2009 Founder's Award Recipient
Citation for Richard Smith '66 (see remarks below)
Awarded at assembly on May 22, 2009

Richard Smith - You have been generous to Exeter in every way, giving freely of your time, wisdom and resources as a trustee, philanthropic leader, class volunteer and valuable member of numerous committees. For more than two decades the Academy has consulted you on matters as diverse as facility endowment, faculty compensation and financial aid because your acumen for analysis, penchant for probing questions and point of view consistently reflect the union of goodness and knowledge which this institution so highly values. And, while you prefer to remain out of the limelight, we honor you today for the substantive and often groundbreaking contributions you have made to nearly every facet of this Academy community.

As a young student, you applied for a scholarship to the Academy at the suggestion of your older brother, Jack, who learned of Exeter’s academic rigor and generous scholarships from his peers at MIT. As a result, you became the first in your family to attend a private secondary school. Jack often steered you toward rewarding opportunities but, as you later said, it was his recommendation of Exeter that you still hold most dear.

While the D you received in math on that first report card was humbling, you quickly began to appreciate the widely shared attitude at Exeter that excellence was, or should be, the norm. In time, as you engaged in vigorous Harkness discussions, served as president of your class, made tackles on the gridiron and, yes, played Frisbee in the corridors of Hoyt Hall, you experienced the confidence that comes with mastering Exeter’s manifold challenges.

A man who always cared about ideas, you earned a B.A. at Princeton and a Ph.D. in philosophy at Yale. A brief foray into teaching gave way to an interest in business, and you earned an M.B.A. at Harvard Business School. You took a position as a management consultant at Boston Consulting Group and went on to become a founding principal of Bay Resource Corporation, which establishes, finances and develops operating businesses.

As you and your wife, Carol Marine, raised two children, you discovered and continue to take pleasure in the joys of skiing in Utah, mountain biking in New England and eating, well, anywhere. A seasoned alpinist, you still appreciate the challenge of skiing off-piste and can pick a path through untracked terrain that few others can see, let alone navigate. So, too, do you greet the challenges in your work on behalf of the Academy.

Rick, you have never lost sight of the tremendous opportunities Exeter provided you and the investment it made in you. In all you do for the Academy you seek to provide the same experience if not a better one for future generations. Even before becoming a trustee in 1993 you turned a critical eye toward the composition of Exeter’s student body, concerned about affordability and the threatened erosion of the Academy’s longstanding meritocracy. Your meticulous historical research and economic analysis inspired the trustees to focus attention on the challenges facing middle-income applicants and their families.

In true fashion, your passion carried you beyond simply exposing the problem to assuming a leadership role in designing a response. With your support the Academy launched the $40 million middle-income scholarship initiative, which enabled Exeter to retain the gains it had made in offering aid to lower-income families while supplementing the resources available to middle-income families.

Meanwhile, you encouraged the Academy to expand its efforts to bring word of Exeter to talented and motivated students of varying economic circumstances throughout the world. You also provided resources to fuel those efforts. Rick, there are few among us who have played such a vital role in the unprecedented growth of Exeter’s financial aid program in the 21st century.

You have advanced our school in many other respects as well. As a trustee, you were indispensable to discussions on matters ranging from the operating budget to the Academy Master Plan to the search for the school’s 13th principal. You also provided philanthropic leadership to numerous projects that enhanced the campus, among them the state-of-the-art Phelps Science Center.

You served on The Exeter Initiatives leadership committee and dedicated countless hours as a class volunteer. And you and Carol have honored the power of great teaching by supporting our esteemed faculty in many ways, including the creation of the John E. and Mary E. Smith Memorial Chair in Mathematics, named in honor of your parents.

A self-effacing man, you have never sought recognition for the inestimable time, insights and resources you have provided to the Academy. We understand that you prefer to be the man behind the curtain rather than the actor at center stage. Still, your extraordinary generosity and non sibi spirit cry out for recognition, and we thank you for allowing us to honor you today with the 2009 Founder’s Day Award.

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Rick Smith '66 - Founder's Day Remarks
Delivered during a special assembly on May 22, 2009

Good morning Exeter. Monica, what a generous citation that was.

