[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 167 (Wednesday, October 31, 2007)]
[Senate]
[Pages S13619-S13621]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 INAUGURAL ADDRESS OF DREW GILPIN FAUST

  Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, it is a privilege to draw the attention 
of my colleagues to the inauguration earlier this month of Dr. Drew 
Gilpin Faust as the 28th president of Harvard University.
  Unfortunately, because of my recent surgery, I was not able to attend 
the ceremony, but I read with great interest the eloquent and inspring 
address of Dr. Faust at that ceremony.
  Dr. Faust, an historian of the Civil War and former dean of the 
Radcliffe Institute, made history herself by becoming the first woman 
to serve as president of this outstanding university.
  Others who spoke on this occasion included our Massachusetts 
Governor, Deval Patrick, historian John Hope Franklin, University of 
Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann, where Dr. Faust spent much of her 
brilliant career, and author Tony Morrison.
  Present also were three of Dr. Faust's distinguished predecessors, 
Derek Bok, Neil Rudenstine, and Lawrence Summers, as well as 
distinguished representatives of other major colleges and universities 
in the United States and throughout the world.
  Last month, Senator Dole, Congressman Petri, Congressman Frank, 
Congressman Capuano, and I had the privilege of hosting a reception in 
the Senate's Mansfield Room to honor and welcome Dr. Faust. A number of 
our colleagues attended as well, and we all look forward to working 
with Dr. Faust, especially on higher education issues, in the years 
ahead.
  Dr. Faust is obviously an excellent choice by Harvard. She grew up in 
the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, and attended Concord Academy in 
Massachusetts. After earning her BA from Bryn Mawr College, she 
continued her education at the University of Pennsylvania, where she 
earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in American civilization and served on the 
faculty there for 26 years, earning wide renown as a leading historian 
of the Civil War and the American South. In 2001 she became the first 
dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and was 
appointed as Harvard's Abraham Lincoln Professor of History.
  Her scholarship has been focused on the past, but almost from the 
beginning she has been committed as well to solving the problems of the 
present and making the world a better place for the future.
  As a child in Virginia, she was appalled by the racism in her own 
community. At the age of nine, she wrote a letter to President 
Eisenhower opposing segregation.
  In high school, she went to Eastern Europe one summer and spent 
weekends volunteering in a program to help the poor. She was elected 
senior class president and was so widely respected that the school's 
new headmaster sought her advice about the school.
  In her freshman year at Bryn Mawr College, she was outraged when 
peaceful protesters against segregation in Selma were brutally clubbed 
and gassed by the police--so she skipped her midterm exams to go there 
and join the protest.
  At the University of Pennsylvania, she dedicated much of her time and 
energy to the cause of women in academic life. She chaired the 
university's Women's Studies Program, and worked skillfully to see that 
women candidates for the faculty were considered fully and fairly.
  Through it all, Dr. Faust won well-deserved renown for her 
scholarship. She became one of the Nation's preeminent historians of 
the South, bringing new light to topics such as plantation agriculture 
and the life of southern intellectuals. Her landmark 1996 book, 
``Mothers of Invention,'' made her the first to demonstrate that women 
had a significant impact on the outcome of the Civil War. For that 
pioneering study, she received the Francis Parkman Prize for the year's 
best work of history.
  For the past 7 years, Dr. Faust has been the ``mother of invention'' 
at the Radcliffe Institute, skillfully guiding Radcliffe's 
transformation into one of the Nation's foremost research centers for 
established and emerging scholars in all disciplines, and still 
maintaining its special and long-standing role in the study of women, 
gender and society.
  As Dr. Faust has said, our shared enterprise now, as people connected 
to Harvard, is to make the future of this extraordinary university even 
more remarkable than its past. And with the distinguished leadership of 
Dr. Faust, there is no doubt it will be.
  I still remember the old inscription on the Dexter Gate in Harvard 
Yard: ``Enter to grow in wisdom. Depart to serve better thy country and 
all mankind.'' I am sure President Faust will give new power to these 
words in our day and generation.
  I wish President Faust well as she assumes this extraordinary 
responsibility, and I believe all of us in Congress will be interested 
in her eloquent and inspiring address on the historic occasion of her 
inauguration. It is an auspicious new beginning for Harvard, and I ask 
unanimous consent that her address be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                Unleashing Our Most Ambitious Imaginings

   (Inaugural Address of President Drew Gilpin Faust as President of 
    Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, October 12, 2007)

