Source: Library of Congress. Drew Faust2021 [2] 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. 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. And thats what sent me off into this set of inquiries. Such an incendiary interpretation, directly contradicting both Lost Cause myths about womens devotion to the Confederacy as well as military historians strategic interpretations, elicited much criticism at the time and since. Walt Whitman warned that the real war will never get into the books. It would indeed be impossible ever fully to capture wars contradictions, its paradoxes, its horror and its exhilaration. The statistics Faust cited paint a fairly grim portrait of the humanities' declining prestige. 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. John Keegans transformative 1974 book, The Face of Battle, changed military history forever with its powerful call for a diversion of historical effort from the rear to the front of the battlefield from commanders to common soldiers. One of the most forceful of wars attractions to its chroniclers is the very impossibility of their task. Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust is the President of Harvard University, the first woman to hold the position and the university's 28th president overall. 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. 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. Hope. First was the history of the Civil War. Fausts publications included A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South, 18401860 (1977), The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South (1982), James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (1982), Southern Stories: Slaveholders in Peace and War (1992), and Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (1996), which received the 1997 Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians. We remember a very different Civil War from the one we celebrated and contested in the 1960s. The former dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Faust is also . During the historiographical moment of the late sixties and early seventies scholars began to inquire about the rest of the population that hadnt perhaps been so literate and hadnt had the opportunity to have their almost every word preserved in an archive. The preceding summer, in July 1961, some 35,000 spectators had thrilled to what the press had dubbed the Third Battle of Bull Run. From comments of astonished pundits on television, in print, and online, to conversations with bewildered friends and colleagues, the question seems unavoidableand mesmerizing: What is going on? She came north for high school to Concord Academy, a girls prep school in Massachusetts, and then to Bryn Mawr, a womens college outside Philadelphia, where she graduated in 1968. Human beings need meaning, understanding and perspective as well as jobs. And he was always such an excessive character. Yet still we try. She revealed in stunning detail how these women struggled against their fate, not as proto-feminists, but as women undergoing transformations for which they were psychologically unprepared. 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. There wasnt a vivid discourse of race. Existing studies of Confederate politics and public life, she wrote in the introduction to Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, have paid almost no attention to the place of women., This lack of interest in the role of women led scholars to the growing disenchantment with the war on the home front as a factor in causing the Souths surrender, when the war might have been waged even longer. But an essential aspect of its interest and appeal not just to those reenactors but, in fact, to all of us is simply that it was war. James Suiter of the 84th Illinois reported in his diary that a depiction of Chickamauga would be an absolute impossibility. John Casler of the Stonewall Brigade struggled for words in a letter to his parents, I have not power to describe the scene. ", 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. Fausts research into how the South viewed and justified slavery led her to other stories of the era, including those of Confederate women, generally thought of as being among the staunchest supporters of the Confederate cause. Faust has declined to discuss press reports related to Romer's tenure case. A documentary based on the book aired on PBS in 2012. numbering . She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994 and the American Philosophical Society in 2004. War is terrible and yet we love it, wrote Drew Gilpin Faust in 2004. At the outbreak of the Crimean War, for example, Tennyson enthusiastically anticipated the sudden making of splendid names and the heart of a people that would beat with one desire. Herbert Asquiths World War I poem The Volunteer depicted a clerk who half his life had spent/ Toiling at ledgers in a city grey, who was now invited to join the men of Agincourt. The American Civil War, fought in the years between Balaclava and the Western Front, generated similar sentiments and declarations. But this was a carnival without carnage, a battle stripped of content and context. We as writers create that story; we remember that story. As James Madison wrote in 1822, a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power that knowledge gives. JIM LEACH: You were brought up in the Shenandoah Valley. And what a moment it is. There is always a sense, which comes from this kind of inquiry, of the contingency of things and how they could be otherwise. Workforce and Employment. Unlike perhaps any other institutions in the world, they embrace the long view and nurture the kind of critical perspectives that look far beyond the present. But why havent we Civil War historians been equally preoccupied with death? 