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November-December 2007
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< previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 And at the end of the day’s work, a color guard of Harvard ROTC cadets led the recessional. But unmistakably the farthest-reaching symbolism sprang from Faust’s own experience growing up in the segregated South, as a participant in the civil-rights movement, and as a scholar of the disfiguring wounds of racial division in America. Beyond Toni Morrison’s reading—about a slave girl enmeshed in the mounting witch terrors of 1690—and Kara Walker’s unsettling prints, the Sanders Theatre concert began with the rousing Kuumba Singers and ended with saxophonist Joshua Redman ’91 (and three Harvard sidemen) filling the hall with jazz of sonic-boom intensity. Carla Ann Harris ’84, M.B.A. ’87, of Morgan Stanley and Harlem’s St. Charles Gospelites choir, sang “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” in Memorial Church Friday morning. For the afternoon exercises, the exuberant Harvard College Pan-African Dance and Music Ensemble escorted Faust and her presidential party into Tercentenary Theatre. The penultimate song, before the throng gave voice to “Fair Harvard,” was a rendition of “Amazing Grace” by Simon Estes.
“Often inaugural addresses contain lists—of a new president’s specific goals or programs,” Faust observed, but on October 12, she found such lists “too constraining.” Nonetheless, in the events surrounding the installation exercises, and by her actions since assuming office on July 1, she has in fact given many signs of her substantive agenda. In five faculty symposia on Friday morning, Harvard scholars wrestled with issues of intellectual moment and of focused interest to the president and the wider institution. At “The Arts of Interpretation: Whose Meaning Is It Anyway?” Homi K. Bhabha, Rothenberg professor of the humanities, moderated a discussion on the ways we extract meaning from texts, maps, music, and art works—and the ambiguities that doing so entails. Using ob- jects ranging from a 1540s Mexican codex to a contemporary photograph, the panelists explored the problems of teasing apart myth and history in an old painting, works’ political subtexts, and the varied ways in which a perceiver “completes” an art work. In “Decisions, Decisions: Health, Wealth, Happiness, and Neurobiology,” scholars in business, economics, medicine, psychology, and public health examined rationality, emotion, and the cognitive components of making complex decisions—and the implications for training doctors, investing for retirement, or waging war. “Innovation and Impact: Science and Engineering Today and Tomorrow” brought together experts in life sciences, physics, and infectious diseases. Among their common concerns, articulated by Cabot professor of the natural sciences Douglas Melton, was the need for Harvard to become as good in teaching science to undergraduates as it is in conducting scientific research. During the discussion on “Inequality and Justice in the Twenty-First Century,” led by Gottlieb professor of law Elizabeth Warren, associate professor of education and economics Bridget Terry Long said universities, as society’s gatekeepers, have to “acknowledge our own role in creating inequality.” Prescriptions ranged from fostering direct service, such as in healthcare, to crafting policies through which society “can have less [inequality] than there is now,” according to Christopher Jencks, Wiener professor of social policy. 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | continued >  
 
 
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The first individual Faust identified in her speech was John Hope Franklin, Ph.D. ’41, LL.D. ’81, the pioneering historian of race in America. In his autobiography,