Drew at Concord

As Head of Concord Academy since 1948, by 1960 Elizabeth Hall had injected into the school a new spirit and sense of purpose. No longer were the girls focused on the upcoming debutante world and a lifetime focused solely on marriage and family. Instead, women were viewed as active do-ers for whom all possibilities were open.

The many school rules had been reduced to five unbreakable ones. It was up to each individual to decide and do what was right, more challenging than simply obeying rules. In the summer of 1956, Hall, together with a group of faculty and a student, dismantled a chapel in Grafton, N.H., board by board and rebuilt it board by board (including the labor and encouragement of all the classes) on the Concord Academy campus. With Hall as Head, Concord students learned that women could run tractors, paint clapboards, participate in town meetings, pursue dreams. The possibilities of action were unlimited. It was this spirit that attracted Drew to Concord Academy.

At the opening faculty meeting in the fall of 1960, the Concord Academy teachers were alerted to the arrival of a new freshman boarder from a small town in Virginia. She was only 12 years old, about to be 13. It seemed likely that she would be homesick, unsure of herself, slow to make friends. Drew Gilpin—known in high school simply as Drewdie—was none of those things.

Confident, independent, eager to try new activities, and filled with the spirit of fun, she launched herself into life at Concord with enthusiasm. As a student, she was exceptionally thoughtful and intelligent, quick to pick up academic challenges in class and explore new ideas. As a writer, she learned to express herself clearly and directly, skillful in putting criticism to good use. Interested in ideas for their own sake, she was able to excel in all areas—math, science, languages, history, and English.

In the boarding department, Drew was a leader, though never flamboyantly so. Solid, dependable, inventive, and sensitive to the needs and moods of adults and kids alike, she was able to win the trust of not just her dorm-mates but others as well. Somehow, instinctively, she knew the difference between plotting in fun to paint the bathtubs blue and going out to buy the paint.

Her sense of the limits of pranks saved not only her, but also often her more foolish friends and colleagues, from disaster. Having won the confidence of her peers, in the spring of her junior year Drew was elected senior class president, a role even more influential in the lives of others than president of the school council.

At the beginning of Drew’s senior year, Hall unexpectedly resigned as Head of the Academy, and David Aloian took her place. His experience included not girls’ but boys’ schools, such as Exeter and Belmont Hill. Among those from whom he sought advice, Drew was one of the most useful in explaining quirky customs and rituals such as “Tripe Night”—the threat of serving tripe instead of turkey at Thanksgiving dinner, the savings to be donated to the poor—and alerting him to the surprise party at dawn when the boarders departed for Christmas vacation. Instinctively, she knew that David Aloian liked to be in control, not the unwitting participant in an unexpected prank.

It was also during her senior year that Drew’s interest in the civil rights movement sharpened, along with other reform movements, leading her to pursue issues of peace and justice with a Quaker group in the South the summer after graduation.

Other than her outstanding academic record, several of Drew’s achievements stand out from her years at Concord. First comes her intuitive sense and how much she cares about how others feel. Second, comes her talent in steering others toward more productive and harmonious directions. Especially important, we see how she has developed the readiness to perceive new ideas and the initiative to seize the opportunity to use them to in moving both people and institutions forward. Although I never dreamed in the 1960s that Drewdie might one day become president of Harvard University, I believe that Harvard has chosen well.

I look forward to seeing Drew put her lifetime full of talents and abilities to work here during the years to come.

Sylvia Mendenhall is Teacher Emerita at Concord Academy. She was President Faust’s English teacher and advisor in junior year at that institution.