"The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be

There is an old photograph showing academy Glee Club members cooling their heels on the Memorial Building steps before a busload of Emma Willard girls arrives. The year is 1952. The expressions of the four dozen or so boys range from giddiness to indifference to bald dread. Hands are thrust into trouser pockets in a simulacrum of casualness. Ties and bowties have been specially straightened, loafers and oxfords polished. Faces turn southward, down The Street, toward the sun and warmth of a spring day. The girls are coming!

One of the boys, leaning rakishly against the doorsill, his weight borne on his outstretched left arm, is senior Peter Hindle. The last of the Deerfield girls had graduated four years earlier, in the spring of 1948 before Peter arrived as a freshman. Girls, he reflected in a recent interview, were regarded "as the social part of our lives: as girlfriends, as wives and the mothers of our children" by Peter and his classmates. How could this son of Deerfield know that nearly 40 years after the photograph was taken-when he had acquired a moniker suggestive of Russian royalty and become one of Deerfield's most beloved math teachers-that the Deerfield girl would return? When, in the 1980s, he joined the committee to study the transition to coeducation, he came to see that it was as a "holdout." "I wanted to be sure there wasn't a place for an all-boys' institution in New England." Even before the process was complete, he marveled at how seamlessly Deerfield integrated girls. "The atmosphere here is so natural... and so familial," said the Czar, who retires this year after 44 years in the Math Department. "By natural I mean seeing girls and boys sitting on benches talking and studying together, and walking across campus, and acting and singing and eating together. It really is wonderful."

This spring marks the tenth anniversary of the graduation that sent the first small group of alumnae into the world. Since that time, coeducation has become as much a part of the landscape as the Pocumtuck range to the east and the river's silver glint through trees. The student body now stands at 48.5 percent girls. At last September's Opening Convocation, and again on a special day in January set aside for reflecting on a decade of boys and girls together, the Deerfield community had a chance to pause and comment on how coeducation has changed and strengthened the Deerfield experience.

The changes have been profound, positive and permanent; there is no going back; if there is any desire to do so, it is not apparent. But that doesn't mean that new challenges haven't emerged in the wake. The conversation is no longer confined to gender. One might view coeducation as a portal through which a host of new and urgent questions-about how a community gains strength from all its differences and similarities, about the dynamics of power, fairness, equality, tolerance and diversity, in short, inclusion-have entered. The discussion has broadened out to diversity of color and class, to new ways to build community in what Headmaster Eric Widmer calls "an international institution." The timeline has advanced, not only at Deerfield but in the world.

Much has been written in the last 30 years- some of it contradictory, about the different learning styles of girls and boys. Even if Harvard's Carol Gilligan had done no more than identify gender as a neglected aspect of research, she would have broken new ground. Her work, of course, went much farther and showed that boys and girls assess moral choices differently, among other things. In the 25 years since she wrote In A Different Voice, many researchers have pointed out the perils of remaining ignorant of the sexes' developmental differences. Mary Pipher warned readers in Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1994) that girls are "coming of age in a more dangerous, sexualized and media-saturated culture." Boston-based psychotherapists Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson's Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Lives of Boys (Ballantine, 1999), claims that American culture is starving boys of their deepest emotional and spiritual needs. A significant study by Providence College researcher Cornelius Riordan, "Girls and Boys in School: Together or Separate," reports that both sexes in single-gender schools outperform those in coeducational settings. William Pollack, author of Real Boys, argues that if girls speak "in a different voice," then boys do, too.

Long before the researchers started writing bestsellers for anxious parents, teachers and social workers, Frank L. Boyden seemed to have intuitively grasped what boys-and until the school went all-boys, girls-need to grow and thrive like young corn in rich Valley soil. Some have said Mr. Boyden "was blessed with a sixth sense about boys." He knew that Jack, in order to avoid becoming a dullard, needs equal measures of work and play. He became headmaster around the time when Freud was making his famous utterance about love and work being the necessary elements of a satisfying life. Mr. Boyden understood that and proceeded to build a school on a shoestring. "Boys will work for schools that work for boys," wrote Kindlon and Thompson. Mr. Boyden-who left the dedication of the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College and President Kennedy in time to make it to see his football players whomp Choate-anticipated them by nearly a century.

