Presidential Distinguished Speaker Series: Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust

Who speaks in this episode?

• Drew Gilpin Faust (Guest)
• John Lewis (Guest)

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 5:00: Harvard University, Drew Gilpin Faust, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Concord Academy
2. 5:00 – 10:00: Brown v. Board, Binmar College, Concord Academy, Caltech
3. 10:00 – 15:00: Sputnik
4. 20:00 – 25:00: Harvard University, East Germany, Cuban missile crisis, Yugoslavia
5. 25:00 – 30:00: John Lewis, Harvard University, Brown v. Board, Binmar College
6. 30:00 – 35:00: Harvard University, John Lewis, Caltech, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
7. 35:00 – 40:00: Harvard University
8. 40:00 – 45:00: Harvard University
9. 45:00 – 50:00: Harvard University, Caltech
10. 50:00 – 55:00: Harvard University, Caltech

Notable quotes from "Presidential Distinguished Speaker Series: Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust"

• February of 2007. Rest is history, as they say. I think this quote, drew from your speech to the Asia Society in 2012 in Mumbai, India. And I'm always worried about quoting…

  about Drew Gilpin Faust · at 1:24

• People have responded to it and found it illuminating, I think, and astonishing in many ways when I was named president of Harvard in 2007, a reporter from the New York Times…

  about Harvard University · at 4:59

• It is remarkable. We just celebrated the 50th year of women being admitted to Caltech and that seems a long time in some ways and just so recent in others, right?

  about Caltech · at 5:45

• Virginia started to mount a campaign that was called massive resistance.

  about Brown v. Board · at 7:45

• You ask about my peers. I went off to Conquered Academy in New England at in ninth grade. So, I got a very different set of peers from my Virginia peers. But I do remember later when I.

  about Concord Academy · at 9:18

• Explain that? in one example, I felt very strongly about Splitnick when I was a little kid. It terrified me and I thought it was going to fly over my house in Virginia and drop…

  about Sputnik · at 13:20

• Just stumbled across this flyer that said the world Oh, this I should add something else. The fall of my junior year was the Cuban missile crisis and we sat around at Conquered…

  about Cuban missile crisis · at 20:51

• Aspect of Selma. Yeah. and you talk about John Lewis of course the title of your book necessary trouble is with permission a John Lewis phrase and tell us about your…

  about John Lewis · at 28:13

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Drew Gilpin Faust — Person · Main guest / main speaker · 1 mention · first at 1:32
  Central interview subject; discusses her memoir 'Necessary Trouble', her upbringing in segregated Virginia, civil rights activism, and leadership in higher education (Radcliffe/Harvard).
• John Lewis — Person · Referenced historical figure; personal acquaintance of guest · 6 mentions · first at 25:35
  Appears as a civil-rights exemplar and as someone Faust met through Harvard; his phrase 'necessary trouble' becomes the book title and frames the episode’s moral theme of activism.

Companies & orgs

• Harvard University — Company · Affiliation · 29 mentions · first at 0:11
  Drew Gilpin Faust's primary affiliation as president emerida and research professor.
• Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study — Company · Affiliation · 2 mentions · first at 1:12
  Founded after the merger of Radcliffe and Harvard, where Drew Gilpin Faust was the first dean.
  Years as director of the women's studies program. In 2001, she was appointed the first dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, which was created after the merger of…
• Concord Academy — Company · Affiliation · 2 mentions · first at 0:45
  Drew Gilpin Faust's high school alma mater.
• Binmar College — Company · Affiliation · 2 mentions · first at 5:18
  Drew Gilpin Faust's undergraduate alma mater.
  Get the inside story on me and she said to this Binmar classmate, so why did she go to Binmar? Why didn't she go to Princeton like the rest of her family?
• Caltech — Company · Referenced institution · 5 mentions · first at 5:50
  Mentioned in the context of celebrating the 50th year of women being admitted.
• Asia Society — Company · Affiliation · 1 mention · first at 1:32
  Mentioned as the venue for a speech by Drew Gilpin Faust.
  February of 2007. Rest is history, as they say. I think this quote, drew from your speech to the Asia Society in 2012 in Mumbai, India. And I'm always worried about quoting…

Concepts & topics

• Sputnik — Concept · Historical reference · 1 mention · first at 13:41
  Mentioned as a significant event that shaped Drew Gilpin Faust's childhood fears and perceptions of the Cold War.

Places & events

• Brown v. Board — Event · Historical reference · 2 mentions · first at 7:42
  Mentioned as a pivotal event in the civil rights movement that influenced Drew Gilpin Faust's upbringing.
• Cuban missile crisis — Event · Historical reference · 1 mention · first at 20:58
  Mentioned as a formative experience that influenced Drew Gilpin Faust's perspective on peace and conflict.
• East Germany — Place · Travel destination · 2 mentions · first at 21:42
  Mentioned as one of the countries Drew Gilpin Faust visited during her trip behind the Iron Curtain.
  Wanted to do that. So I ended up in the summer of 1963 going to East Germany, Czechlovakia, and Yugoslavia.
• Yugoslavia — Place · Travel destination · 1 mention · first at 21:42
  Mentioned as one of the countries Drew Gilpin Faust visited during her trip behind the Iron Curtain.
  Wanted to do that. So I ended up in the summer of 1963 going to East Germany, Czechlovakia, and Yugoslavia.

