An Interview with Jason Robinson

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‘The substance of a meaningful life’

Jason Robinson, our next headmaster, shares his commitment to education, his impressions of St. Albans, and his vision for the school.

Last summer, following a six-month, international search, the St. Albans Governing Board named Jason F. Robinson the eighth headmaster of St. Albans. Currently the head of upper school and assistant head of school for academics at Princeton Day School in Princeton, N.J., Robinson will assume his new position on July 1, 2018.

Raised in Roanoke, Va., Robinson attended public school until fifth grade, when his mother, a former French teacher, encouraged him to apply to the local independent school North Cross. From there, he went on to receive a B.A. in philosophy from Washington and Lee, magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, and an M.A. in government from the University of Virginia, where he served as chair of the Honor Committee. After receiving a J.D. from Stanford Law School, Robinson held a judicial clerkship with the U.S. Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit, in Baltimore, Md., and practiced corporate law at D.C.’s Covington and Burling, where he met his wife, Olinda Arias Robinson. In 2004, he left the legal profession to begin a career in education, first at the Landon School in Bethesda, Md., where he taught government and a humanities course that spanned English, history, art, philosophy, and cultural studies, and he coached basketball and baseball. He then went on to teach history, politics, constitutional law, and ethics at the Lawrenceville School, in New Jersey, where he chaired the Interdisciplinary Studies Program; chaired the Discipline and Honor committees; coached basketball, baseball, and golf; and served as a housemaster, living with Olinda and their two daughters in a student residence in the school’s historic House System.

In 2013 he was named head of upper school at Princeton Day School, and in 2015 his duties expanded as he added the title assistant head of school for academics, responsible for the development, assessment, and coordination of the academic program for one thousand students in pre-kindergarten through grade twelve.

Jason and his wife, Olinda, have two daughters: Francie, a junior at Dickinson College, and Abigail, a sophomore at the University of Richmond. In a conversation this spring, Robinson reflected on his schooling and career, education today, the teachers who inspired his passion for education, and his belief in the potential of independent schools to transform live.

On your visits to St. Albans this past year, did anything special strike you?
Jason Robinson: When I visited in December, I had the pleasure of beginning the day with Fred Chandler and experiencing the wonderful tradition of greeting the boys outside the Lower School as they start their day.

I love that St. Albans begins each day with this humanizing ritual, warmly greeting the boys and teaching them from an early age the importance of civility and community. When I was an undergraduate at Washington and Lee, we had a similar custom called “the speaking tradition,” where students and professors always exchanged a simple but respectful greeting when passing one another on campus. It was a small gesture, but it shaped the moral ecology of the school in profound ways.

What struck me about St. Albans as I greeted each Lower School boy on that December morning was how fully the boys have embraced the norms and values of the school. It was one of those special moments where you see the mission of the school imprinted on the hearts and minds of each student.

Why did that impress you?
David Brooks wrote a wonderful piece in the New York Times last spring in which he distinguished “thick” from “thin” institutions. Thin institutions are the ones we pass through with only faint memories of our time there. Thick institutions provide something more lasting and fundamental. They transform us. St. Albans alumni I have met speak of the school in this way, and as I greeted the Lower School boys that morning, I began to understand why.

Did anything else about St. Albans surprise you?
In many ways, my visits to St. Albans this year have been a powerful affirmation of all I believed the school would be. I have been so impressed by the talent and passion of the faculty, the humanity and kindness of the boys, the sense of transcendent purpose provided by our Episcopal identity, and the way the traditions of the school provide such a strong sense of community.

