Alumnae Association Governor Lauren Collins Oaks ’96 (left) presented Amanda Mortimer Burden ’62 (center) with the 2007 Westover Award at the May 2007 Alumnae Weekend as Alumnae Association Governor Dena Simmons ’01 looks on. The following excerpts are from Lauren’s introduction:

Her classmates remember her as kind, beautiful, generous, and graceful. Her professional contemporaries have dubbed her “the Velvet Hammer,” an “aesthetic watchdog,” a woman with “a will of steel,” and “the Design Conscience of New York.” Amanda Mortimer Burden’s journey from Westover’s Class of 1962 to the planning offices of New York City is one that lives out our motto, “To Think, To Do, To Be.” I would add to that, “To See.”

As Chair of the New York City Planning Commission and Director of the Department of City Planning, you, Amanda, are a visionary. You have been able to strike a balance between beauty and function, between places we want to see and be in and places that support the needs of the world’s premier city. Somehow, you have managed to do this with open and green space as priorities on an island where both are in short supply.

Your ability to rally others behind your vision has garnered the respect of an entire city, even from those who may not agree with you. Your vision to improve lives is also evident in your volunteer work. You have dedicated time, energy, and resources to the boards of Creative Time Inc., the Center for Arts Education, the Nature Conservancy, the Architectural League, the Fund for the City of New York, and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. You have also worked with the criminal justice system to better the circumstances of prisoners, ex-offenders, and their families. Your vision for the Midtown Community Court has been duplicated nationwide as a way to address low-level crime and its causes.

As an alumna of Westover School, you have supported the belief that education creates transformation. Amanda, as a professional, philanthropist, mentor, mother, daughter, and alumna, you are most deserving of Westover’s highest recognition.

Amanda’s remarks are excerpted below:

If anyone had suggested 45 years ago that I might be standing here today receiving this wonderful honor, all of us would have said that it would not only be impossible, but ridiculous! Those of you that were in my class, or anywhere near it, know that I was never not in trouble. I was always having the best time, playing endless pranks, eating unthinkable amounts of food, loving not just my friends but the entire student body, and basking in the extraordinarily nourishing world that Westover provided.

Getting to the place I am now was an extraordinarily long and complicated journey. As I was pondering what I might say today, I kept thinking back on the four exuberant and fabulous years that I spent here. All of those memories are filled with deep affection for, and gratitude to this School. Westover grounded me. It taught me values, integrity, what it meant to be honorable, the significance of tradition, respect for my classmates and my teachers, and the importance of relationships. Life was imbued with a generosity of spirit and an unbounded sense of optimism.

Not once during those four years do I recall the kind of attitude that can fragment and undermine a community, a family, an organization or even a city. I never witnessed discrimination, mean-spirited-ness, dishonesty, self-importance or cynicism. They were unheard of at this School. I cannot tell you how important it was to have that solid and substantive value system at center core. Really, it made all the difference.

Those of us who navigated the journey from the mid-60s to the mid-70s know, that for women, this period suddenly and cataclysmically shredded expectations and role models and put so many options on the table that it was frightening. I was totally unprepared. I had two children, I was divorced and hadn’t even graduated from college. But I was grounded, I was always optimistic, and that helped me be prepared to take risks, and choose paths that might lead me to unexpected places.

My trajectory started, oddly enough, with my love of animals, finagling a meeting with the director of the Bronx Zoo, who pointed me to Sarah Lawrence to study with an ethologist. There I received a degree in animal behavior and environmental science equipped with an odd and seemingly unmarketable expertise in quantitative analysis. And then, as luck would have it, I was introduced to the greatest urbanologist of all time, William H. Whyte, who was a pioneer in studying how people use streets and public spaces in cities. He was looking for someone who could take quantitative analysis of his observations.

It was William H. Whyte, who was known as Holly, who changed my life. He taught me why people love cities and what makes them great. He said, “You can measure the health of a city by the vibrancy of its streets and public spaces.” We watched people using, or not using, parks, and streets, and public spaces. I documented everything, using my now essential skill and fell passionately in love with the city. I use what I learned from Holly to this day. Streets must be vibrant, dynamic and filled with – people, sidewalk cafes, shops and active uses. Parks need lots of seating, seating with backs, moveable chairs, different options for different users, shade and sun. And buildings can’t have blank walls. Cities can’t be sterile. They must have diversity, serendipity, safety and entertainment, and they must provide opportunity for everyone.

