September 12, 2001

Dear Members of the Deerfield Community:

Enclosed you will find the letter that I always write to the Deerfield community in September. It was written just a week ago, in a more innocent time. Now we are reminded more brutally than ever that our lives, even in this peaceful valley, are intricately connected with the lives of people everywhere, and especially with alumni, friends and parents who work in the World Trade Center and in the Pentagon, or fly often in commercial airliners. Yesterday, on the morning of the attacks, I addressed the entire school and tried to offer what comfort I could. We are using the Brick Church for our sanctuary. At our school meeting today I read Matthew Arnold's great poem, "Dover Beach," that Robert McGlynn had introduced me to in my senior year at Deerfield, many years ago. I am sure that some of us will be grieving for loved ones. We will respond and our community will become closer as we deal with the impact of this week's events.

Sincerely,
Eric Widmer

September 2001

Dear Members of the Deerfield Community:

As I write this letter, Deerfield has begun its school year for the 203rd time. We know what an impressive group of new students we have, in all their shapes and sizes, similar to one another only in the single important fact that they were all admitted to Deerfield. They introduced themselves to us, as always, on the night of their arrival, as they joined the ranks of our equally impressive returning students who, following that long-standing Deerfield tradition, had arrived a day early to welcome them. For the faculty and the Headmaster, it is impossible not to look forward to the year ahead.

May I thereupon be allowed to digress, for a change, and ask readers of this letter to digress with me? When a school opens for business 203 times, it should have a reliably cumulative understanding of the purposes of its existence. At Deerfield that understanding, while deeply realized, has never been trumpeted; and for most of our history it has been unvoiced, or quietly restated in as few words as possible. It was, therefore, with some misgivings that I took upon myself the job, as the summer began, of actually producing a new mission statement that the faculty would then consider, and finally the Board of Trustees-all of this in order to prepare ourselves for our decennial re-accreditation visit next year.

Mission statements have apparently found an indispensable place in American management theory. Business schools insist on them; corporations require them of all their constituent companies and departments; and accreditation agencies (such as the New England Association of Schools and Colleges) couldn't imagine doing without them. Therefore we have to write them, a task that is usually performed by committee, which in turn is a process that guarantees that all mission statements for all schools like Deerfield are virtually indistinguishable. In fact, two years ago we had some fun doing an exercise with the Board of Trustees. Meera copied the mission statements from half-a-dozen of our sister schools, added Deerfield's (from 10 years ago), but deleted all references to school names apart from providing a list of the schools whose statements she had borrowed, and asked the Trustees to decide which statement belonged to which school. Virtually no one earned a passing grade. All of which doesn't matter at all, because the purpose of the statement, however boiler-plate it may be, is simply to give each school a set of objectives against which it can judge itself as it conducts its business and then prepares for its re-accreditation visitors. The fact that Deerfield has successfully embarked upon its school year for almost all of its 203-year history without a mission statement does not matter in the least. We must have one, and the Headmaster must write it.

My reluctance to get on with this assignment was deepened by the worry that mission statements may conceivably fall into that category of educational initiatives that actually deform the results they intend to achieve. For example, the Scholastic Aptitude Test was originally intended to measure one's academic readiness for college. Instead what they measure now is one's academic readiness for the SAT exams. Schools everywhere teach to the SAT and have accordingly forfeited their responsibility to define for themselves a good high school education. Do mission statements, I wondered, also let us off the hook? By putting words into the air do we relieve ourselves of the rather more important task of considering how well we are doing what we say we do? Or with what dedication and steadfastness? And what experience? And what passion? As I was mulling this question over, and still struggling with the necessity of having a mission statement to present to the faculty, two things occurred to me. The first was that our current statement, written by the faculty ten years ago, is not bad. At least I was having difficulty imagining how we would improve upon it. Second, I realized that what our statement lacked, and virtually all other mission statements lack, was any sense of history-any hint of that larger continuum in which we all live and work and change and find meaning in what we do. So what I proposed to do, with the help of our academy archivist, Tina Cohen, was at the very least to remind readers of our new mission statement that Deerfield had indeed been in existence for a long time, and that an awareness of our past is important to us. I have now presented to the faculty a new statement, which is simply called "History and Mission." It includes the statement of purposes and objectives written ten years ago with little change. But that statement is now surrounded by references to earlier times and earlier people.

