t e sting
Horace Mann
By
g a b ri e l s h e r m a n
When students created Facebook pages that viciously attacked a teacher,
and when their wealthy parents on the school’s board defended them,
Horace Mann was forced to confront a series of questions: Is a Facebook page
private, like a diary? Is big money distorting private-school education?
And what values is a school supposed to teach?
peter sheehy, a history teacher at the Horace Mann
School, sat in his bedroom, trolling the Internet. It was the
fall of 2006, shortly after lunch on a Saturday afternoon. The
school year had just begun. Not a good start, Sheehy thought.
On Thursday, J.T. Della Femina, the newly elected student-body
president and son of advertising magnate Jerry Della Femina,
had brought a female club leader to tears at the opening highschool assembly when he introduced her at the podium as “the
Queen of Mean.”
Now, in the hallways and in the school newspaper, students
and teachers were fiercely debating the presence of sexism on
campus. The students defended J.T.’s words even as the teachers deplored them.
myspace, Sheehy typed into Google. He had never been on so22
Illustrations by Jeffrey Smith
cial-networking sites before, but he was troubled by the reaction
to the assembly, and his worry triggered a thought. Not long ago,
a student had told him that classmates were photographing a
math teacher with their cell phones and posting the embarrassing pictures online. (Sheehy was chairman of the faculty-grievance committee.) Perhaps it was worth taking a look.
Logging on to MySpace proved too
Logging on to
complicated, but then he recalled a facFacebook, Danielle
ulty seminar he’d attended the previous
McGuire was
spring, in which Adam Kenner, Horace
shocked. In every
Mann’s technology director, had demonword on the page,
strated how to monitor student Facebook
she saw herself
pages. All it took was a Horace Mann edepicted as a witch
or a bitch.
mail account, a false name, and a year of
a p r i l 7, 2 0 0 8 | n e w y o r k
23
graduation. Following Kenner’s lead, he logged on to Facebook
using middle names. Sheehy found no evidence of the photos
but within a few minutes stumbled on something much worse.
The Web page for a Horace Mann Facebook group titled the
“Men’s Issues Club” mocked a student organization on campus
called the Women’s Issues Club. The 44 members of the parody
club included children of both trustees and the legion of prominent names who send their children to Horace Mann, which sits
in the top rung of private schools in New York. One club member referred to an English teacher as a “crazy ass bitch” and a
French teacher as an “acid casualty.” Another boy boasted that
he’s “the only person here who actually beats women when hes
[sic] drunk. no joke,” while still another bragged that he had
“banged” a teacher “in [the] music dept. bathroom” and “will get
great college rec” for the accomplishment. The boys lamented
Star Jones’s “fat and wrinkled ass,” “sex in the city,” and “feminism,” proclaiming, “where do they ­belong?!?!????!!! in the
­kitchen!! in the ­kitchen!!!” The club summed up its mission
thus: “For too long men have not had a way to express themselves
and their beliefs in society. Men need to have a voice, we aren’t
meant to be seen and not heard. Let freedom ring, bitches.”
Shocked, Sheehy continued trolling. He then found a Facebook Web page for “McGuire Survivors 2006,” a student group
dedicated to his colleague, Danielle McGuire, a 33-year-old history instructor with a liberal bent who had taught at Horace
Mann for a year. The page’s profile picture was a grotesque illustration of the black slave Tituba, one of three women first accused in the Salem witch trials. Scrolling down the page, Sheehy
again found trustee children behind the Website. Derogatory
slogans about McGuire included “Official Minority Rights Officer and Head of Protection for Feminist Society” (McGuire is
white) and “Representation of Oppressed ‘Indians’ of America.”
The club called on prospective members to join if “you know
what it is like to be a McGuireite; you have an entire volume of
doodles in your history notebook; you have never done the reading; you are scared to enter history class for fear of brainwashing,” concluding ominously, “you don’t know if you will leave
class alive.”
