabeth Phillips Academy Center, Davis was again without a tenant.

Admissions’ financial aid operations moved into the first floor, and in 2009, the former reading room on the second floor was converted into a dance studio. The dancers moved out in 2018 with the arrival of The David E. and Stacey L. Goel Center for Theater and Dance. Admissions found other accommodations. That left 7,000 square feet of brick and marble awaiting their next chapter.

Work on that new chapter is scheduled to commence in August 2024.

This story was originally published in the Spring 2023 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.

Exonians in review: Spring 2023

Alumni are encouraged to advise the Bulletin editor (bulletin@exeter.edu) of their own publications, recordings, films, etc., in any field, and those of their classmates, for inclusion in future Exonians in Review columns. Please send a review copy of your published work to the editor to be considered for an extended profile in future issues. Works can be sent to: Phillips Exeter Academy, The Exeter Bulletin, 20 Main Street, Exeter, NH 03833.

ALUMNI

1955—Charley Ellis. Figuring It Out: Sixty Years of Answering Investors’ Most Important Questions. (Wiley, 2022)

— Inside Vanguard: Leadership Secrets From the Company That Continues to Rewrite the Rules of the Investing Business. (McGrawHill, 2022)

1958—John Newton. An American in Revolutionary Iran. (Tasora Books, 2022)

1963—Dave Rice. Sequelae: Tanka Prose. (Just Keep Walking Press, 2023)

1964—Russell McGuirk, editor. The Moulids of Egypt: Egyptian Saint’s Day Festivals, by J.W. McPherson. (The University of Chicago Press, 2023)

1966—Peter Thompson. Bughouse Blues. (Running Wild Press, 2023)

1974—David Keppel. Creative Uncertainty: A New Philosophy for a World Out of Balance. (Bowker, 2021)

1975—John Montgomery, with Mark Van Clief. Net Zero Business Models: Winning in the Global Net Zero Economy. (Wiley, 2023)

1975—David Potter. Disruption: Why Things Change. (Oxford University Press, 2021)

1980—Elise Thoron, with Ibe Kyoko. The Way of Washi Tales. (The Legacy Press, 2023)

—Felon: An American Washi Tale, director. A solo show written by Reginald Dwayne Betts and performed March 2-4, 2023, at McCarter Theatre Center’s Berlind Theatre in Princeton, N.J.

1985—Lewis Flinn, composer and lyricist. Hood: The Robin Hood Musical Adventure, musical. (Asolo Repertory Theatre in Sarasota, Florida, 2022)

1992—Gigi Foster, with Sanjeev Sabhlok. Do lockdowns and border closures serve the “greater good”? A cost-benefit analysis of Australia’s reaction to COVID-19. (Connor Court Publishing Pty Ltd, 2022)

1995—Wil Seabrook, singer-songwriter. Believe, five-song EP. (streaming platforms, 2023)

1997—Susie Suh, singer-songwriter. Invisible Love, album. (Collective Records, 2021)

2001—David Cooper, with Lawrence Mishel. “America’s Vast Pay Inequality Is a Story of Unequal Power,” article. (American Bar Association Human Rights Magazine, Vol. 48, No. 2, January 2023)

2001—Emma Wynn. The World Is Our Anchor. (FutureCycle Press, 2023)

2017—Meghan Chou, writer. Autopsy of a Night at a Bar, play. Premiered at The Tank in New York in March 2023.

FACULTY

Todd Hearon, with Greg Brown ’93. “‘Caliban in After-Life’: Reimagining Shakespeare’s Monster in Music and Words,” article. (Literary Matters, Winter 2023)

 

This story was originally published in the Spring 2023 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.

Early Investments

Even before the class period has officially begun, the conversation around the Harkness table in ECO510: Macroeconomic Issues in the United States is well underway. A handful of students talk through the finer points of the previous night’s reading as their classmates trickle through the arched doorway of Academy Building room 029.

