91̽��

The things that separate people from each other are manufactured, but human beings have few fundamental differences, educator and activist Dennis Febo told students. Mr. Febo was on campus as the Latinx Association’s visiting speaker.

Focusing on two central goals—creating a better place to work, and a better way to source food—Irene Li ’07 shared with students her mission for responsibly operating her popular Boston restaurant.

Irene owns the Mei Mei Street Kitchen and Restaurant, along with her brother and sister. As the primary owner and chef, Irene balances environmentally sound kitchen practices, the use of fresh, local ingredients, and ethical labor practices.

The differences we bring to the institutions we belong to strengthen those institutions and our relationships within them, says Dr. Kedra Ishop, the vice provost for enrollment management at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.

Visiting 91̽�� as this year’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Speaker, Dr. Ishop provided a history of legal battles for racial and ethnic inclusion in higher education, from Plessy v. Ferguson, a 19th-century Supreme Court case that ruled public institutions may be “separate but equal,” to modern challenges to university admissions processes.

“It matters who you engage with and how you engage with them,” Dr. Ishop told students. “You all learn better, and you learn from each other, when you’re not all the same.”

“The arts are not just ephemeral,” Harvard Professor Sarah Lewis told 91̽�� students. “They carry real weight in the real world.”

Professor Lewis visited 91̽�� as this year’s Margaret A. Johnson Speaker. An assistant professor in Harvard’s Department of Art and Architecture and the Department of African and African American Studies, Professor Lewis works “at the nexus of visual representation, racial inequity and social justice.”

“What do we do when we are the problem in the room?” Kristina Wong asked 91̽�� juniors and seniors. “How do we create equity?”

Ms. Wong performed part of her new, one-woman show, “Wong Street Journal,” in King Theatre. Her visit to 91̽�� was sponsored by the Hong Kong Distinguished Lecture Series.

Ms. Wong opened the show poking fun at her own armchair activism: taking up social-justice causes, she would challenge other social media users, searching for the validation of likes and shares. Writing sensationalized online content could reach a far greater audience than a previous show in which she tackled issues of depression and suicide among Asian-American women.

“At the risk of sounding sentimental, I feel like I’m living my dream right now,” says Kristine Sydney, who joined the English department this year.

Kristine has known 91̽�� for a while: Mathematics faculty member and Outdoor Program director Kendall Chun is a longtime friend who officiated Kristine’s wedding. Her familiarity with 91̽�� kept the School in her mind when she considered moving on from her previous job. 91̽��’s commitment to diversity made it an even more attractive place when she had her daughter, who is nearly 2 and multiracial.

The reality of 91̽�� has measured up for Kristine, who is teaching Class IV English, Class III Perspectives and Class I Themes in Contemporary World Literature. The freedom 91̽�� gives its English teachers to select student reading has been powerful, she says. One section of her students began the year reading Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, her favorite book largely in part of one line: “Do you understand the sadness of geography?”

“Institutions that promote the pursuit of truth and knowledge need to be honest about themselves,” Professor Craig Steven Wilder told Upper School students. Professor Wilder, an MIT history faculty member and author, was this year’s Heyburn Lecturer.

In researching and writing his latest book, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities, Professor Wilder revealed nearly universal connections between early American educational institutions and slavery, explaining, “No college or university established before 1800 survived without the slave economy.”

Professor Wilder focused his lecture on Erasmus Hall Academy, founded in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn by Dutch colonists in 1786. Colonial New York was a hub of the Dutch slave trade; several slaveholders and traders gave money to establish Erasmus Hall, which was “as much a commercial and political enterprise as it was an academic one.” The school recruited students from several states and countries by boarding them with slave-owning families, who received an income from the school, Professor Wilder said. Approximately 25 percent of all black people in Kings County, New York, were owned by Erasmus’ charter trustees.