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November-December 2007
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< previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 Lest any doubt linger about the aims of this community, as opposed to Winthrop’s, Faust’s stepdaughter, Leah Rosenberg, read the final paragraph of Abraham Lincoln’s Address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, on September 30, 1859—then, as now, at the harvest time of year. It ends: “Let us hope…that by the best cultivation of the physical world, beneath us and around us; and the intellectual and moral world within us, we shall secure an individual, social, and political prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away.” Like any ritual, of course, an inauguration is not all spinach. Alongside the rhetoric there is rigmarole. Substance is addressed head on, but also symbolized. Before Faust heard Verba’s sober advice, she had help of a different sort. During the Musical Prelude to an Inauguration, held on Thursday evening in Sanders Theatre, John Lithgow ’67, Ar.D. ’05, introduced “a primer on the finer points of leadership”—from Hollywood. Jeffrey Melvoin ’75 confected a pastiche of film clips, billed as an Illegitimi Non Carborundum Production, offering suggestions from the likes of Groucho Marx (on sustaining college athletics) and on topics such as supporting the arts (soothing Frankenstein’s primal rage with violin music). The next morning, sixth- and second-graders Lili and Tyson Gilpin (the president’s nieces) charmed the Memorial Church audience; the girls, supported by their father, Lawrence Gilpin, and Jessica Rosenberg ’04 (the daughter of President Faust and her husband, Charles Rosenberg, Monrad professor of the social sciences), declaimed from Oh, the Places You’ll Go! The Dr. Seuss classic warns, “You’ll get mixed up, of course,/as you already know./ You’ll get mixed up/with many strange birds as you go” and wisely counsels, “Just never forget to be dexterous and deft./And never mix up your right foot with your left.” Earlier in the week, opening an archival exhibition on Harvard presidents, University Library director Robert Darnton quoted Edward Holyoke’s 1769 deathbed comment, “If any man wishes to be humbled and mortified, let him become president of Harvard College”—and assured Faust, “These remarks do not apply to women.” Self-deprecating Harvard humor was in vogue. During the concert, Alison Brown ’84 recalled that she was a Hist and Lit concentrator and noted, “You can imagine how excited my parents were when I told them I wanted to be a professional banjo player.” Talking about herself and Pink Martini founder and fellow member Thomas M. Lauderdale ’92, singer China Forbes ’92 said if she seemed nervous, it was because “the last time I was in this room, I was failing Ec 10.” (The next afternoon, Faust characterized inaugural speeches as “pronouncements by individuals who don’t yet know what they are talking about,” or “expressions of hope unchastened by the rod of experience.”) Further tweaking the pomp in these circumstances, Karen MacDonald, lecturer on dramatic arts, of the American Repertory Theatre, burst into the Sanders proceedings in the role of Gertrude, an implacable Cambridge meter maid outraged by an illegally parked car. Informed that it was the president’s, she loudly queried about the missing “1636” license plate (recently reassigned to a Harvard van; the black presidential Lincoln is no longer seen) and expressed astonishment that the incumbent was now a woman—before wading into the audience to honor Faust with her first parking ticket in her august new office. There were sly references to the new president’s preferred manner of dress. Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, Litt.D. ’89, who gave a reading from a work “very, very, very much in progress” on Thursday afternoon, remembered when women could not wear pants to work; “This seems like a triumph,” she said. An early clip in Melvoin’s video featured a rebellious Southern girl at the breakfast table, protesting at having to wear a “darn old dress.” Other signs that this was the twenty-first century abounded. The design of the installation invitations featured the Charter of 1650, befitting an historian president, but they were printed on “100% post-consumer waste paper with soy inks.” Visitors to the exhibition of Kara Walker’s Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated) at the Fogg Art Museum (Faust will give a gallery talk on November 2) are invited to comment at a Facebook.com group. Complementing the webcast of the installation exercises, the proceedings were available, reported the News Office, by downlink from Satellite Galaxy 17, transponder 6, using frequency 11820.0000 and “vertical polarization.” As for symbols, Faust made a major statement about the University by inviting each of her living predecessors—Derek Bok (1971-1991, 2006-2007), Neil L. Ruden-stine (1991-2001), and Summers (2001-2006)—to be seated at center stage, and set a precedent by having them confer some of the symbols of office. In a “We Three Kings” moment, Bok handed forth two silver keys, Rudenstine the earliest College record book, Summers the Harvard seals. Then Frances D. Fergusson, president of the Board of Overseers, and Senior Fellow of the Harvard Corporation James R. Houghton formally invested her in the office, Houghton presenting the final symbol, a replica of the Charter of 1650. The Overseers and Corporation members, minus Robert E. Rubin, looked on from the stage. Faust set a further precedent by inviting a University staff member to present one of the formal greetings. (As chair of a Committee on University Life at Penn in the 1980s, she had criticized the “incivility” of students and faculty toward staff members.) Beverly Blake Sullivan, associate director of the Harvard Alumni Association Board of Directors, with 38 years of University service, spoke of the nearly 13,000 staff members as an “exceptionally talented group of people” who “seek knowledge and look for solutions. We are proactive, and daily we strive to maintain the highest standards to help Harvard realize its transformative potential.” 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | continued >  
 
 
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