Sensing a potential starting point for the day’s discussion, History Instructor Aykut Kilinc interjects with precision, opening the topic to the now full table without disrupting momentum of the exchange. “For those that have just arrived, we are trying to remember the notion that expansionary fiscal policy increases interest rates, right?” Kilinc summarizes, while simultaneously teeing up an entry point for any takers.

Charles Holtz ’23 picks up the cue. “If expansionary fiscal policy drives up interest rates, then ‘crowding out’ occurs,” he says of the idea that government spending, funded by an increase in taxes, causes a decrease in private sector spending.

This senior-level course, one of three economics offerings at the Academy, explores macroeconomic theory on a national scale, examining the intertwined entities of the U.S. economy and its government. It seeks to help students answer questions like, “How does a nation’s economy grow?” and “Who sees the benefits of that growth?”

Students dig into the factors that led to economic crises throughout history, including the 2008 recession and the financial repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic, and how these events affect people across different racial, gender, generational and other segments of society. As the period progresses, the history and theories the students are discussing get increasingly current. Topics seemingly ripped from the headlines —rising inflation, the national unemployment rate, and the Federal Reserve’s decision to raise interest rates — fire up the conversation.

“How do banks determine their interest rate?” Kilinc asks. The material is dense and answers require a group effort. Students thumb through text pages and scroll Google search results. “It’s based on consumer behavior, GDP and the Federal Reserve,” Holtz and Daisy Newbury ’23 respond together.

Kilinc plays a short video that begins with a still frame of a numbers o staggering Newbury reads it aloud, twice: “21 trillion, 784 billion, 284 million, 284 thousand, 284 dollars.”

“This is the national debt,” the video’s voiceover says, going on to explain that because the government’s interest rate is relatively low, it can afford to continue to spend despite the increasing deficit — a tenet of Modern Monetary Theory.

Ale Murat ’23 points out a conflicting view from the reading. “The book says countries should only run a deficit on their national debt when there’s a recession or when there’s war or when there’s troubled times. But when it’s peacetimes where the countries are near full employment, then it shouldn’t create a deficit in this national debt,” she says. “Isn’t that what’s happening here? They don’t care how large the national debt gets, and they’re just playing on the fact that interest rates are low?”

“It’s almost like walking on a tightrope,” Kilinc acknowledges.

And with that, the period comes to an end, but the conversation continues as students step out of the classroom and into the Academy Building halls.

Editor’s note: This article first appeared in the spring 2023 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.

Finis Origine Pendet: Quiet Crossings

There’s a silence when we walk past each other now. It’s not a bad silence, I’d say. We see each other, we smile, we wave. He looks down at his phone and keeps walking, always on the way to something. Usually, I am too. When we cross paths, I ponder what his smile means.

Sometimes he’s easy to read, like when we made eye contact while I was walking with my friends from the dining hall, and he was walking towards us on the other side of the path. He was wearing a big fluffy brown Patagonia sweater, and he saw me, and he smiled really big, and he waved his arms back and forth so fast like pages of a book animation. It was so cute. He looked so cute. We didn’t say anything, but that day I felt he was so happy to see me and that made me feel so warm. I didn’t say anything back because I didn’t feel the need to. Does he know I was happy to see him? I hope he knows I’m always so happy to see him.

Sometimes I get nervous to say hi to him. Sometimes I want to tell him that his sweater is nice. Is that weird? Will he think I’m hitting on him? A lot of the time, he’s too far away for me to say something, but at what distance is he close enough? My mind is littered with thoughts that pile like crushed cans and plastic wrap thrown into a sea of doubt. Am I bothering him? Making him late? Does he still care anymore? Why is his smile less big? Often, I ponder what his smile means, and I remind myself that he is busy with things I know little to too much about and things I don’t know about and that I shouldn’t take his smile personally. I remember that I am so happy to see him, and I continue down the path. I wear a blushed smile.

Editor’s Note: This poem first appeared in the winter 2023 edition of Pendulum, Exeter’s literary arts journal.

