Witness Post: William Mules

Bill Mules, Head of School, sits with Lower School children from ASL on the playground, 2007

Witness Post: William Mules

Bill Mules as a graduating Lower School Student

Almost every photo of Bill Mules features his signature bowtie

Bill Mules presents a student with an ASL t-shirt at a student assembly, 2002.

Ten Statements about Bill Mules that you may or may NOT know:

Before arriving at American School of London (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.
Bill Mules is a native of Baltimore, Maryland. He attended McDonogh School, a k-12 private school in the adjacent county, and he is a graduate of Princeton University. He earned his doctorate in counselor education at the University of Virginia. From 1976 to 1992, he returned to McDonogh to become headmaster there. 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.
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 and Mimi Mules 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.”

Bill Mules at gathering celebrating 40 years of McDonogh co-education

Where I Met Bill Mules

Howard Jarvis was my nemesis! I had decided to apply for a teaching job in the San Francisco Bay area of California, only to be stymied by a Jarvis proposition that sliced millions of dollars from the coffers of the counties in the state. Teaches with Master’s degrees and Ph.D’s held on for dear life, while the lowly Bachelor Degree candidates and first time teachers like me, wallowed on the outside of the job market.

Without a single bite from the schools in California, I looked east and applied to three schools in my hometown of Baltimore, Maryland: Loyola Blakefield (my alma mater), Gilman School, and McDonogh School. I was turned down by the Dean of Loyola as the faculty wanted more diversity than a white male alumnus could provide. And I received two teaching offers: Gilman and McDonogh. I chose McDonogh because of the careful eye of Headmaster, Bill Mules, who liked having a Yale wrestling coach and teacher, following in the footsteps of a Princeton grad and a Harvard grad. It seemed to be Ivy League home week for me.

Bill Mules offered me a job in the middle school as a history teacher. One month later the middle school English teacher and coach resigned and I was offered an English class to teach. Three years later I added Director of Development to my responsibilities and continued for another three years. All in all those 6 years were some of the most formative of my life. Thank you, Bill Mules, for believing in me and supporting me for those years at McDonogh School.