Notes From the Prep School Underground: Drugs and Love Ethic at Exeter, Andover

PREP schools follow the colleges--especially Exeter and Andover, which feed more people into Harvard each year than any other school. Now the slack on the cultural lag has pulled tight for those two schools; and while they glimpse the development of political activism on their campuses, their students are trying out the tragi-comic scene of dropping, blowing, and shooting pot, acid, hash, speed, belladonna, sunflower seeds, airplane glue, freon, Benzedrex Inhaler tubes, Paragoric Pall Malls, Romilar, and Dr. Schein's Asmador Powder.

Exeter first caught one of its students sniffing glue about six or seven years ago. They investigated, called up a Harvard expert and found out it was a dangerous trip. The student was expelled.

Four years ago a housemaster of an Andover dormitory smelled something unusual as he walked upstairs. He then walked into a room where three sophomores were lying around spaced out on some ether they had stolen from the infirmary. All three were put on probation; and each eventually was kicked out, asked to leave (which people can and do say no to), or driven to quit by added restrictions.

For the first time the use of drugs, mostly marijuana, became significantly widespread among students at Exeter and Andover in the last two years. Exeter and Andover are very similar schools started one year apart by a pair of brothers about 200 years ago. They have gratefully less tradition than an institution like Harvard; they pride themselves on turning out lots of people who later turn up in key positions in the American business, educational, and governmental establishment; and they still drastically restrict the activities of their students eight months of the year because that is the system that has worked for them in the past. Andover, at last, seems to be evolving into a program of fairly rapid, if overdue, change. Exeter doesn't seem to be.

The main influence of the emergence of drugs on their prep school scenes is a widened gap in the understanding the faculties and students of the two schools have of each other. The big secret students used to hide from their housemasters was drinking. It meant automatic boot. And there was almost always some of it around especially among the big, non-team-captain type athletes. People would get caught passed out in their rooms over Spring Weekend. A few would get kicked out each year. Dozens would come in on the bus every Saturday to tank up in the rooms of Harvard freshmen. Your usual scene.

But the important qualitative difference about drinking was that alcohol was something you could do in a couple more years and it was something some of the faculty were soaked in most of the time. Drinking is socially expected in the world prep school was aiming for while drugs were for hippies. (Of course if prep school administrators knew what the jocks at Harvard did on Saturday night or peeked into a fraternity party at Amherst, they'd find grass is the new substitute for a hangover.)

DRUGS breed tremendous distrust. At Exeter there's a story going round that a student had his mail opened by the academy who found some grass. He wasn't prosecuted because he couldn't be assumed responsible for what someone sent him.

Exeter first instituted its regulation against drugs and substitute highs with penalty of expulsion in the fall of 1966. It followed an incident in which two students who had eaten some of Dr. Schlein's Asmador Powder were, as one student who heard them, said, "Watching TV on the wall and seeing snakes on the shower floor." A friend brought them over to the infirmary to a doctor on the condiiton that the administration not be told. In a prep school community of about a thousand where everyone talks about everyone else, this was risky. The administration found out and in the room searches that followed, faculty members found a number of Benzedrex Inhaler tubes, that had been chewed, in a student's wastebasket.

That was Exeter's first big bust. Randy Smith, a writer for the student newspaper, The Exonian, tipped off U.P.I. for whom he was a stringer. U.P.I. found out independently that Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach's son was involved in the Benzedrex Inhalers. The deans got angry at Smith because he hadn't checked out the story with them. Next year in an interview for his college application a dean told him to "keep clean."

The biggest bust was this year. And it's the one that hinted to the administration that there is a significant amount of drugs on its campus. In explaining that four people were expelled for use of marijuana in this incident, Exeter's Dean Robert Kessler said, "You never find all those who are doing it."

A boy's room was searched, he said, on the basis of his advisor's report and other unspecified suspicious activities. The searchers found pipes and marijuana seeds and some papers he had written about his experiences. (Students say what they found was his diary.) The papers indicted three others; all four were expelled.

The using of what was said to be the boy's diary caused considerable anger among the students, and precipitated an editorial about it in The Exonian, which hadn't mentioned drugs all year. Dean Kessler said, "A faculty member may search a student's room only when it concerns the regulations of the academy."

Andover, as a matter of policy, doesn't search students' private rooms, explained Dean of Students John Richards in an interview. They have had two incidents involving drugs this year; but in neither case did the school initiate an attempt to discover the users.

Two seniors are said by students to have brought back some marijuana with them at the beginning of the winter term. The two would smoke it in their dormitory room which was lit by colored lights and often filled with the smoke of incense. Most of the dormitory and the rest of the senior class were on to their secret up to the time when they were discovered. One senior said that "hundreds of people, even the flits" were joining them for a smoke. In February one of the two left his laundry bag on a staircase. His housemaster, finding it, brought it up to their room where he discovered them smoking. They were both dismissed.

In April two freshmen bought three tubes of airplane glue in a store downtown. When asked to sign for it, they wrote their real names. The store called up the police that afternoon. The police called the school And their housemaster found them sniffing it when he went upstairs. They were put on probation.

At Andover there was quite a bit of smoking of marijuana but most of it was earlier this year. "We knew we had it," said Dean Richards, "but didn't know how much there was." He added that students had told him there was less of it in the spring.

Students who claimed to know said that almost all the marijuana on campus during the winter term came from one student who brought back 30 ounces of "California stuff." This was said to be sold in ounces and half ounces for $15-20 per ounce. This one person is reported to have stopped his business leaving very few people with any drugs.

THE DEAN, who says he is kept informed by students who don't give him names, estimated that there were "25 hardcore users."