So I became a student of the city ...  And I took jobs that frankly scared me to death. When faced with a challenge that was beyond anything I knew how to do, I sweated the details (all important), asked millions of questions of the experts, and took a thousand chances. Amazingly, I oversaw the design and construction of a massive number of parks and buildings while I was still learning the meaning of section, elevation and axonometric. But I instinctively knew that you regret more the things you don’t try to do than those you try to do, even if you fail. And I was, and continue to be, steadfastly optimistic.

It was total luck that Mike Bloomberg happened to live right next door to me. He had heard about my work and when he was deciding whether to run for mayor, he asked me to take him around the city to look at what might be done to make the city a better place to live, work and raise a family. It is worth remembering that “luck favors the well prepared.” You can’t imagine how much work I put into that tour! And it paid off. He was impressed, and after winning an incredibly close election, he asked me to be his City Planning Commissioner.

This has been, of course, the opportunity of a lifetime. For anyone who loves cities, mine is the best job in the world. Shaping the city is no longer done from on high in a dictatorial way. Good city planning is done from the ground up, it builds on the strength of an individual neighborhood or community, and is developed in partnership with residents, stakeholders and elected officials.

It puts a high value on trust, respect for individuals and community, on honesty and accountability. These are the foundation of Westover’s legacy and I am so honored to be a part of that heritage. Thank you so very much for honoring me today.

Anne Holmes White ’47 (center) with daughters Candy White Sweeney ’76 (left) and Starr White Snead ’69, and (back row) Candy’s husband Thomas and daughter Keelin, and Anne’s son King.

Alumnae Association Governor Babs Mallery ’60 presented Anne Holmes White ’47 with the 2007 Maria R. Allen Volunteer Service to Westover Award during Alumnae Weekend in May. The following excerpts are from Babs’ remarks.

As we are getting ready to celebrate Westover’s 100th anniversary in 2009-2010, today’s celebration of Anne’s Westover spirit reflects a history of the lifespan of the School. Anne’s grandmother began four generations of consistent and significant commitment to Westover by enrolling Anne’s mother when the School was five years old.

Alumnae from Anne’s family include: her mother, Polly Griscom Holmes ’19; daughters Starr White Snead ’69,  Candy White Sweeney ’76, and the late Muffy White Dwyer ’72; her sister, Mimsey Holmes Smith  ’50; and her sister-in-law, Katherine White Boni ’47. And her granddaughter, Keelin Sweeney – Candy’s daughter – has attended Westover’s Summer Camp program.

Anne has demonstrated her outstanding loyalty to Westover over the years by serving the School in a number of important roles:

• as Class Secretary for the past 22 years,
• as a member of the Alumnae Association Board of Governors,
• as President of the Alumnae Assocation Board from 1983 to 1985,
• and as a Class Agent.

Her deep commitment to the mission of Westover never wavered and similar contributions from her family have continued with daughters Starr and Candy in leadership roles on the Alumnae Board of Governors, and her daughter Muffy represented through a memorial fund in her honor, which provides a School-wide Arts Day every three years.

Anne, you have exemplified the spirit of this Award in the way you have lived your life and in your relationship to Westover. Let us celebrate an individual who has never missed a Reunion since her graduation from Westover, this year’s recipient of the Maria R. Allen Volunteer Service to Westover Award. Congratulations to Anne White Holmes.

Angela Ndinga-Muvumba ’92 (left), the recipient of the 2007 Distinguished Young Alumna Award, with Alumnae Association Governor Xiania Foster ’95.

The Distinguished Young Alumna Award recognizes an alumna who within 15 years of graduation has distinguished herself as an inspired intellectual, artist, athlete, philosopher, or entrepreneur, and who demonstrates integrity, responsibility, and commitment to community. During Alumnae Weekend in May, Angela Ndinga-Muvumba ’92 was presented the award by Alumnae Association Governor Lauren Collins Oaks ’96, whose remarks are excerpted below:

For the past 15 years, issues of peace, conflict, and the HIV/AIDS crisis have been headlines to most of us – stories that capture our attention and sometimes spur some of us into limited action.

