The school is larger now—50 percent more students than in the 1980s—with a new science building, a new library, a new arts center, and a state-of-the-art facility for the professional development of faculty. At an assembly I attended, run by the five senior prefects, the athletic director handed out awards for athlete of the week; a student group announced a project involving “design thinking,” a concept Peterson had brought back from a continuing-education program at Stanford; and another club announced that Julie Bowen (class of ‘87), who plays a mother on Modern Family, would be speaking on campus the following week.

Then I sat down with Peterson in his office, a high-ceilinged space with wood paneling that is exactly as you imagine it. Peterson—a young 50, square-jawed, clean-shaven, earnest—wore a black St. George’s fleece vest over a shirt and red tie. He had invited me to the school so that I could see St. George’s as it is in 2016, but also said that he was constrained from speaking about its history of abuse. It was an odd set of circumstances that neatly encapsulated the situation Peterson finds himself in. Managing the greatest crisis ever to hit St. George’s, and concerning events that mostly took place long before he’d set foot on the campus, he has had to simultaneously answer to trustees, to current students and parents, to faculty, to alumni, to survivors, to donors, all while a Rhode Island state-police investigation was ongoing (it has recently concluded with no charges being brought), the school’s own second independent investigation was pending, and plaintiffs’ lawyers were circling. Peterson also has a school to run. (And he’s well paid to do so: $525,000 in 2014.) A strategic P.R. adviser sat between us.

We touched on the school’s current anti-abuse precautions, on the wave of prep-school scandals, on the greater contemporary sensitivity to adolescent development. Peterson spoke of his pride in the school’s more robust honor code (adopted nine years ago), in recent changes to student life (“We’ve established somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 new student traditions”), in the tone he’s tried to foster. “I say to the students all the time, ‘We don’t do mean. Mean is a choice.’ ” I asked him about his decision to leave the law for teaching. “My heart was a teacher’s heart,” Peterson said. He talked about the continuing purpose of boarding schools. Peterson, who grew up in Laguna Beach, California, was the first person in his family to go to a private school, and his years at Deerfield had been “transformative. I didn’t know what school could be until I went to boarding school.”

While the survivors I’d talked to, and their allies, seemed mostly adamant that Peterson must go, there had recently been glimmers of détente—at least with the board. Just days after the uproar over the misbegotten “Hope for Healing” event, five survivors met with five trustees and a mediator in Boston. The trustees had agreed that the board would undergo training on the long-term impact of child sexual abuse and would also discuss “reparations” for survivors. The five trustees also agreed to consider survivors’ criticism of Peterson and act on any issues raised about him by the report within 30 days of its release. The report was expected to be published in June, but its likely impact was pre-empted when, early that month, board chair Leslie Heaney announced in a letter to the school community that Peterson had recently told the board he would not seek to extend his contract beyond its end date in June 2017. The news did not appease survivors, who were disappointed that Peterson hadn’t been explicitly fired, that he would keep his job for another year, and that his own letter to the school community alluded only obliquely to the scandal.

Many of the survivors and their allies see what’s happening as an opportunity to help the school become a better place. They say they don’t want to tear St. George’s down but to rebuild it. Anne Scott, who after 25 years of being under a gag order was at first mortified to have the details of her life—her abuse, her hospitalizations, her medication—spilled on the pages of newspapers, has found meaning in this fight. “Our society has to start talking about this stuff,” she says, “and maybe I can play a small part in that by putting my head over the parapet and talking about it and answering people’s questions. A lot of what the school says is not evil, but it’s ignorant and tone-deaf to survivors. But why would you expect them to understand something that’s taboo and nobody gets any practice in talking about or understanding? Why would they get it right?”

Postscript

On August 3, after months of mediation between antagonists—on the one hand, the elite Newport boarding school St. George’s, and on the other, an unusually cohesive group of as many as 30 alumni who say they were abused as students there—the two sides issued a rare joint announcement. They had reached a financial-settlement agreement. The St. George’s case is one of the largest of its kind, but according to one survivor, final dollar figures haven’t yet been disclosed even to survivors, who will be asked to agree to an amount later this month. “Some closure at last!” Ethan wrote in an e-mail, and he passed along something he had written to the school: “In many ways we are back where we started: without the victims speaking up, there would have been no investigation, clemencies, reports, exposes, and settlements. But when the dust settles the groups who stood by and did nothing to help us when we needed it most—the police, school administrators, judges, headmasters, lawyers, doctors, family services—all of THEM will likely have access to a full understanding of what happened to us. As for the victims, we will go home with our respective bags of coins, left essentially none the wiser. Hopefully the next generation will learn to treat us better.”