On one particularly dull evening, I decided to type “Deerfield Academy” into the search bar of Google. When I am not consumed with never ending project deadlines and Scroll assignments, I sometimes stop to think about what a person entirely removed from the Deerfield Bubble might think of me. In my search, I was able to find the opinions of countless anonymous internet denizens. Under the “Better Dead than Coed” article, a 2018 article describing the Academy’s past with sexual harassment and discrimination, Boston Globe user @user_4429094 wrote, “I have never known a private school family that wasn’t driven by ignorance and fear.” Under that same article, user @ REB-57 wrote, “Many students have known nothing but Lord of the Flies private boarding school mentality their whole lives… Living in a dorm during your adolescent years, where much of your value system is peer driven, is a recipe for an environment where bad things happen.” User @ ALStringer gave a much more concise evaluation of boarding school students, saying, “They are nothing but over-privileged drunken bums. Not worth a pot of water, the whole lot of them.”
To find some more recent backlash, I browsed the comment section of the instantly-viral Bloomberg article titled “Deerfield Academy Is Raising $89 Million to Build a Dining Hall.” Bloomberg user @Brh summarized this boarding school stereotype quite eloquently, writing “Such a nice tradition to promote lifelong friendships among the wealthy privileged class group of students. They will move on to prestigious universities, then to Wall Street, high powered law firms, judgeships, etc. and produce more like them to continue the cycle. All while middle America will toil to indirectly support these folks while they summer in Southampton [sic] and winter in Palm Beach.”
The stereotype of boarding schools and boarding school students is inextricably linked to the numinous idea of privilege. And this is not an unsubstantiated claim. With a yearly tuition of $70,900 for boarding students, a uniform consisting of blazers, ties, and dresses, and traditions such as sit-down meals, Deerfield Academy is simply incomparable to the average public institution. Privilege pervades our lives – in learning, dressing, eating, and sleeping.
Now, while this article will focus mainly on to what degree the Deerfield students are overwhelmingly privileged and the ways in which we need to address it, it would not be complete without pointing out the ways in which Deerfield has made tremendous strides towards equity. The Deerfield Academy website reports that 40% of students are on financial aid, making the student body a far stretch from the caricatures portrayed in the above comments. I would argue that the results from the Climate Survey disprove the claim that we are walking into history class blacked-out every morning, and anyone who has raced to the library on a Sunday morning to snag one of the coveted second floor study rooms wouldn’t think the entire student body is made up of lazy bums.
Still, despite all of these concessions, I will continue to assert that our very existence as Deerfield students makes us massively privileged in ways that are often underrecognized. In my experience, I have noticed that Deerfield students generally fall into one of three categories concerning their beliefs about their privilege. The first, and I believe most common, is, “I appreciate and acknowledge that boarding school education is both an amazing opportunity and a privilege that I must take advantage of.” The second is, “I am unaware of the privilege/opportunity I have.” The third, yet in my opinion most concerning, belief is, “I am aware of the privilege/opportunity I have, but I believe that I am entitled to it.” Still, I believe that every student lets elements of this idea that they deserve a Deerfield education invade their life at some point or another. Now this might seem extreme, but allow me to go into more specific examples. There is the belief that because a person’s family can afford a boarding school education, they are entitled to it. While this example might seem rare and obvious, I personally believe that the phantom of an idea, the subconscious voice that says you deserve Deerfield because of your academic prowess, athletic dominance, or artistic abilities, is also entitlement. And in one way or another, I have heard students in my classes and halls innocuously imply that their skillsets make them earn them a spot at Deerfield.
None of us, no matter how gifted we are, “deserve” a Deerfield education. There are millions of high school students across the world. I would bet all the money on my OneCard that we are not the 650 best students. We are not the 650 most eloquent writers, prodigious engineers, gifted aspiring politicians. We are not the 650 fastest runners or technically impressive musicians. So why are we here? We knew about Deerfield, and we were able to apply. We didn’t need to stay at home to support our families with extra income or take care of young children or older family members. For boarders, our physical and mental health were stable enough to live away from home. We triumphed over countless of (from my personal experience and conversations) equally talented and deserving applicants in the admissions process.
In order to actually make the most of our experiences, we must acknowledge our privilege. But beyond simply recognizing the truth in the statement, “I have privilege,” I believe that we have a duty to put deliberate effort into researching the impacts of our privilege, as well as the status of Deerfield Academy compared to the broader national context. Otherwise, I believe that we as students would not be fulfilling the moral responsibilities inherent to the privilege we have.
To that end, I believe it is important to see how our institutional privilege often comes at the detriment of those in our direct and extended community. Deerfield Academy pays no taxes in the third poorest county in Massachusetts (US Census Bureau Data). A notice on the Town of Deerfield website explains that “sidewalks will not be maintained by town this winter due to fiscal constraints.” According to email communications with Sarah Kimball, a representative of the Town of Deerfield, and my own spreadsheet calculations, Deerfield would pay exactly $3,013,309.56 to the town from property taxes every year if it was not tax-exempt. Internet denizens, both those local to the area and those entirely removed from the situation, have long opposed Deerfield’s nonprofit status. Boston Globe user @DaleOrlando wrote under the “Better Dead Than Coed” article, “Let them [boarding schools] pay their full freight in taxes.”
And no matter how inaccurate that characterization of the Dining Hall renovation is, no matter how incorrect the boarding school stereotype could possibly be or how misleading the Bloomberg article’s headline was, we cannot ignore that the number 89 million is infuriating. That’s more money than most high schools’ entire construction budget. That is over five times the entire yearly budget of the Town of Deerfield. All to renovate a completely functional, red brick Dining Hall where most schools have a linoleum tiled cafeteria.
In Houston, if the 2.2 billion dollar budget for the Houston Independent School District was divided equally across all schools 274 schools (which it isn’t), they would have ~8 million dollars to spend. In my neighborhood, kids attend classes in trailers attached to regular school buildings; this has been the case for as long as I can remember. Evidently, HISD does not have the budget for improvements. Tens of millions of dollars are simply unfathomable to the average educational institution; the price of a Deerfield tuition alone is twice the income of the average American.
So, what can we do as students of this prestigious institution? We can’t advocate for the Academy to pay taxes, as they have no legal obligation to make this financially detrimental move. And as someone who goes to a boarding school and benefits enormously from it, it would be beyond hypocritical of me to advocate for the complete shut down of the private school system. So, what we must do is do our research. Each student should find out the repercussions of our existence, both on a local and national scale; while I tried to outline some of the most pertinent and noticeable issues, this article is by no means a comprehensive review of the impacts of the Academy and the socioeconomic state of America. Reflect on your research and do what you believe is best to minimize your own negative impacts as a part of a privileged institution.
Heritage has many meanings. The most common one has to deal with inheritance and ancestry, but there is another which the Oxford English Dictionary describes as “the ‘portion’ allotted to or reserved for anyone.” So, Deerfield, be worthy of your heritage. But more importantly, know what that heritage is and what it means to have it.