Full transcript with timestamps

0:05 Good morning. It's my pleasure to welcome uh Dr. Drew Gilpin Faustst um president emerida of Harvard University, Arthur Kingsley Porter University research professor and the award-winning author of seven non-fiction books. She's an expert on the history of the civil war in the antibbellum south and her recent book necessary trouble growing up in midcentury and see I have I have a prop uh there it is if you haven't read it you should and I've not been uh instructed by Drew to say that uh which but I know many of you have already read this uh provides a more personal slant on these issues uh educated at the Concord Academy with an undergraduate degree degree in history from Binborn and an MA and PhD in American civilization from the University of Pennsylvania.

0:58 Uh, Professor FA spent 25 years as a member of the Penn faculty, including five years as department chair and four years as director of the women's studies program. In 2001, she was appointed the first dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, which was created after the merger of Radcliffe and Harvard University, and famously appointed Harvard's 28th president in February of 2007. Rest is history, as they say. Um, I think this quote, uh, drew from your speech to the Asia Society in 2012 in Mumbai, India. And I'm always worried about quoting people back to themselves, but I I hope you'll give me some leave because I think this captures beautifully our aspirations as researchers and educators.

1:50 Fundamental to both the humanities and the sciences is the capacity for interpretation, the ability to combine intuition and reason to make sense of the world around us, to understand not only the measure of things but their meaning. This capacity lies at the heart of innovation. It lies at the heart of what universities do. And I hope we'll get a chance to talk a little bit about what universities do. But I wanted to start uh with your book with necessary trouble if I may. And uh you write there in the prologue, as a historian, I've spent much of my life listening to voices from the past and trying to use them as bridges of understanding to times distant from our own. Here I am seeking to be one of those voices, recounting an error that fewer and fewer living humans can remember. It is time for me not just to listen, but to tell.

2:51 So, what made it the time to tell? Well, part of it was being old. Um, but being old meant that I was constantly encountering students and others who had no notion what it was like in the 1950s when I was growing up and couldn't believe that water fountains said white and colored in the lifetime of someone who was sitting there across from them. couldn't believe the things that women couldn't do. And I thought as we seem to be increasingly celebrating this bygone era, we need to understand why we should be happy to be rid of it

3:34 and why the 50s and the transformations of the 60s should be looked at as progress moving through the 50s and so forth rather than as a world we have lost and must mourn. And so that really was the motivation just to paint a portrait of what what life was like for a young girl, white girl growing up in segregated Virginia in a family where my mother told me the sooner I learned that it was a man's world, the better off I'd be.

4:06 She said that constantly when I was growing up and young people particularly just found that unbelievable. So I thought I need to not just assert this from time to time but really embed it in in the story of that time and the story of how I managed luckily happily to escape it.

4:26 So have you found resonance with that message? Yes. I think that that message as I just described it was aimed at younger people. The greatest resonance I found is with people my generation who have written to me in considerable numbers to say, "Boy, did you get that right? It was terrible." And this and they tell me their stories, all of which I've saved and will put in the Harvard archives. So, I've created a kind of archive of people who um saw the 50s and that era in much the same way I did. But younger people have responded to it and and found it illuminating, I think, and and astonishing in many ways when I was named president of Harvard in 2007, uh, a reporter from the New York Times called up one of my Binmar classmates to get the inside story on me and she said to this um, Binmar classmate, so why did she go to Binmar? Why didn't she go to Princeton like the rest of her family?

5:26 Princeton didn't admit women. I mean, not that I necessarily would have, but that this sophisticated New York reporter, New York Times reporter wouldn't even know

5:35 that in my college era, Princeton was all men. I just things like that are so um important to recognize and and push back against.

5:45 It is remarkable. We just celebrated the 50th year of uh women being admitted to Caltech and that seems a long time in some ways and just so recent in others,

5:56 right? Yeah. Uh you alluded to being brought up in Virginia's Shannondoa Valley with a more conservative uh mother, shall we say. Um uh you you referred to um uh a time where quote roles and rules of revered traditions and rigid expectations not entirely removed from slavery times. And you talk in the book about becoming aware of segregation even and in fifth grade sending a letter to President Eisenhower uh importuning him to be able to do something better to accept people of color. Um how did this reflect your how did this affect your relationship with your peers because you were pretty uh demonstrative about your beliefs that way and with your parents?

6:50 Well, I was always an outlier in terms of what expectations about being a girl in that societ white girl in that society meant. And it began early on and centered around the girl part of it rather than the race part of it first. I think my first rebellion was when I was about two years old and my mother wanted me to wear little lacy underwear over my regular underwear. Called them fancy pants and they itched and it seemed stupid. Why did I need two pairs of underpants instead of one pair of underpants? And my brothers didn't have to do it. And I had a major campaign at age two against fancy pants. And I think my parents saw this as the port tent of disaster and they were right. Um and so I was always battling it about I have three brothers about what they could do and what I couldn't do. And when in the late 1950s after Brown v. board.

7:45 Virginia started to mount a campaign that was called massive resistance. Close the schools rather than integrate them. It brought assumptions that had been quietly followed but not articulated into the forefront.

7:58 So one day I was I was coming home from school and being driven by a black man who worked for my family and I heard on the radio all this discussion about how black people and white people couldn't go to school together. Of course, my school was all white, but it never occurred to me that that wasn't just an accident. And suddenly, the I don't it's this isn't fair mentality that had come out of my relationship with my brothers, I realized there was a much bigger unfairness. And it just seemed so at odds with everything I'd been taught in in church, in school, the American democracy, all people are created equal.