H
orace mann
has always been a pressurized place, the junior division of New
York’s elite. Parents of current students include former governor
Eliot Spitzer, Hillary Clinton pollster Mark Penn, fashion designer Kenneth Cole, and Sean “Diddy” Combs. But the Internet
has added a new kind of pressure. For Horace Mann, this new
reality emerged in the winter of 2004, when an eighth-grader
e-mailed a cell-phone video of herself masturbating and simulating fellatio on a Swiffer mop to a boy she liked, who in turn
forwarded the clip to his friends. In short order—as these things
24 n e w y o r k | a p r i l 7, 2 0 0 8
inevitably do—the video popped up on Friendster for millions
to view. “Swiffergate,” as the scandal became known, roiled the
Horace Mann community.
Adam Kenner, who had taught in the school’s technology department for twenty years, began lecturing parents, students,
and teachers on the risks of social networking. “Nothing online is
private, not even if you are only sharing it with your best friend,”
he said in one speech. “Don’t post anything online you wouldn’t
want posted on a bulletin board in your school’s hallway.”
These Facebook pages, however, were something different.
Kids have always ragged on an unpopular teacher or ridiculed
an unfortunate classmate. But sites like Facebook and RateMyTeachers.com are changing the power dynamics of the
community in an unpredictable way. It is as if students were
standing outside the classroom window, taunting the teacher to
her face. Should they be punished? There were, as yet, no rules
or codes for how a school should address such issues. (Horace
Mann, through its PR advisers Kekst and Company, declined
to comment.)
But the questions provoked by the Web postings ran deeper
than these. Who should make the rules? In the past, there had
been at least a rough assumption that teachers were parental
surrogates, authority figures who were charged with making
decisions regarding education and discipline, and that the
rules governing this kind of behavior were clearly the faculty’s
to make. But the frenzy around college admissions is driving a
private-school arms race, funded by wealthy parents who believe
their contributions entitle them to substantial input in the running of the schools. Now, at times, teachers can seem merely
like hired help. Horace Mann alumnus William Barr, the U.S.
attorney general under President George H.W. Bush, believes
that the school has become “too much of a business.” “The school
needs and wants a lot of money,” he says, “so the influence of the
business community becomes very strong. It’s a symbiotic relationship. But in the long run, the school loses something.”
The students were more aware than ever of where the real
power resided. So when the Facebook situation was brought into
the open, the teachers found themselves powerless to act, and
the students did not passively wait to be disciplined.
sheehy knew the facebook pages had the potential to
be explosive. The previous spring, the board had been furious
with a colleague of Sheehy’s in the history department, Andrew
Trees, after he published a satirical novel about an unnamed
New York City private school (bearing a strong resemblance
to Horace Mann) and its craven and corrupt board of trustees.
Around the time Trees admitted in a letter to the Horace Mann
student newspaper that he was the author of Academy X, some
board members wanted him fired.
On Monday morning, September 25, 2006, Sheehy alerted
Thomas M. Kelly, the head of school, to the Facebook clubs, and
Kelly called an emergency meeting after school, attended by the
grievance committee and department heads and deans. Within
hours, several board members’ children were pulled off the Web
pages. It was becoming clear that this was something the powers
at the school would rather sweep under the table.
Meanwhile, the history department informed Danielle McGuire about the club specifically targeting her. From her computer in the history-department office, she logged on (using her
married name) and stared at the screen, aghast. Immediately,
she recognized the crude illustration of Tituba, whom she had
lectured on last year. Tituba as Aunt Jemima, she thought.
The artist had painted a racial slur. In every word on the page,
­McGuire saw herself depicted as a witch or a bitch. She trembled
a little as she read the names of the members. There was the
In Early May, Head of school thomas Kelly called Andrew Trees, Peter Sheehy,
and the chair of the history department into his office. “It’s frustrating
to some trustees,” he said, “because in the corporate world you don’t need cause, you just fire people.”
daughter of one board member, who had e-mailed from her
daddy’s BlackBerry requesting extra credit. And the club’s creator, who daydreamed in class. (The Facebook page sometimes
seemed to have been written not so much to attack the teacher as
to express admiration for a boy she liked. “I formally dedicate this
group to … a survivor (hopefully) and a friend,” she wrote. “Didn’t
think he was going to make it, but he pulled through and got a
hug!”) And a rich kid who got caught up in the wrong crowd.
And then, McGuire saw the name that bothered her most. We’ll
call him Jeffrey Robbins.
