Harvard Author Profile: Former Harvard President, Drew G. Faust

As a child, Drew Faust already had an innate tendency towards enacting change. At the young age of eight, Faust wrote a letter to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, imploring him to end the racist segregation practices that plagued her 1950s Virginia community. The letter is included in the opening pages of Faust’s debut memoir, “Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury,” setting the tone for her life of trailblazing. Faust’s writing details her life as a young girl and her subsequent choice to attend Bryn Mawr College to study history and become involved in student activist groups protesting the Vietnam War.

The Harvard Crimson recently spoke with Faust, president emerita of Harvard University and University Professor — Harvard’s highest faculty honor — about her life and work. In the interview, Faust described the historical lens of her writing, resulting in a book that successfully balances and blends genres:

“I always thought of the book as a history memoir,” Faust said. “By history memoir, I mean situating my life within a broader set of understandings and research into the era.”

Faust stays true to her training as an American historian, as she sprinkles both snippets of Life Magazine archives and scans of family photographs throughout the work. Much of her memoir’s content also extends back several generations, providing insight not only into her childhood but also the lives of her extended lineage. Faust achieves this broad family history by writing short biographies of her numerous ancestors in the South, articulating the ways that the social constraints and political developments of the time dictated each of her ancestor’s life trajectories and, by extension, her own. The early chapters of Faust’s memoir dutifully and meticulously chronicle the decades-long impacts of countless wartime tragedies, stifling gender norms, and demanding upper-class expectations which ultimately decided the terms of her birth and upbringing.

“For my mother and grandmother,” Faust said, “the constraints on them as women of their class, time, and race dictated certain paths that so suppressed their ability to choose that they lapsed into the positions they were expected to fill. Whereas when I came along, things were beginning to open up so that my own sense of injustice could intersect with the rising voices opposing the injustice of segregated schools.”

Faust specifically cited the landmark Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education as a turning point she experienced that created an urgency to pursue greater choice and opportunity.

“[Brown v. Board of Education] opened up a conversation and a debate that I could overhear on the radio,” Faust said. “That began a path for me of seeing where I might intersect with the wider world — a path that I found more gratifying and more fulfilling than the past that my predecessors, especially the female ones, were able to follow.”

Before coming to Harvard, Faust pursued a career in academia at the University of Pennsylvania, earning her Ph.D. in History and serving on the faculty there for 25 years, eventually earning a named History professorship. She left this position for Harvard in 2001, becoming the inaugural dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the University’s 28th and first female president in 2007.

Continuing to teach for several years after stepping down as president, Faust recently retired from teaching this past June, now dedicating much of her time to writing. Faust is a contributing writer for The Atlantic and is in the early stages of future book proposals while continuing her press tour for “Necessary Trouble.”

While no longer teaching students in the classroom, Faust nonetheless continues to consider how her writing can connect with younger audiences and future generations: “This is a story of a particular moment, the shift from the ’50s into the ’60s, that I think is extremely important,” Faust said. “I also feel that Baby Boomers have been maligned, and I want to show the struggles they did have and the things that later generations don’t have to think about,” she added.

“I’ve also gotten a lot of emails from people about my age who are prompted to tell me their life stories, and I’m collecting them. I’m going to keep them all and put them in the archives at Harvard. Maybe they can be a resource for people who want a window into that era of life stories.”

Faust’s commitments to justice and diversity, notable from the first page of the book onward, were guiding forces in her adult life as well.

In describing her years as president, University Provost Alan M. Garber ’76, appointed to the role in 2011 by Faust, wrote in an email to The Harvard Crimson that much of Faust’s presidency was “dedicated to righting wrongs,” which she accomplished through “well-crafted arguments, eloquence, and tact.”

“Drew's effort to reverse the exclusion of many talented people from the positions they deserved, whether based on gender, race, or other factors, was already well underway when I arrived in 2011,” Garber wrote. “Her perspective and skills as a distinguished historian shaped how Harvard approached these issues. Her goal was not to erase the past, but to examine it and trace the path from past events to our current challenges.”

In the closing chapter of her memoir, Faust details her graduation from Bryn Mawr and her subsequent struggle to chart her own course as a young adult. This narrative arc bears a marked resemblance to the same struggle facing many college graduates today, adding relatability to the work for a younger audience.

“I write about freedom ‘from’ and freedom ‘to,’” Faust said. After graduating from college, Faust described herself as “free from the constraints that had been imposed on her by Virginia of the 1950s.”

“I was educated, I had a job, but what was I going to do? How was I going to find the freedom ‘to’? To do what?” Faust said. “I never had in my mind a clear path, not when I graduated from college — a clear plan that I wanted to follow.”

However, Faust cautions recent graduates from choosing a strict career path immediately following graduation: “That thinking in some way reduces the anxiety of uncertainty, but it may also limit one’s ability to discover paths that aren’t necessarily predictable,” Faust said.

Instead, Faust offers a different perspective on how one should approach their postgraduate years; “That mantra, ‘be comfortable being uncomfortable,’ is, I think, what graduates right now should feel.”

If Faust’s life and career are any indication, that best career path may not even be a possibility in the minds of many students. However, through her memoir and advice, Faust suggests that adaptability and comfort with uncertainty can lead to great success and a rewarding life.

—Staff writer Carmine J. Passarella can be reached at carmine.passarella@thecrimson.com.