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College Campus. In trying to serve, Kemper has vastly improved his school. With 436 acres and 139 buildings, it has more students than half the nation's four-year colleges. Its 80,000-volume Oliver Wendell Holmes Library tops three-fifths of all college libraries. Its Addison Gallery of American Art, with works from Homer to Hopper, would do a sizable city proud. Its 85-man faculty is superior to most college faculties, and some teachers get paid more—up to $12,000, plus fringe benefits that add as much as $3,000.
Andover is such big business that its budget this year hit a record $3,000,000, including $3,000 for athletic tape, $80,000 for mowing and planting the grounds, $210,000 for food and $727,690 for instruction. The school is bursting with new construction: four elegant dormitories, a breathtaking science building, a revolutionary creative arts center—all the result of a recent drive that stirred parents and alumni to cough up $6,763,970 in just 22 months, breaking all records for independent school fund raising.
College Courses. The school's endowment is $25.3 million (book value ), which is why it can hand out scholarships freely. This fall 28% of the student body is down for $260,000 in aid, including such all-out help as full tuition for the son of a coal miner with a yearly income of $1,975. Even those who pay the full $1,800, which is low for top schools, are in a sense on scholarship. Andover spends $3,400 a year on each boy.
Andover boys tend to measure this gift in one word: college. In 1951, Andover's courses were already so collegiate that John Kemper spurred Andover, Exeter and Lawrenceville to join Harvard, Yale and Princeton in setting up the nationwide (1,358 schools this year) Advanced Placement Program. Now 50% of Andover boys take college courses, from calculus to philosophy. Of 208 boys going to 39 colleges this fall, Harvard took 42, Yale 39, Stanford 20, Columbia 12, Princeton 11. Of 115 new students that Harvard accepted this year as sophomores, 20 were Andover graduates. The average Andover graduate, says College Board President Frank H. Bowles, "could enter the junior year in a great many colleges without risk of failure."
Authors & Vegetarians. Andover and Exeter, plus some subsequent Ivy, produce a rich pattern of graduates. Exeter has one President (Franklin Pierce) and ten Cabinet members, from Daniel Webster to Henry Morgenthau Jr. Andover boasts a Supreme Court Justice (William H. Moody) and two Cabinet members, including Henry L. Stimson.
Exeter's diverse writers include Booth Tarkington, Robert Benchley, Drew Pearson. Andover's are Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Lardner, Quentin Reynolds, John Home Burns, James Ramsay Ullman and the much-read Dr. Benjamin Spock. Most famous nongrad is Andover's Humphrey Bogart, who got the boot for "incontrollably high spirits" (he dunked a teacher in Rabbit Pond) and spent his life boasting about it.