       I stand honored by your trust, inspired by your charge. I 
     am grateful to the Governing Boards for their confidence, and 
     I thank all of you for gathering in these festival rites. I 
     am indebted to my three predecessors, sitting behind me, for 
     joining me today. But I am grateful to them for much more--
     for all that they have given to Harvard and for what each of 
     them has generously given to me--advice, wisdom, support. I 
     am touched by the greetings from staff, faculty, students, 
     alumni, universities, from our honorable Governor, and from 
     the remarkable John Hope Franklin, who has both lived and 
     written history. I am grateful to the community leaders from 
     Boston and Cambridge who have come to welcome their new 
     neighbor. I am a little stunned to see almost every person I 
     am related to on earth sitting in the front rows. And I would 
     like to offer a special greeting of my own to my teachers who 
     are here--teachers from grade school, high school, college 
     and graduate school--who taught me to love learning and the 
     institutions that nurture it.
       We gather for a celebration a bit different from our June 
     traditions. Commencement is an annual rite of passage for 
     thousands of graduates; today marks a rite of passage for the 
     University. As at Commencement, we don robes that mark our 
     ties to the most ancient traditions of scholarship. On this 
     occasion, however, our procession includes not just our 
     Harvard community, but scholars--220 of them--representing 
     universities and colleges from across the country and around 
     the world. I welcome and thank our visitors, for their 
     presence reminds us that what we do here today, and what we 
     do at Harvard every day, links us to universities and 
     societies around the globe.


                             NEW BEGINNINGS

       Today we mark new beginnings by gathering in solidarity; we 
     celebrate our community and its creativity; we commit 
     ourselves to Harvard and all it represents in a new chapter 
     of its distinguished history. Like a congregation at a 
     wedding, you signify by your presence a pledge of support for 
     this marriage of a new president to a venerable institution. 
     As our colleagues in anthropology understand so well, rituals 
     have meanings and purposes; they are intended to arouse 
     emotions and channel intentions. In ritual, as the poet 
     Thomas Lynch has written, ``We act out things we cannot put 
     into words.'' But now my task is in fact to put some of this 
     ceremony into words, to capture our meanings and purposes.
       Inaugural speeches are a peculiar genre. They are by 
     definition pronouncements by individuals who don't yet know 
     what they are talking about. Or, we might more charitably dub 
     them expressions of hope unchastened by the rod of 
     experience.
       A number of inaugural veterans--both orators and auditors--
     have proffered advice, including unanimous agreement that my 
     talk must be shorter than Charles William Eliot's--which ran 
     to about an hour and a half. Often inaugural addresses 
     contain lists--of a new president's specific goals or 
     programs. But lists seem too constraining when I think of 
     what today should mean; they seem a way of limiting rather 
     than unleashing our most ambitious imaginings, our 
     profoundest commitments.

[[Page S13620]]

       If this is a day to transcend the ordinary, if it is a rare 
     moment when we gather not just as Harvard, but with a wider 
     world of scholarship, teaching and learning, it is a time to 
     reflect on what Harvard and institutions like it mean in this 
     first decade of the 21st century.
       Yet as I considered how to talk about higher education and 
     the future, I found myself--historian that I am--returning to 
     the past and, in particular, to a document I encountered in 
     my first year of graduate school. My cousin Jack Gilpin, 
     Class of '73, read a section of it at Memorial Church this 
     morning. As John Winthrop sat on board the ship Arabella in 
     1630, sailing across the Atlantic to found the Massachusetts 
     Bay Colony, he wrote a charge to his band of settlers, a 
     charter for their new beginnings. He offered what he 
     considered ``a compass to steer by''--a ``model,'' but not a 
     set of explicit orders. Winthrop instead sought to focus his 
     followers on the broader significance of their project, on 
     the spirit in which they should undertake their shared work. 
     I aim to offer such a ``compass'' today, one for us at 
     Harvard, and one that I hope will have meaning for all of us 
     who care about higher education, for we are inevitably, as 
     Winthrop urged his settlers to be, ``knitt together in this 
     work as one.''


