Jeff Hooper All-School Banquet Address

As at many All School Banquets before, tonight we savor the final moments of the community that we have constructed together this year while we also mourn its ending. Every year at Thacher has throughlines to every other year, but never before and never again will this Thacher exist. All of us under this roof, and many others who aren’t with us this evening, have contributed to the construction of this Thacher. Those of us who will be here 101 days from now, when we gather again for the New Year Banquet of the 2026-27 school year, will be at a new Thacher, distinct from this one. So let’s take a moment. Think of something positive you contributed to this community. It could be very specific, or it could just be a value or principle that you tried to adhere to. It could be an initiative you participated in or a problem you helped solve. In a moment I want you to find a partner and for each of you to tell the other about your contribution. Then thank each other for that contribution. Consider a high five, fist bump, or other modest celebratory gesture. You have exactly 46 seconds to complete this task. Begin now. 

We can lose sight of this fact as we tend to our daily exigencies, but now is a good time to remind ourselves that this community that we create on this campus is not meant to mirror the broader society we live in. We aren’t looking to recreate the gritty authenticity of the “real world,” whatever that means. We don’t model our discourse in the style that prevails online, or in our public and political life. No. We are trying to create a bubble -- that’s a feature, not a bug. We strive to build a community of values, governed by an honor code, in which high standards are paired with compassion and kindness. We have the luxury of creating these conditions because we are a small community, because we are a community of choice, because we have robust resources to ensure that our fundamental needs are met, and because we have incredibly strong networks that enable and safeguard our community. 

Nor do we seek to recreate the tranquility of a yoga retreat, a monastery, a zen garden, or some other putatively stress-free zone. Within this protective bubble, we intentionally introduce stress. This experience is meant to push up against the edges of your capacity. Sometimes this means experiencing uncomfortable difficulty and challenge, which may be physical, intellectual, or emotional. It would be a disservice, educational malpractice even, to spare you those moments and to remove struggle and hardship from your journey. Because you are meant to change here, to expand your frontiers, to build capacity, to become. Every single thing--from the Smartboards to the cookies to the paintbrushes to the curry combs–is ultimately about increasing your potential, to maximize the possible scope, nature, and impact of your contributions to this world. In economic terms, the entire complex enterprise is quite simply about the formation of human capital, which is a concept I’ll return to in a bit. 

It’s honestly exhausting to engage with all of the discourse around how generative artificial intelligence is changing our lives generally and education specifically. But it’s also necessary, because we have really consequential choices to make about how we engage with this powerful suite of tools. I recently read two compelling articles about two California institutions that advanced my thinking about this topic. The first was an essay by a particularly insightful Stanford senior named Theo Baker titled “What A.I. Did to My College Class.” This year’s graduating seniors share a historical quirk, of beginning their careers in one world and graduating into a different one, because, as Baker puts it “Chat GPT arrived on campus about two months after we did.”

Baker’s essay is smart and sobering, focusing on the concussive impact the technology had on the learning experience and the culture of the university. Speaking of the impact on his graduating class, Baker notes that AI has “permanently changed how we think and behave.” That’s a really powerful and somewhat alarming assertion, and it highlights the imperative to be intentional and introspective about how we relate to these tools. The implications of Baker’s claim are destabilizing–in less than four years, something has emerged that has permanently changed how we think and behave. While he observes that AI enabled widespread cheating at Stanford, the author also extends the moral risks beyond the obvious challenges for academic integrity, stating “AI has made deception easier and more remunerative than ever before.” The overall picture painted in this article is not a hopeful one in terms of the intersection of artificial intelligence and learning. 

For all its prestige, resources, and fame, Stanford is not the most selective institution of higher learning in California. That distinction belongs to a tiny two-year college in the middle of nowhere with spotty cell service that most people have never heard of. It’s home to fewer students than Lower School. It’s Deep Springs College, and it’s hard to imagine a place more different than Stanford. The students make almost all of the decisions about how the college runs, and they also perform almost all of the labor, the vast majority of which is unglamorous. They milk cows, weed gardens, and mend fences. They also hire professors, admit students, and determine the rules that will govern their community. It’s not only a college, but also a working cattle ranch about 40 miles from Bishop. In a recent article about Deep Springs, the author Michal Leibowitz notes that the community is remarkably cohesive and intimate. In addition to rigorous academics, students work a minimum of 20 hours per week to support the operations of the school and ranch. She notes of all students at Deep Springs: “They have challenged themselves, and they have all failed–the curriculum, almost by design, demands too much. And they have survived it all.” She also indicates that AI-enabled academic dishonesty is not an issue. 

The perspective that Baker offers from his Stanford experience suggests a worrisome trajectory. As he writes “Higher education was not equipped for the A.I. revolution.” Schools of all kinds, including ours, clearly have more work to do in rationalizing their relationships with emerging technologies. When winds of change blow with as much force as generative AI brings, it tests the ballast that institutions rely upon to keep themselves steady. That ballast takes a lot of forms at Thacher: physical work, interdependent and collaborative pursuits, the messiness of living in community, the Honor Code, caring for animals, separating ourselves from our screens, creating art for its own sake. Holding fast to those stabilizing factors make it easier to harness the winds of change rather than be capsized by them. 

One of the trends that is being accelerated dramatically by technological change is the tendency to understand education in very commodified and transactional ways. Both articles point to this, as Baker writes “Education itself can be seen as a secondary goal to enabling future success, frequently defined as a future windfall.” And Leibowitz identifies a number of unspoken assumptions in modern thinking about education that Deep Springs challenges or rejects. These assumptions include “that you can A.I.-proof yourself for the future. That it is possible to put life–relationships, community, meaning–off until you’ve made it in finance or technology, only to pick them up when you’re more financially secure. That everyone else is working single-mindedly toward professional aggrandizement, so that by even stopping to question the race, you are falling behind. That the most efficient way to get to a destination is always the best. That your individual future is the only thing you are responsible for and that it is all that is at stake.”

Helping you identify and develop new capabilities, pushing you beyond what you know yourself to be able to do, preparing you for, as our mission states, the art of living … this is what we mean by the formation of human capital. This is the essential and noble goal of the education we seek to create together, not so that you can get into a specific college nor so that you will be prepared to pursue a lucrative career, but rather because your value lies in your humanity, in your integrity, in what you mean to others and how generously you offer your unique and specific gifts to the greater good. We should all be immensely proud of our collective efforts in this pursuit, and of the Thacher we created together this year. Thank you.