February 26, 2007
A Historian at the Helm Posted by Alexander Burns at 02:35 PM EST It has always been characteristic of the news media to focus on the scandalous, embarrassing, and tragic. As Fred Smoler wrote a while back, many reporters tend to live by the maxim “If it bleeds, it leads.” It was consequently unsurprising to me that there was relatively little media coverage of Harvard University’s decision, earlier this month, to name the historian Drew Gilpin Faust as its new president. When I say “relatively little” coverage, I mean relative to the national frenzies that broke out intermittently over the last two years as then–Harvard President Lawrence Summers stumbled his way into early retirement. In contrast, the naming of Faust as president-designate was noted in a number of news stories, most of which focused on her gender and the university’s apparent retreat from Summers-style leadership. This is unfortunate, as Faust is a more intriguing character, and the calculus of her appointment seems more complicated, than most articles suggested. First, it is significant that Faust, currently the dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, is a historian. A few weeks before her appointment, I spoke to a former Summers aide about the presidential search and asked who he expected would be the next president. He said he wasn’t sure who, specifically, the search committee would choose, but confessed he expected it to be a scientist. Harvard has not had a scientist as president since James Conant vacated the office in 1953. While this is a source of understandable frustration to the science faculty, it is a good thing for the rest of the university that this streak will continue. These days, it is awfully easy to act as though anyone studying something non-utilitarian is wasting her time. It is fortunate that Faust, a distinguished scholar of Civil War history, will not bring such narrow intellectual values to University Hall. It is unfortunate that virtually none of the discussion of Faust’s appointment, even on campus, has taken her scholarship into consideration. There’s been fairly vigorous debate here over whether she is well suited to the job of president, but so far as I have seen, few commentators have seen fit to seriously consider the content of her academic work. I’ve only had time to read a few of her papers, but from what I have seen her work is both thorough and provocative. Her writing on the Civil War is, admittedly, more in the realm of social and cultural history than of military or political history. It does not appear, though, to be as soft or insubstantial as cultural history can be. In a 2001 essay in The Journal of Southern History, Faust examined how the Civil War “violated prevailing assumptions about life’s proper end—about who should die, when and where, and under what circumstances.” The subject may be a little vaguer than, say, the second day’s events at Gettysburg, but the primary evidence Faust musters is extensive, and the historical content of the work is serious. My deepest reservation about Faust’s appointment is that it is undoubtedly a safe choice for the university. She is unlikely to cause unnecessary controversy, like Summers, but she also seems less likely to risk ruffling faculty feathers, as Summers did and as other possible presidential choices, like Law School Dean Elena Kagan, might have done. My unease in this area is somewhat calmed by the willingness to provoke that is evident in some of her earlier scholarship, such as a 1990 paper in which she asserted: “It may well have been because of its women that the South lost the Civil War.” It may not be surprising for a feminist professor to focus on the historical contributions of women, but it is a bolder task altogether to so overtly assail the tightly held cultural assumptions about Southern culture and womanhood. The president of Harvard is treated as an international academic leader. I hope Faust brings the same originality and iconoclasm to that role that she has brought to her historical scholarship.
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