"We have to be accountable to the long-term future in how we approach the use of any of the resources.". 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. Facing Widener stands Memorial Church. The study of slavery required a different approach to sources and a different approach to the work of doing history than what had preceded it. Just today, I was talking to a couple of people in my office who had helped work on the return of ROTC. But somehow I always lost. I felt our students would learn a lot, and I felt that it was important for the military as well. Faust generated what might be considered the . Drew Gilpin Faust (born September 18, 1947) is an American historian and was the 28th President of Harvard University, the first woman to serve in that role. Faust joined Dean Michelle Williams in the Voices in Leadership studio to candidly discuss the challenges and opportunities they have seen in higher education, national activism, and global health. Drew Gilpin Faust - The ability to recognize opportunities. It is as if we are being visited by the horsemen of the apocalypse with war, famine, natural disasterand, yes, even pestilenceas Zika spreads, aided by political controversy and paralysis. We remember a very different Civil War from the one we celebrated and contested in the 1960s. What are the variety of other materials that we, as historians, hadnt bothered with before that give us insights into a population that didnt necessarily keep diaries, whose history wasnt preserved in a formal process of record-keeping? We also see a repository of learning, with 57 miles of shelving at the heart of a library system of some 17 million books, a monument to reason and knowledge, to the collection and preservation of the widest possible range of beliefs, and experiences, and facts that fuel free inquiry and our constantly evolving understanding. . So, I cared a lot about the overturn of Dont ask, dont tell, as another step in the nations progression towards inclusiveness. War is not random, shapeless violence. The protagonist Kien has survived the conflict and finds himself all but overwhelmed with the need to write about it even against his will. After all, such people were individuals with lives and with agency and with influence on the outcome of historical events. As enthusiastic crowds during these centennial years cheered Confederate troops at Bull Run and Antietam, hailed Jefferson Davis in a restaging of his inauguration in Montgomery, and resurrected the long abandoned Confederate Stars and Bars to fly over statehouses across the South, civil rights activists joined sit-ins, picket lines and freedom rides and called upon the emancipationist traditions of the past to situate themselves and their cause on the right side of history. 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. The death of an army horse in the An equivalent proportion of today's population would be six million. Because we still believe that as a nation we have been defined by the ideals and the sacrifice of that war, we feel compelled even a hundred fifty years later to situate ourselves in relationship to it. LEACH: And yet records, especially those people create for themselves, are especially important to your work, even though, as you have noted, a historian must keep in mind that when people write of their times and themselves they can be misled or misleading. At this time there was a belief that slaves had no sense of family because it had been destroyed by the oppressions of slavery. Lincoln is off the heal a nation, a noble goal he will not live to see realized" (O'Reilly 24-25). [30] They have a daughter, Jessica Rosenberg, who is a Harvard graduate and works for The New Yorker. In the 1950s, Ron Kovic learned of war from John Wayne movies and felt destined for glory by his birth on the Fourth of July. As a nation, we need to ask more than this from our universities. And it took a while before I figured out that history had turned out otherwise. Change, the message is, lies at the heart of what education does, how it empowers us and what it demands of us. In the months preceding the layoffs, various campus groups called upon Faust and other administrators to reduce their salaries as a means of cutting costs campus-wide. Yet it has hardly reduced the salience of persisting differences in understanding. The publication of an average of more than a hundred books a year during each of these past five decades has meant an accumulation of information that would inevitably change understanding. And David Donald taught at Hopkins before he came to Harvard. She graduated from Concord (Massachusetts) Academy in 1964 and received a B.A. 801-422-4511, Humility, Hope, and the Work of Becoming Educated | Drew Gilpin Faust | 2021. Greetings alumni, graduates, families, and friends. But in todays world, I believe it is dangerous for universities not to fully acknowledge and embrace their responsibilities to values and to service as well as to reason and discovery. . And there was Harry Byrd, who was not just our senator, but really our neighbor. LEACH: Let me ask you about James Henry Hammond, about whom you wrote a biography. 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. Yet even as they described the impossibility of their task and the ineffability of war, each of these witnesses to war set about to write, to use language where none could be found, to employ words to decry those words very inadequacy. LEACH: How did it influence you as you grew up? War is nasty; war is fun, OBrien has written. Moreover, in Hammond, Faust found a figure through which all the contradictions of the Old South flowed; he was a brilliant and handsome sexual predator who abused his slave women at the same time he argued for a blending of modernization and tradition in a society heading toward destruction. The inherent magnitude of a war story is, of course, that it is about life and death, about the quintessential moment of truth when the ultimate is at stake. Drew Faust gets candid about gender, opportunity and being "in the room where it happens." Find out what Harvard's first woman president has to teach all leaders who aspire to realize a bold . Universities are meant to be producers not just of knowledge but also of (often inconvenient) doubt. . While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Will the reenactors tell only an old battle piece of courage and glory and how sweet and proper it is to die? She earned a BA magna cum laude with honors in history from Bryn Mawr College in 1968. Before serving as president, she was the founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and for many years was a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. . The University also undertook an involuntary reduction in staff of 2.4 percent of its employees. They began to question the sacrifices they had made. