In January 2020, Principal Bill Rawson ’71; P’08 announced the formation of a steering committee tasked with examining connections between Exeter and the institution of slavery. Though the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic led to some delays, the Committee to Study Slavery and its Legacy at Exeter kicked off its efforts in the fall term of the 2023–24 school year.
Co-led by Director of Equity and Inclusion Stephanie Bramlett and Magee Lawhorn, head of Archives and Special Collections, the committee includes students, faculty, staff and alumni dedicated to reporting on and raising awareness of the Academy’s history and connection with enslaved persons, as well as researching and sharing the stories of early Black Exonians.
Exeter is only one of many educational institutions undertaking similar efforts in recent years. Universities including Brown, Harvard and Georgetown have all launched major initiatives to investigate and confront the various ways in which slavery shaped their histories, and considering how to recognize and reckon with its legacy. This week, Bramlett, Lawhorn and other staff and faculty members on the committee shared some of the results of their ongoing work in a community-wide assembly held during the Core Values Project block.
Members of the Committee to Study Slavery and its Legacy at Exeter
Urging students gathered in the Assembly Hall to “seek the stories” connected with Exeter’s past, Bramlett spoke of four individuals who were at one point enslaved by John Phillips, who founded the Academy in 1781 with his second wife, Elizabeth. Phillips inherited three individuals, a man named Robin and two women, Phillis and Dinah, as part of the estate of his first wife, Sarah, who died in 1765. Bramlett shared what information is known about Robin, Phillis and Dinah, as well as another man, Corydon, who was still living at the time of Phillips’s death.
“When John Phillips died in 1795, he was not an enslaver,” Bramlett said. “But he did enslave four people during his lifetime, and I want you to remember their names.”
Other highlights from the committee’s presentation:
Laura Wood, director of the Class of 1945 Library, concluded the assembly by urging the audience to remember the names of those whose stories were shared and to challenge themselves to learn more about those yet untold. “Have conversations and engage with one another,” Wood said. “It’s a full community project, and we hope that it becomes a full community conversation.”
At the conclusion of the assembly, community members headed to Elm Street Dining Hall to enjoy some cake and “ale” (cider) in tribute to Dinah, whose story Bramlett shared in her presentation. One of the women formerly enslaved by John Phillips, Dinah later owned property and operated her own business near today’s Court Street in Exeter, selling similar snacks to the boys attending the Academy.
For five weeks last summer, a group of rising 8th and 9th-grade students grappled with big global issues, read classic and modern literature from around the world in translation, and spoke to each other in Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Arabic — all without leaving Exeter’s campus.
These students, who arrived at Exeter from various states and several foreign countries, chose the popular course cluster A Global Community. It’s one of 10 different academic clusters available as part of Access Exeter, the Exeter Summer program aimed at younger students. They took three different classes — Contemporary Global Issues, The World’s Literature and Dipping into Modern Languages — grouped around the theme of preparing students for participation in an increasingly interconnected world. In Dipping into Modern Languages, they spent about a week on each language and culture, including greetings and simple dialogues for everyday situations, conversation and hands-on activities.
Below, three students in the cluster, each hailing from a different region of the United States, talk about their reasons for taking the course, and what their experience was like.
Previous language learning experience: Speaks some Kiswahili at home with his mother, who is from Kenya.
Why did he choose the Global Community cluster? “I wanted to learn more about the issues in the world, and steps towards solutions that we could take.”
Favorite language he studied last summer: “Japanese. The language is really pretty, and it all comes together once you learn a specific pattern [of] how to put the words and then the meaning of each word and character.”
Previous language learning experience: Has studied Spanish in school
What was it like studying four languages in as many weeks? “I was skeptical at first coming in and only practicing one language every week, but I’m really impressed at how much we’ve been able to go over in the five days that we have [for each].”
Favorite thing about Harkness learning in Exeter Summer? “I really enjoyed being able to have conversations with people my age, but they’re actually in-depth important conversations that I’m not often able to have at my own school. Especially in literature, because we’re able to narrow into certain literary aspects of what we read.”
Previous language learning experience: Speaks some Korean at home; has studied Spanish and German
Why did he choose the Global Community cluster? “I thought it would be interesting to study world literature, other modern languages and contemporary global issues.”
One of his favorite moments of the summer: Making a stop-motion film starring a lemon (inspired by the short story “Lemon” by Japanese writer Motojirō Kajii) with other students in his literature class.
Bob Bauer ’70 is no stranger to political partisanship and controversy. During his 46-year career as an attorney, he has served in various legal roles for Democratic Party organizations and candidates: advising House and Senate Democratic leaders during President Bill Clinton’s impeachment; acting as Barack Obama’s campaign lawyer and White House counsel; and as senior adviser to the Joe Biden presidential campaign on voting rights and election protection. He is a scholar-in-residence at New York University School of Law.
