Community beyond classrooms

By his own admission, Kendall Bell wasn’t exactly sure what he was looking for at the outset of his college process.

“The process never looks the way you think it will,” Bell muses in hindsight. “You may think you know what you want, but you probably don’t. You may think you know what a college is like, but you don’t until you visit campus. Without guidance, without help, you are just taking shots in the dark.”

For Bell, that light in the dark came from CA’s college counseling team. “The college counselors at CA don’t just learn what you want in a college, they learn you as a person,” reflects Bell. “They talk to you about your classes, about what is going on in your life, about everything else, and only then talk to you about college.”

With guidance, Bell homed in on the important attributes that he was looking for in a college experience: the curricular flexibility to pursue his interest in both chemistry and the humanities; immersive, hands-on learning opportunities; and a “quirky” atmosphere that embraced uniqueness and didn’t take itself too seriously.

The University of Chicago was an early front-runner, a position later solidified by a visit to campus. It quickly became the yardstick against which he compared all other prospects.

It was college counselor Leya Jones that encouraged Bell to take a closer look at Duke University, a school he initially included on his list only because it was local. However, on closer inspection, Bell found that he appreciated the interdisciplinarity built into Duke’s curriculum and the flexible way in which it structures its majors.

“Very few majors at Duke are vertical,” explains Bell. “There are often different versions of a degree, specializations within a major that allow you to reach across disciplines and pursue your various interests.”

Ultimately, Bell’s receipt of Duke’s Reginaldo Howard Memorial Scholarship—a merit-scholarship established in honor of Duke’s first African American president of the undergraduate student body—would make his decision an easy one. Bell found the community of “Reggie Scholars”—and their shared commitment to transformative leadership, intellectual courage, and social justice—compelling. The scholarship would ultimately lead to some of Bell’s most gratifying moments on campus.

“As a Reggie Scholar, I helped to organize and lead campus visit for new Reggie Scholar finalists,” offers Bell. “It was a meaningful experience. Not only was I was representing the program, but I helped to shape our community’s future by setting expectations and asking candidates how they would contribute and advance social justice work.”

Duke’s “work hard/play hard” culture also proved appealing. It forced Bell, an introvert, to stretch and reach out of his shell.

“I realized that life isn’t all about work and school. Duke offered me different communities of people that pushed me to engage outside the classroom, to do other things besides study that helped me make the most of the experience.”

On reflection, it is those opportunities outside of the classroom—those that allowed him to socialize or intellectually engage with his peers and professors—that rise to Bell’s memory as the most meaningful.

“A lot of the fun stuff, the cool stuff that happens in college, doesn’t necessarily happen in class,” says Bell. “It’s having a four-hour lunch conversation with your favorite professor, or being in your room at 11:30 pm on a Tuesday, when suddenly a lot of people roll up, and before you know it you’ve had a fascinating conversation about mass incarceration for hours. Those are the most powerful moments.”

Of course, there were ample academic highlights as well, including a long list of favorite classes—some stumbled on entirely by happenstance—that broadened his perspective or sparked new interests. Being nominated by his professor and winning the Mary McLeod Bethune Writing Award for a paper on moral panics was another particularly memorable moment.

Bell graduated from Duke this past May with degrees in both chemistry and global cultural studies and a minor in African and African American studies. This fall, his journey will come full circle, as he joins the CA community as a Teaching Fellow (he’s also recently completed a two-year stint as a member of CA’s Board of Directors). At CA, he’ll be working alongside one of his favorite teacher-turned-mentor Gray Rushin.

Bell looks forward to shaping his students’ journeys of self-discovery in much the same way others have shaped his. “There are many different places in my educational career where, if it had not been for that teacher that intervened, I would now be in a very, very different place,” explains Bell. “The best classes that I’ve taken are not just about learning the material but about learning about yourself as well.”

The A-ha Moment

Carrie Miller credits the support of the CA community and the leadership skills she developed during her time as a student with giving her the confidence she needed to strike out beyond her comfort zone to find the perfect college. “I knew I wanted to try something new, to explore a different part of the country, to try out an entirely different environment than what I was used to,” explains Miller.

She initially thought that she’d find that experience in a mid-size university in New England. It was only on the last-minute advice of favorite English teacher Sunny McDaniels (herself a Bowdoin alum) that she added Bowdoin College—a small liberal arts school on the coast of Maine—to her list.

“As soon as I walked onto the Bowdoin campus, I knew that this was the place. I felt so comfortable, so at home; everyone was so friendly. I loved the classes, the sunny days, the coastal campus, the engaged faculty, the intensely loyal alumni network” reflects Miller. “I’d always heard people talk about this intangible feeling you get when you find the school that’s the right fit. I never bought into that idea, never thought it would happen to me, until it did.”