8:34 I came from Virginia after all, Thomas Jefferson, all that. And I was just outraged. You know, I've been sold a bill of goods. So, I went home and wrote this letter to Eisenhower. Didn't tell my parents I was doing it.

8:45 I got this acknowledgement from the White House. My mother said, "What did you do? What is this about?" She never saw the letter.

8:54 She never saw the letter. My parents were very conventional white people of that era. They supported the status quo, which was segregation. They did not question it. They were not, they were, at that point, Virginia was just becoming Republican. and Eisenhower had made it Republican. They were big Eisenhower supporters. Um, and so they knew that this was part of the trouble I'd been making since an early age.

9:18 You ask about my peers. Um, I went off to Conquered Academy in New England at in ninth grade. So, I got a very different set of peers from my Virginia peers. But I do remember um later when I was in high school, I was going to go out for an afternoon with an old friend um and I went to the house to meet her and her mother said as we left um don't let her take you to any demonstrations. Now there weren't any demonstrations, but I guess I had a reputation in this little community for being

9:52 trouble. Trouble. Good trouble. Trouble. Yes. So, so you talked listening to the radio about the blinders coming off. Has that experience happened to you in other circumstances where you just kind of have a revelation about the world being different than you thought?

10:13 I think yes. I mean, I think one of the aspects of being a historian is you're constantly looking to the past to re understand where you are and how you got there. And here's an example that was reinforced for me lately. When I was a graduate student in American history, there was actually very little attention paid to Native Americans. And I had been quite interested in that subject in college. And I took an anthropology course on Native American anthropology, but otherwise there was no curriculum around it. And most of the writing was not focused on or incorporative of Native American experience. And as I was watching the Ken Burns series on the revolution that appeared and I've tried to compensate for that in recent years, but I realized that I just was teaching an inadequate version of the history of the South over the many years that I taught that course until I began to see a quite different configuration of

11:13 peoples on the North American continent. And I think the one of the wonderful things about the Ken Burns series is the Native Americans are so central to that story. And he provides that for the public at large in a way that's so different from even professional history

11:31 in my um graduate career and early early teaching years. It it really does speak to the power of history which has seems sorely lacking in some of our discussions these days. Um, and you talked about your parents and your interaction with your parents and I was fascinated and we we had a little chance to talk about this earlier um about the way that you were able to step back and be analytical about them. And I and I wondered what that process was like. Well, I think it it comes out of many decades, including as a as a teenager, just analyzing my parents and trying to figure out why why was I the way I was and why were they the way they were. And there was very much a a vogue or a um preoccupation among girls at least of my generation to talk about our mothers and our difficulties with our mothers. And one of the responses that I've gotten from people who have written about the book from my age group is boy

12:33 I had trouble with my mother too. I mean mother daughters of of that era I think were were very troubled. And so I've had practice in a sense of trying to situate my experience through analysis um of of larger forces and and what was going on. Uh, it also came out of what I wanted to do in this book, which was to write both a history and a memoir. To write a memoir the way a historian would. It's a memoir with footnotes. Most memoirs don't have footnotes. I tried to check my memories and see, was I right? Did I understand the progression of things in the right chronological order? Is there evidence that I was making this up? Um, and also what were the larger forces that might explain that? I mean, in one example, I felt very strongly about Splitnick when I was a little kid. It terrified me and I thought it was going to fly over my house in Virginia and drop bombs on me because it would be aiming at Washington

13:31 and we weren't that far away and it would hit me. And so for years I slept on my ears months I slept on my back looking up so I'd see the bombs. I thought, how odd was that? So I started reading about the reception of Sputnik. It wasn't that odd. And the book has a wonderful quote from Stephen King of all people who turns out to be like three days different from me in age about how for him Spooknik changed everything. He knew that America wasn't the fastest gun in the west anymore. That we had been pretending to be on top of the world, but here the Russians had put this up and we were behind. And suddenly he had all these questions about everything he'd been told. And that was so much like my reaction to it that I I was able to kind of situate it more broadly. So I think part of the analytic approach of this book was intended to to contextualize it beyond my own experience. But then let me say a

14:27 weakness of it. Um my editor I'd never written this kind of pros before. And I very much wanted an editor who would say, you know, you can't write as if you're writing an academic treatise and change this, change that. He kept pushing me to make it more personal, more emotional, more revelatory. And um as I as I said to Tom last night, I got a certain direction. He said, "You got to put in the boyfriends." I said, "Oh, the boyfriends? Really? Do I have to put in the boyfriends?" Yes, the boyfriends are there.

14:57 But this is not Mary Carr. And um it's a memoir in which there's a lot of restraint. And I think that's something I was unable to overcome or maybe didn't want to overcome.

15:10 Perhaps it wouldn't have been you. It wouldn't have been me. Long answer to it.

15:15 No, it's it's a great answer. And you talked a little bit about going to Conquered Academy and different peers and you were also influenced there, it turns out, in the book with by the head mistress, Elizabeth Hall. Um, and you you recall that she conveyed a social order in which men took care of life's practicalities and women were responsible for the keeping of society, which is similar to what you had learned, I suppose, in growing up in Virginia, but presumably it was in a different environment and you were able to uh uh understand this in a different way or h how did your how has that changed through your life? When I was growing up, I never saw any women working outside the home in positions of authority and responsibility. I didn't know any female lawyers. I didn't know any female doctors. I didn't know any female business people. I knew a few teachers, but that was kind of the sum

16:12 total of professional women as I was growing up. So, I land in New England in this what was then an all girls school. And it was a kind of a world run by women. And in that environment, women were extremely powerful. And Mrs. Hall, she was just she struck awe into you. She drove a tractor and built a skating rink. She brought a church down from New Hampshire and reassembled it on the campus. I have pictures of her up on the ladder, you know, banging the the beams into place. She was a fabulous speaker. We all were just terrified by her but but so impressed by her strength. And so she lived this very forwardlooking life in terms of feminine strength. But on the other hand, she would give us these talks which I went back and read and was astonished by because they said, you know, you're not going to have a career.

