The Headmaster by John McPhee

Author:John McPhee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-06-23T16:00:00+00:00

WHEN THE HEADMASTER had little else to offer, he hung on to his faculty by charming them into a kind of loyal paralysis. Year after year, he promised salary raises and could almost never deliver. As June approached, he would make a modest show of brave loneliness, telling the teachers to move on for their own good, and assuring them that his understanding would be unalloyed with resentment. He said that if, however, they should decide to stay with him, he would never forget it. And he thought that they could all build something together. The faculty, at one time, lived in his house. If Boyden and his wife wanted to have a private talk, they went down into the cellar and held their conversation behind the furnace. Miss Minnie Hawks sat in a rocking chair in the living room directly overhead, and listened. The headmaster built and has maintained a faculty of solid schoolmen, few of whom have administrative ambitions. Those who do have such ambitions rapidly become headmasters elsewhere. At Deerfield, all ranks between the five-star general and the noncommissioned officers are vacant.

There is a high degree of compatibility between the faculty and the students, partly because they bear an analogous relationship to the headmaster. “I’m not running this school for the faculty,” he has often said. “I’m running it for the boys.” From early morning until late evening, his faculty’s lives must constantly touch the boys’ lives—at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, in the classroom, in organized study periods, in club activities, in athletics. The faculty members are expected at all school functions, and there are very few who manage to be simply teachers; most of them have to coach athletic teams and run dormitory corridors as well, not to mention a couple of dozen lesser duties. To some extent this describes all prep-school faculties, but at Exeter and Andover the extent is extremely small, and nowhere is it larger than at Deerfield. The headmaster’s idea of a faculty is a group of people who are much in evidence all the time. The faculty is never in a position to complain, because the headmaster and his wife work harder than anyone else at being visible and involved throughout the school day. “The more you coöperate with the headmaster, the more he imposes on you,” says a teacher who has been there twenty-five years. “He exacts a fantastic commitment. If you give it, he expects more. If you don’t give it, he carries you, but you don’t exist.” The loyalty of these people sustains the headmaster, and he, in turn, has shown a loyalty to them which has at times seemed foolhardy. He has kept on at the academy men whose deterioration has caused both embarrassment and detriment to the academy but whose earlier contributions helped him build his school. “He has no patience with minor failings, but with big failings he has infinite patience,” says an English teacher whose failings, if any, have been minor. Years ago, the

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