Freakonomics Radio - 218. The Harvard President Will See You Now

Episode Date: September 3, 2015

How a pain-in-the-neck girl from rural Virginia came to run the most powerful university in the world.

I'm Drew Faust. I'm the president of Harvard University. That is a nice thing to say, isn't it? It is. We spoke with Drew Gilpin Faust on the Monday of the last full week in August. School's starting up and we have undergraduate freshmen arriving tomorrow, so we're going to be back fully in the swing of things very soon. And tell me, maybe in 60 seconds or less, what you actually do in a given day. That's assuming there is a given day in your life, which there may not be. There really isn't a given day and things vary a lot depending whether I'm here on campus,

visiting alums and others, traveling around the country, meeting with alumni and officials across the globe, a series of meetings with different members of the community, the deans who run Harvard schools, meeting with senior administrators, the Office of General Counsel, Legal Affairs, or our executive vice president, meeting with students or faculty, perhaps attending a student performance or a student athletic meeting with the undergraduate student government, attending a faculty meeting in one or another, meeting with individual faculty or groups of faculty to hear about their aspirations and their research and teaching. So those are just some of the things that could fill a day and it often goes from a breakfast like the one I had this morning with a member of our board of overseers through a day of meetings into an evening of perhaps a dinner with one or another constituent group or a performance or some other evening activity.

I'm exhausted listening to you. And part of today you're spending is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dupner. Drew Gilpin Faust was installed as the president of Harvard University in 2007. Her immediate predecessor was Derek Bach, a longtime Harvard president years earlier, who came back for one year as acting president after the very short and very stormy tenure of Lawrence Summers. Faust had spent 25 years as a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania and later became dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. As an historian, her specialties are the Civil War and slavery. Among her books are This Republic of Suffering, Death, and the American

Civil War, and Mothers of Invention, Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War. Your friend Elizabeth Warren, now a U.S. senator, formerly a Harvard law professor, said that you, quote, were raised to be a rich man's wife. Instead, she becomes the president of the most powerful university in the world. So how'd that happen? You came from an environment in which President of Harvard was not really, let's say, the most expected outcome, yes? It was an unimaginable outcome. I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in rural Virginia in the Shenandoah Valley in a conservative community, in a conservative family, a traditional family, in which my mother said to me, it's a man's world, sweetie, and the sooner you figure that out, the happier you'll be. So the expectation for young women in that environment was that they would grow up and marry and have children and that they would be subservient in significant ways to the aspirations, ambitions, and agendas of the men whom they married.

But it was a time of change. It was a time of change in many dimensions. The first and most obvious one to me as a child was the emerging civil rights movement. The Brown v. Board decision sent Virginia into a tailspin, and our senator, Harry Bird, who came from my home county, advocated closing the schools rather than integrating them. And this was all a swirl around me, issues of race, very much on my mind, even as a young child. And I became something of a rebel. I was good in school and happily got sent north to Concord Academy as a teenager. And I found that being a bright young woman had a place in that school. It was an all-female prep school, yes? It was then. It was then. And so I think Concord gave me a route and an avenue and a lot of support to ask questions that were very much in the air and to find a path for myself that could take advantage of doors opening in front of me as women were given opportunities increasingly to undertake activities that just had not been imaginable before. I think I should say in all of this, despite the prevailing ideology of my youth about the appropriate place for women,

I had two very powerful grandmothers who sort of from behind the scenes were the force in the family, even though the men in the family officially were in charge. Those grandmothers set an example of female power for me that I think had its effects. You once said at a Harvard College Women's Leadership Awards ceremony that, quote, I'll quote you, I think I was born a pain in the neck. Talk a bit more about that, your desire to, let's say, agitate the status quo. Well, it began with a demand for equality with my brothers. You had three brothers, yes? Three brothers. And from an early age, they were given freedoms and permissions that I wasn't.

