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November-December 2007
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"Knitt Together...As One"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 given so generously 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’m a little stunned to see almost every person in the world that I am related to sitting here in the first few 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—teachers who taught me to love learning and the institutions that nurture it.
Listen to President Faust's inaugural address.
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 globe. 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 world. 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. 
Photograph by Jim Harrison Formally installed as president, Drew Gilpin Faust delivers her inaugural address. Inaugural speeches are a peculiar genre. They are by definition pronouncements by individuals who don’t yet know what they’re 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 went on for 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 twenty-first 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 that I encountered in my first year in graduate school. My cousin Jack Gilpin, class of ’73, read a section of it at Memorial Church this morning. As John Winthrop sat aboard 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 institutions 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, as he put it, “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. 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 equality, citizenship, 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 twentieth 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; it now 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; 12 times what it was before the 1920s. Ours is a different and a far better world. 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | continued >  
 
 
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