Hotchkiss School
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The Hotchkiss School is an independent, American college preparatory boarding school located in Lakeville, Connecticut. Founded in 1891, the school enrolls 567 students in grades 9 through 12 and a small number of postgraduates. Students at Hotchkiss come from across the United States and 18 foreign countries. The current head of school is Robert "Skip" Mattoon, though he has announced that the 2006-2007 school year will be his last. Hotchkiss is part of an organization known as The Ten Schools Admissions Organization. This organization was founded more than forty years ago on the basis of a number of common goals and traditions. The school is also a member of Round Square, an international association of schools.
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[edit] History
The Hotchkiss School was founded in 1891 by Maria Bissell Hotchkiss with the encouragement of Yale University president Timothy Dwight V. Maria Hotchkiss was the widow of Benjamin B. Hotchkiss, who founded the French arms company Hotchkiss et Cie, made famous by the use of its machine guns in World War I [1]. Maria originally had aspirations for the school to serve underprivileged students, and the original charter provided some scholarship for local farm-boys.
[edit] Campus and facilities
The school is located in a rural setting in 545 acres (2 km²) of woodland near two lakes. Hotchkiss also has an endowment of over $365 million.
[edit] Academic facilities
Most classes are held in the "Main Building", a three story building at the center of campus, containing most of the classrooms, which is interconnected with the dining hall, chapel, library, auditorium and music building. Science classes are held in laboratory classrooms in the separate "Science Building", which is divided into floors for physics, chemistry and biology.
The Edsel Ford library, connected to the main building, holds 80,000+ volumes, along with many computer workstations.
[edit] Esther Eastman Music Center
2005 saw the completion of Hotchkiss' brand new music center. The building is constructed from wood and glass and has views over the Litchfield Hills. Elfers Hall seats 700 and has excellent acoustics. The school has equipped the hall with a handmade Fazioli piano. There are also many practice rooms, three class teaching rooms and a music technology studio.
[edit] Athletic facilities
Outdoor facilities include climbing walls and a nine-hole golf course created by designer Seth Raynor. An adjacent lake, Wononscopomuc, has a boat house and is used for sailing. There are also many fields, providing playing grounds for the football, soccer, field hockey, baseball and softball teams.
The athletic complex, known as the "MAC", an acronym for the Forrest E. Mars Jr. '49 Athletic Center, houses an olympic-size ten lane pool, eight squash courts, two ice hockey rinks, two basketball courts, a wrestling room, a fitness center/weight room, three indoor tennis courts and two paddle tennis courts.
[edit] Dormitories and other facilities
There are ten dormitories on campus, five for boys (Tinker, Coy, Dana, Memorial, and Van Santvoord) and five for girls (Bissell, Buehler, Watson, Garland, and Wieler). Rooms vary in size, from singles to the occasional triple. Ground was broken in 2005 for two new dorms, one each for girls and boys.
The dining hall and snack bar provide food. Three meals a day are served buffet-style in the dining hall. A salad bar, deli bar and dessert bar are provided in addition to the hot entrees. Meals at the dining hall are included in the tuition. The snack bar is open when the dining hall is not, and provides snack-type food, but costs money, payable by debit card, one of the main forms of currency exchange at the school.
[edit] Students
In the 2005-2006 school year, the school had 567 students from 33 states and 18 countries. The students are divided into grades 9 through 12, known as "Preps" (Grade 9), "Lower-Mids" (Grade 10), "Upper-Mids" (Grade 11), and "Seniors" (Grade 12).
Students are expected to adhere to a formal dress code each class day. Girls have guidelines on combining top layers with pants or skirts, whereas boys are required to wear a blazer, khakis and a tie. The dress code is relaxed during the winter and late spring months, to accommodate for the weather. Students are also bound by a "no-chance" drugs and alcohol policy, as clearly defined in the school's rulebook, "BluePrints."
