Keio Academy of New York in its 33rd Year: 2022 NYSAIS Accreditation Report

2023/04/20

Photo: The visiting committee members after completing the inspection

In early November 2022, I stayed at the Mountain House on the shores of Lake Mohonk, about an hour north of Manhattan along the Hudson River. This is a massive hotel boasting 260 rooms, built through continuous expansions on a vast tract of land purchased in 1869 by the Smiley family, wealthy Quakers, following the end of the Civil War. Lake Mohonk is located at the mountain summit, true to its etymological meaning, "Lake in the Sky."

The purpose was not a vacation, but a heads of school conference hosted by the New York State Association of Independent Schools (NYSAIS). The Mountain House is also known for regularly hosting conferences since 1883 aimed at Native American human rights and nature conservation, based on the philosophy of the founding Smiley family. Since the closing of the frontier was in 1890, this series of conferences predates it by seven years. The participant lists at the time included business figures like Rockefeller, as well as President Hayes and Cornell University founder A.D. White; they reportedly invited indigenous leaders to engage in thorough discussions on racial and environmental issues in a residential retreat format.

Now, 140 years later, NYSAIS holds conferences at this hotel several times a year in the same retreat format to look toward the future of the highly diverse private schools in New York State. The association was established in April 1947 at the suggestion of Paul D. Shafer, headmaster of the Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn. It held its first meeting and decided on its formal name in October of that year, with the first annual conference held in January 1949. Eventually, in 1968, at the suggestion of the Board of Regents of the University of the State of New York, it established bylaws and a board of directors to be officially recognized as a non-profit organization. To this day, it operates as an independent school association completely free from state intervention or regulation, serving nurseries, kindergartens, elementary, middle, and high schools, as well as post-graduate students before university entry. Since the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) was established in 1962, NYSAIS actually predates NAIS in terms of its founding.

I participated in a conference where about 200 recently appointed heads of school in New York State met. The program was packed with stimulating projects, including seminars on school financial management, the fusion of psychology and pedagogy in school administration, "emotional labor," and lectures examining the currently trending "authenticity complex."

Incidentally, during the self-introductions at the banquet, I mentioned, "I was appointed Headmaster of Keio Academy of New York immediately after retiring from Keio University in March 2021," which drew a roar of laughter from the audience. I continued, "Immediately after taking office as Headmaster on New Year's Day 2022, I was informed that I had to undergo the once-in-a-decade NYSAIS inspection," which triggered even greater waves of laughter.

It is well known that Keio Academy of New York has upheld the philosophy of being "bilingual and bicultural" since its inception in 1990, the same year as SFC. However, it had to wait until passing its first NYSAIS inspection in 2001 to be officially recognized as an American school as well as a Japanese school. Through this, the Academy acquired a "double status" that guarantees graduation qualifications for both Japanese high schools and North American high schools.

Since then, the Academy has maintained its NYSAIS accreditation for a long time, but as someone unaware of the circumstances, this was a complete surprise to me. Fortunately, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the inspection was postponed from the originally scheduled March to October. Thus, for six months after taking my post, I developed a strategy with advice from many faculty and staff members, particularly Mr. Kenichi Sadate, the Dean of Students, who had experience serving as a NYSAIS evaluator himself.

Specifically, we first launched the Academy's first monthly newspaper, the , in June, and the annual research bulletin, the , in September. Next, to practice the Academy's new mission of "Tri-Culture" (comprising Keio in Japan and the U.S.) proposed by Motohiro Tsuchiya, Vice-President and Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Academy, we began a continuous lecture series in October. This series featured monthly university-level lectures primarily by scholar-critics I have known who have taught at North American universities. Furthermore, we set about a fundamental restructuring of the library, which had been closed due to the pandemic.

As expected, a six-member NYSAIS visiting committee arrived at Keio Academy of New York at the end of last October and stayed for four days. On the first day, I gave a mini-lecture as a sort of orientation to explain the relationship between the history of trans-Pacific negotiations of Keio University in Japan and the U.S. and the Academy's new mission. Since an integrated education system like Keio University's does not exist in North America, I had to start by helping them understand that. Subsequently, the visiting committee thoroughly scrutinized every aspect, from the Academy's educational content to staff labor, financial status, facilities, the Board of Trustees, and the Parents' Association, sometimes even conducting unannounced interviews with students and parents. In response, the Academy acted as one, from the Board of Trustees to all faculty and staff, the Student Council, and the Parents' Association. It was, so to speak, an all-out war.

Then, on January 17, after the turn of the year, the Academy received the good news that it had passed the NYSAIS inspection. It was decided that we could continue to maintain the honor of being the only NYSAIS member school in Japan.

By the way, you may have noticed that in this article, I have deliberately translated the "independent school" targeted by NYSAIS as "shigaku" (private school). Usually, the English for "shigaku" is "private school," but in fact, British public schools are also private schools. The "Gijuku" in "Keio Gijuku" is said to be the Japanese translation of this "public school." However, it can only be described as a coincidence that in New York State, there is a tradition where "independent schools" unite extensively to resist all bureaucratic intervention and restrictions, transcending the common public-private dichotomy. In my final lecture in March 2021, "Keio University and America," I examined the possibility that the ideological lineage connecting Franklin, a leading figure of the American Revolution, to transcendentalist thinkers Emerson and Thoreau influenced the Fukuzawa spirit of "independence and self-respect." That is surely the true essence of the Fukuzawa-style concept of "shigaku." Keio Academy of New York, in its 33rd year, entrusts its future to the new things born from such trans-Pacific intersections of Keio in Japan and the U.S.