Lawrenceville School

The Lawrenceville School
File:Lawrenceville Seal.jpg
Location
Lawrenceville , NJ USA
Information
Type	Private, Boarding
Motto	Virtue is always green
Religious affiliation(s)	none
Established	1810
Headmaster	Elizabeth A. Duffy
Faculty	142
Enrollment	807 total 541 boarding 266 day
Average class size	12
Student to teacher ratio	6:1
Campus	700 acres
Color(s)	Red/Black
Athletics	21 Interscholastic Sports
Mascot	Big Red
Website	www.lawrenceville.org

The Lawrenceville School is a coeducational, independent boarding school for grades 9-12 located on 700 acres in the historic village of Lawrenceville, New Jersey, five miles southwest of Princeton. Today, the School enrolls 800 boarding and day students, who come from 34 states and 29 countries. Its endowment stands at $225 million (as of 2005), or nearly $300,000 per student.

History

One of the oldest prep schools in the U.S., Lawrenceville was founded in 1810 as the Maidenhead Academy. As early as 1828, the school attracted students from Cuba and England, as well as from the Choctaw Nations. It went by several subsequent names, including the Lawrenceville Classical and Commercial High School, the Lawrenceville Academy, and the Lawrenceville Classical Academy, before the school's current name, "The Lawrenceville School," was set during its refounding in 1883.

Among Lawrenceville's most distinctive features is its House system common to British boarding schools. Students reside in three distinct Houses (or dorms), where they live with faculty members in a family-like setting: the Lower School, the Circle and Crescent Houses, and the Upper School. Freshmen, or IInd formers (the School stopped accepting Ist formers in 1997), stay in two dorms, one for boys and one for girls. For their sophomore year, students are placed either into the Circle (for boys) or the Crescent (for girls) Houses. The "Circle Houses" are named for their location on a landscaped circle designed by the 19th-century landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who is most famous for designing New York City's Central Park. The Circle is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The "Crescent Houses" are similarly named after the layout of the buildings. Circle/Crescent houses, which field intramural sports teams, have their own traditions, and participate in friendly, though intense, competition. Circle houses are Kennedy, Hamill, Dickinson, Woodhull, Griswold and Cleve. Crescent houses are McClellan, Stanley, Stephens, and Kirby. Plans to build a new Crescent house, to be called Carter, are underway. Seniors (the Vth Form) live in separate dormitories off the Circle and Crescent, or with underclassmen as prefects.

Like the House system, the Harkness table is a hallmark of the School. In the Harkness method, teachers and students engage in Socratic, give-and-take discussions around large, wooden oval tables, which take the place of individual desks.

In 1951, a group of educators from Phillips Academy, Phillips Exeter Academy, and Lawrenceville, Harvard University, Princeton University, and Yale University convened to examine the best use of the final two years of high school and the first two years of college. This committee published a final report, General Education in School and College, through Harvard University Press in 1952, which subsequently led to the establishment of the Advanced Placement Program (the AP Exams).

Lawrenceville 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. Member schools include Lawrenceville, Choate Rosemary Hall, Deerfield Academy, The Hill School, The Taft School, The Hotchkiss School, St. Paul's School, Loomis Chaffee, Phillips Exeter Academy, and Phillips Academy Andover.

Lawrenceville was featured in a number of novels by Owen Johnson, class of 1895, notably The Prodigious Hickey, The Tennessee Shad, and The Varmint (1910). The Varmint, which recounts the school years of the fictional character Dink Stover, was made into the 1950 motion picture The Happy Years which starred Leo G. Carroll and Dean Stockwell and was filmed on the Lawrenceville campus. A 1992 PBS miniseries was based on his Lawrenceville tales.

In 1959, Fidel Castro spoke at the School in the Edith Memorial Chapel. Recent speakers have included boxer Muhammad Ali, legal scholar Derrick Bell, poet Billy Collins, playwright Christopher Durang, historians Niall Ferguson and David Hackett Fischer, the Rev. Peter J. Gomes, poet Seamus Heaney, political analyst Ariana Huffington, novelist Chang-rae Lee, photographer Andres Serrano, poet Mark Strand, writer Andrew Sullivan, politician Lowell Weicker, and philosopher Cornel West.

Among Lawrenceville's prominent teachers over the years have been Thornton Wilder, who taught French at the School in the 1920s; R. Inslee Clark, Jr., who revolutionized Ivy League admissions at Yale in the 1960s; and Thomas H. Johnson, a widely-published authority on Emily Dickinson. Faculty members have gone on to head institutions such as the Horace Mann School, Phillips Exeter Academy, the Groton School, Milton Academy, Westminster School, The Peddie School and Governor Dummer Academy.

While Lawrenceville was all-male for much of its nearly 200-year history, then-Head Master Josiah Bunting III and the board of trustees coeducated the School in 1987. In 1999, the student body elected a female president, Alexandra Petrone; in 2003, Elizabeth Duffy was appointed the School's first female head master; and in 2005, Sasha-Mae Eccleston, class of 2002, became Lawrenceville's first alumna to win a Rhodes Scholarship.

The School's weekly newspaper, The Lawrence, has been in publication for 127 years. It has won numerous awards for journalistic excellence.

Lawrenceville's student body president for the 2006-2007 year is Geer LeBoutillier, from Larchmont, NY.

Lawrenceville will celebrate its bicentennial in 2010.

