Wednesday, February 28, 2007. Stephen Davenport. "Leadership at Miss Oliver's."

MS. FORD: Good morning, everybody. I'm so sorry that we've thinned out a little bit, and I know it's because there are so many other demands on everybody's time. But I'm so glad you all are here, because I think that what you're about to hear about is really interesting and just a wonderful case study. Unlike most novels about schools, which are generally focused on a particular boy or a particular girl, this is really about the grownups, and the lives that we live every single day. And so to introduce our speaker this morning, Steve Davenport, is Eleanor Dase.

MS. DASE: Good morning. It's my honor to introduce Steve Davenport this morning. It was exactly 30 years ago this year when I first met Steve. I was a young, naive math teacher at the Athenian School, and Steve became head of school. What I remember most vividly about those early years were Steve's total investment in the lives of students, his passion for the teaching of international understanding, and his unusual commitment at that time to diversity and inclusion. And so it's no surprise to any of us that Steve's leadership and education spans an impressive 50 years.

He began his career in education in 1957 as teacher, coach, and dorm parent in an all-boys' boarding school. From 1960 to 1973, he served as English teacher, department head, and coach at Kingswood Oxford in Hartford, Connecticut, where in 1968 he received the Outstanding Teacher Award by Trinity College. During the summers, he directed a co-ed summer camp and also led wilderness canoe trips.

During the 1970s, Steve also worked as a free-lance journalist, focusing on education and conservation. He published in the New York Times Magazine, the Hartford Current, and the Saturday Review of Literature, among others. From 1973 to 1977, he was headmaster at the Country School, an elementary school in Madison, Connecticut. In 1977, the philosophy of the Athenian School and visionary founder, Dyke Brown, lured Steve west, where in addition to serving as head for ten years, he was the external director for the NAIS new heads workshop, he was a trustee at the School of the Pacific islands, a foundation devoted to improving education in Micronesia, and also on the boards of NAIS and CAIS.

From 1987 to 2000, Steve applied his extensive leadership experience as an executive search consultant and workshop facilitator to a variety of schools, including several single-sex schools for girls.

Presently, Steve divides his time between writing and serving on the boards of Aim High and East Bay Conservation Core, both dedicated to education of underserved populations, as well as on the board of Athenian, an unusual and wonderful gift to a school he knows so well.

With Steve's love of writing, his unconditional loyalty to student and faculty voice, and his extensive experience in independent schools, it's only fitting that his first novel be Miss Oliver's School for Girls. Steve's characters come alive and we can see the personalities of the characters in our own schools. To whom are they loyal? How do they exhibit their leadership and how do we exert ours? Do students sometimes teach us more than we teach them? Steve weaves these things beautifully throughout the book, and it's my honor as we all welcome my mentor, our colleague, and our friend, Steve Davenport.

MR. DAVENPORT: Eleanor describes herself as a naive, young teacher. But believe me, I was a naive young head.

Eleanor, that was so generous, and I appreciate it so much. I have to tell you, one of the greatest feelings as you approach the ancient age that I'm approaching, is to be the ex-head of a school that is now prospering and running so well under leadership of people like Eleanor. It's a wonderful feeling.

Let me also just say that I couldn't be more grateful to Bruce and Burch and everybody for including me in this group and for letting me hang out with you for three whole days. It feels like I'm coming home. You are my people. That's how I feel, and what you do is so wonderful in life. To be part of that again and to hear these marvelous speakers has been a wonderful, wonderful inspiration for me. It makes me very grateful. So thank you.

Well, let's get to talking about Miss Oliver's School for Girls. When Robert Ducas, the literary agent to whom I sent this manuscript, first got it, the name was different. The name after the "Miss" was a different family name. Robert looked at it, and the very first thing he told me after he agreed to take the book on was, "You must change the name."

And I kind of looked at him, and he looked at me and he said, "Well, you don't want this to be seen as a roman a clef, do you?"