On joining the student body, Miller immersed herself in campus life—moving into one of the social houses, joining the women’s rugby team, even working in the admissions office, first as a tour guide, and, later, as an applicant interviewer (a role she continues to enjoy as an alum).
Unsure of a major, she used her first semester to explore her myriad interests across gender studies, sociology, French, and science. “I wanted to take that first semester to just enjoy being at Bowdoin, to let myself be excited and inspired by all the possibilities,” explains Miller.

The next semesters saw Miller focus in on a career in women’s health, as she pursued pre-med prerequisites alongside classes for an interdisciplinary women studies major.

A culturally immersive semester-long study abroad in Botswana—during which Miller lived with a host family, studied the local language, completed coursework in HIV and public health, all while shadowing two days a week in the local healthcare clinic—proved to be transformative, triggering an interest in obstetrics and gynecology.

After graduating Bowdoin in 2008, Miller moved to Boston, taking a position within a child psychiatry research office from which she was able to explore a variety of roles within healthcare. Realizing that she valued the patient-doctor relationship above all else, she enrolled in Harvard’s post-baccalaureate program to complete a handful of remaining classes required for medical school admission and took the MCAT—all while working full-time.

Miller was admitted to the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in 2011 and started an OBGYN residency at Penn in 2015. She graduated in June 2019 and will soon be moving to Minnesota with her husband (a fellow doctor and Bowdoin alum) and young daughter, where she has accepted a position within a local hospital system.

Aiming abroad

An eighth-grade CA summer trip to Oxford University proved pivotal for Esra Balkas, triggering a longstanding desire to attend college abroad. She was immediately taken by Oxford’s beautiful campus and academic gravitas. A huge Tolkien fan, she loved the idea of attending her idol’s alma mater, of studying in the same hallowed halls in which he used to teach.

Practically, Balkas knew she wanted to study anthropology or international relations. These were passions she had discovered and explored thanks to CA’s flexible curriculum and the guidance of Upper School social sciences teacher Maret Jones.

Beyond academics, Balkas sought a school in an urban center and one with a large international student population, a desire borne out of her participation in the Student Global Leadership Initiative.

“SGLI was a huge thing for me. I learned so much from the other students in the program that were from all over the world—not just academically, but more broadly,” explains Balkas. “It changed how I looked at a lot of things in life. I wanted to go somewhere that offered a similar experience at the collegiate level.”

When an early and initially-disappointing rejection came from Oxford, Balkas shifted gears. She applied to the London School of Economics, another school that checked all her boxes.

“I applied on a whim,” recalls Balkas. “I was familiar with LSE’s anthropology program and had already written the application for the United Kingdom school system. I submitted my application two hours before the deadline closed. I didn’t even tell my parents or college counselor that I was applying. LSE is very competitive; I didn’t expect to get in.”
To her surprise, Balkas received a conditional acceptance weeks later. If she aced three of her AP exams, she was in.

Daunted, but determined, she redoubled her commitment to her academics. “It was hard. When all my friends were cruising, I was buckling down to study.”Her efforts paid off and she was officially admitted into the anthropology program at LSE in 2017. Since arriving on campus, she’s been immersed in her field, enjoying the close-knit community, and taking a full load of anthropology classes.

“At LSE, we’re offered only one elective credit per year—everything else is within the anthropology department” explains Balkas. “Because of the intensive focus, my program is only three years. We go deep from the outset and get out fast.”

She’s making the most of her small classes, which offer ample opportunities for hands-on learning, collaboration, and engagement with senior faculty. It’s an environment that has pushed her out of her comfort zone and helped her grow.

“I had initially thought I wanted a larger school,” explains Balkas. “I’m kind of shy and thought that it would be nice to blend into a huge class. That’s not possible at LSE, where the classes are capped at 12-14 people. It has pushed me to participate more, to be more confident.”

A field work unit completed during her second year has been a highlight of her time so far. “It was a crash course in becoming an anthropologist,” she explains. “You are given freedom to design a project, research it independently, and write an essay to share your findings.” Balkas—a self-described “nerd” who loves video games—chose to observe a popular e-sports team in London to explore how players use language, including gamer tags and gaming lingo, to construct their online identities and build community.

For Balkas, her experience abroad at LSE is all that she hoped it would be. “London is an incredible city and LSE is right in its heart, just a twenty-minute walk to Buckingham Palace,” she enthuses. “Being able to walk to school every day—stopping on the London Bridge, the London Eye is there, Westminster is there, my school is just on the other side—it is just so cool.”

