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Last fall, at Miss Porter’s School, in Farmington, Connecticut—attended by generations of debutantes and heiresses, including Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Gloria Vanderbilt, and Barbara Hutton—a student named Tatum Bass confessed to cheating, and was later expelled. Bass’s parents claim the school allowed their daughter to be so bullied by a group of girls, “the Oprichniki,” that she was driven to cheat. Talking to students, alumnae, and the headmistress, the author discovers that Bass violated a deeper, unspoken code as well. It’s the perfect Edith Wharton morning at Miss Porter’s School, in Farmington, Connecticut—brisk and snow-covered, with icicles hanging from the porticoes of the white clapboard 19th-century dormitories. Freshly scrubbed teenagers, weighed down by backpacks, are rushing to morning meeting and just counting the days until spring vacation. With no boys around to look hot for, they’re dressed in jeans—not the skinny kind, but ones that are comfortable—sweatshirts, and either high-tops or Uggs.
Oct 21, 2015. Here's a summary of the panel's controversial history and a look ahead at the questions Clinton likely will face about the 2012 attacks. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was not interviewed by the Accountability Review Board, testified in January 2013 before the Senate Foreign Relations and House. Mar 31, 2015. Mary Pilon's history The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World's Favorite Board Game is one such book, and it's an excellent. A disclaimer in the back of the book notes that Parker Brothers refused interviews, which is a shame: there's an interesting story from their side about.
They hug and link arms and no one’s going to make fun of them for it. All is good with the world, and every facet of life at Miss Porter’s a cause for celebration. Another girl stands to speak. “Don’t forget about coffeehouse this week.
We’ll even have a belly dancer!” “Yeow!” calls out a male teacher, adding quickly, “That wasn’t me.” More applause. Lots of giggles.
And, finally, it’s time to hand out the awards to the “Girls of the Week”: Alana, who sacrificed so much time to help her classmates in chemistry; Sam, for doing such a great job organizing senior kitchen; and Lillian, for having such a positive attitude and cheering so much in gym. The honored girls approach the stage to take their certificates. The rafters are thundering. Midas Gen Crack Serial Key on this page. Meeting concludes with a small a cappella group singing “Here Comes the Sun.” You’d have to be Scrooge not to smile a little. Or paranoid about cults.
But last fall at least one student, a senior named Tatum Bass, wasn’t feeling the love. Miss Porter’s made her so unhappy, in fact, that her parents hit the school with a lawsuit, alleging that a group of girls had verbally abused Tatum for weeks. The family claims that despite its efforts to stop the abuse Kate Windsor, who’d been installed as the new headmistress just weeks before, did nothing to intercede. Eventually, Tatum claims, the harassment caused her so much emotional distress that she ended up cheating on a test and missing some school, which resulted in her getting suspended and then expelled—something the family says was unfair in light of the circumstances. The school informed her college of choice, Vanderbilt, of the cheating and suspension, without, the family says, giving her the proper opportunity to defend herself—and Tatum was rejected. Ordinary “mean girl” accusations maybe, but Miss Porter’s is no ordinary school. Sarah Porter in the garden, circa 1855.
Courtesy of Miss Porter’s School. The school was founded by Sarah Porter, the daughter of a minister and the sister of Yale president Noah Porter, when young women had few educational opportunities.
Though it would become known as a “finishing school,” a term you might associate with wearing Mummy’s pearls and knowing how to set a table, its roots were puritanical and morally rigorous. Porter’s goal was to make her charges good Christians and good wives and mothers. There were only a handful of girls in those first years, most of them, like Sarah herself, the daughters of educators and religious leaders, who might go on to become missionaries. While they worked on their “accomplishments,” such as embroidery and needlework, Porter read to them, schooling them in literature, fine arts, and history—topics that would make them more interesting people, and more pleasing to their husbands and the company he kept.