Hired as either "a new headmaster or an undertaker," as John McPhee '49 quoted a trustee as telling the young Boyden on that sweltering August day in 1902, he instantly put his 14 energetic charges to work. The boys set about cutting trees to build lockers and showers, aiding farmers in their fields, and finding other ways to shoo the devil from his favorite workshop. Part public relations move and part community outreach, Mr. Boyden opened a Boys Club in the basement of Dickinson Hall where the boys from town were invited three nights a week for basketball, reading and "manual training." Girls, meanwhile, were to be "thrown for an hour every afternoon with a woman of culture and refinement," and when the Girls Club opened in 1914, it was headquarters for domestic science, girls' lunches, teas, and Valentine parties. It never would have occurred to the new head to apologize for providing different venues for the sexes, for as one teacher noted, "Mr. Boyden was a man who received his education in the 19th century and subscribed to the notion that males would preside over the positions of leadership and significance in the world. He along with others of his era accepted that a premier boarding school would be built on a masculine model." Boyden comprehended, as Thomas Wolfe noted in Of the Time and River, that "(a) young man is so strong, so made, so certain and so lost. He has everything and he is able to use nothing." In a grateful essay on his Deerfield days, author William Zinsser '40 echoed the novelist: "He knew that every adolescent boy is a loser and an outcast in some area of his development: socially or emotionally, scholastically or athletically. His school enabled us to be comfortable with our limitations and confident in our strengths. Within that community of male friends I never doubted my freedom to be myself."

Little wonder that, as former Headmaster Robert Kaufmann noted in his recent Convocation speech, few were eager to "tinker with the recipe for fear of losing the magic." It makes an interesting exercise to ponder how Mr. Boyden would fare if, through some warp in time and culture, he were brought on today, two years shy of what would be his 100th anniversary. Would his paternalistic style be appreciated by students who grew up in a culture where Father is no longer the undisputed head of house or culture? Conversely, would Mr. Boyden relate to the Deerfield boy and girl of today?

The genesis of coeducation at Deerfield has been covered exhaustively and is known to every alumnus; only the general thread will be retraced here. As many have pointed out, the school didn't "go" coed; it returned to coeducation. The feminine force was originally a part of the Deerfield scene: the school's early benefactress, Esther Harding Dickinson, intended the school she funded to provide education for both sexes. The "all-boy direction" of the school, as Kaufmann described it, began when the Boydens turned Deerfield into a boarding school during World War I. Girls were not part of this residential plan, which the Boydens envisioned as being rather like English public schools. That is, they set out to create an ideal culture, which anthropologist Margaret Mead would later define as a culture in which there is a place for every human gift. Women had gifts to offer, but they were still several years away from getting the vote, and it would have been inconceivable, given the social conventions of the time, for girls and boys to share such close quarters.

Richard I. Melvoin, a 15-year faculty member who taught history before becoming headmaster at the all-boys Belmont Hill School, said that Deerfield's return to coeducation grew out of two-pronged considerations that were both philosophical and pragmatic. Philosophically, rumblings of returning to coeducation were heard as early as the late 1960s. Mr. Boyden's retirement coincided with the rising volume of women's voices in the political scene. With its headmaster gone, the school looked out and saw a world where women were calling for a reconsideration of the power structure. The school responded by bringing on more female faculty, including more married couples, whose numbers rose from 25 percent in 1960 to 75 percent just before coeducation. Headmaster David M. Pynchon did an admirable job of walking the razor's edge between responding to ineluctable social pressures from without and pleasing alumni and students whose fidelity to their school, said Kaufmann, "wasn't so much an anti-girl sentiment as it was a pro-Deerfield sentiment." Pynchon saw two trustee votes on coeducation fail under his watch.