                    AMERICAN HIGHER EDUCATION TODAY

       American higher education in 2007 is in a state of 
     paradox--at once celebrated and assailed. A host of popular 
     writings from the 1980s on have charged universities with 
     teaching too little, costing too much, coddling professors 
     and neglecting students, embracing an ``illiberalism'' that 
     has silenced open debate. A PBS special in 2005 described a 
     ``sea of mediocrity'' that ``places this nation at risk.'' A 
     report issued by the U.S. Department of Education last year 
     warned of the ``obsolescence'' of higher education as we know 
     it and called for federal intervention in service of the 
     national interest.
       Yet universities like Harvard and its peers, those 
     represented by so many of you here today, are beloved by 
     alumni who donate billions of dollars each year, are sought 
     after by students who struggle to win admission, and, in 
     fact, are deeply revered by the American public. In a recent 
     survey, 93 percent of respondents considered our universities 
     ``one of [the country's] most valuable resources.'' Abroad, 
     our universities are admired and emulated; they are arguably 
     the American institution most respected by the rest of the 
     world.
       How do we explain these contradictions? Is American higher 
     education in crisis, and if so, what kind? What should we as 
     its leaders and representatives be doing about it? This 
     ambivalence, this curious love-hate relationship, derives in 
     no small part from our almost unbounded expectations of our 
     colleges and universities, expectations that are at once 
     intensely felt and poorly understood.


                         THE POWER OF EDUCATION

       From the time of its founding, the United States has tied 
     its national identity to the power of education. We have long 
     turned to education to prepare our citizens for the political 
     equality fundamental to our national self-definition. In 
     1779, for example, Thomas Jefferson called for a national 
     aristocracy of talent, chosen ``without regard to wealth, 
     birth, or other accidental condition of circumstance'' and 
     ``rendered by liberal education . . . able to guard the 
     sacred deposit of rights and liberties of their fellow-
     citizens.'' As our economy has become more complex, more tied 
     to specialized knowledge, education has become more crucial 
     to social and economic mobility. W.E.B. DuBois observed in 
     1903 that ``Education and work are the levers to lift up a 
     people.'' Education makes the promise of America possible.
       In the past half century, American colleges and 
     universities have shared in a revolution, serving as both the 
     emblem and the engine of the expansion of citizenship, 
     equality and opportunity--to blacks, women, Jews, immigrants, 
     and others who would have been subjected to quotas or 
     excluded altogether in an earlier era. My presence here 
     today--and indeed that of many others on this platform--would 
     have been unimaginable even a few short years ago. Those who 
     charge that universities are unable to change should take 
     note of this transformation, of how different we are from 
     universities even of the mid 20th century. And those who long 
     for a lost golden age of higher education should think about 
     the very limited population that alleged utopia actually 
     served. College used to be restricted to a tiny elite; now it 
     serves the many, not just the few. The proportion of the 
     college age population enrolled in higher education today is 
     four times what it was in 1950; twelve times what it was 
     before the 1920s. Ours is a different and a far better world.
       At institutions like Harvard and its peers, this revolution 
     has been built on the notion that access should be based, as 
     Jefferson urged, on talent, not circumstance. In the late 
     1960s, Harvard began sustained efforts to identify and 
     attract outstanding minority students; in the 1970s, it 
     gradually removed quotas limiting women to a quarter of 
     the entering college class. Recently, Harvard has worked 
     hard to send the message that the college welcomes 
     families from across the economic spectrum. As a result we 
     have seen in the past 3 years a 33 percent increase in 
     students from families with incomes under $60,000. 
     Harvard's dorms and Houses are the most diverse 
     environments in which many of our students will ever live.
       Yet issues of access and cost persist--for middle-class 
     families who suffer terrifying sticker shock, and for 
     graduate and professional students who may incur enormous 
     debt as they pursue service careers in fields where salaries 
     are modest. As graduate training comes to seem almost as 
     indispensable as the baccalaureate degree for mobility and 
     success, the cost of these programs takes on even greater 
     importance.
       The desirability and the perceived necessity of higher 
     education have intensified the fears of many. Will I get in? 
     Will I be able to pay? This anxiety expresses itself in both 
     deep-seated resentment and nearly unrealizable expectations. 
     Higher education cannot alone guarantee the mobility and 
     equality at the heart of the American Dream. But we must 
     fully embrace our obligation to be available and affordable. 
     We must make sure that talented students are able to come to 
     Harvard, that they know they are able to come, and that they 
     know we want them here. We need to make sure that cost does 
     not divert students from pursuing their passions and their 
     dreams.
       But American anxiety about higher education is about more 
     than just cost. The deeper problem is a widespread lack of 
     understanding and agreement about what universities ought to 
     do and be. Universities are curious institutions with varied 
     purposes that they have neither clearly articulated nor 
     adequately justified. Resulting public confusion, at a time 
     when higher education has come to seem an indispensable 
     social resource, has produced a torrent of demands for 
     greater ``accountability'' from colleges and universities.


