But already the campus was becoming quite grand. The chapel and the Gothic Upper Dining Room, with its high, vaulted ceiling, were positively Hogwartsian. Money was corrupting the mission, despite Dr. Drury's best efforts. "[The school] must not become a place of fashion, an exclusive retreat, where like-minded sons of like-minded parents disport themselves," he expostulated. "Our function is not to conform to the rich and prosperous world which surrounds us but, rather, through its children, to con¬vert it." Nevertheless, St. Paul's was beginning to resemble the St. Midas's School-- "the most expensive and the most exclusive boys' preparatory in the world" -- of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1922 short story "The Diamond As Big as the Ritz." Nelson W. Aldrich. Jr. ('53), in his book, Old Money: The Mythol¬ogy of Wealth in America, describes his time at the school as "the St. Midas Ordeal." One observer said of the recent scandals, "St. Paul's has always been a melange of church and money, and money won out, because the church is dying."
 
 

      In the 60s, the complexion of the school began to change. More scholarships were awarded, and the first minority students were admitted. A revolt of 162 sixth-formers along with a teacher named Gerry Studds, who later became a congressman, led to a relaxation of the dress code and the admission of girls in the early 70s. The new, secular rector, William Oates, espoused the prevailing educational and developmental thinking of the day, that schools should not be repressive and that adolescents should be free to experiment and try out different identities. In the 80s an impressive performing arts center was built, and the school became more artsy.

      Thanks to Manchester Airport and the improved interstate highway system, the school was no longer so remote and tucked away. And now that greed was good, some felt the notion of service barely received lip service. The school had an enormous ability to raise money and to scour the country and find the best and brightest kids. To keep up with rival prep schools, monumental building projects were undertaken, architecture that will one day be seen as late-imperial, climax-of-the-consumer-culture.

      By the mid-80s, however, the board was getting alarmed that the students were out of control and the faculty had too much leeway, so they brought in David Hicks, the headmaster of a day school in Dallas called St. Mark's, to tighten things up. Hicks, who now lives in Montana, recalls, "One of the mandates I was given was to improve the quality of the school academically. Nobody had gone to Harvard in five years, except for legacies. I was also mandated to get control of student behavior. The students were polled and 80 percent of them said they were using drugs. It was very obvious to anyone who walked around the school on Saturday night that many of them were under the influence of something .... On my watch, some prospective parents from Philadelphia walked into the student center and found a boy and a girl having intercourse on a couch. I expelled them, which was not popular. 

      "The original parents of the Gilded Age, who knew what it was like out there, want¬ed their children to be hardened and not spoiled, but by the time I got there, silly faddistic ideas encouraged them to think they were something special, that the rules didn't apply to them, and that was not good. The kids would have been better off in a more meritocratic environment." 

       Hicks alienated the faculty by firing some of its most prominent members as part of a program to streamline the curriculum, and was so disliked by the students that the Christmas tree in front of the Rectory was torched and a steaming turd was left on the doorstep. When the faculty voted in favor of a no-confidence motion, Hicks left in the middle of the' year. 

       In 1996, he published an article in The American Scholar called "The Strange Fate of the American Boarding School." It in¬cludes a thought-provoking passage: "Although the old-monied families still exert a considerable influence and control over their alma maters, they often do so in ways that reflect their own social and financial insecu¬rities ....To some extent, the selfishness born of mounting social and financial anxiety among this class has caused the board¬ing school to do what it has often been accused of doing, but now with more reason— namely, to serve private rather than public interests. This may seem to increase its appeal, but it also undermines its integrity and contributes to its destruction.”

       Hicks was suggesting that the moral slippage at the school was related to the decadence of the old Wasp establishment. One can certainly draw a parallel with what was happening to the country as it entered the era of Enron, but it wasn't just the old money that was greedy, and the extent to which the old Wasp establishment is actually declining is also questionable. 

      The man who replaced Hicks couldn't have been more different. Bishop Anderson was ready to deal-with the parents and the board. Physically, he was the rector from central casting-san exceedingly hand¬some, square-jawed guy with a great smile who knew how to wear the miter and had a closetful of the most splendid vestments in the church. And he had a way with words. Even after he came under fire, he couldn't resist closing a sharply worded letter to Eleanor Shannon with a grand ecclesiastical flourish: "In the sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life, I wish you a blessed Eastertide."

