Noble Brigham ‘20
Photo Courtesy of Kemi Odeyemi ’20
In 1968 Tom Dalzell ‘69 and Van Kalbach ‘69 wrote a long editorial for Scholium entitled “Commentary and Proposal for Reform at Episcopal Academy.” This article changed the course of EA history; many of their suggestions have been implemented over the 50 years since their graduation.
In Charles Latham’s book,The Episcopal Academy, he calls it the “opening gun” that inspired schoolwide reform. In fact, Jay Crawford ‘57, Head of School from 1974-2002, can still quote from the editorial and kept a copy of it in his desk drawer and often referred to it when making important decisions. He says, “There’s a lot of repetitiveness in school work and I kept it just because there were so many good ideas and so many ways of dealing with the issues that come up in schools like ours.”
“’68 was a charged year. The world was exploding,” says Dalzell. Kalbach recalls, “There was so much going on in campuses and colleges and it was filtering down to people who were not yet in college.”
They were inspired by other writers. “We had both read the Cox Report about the crisis at Columbia,” Dalzell says, “and “A.S. Neal on Summerhill, a school with no rules at all, and that sounded wonderful to us. It sounds terrifying now, but we were feeling that things were going on and that Episcopal could be better.”
The working title of the editorial was “A Modest Proposal,” after the satirical work by Jonathan Swift who suggested that children be eaten to ease starvation in Ireland. Their advisor objected, but they were given freedom otherwise with no interference from headmaster or board, which was unexpected by them.
Kalbach says, “We felt that we write it as a single piece rather than piecemeal, then it’ll all be out there, and if you string it all over a series, who knows what might not have been allowed.”
The editorial, which spanned two pages of the Scholium, began by stating that “in giving students a say in their education, in providing education meeting the individual student’s needs, in divorcing itself from invalid philosophies, and in preparing its students for the outside world, Episcopal is truly backwards.”
Their goal was student input in virtually all aspects of the school. To Dalzell and Kalbach, Chapel, curriculum, racial diversity, and coeducation were the really important issues.
Dalzell states, “the thing that bothered me most at Episcopal was the lack of racial diversity…there we were, a 2 second walk across City Line Avenue from the City of Philadelphia, and you could’ve almost said we were more like this place out here 20 miles away from the city than we were like anything in Philadelphia. Just geographically, we had reasons to think that things were not sorting out just right.”
Other aspects were reactive to issues that the school faced at the time. Their suggestion that “students should have an advisory capacity in Faculty meetings concerning discipline” was partly in response to a student who was expelled after being accused of being a drug dealer.
According to Latham and Crawford, after the editorial, that student was allowed to re-apply. The request that the library be kept open all the time was because, as Kalbach says, “The library was Mr. Ridgway’s domain and if he had a class, the library was closed.”
Kalbach and Dalzell did not expect to effect widespread change. Kalbach states, “I was thinking that it would not reach the level of the trustees or the administrators. We were just trying to stir something up.” But the school evolved based on many of the issues they raised.
Crawford states, “In that they have a piece of the proposal that he (Cox) wrote for Columbia, and that for me and I think for a lot of people was really what stopped them and said ‘there is something here.’” Crawford continues, “what I took that to mean was don’t do things for us, do things with us.”
Afterwards, Crawford explains that, “It tightened up the relationships of the faculty and the students. For a while we had a student-faculty senate which had equal numbers of elected students and faculty members and they had legislative power over the Upper School and it worked well.”
“I think it was a really admirable response by the school. There has been compromise on chapel where it’s not every day, it’s every other day. And certainly it’s a very different service,” states Dalzell. He adds, “There’s obviously girls here. That’s big. And you have a diversity office, which was beyond anything that we ever would have asked for. As we said in our editorial, there were only four black students and they were all in 9th grade. We thought that having two Catholic guys coming into the class was diversity.”
However, not everyone was pleased by the editorial. James McK. Quinn, headmaster at the time, replied in his own Scholium piece, saying that chapel, dress code, and discipline would not be changed. E. Newbold Smith ‘44 wrote a sarcastic letter to the editor saying, “You fellows are obviously more intelligent than was my generation. You’ve got the school administrators, instructors, masters, etc. all scared of you.”
After Episcopal, Dalzell attended UPenn and Kalbach Yale and both went on to have successful careers. Dalzell says “I graduated in two years because of the rigor. Episcopal was a lot harder than Penn and I had taken AP in four courses, so I breezed through Penn.”
After college, and partly because of EA Chaplain Sandy McCurdy ‘57, Dalzell “went to work for the United Farm Workers with Cesar Chavez in California” and “became a lawyer by reading the law.” Currently, he is counsel for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union.
Kalbach became a college professor at Pierce College in Philadelphia and more recently at Michigan State University and has focused on the history of science. He has continued his education and says, “I finally got a doctorate last year.”
They were impressed after their tour of the school for Alumni Weekend. Dalzell said, “The big ones would be girls and diversity and a more relevant curriculum and I’m seeing that.”
Kalbach said, “I got the impression from your headmaster’s talk this morning that he would certainly encourage that (activism) and would not be standing in the way of that, and that’s very important to me.”
At the end of their interview, both offered advice to current Episcopal students. “Preserve and build on your bonds with the people around you,” recommends Kalbach.
Dalzell advises, “Don’t believe all your own bullsh*t. Nobody has a monopoly on truth. Express yourself, try to change things, and remember that it’s a big world.”