Fifty years ago, 89 students arrived in Lakeville and ushered in a new era of women and girls at Hotchkiss. Throughout the 2024-25 academic year, Hotchkiss will reflect on their inspiring legacy, pay tribute to the achievements of students who followed in their footsteps, and gratefully acknowledge all members of the Hotchkiss community who boldly helped steer the School forward.

---

By Erin Reid P’01,’05

Emily Pressman ’98 found her passion for history at Hotchkiss, and it has guided her career in education. “Tom Drake’s modern European history classes taught me how to think and write like a historian and to frame the kind of analytical questions that uncover the complexity of the past,” she said. Pressman currently serves as dean of teaching and learning at St. Andrew’s School in Delaware, and she is the recent chair of the school’s History Department.

Pressman grew up on Hotchkiss’s campus as a “fac brat,” she says. “It was quite evident to me, even as a youngster, how lucky I would be if I had the opportunity to attend. Hotchkiss was full of incredible people from all over the world who were excited to build an intentional community together.”

She made the most of her time as a student. Her career choice was heavily influenced by her parents—Lou Pressman P'98 and Kathy Pressman P'98, who were both “brilliant” teachers—as well as many Hotchkiss faculty members. “Without Pat Jones and Tom Drake as teachers and mentors, I absolutely wouldn’t be who I am.”

Being the daughter of two teachers initially made Pressman reluctant to teach. “I was envisioning law school as a possible future path, but a few months into my senior year at Hotchkiss, Mr. Drake offered me the opportunity to pursue an independent study and serve as a teaching assistant for his modern European history class. I got to help plan and prepare for classes, facilitate discussion, and teach a whole unit. I felt inspired in my work with history in an entirely new way, and I vividly remember a particular discussion in that class when I thought to myself, ‘Now I understand why people do this for their whole lives.’” 

She praised Drake, the Class of 1938 Teaching Chair and instructor in history, for teaching students to engage at the highest level and “bringing joy” to every moment in the classroom. 

Other teachers in the history department and beyond inspired her as well. “Bryan Smith’s U.S. history class called me to focus on fundamental questions of race, class, and power in Southern history and, more broadly, American history. My father’s course on the Holocaust embodied the power of deep interdisciplinary thinking, bringing multiple and varied scholarly lenses to the most challenging and troubling history—something that I work to introduce students to in my own teaching.”

Pressman was also passionate about theatre at Hotchkiss. “Watching productions at Hotchkiss when I was little was formative,” she said. “I joined the Hotchkiss Dramatic Association, and my work on stage in Walker Auditorium and in the Black Box led me to discover things about myself and the human experience, as well as other ways of looking at the world. I could take risks in the context of theatre that I wasn't ready to take in life. That’s part of the magic of theatre.”

She went on to Yale, graduating in 2002 summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with distinction in history. She focused on American history, particularly Southern history, and issues of race and slavery. She spent a summer working as a research assistant for a Yale historian followed by a Richter Fellowship, where she pursued her own research at UNC-Chapel Hill.

She taught for a year at Phillips Academy in Andover, MA, followed by a fellowship to the Klingenstein Summer Institute through Columbia Teachers College. Additionally, she pursued studies in England, Ireland, and Northern Ireland, including a program focused on educational leadership at Oxford.

Returning to Yale in 2008 for a master’s degree in history, Pressman furthered her work in 19th-century American history and Southern history. Her studies also encompassed 20th-century American conservatism, comparative genocide studies, and issues in historical memory. Her graduate research brought her back to Delaware to the state archives, as part of her examination of massive resistance to school desegregation in Milford, DE, in 1954. 

She was appointed to the faculty of the Klingenstein Summer Institute in 2021, where she is a lead teacher in history and mentors early-career teachers from around the country and the world. She is also a co-founder of the St. Andrew’s Summer Institute. “We host a small cohort of St. Andrew’s faculty to engage in new thinking, research, collaboration, and reflection on our work as teachers, advisors, counselors, dorm parents, and coaches.”

She draws inspiration as both a historian and a teacher from a (perhaps apocryphal) quip Benjamin Franklin purportedly said to Elizabeth Willing Powel as he emerged from the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, having finally agreed on a new plan for the government to propose to the states for ratification. “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” Powell supposedly asked. Franklin's reply: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

Pressman explains: “What does it mean—and what does it take—to ‘keep’ a democratic republic? As educators, we foster in our students independent thinking and habits of mind and heart that will allow them to engage critically, thoughtfully, and empathetically as citizens. All of us who teach history feel a particular responsibility to which our discipline speaks especially powerfully. But it only does that if we maintain our responsibility as historians and educators—and, more broadly, citizens—to seek and tell the truth about the past. With efforts to restrict student learning in public schools and to influence and limit what can be taught on college campuses, we may be looking at a moment when independent schools have a particularly critical role to play in keeping the republic and maintaining the independence to prepare students to engage in the complexities of the world we live in.”

Women’s History Month in March celebrates the critical roles that women have played as makers and shapers of history. “But women’s history is also, of course, the history of all of us,” she said. “To celebrate the history of women at Hotchkiss in this 50th anniversary of coeducation year—to tell the stories of women’s experiences here, to confront the challenges they faced, and to recognize how their contributions have created the School of today—is to tell the history of Hotchkiss.”