From Avenue Magazine February 1979/Vol 2. No.5
It is nine a.m. on a cold and blustery morning on East Seventy-first Street. Stephen H. Spahn, the youthful headmaster of the Timothy Dwight School, is sitting at his desk at the new Lower-School "campus," conferring with his secretary about the wording of a letter he is about to dispatch to some four hundred and fifty sets of "Dwightonian" parents. Through an opaque glass wall one can see a troop of first-graders - or are they second-graders? - merrily assembling at the foot of the stairs, quietly teasing and punching each other before being herded up to class.
Spahn looks up from his correspondence and smiles proudly as the little Hottentots disappear. He is obviously pleased. With over one hundred and twenty-five students, the Lower School that Spahn created only last September is now almost fully enrolled. Including its Upper School, on Sixty-second Street, Dwight now boasts a total enrollment of four hundred pupils. "Fantastic!" the headmaster exults.
"Terrific!”
The secretary smiles indulgently and hands him a copy of the letter. "Dear Parents." it reads. "The fall days have been filled with the characteristic vitality of all Dwight Days... The Primary School has seen several special programs launched in gymnastics, judo, after-school teams, and assemblies...The Middle and Upper Schools are off to a fall filled with activity. Judo has twelve determined students. The varsity soccer team has won its first league match and the boys assured me they will win another championship."
The letter continues in the same cheery, confident, and slightly corny tone that characterizes all of Spahn's public pronouncements. The headmaster is the school's most ardent cheerleader, which is understandable, considering the fact that he more or less owns the place.
Spahn, thirty-seven, is only the sixth headmaster of the Dwight School, a small "humanistic-traditional' school founded in 1880 by Timothy Dwight, then president of Yale University. Over the years, Dwight has produced a number of eminent New Yorkers, including Fiorello LaGuardia and Robert Moses, but until fairly recently the school remained one of the city's more obscure private academies.
Spahn was appointed headmaster in the fall of 1967, at the unusually tender age of twenty-five, and his rapid - and, for him, totally unexpected - accession to such a position continued a pedagogical legacy of sorts. After Dartmouth and a stint at Oxford.
Spahn was teaching mathematics and economics part-time at the Franklin School, which was then headed by his father, Dr. M. C. Spahn, who has since retired. Winton Miller Ir., who had been headmaster at Dwight for thirty years and was thus an acquaintance of the elder Spahn, was casting around for a new assistant headmaster to help out with his increasingly time-consuming duties, as well as to be a possible successor. According to Spahn The Younger, one thing just led to another and within a year he had become headmaster. Then there were two Spahns dispensing diplomas and sound advice for the future.
Spahn is completely caught up, both emotionally and financially, with Dwight, his "baby," but then the school is truly a family affair. For instance, Spahn's wife, Constance and daughter of former New York Central Railroad president Al Perlman, is dean of admissions. While he doesn't actually "own" the school in the strictest sense, the non-profit Timothy Dwight Foundation that acts as the school's board of trustees is composed of Spahn's close friends and members of his family. His other interests, which are presumably far more financially remunerative than his post at Dwight, include Down East, a folksy monthly magazine about Maine; the Twin Cities Printery in Lewiston, Maine, which is that state's largest printing plant; and a string of trade magazines, most notably Any (Advertising News of New York) and its sister publications in Chicago and Los Angeles. Now Spahn is considering acquiring a company that publishes books -educational textbooks, of course.
The success of Spahn's various business enterprises is not unrelated to the welfare of the Dwight School.
Much of the Spahn clan's outside income is siphoned into the Timothy Dwight Foundation; without it, the addition of the lower school, long a dream of the Spahns and the rest of the school staff, might not have been possible.
After eleven years as headmaster, Spahn believes Dwight is beginning to acquire the reputation it deserves. Perhaps one of the best indications of his success is the school's college placement list for 1978 which lists Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, M.I.T., Pennsylvania, Rensselaer, Tufts, Vassar, and Yale. Few small private schools in the city can boast such a record. According to academic dean Doris Post, Stephen Spahn has "resurrected" the Dwight School, transforming what had previously been good, if somewhat anemic and overspecialized private school, into "one of the finest.
One of Spahn's first moves as headmaster was to make the school coeducational, perhaps his most significant innovation. He later broadened the curriculum, which had been weighted somewhat in favor of the sciences and mathematics, adding courses in art, music, and writing.
"The essence of this school is good writing and good reading," Spahn says. "Now that the liberal arts and the humanities are being undermined at the college level and course requirements aren't as tough as they used to be, it is up to us at the secondary school level to carry the pedagogical torch, so to speak."
At the same time, Dwight's self-proclaimed "spiritual leader" has not been deaf to his students' vocational concerns, establishing various new courses that afford Upper-School students an early glimpse of the professions. Spahn-sponsored programs range from "Medical Biology Studies" (offered in cooperation with professors at nearby New York Cornell Medical School), which surveys bioelectronics, cytology, pathology, immunology, and eugenics, to
"Constitutional Law," in which students study landmark legal cases in American jurisprudence and learn to prepare briefs and argue their cases logically.
A confirmed internationalist, having travelled widely and worked for a time as an executive intern at the United Nations, Spahn established another
"campus in England in 1971. Each year, fifteen to twenty Dwight students spend their junior or senior years in London. In fact, Spahn has integrated so much of the British high school curriculum into the Dwight program that there may be no better "colonial" preparation for American students planning to enter an English university.
In many respects, Spahn is an educational traditionalist, but he is also an enthusiastic exemplar of Dwight's "open door" policy. Every day, during lunchtime, Spahn tries to be standing near the front door to personally intercept and cajole each of the escapees. "How did that test go?" he cries out to a pretty tenth-grade girl. "Did you get that paper in on time?" he asks another student.
"Are you going to be at practice?" he demands of another. "Fantastic! Terrific!"