Of course not. That was the last thing I wanted. It's about schools, not People Magazine. But this incredibly quick man had traced the name back through its Latin root to an English synonym of that name which is very much like the name of a real independent single-sex girls boarding school, and so obviously, I didn't want that, and I changed the name to Oliver's, because like the name just discarded, it had that new New England ring, and also because I was sure -- and I certainly hope I'm correct -- that there is no school in New England or anywhere else by the name of Miss Oliver's School for Girls.

Well, sadly, Robert died before I found a publisher for this novel. I had become incredibly fond of this man. I had great admiration for him. He loved schools, and I think that's why he liked the novel and why he wanted it to have an audience. He was a person of incredible integrity. So I had no heart for finding his replacement.

After a major publisher had kept the manuscript forever, hemming and hawing about whether to publish a novel with very little scandal in it -- as a matter of fact, I didn't know there was any scandal in it; they wanted a lot more -- a novel with very little scandal in it by an unknown author about a school that only a small percentage of American children go to, I said to myself, rather arrogantly, "You know, if you can run a school, you can sure as heck run a small publishing organization."

So I started one of my own. I named it after my grandfather, a literary scholar whom my mother adored, and who died before I was born. And I came out with a book.

So I mention this not to tell what I have learned about the publishing business, which doesn't happen to be very good news, but to tell you how real the school and the people came to be as I dreamed it up, and how that realness makes me think that I can meditate in front of you about the leadership of schools, which I would dare not do if I hadn't written this book. I wouldn't stand up here in front of you and talk about leadership when that's what you do and it's what I don't do anymore, if I hadn't written this book.

Technologically, it was very easy to change the name. All I had to do was push the "replace" function on Microsoft Word, and abracadabra, presto, through pages of manuscript, the name had changed. But torture emotionally, just as hard as if it were a real school whose campus I knew every inch of like the back of my hand. Yes, I had made it all up, but you couldn't convince me that it wasn't real. I was so invested in the school and loved it so much that changing its name was very, very difficult. I'm used to it now, but on that question of real or not, I get the same questions over and over. People want to know, is it fantasy, or is it real? Can I trust this stuff?

It interests me, though, that I almost never get the questions from people like you who are involved in schools. But here are the questions. Did it really happen? Yes, I always answer, absolutely. Did it really happen just like in the novel? I don't know, I say. Maybe. Are these characters modeled on real people you know? Absolutely not. And this is true. Not one character in this book, of the 37 people who inhabit this story, are modeled on anybody I know. Why do they need to have a double? They have a life of their own.

Is Miss Oliver's School for Girls modeled on a real school? Again, absolutely not. The campus of Miss Oliver's School for Girls is modeled on the one whose sweeping lawns I always cross on my way to the river in a recurring dream. It's always springtime in the dream. The new leaves have just come out in the arching branches of ancient maple trees, and I love the school with all my heart. But every once in a while the dream changes. I'm not on the way to the river. I'm on the way to the dean of something-or-other's office to be told I'm about to be expelled for failing math. And I always walk very slowly so I always wake up before I get there.

Well, then comes the ultimate question. By now they aren't asking it, but it's still in their eyes. If the characters aren't real people, and the school isn't a real school, and you don't know whether it happened, how do you know, how can you say that you know it happened? Well, I'm sure you know the answer. This is not what happened to happen. This is what happens. That's the difference between news and serious fiction. We report news. We make up fiction; tell lies to try to get to know what is the truth to learn what we already know.

I won't claim I wrote a good novel. That's for others to judge. But I am claiming a trust in the process as a way of apprehending reality, learning what I already know. I think the forces at play in this novel are the ones that are in play in all kinds of organizations, because that's the way of human beings. They have been in place since we lived in caves. Surely some ancient matriarch dressed in bear skins dominated and inspired her colleagues as Marjorie Boyd did millennia later, and just as surely, after she left, there was a time of dysfunction.

I didn't have any idea where the plot would go. I really put the school I dreamed up into extremis for the drama's sake and people that were characters to whom I assigned a desire, something they wanted to live for. Then they stole a plot from me and I was no longer in control. Autonomous agents, they kept doing these inevitable things and it's that inevitability that gives me some faith that this novel is true.

I would like to talk about four of these people this morning: Marjorie Boyd, the beloved long-time headmistress whose dominating leadership has built an extraordinary school, but has also infantilized it by making all the decisions.

