Opening Assembly 2024

Good morning, Exeter.

 

Thank you, Dean Page, for welcoming and recognizing our emeriti faculty this morning, and for introducing our new faculty. It has been a great pleasure getting to know our new faculty over the past couple of weeks.

I would like to extend a special, warm welcome to all our new students. You are 369 in number and come from 31 states and 28 countries. You bring a wonderful diversity of backgrounds, experiences, talents and interests to our school. We are delighted that you are here, ready to begin your Exeter journey.

Many of you know that I too once sat in this assembly hall as a new student. I was a financial aid student, as roughly half of you are. I worked hard, played sports, had fun, and made lifelong friends. Attending Exeter was a transformative experience for me.

But sitting in this assembly hall for the first time as a new Lower, many years ago, I was a bit nervous. I felt uncertain. I had questions. Would I fit in? Did I really belong at Exeter? Would I be able to do the work?

I like to tell our new students what I would have appreciated hearing as a new Lower. Returning students know this well because they have heard it before:

• You can do the work.
• You will make lifelong friends.
• Absolutely, you belong here.

A few of you – 43 to be exact – are living off campus in a hotel for a couple of weeks while we complete the renovation of Langdell Hall. We appreciate your patience and understanding. You will be settled into a newly renovated dorm very soon. In the meantime, we will have a surprise or two for you along the way to make the wait a little more enjoyable.

The new dining hall will be completed near the end of fall term. Until then, we have the tent outside Elm and we have added serving lines and adjusted our daily schedule to even out the flow a bit. As you go through the lines, please let the dining staff know how much you appreciate all their efforts on your behalf, and please show your appreciation by clearing your tables properly. The new dining hall is going to be terrific and well worth the wait.

It is our tradition at Opening Assembly to revisit the Academy’s Deed of Gift and reflect on the mission of our school. The Deed of Gift was signed by John and Elizabeth Phillips in 1781, seven years before the State of New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the U.S. Constitution. Our Deed of Gift is a remarkable document.

It states that Phillips Exeter Academy “shall ever be equally open to youth of requisite qualifications from every quarter."

It also states,

"Above all, it is expected that the attention of instructors to the disposition of the minds and morals of the youth under their charge will exceed every other care; well considering that though goodness without knowledge is weak and feeble, yet knowledge without goodness is dangerous, and that both, united, form the noblest character, and lay the surest foundation of usefulness to mankind."

From these passages, we derive our mission statement. Our mission is to unite goodness and knowledge and inspire youth from every quarter to lead purposeful lives.

In the very first paragraph of the Deed of Gift, our Founders also wrote, “the time of youth is the important period, on the improvement or neglect of which depend the most weighty consequences, to individuals themselves and the community.” In essence, John and Elizabeth Phillips were saying that your time here matters. It matters to your personal development as human beings, and it matters to the world, because the education you receive here will provide the foundation for your purposeful lives.

We give expression to these ideas on our school seal with the Latin words finis origine pendet, which translated mean “the end depends upon the beginning.” These words express our belief that what you will accomplish in life, and how you will make a difference in the world, will be shaped by what you learn and how you grow here at Exeter. Graduates return to campus every year and tell us that the education they received at Exeter made the greatest difference in their lives. Time and again they say it all started here.

The Latin words “non sibi,” which mean “not for oneself,” also appear on our school seal and signify our belief that the education gained here should be used for the benefit of others as well as for oneself. Our core value of non sibi proclaims that we “seek to graduate students whose ambitions and actions are inspired by their interest in others and the world around them.” Non sibi represents the very spirit and ethos of our school.

With these thoughts in mind, I would like to share three goals that I have for you and for our school this academic year.

Have Fun and Find Joy

My first goal is that you have fun. This might not seem like something special, since we have fun every year, but it is still a good place to start. I want you to have fun and find joy in your classes, dorms, clubs, co-curricular and extra-curricular activities, performances, teams, ensembles, affinity groups – everything you do and everywhere you go.

I want you to find joy in knowing that you belong here, in discovering that there are other students here with similar interests and passions, and in building lasting friendships with students who initially might seem very different from you.

Without a doubt you will grow academically, thrive in the arts, compete hard athletically, and excel in various clubs and activities, as students do every year. You will earn some honors and likely win a few competitions and championships. But the fun and joy do not depend on winning. The fun and joy are in the doing, in the learning and growth that occurs, and in the friendships that you make along the way.

To have fun and find joy in these various ways, you need to be healthy. To be healthy, you need to eat well and get your sleep. Please eat well and maintain good, consistent sleep habits. You do not have to do everything. Please do not try to do too much.

But do try new things. An Exeter alum rowed in the Olympics just a few weeks ago. I saw her say on Instagram that she first learned how to row at Exeter. She tried something new and ended up in the Olympics. That might not happen very often, but every year Exonians graduate with passions that they discovered here. I encourage you to try new things.

Having fun does not mean you will not work hard. You have come here to be challenged, and with challenge comes hard work. As you rise to the challenges that come your way, you will begin to understand your capacity to meet those challenges. You will grow in confidence. You will develop self-belief. I hope that too will give you joy.

