Founder's Day Award Recipient
Citation for Fred E. Pittman '51
Awarded at the Founder's Day assembly on May 16, 2003

Fred E. Pittman—For over 50 years, you have sung the praises of the education you encountered during your year at Exeter, a year you often call the most meaningful one of your life. Your enduring love of the Academy has embraced and enabled what is best about Exeter today, helping to keep this a place where talented people discover in themselves and each other the strengths, knowledge, passions and principles they will bring to the world.

For the past 15 years, you have, with your characteristic blend of doggedness and spark, applied your considerable and creative energies to both finding applicants from your region of the country and providing scholarships for them. Like Hammy Bissell, you have given much of yourself to supporting Exeter's mission of enrolling youth from every quarter. It is your hope that some of those whom you launch as Exonians will return to the South, just as you have.

In 1950, you were valedictorian of your high school class in the small Delta town of Cleveland, Mississippi. You dreamed of attending Yale but realized you had neither sufficient money nor academic foundation. Then you learned of Exeter and were soon a world away from home on a scholarship at an elite Northern boarding school, a smart boy from Mississippi who knew a lot about what was in books, but little of what was out in the world. That soon changed. At Exeter, you relished the intellectual and democratic milieu and threw yourself into music. If at first you were lost, the opportunity to expand your horizons was not lost on you. Success at Exeter was your first step toward becoming a Renaissance man, at home in the world.

You attended Yale, on scholarship. Already a proponent of the liberal arts, you majored in English. You then won a scholarship to attend medical school in New York, earned a Ph.D. in England and studied in Paris. In 1969, desiring to use your training in the South, you moved to Charleston, South Carolina, where you enjoyed a successful career as a gastroenterologist, researcher and professor of medicine until retiring in 1996. You have studied painting, sculpture and voice, are active in community theater and a host of civic enterprises, and travel the globe. Meanwhile, you and your wife, Joan, raised three children on whom you exercised, to good effect, your passions for education and self-challenge.

In 1987, due to prudent investing for which you always credit others, you found yourself able to do for Exeter what had been done for you. With vision and attention to detail, you established the Mississippi and South Carolina Trust, which provides scholarships to Exeter for qualified students from those states. To help find those students, you have personally built an unusually broad network of recruiting contacts through Charleston's community theater, ministries, Chamber of Commerce and colleges, selling Exeter in a region where boarding school has long been a hard sell. Thanks to you, since the Trust's first disbursements, 14 students have come to Exeter who otherwise would not have. You believe Exeter can and should help to justify the existence of elite institutions in a democratic society by reaching out to other educational communities. To that end, the Trust has sent students to our summer sessions and teachers to our summer teaching institutes, further seeding Exeter with Southern talent and the South with Exeter pedagogy.

To ensure that Exonians are truly well educated, you also generously support our music program in many ways, from making specific department programs possible to sending brochures across the country so friends might attend choir tour concerts and making heroic efforts to do so yourself.

You have been described as a man of wonderful, open enthusiasm in a society that generally rewards disguising one's hand. You readily share your life with others and the energy with which you pursue all the things that interest you is infectious. Your lively correspondence with members of the faculty and staff is full of details about your travels and travails, family news, pet peeves and projects and ideas for making Exeter a better place. You clearly believe in exploring and challenging the world around you and in taking your place among those who act, not in the interest of self-promotion, but out of a genuine desire to serve. You have served Exeter mightily with a rare combination of fiscal generosity and the kind of energetic legwork that truly makes us a richer place, one student at a time. It is our pleasure, Dr. Pittman, not only to thank you for your inspired support of this institution, but also to honor you with this Founder's Day Award.

Click here to read remarks

back to top