Francis Plummer, the very gifted and thus politically powerful teacher who has made Marjorie his surrogate parent.

Fred Kindler, Marjorie's successor. A grieving father who has lost his daughter.

Lila Smythe, a senior who is president of the student council, who takes more responsibility and feels more pressure than many of the faculty.

First Marjorie. Karen Benjamin, editor of the school newspaper, tells Fred Kindler on his very first day in office that he's got big trouble because, she says, "The students love Marjorie. The only way they're going to know how to be loyal to her is not to like you. So she screwed up the business, the financial part. Who wants an accountant for a headmistress?"

What Karen understands better than most is that Marjorie didn't value the business side of her responsibility and Marjorie dominated the conversations so thoroughly that no one else did either. So exactly what Fred Kindler brings -- discipline around the business side, strategic planning, careful marketing -- is exactly what the school needs in order to survive, and exactly what it will resist.

But Marjorie's character didn't come alive to me until I was consulting and struggling with the very first draft. I went to a very well-known school whose beloved long-time head had just resigned and by the second or third day of a three-day faculty/administrative workshop I hadn't heard one word about that head being a dominating leader and authoritarian. I heard nothing but admiration and respect. But just the same, in the middle of the workshop, during a break, the athletic director came up to me and wanted some advice on how he could get the new head to enforce the rule that JV and third-team players should play in every game regardless of whether they lost or not. He was very passionate about this rule, and I thought he was joking about going to the new head. But when he asked it again, I realized he was serious and I kind of lost my diplomacy. I said to him, "You're the athletic director, for goodness' sake, and you're 45 years old. It's your rule. You enforce it." He went white in the face.

After that, I knew how to write about Marjorie. I could see her walk across stages. I knew how she dressed, how she talked, and I knew that she should dominate the very first scene in the book, absolutely dominate the landscape, and then disappear and keep on influencing events.

Well, none of you is Marjorie Boyd, and I'm not either. We expect our colleagues to whom we have delegated authority to exert it on their own. Just the same, when a trustee told me halfway through my headship at Athenian that I'd become the embodiment of the school, I took it as compliment. Now having written this book, I take it as a warning. Now I think I would adjust the way I think about delegation and supervision, not only about what those functions are out there that need to be covered and responsibility to be taken. I would do that. But I would also much more intentionally try to lead in such a way as to mature the organization, as to make it wiser. For its own sake I would ask myself the question, next year will there be more sources of great ideas, more wisdom to choose among them, more discipline and know-how to bring them into fruition than there are now? And will this be the result of a planned, purposeful effort on all our parts? I'd try to be just as self-disciplined about that question as about progress on external goals.

Marjorie didn't hoard the power for its own sake. She was so completely identified with the school; she couldn't give any of it away. And I would try for much more distance now if I were running a school. I would try to think like consultants do, or interim heads that are running someone else's school. None of us stays forever. We're really all interims in the end. If I knew how naked I was going to feel when I resigned and left the school, didn't have a comma and a title after my name, I would have started working for that distance from the very first day.

But enough of Marjorie's flaws. We don't have to even think about her inattention to the business side. That old archetypical educational leader who is too elevated for such mundane things as the budget doesn't exist anymore. That's long passé. I don't think there's one person in this room who makes that mistake. So let's look at her glory, for there's a ton of that.

Marjorie's great accomplishment was to lead in such a way as to create a school that was beloved. More than beloved. Revered. And even more important, beloved and revered for the right reasons. Marjorie understood in her bones that there's a transcendent meaning in education, a transcendent meaning in what schools do. Every moment in her life was driven by her understanding that the potential in each human being is precious beyond imagining, and is sacred, and that it is education that will lead that potential out. By the fierce power of her conviction, her faith, she shined the light on that transcendence and dimmed it on everything else, because everything else than the empowering of the sacred lives of young women was peripheral. She kept her eyes on the prize. After hearing such wonderful speakers all this week, I think I know now really what is the essence of leadership. That is the essence of leadership. Yes, we have to be good managers, too, as Marjorie learned too late, but what availeth good management if it isn't in the service of our reason for being? There are many forces that push us away from that center. Most of them come under the guise of realism and practicality. It is a leader's job to recognize the disguise and keep us centered.

