Fear and Self-Loathing at the Elite Boarding School Conference

Skewed priorities in the mad scramble towards "progressive" education

By Micah E. Weiss

Most people have never heard of The Association of Boarding Schools, or TABS, for short.  Even those lucky enough to have attended one of the classic member institutions—Exeter, Choate, Deerfield, Andover—don’t have any idea that TABS exists. However, if you are a boarding school administrator on one of several continents (a handful of United Kingdom and Australian schools are also members), you may have attended their annual conference, held just a few months ago in Washington, DC.

I am one of those administrators.

Nowhere have I seen the contradictions of the current American Elite more pronounced than at this gathering.  At its core was the topic in everyone’s mind, and in one way or another on everyone’s lips, dominating the sessions, the vendor’s hall, and the TABS organization itself: How do the attending institutions, as hallowed as the Ivy League, with financial endowments and facilities to match, align with, or even get out ahead of, the newly elevated “progressive” values of Ivy League schools for which they act as a feeder system?

A complicating factor that TABS member-schools face is how to accomplish this “progress,” or at least appear to be doing a great deal towards that “progress,” while not making any strenuous demands or requiring any serious sacrifices of an elite and moneyed clientele.  An institution must appear to be forward thinking, progressive, dedicated to taking the youths in their charge and forging them into responsible “global citizens,” while not requiring those “global citizens” to diverge from the path their elite parents expect of them.  Investing in Green Tech with dubious environmental benefits?  Absolutely.  Voluntourism?  Certainly encouraged—college applications aren’t going to pad themselves.  However, not owning a slave-labor built iPhone with an environmentally destructive lithium battery, or refraining from the carbon-intensive trips to the developing world, or overusing energy-intensive social media platforms?  Maybe not so much.

Over the course of the three-day conference, there were sessions suggesting that since schools have lost the battle against social media use, they could promote “responsible” social media use—for example, a presentation by a well-intentioned company that just so happens to offer such a platform to schools for a modest fee.  Another session explained how to completely revolutionize grading by moving from that draconian A, B, C, D, F, scale to the enlightened, and totally different, 1, 2, 3, 4 point “Mastery” system (don’t worry, the back end of the grading software—also available for a modest fee—will still create a “normal” transcript for college admissions officers to peruse).  Yet another session proposed that schools join in the brave, and not at all begging for a lawsuit, endeavor of instituting “all gender” dorms.  On the list of questionable ideas, this one seemed to have the most forced enthusiasm and least understanding of the average adolescent boy’s sex drive.  “No heterosexual boy would wear a dress to get into a girl’s dorm,” one fellow administrator was heard to remark.  My response: “Wanna bet?”

Side note on intentions: these are amongst the most well-meaning people I’ve met.  They believe in making the world a better place, and not many flatter themselves that they are succeeding.  They are hard working, dedicated, and true of heart.  None of the attendees got into education to get rich, and few for recognition.  All want or wanted to help students grow and succeed in their lives.  And I’m convinced at least some feel as I do about much of what I am commenting on.  

Paving the path to hell is the work of legions.

And nowhere did the TABS National Conference approach so near a collapse under the weight of its own well-intended contradictions than with the contrast formed by the two very different keynote speakers and their speeches’ tones, themes, and content.

The first was Crystal Williams, the current president of the Rhode Island School of Design.  She is a black intellectual poet who made her name and career running Boston University’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion program (she called it Social Equity, and Inclusion—a distinction without a difference, hence DEI from here on).  Her carefully crafted speech framed herself as a straight talker, admonishing the audience, or threatening the audience with admonishment, for not being serious about DEI.  She walked through the historical development of DEI and its applications today, barely hiding the Critical Race Theory within, carefully and subtly referring to Kimberlé Crenshaw (not by name), Dereck Bell (not by name), and working her way through the bad-ideas Hall of Fame to Ibram X. Kendi (also, not referenced by name).  She insisted that the way "we make change" is by capturing the budgeting of the institutions in which we work and making DEI "work" the focus of every department, integrating it into all aspects of our institutions.  She told a stunning anecdote wherein she heard a well-meaning administrator declare that “we will need to make sacrifices” to properly implement DEI in their institution–the name of which was omitted from the anecdote.  Her response to that colleague was to lecture him, and then us all, on how backwards that kind of thinking is, how there are no “zero sum games” when the “work” is this important: that the ideology needs (echoing Kendi again) to be embodied in our institutional frameworks from beginning to end, top to bottom, if “we” are ever going to take “the work” seriously and make change; that DEI must subsume all the resources of every department.  She insisted that representation was central and overcorrection in representation was going to be required.  She was smart, polished, eloquent, funny-ish, pedantic, smug, self-satisfied, arrogant.  Her tone was nearly triumphant.  She was so self-possessed and calm, she didn’t so much lean as lounge at the podium like she would at her own kitchen counter—she knew she faced a crowd falling all over itself to make her feel important, welcomed, and praised—which, after her speech, the white man from TABS was more than happy to do in one of most grotesque displays of servile fawning I have ever been mortified to watch.  The crowd applauded.  I did not applaud, but was only mildly annoyed as I had known from the content of her introduction what was coming.

