Edward Shanahan stands with his wife, Sandy. PHOTO/Contributed

So I hear you did an interview yesterday.



With Annie [Oxborough-Yankus ’08], yep.



How did that go?



It was good.



So I have a standard to live up to.



No, no, no, no, no. She was great, but yours will be different. In my experience a biography is as much the writer as it is the person being written about.



All right then, let’s get right into it. You grew up in New York, right? What part? And how has that influenced you?



I grew up in the South Bronx section of New York City, as far south in the Bronx as you can get, right on the East River. And it was a neighborhood that was at that time made up mostly of Irish immigrants—Irish Catholic immigrants—though there were a sufficient number of Italians, Germans and Jews in the area. It was a very Irish neighborhood, a very Catholic neighborhood, arranged by parish. If you were Irish and you were from the Bronx, you wouldn’t say what neighborhood you were from, you would say what parish you were from. You would say St. Luke’s parish, or St. Jerome’s parish.



Which was yours?



St. Luke’s. And by my teenage years it started to go through a transition, there was a lot of Puerto Rican immigration into that part of the city, and that resulted in the kind of conflict you see played out in West Side Story, between Puerto Rican gangs and other gangs, and I got caught up in some of that. And so in terms of the influence of those years on me, I was profoundly influenced by my heritage and I still am. And my faith, my faith community, influenced me a lot, directed me to study for the priesthood. The fellowship of my neighborhood influenced me a lot. I’m still in touch with a lot of folks I grew up with.



Were you seriously considering becoming a priest? Was that your goal coming out of high school?



Yes, my four years in college were spent studying for the priesthood.



Then what influenced you to change that decision?



Just growing older, and thinking more about the different opportunities I wanted to pursue in my life. This prospect felt very comfortable in my middle high school years, and certainly even more comfortable during my early years in the seminary. But as I got into my junior and senior years I began to think more deeply about the world, and less about where I had come from, and that opened up the more attractive opportunity for me to think about becoming a college teacher. So I left the seminary after college and took some time off. I was a welder and pipefitter by the time I graduated from college, so I worked for Standard Oil in Ohio and other companies doing oil refinery shutdowns and the like across the country.



How did that come about? Had you done it in the summers?



In the summer and on weekends. My father had been trained in this area, and he wanted me to be trained in it, so he dragged me off to apprenticeship school. It’s a good skill to have.



Good money?



Good money. Two months into it I was able to go out and buy my first car and pay cash.



Going back to wanting to be a priest, was it always something you had wanted to do as a kid? What was the attraction?



Growing up in the neighborhood that I did, you’re surrounded by priests and nuns and the church, and you’re regularly being confronted with whether you’re being “called” to the serve God and serve the church, so it was a natural thing for many kids in the neighborhood to think about the religious life. So I was a pretty good kid. I wasn’t one of the delinquents. Did I do things wrong? Did I make mistakes? Sometimes, sure. But by and large, I was a pretty good kid. I didn’t do drugs, I didn’t drink. So the strength of my faith definitely influenced me; my behavior was a little bit different from the kids who didn’t have that influence.



You left the University of Wisconsin to take a job at Wesleyan. How did that come about?



I was working on my Ph.D. in Wisconsin, and the Dean of Students of the University of Wisconsin took me aside and told me, “I have a friend who is the chair of the search committee at a small university in Connecticut, and they’re looking for someone to run their residential life program. Would you be interested?” and I said sure. At that time my mother and my nephew were killed in an accident in New York City and my father was living alone, and so this was the perfect opportunity for me to get back east, and at least have a job. The disruption it created was I had not finished writing my dissertation, so that got put on hold for several years. But I figured I could do that over several years if I had a good job, so I came to Connecticut, interviewed, and got the job.



After Wesleyan, you served as the Dean of the College for Dartmouth for nine years. What was your time at Dartmouth like?



