O'Brien '65 returns as president, role model to former alma mater

John O'Brien '65's life has come full circle. Forty-two years after graduating from the Milton Hershey School in Pennsylvania, he has returned to the school to take the helm as president.

Founded in 1909 by Milton Hershey, of Hershey's Chocolate fame, the boarding school provides needy children with free education from preschool through high school.

O'Brien entered the school, which was then an orphanage for boys, when he was three and stayed there through twelfth grade.

"I had not been outside of the Hershey area too much when I went to look at schools," O'Brien said of his college search, during which he was recruited for his athletic and academic skills.

"Princeton had the most authentic people, the most real people and that is why I chose it over Harvard, Cornell and the other schools I was accepted to," he said. O'Brien described the move from the regimented atmosphere of Hershey to the freedom of college life as "traumatic." For the first time in his life, he was on his own and making decisions.

"I remember the first day of school very clearly," O'Brien said.

"All I owned was a green duffle bag of belongings and I walk over to Little Hall, and there were Mercedes and limousines and people carrying in all of this stuff."

Though he soon discovered his roommates were not that wealthy either, his first glimpse of Princeton left a lasting impression.

After a brief foray into engineering — "It was two years after the Russians set up Sputnik and everyone said it was your duty to study engineering" — O'Brien switched out to pursue a degree in psychology.

"Learning was much outside of the classroom for me," he said. At the University, O'Brien was a member of the football and lacrosse teams and an officer at Tiger Inn.

Though he was injured during his senior year and had to sit most of the season out, O'Brien still relishes the fact that he was a part of the last undefeated football season in 1964. Today, being only a state away allows the former football star to keep tabs on Princeton's "struggling" team. O'Brien said he comes back often to watch home games.

"I've come to 80 percent of the reunions and have more good friends from my class now than I did when I was actually a student at Princeton," he said.

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When he left Princeton in 1965, O'Brien said that he did not have much of a plan for his future. He took a job teaching and coaching football at the New England Preparatory school.

After some graduate work at Johns Hopkins University, he returned to Princeton to work in the admissions office and coach freshman football.

"It was a disorienting time to be at Princeton with people protesting and setting fires and the administration looking into coeducation," he recalled.

At first, O'Brien was against letting women in, but after serving on a committee and looking at research on the subject he changed his mind. "I helped in a small way to admit the first class of women," he said.

O'Brien later worked for the National Institute of Education, where he became a huge proponent of "learning before doing," also known as action learning. He later started his own company based on this educational method.

For the past 25 years, O'Brien has helped executives, mostly of Fortune 500 companies, to become effective leaders using a human values approach. "I try to help CEOs understand what type of values underscore high performing cultures," he said.

His life's work in education — be it teaching adolescents or corporate leaders — has brought him back to the alma mater where he grew up. O'Brien says the school has changed greatly. "The students are more diverse and much more sophisticated," he said.

When he attended the school, Hershey was an all-white male orphanage. Eighty percent of the graduates went on to vocational school.

The initiatives that Milton Hershey outlined, however, have remained the same. O'Brien is working hard to make sure the boarding school is admitting the "neediest and most alone" children.

"I feel like I won the highest honor to come back to Milton Hershey," O'Brien said.

Another of his goals as headmaster is to shift the school's focus back to one where work ethic is a key value.

With an endowment close in value to the University's, Milton Hershey has the money to give students laptops in ninth grade. O'Brien, however, believes these resources have created an "entitlement atmostphere," which he wants to change. He is trying to create an atmosphere where students and faculty are focused on helping the graduates reach their full potential.

"The most important thing about our school is that we admit students whose home life is dangerous," he said. "They are going to need a year-round residential school; otherwise they have almost no chance of making it."