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. 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. During the punishing years of the Civil War, Faust chronicled how women of the South went from self-denying to self-preserving, with their allegiances shifting from the aims of Confederate army to the safety of their families. For this mornings ceremony I wore the traditional Harvard presidential robestyled on the garment of a Puritan minister and reminding us of Harvards origins. Higher learning can offer individuals and societies a depth and breadth of vision absent from the inevitably myopic present. 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. Who was Hammond and what was his role in the South in the years leading up to and during the Civil War? 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. C. Vann Woodward was at Hopkins before he ended up at Yale. 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. . They have now reached nearly 60 percent. FAUST: I felt very much that I lived in historyin a couple of different ways. It has reinforced Americas deep-seated notion that a college degree serves largely instrumental purposes. Part of this is the result of the extensive work historians have undertaken since the 1960s. Scam Advisory: Recent reports indicate that individuals are posing as the NEH on email and social media. 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. May we and the students we send forth today embrace it. FAUST: I loved writing that biography of Hammond because he wrote down everything he did. 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. Education. First we must maintain an unwavering dedication to rigorous assessment and debate within our own walls. The Obama administration has set a goal of devoting more than 3 percent of gross domestic product to research. 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]. We are gathered today in Tercentenary Theatre, with Widener Library and Memorial Church standing before and behind us, enduring symbols of Harvards larger identity and purposes, testaments to what universities do and believe at a time when we have never needed them more. 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. Drew Faust. A number of these festival rites took place under clouds of war; others in times of financial crisis and despair; still others in face of epidemicsfrom smallpox in the 17th century to the devastating flu of 1918 to the H1N1 virus just a few years ago. She broadened the University's international reach, [] Like any good story, it offers the promise and gratification that accompany a resolution of the plot. 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. The Morrill Act seems to me consistent with those. December 26, 2011. Sometimes it is just beyond telling.. 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. Knowledge is replacing other resources as the main engine of economic growth, and . 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. 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 . As the political philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain has put it, War imitates narratives imitating war. John Keegan, who for twenty six years served as an instructor at the British Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, has offered an example central to historical writing in his description of the battle piece. This highly conventionalized, heroic account of combat has shaped not just the rhetoric and assumptions of military history, but more powerfully and more dangerously, the understanding and seduction of war itself. As Robert Sutton, the National Park Services chief historian, has insisted that the nations historic sites emphasize that slavery is the principal cause of the war, he has encountered widespread resistance and controversy. 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. (1971) and Ph.D. (1975) degrees in American civilization from the University of Pennsylvania, where she joined the faculty as an assistant professor in 1976. [29], Faust is married to Charles E. Rosenberg, a historian of medicine at Harvard. 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. 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. gargling . He lived in Clarke County, as we did, and he was very much a presence. By Drew Gilpin Faust. There is no algorithm that writes itself. Or as early 20th-century civil rights activist Nannie Helen Burroughs put it, education is democracys life insurance.. overrideTextAlignment= Stories of war are infused with the aura of the consequential. But the input of her brother, Donald Gilpin, a retired teacher of English and drama, sparked both memories and insights. 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? We must support and sustain fact and reason beyond our walls as well. That would be an extremely important theme. And it seems to me very important that the education that Harvard has to offer be something that individuals in the military are able to experience and are encouraged to experience. I wrote a senior thesis on American foreign policy, which I was very interested in, it being the Vietnam era. A nation with a black president contrasts significantly with the nation that in 1961 still denied millions of black southerners the franchise. Those years in the early 1960s were not just a historic anniversary but themselves a time of history making. It attained a scale that shocks and horrifies a scale of drama and a scale of death that prefigured the slaughter of the century that followed. But that seeming incongruity simply reinforces the centrality of paradox to any understanding of war. . FAUST: What has always interested me most about history is trying to understand how people see their own world. 