With a queasy feeling, the school watched as the quality and quantity of its applicant pool was increasingly compromised, as talented prospective teachers took posts at less outstanding schools that had embraced coeducation. Even with additional admission staff visiting schools as far away as Seattle and Omaha, applications dropped from 1,000 to 650 in the mid-1980s. No one questioned the value of a Deerfield education per se. But "feeder" schools that had always sent their best boys Deerfield's way began to report that students who a decade or two earlier would have sacrificed a limb to come to Deerfield, were opting for schools with girls. Perhaps most disturbingly, alumni sons-who had surely grown up fed on the nectar of their fathers' days in the Pocumtuck Valley and knew its beauty firsthand from accompanying Dad to reunions-were going elsewhere.

As a third trustee vote on coeducation became inevitable, it was younger alumni and the students, unexpectedly, who were the most vociferous in their opposition. Older alumni, for whom the response was expected to anathematize the vote, took administrators by surprise with their general support of coeducation; they had lived long enough to have daughters and granddaughters who would clearly thrive at Deerfield. The younger ones were a "self-selecting" group, boys who could have gone to a co-ed Hotchkiss or Andover or Choate but favored an all-male environment. They wanted to be worthy of a heritage that was all male. Their objection to the idea of making room for the opposite sex was "truly implacable," remembered English teacher and former director of alumni relations James Marksbury. They were content with occasional festivities with sister schools, and were years away from relationships with women-wives, daughters, colleagues and collaborators-whose intellectual and personal development they would care about deeply.

With several key trustees chesting their cards until the last, it was impossible to tell which way the vote at the January 1988 board meeting would go. Director of Development David Pond remembers how his office floor was covered with two piles of letters announcing the two possible outcomes. When Bob Kaufmann announced the 20-2 affirmative vote in favor of coeducation at Sunday dinner, the word hit like a malediction; a fifth of the student body walked out. Kaufmann was bombarded with letters and calls in the weeks following. Patricia Gimbel's son, reached by his mother in his dorm at Duke, hung up on his mother in disbelief. Marksbury phoned key alumni at home to deliver the news early, and recalls the quiet, measured response of one: "Thanks for the call, Jim. That's it for Deerfield for me. It no longer exists." That alumnus, like so many, has since served as his class secretary and supported the school in many other ways, Marksbury noted.

Christa Calagione '93, says it is rare in her work as assistant director of annual support and young alumni relations to talk to an alum who remains unhappy. But, noted Calagione, "When I do encounter that, I totally respect it. I tell them, 'That was your Deerfield. I understand that. My own Deerfield is different from the Deerfield of today, and today's Deerfield is different from the way it will be tomorrow."

The school had 18 months to make a transition. Not a beat was missed; by the spring following the vote, the job of making the school coed had been taken over by half a dozen committees-small groups to oversee changes in housing, to re-configure the gym and the fields, determine the number of girls in classes (never less than three, to avoid a perception of tokenism). There was even a committee on how to make traditions egalitarian without doing away with the tradition itself. Under music teacher Orlando Pandolfi's able pen, Ralph Herrick Oatley's lyrics, as "Her sons" became "Her sons and daughters," a modification which was, in some eyes, as perilous as rewriting Gospel.

Even skeptics agreed that the thoroughness of the preparation would have impressed the ever-thorough Mr. Boyden. "The school had really done its homework," recalled Ashley Prout '92, who saw the school go from an impressive, if intimidating, bulwark of masculinity during visits to her brother Ian '90, to a place in which she felt totally at home when she arrived as a sophomore in 1989. New dorms, including Rosenwald and Shumway whose constructions were timed for the arrival of girls, were outfitted with an abundance of mirrors, bathrooms and closets. The girls' locker room in the new gym was a dream. Even the menu in the Dining Hall expanded from the proverbial meat and potatoes to salad bars and yogurt. Skim milk made its debut, as did a shampoo selection in the store, which went beyond Head and Shoulders. "The first year was a honeymoon," recalled Ann Quinn, who fondly remembered a student describing the newly co-ed Deer-field as feeling "like Christmas morning." As English Department chair Karinne Heise noted, Deerfield learned from the mistakes and successes of schools that had made the switch earlier. "We made the change so late, after almost every other school had done it, that we learned from those schools." Over the years, other additions seemed to emerge in the wake of student need and demand. The Health Center expanded to include counseling, and Health Issues, including sections on sexual health, became a requirement for sophomores.

