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. Faust is the first woman to serve as Harvard president and the university's 28th president overall. As Ernest Hemingway once explained to F. Scott Fitzgerald, War is the best subject of all. Steep federal deficits will combine with diminished university resources to intensify what a 2007 report by the National Academies declared to be a gathering storm, one that threatened the future of scientific education and research in America. . FAUST: I loved writing that biography of Hammond because he wrote down everything he did. That would be an extremely important theme. killing . and surviving, but with ultimately finding meaning in it all. 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? Cold Mountain is a recent literary rendering of such a story. The manuscript he produces is one of fragments, of images but not of coherence. As extraordinary as these times may seem to us, Harvard reminds us we have been here before. FAUST: One would be about citizenship. That reinforced my interest in the notion that if you can understand how someone sees the world differently from you, then you learn something about your own world too. 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. I could see that slaves were naming their children after their grandparents. 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. In 1975, Faust joined the University of Pennsylvania faculty as assistant professor of American civilization. Faust is one of the world's leading historians on gender issues in 19th century America. 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. It is in some ways reassuring at this 365th Commencement to recall all that Harvard has endured over centuries. 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. [25], Faust championed organic lawn management of the campus grounds and Harvard Yard during her tenure, including adopting the practices at Elmwood, the presidents house on Brattle Street. Have universities become too captive to the immediate and worldly purposes they serve? This was fascinating to me as a way of expanding how one does history. These battlefield tourists earned the scorn and resentment of the wounded and of those struggling to provide aid amidst the desolation. 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. [1][7] Her paternal great-grandfather, Lawrence Tyson, was a U.S. senator from Tennessee during the 1920s. And we realized that all of us had parents who served in World War II. On Friday, she came to Girls High to tell students they can do anything. Faust served as an officer of the American Historical Association and the Southern Historical Association, a board member of the Society of American Historians and the Organization of American Historians, and a judge for the Pulitzer Prize in history. What should we do? (1971) and Ph.D. (1975) degrees in American civilization from the University of Pennsylvania, where she joined the faculty as an assistant professor in 1976. So, I had a very special version of the Civil War story told to me when I was little. 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. 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. And he was always such an excessive character. Wars participants have often noted the failure of words to convey either its reality or its meaning. overrideCardHideByline=true Telling War Stories: Reflections of aCivil War Historian. And much is at stake, for us and for the world. Her point of view is extremely interesting [17]: "Higher learning can offer individuals and societies a depth and breadth of vision. This too has shaped a new approach to our past. Our narratives are not just modeled from war; they become models for war. Education has been central to the American Dream since the time of the nations founding. It beggars all description. A Wisconsin nurse, aiding the wounded in Tennessee, wrote home of the mental and physical suffering around her: There are times when the meaning of words seem to fade away; so entirely does our language fail to express the reality. In its assault on language, war once again challenges our very identity and essence, for it is words that help to define us as distinctively human. 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,. 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. I feel very strongly about the importance of inclusiveness in the military. We must acknowledge both its horror and its attraction if we hope to understand the contradictions in its impact and presence in human lives. Why they didnt just let the South go. 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. She earned M.A. 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.. 801-422-4511, Humility, Hope, and the Work of Becoming Educated | Drew Gilpin Faust | 2021. They began to question the sacrifices they had made. And so with the articulation of these principles of separation and inequality as a defensive response to the emerging civil rights revolution, I was struck, even as a young child, by their inconsistency with the values I had learned at church, as I made reference to in my piece about my letter to Eisenhower, and in school as we learned about democracy and America, those political values that had been transmitted to me by the time I was nine years old. In and around Boyce, where she grew up in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, roads were marked by Confederate-gray signs for the many Civil War historic sites nearby, such as Cedar Creek, a few miles to the south and Winchester a few miles north. It was just taken for granted. I wrote a senior thesis on American foreign policy, which I was very interested in, it being the Vietnam era. War engages and thrives on contrasts the unflinching gore and undeniable glory represented in the Iliad; the parallel human and inhuman dimensions of what Vietnam veteran Tim OBrien has called the awful majesty of combat and its powerful implacable beauty; the interdependence of life and death as millions have perished throughout the centuries in hopes that others or perhaps, in Lincolns words, nations might live. Harvard University president Drew Gilpin Faust, who shepherded the school through the turbulence of the economic recession and expanded its diversity, will step down in June 2018 after 11. Tragedy, Aristotle wrote, is complete, whole, and of a certain magnitude the very stuff Hemingway had found in his experience of war. And he was always Lee, so I had to be Grant. Those years in the early 1960s were not just a historic anniversary but themselves a time of history making. 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. 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. LEACH: But the Civil War wasnt quite over for you. Faust has not merely contributed to historical knowledge or told old stories well. The questions we choose to ask and the research we decide to support; the standards of integrity we expect of our colleagues and students; the community we build and the model we offer: All of this is central to who we are. 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. I have come to believe that it is out of this struggle that certain recurrent images or descriptions appear like verbal snapshots, designed in essence to short-circuit the complexity of language with an almost visual substitute words as pictures rather than as interpretation or understanding. And David Donald taught at Hopkins before he came to Harvard. Fussell has written of the tutors in this special diction of heroism, manhood and sacrifice in pre-World War I Britain the poems of Tennyson, the romances of Rider Haggard, the boys books of George Alfred Henty, where the soldier is a warrior, the enemy is the foe, to die is to perish, and the soldiers are the brave. For a whole generation of men, these stories were to prove a betrayal. In 2009, however, she instituted layoffs and pay freezes after Harvards endowment suffered a major loss during the global financial crisis. 