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. You cant tell where you are, or why youre there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity. 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. We love war because of these stories. The statistics Faust cited paint a fairly grim portrait of the humanities' declining prestige. 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. Read More. The University's Crisis of Purpose. 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. Humility. My older brother became a Civil War aficionado and collected stuff. As we continue to be lured by war, we must be committed to convey its horrors. 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. Friday, March 3, through Sunday, March 12. But neither our minds nor those of the thousands of observers and reenactors around us were focused on such matters. Harvard and the world. Yet it has hardly reduced the salience of persisting differences in understanding. We have been telling and hearing and reading war stories for millennia. Drew Gilpin Faust Image credit: National Endowment for the Humanities. Her point of view is extremely interesting [17]: "Higher learning can offer individuals and societies a depth and breadth of vision. [Ms. Faust, the new president of Harvard, is a Civil War historian by training.] Passing through our county in Virginias Shenandoah Valley, we headed towards Charles Town, West Virginia, then crossed over the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers at Harpers Ferry into Maryland. It is war stories like these that lure the toiling clerk in city grey to volunteer in anticipation of the grandeur of another Agincourt we few, we happy few and then to experience instead the reality of the Somme. 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. No, No, No, a thousand times No!, The life and work of Faust can seem paradoxical in certain lights. In 1957, nine-year-old Faust, of her own initiative, wrote to President Eisenhower to let him know her feelings on the matter: Please Mr. Eisenhower, please try and have schools and other things accept colored people.. If you were to pick out one or two thematic perspectives that we should all come together as a people to think about the Civil War, what would you suggest? It was fought on our own soil, in places with familiar names and by people who seem not so unlike us. Lincoln rendered the United States as the last best hope of earth at a time when democracies around the world were struggling and it looked like that form of government might not survive. 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. In myriad ways we challenge our students to be individuals of character as well as of learning. . The biography grew out of my first book, which was a study of a group of intellectuals who wrote defenses of slavery. One of the most striking aspects of the Civil War in my mind is why the North fought. [12] Faust was the first woman to serve as president of Harvard University.[13]. Its fascination lies in its ability at once to allure and repel, in the paradox that thrives at its heart. We might even say that the humanities began with war and from war and have remained entwined with it ever since. A sense of ignorance fuels the desire to overcome it, she said. 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. This model now faces significant challenges. There wasnt a vivid discourse of race. We look at Widener Library and see a great edifice, a backdrop of giant columns where photos are taken and 27 steps are worn down ever so slightly by the feet of a century of students and scholars. 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. It groups the maximum of material and speeds up the action and brings out all sorts of stuff that normally you have to wait a lifetime to get. Hemingways description of why war is the best subject is a striking, though almost certainly unwitting, invocation of the dramatic structures Aristotles Poetics so long ago defined the unity of time, action and place that, in intensifying and containing experience, refashions it as literature. This was fascinating to me as a way of expanding how one does history. And yet. Should universities have presented a firmer counterweight to economic irresponsibility? History is iterative and interactive which, happily, is why there will always remain new inexhaustible work for historians. Hope. overrideCardHideSection=false Even the battlefield looks different. It is about learning that molds a lifetime, learning that transmits the heritage of millennia; learning that shapes the future. Universities, and especially the humanities, are vital to the very survival of our civilization. The school adopted a motto that has a double meaning: "Learn to change the world." Is your emphasis on the original word, or is the emphasis on the context in which the word is made? In his famous speech, The Soldiers Faith, the Civil War veteran and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., confidently announced in 1895: It is our business to fight, the book of the army is a war-song, not a hospital-sketch. Not so, argued Faust: Before singing a war song, we might first listen to a Union surgeons description of the fields at Antietam a week after the battle: The dead were almost wholly unburied . 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. 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. But what will they understand of war? The federal governments intervention was seen as very threatening to that sense of local control. 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 Drew Gilpin Faust, the president of Harvard, you can trace the roots of her life as a leader back to her childhood in rural Virginia. It is such a pleasure to see you all here and offer congratulations on this day of celebration. How is it that the human has become so entangled with the inhumane? 