Old-timers and new gamely adjusted. Pedagogically, Deerfield left no stone unturned as it sorted out fact from fiction in the research on the genders' different learning styles. Mount Holyoke College professors were consulted on the so-called "math phobia" of girls, a phenomenon teachers like Peter Hindle reported they couldn't find much in evidence. (Peter's calculus class this year approached an unprecedented 40 percent girls.) Teachers were attuned to research that pointed out a tendency, however unconscious, to call more often on and to make more eye contact with male students. Hindle and others found studies suggesting that girls prefer learning in groups and collaborative settings, and introduced that format to sections of his math classes. The English Department began incorporating works by women, most recently Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston and Kate Chopin. Freshmen read The Odyssey back to back with Barbara Kingsolver's roadtrip novel The Bean Trees, which invariably opens discussions about masculine/feminine/external/internal definitions of adventure. As predicted, the academic caliber of the Deerfield student rose swiftly. The number of honor roll students surged from 113 for fall 1981 to 213 in 1998, a jump the Scroll surmised is due to "an increase in selectivity during the admission process."

Students from the early days recalled bittersweet stories of the adjustment by teachers. Ashley Prout recalls her Spanish teacher, Carlos Garcia, taking his male students to task for making blunders in his native tongue. He was far more forgiving with girls. "He'd always reply 'mui intelligente' to the girls' comments, and 'stupido' to the boys if they got something wrong," said Prout. "If anything, we were more pampered at first."

Perhaps nowhere was more attention to detail lavished than in sports. The school established all levels of teams from the start; there would be no gradual build-up to varsity status for the Deerfield girl. That put the onus on Admission to find truly gifted female athletes, young women whose talents were already more developed than inchoate, said Karinne Heise, who coached varsity field hockey that first fall. The pioneer female athletes said they "felt they were being watched, and tested, and needed to prove themselves" in a school of whose sports heritage they wanted to be worthy, observed Heise. But, as fierce fledglings of the sisterhood, they stepped up to the challenge and discovered they bled just as green. They even made up their own battle cry. "Co-ed has just begun/We're here to stay, we'll show you the way/Go, Green and White!" Bonding quickly in body and spirit, the girls' games quickly became events worth coming out for. The field hockey team that arrived as freshmen in 1989 went on to capture New England four years later. Tournaments and finals were reached in the first few years for girls' swimming, soccer, ice hockey, basketball and softball. Girls water polo steadily improved, to bag the New England trophy in 1998.

Boys' ways of thinking about sports changed too. Dance had long been a presence at Deerfield, thanks to John Reese's efforts to bring his colleagues from the musical theater world as guest artists to campus every year. But as Dance Department founder Jennifer Whitcomb noted, it was always the "poor sister" to "real" athletics. With coeducation, dance became a force, going from classes of ten or 15 to upwards of 80 dancing in a typical Winter Term. Even male faculty lent credibility to the art form with occasional performances, including Athletic Director Jim Lindsay, wrestling coach Marc Scandling and math teacher Arthur Horst.

With a new dance studio under construction behind Reid Theater, a residential teaching fellow and guest choreographers visiting throughout the year, Deerfield is now a place where serious student-dancers can come and make strides toward dance careers. Modern, ballet and jazz are offered as both a sport and an academic subject. The first couple of years, boys signed up for dance classes in equal numbers as girls, perhaps in an effort to show solidarity with the new arrivals, said Whitcomb. Those numbers shrank back down but bounced back with a vengeance when some strong personalities who had proved themselves on the playing fields discovered dance.