Apart from her friends and family back home, she’s embraced her newfound independence and self-reliance that has fast-tracked her entry into adult life.

“Having to figure things out for myself—how to set up a bank account, how to register for a doctor, how to cook for myself (LSE doesn’t have dining halls), how to create my own support network—it’s been really empowering to do all of that on my own at eighteen. It’s tough, but in the end, I would always choose it. The life skills it has given me are incredible and I’ve made the most amazing friends and connections along the way.”

Brandon Byrd’s (’05) love of history has deeply personal roots.

For Byrd—Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, accomplished researcher, and published author—these stories were always relevant beyond mere familial anecdotes. They represented much larger stories, and more complex histories, including some of the most defining moments in African American history.

“My mom talked a lot about the Great Migration—the movement of tens of thousands of African Americans out of the Jim Crow South to the North, Midwest, and later to the West—that her family was a part of,” Byrd offers as an example. “It was those larger historical narratives—those that I had a personal connection to—that attracted me, intrigued me.”

“I came to an initial interest in history the way a lot of folks do—by just generally taking an interest in my own personal history,” muses Byrd. “I was enamored by the stories that my family would share and pass down, stories of my grandparents’ and great grandparents’ experiences, all of whom passed before I was born or shortly thereafter.”

He credits Cary Academy—and the engaged, collegiate-quality faculty that took an interest in him, both in and out of the classroom—for nurturing that initial interest, fanning it into a passion that would ultimately become the bedrock of
a meaningful humanities career.

“Being a historian now, I can clearly trace the influence that CA faculty—Conrad Hall, Joe Staggers, Bill Velto, and others—had on my thinking. They taught me to approach history in a more systematic manner, taught me how to go from merely consuming stories to thinking historically, to thinking about change over time, to thinking about causality.”

He fondly recalls one of his literature teachers in the Upper School, Chuck Burdick, to whom he had expressed a growing interest in slave narratives and abolitionist literature.

“He took me on a book talk and signing by a historian that had just published the first biography of Harriet Jacobs, the author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” reflects Byrd. “For someone to take that interest, to take time out of their personal life to help an (at that time) pretty brash, cocky high school student pursue his interest—it was impactful.”

It is perhaps little surprise that Byrd—embarking on his college career at Davidson College on an academic scholarship—confidently declared his major in history within his first weeks on campus. Later, he gained admittance into the honors history program, which allowed him to spend a year developing an independent research project to explore the life of Charles Clinton Spaulding, a prominent black businessman and intellectual leader in Durham, North Carolina.

That project would prove to be a springboard, offering a deeper introduction to the black intellectualism that would ultimately become the focus of his career. This early work would go on to inform his later research as he earned a Master’s degree from the University of William and Mary, and PhD from the University of North Carolina.

Byrd identifies first and foremost as an intellectual historian. Fascinated by the history of ideas, his specific research centers on the international dimensions of black intellectual history. As a professor, first at Mississippi State University and, currently, at Vanderbilt University, he teaches a full course load—including classes like “Black Lives Matter,” “Black Thinkers from Equiano to Obama,” and “Readings in African American History”—to undergraduate and graduate students. He also pursues his research agenda and contributes to the administration of his department and the university.

Byrd sees reflections of Cary Academy in his approach to teaching. No more so than when he’s pushing the pedagogical envelope, asking students to think critically or in ways that might question
a predominant narrative.

“I remember taking Bill Velto’s class on terrorism in the years immediately following 9/11,” reflects Byrd. “It was a moment when the general American public was being asked to think pretty uncritically about terrorism. They were having terrorism defined for them and they were being told ‘this is what it is to combat terror.’ In Velto’s class, we were being asked to think more critically, to consider the global roots and terms of terrorism. In hindsight, it was remarkable.”

It is an approach that stuck with him. He notes that his Black Lives Matter class, while dissimilar in content, shares its pedagogical roots in those early liberal arts classes at CA that initially stretched his thinking.

“The Black Lives Matter movement is also something defined largely in sweeping, generalized, and reactionary terms,” explains Byrd. “In my class, I try to take that and say ‘Well, let’s try to think about this. What is this movement? How does it fit into a broader global history of activism? What are the problems related to it? What can we learn if we stop assuming that we already know the answers?’”

That emphasis on the global, on the broader context, is indicative of Byrd’s larger research interests. For Byrd, examining historic African American intellectuals within their full global context—understanding how they and their ideas moved across and transcended national boundaries and how that, in turn, shaped their politics and intellectual practice—is crucial.

