Remarks of William S. Peebles IV ’73
EHS Cum Laude Ceremony
April 27, 2020

Thank you, Mr Stillwell, for that kind introduction. I am very grateful to you and to Mrs. Fielder for inviting me to speak at today’s Cum Laude ceremony, which calls out and celebrates the qualities of excellence, justice, and honor — qualities that have been preeminent and timeless touchstones for Episcopal High School since our founding 181 years ago in 1839.

Congratulations to our Cum Laude members and new inductees, and thank you for your uplifting devotion to excellence in all of its forms — excellence of mind, excellence of heart, excellence of spirit. And, let me applaud all members of the EHS community for the many, many examples of your resilience, of your perseverance, of your continuing commitment to excellence, and of your concern for one another during the unprecedented times we are currently living through. What you are doing through text, phone, and screen to carry out your responsibilities and obligations is both impressive and inspiring.

Let me admit right away that I cannot be very objective about Episcopal. I owe this special school a huge debt of gratitude. My time here was truly transforming for me and indeed inspired my interest in teaching — a vocation I have been blessed to be a part of for almost 40 years. Shortly after graduating from EHS in June 1973, I wrote several of my teachers. I wanted to thank them for all they had done for me. I wanted to thank them for their advice, their encouragement, their support, and their genuine care for me. I told them that because of my experiences at EHS, I thought I wanted to teach — and since leaving here in 1973, except for college, graduate school, and one year in the business world, teaching is what I have done. And, as it turns out, a critically important mentor to me when I was a student here, Sandy Ainslie, gave me my first teaching job. I can’t imagine doing anything else.

What is it about the Episcopal experience that inspired my interest in teaching? I would like to discuss several lessons learned at Episcopal — really gifts — given to me by this school that have been vitally important to me, gifts that I think are still as much a part of the fabric of this school in 2020 as they were over 50 years ago when I started here in 1969 as a ninth grader.

First, this is a place that has always required much from all of us. Those high expectations are rooted in the staff and faculty’s deep concern and love for their students. We sometimes bristle at — rebel against — those demanding standards around our effort, our care for others, our participation in the life of the community, our citizenship, and our integrity. But deep down, we know that Episcopal’s exacting expectations come from a place of true concern for us.

Through those high standards, we are always being urged to be our best selves — to live into what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.” And, that is another gift from this experience. I am sure that each of you has had the privilege here to work with teachers and coaches and advisors who believed in you when you did not believe in yourself — adults who believed that you could do and would do some wonderful things at a time when you did not see the same promise in yourself that they did.

Fred Rogers, “Mister Rogers,” about whom so much has been said and written since he died in 2003, was fond of saying that each of us has had “people who smiled you into smiling; people who talked you into talking; sang you into singing; loved you into loving… [D]eepdown, Mister Rogers reminds us, you know that these people have always wanted what was best for you. They have always loved you beyond measure and have encouraged you to be true to the best within you.” 

I certainly had those kinds of adults here for me when I was a student, just as they are here for you today. Through their deep devotion to us, through their rock-solid character, through their tireless efforts, and through their pushing me and my schoolmates to do our best, my teachers and coaches and advisors and dorm parents — just as they do today — to paraphrase Fred Rogers, pushed us into pushing ourselves, disciplined us into disciplining ourselves, cared us into caring for others, and loved us into loving others. And, in my case, they literally called me into my calling.

Episcopal also gives us a love for ideas and a desire to wrestle with and consider carefully and critically our ideas. We learn here that our ability to think objectively and clearly is determined largely by our own willingness to be open to the possibility of disagreement and conflict. As far as the potential discomfort goes of new ideas and new experiences and new relationships, remember this warning from a long ago scholar: “There is no limit to the nonsense one may propound if he thinks too long alone.” (Jacob Viner, quoted in William Bowen’s graduation address at Princeton on June 12, 1973). We all need both solitude and substantive, honest relationships if we are to do our best thinking. Episcopal teaches us that!

And, of course, we come to think better as we learn to write and speak better. Teachers here spent hour after hour pushing me to write, speak, and think more clearly, more precisely, more succinctly. They helped me understand the importance and power of the written and the spoken work. They helped me understand that language is sacred, that we have a responsibility to use language properly and respectfully and that language can be used to connect and to build up or to divide and tear down. Many years into my teaching career, I developed an even fuller appreciation of how critical language is to our humanity when reading a book by the late John McCain, a U.S. senator and an EHS alumnus of the Class of 1954 and in whose honor Episcopal’s Center for Intellectual and Moral Courage was created. Senator McCain wrote that as a prisoner of war, often in solitary confinement, communicating with his fellow prisoners was “simply a matter of life and death.” McCain would communicate in any way possible — a prisoner tap code was used very frequently — but spoken communication was especially meaningful. For McCain, “the sound of the human voice, unappreciated in an open society’s noisy clutter of spoken words, was an emblem of humanity to a man held at length in solitary confinement, an eloquent and poignant affirmation that we possess a divine spark that our enemies could not extinguish.” ("Faith of My Fathers," pp. 211-212). McCain and his fellow prisoners would risk painful punishments in order to speak with one another. Language brought them light and hope; language restored their humanity; language boosted their spirits and gave them a reason to keep having faith that they would one day get home. Episcopal’s focus on writing and speaking with clarity and respect is a gift that keeps on giving, a gift that helps us think more cogently and helps us give robust life to our ideas and to show our reverence for language and for people.

A fourth gift from Episcopal is the opportunity to have the sheer joy of losing yourself in striving to do your best. There is no more rewarding experience than feeling and believing that you truly gave your all for a particular endeavor; that you left it all “on the field” in intellectual engagement or in athletic competition or in artistic expression or in any of the countless other causes to which you give your all here. Or as one shrewd observer of the human experience put it: “What could be more satisfying than to be engaged in work in which every capacity or talent we may have is needed, every lesson one may have learned is used, every value one cares about is furthered.” (John Gardner). Episcopal gives us so many opportunities — and encouragement — toward experiencing this wonderful sense of fulfillment. We only have to seize those opportunities. I am confident that the students we honor today — and all EHS students — have had or will have a taste of this kind of true joy.

And then there is the gift of belonging to a community thoroughly committed to the timeless and forever important principles of honor, excellence, respect, courage, and love. This school challenges us all to give of ourselves to the community, recognizing that we all belong to one another. EHS also challenges us to expand our vision and raise our gaze to include principles and purposes that take us beyond ourselves. Episcopal expects us to use the amazing education we are blessed with here as a springboard for action, for service, for engaging our democracy, and for helping to make the world better for all. We learn here that the “pathway to true happiness” is learning to love and to put other people and enduring principles first. (Tony Jarvis, "All Loves Excelling"f). Episcopal teaches us that as we embrace and serve ideas and communities beyond our personal interests, we receive that brand of joy and fulfillment that is true to our “better angels” and that lifts others. Learning that just might be this wonderful school’s most generous and grace-filled gift to us all.

Thank you, congratulations, and Godspeed.

William S. Peebles IV ‘73