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. Drew Gilpin Faust, the president of Harvard University, talks about leading the institution through a decade of change, from the financial crisis to the Trump era. [21], In the wake of a series of layoffs in June 2009, Faust was criticized for refusing to accept a pay cut that would have saved jobs. 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. However, I. 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. It would take a god to tell the tale. Even to write about war, Homer observes, is to reach beyond the human, towards the sacred. Harvard University president Drew Gilpin Faust, who shepherded the school through the turbulence of the economic recession and expanded its diversity, will step down in June 2018 after 11. FAUST: It began with my book on women of the Confederate South and with my engagement with their diaries and letters. The centennial commemoration of Antietam was designed to be less about remembrance than about forgetting. 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 . 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. A well-known scholar of the antebellum South and the Civil War era and, since 2007, president of Harvard University, Faust had two histories in mind. The valor and sacrifice of Gettysburg were rendered inseparable in his words as in his understanding from the wars transcendent purposes of freedom. If we can comprehend the sources and mechanisms of their blindness, perhaps we can better equip ourselves to acknowledge and confront our own.. . Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust noted in 2009 the growing dominance of economic justifications for the existence of universities, to the exclusion of its other missions, such. Drew Faust. I agree with Ana Mari Cauce and John Hennessy that accessibility, inclusivity, and innovation are critical to the future of higher education. There were a lot of very powerful, influential historians who were studying the South, and that was intriguing. Drew Gilpin Faust is president of Harvard. Responding to terrorism with war replaced the specter and fear of mass murder with a hope for the controlled, ordered force of war. Where do universities fit in this threatening mix? In New England, Henry Lee Higginson later looked back on his hopes for the conflict, evidently sustained in the experience as well as the anticipation of battle: I always did long for some such war, and it came in the nick of time for me.. After attending Bryn Mawr College -- a seven sister school and one of the few remaining women's colleges in the country -- she earned a Ph.D. in American Civilization and became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. For example, I was able to trace a childs name back two or three generations to someone in that slave line of descent who had that same name. [24] In early 2009, the Harvard Corporation approved salary freezes for the president, deans, senior officers, management staff, and faculty, and offered an early retirement program. In Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, Faust deeply researched elite white women undergoing the brutal travail of war, revolution, and loss. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008) assesses the lasting impact of civil war fatalities on American attitudes toward death. Also, if you look at the Civil War, it was a time when the American government was able to establish a number of forward-looking policies that strengthened the nation. The biography grew out of my first book, which was a study of a group of intellectuals who wrote defenses of slavery. Some might see the connection of war with human creativity as the inevitable outcome of the prevalence of war in human experience. As two of the university's most prominent female leaders, they also agreed on the power of example and on the importance of inclusive leadership. Why choose war? 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. It challenges us as it has long challenged the humanities to take it on. 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. This model now faces significant challenges. . That was a significant driver in this decision as well. And today we send thousands of youdoctors, lawyers, teachers, artists, philosophers, business people, epidemiologists, public servantsinto the world. History. Her father was a Princeton graduate and breeder of thoroughbred horses. For the common soldier, OBrien writes, war has the feel the spiritual texture of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. 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. 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. overrideButtonText= . We dont just write about wars because, like Mount Everest, they are there. Each of which has important messages to deliver to you and important things they want from you. Our route was in fact not very different from the one both Jackson and A.P. Catherine Drew Gilpin Faust (born September 18, 1947) is an American historian, college administrator, and the president of Harvard University. We had many of those: the old mill in Millwood from the eighteenth century; Carter Hall, up on the hill that we had known had been an important outpost of the Carter family from the Tidewater. We have been telling and hearing and reading war stories for millennia. Faust is widely known today as an important American firstthe first woman president of Harvard University. 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. The growing force of black voices in the 1960s and the reinsertion of race into national discourse and the national agenda necessarily challenged the prevailing narrative of the war. She supervised a major campus expansion in nearby Boston, assessment and expansion of the role of the arts in the university, and continuation of work on a substantial revision of the undergraduate curriculum. First was the history of the Civil War. Higher learning can offer individuals and societies a depth and breadth of vision absent from the inevitably myopic present. The army and the military services were integrated into American life in a way they no longer are. By Drew Gilpin Faust. More than twenty-six centuries later, contemplating Americas Civil War, Herman Melville concurred, None can narrate that strife. Yet both chose nonetheless to write, to find words to convey wars meaning, seeing in its impossibility the attraction of its necessity. Evidence, reason, facts, logic, an understanding of history and of science. 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. . Faust focused her speech more broadly on the purpose . She has also written books about the effects of the war on Southern womanhood and about the lives and culture of slaverys apologists in the antebellum South. 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. I wrote a senior thesis on American foreign policy, which I was very interested in, it being the Vietnam era. 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. 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. 