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. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Faust published her first three booksA Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South, The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South: 18301860, and a biography, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Masteryshe worked against a prevailing assumption that the slaveholding elite of the Old South produced no intellectual history. While the mind of the South had been a twentieth-century preoccupation of many writers and scholars, few had probed the disturbing and, to modern sensibilities, retrograde proslavery mind. September 16, 2022 I t was a good book, the student told the 14 others in the undergraduate seminar I was. So, I cared a lot about the overturn of Dont ask, dont tell, as another step in the nations progression towards inclusiveness. Tens of thousands of participants and spectators are expected, for the enthusiasm to refight the Civil War has only grown in the fifty years since the centennial observances. Omissions? How can I picture it all? Homer demanded in the Iliad. Truth cannot simply be claimed; it must be establishedeven when that process is uncomfortable. Prevailing discourse emphasises the university as a paramount player in a global system increasingly driven by knowledge, information and ideas. War is not random, shapeless violence. In an assessment of the condition of higher education in the Anglo-American world, Multiversities, Ideas, and Democracy, George Fallis, a former dean at York University in Toronto, deplores the growing dominance of economic justifications for universities. Understand what it is that is so significant to them and then try to use that understanding to bring them to you and to what you see as the most important agenda for the university. After all, such people were individuals with lives and with agency and with influence on the outcome of historical events. And it also emphasizes the kinds of pedagogical innovation that are a necessary part of adapting to the world that has been transformed in the ways I have described. [5], Drew Gilpin was born in New York City[6] and raised in Clarke County, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley. . Drew Gilpin Faust is President Emerita of Harvard University and the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor. Workforce and Employment. Her other works include James Henry Hammond and the Old South, a biography of James Henry Hammond, Governor of South Carolina from 1842 to 1844. But in the five Southerners who fashioned themselves a sacred circle of alienated intellectuals, the politician Hammond, the novelist William Gilmore Simms, the agricultural reformer Edmund Ruffin, and the college professors Nathaniel Beverly Tucker and George Frederick Holmes, Faust uncovered and humanized a cadre of book-toting critics of the society they were helping build. [2] 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. 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. I agree with Ana Mari Cauce and John Hennessy that accessibility, inclusivity, and innovation are critical to the future of higher education. 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. But with the rise of the research university in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, moral and ethical purposes came to be seen as at odds with the scientific thinking transforming higher education. Most other creatures engage in violence, and some insects and animals with elaborate social structures reflect those systems in their modes of fighting and aggression. Within her first six months in office, Faust filled several open deanships and appointed other top administration officials. 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. In New England, Henry Lee Higginson later looked back on his hopes for the conflict, evidently sustained in the experience as well as the anticipation of battle: I always did long for some such war, and it came in the nick of time for me.. Want to read all 3 pages? And, interestingly, in the last year its crept back into the American political vocabulary. Bringing students of diverse backgrounds to live together and learn from one another enacts that commitment, as we work to transform diversity into belonging. He was a biographers dream. 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. It is such a pleasure to see you all here and offer congratulations on this day of celebration. Is your emphasis on the original word, or is the emphasis on the context in which the word is made? Faust stepped down as president in 2018. 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. There is no value-free science. It places the tradition and the principles of general education within a curriculum that is new and forward-looking. 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. In September 2010, the official Virginia Sesquicentennial Commission foregrounded this shift with a conference entitled Race, Slavery and the Civil War: The Tough Stuff of American History and Memory. Issues that were suppressed or ignored a half century ago are now necessarily fundamental to Civil War remembrance: It is impossible to avoid the tough stuff. The amnesia of the 1962 Antietam observances is unthinkable, as Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell learned last year when he scrambled to apologize for not mentioning slavery in a proclamation of Confederate History Month. At this time there was a belief that slaves had no sense of family because it had been destroyed by the oppressions of slavery. JIM LEACH: You were brought up in the Shenandoah Valley. That was part of a whole overturning of traditional historical practice as well as of the substance of historical conclusions. 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. 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. 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. We dont just write about wars because, like Mount Everest, they are there. We love war because of these stories. [26], In December 2010, Faust and Stanford University president John L. Hennessy co-wrote an editorial in support of passage of the DREAM Act. On January 9, 2008, Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust spoke on her newest book, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. There is no clarity. Explore a roundup of events this month, including a book talk, several musical and theatrical performances, and new art exhibition openings.Visit The U Creates for more information on the arts and humanities offerings at the University throughout the year.. Bill Cosford Cinema. Our route was in fact not very different from the one both Jackson and A.P. burying . In. overrideCardHideSection=false War and narrative in some sense create one another. This Republic of Suffering (2008) was a critically acclaimed exploration of how the United States' understanding of death was shaped by the high losses during the Civil War. [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. . [1] She is the daughter of Catharine Ginna (ne Mellick) and McGhee Tyson Gilpin. A sense of ignorance fuels the desire to overcome it, she said. 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