Greetings alumni, graduates, families, and friends. The Battle of Antietam, fought on September 17, 1862, had been of even greater significance in the war than either first or second Bull Run. realizing . We seek to educate people, not just minds; our highest aspiration is not just knowledge, but wisdom. Drew Gilpin Faust Image credit: National Endowment for the Humanities. Even the battlefield looks different. 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. 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. 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. 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? Education. Have universities become too captive to the immediate and worldly purposes they serve? Byrd was the person who championed the notion of massive resistance. Rather than integrate in response to Brown v. Board of Ed., he proclaimed that Virginia should close its public schools. How is it that the human has become so entangled with the inhumane? Moreover, many students around the world simply cannot access universities. 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. Facing Widener stands Memorial Church. It was just taken for granted. doubting . She also added, "I'm not the woman president of Harvard, I'm the president of Harvard."[3]. For this distinction, her remarkable career should be recognized and studied as a story of ambitious and graceful achievement. The move reduced the use of irrigation water by 30%, made Harvard Yard greener, and improved the health of the campus orchard. 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. 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. ", 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. A surprising expression of this point of view came in March, when, after a forty-year absence, ROTC was welcomed back onto campus. But at this moment in our history, universities might well ask if they have in fact done enough to raise the deep and unsettling questions necessary to any society. Universities, and especially the humanities, are vital to the very survival of our civilization. Report scam, The National Endowment for the Humanities, State and Jurisdictional Humanities Councils, Chronicling America: History American Newspapers. [8] Faust also has New England ancestry and is a descendant of Jonathan Edwards, the third president of Princeton. 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. 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. They have now reached nearly 60 percent. Anyone can read what you share. War is not random, shapeless violence. 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? Knowledge is replacing other resources as the main engine of economic growth, and . 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. [26], In December 2010, Faust and Stanford University president John L. Hennessy co-wrote an editorial in support of passage of the DREAM Act. But what will they understand of war? When you were nine, you wrote a letter to the president of the United States, Dwight David Eisenhower. They conflict, he argues, with other parts of the multiversitys mission, with . 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. Those are two pieces of advice that 1,702 first-year students heard this week as they started. 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. We will continue to be educated in one way or another until our very last breath., Next Devotional: Ryan Gabriel, Assistant Professor of Sociology. "Nightly Business Report" with Susie Gharib, wp.nbr.com. In 2014, she was ranked by Forbes as the 33rd most powerful woman in the world. But one has the sense you continued thinking about your Southern heritage through your chosen field of study. overrideCardHideDescription=false The protagonist Kien has survived the conflict and finds himself all but overwhelmed with the need to write about it even against his will. The search for understanding compels language even as it rejects it. No, No, No, a thousand times No!, The life and work of Faust can seem paradoxical in certain lights. She's retiring as president of the university, and the Library of Congress is announcing today that she has also won the. [they] stretched along, in one straight line, ready for interment, at least a thousand blackened bloated corpses with blood and gas protruding from every orifice, and maggots holding high carnival over their heads. Faust showed with careful realism how mass death in the Civil War forced Americans not only to cope, as she puts it in chapter headings, with dying . She has enjoyed good health since then. Like any good story, it offers the promise and gratification that accompany a resolution of the plot. 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. Faust's book is an illuminating study of the American struggle to comprehend the meaning and practicalities of death in the face of the unprecedented carnage of the Civil War. Our narratives are not just modeled from war; they become models for war. My older brother became a Civil War aficionado and collected stuff. Drew Faust. 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. 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. FAUST: What has always interested me most about history is trying to understand how people see their own world. One bag of trash was created. Now, it may surprise some of you to hear that this is not an uncontroversial assertion. "[15] The new policy expanded on earlier programs that eliminated contributions for families earning less than $60,000 a year and greatly reduced costs for families earning less than $100,000. There were a lot of very powerful, influential historians who were studying the South, and that was intriguing. A liberal arts education is designed to equip students for just such flexibility and imagination. Want to read all 3 pages? They will in these myriad details get history just right. [30] They have a daughter, Jessica Rosenberg, who is a Harvard graduate and works for The New Yorker. They began to question the sacrifices they had made. FAUST: When I began studying history at Bryn Mawr, it was a very traditional history curriculum in which wide preparation in European history was required. As we continue to be lured by war, we must be committed to convey its horrors. How can I picture it all? Homer demanded in the Iliad. 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. 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. In the era of economic constraint before us, the pressure toward vocational pursuits is likely only to intensify. Lincoln is off the heal a nation, a noble goal he will not live to see realized" (O'Reilly 24-25). believing . Her tenure was approved, he told her, providing one more reason to celebrate a day already rich with new beginnings. She spoke on humilitys role in the work of becoming educated. Hope. As extraordinary as these times may seem to us, Harvard reminds us we have been here before. 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. 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. 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. Telling War Stories: Reflections of aCivil War Historian. 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. 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 . 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." We must support and sustain fact and reason beyond our walls as well. Higher education is not about results in the next quarter but about discoveries that may take and last decades or even centuries. 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. Her studies have resulted in several books notable for their original thought and thoroughgoing research. It is indeed striking how often the language of altitude is used by those describing the allure of war: it will lift, elevate, raise us towards the transcendent, and link us to the sublime, a word often repeated in nineteenth century paeans to war. 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. Universities do not just store facts; they teach us how to evaluate, test, challenge, and refine them. And the opening of citizenship to individuals who had been excluded from it. Truth cannot simply be claimed; it must be establishedeven when that process is uncomfortable. It challenges us as it has long challenged the humanities to take it on. Yet still we try. Values were an integral part of the defining purpose of the early years of Harvard College, created to educate a learned ministry. Where do universities fit in this threatening mix? We must acknowledge both its horror and its attraction if we hope to understand the contradictions in its impact and presence in human lives. 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. As late as the 1920s, enrollments in the United States stood below 5 percent of the college-age population. . . Fivescore years ago, he declared, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. King here invoked two of Lincolns most famous utterances, both issued, as he noted, just a hundred years before. 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? 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