But not everyone is convinced that the housecleaning within the board has been thorough enough. One member of the class of '69 would later complain in a mass e-mail, "Much is being said lately by the board leadership about clearing the air and restoring trust. That's a difficult thing to accomplish when many are still on the board who signed 'unanimous' declarations of support for Anderson, and managed to heap praise on themselves at the same time. A boatload of trust would return quickly, and much air clear, if those board members would demonstrate their sincerity by resigning. There's really no other way to 'clean break' with the past; those are honoured who fall upon their swords." 

        Robbins apologizes to the form directors for the way all the trouble has made their jobs harder, and tells them, "The problem was that the board did not do due diligence in checking out Anderson before he was hired. They fell in love with the candidate and suspended disbelief, and that can't hap¬pen again." He cites other problems: concentrated power in the Executive Commit¬tee-the board's five-member administrative body, which has since been shaken up and expanded-and a lack of communication among the rector, the board, and everyone else. Then he adds, "The school is phenomenal, but this murmur--this noise at the top--we need to establish a disconnect with it. The students' experience is unencumbered by whatever noise there has been at the top of the organization. But it's going to take a while to get out of this ditch." 

     There is a lot of talk about getting new blood on the 23-member board, but it already seems to be somewhat diverse. In addition to classic Wasps such as Robbins and Lindsay, there is an African-American judge who serves as the clerk and a Jewish New York investment banker who heads the audit committee. There are also Sabrina Fung and the Nigerian-born Dr. Olufunmilayo Falusi Olopade, as well as Trinka Taylor of Dallas, originally from Midland and a dear friend of the president's. And there is Julie Frist, a relative of Senate majority leader Bill Frist, who is under investigation for dumping his stock in HCA Inc., a company his father helped found, a few days before it tanked. 

      Lindsay tells the room that "the view that the trustees were enriching themselves is not true." This will be confirmed a few days later by Harold Janeway, the investment banker who did the report on the school's endowment management for the A.G.'s office. "There was nothing that was a charge¬able offense or even close to it," Janeway says. According to the report, one trustee, George Baker, had been managing the endowment for more than 25 years, with very little oversight. He had invested it in more than 50 "instruments," many of them hedge funds and private venture-capital firms, so the money was very difficult to track. "It wasn't so much what they were doing, but the way they were doing it," Janeway says. 

      Reached at his investment firm in New York, Baker confirms that he ran the endowment committee almost single-handedly from the late 70s to 2005 and had "pretty much carte blanche" because "few trustees were trained in the business." He adds, "Those were simpler times." During this period, Baker says, he grew the endowment sixfold and shielded it from the dot-com bust that clobbered many other schools. 

       It is a relief to know that the alleged financial improprieties seem to have been limited to Anderson. Even he didn't think he was doing anything wrong-just getting what he was entitled to in his contract. "The current climate, with Sarbanes-Oxley [the federal regulations imposed on corporations in the wake of Enron's collapse, in 2001] migrating to the nonprofit sector, has brought schools like S.P.S. under a lot of scrutiny, which is probably good," he says. "But to judge the past in terms of the new govern¬ment regulations, to suggest that people acted inappropriately, is insensitive. There is just a new way of operating." 

        Wondering how the whole thing got started, I began to piece together the bizarre and rather sordid chain of events that ended with Anderson's resignation and vice-rector Sharon Hennessy's indefinite sab¬batical. Hennessy, whose salary also nearly doubled in the eight years she was there and whose perks included a membership at the Canyon Ranch spa-which reportedly cost between $20,000 and $30,000-and an annual trip to a pedagogical conference in Cannes, was not charged with any wrongdoing, but after she left, the position of vice¬ rector was abolished. 
      The chain begins in the fall of 1974, when a revered teacher named Lawrence Katzenbach (whose uncle Nicholas had been dep¬uty attorney general under President Ken¬nedy) allegedly dropped his trousers' and exposed his erect penis to a senior girl who was babysitting his newborn baby. "His wife was in the hospital," says the victim, who asked not to be named. "He said, 'Come on, touch it,' and I ran out of the house and just kept-running until I stopped somewhere in the woods, shaking." Deeply traumatized for years, the woman was unable to tell any¬one what had happened until her 25th reunion, in 2000, when she decided to finally get it off her chest. 