No one can spend a day at St. Albans without also feeling the immense joy that defines the soul of this place. The deep affection the boys feel for one another—and for their teachers and coaches—speaks to this each and every day. Part of the brilliance of this school is the way it combines reverence for tradition with an appreciation for the joy and humor of working with boys and the very special bonds that develop during this process.
“Part of the brilliance of this school is the way it combines reverence for tradition with an appreciation for the joy and humor of working with boys.”
Many people become teachers because of a teacher. Is that true of you?
Teachers have been among the most important figures in my life. I owe so much to them and to the truly sacred work of this profession. I became a teacher hoping to give back to my own students the gifts my teachers gave to me: a love of learning, a belief in the power of ideas, and a commitment to leading a reflective, examined life. My teachers helped me understand that education is not about information but transformation. They showed me a model of a life dedicated to asking the important questions—of valuing learning for its own inherent, humanizing potential. And they did this with a deep love and concern for who I became as a person. Paul speaks in Corinthians of those who can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge but have not love. All great teachers understand, as Paul did, that the sacred work of education begins with love and is empty without it.

Tell us about your family and early education.
I grew up in Roanoke, a town in southwest Virginia. I went to public school until fifth grade, when my family decided to send me to a private school called North Cross. Attending North Cross was an inflection point in my life. And I credit my mom, a gifted teacher herself, for believing in the promise of an independent school education and the difference it would make in my life. The teachers at North Cross forever changed the way I viewed learning. They helped me grow as a thinker and as a person and helped me see possibilities in myself that I never would have seen without their influence. I owe a great deal to them for being my first role models in education.

My high school years were also active and fulfilling outside the classroom. I was president of my senior class. I played three sports—cross-country, basketball, and my favorite, baseball (I kept hoping all through the ’80s and ’90s that D.C. would get a baseball team!). And I was fortunate to be at North Cross during a luminous period of athletic success for the school. The high point was my junior year, when our basketball team won the independent school championship for the state of Virginia. That was quite an accomplishment for a team from a small school in southwest Virginia to defeat the best independent school athletic programs from Richmond and Northern Virginia.

From high school, you headed to Washington and Lee. How was that experience?
I chose Washington and Lee for a number of reasons. The strength of the school’s Honor System was a key factor. I also believed the close teacher-student relationships and the sense of academic community at a small liberal arts college would be similar to what I most valued about my high school experience. And I was right. Through the influence of my professors at Washington and Lee, I began to think about teaching as my life’s calling. Before that time, I thought about school, like many students do, as preparation for something else, as a prelude to what I would one day do with my life. But my professors inspired me to think about teaching and learning as the substance of a meaningful life—not as a means to an end but an end in itself. So around my junior year I stopped asking what school was preparing me for and began to believe that life in a school was the life I was meant to lead. I hoped to follow in the footsteps of my best college teachers by becoming a professor at a liberal arts college.

And that’s why you began to pursue a Ph.D. in government at the University of Virginia?
Yes, I was drawn to graduate school at UVA because two of my professors at Washington and Lee had done graduate work there. My college town of Lexington, Va., was charming but quite small. Moving to Charlottesville and being part of a larger university culture was an exciting change.

How did your life change at UVA?
At the beginning of my second year of graduate school, I was given the opportunity to be a teaching assistant in several undergraduate courses at UVA. I look back on that period at UVA as among the happiest and most important in my life. I remember vividly a special class of UVA first-year students I had the privilege of teaching. They were my first class and will always hold a special place in my heart because it was through them that I first experienced the deep sense of happiness, connection, and purpose that makes teaching the most rewarding profession in the world.

My second year at UVA was important for another reason. I was elected to the university’s Honor Committee and ultimately became chair of the committee, responsible for administering the university’s Honor System for the entire school population of more than twenty thousand students. I learned so much about myself, about the university, and about leadership. It tied me to the school in a deep and emotional way, as I had the privilege of being the steward of one of the school’s most sacred traditions for a brief but incredibly meaningful moment. The relationships I formed, the sense of belonging to something larger than myself—all these things have stayed with me and make my years at UVA among the most special and important in my life.

Why did you leave the Ph.D. program for Stanford Law School?
Like most stories in my life, it was because of the influence of a teacher. One of my professors at UVA, Henry Abraham, was a celebrated constitutional law professor in the Government Department. His teaching began to instill in me a deep love for the law and a curiosity about what it would be like to pursue a law degree.

