Drew Gilpin Faust: Maybe not the "Safe" Replacement everyone thought
Eighteen years ago, at an academic conference at the University of California, San Diego, Drew Gilpin Faust, then a widely respected professor of Southern history at the University of Pennsylvania, caused an uproar that some of her peers still talk about.
Among historians of the South and the Civil War, there is no larger question than why the Confederacy lost its bid for independence. Explanations range from battlefield tactics to the North's industrial superiority, from slave insubordination to the gradual disillusionment of the South's poor, white, non-slaveholding majority.
In San Diego that day, Faust, who takes over the presidency of Harvard on July 1, offered her own explanation, and it managed to rub nearly everyone the wrong way. The South lost, she argued, largely because of the part played by rich, white women, the very figures that had been held up as Dixie's staunchest supporters. Their disappointment with the cause, and their subsequent entreaties to their husbands, sons, brothers, and fathers to give up the fight, did as much as anything else to bring on collapse and defeat.
"It may well have been because of its women that the South lost the Civil War," her paper concluded.
Faust's revisionist salvo brought a fierce response from her audience. Stephanie McCurry, a historian now at Penn who was moderating Faust's panel, remembers the reaction as immediate. The audience at the talk, she says, "went nuts." To military specialists, to historians of slavery, to economic historians, even to some feminist historians, Faust's argument seemed at once radical and wrong-headed, and at the conference and afterward many people let her know that. Faust was verbally attacked. "I'd never seen anything like it," McCurry recalls.
As bombshells go, it can't compete with the one Larry Summers, who stepped down as president of Harvard a year ago, famously dropped in 2005, when he questioned women's aptitude for science. Indeed, Faust's tenure as dean of Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study has earned her a image in Cambridge as a kind of anti-Summers: In contrast to his damn-the-torpedoes style, she is a discreet conciliator, and her impeccable feminist bona fides stand in sharp contrast to his controversial musings on gender.
Nevertheless, Faust's distinguished career as a historian suggests a temperament quite different from that of her reputation as a consensus builder. Although as an administrator she has by all accounts been a smooth inside operator, as a thinker and writer Faust has displayed a taste for shaking things up.
Read entire article at The Boston Globe
Among historians of the South and the Civil War, there is no larger question than why the Confederacy lost its bid for independence. Explanations range from battlefield tactics to the North's industrial superiority, from slave insubordination to the gradual disillusionment of the South's poor, white, non-slaveholding majority.
In San Diego that day, Faust, who takes over the presidency of Harvard on July 1, offered her own explanation, and it managed to rub nearly everyone the wrong way. The South lost, she argued, largely because of the part played by rich, white women, the very figures that had been held up as Dixie's staunchest supporters. Their disappointment with the cause, and their subsequent entreaties to their husbands, sons, brothers, and fathers to give up the fight, did as much as anything else to bring on collapse and defeat.
"It may well have been because of its women that the South lost the Civil War," her paper concluded.
Faust's revisionist salvo brought a fierce response from her audience. Stephanie McCurry, a historian now at Penn who was moderating Faust's panel, remembers the reaction as immediate. The audience at the talk, she says, "went nuts." To military specialists, to historians of slavery, to economic historians, even to some feminist historians, Faust's argument seemed at once radical and wrong-headed, and at the conference and afterward many people let her know that. Faust was verbally attacked. "I'd never seen anything like it," McCurry recalls.
As bombshells go, it can't compete with the one Larry Summers, who stepped down as president of Harvard a year ago, famously dropped in 2005, when he questioned women's aptitude for science. Indeed, Faust's tenure as dean of Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study has earned her a image in Cambridge as a kind of anti-Summers: In contrast to his damn-the-torpedoes style, she is a discreet conciliator, and her impeccable feminist bona fides stand in sharp contrast to his controversial musings on gender.
Nevertheless, Faust's distinguished career as a historian suggests a temperament quite different from that of her reputation as a consensus builder. Although as an administrator she has by all accounts been a smooth inside operator, as a thinker and writer Faust has displayed a taste for shaking things up.