      Ursula Holloman ('75), now a screen¬writer in L.A., describes the scene to me: 
"I was sitting on the lawn with [the victim] and a couple of other women in my class when she started to tell us what Mr. Katzen¬bach did to her. I was stunned. I took Modern Novel with Mr. Katzenbach, and he was one of the best teachers I had at S.PS. So we started talking and we remembered that another teacher had a bad rep¬utation as an abuser, and there he was on prominent display right there at Anniversary." 

      The teacher in question, who has never been charged with any crime, had worked at the school for decades. By 2000, he was retired but still involved with the school, and was one of its best-regarded masters. "We decided, Something has to be done about this, so, using the e-mail chain for our 25th, in the fall of 2000 we started our pro tempore task force on student molesta¬tions." 

      Alexis Johnson ('76), a native-rights lawyer in Flagstaff, Arizona, who says he had been propositioned by this teacher, joined the task force, which collected eight reports on the retired master and nine on Katzen¬bach. The former was accused of forcibly holding hands and of physical assault, but not of any sex acts or fondling of private parts. "His victims ranged from some who felt slimed to others who felt completely de¬stroyed," Holloman says. 

     Eventually the group gathered allegations of abuse by 29 masters over a 50-year period, including 5 who were active in the early 60s, when I was there. "Many who are abused have had their boundaries violated already," Holloman adds. "Predators can smell a victim." 
 
 

      In the fall of 2000, a delegation from the task force, consisting of some of the alumni who had been abused and some who had not, presented the rector and the board with numerous signed, firsthand accounts of abuse--"just to give them an idea of what had been going on," Holloman says. "They said, 'This is ancient history. It could never happen now.' They were concerned with, basically, covering their butts. They asked if any of the teachers were still at the school, and we said, 'Yes.' And it all became about [the unnamed teacher]. The dead and long-departed teachers they didn't care about. They never asked for the list. They were not interested. He was the only one they had to protect themselves from." Anderson disputes this, saying, "I complimented the work of the task force .... I never said the incidents were ancient history. I said, 'We want to do everything in our power to ensure that this never happens again....   We were not interested in just [the one teacher]." (The school declined to answer a number of questions for this article.) 
 

      Even when the teacher cut his remaining ties with St. Paul's, no reason was given. The school's policy in such situations appeared to be absolute confidentiality, which deprived the victims of the closure they sought in all the other cases. "It was pretty similar to the Catholic Church," Hol¬loman says. "All we got was lip service: 'We're formulating a new policy on this. It's under control.' We were accused by one trustee of plotting to sue the school, but we were just trying to bring this out into the light so people could talk, because we discovered a culture of secrecy among teachers and students that kept these things hidden and enabled the abusers to keep abusing-a whole repeating pattern." Katzenbach's victim adds, "The thing that became really appalling is that the administration knew it had been happening over. a very long time." 

      As its 25th-reunion gift, the class of 1975 gave a sizable amount of money for boundary training for the faculty and other mea¬sures to enhance the security of the students. These have been implemented, according to Dean Dale. But boarding schools attract sexually conflicted adults. Over the years, at least one staff member suspected to be preying on students at St. Paul's was dismissed, but the administration didn't implement a zero-tolerance policy until the early 90s. 
 
