Head of School Emily Raudenbush Gum Awarded Doctoral Degree from the University of Oxford, England

“There is a huge amount of relevance to the research that I’ve been doing in terms of the kinds of questions that we tackle as a school. We are a school that has, for our whole history, understood strength of character to be the primary goal of education,” said Dr. Raudenbush Gum, who is the only Head of School in Gunn’s 175-year history to be awarded a doctoral degree during their tenure. The only other Head of School to hold a doctorate was Russell Bartlett, who led the school from 1942-1946 and was awarded a Ph.D. in physics from Yale University in 1924. Dr. Bartlett studied with Sir J.J. Thomson, a Nobel Prize winner and discoverer of the electron, at Cavendish Laboratories and Trinity College at the University of Cambridge.

Dr. Raudenbush Gum finalized  her thesis, “The Place of Identity Formation in the Education of Children,” this fall. Her degree will be conferred at a graduation ceremony that she and her family will attend in July at Oriel College, one of Oxford’s oldest colleges, founded in 1326 and celebrating its 700th anniversary this year.

“The dissertation brings together thinkers across a wide range of fields, from educational philosophy and practice, to theology and religious studies, to political theory, and introduces the idea of moral identity as a particularly relevant domain in secondary school education,” she said.

Oxford boasts the top-ranked Theology, Divinity and Religious Studies Department in the UK and Europe and also has sat atop the Times Higher Education listing as the top research university in the world for a decade. The program is highly competitive, requiring a minimum of three years of full-time study to complete, and all students must prepare a 100,000 word thesis. While Dr. Raudenbush Gum does not anticipate that she will look to publish her dissertation immediately, she said, “I am eager to maintain my university connections through networks that form intersections between broad questions of the purpose of education in the 21st century and the practices of school leaders.”

Prior to joining Gunn as Assistant Head of School for Teaching and Learning in 2018, Dr. Raudenbush Gum graduated with distinction from the University of Oxford with a Master of Philosophy in Theology and Religion, and graduated with Joint Honours from the University of St Andrews, with a Master of Arts in International Relations and Theological Studies. She served in several leadership roles with the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture (IASC) at the University of Virginia and its affiliate foundations over a 13-year period. During her tenure at UVA, she achieved a multi-million dollar fundraising initiative, managed daily operations and annual budgets, edited The Hedgehog Review, launched a social impact non-profit, and wrote and spoke about ethics, character education, contemporary social and political theory, religion, questions of identity, and educational theory.

Last week, Dr. Raudenbush Gum reflected that the seeds for her thesis were planted when she was a boarding student at The Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. “My first theology classes were required study at The Hill School, and I was one of a very small number of Americans studying theological studies with an international relations focus at St Andrews. I went back then, to study again at Oxford for my master’s in 2014; but this has been a continuous journey that started at prep school with The Rev. Dr. John Harvard. He was our school chaplain and taught the theology courses that were offered, and he sadly passed away in 2005. This thesis was inspired by the class I took with him.”

Her doctoral research was also informed and largely shaped by her work at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at UVA. “I do think that group, the interdisciplinary nature of it, and the focus on how theory and practice intersect at a very high level, ultimately shaped the outcome of my dissertation. The global network of scholars I was introduced to there was also the catalyst for my reflection on schools specifically, alongside broader institutions of education, and it was there I learned to consider  questions of formation, around what is happening with people as they are becoming young adults,” Dr. Raudenbush Gum said. “I was able to bring those questions to a set of leading scholars at Oxford and that is how this ultimately all came together.”
 

Photo credit: Kristin Moore