From The Headmaster: Your Support Allows Woodberry to Deliver on its Mission

The first sentence of the school’s vision statement reads, “Since the school’s founding in 1889, Woodberry Forest has sought to develop young men of intellectual thoroughness and principled integrity equipped with the capacity and eagerness to serve as leaders, learners, and citizens.”

I think often about the pillars of a Woodberry education — intellectual thoroughness and principled integrity — and how we go about developing those qualities in our students. The practice of intellectual thoroughness includes time-tested commitments to Friday night study hall and Saturday morning classes. But it’s also the lived experience of deep learning, careful writing, and an unwavering belief in critical thinking. We remain dedicated to the mission statement’s aspirational call to teach boys how to think and not what to think, a challenge that’s even more important in the swirl of contentious forces that divide us culturally.

Principled integrity can be even more difficult to grasp. Yet I think all of us would agree that this value, more than anything else, is the defining characteristic of a Woodberry education. If our boys leave here not knowing what it means to be a good man — how to choose the hard right over the easy wrong — we have failed. Tests of integrity aren’t always obvious, however, and the results rarely generate a clear outcome for others to measure. If, as UCLA basketball coach John Wooden famously said, “The true test of a man’s character is what he does when no one is watching,” how can we possibly know whether our boys are passing or failing that test?

The simple answer is that we can’t. Instead, we trust an institutional framework and an honor system that has been in place for more than one hundred years. To verify our beliefs, we collect data through a longitudinal study that surveys alumni each year and informs us that, for the overwhelming majority of our alumni, the lessons they learned at Woodberry have stuck with them their entire lives. The important and indelible mark those lessons left is also reflected in the extraordinary support the Amici Fund receives every year, with each gift a ringing endorsement for what generations of exceptional teachers and coaches have done at this humble school in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

We wouldn’t be the school we are today without your unwavering generosity and support. Running a school like Woodberry, where every boy and almost every teacher lives on campus, is expensive. Tuition revenue covers only 52 percent of our annual operating budget. For us to be the kind of school we want to be — a place that is able to offer opportunities that provide life-changing experiences — we rely on the generosity of thousands of alumni, parents, and friends. As the following pages demonstrate, that devotion once again made all of this possible, and for that, you have my enduring gratitude.