Robert N. Shapiro
"Questions of equality and access are burning hot right now."
Growing up in Houston, Texas, Helen Xiu ’20 remembers being a “really talkative kid,” which wasn’t always a welcome characteristic in a traditional classroom. “I had been taught that speaking too much in class was a bad thing,” she remembers.
When she arrived at Exeter as a prep in the fall of 2016, Xiu had to acclimate to a new kind of classroom experience. “I was [accustomed] to not being noticed by the teacher that much,” she says. “I had to learn Harkness etiquette, and how to present yourself at the table.”
One year later, Xiu roomed with a new lower in Wheelwright Hall. As she watched her roommate go through a similar adjustment, Xiu appreciated how far she had come on her own journey, and how fully she had embraced the Harkness method. It was a meaningful revelation, one that she had the chance to share with former trustee Robert N. Shapiro ’68 when he was on campus for his 50th class reunion that May.
Shapiro had established the Robert N. Shapiro, Class of 1968, Financial Aid Fund in 2012 to provide greater access and opportunity to deserving students. Xiu was the fund’s first beneficiary, and when she wrote a letter of thanks to Shapiro via the school’s Financial Aid Office, he replied to her, suggesting that they connect in person at his reunion so that he could hear firsthand about Xiu’s Exeter experience. They met in Elm Street Dining Hall and have kept in touch by email since then.
A lifelong love of education
Shapiro vividly remembers his own first class at Exeter, a second-level Latin course with David Thomas. As the only ninth-grade boy in the class, he arrived late after having to file out of the Assembly Hall by class, and there were no chairs left at the Harkness table. “There were three chairs with armrests on the sides,” Shapiro recalls. “I sat down in one, and I never moved from that chair. For the entire year, I never sat at the table.”
He still managed to hold his own in that class, an achievement that set the tone for the rest of his Harkness career. “That was trial by fire, even though I didn’t realize it at the time,” Shapiro says. “I had a great time in the classroom at Exeter. It was just about the best experience one could imagine.”
During his senior year, he and a friend convinced one of their teachers to let them lead the discussion in some lower-year English classes. Later, while still an undergrad at Harvard, Shapiro began teaching at Noble and Greenough School, where Ted Gleason, the former minister at Exeter and his Dunbar dorm master, had become the headmaster.