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unicornduke replied to your post about 20th high school reunion
that is the fanciest castle??? I’ve ever seen. is that really a high school????
it sure is.
It’s in Troy NY, has been in operation since 1814 which makes it the oldest high school serving women in the United States, and that campus dates from 1914 or so, when they did a swap with a women’s college to give them downtown space in return for a more isolated campus. The campus is a gorgeous example of American Neo-Gothic architecture and is pristinely maintained by the most meticulous grounds crew you can imagine, and naturally, as a student there, I had basically no notion of this. Anyway.
Here are more pictures. It’s a whole thing. It’s fancier than that photo even shows you. Check some of those interiors, it’s unreal.
We just had a whole conversation about what it meant to have gone there and such. I honestly just gate-crashed because one of my classmates was giving a presentation and I wanted to support her. It was $100 to stay to dinner but I did not do that. I got in all the pictures though, waved some banners, was generally obnoxious. I went there on a huge need-based scholarship and it was still a lot of money and a stretch for my not-that-upper-middle-class family, but it was kind of an amazing experience, I won’t lie about that.
We recently had a huge scandal, there was a class-action lawsuit over decades of allegations of sexual abuse of students by staff. One of the complainants was someone I knew, and the teacher she accused was one of my favorite teachers, and I absolutely believe her. The school settled and then instituted a whole separate governing board of experts and alums and such. And like, it’s a lot of self-flagellation, but there’s no other way to do it, you need to be fucking sorry for shit like that. Many of my friends suffered at the hands of administrators who were out of their depth and just wanted them to shut up, about all kinds of things– the woman who gave the presentation had a mental breakdown and in lieu of treating her they threw her out, and we never knew what happened or why, and now she’s back at our 20th reunion getting a Distinguished Alumna Award? Clearly, if she was willing to come back, they’ve changed things, and I do feel that they have. But there were some hard conversations in among all the feelgood bullshit.
It remains one of the last single-sex educational bastions in the United States, and I think the commitment stands pretty firm. Integrated education is great, but until women are genuinely considered people by the culture at large, they still need protected spaces, and I do think Emma’s mission remains sacred. Even if they mostly churn out White Feminists ™, but I will add, they’ve got a great international student contingent and I’m still grateful for having had that kind of exposure and perspective at such an early age. Especially if they’re going to have decent mental health supports and some kind of accountability for action on complicated interpersonal and disciplinary issues and abuse issues and such. I dunno, it’s not all sunshine and roses but I still think it’s an important institution. And having gone there, as I explained in that workshop– the main value for me was that, in matters interpersonal, academic, social, or high-class-society related, after Emma nothing really cowed me. I’d seen fancier, done more advanced, been through worse, seen crazier, heard of worse– my world was much larger than my compatriots’, and it wasn’t necessarily that it got me ahead, it just let me keep up in a way I’d never have managed on my own.
Also, in 1991, they filmed Scent of a Woman there. I’ve only seen the movie because of that, but for the record, it opens on a gorgeous shot of our campus coming up the hill from the athletic center, with the two modern buildings in the back cropped out.
Oh, current notable alumnae include the current junior senator for New York State, Kirsten Gillibrand (class of ‘84), so. I bought some Emma postcards to mail to her.
unicornduke replied to your post about 20th high school reunion
that is the fanciest castle??? I’ve ever seen. is that really a high school????
it sure is.
It’s in Troy NY, has been in operation since 1814 which makes it the oldest high school serving women in the United States, and that campus dates from 1914 or so, when they did a swap with a women’s college to give them downtown space in return for a more isolated campus. The campus is a gorgeous example of American Neo-Gothic architecture and is pristinely maintained by the most meticulous grounds crew you can imagine, and naturally, as a student there, I had basically no notion of this. Anyway.
Here are more pictures. It’s a whole thing. It’s fancier than that photo even shows you. Check some of those interiors, it’s unreal.
We just had a whole conversation about what it meant to have gone there and such. I honestly just gate-crashed because one of my classmates was giving a presentation and I wanted to support her. It was $100 to stay to dinner but I did not do that. I got in all the pictures though, waved some banners, was generally obnoxious. I went there on a huge need-based scholarship and it was still a lot of money and a stretch for my not-that-upper-middle-class family, but it was kind of an amazing experience, I won’t lie about that.
We recently had a huge scandal, there was a class-action lawsuit over decades of allegations of sexual abuse of students by staff. One of the complainants was someone I knew, and the teacher she accused was one of my favorite teachers, and I absolutely believe her. The school settled and then instituted a whole separate governing board of experts and alums and such. And like, it’s a lot of self-flagellation, but there’s no other way to do it, you need to be fucking sorry for shit like that. Many of my friends suffered at the hands of administrators who were out of their depth and just wanted them to shut up, about all kinds of things– the woman who gave the presentation had a mental breakdown and in lieu of treating her they threw her out, and we never knew what happened or why, and now she’s back at our 20th reunion getting a Distinguished Alumna Award? Clearly, if she was willing to come back, they’ve changed things, and I do feel that they have. But there were some hard conversations in among all the feelgood bullshit.
It remains one of the last single-sex educational bastions in the United States, and I think the commitment stands pretty firm. Integrated education is great, but until women are genuinely considered people by the culture at large, they still need protected spaces, and I do think Emma’s mission remains sacred. Even if they mostly churn out White Feminists ™, but I will add, they’ve got a great international student contingent and I’m still grateful for having had that kind of exposure and perspective at such an early age. Especially if they’re going to have decent mental health supports and some kind of accountability for action on complicated interpersonal and disciplinary issues and abuse issues and such. I dunno, it’s not all sunshine and roses but I still think it’s an important institution. And having gone there, as I explained in that workshop– the main value for me was that, in matters interpersonal, academic, social, or high-class-society related, after Emma nothing really cowed me. I’d seen fancier, done more advanced, been through worse, seen crazier, heard of worse– my world was much larger than my compatriots’, and it wasn’t necessarily that it got me ahead, it just let me keep up in a way I’d never have managed on my own.
Also, in 1991, they filmed Scent of a Woman there. I’ve only seen the movie because of that, but for the record, it opens on a gorgeous shot of our campus coming up the hill from the athletic center, with the two modern buildings in the back cropped out.
Oh, current notable alumnae include the current junior senator for New York State, Kirsten Gillibrand (class of ‘84), so. I bought some Emma postcards to mail to her.
