Ellis Jones ’72 Headmaster’s Chair

May 1, 2017

Paul Denison ’79 was the recipient of the newly endowed Ellis Jones ’72 Headmaster’s Chair.

On April 26, 2017, a newly endowed faculty chair, the Ellis Jones ’72 Headmaster’s Chair was awarded to Paul Denison ’79. Read the transcript from Head of School Ben Williams’s presentation below.

We have the great good fortune at Cate to have alumni who long after their experience on the Mesa choose to invest in the teachers who deliver our life-changing program. Often those investments come in the form of endowed chairs, which are essentially donated funds within Cate’s endowment, the interest from which funds the salary of the faculty member who holds the chair. A named Chair, therefore, represents a philanthropic commitment on the part of the donor in excess of one million dollars. In 2016, Ellis Jones ’72, a Cate trustee and longtime supporter of the School made such an investment and created the Ellis Jones ’72 Headmaster’s Chair.

The description that accompanies the chair is as follows: The focus of the Jones Chair is the evolving character of teaching and learning and the manner in which that evolution might be best-advantaged instructionally. This is the chair for the faculty member who wants to adjust his or teaching to the times, to harness new technologies and techniques, to connect ideas or disciplines or colleagues, and to imagine new possibilities and horizons for student learning. Those very ambitions will be partially enabled by the awarded Chair, for it comes with an annual stipend designed to both honor the work of the chair holder and to incentivize the holder’s efforts to advance the programmatic efforts of the school. The Jones Chair will be awarded for a four-year term and is linked not to a particular academic discipline or area of study but to the universal opportunities that accrue to students who enjoy the best, most imaginative, most relevant, and most powerful teaching. Jones chair holders will also serve as a resource and guide for colleagues: our teachers of teaching.

The inaugural recipient of the Jones chair has been fulfilling these various responsibilities of his own accord throughout his long tenure at Cate. He is an intuitive teacher and learner, a scientist, and a man of letters. His focus throughout his teaching is less on the subjects he teaches and more on the students he is trying to reach. For that very reason, he can and does teach in virtually every department, adjusting his tactics to meet the needs of his students. And as empirical and anecdotal data demonstrate, no student leaves his class without being fundamentally challenged, inspired, and improved by the experience. Perhaps it is fitting, too, that the recipient of the Jones Chair literally grew up on this Mesa, learned from the very faculty he now knows as colleagues and has built the kind of scholarship that is as broad as it is deep.

It gives me great pleasure, therefore, to award the Ellis Jones ’72 Headmaster’s Chair to Paul Denison.