      "He was the most narcissistic man who ever came to the school," a teacher told me. The nurses in the infirmary, which is right next to the Rectory, used to watch him primping in the upstairs bathroom for a half-hour before morning chapel. ("Yes, I did shower and shave every morning, but I hope this could be seen as good hygiene," Anderson says. "And when we realized [the nurses could see us], we pulled the shade.") A parent of a former student found the Bish "very glossy, like a used-car salesman." Anderson, 63, had started out in marketing at Procter & Gamble, and he had been an infantry officer in the army before entering the ministry. He had risen to be the bishop of South Dakota and then became the head of the General Theological Seminary, in New York City. There, he had performed expensive renovations on his residence, and that was one of the first things he did at St. Paul's after the school hired him away. "The Rectory was built in 1872," Anderson explains, and the renovation "was almost all structur¬al, not cosmetic .... That's part of running an institution." 

      But Anderson's arrival coincided with the tanking of the dot-com boom, and mon¬ey became harder to raise. In an effort to cut costs, the board let go longtime staff and adjusted benefits to the children of faculty. No one seemed to realize that implementing such measures when the rector and the vice-rector were still getting whopping salaries was bound to create resentment. 

      When the stories about the school's financial irregularities surfaced in the national press, the board rallied behind the Bishop. "I find it incredible that people who have affection for this school would go to these kinds of levels ... to tear down its leadership," Jim Robbins, who was by then on the Executive Committee, protested to The Wall Street Journal. But two years lat¬er, with the A.G.'s investigation concluded and the I.R.S. audit in progress, the board felt compelled to demonstrate that it was taking steps to rectify the situation, and just two weeks before graduation and Anniversary, it announced that the Bishop had re¬signed. 

      A man who was there for the alumni procession that weekend recalls, "We all thought, How ghastly and embarrassing, and surely he'd be gone by the time we got there. But we show up and there's a cocktail party in the afternoon and there is Craig Anderson front and center, representing the in¬stitution. I've been married to a Wasp family for 25 years, and I've seen the power of politeness and repression, but for stiff upper lip this really took the cake. A lot of kids were wearing a T-shirt that said, 'I heart the Bish.' So the general sense I got was that, whatever Anderson's peccadilloes were, the kids really loved him and were in a rebellious mood that he had been shown the door." 
 
 

      Dr. Shattuck's ideal of keeping out the outside world has long since been aban¬doned. The Internet, cell phones, and the rules allowing DVD players in the dorms made sure of that. But Jim Robbins's wish to shield the students from the "noise at the top" is coming true. One night I went to the school's $2 million observatory to look at a few stars and get some perspective on the antics of us foolish mortals. The observatory has six telescopes in four domes. One of the school's two astronomy teachers, Dr. Tom McCarthy, took me into the Lowell Dome. Untold Lowells have gone to St. Paul's over the decades. I asked McCarthy if the dome was named for Per¬cival Lowell, the eccentric 19th-century astronomer who moved to Flagstaff, Arizona, and from his observatory there claimed to have seen water-filled canals on Mars. McCarthy said it was named for Lowell Swift Reeve ('69), who had died tragically in his youth. 

      McCarthy is clearly passionate about the sky, the kind of teacher who is so enthusiastic that he can change a student's life. "With these telescopes we can find supernovas and extraterrestrial planets. We can spot near-earth asteroids, the ones we fear could slam into us one day," he said. 

      Two students arrived. McCarthy was taking one of them down to Harvard in the morning to receive some kind of award. McCarthy trained the telescope on Alpha Andromedae, the brightest star in its constel¬lation. It looked like a dazzling rhinestone. The instrument, I noticed, was called the St. Paul's Alumni Telescope. "Just what we could use," I said to him, and he laughed. I asked him what he thought about all the recent goings-on, and he said, "That's administration. The school is rock-solid as far as its mission goes." 
 

