The arguments over the interpretations of this history were captivating as well. And as I wrote that first book, James Henry Hammond being one of the individuals I studied, he rose to the fore in my mind as an individual who, as a plantation owner, as a senator, as a governor, as a writer and intellectual, offered windows into so many aspects of the South in the pre-Civil War and the Civil War era. For this distinction, her remarkable career should be recognized and studied as a story of ambitious and graceful achievement. Widener and Memorial Church. Now, it may surprise some of you to hear that this is not an uncontroversial assertion. overrideCardHideDescription=false This was the norm when we were growing up. Implicit in President George W. Bushs proclamation of a war on terror, moreover, was the reassurance that terrorism could be defeated, eliminated, that it need not be a permanent condition of modern life. Irony would not seem to be available to Robert E. Lee. This paradox at the heart of the experience of war also forms the core of wars attraction to writers and artists. How did they deal with the bodies? 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. 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. His work, the now all-but-iconic The Things They Carried, is like that of Kien in The Sorrow of War, fragmented and filled with disruptions. Often, OBrien writes, you cant even tell a true war story. But why havent we Civil War historians been equally preoccupied with death? 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. Greetings alumni, graduates, families, and friends. A liberal arts education is designed to equip students for just such flexibility and imagination. That was a significant driver in this decision as well. Drew Gilpin Faust [1]In 2007 American scholar Drew Gilpin Faust [2] (born 1947) . . Drew Gilpin Faust is president of Harvard. 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. . . So, nullification emerged in that context and was really a precursor of the language of states rights and secession that followed it a few decades later. Drew Gilpin Faust is the President of Harvard University. Only 1 percent of Americans now serve in the military. 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. Escalating college costs have played a significant role in this slowdown, even as universities have substantially expanded their programs of financial aid. overrideTextColor= The seductiveness of war derives in part from its location on this boundary of the human, the inhuman and the superhuman. And significant segments of the American population, particularly in the South, continue to reject slavery as a fundamental cause of the war, even in the face of irrefutable evidence that what southerners called the peculiar institution played a critical role in secession debates, declarations, and decisions across the South. Built in the aftermath of World War I, it was intended to honor and memorialize responsibilitynot just the quality of men and womens thoughts, but, as my predecessor James Conant put it, the radiance of their deeds. The more than 1,100 Harvard and Radcliffe students, faculty, and alumni whose names are engraved on its walls gave their lives in service to their country, because they believed that some things had greater value than their own individual lives. [17] She has made it a priority to revitalize the arts at Harvard and integrate them into the daily life of students and staff. . Catharine Drew Gilpin Faust (born September 18, 1947)[1] is an American historian and was the 28th president of Harvard University, the first woman to serve in that role. overridebuttonBgColor= It was officially about the federal governments power to impose tariffs. 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. 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. Drew Faust Director Since: July 2018 Goldman Sachs Committees: Compensation, Governance, Public Responsibilities Other Current U.S.-Listed Public Company Directorships: None Other U.S.-Listed Public Company Directorships within past 5 years: Staples, Inc. Key Experience and Qualifications At the same time, American colleges and universities have remained the envy of the world. LEACH: The American university is the hallmark of our land, Harvard being our emblematic institution. Faust, 59, has a lot on her plateplacating an often unwieldy and ego-driven faculty, making a Harvard education relevant in today's world, underwriting lower- and middle-class students who can . Such an incendiary interpretation, directly contradicting both Lost Cause myths about womens devotion to the Confederacy as well as military historians strategic interpretations, elicited much criticism at the time and since. Drew Gilpin Faust is President Emerita of Harvard University and the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor. But this was a carnival without carnage, a battle stripped of content and context. FAUST: Stamina, curiosity about a wide range of intellectual fields and about a wide range of people. Up until the end of the 1800s, most American college presidents taught a course on moral philosophy to graduating students. As the political philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain has put it, War imitates narratives imitating war. John Keegan, who for twenty six years served as an instructor at the British Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, has offered an example central to historical writing in his description of the battle piece. This highly conventionalized, heroic account of combat has shaped not just the rhetoric and assumptions of military history, but more powerfully and more dangerously, the understanding and seduction of war itself. Yet what we would regard as the extraordinary incongruity of their motivation and presence only underscores wars fascination. In announcing the policy, Faust said, "Education is the engine that makes American democracy work. And it has to work and that means people have to have access. 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. Nevertheless, my assignment is to offer a few reflections on this magnificent institution at this moment in its history. Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust noted in 2009 the growing dominance of economic justifications for the existence of universities, to the exclusion of its other missions, such. David Norton February 17, 2011 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. The centennial commemoration of Antietam was designed to be less about remembrance than about forgetting. [26], In December 2010, Faust and Stanford University president John L. Hennessy co-wrote an editorial in support of passage of the DREAM Act. And he was always Lee, so I had to be Grant. [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. 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. 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.. We must acknowledge both its horror and its attraction if we hope to understand the contradictions in its impact and presence in human lives. The Attorney General of the new Confederacy anticipated that war would stimulate . In 2009, however, she instituted layoffs and pay freezes after Harvards endowment suffered a major loss during the global financial crisis. 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? And we must do still more. And theres an oft-cited assumption that education may be the civil rights issue of this century. 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. Have universities become too captive to the immediate and worldly purposes they serve? The manuscript he produces is one of fragments, of images but not of coherence. She earned M.A. In prose both clear and beautiful, she has brought some of our darker side into the light. Summary Of Seven Days Battle By Shelby Foote . When you were nine, you wrote a letter to the president of the United States, Dwight David Eisenhower. 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. A sense of ignorance fuels the desire to overcome it, she said. Prevailing discourse emphasises the university as a paramount player in a global system increasingly driven by knowledge, information and ideas. 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. 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. Learning is a result of the understanding that there is always more that we do not know. We seek the order that narrative promises to impose on the incoherence of conflict. 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