The Big Cover-Up

Whether it involves a former medical director from Andover or fifteen alleged instructors from Horace Mann, sexual scandals have occurred numerous times at elite high schools across the nation. A drama instructor at Exeter was even arrested in 1992 for child pornography that may have involved a student, and more recently, Phillips Academy Andover has come under fire for its formal medical director being arrested on a similar charge. Despite the range of scandals, all prep school sex scandals have largely become viewed through one lense that often implicates the institutions.Although sexual scandals of any kind are awful and unacceptable, it is generally not an institution’s fault for having a faculty member that partakes in something illegal and inappropriate. At the private-day school I attended in Washington, D.C. before Exeter, a teacher was fired and investigated for apparent misbehavior. A similar situation took place at a nearby preparatory academy in Maryland. Indeed, it seems that these affairs reflect poorly on the school, because they were the ones who hired these people and brought them onto their campus. If the case is an anomaly, which in most cases they are, however, nothing can be done by academic institutions to prevent such misfortunes. Exeter has over 200 faculty, and with the coming and going of different instructors year after year, it is possible that the administration hires someone who partakes in illegal and destructive behavior. If Exeter suddenly had an instructor arrested for unlawful and out-of-line behavior, we Exonians would not think any less of the school, and we should not sneer at other institutions if something similar occurred. There is nothing the Academy can do because only the person in question is to blame.On the other hand, if multiple instances have occurred at one establishment or a widely known image of sexual abuse and uncomfortable relationships persists at a school, then it is within the school administration’s duty to address the problem and implement measures to put an end to it. Amos Kamil, who attended the prestigious Horace Mann School in New York during the early 1980s, discussed the pervasive presence of sexual abuse in an article from The New York Times Magazine.“I heard about some teachers who supposedly had a habit of groping female students and others who had their eyes on the boys. I heard that Mark Wright, an assistant football coach, had recently left the school under mysterious circumstances. I was warned to avoid Stan Kops, the burly, bearded history teacher known widely as “the bear,” who had some unusual pedagogical methods,” he said in an article.When a situation is so bad that these terrible rumors were common knowledge, it seems only rational that the school administration should and would direct attention towards them. But in this case, nothing was done.“It was revealed that the administration apparently knew about the abuse in many instances, but refrained from alerting police, students or parents,” a petition on Change.org to stop covering up Horace Mann’s complicity in child abuse said.In this case, there is something the educational institution could accomplish and instead, they ignored the moral, principled decision. Even worse, Horace Mann was accused of covering up the ongoing abuse. This behavior is not only egregious, but it goes against everything that the school tries to instill in its students, including morality, justice and conviction.When dealing with sexual scandals at prep schools, the administration’s engagement can range from righteous to uninvolved to immoral. They can either have no way of knowing or can easily act; they can passively lead the school as they did before or endeavor to achieve meaningful change in the community. Before judging the reputation of any academies, all of these factors should first be taken into account.