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. But from the time he was much smaller he had us playing Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be six million. For this mornings ceremony I wore the traditional Harvard presidential robestyled on the garment of a Puritan minister and reminding us of Harvards origins. Moreover, many students around the world simply cannot access universities. 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 former dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Faust is also . And he had to struggle so hard to get access to it and to teach himself in large measure. Drew Gilpin Faust [1]In 2007 American scholar Drew Gilpin Faust [2] (born 1947) . Having a completely different subject occupy each consecutive hour of my day on many occasions is a wonder and a thrill. She is the author, most recently, of "This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War." End of preview. We produce a ready stream of evidence and insights, many with potential to create a better world. [11] Following formal approval by the university's governing boards, her appointment was made official three days later. War is not random, shapeless violence. And he was always Lee, so I had to be Grant. We will continue to be educated in one way or another until our very last breath., Next Devotional: Ryan Gabriel, Assistant Professor of Sociology. Drew Gilpin Faust: Thank you, Percy. Despite the creation of the task-force committees, whose goals were to hire and promote more women in the sciences, Summers was forced to resign in early 2006, effective June 30 of that year. Will this reenactment do any more to acknowledge the wars purposes and politics and their continuing significance than did the reenactments of fifty years ago? LEACH: With our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan today, we seem to be learning again that sometimes its harder to end a war than to start one. Catharine Drew Gilpin Faust (born September 18, 1947)[1] is an American historian and was the 28th president of Harvard University, the first woman to serve in that role. When you were nine, you wrote a letter to the president of the United States, Dwight David Eisenhower. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. Its fascination lies in its ability at once to allure and repel, in the paradox that thrives at its heart. And it also emphasizes the kinds of pedagogical innovation that are a necessary part of adapting to the world that has been transformed in the ways I have described. If one considers any period of 100 years in the last 5,000, an average of 94 of those years would have witnessed a large-scale conflict in some area of the world. I felt the biography would offer important insights into some of the most important dimensions of that antebellum Southern culture. In and around Boyce, where she grew up in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, roads were marked by Confederate-gray signs for the many Civil War historic sites nearby, such as Cedar Creek, a few miles to the south and Winchester a few miles north. Wars are indeed turning points both in individual lives and in national histories. . According to Wikipedia, Catharine Drew Gilpin Faust is an American historian and was the 28th president of Harvard University, the first woman to serve in that role. 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. She has declined to speak with the media with more details about her diagnosis or treatment. The discussion and debate that surrounded that were very much in the air of my childhood. 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. 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. Drew Faust has fulfilled the historians highest calling in telling us difficult stories through masterful and innovative uses of evidence. Higher education is not about results in the next quarter but about discoveries that may take and last decades or even centuries. Even a war story that focuses on the seemingly trivial and mundane uses the weight of wars meaning to imbue the smallest detail with extraordinary import. Widener and Memorial Church. numbering . What should we do? . Drew Gilpin Faust - The ability to recognize opportunities. And how they create the structures of meaning and understanding that serve as the lens through which they view what is around them and the events that confront them. 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. She earned M.A. BYU University Communications 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. Built in the aftermath of World War I, it was intended to honor and memorialize responsibilitynot just the quality of men and womens thoughts, but, as my predecessor James Conant put it, the radiance of their deeds. The more than 1,100 Harvard and Radcliffe students, faculty, and alumni whose names are engraved on its walls gave their lives in service to their country, because they believed that some things had greater value than their own individual lives. We sing in our alma mater about Calm rising through change and through storm. What does that mean for todays crises? I would not have missed it for worlds.. overrideCardHideDescription=false We have learned about women left to manage plantations and farms; women in voluntary agencies; women as writers and readers; women working in factories, laundries, hospitals, and schools; slave women fleeing to Union lines or remaining to claim freedom and protect families at home. Stories of war are infused with the aura of the consequential. By Drew Gilpin Faust Illustration by Katie Martin. Most of the costumed soldiers and camp followers will have read extensively about the war; they will wear garments accurate to the last button and stitch; they will use period weapons and canteens and knapsacks, for authenticity is the watchword of the thriving reenactor culture. Yet what we would regard as the extraordinary incongruity of their motivation and presence only underscores wars fascination. LEACH: Well, you have commented elsewhere on the importance of education in the American dream. The median earnings for individuals with a B.A. September 16, 2022 I t was a good book, the student told the 14 others in the undergraduate seminar I was. But why havent we Civil War historians been equally preoccupied with death? 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. Explore a roundup of events this month, including a book talk, several musical and theatrical performances, and new art exhibition openings.Visit The U Creates for more information on the arts and humanities offerings at the University throughout the year.. Bill Cosford Cinema. LEACH: You went to prep school in Massachusetts, college at Bryn Mawr, and then graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania. It places the tradition and the principles of general education within a curriculum that is new and forward-looking. We as writers create that story; we remember that story. On the June day in 1980 when young historian Drew Gilpin Faust married fellow historian Charles Rosenberg, she received a congratulatory call from Vartan Gregorian, then provost at the University of Pennsylvania, where Faust was on faculty. The drew gilpin faust the goal of education of higher education, in the air of my first book, the student told the 14 in... 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