Since graduating from Westover in 1992, Angela Ndinga-Muvumba has been working all over the globe on the delicate search for peace and, most recently, on how the HIV/AIDS pandemic figures into long-term social sustainability.

On your Westover yearbook page, Angela, you include several quotations of inspiration from the Bible, St. Francis of Assisi, Maya Angelou, Indira Gandhi and others. Your work has certainly shown that those words live in you.  

At Lawrence University, you were awarded the Harriet Tubman Prize, which is given to “the black junior who ... at Lawrence (worked), as Mrs. Tubman did, to improve the lot of her fellow human beings.” In your graduate studies at Columbia, you were exposed to the ways in which you could apply your want to better the world to those who most need your help. You have not looked back. You have been a tireless support of human and women’s rights in many capacities, having worked as the post-conflict focal person at United Nations Development Program, as a researcher for the UN Development Fund, as a senior program officer for the International Peace Academy’s Africa Program, and now as a senior researcher for the Centre for Conflict Resolution’s Africa Program.

There, you are able to work one-on-one with political and military leaders, policy makers, advocates and others on the immediate and long-term implications of the HIV/AIDS crisis and on the steps that can be taken now to stem the effects. You speak internationally on the topic and your work is respected at the highest levels of policy making.

It is with greatest pleasure and humble admiration, Angela, that I present you the 2007 Westover School Distinguished Young Alumna Award in recognition of your past, continued, and future work.

(Editor’s note: Angela, who was profiled in the 2007 Westover Magazine, gave a talk during Alumnae Weekend to alumnae and students on “Africa, Human Security and the 21st Century.”)

“This is the day which the Lord has made.” What an exalted declaration, ancient yet fresh, full of the promise of morning, and a reminder that a new day is a gift. Hearing these words daily in this chapel when I was a teenager was a new experience. They made an impression and are carved into my consciousness. They make me think of hiking on a spectacular trail, breathing in crisp air.
   
I am also glad that today’s service includes First Corinthians, Chapter 13. It always bears repeating, and reminds me of why I love Westover, and, once again, of the inspirational role the School has played and continues to play in my life. When we were here, like the generations before us, we had to memorize that passage. Some of us never managed, since one could fake it by repeating “watermelon, watermelon, watermelon” in time with St. Paul’s lovely cadences.
   
I liked chapel and singing hymns, and I particularly liked memorizing poetry. Now that poetry in the literal sense is not as much a part of my daily life as it was at Westover, it uplifts me to recall lines of poems we studied here. I have always kept Untermeyer’s Book of Living Verse by my desk, even though all the poets in it are long dead and the cover is held on by packing tape. The volume contains my penciled notes from four years of Westover English classes. I have referred to the poems when I have written articles or titled a painting. Or I simply re-read them.
   
It might not surprise you to know that for most of the 40 years since I graduated from Westover, my major focus outside of my family has been creative expression, the arts, mainly visual but also literary. I agreed to speak today because I knew I could talk about one component art and religion have in common, and that is inspiration. I think of inspiration as a form of grace, a creative capacity that all of us are endowed with, not just artists. The dancer Twyla Tharp will tell you inspiration is but a drop in the mixture that goes into artistic production, and I agree. But it is the drop that you cannot command into being. It is received, not willed.

Inspiration is as accessible as oxygen and available to us all in our daily encounters with the world, even – perhaps especially – in the most quotidian events. It was during one such quotidian event, throwing away magazines, that I stumbled upon a very famous quotation by St. Augustine. A modern translation reads: I came to love you, O Beauty, so ancient and so new. I came to love you, and you were within me all the time. The saying is now as familiar to me as a mantra – I even know the Latin by heart (and it is the only Latin sentence I do know): Sero te amavi, pulchritudo, tam antiqua et tam nova. Sero te amavi! Et ecce intus eras.

Augustine goes on to say (in stunning prose that I am reducing to a telegram) that beauty, or God, was in him, but Augustine himself was outside of himself, alienated from both God and his own better nature. What I understand here specifically is that inspiration is both discovery and renewal, a recognition of something already deeply sensed or intuited but not grasped.

