A Tribute to Christine Robinson

Christine Robinson, an English instructor who held the position of B. Rodney Marriott Chair in the Humanities and graced the Academy with 33 years of service, died on June 11 at the age of 66. She was known by many as a brilliant writer, public speaker and mentor.With her unique, questioning attitude and her readiness to devote time and energy to her beliefs, Robinson pushed her students and peers to both observe and challenge the world around them. Her involvement on campus with social justice and advocacy was the starting point for many of the Academy’s pillar programs such as the MLK Day program.Born on March 24, 1949, Robinson grew up in Concord, New Hampshire. After attending secondary school, Robinson received a B.A. degree at Northwestern University and a M.Ed. degree at Harvard University. She joined the Academy’s English department in 1980.At the Academy, Robinson played a variety of roles, from advocacy to athletics. She helped coach the girls’ varsity lacrosse and field hockey teams, served as an adviser to a number of student organizations and was affiliated with Dunbar, Bancroft and Soule. Robinson also started and taught several senior English elective courses, including “Baseball: The American Narrative,” which she created to share her lifelong love of the sport with students. Additionally, she was a long-serving chair of both the MLK Day Committee and the Discipline Committee. She was named an honorary member of the Academy’s Class of 1983 and received a Brown Faculty Family Fund award in 1992.Robinson covered her classroom walls with posters and signs such as “Question Authority” and “No Like,” Max Le ’15 said, who had Robinson as a teacher for all three terms of his lower year. The posters conveyed her opinions and beliefs and included an arrest warrant she received at a protest. Le recalled that when a student used the word “like,” Robinson rang a bell to push them to think about what they were saying.

“Christine Robinson was a legendary teacher and an ethical leader of the faculty for a long time. She was exceptionally thoughtful about many things and she challenged everyone to listen to people they were inclined to judge harshly. Her example led the faculty and the school toward insight and humility.”