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. 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. Implicit in President George W. Bushs proclamation of a war on terror, moreover, was the reassurance that terrorism could be defeated, eliminated, that it need not be a permanent condition of modern life. She has enjoyed good health since then. which else had remained torpid in our souls. Historian Francis Parkman of Boston believed that war would renew and purify the nation, liberating it from its growing preoccupation with material success. The Richmond Enquirer saw in war an offer of the joys of patriotism and brotherhood, the spirit of self-sacrifice, the demise of selfishness and the ecstasy of martyrdom. It is well that war is so terrible, Lee observed, else we should grow too fond of it. Lees ambivalence, his complexity, his capacity for irony are in one sense surprising here, for he has been extolled and is best remembered as the wars romantic hero, a man of decisiveness and little doubt. What can we do? A vehicle for Veritasfor exploring the path to truth wherever it may lead. Faust focused her speech more broadly on the purpose . Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., wounded three times in the Civil War, called his experience incommunicable. Soldiers on both sides of the conflict would have agreed. Yet what we would regard as the extraordinary incongruity of their motivation and presence only underscores wars fascination. ASB C-347 In reaction, Fausts neighbor, U.S. What must we do? And it was an issue I was confronted with even before I became president. 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. Four days after retiring from her position as president, she joined the board of Goldman Sachs. 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 prose both clear and beautiful, she has brought some of our darker side into the light. As a British soldier wrote of Gallipoli, It was a horrible day and a great day. She had followed Lawrence H. Summers, who was forced out for saying that "intrinsic" gender differences accounted for the lack of women in science. And that led me, after I finished my PhD, with a yearlong grant from the Social Science Research Council, to study anthropology and to explore what anthropologists call worldview.. She was the first woman to hold the office and the first president since the 17th century who did not have a Harvard degree. History. I was fascinated by how anybody could do such a thing and the bases on which they justified this to themselves and how they came to see the world in this way. 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. . War stories matter. 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 English Word. overrideCardHideDescription=false What should we do? She is the author, most recently, of "This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War." End of preview. Steep federal deficits will combine with diminished university resources to intensify what a 2007 report by the National Academies declared to be a gathering storm, one that threatened the future of scientific education and research in America. This article was most recently revised and updated by, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Drew-Gilpin-Faust, Harvard University - Biography of Drew Gilpin Faust. For a young woman historian of her native region, these subjects were hardly the comfort zones of Southern history. Her father was a Princeton graduate and breeder of thoroughbred horses. So, he was an individual who had great respect for learning. We as writers create that story; we remember that story. 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. [8] Faust also has New England ancestry and is a descendant of Jonathan Edwards, the third president of Princeton. Gilpin grew up in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, where her parents raised Thoroughbred horses. 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." So often, I have found, men describe themselves as beyond feeling or comprehension, numbed by their experience, yet nevertheless seeking a means to convey its significance and impact. Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust will step down next June, capping what will be an 11-year tenure at one of the most prestigious universities in the world.. Ms. Faust is the first . 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. And we must do still more. It established a newly powerful and centralized nation-state and launched it on a trajectory of economic expansion and world influence. burying . Drew Gilpin Faust President, Harvard "Women in Leadership: Drew Gilpin Faust". Will we in this historic sesquicentennial to be observed at a time when Americans are involved in real conflicts in three sites across the globe forget what a heavy responsibility rests on those who seek to tell the stories of war? But if we think of our own Civil War example, its four-year duration less than two percent of our national history is certainly disproportionate to the volume of both literary and historical writing it has generated. Every war is ironic, Paul Fussell wrote in his brilliant study of the First World War, because every war is worse than expected.. When Marine recruiters marched in perfect step into his high school auditorium, it was for Kovic, like all the movies and all the books and all the dreams of becoming a hero come true. He returned from Vietnam paralyzed from the waist down by a severed spinal cord, bitter about a war so different from the myth we had grown up believing, victim of a shattered body and even more shattered illusions. Learning is a result of the understanding that there is always more that we do not know. LEACH: Let me ask you about James Henry Hammond, about whom you wrote a biography. 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