And I was required to do things like wear little lacy garments that I found objectionable. And so my first pursuit of equality was for myself in the family. And I'd do things like refuse to come to dinner because I was told I had to wear a dress or I couldn't come in from the barn where I was taking care of my steer and not change before dinner. And so I'd throw fits about that kind of stuff. about the American dream and about humane justice and Christianity seemed so at odds with the position of supporting segregation that was just taken for granted in the white community that I began chafing against that and wrote a letter to Eisenhower when I was nine years old, urging him to support integration. You don't happen to have that letter with you handy, do you? I don't have it with me. It is available. I found it in the National Archives in the early 2000s.

I was astonished. I have it handy. Could I read it to you? You do. Ah, sure. I'd love to just get your commentary on it. It's so interesting. Go ahead.

My nine-year-old self. I read that you were a little bit trepidatious about going back and finding it, hoping that it squared with your memory of what it said, yes? Right, right. All right, I'll read your letter that you wrote in February 1957, although it was apparently incorrectly misstated as 1956. Dear Mr. Eisenhower, I am nine years old and I am white, but I have many feelings about segregation. Why should people feel that way? Because the color of their skin. If I painted my

face black, I wouldn't be let in any public schools, etc. My feelings haven't changed, just the color of my skin. Long ago on Christmas Day, Jesus Christ was born. As you remember, he was born to save the world. Not only white people, but black, yellow, red, and brown. Colored people aren't given a chance. They don't have a good education, says many people. Is it their fault if their fathers are so poor they must be taken out at an early age to find jobs? Only about 2% of our prep schools are for colored people. So what if their skin is black? They still have feelings, but most of all are God's people. Please, Mr. Eisenhower, please try and have schools and other things except colored people. Sincerely,

Catherine Drew Gilpin, nine years old. Did you hear back from the president? I'm curious. I got a letter from a staff member, not from the president himself. And my parents, they hadn't known I'd written this letter. And so when this letter, this acknowledgment from the White House arrived, they were astonished and asked me what it had been about. And I told them, and they kind of rolled their eyes. But neither one of them was alive when I finally found the original of the letter in the Eisenhower Library.

Oh, that's a shame. You plainly had a very pronounced sense of segregation, be it male, female, black, white, and so on. Can you just describe a little bit more the environment you grew up in? I know that you led a life of, I guess we'd call it great privilege, we'd all agree, yes, from a family of substantial means. Your parents, I understand, met at a fox hunt, which is a nice way to meet. So I'm just curious if you could describe the environment, especially racially, I guess, of your growing up and how that led to this nine-year-old girl who wrote this letter to the president. Clark County was the smallest county in Virginia, and it's on the Shenandoah

River. But it's an interesting county because even though it's in the western part of the state, where slavery was less installed than along the seaboard and the eastern part of Virginia, it was a kind of outpost for a lot of tidewater families, carters and birds and others. Their younger sons came to that area in the 18th and 19th century. And so it had a substantial African-American population that persisted into my childhood, the era of my childhood. And so I lived in a community where I had a lot of interaction with African Americans, but it was a hierarchical interaction. They lived in a village called Millwood, which was near the farm on which we lived. And they basically, African Americans,

worked in a variety of roles for the white people in the neighborhood. I lived on a farm, a large farm, and my father was in the horse business. So I spent a lot of time with horses and other animals. I was in the 4-H club. I raised cattle and sheep. And I attended a school in that area just a few miles from the house in which I lived. There's a certain conflict or complexity about the family of means idea in that, yes, my grandmother had substantial means. We lived on this large farm, but my father never made a lot of money. So there was this kind of scramble always for cash. There was a lot of land and other surround, but there was not a lot of disposable income. And he relied in a number of domains on my grandmother.

For example, she paid my tuition at Concord Academy. So that made it a little more complex than simply a spigot of available resources. And so there was a sense both of wealth and also awareness of what limits there might be. I also came from a community in which I did have a lot of interactions with African Americans. It was not the same kind of upbringing as, say, I would have had had I been in the northern suburb, where I think I would have been more separated from African Americans. So I had, I think, a life very much influenced by individuals who I cared a lot about from that community.

