Two years before, the wrestling team at the Horatio School in Rhode Island had won the ISL championship in a huge upset over Belmont Hill. To celebrate, five members of the team had convinced a fifteen-year-old sophomore girl to give them blow jobs and then to swallow their ejaculate out of the ISL championship trophy. Talk of the incident had spread, and when the local paper ran a front-page story on the moral decay at the school, the girl had decided to withdraw and the wrestling seniors were expelled. Over the next two years, Horatio’s applications declined by twelve percent.

The year before that, a new student at Philadelphia’s St. Luke’s School had been forced into a metal garbage can and rolled down the stairs of his dorm after making fun of his roommate’s permanent-press dress shirt. Halfway down the stairs, the student’s front teeth met the rim of the trash can and flattened against the roof of his mouth. All the other kids in the dorm believed they had justly punished snobbery and so none of them would admit who had been responsible, and the student’s family had sued St. Luke’s and settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.

In both cases the administration had been slow to respond, hoping that handling things discreetly would make them go away unnoticed, but discretion had been seen as indifference, and was in fact partially indifference, and so the incidents became not only scandals but signs that the souls of these schools weren’t right.

Phelps—the entire St. James administration—knew that over the decades scandals just like these had caused the undeniable decline of other schools that had once been in the top tier. Almost all of these selective secondary schools had once had first and second forms, equivalent to seventh and eighth grades, but in the 1950s, at the Halyard School outside Washington, DC, and at Vernon-Brighton in western Massachusetts, both top-fifteen schools at the time, several incidents of teachers exercising their power over younger boys became widely if quietly talked about. Eventually first and second forms were phased out; by third form, it was thought, boys are not as attractive to a certain kind of older man. But a stain stayed on Halyard and Vernon-Brighton, and slowly their alumni giving suffered, and they began to send one or two fewer kids to Princeton and MIT each year, and their admissions yield forced them to accept more and more mediocre students, and now both schools were ranked in the low thirties.