Non sibi and the environment

Non sibi is at the core of everything we do at Exeter, including our long-standing commitment to sound environmental stewardship. With the publication of Exeter’s first comprehensive sustainability and climate action plan, which you will read about in this issue, we take an important step forward in realizing our vision for environmental stewardship, and in meeting our responsibilities to future generations of students and our planet.

Our plan recognizes that our greatest contributions to sustainability and addressing the climate crisis will be through educating our students and be future environmental leaders. We want every student to graduate from Exeter with a strong understanding of the principles of sustainability and the issues posed by climate change. In recent years, we have steadily grown our curricular offerings in the areas of sustainability and climate science, but we see opportunities to do more, including adding more academic offerings inside and outside the sciences, bringing more speakers to campus who are leaders in relevant fields, creating sustainability-related internship opportunities, and growing the number of global studies programs with an environmental focus.  

Our students seek these opportunities and stand ready to be full partners in this endeavor. Their enthusiasm builds on a long tradition of student-led environmental stewardship, going back to Gifford Pinchot, Exeter class of 1885, who spoke in assembly more than a century ago about the importance of conserving our natural resources. The first ecology club was formed, and first  ecology course taught, when I was a student more than 50 years ago. Student engagement has been strong ever since, and is strong today, as students take an active role in shaping their environmental education and activism.

The Academy’s Non Sibi Value Statement

“Non Sibi, or Not For Oneself, inscribed on Exeter’s seal, attests to the philosophy that wisdom gained here should be used for others as well as for oneself. Exonians are motivated by this philosophy to face the challenges of their day. Teaching and living the principles of a just and sustainable society — environmentally, economically and socially — are fundamental to this philosophy today. Exeter seeks to graduate young people whose ambitions and actions are inspired by their interest in others and the world around them.”

We also commit to managing our campus facilities responsibly, reducing our environmental impact, and minimizing our contributions to climate change. Our plan contains ambitious goals to reduce carbon emissions by 75 % by 2031 (we are close to 60% now) and achieve zero carbon emissions by 2050. And we commit to integrating principles of sustainability into all of Exeter’s programs and operations. This means fostering a culture of sustain-ability and environmental awareness in all facets of our daily lives — where we learn, where we work, where we live, and where we play. As a school, we are aiming high and acting ambitiously to meet the environmental challenges of our day.

It has been encouraging to hear from many of you who care deeply about the issues of climate change and sustainability. I know many of our alumni are leaders in the field in their own right, and are eager to help us in this work. I am grateful for all the ways our alumni have supported our efforts thus far; your continued support will be vital to the success of this plan. In my first-ever column in this magazine in 2018, I said that Exeter has never stayed strong by staying the same. With the adoption of our first comprehensive sustainability and climate action plan, we move forward with the challenging and vitally important work of strengthening our environmental stewardship as a school and preparing our students to be environmental leaders.   

 

This story was originally published in the Spring 2023 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.

The music of resistance

On a late afternoon in mid-January, The David E. and Stacey L. Goel Center for Theater and Dance is quiet as Anthony Davis ’69 gets his first look around the building, which opened in 2018.

Soft-spoken, with curly gray hair and wire-framed glasses, he smiles easily as he admires the lighting and flexible seating options in the intimate performance space known as the Actors Lab. Times have changed, Davis acknowledges, since he took to Exeter’s stage as a senior in a production of The Threepenny Opera. “I don’t even remember where we performed that,” he says.

A search of Exonian archives reveals the 1969 production was performed in the old Dramat House, a renovated parish building behind Dunbar Hall. When Fisher Theater, the Goel Center’s predecessor, opened in 1972, Dramat House was renamed 3-D Hall; it was used to house drama and art classes until it was torn down in the early 1980s. Davis can be forgiven for not keeping track of Academy renovations over the years. He made this trip — his first back to Exeter’s campus since he graduated nearly 54 years ago — to deliver the keynote address for the school’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day commemoration.