And I assume that was a substantial influence in your becoming a scholar who's written about the Civil War, but also has written particularly about slavery. Also, I'm just curious, coming from New Jersey and New England roots. But my father grew up in Virginia. His family before that came from Tennessee and North Carolina. And around the time of the Civil War, his family – some of his family in North Carolina and some of them in Tennessee would have been slave owners, yes. You went to an all-female prep school and then an all-female college, Bryn Mawr, and wound up in the Harvard orbit by taking over the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, formerly Radcliffe College, of course, which was the all-female sister college of Harvard. Considering all that you've accomplished in scholarship and administration and beyond,

does this, in your mind, make any kind of argument about the value of a single-sex education? Certainly, it was critical for me. If I had been at Harvard College, Radcliffe College, as a student during the years of my college education, which was 1964 to 1968, I would not have seen powerful women professors. There were, during some of that time, zero tenured women professors at Harvard in arts and sciences at Harvard, or one, perhaps, by the time I would have graduated. I wouldn't have been allowed in the undergraduate library until the spring of my junior year. It was reserved for men. At Bryn Mawr College, we ran the world. It was a much smaller world. It was a much less influential world.

But I had many female role models, powerful women around me. I had no reason to doubt what was possible for a woman until I was cast forth on the world and began to get a more realistic view of what that world was like. So you could argue it two ways. You could say, while I was at Bryn Mawr, I was able to build up certain kinds of capacities and confidence that then were challenged and tested when I saw a more realistic portrait of the world as a whole. Or you could say that had I been at Harvard or at Radcliffe, I might have had to build up those awarenesses earlier on. But on balance, I think I was lucky to have a time to become educated in an environment where I was valued in the way that women were at Bryn Mawr College. You have accomplished so very much in your life. You have three brothers. I'm just curious if you've ever thought what you would have accomplished or how you might have accomplished differently if you'd been born the fourth son in that family instead of the only daughter. We actually talk a lot about this as siblings and what explains our different roots

in life. I think partly I was driven to do what I have to make up for being a girl, that I was not given an assumed and natural place in the hierarchy, I had to earn it. So that's one thing I often think. I also think about my grandmothers and their image of familial power that maybe translated naturally in a changed era into more public expression of capacity and power. It's a little bit of a joke in our family about the seeming power of men, but the underlying force of everyone being terrified of my grandmother. So how to work that out, I'll leave to others, but there's some speculation about it. Coming up after the break, did President Faust, the first female president in Harvard's very long history, consider herself a token female appointment? There's no asterisk next to my name saying, well, she's just the woman president of Harvard. Also, why Harvard's 30 plus billion dollar endowment is kind of, sort of, maybe not as massive as it seems.

So, if we look at endowment per student, Yale actually has more endowment per student than Harvard. And you know who doesn't have an endowment? Freakonomics Radio. Hard to believe, but true. So if you want to support this show and all the other great public radio programming and podcasts coming out of WNYC in New York City, please visit Freakonomics.com and click on the donate button. You could write a letter to President Faust at Harvard, ask her to redirect a stray billion or two of her endowment. But, well, yeah, you should probably just click on our donate button instead. From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner. We're talking with Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust, the former pain-in-the-neck kid from rural Virginia who,

before getting into university administration, was a well-regarded scholar of the Civil War South. I assume, and maybe it's a wrong assumption, you no longer have the time at all to research and write, which is what you've been doing for many, many years, correct? Well, I don't have time to do new archival research, which is extraordinarily time-consuming because it's something of a treasure hunt and you have to be willing to waste a lot of time, in a sense, looking for things in order to find the ones that really matter. But I have been able at least to have some opportunity to write and think about history based on work that I've done in the past. I had a book that

came out just after I became president on death and the Civil War, and it came out just as we were beginning to celebrate, not celebrate, but observe the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. So I've spoken about the book and traveled around to battlefields, and it got made into a PBS film. And so I followed the film around and spoke about that and have written some about issues having to do with the Civil War at this time of its anniversary. So I've still got a hand in there. part because of the sheer scale of death, along with many other elements. You're right that more than 600,000 soldiers alone died, which at this point would be the equivalent of 6 million people in today's population. I'm just curious, how did you think this huge wave of death and the way that that death happened, not in the family home, not surrounded by friends, not with the religious