In the process, she released the intellectual powers of some extraordinary women, including Edith Hamilton (1886), the classics scholar, and her sister Alice (1888), who would become the first female faculty member of Harvard University and who founded the field of industrial medicine. With its success, the school was flooded with the daughters of the newly wealthy, such as railroad executives Perry Smith and James Walker. As Barbara Donahue and Nancy Davis explain in their 1992 book, Miss Porter’s School: A History, the new rich, unlike the earlier students, believed that the whole point of having money was not to work, and to exhibit their wealth, which meant wearing fancy clothes, such as dresses with long trains. Porter, still dreaming of educating missionaries, delicately expressed to parents her horror over this development in an 1873 bulletin: “I have observed more spirit of display in dress. Our simple mode of life makes no demands for any other than a simple toilet, and hardly furnishes occasion for any other.”. Theodate Pope, Alice Hamilton, and a student believed to be Agnes Hamilton, 1888.
Courtesy of Miss Porter’s School. Porter died in 1900, and the swells eventually won out. From the 1920s until midcentury, Farmington’s reputation as a finishing school would become unparalleled. Its students came chiefly from New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and the Main Line, outside Philadelphia, and they were often called by such nicknames as Bunky, Flossie, Hiho, A-Bee, B-Zee, Wheezie, Tug, and Poo. Women’s colleges were now available, but Farmington, according to Farmington, was all that a girl needed.
Once the school had given her a good education in the liberal arts and smoothed out her rough edges and made her shine, she was “finished” and ready for the proper husband, ideally a Princeton or Yale investment banker or businessman from a “good” family. To this end RoseAnne and Robert Keep, who reigned as heads of the school from 1917 to 1943, imposed a strict routine. Girls were awoken each day at the crack of dawn with a cheerful “Good morning” from maids, who would raise the shades.
The girls would dress behind screens for the sake of modesty, be at breakfast by 7 and ready for morning prayers at 7:55. Naturally, there was no smoking or drinking. There was also no cardplaying, no gumchewing, no reading of the popular novels of the day, and, eventually, no smoothing of the hair during meals, and no crumbling of cookies into ice cream.
Miss Porter’s was an island of correctness, and human contact beyond the school gates was practically prohibited. During term time, girls could rarely leave the grounds. They could not walk into town without special permission, and they were discouraged from talking to anyone once there. They could not receive phone calls except in emergencies. Bouvier on her horse at Miss Porter’s, 1947. Courtesy of Miss Porter’s School.
While its star Ancient was helping her husband, President Jack Kennedy, usher in a new world, Miss Porter’s was in many ways stuck in the old one. “They were very much, in the early 60s, preparing us for life in the 1930s,” says Beth Gutcheon, who wrote the 1979 novel The New Girls, based on her time at Miss Porter’s, in the early 60s. “It was a man’s world. And Farmington was making it clear to us that we should learn to survive and learn to be our best selves within those strictures.” Jackie was constantly being held up by teachers and the headmaster, Hollis French, as the Female Ideal.
“Miss Watson never ceased rubbing our noses in the fact that Jackie would have gotten it right, that Jackie would have said that correctly,” recalls Victoria Mudd, who attended in the early 60s and went on to make socially conscious documentaries. As in the early days, Miss Porter’s—thanks to impassioned teachers such as Miss Smedley, who taught European history—was turning out minds whose ambitions and interests were surpassing the gentler expectations the administration had set for them. When Gutcheon decided she wanted to go to Radcliffe, for example, the school discouraged her: “They really wanted us to go to the colleges that were more like finishing schools.” The brightest girls often ended up in high-profile art-world careers, such as Agnes Gund, president of the Museum of Modern Art until 2002; Eliza Rathbone, chief curator of the Phillips Collection, in Washington, D.C.; Jennifer Russell, a director of exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art; and Dede Brooks, chief executive of Sotheby’s until 2000, when she resigned amid a price-fixing scandal. While the country’s top colleges and prep schools were opening themselves up to women and minorities, Miss Porter’s clung to its ancient attitudes about blacks, Irish, and Jews. According to Gutcheon, a student in her time asked the headmistress, Mary Norris French, why there were no Jews at Farmington, to which she replied, “How do you know there are not?” Whoever they were, says Gutcheon, “they all had to pretend they were Episcopalian.” “The level of political awareness at that time was pretty much zero,” Mudd says. By the time she got to Stanford, in 1964, she had learned from a senior who had been involved in the Mississippi Freedom Summer, registering voters, about what was going on in the world, with the war in Vietnam and the civil-rights movement. “She had pictures and stories, and I’m like, ‘What?
