SCHOOL NOVELS AS CASE STUDIES

When I set out to write Saving Miss Oliver’s, the first novel in a trilogy set in a boarding school for girls, I had no idea I was writing a case study. I was just instinctively following the maxim, famously expressed by Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway, write about what you know about.

I’d had a long, successful career in independent schools as an English teacher and department head, followed by fourteen years as head of two schools and ten summers as director of a boarding camp, and was presently working as a consultant to boards, faculties, heads and search committees. I had experienced or witnessed or heard of everything that can happen in independent schools. But I was only dimly aware of the patterns, the similarities of devasting events that happen over and over again.

All I wanted to do was write a novel that would break your heart and also serve as witness to the humanity of a leader who sacrifices “success” to stay to true to his moral compass.

So I found myself making up Fred Kindler, a young male head of Miss Oliver’s School for Girls, the immediate successor to Marjorie Boyd, the beloved, authoritarian whom the board had at last found the courage to fire only because the school was on the verge of bankruptcy. She had focused her prodigious charisma on the curriculum and pedagogy and so fiercely defended the feminist mission of empowering young women that the school was beloved by all its constituencies, especially the alumnae whose lives the school had indeed enlarged. But the financial management side of her job had been unworthy of her passion.

So here comes, the young, naïve Fred Kindler, whose first move everyone suspects will be to admit boys, following a beloved leader, whose authoritarianism has made children out of the faculty. How else can they show loyalty to her than to hate the new head, who has also committed the unpardonable sin of being male?

Perhaps Fred can garner some sympathy if he immediately makes public that he and his wife are grieving for the daughter they would have enrolled in Miss Oliver’s had she not been recently killed in a car accident. But their grief is a privacy that the Kindlers honor, and even if it were not, Fred doesn’t want to demean it by making it into a strategy of his leadership.

Instead, he chooses the strategy of garnering the support of Francis Plummer, the legendary teacher beloved by the alumnae, and the board, all of whom are alumnae, or wealthy parents of currents students. But Francis has unconsciously made a kind of parent out of Marjorie and will have no part in even tinkering with the ways things have been done at Miss Oliver’s School for Girls since the beginning of time.

However, Francis’ wife Peggy was beloved and approved of by her parents. She loves and respects Marjorie too, but she’s her own boss and understands the need for change and supports the new head. Thus, the Plummers’ marriage, already unstable, is endangered, a family dysfunction caused by the larger dysfunction the board has created by failing to supervise Marjorie, thereby encouraging her to dominate in their domain as well as her own. If that’s not a classic problem that makes good governance impossible there isn’t one.

At first, I didn’t realize that Saving Miss Oliver’s was not about a problem that happened to happen because I happened to imagine it, but about what I had to write about because it always happens when an autocratic head usurps a pliant board’s foundational responsibility – a situation present in far too many independent schools,

I finally understood that I was writing a case study when I remembered giving a lecture about being sure you understand what you are getting into at what was then called The New Head’s Workshop, sponsored by the National Association of Independent Schools. One of the newly appointed heads, whom I will call Mary, burst into tears, jumped up from her chair and ran out of the room. It was the third week of July. Mary’s headship of a well-known, prestigious boarding school for girls had just started on July 1, and she had just learned that her headship was in great danger, if not doomed.

During the afternoon recreation time, I invited Mary to take a walk with me.

She told me that the board had given her a mandate to upgrade the faculty. In other words: Fire some teachers and maybe an administrator or two. I didn’t need to ask her if the rest of the staff would be relieved, grateful to her for doing the unpleasant job that the previous head should have done, probably a while ago, but absolutely before a new head started her tenure. If the answer had been ‘yes,’ she wouldn’t have burst into tears. In fact, the teachers who needed to be let go had been there a long time and though they had gotten stale, were well liked by their peers, and alumnae, if not beloved. The same was true of the head, whom the board had finally found the courage to ease out, gently, with the most important part her job, sustaining the excellence of the faculty, undone.

I suggested to Mary that she call the board chair that very day and make an appointment with her and the executive committee of the board to be held soon after the workshop. Thinking that the board would respect the advice provided by an NAIS sponsored workshop, I advised her to convey how she’d learned that clarity around the mandate and recognition of the political dangers it could engender were critical. She did so, but the conversations must have been unsuccessful. She was notified in March that her term would end on July 1. It’s easy to imagine how painful were her last three humiliating months as a powerless leader. She deserved much better.