attachments that were traditionally a part of death. How do you think that huge wave of death influenced our national character, if you can say? I think it did so in a couple of ways. One is that the brutality of Civil War death coming to so many young people whose deaths seemed unnatural in the usual process of life and aging, made the Victorian romanticization of death almost impossible. It was hard to think about death in a benevolent way. It was hard in some instances to think about what kind of God would allow such slaughter. So people were really knocked back on their heels in terms of the assumptions about the world in which they lived and how it operated and

what their expectations should be. So that was part of it. Another part of it was that these deaths were undertaken on behalf of the country. And so what was the relationship of the government to these losses? And what kind of responsibility did the government have in face of military deaths? And what grew out of that was a real change in federal policy that now seems so second nature to us that the government would have responsibility for burying the dead, for finding the dead, for identifying the missing. And the National Cemetery System was established at that time, as well as the Pension Bureau and other kinds of instruments of responsibility to soldiers who had fought and to those who had died. And that, of course,

is a taken-for-granted aspect of our 21st century lives. You took over the presidency of Harvard not too long after the dismissal of Larry Summers, the economist who rubbed some people very much the wrong way, evidenced by his public discussion of the difference between men and women in the sciences. Shortly after his dismissal, then you became the first female president in Harvard's 350 plus year history. Did you feel in any way, and forgive me if I'm asking questions that exacerbate this, if the answer is yes, but did you feel in any way a token female appointment? I'm just curious whether you've been made to feel a kind of feminist symbol or a symbol of feminism when, in fact, you're just Drew Gilpin Faust. Well, I didn't feel that I was a token appointment because I didn't think that the Harvard Corporation would make token appointments.

They're not that kind of group. I felt that I had been chosen on the merits. But there were plenty of people who, outside of that realm, who accused me of being a token appointment or alleged that I was a token appointment. And I found myself at the announcement of my presidency in February of 2007, asked a question from the audience about how I felt as the first woman president of Harvard. And just without having prepared it or even thought it through, I just shut back and said, I'm not the woman president of Harvard. I'm the president of Harvard. And that was an important statement for me. But I also realized increasingly over the weeks that followed that the kind of attention to the fact that I was a woman was not just about, oh, she's just a token. It was also letters from little girls all over the world, from their parents saying, now I know my daughter can do anything. And I realized that I had to inhabit that space as the woman president of Harvard because it did matter. And it didn't mean that I was someone who had been appointed the way somebody is given an asterisk when they hit the largest number of home runs in an extended season. There's no asterisk next to my name saying, well, she's just the woman president of Harvard. But at the same time, I am the woman president of Harvard that sends a message, I hope, to anybody who hopes for the best and the most for young women.

When you came aboard, what were your biggest challenges as Harvard president? And then give me an update and tell me where things stand now. Well, when I became president, it was after an interim year where Derek Bach had come back to serve as president. And so things had been kind of in suspended animation a little bit. And so how did we get back to normal? How did we enable everybody to get back and do their work and settle into the routines of excellent teaching and scholarship? And so calming things down was a big part of that first year. And I had to replace a lot of deans. There had been deans whose terms had ended. And so I did

a lot of searches and finding people to put in place in a variety of jobs. I care a lot about teaching, always have. That's been a high agenda item. So how can we attend to the issues in the college? So all of those things were on my plate. Harvard's increasing international profile. But then one year in, the financial crisis came. Had a little recession to deal with, yeah. crisis in which we had to look hard at everything we did and ask, why do we do it that way? Do we want to keep doing it that way? And how can this be an opportunity for change and innovation in this institution to fit it for its next 375 years? And so as a result of that, it was a very difficult time. We had to make a lot of hard choices. But I also had a kind of wind at my back for change in areas varying from the governance structure of the university,

which we changed for the first time since 1650, to a whole variety of ways of trying to do our work better and move Harvard forward. Now, we should say as much as Harvard lost in its endowment during that crash and the recession, Harvard still has by far the largest endowment on earth. So I guess the average college endowment in the U.S. is about $350 million. Harvard's is north of $30 billion currently, unless, correct, please correct me if I'm wrong, a little bit north of $30, which is more than $10 billion more than number two Yale. So I totally appreciate the fact that you say when the endowment loses a huge chunk of its value that there's a lot of change that needs to be undertaken or at least considered.