Of course one of those people is Frank L. Boyden. Among his many, many letters in our archives, I lingered over one in particular that he had written to the Deerfield community at the start of the new year, during the Second World War. Here is the sentence that particularly moved me: "We have preserved those fundamental, high traditions of character and scholarship on which our school was founded, and none of the vital things which have given a feeling of permanence and security have been lost or changed. We still study and work, play and sing, and pause to look up to the hills."

As I read those words and pondered them quietly, I thought that Mr. Boyden indeed had defined Deerfield for all time. And I suppose it was particularly his "feeling of permanence" that struck me, for surely that is what gives us all not just our sense of place, but our sense of purpose as well. Our job is quite simply to continue to sustain and carry forward what has been bequeathed to us. It means, of course, that we continue to cultivate the mind and heart at Deerfield, but it also means simple things that never get mentioned in mission statements, like feeding our students well, or having no deferred maintenance issues, or being courteous to each other and to visitors, or appreciating our human and natural environment and wanting to give back to it as much as we can. But for us "permanence" also means building up our endowment and securing the future of our school forever, and doing everything we can to maintain our position at the forefront of independent secondary education. (On October 4, ninety-nine years after Mr. Boyden assumed the dubious Headmastership of a school whose student population had dwindled to 14 boys and girls, Deerfield will celebrate the end of its Strength of Heart Campaign, having exceeded a year early the target of $125,000,000; of which $100,000,000 will go directly into the endowment of the academy.)

The "feeling of permanence" also means to me that we continue to think of ourselves, as Mr. Boyden did, not as an exclusive school, but an inclusive one. As a result of the extraordinary generosity of our alumni and parents, close to 40% of Deerfield students now receive need-based scholarship assistance, and we are perhaps the only school that has been completely need-blind in the admission process from beginning to end for the last four years. That statement now includes international students as well, as Deerfield has chosen to follow the example of those Ivy League institutions that have rightly considered themselves to be international institutions and not just national ones. We have, for example, admitted this year the captain or head boy of Starehe School in Nairobi, a school predominantly of orphaned boys in Kenya. What an extraordinary opportunity indeed it is for us to have Joseph Mama Nyamumbo here at Deerfield. Our inclusivity-from which I benefited so greatly almost 50 years ago- continues to be the strongest reply we can give to Mr. Boyden today.

The truth is that we live with our past and with the question of how we can be faithful to it in everything we do. It inspires our competitive spirit, and it underlies our sense of purpose and even our daring as a school. When we build a new science, math, and technology building beginning next year in exactly the place where the present science building is now located, I have no doubt that the design team, headed by David Childs '59, will give us an extraordinary structure that looks to the past as well as to the future, evoking everything that is permanent about the Deerfield River Valley even as it takes its place as one of the most exciting new teaching buildings that one could find anywhere. But as I think about this project-the largest and the most ambitious in the history of Deerfield-I am reminded of what Mr. Boyden did at the conclusion of our first Capital Campaign in 1930. He tore down our principal school building at the time and erected the present building exactly in its place. The old building was scarcely fifty years old. It was our only brick building. It had been designed by the firm of Peabody and Stearns and would surely qualify today as an excellent example of high Victorian institutional architecture in America. But for Mr. Boyden it was neither aesthetically optimistic nor functionally successful, and least of all did it therefore speak to the issue of permanence any better than our present science building does for us.

Such indeed is the optimistic spirit of Deerfield, and such is the way in which we continue to embrace the "feeling of permanence" as we stride forward together, for the 203rd time.

Sincerely,
Eric Widmer