Communication Office

“The arts are not just ephemeral,” Harvard Professor Sarah Lewis told Milton students. “They carry real weight in the real world.”

Professor Lewis visited Milton as this year’s Margaret A. Johnson Speaker. An assistant professor in Harvard’s Department of Art and Architecture and the Department of African and African American Studies, Professor Lewis works “at the nexus of visual representation, racial inequity and social justice.”

“What do we do when we are the problem in the room?” Kristina Wong asked Milton juniors and seniors. “How do we create equity?”

Ms. Wong performed part of her new, one-woman show, “Wong Street Journal,” in King Theatre. Her visit to Milton was sponsored by the Hong Kong Distinguished Lecture Series.

Ms. Wong opened the show poking fun at her own armchair activism: taking up social-justice causes, she would challenge other social media users, searching for the validation of likes and shares. Writing sensationalized online content could reach a far greater audience than a previous show in which she tackled issues of depression and suicide among Asian-American women.

“At the risk of sounding sentimental, I feel like I’m living my dream right now,” says Kristine Sydney, who joined the English department this year.

Kristine has known Milton for a while: Mathematics faculty member and Outdoor Program director Kendall Chun is a longtime friend who officiated Kristine’s wedding. Her familiarity with Milton kept the School in her mind when she considered moving on from her previous job. Milton’s commitment to diversity made it an even more attractive place when she had her daughter, who is nearly 2 and multiracial.

The reality of Milton has measured up for Kristine, who is teaching Class IV English, Class III Perspectives and Class I Themes in Contemporary World Literature. The freedom Milton gives its English teachers to select student reading has been powerful, she says. One section of her students began the year reading Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, her favorite book largely in part of one line: “Do you understand the sadness of geography?”

“Institutions that promote the pursuit of truth and knowledge need to be honest about themselves,” Professor Craig Steven Wilder told Upper School students. Professor Wilder, an MIT history faculty member and author, was this year’s Heyburn Lecturer.

In researching and writing his latest book, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities, Professor Wilder revealed nearly universal connections between early American educational institutions and slavery, explaining, “No college or university established before 1800 survived without the slave economy.”

Professor Wilder focused his lecture on Erasmus Hall Academy, founded in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn by Dutch colonists in 1786. Colonial New York was a hub of the Dutch slave trade; several slaveholders and traders gave money to establish Erasmus Hall, which was “as much a commercial and political enterprise as it was an academic one.” The school recruited students from several states and countries by boarding them with slave-owning families, who received an income from the school, Professor Wilder said. Approximately 25 percent of all black people in Kings County, New York, were owned by Erasmus’ charter trustees.