Josiah Bunting III

Josiah Bunting III (born November 8, 1939) is an American educator. He has been a military officer, college president, and an author and speaker on education and Western culture. Quotes All Loves Excelling (2001) The culture of St. Matthew's was implacably hostile to leisure, to unscheduled time, to solitude. It was a place of furious energy and bustle. Amanda saw this at once and it frightened her. The school had become an institution for the New Millenium- on-line, intense, watchfully competitive. Parents who paid twenty-six grand a year, in Joey Bahringer's phrase, fed into this maw of ceaseless assessment and pressure, now began an academic week-day that would vary only slightly from any other. She would attend five classes; required School Chapel, require meals, mandatory athletics, Avocational Pursuit (for Amanda piano and, possibly, cello in Winter Term); SAT UP; required study halls each night- for three hours, which, however, Class IVs could satisfy in their own rooms. And there was a breathless welter of counseling sessions, meetings with college reps, cheer rallies, concerts, addresses by alumni. The work never stopped. Ch. 5, p. 31-32 Roderick Steele, Master of History, had lately become conscious that he was older than his students' parents. Earlier they had condescended to him. Now they began to humor him with contrived solicitudes, occasional gifts, Christmas biblelots from catalogues. On campus the conventional wisdom was that he was a tough grader, unassailably learned and incorruptible. His commitment to his work and to St. Matthew's was absolute. His appearance in its austerity suited his reputation. Ch. 6, p. 33 Gibbon Gymnasium lay at the western edge of the St. Matthew's campus where, raw, dark, and abrupt, the Seneca Forest began. All the humming, polished regularity of the school's routines, all its elegance of architecture, of pollarded trees and clipped shrubs and shaved lawns- here all stopped abruptly at the limit of the great forest. The forest floor was honeycombed with running trails, meandering paths, old logging roads, most leading towards, or rather down to the Seneca River, no more than a mile from the campus, but infinitely remote from its enterprise and ambience.The river was so sluggish that no current, no motion of waters, could be discerned. Even in winter its surface was an onyx-like blackness, an unglistening mirror. Yet the river was also deep enough, and sufficiently broad, that it could accommodate St. Matthew's crews for an uncluttered reach of almost a mile. On the school side of the Seneca, an old berm, perhaps three feet above the river's surface, offered a worn pathway, the longest portion of which served as a main venue for the training and racing of St. Matthew's runners. Ch. 10, p. 53 Amanda ran like an adolescent American athlete of ordinary gifts. She had started three years earlier, under a new policy that required every Lawrence sophomore to compete in an interscholastic sport. Cross-country running seemed less threatening to her, less competitive, than the only other fall option- field hockey. The high school running coach had said, "You're tall for your age, and pretty thin. You oughta run." She competed with a modest success that was the product of tenacious training. The transformation of an offhand avocation into a serious staple of Amanda's daily routine came quickly and unremarked. Ch. 10, p. 53-54 Amanda understood that what the coach called serious running also offered serious benefits- a message her mother reinforced. It made you lean and fit. And while you were doing it, it somehow lifted you out of your troubles and worries. You could measure your progress. Your success was a function of how you trained- you by yourself, but how you trained was soon transmuted to how long you trained, how many miles you ran- and how many miles everyone else ran. She heard coaches gabbing away at meets about runner's highs and endorphins, but the closest she came to them was a feeling of dull exhileration that seemed to blot out other anxieties for a few hours. Inevitably a new consideration was imposed- opportunity and liability both: Amanda understood that she might attain "times" that would aid her chances to get into an Ivy League college. That was, Amanda began to learn, a kind of system at work; students who were good athletes would be given certain advantages in the admissions process. Coaches were said to have unstated quotas, slots they could fill with the athletes they wanted, provided these athletes were smart enough to do the work after they got in. So Amanda no longer ran to feel free or feel good: she began to run for a purpose- for success in running, and, a year later, success in getting into Dartmouth. By now this had become her mother's goal for her. Ch. 10, p. 54 Passmore read the poem aloud- with a small catch in his voice after "asked to be." He loved the poem, and he loved was he was doing, teaching it, and teaching it in his own house, where he had asked to be. The room was silent, the students rapt. He looked at Amanda with the same gentle directness she remembered from the opening Chapel procession. Behind him on the wall were dozens of framed photographs of St. Matthew's crews and football teams, themselves silent witnesses to a living tradition, the headmaster as chief master, or teacher. This was not a man you would want to disappoint. There was a kindly earnestness in him learned and earned through forty years' teaching and (as he called