Freakonomics Radio - The Harvard President Will See You Now (Rebroadcast)
Episode Date: June 29, 2017How a pain-in-the-neck girl from rural Virginia came to run the most powerful university in the world. ...
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I'm Drew Faust. I'm the president of Harvard University.
That is a nice thing to say, isn't it?
It is.
Drew Gilpin Faust recently announced that in 2018, she will step down as
Harvard president. So we thought it'd be a good time to replay an episode of Freakonomics Radio
featuring Faust that we recorded back in August of 2015. Hope you enjoy. 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 event. 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 with Freakonomics Radio,
for which we're very grateful. From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio,
the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything.
Here's your host, Stephen Duffner.
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. But I think early on, the disparity between what I was being taught in school and in
church 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. 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 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 acknowledgement 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 on 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 an old, prominent Southern family as you do, I'm curious whether your ancestors had slaves, owned slaves?
I'm sure they did.
I have, my mother was 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, 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 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 andiffe, 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 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?
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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 excuse me, 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.
Let me ask you one question about that book, Republic of Suffering. You write about
how the Civil War changed the way Americans thought about death, in part because of the
sheer scale of death, along with many other elements. You write 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 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 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.
Yeah.
And we lost 27% of our endowment, and our endowment funds 35% of our operating budget.
So what that created was a 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, north of $30 billion currently,
unless, 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 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 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 their state governments.
This is a disinvestment that our nation is making in the most important investment it can make in
its future. And so we need to make sure that places like Harvard can thrive, but we also need
to make sure that the public's can thrive 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 like 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 former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.
I am afraid basically of falling down, and I have been ever since I was a kid.
I still go down the hill sideways sometimes.
So let me ask you this, 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. 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 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 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, over it, 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 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 and 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 their 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.
Coming up next time
on Freakonomics Radio,
in 1960,
just 5% of births in the U.S.
were to unmarried mothers.
Fast forward now to 2014.
In 2014, over 40% of births in the U.S. were to unmarried mothers. Fast forward now to 2014. In 2014, over 40% of births in the U.S.
were to unmarried mothers.
That is not good news.
The kids who are being born to less educated single moms,
they are falling farther and farther behind.
But what if the economy got a huge positive jolt?
That would definitely help turn things around, wouldn't it?
Wouldn't it?
In fact, the data showed the opposite.
Unmarried births and the fracking boom.
That's next time on Freakonomics Radio.
Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions.
This episode was produced by Irva Gunja, with help from Matt Fidler and Cameron Drews.
Our staff also includes Shelley Lewis, Christopher Wirth, Merritt Jacob, Greg Rosalski, Stephanie Tam, Eliza Lamber, Alison Hockenberry, Emma Morgenstern, Harry Huggins, and Brian Gutierrez.
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