Catharine Drew Gilpin Faust (born September 18, 1947)[1] is an American historian and was the 28th president of Harvard University, and the first woman to serve in that role. As late as the 1920s, enrollments in the United States stood below 5 percent of the college-age population. Escalating college costs have played a significant role in this slowdown, even as universities have substantially expanded their programs of financial aid. Citizenship and military service have been very closely tied in our history. The Civil War centennial occurred in the midst of challenges and changes nearly as dramatic as the war itself. Now, it may surprise some of you to hear that this is not an uncontroversial assertion. 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. Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer. First we must maintain an unwavering dedication to rigorous assessment and debate within our own walls. Yet it has hardly reduced the salience of persisting differences in understanding. In a world divided by difference, we at Harvard strive to be united by it. At this time there was a belief that slaves had no sense of family because it had been destroyed by the oppressions of slavery. They conflict, he argues, with other parts of the multiversitys mission, with . 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. Unlike her brother, Faust did not originally intend to teach. War, like literature, is a distinctively human product. Drew Gilpin Faust is President Emerita of Harvard University and the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor. 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. Youve been a huge influence on my life, she told him at a celebratory dinner, and went on to explain. 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. As president of Harvard from 2007 to 2018, Faust expanded financial aid to improve access to Harvard College for students of all economic backgrounds and advocated for increased federal funding for scientific research. 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. Expect to Be Wrong Harvard president Drew Faust, in what will likely be her last. [B]ut Peace is poor reading. Wars decide; they change rulers, governments, societies and the human beings swept up in them. In a mode both analytical and elegiac, Faust removed the veil from a subject that has never fit into the sentimentalized Civil War demanded by many enthusiasts. And we realized that all of us had parents who served in World War II. Learning is a result of the understanding that there is always more that we do not know. Facing Widener stands Memorial Church. The seductiveness of war derives in part from its location on this boundary of the human, the inhuman and the superhuman. It requires us to confront the relationship among the noble, the horrible, and the infinite; the animal, the spiritual, and the divine. We were there for a picnic and for an exciting display of seemingly lifelike military action, a spectacle that would remind us of the courage and sacrifice we had been taught to revere since the time we were very small and first began playing Civil War with toy swords and rifles in the fields and woods that surrounded our house. Faust also cautioned against building universities that only address short-term albeit vital issues like economic development and health provisions. War is terrible and yet we love it, wrote Drew Gilpin Faust in 2004. We have a very special obligation in a very difficult time. 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. FAUST: I made an argument that womens exasperation and exhaustion in the Confederate South led them to focus increasingly on their own interests in preserving what remained of their property and their loved ones. The nation found itself once again convulsed in a struggle over the meanings of citizenship, justice and equality. Report scam, The National Endowment for the Humanities, State and Jurisdictional Humanities Councils, Chronicling America: History American Newspapers. On December 10, 2007, Faust announced a new policy for middle-class and upper-middle-class students, which limited parental contributions to 10 percent for families making between $100,000 and $180,000 annually, and replaced loans with grants. 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. 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. 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. . For Faust, it was the anxiety caused by her own expectations. Over the next several years Harvards financial situation improved as the U.S. economy recovered. 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, 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? In Tuesdays forum, Rabbi Dr. Ari Berman, president of Yeshiva University, described religious education as a potential antidote to Americas pervasive consumerism. 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. Free shipping for many products! For Gilpin, it was the paperwork. 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. He was a biographers dream. 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.. In addition, she has been a strong advocate for sustainability and has set an ambitious goal of reducing the university's greenhouse gas emissions by 2016, including those associated with prospective growth, by 30 percent below Harvard's 2006 baseline. We seek to educate people, not just minds; our highest aspiration is not just knowledge, but wisdom. LEACH: How did it influence you as you grew up? . 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. We seek to establish standards for the College community that advance our institutional purposes and values. [11] Following formal approval by the university's governing boards, her appointment was made official three days later. Many of these have been collected and published; others rest in archives; others no doubt still remain in attics North and South. He embodied principlesnot principles in terms of positive values, but characteristicsthat so reflected what he saw as the route to success in the Old South. One of the most forceful of wars attractions to its chroniclers is the very impossibility of their task. A documentary based on the book aired on PBS in 2012. Anyone can read what you share. Bill. They began to question the sacrifices they had made. 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. A longtime scholar of American history and a specialist in feminist and American Civil War studies, Faust had spent her entire career in the academic world, and her appointment to the Harvard presidency became a benchmark moment in U.S. higher education. Similar policies were subsequently adopted by Stanford, Yale, and many other private U.S. universities and colleges. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. There were a lot of very powerful, influential historians who were studying the South, and that was intriguing. Faust emphasized that our commitment to education can not only better ourselves, but our world at large. 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. 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. And significant segments of the American population, particularly in the South, continue to reject slavery as a fundamental cause of the war, even in the face of irrefutable evidence that what southerners called the peculiar institution played a critical role in secession debates, declarations, and decisions across the South. Confederates became valiant opponents rather than traitors, their cause not slavery but states rights, their loss not a failure but an exhaustion of resources that left them the proud, if defeated, underdogs. [28], In 2016, Harvard began to study its history with slavery following Faust's public acknowledgement that the school was "directly complicit in America's system of racial bondage", then had a commemorative plaque installed on campus to honor the enslaved whose labor was exploited by the institution. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008) assesses the lasting impact of civil war fatalities on American attitudes toward death. 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. War makes rattling good history, a Thomas Hardy character observes in The Dynasts. Her studies have resulted in several books notable for their original thought and thoroughgoing research. What can we do? War imposes an orderly narrative on what without its definition of purpose and structure would be simply violence. This was fascinating to me as a way of expanding how one does history. It has reinforced Americas deep-seated notion that a college degree serves largely instrumental purposes. Military deaths alone were staggering: The number of soldiers who died between 1861 and 1865, an estimated 620,000, is approximately equal to the total American fatalities in the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War combined. To bury and to memorialize, and to go on living, even after the passing of more than two percent of American society, all this required, Faust shows, a new set of norms, a sobered worldview, a familiarity with death that seems unthinkable today. Faust pointed out that learning must begin with, and be centered around, humility. 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. 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. Reason and responsibility. Neither John Henry Newman's view that the goal of the university is to cultivate "gentlemen" 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. Faust also has a stepdaughter, Leah Rosenberg. Several thousand men clad in blue and gray had assembled on the field where two major encounters of the war had been fought to perform, as a New York Times reporter described it, a dramatic rsum of the battles highlights. Perched in bleachers and grandstands or milling in an adjacent field of refreshment tents and folding chairs, an enthusiastic crowd had cheered victorious Confederates and booed fleeing Union troops, just as Virginians had hailed their predecessors a century before. And what a moment it is. 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. The tumultuous state of American politics, spotlighted in this contentious presidential contest; the political challenges around the globe from Brazil to Brexit; the Middle East in flames; a refugee crisis in Europe; terrorists exploiting new media to perform chilling acts of brutality and murder; climate-related famine in Africa and fires in Canada. But what began to become even more interesting as I moved into my graduate historical studies was one aspect of Southern history, which was the revolution in the study of slavery. 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. The battle transformed and defined the purposes of the war, for Union success propelled Lincoln into issuing his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. A productive and original scholar, Faust has also proven to be an able administrator. 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.. 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. Where do universities fit in this threatening mix? 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. 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