A celebrated jazz pianist and composer, Davis has taught music at the University of California San Diego since 1996. His distinctive fusion of traditional operatic forms with more modern genres — particularly jazz — and his willingness to confront political and societal issues in his work propelled him to new heights in 2020, when he won the Pulitzer Prize for music for The Central Park Five. This fall, a revamped version of his first major opera, X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, will premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

For the keynote, Davis addressed an all-school assembly in the Love Gym alongside his brother, Christopher “Kip” Davis ’71, a social researcher and educational reformer. The brothers talked about their formative experiences at Exeter and beyond, how they worked together on X and how the world, in the post-George Floyd era, is finally catching up to the composer’s trailblazing work.

“As artists, we can revisit and transform these stories and make these stories tell the stories we want to tell,” Davis told the students. “I think that’s what Martin Luther King envisioned for us, that we could have this potential to transform the world through our art, through our actions, through our activism.”

In eighth grade, Davis was one of a handful of Black students in his school in State College, Pennsylvania, where his father, Charles Davis, was an English professor at Penn State. He was passionately interested in history and politics at the time, and he was kicked out of his social studies class for questioning the definition of “communism” in the textbook.

We could have this potential to transform the world through our art.”
Anthony Davis ’69

Seeking a different learning experience, Davis applied to Exeter. He initially planned to matriculate as a lower but deferred his admission after his father won a Fulbright award to teach for a year in Italy. By the time he arrived at Exeter in the fall of 1967, Davis had fallen in love with jazz — particularly the work of Thelonius Monk — and had begun exploring his identity as a young Black man at a tumultuous time in the nation’s history. He remembers the school as a tight-knit community, where he made close friends in his dorm and had some great teachers, particularly in math and English.

“[Anthony] has always excelled academically, and he was really able to thrive at Exeter,” Christopher Davis remembers. Yet he also encountered prejudice. In one memorable example, Davis turned in a poem about the Acropolis, inspired by a visit to Greece during his father’s Fulbright year. His English teacher told him dismissively that he should write poems from his experience.

Davis continued to hone his musical identity at Exeter, expressing a passionate dislike for Brahms and challenging himself to improvise on the clarinet, saxophone and piano. By the time he graduated, he had begun pondering the possibilities of combining jazz and improvisation with the more formal structure of traditional opera — and the potential for music as an act of political resistance. “Music was so much a part of what I thought was the revolution,” he told the MLK Day audience. “The revolution that was coming.”

After his graduation from Yale University in 1975, Davis moved to New York City, where he spent time writing music for plays and choral poems by playwrights including

Ntozake Shange, author of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf, and his cousin Thulani Davis. “That was developing the idea of how words flow to music,” Davis says. “From there, it wasn’t that big a step to start setting words to music.”

In 1986, the New York City Opera premiered his first opera X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X, with a libretto written by Thulani Davis. “Anthony and I were both fans of John Coltrane, who underwent a whole spiritual journey that’s reflected in his music,” says Christopher Davis, a story writer for X. “That paralleled for us the spiritual journey of Malcolm X, including his conversion to Orthodox Islam and changing his name to Malik el-Shabazz.”

Davis’ subsequent operas drew on history as well, covering topics as diverse as the kidnaping of heiress Patricia Hearst (1992’s Tania), the historical mutiny of enslaved Africans aboard a slave ship (1997’s Amistad) and a Native American family in Nebraska (2007’s Wakonda’s Dream). In 2016, he began writing what would become The Central Park Five. With a libretto by Richard Wesley, the opera dramatizes the arrest, trial and imprisonment of five Black and Latino teenagers for the brutal rape and beating of a female jogger in New York City in 1989 —and their ultimate exoneration in 2002 based on DNA evidence and a confession by the culprit. After extensive revisions, The Central Park Five was performed in its entirety at the Long Beach Opera in 2019, receiving a glowing critical reception. Mark Swed, classical music critic for the Los Angeles Times, praised Davis’ “special blend of eloquence and unblinking righteousness.” Of the opera itself, Swed wrote: “He puts a good deal of what makes American music American in his score, particularly roiling jazz. The growling trombone and heckling trumpet could be characters themselves.”

