The Exeter Man: Rebel Without a Cause

Mr. Jencks graduated from the Phillips Exeter Academy in 1954. During his senior year, he was President of the Exonian, the school newspaper.

Five years ago last September a young graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy strode into the Freshman Dean's Office, and announced that after a week of surveying America's oldest university he was distinctly displeased. His interlocutor asked him when he planned to leave. "Tomorrow afternoon," he answered.

Almost four years later two Exeter alumni combined forces with a disgruntled graduate student to publish a spectatcular hundred page indictment of Harvard in i.e., The Cambridge Review. Meanwhile their ex-classmate had spent a half year finding his bearings, two years acquiring a B.A. at the University of Chicago, and was entering his second year of medical school.

Although they were but three among seventy-five Exonians who came to Harvard in 1952, these students typified what some University administrators describe as "the Exeter syndrome." The use of such a phrase does not, however, imply that all Exeter graduates follow this pattern of agressive dissatisfaction, nor that the patern is confined exculsively to Exeter graduates.

Every year a substantial minority of the college devotes most of its energy to rejecting Harvard's ideals and evading the responsibilities which Harvard attempts to impose. This can mean anything from neurotic delinquency to mere failure to complete academic assignments, and only occasionally includes departure from the University. The Exeter syndrome is the same thing, only more so, concentrated in a smaller group of people.

There are, however, several obstacles to careful analysis. First, little information on why people dislike or depart from Harvard exists. Most of this is not available to the public, since it is not very favourable to Exeter. Analysis must, therefore, begin and end with the opinions of those who know large numbers of Exeter students.

There are, however, a few facts on the public record. Exeter annually sends about a third of its two hundred seniors to Harvard, where they compose the largest group of resident freshmen. These students are better prepared than any other group. Eleven of this year's thirty entrants with sophomore standing came from Exeter. As a group, the Exonians also do better over the years than any other group of public or private school students.

This effect is achieved by rather obvious techniques. Exeter is one of America's oldest and richest prep schools, this year celebrating its 175th anniversary with the successful completion of a fund drive which gives it a per student endowment comparable to Harvard's.

A New Hampshire Harvard

Educational techniques are familar in Exeter and have been largely modelled on those of Harvard. Exeter seeks and gets national distribution, although still primarily a New England-New York school. It has a massive scholarship program which includes more than a quarter of the student body. Admission is even more highly competitive than Harvard's.

Exeter works its students hard, grades them hard, and flunks them out if they do not perform. An Exeter B- average is usually equivalent to a Harvard B, although most people spend more time working at Exeter, since there are few diversions. The faculty is among the best paid in the country. An Exeter teacher now looks forward to a top salary of $10,000. Like Harvard professors, many of these men are more interested in their subject and their families than in their students.

The results of all this is that ninety percent of all Exeter students get into the college of their first choice, a fact which gives the Exeter pattern particular significance today. As college admission becomes more competitive, colleges will be able to demand better preparation of freshmen, and already Dean Bundy has suggested that Harvard do so. This emphasis on preparation will inevitably force other schools to put, in the continental tradition, more and more emphasis on competitive academic achievement.

Harvard as High School

Such emulation has great advantages. It is much easier to run a college which is only a college, not a remedial high school for promising ignoramuses. Nobody at Harvard wants to spend time teaching foreign languages, high school algebra, or punctuation, paragraphing and syntax. If these things vanish from the curriculum there is room for more advanced teaching.

It is worth nothing that local administrators see a trend towards academic disorientation at Andover, a school which resembles Exeter in everything but intensity. Before the process proceeds any further, however, it is worth nothing that education is not Exeter's only product. There are few statistics, but they are revealing. Exeter graduates leave Harvard in larger numbers than any other group. They see psychiatrists in unusual numbers. Despite their preparation, they do worse than the average freshmen, placing only thirty percent of their group on the Dean's List, compared to a class average of forty percent.

Given these discouraging facts about well prepared students, most people are hard pressed to define or explain the syndrome which they represent. The only systematic effort was made in the Blackmur Report, General Education in School and College, a six man study of the relationship between Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Andover, Exeter, and Lawrenceville, in which Dean Bundy participated. Their explanation was that the well-prepared freshman is disturbed by the elementary quality of the freshman courses, becomes bored, and stops working for a few years.

Although most observers agree that boredom is common among Exeter students, and that the recommended Advanced Standing Program should be a valuable remedy, they note that the "over-prepared" formula fails to explain several facts. First, Harvard Gen Ed courses may indeed have elementary lectures aimed at an extremely unsophisticated mind, but they certainly do not have elementary reading lists. Yet the Exeter syndrome involves rejecting reading as well as lectures. Second, the Exeter "A" student generally suffers less from boredom at Harvard than his academically less proficient schoolmate.

A more adequate explanation centers around the generally recognized arrogance of these Exeter students. The Exonian is not impressed by anything or anybody. He exudes sophistication from the moment that he enters his freshman dorm. He is, after all, better than his fellows, for he has been to Exeter.

One example of this attitude is the reaction to grades. Most incoming freshmen get a C or a D early in the fall, and most of them are scared. They go to see their grader or their sectionman in order to find out what they have done wrong and how to do better. Exeter students also get low grades on occasion, but they are less likely to be scared than to be contemptuous of the grader who has failed to appreciate them. The reason is apparently that the Exeter student is unawed by Harvard, and really does not believe that the grader is fit to pass judgment on him.

The Penmanship Grade

One reason is that the Exonian soon discovers that the graduate student is not as good a teacher as the Exeter faculty member with ten or twenty years experience. He is likely to conclude from this that this graduate student can teach him nothing. He also notices that his grades are not consistently related to any observable quality of his work except penmanship. He therefore concludes that these grades are meaningless and arbitrary. Both theories contain just enough truth to make them a useful raft for his sinking self confidence.

But the syndrome is not restricted to anti-academic values. For while the Exonian rejects the academic, he places amazing emphasis on intellectual sophistication, subjectively defined. He feels that he is different from his classmates, and he treasures this distinction. Yet the only real difference is that he is a little older intellectually. In order to feel really different he must forget what he was like but a year before. When a classmate discovers that the truth is not always in the Bible, or that the devil did not invent Communism, the Exonian's feelings are akin to those of an older brother explaining that babies do not come from storks.

Noveau Riche Superiority

The effort to remain apart from his classmates comes, then, from his precarious hold on superiority. The Exonian's intellectual feelings are not unlike those of the nouveau riche. Both are seeking to prove that they have already got what only passing years can bring, while constantly afraid that their inferiors will refute the claim to superior status.

But why, we may readily ask, should Exeter be the breeder of these feelings? Why are not other well-prepared students equally intent on asserting their superiority? Although there is no pat answer to this question, two factors may help explain the pattern.

First, Exeter is more like Harvard than any other school. The Exonian, having reached the top of a very select and highly competitive group after four years of struggle, is reluctant to admit that he is on the bottom of the pile again. While he is no different from his classmates in this respect, he finds it easier to avoid recognizing his new lowly position.

This is true primarily because he has a large number of friends when1