Jeffrey was McGuire’s most antagonistic student from sophomore U.S. history the previous year. Jeffrey challenged McGuire’s
focus on liberal politics and civil rights, proposing to write his
class research project on plagiarism in Martin Luther King
Jr.’s speeches and saying that his hero was Roy Cohn—himself
a Horace Mann alumnus. The previous spring, after he lost a
student-judged essay competition, Jeffrey had stormed into the
history-department office, railing against McGuire’s sexism and
claiming she was biased against his work. A few weeks later, Jeffrey accused McGuire of maligning his mentor, Sam Gellens, a
more conservative world-history instructor, in class. The school
investigated and found no evidence to substantiate his claims.
On Tuesday afternoon, September 26, McGuire informed
Barbara Tischler, the high-school principal, that she viewed the
Facebook group as connected to Jeffrey’s earlier conflicts with
her. The page had exhorted students to join McGuire Survivors
if “your name is Jeffrey Robbins” and “you are excited to enter
history class to see Jeffrey Robbins pace around and get angry.”
Clearly, Jeffrey was behind the group, McGuire explained, as
Tischler listened impassively.
At a faculty meeting in the cafeteria after school the next day,
Kelly said that punishments for students would be severe—and
then proceeded to castigate the faculty for engaging in “similar
behavior” by logging on to the Websites surreptitiously, and instructed them to straighten their “moral compasses.” “Your contracts are under review, and you’re being watched by the kids,”
he said.
To McGuire, this was a shocking statement on a number
of levels. She too had been at Kenner’s seminar the previous
spring—as had the high-school principal and almost the entire
faculty—and McGuire had followed his instructions in accessing
Facebook. Kelly, however, didn’t acknowledge that the meeting
had taken place—and thus that the administration had in effect
sanctioned McGuire’s tactic. Instead, he tried to suggest that
such ugliness was part of the job—he spoke of a time when, in
his previous job as a public-school superintendent in Westchester County, he had been the target of online hate groups. Three
times Kelly repeated that he had been called a “nigger lover.”
Kelly had been at Horace Mann for just over a year when
the Facebook scandal erupted, and he hadn’t earned the trust
of large segments of the faculty. What is clear is that Kelly, in
the Academy X affair, had shown a keen grasp of the principles
of political expediency. When Trees admitted to Kelly that he
had written Academy X, Kelly was forgiving, urging him to announce the news in a letter to the school’s student newspaper,
the Record. “I want to be clear that I have not tried to paint a
portrait of Horace Mann,” Trees wrote. “Dr. Kelly has already
read the book, and he assured me that he did not think it would
cause any major problems.” Then, around the time the letter
appeared in the paper, some members of the board leaned on
Kelly to fire Trees. In early May, Kelly called Trees, Sheehy, and
Barry Bienstock, chair of the history department, to his office
for a meeting. “Just so you know,” Kelly began, “the pushback—I
said that there’ll always be some—has occurred.”
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25
“For me personally, and as head of the school, it’s satire,” Kelly
told Trees and his colleagues gathered around Kelly’s conference
table. “It’s fair game. It’s my job. I get criticized, and if you don’t
want to be criticized, then you know what, live in a hole.” C’est la
vie, in other words. “At this point in time the school does not see
a legal issue … We’re going to handle this like everything else we
handle here: by the book, standard operating procedure.”
His only concern, in fact, was the likely media frenzy the book
would prompt. Kelly pledged to remind faculty not to talk to the
press, invoking the “Swiffer incident.” The student newspaper’s
review of the book would be the most delicate. “Everyone is trying to find out if I’m going to squash a Record review … I said,
‘It’s not my place.’ ” Kelly added, however, that he planned to
put the Record’s archives behind a private firewall as soon as he
could, but not now. “Just because your book is out,” Kelly confided. “It would look creepy.”
Despite his assurances, Kelly stressed that the board would not
be so forgiving. “It’s frustrating to some trustees because in the
corporate world, you don’t need cause, you just fire people,” he
cautioned. “I’m trying to referee there. I said, ‘Guys, take a deep
breath. With all the things going on, this is a book written by a
faculty member that’s not unlike other things that have been written,’ ” Kelly said. He even played with the idea of writing a Horace Mann tell-all himself. “They’re nervous about me because I
joked with one of them. I said, ‘What, are you kidding me? I only
have two years left on my contract here, I’ll do Academy X uncensored!’ And they’re like, ‘That’s not funny.’ And I’m like, ‘Guys,
think about it! David Schiller’ ”—the English-department chair,
who became high-school principal last year—“ ‘says it all the time,
and he’s right: There’s no better story than a Horace Mann story.’
