Ken returned to America that summer, but the two men kept in touch. Mounir went on to finish his undergraduate studies at the university and take a graduate degree at the Near East School of Theology. Then he taught at the American University of Beirut himself for 15 years before coming to the United Stated to teach at Western Reserve Academy in Ohio in 1945, "when I dropped Ken a note which was forwarded three times and he wrote back and said, 'I don't know why you're here or what you're doing or how long but don't engage yourself in anything that cannot be altered until you come and see the best school in the best town in the best state in the country that I just started."" [Mounir int p.I/1]

Mounir visited Woodstock in March 1946 and found the school "very exciting -- there was intimacy -- they would sit around the piano and sing, there was a great deal of rapport between faculty and students, but they kept a high degree of respect for each other." During his visit Mounir spoke at a school vespers service and gave a public talk on Middle East issues at the Universalist Church. The trip produced two jobs. The following fall Mounir came to the Country School to teach history and philosophy, and he became the minister at the Universalist Church, positions he would hold until 1964, when he accepted the chairmanship of the history department at the Choate School. [Mounir int p.I/2]

For Mounir, running the school had no appeal, he did not seek that kind of power and so avoided school politics: "You see I was so excited about my teaching there that I just sailed on and I did not know that there were politics in the whole situation. Politics is not anything I engage in. I talked my profession with everybody, I talked students with everybody, but it didn't occur to me that I might be stepping on somebody's toes or somebody was climbing and I was in the way or something. I had no idea as to what the politics of the situation were, or what the realities were. I discovered only after I retired, politics is half of the life of private schools." [Mounir int p.II/3-4]

Mounir devoted his energies to his courses, which included Ancient History and European History, as well as two senior courses called Contemporary History and Problems of Democracy. The former was a current events course and was as unpredictable as the daily New York Times, which was the only text. Problems of Democracy, or P.D. as it was called, was a more reflective course which had little to do with democracy in the usual sense. The course changed almost every year, but always featured readings from the great philosophers beginning with Plato and Aristotle, and it usually required each student to teach for a week in the spring, on a subject of his or her own choosing. Mounir also conducted numerous chapel services and, in the early sixties, developed an Arabic program which the school, vainly, thought might get funding from the Central Intelligence Agency.

But in the early years, at least the first decade, much of the Country School's excitement came from the sense of shared enterprise, of students and faculty alike helping each other make the school work. And Mounir remembers this both growing out of and feeding a remarkable generosity of spirit: "The faculty were really good people, who were dedicated. There was no question of time or anything that we weren't willing to give to the school. And then they gave us a free hand to do whatever -- nobody ever told me what to teach or what not to teach. Just open it and find whatever there is in it -- basically that was the great secret of the school. And David was able always to have people who, if they were left on their own, they did very well. I liked the school. I think it was a terrific place. I read more books, I studied more, I enjoyed growing with the school --- after all, I had just arrived from the Middle East, and the school just gave me an opportunity to grow into American life. I think everyone else felt the same way -- that we were growing with the school.

Perhaps more than any other teacher from the early years of the school, Mounir embodies the difference between the school as an independent, learnable, perpetuable idea and the school as an extension of David's persona. Mounir was never terribly close to David -- he liked many of David's personal qualities, but he was not seduced by David's personal style: "David had charm, there was no question. Where it was, I don't know, I never saw it. But he had charm, he could charm people. Even parents -- some of them fell so much in love with him that they came to Woodstock just to be close enough to see David. And he told one of his secretaries once, when she wanted to resign, 'Every single secretary who has ever been here has fallen in love with me'" [Mounir int P.IV/3]

In addition, Mounir and Buffy were always at odds, for 18 years as colleagues and beyond, and Buffy at least was never one to hide it very well (which may have helped Mounir's status in a perverse way). But just as Buffy was free to act as she saw fit because of her money, so Mounir gained a measure on independence and safety from being the Universalist minister, having a separate power base and constituency.

For a long time this man who had few illusions about the reality of the school, and certainly no uncontrolled affection for the school's dominant personalities, nevertheless served as Woodstack's director of admissions. He did the job well, not least because of his apolitical posture, his willingness to bend with the wind, and his ability to be charming even to those he found distasteful (an important quality for any admissions director, not to mention any minister). But Mounir is also one of the few people in the school's history who was able to make clear distinctions between the qualities of the school as such, and the qualities of the people who ran it. He was one of the few people in any position of responsibility in the history of the school who could explain those distinctions, define the differences, and who and articulate the value of each.[sic] Perhaps none of the school's trustees ever achieved as much clarity, and few ever showed they had any clue as to what really made the school work (when it did work). lt's not surprising, then, that in 1978, as the Country School was slowly destroying itself in plain view of anyone who cared to look, the trustees turned to Mounir for an evaluation and recommendations. Characteristically, Mounir produced an atmospheric, apparently flattering document that was, at core, a devastating critique. The trustees misrepresented the report in their official minutes. Then they ignored it.