Such a widespread perception of the value of universities derives in no small part from very pragmatic realities: a college education yields significant rewards. The economic downturn has had what is perhaps an even more worrisome impact. FAUST: Youre very kind and very generous. Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust is the President of Harvard University, the first woman to hold the position and the university's 28th president overall. [29], Faust is married to Charles E. Rosenberg, a historian of medicine at Harvard. We must acknowledge both its horror and its attraction if we hope to understand the contradictions in its impact and presence in human lives. Some might see the connection of war with human creativity as the inevitable outcome of the prevalence of war in human experience. Yet what we would regard as the extraordinary incongruity of their motivation and presence only underscores wars fascination. Part of this is the result of the extensive work historians have undertaken since the 1960s. Her father bred thoroughbred horses on their sprawling land and her mother brought her up to be a lady. But along with her three brothers, Drew preferred to get a great education, and to challenge the gender destiny and racial segregation with which she came of age. President Faust represents that essential truth as a model, but the trajectory by which she became Professor Faust tells us even more about her as a person and a scholar. Representative Ron Paul has recently attracted media attention by declaring Lincoln and the war responsible for arrogations of central power that Tea Party originalists and libertarians are dedicated to overturn. This abundantly documented life also yielded an exceptional view into Southern society: its codes of honor, the rigors of political advancement, and glimpses of the private lives of slaves. It is indeed striking how often the language of altitude is used by those describing the allure of war: it will lift, elevate, raise us towards the transcendent, and link us to the sublime, a word often repeated in nineteenth century paeans to war. The preceding summer, in July 1961, some 35,000 spectators had thrilled to what the press had dubbed the Third Battle of Bull Run. Those values seem to me ones that are important to underscore as well. Her other works include James Henry Hammond and the Old South, a biography of James Henry Hammond, Governor of South Carolina from 1842 to 1844. JIM LEACH: You were brought up in the Shenandoah Valley. Drew Gilpin Faust President, Harvard University. A year later, she entered graduate school in history and American civilization at the University of Pennsylvania, and achieved her PhD in 1975 at the tender age of 27. . And yet. We have a very special obligation in a very difficult time. Western historiography was born somewhat later, but it too emerged as a chronicle of war in the hands of Herodotus and Thucydides in the fifth century BCE. overrideCardHideSection=false She published a book about Americans attitudes towards death in the nineteenth century in an attempt to understand the effect of the Civil War and other tragedies to follow on that topic. But at this moment in our history, universities might well ask if they have in fact done enough to raise the deep and unsettling questions necessary to any society. LEACH: Well, you have commented elsewhere on the importance of education in the American dream. Hope. An increasing interest in the lives of ordinary Americans during the years of conflict has included a great deal of research and writing about what happened beyond the battlefield, on the homefront, in communities and families North and South. The Morrill Act seems to me consistent with those. FAUST: I loved writing that biography of Hammond because he wrote down everything he did. Scholars and readers alike rightly tend to value most those historians who, like Faust, can make us think anew, and embed their research-based judgments in good narrative, as they also suggest the pasts inherent place in our present. While most academic historians avoid biography, Faust found in Hammond a combination of monstrous appetite and singular expressiveness, a first-rate character and a lesser human being. It was a pointed erasure of the wars causes and consequences, a suppression of their direct relationship to the turbulent racial politics of Maryland and Virginia and indeed the nation a full one hundred years after Lincoln had declared his intention to make the slaves of the rebellious South forever free.. We must support and sustain fact and reason beyond our walls as well. Bringing the subject back to the here and now, I can attest, having taught briefly under your leadership at Harvard, that the student body and faculty have found you to be an extraordinary president, able, like Lincoln, to manage deftly an institution of many parts and diverse egos. As James Madison wrote in 1822, a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power that knowledge gives. ", In January 2015, Faust delivered the Rede Lecture at the University of Cambridge, entitled "Two Wars and the Long Twentieth Century: the United States, 186165; Britain 191418", Her "Dread Void of Uncertainty" was named one of ten best history essays of 2005 by the Organization of American Historians, Received the Francis Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians for, This page was last edited on 19 November 2022, at 17:48. It challenges us as it has long challenged the humanities to take it on. Were in a time in which knowledge has paramount importance in how our world will move forward and how people will claim their place as contributors to that world. Why they didnt just let the South go. Seeing beyond ourselves enables us to imagine and act on behalf of a different future.. In an assessment of the condition of higher education in the Anglo-American world, Multiversities, Ideas, and Democracy, George Fallis, a former dean at York University in Toronto, deplores the growing dominance of economic justifications for universities. 