By Caleb Cochran
On July 1, St. Mark’s welcomed its 16th and newest head of school, Dr. Ivory D. Hills. A distinguished scientist with a Ph.D. from MIT, Dr. Hills spent time as a research chemist at Merck Research Laboratories before transitioning to education and an impressive 13-year tenure at Deerfield Academy, where he served in a number of roles, most recently dean of faculty and assistant head of school for strategy and planning. In our wide-ranging conversation with Dr. Hills, we talked about his personal background, challenges and goals for his first year at St. Mark’s, and what the future may hold for independent schools.
Can you tell us a little bit about your childhood and your school years?
I lived in many different places. I was born in Hawaii, moved to Texas, moved to North Carolina, lived in South Korea for four years, returned stateside to live in Georgia, and then moved to Virginia. I went to college in North Carolina, and then I went to grad school in Massachusetts. My first professional job outside of grad school was in Pennsylvania, and then I found myself in Massachusetts again in independent schools. I never attended an independent or private school. Starting in middle school, I was in public middle school. I was in two middle schools and two high schools. If you didn't know better, if you just looked at the script, you would think I was bounced from school to school because of disciplinary issues, but it was because of my dad moving around. In grades eight through 11, I went to a fine arts magnet school [Davidson Fine Arts in Augusta, Georgia].
What sparked an interest in science, and specifically chemistry?
My interest is really just to understand how the world works. When I was younger and I believed heavily in science and physics, I thought the world was kind of deterministic. If you understood the fundamentals, you could predict how everything is going to work. I actually started off as a physics major. At that time in my life, I had this false belief that you were either good at math or not good at math, and I learned that I was not that great at math, so I switched over to chemistry, because in chemistry you only need to know how to count to seven, and then you're off and running as a chemist. I thought the combination of chemistry and physics would help me understand the world. Since college, I've become more enamored with psychology, organizational design, sociology, and anthropology, because that's another way of understanding the world. Hopefully I haven't even hit the last plateau of whatever I'm interested in.
What would you say you learned about Deerfield specifically, and about independent schools in general, from serving in a number of various roles there?
If you had asked me 15 years ago, ‘Are schools more like machines or more like living organisms?’ I would've said, ‘Of course they're machines. And if you can set them up properly, then the head of the school is an engineer, you get in there with your wrenches and your hammers, and you just put the right pieces in place, and the school will take care of itself.’
That was naive. Schools are more like living organisms, and heads or school administrators are more like gardeners or farmers. You try to set the right conditions, and then whatever grows grows. You can prune, you can weed, but you can't tell an apple tree to bear orange fruit. It's an apple tree. So your job then is to get the best apples from the apple tree, and yelling at the tree, or trying to tell the tree to be a different tree—it's just not going to work.
That's what I learned at Deerfield. But probably some of that is coincident with becoming a parent. I mean, you just try to get the best out of the people. You can't tell them to be different people. But the engineering or the mechanistic viewpoint is, ‘Just swap this piece out for another piece.’ But that's not real. That's not how it works.
And this isn't Deerfield-specific. I probably would've learned this 13 years at any school. I would've learned that every kid is special in their own way. I would've learned the value of teamwork—adults working as teams to wrap support around students. We don't all see the complete puzzle, nor do any one of us have the necessary and best relationship with the student. It's good to have an advisory system, but sometimes the advisor is not the right person for the thing. Sometimes the coach or the dorm resident is the right person. That's why we've got to do this together.
As you look to this first year at St. Mark’s, what do you see as your main areas of focus and attention?
I think relationship-building is number one, because I think there are some tough decisions ahead of us. The School has proliferated in lots of innovative programming. And I think eventually we'll have to focus. St. Mark's has, for a school this size, been in hyper-innovative mode, which has been good, but I think focus is ahead of us, which means we're going to have to pick and choose what we do. Tough decisions are best made in a very high-trust environment. Trust is built on relationships. So it all connects, because when you've got a finite amount of time or financial resources, and you make these tough decisions, even though I'm not a believer of zero-sum games, some will perceive winners and losers. But I don't believe in zero-sum games. I think actually we can all be winners, because if you're doing 12 things, and I tell you you can stop doing seven of them and focus on the other five, you may temporarily feel a sense of loss—’Oh, I'm missing those seven things.’ But you'll learn, ‘Now I can be awesome at these five things.’ So I think we'll win.