 
 

      Frustrated by what he saw as stonewalling, Johnson says, "I started to wonder: If there is a lack of candor on the crucial issue of the children's safety, what else aren't they being candid about? So I started to look into the financial operation." At the same time, Eleanor Shannon, a wealthy parent from Hanover, New Hampshire, who co-chaired the Parents' Committee with her husband, David Salem, was also looking into it. The couple had been on the verge of giving a six-figure gift to the school when a fellow parent familiar with fund-raising efforts told Shannon at a squash match that she had better take a look at the school's finances, starting with the rector's salary. 
       Shannon's husband is the founding C.E.O. of a big investment fund for nonprofit orga¬nizations, and she believed that, as head of the Parents' Committee, she could be legally liable under New Hampshire law if there were any financial impropriety. Using the Internet, she pulled up St. Paul's statements, as well as those of Andover and Exeter and Deerfield Academy, in Massachusetts, and noticed some unusual expenses in St. Paul's $30-million-plus annual budget that Shannon says were not in those of the other schools-such as $932,118 for legal fees and $3,909,861 for "other." The school explained that there had been an error in filling out the forms but that the problem had been subsequently addressed. According to an alum familiar with the situation, "Shannon asked for more detailed stuff than what was on the 990 [the statement the school, as a nonprofit institution, was obligated to file], which she was entitled to do." 

      A 30-page exchange detailing her frustrated attempt to get answers to her questions was posted on an alumni Web site, and she soon resigned from the Parents' Committee. Then she really started digging. Another alumnus started an online chat forum that detailed all sorts of damaging revelations and allegations, which sped around the alumni and ultimately reached the media.

       At that point, the momentum leading to the downfall of Anderson and Hennessy and the Executive Committee was unstoppable. As myoid blue-blooded classmate reflected, "A school administration used to be able to handle the news. But now there are blogs and cell phones that spread rumors, and the school has to react. The ability to keep information private is gone, and that is really hard for the administration of a school. Something happened at St. Paul's one night at 11 o'clock, I don't remember what it was, but there was an accurate account of it in the Andover student newspaper the next morning. God, I'd hate to be a headmaster and have to wake up every morning wondering, What have the little fuckers done now?" 

       The faculty was also at odds with the rector and the board. Partly it was because the teachers were liberals, and the trustees were for the most part stodgy conservatives "who have not crossed the postmodern line into the world with the rest of us," as one faculty member put it. And partly it was a class issue: the trustees acted as if the teachers were underlings, when in fact it is the teachers who  dedicate their lives and careers to fulfilling the school's mission. 

      The questions about the school's financial operations were brought to the attention of The Wall Street Journal, possibly by an ex-teacher; and a three-inch-thick dossier entitled "St. Paul's School: Legally Actionable Acts of Commission and Omission" was sent to the New Hampshire attorney general's office. Some of the claims cited in the dossier have the whiff of shadiness, but few Paulies seem eager to go into it. As another classmate told me, "There's probably more bad stuff to be uncovered, but nothing really salacious." People would prefer to let sleeping dogs lie-as long as they don't become rabid again. 
 

     Hoping to gain some insight into how these events fit into the flow of the school's history, and that of the country at large, I spent every minute I could at the fabulous Ohrstrom Library, sampling its enormous collection of books. Designed by Robert A. M. Stern and finished in 1991, the library is one of the masterpieces of late-2Oth century educational architecture. I didn't have the slightest interest in the school's history when I was a student there, but, as I now discovered, it is quite fascinating. 

     The school was founded in 1856 by a Boston doctor named George Shattuck, who hoped to implement the beliefs of an early19th-century Swiss pioneer in progressive education named Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. Pestalozzi espoused the Rousseauian idea that society was irredeemably compromised but that children were a fount of natural goodness. The only hope for reforming society, therefore, was to begin with children and give them a "natural" education. 

      This meant removing the sons of the Gilded Age's ruling class from their corrupting environs and building a school for them in some pristine place where they could experience the sublime directly through their senses. Green fields and trees, streams and ponds, beautiful scenery, flowers and minerals, are "educators," Shattuck wrote. Nature was character-forming, and so was what Groton's legendary headmaster Endicott Peabody called "corrective salutary deprivation." So the boys had to take cold showers and live in spartan alcoves and were completely cut off from the outside world and the opposite sex.