     UNIVERSITIES ARE ACCOUNTABLE TO THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE

       Universities are indeed accountable. But we in higher 
     education need to seize the initiative in defining what we 
     are accountable for. We are asked to report graduation rates, 
     graduate school admission statistics, scores on standardized 
     tests intended to assess the ``value added'' of years in 
     college, research dollars, numbers of faculty publications. 
     But such measures cannot themselves capture the achievements, 
     let alone the aspirations of universities. Many of these 
     metrics are important to know, and they shed light on 
     particular parts of our undertaking. But our purposes are far 
     more ambitious and our accountability thus far more difficult 
     to explain.
       Let me venture a definition. The essence of a university is 
     that it is uniquely accountable to the past and to the 
     future--not simply or even primarily to the present. A 
     university is not about results in the next quarter; it is 
     not even about who a student has become by graduation. It is 
     about learning that molds a lifetime, learning that transmits 
     the heritage of millennia; learning that shapes the future. A 
     university looks both backwards and forwards in ways that 
     must--that even ought to--conflict with a public's immediate 
     concerns or demands. Universities make commitments to the 
     timeless, and these investments have yields we cannot predict 
     and often cannot measure. Universities are stewards of living 
     tradition--in Widener and Houghton and our 88 other 
     libraries, in the Fogg and the Peabody, in our departments of 
     classics, of history and of literature. We are uncomfortable 
     with efforts to justify these endeavors by defining them as 
     instrumental, as measurably useful to particular contemporary 
     needs. Instead we pursue them in part ``for their own sake,'' 
     because they define what has over centuries made us human, 
     not because they can enhance our global competitiveness.
       We pursue them because they offer us as individuals and as 
     societies a depth and breadth of vision we cannot find in the 
     inevitably myopic present. We pursue them too because just as 
     we need food and shelter to survive, just as we need jobs and 
     seek education to better our lot, so too we as human beings 
     search for meaning. We strive to understand who we are, where 
     we came from, where we are going and why. For many people, 
     the four years of undergraduate life offer the only interlude 
     permitted for unfettered exploration of such fundamental 
     questions. But the search for meaning is a never-ending quest 
     that is always interpreting, always interrupting and 
     redefining the status quo, always looking, never content with 
     what is found. An answer simply yields the next question. 
     This is in fact true of all learning, of the natural and 
     social sciences as well as the humanities, and thus of the 
     very core of what universities are about.
       By their nature, universities nurture a culture of 
     restlessness and even unruliness. This lies at the heart of 
     their accountability to the future. Education, research, 
     teaching are always about change--transforming individuals as 
     they learn, transforming the world as our inquiries alter our 
     understanding of it, transforming societies as we see our 
     knowledge translated into policies--policies like those being 
     developed at Harvard to prevent unfair lending practices, 
     or to increase affordable housing or avert nuclear 
     proliferation--or translated into therapies, like those 
     our researchers have designed to treat macular 
     degeneration or to combat anthrax. The expansion of 
     knowledge means change. But change is often uncomfortable, 
     for it always encompasses loss as well as gain, 
     disorientation as well as discovery. It has, as 
     Machiavelli once wrote, no constituency. Yet in facing the 
     future, universities must embrace the unsettling change 
     that is fundamental to every advance in understanding.


                      OUR OBLIGATION TO THE FUTURE

       We live in the midst of scientific developments as dramatic 
     as those of any era since

[[Page S13621]]

     the 17th century. Our obligation to the future demands that 
     we take our place at the forefront of these transformations. 
     We must organize ourselves in ways that enable us fully to 
     engage in such exploration, as we have begun to do by 
     creating the Broad Institute, by founding cross-school 
     departments, by launching a School of Engineering and Applied 
     Sciences. We must overcome barriers both within and beyond 
     Harvard that could slow or constrain such work, and we must 
     provide the resources and the facilities--like the new 
     science buildings in both Cambridge and Allston--to support 
     it. Our obligation to the future makes additional demands. 
     Universities are, uniquely, a place of philosophers as well 
     as scientists. It is urgent that we pose the questions of 
     ethics and meaning that will enable us to confront the human, 
     the social and the moral significance of our changing 
     relationship with the natural world.
       Accountability to the future requires that we leap 
     geographic as well as intellectual boundaries. Just as we 
     live in a time of narrowing distances between fields and 
     disciplines, so we inhabit an increasingly transnational 
     world in which knowledge itself is the most powerful 
     connector. Our lives here in Cambridge and Boston cannot be 
     separated from the future of the rest of the earth: we share 
     the same changing climate; we contract and spread the same 
     diseases; we participate in the same economy. We must 
     recognize our accountability to the wider world, for, as John 
     Winthrop warned in 1630, ``we must consider that we shall be 
     as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.''


