Frisbees were flying as students and faculty celebrated this year’s Academy Life Day. Started in 1995 as part of a wider initiative to improve residential life at Exeter, the day set aside for dormwide activities has become a beloved fall-term tradition.
Smiles abound on Academy Life Day as students and faculty enjoy the campus quads or visit local apple orchards, trails and beaches.
Exeter students, administrators, faculty and Trustees gathered in Love Gym to celebrate the longtime educator and activist James R. W. “Wick” Sloane ’71; P’03, this year’s recipient of the John and Elizabeth Phillips Award. One of the Academy’s highest alumni honors, the Phillips Award is given annually to an Exonian who has contributed significantly to the welfare of community, country or humanity.
“Through your writing and your grassroots activism, you have helped address the challenges facing millions of veterans and low-income college students across the nation,” Sam Brown ’92, trustee and president of the Exeter Alumni Association, read from the award citation.
After a diverse career that included reporting gigs for newspapers and more than a decade of executive roles in the insurance industry, Sloane began working at Bunker Hill Community College in 2006. He started with a nighttime shift in the school’s tutoring center, and later became an adjunct faculty member, teaching late-night classes in the college’s nationally recognized Midnight Classes program. Eventually, Sloane worked as senior special programs coordinator in charge of helping students transfer to four-year colleges.
In all these roles, Sloane went out of his way to support his students, many of whom were juggling school with jobs, family responsibilities and other challenges. “When you discovered that a student hadn’t eaten that day, you bought bread and peanut butter and made them a sandwich,” Brown read from the award citation. “You expanded on those efforts by soliciting donations from local businesses and helping to open a mobile food market on campus.”
Sloane also became a regular contributor to the publication Inside Higher Ed, and wrote extensively about issues facing low-income students like the ones at Bunker Hill, including hunger and homelessness. In 2013, his open letter to then-President Barack Obama asked why the same students eligible for federal free and reduced lunch through high school lost those benefits once they began attending college. Sloane’s work spurred lawmakers to persuade the U.S. Government Accountability Office to conduct the first-ever study of food insecurity at U.S. colleges and universities in 2019, and led to new or proposed legislation addressing the issue at the local, state and federal levels.
Sloane began his remarks by referencing the words of W. Ernest Gillespie, who served as the Academy’s interim principal from 1963–64: “Return often, and show us your trophies and your scars.”
“Those words are my Exeter as much as non sibi,” Sloane continued. “[They] create for each of us the 50/50 expectation that all of us will return here with as many scars as trophies, and scars are often where the trophies come from.”
He shared the story of one of his most prominent “scars” — learning he had been “fired on false charges” from his position as chief financial officer at the University of Hawaii in 2003. By that time, Sloane had already developed a love and respect for community colleges and their students, having interacted with them through the University of Hawaii system. “These are thousands of men and women, not that different from any of us, except they never had a break,” Sloane said. “They never had a break equal even to one day at Exeter.”
At a hearing on higher education in Boston, Sloane met the president of Bunker Hill Community College, one of the largest and most diverse community colleges in Massachusetts. At his persistent urging, she agreed to give him a night shift in the college’s tutoring center.
“I kept showing up, until the chairman of the English department found me and offered me a section of College Writing 1 in D118, a windowless basement classroom at 8:30 on Mondays and Wednesdays,” Sloane recalled. “That first class changed me.”
Sloane spoke about his students, many of whom faced challenges far beyond those of a typical undergraduate. He and his colleague, Kathleen O’Neill, were managing the school’s emergency assistance fund when they learned many students were going hungry most days, as they couldn’t afford food.
“We weren’t trained as social workers, but that’s what we became because students were hungry,” he said. “We started with peanut butter, jelly, and bread from the supermarket across the street, three blocks from where Paul Revere landed to begin his midnight ride.”
Thanks to donations from local businesses and the Greater Boston Food Bank, Sloane and O’Neill began distributing food on campus, to the tune of more than 700,000 pounds of food since 2012, Sloane said. When they failed to get attention from the state government, they went to federal legislators like Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, leading to nationwide program and legislative changes aimed at combating food insecurity.
“[Hunger] has been the injustice I’ve sought to solve,” Sloane told the current Exeter students seated in the gymnasium. “You’ll find your own. You will come across an issue that you simply can’t turn away from — so don’t. Instead, get to work.”
Sloane and Brown were joined onstage by Principal Bill Rawson ’71; ’65, ’70 (Hon.); P’08, a classmate of Sloane’s at Exeter. In addition to speaking in assembly, Sloane joined students in class discussions, visiting a session of the integrated studies course Social Innovation and the religion, ethics and philosophy course Ethics of the Marketplace. He also attended a luncheon with students held at the Class of 1945 Library.
