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A Simple but Sacred Goal

Vance Wilson

Excerpts from Vance Wilson’s address at the Alumni Dinner on March 3, 1999.

I use this short illustration to introduce how I feel about being the headmaster-elect of St. Albans. As you think about that statement, please focus on the not-tempting-fate part and not the simile that casts Jonah overboard. Superstitiously, I know not to tempt fate, and as I tell you a personal anecdote, I want everyone to understand that I don’t intend to interpret this anecdote – don’t intend to foolishly say, since this happened in my life, success is guaranteed – only to tell the events in a straight-forward way in order to express my delight at our coming voyage together and also my utter sense of “rightness” about what lies on the horizon.

The anecdote is this: Two years ago, when I took a job as associate head at Bryn Mawr School, my family and I drove into Baltimore and began to look for the kind of house we would fall in love with, for in all our wisdom about the future we planned to put roots down in Baltimore and stay a long time. We looked for two or three days at fifteen to twenty houses, but one obviously seemed right to us from the very beginning. Let me simply tell you the address of the house where we have lived for two years: 5617 St. Albans Way.

When [Alumni Association President] John Bellinger asked me to speak tonight, he said to introduce myself first. I can do so briefly. My full name is Zebulon Vance Wilson. This is a burden to grow up with.

For those of you unfamiliar with North Carolina and the history of the War Between the States, Zebulon Vance was the governor of North Carolina during the war and, after Reconstruction, a two-term senator. As a young man I knew I was first named after my grandfather, Zebulon Vance Mehaffey, but I allowed people to believe I was a direct descendant of the Governor Zebulon Vance. I also allowed myself to believe that, and I never looked into it, for with a name like Zebulon, a young man has little choice but to hide behind the pretension that his blood must somehow be stately and royal, and surely biblical.

It wasn’t until I worked at Asheville School in the 1980s that I bothered to figure out why I was named after Zebulon Vance. My grandfather, it turns out, was born in 1886. This was the last year Zebulon Vance served in the senate, and in honor of his retirement, he decided to give a silver dollar to any family in the state who would name a son after him. So my great-grandparents named their son Zebulon Vance and pocketed the silver dollar. I inherited the name but not the silver dollar....

In a moment I would like to move on to some thoughts about the school and what attracted me about it, but first let me quickly say that from my perspective, the search for St. Albans could not have been run more professionally. I think the best compliment I can give to Paul Mickey, Bob Shorb, and the Search Committee and the Governing Board is to tell another brief story. Last week I was in Dallas at the National Association of Independent Schools conference, interviewing teaching candidates for Bryn Mawr. As I walked across a large plaza between the hotel complex and the convention hall, I was stopped by a man I have known and respected for most of my twenty-five-year career in education. We chatted about some work we did together in the early 1980s and then he asked if I knew that he had been part of the St. Albans search. I said I did. I was a little nervous about what he might say next – something like, they got a real Bozo in you, Wilson – but then in one of the most generous gestures I have ever experienced, he shook my hand and wished me well and said he was envious of my getting the job because St. Albans was a great school and he particularly knew how great it was because of the way the Search Committee had conducted the process. If the school operates the way the Search Committee did, then I was a very lucky man indeed. I agree with him on all counts.

St. Albans is one of the great schools in this country. Great schools remain great by holding themselves accountable. The outside world often allows a school to sail unimpeded on its reputation for far too long a time, but any school that grows smug about what it has accomplished in the past will certainly go aground. But it seems to me that any new school head at a place like St. Albans has a moral obligation to honor what is good about the school, what its core values are, and what has lasted well.

I have repeatedly said throughout the search process that I don’t have a preconceived agenda, for what works at one school does not necessarily work at another school. School cultures, even within the narrow range of the independent school world, can be profoundly different. So what I see myself doing as I begin as your school head is articulating what is good and reaffirming what works for that good, for sometimes the people accustomed to a community lose sight of what is distinctive about the place – in other words, they grow blind. But at the same time I go about naming the good, I must ask difficult questions that might cause people to see in a new way, to reconsider. I might pose a different interpretation of a story, and I will always demand evidence for the claims St. Albans makes about itself.

In two of Jack McCune’s speeches I have read, he uses the phrase “measured change,” which I take it is a careful wordsmithing of the St. Albans way. This is the last place that is going to change for change’s sake. That is an anathema. But at the same time we don’t want to slowly rot in our own traditions. Let me assure you, however, that I know there are certain aspects of school which are sacred, and these are obviously aspects of the school which attracted me, or I never would have entered the search.

While I am not a priest, I see my work here as a vocation. I intend to be pastoral, if not in the collar I wear, in the countenance I pray to keep. While I keep watch, this school will always remain a church school, with priests on staff, with mandatory chapel, with the philosophy that all education is at root spiritual, and with a sense of mission that our excellence will be devoted to the betterment of humankind. I also hope, parenthetically, that while protecting St. Albans’s uniqueness as an institution, we can continue to improve our relations with the other institutions on this Close.

This school will also always remain a college preparatory school committed to academic excellence. This school will remain committed to sportsmanship and athletic accomplishment. One generation’s idea of how academic excellence is achieved, however, does not necessarily translate into the next generation’s: it’s very clear in the school histories that, while each period in the school’s history was dedicated to academic excellence, definitions of it modulated in the tenures of Canons Lucas, Martin, and Mullin. I would like to see the traditional athletic accomplishment in this school matched by a renewed sense of artistic accomplishment.

These are grand ideas, the kind of statements necessary for philosophies and strategic plans. But for me, a school is most essentially about the relationship between a student and a teacher, and then, a close second, about the relationships among the students. When I grow confused by the buzzing life of a school, or when I get lost in peevish adult struggles, I focus myself on those two relationships. I know perfectly well that the people here tonight return to their school and support it because they remember profound and long-lasting experiences brought about by teachers and fellow students. Your fellow students sit around you now, only slightly worse for wear. If I read just a few names of your teachers, you know the truth of what I say about the essential nature of a school. With the exception of Jack McCune, I will not read the names of those still teaching here, but listen to this roll call and know what a great school is: Grant and Arnds and Mejia and Ruge and Walch, Canons Martin and Lucas and Mullin, or Willis and Hogan and Sofield and Spicer, Gabritchevsky and True and Dirksen and Gordon. Stambaugh and Davis and Callaway and Scott, Wagner and Chasseaud and McGehee and Hurlbut, and then, last but not least, all the other ones you’re naming now in your heads because as a newcomer I left them out.

My most important job when I become headmaster is to sustain this tradition of teachers who inspire students, who demand the most of them, who believe that the education of the character, the spirit, and the body sustains the education of the intellect. Education is a moral venture. No teacher stays in the profession without wanting to be a hero to his students, without wanting to become that teacher who is remembered from one generation to the next. So what we should want most for St. Albans is that we remain a place where young men’s lives are profoundly shaped by their teachers. It’s a simple but sacred goal.
 
Excerpts from Vance Wilson’s address at the Alumni Dinner on March 3, 1999. Printed in the Spring 1999 Bulletin.
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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.