Ten facts about Bill Mules (ASL 1998-2007), ASL's sixth Head of School
During the 2020-21 school year, we're celebrating ASL’s 70th anniversary with a series of 70 stories highlighting our school’s vibrant past, present and future.
Bill Mules sits with Lower School children on the playground in his final year as Head of School, 2007
Before arriving at ASL, Dr. Mules had been the Headmaster at the Morristown-Beard School in New Jersey for five years. The start of his ASL headship was marked by the start of the SchoolWorks capital campaign construction of a new high school facility and renovation of the gym. “My biggest challenge will be to keep school operating in a close-to-normal fashion while construction is happening,” he said at the time. A young Bill dressed up for primary school graduation. Photo courtesy of The Scroll Archives
Bill is a Baltimore, Maryland native who graduated from Baltimore’s McDonogh School and later became headmaster there from 1976 to1992. Bill often cited his McDonogh Honors English teacher, Charlie Kinard, as the reason he pursued a career in education. “For me, there will always only be one Mr. Kinard,” Bill once wrote. “For students at ASL, there are scores.” Bill enjoyed spending time in the classroom with students and welcomed the chance to guest lecture in English Literature classes. Photo courtesy of the ASL Archives
A Princeton English major and proud bibliophile, Bill was a self-described stickler for grammar, insisting the word rôle, for example, be spelled with a circumflex, and wary of “...predictive text and emoticons” even in the mid-00s. “What loss of nuance, of flavor, of tone, or of subtlety will our communication suffer when a love note is reduced to CU@8?” he once bemoaned in a parent newsletter. A safe guess to presume Dr. Mules won’t be tweeting or TikTok-ing anytime soon!
Bill considered traveling his “amateur profession,” and he and his wife, Mimi, made the most of school holidays with visits to France, Portugal, Ireland and Turkey, among other European countries. Almost every headshot of Bill features him in a signature bowtie
A bowtie was a hallmark of Bill’s personal dress code, and nearly every photo of him in the ASL archives reveals a big grin with a statement bowtie around his neck. “I think that I am very laughable,” he commented during a student interview for The Standard at the start of his tenure. “I don’t mind if people make fun of the way I look—life is fun and we shouldn’t take everything so seriously.”
One of Bill’s favorite memories during his tenure was when ASL parent and journalist T.R. Reid P ’00 ’02 delivered the commencement speech for the Class of 2000. Reid, who was the Washington Post’s bureau chief in both Tokyo and London, has authored ten books, including United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy, which he presented on in an ASL Speakers Series event in 2005. Bill actually inspired the title of the book after he read a quotation from James Joyce with the phrase “the United States of Europe,” which he mentioned in an email to Mr. Reid. The rest, as they say, is history! Bill presents a student with an ASL t-shirt at a student assembly, 2002. Photo courtesy of The Scroll Archives
Bill and Mimi have two daughters, Blake and Rebecca, and two grandchildren. Bill and the Board of Trustees at the groundbreaking ceremony for the Great Expectations campaign, June 2006. Photo courtesy of The Scroll Archives
Another significant experience of Bill’s time as Head of School was leading the ASL community through the shock and aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks. Despite a shared grief, the former head will always be proud of the way teachers, parents and students joined together to support one another through it. “It was, to steal Churchill’s line, ‘our finest hour,’” he described.
When asked if he would have done anything differently as head, Dr. Mules admitted that the Waverley front step, remodeled while he was in office, had caused a few problems. “Those steps have just never been right!” he shared. Hopefully he can return for a visit to campus soon and see the new Waverley entrance, complete with stylish new stairs.
In a final interview with The Scroll, shortly before leaving ASL and London, Bill said that he was especially proud of being part of the positivity he felt everyone at the School shared. “It’s not that I really did it,” he explained, “it’s just that I was involved in it. Sometimes it’s just as simple as having fun.” Photo courtesy of The Scroll archives