And someone says, ‘Tom, what if you get hijacked by the media?’
I said, ‘Then my response to Larry on Larry King Live will be, “I
just got here, I’m trying to
clean this shit up.” ’ ”
Despite the pressure
from the Horace Mann
board, Trees remained on
the payroll and returned
to teach in the fall of 2006.
In one way, his presence on
campus further complicated the Facebook crisis: If a teacher could write what he wanted
without punishment, why should students be disciplined for posting to sites that weren’t intended to be public? Even before being
directly confronted by the administration, many students seethed
at the perceived violation of their privacy. And in their fury, of
course, the students had powerful allies: their own parents on the
board. “It wasn’t just that students were threatened by the faculty;
the faculty was threatened by the students,” the then–student-body
vice-president, Michael Marcusa, recently recalled. “There was an
erosion of trust.”
“We all knew which teachers were on Facebook, and that made
it awkward to be sitting in class with them,” says Sonya Chandra,
former editor-in-chief of the Record and member of another derogatory Facebook club.
On Thursday morning, September 28, Tischler sent an e-mail to
the entire high school calling for a mandatory assembly on Friday
to discuss the Facebook incident. “Make no mistake,” she wrote.
“This is a serious issue, and there will be consequences for some
students.”
That morning, Kelly called Sheehy to his office and said he was
getting more pushback from board members, who were demanding
that faculty be disciplined for accessing their children’s Facebook
pages. After the meeting, Sheehy called his lawyer. Then a senior,
“what your daughter
AFTER A BOARD MEETING, the trustee whose daughter had created one of the
Facebook pages came up to Danielle McGuire. “Students are just blowing off steam,” she said. “They’re
stressed. It’s not unusual for them to say racist or sexist things.”
26 n e w y o r k | a p r i l 7, 2 0 0 8
“what you did was like breaking into my daughter’s room
and reading her diary,” said the trustee. “no,” said mcguire,
did was the equivalent of posting something in Times Square.”
who hadn’t viewed the sites himself, submitted a letter to the Record
criticizing McGuire and another teacher for accessing the Facebook
pages. Having learned that she was named in the letter, McGuire
e-mailed Kelly and a dean who oversaw the paper hours before the
newspaper was set to close, warning that she would sue for defamation if the letter appeared in print. Later that afternoon, Sheehy
sent Kelly a memo from the grievance committee pressing him to
censor the letter and protesting the board’s involvement. “We have
been concerned by the involvement of [a member of] the Board
of Trustees, in a disciplinary matter involving one of his children,”
Sheehy wrote. “We consider this a clear conflict of interest and we
trust that you will urge [the trustee] to allow the school to exercise
its disciplinary responsibilities in relationship to its students.”
Kelly didn’t respond to the complaint regarding the trustee but
commanded the Record to hold the letter.
At the Friday-morning assembly the next day, Kelly stressed the
need to begin a dialogue about appropriate speech. At the same
time, the trustees convened on campus.
Then, after lunch, McGuire and Sheehy were walking in front
of Tillinghast Hall when a woman wearing alligator sunglasses
stormed up to them. It was the trustee whose daughter had formed
the anti-McGuire club.
“You logged into Facebook under a false name,” the woman
said, glaring at McGuire.
“I had a right to defend myself against defamation,” McGuire
responded.
“Students are just blowing off steam,” the trustee said. “They’re
very stressed; it’s not unusual for them to say racist and sexist
things … The site is private.”
“No,” McGuire insisted, “it’s got 9 million users.”
“What you did was like breaking into my daughter’s room and
reading her diary … ”
“No,” McGuire said, the emotion rising in her voice, “what your
daughter did was the equivalent of posting something in Times
Square.”
McGuire could not control herself any longer. “What your
daughter did was actionable, and I’m not talking about this anymore,” she said before walking off.
Barry Bienstock, the history-department chair, walked over as
McGuire walked away. The trustee was seething. She told the men
that McGuire had called her daughter’s friend Jeffrey Robbins,
who is Jewish, a “Nazi” in class the previous spring and encouraged them to investigate the matter.
