A Scholar President

There are many reasons to be enthusiastic about the ascension of Drew G. Faust to the presidency of Harvard, but for me, the most important feature of President-elect Faust is that she has spent her entire adult life as an active scholar. She is not a long-time administrator like Nathan M. Pusey ’28 was. Her scholarship was not mixed with public service or a Brahmin legal career. She is a dyed-in-the-wool, true blue, one-hundred-percent academic, who has spent her life creating knowledge and disseminating it through writing and teaching.

In the history of Harvard’s presidents, only Cornelius C. Felton, Class of 1827, can really compete in his lifetime dedication to scholarship, and in the past century only James B. Conant ’14 comes close. I have nothing but admiration for the extraordinary achievements and diverse backgrounds of Harvard’s past presidents, but I also rejoice in the fact that by choosing Faust, the Corporation has affirmed the University’s core values of teaching and research.

Faust’s work focuses on the spread of ideas and the maintenance of power. She specializes in Southern intellectuals, like James Henry Hammond, Josiah C. Nott and Edmund Ruffin, who embraced slavery and later secession. These are complex characters whose racism was detestable, but who also fought hard to spread occasionally live-saving ideas: Nott promoted the fight against the mosquito to limit malaria, and Ruffin was an agronomist who advocated agricultural lime.

But Faust’s intellectuals are most famous for their ideas justifying human bondage. Hammond, who wanders through Faust’s work the way that populist Thomas Watson meanders through the works of C. Vann Woodward, is problematic both in his ideas and in his personal life. He became rich through marriage, sired children with his slaves, and almost destroyed his political career with a scandal involving his nieces.

Faust navigates this moral maelstrom with Olympian equanimity. While most of us would be drawn to harsh condemnation, Faust’s quest is to understand. The balance she shows surely reflects both her values as a historian and her character—this is good for the University.

Faust focuses on the connections between Southern thinkers that made them intellectually productive. Ideas spread easily in cities, but the great distances that separate farmers challenge the transmission of new thoughts. Faust’s intellectuals were not the ante-bellum Bostonians whose easy interactions in dense urban environment produced abolitionism and transcendentalism.

The Southern thinkers had to fight to connect with each other, and they had to fight against a culture that didn’t always treat scholarship with respect. Yet Faust shows how the Southern circle built a network of ideas; an American Quarterly article from 1979 has a particularly elegant circular map of the connections between Southern intellectuals, connections that we at Harvard try to make. Connections that started in one area produced shared insights in totally different fields. The business of Harvard is to produce knowledge through the connection of scholars and students; Faust has spent her life thinking about this process.

Her analysis of Southern thinkers emphasizes that many intellectuals became arch-defenders of the Confederate system to gain the status that did not naturally flow to Southern men of letters. Hammond’s intellectual efforts gave the governorship of South Carolina and a Senate seat. Scholars are motivated by many things, many of which are admirable and some of which are not. Harvard is well served by the fact that Faust has spent more than 30 years on the motives of thinkers.

Faust’s books are explorations of the acquisition of power, both within great legislative chambers and on plantations. No matter what Confederate apologists might think, slavery was not based on the passive acquiescence of an accepting slave population. The subjugation of the slave population was also not the immediate outcome of overwhelming force. Instead, mastery was a constant fight where whites used violence to repress people who never gave up, using both their minds and bodies to either escape or limit the impact of slavery. Faust’s “Mothers of Invention,” which chronicles slaveholding women during the Civil War, seeks to understand a ruling class fighting to keep control in a world spiraling out of control.

And so the University is to be led by a life-long historian, who specializes in power relations and the spread of ideas. She has thought long and hard about two topics that are central to running the university, and now she has a chance to act. While I can see the appeal of a having a physical scientist to oversee the growth of Allston, I am comforted in having a president who has spent her life studying the foibles of our own species. Even more importantly, I am delighted that we have a president whose entire life has been dedicated to scholarship. She is a scholarly paragon and we should cherish that fact.


Edward L. Glaeser is Glimp Professor of Economics.