My French Teacher Was Beloved for 25 Years. Then She Was Asked About Hijabs.
Spence—a $65,000-per-year Manhattan private school—claims that ‘true education means learning how to honor differences.’
They lied.
At The Spence School, a tony all-girls private institution on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Anne Protopappas was larger than life. “Bonjour!” she’d smile to students, wearing her quintessentially French red lipstick with Plato tucked under one arm and croissants in the other to offer her next class.
For a quarter of a century, generations of young Spence women adored our “Madame Proto.” She spearheaded school trips to China and Japan, launched a language and culture institute, revived the Model United Nations Club, advised the yearbook staff, developed a debate team, and offered special “salon” classes to parents and alumnae. Part Vietnamese, part Greek, and part French, she speaks five languages. When I was at Spence from 2006 to 2019, there was no teacher I admired more. She was the only faculty member in the language department to receive three yearbook dedications and four recorded money donations to the school in her name.
But in February, she was fired. Unable to find another teaching job, she is suing the school, its trustees, and its two top officials, Head of School Felicia Wilks and Director of Teaching and Learning Eric Zahler. In the lawsuit, filed earlier this month in New York State Supreme Court, Protopappas and her attorney, Sean Dweck, claim she was the victim of “employment discrimination based upon age, race/national origin” and “retaliation after lodging complaints about the discriminatory practices at the school.” What’s more, they argue, after a student took issue with the way Protopappas, 62, conducted a class, Spence deprived her of the due process that would have allowed her to defend herself.
“I never thought that I would pay such a high price for practicing and teaching the skill of free and responsible expression and independence of mind at a school that I picked for its open-mindedness twenty-five years ago,” Protopappas told me. “I have done nothing but serve this school.”
Protopappas’s firing stems from a May 2023 incident that took place in her Advanced French class, which was being taken by eight Spence seniors. Out of the blue, according to the complaint, one student asked, “Why did France ban the hijab?”
Protopappas said she responded by thanking the student and then giving the class some background about why the French law banning hijabs and all other visible religious symbols in public K-12 schools was in accordance with the country’s belief in secularism, or laïcité. She said she invited the class to consider the pros and cons of this law, which came into being after a nationwide debate in which some Muslim women advocated to protect young students from family pressures to wear the veil.
According to Protopappas’s complaint, the student who had asked the question, Sarai Wilks, “unexpectedly burst out of anger and displayed an uncharacteristically emotional and intensely personal reaction to the discussion, focusing on how unfair the French law was to her friend from her former school on the West Coast who wore the hijab.”
Sarai is not just any student. She is the daughter of the head of school, Felicia Wilks, who began her tenure in July 2022. The next day, Sarai returned to class—the last day of her senior year—and “expressed even more anger, as if she had been inflamed,” according to the complaint. “She also tried but failed to get her peers involved and join in her outrage. She was very disappointed to be unsuccessful and to remain isolated in her anger.
Her classmates were embarrassed and confused by what seemed completely out of the ordinary and blown out of proportion, especially since Sarai and her West Coast friend became the focus of the two final days of a productive year they had enjoyed.”
(Free Press requests for comment from Sarai Wilks were not returned.)
It was all downhill from there. Protopappas scheduled meetings with administrators to discuss Wilks’s reaction in class, but the meetings were canceled and postponed, the lawsuit claims. According to an email shared with The Free Press, when she finally met with Zahler, the director of teaching and learning, he told her that “some students” found her comments regarding the hijab “Islamophobic.”
“Overnight, I felt demonized, discredited, disqualified, and delegitimized,” said Protopappas.
The following school year, Protopappas’s Advanced French class was placed under “scrutiny,” her complaint says. She proposed two interdisciplinary courses, on “Trust, Truth, Faith & Facts” and on “Identities in Exile,” the sort of courses that had always been approved in the past.
Wilks said no to both. While in the past Protopappas had taught the philosophies of “the dead white men”—including Jean-Paul Sartre, Blaise Pascal, René Descartes, and Immanuel Kant—she had also introduced students to the influence of the Harlem Renaissance on France’s Negritude, a literary movement of French-speaking black intellectuals. She explored how the Arab and Christian worlds coalesced in French culture.
And yet, by February, Zahler had concluded from three visits to her class that her teaching was “inequitable, confused students, and prevented them from speaking in class” and “did not meet Spence’s standards and expectations,” according to the complaint.
Despite two decades of student evaluations in which she was lauded as “by far Spence’s best asset,” according to a PDF of the appraisals she shared with me, Protopappas was brought into an in-person meeting with Wilks and the school’s head of human resources and informed of her termination.
“It’s Orwellian,” Protopappas told me.
A few months after she was fired, Protopappas said she requested to be reinstated as a member of the Spence faculty, but the school declined. Afterward, she said she applied to fifteen “sister” schools and didn’t land a single interview. “I was simply trying to find another job and not stir any controversy or sue, but since strangely all doors suddenly closed, I had no other choice but to start this process,” she told me.