During assembly, Robinson once hauled an old portable record player onstage to play Bob Dylan records. She talked about social protest, the ’60s and the importance of challenging authority and the status quo. To emphasize her point, she asked the student body to switch seats, sending the seniors up to the balconies and bringing the preps down to the front of the stage. Remarked history instructor Amy Schwartz, “[Robinson] was interested in shaking things up.”Schwartz added that Robinson’s actions were “not for novelty’s sake, but out of a deep commitment to social justice. She wanted students to understand how little things like seniority build up to become big things like inequality.”Robinson was instrumental in establishing the senior meditation as a central part of the Academy tradition, longtime colleague and English instructor David Weber said. On a number of occasions, Robinson served on the Senior Meditation Selection Committee, whose members read through scores of meditations and select roughly a dozen to be presented in the Academy church. Additionally, along with three other English instructors, she compiled and edited “A Book of Meditations, Volume 2: 1995–2001,” published in 2005.In an article published in The Exeter Bulletin in the summer of 2005, Robinson described meditations as “small islands on a large, busy campus.” She elaborated on their significance to her: “Through countless drafts, writing a meditation allows me, requires me, to remember, to reflect, to explore and discover meaning,” she said. “I may fire off letters when I’m angry; writing meditations centers me, calms me, brings me to things that matter.”One of Robinson’s meditations, which she read both in Phillips Church and the Assembly Hall, is titled “The Simplest Thing is to Call Him a Homeless Man.” In this introspective piece, she described a special rapport she developed with a homeless man named Eddie in a residential San Francisco neighborhood.For weeks, Robinson ignored the man on the side of the street, avoiding eye contact on her way to a nearby café. Eddie was “just a figure on the urban landscape, he was poverty, he was homelessness, he was the dark side of San Francisco’s beauty.” Eventually, as part of her morning ritual, Robinson handed him the sports section of the San Francisco Chronicle. As the World Series approached, the two discovered a mutual dislike of the Yankees. Over time, they became friends, and to her, he became a symbol of much more than a wild-looking old man.Laura Dismore ’07 was a lower when Robinson read her meditation at assembly. It changed Dismore’s view of homelessness, she explained in an editorial published in The Exonian’s 2005 graduation issue. “It’s easy to write Eddie off as some man on the streets who has no bearing on my life or yours,” she wrote. “It would be simple enough to see him as the San Francisco version of people on the streets anywhere, but Ms. Robinson’s piece asked us to do more than that.”Le had similar thoughts. “Her meditation reminds me, and all of us, that human interactions have no boundaries, and that no one is above everyone else,” he said.Robinson lived her beliefs. She attended social protests around the country that supported equality and justice. In January 2003, she drove to Washington DC to protest the Iraq War, accompanied by Schwartz and English instructor Mercedes Carbonell. Schwartz recalled how they drove in Robinson’s “big old boxy Volvo,” which didn’t have sufficient heating; Schwartz ended up with frostbite. Despite this misfortune, Schwartz reflects positively on Robinson’s attitude toward antiques. “[Robinson] loved beautiful old things,” she said. “She really despised modern technology and for years she refused to use email.”But what students and faculty most valued about Robinson was how she guided and changed lives through her impassioned teaching and example. In Robinson’s class, Le was “an artist, a writer, a thinker and a rebel.” She constantly pushed his creative boundaries by encouraging him to further survey and question the world. “Writing felt as natural as breathing because she allowed me to liberate myself from the fear of bad grammar,” Le said. “She gave me the space to fail, and to observe the small things that make this vulnerable yet beautiful world. And I am eternally grateful for that.”To Catherine Zhu ’15, Robinson represented strength. When Zhu first stepped into Robinson’s class during her lower fall, she felt “profoundly insecure, oftentimes filled with sadness and unsure of [my] place in the world.” At one point, when pushed by Robinson to relate a novel’s themes to her personal life, Zhu shyly made a comment about how there was “sort of a violence to finding yourself.”After class, Robinson pulled her aside and asked her to clarify what she had meant. Eventually, the conversation veered toward the topic of confidence, and how Zhu couldn’t find it among the personal difficulties and confusion she was experiencing. Robinson said something that resonated with Zhu: “Don’t fight to escape it. Embrace it.”In retrospect, Zhu realized those simple words “really did make all the difference. Through her teaching, activism and writing, Ms. Robinson was an example of the strength that comes from confronting the more difficult parts of our personal realities and the world we live in, rather than shying away from them,” Zhu said. “She was an example of how being true to ourselves and finding our own authentic voices can allow us to find strength in a world where so much often seems to feel uncertain.”Emily Lemmerman ’15 was in the same class as Le during her lower fall, but didn’t get to know Robinson well until her upper spring, when the two communicated via handwritten letters. On the last day of class, Robinson asked her students to write a letter to someone important to them. For Lemmerman, the result was a reinvigorated friendship with a peer with whom she had lost connection.In addition to helping Lemmerman re-establish a friendship, Robinson skillfully guided her through classes, rather than pushing or pulling her. Robinson was always there to help, but at the same time she allowed Lemmerman to learn independently. “She demanded a lot from you as a person,” Lemmerman said. “She was concerned about having kids be big people and Harkness be the collaborative model.”Like Lemmerman, Gabrielle Snowden ’15 felt that Robinson encouraged her to explore all areas of her work and approach it using a method tailored to her own needs.“She was the first teacher I had for English who made me feel like I could really write about and explore any situation without worrying about how she would take it or if she would understand it,” Snowden said. “She was always very perceptive, no matter what I wrote.”The effects of Robinson’s zeal and insight weren’t just limited to her closest friends and students; she was a positive figure for the Academy community as a whole.“Christine Robinson was a legendary teacher and an ethical leader of the faculty for a long time,” Weber said. “She was exceptionally thoughtful about many things and she challenged everyone to listen to people they were inclined to judge harshly. Her example led the faculty and the school toward insight and humility.”