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. LEACH: And yet records, especially those people create for themselves, are especially important to your work, even though, as you have noted, a historian must keep in mind that when people write of their times and themselves they can be misled or misleading. 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. 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? My older brother became a Civil War aficionado and collected stuff. Hill and their troops had followed to arrive from Harpers Ferry for their critical roles in the battle. numbering . 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. Their endurance may lie in their impossibility; they can never be complete, for the tensions and contradictions within them will never be eliminated or resolved. accounting . The more formal literature of war reflects a similar dynamic, as writers from Homer onward have labored both in spite of and because of wars resistance to representation. More than twenty-six centuries later, contemplating Americas Civil War, Herman Melville concurred, None can narrate that strife. Yet both chose nonetheless to write, to find words to convey wars meaning, seeing in its impossibility the attraction of its necessity. And the opening of citizenship to individuals who had been excluded from it. Fighting on the other side of the same war, and equally compelled to write, Tim OBrien confronts a similar sense of the difficulties of language and of narrative. She was the first woman to hold the office and the first president since the 17th century who did not have a Harvard degree. And I could see things that Hammond himself probably never saw. Human beings are in fact powerfully attracted to war. Faust has somewhat modified her own stance. But why havent we Civil War historians been equally preoccupied with death? Faust is the former dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. The nation found itself once again convulsed in a struggle over the meanings of citizenship, justice and equality. . It's like Nelson Mandela once said "Education is the most powerful weapon, which you can use to change the world." . Throughout history, we can find representations of wars powerful allure in the discourse that precedes and pervades almost every conflict. In her educational career, Faust chose to devote her life to history. Seeing beyond ourselves enables us to imagine and act on behalf of a different future.. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against racial segregation of the schools. 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. They rose to about 15 percent by 1949, in part as a result of the G.I. 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 . Wars participants have often noted the failure of words to convey either its reality or its meaning. 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. 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. After all, such people were individuals with lives and with agency and with influence on the outcome of historical events. The battle transformed and defined the purposes of the war, for Union success propelled Lincoln into issuing his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. . narratives of liberal learning, disinterested scholarship and social citizenship. University leaders, he observes, have embraced a market model of university purpose to justify themselves to the society that supports them with philanthropy and tax dollars. That humanitys highest creative aspirations of literature and imagination have been all but inseparable from its most terrible invention: the scourge of war? This was fascinating to me as a way of expanding how one does history. A Civil War historian, she said she has been thinking about civil rights since she was a child.. How do you put all of this together? And we must do still more. On Friday, she came to Girls High to tell students they can do anything. In a fascinating 40-minute interview on the latest episode . The move reduced the use of irrigation water by 30%, made Harvard Yard greener, and improved the health of the campus orchard. Harvard and the world. There is no clarity. But the input of her brother, Donald Gilpin, a retired teacher of English and drama, sparked both memories and insights. Catharine Drew Gilpin Faust (born September 18, 1947) is an American historian and was the 28th president of Harvard University, the first woman to serve in that role. So what are our obligations when we see our fundamental purpose under siege, our reason for being discounted and undermined? I would say also that what I just described as enormous variety and range also means that you have many, many constituencies. Greetings alumni, graduates, families, and friends. 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. Bringing students of diverse backgrounds to live together and learn from one another enacts that commitment, as we work to transform diversity into belonging. So, I had a very special version of the Civil War story told to me when I was little. And that gave me a new perspective on what it must have meant in American society in the 1860s. I juxtapose Widener Library and Memorial Church today because we need the qualities that both represent, because I believe that reason and knowledge must be inflected with values, and that those of us who are privileged to be part of this community of learning bear consequent responsibilities. 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. 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. As president of Harvard, Faust has expanded financial aid to improve access to Harvard College for students of all economic backgrounds and advocated for increased federal funding for scientific research. Education is the vehicle we ride to the future, both individually and collectively, she said. On October 12, 2007, Faust delivered her installation address, saying, A university is not about results in the next quarter; it is not even about who a student has become by graduation. 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. . Higher education is not about results in the next quarter but about discoveries that may take and last decades or even centuries. It has reinforced Americas deep-seated notion that a college degree serves largely instrumental purposes. Drew Gilpin Faust is President Emerita of Harvard University and the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor. 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. Uniquely powerful dimensions of the Civil War have rendered it of outsized importance to historians. That army was not simply destroyed through death and disease, but also through all those men who seemed to disappear back into the hillsides. . 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. 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. 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. "Even a war against an enemy who had no relationship to September 11's . War is thrilling; war is drudgery. The Morrill Act seems to me consistent with those. As late as the 1920s, enrollments in the United States stood below 5 percent of the college-age population. Updates? FAUST: It began with my book on women of the Confederate South and with my engagement with their diaries and letters. In perhaps the best-known poem of that war, written towards its very end, Wilfred Owen warned children ardent for some desperate glory about what he called The old Lie: Dulce et Decorum est pro patria mori How sweet and right it is to die for ones country. FAUST: When I became president, the issue of ROTCs absence from Harvard campus was already one that was very much in the air and much debated. Friday, March 3, through Sunday, March 12. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be six million. And much is at stake, for us and for the world. Drew Gilpin Faust used her inauguration as the 28th president of Harvard University over the weekend to defend American higher education from critics who allege students are not being taught enough, faculty are not held to high enough standards and the college experience costs too much. Even as . They conflict, he argues, with other parts of the multiversitys mission, with . Higher learning can offer individuals and societies a depth and breadth of vision absent from the inevitably myopic present. LEACH: Well, you have commented elsewhere on the importance of education in the American dream. Only if we ourselves model a commitment to fact over what Stephen Colbert so memorably labeled as truthiness (and he also actually sometimes called it Veritasiness!), only then can we credibly call for adherence to such standards in public life and a wider world. Also in Faust's tenure, Harvard's economics department witnessed an exodus of prominent faculty to Stanford and MIT, including Raj Chetty, Susan Athey, Guido Imbens, Drew Fudenberg, and Nobel Laureate Al Roth. 