Over the next weekend, the administration became concerned
that the media had gotten a whiff of the scandal. On Sunday, October 8, Tischler e-mailed the faculty, pressing them not to talk
to reporters. “Last Friday, a member of the HM community—a
faculty member, student, or staff member—called the Daily News
to discuss matters that are being addressed in the Upper Division
through disciplinary action for students and continuing conversation with faculty,” Tischler wrote. “In all instances of press inquiries, our response should be ‘no comment.’ ”
the following tuesday, October 10, Kelly and Tischler called
McGuire into a meeting. Tischler accused McGuire of “tearing the
community apart” by viewing Facebook. Kelly added that the board
chairman wanted her to write a letter to the Record explaining her
actions. This was part of Jeffrey Robbins’s campaign to harass her,
McGuire protested. Kelly replied that, in fact, there was a new
allegation—the one leveled by the trustee in front of Tillinghast
Hall—that McGuire had called Jeffrey a “Nazi” in class. “I hate to
tell you this,” Kelly said, “but there is a rumor of a tape.”
That night, McGuire sobbed. As a senior in college, after setting out to study world religions, she had decided to convert
to Judaism. She had been married for a year now to a Jewish
doctor at Bellevue. How could she be accused of anti-Semitism?
A working-class girl from rural Wisconsin, she had earned a
doctorate from Rutgers. Her essay “It Was Like All of Us Had
Been Raped,” about sexual violence in the civil-rights era, was
anthologized in Best American History Essays 2006. But none
of that seemed to matter. Before going to bed, McGuire wrote
Bienstock. She was afraid to come to work, she confided.
Back at school the next morning, McGuire burst into tears
during class and went home early. Bienstock e-mailed Kelly. Jeffrey better produce the tape or back off, he wrote. That evening,
Kelly called McGuire and told her that the rumors of a tape were
unfounded. Before hanging up, Kelly expressed his unwavering
support to McGuire.
On Friday, the Record ran McGuire’s letter. Instead of expressing contrition, as the board chair had wanted, McGuire
defended herself. “I make no apologies for integrating race and
gender into my classes,” she wrote. “I should point out that all the
other U.S. History teachers do the same—apparently without
being ridiculed. To single me out is revealing, and is a sign that
parts of the Horace Mann community are not as enlightened
as they pretend to be … Instead of taking stock of the damage
done to the community by these postings, some students, with
the implied consent of some adults in the community, shifted the
blame, cried victim, and wrapped themselves in rights they are
not entitled to.” She concluded: “Is there anything more adolescent and intellectually craven than this?”
In November, the school cleared McGuire of making anti­Semitic remarks. Two weeks later, the administration doled out
punishments. Except for the creator of the “Men’s Issues” club,
who withdrew from the school, the involved students received
slaps on the wrist. Two kids served one-day suspensions; the rest were asked to say sorry. The
creator of the anti-McGuire club apologized to
McGuire profusely in person. In a memo to the
faculty, the deans acknowledged the administration’s slow response. “As we move ahead from the
Facebook ‘episode,’ ” they wrote, “we recognize
that our challenge to create an environment in
which such behavior does not occur again has
only begun.”
I
f the new rules of the Internet were some
of the forces that were creating chaos in the Horace Mann community, another, unquestionably, was money. For much of the
past decade, Horace Mann’s central preoccupation, like that of
many private schools, has been fund-raising. In 1998, the board,
then chaired by Michael Hess, a onetime (Continued on page 107)
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27
horace mann (Continued from page 27)
partner at the white-shoe law firm Chadbourne and Parke (and a founding partner of Rudy Giuliani’s consulting firm),
launched the most ambitious expansion
in the school’s history. The master plan for
the school’s eighteen-acre Riverdale campus included designs for a 45,000-volume
library, a 640-seat theater, a renovated
middle school, a new cafeteria, and an outdoor “Shakespeare Garden” planted with
flora referenced in the playwright’s works.
Horace Mann’s endowment was $60
million at the time, but the construction
budget topped $100 million. To finance the
project, the school floated $103 million in
bonds certified by the city’s Industrial Development Agency over the next five years.
