School Sex Scandals Among The Rich And Powerful

The Tower Hill School in Delaware is considered top of the rank of independent schools in Delaware. Maybe, some say, the best private college prep in the United States.

Their website looks a lot like the website for my old prep school — Beaver Country Day School For Young Ladies, Chestnut Hill, MA.

Yes, in the days of the class of 1969, it was girls only, and was almost a relic of bygone days, with mixers (with boys’ prep schools) where an effort was still made to keep couples a certain distance apart.  I was one of the early token Jews in a system where all visible human skin was the color of a bleached aspirin tablet.

Now, on both websites, there are “bomber crews,”  (at least that is what my husband would call those carefully-ethnically-balanced groups in the older movies that we both savor) clearly representing every known race and sex.

In those days, in a prep school, memorizing declensions and conjugations was the major and necessary pastime.

Sex was limited to fantasy and discussion.

I remember watching the movie “Tea and Sympathy,” seemingly what a faculty wife was supposed to offer stressed (male) students on television, severely edited, and thinking that this kind of emotional affection between a faculty spouse and student must have been only in colleges and boarding schools, not in day schools like where I went.

A movie made way-back — three years after my birth — but things really had not changed much.

Back to Tower Hill.  Illustrious alumni include the governor of and a senator from Delaware, both dwarfed in popularity (surely) by Dr. Mehmet Oz, television medico and one of several mega-successful Oprah Winfrey protégés .

Christopher D. Wheeler, the headmaster of this august institution, apparently was missing for a couple of days (?fleeing arrest?) before he got arraigned for a bunch of counts of child pornography.

25 counts, to be exact.

Realize that a headmaster is WAY above a principal — a relic of a British system hundreds of years old — somehow related to those angry old over-educated toughs who caned the (all too appreciative, sometimes) patrician British bottoms that were attached to future members of beings like the Peers of the House of Lords, or maybe Members of Parliament.

Here something went terribly wrong — maybe wronger than anything I have heard of happening at a prep school.  It is no surprise this person with eight years of service at the school was immediately replaced by someone with forty years of service to the school.  Permanence, continuity, stability will reign, and the show will go on.

But wait, there’s more.

No, it is NOT the same prep school, as I first thought when I saw a link to this story.  It is in Massachusetts.  It is the former medical director of “Phillips Academy” (yes — I remember some of the mixers with them) and apparently this Dr. Keller accessed adult pornography from his school computer but was fired for other reasons and has federal charges pending.

So what is going on?  U.S.A. Today planted the link from the first story to the second.  Somebody wants to know about porn and prep schools.

Maybe just to feel less guilty about not being able to afford to send their kids to one.

This cannot be that rare.  In my wild and crazy career, at least one I ended up walking into a job where the previous psychiatrist had been dismissed for using his county-agency office computer to view porn of some sort.  It was actually a private clinic, that a county had contracted to do some of its work. But still …

Once, in a government facility, a colleague disappeared suddenly when I was not present — never to return —  and I was told that the police had come in and cleaned the hard drive of his computer and found some sort of pornography.  WHOOSH! Away he went.

Offending the public trust by doing this sort of thing on a government computer is not particularly intelligent, but I have not usually seen them as horrific as what was reported at Tower Hill School — more like things male humans should know enough to do on their private computers at home, instead of their public (or even government funded) computers at work.  Bad judgement, which “highly sexed” (a Napoleon Hill term for the driven achievers who also allegedly need some sexual stimulation) folks with big drives might make.

Somehow, when it is a private trust, bought and paid for, it seems worse.  In this respect, at least, the elite are not very elite.

Elite athletes who attended Penn State under the alleged tutelage of Coach Sandusky did not fare too much better.

The religion all worshipped there had something to do with “football” and “winning team.”

Here it is more “rich and privileged elite,” something everyone likes to pretend does not exist in America, but which obviously does.  If a scandal involving this sector is somehow more juicy, more dishy, it is because such scandal brings the elite down to where the rest of us must grovel through life.