Presentation by Nicholas Kip
Dinner, Thursday, June 10, 2010
Hello, my name is Nick Kip, and I’m a recovering Andover‐oholic. I came back here to teach Latin and Greek in 1968, and haven’t had the good sense to retire yet. Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. I come not to praise our selves of 1960 but, metaphorically perhaps, to exhume them. Two score and ten years ago, our parents brought forth from these campi – okay, campuses – a new generation, conceived at the outset of World War II, and dedicated to the proposition that all children are NOT created equal – and after four or so years at Andover, many of us were quite convinced that other 18‐year olds were simply not our equals. Certainly our college admits made us look that good, but we felt we’d earned them; Andover made us study a good deal harder than everyone else our age, and prepared us more thoroughly, at least academically – and I now have less than ten minutes to fast‐forward through all the changes of the last half century here on Andover Hill. In the early 70’s we went co‐ed, merging Abbot and Andover, with top‐to‐bottom adjustments to both schools, some of them very trying. We “trimesterized” courses, ultimately allowing much greater variety of offerings (like Etymology, Computer Science, Economics, Visual Studies Media Studio, Acting and Directing Workshop, to name just a few). We "clusterized" our dormitories into five campus "neighborhoods," each with its own Cluster Dean, academic review meetings, excusing system and discipline committee. Ted Harrison steered the merging school through planning a complete renovation of our athletic facilities. Many of us “switch hit” with our wives at running dorms, sometimes with girls, sometimes with boys – incidentally, we still do NOT have co‐ed dorms. Most of us recall our schools the late 50’s – (figurative) chastity belts, homework assignments that made Sisyphus and his rock look like fun, cultural orthodoxy of A‐Shop or Carroll Reed clothes or coming from the Connecticut Gold Coast, the “iron curtain” between our two campuses – hell, the only Abbot girl in the class of 1960 I knew in those four years was Wendy Bolton Rowland ‐‐ are you here, Wendy? – and only because I knew Wendy almost entirely outside of the Abbot‐P.A. context. Well, several wars, economic yin‐yangs and a few grandchildren later, we’ve come back to a merged school which is not at all the same as either the Abbot or the Andover of 1960. Now students can take almost as many off‐campus excuses as they want, courses now have published limits on hours of homework per week, we now tolerate some quite outrageous styles of dress and grooming ‐
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Presentation by Nicholas Kip
Dinner, Thursday, June 10, 2010
‐ a woman colleague half my age recently suggested to her girls in the dorm that dressing like ladies‐
for‐rent might attract more attention than they wanted ‐‐ but, yes, boys and girls can now visit each other in dorm rooms with doors closed, under well‐defined guidelines, to be sure. We no longer have a "gentlemanly conduct" rule, but this year some faculty have started a movement to make students aware of such unheard of things as civility and appropriate behavior, that is, common sense and common courtesy, but not, we would hope, conditioned by political correctness. Some of us may feel that the school’s willingness to welcome gay students and faculty is a function of political correctness, but in my observation gays seem to be fitting into the community to the discomfort of almost no one. Ted Sizer’s old mantra of “moral education” is nowadays harder to define, certainly more than it would have been in 1960. When kids do break our current, much more liberal rules, discipline is meted out much more humanely, more on an indvidual basis, with more latitude for second chances; alcohol and illegal room visiting are the most common violations, though recently plagiarizing from the internet has sprouted like a noxious weed. In the 70’s drugs made house counselors feel like Gene Hackman in The French Connection; drugs are still a problem, but much less so. Many school rules and policies are now conditioned by legal liability, which sounds sensible enough, but often restricts our capacities to educate the whole child in ways that have been most effective in our experience. We still have an athletics/exercise requirement in place, but with many more options ‐‐ fencing, cycling, yoga, snowshoeing, fitness training, ultimate frisbee, water polo, girls wrestling (heaven help us), and many others. Unfortunately, the importance of “fitness for life” as we draw ever nearer to overloading our health‐care system in dealing with obesity‐related diseases – that understanding is dawning to only slowly on our faculty and students, as also on Americans in general. Technology, of course, has also changed us all a great deal. Electronic resources, for example, have made it possible for me, while teaching very full‐time, to produce several in‐house textbooks, supplemented by many hours of iPod audios and electronic flash‐cards and other computer‐based exercises, in Latin, Greek, etymology and computer science. At the same time, however, cell phones, video games and facebook have become a huge distraction to our students, with the costs seeming to outweigh the benefits. The electronics appear to condition many of our kids not to sit still and read, Page 2 of 3
Presentation by Nicholas Kip
Dinner, Thursday, June 10, 2010
or write, or do their math and Latin, nor to use their own brains to visualize, process and/or verbalize ideas with any real clarity. On the plus side, the internet has broken us all out of our local and regional cocoons. Learning is no longer bounded by the classroom or campus. Our courses reflect new global realities – Brazilian Cultural Studies, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, International Relations, Literature of Resistance (in Africa, Asia, Central America, the Middle East) – the world is now our oyster, perhaps overwhelmingly so. New technology has also affected most of the renovations of our bricks and mortar. All these new opportunities, like the trimester system almost 40 years ago and the ever‐
changing variety of sports‐fitness activities since, have turned on teachers’ and students’ intellectual and creative, even physical, juices in all areas of school life. This extraordinary merged school clearly has grown and prospered in many positive ways, many more than I’ve had time to mention. And yes, it still has some of the same faults, to wit, the tendency of its highly intellectual faculty to take themselves too seriously (myself perhaps worst among them), and notably the feelings of entitlement evident in its very talented students. This spring the student leadership felt it necessary to post small signs on the tables in Commons reminding their peers to take their dirty dishes out the the dish‐return window, because an alarming number of them had decided they should not be expected to do so. As a P.A. student I thought this pretentious sense of superiority was an adolescent male vice, belonging to J.D. Salinger’s cameo of “Joe Andover,” but now, I grieve to say, it has spread to our female students as well. I’m reassured to hear from my younger colleagues, in whose abilities I have the utmost confidence, that they have every intention of taking on these challenges. As Hannah Jopling said to me just yesterday, we’re all back here really to reconnect, not so much with our old schools in the abstract, but with each other personally. Then I thought about Wendy Bolton and how I’ve never really connected at all with you Abbot “girls” – something I’d very much like to do this weekend. I hope all of us can see this reunion as a once‐in‐a‐lifetime opportunity to meet some new friends with whom, underneath it all, we DO have so much in common. Page 3 of 3