Every Quarter

Reunion Weekend is a special time for our alums. Everyone is back on campus, savoring the nostalgia, seeing old friends, and reconnecting with the school that shaped their formative years. We wanted to capture this feeling so for Reunion 2017 we tried an experiment. We set up a tent, a table, and chairs in front of George Washington Hall and invited alumni in to sit, relax, and reflect. We called it the EQ Lounge, and these are their stories.

Grit has been a pretty popular buzzword in education these past few years. The concept isn't exactly new. Perseverance, willingness to learn, passion, positively dealing with adversity—these are all characteristics that we typically associate with good students, and people for that matter. While we may have anecdotally known this for a while, scientific research is now confirming that grit is gold. Angela Duckworth is the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also the founder and CEO of Character Lab, a nonprofit whose mission is to advance the science and practice of character development. Duckworth studies grit and self-control, two attributes that are distinct from IQ and yet powerfully predict success and well-being. She recently visited Phillips Academy to talk about her research and present to the community. Before hitting the stage Duckworth sat down with History & Social Science Instructor and Tang Institute Fellow Noah Rachlin to dive

Earlier this year Every Quarter had the privilege of hosting a special conversation between Nancy Sizer and Louise Kennedy, Class of 1976. Sizer taught at Andover in the seventies and eighties and was the spouse of the renowned educational reformer and Phillips Academy's 12th Head of School, Ted Sizer. Kennedy came to Andover in the first year of coeducation and went on to serve as the first female editor of The Phillipian, the Academy's student-run newspaper. This episode is like listening in on old friends reuniting after many years apart. They discuss the merger of Phillips and Abbot Academies, what life was like on campus in the early seventies and how students and faculty adapted to the transition. Their wide-ranging and fascinating talk is filled with personal stories, random tangents, and perspective that can only be gained from looking back on their experiences some forty years later.

Fake news. Black Lives Matter. Women’s rights. These are just a few of the current issues Andover students are trying to grapple with. Phillips Academy is committed to equity and inclusion, youth from every quarter, non sibi. But how do you uphold these values when it feels like the world beyond our campus bubble is turning into the direct antithesis of everything we try to instill in our community? There are no easy answers. Conversations, however, are happening. Students want to be involved. They have a voice. And we need to listen. Back in April Andover hosted Stand Up: Student Activism in Independent Schools, a daylong symposium for independent school educators and administrators. One of our presenters was the writer, video blogger, and cultural commentator Jay Smooth. Jay grew up in the burgeoning New York hip-hop scene and is the founder of the city's longest-running hip hop radio program, WBAI's Underground Railroad. Before his presentation, Jay joined Dean of Community and Multicultural Development L

What makes you laugh? Is it the observational stand-up of Louis C.K.? Sketches on Saturday Night Live? Mark Maron’s podcast that you always listen to first before EQ? You see, comedy is subjective. What makes one person laugh probably won’t make another person laugh, and humor is rarely an acquired taste. It’s not like you turn thirty and suddenly like Seinfeld. Well, maybe that’s a bad example. The point is, you either get the joke or you don’t. In the early nineties, The Farrelly Brothers struck gold with a string of blockbusters that seemed to make everyone laugh. Dumb and Dumber. There’s Something About Mary. Kingpin. Outside Providence. Shallow Hal. Fever Pitch. You couldn’t escape their slapstick premises and earnest storytelling that made them the two of the most successful writers and directors in Hollywood. They’ve worked with comic icons like Bill Murray, Jim Carrey, Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Alec Baldwin and Jimmy Fallon, but as Bobby Farrelly, Class of 1977 recently recounted at a Phillips Academy

Frank Stella '54 is the renowned artist he is today because of Phillips Academy. The access. The curriculum. The friendships (with fellow artists Carl Andre '53 and Hollis Frampton '54). Andover shaped the artist Stella would become. In this special episode of Every Quarter, hear the candid tales from his early years, stories of the New York art scene in the sixties and why he keeps coming back to where it all started. Throughout his prolific and influential career, Stella has been a major figure in the art world, internationally hailed as one of America’s most significant artists. In his paintings, metal reliefs, sculptures, and prints, he has explored abstraction, which emerged during the early twentieth century in the innovations of artists such as Vassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, and Pablo Picasso. A pioneer of minimalism in the 1960s, Stella continues to experiment and innovate, creating some of the most daring work to be seen today.

Since the beginning of time, human beings have documented their experiences for future generations—on caves, tablets, scrolls and parchment. Now imagine a world where these records were lost. What if the Magna Carta were placed in a drawer, never to be seen again? In this episode of EQ, we meet Anishinaabeg members of White Earth Nation. Their search for one of their nation’s founding documents led them to Andover, where a large birch scroll containing ancient accounts from their ancestors languished undiscovered for more than a century. Phillips Academy’s Robert S. Peabody Museum is home to one of the nation’s major repositories of Native American archaeological collections. Founded in 1901, its first curator was the legendary Warren King Moorehead, known as “the dean of American archaeology.” So how did Moorehead come into possession of this sacred scroll and many other artifacts? And what does this discovery mean to its people and their future? Join archaeologist and Peabody Museum director Ryan Wheeler

In early 1942, two months after Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered all Japanese-Americans to evacuate the West Coast. Nine-year-old Sam Mihara and his family were among the approximately 120,000 people who were sent to internment camps across the country. The Miharas, who lived in San Francisco, landed at Heart Mountain, a camp in northern Wyoming, where they would live for the next three years. Sam Mihara visited Phillips Academy in October 2016 to share his story of what life was like inside the camp and how he was affected by those years of confinement, intolerance, and discrimination. Andover Instructor and historian Damany Fisher talked with Mihara and his wife Helene about their experiences for Every Quarter. Fisher is an authority on the American history of residential segregation and housing discrimination. His paper, “No Utopia: the African American Struggle for Fair Housing in Postwar Sacramento, 1948-1967,” was recently published in the academic journal Introduction to Ethnic St

The need-blind admission initiative is the single most distinct feature that Phillips Academy is recognized for around the globe. This episode dives into Andover’s progressive financial aid policies and the history of need-blind admission. On the eve of celebrating a decade of its existence Jim Ventre ‘79, dean of admission and financial aid, sits down to discuss the game-changing initiative, what ‘Big Blue Nice’ means, and why socioeconomic status plays no part in how students are admitted to Andover.

What does it mean to be born digital? How are adults and children navigating the ever-evolving and complex technological landscape of modern life? Are kids spending too much time on devices or are they using modern innovations to develop crucial life skills? Phillips Academy Head of School John Palfrey and Harvard Researcher Urs Gasser have spent years researching these topics and you might be surprised at what they've discovered. In this special episode recorded live at the recent relaunch of Born Digital: How Children Grow Up in a Digital Age, Palfrey and Gasser moderate an open forum with local students and share many of their findings. The excerpted conversations present much more questions than answers but know that we are all continuously learning together and must continue to think about what’s next. Read more on the EQ blog: : http://podcast.andover.edu/2016/12/07/episode-02-born-digital/

Our debut episode is a conversation about what it means to live a life of service. Commander Becky Dowling Calder '94 and Lieutenant Commander Laurie Coffey '95, two legendary Andover athletes, could have played college basketball anywhere they wanted. They each chose Annapolis and went on to fly F/A-18 Hornets at the highest level, selflessly serving and protecting our country for the past twenty years. Why? The lifelong friends returned to campus recently to commemorate Veterans Day and were gracious enough to answer that question and more. Visit the EQ blog: https://podcast.andover.edu/2016/11/17/episode-01/