The opera’s success— and particularly the announcement of Davis’ Pulitzer win in May 2020 — undoubtedly helped fuel interest in a revival of X, featuring a tightened structure with only one intermission. In the fall of 2021, the Metropolitan Opera announced that a new production of Davis’ first major work would debut on its stage on November 3, 2023. It will be only the second opera by a Black composer to be performed at the Met, after Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones, which opened in 2021.

Helmed by Tony-nominated director Robert O’Hara, the new production premiered in Detroit last May. A recording made a month later at a performance of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project was nominated for a Grammy Award.

Though Davis has been exploring themes of social injustice and resistance since the beginning of his music career — not to mention creating roles in operatic works for talented Black performers — he recognizes a shift in the past few years in the way his work has been received. He attributes this in part to George Floyd, a Black man who was killed publicly in police custody early in the COVID-19 pandemic, and the widespread movement for racial justice and equity his death sparked.

“There was a time when there was a real dichotomy between jazz and classical music,” Davis says. “That’s been changing for a number of years, but I think what’s happened in the last few years has challenged classical music to reposition itself. …I think it’s a sense of reevaluating what’s important, who it’s representing and what the future of classical music is going to be.”

“The audience is really responding to the music,” Davis says of the new production of X. “When we did it in 1986, I remember Thomas Young [the lyric tenor who starred in the original X] saying, ‘This is so far ahead of its time.’ But now, I think people have kind of caught up with us.”

 

This story was originally published in the Spring 2023 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.

Anthony Davis’ Revolutionary Playlist

Listen to the playlist at Spotify
 

We Insist!: Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite  
Max Roach featuring Abbey Lincoln 

“Alabama” 
John Coltrane

Black, Brown & Beige 
(The 1944-1946 Band Recordings)  
Duke Ellington and his Orchestra featuring Joya Sherrill

“A Tone Parallel to Harlem (Harlem Suite)” from Ellington Uptown (1951)  
Duke Ellington

“Praying With Eric (Meditations on Integration)” from Town Hall Concert, 1964  
Charles Mingus

A Love Supreme  
John Coltrane

Ten Freedom Summers  
Wadada Leo Smith

X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X  
Anthony Davis  
(libretto by Thulani Davis)  

News

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Pulitzer winner shares tough love

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Exeter students perform in The Bowld

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‘Ease the Roads’ premiere

Exeter launches sustainability and climate action plan

Exeter’s campus of tomorrow is a place powered by the sun and heated by the earth. Its community is schooled on the latest sustainability principles, its equipment and vehicles all run on electricity, and its smokestacks cast little but shadows.

That is the vision Principal Bill Rawson ’71; P’08 revealed Monday in sharing the Academy’s first sustainability and climate action plan, “a road map for a community-wide commitment to action” with a refreshed environmental mission statement and a comprehensive vision to realize it.

Standing in a darkened Assembly Hall, Principal Rawson shared highlights from the 23-page document that is formally titled Building From Strength Toward a Zero Carbon Future. “This is the cover page of our sustainability and climate action plan. You will see that we are ‘building from strength’. Exeter has a strong record of environmental stewardship going back many years, and we are aiming high going forward. We are imagining a zero carbon future for our school.”

Principal Rawson’s announcement kicked off the school’s annual Climate Action Day. Now in its ninth year, Climate Action Day is intended to raise awareness of climate change, teach students about their natural world and reflect on environmentalism as an integral part of human existence.

The new environmental mission statement, revising an original from 2004, says:

Phillips Exeter Academy is committed to fostering a culture of sustainability in our community. Through our academic programs, we educate our students about the principles of sustainability and the threat of climate change and cultivate their capacity to take action. Through our operations, we will continue to manage our natural resources and campus facilities responsibly, reduce our environmental impact, and minimize our contributions to climate change.

