| The Meaning Behind the Mottoes | ||
This is a wonderful moment in the life of the school every year, when the 50th reunion class joins hands with the senior class and exemplifies the great bond across the years at Exeter. It's also a time when the trustees gather, although when they are recognized and asked to step forward, one never knows where they're stepping forward from and who they are anyway and where they should be, so they actually never do get recognized. It's one of the amazing traits about Exeter-the trustees are almost invisible. I don't think they want it to be known that they weren't always as hard working and assiduous as students as they are now as trustees. As a 10-point toss-up, I ask if you could tell me which of the trustees had a first career as a rock musician? Which trustee nurtured a pet squirrel during our senior year and named it after our English instructor? Which trustee is pictured in the PEAN racing around the campus on a bicycle with a classmate in hot pursuit, exemplifying the fact that, if there were no rules at Exeter until you broke them, he had discovered several new rules that morning? And finally, which trustee, known for his intellectual abilities, spent mindless hours at the dinner table (with me, I should add) playing "salt shaker shuffleboard," in which you got one point if the salt shaker overlapped the wooden edge on the inside bound, two points if it was within the wooden edge, and three points if it overlapped the table-but a one-point deduction if it fell off? So, if you find yourself frittering away some time or getting into disciplinary scrapes, take heart: You're in training to become a trustee of Phillips Exeter Academy. Non Sibi: Wells Kerr and Dick Day If you look around the room, you'll see several different answers, and I want to point a couple of them out. Start with the portraits here, which we see all the time. There's a lot of history behind them. Many of these people spoke here. Their voices are in this room. This room holds the memories and the voices of a lot of these important individuals. Two of them I'll talk about very briefly. The first is Wells Kerr, whose portrait resides next to that of Principal Bill Saltonstall. There's no particular reason I should have known Wells Kerr, who retired long before we were students. He was legendary for being quite a ferocious dean, and I bet the class of '51 could tell us a lot about Dean Kerr. I knew him as a very interesting and gentle man. When I was teaching at the Exeter Summer School in 1972, he was here; at that time, he was still teaching at a school in Colorado and he drove to Exeter every summer-at the age of 85. Since he and I had breakfast every morning at 7 o'clock, and since no one else in Exeter had breakfast at 7 o'clock, we did a lot of talking. He would tell me about his plan each summer to hop on a freighter and go wherever the freighter was going. He went to the Mediterranean, he went across the ocean and the summer we spent together he was about to go up the St. Lawrence River. If there was anything really significant from that summer I might have passed along to my students, it came from him; Dean Kerr taught me about the spirit of exploration and the unquenchable interest in learning things. By the end of the summer we had chatted a lot about the fact that I was going to spend a year in England. It was my first time overseas. At our last breakfast, he produced a beautiful book of sketches of Cambridge University, which he gave me as his parting gift. Though I didn't know him long, Dean Kerr was a shining example for me of an unquenchable spirit of exploration. On the other wall, next to the doorway, is Richard W. Day, the principal of the Academy while we were here. The citation you just heard referred to a lot of the work we did that year about (as the Exonian put it) "abolishing religion." In fact, I think we actually came closer to establishing religion because it became a vital force when the requirement to attend church was done away with. Mr. Day insisted that students participate with faculty on committees, that they take ownership responsibility for the school. During the spring of our senior year, 1968, the world was about to turn upside down: Columbia University was in a state of upheaval, and we were learning about revolutionary tactics from afar. One of our classmates who had worked on a senior project came back from New York and decided that the student council, which I was heading, should abolish itself through a kind of standard procedure, voting itself out of office. It wasn't very revolutionary, but we talked about it at great length, and Mr. Day was part of our talks. In late evening discussions in this fellow's dorm room, there was the principal, sitting on the floor, listening and absorbing and trying to understand what was going through our heads. He was a great teacher, even though he didn't always have a chance to be in the classroom. We corresponded frequently after I graduated, and he remained a very important teacher and mentor for me from afar. I want to read to you from a letter he wrote me when I was in my first year at law school: "Informal education comes best from finding some extraordinary person to work with. You may not see these people often, but by close listening and observation, even the shortest meetings prove invaluable"-as I had found with Dean Kerr. "And as you realize, one never knows when one will meet the extraordinary teacher or from where the most enriching learning will come. I think I probably learned most about teaching in the Army during a period when I had consigned myself to standing still. I encourage myself, when I am discouraged that I have no time for formal teaching, that every relationship is, in effect, an opportunity for teaching." That lesson is one that has affected me deeply. Dick Day was a great mentor. And all faculty here are about as important people as there are on the planet. By being mentors and teachers, they exemplify that same belief. I think the spirit of non sibi really means a graciousness of spirit, a generosity of spirit, when you give back a lot to an institution like this. page 1 | page 2
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