Hats Off to the Form of 2015!

On Sunday, May 31, 88 members of the Form of 2015 graduated from Groton School.

It was a day of tradition, tears, and torrential downpours—a day of gratitude paid to teachers and parents, memories rehashed, and insights shared.

Christopher Isham '71, Vice President and Washington Bureau Chief of CBS News, delivered the keynote address, stressing the importance of four values central to a Groton School education—service, critical thinking, confidence, and teamwork.

“Service can take many forms and all of you will find different ways to serve,” Isham told the graduates. “For me, it was telling stories. In my line of work, one encounters many people who rule—presidents, would-be presidents, kings, and generals. But the most impressive people were the unlikely heroes, ordinary people with extraordinary courage.”

He went on to describe a unionist who organized migrant mine workers in South Africa, an Afghan woman who clandestinely filmed an execution “to expose the hidden state of terror under the Taliban,” and a Bosnian man who escaped execution by playing dead—and the extraordinary followup reporting by Isham’s team.

“When we met him, he was not able to tell us exactly where the executions had been committed, but he was able to draw a map from memory of the scene on a remote farm…” Isham explained. “My team matched his hand-drawn map to satellite imagery. We alerted the International Criminal Court in the Hague. They launched an investigation, excavated the site, discovered the mass grave, and confirmed the execution. The evidence of this and other war crimes finally led the U.S. and our allies to intervene and stop the killing.”

Isham related, matter-of-factly, how he convinced his boss, when he was with ABC News, to fund an interview in 1998 with then little-known Osama bin Laden. “It was the interview that revealed bin Laden’s doctrine and exposed the full dimensions of the threat,” he said. “Two months later, bin Laden launched the twin attacks against our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.”

Isham told harrowing stories with good humor—for example, of having 10 Kalashnikov rifles pointed at his head while he asked an interviewee if he were a terrorist. "I was asking a gentleman who could have my head blown off with the wink of an eye if he was a mass murderer, so I added the word ‘sir.’

“Are you a terrorist, sir?”

The man rambled an affirmative answer. “Lesson learned—you can ask anyone any question, as long as you are polite about it,” Isham said.

Isham also touched on the interconnectedness of the world, contrasting the turbulence of his years at Groton to the global upheaval today. “New fault lines are appearing, countries are being torn apart, refugees are spilling across borders, and business models are being disrupted,” he said. “But unlike the 1960s, we now live in a connected world—that means that street riots in Baltimore, fighting in Ramadi, earthquakes in Nepal are happening right here, in your dorms, on your smartphones.”

Isham’s speech followed introductory remarks by Board of Trustees president Jonathan Klein P’08, ’11, ’18 and Headmaster Temba Maqubela, who bid farewell to departing faculty and staff and told the form “with absolute conviction (and I promise I am not biased) that if or when called upon to lead in any situation, every member of this form will be ready to do so.”

Isham also followed Lily Edwards ’15, a student elected by her peers to speak. Lily, from Bedford Hills, New York, delivered a humorous speech that compared Second Formers (eighth graders) to babies, Sixth Formers (seniors) to wise elders, and graduation day to death (but in a good way).

"Prize Day is a lot like the day we die," Lily said. "...As I look at all of us here on our death beds, I can't help thinking: if Prize Day is death, then Groton is life." In a speech punctuated with hearty laughter, she spoke not of the end as much as of the beginning, the “reincarnation” of the Form of 2015.

Prize Day ended with Headmaster Maqubela directing the graduates, as other Groton headmasters have before him, to "Go Well!" The graduates tossed their straw boaters in the air, and they went.

Photo by Mike Sperling

See more Prize Day photos.

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