176th Commencement Highlights the Shared Journey of our Students, and the Art of Learning to Listen

In her opening remarks, Dr. Raudenbush Gum framed the experience of the graduates as a four-year journey of growth and development, reflecting on the transformation that takes place with each passing year. First-year students arrive as 14-year-olds, who are “somewhat starstruck by the seniors,” eager to find their way and largely without the skills to achieve their highest aims. “But those aims exist, sometimes as aims, sometimes as dreams, longings, or half-formed wishes. However liminal, they drive you towards growth,” she said to the students.

Those early aims are what educators at Gunn build on, and by the end of that first year, skills are starting to fall into place. “Our sophomores turn vague aims to clear ambitions. This is my favorite phase,” she continued. “You, my friends, do not suffer fools, and that keeps us deeply honest as educators, and requires that we are attentive, personalized, and more ambitious for you than you yet are for yourselves.”

In junior year, students face new external pressures in the college process, recruiting, and parental expectations. But juniors insist on being seen as they are, and rise to the occasion. “You are leaders in the classrooms, on the fields, in the houses, in community spaces when no adults are watching. Usually, that leadership leads to the thriving of the whole community,” Dr. Raudenbush Gum said. And then the process comes full circle.

“Senior year is all about swagger. Our younger students look up to you, whether you’re ready for that responsibility or not — and guess what? Year after year, you are up to the challenge. You model clarity of vision, and claim what you’re aiming for. Your ambitions are now beyond this school, and rightly so, to college and beyond,” she said, addressing the graduates as she concluded: “I hope each one of you swaggers right across the stage as you collect your diplomas, deeply proud of the noble and challenging things you have accomplished, proud of this community that has walked you through this extraordinary season of growth and transformation, and proud to represent us as you go on to your next season of learning and emergence.”

A Strong Sense of Belonging
Dr. Raudenbush Gum then introduced this year’s Head Prefect, Martha Ewing ’26, who spoke on behalf of the Class of 2026, and incoming Head Prefect Riker Napoleone ’27, who spoke on behalf of the rising seniors and all of the students returning in the new school year. Both remarked on the exuberance for which the Class of 2026 was known and what makes Gunn feel like home.

“That sense of home is something that I’ve repeatedly found myself thinking about this year,” Ewing reflected. “Our school’s value of Rootedness and Place is one that particularly resonates with me. When you think back to one of your Gunn moments, chances are the underlying feeling of this memory was a strong sense of belonging, the sense that you’re rooted in this community, in this moment of time with these people. This is a feeling like no other, and what’s exciting is that it’s something that you’ll feel again and again in the coming years. A sense of place and purpose is awaiting you at your next step, and I promise it will always be waiting for you here back at Gunn, no matter how much time has passed.”

Introducing Gilpin as the Commencement speaker, Dr. Raudenbush Gum noted that he has enjoyed a tremendous career on stage and screen, including his latest role as Church, the butler on “The Gilded Age,” now in its fourth season on HBO. Gilpin has appeared in dozens of films and television shows, including “Billions,” “Succession,” and “Madam Secretary,” and has performed on and off Broadway and in renowned regional theatres. Raised in rural Virginia, he is a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard University. A man of deep faith and a scholar, he balanced the Hollywood portions of his life with studies in religion, earning his Master of Divinity degree and becoming ordained as an Episcopal priest in 2012. He served as priest-in-charge and as rector at St. John's Episcopal Church in New Milford, Connecticut, until his retirement in 2020.

The Faculty of Listening
In his Commencement Address, Gilpin spoke about the things that an ordained clergy person and an actor have in common. Both call for a script, a performance, and costumes, but above all, what they require is the capacity to be a careful, empathetic, and intentional listener.

Gilpin recalled that when his three children were in seventh grade at Washington Montessori School, they all participated in an overnight trip to Boston, where they toured the Freedom Trail and the Science Museum, and got to ride the duck boats. In the spring of 2008, when his youngest child, Harry, was scheduled to go, Gilpin arranged for his class to also visit his first cousin, Drew Gilpin Faust, Ph.D., a former history professor at Penn, who was in her first year as president of Harvard University. As her visit with the class came to a close, Gilpin asked her, “What would you say was the most important thing that characterized your good students as opposed to your less successful students?”