Then there were personal reasons. I was twenty-four years old, and I had spent my entire life within two hours of where I had grown up in Virginia. I had always challenged myself intellectually but had not stepped much beyond my comfort zone culturally and geographically.

I applied to a number of law schools outside Virginia and ultimately decided to attend Stanford. I felt it was a place that would expose me to new perspectives and broaden me as a person. So I packed up my car and drove across the country to start a new and very different adventure.

Did you enjoy law school?
Yes. I found the academic study of law to be wonderfully engaging and met some truly remarkable people. Northern California is also not a bad place to live for a few years! I always felt I would return to the East Coast, unlike many of my Stanford classmates who fell in love with the Bay Area and are still living there. But the years at Stanford played a very important role in my life. I will always feel blessed for my legal education and for the privilege of attending Stanford.

What did you do after law school?
I decided to apply for a judicial clerkship because everyone I knew who had one said it was the best legal job they ever had. I was especially interested in working for a federal appeals court judge. My constitutional law professor at Stanford, Gerald Gunther, recommended me for a job with Judge Francis Murnaghan on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Baltimore, and I was fortunate to get the clerkship. (I still have the letter from Judge Murnaghan offering me the clerkship framed in my office.)

Did you enjoy the clerkship?
Judge Murnaghan was a brilliant legal mind and one of the most interesting, accomplished people I have ever met. Prior to being a federal judge, he had been assistant attorney general for the State of Maryland, president of the Baltimore City School Board, a trustee of Johns Hopkins University, and president of the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore. He was also a devoted baseball fan and art collector. He began a wonderful tradition when he became a judge. Every afternoon Judge Murnaghan would have tea with his law clerks. We would talk about the law, his passion for collecting art, the fortunes (and sometimes misfortunes) of the Baltimore Orioles, and the history of the city of Baltimore. I learned so much from him about the law, leadership, judgment, character, and the responsibilities expected of those in positions of privilege and authority.

Did you go on to practice law?
Yes. I landed in Washington, D.C., at Covington and Burling, a firm that had a sterling reputation for the quality of its work and for attracting attorneys with an academic interest in the law. Covington was a phenomenal place with incredibly thoughtful, deeply professional people. But I wasn’t sure that I had the passion and conviction needed to make law my life’s work. Instead, a voice kept stirring inside me: “You always wanted to be a teacher; that’s what you always wanted to do.” So after a few years at Covington, I began to think about how I could get from where I was to where I knew I should be—a life devoted to living and learning within an academic community.
“My teachers helped me understand that education is not about information but transformation.”
You met your wife, Olinda Arias, while working at the law firm.
Yes. Olinda was a legal assistant at Covington, working with the head of the Latin American practice. Because she understood what the life of a law partner entailed, she had a very realistic sense of what our life would be like together if I were to remain in the profession.

What did your wife think about your change of heart and career?
One of the things that I most value about Olinda is that she has an abiding sense of faith and a conviction that if you feel called to do something, you should listen to your heart and summon the courage to act on that conviction, even if the path before you appears to be pervaded by risk and uncertainty. The Letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament defines faith as the “substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” I kept that sentiment close to my heart during those early years when I was trying to begin a new life as a teacher.
“A voice kept stirring inside me: ‘You always wanted to be a teacher; that’s what you always wanted to do.’”
Your first teaching job, after practicing law, was at Landon.
Yes, I confess that I taught and coached at Landon for three years. I have a feeling I’ll be issuing mea culpas for that for years to come! But in all seriousness, I will always be grateful to Landon for taking a leap of faith on me as a career changer and for introducing me to the joy of working in a boys school. I taught AP American Government as well as a wonderful interdisciplinary course for eleventh graders called Humanities. I also coached basketball and baseball, advised the school newspaper, and served as faculty advisor to the Honor Council. The relationships I formed with the boys I taught and coached are among the most meaningful I have ever had.