A few years after Saving Miss Oliver’s was published. I designed and moderated several case study workshops based on the novel for aspiring and recently appointed heads of school. The homework was to read the book. The design of the workshop required no genius to invent. All Dan White, an experienced and successful school head, and I did to moderate was break the attendees into groups of eight and ask them to “be” experienced heads of schools designing wise advice and counsel to their friend, the young, honorable, beleaguered Fred Kindler.  The workshops received high praise in the evaluations for causing those who were already heads to think deeply and exchange ideas about their own board head relationships and for the aspiring heads to bring a deeper, more nuanced understanding to whatever headship they are offered in the not distant future.

Later, I wrote the second novel in the trilogy, No Ivory Tower, about a public relations scandal around sexual abuse of a student by a young, married teacher. Because there is hardly ever an issue in a school that is uncomplicated, and because I needed a compelling subplot, I created an abused student, Claire, who was almost totally innocent of the power of her beauty and charisma and need for adventure – and gave to the perpetrator of this banal and disgusting offence a malleability that arose from his not understanding that he was the one who was being seduced.

But I didn’t make this situation out of whole cloth. During my tenure as head of the Athenian School, a school I still love as one loves a person, a relationship between a teacher and student had the potential of becoming disastrous to both individuals and the school’s reputation. It was nipped in the bud, before it became widely known, by the wisdom, kindness and professionalism of the school’s counselor and dean of students working together. I didn’t know about this until after the problem had been solved, and only because the dean and counselor thought I needed to be alert in case an exaggerated version of the “news” leaked out.

The essence of “No Ivory Tower, what makes it work as a story and a case study about managing public relations disasters,  is the threat to the school’s reputation caused by a radio broadcaster, with a large, mostly male, mostly right wing audience, who is angry because his wife, from whom he is divorced and has sole custody of their daughter, has outraged him by enrolling his daughter in Miss Oliver’s school for girls, where he is sure that such licentious behavior as Claire’s is not just allowed, but celebrated. What drives him really crazy is that his daughter, a close friend of Claire, loves being embraced by the Miss O community where she is learning how to be exactly what he isn’t: a clear thinker with an open mind.

The Encampment, the third and last novel in the trilogy, is a case study of the kind of difficult, deeply personal and painful decisions which have to be made about schooling and parenting that often estrange the child from her parents, unless, and only unless, the parent is able to back away and let the child make her own decisions. The Encampment tells the story of a girl who happens to be the head of school’s daughter breaking the only two rules for which expulsion is automatic in order to help a homeless man.  I didn’t think of The Encampment as a case study while I was writing it. Nor, believe it or not, was I thinking of it as fiction – which engenders the question: what is fiction?

All serious fictions, especially those which are vastly more significant than the three in the Miss Oliver’s School for Girls saga, are, at their heart case studies. Think of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, how Huck’s experiencing a long hazardous, eventful trip down the Mississippi River with a magnificent soul, the enslaved Jim, turns Huck’s world upside down so that deep down he knows the truth. Read that book again and ponder a while and tell me how much you still admire George Washington. Did he really refuse another term in the presidency to save the brand-new nation from autocracy? Or did he hanker to get back to his life in a mansion that had a beautiful view of the Potomac from its position on a slave labor camp where people whom he could buy sell, rent, put up as collateral for loans and separate from their families made his living for him?

Why did Odysseus take so long to get back to his wife, killing all of his crewmates in the process, if it wasn’t a combination of curiosity and hunger for adventure? And why did Tennyson write a poem about Ulysses, the other name for Odysseus, leaving  his wife long after he had returned to her, because he’d learned that living with a person who hadn’t seen the world, let alone slept with a goddess was, well – boring?

Didn’t Eve eat the apple, brought to her by a sneaky old snake, so she could develop the imagination to wonder if life would be better in some other place?

And then there’s The Great Gatsby, by Scott Fitzgerald, The Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller and The American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser, three different authors who wrote the same story about what happens to a person who chooses to believe that he can live the Great American Dream, if he just works hard enough.

Long ago Bernard Devoto wrote that we read novels to learn how best to behave in our big moments.

I think he was right.