I wish to consider those conditions in the context of Westover as I experienced it in the 1960s. There was a larger world of Elvis and the Beatles, the optimistic and prosperous America of early Rauschenberg and the Pop Artists; along with it came the Civil Rights Movement, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, and then the Vietnam War, assassinations, protest, drugs and hippies. While all this was going on we focused on Wests and Overs, chapel, singing, Robert Browning and Jane Austen, and looked for squares of maple sugar when exams ended in June. (Mr. Peck’s Holiday, as Muffie Clement Green ’65 clarified for me yesterday.) Westover was very old-fashioned, some would say outdated, a culture of rules and traditions.

Meanwhile, all around us, rules were being broken right and left, and authority figures questioned. As one icon from that time, Bob Dylan said, the times were a-changin.’ Dylan should inspire all of us, because after a career of almost 50 years, he is still going strong and continues to evolve artistically.

Another icon of that time is Jane Fonda. Talk about reinventing yourself – Jane Fonda has become a born-again Christian. She lives in Atlanta and raises millions for her foundation to help teenagers at risk. Fonda attended an old- fashioned girls boarding school not unlike ours. In her autobiography, she has this to say about Emma Willard:

It is a classy place, and I was miserable a lot of the time I was there. Isn’t it the thing to do, be miserable and complain about no boys and strict rules? Actually, I would do it all again in a heartbeat. The teachers were wonderful, the classes stimulating … Atendance at chapel, replete with hat and gloves, was required every Sunday. I loved Protestant hymns – loved singing them and loved hearing them. Today I often find myself singing those hymns when I’m fly fishing or pulling weeds.

Sound familiar? Old-fashioned, obsolete? What made Westover old-fashioned was something supremely positive: belief. Not belief in a particular religious doctrine, but in the sense of purpose that permeated (and permeates) life here. Belief drove the School and our lives here then; it still does.

Westover had and continues to have role models of strong, intellectually gifted women devoted to training minds and instilling ideals. This past year has marked the deaths of two former teachers, outstanding for their dedication and brilliance: Patience Norman and Elizabeth Newton.
   
Miss Norman was a remarkable history teacher who had high expectations of her students and, I think, a tendency to idealize us somewhat, both before and after we graduated. She never stopped believing in us. As a tribute to her when she retired, the Governors made her an honorary alumna of Westover. No one before had ever received such a designation.

Miss Newton was an assistant head of school, the director of drama and an English teacher. And that sentence is quite an understatement. Anyone who had Liz in an English class can thank her for a half dozen extra wrinkles in the brain. She had a transformative influence on my intellectual development. As memorable as she was at teaching Hamlet or Moby Dick, her wisdom and insight were manifest in other ways too. She once said to me: “Think of the prayer of Saint Francis.” It is the prayer that starts “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace …” and was frequently said in chapel. She encouraged me to think about its message, the matter-of-fact interpretation of which is: it is better to give than to receive. “Your goodness is the only thing that you can’t lose,” she added. “Everything else can be taken away from you.”

My classmates and I are of an age now where we have all experienced loss of some kind, sometimes tragic loss. I have never forgotten those words from Miss Newton, which perhaps mean more to me now than they did then. In a different spirit entirely from the jubilance of “This is the day the Lord has made,” the Prayer of St. Francis comprehends the frailty and suffering that are also part of daily reality.
   
My amazement that four decades have passed since I was a student here is surpassed only by my pleasure and sense of honor to be speaking to you. I have said this before and it remains true: the most gracious group of people I have ever been associated with, easily, are you, the alumnae of Westover School. I am impressed and humbled by your efforts and achievements in so many areas, not the least of which is civic involvement, but I am not surprised. I am inspired mightily by your stories, the ones that are talked about in the alumnae magazine, such as the humanitarian efforts made during the time of Hurricane Katrina, as well as the personal stories of my classmates and friends. I am impressed, but never surprised. And I am never surprised to hear of some truly marvelous accomplishment by a woman who was once, like me, a seemingly conventional girl clad in a white dotted Swiss uniform. I am grateful and proud, but not at all surprised.

Highlights of the May 2007 Alumnae Weekend, the Class of 2007’s June Graduation, and recent Westover gatherings are featured in the photo galleries listed below. To view a slide show of a gallery, just select and click on the appropriate link below.

And, for the latest news about Westover, please visit the website’s News section. You may also visit the website’s Photo Galleries of other recent Westover events. To visit those sections of the website, just select and click on their links below.