Why the Head of One of New York’s Most Elite Schools Quit

The leader of one of New York’s most elite schools has stepped down after a damning internal audit found “disquieting problems of religious and cultural bias” at the school.

David Lourie, who became the leader of the all-boys Collegiate School in Manhattan just four years ago, announced on Monday that he and the board had agreed he would leave his post as head of school. “After four years filled with shared successes alongside challenges that required difficult and at times divisive decisions, we agreed that a new Head of School is what is best for the boys and the school community,” Mr. Lourie said in an email to the school community.

The Collegiate report, issued in May and reviewed by The New York Times, was commissioned by the school to investigate parents’ concerns about antisemitism and Islamophobia. Nearly two weeks later, a gender discrimination lawsuit was filed against Collegiate and Mr. Lourie by one of the school’s deans, who claimed that Mr. Lourie had referred to the report as “a joke” and a “power play by Jewish families.”

Mr. Lourie and Jonathan Youngwood, the president of the school’s board of trustees, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Collegiate is among numerous private schools across New York City that have experienced intense disagreement over how administrators and faculty members have addressed the Israel-Hamas war.

Private-school parents, teachers, administrators and students have been discussing — and in some cases, arguing over — the appropriate ways for schools to address issues related to the war both in the classroom and in broader academic and community discourse.

The friction has intensified in the weeks since unrest on college campuses captivated the city and the nation.

Collegiate, which was founded in the 1600s, runs from kindergarten to 12th grade and charges about $63,000 per year in tuition. A long list of famous alumni includes John F. Kennedy Jr., the media and finance executive Edgar Bronfman Jr., and Egbert Benson, a founding father who was New York’s first attorney general.

The school’s internal report was the culmination of a survey and “listening sessions” conducted by an outside consultant who pooled responses from parents, middle and high school students, teachers, alumni and trustees.

It noted that in 2021, the school announced that the administration would show discretion in making public statements about national or global political or news events. But it said that “many Jewish parents were disappointed that the Head of School did not provide a statement condemning the attacks and offering words of support for Jewish students and families at Collegiate.”

The report also said that those interviewed had expressed concerns about the school’s department of “diversity, equity and belonging” and wondered if “by focusing so much on identity, the school may end up being ‘isolating, dividing, and alienating.’”

Among the specific incidents cited in the report was one involving a middle-school teacher who was placed on leave after twice “presenting controversial lessons on the Middle East to his seventh-grade civics class and sixth-grade world history class.”

The administration provided no explanation of why the teacher was not publicly disciplined after the first incident or why he was placed on leave after the second, the report said. “This lack of transparency had a freezing ripple effect on Collegiate teachers,” it said, noting that teachers had felt that “the lack of clarity around what was and wasn’t OK to say was paralyzing them and preventing them from doing the best for their students.”

“Additionally, the lack of communication from the school surrounding this issue led faculty, parents and students to openly blame certain ‘wealthy and influential’ Jewish parents — skirting close to one of the oldest and most pervasive antisemitic tropes,” the report said. “The school did little to acknowledge, let alone quell, these rumors, which persist until today.”