Good morning, everyone. I think most people know who I am. I’ve been here for six years now, but for those of you who don’t, my name is John Austin. I’m the Head of School, and, as I said, this is my sixth year after nine years as head of school at King’s Academy in Jordan and 17 years at Saint Andrew’s School in Delaware, where Monica, my wife, who’s an English teacher here, and I taught for a long time.
First, a huge welcome back to campus. I hope you won’t take this bad weather personally. Spring—it snowed on spring family weekend. It was 47 degrees on Commencement, and I’m told that this is the 12th consecutive rainy Saturday in Massachusetts. So, the seniors had a very rainy, wet spring. But I’m glad everybody’s here. I know some of you have been back to campus often, and some of you may be returning for many years, so I’m really grateful that you’ve decided to join us.
I wanted to offer a special thanks to our staff, who did an amazing job this weekend. We have almost a thousand people here, and it comes fast on the heels of a whole series of events on campus. And they’re just absolutely amazing in terms of how they turn things around. They’re the first people on campus in the morning and they’re the last, so I just wanted to say “thank you” to them.
I think I know the answer to this next question, but are there any members of the Class of 2020 here? That is absolutely outstanding. You are awake and here. These guys were robbed of their senior spring because of Covid, so I’m glad you guys are back on campus. And I wanted to extend a special welcome to you.
I also wanted to congratulate the Class of ’60—this is their 65th reunion—and the Great Class of 1980. This is their 45th reunion. And both of these classes set attendance records, which is great. I also wanted to congratulate the Class of ’95, who set a new 30th reunion fundraising record of $288,000, for which we’re very grateful. And they’ve taken down a record that stood for over a decade. And lastly, I wanted to give a shout-out again to the Class of ’80. They started a unique initiative. They’re going to put together a fund to provide a copy of The Headmaster to every student, faculty, and staff member of the Academy in perpetuity.
Every new member of the community will get a copy of this great book. This is the new version. It is fancy, with a gold embossed Gift from the Class of 1980, on the back, which is fantastic. This is my copy. It’s tattered and broken and torn and annotated, and it’s held together by a rubber band.
I actually first read The Headmaster in 1987, which was my first year as a teacher, and I read it in a single sitting. And who would have imagined that almost 41 years later, I would be the head of Deerfield Academy? That wasn’t part of the career plan. But I’m grateful and proud to be here. I think for anyone interested in the future and not simply the past of American boarding schools, this book is an absolute classic. There’s tremendous wisdom here, and I’ll draw on it in these remarks. So I’m grateful to the Class of 1980 for doing this. And I did want to say that it’s a fund that’s open to anyone. You don’t have to be in the Class of ’80 to contribute to it. So please donate.
And, of course, Deerfield has changed dramatically since the Boyden days in important and necessary ways. There’s a greater commitment to access and diversity across every possible dimension. There’s a thriving arts program, co-education, and a dramatic expansion in the [athletics] program. I think at one point, there were 11 varsity sports at Deerfield. There are now 31: dramatic programmatic expansions, new languages, new departments, and a broader array of electives.
And so Deerfield is a very different school now than it was in 1966, when Mr. McPhee published this book. But it’s still relevant, and it still continues to inform how we think about Deerfield. And I think you know this as well as anyone: The last five years have been among the most tumultuous in the history of American education. There’s just been waves and waves of challenge and change. There was Covid. There was social unrest and protests in the summer of 2020, and we’re living through a uniquely polarized and divided moment. And, of course, there’s the rise of new forms of technology, including the emergence of generative artificial intelligence and a dramatic change in the relationship between secondary schools and colleges and universities.
These have all been huge challenges for schools and colleges. And I would put these challenges together in the form of two questions. And both of these questions, I think, register a kind of defining tension that schools need to navigate at this particular moment. The first is how does a school–and how does Deerfield–remain true to and worthy of its values and history while forging a path into the future?
Mr. Boyden, in 1965, put this quite well. That was the last campaign he launched as headmaster. He said, “No fine educational institution can afford the luxury of standing still. To do so is to lose touch with the very world we are trying to understand.” That’s the first question: How do you manage change and tradition, tradition and transformation? Secondly, how do you create, sustain, and strengthen a school culture that values hard work, high achievement, and excellence, as well as joy, friendship, and camaraderie so essential to the development and well-being and growth of young people?
