Going the Distance

Phyllis was invited to join the trustees at Exeter in 1993, but a year later was offered the job in Beijing. Trustee meetings, therefore, meant traveling back from China three times a year. "In the hour and 15-minute drive from Logan airport," she remembers, "I would find the issues of living in a developing country falling away as the landscape changed and became more rural. Here I was, suddenly back at an institution with this intense concentration on the mission of good teaching and learning. We would focus on the core issues of education and residential life, and then I would go back to my own life again, refreshed and inspired."

Every night this Beijing market street is closed off and gated. Here, Phyllis opens the Da Zha Lan while a guard looks on.

Children look on as local officials count ballots in the election for village leaders in Lishu County in northeastern China, July 1998.

During a visit to observe village elections, Phyllis takes a break on a ‘kang,’ the traditional brick stove heated bed of farmers’ homes in northeastern China.

Unfortunately the unusual distance caused Phyllis to retire from the board after her first five-year term. Nevertheless, during her tenure she provided several services to the school community, some not so easy to put in words. At her retirement dinner, Phyllis’s Exeter roommate and fellow trustee, Julie Dunfey toasted her old friend. "From what I am told and have observed," Julie said, "Phyllis has been a source of great support for women who work at the Academy, a colleague with a different perspective and a sympathetic ear. Additionally, when she presided over projects such as the new lintel on the Academy Building, she made a concise presentation with just the right number of variables to comfortably consider. She then led all of us in an orderly fashion to a satisfying conclusion."

Sixty-six hundred miles away in Beijing, there are some who could say the same about Phyllis and her work with legal reform.

—Alison Freeland ’72

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