52 Copy quote A university is not about results in the next quarter; it is not even about who a student has become by graduation. "Even a war against an enemy who had no relationship to September 11's . Drew Gilpin Faust - The ability to recognize opportunities. Appointed in the wake of widely aired disagreements between the presidents office and the faculty, she has brought calm and competence to the job of heading Americas most emblematic university, while also becoming a forthright spokesperson for the goals of educational access and inclusion. Humility, Hope, and the Work of Becoming Educated | Drew Gilpin Faust | 2021 2,836 views Mar 30, 2021 114 Dislike Share BYU Speeches 117K subscribers Using lessons from America's history,. [19], In May 2008, Christina Romer, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, was not offered tenure at Harvard despite support from the members of the Harvard Economics Department. Drew Gilpin Faust used her inauguration as the 28th president of Harvard University over the weekend to defend American higher education from critics who allege students are not being taught enough, faculty are not held to high enough standards and the college experience costs too much. Faust pointed to recent research from BYU including those about the effects of social media on suicide risk for teenage girls, the implications of ice sheet dynamics for historical ecosystems and the analysis of datasets from 1918 to help understand pandemics as examples of education leading to action. Soul-Butter and Hogwash: Mark Twain and Frontier Religion. As chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy and professor at Texas Tech University, Hayhoe has always understood the global climate crisis through the lens of her faith and her belief in our responsibility to care for others. But these were not issues that anybody spoke about out loud when I was growing up. Americans, North and South, black and white, Faust demonstrated, could not achieve the good death of their fallen loved ones, since huge numbers of slain soldiers were never identified by name or even the location of their graves. She has enjoyed good health since then. Well, after 11 years, Drew Gilpin Faust has now completed the job. Knowledge is replacing other resources as the main engine of economic growth, and . Truth cannot simply be claimed; it must be establishedeven when that process is uncomfortable. . This compulsion rests at the center of Bao Ninhs remarkable novel of North Vietnam, published in the United States in 1991 as The Sorrow of War. One bag of trash was created. LEACH: How did it influence you as you grew up? As OBrien and Bao Ninh and countless others through the ages have recognized, there remains a fundamental un-tellability and unintelligibility about war in its resistance to language, in its refusal to rest within the bounds and shape of narrative. For a young woman historian of her native region, these subjects were hardly the comfort zones of Southern history. Drew Gilpin Faust is the 28th President of Harvard University and the Lincoln Professor of History in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Bringing students of diverse backgrounds to live together and learn from one another enacts that commitment, as we work to transform diversity into belonging. Throughout history, we can find representations of wars powerful allure in the discourse that precedes and pervades almost every conflict. After World War II, the country witnessed the establishment of a new partnership between Washington and the nations institutions of higher learning, with the federal government investing in universities as the primary locus for the nations scientific research. How is it that the human has become so entangled with the inhumane? Tradition and the twenty-first century were tangled together in Barker Center's Thompson Room on the afternoon of February 11, when Drew Gilpin Faust conducted her first news conference as Harvard's president-elect.. Daniel Chester French's bronze bust of John Harvard, perched on the mantelpiece of the enormous fireplace behind the lectern, peered down on Faust and the other speakers . Their views were rendered no less racist or abhorrent, but in Fausts handling their defense of such a system of exploitation became comprehensible as rational thought. During a press conference on campus, Faust said, "I hope that my own appointment can be one symbol of an opening of opportunities that would have been inconceivable even a generation ago." Irony would not seem to be available to