When Andy Barnard ’73 contemplates what he’s carried forward with him from his four years at Northfield Mount Hermon, perhaps the first thing that comes to mind are the friendships he made there. “My oldest friends are all from that time, and I see many of them frequently,” he says. “It's a very special bond.”

Barnard also credits NMH with introducing him to what’s become one of the passions of his adult life: literature. His love of reading deepened during his time at Clark University, where he studied political science and international relations, and through his successful career in the insurance field, including many years as president and CEO of Fairfax Insurance Group. So when Barnard, a regular supporter of NMH, recently decided that he’d like to make a significant gift to the school, he says, it felt appropriate that the gift help today’s students fall in love with literature themselves.

Last fall, Barnard made a generous gift to NMH to create an endowed fund to support two new initiatives: The Joseph Conrad Visiting Writers Program will allow the school to bring up to six writers to campus each year to work with students, including one or two who will do longer-term residencies. The Jane Austen Teaching Fellowship, meanwhile, will support a member of the English faculty, who will oversee the writers program. The gift is part of the ongoing This Place, This Moment: The Campaign for Northfield Mount Hermon. 

“It was important to me that it connect to something relevant to my own life experience and development and evolution,” says Barnard, an avid reader (on the day he spoke about his gift to NMH, he was in the middle of “Anna Karenina”) and book collector.

He was also interested in making a gift that emphasized the value of the humanities, a field that is sometimes underappreciated in the wider world. “I think that exposure to these masters of literature is very helpful in developing communication skills, developing facility with language that is useful in whatever endeavor you choose in life,” he says.

Barnard discussed his interest with Head of School Brian Hargrove and Bea Garcia, assistant head of school for academic programs and dean of faculty, who proposed the faculty fellowship and the visiting writers series as valuable additions to the academic program. 

“We are grateful and excited about Barnard's contribution,” Garcia said. “The support for these initiatives will create exceptional opportunities for students to form direct connections with working writers, deepening their understanding of the creative process, professional pathways in the literary arts, and the role of storytelling in shaping individual voice and identity.”

Barnard chose the program names, which honor two important figures from his reading life. He first read Joseph Conrad at NMH, tackling “Heart of Darkness” in class. He selected the author for the visiting writers’ program because Conrad’s books take readers around the world and because he wrote them in his third language, English. “I thought for a school where about a quarter of students are international and maybe English isn't their first language, it's an inspiring example of what is possible,” he says. Jane Austen is a writer he discovered more recently. “I fairly recently read all of her books and was just so taken with her use of the English language, her writing style.”

Both writers, Barnard says, call for slow, contemplative reading. “You have to read at a pace that enables you to digest what they're saying. That is a wonderful skill to nurture and develop, to be able to read and understand these complex sentences.” He also chose Austen and Conrad because their work transports readers to very different times and places. “Literature is a portal into many different worlds,” Barnard says — a portal that his gift will open for generations of NMH students to come.