It was mixed. I had two jobs at Dartmouth: the first five years and the second five years. The first five years were pretty tumultuous. I was brought in to run this whole division having to do with the whole academic side of students’ lives: requirements, degrees, and all the kinds of support activities that happen in the deans’ office here. But I was also responsible for athletics, health services, the golf course, the skiway, twenty thousand acres of timberland management, fraternities and sororities, and all the residence halls---which had to be renovated. So the tumultuous part of it was two-fold. One part involved making significant renovations to the residence halls, putting in common areas, study rooms, and faculty offices, and creating a new Office of Residential Life that hired, trained, and managed a large group of hall directors, resident advisers, and faculty-in-residence; but I also had to get the fraternities in line. And that was a tough job. Animal House is based on a fraternity house at Dartmouth. So some of these houses were in pretty rough shape. It took me, with the help of a couple of great deans, several years to get my arms around this problem, but I think in the end we did a good job. We instituted a set of standards. Yes, we had to discipline some houses. But by and large the fraternities eventually complied and experienced, along with sororities, a resurgence at the college.



What was the second part of it?



The second part of it was that that was a time when college students were demonstrating against administrations in order to get them to divest holdings in South Africa, and that created a lot of problems, a lot of anxiety on campus, a lot of conflict between the political right and left. We also had a very right-wing paper on campus called The Dartmouth Review, affiliated with the National Review, and so the liberal students were fighting with conservative students. We had a shantytown on the green for a couple of months. Bill Buckley wrote a couple of articles about us. The Boston Globe, too. It was pretty wild.



What were your specific strategies in dealing with the fraternities?



My overarching strategy was that these houses were going to deteriorate to the point where they will be no longer recognized by the college.



How do you mean deteriorate?



I mean physically, and if physically then socially, and if socially then morally. The house in Animal House looked a lot better than any of the houses. There was little furniture. If there was furniture it was an old wooden box. There were not drapes on the windows, there were no carpets, the floors hadn’t been scraped, the paint was peeling off the walls, some windows were out, the basements had full-service taps. Beer was on tap all day long. Some kids spent a lot of time in the basements. A lot of drinking, a lot of rowdiness, occasional fights. Some other issues between boys and girls. So my pitch to them was, listen, I’m here not to eliminate the fraternity system, but to strengthen it and make sure it stays around here long after we’re all gone. And thanks to some great student leaders in the fraternity system we were able to turn the corner and really work these things out. They are a lot stronger today than they were in the early 80’s.



Were there any specific incidents of conflict between you and the fraternities?



Sure, plenty.



Do you have an example?



Well, I’ll give you an example. The winter after I arrived at Dartmouth, a fraternity had an initiation ritual on the golf course where the pledges would go barrel to barrel, and at each barrel there was a fire, and at each station there were a group of fraternity members who would tell them about the house. But while they were telling them about the house they would be feeding them alcohol. These were drinking stations in the middle of the night. I didn’t know this was going on. Later in the night there were two kids who got disoriented on the golf course, which is on the banks of the river, and they saw lights and they then proceeded to cross the Connecticut River. Thank God they made it to the other side, they could’ve fallen through. But they continued to get more and more disoriented as the evening went on until finally they broke into a house and collapsed. So that was the first fraternity house I had to discipline.



Did you ever have any personal conflicts with any of the fraternities?



Never with the fraternities, specifically. I did have my office taken over many, many times, but that was usually for larger, national political reasons.



You had your office taken over? While you were there?



Yeah. Several times. Once I even had to call the police.



This was a regular occurrence?



Not a regular occurrence. I’d say the building that I and the President were in, in ten years, was taken over three, four times.



You mentioned students were protesting the apartheid in South Africa. Were there any other major issues with the administration?



