That army was not simply destroyed through death and disease, but also through all those men who seemed to disappear back into the hillsides. 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. As we continue to be lured by war, we must be committed to convey its horrors. Even as universities, both public and private, face unanticipated financial constraints, the president has called on them to assist in solving problems from health care delivery to climate change to economic recovery. Values were an integral part of the defining purpose of the early years of Harvard College, created to educate a learned ministry. FAUST: Well, he was a person for whom education was so important. 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.. This too has shaped a new approach to our past. 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. 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. Related Speeches. And in the past decade and a half, such conflicting and unbounded expectations have yielded a wave of criticism on issues ranging from the cost of college to universities intellectual quality to their supposed decline into unthinking political correctness. Drew Faust. Education is an essential prerequisite for full membership in that community. Widener and Memorial Church. . Drew Gilpin Faust President (2007-2018), Harvard University 1968, BA, Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania; 1971, MA, and 1975, PhD, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. 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 conflicts overwhelming scale of death and suffering. Their notion of war as sublime was clearly rooted in the nineteenth centurys romanticism. Climate change poses a call to Christian action, said climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe in Tuesdays forum on campus. Have universities become too captive to the immediate and worldly purposes they serve? Faust served as an officer of the American Historical Association and the Southern Historical Association, a board member of the Society of American Historians and the Organization of American Historians, and a judge for the Pulitzer Prize in history. . 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. In July of 1862 he signed the Morrill Act, which established land-grant colleges, with the implication that even in wartime we needed to expand educational opportunity for American citizens. She was ranked by Forbes in 2014 as the 33rd most powerful woman in the world. The University's Crisis of Purpose. This was fascinating to me as a way of expanding how one does history. And there was Harry Byrd, who was not just our senator, but really our neighbor. Faust is one of the world's leading historians on gender issues in 19th century America. 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 focused her speech more broadly on the purpose . Responding to terrorism with war replaced the specter and fear of mass murder with a hope for the controlled, ordered force of war. There is no clarity. The arguments over the interpretations of this history were captivating as well. . 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? She spoke on humilitys role in the work of becoming educated. 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. Part of this is the result of the extensive work historians have undertaken since the 1960s. But here were slaves clearly affirming long and deeply held family ties. People have been trying to answer that for over a hundred years. It was an all-American war of brother against brother as it is so often put. The first masterwork of Western literature, dating to approximately 750 BCE, was the Iliad, a tale that exerts a wrenching power more than two millennia after its origin. . As I thought about the six million analogous number, I couldnt imagine how our society today could deal with that. 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. And I could see things that Hammond himself probably never saw. Faust is widely known today as an important American firstthe first woman president of Harvard University. Is your emphasis on the original word, or is the emphasis on the context in which the word is made? And were proud of the role it and you have played in helping insure that America leads the world in almost every academic discipline. overridebuttonBgColor= . 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. But today, for all its importance to individual and social prosperity, higher education threatens to become less broadly available. 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. We produce a ready stream of evidence and insights, many with potential to create a better world. Drew Gilpin Faust - The ability to recognize opportunities. Memory and history focused on battles, glory and sacrifice, with still divisive issues of race pushed largely aside in deference to white southern custom and sentiment. A number of inaugural veterans - both orators and auditors - have proffered advice, including unanimous agreement. In July 2007 Faust became the 28th president of Harvard University. In reaction, Fausts neighbor, U.S. [25], Faust championed organic lawn management of the campus grounds and Harvard Yard during her tenure, including adopting the practices at Elmwood, the presidents house on Brattle Street. Faust, 67, was born in New York and grew up in Clarke County in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. 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. The author Drew Gilpin Faust wanted to show the world a side of the war that Americans have never seen in details. . These battlefield tourists earned the scorn and resentment of the wounded and of those struggling to provide aid amidst the desolation. And yet. LEACH: The American university is the hallmark of our land, Harvard being our emblematic institution. 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. 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 . But that seeming incongruity simply reinforces the centrality of paradox to any understanding of war. This spirit animates not just global health but so much of all we do. 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. She's retiring as president of the university, and the Library of Congress is announcing today that she has also won the. So, too, have declining levels of government support. And yet. And thats what sent me off into this set of inquiries. Escalating college costs have played a significant role in this slowdown, even as universities have substantially expanded their programs of financial aid. 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. And that gave me a new perspective on what it must have meant in American society in the 1860s. How is it that the human has become so entangled with the inhumane? Will the reenactors tell only an old battle piece of courage and glory and how sweet and proper it is to die? We as writers create that story; we remember that story. Jeffrey R. Holland March 8, 1977. 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. Moreover, many students around the world simply cannot access universities. 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. Drew Gilpin Faust is president of Harvard. Even as . The discussion and debate that surrounded that were very much in the air of my childhood. 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. They have now reached nearly 60 percent. And theres an oft-cited assumption that education may be the civil rights issue of this century. The Civil War centennial occurred in the midst of challenges and changes nearly as dramatic as the war itself. She succeeded Lawrence H. Summers, who resigned in the wake of controversy over remarks that attributed womens lack of visibility in the sciences to intrinsic sex differences. As I was attending at Antietam a rendering of the past that divorced it from history, a quite different battle was raging in Washington, just seventy miles away, over the celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation scheduled to take place at the Lincoln Memorial the following week. This article was most recently revised and updated by, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Drew-Gilpin-Faust, Harvard University - Biography of Drew Gilpin Faust. Some might see the connection of war with human creativity as the inevitable outcome of the prevalence of war in human experience. Drew Gilpin Faust President, Harvard University. She is also the Lincoln Professor of History at Harvard. And then, after college, I was uncertain what I wanted to do and worked for a couple of years for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. 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. For this mornings ceremony I wore the traditional Harvard presidential robestyled on the garment of a Puritan minister and reminding us of Harvards origins. As extraordinary as these times may seem to us, Harvard reminds us we have been here before. 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