                     HARVARD AS A SOURCE AND SYMBOL

       Harvard is both a source and a symbol of the ever expanding 
     knowledge upon which the future of the earth depends, and we 
     must take an active and reflective role in this new geography 
     of learning. Higher education is burgeoning around the globe 
     in forms that are at once like and unlike our own. American 
     universities are widely emulated, but our imitators often 
     display limited appreciation for the principles of free 
     inquiry and the culture of creative unruliness that defines 
     us.
       The ``Veritas'' in Harvard's shield was originally intended 
     to invoke the absolutes of divine revelation, the 
     unassailable verities of Puritan religion. We understand it 
     quite differently now. Truth is an aspiration, not a 
     possession. Yet in this we--and all universities defined by 
     the spirit of debate and free inquiry--challenge and even 
     threaten those who would embrace unquestioned certainties. We 
     must commit ourselves to the uncomfortable position of doubt, 
     to the humility of always believing there is more to know, 
     more to teach, more to understand.
       The kinds of accountability I have described represent at 
     once a privilege and a responsibility. We are able to live at 
     Harvard in a world of intellectual freedom, of inspiring 
     tradition, of extraordinary resources, because we are part of 
     that curious and venerable organization known as a 
     university. We need better to comprehend and advance its 
     purposes--not simply to explain ourselves to an often 
     critical public, but to hold ourselves to our own account. We 
     must act not just as students and staff, historians and 
     computer scientists, lawyers and physicians, linguists and 
     sociologists, but as citizens of the university, with 
     obligations to this commonwealth of the mind. We must regard 
     ourselves as accountable to one another, for we constitute 
     the institution that in turn defines our possibilities. 
     Accountability to the future encompasses special 
     accountability to our students, for they are our most 
     important purpose and legacy. And we are responsible not just 
     to and for this university, Harvard, in this moment, 2007, 
     but to the very concept of the university as it has evolved 
     over nearly a millennium.
       It is not easy to convince a nation or a world to respect, 
     much less support, institutions committed to challenging 
     society's fundamental assumptions. But it is our obligation 
     to make that case: both to explain our purposes and achieve 
     them so well that these precious institutions survive and 
     prosper in this new century. Harvard cannot do this alone. 
     But all of us know that Harvard has a special role. That is 
     why we are here; that is why it means so much to us.
       Last week I was given a brown manila envelope that had been 
     entrusted to the University Archives in 1951 by James B. 
     Conant, Harvard's 23rd president. He left instructions that 
     it should be opened by the Harvard president at the outset of 
     the next century ``and not before.'' I broke the seal on the 
     mysterious package to find a remarkable letter from my 
     predecessor. It was addressed to ``My dear Sir.'' Conant 
     wrote with a sense of imminent danger. He feared an impending 
     World War III that would make ``the destruction of our cities 
     including Cambridge quite possible.'' ``We all wonder,'' he 
     continued, ``how the free world is going to get through the 
     next fifty years.''


                            HARVARD'S FUTURE

       But as he imagined Harvard's future, Conant shifted from 
     foreboding to faith. If the ``prophets of doom'' proved 
     wrong, if there was a Harvard president alive to read his 
     letter, Conant was confident about what the university would 
     be. ``You will receive this note and be in charge of a more 
     prosperous and significant institution than the one over 
     which I have the honor to preside . . . That . . . [Harvard] 
     will maintain the traditions of academic freedom, of 
     tolerance for heresy, I feel sure.'' We must dedicate 
     ourselves to making certain he continues to be right; we must 
     share and sustain his faith.
       Conant's letter, like our gathering here, marks a dramatic 
     intersection of the past with the future. This is a ceremony 
     in which I pledge--with keys and seal and charter--my 
     accountability to the traditions that his voice from the past 
     invokes. And at the same time, I affirm, in compact with all 
     of you, my accountability to and for Harvard's future. As in 
     Conant's day, we face uncertainties in a world that gives us 
     sound reason for disquiet. But we too maintain an unwavering 
     belief in the purposes and potential of this university and 
     in all it can do to shape how the world will look another 
     half century from now. Let us embrace those responsibilities 
     and possibilities; let us share them ``knitt together . . . 
     as one;'' let us take up the work joyfully, for such an 
     assignment is a privilege beyond measure.

                          ____________________