Perhaps most influential was all-round varsity athlete Ryuji Yamaguchi '99. Ryuji had never danced until he came to Deerfield, but he was a born choreographer and became an overnight crusader for getting lettered hockey players and wrestlers to explore a form called weight-sharing, popularized by the internationally-acclaimed Pilobolus Dance Company. The Male Weight-Sharing Team is now an established part of the dance program, whose graduating members personally recruit new members to insure its continuation. Whitcomb calls its members "the princes among men at Deerfield." Any thought that dancing is for girls and effeminate boys is nowhere in evidence. "Nobody would dare challenge a guy on that," said Whitcomb. "They've developed their own style and run with it." But Whitcomb cautioned against the temptation to legitimize a sport just because men have embraced it. In the end, she said, "Once we walk in the door, it's not a gender issue. We're all just people struggling to be good at this challenging physical sport."

Boys and girls say there aren't any gender issues at this school," said Allison Stileau '00, the Harvard-bound senior class president whose steady blue-eyed gaze and strong chin suggest a young Jodie Foster. "The pervasive agreement is there's nothing wrong. That's not true. People don't want to talk about it, so they skirt around the real issues."

These issues are in evidence every day said Stileau, who broke with childhood friends who chose Miss Porter's when she chose Deerfield. The school has made great strides toward equality, said Stileau, one of the students who worked closely with Martha Lyman to make Coeducation Day a reality. But nature and nurture are forces that no school policy can change. Nature dictates that students attend Deerfield during the most volatile and vulnerable passage in the life cycle. This vulnerability is made more tender by the confusing messages with which society has "nurtured" its young people about masculinity and femininity.

"It's not something the administration can change. It's the way people perceive themselves," remarked Stileau. As author Mary Pipher notes, the White Rock soda girl was five-foot-four and weighed 140 pounds in 1952; today she's three inches taller and 30 pounds lighter. Thanks to impossible ideals like this, one out of every five American college girls and an untold number of early adolescents struggle with eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia. Boys, for their part, have absorbed messages that tell them they are only real men if they can hold their liquor as well as their emotions. There is an "urge to merge" with the opposite sex that creates established couples who are all but married by their senior year, said Stileau. Throw these things into a competitive environment like Deerfield where students feel a pressure to conform, and you've upped the ante exponentially, said Stileau. Deerfield would be dreaming, said Stileau, if it thought it could sidestep these issues, or solve them any faster than society at large.

Deerfield has no such illusions, said those who coach, counsel and live with Deerfield boys and girls. Health Issues teacher Susan Carlson said teachers have little choice but to help girls and boys work out their contrapuntal rhythms: girls mature faster physically, socially and intellectually, a fact not lost on their male peers. Carlson reported that those hit hardest by this inequality of nature are freshman and sophomore boys, who arrive with the bodies they had in middle school. They compensate with attitudes toward girls that at times are less than couth. And it often takes more time for them to get up to speed in the classroom.

Additionally, many boys have spent their childhoods in what therapists Kindlon and Thompson call the male "culture of cruelty." Hazing freshmen might have flown with 14-year-old boys when there wasn't a female for miles around to suggest it might be puerile. It is probably not an accident that the school's tolerance for such activities shrank shortly after coeducation.

In Allie's observation, girls feel freer to express a wider range of emotions and embody more divergent roles-athlete, actress, artist, musician, class officer, peer counselor-and this freedom has rubbed off on everyone at Deerfield. But boys still hold each other to a narrower spectrum of roles, and judge each other more harshly if they step outside the zone of acceptability, said Stileau.