There were a whole range of issues. Fraternity stuff never really got into the public. I think most of the other issues had to do with politics. The politics of ROTC, for example. The Dartmouth Review was a very right-wing publication, and they went after minority members of the faculty, they went after Native American students, they went after any initiatives that they perceived to be liberal, and they would do this in a pretty blatant, if not provocative, way in the press. I remember once there was a fundraiser to help the people who were starving in Somalia. It was outside the student center. There was a great rally to raise consciousness, and funds to support these families. And The Dartmouth Review set up a station across the street. They put a couple of round tables out with chairs and a linen tablecloth, and a candelabra, and a couple bottles of supposed champagne. And they sat there, and toasted to the poor. And they drank the champagne. And in that way they were ridiculing students’ legitimate and admirable concern for the poor and destitute. We are the rich people, we’re the privileged ones. Let’s celebrate that privilege, and leave the poor to their lot. Not a pretty sight



Was there a fight?



I don’t remember if there were fisticuffs.



So you feel you were successful in dealing both with the student protests and with the fraternities?



Yes. You know, of course there are some things that if I could do over again I might do differently, but you learn through that whole process.



So then what do you think it was that led to your success?



Well, I worked hard. I listened a lot to what people were saying. I tried to respond. I was loyal to my colleagues and the faculty and the administration. I wasn’t particularly smart. I was just hardworking, loyal, and diligent. I had some talent in the area of student life. I didn’t discover that until halfway through my career at Wesleyan. So a number of things. But I think those are the things that make the difference for a lot of people.



So what influenced your decision then to move from Dartmouth to Choate?



Well, I have a—I wouldn’t call it a philosophy—but I think that after ten years at a place you’ve given it most of what you’re going to give it. So after ten years I started to get restless. Of course I’ve been here now for seventeen years, so I’m violating my own philosophy, but this place is always exciting and always changing. But anyway, I wanted to pull up stakes and try something else, and that was either a small college presidency or a large school headmastership, and I chose the latter because I wanted to get back to teaching, I wanted to get back to having a relationship with students. I got four or five offers to be head of school, and this is the one I chose.



What are your goals as a headmaster? What is your idea of what a headmaster should be?



Oh, God… First of all, I’m charged by the Board of Trustees to run and manage the school. That has a very daunting practical side to it. I’m responsible for making sure the facilities of this place are at least as good as they were when I arrived when I pass them on to my successor. If I’ve done my work, they are better. If I’ve really been successful then they are substantially better then they were when I arrived. So that’s the corporate side. Then I have a responsibility, that’s not unrelated to that, to supervise all the individuals who run the various sectors of the school. To supervise the Dean of Students, the Dean of Faculty, the Dean of Academic Affairs, the Chief Financial Officer, the Director of Alumni Affairs and Development, the Director of Admissions. I have to supervise, and that’s a complicated job. I have to understand them, I hire them, I have to advise them, I help them set goals, and I have to not only help each individual. I’ve got to make sure they’re all running in the same direction. That everybody’s not bumping into each other. I also have thirty trustees, so I have to make sure I’m reporting up to them the direction that we’re going as a school, and make sure I have their blessing, and answer their questions and their concerns. So that’s the management pieces of it. Philosophically, my goals are to make sure we have the best faculty and the best students we can possibly have here given our resources. And our resources are often a big issue, often, because there are schools that have more resources than we have and don’t have as good a faculty, or as strong a student body. But resources certainly help. So that’s why we have a capital campaign, and we raise money, and we try to pay our faculty at a very competitive level, and we do pay our faculty very competitively. We make sure we have financial aid available to as many students as we possibly can who want to come here. So making sure we have the finest students and the finest faculty, and making sure that the facilities that they live in, work in, and play in are comfortable and support our mission: academically, socially, morally. So that’s it. It’s a big job. All that, plus coming around regularly and asking whether we’re accomplishing all that. But it’s a great job. Best job I’ve ever had.



How has your spirituality affected your time as headmaster? Are you still a practicing Catholic?



Yeah, yeah. Not as rigorously, I must confess, as I was earlier on in my life. But when you’re a teacher at a place like this, there’s a ministerial component to it. You’re responsible for the young lives of incredibly talented people who can really change society and you’re regularly talking to kids not only about your ideas, but about their ideas, and their responsibility in the world, and about their relationships with each other. You’re talking about mutual respect, and generosity, and understanding, and compassion, and those sorts of things. The preacher is not far from the teacher. Mr. Timlin is teaching a lot more than writing in his class. He’s teaching life. He’s teaching how to live life, and I think the kids who get the most out of his class do not get just what he’s teaching, they get a lot more. And that stays with them for the rest of their lives.