Listen to Marjorie, even in the last year of her reign, demanding again that the graduation ceremony take place exactly at noon. On the surface, a foolish, merely whimsical, use of her power. "When the sun is at the top of the sky," she declared, as she has every year that she has been head of Miss Oliver's School for Girls, "time stands still for just a little instant right then, and people notice things. They see. And what they see is the graduation of young women, females, from a school founded by a woman, designed by a woman, run by a woman, with a curriculum that focuses on the way women learn. I want the celebration to take place exactly at noon in the bright spangle of a June sunshine so the world can see the superiority of the result," Marjorie has demanded once again in spite of her dismissal. She will be the headmistress until July 1 when her contract expires. Until then, her will prevails.

"But it will be too hot at noon," the more practical-minded members of the faculty objected once again in an argument that for senior faculty members Francis and Peggy Plummer is an old refrain. They are like theatergoers watching a play whose ending they have memorized.

"No, it won't," Marjorie has replied.

"How do you know it won't?"

"I just do," she said, standing up to end the meeting. For meetings always end when Marjorie stands up and begin instantly when she sits down.

Well, of course, it will be too hot. That's part of the point. You can't intensify the meaning of the graduation ceremony by causing it to take place at a convenient time. And what Marjorie is about is intensifying meaning. And again, after hearing those people speak, I'm beginning to think that is our job. Our job is to intensify meaning. What is the school really doing? What is the meaning of it? That is our central job.

"You were Oliver girls," the audience hear Marjorie saying in the graduation speech, and Francis Plummer reaches to hold Peggy's hand. They know what she's going to say next, because she says it every year. And when she says it, "Now you're Oliver women," giving that word of glory, Peggy starts to cry. She is surprised at her sudden melting, for up to this moment she has assuaged her grief over Marjorie's dismissal by reminding herself that she agreed with the board's decision. But we know why she cries at exactly this moment. Her leader has just told her how important she is to the world, how justified is the way she spends what the poet Mary Oliver calls her one and only precious life in service to Miss Oliver's School for Girls. Just as Marjorie allows the editors of the school newspaper to publish articles that most of us would censor, because she respects the truth and the truth, whatever it costs, is holy, she persuades them not to publish the list of the elite colleges to which Oliver girls are every year admitted, not because she isn't proud of the success, but because it's peripheral to the prime reason for the school's existence and isn't at the heart of this meeting. It's impractical, maybe even a foolish stance. It drove the board crazy, as it probably should have, and made Gregory Van Buren, head of English, happy at what he loved to describe as the demise of the monarchy at Miss Oliver's School for Girls. But it made the hearts of others swell with pride.

One of those is the Rabbi Myron Benjamin, who, with his wife, hosted a recruiting gathering at his home. The school carries so much meaning for him and his wife and daughter that he can't make himself sit down after he introduces Fred Kindler. He goes on talking, though it isn't really a talk. It's a meditation, in which he discovers, as if he never knew, why he and his wife, Rachel, are willing to depart from their beloved daughter at a time in her life they can never have with her again. First he listed the teachers' passions for their subjects, mentioning in particular Gregory Van Buren, who has engendered in his daughter a love of language and a desire to write, and goes from there to claim that because the teachers expect so much from their daughter, she demands even more of herself; reminding himself out loud that the other word for "subject" is "discipline."

He meditates out loud this way for a full 20 minutes or so, never once mentioning the value of single-sex education for girls. Near the end, it comes to the rabbi that great teaching is an act of love, a love that is disciplined, and shows it, and has nothing to do with whether or not the teacher likes the child, "not like the love of my Rachel and me for Karen, our daughter. That we can hardly help. For she's our own flesh and blood," he says. "So when you choose a school, don't think so much about preparing for the future, getting into college," he tells him, leaping now to their misguided obsessions, "as if your children were squirrels hoarding for the winter. Look for that passion instead, that adoration of life. Tell me, would you withhold an education from a child who you knew was going to die before she was old enough for college?"

