Installation address: New Harvard President
DREW FAUST
Unleashing our most ambitious
imaginings
Date; October 12, 2007;
CAMBRIDGE,
MASS.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 Arbella 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 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.
- 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 or circumstance” and “rendered by liberal
education ... able to guard the sacred deposit of the 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. DU BOIS 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 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.
- We live in the midst of scientific developments as dramatic
as those of any era since 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 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.” 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.
Drew Gilpin Faust
Date; October 12, 2007;
CAMBRIDGE,
MASS. USA.
****************************************************
NOTA
DO EDITOR do Blog Ronald.Arquiteto e do Facebook Ronald Almeida Silva:
As
palavras e números entre [colchetes]; os destaques sublinhados, em negrito
e amarelo
bem como nomes próprios em CAIXA ALTA
e a numeração de parágrafos que
foram introduzidas na presente versão NÃO CONSTAM da edição original
deste documento (artigo; pesquisa; monografia; dissertação; tese ou reportagem).
Esses
adendos ortográficos foram acrescidos meramente com intuito pedagógico de facilitar a leitura, a compreensão e
a captação mnemônica dos fatos mais relevantes do artigo por um espectro mais
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ALMEIDA SILVA
[Rio
de Janeiro, RJ, 02jun1947; reside em São Luís, MA, desde 1976]
Arquiteto Urbanista FAU-UFRJ 1972
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