Because there is no other institution whose high regard means more to me, I won’t even try to downplay my delight in this award. Consider the distinguished company it puts me in. Past recipients include such faculty stars as Henry Bragdon, Jack Adkins and Ransom Lynch, whose grade of D- on my first math exam--what I thought was my strong suit--indicated the slope of the hill I faced here. They include two principals, Steve Kurtz and Kendra O’Donnell, who led Exeter as it reshaped its culture and restored financial credibility in the last part of the 20th century. Also Hammy Bissell, the man who crafted the prototype of Exeter’s modern day approach to seeking out financial aid students. And alumni leaders such as Jim Rogers, Tucker Anderson, Ricardo Mestres, Rob Shapiro and Clint Gilbert--people whose application of talent, energy and affection for Exeter I have admired first hand. Plus others I know less well--this is an all star lineup that I have just joined. Not bad for a kid who spent much of his first year here convinced that the Academy would eventually recognize him as an admissions’ mistake and move to correct its error. If any of you have ever felt this way, take heart.

I see many people here today with whom I have shared aspects of my involvement with Exeter. Let me acknowledge a handful. First, of course, my family: my wife, Carol, our son, Lee and our daughter, Kate. Also, my brothers, Jack and Bill Smith. Neither of them went to Exeter, but both played parts in my coming here.

As a former recipient of this award, Kendra O’Donnell would have been invited today as a matter of course. To me, she is a special guest. While coincidental that she was principal when I started to get involved with Exeter as an adult, it was no coincidence that she moved reform and expansion of financial aid up on Exeter’s list of priorities at a time when that list was decidedly crowded.

Finally, Mary Gorman, now Associate Provost and Executive Officer at Dartmouth, who was a junior member of the Treasurer’s staff in 1992 when Kendra assigned her to work with me on financial aid. She was a fantastic collaborator, with a great nose for data and resources and a talent for making sense of them. She became, and has remained, a good friend and ski buddy.

I want to focus these remarks on three roles in which I have tried to play a part in renewing some of Exeter’s long standing values and in promoting the school’s endurance. Of course, none of these would have happened without the unlikely event of my becoming an Exeter student first. As I noted, neither of my brothers had come here, nor had anyone else I knew. Indeed, I had never heard of Exeter and my only image of boarding school life came from TV portrayals of military academies.

But, like many here, I had a mentor. My oldest brother, Jack, encouraged my parents and me to look into Exeter and Andover for my high school education based on the experience that a brother of one of his colleague’s was having at Andover with the benefit of a scholarship. Actually, he encouraged us to look into Andover and Exeter, but we soon corrected the order.

For our parents, raising three sons and having us at home could not have meant more. But they also knew how to let go and support us in pursuing opportunities--especially educational opportunities. Even though neither of them had a college degree, they had heard of Exeter and Andover and once the prospect of financial aid was clear, they seconded Jack’s encouragement without hesitation, as did my brother, Bill.

Intrigued, but also a little uncertain, I took the bait, leading to my arrival here for the first time as a new Lower in the fall of 1963.

Exeter was tough and I worked hard. Eventually, that initial D- and the sense of being an admissions mistake gave way to a reasonably strong record and a sense of being engaged in a lively intellectual exploration with a group of interesting teachers, peers and ideas. Along with its challenges, Exeter also conveyed a belief that they mattered and a confident expectation that I could meet them. Fortunately, I had enough presence to recognize this fruitful combination as it was playing out day-to-day. As a result, I spent most of my time as a student pleased to be here--and relatively oblivious to the harsh traits that grated on others in those days. One more thing: I found Exeter’s culture genuine in being indifferent to my status as a scholarship student and in valuing my presence for what I contributed to life here.

In June of 1966 I left Exeter grateful for the financial aid that had enabled me to enroll, enriched by the experience and expecting that, apart from joining the ranks of loyal donors, my involvement with Exeter was over.

And so it was until the early 1990s when I heard Kendra O’Donnell outline her interest in reviewing Exeter’s financial aid program in search of ways to strengthen it. I wrote a letter supporting the initiative and, in short order, she enlisted me to lead it.

So began the most intensive project I have worked on at Exeter as an adult, taking several years, with many significant participants, especially Mary Gorman. We developed a reasonably thorough understanding of Exeter’s aid resources and policies over an extended period (going back to the early 1800s), how they related to changes in family incomes in the United States and how Exeter compared to other institutions. Two important things we discovered were: first, that even with relatively constrained aid resources in the early 1990s, Exeter was essentially even with such need blind institutions as Harvard and Princeton in enrolling students from low income families and was out performing peer schools; and, second, that Exeter’s success in enrolling students needing aid from somewhat higher income families had declined significantly from the 1960s to the 1990s.