SCHOOL NOVELS AS CASE STUDIES

When I set out to write Saving Miss Oliver’s, the first novel in a trilogy set in a boarding school for girls, I had no idea I was writing a case study. I was just instinctively following the maxim, famously expressed by Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway, write about what you know about.

I’d had a long, reasonably successful career in independent schools as an English teacher and department head, followed by fourteen years as head of two schools and ten summers as director of a boarding camp, and was presently working as a consultant to boards, faculties, heads and search committees. I had experienced or witnessed or heard of everything that can happen in independent schools. But I was only dimly aware of the patterns, the similarities of devasting events that happen over and over again.

All I wanted to do was write a novel that would break your heart and also serve as witness to the humanity of a leader who sacrifices “success” to stay to true to his moral compass.

So I found myself making up Fred Kindler, a young male head of Miss Oliver’s School for Girls, the immediate successor to Marjorie Boyd, the beloved, authoritarian whom the board had at last found the courage to fire only because the school was on the verge of bankruptcy. She had focused her prodigious charisma on the curriculum and pedagogy and so fiercely defended the feminist mission of empowering young women that the school was beloved by all its constituencies, especially the alumnae whose lives the school had indeed enlarged. But the financial management side of her job had been unworthy of her passion.

So here comes, the young, naïve Fred Kindler, whose first move everyone suspects will be to admit boys, following a beloved leader, whose authoritarianism has made children out of the faculty. How else can they show loyalty to her than to hate the new head, who has also committed the unpardonable sin of being male?

Perhaps Fred can garner some sympathy if he immediately makes public that he and his wife are grieving for the daughter they would have enrolled in Miss Oliver’s had she not been recently killed in a car accident. But their grief is a privacy that the Kindlers honor, and even if it were not, Fred doesn’t want to demean it by making it into a strategy of his leadership.

Instead, he chooses the strategy of garnering the support of Francis Plummer, the legendary teacher beloved by the alumnae, and the board, all of whom are alumnae, or wealthy parents of currents students. But Francis has unconsciously made a kind of parent out of Marjorie and will have no part in even tinkering with the ways things have been done at Miss Oliver’s School for Girls since the beginning of time.

However, Francis’ wife Peggy was beloved and approved of by her parents. She loves and respects Marjorie too, but she’s her own boss and understands the need for change and supports the new head. Thus, the Plummers’ marriage, already unstable, is endangered, a family dysfunction caused by the larger dysfunction the board has created by failing to supervise Marjorie, thereby encouraging her to dominate in their domain as well as her own. If that’s not a classic problem that makes good governance impossible there isn’t one.

At first, I didn’t realize that Saving Miss Oliver’s was not about a problem that happened to happen because I happened to imagine it, but about what I had to write about because it always happens when an autocratic head usurps a pliant board’s foundational responsibility – a situation present in far too many independent schools,

I finally understood that I was writing a case study when I remembered giving a lecture about being sure you understand what you are getting into at what was then called The New Head’s Workshop, sponsored by the National Association of Independent Schools. One of the newly appointed heads, whom I will call Mary, burst into tears, jumped up from her chair and ran out of the room. It was the third week of July. Mary’s headship of a well-known, prestigious boarding school for girls had just started on July 1, and she had just learned that her headship was in great danger, if not doomed.

During the afternoon recreation time, I invited Mary to take a walk with me.

She told me that the board had given her a mandate to upgrade the faculty. In other words: Fire some teachers and maybe an administrator or two. I didn’t need to ask her if the rest of the staff would be relieved, grateful to her for doing the unpleasant job that the previous head should have done, probably a while ago, but absolutely before a new head started her tenure. If the answer had been ‘yes,’ she wouldn’t have burst into tears. In fact, the teachers who needed to be let go had been there a long time and though they had gotten stale, were well liked by their peers, and alumnae, if not beloved. The same was true of the head, whom the board had finally found the courage to ease out, gently, with the most important part her job, sustaining the excellence of the faculty, undone.

I suggested to Mary that she call the board chair that very day and make an appointment with her and the executive committee of the board to be held soon after the workshop. Thinking that the board would respect the advice provided by an NAIS sponsored workshop, I advised her to convey how she’d learned that clarity around the mandate and recognition of the political dangers it could engender were critical. She did so, but the conversations must have been unsuccessful. She was notified in March that her term would end on July 1. It’s easy to imagine how painful were her last three humiliating months as a powerless leader. She deserved much better.

