Advice From a Former Exonian: Willa Canfield

Hi Lovely Exonians,

I hope you are well and having a wonderful fall.

I arrived at Exeter against my will and almost by mistake, with no understanding of the school at which I was about to spend four years. I felt I had torn myself from my family and Tamworth, my small New Hampshire town. My resistance to the place, however, could not withstand the place itself, which opened me up and nourished me in ways I’d never anticipated. When my sister and I visited Exeter this summer, a couple months after our graduation, and sat in the middle of the deserted quad on Principal MacFarlane’s red Adirondack chairs, I fought a strange sense of heartache at the feeling that I could no longer lay claim to this place. In the months since then, though, my recognition of how much of Exeter remains alive for me has soothed that ache. I still have and will forever have all that Exeter gave me.

In the months since then, though, my recognition of how much of Exeter remains alive for me has soothed that ache. I still have and will forever have all that Exeter gave me.

I have Mr. Moriarty’s prep fall Harkness introductions and Ms. Moore’s warnings against “to be” verbs. I have Bryan Stevenson’s MLK Day keynote speech. I have Lamont Poet Phillis Levin’s reading in Assembly Hall. I have my time with the Exonian’s 139th board, the night that a pipe burst during our inaugural issue and the night we spent in the newsroom putting together the 2017 Grad Issue. I have the writers on the 140th board I got to work with (I love you all). I have the “This I Believe” essays my classmates read aloud at the end of upper spring English with Mr. Hearon, and the study of Hamlet I did that term. The ALES sit in. Student performances at “Unsilenced.” Late nights in Dunbar. Evening walks down Swasey with Stillwells in hand. Long days at D Squared. The Peace Tree in the early morning before we had to say goodbye to it. The discussions my senior winter English class with Ms. Carbonell had about James Baldwin’s works.

I  mean it when I say I had no idea of what I was getting into at the start of my prep year. I remember asking international students how they had managed to find out about Exeter, this random little place tucked away in New Hampshire. They’d looked at me blankly. I had no awareness of “elite institutions,” or that Exeter fell into the top rung of that category. I had little comprehension of the layers of privilege that exist in our country or of the fact that the environment I was entering represented and cultivated privilege to the extreme.

In the midst of Trump’s presidency, in the midst of the Kavanaugh trials, in the midst of America’s slow reckoning with its lifelong history and continued state of injustice and inequality,  I have thought a lot about all the times at Exeter that speakers tell us we are the future leaders of the world. It’s true that Exeter alumni have become governors and presidents and Supreme Court Justices, writers and singers and founders of multi-billion-dollar social media networks. The white capitalist heteropatriarchy we live in has been fed and watered by and for the men who walked Exeter’s paths. The people who moved through Exeter as I did and as you all do now have wielded and will wield incredible power.

We have not earned this power, no matter how hard we have worked. There are many people in the world who deserve to be at Exeter as much as you do and as much as I did. Some of you have already profited from years of privilege prior to Exeter, and because you go to or went to Exeter, you all will be offered opportunities that won’t be offered to people who deserve them just as much. Race and gender and socioeconomic background will play a heavy role in this, but you will likely all be granted power. I have tried to stop wasting time feeling guilty about this, even as I look, for example, at the brilliant girl I work with in the summers who is putting herself through community college to become a radiologist, studying for exams she aces and logging hours at the hospital while she works two jobs and helps support her father and boyfriend financially, at the girl who has earned everything and deserves more. I have tried, instead, to remind myself of the responsibility that should accompany power (though in our world, it doesn’t), and to ask myself how I can use the power I have been given well.

Back in my small town, I marvel at the time Exonians spend distressed about a B+  that could have been an A-, or about getting into their dream college. Returning to Tamworth and the local café where I work always reminds me of how cut off Exeter is from the realities most people face, what a world unto itself it is. At the same time, my time at Exeter taught me about the world and gave me the means by which to think about and understand it better. The texts I read taught me, my teachers taught me, but most of all it was my classmates who, whether they were on the Assembly Hall stage, in class or sitting next to me at dinner, were radically generous in sharing with me and with Exeter’s community their knowledge and their own frames of reference.

I carry with me all they taught me. I know that Exeter demands of its students a pretty serious balancing act, but I hope that you all prioritize going to assembly and meditation and attending the lectures that visiting speakers give. Even more, I hope you commit to caring about the controversies at Exeter, to caring about the conversations the community is having. I hope you love Exeter and also recognize that it needs to confront its history and grow. I hope you take fault with Exeter while practicing gratitude for what it has given you. Attend the discussions on issues you do understand or have some stake in and most of all attend the discussions that are foreign to you, that you will listen to and learn from the most. You will carry some knowledge with you from Exeter but more than that you will carry the capacity to think and ask questions and ask more questions about the world around you. I hope that one of the questions you will begin asking yourself at Exeter and keep asking yourself is how you can use what you love to help the world. So many of America’s past and present “leaders” have desecrated the world in their pursuit of personal gain.  How will you be a future leader who embodies goodness? How will you use your power responsibly?

And I hope you are all having conversations now and paying attention to them. Exeter remains alive for us: So much of what I talked about with people at Exeter has influenced the way I think, the ideas I turn over in my mind, the questions I ask myself. So many of those conversations taught me to think. The post-assembly debriefs around Wetherell’s round tables, the late night talks with dorm mates, the conversations that traveled from the Harkness table to the paths. I have all these. I hope you are having them now and will have them forever, too.

Love,

Willa