Headmasters Letter to the Deerfield Community
Fall 2005

September 2005

Dear Members of the Deerfield Community:

Earlier this month, at our annual 1797 dinner party for alumni, parents, and friends of Deerfield in New York City, I mentioned that I had not yet written my letter to the Deerfield community, probably because - like so many other things - I was reluctant to confront the fact that I would be doing it for the last time. So I have put it off, and put it off, until I have at last been stirred into action by the thought that if I didn't get it written pretty soon it could no longer qualify as a beginning-of-the-school-year letter. At our opening Convocation on September 18 I played with that thought just a little, when I joked that our practice always seems to be to begin school, wait for a week to make sure everything is up and running smoothly, and then have our opening Convocation and announce that the school year had begun. It is our "risk averse" management theory, I explained to our faculty and students.

I also dusted off my old joke that, if Mr. Boyden had already preempted the ideas of "finishing up strong" and "being mobile," then to "begin strong" would be our unique contribution to the theory and practice of education, and I think that's what we have done, once again this year.

And once again this year, at our lunch for new students and their parents on that fraught September day when they all arrive at Deerfield, I told the story of my own arrival with my mother 52 years ago, as a new freshman - a journey I shall never forget, which included the emptying of the contents of my stomach on the roadside, and then looking up at a sign that said "Entering Belchertown, Massachusetts." In my speech to our new families, just to demonstrate that a little pedantry can go a long way, I then recited the famous line from Virgil that Mr. Dicklow had subsequently taught me at Deerfield: "forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit" - "someday, perhaps, even on these things will we look back and smile."

When I returned to Deerfield twelve years ago I wasn't at all sure what to expect or even less what would come of it, except that whatever happened I wanted to be able to smile afterwards. Now I can say, without any doubt at all, that these have been the most joyous years of my life. What times we have all had together - students, faculty and staff, alumni, parents and grandparents, and trustees. For me personally, among so much else, it has allowed me to reclaim my own past, reminding me of those famous lines in T.S. Eliot's Little Gidding "We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time." But much more than that, I quite soon came to think that what I might help Deerfield with the most, because of who I was and because I was the only headmaster ever to have gone to Deerfield himself, would be to deepen the school's appreciation of its past and therefore of itself. This is what we do, when we reflect on our own lives. It's what we want our students to do. It's what we mean by our motto "Be Worthy of your Heritage." It should happen with institutions as well - especially ones with as compelling a history as ours.

I do remember the moment, as we were preparing our Bicentennial celebration seven years ago, and had invited my close friend, Barbara Chase, head of school at Andover, to come and give welcoming remarks in behalf of schools everywhere, that I received a telephone call from Barbara, who was busy writing her speech and wanted only to know what number headmaster I was at Deerfield. She said, "Over a span of 200 years I am the 14th head of school at Andover, what number are you?" Well, just to pinpoint my place in history, one of the first things I had done at Deerfield was to find out exactly the answer to that question, so without any delay I told Barbara that "I am number 54." There was a pause at the other end of the line as the significance of that number registered with her, and then a longer pause as she recalled that one of those 54 headmasters happened to have been on the job for 66 years. But even those long haul years of the nineteenth century, when headmasters were coming and going with alarming regularity, we cherish and celebrate, for they show the simple New England pluck of the school, if nothing else. Yet it's especially the Boyden years that we recall, and the gratitude for them that we feel today - as the beneficiaries - for everything Mr. and Mrs. Boyden did, along with the faculty and staff who worked so closely and so devotedly with them, to bring the school to greatness. In our dress, our manners, and our meals together, in our scholarship and sportsmanship, we are remembering them all the time.

As I once wrote to our Deerfield community, I think it is that belief in ourselves, and the past out of which we have come, that allows us to be daring - to do those progressive things that make Deerfield, as preeminent an institution as it is, nevertheless one that thinks of itself inclusively, not exclusively. Our unswerving commitment to our financial aid budget, to make a Deerfield education accessible to all the deserving students whom we would want to have here, is only the greatest manifestation of our desire to be faithful to our history. And of course it is well enough known, when I make that observation, that I am also speaking autobiographically.

Now there is another way that I believe we are being faithful to our history, and suddenly I find myself again in the middle of it. If my heart was a little heavy at the prospect of leaving Deerfield when I announced, a year and a half ago, my intention of stepping down next June, I have certainly arranged a way of not saying goodbye, but simply au revoir, for my new job as founding headmaster of King's Academy in Madaba, Jordan, will certainly keep me connected. The King wouldn't want it any other way, and I hope the new headmaster of Deerfield, whoever he or she may be, will think of King's as a sister academy half a world away. I do think that founding a school - even one in the middle of the Middle East - must be easier than saving one, which is what Mr. Boyden did beginning 103 years ago. Deerfield quietly lives with the knowledge that in those especially dire days of 1922 and 1923, when public funding was cut off as the school necessarily became fully independent, it was to the headmasters of Andover and Exeter, Al Stearns and Lewis Perry, that Mr. Boyden turned; and it is to them and their schools that we will always have a debt of gratitude for their help. At least I often think of that time in our past, and have wondered how Deerfield might ever repay that debt - not to our sister academies in New England, who would not in any case expect it - but somehow, somewhere. I think that that is precisely what is happening now. King's Academy could never have been more than a dream of King Abdullah's, monarch that he is, without the help that Deerfield has extended, in collaboration, advice, and simply allowing King's to use our name as their partner and their inspiration. It is difficult for me to overstate my gratitude for that, both as outgoing headmaster at Deerfield looking back now on the reconciliation of our own history; and as incoming headmaster of King's, knowing how much it will mean to have that help and that Deerfield past to draw on as we begin to write our own narrative.

Of course there is a great temptation just to plagiarize everything from Deerfield. The other day there was a conference call among the King's Academy board of trustees, and someone asked what the school's motto would be. But I did not suggest "Be Worthy of your Heritage;" instead I suggested Dartmouth's motto. Another trustee asked what motto is that? I replied "Vox Clamantis in Deserto" - "A Voice Crying in the Desert." There was no pause at all before everyone began to laugh.

Good heavens, I did not mean to write at such length. May I conclude this letter by simply reciting a poem that Meera read, first in Japanese and then in her translation, as we addressed the school together at our opening - and our last - Convocation? It is in the form of a tanka, written over a thousand years ago by the court poet Ariwara no Narihira.

Though I had heard that inevitably This was the end to which our path must point I cannot help but wonder How that far-off tomorrow Has become today.

We send our very best late September wishes to our extended Deerfield family as we proclaim our school to be happily in session for the 206th time.

Sincerely,
Eric Widmer