[edit] Faculty
Currently, Hotchkiss has 127 faculty, a 5:1 student-to-faculty ratio. 68% of the faculty have graduate degrees, and a number have doctorates in their respective fields. The majority of the Hotchkiss faculty live on campus, in both private houses scattered across the grounds, or in apartments in the dorms. Each floor of each dorm has at least one faculty apartment.
[edit] Extracurricular activities
[edit] Athletics
Hotchkiss currently fields 17 interscholastic sports teams and the school is a member of the New England Preparatory School Athletic Council and the Inter-Scholastic Sailing Association. Historically strong athletic programs include the Girls Field Hockey team and the Boys Hockey team. Hotchkiss Field Hockey has won 8 New England championships, including four consecutive from 2002-2005.
Sports results can be found on the student run website www.Hgoblue.com.
[edit] Clubs
Hotchkiss students run a number of clubs, ranging from The Record, a student run newspaper, the Human Rights Initiative, to BaHSA, the Black and Hispanic Student Alliance, the Gay/Straight Alliance, to HPU (Hotchkiss Political Union) and SEA (Students for Environment Action). The Hotchkiss Debate Team competes at the national and international level. During the Spring Recess 2006, Hotchkiss hosted the World Individual Debating and Public Speaking Championship. The Record, Hotchkiss' school newspaper, is published on a semi-weekly basis. Clubs are student run, though most have faculty advisors, and many of them receive a budget from the school, to provide for their various needs.
[edit] Notable alumni
- Victor Ashe, US Ambassador to Poland
- John G. Avildsen, Film Director (Rocky, The Karate Kid)
- Robert Bork, Conservative legal scholar, former Solicitor-General of the US
- Max Carlish, British documentary film-maker
- Walter P Chrysler, Jr, Industrialist and art collector, son of Walter Chrysler
- Herbert Dow, Founder of Dow Chemical Company
- Charles Edison, Governor of New Jersey, son of Thomas Edison,
- Edsel Ford, President of Ford Motor Company, son of Henry Ford
- Henry Ford II, President of Ford Motor Company
- William Clay Ford, Jr., CEO of Ford Motor Company
- Varian Fry, journalist and 'the American Schindler'
- Arthur Lehman Goodhart, Legal scholar, Master of University College, Oxford
- Porter J. Goss, former Director of the CIA
- Alfred Whitney Griswold, President of Yale University
- Ernest Gruening, Governor of Alaska, US Senator
- Briton Hadden, Co-founder of Time Magazine
- John H. Hammond, Record Producer (discovered Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen)
- Leland Hayward, Hollywood and Broadway agent and producer
- John Hersey, Pulitzer Prize winning author
- Thomas Hoving, Director, Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Allison Janney, Emmy Award winning Actress
- Lawrence M. Judd, Governor of Hawaii
- Lewis H. Lapham, Editor of Harper's Magazine
- David McCord Lippincott, Novelist & Screen writer
- William Loeb, conservative newspaper proprietor
- Sheridan Lord, Artist
- Winston Lord, US Ambassador to the People's Republic of China 1985-1989
- Henry Luce, Co-founder of Time Magazine
- Archibald MacLeish, Poet Laureate, Pulitzer Prize winner
- Forrest Mars Jr., CEO of Mars, Incorporated, billionaire
- John Mars, billionaire
- Peter Matthiessen, Naturalist and Writer
- Douglas Stuart Moore, Composer
- Ben Mulroney, Host of Canadian Idol, son of Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney
- Gerald Murphy, Precisionist Artist
- Paul Nitze, Secretary of the Navy, architect of US policy towards the Soviet Union
- Clark T. Randt, Jr., US Ambassador to the People's Republic of China 2001-
- Tom Reiss, Author
- Dickinson W. Richards, Nobel Prize winner
- Roswell Rudd, Grammy nominated trombonist
- William Warren Scranton, Governor of Pennsylvania, US Ambassador to the UN
- Marc Simenon, Writer and film director, son of Georges Simenon
- Harold Stanley, Founder, Morgan Stanley
- Burr Steers, filmmaker and actor
- Hugh Steers, painter
- Potter Stewart, Justice of the US Supreme Court
- Strobe Talbott, Journalist, diplomat, president of Brookings Institution
- John Thornton, Former COO Goldman Sachs
- Fay Vincent, Baseball Commissioner
- Arthur Kittredge Watson, Chairman of IBM, US Ambassador to France
- Tom Werner, Chairman of the Boston Red Sox and co-founder of Casey Werner, producers of "The Cosby Show", "3rd Rock" and "That 70's Show"
- Charles Yost, US Ambassador to the UN
- James P Keim, Co-founder of the Southeast Asia Children Projects SACP,whose mission is to address the human trafficking of children for purposes of sexual exploitation.