According to documents filed with the IDA,
Horace Mann’s total debt will reach $339
million, including principal and interest,
over the 42-year life of the bonds. The board
has since raised tuition (now $29,000) and
has completed two major fund-raising campaigns, including selling the naming rights
to its new buildings (lockers at $500,000,
computer classrooms $150,000 a pop, the
orchestra pit for $250,000).
One consequence of the debt has been
the consolidation of wealth on the board.
The last full-time educator to serve as a
trustee, Barnard dean Marjorie Silverman,
left the board in 1999. Nowadays the board
is dominated by lawyers, investment bankers, and real-estate developers, and, possibly as a consequence, the school’s relations
with its teachers have suffered.
In the fall of 2004, the board informed
Horace Mann teachers that financial pressures would require a cut in their health insurance. (According to tax filings, Horace
Mann spent $7.2 million on faculty benefits
in 2004, a little more than the $5.7 million
financial-aid budget. That year, the school’s
payments on construction reached $7.3
million.) In one tense meeting in November 2004, Steven Friedman, then board
treasurer, chided the instructors for making
“poor consumer choices” with their health
coverage (citing Celebrex, the popular but
costly arthritis drug). If they would not
downgrade their health plans, the board
might be forced to cut financial aid, he
said. Following the meeting, a long-serving
photography teacher sent a letter to then–
board chair Robert Katz, Goldman Sachs’
general counsel, and the faculty objecting
to the cuts. “I can’t begin to tell you how
many faculty members I’ve heard wonder
that baseball diamonds are more important
than faculty health in the long-term future
of the School,” she wrote.
Meanwhile, the board was facing resistance from faculty during the search for a
new head of school. In April 2004, Eileen
Mullady, who had run Horace Mann since
1995, announced she was leaving to run
a private school outside San Diego. The
board told faculty that they could have an
advisory role but would have no voting
rights in the final selection. Some faculty
members bristled at the board’s secrecy,
circulating a petition that protested the
search. The board rejected the entreaties
and narrowed the initial pool of candidates
down to four finalists.
Just as the board announced benefit
cuts, the first finalist in the head-of-school
search arrived on campus for interviews.
Of all the candidates, Kelly, who’d been
superintendent of the Valhalla school district in Westchester, stood out for his lack
of ­private-school experience. He had spent
the first ten years of his career teaching
children with severe mental handicaps before becoming a public-school administrator. But the board was impressed with his
experience running a large, complex school
system and his experience with construction, though things had not always gone
as planned. In 2003, Kelly had allowed
construction companies to dump debris
at Valhalla schools in exchange for building new athletic fields atop the pile, but
the plan backfired. (A 2005 report published by State Comptroller Alan Hevesi
found that the “fill-for-fields” scandal was
a “windfall for the construction companies that saved as much as $19.4 million
in dumping fees but a disaster for taxpayers who must pay nearly $3.8 million” to
clean up the mess.) At the time Kelly told
the Westchester Journal News, “You have
to come and see what we’ve gotten: two
new baseball fields and synthetic turf on
another. That’s how I rationalize what a
nightmare this has been.”
After the board had interviewed the
candidates, Peter Sheehy and Jennifer
McFeely, head of the guidance department, met with Katz to recommend that
the school continue its search. On January 5, 2005, the board announced that the
job had gone to Kelly. Over lunch that day,
David Schiller told Sheehy, “This is a tragic
day for Horace Mann.”
andrew trees remained on the sidelines during the Facebook imbroglio. A
month after the scandal, however, David
Schiller, Trees charges, told a colleague that
Kelly had claimed Trees was at work on a
second book, this time a nonfiction exposé
of Horace Mann. (Trees later explained that
he was writing a book, but its subject was
the science of dating.) Schiller’s allegations
baffled Trees, but because no administrator had confronted him directly, he did not
bother to set the record straight.
On Sunday, January 28, 2007, Kelly informed Barry Bienstock that he would not
be renewing Trees’s contract; in effect, he
was being fired. (Faculty who pass a performance review after three years of teaching
are granted automatic contract renewals,
and the school’s handbook outlines a process for termination. Trees had been at the
school for six years and had never been afforded a formal dismissal process.) The next
afternoon, Kelly told Trees that he was “a
really great teacher” and the school had “no
complaints” about his professionalism. But
hypothetically speaking, Kelly wouldn’t offer a job to a teacher if he knew the applicant was writing a “satirical review” about
the school. Therefore, Kelly was giving
Trees the option to resign. If he didn’t accept? “I don’t know what I’ll say to people
when they call and ask why we’re not keeping you,” Kelly said.
