Shedding That Preppy Image

At age 200, Andover reaches out "to youth from every quarter"

In 1778 Samuel Phillips, a 26-year-old gunpowder manufacturer concerned about the "decay of virtue, public and private," began a school with a noble idea: to teach ''the great end and real business of living." The school itself was more humble: 13 students, ages six to 30, enrolled under the tutelage of Calvinist Eliphalet ("Elephant") Pearson in a converted carpenter's shop in Andover, Mass. "On Monday the scholars recite what they can remember of the sermons heard on the Lord's day previous," wrote Pearson in 1780. "On Saturday the bills are paid and the punishments administered."

This week Phillips Academy, better known as Andover, will celebrate its 200th birthday with well-deserved pomp. Andover is in the top rank of American preparatory schools--and in the forefront of their effort to become more than sheltered preserves for rich men's sons. TIME'S Evan Thomas, a 1969 alumnus, revisited Andover and reported:

Set amidst 450 acres of sweeping lawns and arching elms, Andover brims with history. Paul Revere engraved its seal; John Hancock signed its charter; George Washington addressed the school in 1789 (on horseback). English classes meet in a cupolaed schoolhouse designed by Charles Bulfinch in 1819; red brick Georgian-style buildings, many built through the beneficence of a Morgan partner in the 1920s, grace the campus.

In addition to legions of capitalists, the school has produced public servants like Henry Stimson and George Bush. Yale, the Los Angeles Times and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art are all headed by Andover graduates. Other alumni include the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Tarzan Creator Edgar Rice Burroughs, Actor Jack Lemmon. Humphrey Bogart never got his diploma; he was kicked out in 1918 for "incontrollably high spirits."

The nation's oldest incorporated independent school, Andover goes from ninth through twelfth grade. Its 683 boys and 405 girls come from 45 states and 14 foreign countries. About 6% of the students are black or Hispanic; there are also students like the coal miner's daughter who was unable to sleep in her dormitory bed because she was used to sleeping on the floor (the school lent her a sleeping bag).

Andover, nonetheless, is not exactly an academic Ellis Island. Some 14% of the students are alumni children. Next year's tuition will come to $4,975, more than most American families can pay, and the student roster lists some blue-chip names, among them, John F. Kennedy Jr. But this year Andover handed out $1 million in financial aid to 30% of its students, and the full tuition charge is still only half of what it costs to educate each student. A $57 million endowment and $600,000 in annual alumni giving make up the difference. In 1976 the school also began a $50 million fund-raising campaign. Andover needs the money, says Headmaster Theodore Sizer, to maintain diversity and excellence in an era of high inflation and soft stock markets. A boyish-looking former dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Education, Sizer, 45, remembers that, as an undergraduate at Yale in the early '50s, he "frankly resented" Andover boys. "They came arms linked," says Sizer, "and left arms linked." At Harvard, his focus was mostly on education in public high schools. Since coming to Andover as its twelfth headmaster in 1972, he has worked hard at fulfilling its charter: to be "ever equally open to youth of requisite qualifications from every quarter." He set up Short Term Institutes, which bring some 95 high school students a year to Andover for intensive sixto ten-week seminars in a single subject, and an accelerated math and science program for minority students at the school's 700-student summer session. With middle-class families facing ever increasing tuition costs, Andover is taking more and more of their children for just a year or two.

Though a few faculty members grumble that Sizer is "using the school as a laboratory for his social experiments," others applaud him. Sizer likes to recall Andover's greatest benefactors: John Watzek, an immigrant's son who spent only a year at the school in 1910 but gave it $5.8 million between 1958 and 1973; Walter Leeds, who came to Andover in 1905 on scholarship and was kicked out nine months later, yet remembered the school in his will last year to the tune of $5 million.

Andover's reputation as a national and "democratic" school is not new.