The Second Keynote speaker was different.  Her name is Shabana Basij-Rasikh, an Afghani woman who was lucky enough to get an education here, who praised America as the best place in the world for immigrants (something I heard echoed by both of the immigrant cab drivers I had that weekend) and whose boarding school for girls in Kabul, SOLA, had to be evacuated just as her first cohort of girls were entering their final year of high school. She has moved her school to an oddly welcoming Rwanda and spends her time traveling around the developed world fundraising so that she can reopen her school and hopefully expand it as a place for girls who escape Afghanistan.  Ms. Basij-Rasikh started SOLA as an undergrad at Middlebury, a school she attended on scholarship after getting a secondary education, thanks to the American occupation. She has faced constant death threats since she started that project in the early aughts.  Her school building in Kabul was built like a fortress.  Her girls and their families, particularly their fathers, faced death threats throughout the school’s existence.  She explained how a boarding environment was important for Afghan girls because of the threats, because of oppressive familial expectations, because of forced marriages, acid attacks, possible kidnappings, rapes, and murder that they face going to and from local schools, and that was when girls were allowed to go to school at all.  Now, of course, they are not.  She was not polished, well-spoken, or funny-ish.  She did not read a speech or have notes, or even stand at the podium.  She simply told her story in imperfect English, her voice shaking at times with emotion.  She admonished no one but our media for turning the fall of Afghanistan (a fall she lived through and subsequently had to escape) into exploitative theater, and for forgetting it ever happened as soon as the Russian invasion of Ukraine began.  She did not use jargon, or coded language, or make a single debatable ideological point—though she used the word “Patriarchy” once, and unlike most Americans who use it, she was referring to an actual patriarchy.  She almost burst into tears on stage as she mentioned her first cohort of girls who could not graduate, girls she's known since they were 12 (enrolled in 6th grade to be safe), and many in the crowd were not able to withhold tears of their own.

The contrast between concrete oppression and DEI abstraction was provocative.  The reality of the tragedy of SOLA–and the hope–was such that Ms. Williams’ triumph disintegrated, dissipated, and then clarified into an anemic American solipsism.  

It is a small consolation (literally, not ironically) that 41 of the schools represented at TABS helped Ms. Basij-Rasikh by taking two of her students each, essentially adopting them; sponsoring them here in the US so they could complete their schooling at their institutions while she finishes the work of building the school in Rwanda.  The girls have been provided with host-family placements, stipends for clothing, materials, books, and the like, and are on full scholarships.  It was something that those schools could do, could afford to do, and I applaud them for it.

Despite that, I was and still am ashamed of myself and my fellow “educators.”  And when I think of those girls, of Ms. Dasij-Rasikh’s courage, the shame burns.  And the anger.

Then there was the fear—or rather, the contrasting fears.  After Ms. Williams’ speech I could not speak with the co-attendee from my school about what he thought and what I thought.  We walked from the ballroom, headed for the elevator, and as we moved, we kept starting and stopping our conversation because conference goers kept walking by, or joining us in the elevator, or we'd round a corner, and we'd see someone.  We would both instinctively shut our mouths; after all, our names, our roles, and our school’s name were printed on our lanyards, and we knew it.  My colleague realized this before I did a few moments earlier when he said to me, “We’re all standing, gotta stand, gotta stand,” as the crowd applauded after Ms. Williams’ speech.  And though I did not clap—I stood.  Because of the fear.  What if the woman I recognized from an earlier session who was sitting behind me recognized me and remembered my name?  What if we were overheard?  What if the internets got wind of that school whose white male administrators disapproved of that DEI speech?  How fast would our school sink were we “outed” or “canceled” in that way?  That fear was real, and it followed us—it follows me now as I publish this for public consumption.

But again, Ms. Basij-Rasikh’s example was ours to see under fear of a very different kind.  The TABS organizers announced that they could not record or stream her speech because of the continued threat of death under which she lives.  The chance that someone local might find out where she was giving her speech in real time and try to murder her was strong enough to take such precautions.  I expect there are zero sum games in education when assassination is part of the equation.

The DEI industry is growing rapidly.  A recent estimate has predicted that it will command $15+ billion a year worldwide by 2026, double the $7+ billion from 2020.  So here I ask all my fellow administrators, all of us “educators,” including Ms. Williams: How much will we spend next year on DEI at our institutions while SOLA struggles to become a school again?  How many trainings will we nod through, how much cash and lip-service will we pay DEI training servicers to help us root out the last vestiges of our original sin? How much time will we spend doing so, while the women of Afghanistan are beaten down once again?  The SOLA girls are graduating this year, finally.  Ohio State University, just to pick one major institution, paid out $13+ million in DEI department salaries last year, enough for tuition, room, and board for 260 SOLA graduates, if ever there were that many.  Will we support them?

The mote and the beam of Matthew 7:5, which calls out hypocrisy, haunts me when I think of our priorities as educators, as liberals, so-called “progressives,” and as a culture.  The biblical metaphor is peculiarly inverted for our times, and very powerful indeed.  I wonder, how many billions will we waste digging around in our own eyes for motes of “isms” and “phobes” while the girls and women of dozens of countries, the slaves of dozens more, are beaten by the boards.  How much waste are we willing to live with?  Where are our priorities?

If we were serious about wanting to make our students “global citizens,” it’s clear we would reorient our priorities.  The real straight talk is this: There is a finite amount of time and resources in the world at any given moment, zero sum games do not go away simply by wishing them away, or insisting they don’t exist.  So here is the challenge if we really want to put our money where our mouths so often are about Justice in this world, Social or otherwise: for every self-flagellating white-guilt slavery curriculum we use from the New York Times, we should champion five curricula on the suffering and plight of the estimated 50 million slaves, and counting, currently alive in the world today–more individual human lives in bondage than there were slaves in the entirety of the 19th century.  For every minute of training we spend in DEI Professional Development we should spend five minutes with our students sewing blankets, raising money, or collecting canned goods for the people of Afghanistan and Ukraine and any number of other places in the world where actual suffering is taking place right now, as I write these words, as you read them.  And for every $1 we spend on the Crystal Williamses of the world, with all her polish and style and practiced ease, we should spend $5 on SOLA.

Until then, we aren’t teaching our students a damn thing.