Over nearly 40 years, Russell Weatherspoon ’01, ’03, ’08, ’11 (Hon.); P’92, P’95, P’97, P’01 and Jackie Weatherspoon P’92, P’95, P’97, P’01 left an enduring mark on Exeter’s campus and community. In honor of their lifetime of service to the Academy, Sam Brown ’92, president of the General Alumni Association, presented the Weatherspoons with the 2025 Founders’ Day Award in an Assembly Hall packed beyond capacity with excited students, faculty, alumni and Trustees.
“In the classroom, in the dorm, in the dining halls or along the paths, your warmth, wisdom and generosity have earned you the enduring respect and affection of your colleagues and the devotion and gratitude of generations of students,” Brown said while reading from the award citation for the Weatherspoons.
Established by the Trustees in 1976, the Founders’ Day Award is given annually in recognition of longtime service to the Academy. It was renamed in 2019 to honor Elizabeth Phillips’ role in forming the Academy alongside her husband, John Phillips. Several past winners of the award sat on the stage with Brown, Principal Bill Rawson ’71; P’08 and Exeter’s current Trustees during the award presentation, including:
Russell and Jackie Weatherspoon arrived at Exeter in 1987 with their young children, all future Exonians: Ben ’92, Rachel ’95, Clarke ’97 and Rebekah ’01. In addition to teaching religion, English and drama, Russell Weatherspoon took on many important administrative roles during his time at the Academy, including dean of residential life, dean of multicultural affairs, director of Exeter Summer and — from 2020 to his retirement in 2024 — dean of students.
“With your fair-minded, steady presence — and a seeming ability to be everywhere on campus at once — you assured students that wherever they were, and whatever was going on in their lives, someone was looking out for them,” Brown said.
Jackie Weatherspoon expanded greatly on the role of faculty spouse and dorm parent for more than a decade in Cilley Hall. “From ensuring that Black hair care products were stocked at local drugstores to helping students shop for dresses and style their hair for prom, you were a source of steadfast advocacy and support for Black girls and women on campus,” Brown said.
She later took on official roles at the Academy, serving as associate dean of Exeter Summer and holding positions in Admissions, the Lamont Gallery, the Class of 1945 Library, among others. Off campus, she built an impressive career in public service and human rights advocacy that took her from the New Hampshire House of Representatives to the U.S. State Department and beyond. Jackie brought that experience to her role as longtime adviser to students in the Democratic “Dem” Club, encouraging them to engage in political life at the campus, local, state and national levels.
“This is a magical place,” Jackie Weatherspoon said while accepting the Founders’ Day Award. Arriving at the school as the mother of young children, she said she felt welcomed into the community (and honing her cooking skills) thanks to the other faculty wives who had come before her.
Being dorm parents in Cilley Hall “was a commitment that we had made not only to the school, but how we saw life,” Jackie Weatherspoon said. “We felt life was if you were a teenager, you needed adults to be with you.” Speaking of her career in public service and advocacy, she spoke of working “to make Exeter a better place, the town a better place, our state, and our world.” Many students have walked with her on that journey over the years, she said, including at least two “who someday will be president of the United States.”
“I want to thank you so very much for allowing two teenagers from Brooklyn who wanted to serve people to be a part of your journey,” she said.
After his wife received a standing ovation from the crowd — one of several during the assembly — Russell Weatherspoon took to the podium. “One of the great blessings of having been asked to have a variety of roles is that it multiplied for me over the years my understanding, appreciation and gratitude for that wide range of people who are doing so much, so much of the time, so much of it unseen,” he said.
Of two all-important decisions in life — work and marriage — he said he had been lucky in both. “You will spend most of your life in the work of love and with the hope that you’ll love the work that you do,” he advised the audience. “So you want to choose as carefully as you can. We are grateful because we got the chance to do a work life with you.”
Near the end of his remarks, Russell Weatherspoon recalled a moment last spring, not long before he retired after 37 years of service to the Academy. “I woke up to the fact that this is where we had spent the majority of our adult lives, and that we had spent them among people who had the capacity to make us better people,” he said. “Other people shape you. We are grateful for the opportunity to be shaped by this place and, specifically, by you.”
Walking into the Office of Multicultural Affairs on the ground floor of Jeremiah Smith Hall, my senses were immediately delighted by the smell of sweetgrass and delicious Three Sisters Soup and cornbread provided by the dining hall. Images of Maciah Stasis tattooing a woman’s face and of gorgeous works of white and purple quahog shell jewelry were projected on a TV screen.
