The Hotchkiss School

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The Hotchkiss School is an independent, American college preparatory boarding school located in Lakeville, Connecticut. Founded in 1891, the school enrolls 567 students in grades 9 through 12 and a small number of postgraduates. Students at Hotchkiss come from across the United States and 26 foreign countries. The current head of school is Mr. Malcolm McKenzie, former principal at Atlantic College in Wales. McKenzie is a former Rhodes Scholar, and hold a degree in linguistics. Hotchkiss 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.

Main Building
Main Building

Contents

The Hotchkiss School was founded in 1891 by Maria Bissell Hotchkiss with the encouragement of Yale University president Timothy Dwight V. Maria Hotchkiss was the widow of Benjamin B. Hotchkiss, who founded the French arms company Hotchkiss et Cie, made famous by the use of its machine guns in World War I [1]. This led to a nickname for the school, "son of a gun" (see Wertenbaker and Basserman, The Hotchkiss School, 1966, p. 68). Maria originally had aspirations for the school to serve underprivileged students, and the original charter provided some scholarship for local farm-boys.

The school is located in a rural setting in 810 acres (3.3 km²) of woodland near two lakes. Hotchkiss has an endowment of over $419 million.

Most classes are held in the "Main Building", a three story building at the center of campus, containing most of the classrooms, which is interconnected with the dining hall, chapel, library, auditorium and music building. Science classes are held in laboratory classrooms in the separate Griswold Science Building, which is divided into floors for physics, chemistry and biology.

The Edsel Ford library, connected to the main building, holds 80,000+ volumes, along with many computer workstations and almost one hundred periodical subscriptions.

2005 saw the completion of Hotchkiss' brand new music center. Elfers Hall seats 700 and has excellent acoustics. The school has equipped the hall with a handmade Fazioli piano. There are also many practice rooms, three class teaching rooms, and a music technology studio.

Outdoor facilities include climbing walls and a nine-hole golf course created by designer Seth Raynor. An adjacent lake, Wononscopomuc, has a boat house and is used for sailing. There are also many fields, providing playing grounds for the football, soccer, field hockey, baseball, Ultimate Frisbee and softball teams.

The athletic complex, known as the "MAC", an acronym for the Forrest E. Mars Jr. '49 Athletic Center, even though many students still prefer to call it the "AFC", for Athletic Facilities Center, houses an olympic-size ten lane pool, eight squash courts, two ice hockey rinks, two basketball courts, a wrestling room, a fitness center/weight room, indoor track, three indoor tennis courts and two paddle tennis courts.

There are twelve dormitories on campus, six for boys (Tinker, Edelman, Coy, Dana, Watson, and Van Santvoord) and six for girls (Bissell, Buehler, Flinn, Memorial, Garland, and Wieler). Rooms vary in size, from singles to the occasional triple. Hotchkiss is currently in the process of reorganizing the dormitories to achieve a 50/50 balance of the sexes.

The dining hall and snack bar provide food. Three meals a day are served buffet-style in the dining hall. A salad bar, deli bar and dessert bar are provided in addition to the hot entrees. Meals at the dining hall are included in the tuition. The snack bar is open when the dining hall is not.

In the 2005-2006 school year, the school had 567 students from 33 states and 18 countries. The students are divided into grades 9 through 12, known as "Preps" (Grade 9), "Lower-Mids" (Grade 10), "Upper-Mids" (Grade 11), and "Seniors" (Grade 12).

Students are expected to adhere to a formal dress code each class day. Girls have guidelines for combining top layers with pants or skirts, and boys wear a coat and tie. The dress code is relaxed during the winter and late spring months to accommodate the weather. Students are also bound by a "No-Chance" policy on drugs and alcohol.

Currently, Hotchkiss has 127 faculty, a 5:1 student-to-faculty ratio. 68% of the faculty have graduate degrees, and a number have doctorates in their respective fields. The majority of the Hotchkiss faculty live on campus, in both private houses scattered across the grounds, or in apartments in the dorms. Each floor of each dorm has at least one faculty apartment.

Hotchkiss currently fields 17 interscholastic sports teams and the school is a member of the New England Preparatory School Athletic Council and the Interscholastic Sailing Association. Historically strong athletic programs include the Girls Field Hockey team, the Girls Volleyball team, and the Boys Hockey team. Hotchkiss Field Hockey has won 9 New England championships, including six consecutive from 2002-2007. Hotchkiss Volleyball has won 7 New England Championships including the 2007 New England Volleyball Championships.

Hotchkiss students run a number of clubs, including The Record, the student run newspaper; the Human Rights Initiative; BaHSA, the Black and Hispanic Student Alliance; the Gay/Straight Alliance; ;HotchkissTV; Hotchkiss Under God; The Whipping Post (Hotchkiss' satire publication); the Hotchkiss Political Union; and SEA (Students for Environment Awareness). The Hotchkiss Debate Team competes at the national and international level. During Spring Break 2006, Hotchkiss hosted the World Individual Debating and Public Speaking Championship. The Record, Hotchkiss' school newspaper, is published on a bi-monthly basis. Clubs are student-run, though most have faculty advisors, and many of them receive a budget from the school to provide for their various needs.