Each year, I meet with colleagues of the so-called, somewhat pretentiously named Eight Schools Association. And I have tremendous admiration for my colleagues at those schools. And I’m grateful for the conversation and time I have with them. But I’m always struck when I come back to Deerfield and leave those meetings, how different our approach at Deerfield is to a number, really a constellation of related issues, and how purposefully and intentionally we’ve tried to address them. I’m going to mention five, drawing, as I do on the wisdom of John McPhee’s The Headmaster.
The first is technology. So here is McPhee on Mr. Boyden’s view of technology: “He owns 16 buggies and four horses. Nothing Mr. Boyden is quoted as saying will ever take the place of the horse and buggy for me.” Now, that was 1966, the same decade that saw the birth of the internet, the first commercial satellite, a landing on the moon, the invention of Kevlar, and integrated circuits. And I should say I got all of that information from AI. The modern world and the world of today were already there when Mr. Boyden was talking so passionately about his horse and buggy. And there is something positively Amish-like about Mr. Boyden and his commitments. The Amish are often caricatured as technophobic, but that’s actually not the case. Whenever a member of the community thinks about introducing a new form of technology, they meet together and discuss its possible impacts.
They ask themselves a very simple question: Will it enhance or erode our community? So, many Amish communities have said yes to modern plumbing, calculators, cash registers, freezers, and, most recently, electric bikes. They’ve said no to automobiles, televisions, cell phones, and, most recently, hay balers.
I could talk about hay balers, but I will leave that off. So we’ve taken a more restrictive approach to cell phones because, like the Amish, we realize that they undermine face-to-face connection and community. The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls these “experience blockers.” He notes that the average young person spends well over one-third of their waking hours on screens of one kind or another. The opportunity cost of that one-third is extraordinarily steep. It comes at the expense of many other things that matter a great deal: sleep, study, reading, play, time in nature, friendship, and human connection. In fact, young people today, on average, are spending much less time with their peers in person than any other generation, probably in the history of the world. They’re much more isolated. And because we value connection and face-to-face interaction and believe that education is fundamentally a social undertaking, we ask students to leave their cell phones in their room during the academic day, and we ask our ninth and our tenth graders to locker them at 10:30 each night before they go to bed, so we can encourage them to sleep.
There are going to be a couple of additional turns to that dial next year, but I’m not going to announce those right now because you’ll get on social media, and you’ll let the cat out of the bag. Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian media theorist, said that every new technological advance is both an augmentation and an amputation. The encroachment of technology into young people’s lives is itself a kind of social amputation. There’s a tremendous loss. That’s also why, when we think about the lower grades, we want to actively limit their use of technology until they’ve developed fundamental literacies of deep reading–and there’s a massive crisis in reading. It’s disappearing as a skill, which, as an English teacher and also as an educator, very much concerns me, because I think reading is the skill that makes all other learning possible in some ways.
I’ve lost my train of thought as I wandered off there. But we want to limit their use of technology so that they can develop core literacies: reading, writing, drafting, revising, analysis, discussion, oral debate, and defense. And at the same time, creatively explore opportunities where they can use these new forms of technology to–again, to use McLuhan’s term–augment learning and to do that at the upper level of our classes. It’s pretty clear that most college students are using AI in their work. All the college students I talked to told me that they’re using it a great deal.
So on the one hand, we don’t want to be blind to that. But on the other hand, we want to make sure that we’re developing the muscles in their brains, and that involves difficulty and challenge and encounters with things that are hard to do. And AI is frictionless; it’s easy. And so we’re trying to do both our Academic Dean Anne Bruder talks about our Janus-faced approach.
On the one hand, we want to keep it at some distance so that we can protect the intellectual development of children and develop their minds and their abilities to think. But on the other hand, we need to think creatively about ways to help them incorporate it and augment their own learning. On Friday, yesterday, we completed a week-long faculty series of workshops led by our academic team on artificial intelligence. Not because we want to just simply and thoughtlessly import these into our classrooms, but because we want to be knowledgeable, we want to be aware, and we want to try to know as much as the kids know about this stuff, and they often know a lot more than we do. So that’s the first piece, technology.
