Shelby Foote used the word crossroads to describe the Civil War. The school adopted a motto that has a double meaning: "Learn to change the world." And when Lincoln articulated that, he was able to mobilize the North to fight an expensive and devastating 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. Faust told a story about one of the graduate schools at Harvard. As late as the 1920s, enrollments in the United States stood below 5 percent of the college-age population. She published a book about Americans attitudes towards death in the nineteenth century in an attempt to understand the effect of the Civil War and other tragedies to follow on that topic. As I thought about the six million analogous number, I couldnt imagine how our society today could deal with that. Nevertheless, my assignment is to offer a few reflections on this magnificent institution at this moment in its history. This was a dramatic victory for the Confederates, gained as Union troops charged futilely up Maryes forbidding Heights in one of the wars most costly and pointless efforts. She has enjoyed good health since then. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. 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. 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. A year later, she entered graduate school in history and American civilization at the University of Pennsylvania, and achieved her PhD in 1975 at the tender age of 27. 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. . Workforce and Employment. 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? Drew Gilpin Faust President (2007-2018), Harvard University 1968, BA, Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania; 1971, MA, and 1975, PhD, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. . 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. President Drew Faust of Harvard University is this years Jefferson Lecturer, the fortieth recipient of this honor, the highest award in the humanities bestowed by the United States government. When the smoke lifted after the bombardment of Fort Sumter in April 1861, southerners hailed the "bloodless victory" that had yielded the federal fort into Confederate hands without the loss of a single human life. She's retiring as president of the university, and the Library of Congress is announcing today that she has also won the. Our editors will review what youve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. 801-422-4511, Humility, Hope, and the Work of Becoming Educated | Drew Gilpin Faust | 2021. Keegan insisted on allowing the combatants to speak for themselves. The Civil War has proved a rich context in which to pursue such a strategy, for the broad literacy of the American population generated tens, likely hundreds, of thousands of soldiers letters sent home from battlefields from Bull Run to Petersburg and carefully cherished and preserved by their recipients. She also added, "I'm not the woman president of Harvard, I'm the president of Harvard."[3]. are 74 percent higher than for workers who possess only a high school diploma. Wars are indeed turning points both in individual lives and in national histories. The arguments over the interpretations of this history were captivating as well. And David Donald taught at Hopkins before he came to Harvard. We must model this commitment for our students, as we educate them to embrace these principlesin their work here and in the lives they will lead as citizens and leaders of national and international life. Faust joined Dean Michelle Williams in the Voices in Leadership studio to candidly discuss the challenges and opportunities they have seen in higher education, national activism, and global health. 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. FAUST: Stamina, curiosity about a wide range of intellectual fields and about a wide range of people. For Kovic, as for so many men through the ages, war and manhood became inextricably intertwined; war stories still serve as instructional manuals for becoming a man. Above all, in this book, Faust achieved a rare kind of historical writing: unforgettable descriptions of what we have not wanted to see in this story, intertwined with an interpretation of death on such a scale that in its incomprehensibility the Civil War generation experienced a loss of historical innocence from which each generation might learn anew, if only they face it. 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. 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. No, No, No, a thousand times No!, The life and work of Faust can seem paradoxical in certain lights. As we have sought through the centuries to define ourselves as human beings and as nations through the prisms of history and literature, no small part of that effort has drawn us to war. 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. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against racial segregation of the schools. The legislation was not passed by the 111th United States Congress. Faust showed the death of the soldiers, and the effect that the war . I would say also that what I just described as enormous variety and range also means that you have many, many constituencies. She also suggested a bold interpretation of why the Confederacy lost the war. Yet even as they described the impossibility of their task and the ineffability of war, each of these witnesses to war set about to write, to use language where none could be found, to employ words to decry those words very inadequacy. Sometimes it is just beyond telling.. We must make it our work to tell a true war 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. 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. [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. Drew Gilpin Faust President, Harvard University. In South Carolina, this was tied up with the defense of slavery. Where do universities fit in this threatening mix? A dissertation on a circle of antebellum Southern intellectuals led to her doctorate and a book, A Sacred Circle. the nobler impulses . from froth-corrupted lungs, the dying flung into wagons, the living left lame and blind. I also am very conscious of what General David Petraeus articulated here in a commissioning ceremony for the ROTC cadets a couple of years ago, which is that a soldiers most important weapon is ideas. The Obama administration has set a goal of devoting more than 3 percent of gross domestic product to research. [29], Faust is married to Charles E. Rosenberg, a historian of medicine at Harvard. Faust emphasized that our commitment to education can not only better ourselves, but our world at large. And what a moment it is. Derek Bok, who had served as president of Harvard from 1971 to 1991, returned to serve as an interim president during the 20062007 academic year. What does mourning mean when it is so all-pervasive? She has changed the questions and pushed the story in new directions. Rather than ungraspable odd defenders of the twin evils of slavery and white supremacy alone, the myriad writers who fashioned an elaborate justification of slavery in the antebellum era were believers in an organically conservative, hierarchical worldview, manipulating the Bible, but also a theory of history and human nature to defend racial slavery as a vision of social order. What can we do? "All of us are stewards of this remarkable place," she said on Oct. 28 at a Medical School faculty meeting. burying . 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. Humility, Hope, and the Work of Becoming Educated | Drew Gilpin Faust | 2021 2,836 views Mar 30, 2021 114 Dislike Share BYU Speeches 117K subscribers Using lessons from America's history,. Escalating college costs have played a significant role in this slowdown, even as universities have substantially expanded their programs of financial aid. 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