The Headmasters Papers (11 page)

I would rather fuss about this too much than to commit the other mistake. Please make a special effort to proctor these exams carefully.

1.    Do not leave exam copies on the copying machines or in wastepaper baskets.

2.    Do not allow boys to bring in anything but sharp pencils to the exam rooms (exceptions: art history, and Horney's history electives, for which special arrangements have been made).

3.    
Patrol
 the exam room, don't merely watch.

4.    Take attendance as soon as boys are seated and quiet; report absentees to Marge at once.

5.    Do not make individual arrangements for make-up exams. Refer tardy or ill boys to proctor of the day (posted).

6.    Please be on hand at least fifteen minutes before exam is scheduled to begin.

It seems we lose a boy or two every year to cheating. Perhaps this is inevitable, but I hope not. Let's at least avoid fanning the flames of temptation. The better we monitor these exams, the easier it becomes to do so.

Thanks in advance for your care.

J.O.G.

15 November 19—

DRAFT of “Overview” to
“Wells: the Next Ten Years . . .”

A consideration of the next ten years of Wells School as a preliminary step to planning its longer-range future requires at least a cursory review of the school's history. We are not founding a school; we are attempting to be thoughtful custodians of what has been faithfully established at Wells over the past one hundred and six years. As we look to our future direction, we must be kept mindful that we are already on a course. We may choose to alter that course, but we would be unwise to abandon it without a careful assessment of where we have been and to what effect.

Wells was founded as a school for “boys of demonstrated promise who aspire to university training or for training in the practical arts.” The founders also included in the school charter that “lessons of character, manliness, and Christian virtue” were to be undertaken in tandem with a program of “liberal arts and sciences.” Although the student body has since grown from twenty-five to nearly four hundred boys, Wells has never significantly departed from these initial aims.

We are still a school for boys of demonstrated promise. One of a remaining handful of well-established boys' schools in the country, we carry on the traditions of male fellowship intended by the founders. While the current climate of opinion about the role of the sexes and their presumed interrelationship is tumultuous, and the social consensus about “a man's place” and “a woman's place” is no longer what it was when the school was chartered, a new social consensus has not yet emerged. While Wells School has increased significantly its coeducational functions, exchanges, and joint activities over the past fifteen years, its faculty and trustees and students have determined that a boys' school is still a satisfactory, and in a few respects superior, setting for assessing changing sexual expectations in the contemporary world. Moreover, Wells School has demonstrated that it is still a satisfactory, and arguably a superior, place to prepare for the intellectual challenge of college, and for adult life beyond. Moreover, our unusually loyal alumni body have supported the school in a variety of ways financially, and the larger community continues to send us more applicants for places than we can accommodate. We are fortunate to be working still with boys of “demonstrated promise.” Over the past five years there have been more than four applicants for every available place, and last year the applicant pool was the largest it has been in a decade.

We continue to carry out our founders' charge to prepare boys “who aspire to university,” although we no longer train many boys, at least directly, for the practical arts. Over the past decade every single Wells graduate has matriculated into college within a year of his graduation from school. Of last year's graduates, all but two matriculated into colleges and universities, and the two who elected to work and to travel for an interim period deferred until the following year places for which they had been accepted by colleges. Although a rigorous college preparatory school, Wells continues, in the context of contemporary society, to prepare boys for especially responsible work and for leadership, both of which were at the heart of the founders' stated aims.

Nor have we departed much from the ethical intentions of our charter: the “lessons of character, manliness, and Christian virtue.” The lessons of character we convey in a number of ways. Foremost among these, certainly, is direct participation in school processes: captaincies, editorships, monitorships, prefectorships, Student Court, Student Senate, and the scores of other leadership opportunities and responsibilities every boy must to some degree take on. Moreover, we address students on points of character—on charity, on basic honesty—directly in assembly. There is also the required Ethics course for under formers, and optional ethics and religion courses for upper formers. So we not only insist on ethical conduct, we encourage serious reflection on ethical matters. Manliness we consider to be the expression of the fullest range of potential given to each man; it entails self-confidence, and self-confidence is impossible without genuine achievement. Seen this way, manliness is impossible without taking risks, physical, intellectual, spiritual, and emotional. Wells School unashamedly sets the standards and provides the challenges it does to invite risk-taking. Real risk-taking involves the possibility of failure. It is possible to fail at Wells. Typically, however, boys who fail are those who fail to take risks, who close themselves off from challenges. This is always regrettable, and for some boys only a temporary delay in development, but it is no basis, we believe, for lowering standards or for removing challenges.

Given the diversity of the Wells student body today—a pluralism both intended and welcome—it is no longer appropriate to restrict the kind of conduct we aim at to “Christian virtue.” Wells has for the past fifty years been open to boys of all faiths and to those of no traditional faith. The standards of conduct expected and maintained are compatible, however, with all established religions. The school continues to hold a non-denominational assembly each morning, in which prayers are sometimes offered and in which inspirational addresses, including religious ones, are occasionally given. Sabbath services, including a non-sectarian Christian service in Perry Chapel, are encouraged but not required. A school chaplain is retained both as a teacher and as a pastoral counselor to all boys, whether Christian or not. While no longer a purely Christian school by composition or affiliation, Wells is still a school whose tone and student conduct are shaped by the religious tradition of our corporate past.

