To the Editor:
The last two issues of the paper, dealing with race, have been impressive and inspiring for their candor, their intelligence and their openness to dialogue. We are all indebted to the authors for placing crucial issues before us so thoughtfully. With the discussions of gender that began last spring still in full voice, this feels like an extraordinary moment.
It reminds us of another time at Andover in the mid-to-late 1980s. In the stretch of a few years, brave and thoughtful students issued calls to the community that laid the basis first for CAMD, then for Women’s Forum, then for GSA and finally for our current full-day celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr., Day. These changes would not have happened without a receptive administration and without supportive faculty for each of those groups of students. But the fact remains that it was candid and courageous student voices that spoke to the conscience of the community, asking for institutional forms to meet the needs of a newly diverse student body. The infrastructure of diversity that Phillips Academy students inherit today is a direct result of the actions of those students a quarter century ago.
We hope that today’s thoughtful conversations about diversity in our school can have some of the same enduring effects. You don’t have to be an adult to make history.
Respectfully,
Tony Rotundo
Alfred E. Stearns Instructor in History and Social Science
Kathleen Dalton
Cecil F.P. Bancroft Instructor of History and Social Science
