The Work of our Community: Jeff Hooper's 2023-24 Opening Address to Faculty and Staff

"In recent years, a couple of weeks before Senior Exhibitions, I have given a talk to the seniors about crafting effective presentations. Among the advice I offer is to be wary of using the word “I” too much, especially early in the talk. As you’ve probably already noted, I’m obviously disregarding my own advice this morning, as I’m opening by acknowledging that for the first time I stand before you without any modifiers in front of my title. Of course I’m thrilled and honored to serve in this capacity, but I mostly want to acknowledge that this role is a reflection of your hard work and success. In the first place, I pursued it because I had so much fun, far more than I anticipated, working alongside you. Second, my candidacy was viable only because of how you rose to the occasion and did amazing work amidst challenging circumstances for our students over the last year and a half. 

I also want to acknowledge that my candidacy presented a tension between what for some might have felt like a welcome sense of continuity, stability, and familiarity, but for others could raise dispiriting fears of stagnation, insularity, and privilege. I recognize that my identities and my long engagement with the School could make some expect that needed change will be harder, slower, or more limited in imagination, but I don’t think it’s inevitable. I expect that anyone who supported my appointment in hopes that I would seek to maintain the status quo or restore some bygone glory days will be disappointed. Of course, probably everybody will be disappointed at some point by any of my many weaknesses, but I do want to commit to each of you today that any disappointment won’t be due to an unwillingness to work extremely hard nor to a lack of sincere concern for the students and adults who comprise this community. I intend to work doggedly, passionately, and collaboratively to enable, elevate, and honor the work you do for our students and community. I step into this role with no interest in leaving my mark on the school or shaping the legacy of my tenure; rather, my ambition is to be of service to you and our students, to remove obstacles, to lower barriers, and to celebrate and empower others. Ours is a labor intensive pursuit and I can do little to make it easier or less taxing, but I do hope that you will feel that, whatever your role here, your work is honored and respected. 

I know how lucky I am to work alongside each of you. Delivering on our mission requires so many disparate but interconnected expertises -- I don’t know the first thing about caring for trees or making the grass grow, I can’t imagine the logistical difficulties involved in feeding hundreds of people three times a day, I don’t know how to prepare for an audit or tie a clove hitch, I’m not sure what stoichiometry is nor how to get dozens of large SUVs to appear on campus when we need them. But of course these are among the many essential expertises present at the Outdoor Chapel today. The start of a school year is an opportune time to remember how much we depend on each other and to appreciate the expertise of each of our colleagues, as all these tasks and a million more are essential to the sacred and noble work of the School. There is an important grounding humility in remembering that no matter how well any of us does at our jobs as individuals, our work only has relevance and value in concert with the work of so many others.

As we stand on the precipice of a new school year, I invite you to consider three areas of focus for our work with students: the role of the outdoors in our lives and work, the real, practical task of inclusion, and the cultivation of emotional health, wellness, and resilience. As you think of these areas, your mind may immediately go to colleagues who, either by their title or what you know of them, have expertise in each of these areas. And indeed, we are very lucky to have colleagues who are incredible leaders in these areas. However, I’d like to suggest two things to you this morning: first, that the pursuit of these priorities is work that all of us share, and second, that all three are deeply interconnected and interdependent. 

I’d like to start with emotional health, wellness, and resilience. There is so much evidence, quantitative and anecdotal, that points toward this being a matter of urgent importance for us. I won’t go into the worrisome details, but will just stipulate as a point of departure that American society overall and teenagers especially are struggling. Alienation, depression, loneliness, despair, and thoughts of self harm are pervasive. As we think about how to grapple with these challenges at Thacher, it’s important to first be clear about what we really mean and how we frame the problem. Let’s start with what we don’t mean: emotional wellness is not a question of mantras on a coffee cup, it’s not about a getting a massage or lighting a candle. It’s also not about lowering expectations or avoiding hardship. Most importantly, it’s not an individual pursuit. Too often we think of this work as something for the individual to grapple with, which ignores the crucial fact that the roots of this challenge AND its solutions are found in community, in culture, in our environment, and in our interpersonal relationships. The work of fostering emotional wellbeing at Thacher, for students and adults alike, is a huge group project, a shared endeavor in which we all have duties, and which promises rewards for all. 