In 2007 you moved to Lawrenceville with your family.
Yes, I very much wanted to experience life in a boarding school as part of my professional growth as an educator. While at Lawrenceville, I taught courses in history, ethics, and constitutional law; coached basketball and baseball; became chair of the school’s Interdisciplinary Studies Program; and served as housemaster of a dormitory with forty-five tenth and eleventh graders. Olinda and my daughters (who attended Lawrenceville and are proud graduates of the school) were as invested and involved as I was. It was a deeply formative and influential time in our lives. Lawrenceville taught me many things. During my six years there, I learned that great schools only remain great by continually challenging themselves. And Lawrenceville showed me the true meaning of school community, teaching me how transformational independent schools can be when adults commit themselves in such a comprehensive way to the care and well-being of students.

Olinda’s impact at Lawrenceville has in many ways been more far-reaching than my own. Besides being my partner and right-hand for the six years we lived in the dormitory, she worked in the Capital Programs office for two years and then transitioned to the Dean of Faculty’s Office, where she has been for the past eight years. Her welcoming presence, generosity of spirit, and attention to detail have made such a difference in the lives of so many faculty, students, and families at Lawrenceville.

At Lawrenceville, you chaired the school’s celebrated Interdisciplinary Studies Program. Why are you interested in cross-disciplinary work?
One of my favorite books is The Hedgehog and the Fox, by the great Oxford social theorist and historian of ideas, Isaiah Berlin. The title of the book is taken from a saying attributed to the Ancient Greek poet Archilochus: “A fox knows many things, a hedgehog knows one important thing.”

As a student, I was always inspired by teachers who knew many things, who saw education as a journey across a vast landscape of ideas, who resisted one-dimensional, compartmentalized ways of viewing the world. Our habit of dividing knowledge into discrete, specialized areas—science, math, history, literature—is a relatively recent construct, dating back only to the nineteenth century. In an age of specialization and fragmentation, interdisciplinary studies remind us to keep looking at the big picture, to aspire to an integrated vision of human life and human knowledge. This is one of the greatest gifts of the liberal arts tradition. And it begins by exposing students to what Matthew Arnold called “the best that has been thought and said” in every subject and every part of our culture.

Why are interdisciplinary studies important today?
One of the most powerful things about interdisciplinary studies is that it honors the best of the traditional liberal arts ideal while also helping us meet the challenges of the future. Think about the most important questions and problems our boys will face in their future civic and professional lives: globalization, climate change, privacy in a digital age, bioethical controversies. These are complex, multi-dimensional issues that don’t fit cleanly into a single discipline. Giving our boys the skills and habits of mind needed to think flexibly across many different subject areas is one of the best investments we can make in preparing them for the challenges and responsibilities of citizenship in a world increasingly defined by complex interdisciplinary problems.
As assistant head and head of upper school at Princeton Day School, you’re responsible for hiring faculty. What do you look for in a teacher?
Recruiting talented new teachers and helping to develop them as educators are among the most enjoyable and rewarding parts of my job. Finding teachers with outstanding academic backgrounds is critical, but it goes beyond this. I am looking for educators who have the intangible qualities I remember from my own best teachers—a deep and abiding passion for learning, the belief that teaching is a sacred calling, the conviction that teaching can and must be a transformational experience in a student’s life.

To make this type of teaching a reality, an educator must not only love the subject he or she is teaching, but also have the capacity to connect with boys on a human level. There’s a wonderful book—a classic in education—by Theodore and Nancy Sizer called The Students Are Watching. The Sizers argue that the most powerful teaching comes not from the formal curriculum in history, math, science, art and literature, but from watching the human life a teacher leads—the example a teacher sets and the values he or she embodies. This idea has been central to my own teaching and to my work as a school leader.
What challenges face our students today?
One of the greatest challenges facing our students is specialization. Boys feel greater pressure at a much younger age to know what they want to do with their lives. They worry they will be left behind in an increasingly competitive world if they do not specialize. You see this in almost every domain, from athletics to academics to the college and career anxieties that afflict students at younger and younger ages.