Robert E. Lee. They will in these myriad details get history just right. [Ms. Faust, the new president of Harvard, is a Civil War historian by training.] In October 2008, President Faust hosted a Sustainability Celebration to rally the community around Harvard's greenhouse gas reduction goal15,000 people attended, and Vice President and Nobel Laureate Al Gore delivered the keynote address. She spoke on humilitys role in the work of becoming educated. [31], She was previously married to Stephen Faust. . The Attorney General of the new Confederacy anticipated that war would stimulate . For this distinction, her remarkable career should be recognized and studied as a story of ambitious and graceful achievement. Ruth J. Simmons during a 2007 Harvard panel discussion among women Ivy League presidents (including then-president-designate Drew Gilpin Faust) Courtesy Harvard University T his morning, Harvard announced that Ruth Simmons, Ph.D. '73, LL.D. A productive and original scholar, Faust has also proven to be an able administrator. She retains her title as a professor of history at Harvard. Since the 1970s there has been a steep decline in the percentage of students majoring in the liberal arts and sciences, and an accompanying increase in preprofessional undergraduate degrees. A tribute to the belief that knowledge matters, that facts matterin the present moment, as a basis for the informed decisions of individuals, societies, and nations; and for the future, as the basis for new insight. LEACH: Your most recent book is This Republic of Suffering, which could perhaps be described as a compendium of how families of the nation deal with loss. We seek to establish standards for the College community that advance our institutional purposes and values. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. Is your emphasis on the original word, or is the emphasis on the context in which the word is made? David Norton February 17, 2011 For Americans, it was and is a special war with special meanings. We must be unassailable in our insistence that ideas most fully thrive and grow when they are open to challenge. But arrive they did. Harvard has not just survived these challenges, but has helped to confront them. In the seventies, the womens movement made military service a big focus of the struggle for womens equality. And yet. And those might, for example, be demographic. 1976-2000, Assistant Professor to Annenberg Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania. And we realized that all of us had parents who served in World War II. Faust told a story about one of the graduate schools at Harvard. Another would be the importance of the United States and Lincolns arguments for the United States. I felt the biography would offer important insights into some of the most important dimensions of that antebellum Southern culture. In a fascinating 40-minute interview on the latest episode . As president of Harvard from 2007 to 2018, Faust expanded financial aid to improve access to Harvard College for students of all economic backgrounds and advocated for increased federal funding for scientific research. . accounting . She earned an MA in American civilization from the University of Pennsylvania in 1971 and a Ph.D. in 1975, with a dissertation entitled "A Sacred Circle: The Social Role of the Intellectual in the Old South, 18401860".[9][10]. [32], Faust was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1988 and treated that year. On Education: A Conversation with Drew Gilpin Faust and Donald Gilpin On March 21, Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust and her brother, retired English and drama teacher Donald Gilpin, engaged in a conversation with Dean Jim Ryan about their successful careers as educators. How did you become interested in writing a whole book on the wars death toll and its social consequences? What must we do? In. We remember a very different Civil War from the one we celebrated and contested in the 1960s. Education must be about a different future not just for ourselves as individuals but for a wider society that will benefit from the contributions of those who learn, she said. She was ranked by Forbes in 2014 as the 33rd most powerful woman in the world. She is the author of six books, including Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (1996), for which she won both the Society of American Historians Francis Parkman Prize and the Avery O. Craven Award from the Organization of American Historians in 1997. Values were an integral part of the defining purpose of the early years of Harvard College, created to educate a learned ministry. Before accepting the position in 2007, Faust was the former dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. Never such innocence again, Philip Larkin concluded in his poem MCMXIV. Modernity enshrined irony, learned, Fussell would have it, from the horror of the First World War. A 2005 international ranking included 17 American educational institutions in the top 20, and a recent survey of American citizens revealed that 93 percent of respondents considered our universities one of the countrys most valuable resources.. FAUST: When I became president, the issue of ROTCs absence from Harvard campus was already one that was very much in the air and much debated. LEACH: There