Farah Pandith ’86, 40th Reunion
In 1986, lifer Farah Pandith ’86, now a senior fellow on the Council on Foreign Relations, sat stumped in her senior Middle East elective. It was her first day, and Mr. Proctor, the instructor, just handed out a map of the Middle East without any country labels. Pandith’s job was to fill everything in.
“It really was a kick in the pants for me,” Pandith said as she recalled how she and her classmates scrambled to figure out the locations of Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. “You’ve got to see yourself as bigger than just Massachusetts.”
Now back for her 40th Reunion, Pandith describes her 13-year Milton experience as instrumental and imperfect. The Self-Governing Association and the Speech Team, specifically, shaped Pandith’s career. As class representative every single year in the Upper School, Pandith listened to disagreeing perspectives, learned how to speak in public, practiced leading meetings and encouraged consensus.
“Going out in the world, it is very important that you’re able to be clear about what you believe,” she said.
Speech Team, meanwhile, was where Pandith saw “the power of a team coming together.” Upperclassmen mentored underclassmen, crossing “rigid” divides between classes. The team also introduced Pandith to her coaches, and later, her English instructors, Dale DeLetis and Debbie Simon.
“[DeLetis] taught me so much about how to present my ideas in a way that an audience can hear them,” she said. “Debbie Simon…actually taught us about feminism. You don’t know what you’re being exposed to, and then later you think to yourself, ’I read The Color Purple in ninth grade.’”
Yet, Milton was far from a perfect place for Pandith. When she was ten, her parents divorced and her mother had to financially support her and her brother through their education.
“[My mother] was working nine hours a day to get the money to pay for schooling,” she said. “With that sacrifice, something needs to come from it…[because] if we had stayed in Kashmir, Northern India, I would be living a very different kind of life.”
The pressure to succeed not only came from Pandith’s immigrant background. In the 1980s, the path beyond Milton was not up to creative interpretation. There were certain colleges and professions people were expected to go into. That year, twenty-two seniors matriculated to Harvard.
“The pressure of an elite [place] in our society at the time was…inconceivable,” she said. “To think of one of us [would become] president…that was pretty much the expectation.”
Despite changing times and social pressure, Pandith and her classmates, who now sit around a table excitedly chatting, proudly recall that their class was the first co-ed class to graduate: that year, boys and girls marched together into the Robert Saltonstall Gym.
“Milton was not what is today,” Pandith said. “It was never a perfect place. It's a reflection of the humans and the world.”
Elly Lindsay ’66, 60th Reunion
The first thing Elly Lindsay ’66 learned when she arrived at Hathaway House in tenth grade from Long Island, New York was how to fold a note. These little paper notes created an elaborate system intended for communicating with boys, who were completely separated from the Girls’ School. All the science classes were in the Boys’ School, so girls with science class would pass the notes to the boys in the stairwells during passing periods.
“I didn’t know all the guys in the Boys’ School, but there were three or four that I knew very well, and they are here,” Lindsay said. “So it was really fun to see them and catch up with them.”
Lindsay, returning from Texas for her 60th Reunion, fondly remembers a “wonderful little wooden theatre behind Hathaway” where she stage-managed the play Arsenic and Old Lace and the three meals she had at the long wooden table in her dorm Hathaway’s dining room. Yet most importantly, Milton taught Lindsay how to navigate intense times of current events.
John F. Kennedy was assassinated when Lindsay was on a bus to play a field hockey game.
“The news came through… and [we still] played the game,” she said. “Literally, my parents came up and took me out of school. So it was a very emotional and difficult time.”
Yet, it was the way “Milton still talks about ethics and morality as well as current events” that shaped Lindsay and her experience in college and beyond. Lindsay attended Radcliffe Women’s College of Harvard at the height of the Vietnam War, a time filled with protests and upheavals on campus.
“The dare to be true for me was all about finding that moral compass: what is the path for the greatest good for most people as well as finding the path that is your path, the unique work, not the work somebody else thinks you need.”