Well Begun Is Half Done

(See Cover)

In the next two months, some 1,400 teen-age boys and their parents all over the U.S. will tremulously collect the credentials--IQ scores, grades, test results, recommendations, interviews--needed to apply for admission to what they are sure is the nation's best prep school: Massachusetts' Andover. Many applications will come from Eastern boys with good primary education and some wealth and social standing. But not all. Even now, Andover alumni are searching slums and back-country towns for bright boys who may have little money and position but who "need" Andover. Recruiters are grilling newspaper circulation managers for the names of deserving paper boys, asking forest rangers to suggest suitable rural applicants, checking big-city youth clubs for promising kids--and then helping the boys apply.

By Jan. 15 all of the applicants, rich and poor, will be listed on a big chart in Andover's admissions office. Studying each boy's credentials, three faculty men and an admissions director, working individually, will grade the applicant from 1 to 5, with 5 representing total disapproval. The four grades will be added (and a helpful three points will be subtracted from the totals of sons of Andover alumni). About one fifth of the boys--that is, those with low totals--will be accepted. The rest will be turned down.

Then, and only then, will Andover consider whether the applicant has the $1,800 a year that going there costs. Probably three-fourths of the boys will be able to pay full freight. For the rest, rich Andover will dip into its pockets for scholarships and loans tailored to the boys' needs. Thus will be formed the group of next year's new boys at a school that aims by intensity and excellence to be No. 1 in the U.S.*

The Way to College. The increasingly competitive admissions crush at Andover does not mean that public schools are being abandoned: only 2-3% of U.S. schoolchildren go to the nation's 2,400 independent schools (more than half of them day schools). But within that fraction there is room for much experimentation, pacesetting, quality and growth. In Florida and Colorado, the number of independent schools has doubled in five years. In Manhattan, some schools have to turn down eight out of nine applicants.

The big spur toward private schooling is getting into college. The country's 1,708 independent secondary schools, with an enrollment of about 250,000, send 95% of their graduates to college, against 40% from public schools. This faith in private schools is chiefly rooted in their freedom. They can select better students. They can pay teachers by merit, make innovations, borrow ideas from anywhere. On every score they can outpace all but a few crack public schools.

Chauffeur at Groton. Until recently, pace was not the pride of many famed New England boys' boarding schools, which for years had the pretense but not the product of Eton and Harrow. Now they have changed dramatically. By snubbing Social Register dullards and by combing the country for bright recruits of all races, religions and incomes, they are fast becoming more democratic than homogeneous suburban public schools. "The idea that private schools are for snobs is absolute nonsense," says Owen B. Kiernan, Massachusetts' commissioner of education. A few Junes ago, one proper Bostonian summed up: "Today my daughter graduates from Foxcroft. Tomorrow my chauffeur's son graduates from Groton."

All this portends something new: "the national public school." Such is the goal of John Mason Kemper, 50, headmaster of Phillips Academy, which is more popularly known, from the name of its home town, as Andover. The definition comes close to fitting both Andover, the nation's oldest (1780) incorporated school, and its younger (1781) brother: Phillips Exeter Academy, 25 miles away in Exeter. N.H. More than any other U.S. prep schools, they fulfill the dream with which they began: to be "ever equally open to youth of requisite qualifications from every quarter."

Andover (841 boys) and Exeter (760) are the biggest nonmilitary boarding schools in the U.S. They are already national: Andover has boys from 44 states. Exeter from 42. They try to be public by breaking down the barriers of tuition, by striving to find poor boys with rich minds. Yet because they retain high standards and cannot open their doors to everyone, they remain elite schools for gifted boys of a sturdy, stable kind.

Lucky Me? These ideals and necessary compromises are the day-to-day concern of John Kemper, who entered the prep school world not as an Old Boy but as a West Pointer and professional soldier. Those were strikes against him in 1947, when the trustees plucked him out of the Army at 35 to become Andover's eleventh headmaster. As it turned out, Kemper's gifts for hard analysis and easy leadership galvanized Andover. Today, Harvard College's Dean John Monro calls Kemper "one of the really great headmasters."

Like Exeter's Principal William Gurdon Saltonstall, whom he calls "a fast friend and a mortal competitor," Kemper is the first to ask whether his school is using its wealth wisely. The last thing he wants Andover to be is a shoehorn to slip grade-getters into prestige colleges. He worries about the lucky-me attitude that afflicts many Andover boys. He wonders how to teach them a sense of humanity and public service. He wants the school to serve. "We should be identified with public schools," he says. "Our job is to be available to anyone who wants to use us. We must be of service."

