by Emily Layden
On several occasions, interviewees described relationships between students and faculty that they believed to be romantic or sexual. In each instance, we sought to corroborate the information through additional interviews and documentation. In total, we found five former faculty members to have been credibly accused of engaging in inappropriate relationships with students.
Four of the five relationships described are believed to have occurred in the 1970s and early 1980s, when the cultural understanding of appropriate romantic and sexual relationships differed vastly from today’s. All are believed to have been understood as consensual at the time. In our opinion, the extent to which the school was involved in cultivating an environment that fostered such relationships does not exceed the parameters of the cultural moment itself. Indeed, the community members who described these relationships by and large called upon the benefit of their own hindsight: individuals who were aware of the relationships described coming to the understanding that they may have been inappropriate only afterward, sometimes quite recently.
The remaining accusation has been entered into the public record via local news reporting. In 1995, Karen Mirro, then eighteen and a senior at the school, alleged that she was raped by a male faculty member in his on-campus apartment following a months-long romantic and physical courtship. The school’s handling of the case at the time reflected a lack of meaningful guidelines to follow under such circumstances. While we do not believe that school officials at the time made a conscious decision to protect a distinguished faculty member, we understand how a lack of transparency could contribute to a fear of retaliation. Responsiveness to these kinds of allegations should not be left to administrative discretion. A clearer process was and is necessary to ensure students and staff alike are heard and protected.
Recommendations
We believe that in matters of sexual misconduct, the nature of a boarding school community is both a weakness and its greatest strength. The benefit is that these communities tend to function as such, and are uniquely equipped to collaborate in the manner required for cultural change.
In this effort, it is important that the school assess both its response to alleged misconduct and its efforts to prevent misconduct. In the former, the school should swiftly establish a set of in-house policies on top of state and federal mandatory reporting and Title IX guidelines, e.g., a clearer, more explicitly delineated sexual harassment policy inclusive of an extensive anti-retaliation clause and an accessible avenue for confidential reporting; the establishment of a committee inclusive of school personnel outside administration (e.g., school counselors; a representative selection of faculty) that must convene in every instance of alleged misconduct.
Preventative work, however, is the key to creating lasting change within a community. Programming that helps students and staff alike to develop an understanding of healthy relationships, including education in sexual literacy and affirmative consent, will be the most beneficial in establishing a climate of respect. The school has made clear its intention to assume leadership in sociocultural change. We suggest that it utilize the Head of School’s retirement as an opportunity to carry out this mission, and that it invest in a progressive leader with a proven track record of prioritizing student safety.
Finally, our investigation underscored the extent to which the Atwater community is one consistently willing to do the work, and we advise the school to capitalize on this asset with the same ingenuity and inventiveness that has defined its operation for two centuries.
Commencement
The email comes from Linda Paulsen in mid-January, as it always does, with the subject line PLEASE READ: GRAD DRESSES, as it always says. If a member of the graduating class had thought the events of her senior year might have given the school cause to reexamine the dress code for Commencement, she would be disappointed: the contents of the email are more or less unchanged from the previous year. Per tradition, graduates of the class of 2016 are invited to purchase their own dress for Commencement. Atwater also maintains a small “closet” of gowns donated over the years; students may borrow from this collection for the occasion on a first-come, first-served basis. All dresses—whether they are chosen from the closet or purchased independently—must be approved by the Dean of Students by April 15. Should a student choose to purchase her gown rather than borrow one from the school closet, she should be advised of the expectations. Dresses should be no shorter than three inches above the knee and no longer than the ankle. They should be made of a single-texture fabric, e.g., silk, silk crepe, or satin, which is to say that embellished (e.g., beaded) fabrics and/or lace and lace overlays are not permitted. Plunging necklines are also not permitted, with the definition of “plunging” at Ms. Paulsen’s discretion. All dresses should be, of course, paper-white.