"Some students may be comfortable with the school, but not with themselves," said Carlson, who is conducting a five-year longitudinal study testing assumptions about coeducation with 25 other faculty from independent secondary schools. So far, the study indicates that, while upperclassmen have generally made peace with themselves and the opposite sex, the transition for younger students can be rough. In the early years of coeducation, Carlson remembers worrying that socially, female students would experience what Mary Pipher describes as a kind of personal disappearing act. Pipher reports that pubescent girls "crash and burn in a social and developmental Bermuda Triangle." While the years from nine to 12 are often a golden age of creativity, self-expression and friendship, wrote Pipher, in "early adolescence, girls' IQ scores drop... they lose their resiliency and optimism and become less curious and inclined to take risks. They lose their assertive, energetic and 'tomboyish' personalities and become more deferential, self-critical and depressed. They report great unhappiness with their own bodies." Allie Stileau said she encounters that every day in dorm mates and friends who have the image-conscious monkey on their backs and take it out on their bodies. "There's a pressure to conform to stereotypes here. To be socially acceptable you've got to be an athlete-not necessarily muscular but healthy and fit." As another teacher remarked, the girls who are least likely to be challenging the cultural standards of femininity are the ones who are tall, blonde and popular.

Deerfield, despite ten years of coeducation, is still a palpably male place, contended Stileau. She sighed loudly when she expressed her ambivalent feelings about being surrounded by walls on which hang black-and-white photographs of walls of "boys, boys, boys." When she passes Mr. Boyden's portrait in the library, she feels an odd mix of awe "because he brought this school to greatness, yet I would never have been welcome when he was here." She cited ongoing sore points among her peers, for example that girls decorate the boys' lockers before a big hockey game; the games of her own ice hockey team are more sparsely attended. "Your friends will come to girls' hockey games, whereas everyone will show up to cheer for the boys." Her team has done well in past years, yet even Stileau admitted that given the choice for speed and action, she too would attend a boys' game.

After three years at all-boys Eaglebrook, Rob Fried '00 said he delighted at the sight of the opposite sex, which he felt was more "reflective of the world around us. You have to learn how to relate to girls." He had grown weary of the winks and nudges whenever he had more than a monosyllabic conversation with one of the handful of Eaglebrook faculty daughters. "There couldn't be any kind of relationship with a girl except a romantic one. That didn't seem healthy to me," said Fried, a hockey right wing who was the November 1999 Sports Illustrated Old Spice high school athlete of the month.

Fried is candid about how his feelings have shifted in his four years. As a freshman he felt he was part of a co-ed "mass of kids," a tumbling litter of puppies who hadn't differentiated as individuals or as a class. "The older you get, though, the separation between the boys and girls gets bigger. The past couple of years-I'd hate to say it's a product of pushing aside girls, but the part I enjoy most about Deerfield is the brotherhood. In the classroom, at the dining hail table where you try to integrate with girls- that's fine. But your most meaningful trials and experiences usually take place on the field, where emotions run high. If you have a problem, you go back to the dorm and talk about it."

"During the day this is a very coed school," said Sue Carison, who is faculty-resident on the ninth- and tenth-grade girls' dorm Mather. "After hours, it's a very single-sex school. Life in boys' dorms and life in girls' dorms are very, very different." In truth, boys and girls do not and should not have unlimited access to each other at Deerfield. And while parietals are forever a subject against which students chafe, students say they are also relieved at the single-sex moments faculty create in their coed days. In January, for a change of pace, Assistant Head Marty Lyman proposed three weeks of single-sex tables in the dining hail. It's in these separate-but-equal moments, what Eric Widmer calls "all those moments and spaces in between," that the lifelong Deerfield brotherhood and sisterhood are built, said Carison.

The truth, report many students, is that girls and boys are often strangers to each other, and they invest the majority of their social and emotional energy into their same-sex friends. Even when they have free time to hang out, such as at the Greer Store, boys and girls often segregate into their own booths. As Scroll co-editor David Wanczyk '00 said, "It's excruciating to sit down and talk to a girl in that setting. What are you going to say? 'So, what are your thoughts on life?' " Female and male relating takes its optimal form when they are engaged in something else-playing air hockey or ping pong, or debating in class. As facilitators at Coeducation Day, David and his co-editor Louise Lamphere '00 led a discussion about whether girls and boys can be best friends. Said Louise, "The upshot was that it's not possible at Deerfield, because best friendship is fostered when you meet one-on-one, late at night, when you hang out with your friends in the dorm. And you're not allowed to do that with the opposite sex."