Moreover, it is shared by Andover's great rival and sister school, Phillips Exeter Academy (965 students, $47 million endowment), founded by Samuel Phillips' uncle, John Phillips, in 1781. But for years, democratic was the last word used to describe most New England boarding schools. No longer.

Other first-line schools--St. Paul's (497 students, $46 million endowment), Groton (300 students, $17.7 million), Deerfield (558, $21 million), Lawrenceville (700, $24 million), Hotchkiss (478, $10.4 million), and Choate Rosemary Hall (920, $11.7 million)--have also sought a wider range of students. Limited resources, rather than any residue of snobbery, keep them from reaching further. Inflation has forced all of them into massive money-raising efforts and budget tightening. The admissions picture is more bullish, thanks partly to the declining quality of public schools. Applications are up at top prep schools, and the percentage of children in private schools around the country has been increasing.

The biggest change in New England boarding schools is, in a word, girls. Since 1970 Andover, Exeter, St. Paul's, Groton. Hotchkiss, Middlesex and St. Mark's have all gone coed. With the girls came the easing of once strict daily regimens. Traditionally, schools such as Groton and St. Paul's tried to imbue their boys with a "muscular Christianity" through spartan rigor in almost monastic isolation. Chapel at these Episcopal Church schools was required every day and twice on Sunday; supervision was so strict that at Groton, seventh-graders were given black marks for going out in the rain without rubber overshoes, and eleventh-graders had to ask permission to go to the bathroom during study hours. Then came the virulent student discontent of the late '60s. After some bitter rear-guard struggles, the schools emerged with female students (of the top schools, only Deerfield and Lawrenceville remain all male) and far more freedom: relaxed dress codes; fewer required chapels, meals and study halls; more weekends away. "We treat them like human beings now," says Exeter Principal Stephen Kurtz, "not just as pupils."

At Andover rules have been whittled down to the "essentials." Except for taking drugs, drinking liquor or engaging in sexual intercourse, students can do what they want where they want, as long as they meet class and athletic appointments and return to their dormitories by 10 p.m. (11 p.m. for seniors). Even room visiting between the sexes is now permitted, though it is limited to a couple of hours in the early evening.

The result is a cheerful, creative, motley-looking student body. Beating Exeter in football and hockey is no longer the student body's chief interest; Andover, like other schools, has seen an explosion of interest in art, music, drama and dance. Boy-girl friendships are easygoing, though formal dating is rare and romances do not last long in the fishbowl of a residential school. "The school used to be rigorous but humorless," says English Department Head Kelly Wise. "Now there is more laughter and joy and excitement than there was a few years ago." And every bit as much schoolwork. The days when more than half of Andover's senior class sailed into Yale or Harvard are long gone. Andover still gets 40% of its seniors into Ivy League schools, but the competition for "thick letters" on "Black Monday"--the day in mid-April when Ivy acceptances arrive--is still fierce.

Whether or not they make it into Harvard, as 42 did this year, Andover's 376 seniors will be well prepared for college. In classes averaging fewer than twelve students, the school's first-rate faculty drills home such basics as English competence, a writing course required of all entering students. After fulfilling a rigorous core of requirements, students can choose electives ranging from infinite series and differential equations to calligraphy.

At their best, the electives have the intensity and ferment of Kelly Wise's novel and drama course. Wise's teaching style is vastly different from that of Georgie Hinman, a legendary Latin teacher of an earlier Andover who stabbed penknives into his peg leg to express disapproval and made students flush bad translations down the toilet. Wise, in contrast, has a more casual attitude toward the 14 seniors in his class. "I don't act as a sage," says Wise. "Sometimes I lie and dissemble and distort to provoke them, to make it impossible for them to sit there neutrally." He succeeds. The class bubbles on about a Flannery O'Connor story, oblivious to a bright spring morning outside and even to the end-of-class buzzer. "I don't sandbag or bluff them," says Wise. "I try to challenge them."

So does the venerable but still vigorous school that Sam Phillips founded 200 years ago with his gunpowder profits and his grand hopes.

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