17:08 you're going to embellish your husband's career and um you won't you don't have to involve yourself with the details of daily life. You will be the moral force. So in a way that was a a little power that we could figure out how to use. But the difference between what she said and what she did was very marked. And and do you think of her sometimes as when you're doing your administrative jobs about getting out there and banging the nails into the beams and making things putting them together and working?

17:40 Well, I think she was a model of messaging in a sense. You know, she wanted us despite the rhetoric that I just described, she wanted us to be strong. She didn't think, you know, she didn't want to put up with nonsense and, you know, women faltering and so forth. and she communicated that in a very powerful way. So I've thought a lot about how always about her actually from from the time I was a student in that school how even though she didn't have time to speak to each one of us on a daily basis or even a yearly basis probably nevertheless she was able to project a certain aura that extended beyond her immediate presence and how important that is in a leader to to be able to do that and to

18:27 um inspire people not just with individual actions or with words but with a larger a larger message.

18:35 You you write also in terms of your intellectual trajectory about the influence of books whether it's the diary of Anne Frank or Albert Kimoose the plague or to kill a mockingb bird and h how did the the reading and the books serve serve your development in this way? I think in this world where there were no obvious role models,

18:56 I found role models in books and some of those were horse books. I don't know if anybody here would have been a reader of horse books, but young women and I, my father was in the horse business, so I was surrounded with horses and young women were very strong with those horses and they accomplished remarkable things riding their horses and training their horses. So that was one category. But then far beyond that um and Frank was a a very important book for me which I sort of picked it up by accident and it had on the cover of the edition I read a story of adolescence and I was very much an aspiring adolescent at that time and I picked it up and it was so much more than a story of adolescence.

19:38 um Tequila Mockingbird, the strength of scout and she's the one who calls everybody to task and I think one of the things that came out of a lot of these books is and it was reinforced by the world around me children could be very strong and children could have an impact and in the real world children were integrating schools and in the county next to mine it was very young children who integrated the Warren County schools and so I kept seen these daring young people, including daring young women, and that that really had an impact on me.

20:17 Yeah. Very different from what you were seeing in the life immediately around you, except for, as you say, the

20:22 the extraordinary young people who were thrust into the integration fight. Yeah. Wow.

20:28 Uh you also learned by travel and by visiting uh far away places. uh you went uh as part of a group trip to behind the Iron Curtain. What did you learn from the people there and from those experiences?

20:46 This was a trip I took um in the summer after my junior year of high school. I just stumbled across this flyer that said um the world Oh, this I should add something else. The fall of my junior year was the Cuban missile crisis and we sat around at Conquered Academy thinking our world was going to be blown up and we talked about what we were worried about missing what it meant to be facing the end of the world and that sounds like adolescent girls exaggerating things except we weren't actually we were in great peril and after that I just was so attuned to the notion of why can't the world be at peace and why why are we doing this and I came across this flyer about a Quaker group that was going to Eastern Europe to, you know, stretch hands across the Iron Curtain and talk to young people. And I just very much wanted to do that. So I ended up in the summer of 1963 going um to uh East Germany,

21:45 Czechlovakia, and Yugoslavia. None of those countries still exists. Uh but it was such an interesting time for a lot of reasons. One was that they were all so different and we had this kind of monolithic I had a monolithic image of communism and when you saw three completely different communisms that began to erode your understanding of how the Cold War had been presented to you and meeting with young people in those countries who were just as interested in not blowing up the world as we were was very reinforcing and heartening. I was also in a group. There were just nine of us, including our leaders. And um it was an integrated group. Three of the nine were African-American. And I had never been with African-Americans in a situation where they were not in some ways doing domestic work or other kinds of of service. And that was I really wanted to do it. I did it very consciously but it was it was life-changing in in itself

22:54 and the group was also Quaker and it introduced me to a whole world of belief and influence that although I've never become religiously a Quaker I think it's continued to influence my attitudes about civil rights about everything through the rest of my life

23:10 and were you do you keep in touch or were you able to keep in touch with any of the other travelers? Well, one of the travelers um was a young man named Chuck Lawrence. He was then a Hford College student and he um ended up being a law professor and I kept in touch with him. His sister teaches at Harvard and then his daughter came to Harvard when I was president and was like the leader of the opposition. She was very much an activist on campus and ter she was actually terrific, but we had to negotiate ourselves around a lot of things and it just seemed a wonderful heritage from Chuck being with me in East Germany in 1963 to me dealing with his daughter or his daughter dealing with me was more the case at Harvard.

