During the 2025 Commencement ceremony, Head of School Robert W. Hill III gave a speech to open the proceedings. Below are his remarks in full. You can watch the ceremony on our YouTube page.
A warm welcome to parents, family, friends, faculty, students, Chair of the Board of Trustees, John Hazen White, and our honored speaker from the Class of 1998, Michael George. And especially you, the Class the Class of 2025!
Welcome to the Williston Northampton School’s 184th Commencement exercises-I want to add a special welcome to those families who have traveled from great distances for this proud moment, families from China, Korea, Singapore, Mexico, Iceland, and Austria-we are truly a global community at Williston. We have a commencement tradition, where I ask that seniors stand and thank Williston’s incomparably dedicated and talented faculty, sitting behind me-before you sit down, please face the audience, your family and friends, and thank them for all of the love and support they’ve given you to reach this important milestone.
It has been a memorable year at Williston, class of 2025, and your achievements have broken all kinds of recent records-and now you are sharing your talents as you migrate to nearly 95 different colleges and universities, home and abroad. You have worked hard in our classrooms and art studios, on the stage and on the fields. We have watched you grow and change before our eyes, in some cases dramatically so as with Sako returning from a year abroad with long hair, a bass voice, and an unforgettable lead role in Hades Town. As we heard yesterday, we had a record number of championship teams: football, field hockey, boys swimming, boys basketball, and just last week, boys track and field-and still others who went deep into post-season play, like boys’ soccer and girls’ hockey, and softball. Because you made it look so easy, we got accustomed to seeing Ashton’s soaring dunks, Gab sprinting into the record books, Liv Ferebee’s dominant goaltending, or Jacob Waah leaving it all on the gridiron.
But amid all of these highs, last October we experienced the loss of a treasured member of the Class of 2025—Elise Ollmann-Kahle—in her battle with cancer. Her nearest friends and teachers who had worked so closely with Elise pushed through their own emotions and continued to do good well-and pink became the adopted color of the year.
In one collaborative effort, Mrs. Hill and Parker Brown teamed up with the idea of generating a scholarship in Elise’s name, and you responded by myriad fundraisers led by teams and other campus groups. Thanks to those efforts and the generous support from every segment of the Williston Community, including Founders Day gifts-that fund now stands at over 60 thousand dollars, and thus becomes a permanent and growing fund in our endowment, as the Ellise Ollmann-Kahle Class of 2025 Memorial Scholarship Fund.
As I have been reflecting on my remarks for this morning, I recognize that all of us, but especially 2025, witnessed a year that contained tragedy and elation, in other words, we lived through that broad spectrum of human experience that will characterize the rest of your lives.
Through it all you have made durable memories.
I won’t soon forget this year, and I doubt many of you will either-that’s because important life moments and lasting friendships are durable, they are called lasting because, well, they last. You have memories and have developed traits and characteristics, like selflessness, dedication and integrity, that I hope will stick with you forever. You have friendships with peers and adults that I know will endure, just like your Class Banner which Gemma designed and that will be here for you at your reunions.
Contrast this permanence with countervailing forces that seem to be everywhere-especially in your teenage lives. So much of what we consume, either literally or figuratively, is impermanent; it’s perishable; it’s disposable. Every time I see uber-eats pull up to campus I think of disposable waste, of the disproportionate amount of packaging surrounding the scant valuable protein that it encapsulates. Every time I hear about a new viral TikTok craze, I think that it will be displaced by the next one that comes along. It turns out that 40 percent of 13-year-olds already have lnstagram accounts, and so by the time you have finished high school you are all pretty much conditioned, some would say captive, to this disposable virtual world.
Class of 2025-you head to college in extraordinary times, where once promising professional pathways can shift in a matter of months. Just a few years ago, undergraduates scrambled to learn coding, but now that Al has permeated that workplace, according to a recent Washington Post article, one quarter of coding jobs have been eliminated in the last two years. Deep fakes are really good. So are the voices that read the articles in the New York Times. If something can be done faster, cheaper, and better, you need to pay attention. I’ve been reading a lot about the state of college and university students: college students self-report that they read very little of what’s assigned to them, and at the same time they admit that they use Chat or some other Al tool to do a chunk of their work for them. Let me say that again, college kids read less and use Al more. That means they do less of the hard work of thinking on their own. If you don’t believe me, just ask a college friend. That’s not durable learning. That’s not a sustainable vision for higher education.
