Exeter Culture

Exeter’s cultural life runs through its school, its history and an unusually literary main street.

The Harkness method

In 1930 the philanthropist Edward Harkness gave Phillips Exeter a large endowment on the condition that it change how it taught: no lectures, classes of about twelve, seated around an oval table with the teacher as a participant rather than a lecturer. The Harkness table is now used at schools and universities around the world, and the physical tables themselves — oval, so that everyone can see everyone — are the object that carries the idea.

Writers

The school’s alumni include a long list of American writers, and Exeter has an independent bookshop of long standing and an active lecture and reading programme.

Revolutionary commemoration

The American Independence Museum holds an original Dunlap broadside of the Declaration — one of about two dozen surviving — found in the 1980s in the attic of the Ladd-Gilman House among family papers.

Town meeting

Direct democracy as a working institution, with an annual deliberative session.

Dan Brown and the school’s writers

The academy has produced an unusually long list of American authors across generations, and the town’s bookshop and library programme reflect that; the school’s own writing instruction, conducted around the Harkness tables, is part of the reason.

Music and film

The Ioka, the town’s 1915 theatre on Water Street, was for a century the centre of Exeter’s evenings and its long closure and attempted revival have been a running local preoccupation. The bandstand carries a free summer concert series, and the academy’s music programme is open to the public for much of the year.