“I could see that the question took her by a bit of surprise,” he recalled. “First she said, ‘Well … the ones who did their homework … ’ but she was thinking. She stopped, and looked at me, and said: ‘The ones who listened.’”

“In my two careers, I can tell you that the faculty of listening is absolutely critical in each,” Gilpin told his audience at Gunn. “Listening is not the same thing as hearing. Listening is intentionally giving your best attention to what you’re hearing. In a very real sense, it’s giving yourself over to the person who is talking, honoring that person, agreeing to enter that person’s world, the better to understand what he or she is saying, whatever it is.”

At age 7, when Gilpin had a starring role as the Easter Bunny, in a pageant at the little country church his parents attended, he remembered thinking “it was cool” when the audience applauded. Years later, he reflected that it wasn’t the applause that moved him in that moment as much as the fact that the audience was truly listening. “It didn’t matter that they were grown-ups and we were kids,” he said. “They were honoring us — as our parents and our neighbors — and supporting our efforts to put across that story; and through their listening, made us all — audience and actors — co-collaborators in the creation of a story, never experienced in precisely the same way before, and never to be experienced in precisely the same way again. That’s theatre. A story isn’t alive until there is somebody to listen to it, and it changes infinitesimally, but it changes both the person who speaks, and the person who listens.”

“The legendary British theatre director Peter Brook talks about this in his seminal book, The Empty Space, in which he describes theatre — not theatre in general, but the physical space, the empty space, wherever it is, wherever theatre is done — describes it as through its very emptiness, a place of infinite possibility. I’ve always felt that. And sometimes it’s junk. And sometimes it changes your life. But my first whiff of the sacredness of that theatre space was at that Easter pageant. It was that audience that first taught me that truth, and they did it by listening.”

Gilpin shared more examples, from his time as a chaplain intern at a hospital, and his years as an Episcopal priest, when knowing how to listen made all the difference. “It’s something anybody can do, and can learn to do. It’s a gift in the life of the mind, and it will help you in whatever career path you choose, and even more, it’s a gift especially in the life of the heart, with your life partner, your family, your friends, with total strangers. Listening in the way that I’ve described will enrich your life and the lives of those to whom you listen in a way nothing else can approach.”

The Highest Awards and Top Scholar
Dr. Raudenbush Gum congratulated the many students who were recognized at Prize Night with awards for scholastic excellence and other honors, and then presented the school’s three highest awards to students who were chosen by a vote of the faculty.

The Brinsmade Prize is “awarded to the student who best combines unselfish and sympathetic interest in people with a purpose for citizenship and social responsibility.” This year it was presented to Daniel Conlan ’26.

The Head of School’s Prize is “awarded to a member of the graduating class who, by constant excellence and dependability in studies and in extracurricular activities, has contributed outstandingly to the success of the school year.” This year’s prize was awarded to Michael Copen ’26.

The Gunn Cup is “awarded to that student who, through character and achievement, shall have contributed most largely to the success of the school year.” The cup was awarded to Martha Ewing ’26.

On behalf of the Board, new Trustee Jeremy Chase P’26 ’30 granted Dr. Raudenbush Gum the authority to grant diplomas to the great Class of 2026. Associate Head of School Seth Low P’26 ’28 called each of the graduates by name as Dr. Raudenbush Gum awarded their diplomas. The final diploma of the day was awarded to Jaime Zafra Gutiérrez ’26, who graduated cum laude and was named the Top Scholar of the Class of 2026. As the ceremony concluded, Dr. Raudenbush Gum read the charge to the senior class and retiring faculty member Karoline Theobald P’09 ’14 delivered her last benediction as the Anne S. and Ogden D. Miller Senior Master.

To view the recording of the 176th Commencement Exercises, click here.


Photos by Island Photography