All of this is affecting our boys and our educational model in complicated ways. And part of our job as educators is to disrupt this narrative, to help our boys see their education and their lives in a broader perspective. I’m a great admirer of Christopher Eisgruber, the president of Princeton University (and a former lawyer who became an educator). A few years ago, he assembled the incoming freshman class at Princeton and said something very powerful to them. I’m paraphrasing, but his message was: Like many students of your generation, you arrive at Princeton falsely believing that you must know at age eighteen what you want to major in and what you want to do with your lives; college, however, is a time for multiplying possibilities, not contracting them—for discovering new ideas and perspectives, for discovering new dimensions to life and oneself. Eisgruber was making a classic argument—even in the age of specialization—for the enduring value of the liberal arts, for a vision of education as transformational rather than transactional.

What challenges does the school face?
St. Albans is blessed to face the future from a position of great strength. We have amazingly talented teachers and students, a devoted alumni and parent body, and a powerful mission. But great schools only remain great by challenging themselves, by engaging in continual self-examination. The way we respond to future challenges will reflect the best of our traditions and our ability to think critically and flexibly in the face of new circumstances.

As bright as I believe the future is at St. Albans, we live in interesting and complicated times. There’s a clever New Yorker-style cartoon I saw a few years ago. A student says to his teacher during class one day: “Mr. Jones, after you finish explaining the solution to question 4 from last night’s math homework, can you also tell us the solution to economic uncertainty, political polarization, declining social trust, rising sea levels, and whether social media is playing too big a role in our lives?” So much is at stake as we try to help our kids navigate a complex, uncertain world. And students and families increasingly look to schools to provide answers or at least a framework to make sense of the challenges we face. As a school, we must define the terms of engagement with these issues, rather than having the issues define us.
“Giving our boys the skills and habits of mind needed to think flexibly across many different subject areas is one of the best investments we can make in preparing them for the challenges and responsibilities of citizenship.”
How does our identity as a church school help address this?
Our identity as an Episcopal school connected to the Washington National Cathedral is a crucial part of our history. It means the education of a boy at St. Albans unfolds within a larger narrative, reminding us each and every day that we are ultimately preparing our boys for something larger, something beyond themselves. Canon Martin captured the sense of this in his memorable way when he said we are preparing boys “for the Kingdom of Heaven, not the Kingdom of Harvard.” We of course value individual excellence and success and are proud of the outcomes our graduates enjoy, but living and learning beside the National Cathedral keeps us looking upwards and outwards, helping us to keep other pursuits in proper perspective.

What do you consider the responsibility of a school like St. Albans?
Independent schools must never become insular, must always connect their mission to public purposes. I think of St. Albans’ motto: For Church and For Country. These commitments are deeply woven into the fabric of the school. Vance Wilson has told me how much he values the walk from the headmaster’s house to the school each day. The first thing you see on that walk is the Cathedral, a powerful daily reminder that the school’s work on behalf of the boys is ultimately in service to something of transcendent value and importance.

And then as you get closer to St. Albans, your eyes are drawn to the majestic view of the nation’s capital. As a former lawyer and a government teacher, I think that vista is a powerful reminder that we’re preparing our boys for lives of service and civic responsibility that will elevate and ennoble the public life of our country. That sacred work begins each day by ensuring that each boy is known and loved, by exposing our students to the “best that has been thought and said,” and by calling them to lives of meaning and purpose worthy of their privileges and the gift of a St. Albans education.

Thank you.
Thank you. I can’t wait to join this extraordinary school community and be part of the future of St. Albans.

St. Albans School

Phone: 202-537-6435
Located in Washington D.C.,  St. Albans School is a private, all boys day and boarding school. For more than a century, St. Albans has offered a distinctive educational experience for young men in grades 4 through 12. While our students reach exceptional academic goals and exhibit first-rate athletic and artistic achievements, as an Episcopal school we place equal emphasis upon moral and spiritual education.