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July-August 2007
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< previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 And her mother, despite those admonitions, guided her into a wider world through the powerful medium of education. Faust attended Concord Academy in Massachusetts, the first step in a trajectory that led northward, into academia. She then earned a bachelor’s degree, magna cum laude with honors in history, from Bryn Mawr in 1968; while there, she marched for civil rights and against the Vietnam War and was a student-government leader. Among her teachers was Mary Maples Dunn—later president of Smith College and then director of the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Radcliffe College, and interim president during the year in which Radcliffe transformed from college to institute for advanced study. 
Marc Halevi / Harvard News Office April 2000: Drew Gilpin Faust at the announcement of her appointment as the Radcliffe Institute’s founding dean, with Radcliffe interim president Mary Maples Dunn and Harvard president Neil L. Rudenstine Faust pursued master’s and doctoral degrees in American civilization from the University of Pennsylvania, concluding her graduate studies in 1975. She then served on the Penn faculty, in the departments of American civilization and of history, from 1976 until her appointment as the Radcliffe Institute’s founding dean, effective on January 1, 2001. Committees of faculty and students twice honored her for her teaching. During her early academic career, Faust also passed through testing personal experiences. An early marriage ended in divorce in 1976; Faust and historian of science Charles Rosenberg (then at Penn, now Monrad professor of the social sciences) married in 1980. Their family includes Faust’s stepdaughter, Leah Rosenberg, an assistant professor in the University of Florida’s English department, where she specializes in Caribbean literature, and their daughter, Jessica Rosenberg ’04, who begins graduate study in comparative literature at Penn this fall. In 1988, Faust was treated for breast cancer (during a conversation, she calls the diagnosis, just after her fortieth birthday, and therapy “life-transforming”) and in 1999 for thyroid cancer, which required no treatment after surgery. She now enjoys an “entirely clean bill of health.” Whatever she left behind in Virginia, Faust wrote in 2003, “I have always known that I became a southern historian because I grew up in that particular time and place.” Both “historian” and “southern” figure in that formulation. “I wanted to keep my scholarship and teaching at the core of what I did,” she says. Although the wide praise for Mothers of Invention and her association with women’s studies at Penn and Radcliffe may have created an impression that Faust is principally a feminist historian, her work, while thematic, is much broader. From The Sacred Circle (1977), a study of the ideas and ideology of five proslavery Southern intellectuals, through Mothers of Invention, Faust says, “The reason I got so interested in the Civil War, moving from the antebellum South to the Civil War period in the focus of my research, is that it is a moment when people are confronted with the necessity of change and how they respond to that. What changes do they make, and what ones do they resist?” The subjects and approaches vary, but Faust’s books tease out the reactions of elites on the edge—or during their failure to adapt to new circumstances. James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (1982) probes deeply the mind and mores of one member of the “sacred circle”: a South Carolina lawyer, publisher, planter and slaveholder (he died at the evocatively named Redcliffe plantation), U.S. Representative, and governor, and the successor to Senator John C. Calhoun as the foremost proponent of nullification. In pursuit of that idea, she shows, Hammond “overtly espoused traditional republican political values,” but in fact undercut Calhoun’s efforts “to restore the politics of deference” by resorting to more democratic politicking. His defense of slavery as a benevolent, divinely ordained, and mutually beneficial system was rendered hollow by the harsh relationship that Faust reveals between master and bondsmen, and by his sexual use of women he owned. Between his public beliefs and his private needs, Faust shows, “Like many other Americans of his day and many southerners especially, Hammond was alarmed by what seemed to him an unprecedented rate of progress in the modern world,” transforming economic life but also “long-cherished social and political arrangements as well as traditional systems of belief and morality.” In Mothers of Invention, Faust examines an entire elite—plantation wives and daughters—whose race, gender, and class accorded them an elevated place in society that was shattered in the Civil War. Through diaries, letters, and other evidence, Faust explores what it meant to be thrust from the luxury of living above and apart from the brutality of administering a slave economy, to the necessity of running plantations when the men went off to battle. Ranging across the fiction women read and wrote, their appeals to Jefferson Davis for protection and sustenance, their jobs in hospitals and schools, their changes in faith and in clothing, and the consequences (social and sexual) of the disappearance of suitable mates from the community, she analyzes the collapse of a system dependent on deference to patriarchy. One of her subjects wrote to her husband, “I will never feel like myself again.” Faust notes that others, especially upper-class women heavily invested in their past superiority, “[f]or all their disillusionment with slavery, with Confederate leadership, and with their individual men…clung to—even reasserted—lingering elements of privilege,” holding fast to “the traditional hierarchical social and racial order that had defined their importance.” Faust’s histories of these doomed elites are characterized by deep archival research, multiple forms of evidence, and human empathy—her ability to understand the ideas and hopes of people whose values and behavior may be utterly alien. Scholarly curiosity has motivated her research and writing, aligning her own career experience closely with that of the professors she will now lead. But her subjects and discoveries, unlike those of most of her former peers, bear an almost uncanny relevance to thinking about the culture of elite research universities. For after a century of intellectual and institutional preeminence, universities have entered an era when their assumptions and performance face questions both from within and from the wider society. “I was always a citizen”Productive scholarship did not isolate Drew Gilpin Faust in dusty archives. “I resisted a number of requests, invitations, even a certain amount of pressure, to take on administrative roles,” she says. “But I found myself doing a lot of it anyway, because I’d be asked to chair committees, or be on boards, or be on committees for the American Historical Association—to be an officer, take responsibility for my discipline, for my university, for my department.” So despite her focus on research and teaching, Faust chaired the American civilization department and directed the women’s studies program, for five years each, during her quarter-century at Penn. Her service ultimately extended far beyond such professorial routines. “A Mind of Her Own,” an extended article by Jean M. Dykstra published in the February 1991 Pennsylvania Gazette, portrays Faust the scholar also taking on highly contentious issues—diversity; faculty, student, and staff interactions; the challenges facing Penn’s urban West Philadelphia environs; fraternities—as chair of a Committee on University Life appointed by that institution’s president, Sheldon Hackney, in late 1988. Dykstra cited the committee’s emphasis on the “incivility” of students and faculty toward staff members; Faust’s advocacy of moving fraternities from their central campus location; and her promotion of smaller classes, in part, as Faust said, so “students have to take responsibility for their own education—talk, contribute, argue, risk.” At the time Dykstra wrote, Faust was serving on 11 Penn committees (Harvard’s news release on her election as president cites her work there on academic planning and budgets, academic freedom, human resources, the university archives, and intercollegiate athletics). She was also a member of the search committee that in 1994 chose Judith Rodin to become Penn’s (and the Ivy League’s) first regular female chief executive. “I always enjoyed those roles,” Faust says now. “I was always a citizen in that I was very engaged with the communities in which I found myself.” 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | continued >  
 
 
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