I hope I am not sounding too doom and gloomy on this celebratory day, so let me shift topics for the three minutes I have remaining.
Earlier this spring, Mrs. Hill and I test drove a Tesla, and no offense meant to Tesla owners, but we chose another electric vehicle instead. For me operating a Tesla was too reliant upon a giant iPhone screen, and I’m actually trying to reduce screen time. (For those not familiar with these cars, all vehicle controls, from shifting into drive or reverse to turning on the heated seats, requires using the touch screen.) Besides, I reasoned, Mrs. Hill and I still have twenty something-year-old kids in our orbit and their frontal cortex definitely needs more maturing before they drive a touch screen car.
Which connects to my next thought, I am a disciple of Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation, and he warns about our addiction to screens, especially iPhones and social media channels, and how it all affects dopamine levels and behavior, without our awareness. So now I’m thinking that maybe Tesla actually has a powerful business model that hooks screen addicted drivers to their high-tech cars-maybe they imagined little mobile dwelling units-like some sort of WallE movie.
My musings take me back to a fundamental binary: it all comes down to permanence versus impermanence. Mrs. Hill helped shape my thinking on this topic. Those of you who have experienced her as a teacher in mathematics or Latin, probably think of her, as I do, as a really smart person- But I also know her, mostly in the summer when time permits, as a DIY beast. I apologize Kathryn for oversharing, but I think everyone here can keep your secret-Mrs. Hill gets totally dialed in on home improvement projects. Heck, she would have helped set this tent up if they had let her.
In our house, instead of White Lotus or Severance, we get a lot of Fixer Upper or Property Brothers.
Ok, some of you, and probably ALL of my colleagues, are wondering, where is he going with this thread. Well, since this is, after all, my last chance, 2025, to speak to you as seniors, I thought I would share this final message. Last summer at our home in down east Maine, Mrs. Hill decided we needed to build a path to our front door rather than continue to walk across a lumpy lawn. I could have hired a contractor, but that idea was quickly rejected. “If you do it yourself”, she insisted, “then you know it will last.”
To build our indestructible walkway of slate stone pavers, we first had to remove about eight inches of clay like soil from an area three feet wide and 50 feet long. Go ahead and take out your Tl-84s and calculate the quantity in cubic feet of base layer needed to fill it back in. So there was that, along with, of course the 24, 45-pound slate paving stones. Basic arithmetic. For the record, it came out to about 200, 50-pound bags of various sands and gravel. For me, however, the daily calculus was simple: I was like the kid in the car whining “are we there yet?” Mrs. Hill was not just a patient cheerleader, she poured in her own sweat equity.
Time spent became less a measure than what we had accomplished. Excavating, re-filling, and packing down the base became a daily rhythm. In fact, Mrs. Hill would have made Coach Blayne proud with her AP performance-like work—while I was sipping my morning coffee, she was hammering away at the base with a tool that looks like a giant potato masher attached to a 25-pounds of iron—over and over and over. It was the same sound as the weight balls slamming into the Cain athletic center’s floor. We worked together as a team and emerged with a newfound knowledge of building a durable path, and for me, many, many lasting memories.
A bit of research, taking time, building a solid foundation, and doing the hard work, those were the attributes that led to our successful DIY path. Even somebody with such high standards as Mr. Wing, who leads Williston’s own physical plant staff, said it looked pretty good. So, now, class of 2025, I hope you see the connection to your next four years and beyond. My message to you is: Live durable lives-take time, do the hard work yourself, and build lasting foundations. In all that you do, take the DIV challenge and I promise you that you will develop skills and resilience, to say nothing of lasting relationships. And, oh yeah, try to stay off your screens.