Rhodes TKS

NMH Receives Lead Gift for Arts Center

June 5, 2006

On behalf of the Northfield Mount Hermon School community, I am honored to announce that William R. Rhodes, class of 1953 and chairman emeritus of the NMH Board of Trustees, has donated a total of $5 million for the school’s new center for the arts. To honor his lead gift toward this critical project, I am delighted to announce that the building will be named The Rhodes Center for the Arts.

Mr. Rhodes served as a trustee for 15 years, 12 of them as chair, and he has consistently supported the school with leadership-level annual and capital cash gifts. In honor of his father, he created the Edward and William R. Rhodes Award in Economics, given annually to an NMH student. In the late 1990s, Mr. Rhodes made a significant capital gift to renovate Beveridge Hall, the main academic building on the Mount Hermon campus, and the Rhodes Room was named in his honor. In 2002 he convinced his friend, South African president Thabo Mbeki, to speak at NMH. To commemorate the occasion, he established and funded the W. R. Rhodes South Africa Scholarship to support a student from South Africa. More recently, he offered the seminal gift to support the Northfield history project, which will document the architectural and landscape history of the Northfield and Mount Hermon campuses.

Mr. Rhodes is chairman, president, and CEO of Citibank, N.A., and senior vice chairman of Citigroup. He has managed successful debt negotiations with such countries as Mexico, Brazil, Jamaica, Argentina, Uruguay, and Korea and worked closely with U.S. treasury secretaries, prime ministers, and presidents. He is involved with numerous for-profit and not-for-profit boards and serves as chair of the Americas Society and the Council of the Americas, the Hong Kong-U.S. Business Council, and the Korea-U.S. Business Council, as well as first vice chair of the Institute of International Finance. He sits on the board of Brown University’s Watson Institute.

“It’s a sense of payback for what the school gave me,” says Mr. Rhodes, who ranks NMH first among his philanthropic priorities. “One’s life and character are very much formed by the years you have at a secondary school. That’s why the mission of NMH is so important.” While at NMH, Mr. Rhodes lived in London, Overtoun, and Crossley. An athlete, he participated in lacrosse, alpine skiing, football, and the outing club, and he was involved in the yearbook, the press club, and the debate club. Mr. Rhodes has said that the faculty member that had the most influence on him was Jack Baldwin.

In the late 1980s, when Mr. Rhodes was credited for bringing stability to Latin America’s foreign-debt crisis, NMH peer Augustus White III ’53 said, “It does not surprise me that Bill would end up a champion of Third World countries. He was always concerned about the welfare of others and did not confine himself to his own interests.”

Mr. Rhodes’s outstanding service and support have been key elements to our school’s successes over the last two decades. Please join me in thanking him for his leadership and his generosity to Northfield Mount Hermon School. We are planning an exciting groundbreaking event in the fall to celebrate The Rhodes Center for the Arts. We’ll send more information at a later date.

Sincerely,

Thomas K. Sturtevant
Head of School

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