Let’s think about some of the forces that are making this challenge especially acute right now. First, it’s critical to recognize that adolescence is and always has been a time of unusual emotional intensity. Put simply, the feelings and emotions that our students experience are louder, more complicated, and more powerful than they were at earlier stages of their lives. This reality, rooted in the very real uncertainty and insecurity that comes with a still-developing selfhood, is not unique to our era, but it is heightened and amplified today in various ways. The fact that so much of our students’ and our lives are mediated through screens, where algorithms relentlessly direct us to the loudest and most aggrieved voices, build homogenous groups defined by their opposition to others, and provide misleading windows into curated, inauthentic and idealized portrayals of the lives of others, creates real headwinds for our pursuit of emotional health and resilience. It can get tiresome to belabor the role of screens in our lives, and I sometimes feel like an old man yelling at clouds, but the simple fact is that the advent of cell phones with their extraordinary capabilities is a still-new and unresolved chaos agent in the universal human task of figuring out how to exist on this planet and in community with others. We have an enormous task in helping our students and ourselves try to mitigate the risks and maximize the advantages of these tools. We know that part of that work involves putting boundaries around the role that screens play in our lives, and the forced separation from them that our camping trips allow is one of many ways we do so. 

It’s also important to think about some other challenges that our students face that are specific to this historical moment. As we embrace our responsibility to care for our students’ emotional health and to help them develop resilience, we must acknowledge and account for the stressors that they bring with them to campus. All of our students must grapple, in ways we didn’t have to at their age, with the profound and worrisome impact of climate change on our planet and our lives. The summer, when many of our students have more time and bandwidth to engage with the wider world, now invariably brings new and increasingly alarming evidence of the realities and tragedies of a changing climate, as we recently saw in Hawaii. Our kids feel this deeply, and whether it’s articulated or not, it’s a burden that they all bring with them to campus. It changes how they think about the present and the future. 

Additionally, while we serve some of the most privileged young people in the world, our student body also includes individuals who carry with them the burdens of poverty, concern about food and housing security, guilt in enjoying here comforts not accessible to family members back home, and the millions of indignities and insecurities that are part and parcel of of being poor in America today. Many students, regardless of socioeconomic status, come to us having experienced the grinding stress of discrimination and exclusion based on aspects of their identities -- their race, their ethnicity, their religion, their gender identity, their ability, their sexual orientation, and many more. While these injustices may impact only some of our students, in order to treat emotional health as a group project, we have to acknowledge and account for these extra burdens that many of our students carry. Finally, our students all deal with varying degrees of stress and pressures around grades and achievement, college placements and other measuring sticks that can have real impacts on their emotional health. We must also remember that they had wildly disparate pandemic experiences, with some isolated indoors and in Zoom school for months and months, deprived of crucial social interaction at a vulnerable time. In short, we don’t all have the same starting line on the path to emotional wellbeing. 

What we do have are shared and common tools to counter the loneliness and alienation these challenges can confer. This morning I want to talk about two powerful antidotes to these feelings: connection with the outdoors and a sense of belonging. One of the goals of our opening days is to clarify, articulate clearly, and recommit to the role of the outdoors in a Thacher education, especially in regards to the camping trips that we’ll undertake starting ten days from today. These trips are expensive in every sense of the word, but in my view they are also priceless and precious. Our purpose is not to conquer peaks, log miles, endure hardship nor to pursue leisure, though we may do all of these things. Rather, we take these trips first for their social power. Our trips are meant to be spaces for belonging, mutually interdependent ventures where each member of the small group matters. There’s a powerful intimacy to the shared endeavor of a wilderness trip. Further, experiencing truly wild spaces is powerfully humbling and helps us deepen our respect for the natural world and embrace our responsibility as stewards of the planet. Our trips are microcosms of our community, and we must leverage the special opportunity they provide to build and shape our school culture. We must also recognize and celebrate the more quotidian ways that the outdoors promotes our community wellbeing. It’s a gift that most of our dorm rooms open directly to the outside, rather than a closed hallway. A trip to the beach, a hike on one of the trails, a class spontaneously relocated to an outdoor space -- our environment urges us outside, and we do well to take advantage of those opportunities whenever we can.