One obvious "solution" would have been simply to shift some aid resources away from lower income families. But no one at Exeter wanted to backtrack. Instead, Kendra thought we had assembled a case for adding resources that would appeal to Exeter’s donors. The trustees approved her recommendation and launched a successful effort to raise $40 million to support a range of revised aid policies. The Kendra Sterns O’Donnell scholarships that some of you have today are among the lasting results of this effort.

As a former aid student, it was immensely satisfying to be involved in this renewal of Exeter’s long commitment to enrolling "youth from every quarter." Seeing its most recent extension in the trustees’ announcement two years ago of 100% aid for students from families with incomes under $75,000 made the satisfaction even better.

In 1996 I accepted another assignment, serving on the Principal’s Search Committee as the trustees prepared to exercise their responsibility of selecting a successor to Principal O’Donnell. This was an intense commitment over a period of 6 months or so, but, like my role in the aid initiative, it benefited from circumstances aligned in favor of success. Last May, in his remarks upon receiving the 2008 Founders Day Award, Jim Rogers described how much he had learned in leading this committee. He was such a good student of the process, integrating faculty and trustees in a Harkness-style effort, tapping into shared judgment and individual strengths, that the job for the rest of us was pretty easy. And, we had Ty Tingley as our lead candidate; our work was bound to look good.

The final role I will note did not come with a lot of momentum behind it. That’s probably because I am one of the few people who could get excited about an arcane point of finance such as Exeter’s policy of securing endowment support for the long term renewal of new facilities before building them.

Deferred maintenance was a major problem when I became a trustee. Much of the campus was visibly run down and underlying conditions were getting worse. The only good news was that several years earlier the administration and trustees had recognized the problem and initiated a long term plan to close the gap between ongoing wear and tear and spending on upkeep projects. Today, Exeter has a much better maintained campus--thanks to persistent attention both to understanding the complexities of its deferred maintenance and to catching up. Even so, the catching up is far from done--indeed, part of the progress has been discovering how much larger the backlog was than anyone anticipated in the early 1990s. And, of course, current financial conditions are only amplifying the remaining challenge.

The trustees who initiated this process had also discussed and generally supported requiring advance funding for long term renewal of any new building. However, some had reservations. The common "best" practice among schools has been to proceed with a new building once there is reliable funding for construction. Some thought that asking donors to fund renewal as well would amount to asking them to pay for a building twice. Moreover, even if an institution could raise endowment gifts to fund renewal projects in the distant future, such gifts might cannibalize support for projects of immediate value to current students, faculty and school leadership.

To me, the requirement seemed like an important corollary of the effort to address Exeter’s existing deferred maintenance. Building new facilities without endowing their renewal would end up creating a new deferred maintenance challenge for a future generation. I thought that good trusteeship called for biting the bullet.

For several years, discussions remained largely theoretical since Exeter was not considering major new building projects. That changed when planning began for the Phelps Science Center, Exeter’s largest building project at least since the Harkness buildings of the 1930s. Funding construction of this project was clearly going to be a challenge even without an endowment for renewal. I believed that by explaining its approach to deferred maintenance Exeter could gain additional backing for its financial prudence. As my trustee colleagues from that time can attest, I expressed my belief with some frequency and passion. Not that anyone was actively against raising the endowment funds. Rather, some were just more focused on upgrading Exeter’s ability to deliver a strong science program as soon as possible.

In the end, we succeeded in funding the science center complete with an endowment for renewal, and with the trustees directing our gifts to that endowment. I take particular delight in this outcome because Exeter gained more than a wonderful new facility. It also made a significant step towards embedding this kind of funding requirement into the school’s DNA. Not that this strand will ever rank with John Phillips’ commitments to "goodness and knowledge" and "youth from every quarter." But it has won Exeter even more confidence among donors and admiration among leaders in education. Moreover, and most importantly in my view, it makes Exeter more durable. It reduces the risk that a ballooning backlog of deferred maintenance coming in combination with some future financial downturn will convert painful adjustments into catastrophic ones. I believe good things can come from attention to arcane principles.

So, I have had the good fortune of a wonderful student experience leading, unexpectedly, to a second chance to be significantly involved with Exeter as an adult. Some of you may have that chance. Take it and you could have one of the most satisfying experiences of your life. Who knows, you might even help sustain the opportunity for some kid 50 years from now to be steered here by his or her older sibling. I hope so.

For now, I thank you for your goodwill and your attention this morning.

 

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