The Headmasters Papers (20 page)

My son is unaware that his mother became ill and recently died. It is very important that I get in touch with him.

I enclose some photographs for identification purposes. Please do not hesitate to call me if I can provide you with further information that may assist you in finding him.

Yours sincerely,

John Greeve

14 February

MEMO

To: Phil Upjohn

Director of Studies

Dear Phil,

I am sorry our talk yesterday p.m. devolved into unpleasantness. I do not wish to salt wounds here, but there are some premises that ought to be cleared up so as to avoid occasions for such unpleasantness in the future.

First, let me repeat: you are
not
at fault for the concerns I raised about the parent/alumni weekend. I am clearly and principally at fault. The orchestrating of that show has always been my responsibility, and I neither took it on, nor shared with you the tried-and-true procedures necessary to insure that it went its best. Returning to the campus with term in full swing, I felt (wrongly!) reluctant to storm in and to tread on plans already made. This was a mistake. The tone of those kinds of affairs is primarily my responsibility, and I should not have stayed in the wings, treading be damned. You may disagree with me here, but there I stand. This is not the same thing as saying you are somehow unable to manage a parents' weekend. I don't think this for a minute. I do think, though, that some guidance was required on this last one.

Here are some guidelines for future weekend affairs, whoever is in charge.

1.    An agenda of all parent-related weekend events should be printed and provided to all visiting participants; these should be available at guest houses and hotels and should be everywhere available on this campus.

2.   All visitors' time should be provided for, theoretically. This means that even if parents don't visit classes or don't attend this or that faculty talk, there should be some plausible attraction: coffee and cake at Hallowell House, student-art exhibit at Gibbs, exercise clinic at the Held house, etc.

3.  Faculty should be available in offices for parent chats. Times and locations should be printed and posted.

4.  Student guides, preferably clean ones, should be recruited from Cray Key and from other organizations.

5.  Overall, events should be bridged with some sort of attraction. If the Guests' Supper is over by seven and the musical doesn't begin till eight, wheel out the glee club, the octet,
or
some endearing home-made ensemble.

6.  A pre-weekend faculty meeting is always in order to run through the steps of the weekend program. Both faculty and students must be prepared. Everybody is more gracious when we sense a proper occasion is upon us and when we feel informed about what's going on.

We cannot be embarrassed about doing “PR”—we should only be embarrassed about doing it falsely or badly. Our parents and our alums are our lifeline. It is essential that they feel
positively impressed
with how we run things, especially their things. If someone drives a full morning up here from New York only to be confused, bored, cold, and seated uncomfortably at perhaps not too good a meal, those impressions go deep. These people are our clients. They have options. If not with their enrolled son, then maybe with the next one, or the nephew, or the neighbor. If we keep our fairly substantial light under a bushel for our parents and alums, we could easily dry up as a first-line school in five years.

I don't mean to lecture you, Phil, but I
care
about this issue, and I guess I want you to share that concern. Let's not have it be a meyou thing. At any rate, we'll dazzle them at commencement.

What was that play again?
Tiny Murders? Little Murders?
Not only the most ill-performed show I have ever seen here, a thoroughly vulgar thing too. What luck. Not characteristic Burgermeister.

J.

14 February

MEMO

Mr. Robert Burgermeister

Theatre Department

Bob-

Far from me ever to question a Burgermeister decision, but was
Little Murders
appropriate stuff for us? For our parents/alumni? Is that frothy comedy these days? Is there a laugh in the show? Is the bathroom stuff funny?

I feel comfortable raising these questions only against my previous record of unrestrained approval of all Burgermeister stage work. Take this for what it's worth.

J.O.G.

16 February

R
EMARKS
T
O
T
HE
S
CHOOL

Gentlemen: Not much more than a week ago I stood before you to say a few things by way of getting reacquainted. One of the things I said was that I was glad to be back. Another was that I was concerned about the amount of casual destruction I saw on the campus.

I would like to update those remarks. This morning I am less glad to be back. Apparently a few of you took my statement of concern as a kind of challenge. Since then the following events have occurred: all of the corridor light bulbs on the first floor of Gibbs have been smashed, the pay phone in the commons has been ripped out—the only phone available to under formers for outside calls—and, this one you all have, I am certain, already had a good laugh about: the oldest and most valuable work of art in the school has been permanently damaged.

Let's look for a moment at the last one, the funny one. It must have been hilarious—and daring too—to bash a great hunk out of the genital area of the statue. Imagine it, the
private parts!
It worked, too. Whoever did it knew his—knew their—school. There has been a lot of laughter and excited comment since Sunday night. And if the deed was meant to say, “Take
that,
school and authority!”, that worked too. At least it worked with me. I took it, and was alternately dumbfounded, furious, and helpless. It was certainly an effective and dramatic act.

As many of you know, it's right out of the history books, too. Somebody, whether Corinthian troublemakers or Alcibiades and his thuggy friends, hacked off the genitals of the ‘herms' of Athens just on the brink of the second war with Sparta. That stunt was effective also—shocking, outrageous, and, to the hip and cynical, hilarious. Although you will have to go to the history books to learn how, it also brought down the city of Athens, down from perhaps the height of any city in the western world before or since. It brought down Athens, brought down Alcibiades, brought down his innocent teacher, Socrates, and it brought down the thugs and cynics who started it all.