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. And that, I believe, was part of his motivation. They conflict, he argues, with other parts of the multiversitys mission, with . 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. There were a lot of very powerful, influential historians who were studying the South, and that was intriguing. His opening sentence thus united the two documents as foundational to the meaning of the war and to Kings definition of America. . 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. [11] Following formal approval by the university's governing boards, her appointment was made official three days later. We can see these values clearly in the choices and passions of our faculty and students: in the motto of Harvard Business School, which you heard earlier this morning uttered by the dean, the commitment to make a difference in the world. Most of the University would readily embrace this sentiment. Senator who resigned his seat shortly before South Carolina seceded. overrideCardHideSection=false Understand what it is that is so significant to them and then try to use that understanding to bring them to you and to what you see as the most important agenda for the university. Bringing students of diverse backgrounds to live together and learn from one another enacts that commitment, as we work to transform diversity into belonging. LEACH: At Harvard, under your leadership, ROTC has been welcomed back to campus after a forty-year hiatus. 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: One final Civil War question. Journalist Chris Hedges, in a recent best-selling book aptly entitled War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, has described war as a narcotic, a lethal addiction, a drug which he himself ingested for his many years as a war correspondent. How, to quote a prominent Confederate, does God have the heart to allow it? And what does it mean for the nation-state that has required so much sacrifice? FAUST: Well, the notion of nullification emerged in South Carolina in the 1820s and thirties and became a kind of emblem of opposition to federal power. Faust replaced Lawrence Summers, who resigned on June 30, 2006, after a series of controversial statements that led to mounting criticism from members of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. She spoke on humilitys role in the work of becoming educated. 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). Why they didnt just let the South go. Confederate Women and the Narratives of War," Drew Gilpin Faust emphasizes the importance of the Civil War as it stood out among other wars for "the place of women in that conflict stimulated especially significant . [26], In December 2010, Faust and Stanford University president John L. Hennessy co-wrote an editorial in support of passage of the DREAM Act. It beggars all description. A Wisconsin nurse, aiding the wounded in Tennessee, wrote home of the mental and physical suffering around her: There are times when the meaning of words seem to fade away; so entirely does our language fail to express the reality. In its assault on language, war once again challenges our very identity and essence, for it is words that help to define us as distinctively human. If C. Vann Woodward were alive to witness the wars sesquicentennial begin this spring, he would find that the conflict over its interpretation continues, once again mirroring our contemporary debates about national purposes. The valor and sacrifice of Gettysburg were rendered inseparable in his words as in his understanding from the wars transcendent purposes of freedom. Faust has somewhat modified her own stance. As a child you must have been aware of the Civil War legacy and probably had a sense for the nineteenth-century past. How is it that the human has become so entangled with the inhumane? Fighting on the other side of the same war, and equally compelled to write, Tim OBrien confronts a similar sense of the difficulties of language and of narrative. 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? C. Vann Woodward was at Hopkins before he ended up at Yale. That challenge is essential to their power and attraction. But it is more than the magnitude, the weightiness of war that makes it the best subject for our stories and that has lodged it at the heart of the humanities since the time of Homer. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Faust published her first three booksA Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South, The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South: 18301860, and a biography, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Masteryshe worked against a prevailing assumption that the slaveholding elite of the Old South produced no intellectual history. While the mind of the South had been a twentieth-century preoccupation of many writers and scholars, few had probed the disturbing and, to modern sensibilities, retrograde proslavery mind. FAUST: That was the other part of history that I lived in: The stirrings of the Civil Rights Movement were emerging all around me when I was a young child. A Civil War historian, she said she has been thinking about civil rights since she was a child.. Humility is a prerequisite for becoming educated.. After all, such people were individuals with lives and with agency and with influence on the outcome of historical events. It requires us to confront the relationship among the noble, the horrible and the infinite, the animal, the spiritual and the divine. 