Twenty-eighth, and First

Honored historian, seasoned scholar steeped in universities’ distinctive role, adept academic administrator—Drew Gilpin Faust forcefully took possession of her Harvard presidency during inaugural celebrations and a formal installation ceremony on October 11 and 12. She did so in striking language and imagery, telling the crowd in Tercentenary Theatre—their spirits unchilled by blustery rain showers—“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.”

Although this was also a personal occasion (Faust said she was “a little stunned to see almost every person in the world that I am related to sitting here in the first few rows”), she focused on the most institutional of purposes. In the presence of nine of her former teachers, from elementary through graduate school, and more than 200 representatives of higher education from around the world, she defined the essence of the university as being “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.” Rather, she said, “A university looks both backwards and forwards in ways that must—and even ought to—conflict with a public’s immediate concerns and demands.” As “stewards of living tradition,” she said, universities “make commitments to the timeless,” endeavors pursued “because they define what has, over centuries, made us human, not because they can enhance our global competitiveness.” As agents of uncomfortable change, accountable to the future, “universities nurture a culture of restlessness and even unruliness.…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” and new therapies. And she arranged three times—in her own address (see “Knitt Together...As One”), and twice in readings by relatives—to invoke the most deeply rooted American beliefs in community and in progress, to enlist engaged, energetic, and accountable membership in the Harvard community.

Photograph by Jim Harrison

The twenty-eighth president—deemed a “rebellious daughter of the South” and "Harvard’s president of reinvention” by Amy Gutmann—receives applause from (left to right) University Treasurer James F. Rothenberg; Frances D. Fergusson, President of the Board of Overseers; James R. Houghton, Senior Fellow of the Harvard Corporation; and Marc Goodheart, Secretary of the University.

For the most part, it was others who pointed out how extraordinary the installation of the University’s twenty-eighth president was. Amy Gutmann ’71, Ph.D. ’76, now president of the University of Pennsylvania, extended greetings from academia to Faust, who earned her master’s and doctoral degrees from Penn. “For the first time in 371 years, Harvard has chosen as its president…a Southerner,” she said, with perfect timing, to laughter and cheers, “and a woman”—a development in which “Cotton Mather, Harvard class of 1678, would surely see Satan’s hand.” Faust subsequently acknowledged the obvious (“My presence here today—and indeed that of many others on this platform—would have been unimaginable even a few short years ago”), but promptly used her individual status to punctuate her point about the institution (“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”). Although Faust chose to focus on academia generally, Gutmann limned Harvard’s distinctive role and alluded to Al Gore Jr. ’69, LL.D. ’94, who hours earlier had been named co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Listen to President Faust's inaugural address.

Speaking for the faculty, Sidney Verba, Pforzheimer University Professor and director of the Harvard University Library emeritus, pointed to the practical challenge of running the place, given that “somehow the disparate and independent parts of the University must be made to constitute a whole.” Perhaps alluding to the turbulent presidency of Lawrence H. Summers, which had ended 16 months before, Verba said Harvard’s leader must be able “to work with, listen to, appreciate, and understand the many voices that are raised [here]. To persuade, rather than to command….” Among University constituencies, he said, the faculty is “the most varied in its views.… But I doubt that I have ever seen the faculty as united as it is in welcoming President Faust.”

For her part, in service of today and the future, Faust mined deeper history. Among the readings she chose for the Service of Thanksgiving for a New President, conducted Friday morning in Memorial Church, was the conclusion of “A New Modell of Christian Charity,” Governor John Winthrop’s 1630 instruction to the settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, composed aboard the Arbella. The paragraphs, read by her cousin Jack Gilpin ’73, famously proclaim the new settlement “as a city upon a hill.” Crucially, then as now, Winthrop defined this enterprise as “work we have undertaken,” the success of which required its members, voluntarily associated, to “entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own…always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.” In an abbreviated way, Faust summoned that spirit in her own address, twice quoting from the same passage Winthrop’s call to the settlers to be “knitt together, in this work, as one….”

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