by McKay Jenkins '81 - faculty

Toward the end of the first day of "Look to the Hills": The Deerfield Summer Institute, I asked Deerfield's own philosophy teacher Michael O'Donnell about his first class, wryly titled "Why Not Be A Bad Person?" His eyes lit up, as they always do, with a mix of erudition and irony. "Pretty well," he said, "but I'm having trouble deciding how to start tomorrow's class on ethical behavior. Think I should go with Emmanuel Kant or Monica Lewinsky?"

Something about Michael's dilemma neatly captured the tone of the Summer Institute, four days of rich classroom conversation, cultural field trips, and live musical performance that was by all accounts both intellectually challenging and frequently playful. The faculty for the institute would have made any university proud. Meera Viswanathan worked what can only be described as a kind of magic over her students in a course called "Renouncing the World: The Aesthetics of Japanese Poetry and Medieval Garden Instruction, Theory and Practice." Meera's gentleness and palpable wisdom are so mesmerizing she could have improved all our lots simply by reading a phone book.

Equally challenging was a course taught by Heddy Rose, Holocaust survivor.

Princeton Art Historian Gillette Griffin taught a lively class in "Sexuality in Art." Other classes were taught by superb Deerfield faculty members and also people from the Five College community. My own class, a discussion of the researching, writing, and editing of long pieces of nonfiction, brimmed over with students who have lived several decades longer than I, and had the stories to prove it. As always, the teacher learned more than the students.

By many accounts, the weekend's extracurricular moments were as fruitful as the classroom time. In between classes, participants visited the studios of local artists, learned how to sight-read music, listened to a live evening jazz performance, and took bicycle tours around the Pocumtuck Valley. In all, the Summer Institute succeeded in what I consider to be the most important way possible. It brought an energetic collection of Deerfield alumni, family, and friends together with a lively group of teachers and scholars, and over an otherwise slow August weekend created a vibrant atmosphere of curiosity and learning. This group grappled with art, politics, and history, and left the place energized and intellectually refreshed.

As published in the Fall 2003 issue of Deerfield Today, a newsletter for alumni of Deerfield Academy