The Duke Steps Down

In the auditorium of the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Conn., one night last week, a tall, courtly gentleman of 63 rose to address an assembly of parents and masters. What he had to say came as a shock: after 29 years, Headmaster George Van Santvoord announced that he is retiring.

For the thousands of boys and men who have known him, it was difficult to imagine Hotchkiss without The Duke. Though the school already enjoyed a solid reputation when he took over, he has kept its prestige steadily mounting. Of all U.S. prep schools, few, if any, can beat the standards Hotchkiss has set.

In its 62-year history, it has turned out such alumni as Poet Archibald MacLeish, Yale President Whitney Griswold, former New Jersey Governor Charles Edison, Henry Ford II. Today, over its 480-acre Georgian campus, its 353 students still pursue their education with an intensity most any school would envy. It takes in boys of every race and religion, makes them clean their own rooms and wait on table. But more important than its disciplined democracy is the quality of its intellectual fare. The boys are taken up through calculus and analytic geometry, read everything from the Iliad (in Greek) to Racine's Phedre (in French) to the Latin of Terence, Tacitus and Plautus.

Throughout the years, The Duke has always insisted on quality. Occasionally, when things have not suited him, he could lash out at his boys ("You're barbarians! You're uncivilized! You're rude!"). But mostly, he has found other ways of making them stretch their minds. Every morning he has been on hand to have breakfast with them; after that, he guided them spiritually from the pulpit in chapel. He conducted his own Bible class, and in the afternoon, his dog Rani trotting at his side, he was apt to lead a group of boys into the woods for a discourse on woods lore. At dinner or at tea--or during his daily rounds through the infirmary--he would try to draw his students out on every sort of topic--from the materials used in Syrian pottery to the virtues of the Confederate cause during the Civil War. "He seems," said one awe-struck student, "to know everything about everything."

The Duke's successor: the Very Reverend Thomas Chappell, 48, popular Dean of the Cathedral Church of St. Stephen in Harrisburg, Pa. A Hotchkiss boy himself (class of '24), Dean Chappell graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale, later went on to the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Mass. His plans for Hotchkiss are, in a sense, ambitious. They are nothing less than to give the sort of spiritual and intellectual education long provided under The Duke--a training in 'the habitual contemplation of greatness" for the production of men "sensitive to the good, competent, imaginative, ready to do well in a world which is in urgent need of the best."

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