* * *
Collier Ludington has just the right kind of buzz. It’s midmorning on the first Saturday in June, and she and the forty-seven other members of the class of 2016 are gathered inside Trask, in an old sculpture studio near the back of the building. Outside, it is a perfect late-spring morning; the forecast calls for early-evening thunderstorms, but for now it is warm and bright, the sun cascading from spotless skies. Linda Paulsen wrangles her students like cattle, literally poking and prodding them when they dare to leave their confined space. The last thing she needs, she says, is for one of them to be in the bathroom when it’s time for the procession to start. The whole thing will fall apart! Like a house of cards! Like dominoes!
Collier wonders if Paulsen knows that probably a third or even half the students around her are also lightly buzzed, or a little high, or blissed out on benzos, if they’re hard-core like that. She probably does. She has been doing this for a long time. They keep it together, and that’s all that matters. Collier considers that of the things young women learn at Atwater, keeping it together while a little bit drunk may just be among the most valuable. On the other hand, it’s not like she wouldn’t have picked this up at home, had she gone to Greenwich Academy or even Greenwich High School. Her mother and grandmother have the talent in spades.
But she didn’t go to GA or to Greenwich High, and not because the latter is a public school (GHS is so well-resourced that it may as well be a private school). She came here, and in an hour or so she will be the fourth generation in her mother’s family to graduate from Atwater. Third-gen graduates are not uncommon at Atwater, but fourth gen is rarified air. Her mother had a slate of paper-white dresses shipped to the dorms from Neiman Marcus before Linda Paulsen’s email—PLEASE READ: GRAD DRESSES—dropped in Collier’s inbox. Like the dresses themselves, an Atwater graduation every three decades is a family tradition. She chose a wrap dress with a high slit and cascading ruffles along the neckline from the shoulders to her waist in both the front and back. It’s a little bit bohemian, something that she might have expected Addison to wear. Her mother had been surprised by the choice.
“Really?” she’d said over the phone the night Collier tried them on.
“She looks great, Mrs. L,” Addison hollered from where she sat on Collier’s bed, willing her voice into the speaker across the room. Collier wondered: Who will do this for her next year—be her casual ally, her easy and constant company?
“It’s just—” Meredith Ludington lowered her voice: “I threw that one in as an afterthought.”
* * *
Honestly, the white dresses are embarrassing, Mia Tavoletti thinks as Mrs. Brodie welcomes the community to the 202nd Atwater Commencement. It’s true that Karla Flores is killing it in that one-shouldered, trumpet-shaped gown that accentuates her teeny-tiny waist, and that Olivia Anderson is—as always—a vision, and that Mia’s own dress, an early-nineties silk-satin slip dress bought for $78 from a vintage store online, is perfectly fine, but for the most part her classmates just don’t look like themselves. She remembers sitting in the back of the student rows as a freshman at her first graduation and watching the seniors—none of them she knew well, but she could call u
p their names easily now, still: Delaney Mathis and Lidey Preston and Tatum Walsh—clop across the stage to shake hands with Mrs. Brodie and accept a single red rose, cradled in plastic and a few sad sprigs of baby’s breath, from the Dean of Faculty. Even Tatum Walsh, who looked like a Tatum, the kind of girl she expected to meet at boarding school, tall and tan with glossy brown hair that always seemed to catch the light, looked ridiculous that day in her paper-white gown. Nobody that isn’t a wedding dress designer makes a decent paper-white gown, and at her first Atwater graduation Mia understood what her mother meant when she said something looked cheap. None of the dresses fit quite right; the fabrics were too stiff or the seams stitched too thick, and so on this day—their graduation day, the crowning achievement of four years of toil and turmoil—the seniors looked suddenly like little girls playing dress-up.
But the poor tailoring was really just a superficial appraisal, one that hooked her attention while she honed a more sophisticated critique. By her sophomore year (Bea Corbin, Francesca Murray, Annika Stern) she’d developed a line of thinking about the white dresses. The whole connotation was off: purity, chastity, fetishized notions of innocence. Atwater—one of the finest schools for young women in the entire world, educator of CEOs and Pulitzer winners and MacArthur Geniuses and senators (but no presidents—yet)—dressed its graduates as brides on their graduation day.