The second: the dining hall. And again, I’ll quote Mr. Boyden, “You must bring your students together once a day, just as you have your family to gather once a day.” That is why we’ve made a very intentional investment in expanding and modernizing our dining hall. Some of you went on the tour yesterday, and that commitment is, I think, apace with our approach to technology and all of our traditions really; it’s a way to forge connection and community amidst diversity.
Almost every other boarding school in this country has given up on sit-down meals, either because they’ve outgrown their existing dining hall or because their faculty has simply said, ‘No, we don’t want to do this anymore.’ And we say yes to sit-down meals. We say yes to dining together.
And we say yes not because all of this togetherness is easy. In fact, it can be quite irritating, and that’s really the point. That’s why the frictions of everyday school life matter. They have tremendous educational power. They make us better people. They make us better friends, more accepting and open-hearted, more kind, and more generous. They foster a shared sense of responsibility for the school as students work side by side with our staff. And in the end, they make us better citizens. Is it expensive? Yes, that’s a very expensive project, and it’s worth every last penny. I think we’re the only school–you guys are a very applauding group; you can keep that up–I think outside of West Point and the U.S. Naval Academy, this is the only school in the country or college in the country where the entire student body is eating together seven times a week. (That doesn’t compare with when some of you guys… I heard you guys…. We’re doing–what’s three times seven?–sit-down meals a day. But seven, seven, seven is good.) And one of the things that I love about Deerfield as a head of school is the way in which students cheer one another, support one another, and lift one another. And that cultural aspiration and quality of character in the collective student body are built and created through those kinds of rituals. So that was number two.
Number three is our academic values and commitments. A year ago, Deerfield published, with the support of the Edward Ford Foundation and in collaboration with eight other heads of school from a diverse range of schools across the country, what we entitled A Framework for Schools Thriving in a World of Pluralistic Contention. I hope you’ll read it.
If you haven’t . . . I understand there might be copies in the lobby. And it’s been used literally by hundreds of private schools across the country for their faculty, for their trustees, and for their students. And it makes the case for three enduring and important educational principles, each of which, and all of which, working together, are designed to encourage young people to develop the capacity for independent thought and judgment. Those include: a school-wide commitment to expressive freedom and thoughtful, courageous inquiry; a commitment to non-partisanship, both as an institutional orientation and also as an instructional philosophy for teachers in the classroom; and a commitment to intellectual diversity in programming and curriculum. We want to expose young people to a broad range of perspectives, worldviews, beliefs, philosophies, disciplines, and methods for understanding the world. And those have long been at the very center of a liberal arts curriculum. They’re time-tested, they’re time-proven. They’re going to go through yet another test as artificial intelligence overtakes almost every industry in the world. But they are, in my view, essential to graduating young men and women who will use their minds well and independently and in the service of what our Constitution calls a more perfect union. So that’s number three.
Fourth: our commitment to access and financial aid. Some of you may have seen the article earlier this year in the Wall Street Journal describing our new financial aid initiative. Deerfield is now tuition-free for any family whose documented income is lower than $150,000, and families with an income in excess of $150,000 are asked to pay no more than 10% of their documented income. That’s generous, but you should keep in mind that less than 2% of the American public can afford an independent school education like Deerfield. So this is geared to 98% of the people and kids in this country. And the financial aid process is both complicated and really intimidating to families. Many simply look at the sticker price and the tuition and assume that a Deerfield education is simply beyond their means and they walk away.
One of the reasons we like this initiative is that it reframes the cost of an independent school education and makes it clear to both lower- and middle-income families that this is possible for them, that they can look at it and that it’s real. And again, this is this is completely consistent with Field’s best traditions. It’s not too much to say that in many ways, Mr. Boyden invented the modern idea of need-based financial aid.