When you think not only about St. Mark's, but about independent schools more broadly, what gives you hope about the future, and what do you see as real challenges?
The thing that always gives hope is the students. Inherently, natively, young humans like to learn. You just have to watch a 3-year-old, a 4-year-old, a 5-year-old. And what gives me pause, or what makes me a little nervous, is somehow schools are really good at squeezing out curiosity in students. A lot of times people focus on, ‘How can we win? How can we be awesome? How can we be the best school?’ The real question is, ‘How can you stop crushing the spirits of students? How can you identify where the landmines are, and just stop stepping on the landmines?’
When I was the academic dean, I was in conversations about fostering creativity. I have some small ideas on how to foster creativity. I have lots of ideas on how we squelch creativity every day. If you wanted to squelch creativity, you would put time limits or deadlines on kids. You would grade them for their work. You would not give them feedback. All the things that we do, perhaps out of what we believe is necessity—we have industrialized education. We cannot be the industrialized model.
The only thing you have to ask yourself is, ‘If I were a parent, and I had one child, and we were stranded on a desert island, how would I build a school to serve that one child?’ And it would be: ‘Today we're walking in the jungle. Here's your empty notepad. Tell me what you think is interesting, and then we'll follow up on whatever you think is interesting.’ It wouldn't be highly scripted assignments, and it certainly wouldn't be a true-false or multiple-choice test. That's nonsense.
So that's what gives me hope. Students are curious and enthusiastic about learning, for all the curmudgeonly talk about ‘This generation, all they want to do is be on social media and watch TV’—It's not true. It is not true. If you go visit an English class, and if you've put in front of them a text that they really enjoy, you can watch them talk about it. It's hardwired in our DNA. So I love that.
What's your favorite class to teach, and why?
Any class with genuinely interested students. I'll teach anything.
What have you taught?
I've taught chemistry to 10th graders. I've taught a second-year chemistry class to 11th and 12th graders. I've taught specifically synthetic organic chemistry. I've taught energy research, where we made Rube Goldberg machines. I've taught a class called ‘Thinking and Deciding’. I've taught, ‘Is That True?,’ where we just pulled things from the internet, and asked, ‘Is that true? How do you know?'
What are you teaching at St. Mark’s?
Integrated Science II. That's for multiple reasons. One, spend time with students. Two, integrated science is actually new at the School, and I think we need to make some decisions on how to improve it or modify it. And then three, I come from a school where every administrator teaches. I think that's important.
One challenge for St. Mark's and for other independent schools is balancing traditions with more current thinking about what might be best today. What thoughts do you have about that?
Schools are long-lived institutions. We've got an 1865 start. But the operations of the School occur at a moment in time. Our job today, as best we can, is to prepare our students of today as best we can for their futures. I can't predict what the future looks like, but that's the job of the School today.
Traditions necessarily come from the past. Any tradition that helps us prepare students for tomorrow, I'm 100 percent behind. Since we're 1865 to the present day, they allow for continuity of the community, organization, institution, through the lens of time. It's like the relay, the baton, from hand to hand to hand. Any tradition that keeps the school identity strong, our intergenerational memory strong, I think keeps the School strong, which helps us execute on our mission in the present, which is to prepare students for their future. Any tradition that adversely impacts our capacity to prepare students for their future should be considered something we don't need to do anymore.
It’s not a perfect lens, but that will help us. If you use that framework, it can help us evaluate a lot of different traditions, I think. I'm not anti-tradition. I'm definitely pro-tradition, as long as traditions don't get in the way of the work we're trying to do in the present day.
What advice would you give to high-school-age Ivory Hills?
This is something I've learned being a teacher: There's lots of advice you can give to young people, and they have to figure it out themselves. It doesn't stick. But if I had to pick something, I would pick: ‘Be brave, because there is no script.’ You can do whatever you want to do. There is no right way or wrong way. There's a way that has been done, but there is no script. So be brave, be bold, follow the master algorithm. If it works, keep doing it. If it doesn't work, stop doing it. And since people matter, kindness matters. Be curious.