it) school-keeping. Ch. 11, p. 59 To look at the headmaster, to watch him, to hear his ordinary conversation, to see him eat his meals in a Savernake or tramp the muddy sidelines of children's games, was to form an impression that such a passion for poetry was as unlikely as his suddenly leaving his profession, his vocation. But he regarded himself as an agent of transmission, a teacher bearing a priceless gift, this poetry, from one generation to another, the one long dead, the other not yet born.Early each term, students new to Hopkins and Dr. Passmore hardly knew what to make of either. They reacted unpredictably. Some responded in disbelief; they tried to get out of the seminar. Others thought him soft in the head or a religious zealot. It was believed in the school that he had gone off the deep end after the only woman he had ever loved had thrown him over for a Wall Street mogul in the 1980s. He'd buried himself in poetry: as an idiosyncrasy it was harmless, though it seemed out of character. And he had never given an F. There were many such reactions. Yet every few years Hopkins' poetry, through the headmaster's grace and passion for it, really did, in fact, change a life. Knowing this, and knowing this alone, sustained and rewarded him. What more did a man need? Ch. 11, p. 61-62 It was not smart, Arnett had advised, to be needlessly expansive. Make the point and leave it at that. Lawyers weaken their case when they make more than one point. Ch. 15, p. 85 "I don't believe you.""All right. Why not? Why don't you believe me? I'm prepared to listen.""Because you think they know what I'm really like, and what I want and what my needs are.""Your needs? For God's sake, Amanda, haven't we taken care of those needs, every need you or your father or I could think of since you... since none of us can rememember? Your needs! Amanda. You have been given everything. And now we have a chance to really give you something more, and you have to trust the wisdom of an adult, this is a great school- do you know what Harriet Cummer said today when I told her you were at St. Matthew's? She said it is the most prestigious school in North America, and it can be the making of you. Do not let yourself down, don't wind up in some little jerkwater college no one ever heard of: do you know what that means?"Amanda hung up on her. Ch. 16, p. 96 It is the worst spectator sport of all. One sees the runners for a minute; they disappear; are seen again, hurtling in a foggy distance, their singlet colors suddenly flashing brokenly between stands of trees; then nothing for ten or twelve minutes; finally, in a long, ragged stream, gasping and lunging, heads bobbing on narrow shoulders, they appear again, straining to finish at the original starting line- usually in a desperate and disjointed sprint, each trying to gain a place or two at the finish. Ch. 18, p. 105 Dr. Passmore's housekeeper came to the door. Amanda could see her expression, the expression of someone interrupted in her work but determined to be obliging. A reedy, watery voice seemed to be gliding down the stairs. It was a man's voice singing about a foggy day in Londontown. Amanda sat on a shiny settee in the headmaster's study, her hands folded in her lap. Outside it was perfectly still. Sunday mornings at St. Matthew's were the silent times of the week, when the frantic business of work paused- stopped, so it had seemed, not because it wanted to, but because it had simply exhausted itself. p. 160 Amanda left the trail; she began to make her way directly alongside it. It seemed colder, the lower she descended, the farther she moved away from the school, the closer to the Seneca. You never saw the river until you were upon it; you never heard it. Ch. 51, p. 295 Before her, she saw, perfectly framed in memory, Daniella running ahead, effortless, gliding, tumbling finally out of sight. Amanda stopped. Here she slid down to the river, knelt, began a harvest of pebbles and sand, filling the pockets of her heavy coat until they could hold no more. It was like filling the pockets of your jeans with rolls of coins. She stood up, moved herself forward, hands extended like an acrobat's on a wire, began stepping out onto the ice, carefully, slowly, making her way to its last thick limit. Into the blackness, under her gaze, seeing nothing but the reflection of her own face, she flung herself forward, sinking down easily and immediately. p. Ch. 51, p. 295 Joey performed the same domestic duties he had done for twenty years: emptying an ashtray, locking the doors, laying out business papers in his study for the morning, checking the mail. There was an Architectural Digest and there were four or five letters, the last of which was addressed to Miss Amanda Bahringer. It bore the return address: Office of Admissions, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, 07355-4030. Joey opened the envelope and read the letter. His wife was already in bed when he came upstairs. She lay in a way he had never seen: on her back, eyes open and looking up, her head on a single pillow and her arms at her sides. "Is everything all right? Is Cleopatra OK?" "Fine," Joey said. "Was there any mail?" "Nothing important," he answered. Epilogue, p. 301 External links Category:1939 births Category:Living people Category:Virginia Military Institute alumni Category:Hampden-Sydney College faculty Category:People from Pennsylvania Category:Military leaders from the United States Category:United States Army people Category:University of Oxford alumni