Lawrenceville is affiliated with The Island School - Cape Eleuthera, The Bahamas

Athletics

Lawrenceville's arch-rival in the Mid-Atlantic Prep League is The Hill School of Pottstown, Pennsylvania. On the first or second weekend of November during "Hill Weekend," the two schools celebrate the nation's third oldest high school football rivalry and fifth oldest school rivalry in the nation, dating back to the 1890's. Also famous, is the annual golf competition for the Crooked Stick, similar in format to the Ryder Cup, which Lawrenceville has dominated over the years.

Lawrenceville competes with other schools in baseball, basketball, crew, cross-country, diving, fencing, field hockey, football, golf, hockey, indoor and outdoor track, lacrosse, soccer, softball, squash, swimming, tennis, volleyball, water polo, and wrestling. In addition, the School offers a variety of intramural sports, including 8-man tackle football for boys' Circle Houses.

Lawrenceville's House Football League is the oldest active football league in America. Teams compete against each other to battle for the pride of their house. Traditions abound, including the yearly rivalry game between the Hamill and Kennedy houses referred to as "The Crutch Game," first played in 1947. The game is fought for the possession of a historical crutch made of wood.

A bit of Lawrenceville football lore is recounted in the book Football Days, Memories of the Game and of the Men Behind the Ball by William H. Edwards, a graduate of Lawrenceville. The book describes the author's time as a member of the Lawrenceville football team, and paints a vivid picture of "the vital power of the [collegial] spirit."

On November 6, 2005, the Lawrenceville Girls Varsity Field Hockey team defeated The Stuart School 2-1 to capture their third straight Prep A State Championship.

On February 12, 2006, the Lawrenceville Varsity Boys' Squash team won Nationals for the third year in a row.

On Thursday, May 18, 2006 the Lawrenceville Varsity Baseball Team won the New Jersey State Prep A Championship over Peddie in a double header (14-0 and 6-1).

Facilities

Memorial Hall, a classroom building on the campus of The Lawrenceville School

On Lawrenceville's 700-acre campus are thirty-four major buildings, including the Bunn Library (with space for 100,000 volumes). Opened in 1996, the Bunn Library offers computer research facilities, an electronic classroom, and study areas. Other campus highlights include a 56,000-square-foot science building (opened in spring 1998), a visual arts center (opened in fall 1998), a history center (reopened in fall 1999), and a music center (opened in fall 2000).

In the main arena of the Edward J. Lavino Field House are a permanent banked 200-meter track and three tennis/basketball/volleyball courts. Two additional hardwood basketball courts, a six-lane swimming pool, a wrestling room, two fitness centers with a full-time strength and conditioning coach, and a training-wellness facility are housed in the wings of the building. A new squash court facility, hosting ten new internationally zoned courts, opened in 2003.

Lawrenceville has eighteen athletics fields, a golf course, twelve outdoor tennis courts, a ¼-mile all-weather track, an indoor ice-hockey rink, a boathouse, and a ropes and mountaineering course.

Notable Lawrentians

• George Akerlof, Nobel Laureate for Economics
• Prince Al-Faisal, Saudi Arabian ambassador to United States
• Edward Albee, Playwright
• Garth Ancier, President, Warner Brothers Network
• Dierks Bentley, Country Music Singer
• Frederick Buechner, Novelist
• George Bunn, Industrial Coffee-maker magnate
• Fox Butterfield, Pulitzer Prize-winning Journalist, New York Times
• Bill Cabaniss, U.S. Ambassador to Czech Republic
• Jay Carney, TIME Washington Bureau Chief and former White House correspondent
• Shelby Cullom Davis, investor, philanthropist, and U.S. ambassador to Switzerland
• Wickliffe Bond Dashiell III, Memphis cotton magnate
• Christopher DeMuth, President, American Enterprise Institute
• Michael Eisner, former CEO of The Walt Disney Company
• Peter Elkind, writer, Fortune Magazine and co-author of The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron
• Malcolm Forbes, Publisher
• Clinton Frank
• Charles Fried, Harvard Law School professor and former United States Solicitor General
• George Gallup, pollster
• Robert Goheen, Former President of Princeton University and former U.S. Ambassador to India
• John Gutfreund, Former CEO, Salomon Brothers
• Armond Hill, former NBA player (Atlanta Hawks)
• J. Robert Hillier, architect
• Owen Johnson, writer
• Philip Jordan, former president of Kenyon College, former head master, Lawrenceville School
• Winthrop Knowlton, former chairman and CEO, Harper & Row
• Peter Lawson-Johnston, chairman, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
• Se-Jin Lee, Johns Hopkins medical school professor who discovered myostatin, the gene responsible for inhibiting the growth of muscle tissue
• Aldo Leopold, Father of Ecology
• Huey Lewis, Musician
• Ricardo Maduro, Former President of Honduras
• Reginald Marsh, painter
• William Masters, human sexuality researcher and co-founder of the Masters & Johnson Institute
• Curtis McGraw, publisher
• James Merrill, Poet
• Paul Moravec, Jr, 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Music-winning composer
• Geoff Morrell, White House correspondent, ABC News
• Paul Mott, President of New Orleans Hornets
• Joakim Noah, current basketball star at the University of Florida
• John Oakes, former editorial page editor, New York Times
• Lewis Perry, former principal, Phillips Exeter Academy
• Bob Ryan, sportswriter and ESPN analyst/contributor
• Peter Schwed, former editorial chairman, Simon & Schuster
• Brandon Tartikoff, former NBC programming chief
• Taki Theodoracopulos, writer
• Raleigh Warner, former chairman and CEO, Mobil
• Lowell Weicker, Governor of Connecticut and United States Senator
• David Wicks, former principal, Milton Academy
• James Harvie Wilkinson III, United States Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit and oft-mentioned prospective Supreme Court of the United States nominee
• Welly Yang, actor