O Captain, My Captain: About the Boarding School Stigma

As an elite liberal arts school that routinely tops lists of college rankings, Middlebury has a reputation for attracting a certain kind of student: predominantly white, relatively affluent, hailing from boarding and preparatory schools in the Northeast. Most of these students have been successful all their life academically, and have received very well-rounded educations. They have had access to resources like guidance counselors, college counselors, a high quality curriculum, well-paid teachers and beautiful campus facilities.

Historically, preparatory and boarding schools were, by design, intended to prepare their students to attend prestigious schools. Phillips Exeter Academy, for example, was considered more or less a pipeline for Harvard. Films like The Dead Poets Society dramatize the pressure these boarding school students feel to attend elite higher-education institutions, and the almost mythic nature of doing so.

This is the stereotype, at least. And the Campus set out to explore it: does it really exist? Does the stereotype work both ways — that is, does it create a culture here, a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy? The thoughts of students, professors and administrators help to tell the story.

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This semester, Professor of English and American Literatures Kathryn Kramer is teaching a course called “Boarding School: Fiction & Fact.” With the exploration of the boarding school experience forming the heart of the class, the course considers novels, memoirs and films, from Roald Dahl’s Boy to Anita Shreve’s Testimony.

Kramer noted that these works often feature humorous accounts of boarding school life wherein it is not uncommon to see characters forming tight, familial bonds with their peers and responding to everyday experiences “with a kind of irony” and admirable sense of adventure. Nonetheless, Kramer also said that the unfazed quality these characters project is, in reality, not always so effortless.

A particular example that crossed Kramer’s mind is S.R. Khan’s ethnography Privilege, which provides a rare glimpse into student life at the St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire. An institution that is highly steeped in tradition, St. Paul’s offers all students the chance to participate in a weekly formal dinner.

While the idea of a formal dinner seems simple and harmless on the surface, emotions can run deep.

“The weekly dinner teaches the students about manners, but it also teaches them to never look uncomfortable in a situation no matter how uncomfortable it is,” Kramer said.

Just as students strive to maintain a stoic air of “coolness under fire” in front of their peers, Kramer said that the boarding school can also become a contradictory — and confusing — institution that, on the surface, promotes student growth, but simultaneously binds them to seemingly unbreakable tradition.

“There is a paradoxical sense of real tradition and things having always been that way, but also a sense of open possibility,” Kramer said.

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To hear first-hand accounts of these places, we interviewed several students who went to boarding schools. They are all students of color who now attend Middlebury. We asked the students about their academic, social, athletic and other experiences, if and how their experiences prepared them for Middlebury, and what their perceptions are of the boarding school stigma.

Sunho Park ’18 — Deerfield Academy in Deerfield, Mass.


“I haven’t thought too much about it, but I guess going to Deerfield was somewhat of a middle ground between college prep and interest in learning. Students generally took five classes every year. Teachers were always willing to help us out, whether we were struggling or doing just fine. We had sit-down meals on certain nights of the week, and I would often see students staying behind with a faculty member and going over some class material. And, faculty apartments were often visited by students during study hall hours.

“Living with my friends on campus, I found all of the school year to be a lot of fun. There were so many ways to befriend everyone on campus, through class, dorm life, sports teams, community service, meals and so on. People often tend to stereotype the kind of students that attend boarding school, and yes, there are many students that fit that stereotype, but there are also many other students that come from different backgrounds who have their own stories to tell. It was great meeting these people, and becoming best friends with some of them.

“During my sophomore year, nine other students and I wanted to help out with the kitchen staff during meals, so we formed a group called ‘Dish Crew.’ Some of us were close friends from the start, but others only knew of each other vaguely. Many of us had different friend groups during our time at Deerfield and came from different backgrounds, but Dish Crew gave us a place to came together as classmates. I share this story because cliques do naturally form on campus according to similar backgrounds sometimes, but there are also many times where everyone just comes together.”

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Qadira Al-Mahi ’19 — Peddie School in Hightstown, NJ

“Peddie was pretty challenging academically, and the school induced much more anxiety than it cared to admit for the students. Peddie did prepare me well for college academics, though. Socially, it is a different environment for everyone. I personally did not have a good social experience at Peddie because of who I was, how everyone perceived me based on their preconceived notions of black women and where I come from, as well as the pervasive Eurocentric beauty standards. I obviously had friends, but all of my closest friends were students of color. We all ended up gravitating toward one another because no one else would accept us into their groups. This led us to form our own friend group.

