A Club For Complex Conversations

The John G. Winant Society offers students a bipartisan forum for sharing ideas around public policy, government and more.

BY KRISTIN DUISBERG

When Owen Sweet ’21 and Seth McKenzie ’21 revitalized the John G. Winant Society not long before they graduated, they did so in a community-wide Zoom discussion featuring the Hon. Jess Baily ’78, P’13, a career Foreign Service officer with more than 35 years of diplomatic experience. Last year, current Winant Society head Rhys Henrikson ’26 had the opportunity to moderate an in-person conversation between Baily and the SPS student body, posing questions to the former U.S. ambassador to Macedonia alongside Isa Martinez ’24.

“Getting to interact with Ambassador Baily was a really powerful experience,” Henrikson says. “It pushed me out of my comfort zone a bit, but in a great way. It helped me frame the impact I wanted to have with the club and hopefully leave with it after I graduate.”

The Winant Society was founded in 1960 by members of the Fourth and Fifth Forms, including former Senator and Secretary of State John Kerry ’62, and named in honor of the 1908 alumnus and onetime St. Paul’s School teacher who went on to become the ambassador to the United Kingdom and the 60th governor of New Hampshire. The club, Henrikson explains, aims to foster both student awareness of, and balanced bipartisan conversation around, current affairs and politics. He got involved last year after expressing an interest in creating an ethics club on campus and connecting with the Rev. Charles Wynder Jr., the School’s dean of chapel and spiritual life and the Winant Society’s adviser, who felt there was a strong overlap between the then-Fourth Former’s interests and the club Sweet and McKenzie had relaunched three years earlier.

“He sort of gave me a tap on the shoulder and said, ‘hey, I think there are some interesting parallels here, and we could use you,’” Henrikson recalls. Following last year’s conversation with Baily, this year the club met several times each term to discuss student-selected topics that included U.S. politics and economic policies, and it helped host a visit by a group of West Point cadets. For next year, Henrikson is working on plans to bring Austin Sarat, a professor of political science at Amherst College, to campus to discuss the criminal justice system and the death penalty — topics that reflect the interest behind his own involvement in the club.

Growing up in New York City, Henrikson shared in a January chapel talk, “The news was always filled with stories of violent criminals being arrested, depicting a struggle between good and evil. But the news stories seemed to stop at the arrest of those people labeled as ‘violent criminals.’” It was when Henrikson’s family moved north of the city and he learned about nearby Sing Sing, the maximum-security state penitentiary where many of those individuals ended up, that he began to delve into the social dynamics and systems that often set the stage for crime. “Around this same time, I started to get involved in the revival of the John Winant Society and realized it was the perfect space to nurture my interests,” he says.

Henrikson estimates that the club had 60 students sign up last fall, with about a dozen core members who attend meetings that range from small group discussions to larger events with other student interest groups. He sees the club as a vital opportunity for students to learn how to understand others’ perspectives and to embrace the discomfort of sharing their own opinions and values.

“The one thing I’ve seen, which is kind of exciting, is people all have the same end goal,” he says. “Everyone wants to create a thriving community, and to figure out how we can all take our experiences, our knowledge, and work together to create something that works for everybody, or as many people as possible.”