And then he stops, coming out of his medication like a man waking up, a little sheepish for having wandered from thought to thought, being so personal. What does Fred Kindler need to say after that?

It's interesting to me you wonder where you get these ideas and how they get into people's mouths, and I know now -- I didn't really figure it out until I was actually rereading this speech -- my wife and I, quite a few years ago, went to a concentration camp that had been made into a museum outside of Prague. I have forgotten the name of it. Some of you might have been there. A Holocaust concentration camp. And you walk through this place of horror, and you can be in the footsteps -- which is what novelists do, right -- of these good people whom somebody else decided should be exterminated. You can have their vicarious experience. You can even, as I did, stand up against the wall where they shot people and look at that part of a campus which they saw in their last instant.

But what we really do remember is walking into this room, and on the wall of this room were pictures by little children, artwork, and on the tables were their journals and their compositions and the dramatis personae of the plays they acted in when we were in school. The adults in that school, all of whom were doomed, made themselves into a faculty for the children, all of whom were doomed, so they could go to school.

And in that moment, of course, I realized the true value of education. It is for itself. It is for now. It is for what we are. It is for the elevation of us into our potential. And I remember looking at my wife, who's also a teacher, and we didn't have to say how glad we were, how blessed to be in the profession you all are in. So that's where that idea came from.

And it's interesting to me -- this is an aside -- but I go back to our speaker yesterday. In that room where Myron Benjamin is making that talk, he's a rabbi, a Jew. Fred Kindler is there, deeply Christian, orthodox Christian man. And Francis Plummer, who, if he could be -- and will be a little later -- worships and is associated with the creator and the creation in the same way that wonderful man who started our blessing the other day is. All three in the same room, and they all knew the same thing.

Well, under Marjorie's leadership, the school came into being, whose intense culture of academic and artistic richness was celebrated in idiosyncratic rituals sacred to its members. In the way of its graduation ceremony, the order for which was plucked out of a tall silk hat that is rumored to have belonged to Daniel Webster, because Oliver girls believe in myths about their school that students in lesser schools would scorn. And in many other ways, Miss Oliver's School for Girls expressed its meaning in myth and ritual that lent the school a style, a way of being in the world that identified it and bound its members to it in ways that go beyond what words can explain.

And yet, when called upon to explain their beloved school, its members never failed to do so in very vivid terms. They have caught on to Marjorie's passion. It has inflamed the hearts and inspired their eloquence. So Francis Plummer, at a recruiting gathering in San Francisco, even though he is trying very hard not to take the light away from the new head, Fred Kindler, can't help it. He takes one look at these three kids sitting there, and he instantly understands them. They have affluenza, which is the disease that Kurt Hahn, the German educator, identified as the expectation that every single desire you have ever had will be immediately gratified, warring with the unconscious hope that most of the desires will be resisted.

And so he starts to talk, and here's what he says. "Something in the air at Oliver's demands that limits be pushed. It's just the way we are. It's a crazy kind of place. When you write a paper for an Oliver teacher, you'll always get it back. It won't be good enough. You will always do it again. Are you ready for that? If you think you're weak in math and science, don't worry. We'll pile on the math and science until you know you aren't. Same with history. Same with art. Nobody gets enough sleep at Miss Oliver's School for Girls."

He goes on like this much longer than he intended, strewing hyperbole to make his point. He never shows them the top of the mountain he's inviting them to claim, only how hard the climb. That's what grabs these kids' attention, focuses their minds, changes what they want. And as when the rabbi spoke, every girl in the audience applied to the school. The best and deepest parts of them had been touched.

Marjorie's faithfulness to the transcendent, the spiritual reasons for the school's existence, attracts faculty like Gregory Van Buren, who for all his annoying traits is a gifted and dedicated teacher and a man who comes through in the end. Here are some contemplations about his reason for teaching.