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.

In the Dictionary of American Biography, Andover's roll call tops all schools except Boston Latin, the oldest (1635) U.S. public school, with Exeter coming in third. In the 1957 Who's Who, Andover counted over 400 names, more than any other prep school. The 1962 Who's Who adds 49 new Andover names; the biggest contingent is seven Foreign Service career men, along with the mayor of Memphis, the editor of The Commonweal, and the president of the International Vegetarian Union.

The Real Business. Andover's founder was Samuel Phillips Jr., a good Calvinist who began to worry about the country's "decay of virtue, public and private" around the time he nearly blew himself up making powder for the Continental Army. To head off decay, the 26-year-old Phillips got his father and uncle to give cash for a school to teach boys "English and Latin Grammar, Writing, Arithmetic, and those Sciences wherein they are commonly taught, but more especially to learn them the great end and real business of living."

Principal Eliphalet ("Elephant") Pearson learned them just that when he opened the school with 13 boys shortly before George Washington marched out of Valley Forge. A hefty Harvardman, Tyrant Pearson ruled by rod and God. His awed charges, including Josiah Quincy, 6, a future Harvard president, paid $10 a year and toiled from dawn to dusk. On the school seal, Paul Revere engraved Finis Origine Pendet, a Calvinistic commercial meaning: "One's end depends on one's origin." More hopefully, Phillips took it to mean: "Well begun is half done." George Washington thought so well of the school that he sent his favorite nephew and eight grandnephews, and in 1789 addressed the student body on horseback.

Equally impressed was Samuel's Uncle John Phillips, a sometime preacher turned moneylender (at 15%), who founded the second Phillips in his own town of Exeter, N.H. Andover was soon awash with Lees of Virginia, New England Quincys, Lowells, Longfellows. Samuel F. B. Morse arrived at eight and ran away. Many a poor farm boy walked 50 miles carrying his suitcase and a headful of Greek grammar to enter the best school around.

In 1808 Pearson helped launch Andover Theological Seminary, which soon turned town and gown into what Student Oliver Wendell Holmes (1825) called "the very dove's nest of Puritan faith." Great preachers flocked there; on Andover Hill was written My Country 'Tis of Thee. Shunning Unitarian Harvard, the school became such a solid Yale "feeder" that in the 1920s Andover men comprised 10% of many a Yale class.

Headed for Hell. For 184 years, strong rulers have built Andover. The pious John Adams (a relative of both Presidents) forbade dancing as well as Shakespeare, and regularly climbed a ladder to wind the clock in Bulfinch Hall, discoursing on its motto, "Youth is the seedtime of life," as the boys vainly awaited his fall. The zealous "Uncle Sam" Taylor (1837-71) was a total believer in "total depravity." "Robinson," he warned one 14-year-old, "you're on the direct road to hell. You're reading too many novels." Still, Taylor's boys, partly inspired by Faculty Wife Harriet Beecher (Uncle Tom's Cabin) Stowe, flocked to the Civil War, one of them becoming a major general at 25.

Shrewd, bearded Cecil F. P. Bancroft lifted Andover out of its classical rut, gave it a good faculty versed in modern science. In his time (1873-1901) Andover drew 9,600 boys from all over, including its first Negroes. "Banty's" boys began Andover's athletic rivalry with Exeter in 1878, winning in football 22-0. Andover has dominated since (42 games to 32 in all), even using halfbacks who charged the Exeter line singing Palestrina motets.

Fabled Rages. Living alumni still shiver at the memory of lean, eagle-beaked Alfred E. Stearns, the devout, athletic zealot who ruled Andover for 30 years prior to 1933. Stearns hired the fabled Latinist Georgie Hinman, who jabbed penknives into his wooden leg, chewed pencils in half, caromed erasers off thick skulls, and made students flush bad translations down the toilets. Yet it was also Stearns who steered Andover toward opulence. In 1908 he took over the seminary's buildings when that institution fell on bad times and slunk off to Harvard. He raised $1,000,000 for teachers' salaries, and in the 1920s guided Thomas Cochran ('90), a Morgan partner, in spending more millions for new Georgian buildings that made Andover a showcase. "We're beaten," cried one Exeter teacher. "Exeter can never catch up."

But in the early 1930s, Philanthropist Edward S. Harkness crashed through with $5,840,000 for Exeter. The money brought in 25 new teachers for small round-table seminars under the famed "Harkness Plan." Exeter's remodeled plant outshone Andover's for years.