Later that week, Sheehy and the three
other members of the faculty-grievance
committee resigned their positions in protest. In March, Trees’s attorney, Ed Little,
met with the school’s lawyer, Mark Brossman, and vice-chairman of the Horace
Mann board, Cahill Gordon & Reindel
partner Howard “Peter” Sloane. Before Little could open negotiations over severance,
Sloane cut him off. “The answer is zero,” he
said. “Maybe we’ll give him a letter of recommendation, but he’s out.”
News that Trees was leaving was closely
held. Over the spring, he quietly packed up
his office, bringing a few books home each
day. But on Friday, May 18, Sheehy wrote
a letter to the Record disclosing Trees’s departure. “The short-term satisfaction that
some may receive by the expulsion of Dr.
Trees from our community will, I fear, be
overshadowed by the chilling effect that
such an act will have on the open and free
exchange of ideas that is crucial to a secure
and healthy institution,” he wrote. Some
students protested Trees’s firing. One
class studying civil disobedience staged a
walkout, and enlisted another—studying
­Bolshevik history—to walk out, too. But
other students had somewhat subdued reactions. (In the Record the previous spring,
a snide, un-­bylined review had noted that
Academy X “leaves HMers wondering just
how much of the book is real—and I’m sure
that we all hope that the explicit sexual urges that teachers in Academy X feel towards
their students and co-workers are more fictional than the large bell tower that Trees
describes as adorning the school.”)
Students questioned once again why the
same teachers who had cracked down on
student expression on Facebook were now
defending the free speech of a colleague
who had made fun of students in his novel.
“When it was students saying things about
a p r i l 7, 2 0 0 8 | n e w y o r k
107
teachers—and I’m not equating—they
were immediately punished,” said Jessica
Moldovan, a member of the class of 2007.
“And when it was a teacher making certain
statements about students, about the way
we act, many of which were fabricated and
exaggerated, you know, he was fighting
back and saying freedom of speech.” Other
students complained about teachers who
passed around petitions in class defending Trees. “It was borderline coercive,” said
Michael Marcusa, then student-body vicepresident. “The overall principle of trying
to bring students into a dispute with the
administration is unprofessional.”
The week before final exams, Sheehy
collected signatures from some 60 scholars and public figures on a petition voicing support for Trees, and submitted it to
the Record. After the editors called Kelly
for comment, he censored the letter, citing
legal grounds.
on graduation day, last June, Trees
packed up his remaining books and left
campus. Danielle McGuire, who sat two
desks down from Trees in the historydepartment office, was also leaving. In
March, Kelly informed her too that the
school would not be renewing her contract. (She’s now on a fellowship at the
University of North Carolina’s Center
for the Study of the American South.)
“The really good students make you forget about all the crap,” McGuire recalled
recently. “Now when I go back through
this, I can’t believe this shit … It was so
clearly about the culture of money and
power and lack of a willingness to really
take a firm stand over what was right and
wrong.” Martin Bienenstock, a Dewey &
­LeBoeuf partner whose son was in McGuire’s class, regrets the board’s decision.
“The issue of privacy was misapplied totally,” he says. “After having heard what
was said about her, she easily could have
filed a lawsuit and gotten that material in
discovery. She decided not to sue. Frankly,
that was a concession on her part. Lots of
lawyers would have taken that case.”
In November, Trees’s new attorney,
Thomas Mullaney, filed a lawsuit in State
Supreme Court against Horace Mann, alleging that the school’s firing of Trees violated its employment agreement. The suit
also alleges that Schiller defamed Trees by
falsely accusing him of drafting a nonfiction tell-all in the fall of 2006.
In February, Horace Mann’s lawyers
filed a 121-page motion to dismiss, claiming that the school employs teachers on
one-year contracts without any guarantees of renewal and that Horace Mann
rightly didn’t renew Trees’s contract,
since he had embarrassed the school in
108 n e w y o r k | a p r i l 7, 2 0 0 8
a work of fiction. “Reaction in the School
community to the portrayal of ‘Horace
Mann’ in Academy X once the book was
published was swift and overwhelmingly
negative,” Kelly said in an affidavit. “The
School concluded that Trees’s continued
employment, under the circumstances,
would be divisive and distracting.” (In
a meeting with Trees the previous May,
Kelly said he had heard complaints
“­second- and thirdhand.”)