24:00 Some of the other people in the group I got in touch with as I was writing the book. I got back in touch with there was a young woman named Maline Nicks who was one of the nine people who integrated the Atlanta schools and she was a very impressive person and I just lost touch with her but had zooms with her when I was going back to write this and so forth. So that was that was really fun to do. So, another highlight of the book for me was when you described going to the march down to uh from Selma to Montgomery and uh jumped in a car, drove a thousand miles in short order and were part of this remarkable time in American history. Uh h could you talk a little bit about the dangers, the rewards, how it changed you? So the the summer after I did the Eastern European trip, the person who' organized it said that he was going to take a group of young people into the South and we were going to go to some of the Quaker initiatives

25:02 in various cities within the South. And so we were in Prince Edward County, we were in Orangeburg, we were in Birmingham that summer. And um I felt that I got to know, we stayed with African-American families who were active in the movement. And I got to know people my age and younger. One of the families I stayed with, a nine-year-old, had been rest arrested a dozen times. And I had a sense of what these people were committed to and what they were sacrificing. And so when I saw the TV footage of John Lewis walking over the bridge and having his head bashed in, I felt as if I knew those people.

25:42 They were just like the ones I'd spent the previous summer with. And I was a freshman at Binmar College. It was March of 1965. I was supposed to be taking my midterms. And I just thought, I can't live with myself if I don't go. And Martin Luther King had said, "Come, everybody come to this march." And so I told my then boyfriend, um, let's go to Selma. And he sort of said, "What?" And we borrowed a car and we drove to Selma, alternating driving every hundred miles. It was really crazy. And it's the kind of thing a young person does and

26:18 no one else would do it. Um, we got we got it. We're exhausted. We got to Atlanta and we had to sleep. The previous summer I'd spent some time in Atlanta. So, I thought I could find the Morehouse College parking lot off the freeway and maybe we could just park there and sleep in the car. So, we did. This guard came over and banged on the window and said, "What are you doing here?" And we said, "We're going to sell me." He said, "Bless you. keep sleeping. You know, just crazy unplanned things that somehow worked out.

26:49 So, we arrived in Selma and we had a car with I think it was Ohio license plates and people were blowing up cars. So, we thought, you know, where are we going to park? Is our car going to blow up? We worried about that. Um, in the course of our travels down, we heard on the radio that uh President Johnson had nationalized the the Alabama National Guard to protect the marchers. So, we felt that we were safer than poor John Lewis had been and all those marchers had been the uh 10 days before. Um, but as we were walking along the street, these two Alabama National Guardsmen were coming toward us and I thought, "Oh, good. They're taking care of us as one guy just punched me in the in the breast and kept walking." But we we marched um and met up with everybody at Brown Chapel and were part of the the march. And then we went home and I'd cut my midterms and I hadn't written my big term paper or I' given a draft of my big

27:47 term paper to a friend to type and it was a total mess. And I had this response from my professor. It was like two pages of single spaced. I cannot but deplore what your trip to Selma has meant for this paper. And he went on and on and on. And I kept it. I kept it. So I quoted it.

28:08 Yeah. in the arc of history that may not be the most important aspect of Selma. Yeah. Uh and you talk about John Lewis of course the title of your book necessary trouble is with permission a John Lewis phrase and uh tell us about your relationship with John Lewis. Well, I had admired John Lewis from afar afar for decades, but when I became president of Harvard, there were some occasions where I actually got to meet him and he he was just wonderful to me. One of one such occasion, he spoke at Harvard a number of times. Um I visited him in Washington a number of times. Um, but one occasion that was particularly memorable, maybe one of the most memorable of my presidency was we had begun to explore the history that Harvard had had with slavery and a student seminar had done a lot of research and had uncovered the fact that four enslaved they got the names of four enslaved people who had worked for Harvard presidents in the

29:13 18th century in a building that still stands. In fact, it's the building where I now have an office, Wadsworth House. And so, we decided not only to pursue further research and activity about Harvard and slavery, but to put a plaque on this building with the names of the enslaved workers who had served two presidents in that house. It had been the president's residence. And John Lewis came to dedicate the plaque. And it was just such a moving day. I mean it just his speech, the music of the Kumba choir. I I I just will never forget that and that was pretty wonderful. And then I asked him if he would give the commencement address the last year of my presidency, which he graciously did. And he began, you know how people begin to say, "Mr. President," and blah blah blah. And so he turned to me and he said, "Thank you for making necessary trouble in your life." And so I I have this on tape. I thought, "Did I make

30:15 that up? I went back. There it was. I didn't make it up." Um, and when I was thinking about what I should call this book, I thought, I really want to call it necessary trouble because the things I did, I did because I had to do them to survive. You know, maybe they were ultimately designed to help other people, but I couldn't live with myself if I hadn't gone to Selma. I couldn't have survived if I hadn't fought with my mother about all the things she wanted me to be that I would have been stifled and suffocated by. And so I thought it's really presumptuous to want to take that phrase and I don't want to do it unless I speak to him. And I wasn't sure. I wasn't really asking his permission. I was maybe his blessing.

30:58 So I spoke to him on the phone just a couple months before he died and being the gracious person he was he said of course he'd be honored and so forth and so on. So there it is the title.

31:09 So so we talked about this a little too the same year he gave the commencement address at Harvard. He gave the commencement address at Caltech and some of you may have been there and talked about necessary trouble of course which is an incredible lesson for our students. Well, for all of us, but in particular, he was talking to the students and the way he had to present ideas, as you say, was remarkable. He talked also about practicing in the with giving speeches to the chickens,

31:39 right? Yeah. Yeah. In terms of trying to do that and uh you you see the power one person can make in history.