But can you just talk for a moment about what an endowment in your view, and obviously this is not your decision to make, really should be used for, should fund, should be used for, should fund, should be considered as, because it's obviously much more than just a nest egg. I worry a lot that there's not a broad understanding of what endowments are. So thank you for this opportunity to say a little bit about it. First of all, an endowment is made up of gifts given to the university over time that are legally bound to certain uses. So some of the endowment is restricted to funding a French professor or funding student aid. And that means that we have to use the income from that money for that particular purpose

and also at the same time preserve the corpus of the gift so it can continue to fund that in perpetuity. Now, let me say one other thing about comparing Harvard's endowment to Yale's or Princeton's or anyone else's. It depends what a university does. Harvard is much, much bigger than Yale. So if we look at endowment per student, Yale actually has more endowment per student than Harvard. And if you think about some of the things that are funded by Harvard's endowment, things like our art museums, things like a Renaissance Research Center in Italy, we can't take that money out of that. It can only be used for that, but it gets counted in that figure of Harvard's total endowment that you described. A major thing

we use our endowment for is student aid. And we are able to fund in our undergraduate college student aid for 60% of our undergraduates because of the very generous gifts to financial aid that have been given over the years. There's a lot of evidence, particularly in the realm of economics, that the ROI, the return on investment on education, is very strong. In fact, one could argue that education is maybe the single best investment that any human could ever make in oneself or one family. But increasingly, there's been a lot of suspicion and indeed some evidence that the ROI is either declining or simply not as strong as believed and or that too many people have been directed toward a certain kind of colleges when in fact perhaps that might not be best for their outcome.

How do you look at that question? Please be as empirical as you can in making the argument that education is indeed the great investment that universities argue it is? Well, what we've seen in the past decade or two is that knowledge is increasingly the currency of the world in which we operate. And the differential between what a high school graduate can make over a lifetime and what a college graduate makes over a lifetime has increased. We also saw during the recession that unemployment was much lower among college graduates than it was under those who did not have college degrees. So this is a time when learning and knowledge is increasingly, not decreasingly, important. This is something that we need to recognize as a society, and Harvard believes very strongly in this and believes in giving opportunity

to students from the widest possible range of backgrounds and financial circumstances. But we need to think about this holistically as a system of higher education across the United States and the importance of the publics who have been significantly defunded. In the night, about the 1990s, one in four dollars of support for the publics came from families and the rest came from the state. This has reversed. And so when you see the cost of education in the public's has not changed, but the price has changed because they've been defunded by, and the system of community colleges as well for students who are seeking either a leg up into a four-year college education or perhaps a terminal two-year degree that will give them the skills to operate within the modern technologically advanced workforce. It was time now to move on to a few of our frequently asked questions, the same questions we've asked of people like Aziz Ansari.

I read the internet so much, I feel like I'm on page a million of the worst book ever, and I just won't stop reading it. For some reason, it's so addictive, but it's such a horrible look. And Boris Johnson, the mayor of London. As I'm sure you know, we have now in London 72 billionaires, which is more than New York. New York has only 43 billionaires.

And Paris has only 18 billionaires. And Moscow has, I think, 40. So, you know, President Faust. What would you consider the single best investment you've ever made? It might be financial, emotional, educational, whatever, in getting to where you are today. And getting to where you are today, I mean, not necessarily as just a professional, but as a human. I would say definitely my education. Going to Concord Academy was life-changing for me. Put me in a different environment and gave me aspirations and possibilities that had not been available before.