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. LEACH: You went to prep school in Massachusetts, college at Bryn Mawr, and then graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania. 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. There is no value-free science. 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. When Martin Luther King delivered his I Have a Dream speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial almost a year later in August 1963, he self-consciously placed himself within the Civil War centennial not the historyless version of the reenactors, but one that urged Americans to finish the revolution the war had begun. We simply know a great deal more about the experience of black Americans in a variety of critical roles in the war as soldiers nearly 200,000 strong fighting for Union victory, as contrabands forcing the issue of freedom onto the northern agenda, as slave laborers refusing to continue the status quo on farms and plantations across the South. 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. [1], On February 8, 2007, Faust was selected as the next president of the university. I felt that Harvard and Harvard students should have connections that would promote this kind of integration of the military with civilian forces and civilian realities. She is also the Lincoln Professor of History at Harvard. In the Civil War, civilians rushed to the battlefields when the fighting ceased, many, of course, to search for wounded kin, but many to experience a direct connection to what they described as a force beyond themselves and their accustomed lives. Faust soon established herself as a historians historiana scholar who logs endless hours in archives, and asks new and provocative questions that yield fresh and surprising insights, all captured in clear, sometimes even lyrical prose. December 26, 2011. 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. Business is now by far the most popular undergraduate major, with twice as many bachelors degrees awarded in this area than in any other field of study. They accelerate and concentrate change in ways that make it vivid and visible. And, interestingly, in the last year its crept back into the American political vocabulary. This was a dramatic victory for the Confederates, gained as Union troops charged futilely up Maryes forbidding Heights in one of the wars most costly and pointless efforts. It was just taken for granted. The more formal literature of war reflects a similar dynamic, as writers from Homer onward have labored both in spite of and because of wars resistance to representation. . How did you become interested in writing a whole book on the wars death toll and its social consequences? LEACH: How did it influence you as you grew up? . Putting issues of race and inequality front and center in the American present meant putting them front and center in the American past as well. 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. Diaries, letters, and business records furnished a superb record of Hammonds rise from near poverty to social success as a politician and the master of a large plantation. She had followed Lawrence H. Summers, who was forced out for saying that "intrinsic" gender differences accounted for the lack of women in science. It is not just Civil War soldiers, of course, for whom telling the story, depicting the scene, was a challenging imperative. I think back to the Emancipation Proclamation and how it welcomed black soldiers into the military. The language of war made Americans protagonists in a story they understood rather than the victims or potential victims of forces beyond their comprehension or control. "Nightly Business Report" with Susie Gharib, wp.nbr.com. 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 . We will continue to be educated in one way or another until our very last breath., Next Devotional: Ryan Gabriel, Assistant Professor of Sociology. It is such a pleasure to see you all here and offer congratulations on this day of celebration. At the end of World War II, 11 percent of students nationwide chose to major in the humanities. From across the Universitygraduate, professional, and hundreds of undergraduateswe see a remarkable enthusiasm, for example for the field of global health because it unites the power of knowledge and science with a deeply-felt desire to do good in the worldto lead lives of meaning and purpose. The Morrill Act seems to me consistent with those. Drew Gilpin Faust President, Harvard "Women in Leadership: Drew Gilpin Faust". [B]ut Peace is poor reading. Wars decide; they change rulers, governments, societies and the human beings swept up in them. I am in the unenviable role of warm-up act for one of the greatest storytellers of ouror any othertime. 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. 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. 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. Who was Hammond and what was his role in the South in the years leading up to and during the Civil War? At a time when access and affordability are more consequential than ever before, the . They began to question the sacrifices they had made. So what are our obligations when we see our fundamental purpose under siege, our reason for being discounted and undermined? This was fascinating to me as a way of expanding how one does history. It's why I cheered Drew Gilpin Faust's appointment as Harvard's 28th presidentthe first woman to hold the job in the university's 371-year history. It offered the United States the sense of intention, the goal-directedness and lure of efficacy that war promises and terrorism obliterates. Where do universities fit in this threatening mix? The economic downturn has had what is perhaps an even more worrisome impact. We entered a new world of disillusion that would yield the dark sensibility of Joseph Hellers Catch-22 at the heart of the late twentieth centurys approach to war. Drew Gilpin Faust, U.S. historian and former Harvard president, delivered Tuesdays forum address. When you were nine, you wrote a letter to the president of the United States, Dwight David Eisenhower. Well, after 11 years, Drew Gilpin Faust has now completed the job. Another would be the importance of the United States and Lincolns arguments for the United States. 