She wrote editorials in the Heron. She drafted petitions that even members of ***Flawless refused to sign. She had meetings with Mrs. Brodie and Ms. Burdick and Linda Paulsen herself, each of whom listened attentively and made empty promises to visit the issue at the next faculty meeting. This year, she’d lost track of this particular battle—maybe they all had, or maybe Mia had thought that the thing would take care of itself: that the school would realize that this year was not the year to force its young women into wedding dresses. But like everyone else Linda Paulsen plowed forward undeterred; the email came regardless—PLEASE READ: GRAD DRESSES—and Mia was told in no uncertain terms that she would find herself a paper-white dress or she would not walk across the stage with her classmates on the first Saturday in June.
* * *
Like the rest of her classmates, Anjali Reddi had become obsessed with sleuthing out the identity of Atwater’s Commencement speaker, whose name—according to tradition—is kept under lock and key until the weekend-of. Much like the roles of the Vespers performers, the students delight in the guessing game, trying to trick faculty members into giving it up—just raise your left eyebrow if it’s Oprah—and hounding the children of Board members, who might have some intel. Anjali tried exactly this with Bryce Engel, whose grandmother stepped down two years ago after a decade on the Board, going so far as to take the freshman out for a coffee “study date” on a Sunday afternoon in May—but little Bryce with her freckled nose seemed to have genuinely no idea.
Mostly because of the Oprah fantasy, the speaker selection is always a little bit of a let-down, which is not to say that Atwater’s alumnae themselves are let-downs but rather that the pool of dream candidates is not rich with Atwater-adjacent individuals. Personally, Anjali had been rooting for a Supreme Court justice. Instead they’d been blessed with a writer, a woman in her mid- or late-thirties with pale skin and a blunt cut and wooden clogs peeking out from beneath her academic regalia. She’s a cultural critic whose work primarily focuses on feminist issues, Anjali reads from the program in her lap, and her writing has appeared at or in all of the major places: The Atlantic, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, The New York Times.
It is also tradition that relevant members of the senior class are invited to an evening tea with the Commencement speaker on the eve of graduation. Because Anjali is coeditor of the Heron and because the speaker is a journalist, Anjali was an obvious invite, and so she spent her last official night as an Atwater student in Patricia Brodie’s living room perched on a stiff and scratchy floral settee, bitter tea balanced in her palm, angling for the attention of a writer whose work she’d crammed-read hours before. Also in attendance: Collier Ludington (student council president); Hitomi Sakano (top in their class, although Atwater did not officially rank); Olivia Anderson (everyone’s favorite, and—Anjali was cynical enough to know—a diversity twofer, multiracial and gay); Addison Bowlsby (Collier’s best friend); Karla Flores (who was heading to Georgetown in the fall, the writer-in-question’s alma mater).
From her quick pre-tea research, Anjali knew why the school had invited this particular speaker: she’d written widely about sex and consent, about reproductive rights and equal pay, about gender parity in the workforce. She had a book coming out in the fall, a “deeply reported examination” (according to one reviewer) of the sex lives of young women (they never orgasmed! Young men always do!). Her invitation was an obvious PR stunt, one more Band-Aid on a gaping reputational wound. And yet, in spite of herself, in spite of the cynicism that had calcified around her this year like a hard shell, Anjali had been excited to meet this woman. She seemed like the kind of person they could talk to. Her writing talked about sex in a way that wasn’t plainly clinical; she seemed to use “oral sex” and “head” interchangeably.
Maybe it was because Mrs. Brodie was there. Maybe it was because the school was surely paying her a large honorarium. But the writer—a journalist!—had asked them the same questions as everyone else: Where are you going to school? What do you plan to major in? And what do you want to do with that? But don’t you really want to know if we’ve ever had an orgasm? Anjali had wondered, wildly, simultaneously embarrassed at the ludicrousness of her interior thoughts.