Both schools have informal working agreements with the police about drugs on their campuses of the same nature as the one Harvard has with the Cambridge police. The way it works is that the Dean of the school reports to the police if they catch anyone for drugs. The police ask if the student got it in the town. If the answer is no, they don't prosecute.

Dean Kessler pointed out that "the most effective evidence we have (against a student) is confession." Generally, he added, there wouldn't be enough evidence for a court case without self-incrimination.

A story among students at Exeter says that one student was turned down by all his colleges because the Dean told them the student was strongly suspected of drug traffic. Dean Kessler said, however, that they wrote to colleges "only when a student has been expelled."

Drugs at Exeter have spread to become part of someone's identity in the students' social hierarchy. For a while most students were considered to be divided into the "drug agg" (abr. for aggregation) or the "jock agg." Athletic ability, at a school where sports are required, and masculinity, at a school where most boys enter just before or after they reach puberty, are two psychological hangups that keep the jock cliques on top of the social hierarchy for the first two or three classes. The "drug agg" was a social reaction against the athletes. Drugs were their most salient, if least typical, characteristic.

There is a new hierarchy at Exeter that divides people into the intellectuals, the straight grinds, and the jocks. The terms are loosely applied and mostly theoretical; but the intellectuals are typified by New Left politics, writing poetry, blues records, and drugs. Drugs stay pretty much within their group; and unlike Andover, they have numerous and individual sources for buying them.

A student at Andover described the hierarchy at Andover as once being, "jocks, jet-set (very preppy socialites), and non-entities." Now, he says, there is a third and dominant group which could be classified the "hip people." But drugs are not the trademark of the hip people, he explained. The hip people share "the love ethic."

"The love ethic" is as good a phrase as any for the air of optimism and ease that has appeared on the Andover campus in this spring. Those who use drugs do so in their rooms. The administration will kick them out if they're caught. But the school isn't trying to catch them as they are at Exeter.

Andover has put all the seniors together in a new dormitory complex and has instituted and is planning several reforms in the regulations and curriculum. Next year scholarship students will no longer be required to hold jobs in the old scholarship work program.

But students aren't happy with the administration. They almost had a quiet student power demonstration last week to get a student representative into faculty meetings. But plans were cancelled at the last minute. Students haven't been allowed to smoke cigarettes since the Surgeon General's Report. They are allowed to smoke pipes.

ONE student said that he first tried marijuana because someone in his regular illegal cigarette smoking clique introduced it one week. Virtually all who would smoke cigarettes legally still do so anyway. And pipes are sometimes used to cover the smell of drugs. Incense has been banned by the administration because it can be used for that purpose. And there is a move afoot to get rid of pipes for the same reason.

The faculty finally gave in on long hair last winter. And the president of the senior class, Alan Oniskor, wears his very long. The whole student body looks different. Their hair is long. They wear corduroy jackets instead of madras, work shirts instead of Arrow, and boots instead of loafers.

Drugs spread horizontally at Andover because all four classes share dormitories with only other members of their class. There is a minimum of socializing between different age groups. As a result, each class comes up with strange new drugs of their own. For the sophomores it is Romilar. Romilar is a cough syrup, $1.50 without prescription. Drink a whole bottle down to get high. One student said, "It doesn't make you throw up like Lavoris (another high). It stiffens you up so you can't move."

An Afro-American Society was started at Andover last year; but it has two white officers out of four. The school requires that it not be segregated. Al Ingram, one of the founders, said it was started because of "the fantastic unawareness of people on this campus of the problems of Negroes in this society." There are between 35 and 40 blacks at Andover (out of 850). Half of Afro's members are white, and the purpose of the organization is not one of cultural identity.

Exeter has something called the Afro-Exonian Society. It has as members two whites (it is not allowed to be segregated) and most of the 40 blacks on campus. One student said, "In every dining hall there is a black table. Most prep school Negroes are white blacks who are mostly middle class. There's this guy in our admissions office who's really good and gets a lot of militants."

Exeter Afro held a black mixer with black girls from prep schools in the area. The band was a soul group from Exeter called the Precisions. The Precisions are rumored on campus to be unpopular with the administration because there aren't any whites in the group.

The blacks don't smoke marijuana or take other drugs at Exeter. The commonly-held reason is that coming to prep school was a more unusual alternative than taking drugs. More importantly, they aren't within the social group that takes drugs.

SOCIAL GROUPS are organized vertically throughout all four classes at Exeter because, in contrast with Andover, their dormitories include students from each year. The vertical orientation strengthens groups like Afro and passes down habits like drugs to the younger classes. Drugs started two years earlier at Exeter (in 1965) and it was often seemed a more sophisticated school because everyone picks up the traits of those older than him.

Most students get their drugs from Harvard freshmen or contacts in Cambridge or New York. Some students try to get in on every deal, partly because they want a cut and partly because it is important to their social identity. A few have used drugs as a source of power in cliques--becoming suppliers makes them important.

The campus is cold, compact, and Kafkaesque. Little new has been built on the campus since the 1920's; and its buildings are the repeated module of Italian Renaissance and New England architecture. It's very pretty in the summer. But most of the time students are there, they are knee deep in snow.

The town of Exeter is the kind of small New Hampshire commercial nothing that was filmed so often in the McCarthy primary. The townies are hostile to the studies (pronounced stoodees). A motorcycleless motorcycle gang called the Hell's Avengers periodically beats up an academy student.

But now there's even a group of townies with long hair and paisleys ("teeny-boppers" the Exies call them) who turn on with the academy types.

Most students take their drugs out across the playing fields near the Exeter River by a tree made famous in John Knowles' novel, A Separate Peace. They use little acid, and some amphetamines. They never use speed to study for exams. They use it for escape