Spiegel Stuff: Archive Extra: Back-to-School Scandals

Monday, September 2, 2019

Archive Extra: Back-to-School Scandals

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Whether teacher or student, parent or peer, the business of educating can be fraught with misbehavior. For your Labor Day syllabus, we've selected five tales of bad back-to-school behavior from our archive, featuring a vindictive headmaster, the unbecoming attitudes of elite prep schools, a dangerous club full of English daredevils, and more. We've unlocked the stories below, but for unlimited access to the Vanity Fair Complete Archive, consider subscribing today.

The Kent School Mystery

When Fox's animated sitcom Family Guy was targeted in a letter-writing campaign to sponsors, the show's young creator, Seth MacFarlane, was stunned to learn the attacks had come from a single man: the headmaster of his former prep school. Indeed, Father Richardson Schell's behavior has become increasingly controversial on Kent's red-brick campus.

Extreme Oxford

In the late '70s, a group of mostly Oxford University students formed the Dangerous Sports Club, dedicated to formal dress, abundant champagne, and such imaginatively insane stunts as sending a grand piano down the slopes of Saint-Moritz and skateboarding with the bulls in Pamplona. Led by the charismatic David Kirke, they pioneered hang gliding, invented bungee jumping, and prefigured the craze for extreme sports. Now, with a former DSC member facing trial for manslaughter in the death of a freshman flung from a catapult, Brett Martin explores the club's daredevil legacy.

Code of Silence

Brett Kavanaugh's alleged sins were hardly original, and high school high jinks were never meant to become public fodder. For decades, an aristocratic omertà has bound Georgetown prep boys to secrecy or else.

Fatal Initiation

Still reeling from the Jerry Sandusky scandal, Penn State has a new outrage on its hands: members of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity have been charged after the February death of sophomore pledge Tim Piazza. As 14 frat brothers face trial for the horrifying events of that night, Benjamin Wallace investigates the circumstances that led to the tragedy, and its aftermath, yet another black mark for Penn State.

The Code of Miss Porter's

In 2008, at Miss Porter's School, in Farmington, Connecticut—attended by generations of debutantes and heiresses, including Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Gloria Vanderbilt, and Barbara Hutton—a student named Tatum Bass confessed to cheating, and was later expelled. Bass's parents claim the school allowed their daughter to be so bullied by a group of girls, "the Oprichniki," that she was driven to cheat. Talking to students, alumnae, and the headmistress, Evgenia Peretz discovers that Bass violated a deeper, unspoken code as well.

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