Andover could not redress the balance in the Depression and war years of Headmaster Claude Moore Fuess, the veteran English teacher who preceded John Kemper. Instead, the scholarly Fuess (rhymes with peace) strengthened the curriculum, notably in science, history and fine arts, and lured brilliant scholars such as Classicist Dudley Fitts.

Get the Colonel. When Fuess retired, the trustees saw that Andover needed even better administration. Trustee James Baxter III, then president of Williams College, had an inspiration. Like hundreds of other historians, Baxter had helped the wartime Army write its combat history. When the huge project began, the scholars were appalled to find themselves under the command of a handsome young Regular Army light-colonel, who looked 18 and was only 30. As it turned out, Colonel John Kemper handled his irregulars so adroitly that Baxter & Co. never forgot his "tact, courage, imagination and rare administrative skill."

Baxter was sure that Kemper could run Andover. At first Kemper guffawed. All he knew about Andover was that girls at nearby Abbot Academy, where his wife and his mother went, were once called "Fem-Sems" by Andover boys. For a career military man, his war had been cruelly pacific, but he had won the Legion of Merit twice and had high hopes for promotion.

Baxter kept talking, and in 1947 the peacetime Army began looking drabber. One day Kemper found himself being asked point-blank by Episcopal Bishop Henry W. Hobson, president of the board: "What do you think you could do for Andover if you were headmaster?" Said Kemper: "Isn't the question, Bishop, what I could get others to do with me to help the school?" Team Player Kemper got the job.

Officers & Ladies. "I never would have resigned had I known Korea was coming," says Kemper. "I loved the Army with a passion." Well he might, being descended from eleven straight Army generations going back to the Pequot Indian Wars. Kemper was born at Wyoming's Fort D. A. Russell, followed his officer-father from post to post, attending eight public schools from Texas to the Philippines.

"Father expected all of us to be officers and gentlemen," says Kemper, "which was hard for my sisters, but not for me." The colonel tried and failed to make Johnny a star athlete, but his upright New England mother made him something better. "He is a good man," says his sister Peg. "Anything cheap or second-rate has never been in his mind."

Hoofing & History. When it came time for West Point, lazy Student Kemper crammed hard, came out sixth in a field of some 100 candidates for presidential appointment. At the Point, he was a good leader--manager of varsity lacrosse, superintendent of the post Sunday school, captain of his regiment and class president. He did well in history, a fact that counted later. An avid dancer, he hoofed in the annual Hundredth Night Show, loved to go out shagging with Peg at nearby Vassar.

His other girl was Sylvia Pratt, warm-spirited daughter of a noted Boston doctor, and Kemper married her soon after he graduated in 1935--132nd in a class of 275. A "sand-rat lieutenant," he was soon running a cram school for getting enlisted men into West Point, did so well that in 1939 the Point yanked him out of the infantry to teach history. He dutifully earned a Columbia master's degree in 1942 while itching to go to war. In its wisdom, the Army put him in G-2 with the prickly job of organizing U.S. historians to tell the big story.

A task for Talleyrand, the job involved Kemper in global negotiations with staff officers to get clearance to see generals to allow soldiers to speak to scholars--if they could or would. Result: twelve sound monographs produced by a 500-man team under command of a major general who, in the words of Historian Baxter, "treasured John Kemper as one would a jewel."

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.

Exemplary Education. The lure of all this has brought Andover a seasoned faculty (average age: 46) with only six bachelors as compared with 95 married men, reversing the traditional ratio and filling the campus with children. The teachers are formidable men. A young housemaster may be not only a Ph.D. in classics or physics, but also an ex-paratrooper or Harvard crew captain.

From his squeaky-voiced arrival to his bass-toned departure, the Andover boy (or "man") gets an exemplary education. Basic diploma requirements: four years of English, stressing expository writing; three years of math and a foreign language; 1 1/2 years of science and history; one year of religion and one of art or music, plus four electives, from Russian to anthropology. Ambitious boys take five major courses a year. Science stresses what scientists do. In biology, senior projects run from slide talks on bog plant life to cutting out a chicken's bones and reassembling them.

Foreign languages begin without books, and English is banned from the classroom. For nine hours a week, 14-year-olds answer one question after another in high-speed French or Spanish. In senior English, the visitor who hated college Chaucer is delighted to hear raucous laughter as Dudley Fitts translates the "pleyn speken" Prologue. In the science honors (physics-chemistry) course of Edmond G. Hammond Jr., a brilliant young teacher with icy blue eyes, he listens raptly to sneers at "routine thought" and generalizations that are "pretty messy."

