It has been a tremendous start to another year at University! From adventures on the “Shortest First Day of School” to Freshmen Retreat and Seminar Days, from our first wins on the courts and on the pitch to our first Spirit Week and the Club Fair, University students are showing up, showing out, and ready to engage with one another. They talk with their teachers, they celebrate their sports in the announcement line, and they eat lunch on picnic tables in the sun. The halls are filled with joy and purpose, and our community is humming with the familiar rhythm of being together.
Last spring, Assistant Head of School Jamie MacDougall gave us the perfect frame for our year: “Living the Questions.” This directive, drawn from the poet Ranier Maria Rilke, reminds us that we don’t always need to have the right answers; sometimes what we need instead is to pursue the right questions with a dogged commitment to learning—about butterflies or cathedrals or hip hop—in an effort to understand more about our world and ourselves. In many ways, this call to live the questions connects us back to University’s beginning.
Twenty-five years ago, our school began with a question. A group of parents came together and asked what a school could be if it took students seriously, empowered them to shape their own education, and built a community centered on a set of shared values. That intrepid group didn’t have all the answers, but they certainly asked the right questions. We’ve grown and evolved since those early days, but we’ve never lost sight of who we are. Our world will keep changing, and there will undoubtedly be new questions for us to explore. And, we’ll do it as we always do, together.