There’s racism? There’s poverty?’” Seeds of Change In 1968, under the leadership of Richard Davis, the school dipped its toe into diversity by inviting its first black student, Glenda Newell, to attend. Davis made it clear that she was an experiment.
“They told me that they were going to take a chance on me,” recalls Newell, now Glenda Newell-Harris, a doctor in the San Francisco Bay Area, “and that if I did well they would then believe what they had heard, which was that many people of color may not be good test takers but could be good students. And so, therefore, I had that burden.” For the most part, her classmates were ready for Newell and to learn about something new.
They got into the Motown she was listening to; she started liking James Taylor. The parents were trickier. She and a fellow student wanted to become roommates their junior year, but the girl’s parents initially objected. She was continually reminded of the disparity in wealth. At the mail table, she watched other girls opening typed notes from their fathers’ secretaries along with a $300 check, while she got two or three dollars to buy some toothpaste. “People had homes in Eleuthera.
I didn’t even know where Eleuthera was.” But Newell-Harris, the Jackie Robinson of Farmington, toughed it out, eventually serving on the board of trustees. She saw that others were toughing it out in different ways, by quietly enduring troubles back home. A number of Farmington girls had divorced parents, alcoholism in their families, or mothers they weren’t speaking to. But it was not the Farmington way to talk about it or let it send you off course.
Still, stoicism could go too far. In 1976, three years after Roe v. Wade, one girl suffered alone through the most unimaginable horror. A rather stout, seemingly overweight New Girl from the Midwest entered Miss Porter’s several months pregnant, unbeknownst to anyone at the school, her physician father having apparently signed off on her health form.
In mid-November, as a former teacher tells it, the girl went to her classes, played soccer, skipped dinner, returned to her dorm, and gave birth to a boy by herself in the bathroom. She cleaned up the mess, wrapped the baby up, stashed him under her bed, and went to study hall. She began to bleed ferociously and was taken to the infirmary. “Dear, you have something you must tell us,” the nurse said. By the time they got to the baby, he had suffocated.
Miss Porter’s was left with a sudden shock to the system. “I think there was sort of a collective sense that we had betrayed her in some way,” says Avery Rimer, who, like her classmates, missed the signs. “That we hadn’t been able to be there for her and help her through something that lonely and scary. In a way, you feel like you’ve borne witness to a murder that you could have helped prevent.” But the trauma was also a wake-up call. In response to the obvious fact that girls might need help more than they let on, the adviser and counseling systems were ratcheted up. At the same time, the school felt the pressures of the outside world. Rules for dressing were loosened.
Now girls could wear the hip fashions of the day: long, wraparound skirts, puffy blouses, and clogs. Church was no longer a requirement, a nod to the fact that some people weren’t Christian.
Acknowledging that school should have a real-world component, Miss Porter’s began sending girls off in January for various work projects. One of the most popular, of all things, was interning with Ralph Nader. Just as Miss Porter’s began catching up with the outside world, the outside world took one more big step forward. All-male schools such as Hotchkiss, Choate, Taft, and Exeter became coed, which meant that fathers who had attended them could now send their daughters to their alma maters. Miss Porter’s turned down offers to join up with nearby all-boys schools. But in doing so it struggled to attract the same caliber of girl.
Something had to change. To dispel the notion that Miss Porter’s was only creating future society ladies, it redoubled its efforts to focus on science, math, and technology. Starting slowly, it broadened the diversity of its student body, accepting more people of color and more scholarship students. Today, Miss Porter’s college placement is respectable, given the increasing toughness of the admissions game, but it still lags behind such prep schools as Exeter and Andover, and other top-notch all-girls schools such as Brearley.
With its modernization, many Miss Porter’s traditions had to be re-examined. “Times were changing,” says Burch Ford, Miss Porter’s exceptionally well-regarded headmistress from 1993 until 2008, who brought the school’s endowment up to $104 million, “and so behaviors that were either overlooked or not looked at could no longer be acceptable for any number of reasons. Download Free Adler 30 Mechanics Manual For Leganza. ” Some students balked at the hazing of New Girls in the fall. “It was something that no longer could really be defensible,” says Ford. “Theoretically, it was a welcoming tradition.