      I sat in on a Greek class for second-year students. You don't find Greek being taught at too many high schools anymore. The students, who included one African-American boy and two Asian-American girls, were extremely bright, as were all the students I talked to. And so polite and wel¬coming. When I asked how they liked the school, they invariably said it was awesome. And who wouldn't feel the same way? How many high schools have a harpsichord and a corps de ballet? 

       I jammed with a "frelk,' a new category of student since my time who might be described as a latter-day hippie or freak. Frelks (the word is derived from "frolic") are real¬ly into the Grateful Dead. This frelk had a head on his shoulders. He was an excellent musician and had already recorded a CD. His plan was to move to New York and get into the music business. 

      I had lunch with Ike Perkins, the son of some filmmaking friends of mine and the great-nephew of Maxwell Perkins, the fabled editor of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott  Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe. Scads of Perkinses have gone to St. Paul's. Since arriving at the school, Ike had met eight cousins with other surnames whom he never even knew he had, and he was having the time of his life, A fifth-generation Paulie who graduated last year told me .that "there is a lot of fucking, but it's all safe." Apparently, most students are wise enough to choose condoms over diseases and unwanted pregnancies. 
      There are still "preps," like the one in my Class who used to turn over your tie and snicker if the label wasn't Brooks Brothers. Most of the preps live in Simpson House. "The preppiest ones are not the old-line kids, many of whom are not preppy at all," a student told me, "but the wannabes who have new money." 

      Chapel; which I attended twice, had be¬come a totally different experience. It had become fun, an opportunity for the kids to express themselves rather than have the word of God stuffed down their throats. Both times, a conga line of girls started bumping and grinding in the center aisle.  Dr. Drury would have rolled over in his grave if he had witnessed this sacrilege. But the old hymns whose words I knew by heart, though I hadn't sung them in years, were being sung, as was the school anthem, an overt paean to capitalism taken from Psalm 122: 
 

O pray for the peace of Jerusalem; 
they shall prosper that love thee. 
Peace be within thy walls,
and plenteousness within thy palaces. 
 

I found myself whispering the wonderfully consoling words of the closing blessing as they were delivered by the new, interim rector, Bill Matthews: "0 Lord, support us all the day long, until the shadows lengthen and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done." 

       After chapel, Matthews met me at his office in the Old Schoolhouse. I had not laid eyes on him in 44 years, since his days of supervising my form-mates and me, but he was just as I had imagined he would be: a sweet and unassuming 62-year-old with a grizzled crew cut, dressed in a tweed jacket and a tie that he must have worn a thousand times before. This is the standard uniform of the New England prepschool teacher, like that of the masters in my day, and in sharp contrast to the Bish's spiffy attire. 

       Matthews went to Bowdoin, where he majored in Latin, and returned to St. Paul's in 1966. Except for a sabbatical year in Paris, he has been there ever since. He taught Latin and Greek, coached hockey and baseball, and served as the director of college placement, the director of admissions, the vice-rector of students, the exec¬utive director of the alumni association, and, for the last five years, the director of development (in which capacity he staved off Eleanor Shannon's request for clarification on the school's finances with a letter saying:  "It would be simpler if you just trusted us; we're not perfect, but I do think that we are a place of integrity, and that does have a fair amount to do with Craig Anderson and our Board as its leaders"). Two of Matthews's children attended St. Paul's. He is of the schoo!' He understands the values, the joy, and the tremendous responsibility of nurturing vibrant young minds. He is not a guy who is out for himself. 

         Nevertheless, the school has enlisted Wick¬enden Associates, an executive-search com¬pany that has installed headmasters at more than 200 independent schools, to find a per¬manent rector to replace Matthews next fall. In October, the firm circulated an admirably frank 12-page job announcement that includes a section titled "Opportunities and Challenges Awaiting the Next Rector," warn¬ing prospective candidates that whoever gets hired will have to: 
 

1. Lead the school with absolute integrity, hu¬mility, and transparency. 
2. Make a concerted effort to rebuild bridges with disaffected alumni….
3. Support the Board's continuing efforts to strengthen its own governance and commu¬nication practices.... 
4. Counter the effects of negative publicity and restore the school's external reputation through a carefully considered communica¬tions and public relations plan. 
 

In the meantime, Matthews's motto for the 2005-6 school year is "Do the right thing." "This is a school that has a soul," he told me, "and it always has."