Reflection: For Cate and Forever Campaign

By: Benjamin Williams IV, Head of School (1998-2023)
April 11, 2025

I’ve always loved Robert Frost’s great poem Birches. It seems to capture–as only verse can–the cyclical character of life, particularly life in Schools: the beginnings and endings, and all the aspiring in between. His poem is also the story of the Campaign, whose completion we acknowledge today, and the school community that made it possible. It concludes,

I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.

It felt in the years that followed our Centennial–when the Cate family stretched well beyond historical limits in the Campaign that attended that milestone–that we “could bear no more” philanthropically. To borrow from our centennial book, it had been a long way “Along the Road” to that moment. But as we and Frost understood, there were more trees to climb, more heights to be reached. Slowly, inexorably, attention turned from the past to the future. Community interests grew to dominate our dialogue. And energy built for the next climb.

New language reflected our intentions. “Forever” made its way into the campaign title, for we were thinking in terms that transcended generations. Inquiry defined our program and catalyzed our visioning. Raymond Commons–for its history, the community gathering place, the source and site of our nourishment–would in its imagined iteration fire our scholarship. New century, new purpose.

New scale, too. The centerpieces of the building campaign–Booth Commons and the Inquiry Collab would stretch the historic proportions of our Reginald Johnson-designed campus, architectural symbols of evolving programmatic and community ambitions. Endowment to fund it all required an order of magnitude jump.

To realize such goals required more than had ever been given before–not simply more gifts but more energy, more purpose, more vision, and more investment. I remember going to a Cate family who had long supported the School during the feasibility study, sharing our plans, and being told that we were “too ambitious” and that Cate should be content “with its place in the world and not to try to change it.”

But we are climbers of Birches–A small number of families and Foundations stepped up early with the largest gifts the School had ever received, and suddenly the momentum was more than ideological. Booth, Emmett, Tunnell, Horowitz, Panzer, Wiegand, Avansino, Sprague, Parsons, Wecker, Gabbay, Cook, Gruber, Ford, Marin, Murray, Shafran, and Jones are just a few of the names that set us on a path toward Forever.

The path was not straight. A fire, a flood, and a pandemic brought no shortage of impediments and tragic consequences. I remember writing to the community after the mudslides in 2018, which took the lives of Caroline Montgomery ‘14 and her father, Mark, “We have known lots of good fortune at Cate, and more is surely on the horizon. But we know tragedy, too, and loss. No life–individual or community–can be all one or the other. We live mostly in the middle, between those two polarities.”

We pressed on with that very understanding, and it strengthened our resolve. The campaign itself was an act of faith, an exercise in endurance, and an expression of community will.

The essayist Brian Doyle once wrote, “The residents of a campus change but the residence does not, and each child who lives there adds infinitesimally to a story that can never be told in words.” But it can be lived. Forever, we hope.