Sink or Swim. Yet the boys and their keepers are not intimate. Andover is no place for teacher's pets. A "man" stands alone on his marks and muscles. All year the juniors (first-year boys) toil at attaining "silver" standards in physical tests, including a "drownproofing" course (copied by the Peace Corps) with a rugged exam--staying afloat for 35 minutes with hands tied behind back. The pride a boy feels when he succeeds is the fruit of Andover's unofficial motto: "Sink or swim."

Every afternoon the juniors spend two hours with the lower-middlers, upper-middlers and seniors on the vast playing fields--a sea of runners, jumpers, kickers. All get a chance to excel at one of 17 sports, if not on a varsity team, then on one of four intramural teams in each sport--the red-shirted Romans, the green Gauls, the grey Greeks, the orange Saxons. Belonging grows as the morning teacher turns afternoon coach, yelling, "Tail down, Jones!" It mounts in a delirious rally before the Exeter game, and if victory comes, in a yowling torchlight parade and huge campus bonfire, On to Abbot Academy!

"Almost a Sin." All this bespeaks the enduring Andover, which is run on nothing more complicated than the primitive idea of ordeal. But the ordeal is far different from the one old grads remember. Everyone still looks up to the "jock" or man with a major "A." But these days the jock has to be a lot more--an actor, a proctor, a Merit scholar. The balanced hero is in. The snob is out. "A million kids are dying to get into Andover," says one lower-middler in a falsetto voice. "A guy who just mopes his way through, boy, that's almost a sin."

In fact, moping is almost impossible. At 7:05 comes breakfast in the Commons, at 7:50 compulsory chapel--a requirement so generally resented that at times boys have refused to sing or pray. From chapel on: classes, lunch, athletics, more classes before dinner. Until 8, the joiners have a chance at some 40 extracurricular activities, from the jazz club to the Phillipian. But then comes studying, which totals more than five hours a day for seniors--all night if they care to. It takes this to keep up, which may explain why Andover is short on creative writing and boasts only four Westinghouse Science Talent Search winners.

The Andover costume is coat, tie and button-down shirt, plus wrinkled khakis and loafers or ragged sneakers. Andover bars cars, bikes and liquor. Seniors and upper-middlers can smoke; others, if caught, are "posted" (confined to campus). Otherwise, rules are sparse. A boy can go for days without making his bed. The recipe is "independence"--so much so that Andover can be a very cold place. Not long ago, the head of a smaller school who thinks Andover is too big decided to test his theory. He sent one of his boys to spend a week at Andover, where he lived in a dorm, went to classes, played games--"and nobody knew he was there."

Killing Place. More disturbing to some teachers is that Andover seems to be filling up with boys who feel that any earthly sacrifice is worth an Ivy League heaven. They work, work, work. The irony is that Andover's soaring standards may encourage the widespread notion summed up by one senior: "We get good grades so we can get into a good college--a prestige college. That's why we're here."

Such a narrow view of goals infuriates some Andover teachers. "The spirit of man is neglected in this school," fumes Emory Basford, veteran chairman of the English department. "These boys admire managerial things. Even when they collect clothes for the poor, it is done as a study in organization. A little boy likes to linger, to look at bugs and birds. Here he has to hurry away because he hasn't time. This has become a strange, bewildering, killing place."

Those Great Kids. Typically, John Kemper is inclined to agree. "The school is in a ferment about it, and I intend to keep it that way," he says. ''We can't demand less than the best of these kids. But we may be trying to get the wrong kind of best." Though he does not excuse the school, he also blames parents in part. A good college and a good job, he feels, have become the goals they teach. "There's just not enough emphasis on the old dream of simply being a good father, a good man," he says.

But it is no bad thing to have created the modern Andover. "You can talk about money and prestige," says Science Teacher Hammond, "but the incentive at Andover is much bigger. Here we have the facilities to do our professional job the way it should be done. Here we have the joy of pure scholarly discussion. And those great kids--where can a man find students who are so electrifying? There lies the dream of the good teacher. There is the significance and the challenge here."

* Most of the successful applicants will have a top school record, a tested IQ above 125, an average score in the 80th percentile on Secondary School Admission Tests. In rejecting 80% of its applicants (including more than half of alumni sons), Andover finds that the least successful are the poorest; poor boys often go to poor schools and do badly on tests. Only 16% of U.S. families have incomes above $10,000 but 43% of Andover's scholarship applicants are in that category.

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