Anjali picks at a cuticle, tugging at a snag of skin she should have manicured away. Her dress has sleeves, fluted ones that flower like calla lilies from the crook of her elbow. The fabric puddles in her lap. The writer’s speech is indistinguishable from the speeches Anjali heard at her first three Atwater graduations, none of which she can remember in all that much detail. Do well but do good; be the generation of women leaders we need; do not forget the people who helped you along the way, thank your families, call your mother from time to time.
* * *
The conferring of degrees happens in a kind of two-step process: first, they are called up by row to the stage, where they stand in a line at the base of the short staircase; next, they are called by name to mount the temporary platform and receive their diplomas from Mrs. Brodie and a rose from Ms. Burdick and to shake hands with the speaker, a writer whose speech was just fine. Kat Foard is in the first part of this process, waiting for her name to be called—the President of the Board is at the Ds, now (“Cecily Davidson … Lucy Dawn … Claire DiNuzzo…”)—facing the audience and thinking about where to put her hands. She chose a dress by a smallish brand out of Venice Beach for the way it reminded her of something she’d danced in, once: A U-shaped neckline not unlike a leotard, with a waist seam cut at the base of her rib cage, stitched into a basic ankle-length ball-gown skirt. She fights the urge to fiddle with the single piece of jewelry she wears: a simple gold cross dangling from a chain at her neck, a Confirmation gift from her grandmother.
She had debated wearing the necklace this morning, putting it on, then taking it off, then putting it on again at the last minute. She wears it every day, although not during dance (because it gets in the way), but most days it stays tucked underneath her shirt. It’s not that her classmates have never seen it, or that she only ever wears tops with highish necklines, but rather that she isn’t typically wearing something that exposes as much of her sternum as this dress. Standing in Trask, waiting to process in, Kat noticed her classmates staring at the pendant on her chest.
You can be a lot of things at Atwater, Kat thinks: There’s a GSA and a club for students of color and a Torah study group (JDate, officially, but “Jew Club” for short, in what Kat guesses is an effort by its members to be ironic in an anti-PC kind of way) and a Kabbalah study group; there’s Veganomics, for students who are either actually vegan or just vegan-curious, and Glutoxic, f
or girls on gluten-free diets; Breathe is for girls interested in meditation. But there is no Bible study group; if you want to go to church on Sunday, you take a cab into town and a separate one back. There are a handful of other girls who wear crosses, Kat has noticed, but she gets the sense that they are family heirlooms or otherwise sentimental gifts, baby rings from baptisms and charms gifted on First Communions.
It’s been hard this year in particular to be the girl who wears a cross not as a piece of inheritance but as a personal reminder. Kat actually believes, and not just in God and heaven and hell and all that but also generally in the mandates of the Catholic Church. (She thinks it’s a little bit manipulative to call abortion murder, but she doesn’t think it should be legal. She thinks that birth control as in the pill is complicated but condoms should be okay; after all, wouldn’t widespread use of condoms lead to fewer abortions? Which is worse?) Everybody knows that Kat is waiting until marriage to have sex, and so in a year when everyone has wanted to talk about whether it was okay for a twentysomething teacher to have sex with an eighteen-year-old student, not a lot of people have wanted to talk to Kat.
* * *
The thunderstorms aren’t supposed to start until that evening—five or six—and Priya Sandhu knows that for the next few hours the air will thicken steadily until it cannot hold another invisible drop. Under the reception tent the air is already damp and heavy, the tarp above and around them acting as a kind of trap for the increasing humidity. She spots her parents right away: her father’s turban, her mother’s head scarf. They stand next to one another, motionless, shallow half smiles on their faces like wax figures. Her father’s temple gleams. The glass her mother holds sweats with condensation. A low-level anxiety reverberates somewhere at the bottom of Priya’s diaphragm, just below the seam of the empire-waist gown she ordered from Anthropologie as soon as the email from Linda Paulsen landed in her inbox.