An Opening-of-Year Conversation with Drew Faust

In a conversation to open the new academic year, President Drew Faust spoke at Sanders Theatre on September 16 with Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof ’82 (who is also a current member of the University’s Board of Overseers). They touched on topics ranging from the humanities to student activism, the purposes of fundraising and the endowment, sexual violence, diversity and inclusiveness, and the role of higher education in society.

In response to a question about the reluctance of today’s students to concentrate in humanities disciplines (perhaps intended to address the smattering of freshmen in the audience, who identified themselves by show of hands), Faust said that she has begun asking people what they majored in during college. “An extraordinary number of important leaders in this country and elsewhere have come from humanities backgrounds,” she continued. “It gives you a basis for thinking, for judgment, for adaptability.” The mayor of London told her that his efforts to straighten out that city’s transport system had been informed by his studies in the classics. And she noted that Lloyd Blankfein ’75, J.D. ’78, chairman and CEO of the investment bank Goldman Sachs, is a lover of history.

Kristof then turned to Faust’s own undergraduate years at Bryn Mawr, when she once skipped mid-terms in order to protest in Selma, Alabama. “It was a great privilege,” she said, to go to college in the 1960s. She couldn’t just stand by and do nothing: “I’m not going to watch people getting their heads bashed in at the Edmund Pettus bridge,” she recalled thinking. Those experiences tied into her own interest in history, and ultimately into her scholarly study of the Civil War. “Learning about the American past helped me understand where these currents in American life come from” and how she could intervene in them.

Kristof asked how that experience shaped her views of student activism today. Faust replied, “I have great admiration for students who take on these causes and want to make a better world,” but she also made clear that divestment of University-held stock in fossil-fuel companies—a subject on which student and faculty activists protesting the issue of climate change have dogged her recently—is not the correct means of protest. She emphasized three points: she doesn’t believe divestment will affect the behavior of these companies; the endowment was intended by donors to support Harvard’s academic mission and therefore should not be used as a political tool; and Harvard enjoys a nonprofit status because it stands outside the political realm. Using the endowment for political ends, she said, “we risk that standing,” because some politicians in Washington have raised the possibility of revoking that status by taxing endowments.

Faust also addressed the related question of why Harvard—now in the middle of a $6.5-billion capital campaign—needs “all that money.” She pointed out that the endowment provides a third of the University’s annual budget, and, citing recent examples of Harvard’s contributions to the betterment of public health around the globe, added, “If we want to do new things, we need to find new sources of funding.”

Turning to the concerns of the student community, Kristof asked about sexual violence on American campuses—recently in the news—and wondered whether the University’s work in this area is making students “safer on Saturday nights.” Faust stressed that the most important means of addressing the problem of sexual violence is “to make sure it doesn’t happen in the first place.” She pointed to the ongoing work of former University provost Steven Hyman on this issue, and said that compiling data on the efficacy of current preventive efforts is now the priority. Kristof then raised the concern that sexual violence might be played down—or even concealed—as a potential embarrassment to institutions of higher learning. Faust responded strongly: institutional embarrassment, she said, was “the last thing” she was concerned about.

The president also talked about diversity, responding to a question about the perception of some African-American students that “they are not fully embraced by people at Harvard.” Faust noted last spring’s “I, Too, Am Harvard” initiative, and said it was important to remember that “diversifying the community is not the same thing” as creating a welcoming community. On the further question of political diversity, given the documented liberal bias of academic institutions, Faust acknowledged, “This is an important issue for us,” and noted that intellectual prowess is the key factor in hiring professors. “We try to penetrate through political valences,” she said. She praised in particular the leadership of former Harvard Law School dean Elena Kagan and current dean Martha Minow in shaping a politically diverse law faculty.

After the formal question-and-answer session with Kristof, Faust answered selected questions submitted from the audience. She talked about the socioeconomic diversity of Harvard’s undergraduates, noting that 20 percent of the freshman class comes from families that earn less than $65,000 a year, and therefore pay no tuition. And even though legacies make up 12 percent of the class, she cautioned against exaggerating the importance of that number, noting that those students also have higher test scores and grades than the average applicant.

The last question from the audience asked what Faust thought the challenges were for women in college today. She noted that “it is not a gender-free world,” and that a recent survey had shown that undergraduate women have lower expectations for achievement than their male peers. “Reach,” she urged women. “Don’t be afraid to reach. Run for everything.”