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Commencement 1999
Women and men of the class of 1999, in just a few moments you will be graduates of Phillips Exeter Academy. This is something that I know you have been looking forward to for many months now, many years, perhaps. Yet at the same time I know that as the moment approaches it is touched with some sadness. All of us present here today feel these related emotions: joy for your success and progress to the next step in your life’s path and sadness that friendships and routines, familiar faces on the paths and greetings in the dorm, are coming to an end. All growth and change bring their measure of sadness, and this ceremony today is no exception. As a young boy, I came upon a lonely year in my life when I lived with my grandmother shortly after my mother had passed away. I remember comforting myself during that period by inventorying the routines and past times of my former life that gave me pleasure, and reflecting on how many of these activities remained. It was a time in which I felt as though I had lost much, but the inventory of good times helped me focus on what was not lost. Perhaps when some of you first came to the Academy you used a similar strategy to cope with homesickness or missing friends and family. As members of the class of 1998 returned to campus this year—alumni/ae now—here to visit old friends with the perspective of a few months in college, I regularly asked them what they missed or what they felt they had lost when they left the Academy. Responses to this question took on a predictable format. There was always a cascade of comments about friends, individuals who mattered and who touched the graduates’ lives. There was a fondness for traditions—beating Andover in anything ranked high on that list. But almost universally, almost invariably, the graduates all said that what they missed the most was great teaching and, in fact, the Harkness table. This fact didn’t surprise me at all because I have been struck ever since I came to the Academy that its alumni/ae almost invariably say that the teaching they received at Exeter was better than the teaching they received in college. Some tell humorous stories to illustrate the point. One graduate told me that when he went off to college it was six months before one of his classmates came up to him and asked why in every lecture class he always sat right in the front row and asked questions all the time without raising his hand. This graduate didn’t realize the world wasn’t a Harkness classroom. Another recent graduate at a reunion this spring asked me, “How do you tell students that this will quite likely be the finest teaching they will ever see when they still have so much schooling to go?” Over and over, I hear from alumni that the teaching they experienced at Exeter set a standard rarely equaled in their educational lives. When I first encountered this phenomenon, it bothered me a bit. I like anticipating that every new educational experience will be better than the last. But as I considered it more fully, a few thoughts became clear. What matters is to have experienced great teaching at all. Great teaching and great learning experiences leave their mark, and once you have encountered a great teacher, all future education is enhanced. Great teaching is something that sticks with you for a very long time. Savor those great teachers you have had at the Academy and enjoy their mastery for the rest of your life. And if what you miss about Exeter is the Harkness program, it is fully portable. Harkness is less a system of education than a commitment to learn from others. Harkness lessons start with inquiry, not some simple fill-in-the-blank sort of question, but inquiry that moves to the edge of what is unknown about the subject. Harkness classes trust people to explore ideas cooperatively and share learning. This is a kind of learning experience that can be carried throughout your life. It is unlikely, however, that your professors in college will appreciate your sitting in the front row and asking questions without raising your hand. But away from formal classes you can start the germ of Harkness growing wherever there are good people interested in exploring ideas and learning from each other. Start slowly—the full-blown Harkness warrior is a pretty terrifying sight to the uninitiated—but Harkness will grow if you tend and care for it.  One of the greatest lessons that you will carry with you from this Academy is not what you have learned but how you have learned to learn. Good learners can be independent of their teachers, and the greatest teachers work to make their students independent learners. This school places great responsibility on the shoulders of its students, and the faculty does so in the sure knowledge that bearing this responsibility amidst the give-and-take of the Harkness table is the surest way to encourage students to take charge of their own learning. Great teaching is important to the world. I hope that many members of the class of 1999 become great teachers. But the greatest teachers are those who make themselves unnecessary as soon as their students are ready to learn on their own. The Jewish liturgy of bar mitzvah teaches that parents have two tasks in the raising of their children: to give them roots and to give them wings. The same might be said of your faculty at Phillips Exeter. Our task has been to give you roots in the academic tradition we represent and the best insight we have gained from our own extended labors in our disciplines. At the same time, we seek to give you wings to exceed our accomplishments and to find joy in adding to the total of human kind’s knowledge and art. The skills you have learned in Harkness discussion will lead you to that joy. As the class of ’99 graduates today, all of us on the faculty know that we are witnessing the commencement of a very strong class of Exonians. This is a class that has added much to Exeter during its time here through hard work and diligent scholarship. The prize day awards, both those presented by the Academy and those awarded by national organizations, speak to this class’s accomplishments.
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