Well, it wasn’t very welcoming.” The word “Oprichniki” came to be associated with traditions that were inappropriate. The school tried to soften the rituals by helping to make sure that the girls tapped were among the nicest in the class, and it attempted to change the name to “the Keepers of Traditions.” But Miss Porter’s traditions die hard. According to a source long involved in the school, “Children of Ancients would go home and say, Well, we can’t do this, we can’t do that anymore. And the mothers, if not egged them on, said, ‘I think that’s terrible.
Without the traditions, it won’t be Miss Porter’s School.’ The Oprichniki would be squashed, and then four or five years would go by, and then there’d be a critical mass of Ancients’ daughters again, and it would bubble up.” And so, in certain years, if a New Girl wore the forbidden gray-and-yellow combination, for example, she might be forced by an Old Girl to get on all fours and start doing push-ups, or other tasks, says an Ancient from the mid- 80s, that would “make you feel like shit.” Ancient Regime Visiting Miss Porter’s today, you’d be hard-pressed to spot the Oprichniki in the crowd. The girls seem friendly, curious about the world, and intellectually fired up. Those I am allowed to meet on my visit there—the school handpicked five of them—bang the drum of sisterhood in a genuine and endearing way. Maggie, a junior from Ohio with adorable ringlets, says that when she arrived at Miss Porter’s she had low self-esteem and was constantly putting herself down, focusing on her bad hair. “The other girls would say, ‘No!
How can you say that?’” Many young Ancients recall Miss Porter’s as a bastion of warmth—especially when they were in the most desperate state of need. Imani Brown (2000), who was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer six weeks before commencement, recalls, “I didn’t know that there was that much love in the world. I felt that maybe this was a parting gift.” Brown not only survived but is thriving, and works as an administrator in a San Francisco high school.
Left, a view of the campus, along Main Street; right, the Congregational church, known as “Congo.” Photographs by Jonathan Becker. In spite of the warmth that permeates the community today, it seems being a member of the Oprichniki has remained for some a badge of honor. Blair Clarke, who graduated in 2007 and who was an Oprichnik, recalls that after enduring the intimidation of the Oprichniki her freshman year—in which she and her classmates wore plastic on certain days for fear of getting pelted with tomatoes and crash-studied basic German just in case—she wanted to become one. “I decided, ‘This is kind of cool.’ A lot of my friends were like, ‘We want to be Oprichniki when we’re seniors.’ And some people were upset if they didn’t get it, so they would make it seem like, ‘Oh, they’re so bad, they’re so bad.’” She maintains that the Oprichniki don’t inflict real pain, just the anticipatory fear of pain. But Tatum Bass, in her lawsuit, claims they are more powerful than that. An honor student from Beaufort, South Carolina, she loved the school under the leadership of Burch Ford, who was also her adviser. Bass was elected to the student-government position of student-activities coordinator.
While planning the prom, she made the suggestion that Miss Porter’s participate in a multi-school prom. According to her, this breach of tradition prompted an onslaught of cruelty, spearheaded by the Oprichniki. Classmates allegedly called her “retarded,” referring to her attention-deficit disorder.
The Basses claim a group of girls yelled “Fuck you” at her in front of hundreds of people during a school dance. They taunted her through mean text messages and on Facebook. Tatum’s adviser was “fundamentally and functionally unavailable to offer support and guidance,” according to the lawsuit. Despite the family’s pleas to the administration to intervene, it did not. (Miss Porter’s School has declined to comment on the suit.) Bass began to fall apart. This led to the cheating, she claims, which she felt so awful about that she immediately confessed to Kate Windsor. After a three-day suspension, she stayed with her parents, Nina, a child psychiatrist, and William, the president of an insurance agency, at a local hotel.