31:49 You know, I think about him a lot these days. Um, one of the times that he was at Harvard was right after the Shelby decision by the Supreme Court, which was the first kind of chopping away at the Voting Rights Act. And knowing that his life had been devoted and risked for the Voting Rights Act, I was sitting next to him at this dinner. I said, "How do you deal with this? This is so upsetting." And he responded in this this way which continues to inspire me which is you know it's always been a struggle. It will always be a struggle. You can't think you've just solved these problems.

32:28 You're going to have to solve them again and again and again. And you have to have faith and commitment to do that. And I think I have brought to many of my perceptions this kind of naive taye that well we fixed women we fixed civil rights it's all going to just get better and better and now we're in a moment where it's not just getting better and better but John Lewis knew that you know the tradition of black struggle and reversals and there's emancipation and then there's reconstruction but then everything gets overturned and we go into the nater of the late 19th century.

33:02 I mean, he knew that in in a visceral way and was communicating to me how much you have to continue through those times to be committed and to have faith and to act and I just think of that lesson a lot because he embodied it.

33:18 Do you think we teach history well in that sense in trying to understand how it doesn't go linearly but it wraps around?

33:26 Well, there's there's a a kind of dismissive phrase that sometimes gets used about historians. there's too wiggish, you know, this wigish interpretation which means you just see things getting better. And you know, I've been known to say that about others, but I didn't realize until recently that I'd kind of taken for granted that that things were going to get better and that we should just assume that whatever accomplishments we've accomplished, they will be built on rather than undermined. Um, so maybe we need to I should have taught it to myself better at least.

34:01 Uh talking about accomplishments, you you came to be to found the Radcliffe Institute, an interdicciplinary um uh institute for advanced study. Uh can you talk a little bit about uh both your aspirations for that institute and where it's gone and also how it's embedded in the history of an institution that's changed quite a bit? Well, Radcliffe was a very curious organization. Um, it was founded as an annex to Harvard when Harvard really didn't want any part of it.

34:39 But women insisted that they wanted access to a Harvard education. And so Harvard professors would teach their Harvard courses and they come across Garden Street in Cambridge and teach the same material to women in separate locations. It was only with World War II that men and women started being taught together because so many men left. It just wasn't efficient to do it twice. And Harvard and Rackcliffe had this very fraught I mean you probably know well from your own experience this very fraught relationship for many years. Neil Rudenstein who was president of Harvard from the early 90s till 2001 and hired me said that it was a bit like there were cannons going off up and down Garden Street between Harvard and Radcliffe and Rackcliffe incorporated itself as a separate entity. It never had its own faculty. had always used Harvard faculty and so its role was was very uncertain at the t turn of the

35:35 recent century and the decision was made to merge Harvard and Radcliffe at last to um put undergraduates female undergraduates entirely in the Harvard college administrative structure and have Radcliffe become an institute for advanced study and Neil Renstein asked me to come and make this be the first dean of this enterprise. So I had the wonderful opportunity to make a lot of decisions about how it should be shaped and what it should be like. And one of the first things that I wanted to do was to bring in people who'd run other institutes for advanced study and who were very expert in their fields to advise me how it should work. And I remember one of the early issues was how could we do science in this institute for advancedity? How do you take people away from their home campuses, bring them there and let them do their work?

36:26 And we were troubled about this and Shirley Tilman p president of Princeton great uh scientist said you have to do that if this is supposed to be a place where there's a special attention to women gender in society how can you not have science in this day and age and so things like that were decisions we made early on that I think have been really important and one of this morning I had a lovely coffee with three faculty here and we were talking about crossing disciplinary lines and what you learn about your own discipline from trying to explain it to somebody who doesn't understand it. And Rackcliffe was wonderful that way because the whole premise became talking across disciplines and we've had some and explaining math people saying I'm here to do this work this year and this is why it should matter to you even though you're a practicing artist or you're a sociologist or whatever it is. I think

37:23 it's had a big impact on the people who've been part of the program and we talk about things called Radcliffe moments which is where real collaborations have taken place. There's a Radcliffe star that was discovered by um a astronomer who was at Radcliffe and somebody else in a completely different field and and so I think it's a it's a great model that's had a I think influence on those who've been part of it and had an influence on the university as well. Well, when you became president of Harvard, among your many accomplishments was to try to cut across these barriers, right? And I I gather this was the uh antecedent, if you will, of having this saying, everything I learned I learned in kindergarten. Everything I learned about being president I learned at Ragcliffe. One thing was this cross-disciplinary effort. Another was the arts. Radcliffe had a long tradition of putting practicing artists with

38:14 academics. And that was so generative for everyone. And so I had a big push to put art more centrally within the Harvard experience.

38:25 You know, Harvard is in some ways the poster child of decentralization, tubs on their own bottom.

38:31 Has that changed? It's changed somewhat. I think it's going to change even more under the current pressures. Part of it was administrative. When I became president of Harvard, the budget for Harvard University consisted of packages from each of its schools with a ribbon tied around them and handed in. And they weren't integrated at all.

38:54 So, a year into my presidency, along comes the financial crisis. And schools would just say, "Well, we want to borrow this amount of money. We want to borrow this amount of money." And fine, go ahead. You couldn't do that anymore under the pressure of the financial crisis. you were really watching your debt load and what was going on. And so that that kind of forced a level of integration that we used as wind at our back to build further um organizational integration and to take advantage of wonderful opportunities obviously for for scholarly innovation. When I was deckliff I'd find myself introducing people from different schools at the university working in areas that were very similar who'd been there for 20 years and never met each other. until they came to some Ragliff seminar and so I think there's been a lot of enthusiasm about that part of it and acceptance of the administrator

39:45 right well getting over these cultural barriers of course is a long-term project as well there's a ways to go

39:53 um last year you you addressed uh Harvard's five beta cappus society and you said that universities have become a primary symbol for larger divisions and polarization of race religion and policy politics. Um, can you talk a little bit about how we got here and uh what we should do?