What's something that you've spent too much on, perhaps still habitually spend too much on, and yet don't regret? My dog. I have a shelter dog who is crazy, needs Prozac, has also... Cleo is the name I read. Cleo, that is the one. She also has lots of... Well, we had a DNA test

that said she was part English setter, part pit bull, part pug, and part... what was the other thing? Eskimo dog. That was it. So she's a very mixed up dog in more ways than one. And she's also had a whole lot of orthopedic problems. So she's had three surgeries on her rear legs. And we invest a great deal in this dog. And I'm very glad we do. But there are others who would think we were crazy, not the dog. What is your strategy for when you need to

bring a bottle of wine to someone's house for dinner? How much do you spend on it and or do you re-gift? I don't think it through that coherently. I guess I go and find a bottle of wine and grab it and go. What do you spend? 20 bucks roughly? 50? Maybe more. Maybe more.

40? 50? I often actually, in recent times, there is a vineyard in California called Faust. And I have a good time giving people bottles of Faust. So you can look up what a bottle of Faust costs these days, and that'll answer your question. I did look it up. A bottle of 2012 Faust Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon goes for around $45. What is the one story about you that your family always tells? Well, they don't tell it in front of me, so I don't know.

What is something, President Faust, that you believed for a long time to be true and then decided that you'd either been wrong or otherwise somehow changed your mind? Wow. I don't know how to answer that. I mean, is there any either political or economic or educational issue or even dogma that you really subscribe to then came to thinking, you know what, maybe it was something that over time, I don't mean it needs to be a road to Damascus conversion moment, but something that you really reversed field. Or you may just be an extraordinarily intellectually consistent person.

No, I doubt that's the case. I think I'm a person who doesn't look back a lot. I'm always looking forward. And so I don't identify and say, whoops, I've changed my mind there. But I need to think about this because I don't want to come to see myself as somebody who never can change. So you've asked an important question that I will ponder, but I can't think of an answer. It's a deal. Okay. And if you had a time machine, when would you travel to and why and what would you want to do there?

I would like to go to the period that I've written about and see, did I get it right? Did I get it wrong? Partly because one of my approaches to history has been very much through the lens of anthropology, of trying to understand the culture and the broader set, not just to chronicle events, but to really understand how people saw their world. And so if I could time travel to the early 19th century or to the Civil War era, I'd get a sense of whether I'd gotten it right. And that would be intriguing to me. And I know you've written that history is inherently tricky in that we rely so often now and then on individual stories. And yet individual stories can be nothing more than anecdotes that might be anomalous. So the job of a historian is to square those stories with the aggregate. I'm curious how you would apply that to the modern world these days. You know, you're

one person, I'm one person, everybody listening here is one person with our own sets of opinions and perhaps biases and so on. And yet we need to kind of think through our own prism, but toward the greater population. Do you think that problem that you identified as an historian is a big problem in kind of public civic life today and why there's so much sort of unhealthy discourse? That's such an intriguing question, which suggests its own answer, I believe. Part of why I love history is it takes us outside ourselves and at its best enables us to look through other people's eyes. And that enables us to understand what's contingent about our choices in our existence. And we need to do that in our own time as well.

We need to bridge beyond ourselves and take advantage of stories to serve as a road to other people, as a pathway to being able to look at the world through their eyes and understand where they're coming from, why they might differ with us on matters of policy or practice, and have the stories empower us to be more than simply locked within our own selves. So that seems to me an important part of what stories can do for us now. Thank you very much for your time. I so enjoyed speaking with you, and congratulations on all you've done. Okay, be well. Thank you so much.

And coming up on the next Freakonomics Radio, in Chicago, which has an awful lot of violent crime, could cognitive behavioral therapy be a way to fight it? So he got to get the bottle out of my hand. A remarkable research project whose findings are just as remarkable. I think the first time that we saw these effects, we thought, wow, can this be right? That's next time on Freakonomics Radio. Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC and Dubner Productions. Our staff includes Greg Rosalski, Caroline English, Susie Lechtenberg, Merritt Jacob, Christopher Wirth, and Kasia Mihailovic. This episode was mixed by Matt Fidler.

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