Remember that movie The Emperor’s Club? William Hundert (Kevin Kline) attempts to mold a seemingly unmoldable high school rebel by persuading him to compete in ancient history trivia competitions, which require contestants to compete in togas, and offer the glory of being crowned “Mr. Julius Caesar.”
You probably don’t remember the mottos of Mr. Hundert’s St. Benedict’s Academy, but I do: “finis origine pendet” (the end depends on the beginning) and “non sibi” (not for oneself). These are the mottos of my high school alma mater.
I went to Phillips Academy, more commonly referred to as “Andover” because of its location in Andover, MA. When I first applied to Andover, I thought just what you’re probably thinking right now: who do these people think they are?
I have neither the space nor the self-confidence to reveal all the gruesome details of my elementary and middle school years, but a few choice anecdotes could explain why Andover’s intellectually charged environment saved me from a quiet demise. In third grade, I decided to write an anonymous love letter to my idol, Thomas Jefferson, on Lisa Frank stationary and put it under the portrait of him in my room, where he would surely find it. Unfortunately, my friends found it the next day instead.
I would have lived that one down eventually, if I hadn’t decided to dress up as the third president for Halloween that year. In eighth grade, I foolishly revealed to my history teacher that I had memorized the Declaration of Independence for fun. The next day, he proceeded to quash any semblance of social status I had left by revealing that fact to the entire class.
Movies like The Emperor’s Club suggest that New England boarding schools are elitist, homogenous breeding grounds for Brooks Brothers-wearing, Princeton Dining Club-attending hedge fund managers who use the names of seasons as verbs. But before you deride the idea of earning a high school diploma from a school with an endowment over two-thirds the size of Georgetown’s (In 2007, Andover had about $780 million, to Georgetown’s $1 billion), hear me out.
Like many stereotypes, those exploited by boarding school movies are based in some amount of truth. The third-generation Andover legacy whose family regularly donates buildings probably had an easier time getting in than I did, as just another upper-middle-class New York Jew whose grandparents arrived via Ellis Island. But surprisingly, the vast majority of Andover students fall into my camp.
That elephantine endowment gives the admissions team the resources to offer financial aid to every student who requires it, and every year, about 40 percent of Andover students receive financial aid. This admissions philosophy created an environment in which I had the privilege of learning with a diverse group of students, most of whom were smart, interesting, and intensely intellectually engaged.
Though my fellow students challenged me during every discussion and project, my teachers ultimately rendered life at Andover the most embracing of the “life of the mind” of any school I’ve attended—including Georgetown. Most Andover teachers live on campus in apartments attached to dorms or in houses adjacent to them. In choosing that lifestyle, each teacher makes educating and mentoring students the primary purpose of his or her life.
Of course, high school students will be high school students, and some didn’t give a guinea pig’s rear about allowing their teachers to act as mentors. I chose to cultivate those relationships and found that the genuine care and enthusiasm with which my high school teachers nurtured my emotional development as well as my admittedly nerdy obsessions with American history, the classics and learning in general ended up legitimizing what had been an often cruelly stigmatized existence during elementary and middle school.
My Latin teacher, Dr. Pottle, once said that Andover isn’t for everyone, and that’s true. It comes down to whether you get that warm, fuzzy feeling when you think about parsing Latin verbs with your best pals. But if Andover’s homogeneous, it’s not because we’re all rich. It’s because, at heart, we’re all school junkies.