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008) assesses the lasting impact of civil war fatalities on American attitudes toward death. Our narratives are not just modeled from war; they become models for war. . For the Civil War, it was perhaps Robert E. Lee who captured this contradiction most memorably in his often and variously quoted remark to James Longstreet as they watched the slaughter at Fredericksburg in 1862. She is the author, most recently, of "This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War." End of preview. in history magna cum laude from Bryn Mawr College in 1968. As she told former NEH chairman Sheldon Hackney in an interview with Humanities magazine in 1997, I guess Ive been studying unpleasant people or politically incorrect people for my whole academic career.. A civil rights activistshe marched in Selma in 1965 in support of Martin Luther King Jr.and a progressive historian who labored to discern voices history has rendered silent, she has also been a close student of people and times many scholars would prefer to avoid. Their endurance may lie in their impossibility; they can never be complete, for the tensions and contradictions within them will never be eliminated or resolved. In her forum address, Angela Duckworth argued that to flourish, we must reconcile the apparent paradox that we are both controlled by our circumstances and able to control our circumstances. I am in the unenviable role of warm-up act for one of the greatest storytellers of ouror any othertime. Feb. 10, 2007 CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Feb. 9 Harvard, the nation's oldest university, plans to name Drew Gilpin Faust, a historian of the Civil War South, to be the first female president in its. How can I picture it all? Homer demanded in the Iliad. And yet. Most other creatures engage in violence, and some insects and animals with elaborate social structures reflect those systems in their modes of fighting and aggression. numbering . And living surrounded by those gray, black-bordered road signs that the state of Virginia put up to mark historic sites. For our youngest students, those just beginning to shape their adult lives, lives who today received what the ritual language of Commencement calls their first degree, for them these questions of values and responsibility take on particular salience. She was Harvard's first president since 1672 without an undergraduate or graduate degree from Harvard and the first to have been raised in the South. Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust is the President of Harvard University, the first woman to hold the position and the university's 28th president overall. 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.. Universities, and especially the humanities, are vital to the very survival of our civilization. And, as we looked increasingly at the home front and its role in the war, I thought we had a lot to learn from thinking about it as a factor in one of the perennial questions of Civil War historiography: Why did the South lose the Civil War? But instead of a sweet story, Owens poem chronicled blood . the nobler impulses . I decided to go back to graduate school. And theres an oft-cited assumption that education may be the civil rights issue of this century. That humanitys highest creative aspirations of literature and imagination have been all but inseparable from its most terrible invention: the scourge of war? The economic downturn has had what is perhaps an even more worrisome impact. For all its prevalence, its ubiquity and universality, war offers the attraction of the extraordinary the escape from the grey everyday, from the humdrum into higher things. But from Homer to Whitman to Owen to Heller to those telling the stories of our wars today, we have grappled to use the humanity of words to understand the inhumanity of war. Jeffrey R. Holland March 8, 1977. In prose both clear and beautiful, she has brought some of our darker side into the light. At a time when access and affordability are more consequential than ever before, the . We all share a common history in America, but we dont necessarily share a common perspective. But, as much historical research has shown, the specter behind that argument was really that of slavery and of the South Carolinian demographic reality of a black majority. We dont just write about wars because, like Mount Everest, they are there. On Friday, she came to Girls High to tell students they can do anything. How did they explain this loss, in both religious and political terms? It remains the bloodiest single day of conflict in American history, a day when more than 3,600 Americans died. Uniquely powerful dimensions of the Civil War have rendered it of outsized importance to historians. She is also the Lincoln Professor of History at Harvard. The arguments over the interpretations of this history were captivating as well. Faust lamented the effects of the financial crisis on universities around the world, and said that debts associated with student loans have exceeded 1 trillion dollars in the United States. For Americans, it was and is a special war with special meanings. What does mourning mean when it is so all-pervasive? History is iterative and interactive which, happily, is why there will always remain new inexhaustible work for historians. Yet even as these debates and disagreements continue, most Americans approach this Civil War anniversary with attitudes and assumptions quite different from those that prevailed fifty years ago. I could see that slaves were naming their children after their grandparents. LEACH: There is in Lincolns background that dimension, and also the obverse dimension. One of the most striking aspects of the Civil War in my mind is why the North fought. Faust is the former dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. FAUST: It does, and its one that Ive quoted or repeated often, because education is the avenue into full participation in the society in which we live. Wars are indeed turning points both in individual lives and in national histories. and surviving, but with ultimately finding meaning in it all. Drew Gilpin Faust Have universities become too captive to the immediate and worldly purposes they serve? 