The plan’s three overarching goals call on the school to:

  • Ensure that every student graduates from Exeter with a fundamental understanding of the principles of sustainability and the issues posed by climate change.
  • Reduce scope 1 and 2 carbon emissions by 75 percent (from a 2005 baseline) by 2031 and achieve zero carbon emissions by 2050.
  • Integrate principles of sustainability into all Exeter programs and operations.

The plan dedicates a chapter to each goal — headlined Education; Emissions and Energy; and Sustainability Integration, respectively. The chapters lay out where the school currently stands in each area and how it intends to achieve the stated goal. The text is the product of more than a year of work led by Principal Rawson and the Environmental Stewardship Committee, led by Warren Biggins, manager of sustainability and natural resources since 2019, and Andrew McTammany ’04, an instructor in science and the school’s sustainability education coordinator. The document was completed last month, but the desire for bold vision on the subject is long-standing.

“The Academy has been thinking about sustainability for a long time,” said Biggins. The newly published plan establishes Exeter as a leader among secondary institutions, he said. “On the college and university level, it’s pretty much par for the course at this time. At the high school level, it’s going to be early, and it’s going to be really, really ambitious.”

Principal Rawson told the students Monday the plan is in part theirs to realize.

“I hope when you get the opportunity to read our plan that you find the climate action plan both exciting and inspiring,” he said. “We face serious sustainability challenges on a global scale. We read about the climate crisis almost every day. We have a responsibility as a school to aim high, and we have responsibilities as individuals to decide how we act.

“We seek to educate and empower you to become future environmental leaders in whatever ways and in whatever disciplines and career paths you choose.”

Nurturing nature and community

“I think my heart, maybe your heart too, was born with some sort of wildness in it,” said Dr. Drew Lanham to the students gathered in the Assembly Hall on Monday. Lanham, a conservation ornithologist, poet and professor of wildlife at Clemson University, was the keynote speaker for Exeter’s ninth annual Climate Action Day, which students spent attending workshops, Q&A sessions and hands-on activities focused on environmentalism, conservation and climate change awareness and action.

While Lanham’s research and teaching has focused on the impact of forest management of birds and other wildlife, his more recent work investigates how race and ethnicity relate to wildlife and other conservation issues. In the keynote, he spoke lyrically of his childhood in South Carolina, and growing up with a yearning to be close to nature as well as an awareness of his home state’s violent racist past.

Invoking humans’ responsibilities as “nature’s nurturers,” Lanham repeatedly drew a contrast between our awareness of the natural world and our relationship with technology. He also referenced Exeter’s adoption of its first sustainability and climate action plan, which Principal Bill Rawson ’71; P’08 announced from the stage earlier that morning. “You’ve just committed to foster a culture of sustainability,” Lanham said. “What does that mean? Commit to foster community. That’s really what you need to remember.”

Early on, Lanham admitted that students in the audience and other young people are saddled by the burdens of previous generations, and tasked with solving a climate crisis that is not of their own making. “We expect from you a larger degree of hope,” he said. Near the end of his speech, he challenged them to embrace this mission.

“What does it take for all of you to suddenly become the geothermal wells that bring up heat, that bring up energy, that helps sustain more than your single being?” he said. “There will be more expected of you, Exeter, than others. How will you carry that charge forward?”

Electrifying transportation

The day’s programming included presentations from three alumni. Duncan McIntyre ’00, Madison Condon ’04 and Jackson Parell ’18 exemplify who Principal Rawson called the “future environmental leaders” he hopes the new climate action plan will inspire.

More than 50 students gathered in the Elting Room in Phillips Hall to hear from McIntyre, founder and CEO of the Massachusetts-based company Highland Electric Transportation.

In an interactive presentation titled “Electrifying Our Transportation,” McIntyre started by stressing the huge impact that transportation has on climate change. Around one quarter (23%) of global carbon emissions come from transportation, he said, with that figure reaching one-third (35%) in the United States.

