Phillips Academy | Retiring Faculty

Kathleen M. Dalton

History and Social Science Instructor

PA Start Date: 1980

I took Dr. Dalton’s course on the Presidency in her first year at Andover. It was a challenging course, thoroughly stimulating, with wonderful articles and texts and a final 15+ page essay on Presidential Leadership style that was at once intimidating and inspirational. Her excitement and enthusiasm resonated, and the course will always remain one of my favorites among many terrific university and boarding school experiences.

Peter Anderson ’81

Her approach to critical thinking and her ability to draw boarder lessons from the current of history helped me form the foundation of my belief system. My hope is that future students will always have the chance to learn from someone like Kathy.

Dan Ankeles ’00

In their own words...

As I reflect on my time at Phillips Academy, I recognize how fortunate I was to work in a school motivated to reinvent itself so many times throughout the past four decades.

After Abbot Academy and Phillips Academy merged to become a new coeducational school in 1973, the school took time to debate ideas about student-centered progressive learning and entitlement. In the next decades the school questioned whether the composition of its student body (60 percent male, 40 percent female) and faculty (close to three-quarters male in the early 1980s) fit the school’s ideals of equality and whether that composition provided the foundation for a welcoming learning environment for students of different genders and ethnic, class, and racial backgrounds. The school embraced change and then struggled to change its gender and racial climate. The school also reimagined ways to achieve a multicultural education.

I was proud to work with students and faculty while the school embraced these changes, and I look forward to following its future engagement with the next generation’s educational challenges. PA has been a great place to teach and to learn.