We love war because of these stories. What can we do? 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. Drew Gilpin Faust was the first woman to serve as the president of Harvard University and is a historian and award-winning author. ", 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. 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. According to Wikipedia, Catharine Drew Gilpin Faust is an American historian and was the 28th president of Harvard University, the first woman to serve in that role. And so you have to be able to listen to them and, in a sense, going back to what I said about studying history, see the world through their eyes. She received her bachelor's degree from Bryn Mawr College in 1968, and her master's and doctorate degrees in American civilization from the University of Pennsylvania. 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. The move reduced the use of irrigation water by 30%, made Harvard Yard greener, and improved the health of the campus orchard. 1976-2000, Assistant Professor to Annenberg Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. . His opening sentence thus united the two documents as foundational to the meaning of the war and to Kings definition of America. We seek to educate people, not just minds; our highest aspiration is not just knowledge, but wisdom. Which included, ultimately, a John Brown pike and a bunch of rifles and all kinds of things. Existing studies of Confederate politics and public life, she wrote in the introduction to Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, have paid almost no attention to the place of women., This lack of interest in the role of women led scholars to the growing disenchantment with the war on the home front as a factor in causing the Souths surrender, when the war might have been waged even longer. 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. A tribute to the belief that knowledge matters, that facts matterin the present moment, as a basis for the informed decisions of individuals, societies, and nations; and for the future, as the basis for new insight. 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. Uniquely powerful dimensions of the Civil War have rendered it of outsized importance to historians. But somehow I always lost. 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." A sense of ignorance fuels the desire to overcome it, she said. Yet still we try. 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. 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. 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. And he was always Lee, so I had to be Grant. The preceding summer, in July 1961, some 35,000 spectators had thrilled to what the press had dubbed the Third Battle of Bull Run. Only 1 percent of Americans now serve in the military. overrideTextAlignment= Jeffrey R. Holland March 8, 1977. 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. Like African Americans, women play a role in American society that has expanded and changed dramatically over the past half century, and their place in Civil War history has grown in parallel. 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. It is well war is so terrible else we would grow too fond of it. After all, we owe to war so much of our history and our literature. It remains the bloodiest single day of conflict in American history, a day when more than 3,600 Americans died. Gilpin grew up in Virginias Shenandoah Valley, where her parents raised Thoroughbred horses. 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? Brought up in an age of fast-changing values and an interventionist war in Southeast Asia, she wrapped herself in painstaking interpretations of the nineteenth-century American South, from its feudal society and slave economy to the almost forgotten inner workings of Southern womanhood. After all, such people were individuals with lives and with agency and with influence on the outcome of historical events. A number of inaugural veterans - both orators and auditors - have proffered advice, including unanimous agreement. History is iterative and interactive which, happily, is why there will always remain new inexhaustible work for historians. A surprising expression of this point of view came in March, when, after a forty-year absence, ROTC was welcomed back onto campus. She earned M.A. And it seemed to me that one way of responding, a way that added a perspective from the new kind of history that was being done of actors who hadnt been included before, was to suggest that indeed their agency included having an impact on this most fundamental of Civil War questions. We seek the order that narrative promises to impose on the incoherence of conflict. Drew Gilpin Faust President (2007-2018), Harvard University 1968, BA, Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania; 1971, MA, and 1975, PhD, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. In 1957, nine-year-old Faust, of her own initiative, wrote to President Eisenhower to let him know her feelings on the matter: Please Mr. Eisenhower, please try and have schools and other things accept colored people.. She is also the Lincoln Professor of History at Harvard. 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. I believe that if we approach the past with the goal of understanding rather than judging, we have the opportunity to learn from the shortcomings as well as the achievements of our forebears, she said. She also suggested a bold interpretation of why the Confederacy lost the war. 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. In prose both clear and beautiful, she has brought some of our darker side into the light. 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. 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. During the punishing years of the Civil War, Faust chronicled how women of the South went from self-denying to self-preserving, with their allegiances shifting from the aims of Confederate army to the safety of their families. For the common soldier, OBrien writes, war has the feel the spiritual texture of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. Just today, I was talking to a couple of people in my office who had helped work on the return of ROTC. Drew Gilpin Faust, American historian and author, delivered this forum address on March 30, 2021. . An equivalent proportion of today's population would be six million. 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. Nevertheless, my assignment is to offer a few reflections on this magnificent institution at this moment in its history. 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. A dissertation on a circle of antebellum Southern intellectuals led to her doctorate and a book, A Sacred Circle. naming . Sept. 1, 2009. A productive and original scholar, Faust has also proven to be an able administrator. And we realized that all of us had parents who served in World War II. Faust is the former dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She has enjoyed good health since then. Education is an essential prerequisite for full membership in that community. In the 1950s, Ron Kovic learned of war from John Wayne movies and felt destined for glory by his birth on the Fourth of July. 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. Before accepting the position in 2007, Faust was the former dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. Two months from now, we will again witness a reenactment of the Battle of Bull Run. James Suiter of the 84th Illinois reported in his diary that a depiction of Chickamauga would be an absolute impossibility. John Casler of the Stonewall Brigade struggled for words in a letter to his parents, I have not power to describe the scene. The legislation was not passed by the 111th United States Congress. In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore its safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true. Part of the interdependence of war and literature rests in this tension of their ultimate incompatibility, the irreducible reality that despite all human striving to impose order and meaning, war remains terrible and incomprehensible. 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. Values were an integral part of the defining purpose of the early years of Harvard College, created to educate a learned ministry. 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. 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. But in the years since World War II, it was higher education, not just instruction at the elementary or high school levels, that emerged as necessary for a technologically skilled work force as well as fundamental to cherished values of opportunity. Friday, March 3, through Sunday, March 12. When life itself cannot be taken for granted, its every aspect assumes an enhanced significance and value. We sing in our alma mater about Calm rising through change and through storm. What does that mean for todays crises? overrideCardHideByline=true Harvard President Drew Faust (2011) Quotes [ edit] She has declined to speak with the media with more details about her diagnosis or treatment. 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. Or as early 20th-century civil rights activist Nannie Helen Burroughs put it, education is democracys life insurance.. 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. As chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy and professor at Texas Tech University, Hayhoe has always understood the global climate crisis through the lens of her faith and her belief in our responsibility to care for others. [7], Faust graduated from Concord Academy, Concord, Massachusetts, in 1964. . It was an all-American war of brother against brother as it is so often put. Drew Gilpin Faust President, Harvard "Women in Leadership: Drew Gilpin Faust". 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. Human beings are in fact powerfully attracted to war. We will continue to be educated in one way or another until our very last breath., Next Devotional: Ryan Gabriel, Assistant Professor of Sociology. 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. "All of us are stewards of this remarkable place," she said on Oct. 28 at a Medical School faculty meeting. But the stories we tell in creating narratives of war rarely deliver the order and control they promise. Journalist Chris Hedges, in a recent best-selling book aptly entitled War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, has described war as a narcotic, a lethal addiction, a drug which he himself ingested for his many years as a war correspondent. And when Lincoln articulated that, he was able to mobilize the North to fight an expensive and devastating war. And how they create the structures of meaning and understanding that serve as the lens through which they view what is around them and the events that confront them. . This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008) assesses the lasting impact of civil war fatalities on American attitudes toward death. Harvard and the world. Robert Penn Warren wrote of the war as that mystic cloud from which emerged our modernity, the great single event of our history. 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