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November-December 2007
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< previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 In the panel on “War and Truth”—of great moment, and the subject of Faust’s forthcoming book on death in the Civil War—MacArthur Fellow Jonathan Shay ’63, a psychiatrist who treats combat veterans with severe psychological trauma, said torturers are produced by training in which they are themselves tortured. Though some participants proposed that news trans- mitted by the Internet would counter the prevalence of atrocity, Tisch professor of history Niall Ferguson cautioned that humans seem to have an innate capacity for violence—and that young men in many parts of the world were avid consumers of “warography.” Such urgent and interdis-ciplinary conversations are the very stuff of the freewheel-ing, creative work that has come to characterize the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, of which Faust was founding dean prior to being chosen as president. In a letter sent to the University community at the beginning of the academic year, she wrote of “opportunities not just to advance our efforts in discrete fields, but to work to become a university known more for bridges and less for walls,” and described her decanal appointees as “all shar[ing] a commitment…not only to the success of their own faculties and schools, but to the future of Harvard as a whole.” John Winthrop would approve. On September 20, at the launch of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Faust spoke of engineers as builders of bridges; she envisioned bridges between basic and applied science, among technology and ethics and public policy, and among Harvard’s schools and industry and the larger world. In his remarks welcoming Faust to her presidency, Massachusetts governor Deval L. Patrick ’78, J.D. ’82, urged her to “lean forward.” That she will certainly do, soon, enlisting faculty members and others in efforts to think broadly about Harvard’s opportunities in the arts and performance; to build connections among social scientists, much like the new Harvard University Science and Engineering Committee; and to establish the University’s relationships with its local communities on a new footing. Those initiatives must meld with academic planning, Allston physical and construction planning, visions for use of the University’s financial resources, and ambitions that require future fundraising. How all those ventures unfold depends, in part, on the Harvard community’s determination to “knitt together” with each other and with the new president. In an unexpected ending to her installation address, Faust reached into history a final time, to suggest the way to the academic future. “Last week,” she said, “I was given a brown manila envelope that had been entrusted to the University Archives in 1951 by James B. Conant, Harvard’s twenty-third president. He left instructions that it should be opened by the Harvard president at the outset of the next century ‘and not before.’” Within she found “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, as he put it, ‘the destruction of our cities including Cambridge quite possible.’…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 let-ter, Conant was confident about what the University would be. He wrote, ‘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,’” Faust read. “We must dedicate ourselves to making certain he continues to be right; we must share and sustain his faith.”  
 
 
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