"Perhaps one source of Gregory's feeling on the subject, which happens to be his horror that the school newspaper -- he is the faculty advisor to the school newspaper -- would even come near writing about the sexual activities of teenage girls in the school, even though it's true. Perhaps his horror at the subject is simple envy. His own sex life seems to be finished. But more likely Gregory, 45, divorced 20 years ago, sticks with a monkish life because he really does believe that sex without love degrades our humanity, and Gregory is too absorbed by Miss Oliver's intense, inward-looking scene to have the time to fall in love again. Maybe the reason Gregory seems so pompous and anachronistic is that, though surrounded by irony on every side, he takes himself seriously enough to believe he has an eternal precious soul that can be stained by fornication. He knows because he's felt that stain a few times when, during summer travels in foreign places, he's fallen off the wagon, punctured his celibacy with some other lonely person, and then suffered weeks of remorse.

At any rate, he takes his students just as seriously as he takes himself. Give him credit for that. They have a soul too, just as eternal as his. That's really why he teaches. If he thought otherwise, he wouldn't bother. And give him credit, too, for being one of the reasons Miss Oliver's goes against the tide. At Miss Oliver's, Gregory Van Buren is cool, precisely because he isn't.

Through the early parts of the novel I thought the title would be Marjorie's Legacy, but I finally rejected that title because there are other people, important people, one of whom was Francis Plummer, second in power only to Marjorie, vastly more powerful than the new school head, Fred Kindler, because he's beloved and revered by the alumni and students for the magic teaching that has so enriched their lives. In fact, he's part of the myth: His other name is Clark Kent. Every day of his professional life, Frances has closed the door of his classroom to the rest of the world and proceeded to use his enormous gifts exactly as he sees fit, enjoying from the first days of his career an autonomy that's hard to find in other professions.

But I didn't think of Francis' power and timing when I was drafting. I just caused him to be as many great independent school teachers are: Brilliant, autonomous, articulate, a joy to work with when they are in tune with you as the leader, and extraordinarily difficult when they're not. I put him in a class and watched him teach, marking the decisions he made minute by minute as he engaged his students in ways that changed them for the rest of their lives.

But Francis Plummer is emblematic also of the baggage, the personal issues we all bring to our work that on the surface seem unconnected to the work, but in reality have an impact on it. In his own inner life Francis isn't at all powerful and autonomous. He's dependent and his marriage is in trouble. He's made Marjorie his parent in place of his father, who dominated him with the power of his convictions, as did his dark-robed Puritan ancestor who glowers down on him from above the mantelpiece. They would have fired Marjorie long ago. They don't see the world the way Francis does, and like a lot of teachers, he knows they would have preferred a son who was a businessperson, or a lawyer, or a doctor, or an engineer than an impecunious teacher.

So when Marjorie hires him into the intense, hermetic world she dominates, he submits so completely to her influence, becomes so indiscriminately loyal to her, that he fails to give her the advice to change her ways that she needs, and then he fights Fred Kindler and the changes he brings to save the school. The problem in the Plummers' marriage, dormant for years, came to the surface under the pressure of the terrifying change that was Marjorie's leaving.

Years ago, as a rookie teacher, in a little elementary school in Connecticut for which I was profoundly unsuited, I got a letter from the faculty telling me all the things that they didn't like about how I operated and how that degraded their morale. I took it to a trustee I really trusted, a psychologist, who looked at it and said, "This isn't just about you. This is about their problems, and you're going too fast, and change has brought them to the surface."

I didn't understand that then, but I do now. I hadn't validated them. I hadn't got to the core of their being and learned who they were, aside from school. And I was so busy trying to get to the point, I kept missing it. If only Fred Kindler understood all this about Francis, and if only Francis knew that Fred and Gail Kindler had lost a daughter, their only child, before they came to Miss Oliver's, and how grievous for them was that loss and how, in all that stress, they were failing to conceive another, how much compassion and generosity would have merged between them? But instead, they went past each other like two ships in the night.

That's something that Lila Smythe, the 18-year-old girl, head of the student council, didn't have to be taught. I was surprised when I finished reading the book -- not writing it -- that she had her hand on every lever that moves the school forward and was, in every contentious issue, Fred Kindler's partner. She's the most gifted and natural leader in the school. And when we first meet her, she and Francis are driving west to participate in an archeological dig, and she's doing what Francis and Fred failed to do: Getting to know him. He's been thinking about her, watching her drive, wondering whether she remembers how much she disapproved of herself when she arrived at the school three years ago, for her tallness, her thick legs, her braces. Now she likes her tallness, her sturdy legs are just fine, and her braces are gone. In a co-ed school, Lila would be one of the girls the boys don't want to date. At Miss Oliver's she's president-elect of the student council. She'll have more influence than many of the faculty.