In his latest book, The Unraveling: Reflections on Politics Without Ethics and Democracy in Crisis, Bauer assesses today’s American politics through the lens of his own conflicts and compromises as a political lawyer. He candidly shares moments when he stumbled, contributing to intensifying partisanship, and others when he succeeded in bipartisan conversation, such as with the 2022 Electoral Count Reform Act and recommendation for changes to the Insurrection Act. The Unraveling offers a timely reflection on ways to restore respect and decency to the political arena and strengthen democracy.
What motivated you to write this book?
I wanted to write about politics as I saw it, addressing as fairly and vitally as I could the state of contemporary American politics. I thought that one way to do that — and also potentially to speak across the aisle at a time that it’s hard to do so — was to review the issues from the perspective of my career and acknowledge my role in the accelerating pull of polarization — the drive to win and the costs of what I term the ‘warrior’ mentality. I wanted to write about ethics as part of participation in the political process. I teach a course at NYU Law about the role of the lawyer in public life. It’s about lawyering and ethics in positions of public responsibility, mostly in government, but some in private life and political campaigns. That’s what shaped my approach to the book.
You describe your work on the Electoral Count Reform Act as one of the most rewarding experiences of your career. Why?
I continue to be very active in Democratic Party politics, but I have tried to create and preserve a space for bipartisan reform work. In the last cycle, working on the Electoral Count Reform Act, an issue that was fraught with partisan tensions, what I found is that there is a way to mark out common ground. I continue to believe that every now and then you can get Democrats and Republicans together, and a conversation that is properly structured can take place, because there is a set of common commitments to the democratic process that you can ultimately appeal to.
You write about your father, an immigrant to this country. How does he inspire you?
He came to the United States embracing the country as a Roosevelt Democrat, but nonetheless, he wanted to hear what other people had to say. He had tremendous faith in dialogue, and in democratic institutions — and he recognized when they could be dangerously under siege. I write in the book that he was a lifelong, fierce antagonist of Richard Nixon. But at the same time, if he had an opportunity to talk to Republicans, hear what they had to say, understand their arguments, he thought that was all a part of what made politics exciting and rewarding, and so extraordinarily valuable. He inculcated that in me, and I wrote about that because both his life experience and also the way he talked about politics brought that home to me very, very forcefully.
You take readers behind the scenes of some of recent history’s most consequential political battles in some wonderful anecdotes. Do you have a favorite?
With some of the stories about Presidents Obama and Biden, I wanted to give some flavor of how organizational integrity ultimately depends on not just rules or even ethical norms. It depends on, if you will, vibes: the culture that leaders establish, and how they handle these issues. There’s only so much you can do to make ethical prescriptions have the bite that you would like them to have. They have some guidance value, but beyond that, what you really want are people in positions of responsibility who are communicating their commitment to ethical politics by their actions, by how they speak, by their fidelity to truthfulness in the communications and interactions with other people. They set the tone, and that tone is what’s so powerful. If you have people at the top who want you to think hard about these issues and make the right calls, that is going to spread throughout the entire organization. It’s going to affect the younger lawyers; it’s tremendous training for younger lawyers.
You’ve served clients in the highest offices in America. How did your time at Exeter serve you in those roles?
I benefited enormously from having Jack Herney as a history instructor. Another significant influence was English Instructor Charles Terry, whom I just thought the world of. When we talked about responses that we had to works of literature, we wound up talking about fundamental moral issues — how we might think about the moral implications of choices that the authors made, or the choices the authors depicted that the characters made. It was a deeply unique, ethically rich mode of instruction. There’s no question that those early experiences, more subsequently than the ones I had in college and law school, had a really significant effect on how I think about issues of common concern.
What’s the most important lesson you’d like your book to impart?
A couple of years ago, I spoke to the assembly at Exeter about my years of politics, and one of the things that I talked about was the importance of, under these kinds of pressures — and they are enormous pressures and strains on the society, strains on the democracy — the importance of still embracing a degree of humility and an openness to conversation. We have to adopt an ethic that puts us at the table with people we strongly disagree with, and learn both how to listen and also how to persuade. A very good friend of mine, also class of ’70, who lived down the hall from me at Exeter, Bob Gerrard, once said: “Don’t argue. Persuade.” And I mentioned that to the assembly: “Don’t argue. Persuade. Listen — and then try to be persuasive.” When I do my nonprofit work around the country on elections and I sit in the room with Republicans and election officials, those conversations are conversations in which it is really important for me to hear what they have to say, with the understanding that they will also listen to what I have to say. What is needed is a conversation and not a confrontation.
This article was originally published in the Fall 2024 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.
