Assemblies 2016: The Year in Review

The Assembly Committee, as well as multiple clubs around campus, has invited a range of speakers to the Academy’s weekly Tuesday and Friday morning assemblies. This year, Exeter hosted multiple events that not only consisted of the larger assemblies, but also included smaller events associated with the same topics. However, despite several standout assemblies, some students complain that there has not been enough diversity in thought with the speakers that the Academy welcomes to campus.

This year, the assembly program covered topics ranging from, “SLUT: The Play,” the story of a 16-year-old girl, Joey, and her experience with sexual assault, to the classic winter holiday sing-a-long assembly, hosted by music instructor Eric Sinclair.

Not only did the Assembly Committee invite speakers to share their ideas, but it also gave many student-run clubs an opportunity to showcase what their club does for the rest of the student body. Student council, for example, had a humorous mock-debate, moderated by current StuCo vice president Jun Park, between current StuCo president Rebecca Ju and the U.S. presidential candidates, all played by various StuCo committee heads.

“Having an assembly program in general is a cultural statement—that we are a community interested in each other and in the outside world, through a quasi-public forum.”

In addition to these student-run assembly programs, the committee also invites many adult speakers, often alumni, to share the work that they’ve been doing after their time spent at Exeter. For Assembly Committee chair, Kathy Brownback, one of the standout assemblies this year was hosted by alumna and sex researcher Debby Herbenick ’94, who with her “good tone and content on the all-important subject of healthy sexuality,” Brownback said, was able to host an outstanding assembly, one that inspired some campus-wide discussion as well as opinion pieces in The Exonian.

The committee also presented many assemblies this year that included many smaller events that spanned throughout the week. “Syria week,” an event that coincided with the joint announcement between the U.S. and Russia on a new Syrian peace deal, involved a Tuesday night panel about the Syrian refugee crisis, led by scholars and experts, who also took part in a panel discussion on Thursday evening about the nature of the Syrian conflict itself. The week was then capped off with an assembly by Harvard professor Tarek Masoud.

Despite having these more in-depth assemblies, many students complained that the assembly committee invited too few conservative speakers, limiting the Academy’s viewpoint to issues that only concern liberal-minded people.

“The lack of conservative speakers instills within conservative students a feeling of ‘otherness’ that often makes them reluctant to publicly voice their opinions, and without an intelligent opposition, liberal students will never have a chance to hone their arguments and will be robbed of the opportunity to drop ideas that seem illogical in the face of new evidence,” upper Alec Howe said.

However, the assembly committee wants to remind students that it is not solely them that plans the topics of the assemblies. “The students and clubs are the ones who propose assembly speakers,” senior Darius Shi, Assembly Committee student chair said. “If there are more liberal speakers than conservative speakers, it simply means that the conservative students and faculty members here have not tried hard enough to bring in relevant [speakers].”

Professor Tarek Masoud speaks at assembly. (Photo Credit: Rachel Luo)

While Shi commented on the proposition of the topics, senior Joe Bartkovich suggested that the problem lies in the unwillingness of the people complaining to see the larger problem: diversity in assembly speakers. “I also want more diversity in assembly,” Bartkovich said. “We’ve had one Indian speaker this year, maybe two or three queer people, I think we’ve had one trans person total over the last four years, and then we’ve had an overwhelming number of mediocre white dudes showing off their pet project.”

Although Shi believes that the root of the problem stems from elsewhere, he, and the rest of the assembly committee, are working to, in the future, bring more diversity of thought to the biweekly gatherings. “The assembly committee is thinking about encouraging students and clubs to invite more conservative speakers next year,” he said. “In fact, since [the general] election will happen next fall term, we are planning a tentative election assembly week where the two speakers will be talking about the election from democratic and republican points of view.”

This, he hopes, will generate discussion on both ends of the political spectrum seen here on campus. Besides political topics for next year’s assemblies, the committee has been working to curate a list of topics that will provide, with them, both entertaining and informative assemblies. This list consists of topics such as modern developments in Artificial Intelligence, environmental sustainability and outdoor adventure.

Though Brownback understands these complaints as well, she sees the fundamental concept of holding school-wide assemblies as the most important, regardless of the political stance of the speaker. “Having an assembly program in general is a cultural statement—that we are a community interested in each other and in the outside world, through a quasi-public forum,” she said.