Brittney Larrabee (N ‘99) pointed me today to a ghastly piece of news: American Idol’s summer camp is going to be held on the Northfield campus of my high school alma mater. Of course, I can’t find any press releases from NMH. Googling for NMH “Idol Camp” turns up nothing; a similar search for Northfield “Idol Camp” only pulls up this press release from Access Hollywood. I’m bewildered at why Access Hollywood heard about this before the school told its own alumni, but it’s disturbing.

Update: NMH sent out a press release email today, 2/22. I still think we should’ve heard about it earlier than this.

For those of you who aren’t in the loop, Northfield Mount Hermon School announced a few years ago that it was closing one of its two campuses. NMH was originally two separate schools, the Northfield Seminary for Girls and the Mount Hermon School for Boys; they were both founded by Dwight L. Moody, an evangelist who worked hard to provide education to young people. (Some of our school’s oldest structures were built by its first students, who had all lived in poverty before joining Moody.)

I’ve always been proud of NMH because it made exceptional efforts to reach beyond the “typical” boarding prep school image. In my time it was fairly generous with financial aid and took special efforts to welcome local students to study. With the closing, NMH also made (but did not announce) significant cuts in scholarships, both for impoverished students from afar and for students living locally within the community. The justification for closing Northfield was the financial difficulty of integrating two campuses, and while I think that’s valid, I also think the Board of Trustees did a horrible job of communicating this out. The impression was that they didn’t want NMH to be special; they wanted NMH to be Exeter.

Here is an excerpt from their Q&A page:

What does NMH mean when it says it is committed to stewardship of the Northfield campus?
Stewardship involves the careful and responsible management of property entrusted to our care, and the board of trustees understands fully the importance and impact of its stewardship role. . . An important part of this responsibility is finding alternative uses for the Northfield campus that ideally are compatible with our mission and heritage, while allowing growth in new directions.
– Future Use of Northfield Campus: Questions and Answers

Even with those assurances that they would find uses for the campus that were “compatible with our mission and heritage,” I felt sympathy for those who had recently donated to Northfield campus. In their eyes, the mission and the heritage was one of educating NMH students; now they find their donations and efforts swept into the bin as part of a “stewardship offering”. Here is a snippet from a Boston Globe article in 2004, talking with the trustee who built a brand new library on Northfield in the 80’s:

“What damn fool would give money for a memorial to his wife that would be used for just 15 years?” Don Dolben said. The former trustee is angry with school leaders. “To cavalierly abandon a campus without stating a purpose seems to be a breach of fiduciary duty, if not a legal duty then a spiritual one.”
– Northfield closure has blood boiling

But I held out hope. I was convinced that NMH could find a worthwhile use for Northfield campups, even though it wasn’t financially viable as part of the school itself. Rumors abounded of prestigious universities that might be interested in the location, or of conferences and seminars for educators and social workers being held in our old class buildings. It sounded great. I thought that, just maybe, another school, financially independent from Mount Hermon, could find its home there (though I doubt NMH would be interested in the competition).

Now, without any advance notice, the first thing we find out about the beloved Northfield campus — which includes the final resting ground for D.L. Moody and his wife — is that it’s being rented out to a glitzy summer camp for pre-teens. How does this reflect the “mission and heritage” of our school? How could anybody, not least of all our Board of Trustees, make the leap from Moody’s mission of educating the poor to a gaudy summer camp for people whose brand recognition of “American Idol” trumps their ability to search for a real music instructor? Where is our heritage being preserved in all of this?

I’m sick to my stomach. It’s just summer camp, I know; at least it’s not a year-round Idol boot camp (though who knows what the investors have in mind). But if this is the first hint we get at how the Board will be using (or abusing?) their “stewardship” of the campus, and how they plan on communicating those out to the school community, then I don’t think it’s a good sign for the years to come.