They've both been promised by the archeologist that they will see what the Ohlone Indians saw, maybe even dream their dreams, and she wants to know why that interests him so, why does that draw him so. She keeps prodding him until he finally gives in and says, "All right. It's like this. Once when I was a little kid, I was fishing with my dad." He begins to speak very fast now that he's discovered he's going to tell her this amazing thing. "In a canoe and a huge turtle swam up to the surface of the lake and came right up beside me where I was in the bow of the canoe. He looked right at me, looked me right in the eyes."

He stops talking suddenly, aware of how foolish he sounds. "And you looked back at him," Lila finishes.

"Yes."

"And then he went away?" Lila's voice is very quiet.

"Yes. Then he went away."

"You recognized each other," she announces. And now he's surprised at how matter-of-fact her voice is. "He chose you," she says. "He's your totem from out of the time when the world was here and human beings were not."

And all Francis can think about is how different this kid's reaction is from Peggy's when he tried to tell her what this moment means to him. "Thanks for telling me. I know you better now," Lila says. "I have always wanted to know you. Now I do. Thanks."

And when I think about those words, I don't like to brag, but I do think that I have found maybe the sweetest, most profound words, the most pure at heart from this 18-year-old girl. "Thanks for telling me. I know you better now. I have always wanted to know you, and now I do. Thanks."

Later in a campground near Winnemucca, Lila waits for sleep to come. She'd rather be out under the stars, but Francis has insisted she put up her tent and sleep in it, afraid some crazy rapist would come through. "Who knows who comes to public places like this?" he asks, speaking like the dad she doesn't have. He's in his tent, too, not far from hers. She imagines she can hear his breathing over the noise of the big trucks on Route 80, half a mile away. She shivers with her happiness and hugs herself, and then she falls asleep.

Well, she should be happy. Francis is an incredibly complicated person, like you, like me, like all of us. And he needs to be known. He's going west for two reasons. One very legitimate. He wants to escape having to help his new boss, at whose right hand he should sit, telling him where the rocks and shoals are. But the other is because this is a Native American archeological dig, and Francis' inner spirit is there with those people, but he can't even identify that to himself. In fact, his wife is a very orthodox Christian, because Francis' father was so dominant that Francis begged her to join that faith, and she did so because she had no other faith to renounce, and then she becomes very faithful in that faith.

That's how complicated we are. And as we lead schools, that's what we're dealing with. And this 18-year-old girl went right to the heart of that with her simplicity and her integrity and validated Francis.

Much later in the story Fred Kindler and Lila have a conversation explicitly about leadership. Lila has thrown the considerable weight of the student council behind a compromise position concerning sharing the Pequot artifacts in the school's possession with the Pequot tribe. Her opponent, Marie, has taken the politically correct position, righteous position, of renouncing all rights to them. "I wish I could be like Marie," she tells Fred. "The way she cares about what's absolutely right, and nothing else."

"Not even whether it works?"

"Yes," she says, "not to give a damn."

"It's too late, Lila," he says. "You're way past that."

And when she doesn't say anything to that, "How old are you, Lila?"

She frowns. Why is he asking that? "Eighteen," she says. "Why?"

"How long do you think those Pequots lived?" he asked.

"In the village that was here? Maybe 40 years."

"You're almost halfway there," he says. "You'd be a chief by now."

"Huh-uh." She shakes her head. "The chiefs were men."

"Behind the scenes, then, Lila. The real boss behind the boss."

"No way," she says. "I'm not going to be anybody's boss. I'm going to be an archeologist."

"You'll be the boss archeologist," he says. "You'll be the one who takes the weight."

But he's got that wrong, she thinks. I don't take it. It just goes right by the ones who really want it, which I don't, and just comes to me. She could tell him that -- if she knew him better -- if it didn't sound so proud.