Lastly, on this point, please keep in mind that we have many kinds of support here – formal and informal. When you do face challenges, you will not be alone. We have these supports – counselors, advisers, learning centers, peer tutors, student listeners, and more -- because we all need support from time to time. Using them will propel your growth and increase your joy.

Seek Complex Truths

My second hope for the year is that you embrace fully our commitment at Exeter to seeking complex truths.

Academic excellence is a defining strength and core value of our school, and one of the reasons why you chose to come here. Our statement of that core value states, “In every discipline, and at every level within our curriculum, we seek to inspire students to develop critical thinking skills and seek complex truths.”

Our goal is to teach you how to think, not what to think.

We are committed to helping you learn how to seek complex truths that take into consideration all relevant facts and that respect the dignity and equal worth of all human beings equally. So how do we do that? How do you do that?

The learning we seek at Exeter starts with being open to different points of view. It starts with being curious why people from different backgrounds and experiences, or maybe similar backgrounds and experiences, might think differently. It requires listening to other perspectives with empathy, humility and respect, and with the understanding that learning at Exeter is a collaborative process, a communal effort.

This kind of learning requires a certain measure of resilience. It requires understanding the difference between being uncomfortable and being unsafe. At Exeter, we want you to learn how to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. This will enable you to engage with facts and perspectives that might not seem to fit your worldview. It will enable you to plumb the depths of an issue and seek complex truths. This is what we mean by “rigorous inquiry and thoughtful discourse” in our core value statement of academic excellence.

Listening with curiosity, empathy and humility; being resilient; being open to different points of view; being comfortable engaging with facts that challenge your thinking – these are all skills. Skills that you can develop and practice. You might call them Harkness skills. Or goodness and knowledge skills. These skills are essential to your learning at Exeter and will provide a foundation for everything you do and everything you achieve in life.

The learning that we seek to encourage extends beyond the classroom. When you leave an assembly during the course of the year, rather than comparing reactions with students with whom you might expect to agree, seek students with whom you might disagree. Share your thinking not to persuade but to understand, and thereby deepen the bonds of respect and friendship that come from learning together.

Importantly, our diversity at Exeter – our commitment to youth from every quarter – also is a defining strength of our school that propels our learning. We celebrate our diversity across all dimensions and cherish the rich learning environment that it creates.

We delight in our diverse identities, but we are not defined by them. We are defined by how we think, how we act, what we do, and by our qualities as human beings.

I am reminded of a passage in A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L’Engle. In this passage, aliens who don’t have eyes and cannot see find it unhelpful when earthlings try to give a visual description of other beings. The aliens say, “Think about what they are. This look doesn’t help us at all.”

This last point is critical, because there is a large body of literature that tells us that we sometimes tend to have less empathy for persons whom we perceive as different. That is the opposite of what we should be striving for, because our learning and growth are not advanced by engaging with persons who think just like us. Our learning and growth are advanced by engaging with persons who think differently.

We understand that the promise of our diverse community is realized fully only when we commit ourselves to rigorous inquiry and thoughtful discourse in this way.

By contrast, anything that narrows our thinking, or closes our mind to different points of view, will inhibit our learning as individuals and as a community. When we stop being curious, we stop learning.

I said earlier that learning at Exeter is a collaborative process, a communal effort. Interestingly, the word “competition” is derived from the Latin word competere, which means to strive together. Even when we think we are competing against our archrival to the south, in reality we are competing with them. Here at Exeter, in the classroom, in the dorm, on team buses, in the theater, at Grill, you are learning and striving together. You are learning with and from each other, and together pursuing a common goal to prepare yourselves to lead purposeful lives.

Gratitude

I would like to close this morning with a few words about gratitude. Gratitude is a common theme at graduations, but it is important to start the year with some of the same thoughts in mind. My third goal for the year is that you nurture a culture of gratitude, grounded in our core value of non sibi, and share your gratitude with those around you.

It is an extraordinary privilege to be a part of this community. We know this, but in the pressure of our daily business, and in moments of disappointment, we can sometimes forget and take things for granted. When we do that, we disrespect the privileges that we all enjoy as members of this community, and we disrespect the sacrifices of all those persons who have made our time here possible.

I hope you will always be grateful to your teachers and all the other adults, here and at home, who support you during your time at Exeter. I hope your gratitude will extend to prior generations of teachers and students who have helped create and shape the Exeter of today, and who have thereby made your experiences possible.

I am very excited about the year ahead. Walking about the campus these last few days, it has been great fun seeing the energy and joy that you all bring to a new school year. It certainly will be exciting to see all that you will do and accomplish this year. It will be fun to watch you carry on old traditions and perhaps start new ones. It will be fun simply seeing the many ways you have fun.

Lastly, remember, you are all Exonians. One way we recognize this is to hand out a new school shirt each year following Opening Assembly. This is another way we welcome new students, and a reminder to all students that you all belong here. Your shirts await you in the Academic Quad. Please take a shirt with your class year on the front.

By tradition, we end all assemblies with the words “Senior Class.” At Opening Assembly, all who are not seniors keep their seats while we allow seniors to leave the assembly hall first.

Senior class!