An Advocate for the Future
With a focus on young people and the ocean, Robert “Peter” Neill III ’59 has dedicated himself to making the world a better place.
BY IAN ALDRICH
The attributes required for making a positive impact on the world can vary. For Robert “Peter” Neill III ’59, three crucial ones — creativity, a tolerance for risk and the willingness to follow his heart — have anchored his storied career.
As a writer, educator and thought leader, Neill has spent more than six decades following his own instincts and insights — even when it has meant defying convention — in pursuit of a pair of causes: improving the lives of young people, and advocating for greater awareness of the issues affecting the world’s oceans and promoting policies to improve their sustainability.
Neill has taught as an adjunct professor, co-founded two public schools, headed one museum, and directed multiple social organizations. A prolific writer, he is the author of several novels and nonfiction books, including the well-received “The Once and Future Ocean: Notes Toward a New Hydraulic Society,” which noted environmentalist Bill McKibben praised for “[reminding] us that our maritime identity is one important way we can start rebuilding a damaged planet.”
In 2003, he founded the World Ocean Observatory (W2O), a web-based portal that provides a space to trade science, technology, policy and cultural ideas about the ocean’s impact on all aspects of human civilization.
“My work has always had a purpose,” says Neill, who lives in Sedgwick, Maine, across the West Penobscot Bay from Camden and Rockport. “I know I have led a privileged life, and I know that I have taken a lot of risks. But I also know I’ve invented things and created things. There are these things that you can do in a life that aren’t measured by money, or real estate or even how many degrees you have. It’s about the relationships you form and the kind of world you leave behind.”
Even at 84, the work continues, and on May 2, Neill will receive the Alumni Association Award for Distinguished Service during Anniversary Weekend at St. Paul’s School. For Neill, the award represents a full-circle moment. In the fall of his Fourth Form year, his English teacher gave him the opportunity to be creative with a routine assignment. That short but profound shift changed everything for Neill: about how he thought of himself and how he could approach the world.
“I don’t want to overdramatize it but everything I’ve done I can trace right back to that moment,” he says. “What it enabled me to do was to discover that I could have an avocation and a vocation that were the same. That’s a privilege not everybody realizes. I had been given permission to be who I was. It was a license to say what I think and say what I felt.”
Neill learned something similarly impactful from Rev. John T. Walker, the School’s first Black faculty member and later the first Black Episcopal Bishop of Washington D.C. Under Walker, Neill discovered a version of religion that focused on the dimensions of a moral life.
“I began to think about what I am part of, what I am enabling, and what I am complicit in,” Neill says. “That morality is everyday life and how you interact with the world. Reverend Walker was not a didactic teacher; he let you feel your way into moral behavior, not by commandments, but rather by empathy, clarity, consistency and quiet action.
After SPS, Neill’s life touched down in several spots. At Stanford University, where he studied English and creative writing; in Paris, where he worked as an intelligence officer for the United States Army; and at the Iowa Writers Workshop, where he earned an MFA.
His early novels, while not widely read, have not gone unrecognized. Today, a complete collection of his notebooks and early drafts are housed at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, offering scholars a unique look at the creative process of a young artist in the mid-20th century.
Education is in fact at the core of Neill’s work. In the span of two decades, he co-founded two innovative magnet schools — The Sound School in New Haven, Connecticut, and The Harbor School in New York City — that center maritime history and the environment in their curriculum.
His museum work has also been expansive. For two decades, Neill served as president of the South Street Seaport Museum in New York City, where he transformed a collection of historic ships into a robust educational powerhouse with exhibits that included the country’s first major museum show on the transatlantic slave trade.
Neill is a preservationist at heart, but not at the cost of staying silent about the present or the shape of the future. In 1998, he read “The Ocean: Our Future,” an official report by the World Commission on Oceans. “It was a revelation,” Neill says, who then pushed to incorporate ideas into the Seaport museum’s programming and partnerships. When he ran into resistance from the institution’s trustees, he heeded the advice of his Fourth Form teacher all those years ago and struck out on his own to launch W2O.
The success of his organization — and the long and varied career that preceded it — have been top of mind since SPS notified him of the award. On many a morning he’s even found himself looking at a photograph of his late father, who had encouraged him to attend St. Paul’s in the first place.
“It’s on my bureau and over the last few days I’ve been looking at it a little differently,” Neill says. “I’m remembering him and what he wanted for me and thinking, ‘Hey, look at what we’ve done.’”