Hotchkiss is one of four US schools in Round Square, a global conference of more than 50 secondary schools. Students have the option to go on an exchange for a semester to another participating school, or they may meet other Round Square students while working together on a project at a more underprivileged school. Hotchkiss has recently hosted students from Germany, South Africa, and India.

  • The school is mentioned several times in F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise and in his short story Six of One.
  • In the book Primary Colors by Joe Klein, later turned into a film, the principal character Henry Burton was educated at Hotchkiss, and is frequently referred to as 'Hotchkiss'.
  • In Jeffrey Archer's novel Sons of Fortune, protagonist Fletcher Davenport is a Hotchkiss alumnus.
  • In Tom Wolfe's novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, the son of a minor character attends the school.
  • There is a passing reference to the school in Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho.
  • The school is mentioned in Natalie Krinsky's book, Chloe Does Yale
  • The school is mentioned in Richard Rodriguez's memoir "Brown: The Last Discovery of America."
  • In John McPhee's profile of alumnus Thomas Hoving ("A Roomful of Hovings"), Hoving is quoted as saying: "'The thought of being locked up there for weeks and weeks–I used to sweat with the horror of it. If you see your life in terms of weather, Hotchkiss was overcast and threatening. Trees were green there in my last year, because it was my last year.'"
  • In Can't Take It With You: The Art of Making and Giving Money, alumnus and supporter Lewis B. Cullman writes, "Like most New England boarding schools of the time, Hotchkiss was built around the concept of rugged, manly Christianity. Living conditions were Spartan; trips home, rare...There was a Hotchkiss way to do everything." On page 41 he wrote of "the virulent anti-Semitism of Hotchkiss back then" and added, "as with all minorities, our status made us vulnerable."
  • Hotchkiss alumnus Julian Houston, a judge in Massachusetts, wrote the novel New Boy, which recounts the story of Rob Garrett, the first African-American student at the fictional Draper School, which strongly resembles Hotchkiss. (According to a Boston Globe article (March 26, 2006) the author said of his own time at Hotchkiss, "'I was miserable there.'")
  • For the school's centenary, Ernest Kolowrat was commissioned to write Hotchkiss: A Chronicle of an American School (ISBN 1-56131-058-1).
  • Alumnus, former Librarian of Congress, and Poet Laureate Archibald MacLeish said in a 1982 interview "God, how I did not like Hotchkiss!" ("America Was Promises", American Heritage Magazine, vol. 32, issue 5)
  • In Hotchkiss in the Fifties: Myths and Realities (George Mason University's History News Network, 11/29/2004), alumnus and historian Jesse Lemisch writes of the various forms of bigotry he witnessed at Hotchkiss. A disabled student was "stigmatized and physically beaten here." He goes on to write, "...anti-semitism was deep in the history and culture of the place." He quotes alumnus Lewis Lapham (editor of Harper's' Magazine): "'Hotchkiss, like Yale, like Harvard, is about setting wealth to music' [Kolowrat, p. 546]. Basically and in reality [continues Lemisch], it seems to me that Hotchkiss greases the wheels of capitalism." Jean Olsen, the wife of a Hotchkiss headmaster, suspected that the school was "by far the most male-oriented, chauvinistic school in the country" (see Kolowrat, pp. 379-380).
  • The Hotchkiss School: A Portrait was published by the school in 1966 (authors: Wertenbaker and Basserman). The Hotchkiss headmaster George Van Santvoord, known as "The Duke" is quoted as saying "'...we took a religious census and found two Baptists, twenty-seven Jews, eight Quakers, three Mormons, and so on...a peculiar breakdown. We never bothered with any of that. Only question: are these boys going to gain from the experience and not prove too intractable?'" (Wertenbaker & Basserman, p. 113).
  • Hobson Brown, Caroline Says, and Taylor Materne (Hotchkiss graduates in the 1990s) wrote the book "The Upper Class," a novel portraying the lives of two girls at a boarding school which closely resembles Hotchkiss both in appearances and traditions.
  • The Hotchkiss School was mentioned in the episode "If It Should Happen to You" of the Best Years.
  • "The Sixth Form," a 2008 novel written by Hotchkiss graduate Tom Dolby and set at the fictional Berkley Academy in Wilton, MA, is said to be based on Hotchkiss. The novel centers around the relationship between a young man and his older female English teacher.
Young men in blackface, from The Hotchkiss School: A Portrait
Young men in blackface, from The Hotchkiss School: A Portrait

Information resources independent from the school itself. Links to independent school organizations and accreditation services.

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The Ten Schools Admissions Organization
Choate Rosemary Hall • Deerfield Academy • The Hill School • The Hotchkiss School • The Lawrenceville School • Loomis Chaffee • Phillips Academy Andover • Phillips Exeter Academy • St. Paul's School • The Taft School
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