Days later, the suit claims, she returned to her dorm to find her belongings thrown into a pile in the corner with a sign that read, for rent. Tatum became fearful of being on campus. Two doctors recommended that she take a medical leave, but the school allegedly denied those requests and instructed its medical director not to communicate with any of her physicians. On November 11, according to the suit, Miss Porter’s disabled Tatum’s school e-mail address and Internet access, and instructed her not to contact her teachers.
A week later, the school informed the Basses that it was expelling their daughter, for alleged unexcused absences and violations of school rules. This was done, the family claims, without giving Tatum any opportunity to be heard. In the opinion of some Ancients, Bass just couldn’t hack it. Not every girl who gets taunted ends up cheating. “You can’t sue a school for girl drama,” says Clarke, the recent Oprichniki member. “She was very insecure.
She was kind of, like, I wouldn’t say timid, but she just reminded me of a little girl.” She adds, “If such a place was so horrible to you, why do you still want to go back there?” Perhaps because Bass, according to a source close to her, still loves the school and has faith that maybe the abuse she experienced was an aberration. The real issue, says this source, is that all of this—the cruelty, the cheating, the lawsuit—could have been prevented had the school’s leadership stepped in.
The family sued (for damages and to void the expulsion, among other things) because they believed they were given no other recourse. The clear implication is that Kate Windsor, the new headmistress, either was ill-equipped to handle the matter or believed that it didn’t warrant her attention. Windsor, 42, is a tall, rather glamorous-looking blonde who stands out from her somewhat earthier, New Englandy colleagues. Her last job was as head of the Sage School, a K–8 school in Foxboro, Massachusetts, for academically gifted children. Her very being exudes an obsession with excellence; you might say she is a modern-day Mrs.
On the day we meet, she’s wearing tan wool trousers, leopard-print pumps, a string of black pearls, and a black cape with a fur collar. Though she won’t comment on the allegations in the suit, she makes her views on coddling perfectly clear. She believes, essentially, we’ve become a nation of politically correct softies, afraid of distinguishing anyone from anyone else lest anyone’s feelings get hurt. More true tales from America’s most exclusive private schools:, by Alex Shoumatoff (January 2006), by Frank DiGiacomo (March 2005), by Evgenia Peretz (June 2004), by Nancy Jo Sales, September 2001 “This idea of a structure of hierarchy or power has been really dismissed in our culture as being not part of the American way or the American Dream: ‘We can all do, we can all be, and we’re all successful,’” says Windsor, who speaks in a matter-of-fact, rather formal manner. “If you have kids and they play soccer, everybody gets the banner. It doesn’t matter if you lose—sometimes you think, Did we even win?” In her position as headmistress of Miss Porter’s, Windsor is determined to rectify this unfortunate development—at least for the 330 girls who are in her charge. That’s where the traditions come in.
“One of the things that is awesome about our traditions, about our Old Girl, New Girl tradition, is that we actually create these rites of passage where girls get anxious. The positive side is that it teaches girls to be prepared. How do you prepare for the unknown?” Windsor believes that, as long as the situation is supervised by adults and no one is doing anything physically harmful, it’s a good thing—they’ll be more prepared and confident when they get to the other side. Bass feels she never had the chance to make it to the other side. She’s slowly putting her life back together. She’s now enrolled in another private school, in South Carolina, and has received offers with scholarships from two colleges for next year. But in her battle against Miss Porter’s she finds herself alone.
In Burch Ford’s day, when a girl unleashed her meaner instinct, Ford attempted to rein it in. “One of the ways that you can establish you’re cool is to put other people down,” says Ford. “I’m thinking about one girl in particular. She was kind of a bombshell. She had learned one way to be popular, and it just wasn’t working.” Ford sat her down with a bunch of other students and explained, “‘You probably need to take a look at that because you may be coming across the way you didn’t intend.
You don’t have to like [people], but you have to be respectful.’ That was the end of anything we heard. She actually became a very nice girl.” Windsor, it seems, is reaching farther back into Miss Porter’s 166-year history, to a time when girls stoically forged ahead through the social minefield of adolescence on their own.
Perhaps her tradition-fortified, tough-it-out approach will create an armada of winners, perfectly poised to compete in our increasingly challenging world. Still, one can’t help but wonder at what price this comes to the losers. Is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.