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Anything Goes. Today, no one agrees more with that praise than Andover's teachers, who at first viewed The Soldier with dread. His West Point classmates are now rising major generals, but Colonel John Kemper, U.S. Army Reserve (ret.). has said goodbye to all that. The tweedy personification of a headmaster, even to his unexpected Harvard accent. Kemper gets a universal faculty compliment: "No man is fairer than Johnny."
When they arrived, Sylvia Kemper proved to be the perfect headmaster's wife. The mother of three girls, she made strenuous efforts to know Andover's boys. She stood for hours in the frigid hockey rink cheering on the team. She invited three boys to live at the house, had dozens of others in for "burgers and shakes." Then in 1960 the Kempers learned that she had cancer.
Last year Kemper took Sylvia to England, where he studied Eton and Harrow in hopes of finding good ideas. Nothing much came of it, and in London Sylvia died. Now his daughters are grown and gone. He lives in the 153-year-old headmaster's mansion alone with his mongrel dog—and keeps busy.
Sugar for Teachers. Headmaster Kemper began his Andover tenure by tackling men before mortar. He set up a cleanly defined faculty table of organization that banished one-man rule and got everyone into running the school. He appointed a faculty dean, veteran English Teacher Alan R. Blackmer, and let department heads dominate hiring. He settled a long battle over Andover's fraternities, which alumni favored and teachers opposed, by smoothly getting some influential alumni to support abolishing them. "The slickest operation you ever saw," says one teacher.
Since 1955 the faculty pay budget has risen 60%. Included are three unique fellowships for beginning teachers. After a year, Andover sends them on to graduate school with grants of up to $3,000. Should they return, which they need not, Kemper can offer seven-room apartments for housemasters in Andover's new dormitories. Teachers' children, if accepted, can attend Andover for $25 a year. In college, they get a yearly tuition grant of $600. Teachers who stay get sabbatical years with full pay plus $1,500 for travel. Dean Blackmer used his sabbatical last year as a "heretic in residence" in the Pittsburgh public schools, where he launched an Andover-style honors program that School Superintendent Calvin E. Gross calls "the most important thing I've been involved in."
Bricks for Brains. In turn, John Kemper supplied stunning tools for teaching. The one-level science building ($1,250,000) that opened this fall has three wings uniting physics, chemistry and biology. It has movable walls, three libraries, space for 43 private student projects.
Even more lavish is the new arts and communications center, a $1,000,000 extension of the Addison Gallery that opens this month. It includes studios for painting, sculpture, woodworking, photography. The 286-seat auditorium has a screen big enough for projecting three images at once, a tool for teaching comparative art. If a teacher wants slide tapes or sound tapes, the center will make them, provide viewing and listening booths for students. All manner of audio-visual props will be produced, and public schools are welcome to use them.