40:12 That's a question. Small small small subject. So, the five beta kappa talk that I gave I think it was the spring of 24. So, before the most recent election, but at a time when it was already evident that universities were very much under attack and I wasn't speaking as president. And I felt I could say speak more freely than I had been able to as president.

40:37 And I just wanted to charge these students who were the arguably the ones who were the most active beneficiaries of the Harvard intellectual atmosphere. They're the ones who'd succeeded noly in becoming five beta kappa. They were special citizens in a way. And I wanted to tell them that they needed to notice that this was happening. This was a concerted attack and they needed to defend the university in which they thrived. Not just Harvard, but university system more generally in which they thrived because it was so central not just to their lives and what they would become, but to our whole society and what we would become. And so it was really kind of a charge. And I got a standing over. They all leapt to their feet and started cheering. I thought they might throw vegetables. So that was that was gratifying.

41:31 I think we got here in part because there has been a concerted attack on higher education. I if I went back I you've got a lot of quotes. I'm s thinking you read a lot of my speeches. If you looked at my inaugural address in 2007, I'm talking there about attacks on higher education. Higher education is dangerous and it ought to be. It is meant to challenge the status quo. It's meant to say that we can't accept where we are. We need to think about where we ought to be in the future. Whether that's with a scientific breakthrough, whether it's about challenges to injustices in society, it's meant to ask questions. It's not meant to always ask the right questions or have the right answers to those questions, but it's meant to be a little bit at odds with power. Mhm.

42:21 And so if we're in a situation where people are uneasy about power or want to hold on to power, they should naturally be finding friction with what universities do. But I would hope they could be capacious enough to think that this is important and it may be uncomfortable, but that discomfort has a purpose. When I first became president, had to address families of first year students. I often said that we promised to give them back someone who was different from the student they'd sent. And then I realized at some point this was not appreciated.

43:02 They didn't necessarily want someone different from their expectations of their child. And that to me was very illuminating because it it's not just policy from on high. It's what we as a society want out of higher education. Do we want training or do we want education?

43:24 And that seems to me a very important distinction that those of us who love what higher education can be and must be, we have to be insistent about education changes and education is about the future. It's also about the past,

43:41 not just the present. The uh the Calvin report at the University of Chicago has this line in it to your point, which is that universities are like Socrates. They need to be disturbing.

43:54 And you know, it's right. I mean, our job is not to make people happy. It's to make them think and to learn and to stretch themselves

44:02 and and certainly in your career, you have you have done all that. So we're very grateful for those contributions. Uh I've left a little time I believe for questions from the audience. So yes,

44:18 if you might introduce yourself. I'm Susan Thunderman and I did attend Harvard School of Education. Got my masters there, but I then came to work in education here in Pasadena. And you were president, you sent out an email, which I always appreciate, about about the death of Jim Rothberg,

44:46 and you said Harvard lost a good friend today. And I'm curious if you could elaborate a little bit about him,

44:57 about Jim, about Jim and his relationship to Harvard and maybe how Harvard changed him as an adult.

45:06 Well, Jim, I got to know Jim when I was Radcliffe Dean still. He was a member of the Harvard Corporation and he was the treasurer of the Harvard Corporation

45:16 and he was just wonderful to me. um my whole experience of friendship with him very supportive in times that were quite difficult because of the financial crisis and we didn't know where things were going. We didn't know Harvard lost a third of its endowment. It was um 30% dependent on its endowment for its annual budget. It was this going to continue? What what was going to happen? And Jim was wise and steady unflapable. I sometimes think he was too unflapable and didn't take his own heart situation seriously enough quickly enough. I just worry about that. Uh and for he died very suddenly. He was a trustee here also. He died hitting a ball in the golf course at age probably 68 I think he was. And it was just devastating and left this enormous hole in a friendship and in the li for me in the lives of his family and and the larger community. And so I still miss him. I always think about him. I think about him a lot. But

46:26 when I'm around here I think about him all the time. Are there other questions? My name is Chan. I'm a Caltech alum. I finished my PhD here in 200. I've been working here as a staff uh for 25 years. I'm also a member of Amnest International international group at Caltech. We focus on human rights in China. And since you mentioned uh briefly just one word communism and also Harvard and my question is like you know Shiin Ping daughter studied in Harvard and every year many Chinese government officials um go to study at Harvard to get training on MBA and while at the same time we talk about human rights in China about the wiger genocides about force organ harvesting to fallong and the wigers right this is what Mnest international care about and so Why Harvard has been giving so much trainings to the Chinese government? Why does Harvard want to support a totally Italian regime government by providing

47:32 them professional trainings? And in Chinese community, right, the Chinese media called Harvard the Chinese Communist Party University. So, do you agree with that statement or like is there any other reason why you decided to train Chinese officials? Thank you. And by the way, I admire you very much as a woman scientist. Thank you for being here.

