STEAMPUNK AHAB'S PARTING SHOT

The revolutionist manifesto

One day during my "Upper" year at Exeter, I somehow managed to arrive early for a class in the Academy building. Amazingly and unexpectedly, I had a moment's respite amidst the otherwise unending busyness. As I sat down, I wondered about the pile of old books in the middle of the Harkness table. They looked like they could have been there since the table was installed in the 1930's. I picked up one well-thumbed volume to check it out. It was Walden. I had never heard of it or Thoreau before. I opened it at random to discover this passage:

If one listens to the faintest but constant suggestions of his genius, which are certainly true, he sees not to what extremes, or even insanity, it may lead him; and yet that way, as he grows more resolute and faithful, his road lies. The faintest assured objection which one healthy man feels will at length prevail over the arguments and customs of mankind. No man ever followed his genius till it misled him.... 

This was the beginning of a lifelong romance with Thoreau. It is also, perhaps, the ultimate starting point for my 25+ year mission to restore the Academy's integrity.

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In 2016, as the campus sexual assault scandal gathered momentum, some fellow Exeter alumni noted my dogged persistence in my quest. I had been at this, off-and-on, since my actions as a whistleblower in 1993-1994. "Ahab would have given up long ago," I joked.

Steampunk Ahab by Josh Guglielmo

But soon, quite unexpectedly, I experienced two extraordinary vindications. Sadly, these weren't recognized by the school. In a fair world, I might have been awarded the institution's Founders Day Award for extraordinary service. Instead, no one had the decency to even tell me what had happened. I had to put the pieces of the puzzle together for myself. To what end?

Though officially ignored, perhaps I could put this distinction to good use. As I explained to trustee Claudine Gay in my attempt to assist her "interim principal advisory committee," I "have a demonstrable track record for being significantly ahead of the curve when it comes to Academy governance." How's that? It came as the result of my pair of parting shots in 1994. As mentioned before, the penultimate one was a call for a code of conduct for faculty and administrators. That was finally instituted in August, 2016.

The final and ultimate vindication didn't start out that way. It was my last attempt to alert the Academy community to problems, an effort that went nowhere at the time. The vindication came twenty-three years later, in 2017, when I discovered that a letter I'd submitted to The Bulletin, PEA's quarterly magazine, had "...anticipated the findings of the Choate/Hall report detailing structural problems in the Admin/Trustee reporting relationships..."

The letter wasn't even published. But how it was received and rejected reveals realities that have yet to be acknowledged, much less addressed.

After the parting shot - what's left?  

Back in 1994, former colleagues told me about the tense opening moments in the faculty meeting following the arrival of my call for a code of conduct. I'd dropped a letter containing this along with documents from the Principal and President of the trustees. I sent these to all the faculty, trustees and administrators. Well over 100 went out. They arrived the day before the regular faculty meeting. Principal O'Donnell started the session with some joke to dissipate the tension. Then, it was immediately back to business-as-usual. There was no discussion about the culture of concealment and the failure to create policy for faculty misconduct. My call to address a fundamental, structural issue - one already identified in a trustee study - seemed to have disappeared down the Memory Hole.

But not entirely.

It raised questions about the O'Donnell Administration's integrity. Could they be trusted to deal with the issue of faculty misconduct? I heard that, after, some bypassed the administration and brought such issues to the trustees directly. I have no way of confirming this. If the trustees received such requests, maybe they had a conversation about it at one of their meetings. They might have wondered why the normal channels weren't sufficient? If this happened, there might be records of it in the archives. When the 75-year gag on Trustee meeting minutes is up in 50 years, be sure to let me know.

Better to have focused on the present
Used courtesy PEA

Regardless, at this point it looked like I was done. Then, the Fall 1994 Bulletin came out a few months after. I was intrigued by the cover story, "Facing the Future Together: A Team Approach Brings Exeter's Trustees Closer to the School and to Each Other" (used here courtesy PEA). Written by former Bennett Fellow Katherine K. Towler, I expected it to be an annoying puff-piece. So I read it first with low expectations. Soon, I found myself going through it with pen-in-hand. It actually contained a detailed snapshot of the information flow between the trustees and administration.

Trustees gather on campus three times a year while school's in session. My students taught me a new term to describe their perceptions of these visits. The Academy, they said, became a "Potemkin Village." I asked them to please explain - I was unfamiliar with this. They did so with great joy - instructing an instructor!

It refers to Grigori Potemkin, Catherine the Great's minister and lover. After Russia annexed the Crimea, he was put in charge of pulling the place together for Russian settlers. The Empress trekked out to check his progress. As the story goes, he pulled together a faux village with a traveling troupe of happy people. They'd set up shop for her inspection. Then, as her entourage rested for the night, the village would leapfrog them. The next day, traveling down the road, she found - another happy village! By this contrivance, the Empress got a mistaken impression of her minister's accomplishments.

I only recall one encounter with a trustee while I served on the faculty. Towards the end of my tenure, I briefly engaged one passing near my classroom. I tried to communicate how difficult it was for them to get a good sense of the place - how challenging for any faculty to give them the actual low-down. She brushed me off with some pleasantries. Apparently, this was too much reality to deal with. Besides, the next merriment in our Potemkin Village was about to get underway! So she was off...

Now, about that article...

From "Facing the Future Together"
Courtesy of Phillips Exeter

Facing the Future Together had some of the usual fluff. But if you read through it attentively (this digital copy used by permission of the Academy), it revealed the actual inner workings of our Potemkin Village. It explained how the trustee's oversight could be so blind.

Suddenly, it provided me the occasion to take another parting shot!

In those pre-Social Media days, the only way to reach out to fellow classmates and alums was the Bulletin. This seemed like an ideal opportunity to communicate the problems I'd experienced. The wider Exeter community needed to know about what seemed to be a structural problem with governance. So I wrote an extended letter responding to the piece. Perhaps I was being entirely too honest. This was sure to burst a few bubbles. There was no acrimony in it, but the reality I was exposing would be hard to accept. But I had to try to get the word out. Here's the heart of it:

As currently constituted, The Administration controls the flow of information at the Academy....the principal "functions as a liaison between the trustees and the faculty and administration." Her reports serve as a keynote to trustee meetings. Her overview frames their "topics for debate"...she plays the role of "'interpreter' (in) helping the Trustees understand." This is appropriate as long as there are outside checks and balances to the Principal's interpretation.

Now, compare this with the findings in the Choate/Hall report (see page 3-5 here) on the problems that allowed the mismanagement in 2011 and 2015:

...PEA did not have sufficiently robust governance processes in place to ensure that sexual misconduct, like the Schubart matter, would always be addressed appropriately. For example, there was no procedure to ensure that allegations relating to sexual misconduct that came to the attention of PEA’s administration would be conveyed to the Trustees in a timely, complete and transparent manner.

Taken together with my call for a code of conduct, these parting shots addressed the core causes of the malaise. How could these go unchallenged for decades? I don't claim any great prescience in terms of my organizational analysis. The issues were as obvious then as they are now in retrospect. Anyone reading that Bulletin piece critically could have seen it.

So, the structural problems driving the mismanagement under Principal Tom Hassan's leadership should have been obvious long before. He was part of the O'Donnell Administration. Was he aware of these structural issues when he headed College Counseling some two decades earlier?

This raises other questions. Why didn't anyone do anything about these issues?  How is it that a generation of Exeter students and faculty had to operate under these conditions?  What was the price they had to pay? What scars remain? What should our response be now to past leadership's mismanagement?

Next, we'll have a look at what happened when I tried, unsuccessfully, to get that letter published.

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