is in Lincolns background that dimension, and also the obverse dimension. In an 1963 essay for the New York Times entitled Our Past Isnt What It Used to Be, the eminent historian C. Vann Woodward observed that there was far less agreement over the interpretation of the Civil War today than there was a half century ago. History, he remarked in a wry variation of Clausewitzs famous dictum, becomes the continuation of war by other means.. We will continue to be educated in one way or another until our very last breath., Next Devotional: Ryan Gabriel, Assistant Professor of Sociology. And thats what sent me off into this set of inquiries. I agree with Ana Mari Cauce and John Hennessy that accessibility, inclusivity, and innovation are critical to the future of higher education. In prose both clear and beautiful, she has brought some of our darker side into the light. Do you draw a connection to the Civil War, or are we talking about a different conception of states rights today? . Rather than ungraspable odd defenders of the twin evils of slavery and white supremacy alone, the myriad writers who fashioned an elaborate justification of slavery in the antebellum era were believers in an organically conservative, hierarchical worldview, manipulating the Bible, but also a theory of history and human nature to defend racial slavery as a vision of social order. FAUST: What has always interested me most about history is trying to understand how people see their own world. My older brother became a Civil War aficionado and collected stuff. Jeffrey R. Holland March 8, 1977. One of the most forceful of wars attractions to its chroniclers is the very impossibility of their task. On a hot Saturday in September 1962, I crowded with my brothers and cousins into my aunt and uncles station wagon and drove off to war. In This Republic of Suffering, Faust locates an authentic American voice in the poetry of Walt Whitman, who said on another occasion that he contained multitudesa robust aim for the poet and a neat summation of the historians task. They are creative and unruly places, homes to a polyphony of voices. narratives of liberal learning, disinterested scholarship and social citizenship. University leaders, he observes, have embraced a market model of university purpose to justify themselves to the society that supports them with philanthropy and tax dollars. This work was often characterized in the 1960s and seventies as the history of the inarticulate: the notion being that history had heretofore focused on the elites who were educated to record their experiences. Her point of view is extremely interesting [17]: "Higher learning can offer individuals and societies a depth and breadth of vision. . Harvard is and must be a community of idealists. Drew Gilpin Faust, ne Catharine Drew Gilpin, (born September 18, 1947, New York, New York, U.S.), American educator and historian who was the first female president of Harvard University (2007-18). Drew Gilpin Faust, American historian and author, delivered this forum address on March 30, 2021. . It featured leading characters Lee, Jackson, Lincoln, Grant, Sherman who combined the estimable and the flawed in ways that continue to engage biographers, readers and now television and movie audiences. Her father was a Princeton graduate and breeder of thoroughbred horses. It is terrible and yet we love it; we need to witness the worst of its destruction in order not to love it even more. So, too, have declining levels of government support. It also yielded an idea for another book, a biography of James Henry Hammond, who was a governor of South Carolina in the 1840s, and later a U.S. . Read More. They have now reached nearly 60 percent. We must make it our work to tell a true war story. Since it was impossible to portray all the action, the days activity focused on Bloody Lane, where a hundred years before the dead had carpeted the ground and blood had run ankle-deep. And so you have to be able to listen to them and, in a sense, going back to what I said about studying history, see the world through their eyes. The federal governments first effort to support higher education, the Morrill Act of 1862, which established land grant colleges, was intended to advance the practical education of the industrial classes. A Department of Education report from 2006, A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of Higher Education, concentrated on creating a competitive American work force and advancing our collective prosperity. But even as we as a nation have embraced education as critical to economic growth and opportunity, we should remember that colleges and universities are about a great deal more than measurable utility. Faust is the first woman to serve as Harvard president and the university's 28th president overall. Harvard and the world. It requires us to confront the relationship among the noble, the horrible and the infinite, the animal, the spiritual and the divine. . She broadened the University's international reach, [] The valor and sacrifice of Gettysburg were rendered inseparable in his words as in his understanding from the wars transcendent purposes of freedom. Education is the vehicle we ride to the future, both individually and collectively, she said. 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