Finally, I’d like to shift our focus to inclusion. As many of you know, we undertook an expansive climate assessment process with Hinderlie and Associates last spring. He has shared his conclusions and recommendations with us and we’ll take time early this year to process that information with all of you and with other constituencies. Dr. Hinderlie’s insights offer a helpful and hopeful path toward continued progress in our efforts, and we’ll collaboratively embark on several action items in the weeks and months to come. While we often use the shorthand of “DEI” to encompass a wide range of ideas and initiatives, it’s also important to be precise about what we mean. I particularly want to distinguish between diversity and inclusion today. Diversity is a simple question of composition, and for a well resourced boarding school like ours, it’s largely a simple and straightforward question of choices rather than actions. Inclusion, however, is rightly understood as a verb, an action item, something we either do or don’t do on a daily basis; it’s the culture we create and the sensitivity and kindness we bring to our interactions. To pursue diversity and ignore inclusion is morally untenable; it’s the responsibility of those of us who could’ve assumed we’d be included at any point in the School’s history to actively and intentionally construct a culture that is inclusive of all of the diverse identities that today constitute our campus population. Inclusion is a forever ambition that merits a sustained and sincere commitment. It’s also, in my view, inextricably linked to both our outdoor program and our efforts to foster emotional health and resilience. 

To explore those links further, I’m going to borrow some language from Cam Spaulding, our new head of outdoor programs. In a recent email to me, Cam noted that our local, state, and national parks were largely created by, and for, white elites. He goes on to say, “This discriminatory history has resulted in disparity of access, and a sense, from both within and without, that people of color are unwelcome in wild spaces. With greater diversity than ever in the history of the school in both our student body and adult population, we have the responsibility now to help subvert that paradigm, but we must do so with thoughtful acknowledgement of the fact that the tradition of visiting wild nature is new for many in our community and that those spaces, instead of offering a sense of refuge, can be viewed as spaces of exclusion or even persecution. 

 

Beyond that narrative, however, deeper into the past and further from the social constructs that divide us, every human being is entitled to a fundamental connection to the natural world and a familial relationship with it. And every culture has that relationship in its past. Our work is to reestablish that connection in a meaningful way, whether the schism we seek to bridge is narrow or broad.” 

 

As Cam’s words highlight, our work in the outdoors is inextricably linked to our inclusion efforts, and both of these are essential ingredients in our efforts to foster emotional health, wellbeing, and resilience. The pursuit of those goals will take many forms: it will certainly mean professional therapy and introspection for many, it will mean confronting and processing very personal and individual challenges in many cases, which is obviously important, honorable, and necessary work. But the fullness of our ambition in this area requires us also to pay attention to the water in the aquarium. It’s the work of the community, not the individual. Emotional wellness will also mean a hike with some peers, the early morning trudge to the barns with friends, or a good community dinner discussion. It might be a hello in passing from someone you don’t know well, or pulling up a sixteenth chair to a table intended for eight. It might mean what it feels like to take a bow with your cast-mates or to laugh with friends at a lively munchout. It might be seeing your culture celebrated at assembly or, for the first time, moving in to a dorm that acknowledges your identity. It might be a good night’s sleep or early morning fitness fusion. Whatever the tools, if we embrace the opportunities the outdoors afford us, if we live our community values and actively, intentionally practice inclusion, despite all the headwinds of modern life and modern adolescence, we can and will create an environment in which we and the young people we serve live happier, healthier lives. This must be our highest ambition and our North Star. I’m honored to join you all in that enterprise."