“There has always been a global dimension to African American history,” explains Byrd. “If we want to truly understand historical black intellectuals, truly understand the world as they saw it, we have to think in international terms, in part because that is how they identified within their world.”

He continues, “Take the abolitionists, for example. They didn’t view slavery as an institution that was peculiar to the South, or even peculiar to the United States. Their activism was based in a broader understanding of slavery’s international dimensions—how it was rooted in global networks of trade and commerce that connected Africa to Liverpool, England to merchants in New York to slaveholders in Georgia.

“And, that’s just one example, you can easily pull out others from across the decades,” explains Byrd. “The civil rights activists of the 1950s and ‘60s, the Black Power advocates of the ‘70’s, they all used similar transnational thinking. For them, thinking about desegregation meant also thinking about decolonization in Africa. It’s why, for a famous example, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was in Ghana on the day of Ghanaian independence in 1957.”

For Byrd, his research feels particularly timely, helping to explain and understand not only the past, but the current fraught historical moment, perhaps even offering strategies for future activism.

“Black intellectuals have historically grappled with complex issues that transcend time and context: slavery; equality; what democracy means, how it can be achieved, and for whom; how to affect political change. Their thinking on these topics is all still incredibly relevant today and probably will be in 100 years,” offers Byrd.

“Consider Frederick Douglass questioning the project of America in his famous address What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?. Then, look at the headlines, the uproar over Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the national anthem. Suddenly, in that context, the use of that moment does not come as a surprise nor does the backlash or the continued insistence on activism.”

As for what is next for Byrd, he is excited that a project that began as his dissertation will soon be shared with the world as a book. The Black Republic: African Americans and the Fate of Haiti considers the significance of Haitian independence in the imagination of black intellectuals grappling with the possibilities of black freedom in the decades following the U.S. Civil War. It will be published this fall by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

This summer, he is digging into a new book project that will delve deeper into the social dimensions of black intellectualism through a multi-generational family history of the Holly family. Patriarch James Theodore Holly led a migration of African Americans from the United States to Haiti in the 1860s and would become the first black bishop in the Protestant Episcopal Church. His descendants represent a long family tradition of black intellectualism and transnational activism.

With this new research, Byrd hopes to gain insight into the intimate spaces of political movements and how genealogies of activism and political thought are built.

“One of the benefits of the family history angle is that, rather than just the church or the political office, I can consider the home as a central space
of inquiry.”

The inclusion of the home as a political space allows Byrd to delve deeper into the dimensions of his work that he finds most gratifying, most important, and perhaps most challenging: finding and elevating marginalized voices—particularly the voices of black women—whose inclusion offers a more holistic understanding of history.

“Finding voices of black women—many of whom were intentionally silenced for various reasons or who chose not to speak out in eras where visceral racism and patriarchy was the norm, even within black organizations—is challenging,” comments Byrd. “But, you have to find them. Folks that are on the margins of the archives—due to reasons of power, race, gender, or sexuality—were often at the center of the thinking and the action.”

It is when Byrd gives voice to those marginalized figures and pieces together a historical narrative that reflects their true experience—an important step in advancing our understanding of both past and present—that he feels he is inching closer to his goal.

“With my work, I am standing on the shoulders of scholars and historians who came before me. Scholars like John Hope Franklin and W.E.B. Du Bois contributed an almost unthinkable amount of knowledge about African American, U.S., and global history in an era where they couldn’t even go into archives,” offers Byrd.

“I don’t have the hubris to say that I am going to offer the same paradigm-shifting work that they delivered, but I think I can nudge us forward. I can help us think differently about aspects of African American history, its transnational dimensions, what it means to the past, and offers for the future. To me, that is a worthy and exciting goal.”

ADVICE FOR CA STUDENTS

“We’re in a time where the value of the humanities is under attack, where there is rhetoric that suggests that viable career paths are primarily STEM-based. It isn’t true. If you look at recent research and data, you’ll find that earnings for humanities majors keep pace with those of STEM majors.

“Ignore the idea that this is a zero-sum game, the idea that there is only one path to success. Skills earned in the humanities can go everywhere and are requisite for success on the job market. Employers want that person that is the problem solver, that can think and write clearly, that can craft an argument, and that can spot gaps in other’s argumentation.”

“As you’re being told what disciplines to value, what courses to value, do your own homework. Read The Wall Street Journal, or Forbes, or the websites of various professional organizations. They can shed light on potential career path outcomes and tell you what it means, for example,
to be a historian.” –Brandon Byrd