You know, boys, it
means something
to strike out at your own symbols.

Statue of a Boy
was given to Wells by Thomas R. Wade, member of the first graduating class of the school. The statue has been in the vestibule of Wells House for over seventy years.

Thomas Wade left Wells and made a career as a distinguished journalist before Woodrow Wilson appointed him ambassador to Italy, during which service he purchased the sculpture he would later give to us.
Statue of a Boy
is a fifteenth-century Roman reproduction in marble of a Hellenistic statue still in Rome. Valued, until Sunday night, at about a quarter of a million dollars, it represents a direct line of Western idealism from classical Greece through the Italian Renaissance to the twentieth century. The statue is—was—said to represent “the finest of human possibilities in the figure of a youth.”

So much for human possibilities. The Wells campus, incidentally, is as I reported to you last week: a seedy, sticky mess. And as long as I'm so full of history this morning, I'd like to record a bit of present history. Today, February 16, 19—, Wells School is a third-line independent school for boys. Good morning.

16 February

MEMO

To: Tomasek, Upjohn, All Housemasters

Colleagues,

Let's meet in my office briefly as soon after seventh-hour class as possible. Agenda: to free boys from sports or other commitments for the time it takes to clean this place up!

J.O.G.

19 February

Mr. Raymond Taskich
Vice President, Operations Group Division
Jersey Standard, Inc.
440 Third Avenue
New York, New York

Dear Mr. Taskich,

Thanks so much for your visit and for sharing with us the corporate view of the energy situation. Enclosed is our modest honorarium; please let me know what expenses you incurred coming up here, and we shall reimburse you at once.

As we discussed, the question-and-answer session was tough, but I hope not unpleasant. I disagree that our boys and faculty are “overloaded” on the environmentalist side. If the questions on taxes and
profits and oil-company influence on public policy seemed especially pointed, it was not because we were in some way gunning for you; I think rather that the polemical mood was invited by the very strong and unequivocal position you took about the inadequacy of alternative sources of fuel and energy use. Your point, if I have it correctly, is that without fossil fuel or its equivalent at roughly present levels of consumption, there would be a decline in both the gross commercial output and in the quality of American life.

I think the boys bought the first premise—that fuel is the basis of a good deal of the secondary activity of the economy—but they were less willing to accept the second premise: that diminished national consumption was equivalent to a diminished quality of life. I am neither an economist nor an ecologist, but it seems to me that there is a case to be made for less being not necessarily worse. If there is something wrong with this position, I think the boys would be receptive to arguments that pointed it out. Some of your respondents were at first puzzled and then a little angry when you classed them with the “sixties commune crowd” or with Mr. Solzhenitsyn. Most of your audience was newly born when the “sixties commune crowd” was a cultural factor; I'm not sure what, or if, they think about Solzhenitsyn.

I hope you would agree that the boys took you and your position seriously and that they cared about the questions they asked. Frankly, I found the exchanges, even at their most crackling, very thought-provoking, and the discussion here continues.

We thank you for that and for providing us so much stimulation.

My good wishes,

John Greeve

21 February

Mr. Dewey Porter
Chairman, Seven Schools Conference
The Adelbert School
Eavesham, Connecticut

Dear Dewey,

I received your letter this a.m. and then tried to reach you by phone—futilely, which perhaps is a good thing. Let me in writing try to sort out my thoughts about the recent Seven Schools business.

In effect, Wells has been given an ultimatum: either to schedule St. I.'s into next year's athletic program or to be excluded ourselves from the Seven Schools Conference. Let me tell you why from here this smells of a power play—and of a fundamentally unfair one at that.

1. Why wasn't Wells invited to be a party to this “Seven Schools” decision?

I know I was away (sorry, I can't seem to stick to business this winter), but Phil Upjohn was here plenipotentiary, and our athletic director Dave Tomasek has always been invited to Seven Schools
meetings. Why were we, certainly the most interested party, excluded?

2. Your proposed decision effectively puts us out of the league and destroys our year's interscholastic program—since, as I wrote you this past fall, we have already rescheduled for next year; we could not reschedule St. I.'s even if we wanted to. And given what has transpired (the original issue), we do not want to. Nor would any other school that has an interscholastic sports policy.

3. I am curious how in your mind the solution proposed fits the initial problem. If you recall, all that we asked from Fred Maitland was an
acknowledgement
that a dirty game had been a dirty game. We never claimed they were solely at fault or asked them to eat any crow. We asked them to
acknowledge
that a game in which boys squared off and belted each other, cursed each other and the officials, incurred penalties in malice—we asked them to
acknowledge
this as a poor show.

St. I.'s would not accede to our relatively manageable sanction of curtailing competition with them for a year, but you ask us to knuckle under to sanctions that would leave us without a sports program for the coming year.

4. I'm confused about your repeated references to the “unilateral” actions of Wells as the cause of all subsequent problems. Didn't
I
bring the problem to Seven Schools attention by calling you about it on October 4, writing you about it on October 15, and several times since? What could have been more open than our concern about what happened, what we wanted to do about it, what we did about it?

I think that is enough. Is there a
principle
involved in this decision, Dewey? What is it?

Faithfully,

John Greeve

23 February

MEMO

To: Florence Armbruster