He moved on to present a brief history of electric vehicles, including milestones such as the Bailey, which went 1,000 miles on a battery produced by Thomas Edison in 1910, and Elon Musk’s brash unveiling of the as-yet-unreleased Tesla Roadster in 2006. Today, with nearly every major car manufacturer offering electric vehicles, McIntyre said the industry is moving decidedly toward electrification. “Climate change and public health is one primary reason,” he said. “Technology, [and the fact that electric] vehicles are just better [than they used to be], is the secondary reason, and cost is the third reason — they operate cheaper and longer.”

McIntyre invited students to ask questions, Harkness-style, throughout his presentation. Many of them took him up on the offer, inquiring about the environmental impact of lithium (a key ingredient in electric car batteries), the probability of solar-powered vehicles and the relatively high cost of electric cars as an obstacle to their adoption, among other topics.

While “everyone can make their own decision on whether they buy a gas vehicle or an electric vehicle in the future,” McIntyre stressed that the real environmental impact would come when corporations choose to electrify the fleets of vehicles — school buses, garbage trucks, delivery vans among them— that operate every day. His company, which owns and operates electric school buses for school districts and fleet managers, is working to be part of that conversion.

Clashing ‘experts’

Madison Condon ’04 credits three things from her childhood for putting her on the path to try to save the planet. The environmentally conscious cartoon Captain Planet, the Dr. Seuss conservation parable The Lorax, and a TIME magazine report in the mid-1990s on the threat of climate change.

“I just remember thinking ‘Well, this seems like an important problem,’” she recalled.

Condon was back on campus — and on the Assembly Hall stage for what she said was the first time — to speak to students about the climate crisis. Her address was titled “Fighting Corporate Lies,” but her self-described “chaotic” presentation was more a history lesson on the struggle to inform about and respond to climate change and the long-standing division between science and economists on the crisis’ impact.

Condon teaches environmental and corporate law at Boston University. A focus of her recent research is climate change’s relationship to corporate governance, market risk and regulation. She opened her remarks Monday by expressing envy for a time in the 1970s, when passionate activists moved mountains that resulted in the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency, the passage of the Clean Water Act and a general awareness that society needed to act.

“Moms actually lit ‘E.P.A.’ on fire in gasoline on one of their lawns and took EPA officials hostage, these moms. People were very agitated about the environment, and I think about this a lot and say, ‘Why aren’t we doing that?’”

“Why aren’t we so mad? Because it’s just as bad, really. It really is.”

She used milestones in her own life as markers in the timeline of climate science and the understanding of the issue, conveying the slow pace of action in the face of knowledge. The first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, zeroing in on human-affected global warming, was published in 1990, for instance. The alarm bell has been ringing for decades, and yet society is not responding to the warnings.

Much of the blame for that, Condon posits, belongs to economists who too often have disregarded science in their analysis of climate change’s impact on the global economy. Repeatedly, policy makers have made decisions based those faulty narratives.

“I’m really mad that economists have dominated the policy space for a very long time, although that is waning,” Condon said. “It’s 2023, and economists are still doing a bad job.”

A walk in the woods

It took a global pandemic, years of soul searching and a near death experience for Jackson Parell ’18 to figure out how he could make an impact in the fight against climate change. But as he told Exeter students, all you really need is passion.

Speaking virtually, the Stanford University senior talked about completing an 8,000-mile hiking adventure that helped him find his life’s calling. In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Parell and three classmates left California to quarantine in Jackson, Wyoming. It was there that the earliest seeds, of what would become a record-breaking accomplishment, were sown. Parell and another of his displaced friends, Sammy Potter, would spend months planning and training to hike three of the longest trails in the United States all within 2021 — a feat known as the Calendar-Year Triple Crown. What’s more, Parell would be the youngest to ever do it.

Throughout their journey, the two battled exhaustion, heat, cold, snow, rain and physical ailments. It was an especially harrowing moment that helped shape Parell’s path post-hike.  