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. . But the input of her brother, Donald Gilpin, a retired teacher of English and drama, sparked both memories and insights. 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. Will its celebratory mood and mode acknowledge what Frederick Douglass declared he would never forget: the difference between those who fought for liberty and those who fought for slavery? overridebuttonBgColor= https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/books/review/Faust-t.html. And yet. 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.. But here were slaves clearly affirming long and deeply held family ties. War is nasty; war is fun, OBrien has written. And we must do still more. the nobler impulses . President Drew Faust of Harvard University is this years Jefferson Lecturer, the fortieth recipient of this honor, the highest award in the humanities bestowed by the United States government. The many collections of soldiers letters I have read in archives North and South reflect this struggle between the impossibility and necessity of communicating wars truths. She's retiring as president of the university, and the Library of Congress is announcing today that she has also won the. May we and the students we send forth today embrace it. 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. She has changed the questions and pushed the story in new directions. So, I had a very special version of the Civil War story told to me when I was little. Harvard has not just survived these challenges, but has helped to confront them. Prevailing discourse emphasises the university as a paramount player in a global system increasingly driven by knowledge, information and ideas. Goldin and Katz demonstrate how this slowdown is creating a work force with inadequate technological abilities, as well as contributing to rising levels of American inequality. [32], Faust was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1988 and treated that year. realizing . On Friday, she came to Girls High to tell students they can do anything. 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 . The arguments over the interpretations of this history were captivating as well. In the late nineteenth century, sectional reconciliation had been achieved by abandoning the wars emancipationist legacy and relegating black Americans to the second-class citizenship of segregation and Jim Crow. And those might, for example, be demographic. Such a widespread perception of the value of universities derives in no small part from very pragmatic realities: a college education yields significant rewards. After a battle, we are so often told by soldiers from the lowliest recruit to General Grant himself, it would be possible to walk across the clearing in any direction, stepping only on dead bodies without a foot touching the ground. Or equally unforgettable in the manner it communicates horror without ever actually naming or grappling with it: the image most famously offered by Whitman but repeated and remembered by nearly every soldier who witnessed it the scene of a surgeon toiling with saw and knife at a field hospital, surrounded by amputated limbs, feet, legs, arms, hands, etc. piled in a heap at his side. People have been trying to answer that for over a hundred years. Education has been central to the American Dream since the time of the nations founding. Yet what we would regard as the extraordinary incongruity of their motivation and presence only underscores wars fascination. overrideCardHideSection=false Dr. Faust took In announcing the policy, Faust said, "Education is the engine that makes American democracy work. And it has to work and that means people have to have access. If 620,000 Americans diedand that was the equivalent of 2 percent of the population or six million Americans todayno wonder they were so preoccupied with death. 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.. Even the battlefield looks different. In 2009, however, she instituted layoffs and pay freezes after Harvards endowment suffered a major loss during the global financial crisis. 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. But humans are unique in their creation of an institution of war that is designed to organize violence, define its purposes, declare its onset, ratify its conclusion and establish its rules. Humility. overridebuttonBgColor= . And we realized that all of us had parents who served in World War II. Drew Faust Director Since: July 2018 Goldman Sachs Committees: Compensation, Governance, Public Responsibilities Other Current U.S.-Listed Public Company Directorships: None Other U.S.-Listed Public Company Directorships within past 5 years: Staples, Inc. Key Experience and Qualifications The questions we choose to ask and the research we decide to support; the standards of integrity we expect of our colleagues and students; the community we build and the model we offer: All of this is central to who we are. But arrive they did. At this time there was a belief that slaves had no sense of family because it had been destroyed by the oppressions of slavery. 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