"I have a number of girl friends," said David. "Well, friends who are girls. No matter how close I get to a girl, she still has her eight or ten best friends I can't compete with."

The most lively editorials and guest columns in the Scroll these days are not about coeducation. They are about the students' concern with much broader issues of individual rights and inclusion for all, to which the women's and civil rights movements were just a start. Which came first? Coeducation in 1989, or the incredibly complex array of concerns that fall under the rubric of diversity-racial, class and economic equality, and acceptance of differing sexual orientations?

Sometime shortly after Deerfield accepted girls, the timeline of society kicked into hyperspeed. Like Pandora's box, this last decade of the century has brought strife and hope into the world. Deerfield, wired to the world via the Internet and involved with serving the community beyond its walls at an unprecedented degree, cannot shut out controversy. Many once-taboo or prickly subjects have entered the public conversation since 1989. Deerfield now has a dean of diversity issues, Assistant Dean of Students Nicole Hager. One need but glance at the Student Activities bulletin boards to see how many personal-political interests grip the Deerfield student: the Diversity Task Force, Deerfield Black Student Coalition, and Get Rid of Homophobia (GROH), a group that started out with three members four years ago and has grown to more than 100. The vast majority are girls, noted David Wanczyk, adding, "I can't imagine them confronting this issue at Avon," which he notes is among the very last schools to remain all-boys.

Issues of identity continue to dominate, not surprising in a school at which 19 countries and countless ethnic and religious backgrounds are represented. Not only Jessica, Emily, Michael and Owen, but Sheida, Shama, Oluwaferanmi, Kaymar, Hyun-Seung, Andre and Ram now endeavor to find their place at what Eric Widmer called "an international institution." For example, outraged letters and guest columns flew into print when Coeducation Day took place on the Monday traditionally reserved for observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day and its campus-wide forum on diversity. "Race relations is not an overdone subject and our obsession with coeducation should not become more important than the most crucial social revelation of our time," wrote Wancyzk in a Scroll editorial after the event. Allie Stileau fired back a response defending a day devoted to gender issues: "King stood for peace and eliminating the prejudices that divide all people, whether those barriers are about class, race, sexuality, nationality, age, religion or gender." That issues seem to be blurring into a muddy palette of color suggests that coeducation, as a discussion of its own, has been supplanted by issues of far more pressing concern to the students themselves.

William Zinsser called on the language of the monastery when he recalled Deerfield. It was a diocese headed by a bishop named Boyden who led teachers who were his "loyal corps of priests." Deerfield is no longer a monastery in any sense of the word. But the ethos of living closely with others, of developing character, of living for something higher than oneself, of caring for other members and the world, of taking a humane approach to discipline and to serve the community well-in the words of Mr. Boyden, to ensure that "our small numbers make it possible for the relationship between pupil and teacher to be. . . intimate"-these are immutable values that time does not change at Deerfield.

One of African novelist Chinua Achebe's poems describes how the people from his village would get together every month in a special hut, drink tea, and look at the moon. The moon, he said, was just an excuse to get everyone together; it was the community they really wanted. The same could have been said at the close of Coeducation Day. A dozen dancers choreographed by the astonishingly gifted Maricarmen Arce '01 came bounding out to the music of Janet Jackson. The funk diva was singing "Rhythm Nation," which exhorts its listeners to celebrate diversity and include everyone. Dancers lithe and sinewy, buxom and bulging, male and female, black and white, Latina, Asian-African, Anglo-Asian, Protestant and Catholic, Jewish and unaffiliated. It took away the breath of the audience, which represented the same cross-section. Talking about coeducation was the excuse to get together, but it was the community everyone came out to see.