I’ll be sure to put that in



[Laughs] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course you will.



How has the school changed since you arrived here?



Well, it’s smaller by about 200 students. It’s more compact. It used to be spread over two campuses. It is the academic power of the student body that has gone extraordinarily high. The applicant pool has gone extraordinarily high. The attractiveness of the school to students and to faculty, the facilities has increased dramatically. The endowment of the school when I came here I think sixty-two million dollars, now it’s over 270 million dollars.



Have you noticed any change in the culture of the school?



That’s a good question. I think the faculty notice a bit of a change in the culture of the school: namely, that the students now, as compared to twenty years ago, are a lot more driven. Back then there was an ease about the student’s engagement in their studies and in life. Our faculty understand this change, I understand it; some of it is because students are a lot more pressured by society, by colleges, by their parents and by each other. The competitiveness of getting into the right college, as you know only too well, is overwhelming. We all wish that that pressure wasn’t so dominant. Sometimes I talk to kids and it seems like their getting on this freight train. You have to get into the right elementary school so you can get into the right high school, so you can get into the right college, so you can get into the right law school, so you can get into the right firm, so you can become partner, so you can become chairman of the board, so you can retire, and then---you die. We’re always looking at the next step. And part of the challenge that we all have as parents and as teachers is to recognize that it is prep school so we’re preparing students for the next step, but we also have a responsibility to help kids to pay attention to what’s going on now in their lives and enjoy it. Hard work is good, but let’s not be so driven about it that if someone does not get into an Ivy school or a NESCAC school, his/her life’s going to be destroyed. And we the school can contribute to it, I understand. We set up the Arts Concentration Program, the Science Research Program, which encourages kids to get more intensely involved in science. But I hope we try to balance it a little bit by having fun being part of our focus, too.



So Karl Rove came to campus a little while ago. How do you think that went?



I think it was great in the end. I think it was a win-win. I think having the seniors handled it perfectly. They were very balanced. They were concerned about the school, concerned about the class and concerned about graduation. They weren’t as political as some of our parents and alumni were, who saw Mr. Rove as a kind of Darth Vader, and the most diabolical man to ever walk the face of the earth. But I was awfully proud of our students: they handled him marvelously. I think the students will remember him. It will be one of their memorable experiences from their high school years. Not that they were converted by him, not that he won them over to his points of view. I do think that his being here encouraged students to think a little more. To realize things are not always clearly black and white, as is often the case.



What do you think the response says about the student body? It certainly wasn’t the kind of activism you experienced at Dartmouth.



The last couple generations of students have not been as politically engaged as I would like them to become. There is certainly not the political engagement there was in the late sixties and early seventies. But over the several last generations of students there is an incredible generosity. They’re not politically engaged: they’re socially engaged. They’re doing things. Helping out. Having fund raisers for this, that, and the other thing. They’re sharing things. They’re sharing themselves. But of late I think that they’re becoming more politically engaged. I think that visits from people like Karl Rove encourage that. There are a number of our students—I can’t say how many not because it was hundreds but because I don’t know—that didn’t even know who Karl Rove was. Or, they’ve only heard his name, isn’t he an adviser to the president?—that’s about it. I guarantee that by the end of that session, even before he set foot on this campus, the kids had googled him, they had looked him up, and they had gotten politically engaged. And so if that did nothing else other than to get them to go online and figure out who this guy was, then that’s great. So I’m hoping that politics are going to come back into the lives of students. Of course, that’s one of the reasons that so many folks in the media and across college campuses are so excited about this campaign and Barack Obama and what he represents for young people. I mean he could do for this generation, for your generation, what John F. Kennedy did for my generation: get them reenergized.