We’ve commissioned the history of Deerfield from the 18th century to the present, and the historian who’s writing this book has been forwarding to me discoveries he’s made in the archive. And not long ago, he forwarded me some letters that Mr. Boyden had written in the 1920s and ’30s to friends of the school, asking them for support for a scholarship fund. And he was famous for telling families to, quote, pay what you can, when you can. And I’ve actually spoken to people who, for that last bit when you can, paid off their tuition with interest 40 years after the fact. They didn’t forget. It just took them a long time to get it back to us. And that is why this is the single largest commitment in our campaign: $90 million. And that will allow us to fully endow our existing financial aid commitment—roughly 40% of our student body receives some form of need-based financial aid right now, fund this new initiative, and provide tuition remission for the children of qualified faculty and staff, and to do so at a moment when many schools are cutting back on that.
And fifth: now I’m going to talk about the faculty a little bit. One of the reasons that we made this investment in our faculty is that we know that everything we do as a school depends upon them. They create the goodness of this place, they create the culture of the school, and they give it to the kids, and the kids reproduce it.
John McPhee described Mr. Boyden’s ideal faculty as “a group of people much in evidence, all of the time.” That is the absolute gold standard for a 21st-century boarding school faculty. And it’s a very rich phrase if you unpack it:
- First of all, “A group of people”—there’s a recognition that a great faculty, a truly great faculty, is a collective body working together with students and with a shared sense of mission and purpose. Everyone’s pulling in the same direction.
- “Much in evidence”—that means that faculty are available, accessible, present, engaged, and generous with their time.
- And finally, “all of the time”—a group of people much in evidence all of the time. That’s a very high bar. Think 3 am. (We’re not around at 3 am.) But it does reveal to us how important it is in a residential boarding school because our work extends into the evening and into the weekends. It’s unpredictable, and it just requires a level of engagement and attention that’s unusual and unique to our profession. So we expect a great deal of our faculty, and we want them to be deeply and broadly engaged in the lives of our students. And for that reason, we need to build out structures of support and professional learning at each stage of their careers and compensate them in a way that ensures we honor their work and are able to attract and retain teachers who love young people and are able to fulfill the many roles that we ask our teachers to do as coaches, teachers, advisors, and mentors.
And we really have to do that better than any school in the country. You probably knew this model of faculty engagement as the triple-threat model. We call it the high-engagement model in recognition of the fact that in a 21st-century boarding school, not every member of the faculty is a coach, doing and interfacing with kids in a wide variety of ways. But we’re deeply committed to that particular model of high engagement. So, one final, related point. Once we complete the dining hall, which is on time, on budget, and scheduled to open when we return from winter break next year in January, we’ll turn our attention to two other projects in the residential program. The first is the building of what we’re calling the West Dorm, which will be adjacent to Barton, and that will allow us to increase the number of boarding beds at the school from roughly 580 to 620, but without changing the size of the school, which presently stands at 650. That will allow local families to apply as boarding students and, in turn, become full and equal citizens at the school.
The second is the redesign of what we call the Ninth Grade Village, which is probably new to many of you and is presently housed in Johnson Doubleday. And together, these two projects will make us more coherent as a boarding school. And this is very important: decrease the faculty-student ratio in the ninth grade from what it presently is 18 to 1, closer to our goal of 10 to 1, which is more representative of our other dorms by adding roughly ten new faculty apartments, bringing more faculty more adults closer to campus and to the center of campus and to the student experience.
So those are my five areas. But I’d like to end with one final quotation from Mr. Boyden on the transformative power of secondary school education. He wrote, and this is quoted in The Headmaster, “The education secondary school offers has to be considered in its own right and in all its aspects and not merely as a conduit to college.” As Mr. Boyden approached the end of his career, he began to see the impact of what McPhee calls the college admissions battle. That was almost 60 years ago when he saw that ramping up. “Mr. Boyden insisted on the unique and irreducible power of secondary education not as a means to an end and not as mere preparation, but as itself precious and defining. He recognized that the years of high school are, at their best, years of wonder and formation, where the contours of character and judgment are indelibly defined and where the sustaining habits of curiosity, creativity, adventure, and joyful, creative exploration come to life.” And that’s a vision that we strive to keep faith with.
Thanks, everybody.