On its 200th birthday, Exeter is still excelling
It looks like a small college. And with its 93 buildings, its $47 million endowment and its 108,000-volume library, the institution on tree-lined Front Street in rural Exeter, N.H., is better equipped and endowed than many colleges. But Phillips Exeter Academy, which celebrates its 200th birthday this year, is only a prep school —though perhaps the best in the country. Its list of illustrious alumni is imposing. Among them: Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Jay Rockefeller, Robert Benchley, Daniel Webster and Franklin Pierce. Equally imposing are the school's fees: $6,100 annually for tuition, room and board, paid by parents in 43 states and 27 foreign countries.
The mainstay of an Exeter education is a demanding round-table discussion, with no more than 14 students, led by an expert teacher. Warns Exeter's catalogue: "Maximum participation is encouraged, pretense and careless preparation [are] readily perceived." In practice, this means that Math Instructor Richard Brown knows his students will be prepared before he begins class discussion by asking, "Have we proved the equation?" In third-year French, Exonians are required to discuss in French their assigned stories. Anyone who lapses into English meets with the teacher afterward to talk things over —in French. Most of the school's science courses follow an "open lab" system so that students can visit labs and do their own experiments.
When Exeter was first opened by Calvinist Banker John Phillips, the school took in just about anyone and aimed at "promoting piety and virtue." Now only one out of every four students who apply gets in, though the school actively recruits low-income students and gives out more than $1 million a year in scholarships. Exeter, says Admissions Director John Herney, is looking for brains plus something more. It turns down a number of applicants with high scores. "We are looking for kids who have a certain contagion to their excitement about learning." During a word association test one applicant linked tumor with friends because "they both grow on you." Herney almost shouted, "Take that kid!"
The school's fast academic track is hard on new students. Some cry themselves to sleep in their first few weeks. Says one student: "If you don't work, you're dead." Adds Senior Deborah Rhodes: "If I'm sick I go to class anyway. Because I'll be sicker if I stay away." The academic pressure tends to do away with social snobbery among its 991 students. Says Mark Driscoll, 22, now a Harvard junior: "It's the only community I've seen in which all the diverse people blend in a very healthy way. That certainly doesn't happen at Harvard."
So successful is Exeter, in fact, that Principal Stephen Kurtz constantly enjoins students and faculty to pursue "excellence without arrogance." But, Kurtz adds, "I've been teaching 29 years, and I've never seen better teaching and better learning than goes on here.''