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. Has the market model become the fundamental and defining identity of higher education? We love war because of these stories. 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. Perhaps it was these very women, writing thousands of letters to their men at the front, who persuaded the soldiers, themselves fearful of the physical and social destruction on the home front, to give up the fight. We seek the order that narrative promises to impose on the incoherence of conflict. 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. [21], In the wake of a series of layoffs in June 2009, Faust was criticized for refusing to accept a pay cut that would have saved jobs. 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. [27], In 2011, Faust signed an agreement with Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, JD '76, to formally return the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps (NROTC) program to campus after almost 40 years, following the repeal of the "Don't Ask Don't Tell" law in December 2010. 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? But it nevertheless reminds us that the human attraction to war as an embodiment of the transcendent is about the struggle to surpass the boundaries of the human as well as the limits of human understanding. overrideCardHideSection=false It enacted a morality play demanding that a nation that regarded itself as the last best hope of Earth confront its own deep-seated injustices. The school adopted a motto that has a double meaning: Learn to change the world., The phrase is at once an invitation come and learn how to change the world and a statement of fact education changes the world, she said. "Education Is the Engine" Faust's promotion once again thrust . It is not just Civil War soldiers, of course, for whom telling the story, depicting the scene, was a challenging imperative. On Education: A Conversation with Drew Gilpin Faust and Donald Gilpin On March 21, Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust and her brother, retired English and drama teacher Donald Gilpin, engaged in a conversation with Dean Jim Ryan about their successful careers as educators. We have been telling and hearing and reading war stories for millennia. What must we do? Want to read all 3 pages? Workforce and Employment. The Obama administration has set a goal of devoting more than 3 percent of gross domestic product to research. . What is happening to the world? Or as early 20th-century civil rights activist Nannie Helen Burroughs put it, education is democracys life insurance.. Widener and Memorial Church. 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. We must acknowledge both its horror and its attraction if we hope to understand the contradictions in its impact and presence in human lives. Responding to terrorism with war replaced the specter and fear of mass murder with a hope for the controlled, ordered force of war. It places the tradition and the principles of general education within a curriculum that is new and forward-looking. A surprising expression of this point of view came in March, when, after a forty-year absence, ROTC was welcomed back onto campus. 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. But one has the sense you continued thinking about your Southern heritage through your chosen field of study. He struggles to find another subject but relentlessly his pen disobeyed him; he cannot stop writing war stories. Ultimately, however, his words and stories fail, for he can find no narrative. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust describes how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. We have a very special obligation in a very difficult time. How can I picture it all? Homer demanded in the Iliad. overrideTextColor= 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. 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. 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. Even more lastingly, Faust helped forge a new interpretation of proslavery ideology. Omissions? 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. Two months from now, we will again witness a reenactment of the Battle of Bull Run. [31], She was previously married to Stephen Faust. In 2001, Faust was appointed the first dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, which was established after the merger of Radcliffe College with Harvard University. War assumes a trajectory towards victory and thus the possibility of its own cessation and conclusion. In the era of economic constraint before us, the pressure toward vocational pursuits is likely only to intensify. 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. The Attorney General of the new Confederacy anticipated that war would stimulate . As we continue to be lured by war, we must be committed to convey its horrors. Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust hymns the restless quest for wisdom that defines higher education's highest goals. Drew Gilpin Faust, ne Catharine Drew Gilpin, (born September 18, 1947, New York, New York, U.S.), American educator and historian who was the first female president of Harvard University (200718). And that, I believe, was part of his motivation. [18] Faust has worked to further internationalize the university. 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 economic downturn has had what is perhaps an even more worrisome impact. To rename violence as war is to give it a teleology. It's why I cheered Drew Gilpin Faust's appointment as Harvard's 28th presidentthe first woman to hold the job in the university's 371-year history. The ability to know, as former dean Jeremy Knowles used to put it, when someone is talking rot. These are the bedrock of education, and of an informed citizenry with the capacity to lead, to explore, to invent. Within her first six months in office, Faust filled several open deanships and appointed other top administration officials. 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. Like any good story, it offers the promise and gratification that accompany a resolution of the plot. The protagonist Kien has survived the conflict and finds himself all but overwhelmed with the need to write about it even against his will. But the stories we tell in creating narratives of war rarely deliver the order and control they promise. How did they explain this loss, in both religious and political terms? In my book about James Henry Hammond, I used his records of slaves and their births and deaths, records that he kept essentially for economic reasons, to map out family ties and to see how long-lived families were and how childrens names were chosen. 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. We can see these values clearly in the choices and passions of our faculty and students: in the motto of Harvard Business School, which you heard earlier this morning uttered by the dean, the commitment to make a difference in the world. Most of the University would readily embrace this sentiment. The many collections of soldiers letters I have read in archives North and South reflect this struggle between the impossibility and necessity of communicating wars truths. 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? In some respects, this is not new. Why must he write of the war? he asks. As a British soldier wrote of Gallipoli, It was a horrible day and a great day. 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. killing . A liberal arts education is designed to equip students for just such flexibility and imagination. She spoke on humility's role in the work of becoming educated. '02,will join the University as senior adviser to the president on engagement with Historically Black . Drew Gilpin Faust, the 28th president of Harvard University and the Lincoln Professor of History in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, discuss her monumental book, "This Republic of. By Drew Gilpin Faust. First we must maintain an unwavering dedication to rigorous assessment and debate within our own walls. 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. 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