47:53 So you're right. Harvard has had a lot of ties with China since the 19th century actually and has uh many alums in China who um have come to Harvard. Some of them I met some alums who came before the communist revolution and and had gone back to China. That was fascinating. I don't think we see ourselves as supportive of the Chinese government. I think we see ourselves as opening intellectual exchanges that could have important influences going um into China and illuminating issues that perhaps don't get addressed. The relationship of Harvard and China and the United States and China changed marketkedly during the years of my presidency. When I first became president, I think we were all nationwide in this notion that of course as um China develops more economically, it is going to become more democratic.

48:53 People were just assuming that that would be the direction of of of politics in China. And of course, that has not been the case. It's been quite a different um trajectory. When I first went to China, I was treated as like a a dignitary from a head of state or something. I had all this attention and police escorts from the airport and all of that. When I made my last trip to China, which I think was in 2017, we had people surveilling us all the time, coming into my room and looking at my papers. It was just a different different world even in that short period of time. But would we have be better off if we didn't have students from China coming and experiencing what an American university is? I often ask myself about Xi Jinping's daughter. What does it mean that she spent four years as an undergraduate in China? What does she say at the dinner table to her father? And I can only think that she

49:54 has a broader perspective and perhaps can use that in influential ways because she chose to do that. So I don't see us as reinforcing um inequities and and tragedies and human rights violations in China, but perhaps opening up a world of intellectual exchange that could lead to understanding them or challenging them. And certainly we have spoken out and our faculty have spoken out very vigorously about the kinds of human rights violations that that you speak about and they will continue to do so.

50:31 Thank you. Another question. Okay. Um, thank you for your very enlightening talk. You talked about how throughout history it's common for problems to repeat themselves and for the people to have to repeatedly find and rediscover the solution to those problems. So, I was just wondering what kind of those problems do you think resonate with um our modern times and what advice would you give to the younger generation? Thank you.

51:09 Well, I I'm particularly concerned about the attacks on diversity and on women. um the reversal of the Voting Rights Act and other African-American well I was very involved in the Affirmative Action case at Harvard which as you know was um brought before the Supreme Court and uh affirmative action was overturned as a result of that case though we invested a great deal in in trying to um sustain it. I worry about uh what kind of country we want to be. I think we've once again I mean Ken Burns I watched so much of it last week it's like in my brain but he does a wonderful job of showing how diverse the American republic was at its very founding and this is who we've been we've been open to others to immigration has made us strong all of these things are being challenged in such fundamental ways and I find that enormously disturbing I think also in the the a realm that's very dear and is central to Caltech

52:22 facts. What is the basis for fact? How do we understand truth? What are our what is the basis for making a truth claim? What is expertise? How we as a country have advanced so far because of discoveries in science and medicine and we're just going to throw those away. So those are extremely troubling um some of the extremely troubling elements about the present. what advice I'd give to young people. I was thinking about this um just yesterday actually because Tom said he might ask me something about advice and I I think this is such an uncertain time that there's been a tendency among a lot of the young people that I worked with at Harvard at least to have a very clear trajectory of what they think their lives are going to be. I'm gonna go to this school and that school and then I'm gonna get a job here and then I'm gonna do this and suddenly that's all up in the air. And to take as an example

53:21 computer science as a field which was such a hot field and students felt that was a something they could definitely get a fabulously well-paying job in the minute they graduated. And now suddenly with AI, computer science and its trajectory is very upended. Who knows what else in the realm of uncertainty we're going to be facing. The international situation is very fraught. The economic situation is very troubling. Where are we going? Students need to be ready for uncertainty. And that seems to me what a university education at its best ought to be able to do. not as I said train you for a specific job but give you certain tools that will enable you to ask the questions to challenge the accepted wisdoms in a world that we cannot predict right now and it's hard thing to say to people get used to uncertainty because certainty is very consoling it's very comfortable but I don't think we have that luxury at the

54:25 moment so my advice to young people is be ready to be surprised. Don't be surprised if you're surprised by what happens next. And figure out what are your basic values that you want to uphold in whatever the world turns out to be and what are the skills you can attain that will enable you to navigate that world, whatever it turns out to be.

54:47 Well, thank you. I I think on that note, uh we will thank you. That's great. I mean, I I couldn't agree more. There's a certain irony about the fact that the discussion about education these days is narrowing and yet the skill set you need is becoming so much more broader and flexibility and adaptability and you know I think uh our institutions try to provide an education that way. uh but uh the young people have to seize that and uh understand uh that the exposure to so many different threads is going to be uh essential for their their ability to succeed. Um any but thank you so much.

55:27 It's been remarkable. Thank you. Thank you all.

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "Presidential Distinguished Speaker Series: Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust"?

Drew Gilpin Faust (Guest), John Lewis (Guest).

What is discussed in "Presidential Distinguished Speaker Series: Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust"?

In order: 0:00 Harvard University, Drew Gilpin Faust, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Concord Academy; 5:00 Brown v. Board, Binmar College, Concord Academy, Caltech; 10:00 Sputnik; 20:00 Harvard University, East Germany, Cuban missile crisis, Yugoslavia; 25:00 John Lewis, Harvard University, Brown v. Board, Binmar College; 30:00 Harvard University, John Lewis, Caltech, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study; 35:00 Harvard University; 40:00 Harvard University; 45:00 Harvard University, Caltech; 50:00 Harvard University, Caltech.

What is mentioned in this caltech episode?

13 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard University, John Lewis, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Brown v. Board, Concord Academy. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Presidential Distinguished Speaker Series: Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust"?

The episode runs 56 min; the transcript is about 9,283 words in 96 timestamped sections.

More from caltech

• All analyzed episodes
• Books mentioned on caltech
• People mentioned on caltech