In many respects, then, Wells School continues to pursue the purposes originally set out for it. In so doing, the school is always in the process of carrying out two fundamental tasks—or perhaps two dimensions of the same fundamental task. We are simultaneously in the business of imparting to the young the best of our accrued culture (“a program of liberal arts and sciences”) and of maintaining a humane, livable community. It is inconceivable that these two missions will not always be the primary business of a school.

In order to assess the future requirements of Wells in the coming decade and in the twenty-first century, it is necessary to scan the horizon for present or approaching realities that will either help or hinder Wells in carrying out those two essential missions. We must look to demographic developments and to every possible indicator of the state of the national economy. The availability and expense of ever scarcer fossil fuel on the eastern seaboard will without question affect the cost, enrollment, and—literally—the climate of the school. While we are monitoring actual and likely external developments, we must also take shrewd stock of internal needs. It is clear we must build, renovate and innovate in order to remain the same. Faculty salaries and benefits must rise with the current levels of inflation if superior instruction is to be maintained. The academic departments and the athletic staff have indicated below, in a ranked list, the major capital expenditures they feel would most enhance their respective programs. An ad hoc Student Life Commission has recently been established to generate a parallel set of recommendations from the students' perspective.

When these data are complete and assembled, they will be distributed to the various school constituents—students, faculty, board, alumni, parents—for further elaboration and refinement. Operating from these shared materials, we will begin to generate two programs. The first of these will be produced by the “immediate” constituents (faculty, students and parents) and should consist of those things most worthy of retaining in the Wells experience as well as those things most worth acquiring. From the board and alumni, we need to generate a program of 
how
 to retain and acquire these things. Central to both programs are the following questions:

1.  What is best and most durable about the Wells experience?

2.  What is worst and most expendable in the Wells experience?

3.  How might Wells be changed structurally and substantively to achieve its stated purposes?

These questions are very basic, but they should provide rich soil for argument and discussion. They are worth resolving since, provided for or not, the future will be upon us.

17 November

Mr. William G. Truax
President, Fiduciary Trust Company
New Haven, Connecticut
P.O. Box 121

Dear Bill,

Enclosed is a draft of an introductory statement to cover the “Wells: Ten Years and After” project. I have also appended some capital needs (or desires) compiled by the faculty, along with some population and demographic info I've culled from here and there. I would like to get a preliminary packet of such materials to the whole board, or at least to the Education Committee, as soon as you give me a green light.

Tell me what you think of this. I'm not sure.

To me, thinking about the future seems a strangely empty process. The only basis for imagination is the present and the past, which is obvious enough. But when you look to the present and the past for what is essentially good, you are accused of bone-headed conservatism. The accusation doesn't make any sense, but the alternative approach, a kind of compulsion to change, is clearly dominating the age. Futuristic visions are all grounded in a relatively shallow near-past. The daring edifices of Kennedy Airport look like a backdrop to a third-line science-fiction movie of the fifties. Boston's new harbor-end megaliths look like upended transistor radios. The most dated-looking buildings in North America are Frank Lloyd Wright's “modern” houses with their hideous overhangs and rectilineality.

What an anomaly, an absurdity to “plan” a future. The most glorious moments in Western history have come about by a confluence of accidents when men went energetically rummaging into the past, into prior traditions: New-Kingdom Egypt, Israel under David and Solomon, Periclean Athens, Augustan Rome, Carolingian Europe, Renaissance Italy, etc. Was Thomas Arnold a forward-looking headmaster? Boyden? Peabody? Have the greatest eras of any school's history been planned for? In the sense that Lockheed and Chrysler and the thousands of flash-in-the-pan government social agencies make their jargon-laden, scientistic long-range plans?

I for one would like to be able to make a plan to maintain Wells somewhere near its present level, but I don't have the “data” to do it. I think only God has the data.

Just grumbling, Bill. Pay no mind.

Best,

John

H
EADMASTER'S
N
OTES
from 
The Wells Quarterly
Fall/Winter

It is the way of Fall Terms to be over before there is time to reflect on them, but we really should reflect on them, lest they lose meaning. Some great men who have thought about it seriously tell us that an event is most meaningful not when it is happening, but when it is recollected in tranquility. I am not sure I can simulate tranquility, but, for a day or two, as I write in this study in a boy-less Wells, the world is at least relatively quiet.

The one hundred and sixth year looks to be a good one. We enrolled one hundred twenty new boys, ninety of them third formers, from the strongest applicant pool we have had since I have been at Wells. The boys remind me, with a corporate groan, that I tell them that every year. But it's true. “Hard” data, such as admission-test quintiles and school transcripts, bear it out.

Possibly because of the talented new boys at Wells or possibly because of the times in which we live—perhaps both—the academic pace of the school has markedly picked up. In faculty meetings there are persistent reports of difficult and sophisticated schoolwork being done, without carrots and sticks. Apparently the pursuit of scholastic excellence gets a kind of guarded approval from today's young. This is a bright sign, insofar as the more we can enable boys with reasoning and general verbal skills, the wider will be the range of their pursuits and interests in the world beyond this little one. My own hardly streamlined theory of adolescent learning is that if a boy can by whatever means—through a teacher's charm, through natural inclination, through early cultural stimulation, through a dull, persistent sense of duty, through fear—reach a certain critical level of verbal and logical proficiency, he has his papers for life into a comprehending, possibly intellectual, possibly appreciating adulthood. Short of this critical point, he closes off, perhaps makes polite gestures in the direction of “culture,” but basically backs away from it as from a formidable alien.