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. Where do universities fit in this threatening mix? In her 2008 book, This Republic of Suffering, Faust yet again provoked the history profession with a close examination of a major and yet strangely overlooked aspect of the much-studied and written-about Civil War: a death toll so large it altered human perception and foreshadowed the vast carnage of twentieth-century warfare. That would be an extremely important theme. This too has shaped a new approach to our past. They conflict, he argues, with other parts of the multiversitys mission, with . In a recent column, George Will deplored the nations evident abandonment of what he called the reality principlethe need to assess and adapt to facts. Universities are defined by this principle. Old, indeed: The words are taken from an ode by Horace and were 2,000 years later inscribed on the wall of the chapel at Sandhurst for aspiring young soldiers soon to be headed for the trenches of France. In 2001 Faust became founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, the successor to Radcliffe College, which had been Harvard Universitys womens college; she was also appointed Lincoln Professor of History at Harvard. Soul-Butter and Hogwash: Mark Twain and Frontier Religion. This was the norm when we were growing up. Two months from now, we will again witness a reenactment of the Battle of Bull Run. What can we do? Education is the vehicle we ride to the future, both individually and collectively, she said. It is such a pleasure to see you all here and offer congratulations on this day of celebration. One was the presence of the Civil War and living on a highway called the Lee-Jackson Highway. killing . Drew Gilpin Faust, U.S. historian and former Harvard president, delivered Tuesday's forum address. To rename violence as war is to give it a teleology. An important leader in American higher education and a well-known scholar, Faust is the Lincoln Professor of History in Harvards Faculty of Arts and Sciences. And that gave me a new perspective on what it must have meant in American society in the 1860s. Yet what we would regard as the extraordinary incongruity of their motivation and presence only underscores wars fascination. overrideCardHideByline=true A productive and original scholar, Faust has also proven to be an able administrator. 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. burying . Related Speeches. But today, for all its importance to individual and social prosperity, higher education threatens to become less broadly available. Those values seem to me ones that are important to underscore as well. Only if we ourselves model a commitment to fact over what Stephen Colbert so memorably labeled as truthiness (and he also actually sometimes called it Veritasiness!), only then can we credibly call for adherence to such standards in public life and a wider world. But it is not just that we have more information; we also look at the past with different eyes and ask different questions, questions based in the belief that rights should not be defined nor voices empowered or silenced because of race. And I used that perception of womens changing views of the war to suggest that this may have been a real factor in the erosion of the Confederate army. Like African Americans, women play a role in American society that has expanded and changed dramatically over the past half century, and their place in Civil War history has grown in parallel. But this was a carnival without carnage, a battle stripped of content and context. Drew Gilpin Faust President (2007-2018), Harvard University 1968, BA, Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania; 1971, MA, and 1975, PhD, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Her most recent is This Republic of Suffering, which takes its title from the words of Frederick Law Olmsted and its subject from the vast death toll of the Civil War. 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. Part of this is the result of the extensive work historians have undertaken since the 1960s. In my book about James Henry Hammond, I used his records of slaves and their births and deaths, records that he kept essentially for economic reasons, to map out family ties and to see how long-lived families were and how childrens names were chosen. Drew Faust has been a pioneer in at least three distinct subfields of nineteenth-century American history: first, the intellectual history of the Old South, especially proslavery ideology; second, the history of women and gender; and third, the social and cultural history of the Civil War, particularly that conflict's overwhelming scale of death Harvard College is a residential community of learning with a goal, in the words of its dean, of personal and social as well as intellectual transformation. Or as early 20th-century civil rights activist Nannie Helen Burroughs put it, education is democracys life insurance.. The question should not be whether we can afford to believe in such purposes in these times, but whether we can afford not to. overridebuttonBgColor= Do you find it remarkable that in the middle of our most horrific war he made a stand for expanding access higher education? So, he was an individual who had great respect for learning. overridebuttonBgColor= We love war because of these stories. They will in these myriad details get history just right. 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. 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. 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. We dont just write about wars because, like Mount Everest, they are.! 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