While on the Pacific Crest Trail in Oregon, Parell and Potter were hiking separately. Parell was stopped along the route by law enforcement alerting him of wildfires in the area. Suddenly surrounded by a “massive plume of smoke” and with no way of knowing if Potter was hiking into danger, Parell says he felt a “sense of morbid anticipation” that the worst had happened to his friend. Potter emerged unharmed, Parell explained, before saying, “I realized in that moment how climate change made me feel and I hated it. This was a really seminal moment for me, my entire focus has been around the issue of climate change and how we can do a better job to address it.”

After his hike, Parell returned to Stanford with a new focus formed by his time on trail. “I’ve done a lot of research on wildfires and my senior thesis involved mapping PM2.5, which is the main pollutant from wildfires across the United States and looking at the effect of PM2.5 as well as proximity to wildfires on mental health.”

Parell left students with words of motivation, hoping they too might find their own moments of clarity that would lead to a life of positive impact on the world.

“Start that process of figuring out what your passion is as soon as you leave this room. And if you can’t find it immediately in front of you, then identify something you like. For me that was being outdoors, and then try something new. Go outside your comfort zone. It doesn’t have to be the [the Triple Crown] but just something new. Because you just might find your passion.”

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Sustainability

Exeter’s campus of tomorrow is a place powered by the sun and heated by the earth. Its community is schooled on the latest sustainability principles, its equipment and vehicles all run on electricity, and its smokestacks cast little but shadows.

That is the vision Principal Bill Rawson ’71; P’08 revealed Monday in sharing the Academy’s first sustainability and climate action plan, “a road map for a community-wide commitment to action” with a refreshed environmental mission statement and a comprehensive vision to realize it.

Standing in a darkened Assembly Hall, Principal Rawson shared highlights from the 23-page document that is formally titled Building From Strength Toward a Zero Carbon Future. “This is the cover page of our sustainability and climate action plan. You will see that we are ‘building from strength’. Exeter has a strong record of environmental stewardship going back many years, and we are aiming high going forward. We are imagining a zero carbon future for our school.”

Principal Rawson’s announcement kicked off the school’s annual Climate Action Day. Now in its ninth year, Climate Action Day is intended to raise awareness of climate change, teach students about their natural world and reflect on environmentalism as an integral part of human existence.

The new environmental mission statement, revising an original from 2004, says:

Phillips Exeter Academy is committed to fostering a culture of sustainability in our community. Through our academic programs, we educate our students about the principles of sustainability and the threat of climate change and cultivate their capacity to take action. Through our operations, we will continue to manage our natural resources and campus facilities responsibly, reduce our environmental impact, and minimize our contributions to climate change.

The plan’s three overarching goals call on the school to:

  • Ensure that every student graduates from Exeter with a fundamental understanding of the principles of sustainability and the issues posed by climate change.
  • Reduce scope 1 and 2 carbon emissions by 75 percent (from a 2005 baseline) by 2031 and achieve zero carbon emissions by 2050.
  • Integrate principles of sustainability into all Exeter programs and operations.

The plan dedicates a chapter to each goal — headlined Education; Emissions and Energy; and Sustainability Integration, respectively. The chapters lay out where the school currently stands in each area and how it intends to achieve the stated goal. The text is the product of more than a year of work led by Principal Rawson and the Environmental Stewardship Committee, led by Warren Biggins, manager of sustainability and natural resources since 2019, and Andrew McTammany ’04, an instructor in science and the school’s sustainability education coordinator. The document was completed last month, but the desire for bold vision on the subject is long-standing.

“The Academy has been thinking about sustainability for a long time,” said Biggins. The newly published plan establishes Exeter as a leader among secondary institutions, he said. “On the college and university level, it’s pretty much par for the course at this time. At the high school level, it’s going to be early, and it’s going to be really, really ambitious.”

Principal Rawson told the students Monday the plan is in part theirs to realize.

“I hope when you get the opportunity to read our plan that you find the climate action plan both exciting and inspiring,” he said. “We face serious sustainability challenges on a global scale. We read about the climate crisis almost every day. We have a responsibility as a school to aim high, and we have responsibilities as individuals to decide how we act.

“We seek to educate and empower you to become future environmental leaders in whatever ways and in whatever disciplines and career paths you choose.”