Wallingford, Conn.
The Lanphier Center, dedicated in 2015, is the latest addition to the campus of Choate Rosemary Hall, one of America’s most prestigious prep schools. Choate has educated leaders and figures across the American spectrum since its founding in 1896, from John F. Kennedy and Adlai Stevenson to Paul Giamatti and Ivanka Trump. The new multimillion-dollar facility for mathematics and computer science even houses a robotics lab. It was donated by Edward Lanphier (class of ’74) and his wife, Cameron. The two met while they were both teaching at the school after college. I went to Choate, and Lanphier nearly failed me in biology. He gave me a break, he told me on graduation day in 1980, because, he reasoned, I wasn’t there for biology. He, too, went on to other things, making a fortune in the biotech industry. Not all my teachers made good.
Last month, Choate released a report written by a former federal prosecutor hired by the school to investigate charges of teachers sexually abusing their students. It is a sad and distressing account of adults, heterosexual and homosexual, preying on children over more than half a century.
One paragraph from the report sums it all up:
In other words, they’ve been carrying it for most of their lives.
It was only in 2013 that this ugly history began to catch official attention. A male student from the class of 1963 recounted in an entry submitted for a reunion yearbook how a male teacher had sexually assaulted him. The same year, a female student from the class of 1988 reported that a male teacher had sexually abused her.
Child sex abuse scandals were already in the news. In 2011, Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky was arrested and charged with 52 counts of sexual abuse of young boys. A year later, the New York Times Magazine published a story about male teachers’ rampant sexual abuse of students at Horace Mann, a private school in Riverdale, the well-to-do Bronx neighborhood. Choate wanted to get out in front of a looming problem.
The school appointed associate headmaster Kathleen Lyons Wallace to serve as “point person for receiving reports of past or present sexual misconduct.” In March 2016, a Boston Globe reporter queried the school for a story regarding a female student who said that two teachers had sex with her while she was at Choate in the early 1990s. Wallace reached out to the former student, and then encouraged other former students to come forward to report cases of abuse. In October 2016, the Globe published its article, and soon after Choate ordered a more comprehensive investigation. Anyone “with possible knowledge of sexual misconduct by faculty or staff” was urged to contact the school, and 42 graduates, parents, and current and former faculty members responded. Investigators were able to corroborate reports of 12 teachers sexually abusing students.
The oldest case involved a classics teacher, John Joseph, whose career stretched from 1944 to 1977, the year I arrived. Students always spoke of him as a great teacher and a kindly man, wise and knowing. His course in etymology was legendary, and the school named its student activities center for him after his death in 1984. He taught generations of Choate boys, at least three of whom, according to the report, he molested.
William Cobbett taught art history and economics from 1969 to 2010 and pressured a 17-year-old girl to sleep with him. When he drove her to his house for sex, he told her to hide under a blanket. He knew what he was doing was wrong.
The worst incident involved a Spanish teacher, Jaime Rivera-Murillo, who raped a female student on a study abroad trip to Costa Rica in 1999. Choate fired him, but did not report the crime or even notify other schools where he applied for work about the reason for his firing. Several schools hired him because an institution designed to produce the country’s leaders didn’t tell them that he had raped a child.
School authorities frequently offered abusers an easy exit. I suspect this is why two of the school’s former headmasters were compelled to resign from the board of trustees. It is one of the questions I wanted to ask Wallace, who according to alumni who know her is an excellent teacher and a tough administrator—yet another woman, said one alumna I spoke with, tasked to clean up after dangerously irresponsible men. The school’s communications department decided it was better she not speak with a journalist. I was invited, as an alumnus, however, to make a report if I knew about some case of sexual abuse.
Sure I knew. Everyone knew.
Chip Lowery was my soccer coach. He was in his mid-30s, built like a medium-size teenager with a beard and thinning hair. In retrospect, it’s not hard to see why teenage girls might have been attracted to his intense gaze, focused somewhere off in the distance. It’s emblematic of a certain kind of mystery easily accessible to kids raised on Westerns and detective shows. Only later do you learn that the long stare means someone isn’t entirely present, perhaps distracted by an old hurt. The girls were too young to see the warning sign.
Lowery was a brilliant teacher of literature and writing who helped his students find things in themselves they could never lose. Teaching is an act of love. To help someone know is a gift—after life, it is the greatest gift one human can give another, and the recipient is grateful for life. Lowery was one of my English teachers, and two of my siblings had him and agree that he was one of their favorites.
As the report explains, “ ’it was known among certain students that certain teachers were having sex with students’ and that Lowery was one of these teachers.” Certain students? “But what were we supposed to do?” one schoolmate asked me recently. “We were going to go to senior faculty and say that Mr. Lowery has all these girls hanging around the dorm?”
There were always teachers who had girls hanging around them. A schoolmate who returned to teach at Choate once he finished college began to see more clearly why the girls had ignored us as students and swarmed the younger male teachers. “We had nothing to offer girls our age. Teenage girls are much more sophisticated and more graceful than boys the same age. You remember what we were like at 15,” he said, chopping his arms in the air like a robot.
It was a matter of fact that the girls preferred older boys—the seniors, the postgraduate students recruited to play hockey or football, college students. For 16-year-old boys, there may seem to be no real difference between a 19-year-old dating an attractive girl in our class and a man in his early 30s dating her. And this is one reason why teenage boys are not charged with designing the social fabric.
But what about the administration? Why didn’t the people who were supposed to enforce the borders step in? I am sure there are many reasons, all recognizably human, that they didn’t: from weakness and vanity to lust and cruelty and friendship and love. There are, of course, high school girls who run off with their teachers and form a couple who cherish each other their whole lives. The newly elected president of France is celebrated for his marriage to a woman he met when she, a quarter-century older, was his teacher. And yet it is hard not to believe that among the many now gushing over Emmanuel Macron’s devotion to his older wife are parents who have had to sort through the wreckage of a teenage child’s intimate entanglement with an authority figure.
The cost is high, not just to the children who were targeted and their families. Graduates I spoke with told me that since publication of the report last month they’d been reflecting on their time at Choate. They remain respectful of the privilege—financial and social—afforded them in attending such a prestigious school, and they cherish the friendships made there, including among the school’s many gifted and generous teachers and administrators. But there are doubts where there weren’t before.
One alumna described to me how difficult it was for girls to get the attention of the most popular teachers, invariably male. Usually they were also the coaches of the most successful sports team and attracted large cult followings of male athletes. The only way the girls could win the attention of these esteemed elders was by their schoolwork—and they were almost always better students than the boys—with their intellectual charisma, their happy and outspoken ambitions to achieve all sorts of things in life, and their plain and joyous determination to make it all come true. This was the glory of the school for her. But maybe, she says now, some of those teachers were just sizing her up, seeing if she’d have sex with them. ¨
Lee Smith is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
