Sabbatical Musings

At our first School Meeting of 2025, I had a chance to offer a few reflections to the community on my fall sabbatical, and how my time away had served to reinforce my enduring belief in our deep and abiding commitment to community wellbeing, and the equally important campus ethos of Harkness teaching and community discourse.

First, I conveyed how much I had missed life on campus and being a part of all the exciting events that I glimpsed from afar on social media. As hard as it was to be away, I told the students, I did make good use of my time! Sarah and I were able to be with our children and granddaughter for extended periods, and we attended a number of fall family events that otherwise would have been near impossible. I was able to do a late-summer hike up Mount Katahdin in Maine with three of my children, I was able to go fishing as temperatures cooled and the fish were returning to Rhode Island waters from up north, my vegetable garden yielded a September bumper crop, and the fall clamming was excellent.

I was also able to travel, going places and experiencing things that we had long hoped and dreamed of doing. We chose destinations that offered opportunities to learn and to see the world from a rather different point of view. After ten days in Turkey, we traveled in November to Japan and spent time in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka. One of the many highlights was a 5 a.m. visit to the Tokyo bluefin tuna auction, where we met and conversed with an interesting array of the professionals involved there and experienced up-close this incredible intersection of commerce and culture. These moments inspired me to think about how important it is to be fully immersed in the global community right here at Lawrenceville — not only the rich diversity of thought, culture, and beliefs, but also our responsibility to cultivate spirited inquiry and to bridge lines of difference to make us stronger communicators, leaders, and citizens.

Just as important, I had time over the past several months to read and reflect in ways that my typical professional routines simply don’t allow. My readings offered a range of lenses for viewing, or in some cases reconsidering, what I had previously thought to be familiar issues. I devoured Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, which depicted the opioid epidemic in Appalachia and
societal biases against rural folk. While traveling in Turkey, I read 1453, a history of the “fall” of Constantinople from an Ottoman point of view, “a proud date in Turkey,” a woman sitting next to me on the plane remarked.

The carefully researched novel, Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa, gave a gripping, heartbreaking, multi-generational Palestinian perspective on their experience in the Middle East since 1948. And to consider a competing perspective, I read Bernard-Henri Lévy’s Israel Alone, a French philosopher’s cri de coeur on the double standard that the international community imposes on Israel and its existential need to defend itself in the face of systemic antisemitism.

As I said to the students, my readings were aimed at tending to my intellectual wellbeing, though not necessarily my intellectual comfort, because of course, learning involves getting out of our comfort zones and challenging our assumptions. In so many ways, this time for reflection on complex issues reminded me of what we strive to do for our students in all settings on campus, but especially around the Harkness tables and in the common rooms in our Houses. The opportunity to listen to each other, to question each other, and to disagree respectfully with each other is a fundamental part of our community’s wellbeing as we work together to learn and grow. These experiences, in turn, develop critically important habits of mind that Lawrentians take with them out into the world, and it is my belief that this has never been more important or more relevant.

My time away was indeed renewing in so many ways, and I am profoundly grateful for the opportunity. And as I return to campus and re-immerse myself in the life of the School, my appreciation for this remarkable institution has never been greater.

Sincerely,

Stephen S. Murray H’54 ’55 ’63 ’65 ’16 P’16 ’21
The Shelby Cullom Davis ’26 Head of School