The Indigenous Reconciliation Club (IRC) and OMA had invited Stasis, a Herring Pond Wampanoag wampum worker, tattooist, regalia maker, story-teller and singer-dancer to campus to give two workshops and celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day. She was seated at the head of the Harkness table and engaged in deep discussion. As co-head of the IRC, it filled me with joy to see faculty and students packed around the table to learn from Stasis.
She began by telling us a bit about herself. We learned that she is a citizen of the Herring Pond Wampanoag tribe, and was born in the land of her ancestors, Plymouth, Massachusetts, where she graduated from Plymouth North High School. Since the age of 15, she has been educating others about her people, delivering keynote addresses at a number of museums and other Indigenous events throughout the U.S. and Canada. Interestingly, she had just returned from a traditional tattooing conference in Canada, where she learned from Inuit tattooists, whose tattooing customs have remained more intact than those of Northeastern Indigenous nations in the U.S.
She shared many details about her work as a wampum jeweler. The quahog clam used to make wampum is endemic to the waters around the Wamapanoag’s land and is believed to be a gift to the Wampanoag as it existed nowhere else. Wampum was greatly valued by Northeastern tribes, and the Wampanoag traded it with surrounding tribes such as the Haudenosaunee, who used it to create treaty belts, among other items. In addition to a form of currency, wampum was and is made into jewelry. Stasis said the work is laborious but worth it. Her pieces include rings, necklaces, bracelets and carvings of wildlife. But, she warned, the dust shed by quahog shells is toxic and has been known to kill ill-prepared artisans.
Stasis then spoke on quillwork, a rare and complicated form of art that uses the quills of porcupines. Quillwork predates beadwork and is used to ornament regalia in much the same way. It is painstaking: Make one mistake and you have to start over, even after multiple hours, or days, of work.
Last, she spoke about her story and process as an Indigenous poke tattooist. She said that tattooing is practiced around the world, and the most common and ancient form is stick-and-poke. This refers to using a sharp needle, or thorn, to insert pigment such as soot into the skin. The method was used across the continent, including in the Wampanoag Nation. Although the custom varied from nation to nation, tattoos generally marked events like childbirth, ages, deaths and accomplishments. But this practice has been suppressed and vilified throughout the history of our country; as a result, few Indigenous cultures continue to practice traditional tattooing.
I learned that Stasis, who has tattooed herself and others for a variety of reasons, is truly a trailblazer in revitalizing this important cultural custom. She says the process is extremely intimate and exhausting, and emphasizes the importance of the environment, the energy and the tattooist during the procedure.
By the end, all of us around the table were brimming with questions, which Stasis answered. She gave each of the attendees a small satchel that contained part of a quahog shell, cedar, deer sinew and sweetgrass, each of which provides protections and properties, she said. I left with a wealth of knowledge and a deep sense of gratitude. This was a truly transformative and mind-expanding event unlike any other I’ve attended in my time at Exeter, and I am extremely grateful for the knowledge Stasis shared, and the space she created in OMA that day.
— Daniel Connelly ’25 is a proctor in the Office of Multicultural Affairs and co-head of the Academy’s Indigenous Reconciliation Club.
This article was first published in the spring 2025 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.
Thomas Ehrlich ’52 has served in the administrations of six U.S. presidents — including as the first president of the Legal Services Corporation and the first director of the International Development Cooperation Agency, reporting directly to President Jimmy Carter. He was also dean of Stanford Law School, provost of the University of Pennsylvania and president of Indiana University.
He has authored, co-authored or edited 15 non- fiction books, written two novels and is finishing a third, Jewels.
We spoke with Ehrlich, 91, about his memoir, Learn, Lead, Serve: A Civic Life, released in December.
You talk about mentorship throughout the book. Is there one mentor who had the largest impact on you?
My father. We were as close as father and son could be — we skied together, played together, read novels together. I can still remember reading The Once and Future King with him. He was always there, always supporting me and a model of what a father, a husband and a caring civic person should be. Other mentors have had a shaping influence on my life including Judge Learned Hand, for whom I was a law clerk, and Under Secretary of State George W. Ball, for whom I was a special assistant during the escalation of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.
You tell a story about your grandmother giving you a biography of Louis Brandeis, an attorney and associate justice of the Supreme Court. Did that shape your decision to use your abilities for the public good?