“This process” means the lawsuit, which Protopappas said was her last resort. “My financial situation is absolutely disastrous,” she said. “I have nothing at all, and I started drawing from my retirement, which of course is a disaster too since I cannot contribute to it anymore, and it is not much. I honestly even have to worry about food, and paying my credit card debt that is ballooning, so I may have to declare bankruptcy.”
Meanwhile, Spence is one of the most expensive private schools in New York City, charging more than $65,000 in tuition. Its tax filings for the 2023 fiscal year show that Wilks made $381,500.
When contacted by The Free Press, Taraneh Rohani, Spence’s director of communications and public relations, said in an email that the school “does not comment on personnel matters or active litigation and respects the privacy of our students and faculty.” She added that “a vigorous and thorough process is employed in the School’s personnel decisions.
Concerns in this matter existed for a long duration of time, and the School made ongoing efforts to address them. We will vigorously defend against the claims, and the necessary details will be proffered during the litigation process.” (Zahler declined to comment for this story, and Wilks did not respond to requests for comment.)
When I was a student in her class, Protopappas would joke to us, “Don’t be un mouton,” a literary reference to François Rabelais’s story of the sheep. Question everything. Engage in multiple perspectives. Dwell in discomfort. Learn the facts, and then form an opinion. “Education is to make the unfamiliar familiar. But also to make the familiar unfamiliar,” she told me.
In a school that can feel like an echo chamber of progressive thought—after Donald Trump was elected in 2016, I recall several teachers effectively canceling class to let students air their feelings about the death of our nation—Protopappas’s approach was radical and liberating.
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I spoke to a dozen Spence alumnae about Protopappas, and they all felt like me about her termination: in mourning over our school turning its back on one of its greatest teachers.
“I can’t remember another teacher I’ve ever had at the high school level that wanted me to be so aware and so well-rounded on issues—not just explaining the facts at face value, but asking us why,” said Madeleine Singer, who graduated from Spence four years ago. “Her class was foundational in my being able to interrogate the world and succeed.” While a French major at Washington University in St. Louis, Singer dedicated her thesis to Protopappas.
Madeline Ford Ryerson, who graduated from Spence in 2010, echoed that sentiment. “It was a privilege to be able to take a class of such profound intellectual value, especially at the high school level,” she said. “To have learned from Madame is to have experienced the embodiment of Spence’s motto, ‘Not for school but for life we learn.’ ”
A Spence parent, Rachel Boué-Widawsky, reflected: “She is the kind of teacher I hope we all had once in our life, whom you never forget.”
Some former students said that Protopappas’s organic and unstructured style of teaching was hard for administrators to control. Once, she nearly brought me to tears in class after I asked a question, and she shot right back at me: Pourquoi? Pourquoi? Pourquoi? She kept urging, until I was shaken by the intensity of her Socratic-style probing. Now, years later, I understand what she was teaching me, and I can say: Merci, Madame.
To some top leaders at Spence, however, the lessons that Protopappas’s students have clung to “for life” were insufficient to justify her tenure. “The implication was that I was not DEI enough,” said Protopappas, whose parents were born in Vietnam, a former French colony. “Ironically, since I was fired, teaching French at Spence appears to be a white privilege,” noting there are no longer any full-time French teachers of color at the school.
Spence purports to foster diversity of thought. The civil discourse statement on its website asserts that “true education includes learning how to honor differences and entering into conversations with curiosity and a truly open mind.” The school has a “director of institutional equity” and a “student equity council” and Protopappas’s suit says even a consulting firm was enlisted to advise faculty on practicing “better disagreements” in the classroom. According to the suit, Wilks exhorted the senior class in her 2023 graduation speech to “love learning so much, to seek it everywhere—even among those who annoy and disagree with you.”
Yet, Protopappas said, Spence’s words don’t match its actions.
Many of the more old-school Spence teachers who were beloved by students have left in recent years. Some alumnae told me the 132-year-old school is also moving away from humanities courses like Advanced French and toward STEM fields as a way to preemptively kill any contentious discussions of political and social issues. They worry that if Spence abandons more teachers like Protopappas, they might not want to send their daughters there. And they won’t donate a dime. Just as with many elite prep schools that have strayed from the model of academic excellence and free expression, the school risks becoming unrecognizable.
Alum Ryerson said that to fire Protopappas “is to deprive countless young women from a truly one-of-a-kind educational experience.”
“High school should be a safe space for intellectual curiosity and debate to flourish, and it worries me that a seemingly simple discussion about cultures that are different from our own can escalate into the dismissal of one of the most gifted educators The Spence School has,” she told me.
Sara Rose Shannon, another Spence graduate who took Protopappas’s French and Chinese classes, told me that “her termination is not just a loss of an outstanding educator but a setback for the values of critical thinking and respectful dialogue that she so passionately promoted. Her firing represents a troubling trend where educators who push students to engage deeply with difficult issues are being dismissed.”
Protopappas told me the suit is not only about her. “It’s about the students. Spence is not honoring the voice of the students.”
“The teaching profession is under attack,” she added. “Independence of mind seems less and less safe. How are we going to have a democracy if we don’t teach that skill?”
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