A few years after Saving Miss Oliver’s was published. I designed and moderated several case study workshops based on the novel for aspiring and recently appointed heads of school. The homework was to read the book. The design of the workshop required no genius to invent. All Dan White, an experienced and successful school head, and I did to moderate was break the attendees into groups of eight and ask them to “be” experienced heads of schools designing wise advice and counsel to their friend, the young, honorable, beleaguered Fred Kindler.  The workshops received high praise in the evaluations for causing those who were already heads to think deeply and exchange ideas about their own board head relationships and for the aspiring heads to bring a deeper, more nuanced understanding to whatever headship they are offered in the not distant future.

Later, I wrote the second novel in the trilogy, No Ivory Tower, about a public relations scandal around sexual abuse of a student by a young, married teacher. Because there is hardly ever an issue in a school that is uncomplicated, and because I needed a compelling subplot, I created an abused student, Claire, who was almost totally innocent of the power of her beauty and charisma and need for adventure – and gave to the perpetrator of this banal and disgusting offence a malleability that arose from his not understanding that he was the one who was being seduced.

But I didn’t make this situation out of whole cloth. During my tenure as head of the Athenian School, a school I still love as one loves a person, a relationship between a teacher and student had the potential of becoming disastrous to both individuals and the school’s reputation. It was nipped in the bud, before it became widely known, by the wisdom, kindness and professionalism of the school’s counselor and dean of students working together. I didn’t know about this until after the problem had been solved, and only because the dean and counselor thought I needed to be alert in case an exaggerated version of the “news” leaked out.

The essence of “No Ivory Tower, what makes it work as a story and a case study about managing public relations disasters,  is the threat to the school’s reputation caused by a radio broadcaster, with a large, mostly male, mostly right wing audience, who is angry because his wife, from whom he is divorced and has sole custody of their daughter, has outraged him by enrolling his daughter in Miss Oliver’s school for girls, where he is sure that such licentious behavior as Claire’s is not just allowed, but celebrated. What drives him really crazy is that his daughter, a close friend of Claire, loves being embraced by the Miss O community where she is learning how to be exactly what he isn’t: a clear thinker with an open mind.

The Encampment, the third and last novel in the trilogy, is a case study of the kind of difficult, deeply personal and painful decisions which have to be made about schooling and parenting that often estrange the child from her parents, unless, and only unless, the parent is able to back away and let the child make her own decisions. The Encampment tells the story of a girl who happens to be the head of school’s daughter breaking the only two rules for which expulsion is automatic in order to help a homeless man.  I didn’t think of The Encampment as a case study while I was writing it. Nor, believe it or not, was I thinking of it as fiction – which engenders the question: what is fiction?

All serious fictions, especially those which are vastly more significant than the three in the Miss Oliver’s School for Girls saga, are, at their heart case studies. Think of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, how Huck’s experiencing a long hazardous, eventful trip down the Mississippi River with a magnificent soul, the enslaved Jim, turns Huck’s world upside down so that deep down he knows the truth. Read that book again and ponder a while and tell me how much you still admire George Washington. Did he really refuse another term in the presidency to save the brand-new nation from autocracy? Or did he hanker to get back to his life in a mansion that had a beautiful view of the Potomac from its position on a slave labor camp where people whom he could buy sell, rent, put up as collateral for loans and separate from their families made his living for him?

Why did Odysseus take so long to get back to his wife, killing all of his crewmates in the process, if it wasn’t a combination of curiosity and hunger for adventure? And why did Tennyson write a poem about Ulysses, the other name for Odysseus, leaving  his wife long after he had returned to her, because he’d learned that living with a person who hadn’t seen the world, let alone slept with a goddess was, well – boring?

Didn’t Eve eat the apple, brought to her by a sneaky old snake, so she could develop the imagination to wonder if life would be better in some other place?

And then there’s The Great Gatsby, by Scott Fitzgerald, The Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller and The American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser, three different authors who wrote the same story about what happens to a person who chooses to believe that he can live the Great American Dream, if he just works hard enough.

Long ago Bernard Devoto wrote that we read novels to learn how best to behave in our big moments.

I think he was right.