Yes, I still have that blue-bound copy of that biography. Brandeis was a great public servant in the best sense. And service was an important part of Exeter for me as well. In my memoir, I call Exeter my ‘best education’, and that’s not hyperbole. Harvard and Harvard Law School were wonderful, but Exeter and the dedication of the teachers 24/7 to their students, of whom I was privileged to be one, was just amazing and transformative for me. Non sibi was at the core, and that really shaped me — it shaped my sense of who I am, how I want to relate to the world around me. I think of the times when I have had the good fortune to be involved in public service, and I really owe much of that to Exeter. This is what Exeter expected of us as students — to think not just about ourselves, alone — and that’s just the way you behaved. When you learn that and behave that way, or try to at least, as an adolescent, it’s built into your character as you grow up and grow older.
It seems like Exeter shaped you emotionally, as well as intellectually.
It did very much, yes. Intellectually, it certainly did in history and in English. We wrote a lot and I’m still writing now. I’m 91 years old, and here I am, writing away, working on my third novel. Exeter is where I learned to read and write, to write and enjoy.
For your Harvard thesis, you researched a survey of family farmers that was done by the Department of Agriculture. You say it was an early awakening for you to the importance of public policy shaped by public opinion. How does it frame the way you look at what’s happening in our country today?
I’m deeply disturbed by what’s happening now. The Trump administration’s assault on our democracy is terrifying. I taught for many years a course called “Democracy in Crisis” at Stanford, so I’m familiar with past crises. And of course, we did have a civil war. This is not a civil war, but I am devastated by seeing what’s happening in terms of an elected president seeking to destroy much of the social fabric of our country, as well as its leadership in the world. Since I oversaw the Agency for International Development, its destruction is a particular blow to me. Millions of people are dying because of that action.
Do you see a future way of managing our way out of this?
I have hope. I quote one of my professors, Sam Huntington at Harvard, who wrote a terrific book American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony. He ends by saying,“Critics say that America is a lie because its reality falls so far short of its ideal. They are wrong. America is not a lie; it is a disappointment. But it can be a disappointment only because it is also a hope.” I have hope. I believe we will have a pendulum that swings back toward the middle, that those in Congress will say, “We’ve got to stand up and stop what’s happening.” But the carnage that’s happening
— America’s place in the world will never be the same.
In your many roles in six administrations, was there one in particular that has stayed with you?
Well, they all stay with me. But the one that shaped me most was the Legal Services Corporation, because when I became dean at Stanford Law School, I had no real idea that 40-plus million poor people had no access to justice. It concerned me, which is why I thought, “If I can have a chance to do something about that, I want to do it.” I spent three-plus years listening to poor people all over the country, hearing their stories of how a crisis would happen if they didn’t get a Social Security check or got evicted, and how important it was to have a lawyer, and what a difference that person could make by listening and devoting their lives to helping poor people. That also shaped my approach to others less fortunate and my character.”
You’ve become particularly focused on instilling young people with awareness around community service, public service and civic learning. Do you think that that’s our most hopeful way forward?
I do. I think it’s essential. That has been my passion since the mid-’80s when I was at the University of Pennsylvania, but it’s certainly increased in that the only significant organizations outside of the universities that I’ve helped to run are ones dedicated to preparing college students to be actively, responsibly engaged in public policy and politics. If we don’t do a better job of that, we’re going to suffer more. It’s important not just to serve in a community kitchen, but to ask: “What public policy changes are needed so that community kitchens are no longer necessary?”
— Daneet Steffens ’82 is a books-focused journalist. She has contributed to the Bulletin since 2013.
This article was first published in the spring 2025 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.
If we could peek inside someone’s mind, what would we see? Jeffrey Augustine Songco gives us a glimpse. His immersive work Society of 23’s Conservatory, which recently concluded a two-month run at Lamont Gallery, offers a tangible stream of consciousness for visitors to ponder. It is a conservatory in the greenhouse sense, replete with living foliage, but the plants are only one element of a multisensory installment that explores Songco’s complicated relationship between his identity as an American of Filipino ethnicity and U.S. colonization of the Philippines for a half-century.
The Society of 23 comprises a fictional brotherhood of 23 mysterious gentlemen, all portrayed by the artist — a play on Songco’s days in a fraternity as an under-graduate at Carnegie Mellon University.
The installment was host to several PEA visiting classes and served as one of the workshops in the Academy’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day programming.
Songco says: “My artwork is a celebration of life. I work with a variety of media including large-scale installation, self-portrait photography, sculpture and video. My practice is rooted in a considered set of conceptual parameters that guide my thought and labor towards the final outcome of my autobiographical artwork. I share my reflections on how my mind and body are shaped by the identities and realities I have inherited and constructed myself. This dense layering of things reveals the forest of ideas I navigate and the conflicts I continue to resolve. Each of my artworks relate to one another in particular ways and evolve in their meaning as I continue to create the grand nonlinear narrative of my life.”
This article was first published in the spring 2025 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.