Behind the Hedge : A Corruption of Time, Talent & Treasure

BEHIND THE HEDGE A Corruption o Time, Talent & Treasure Tom Whitman, behind the wheel on Route 66 heading east with Allison at his side and their cat Caesar curled up on the backseat, would soon find himself immersed in a maelstrom of unimagined dimension. Newly appointed headmaster of Florence Bruce Seminary, Tom was heading toward an unexpected clash of styles and of cultural expectations. His ingrained instincts for sound management were about to challenge the charismatic but lackadaisical leadership style let behind by the former headmaster. In some respects, the differences would be as great as the clash between Indian and white had been three hundred and fifty years earlier. Violence perpetrated on the school and the community by both bystander and combatant would be traumatic. Rules, laws, agreements, accepted tenets of human behavior, simple decency, contracts-written and unwritten-among people of accepted good standing and integrity would be thrown away with abandon or gleefully ignored. In their place, frontier justice-any means to achieve the ends-would be sufficient justification or actions of intense cruelty. The most basic assumptions regarding safety, fair play, due process and continuity would be destroyed; and those who believed that the operating assumptions at Florence Bruce Seminary were based on decency, dignity and respect would be horrified at the level to which these values were betrayed.

Dr. Cummings started life in a small New England town in a family where public service was a rite of passage. "The paternal side of the family was headed by a Baptist missionary and educators dominated the maternal side," he says. "My parents volunteered with half the nonprofit organizations in town and served on the boards of most of them."

A Stanford and Ivy-League trained educator, Dr. Cummings was a public school teacher in Connecticut before coming west for graduate study. "The jobs were in the west," he says, "so we stayed." He raised a family and carved out a career in nonprofit work providing educational field study programs. Starting with a nature program in Yosemite National Park, he directed another site north of San Francisco before moving to southern California to become president of the Ocean Institute.

After building the Institute into a nationally respected educational laboratory, he spent two years researching and gathering material for this book. He and his wife Sigrid live in Tacoma, Washington, where he is executive director of a nonprofit, citizen’s group advocating for EPA Superfund cleanup of toxic industrial waste.