“Despite the intense pressure to be outstanding academically and the stress that that induced, I will always look upon my boarding school experience positively because of the friends I had to get me through it. The people who made up the administration and the institution I do not look upon as fondly because many were ignorant, blatantly or subtly racist, some sexist and unwilling to make Peddie a more inclusive places for students of color when we, particularly the women of color, asked to work with them to make a more inclusive space. Even though that is not something I consider a positive, this aspect also prepared me for the lack of effort for inclusivity I knew I would face at an institution like Middlebury from both students and administration.

“My perception of boarding school versus public high school is that there is a bit more pretension among boarding school students than at public, and a bit more of a sense of entitlement to the education. I think we earn that in our own right by being there, which is fine, but when I think of public high school, I feel like people have less motivation to like school or figure out what they want. My perception is that they do not have as many resources or sometimes the same quality of resources — because the curriculums steer them to becoming worker bees instead of finding a passion, and more often than not the teachers themselves don’t even want to be at school, much less teach. That discourages people from wanting to be there even more.”

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Addis Fouche-Channer ’17 — Westover School in Middlebury, CT

“My Westover experience was definitely academically challenging. My middle school is a feeder for a lot of boarding schools, so I felt really prepared to do the schoolwork once I got there, but there were definitely times where I felt overwhelmed. I think because it was a relatively competitive environment everyone wanted to get into an impressive, name-brand college and that definitely fueled a lot of the students’ desire to do well.

“Westover was an all-girls school, so socially it was interesting. Everyone was really focused on being themselves, discovering who they were and having fun. Obviously, it wasn’t a utopia; there were definitely people who didn’t get along but it was generally great. My friend group of six girls still talk almost everyday, and I feel like I’ll be friends with those girls for a really long time.

“Comparing Middlebury to Westover is a little tough because of the addition of boys. I definitely noticed myself becoming more conscious of how I looked and what I wore after coming to college, and there is definitely more pressure to be perfect here. But I felt academically prepared to come here, and also I had been living on my own since I was 13 so that wasn’t too difficult.
“Honestly, many of the students here from public schools have the same ability to do well here as the ones from boarding schools because of general wealth inequality.”

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One student at Middlebury, Jessica Gutierrez ’17, went through the very experience Fouche-Channer described. After attending a charter high school in Chicago, Gutierrez was nominated for a scholarship to attend the College via the Posse Foundation, a non-profit organization that seeks to identify highly motivated student leaders at urban public high schools. The result of this rigorous selection process is a diverse group — or “Posse” — of scholars who are eager and ready to bring new dimensions to social and academic life at whichever institution they ultimately matriculate at.

Nonetheless, Gutierrez said that while the program does bring an incredible amount of diversity to campus, many students at Middlebury often remain shortsighted in their understanding of what constitutes a diverse campus. “I think Posse is often stereotyped by students as being a program that upholds ‘diversity’ as its sole purpose and hence attracts only a certain type of student. There is an overarching sentiment on campus that the large majority of Posse scholars are of a certain ethnicity and come from same socioeconomic class.”

Interestingly, Gutierrez’s remarks push us to a more nuanced — and important — discussion of campus diversity across both boarding schools and colleges: she noted that the very conception many students hold of ‘diversity’ is stereotypical and restricted to a certain kind of individual.“In my experience, the Posse program is stigmatized as bringing diversity to the campus, but the diversity within each Posse is not recognized. I have met Posse students who come from so many different academic, socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds.”

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While the consensus seemed to suggest that there is nothing inherently wrong with seeking a quality private education for high school, the boarding school experience still has a stigma, whether deserved or not, associated with it — as a place of entrenched privilege by which the families who least need class ascendancy benefit the most. But most — if not all — of the country’s most sought-after boarding schools, following in the footsteps of elite colleges and universities, are taking deliberate actions to increase campus diversity through programs such as the Posse Foundation, affirmative action and class-conscious admissions practices. Ultimately, as Kramer noted in her interview, it remains up to us to observe whether boarding schools are actively bringing progressive “change to the culture” of secondary and higher education, or whether the students are becoming “honorary members” of age-old institutions that keep privilege in the hands that hold it.

The Campus hopes to run more stories in the future evaluating and deconstructing the boarding school stigma at Middlebury. To add your voice to the conversation, please email campus@middlebury.edu.