[edit] Hotchkiss in print
- The school is mentioned several times in F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise and in his short story Six of One.
- In the book Primary Colors by Joe Klein, later turned into a film, the principal character Henry Burton was educated at Hotchkiss, and is frequently referred to as 'Hotchkiss'.
- In Jeffrey Archer's novel Sons of Fortune, protagonist Fletcher Davenport is a Hotchkiss alumnus.
- In Tom Wolfe's novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, the son of a minor character attends the school.
- There is a passing reference to the school in Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho.
- The school is mentioned in Natalie Krinsky's book, Chloe Does Yale
- The school is mentioned in Richard Rodriguez's memoir "Brown: The Last Discovery of America."
- In John McPhee's profile of alumnus Thomas Hoving ("A Roomful of Hovings"), Hoving is quoted as saying: "'The thought of being locked up there for weeks and weeks–I used to sweat with the horror of it. If you see your life in terms of weather, Hotchkiss was overcast and threatening. Trees were green there in my last year, because it was my last year.'"
- In Can't Take It With You: The Art of Making and Giving Money, alumnus and supporter Lewis B. Cullman writes, "Like most New England boarding schools of the time, Hotchkiss was built around the concept of rugged, manly Christianity. Living conditions were Spartan; trips home, rare...There was a Hotchkiss way to do everything." On page 41 he wrote of "the virulent anti-Semitism of Hotchkiss back then" and added, "as with all minorities, our status made us vulnerable."
- Hotchkiss alumnus Julian Houston, a judge in Massachusetts, wrote the novel New Boy, which recounts the story of Rob Garrett, the first African-American student at the fictional Draper School, which strongly resembles Hotchkiss. (According to a Boston Globe article (March 26, 2006) the author said of his own time at Hotchkiss, "'I was miserable there.'")
- For the school's centenary, Ernest Kolowrat was commissioned to pen a doorstop called Hotchkiss: A Chronicle of an American School (ISBN 1561310581).
- Alumnus, former Librarian of Congress, and Poet Laureate Archibald MacLeish said in a 1982 interview "God, how I did not like Hotchkiss!" ("America Was Promises", American Heritage Magazine, vol. 32, issue 5)
- In Hotchkiss in the Fifties: Myths and Realities (George Mason University's History News Network, 11/29/2004), alumnus and New Left Historian Jesse Lemisch writes of the various forms of bigotry he witnessed at Hotchkiss. A disabled student was "stigmatized and physically beaten here." He goes on to write, "...anti-semitism was deep in the history and culture of the place." He quotes alumnus Lewis Lapham (editor of Harper's' Magazine): "'Hotchkiss, like Yale, like Harvard, is about setting wealth to music' [Kolowrat, p. 546]. Basically and in reality [continues Lemisch], it seems to me that Hotchkiss greases the wheels of capitalism." Jean Olsen, the wife of a Hotchkiss headmaster, suspected that the school was "by far the most male-oriented, chauvinistic school in the country" (see Kolowrat, pp. 379-380).
[edit] References
Information resources independent from the school itself. Links to independent school organizations and accreditation services.
- Connecticut Association of Independent Schools
- The Association of Boarding Schools
- New England Association of Schools and Colleges