We know that Fred is right and Lila is wrong. It doesn't just come to her. It comes because when there's a weight to be carried, she's the one who picks it up. Later these two peers, the 18-year-old girl and the 35-year-old new school head do get to know each other, when he gives her a photo of his dead daughter, about whom Gail and Fred Kindler talked to almost no one else.

I can't talk about Fred Kindler without first talking about his wife, Gail, to whom I would give an expanded role if I could rewrite the book. It's plain as day to me that she emerged out of my own good fortune in having a spouse who knows her husband better than he knows himself and is willing to wait for him to catch up. "Wither thou goest," she murmurs to him while he's asleep, quoting the Bible he loves. "Whoever you try to become."

Her husband is Don Quixote, of course, the naive gallant who takes on a role he can't possibly fulfill. He doesn't even look the part. Marjorie Boyd is tall. She strides when she walks. He's so short that when he uses the podium that was built for her, he disappears behind it and everyone laughs. He wears polyester suits and he walks with a toes-out gait like Charlie Chaplin. But he's a hero for following his heart to a school where his daughter would have been fulfilled if she had lived, and then falling in love with that school for the same reason that Marjorie fell in love with it, and he's a leader because against all odds, he helps the school grow up. Never again will Miss Oliver's be underfunded, and never again will all the decisions come down from the top. Only the people who understand that the school is a stronger, more mature organization at the end of the story thank him for this. Everybody else thinks he's a failure.

It was interesting to me that the agent, Robert Ducas, who was British, thought the ending was too happy, while my American friend who brought the manuscript to his attention thought it was too sad.

More interesting that that argument is what might be Fred's most stunning success, that he recognized that the future of Miss Oliver's School for Girls -- in fact, one of the reasons it should be saved -- lay in the expansion of its value to the larger world. Way back there in 1991, before any of the rest of us were thinking and talking about the public purpose of private schools, Fred Kindler empowered and enriched the school -- indeed, he founded salvation -- by giving away a central possession, namely the Pequot artifacts unearthed from the village that existed for thousands of years on the ground that was now the campus. That dismay and the archeological focus it inspired had engendered in Oliver girls an unusually inclusive view of the world that made them better citizens. Now that would happen for others too. No longer would it be a private possession in the center of an independent school of only 400 students. It would be a public museum owned by the Pequot Nation, housed in a library jointly owned by the school and the Pequots, open to everyone. In a world of so much need, in which other people's children dodged bullets on the way to school and arrived without breakfast, in which private schools focused large resources on very small student bodies, the path Fred shows is one I hope we will all soon follow. He knew we should demand of the school that it be a servant, what our schools demand of their students.

I honor Fred for that, and I honor Marjorie for keeping her eyes on the prize, and Francis for been such an excellent teacher and Lila for her empathy, for carrying the weight; but most of all, for spending your one and only precious lives in our sacred profession, I honor you. You are the excellent people I was writing about.

Thank you.

MR. GALBRAITH: Steve, thank you. Can you take a couple of questions?

MR. DAVENPORT: I sure could.

MR. GALBRAITH: I'd like to ask one. I have listened to you talk about how, as the book formulated, you changed things when certain things happened and you got a new perspective on something. Did anything like that happen during the conference as we've been talking about leadership?

MR. DAVENPORT: I don't know if I reflected it well, but as I was trying to say, I think you come to some understanding or maybe a learning of things you already know when you go through the discipline of writing. And I think I had in there maybe too implicitly what our great speakers were talking about all week, that when Mr. Patel discovered that about his grandmother, "I have been doing this for 40 years. That's what Muslims do," I just think, what would have happened in that school if people had taken the time to keep to the essence, which is knowing each other, finding that goal?

So I really didn't manipulate these characters. I lived the life you have all lived for years, and you get into a discipline and you write about a person, you put the character out there, and then he's engaging with another character. For instance, there's a man in there, Milton Perkins, whom I put in there in the beginning as an archetypical right-wing kind of person that I love to argue with, and he becomes a great guy in the book. He does his job. He comes through. And of all the people in the book he's one of the people I like the best.

So it's out of control. I really think it is. Thank you.