Reconciliation between Horace Mann’s
students, faculty, and administration
has been agonizingly slow to come. Last
spring, the administration canceled the
student elections after several candidates
ridiculed classmates during campaign
speeches. After the voting was halted, Jeffrey Robbins became a campus populist,
railing against the teachers’ involvement
in the election, and the administration
decided to let the election proceed.
For his part, Peter Sheehy always
planned to return for his ninth year at
Horace Mann this school year. But in
August, Kelly invited Sheehy to join him
for lunch with David Schiller, the highschool principal. At the Mercer Kitchen,
near the Soho loft that Sheehy shares
with his wife, Us Weekly editor Janice
Min, Kelly and Schiller informed Sheehy
it was time for him to take a sabbatical,
“paid or unpaid.” It wasn’t punitive, they
claimed.
Over the next week, Sheehy and Schiller worked on the terms of the leave, with
little progress. The night before teachers
returned to school this fall, Schiller called
Sheehy at home. “Look, let me just tell
you, I have not gone over to the dark side,
okay?” Schiller began. “I mean, Tom,” he
said, referring to Kelly, “needs me to succeed in the school. And Tom likes me.
I mean, maybe I should feel bad about
that, but I don’t. I feel good about that
because it’s going to help me change the
school, okay?”
Sheehy pressed Schiller to sign a formal letter stating he could return to
Horace Mann the next year or the school
would pay out his salary. “I just feel I’m in
a very highly unusual situation,” he kept
repeating. “I need to be protected.”
Schiller countered that Kelly probably
wouldn’t sign any such agreement. “You
know, what’s going to be is going to be,”
Schiller said. “It will take a lot of generations to undo the bad shit that has happened. But I have some ideas about how
to begin. And they involve holding people
to their commitments, they involve talking about values, they involve the dean of
faculty, and they involve, you know, rules.
And having people live up to the rules,
because the rules come from our values.
And I don’t think that has happened at
Horace Mann.”
Sheehy needed more than lofty assurances. “You weren’t there when Tom
promised Andy that his job was secure,
waited a year, and instead of firing him,
said, ‘Oh, I’m not renewing his contract.’
Okay, very cute, all right? And what happens next year when he says, ‘I’m not
firing Peter; I’m just not renewing his
contract’?”
“I’ll regard it as a betrayal of me,” Schiller said.
Schiller tried to buy time, telling Sheehy they could hammer out an agreement
in the coming days. But Sheehy wouldn’t
have it. If Horace Mann didn’t sign his letter, he would return to campus and teach
that week. In that case, Schiller warned,
the school would strip him of his teaching
duties.
“I’m not paranoid,” Sheehy said. “Clearly
some people wanted me fired, you can’t
deny that.”
“I’m not denying that,” Schiller
conceded.
Schiller added that even if Horace
Mann let Sheehy go, he would remain
loyal and write a letter of recommendation for him. “It’s not in Horace Mann’s
interests that you should be trashed. It
just isn’t,” he said. “I’ll write you the letter now, you can have it and put the date
on it … Maybe Tom is harboring some
deep, dark, evil idea, but I don’t think
so. I would know. Now, if something becomes litigious during the year, you’d be
well advised to have a conversation with
him.”
“It’s amazing to look at the supposed
brain power of the board, or at least their
earning power, and try to figure out how
they made some decisions,” Sheehy said,
sighing.
“I don’t know what the hell they’re going to do, and they don’t answer to me,”
Schiller replied.
The tension eased. Sheehy realized he
had no choice but to take the sabbatical.
“I love you, and you’re my friend,”
Schiller went on. “I don’t want to deprive
you of the school. I really don’t. I know
it means a lot to you. But I also have to
think about the health of the upper school
as a whole. And I think that it’s probably a
good idea, given the situation, to let everyone step back and chill out, and not to be
reminded of the shit that went down last
fall”—Facebook—“or the shit that went
down the previous spring”—­Academy X.
“We need to put that behind us and get a
new piece of history.”
That week, Jeffrey Robbins assumed
office as the newly elected student-body
■
president.