Shots in the Dark

The Harvard president went on to talk about her book, This Republic of Suffering, and Ric Burns’ PBS documentary based on it. And as an occasional Drew Faust critic, I feel an obligation to point out: She’s terrific here. Faust looks calm and poised, she’s articulate, she doesn’t pretend to be something she’s not, and she does a great job of something that’s not easy to do: Being an intellectual in a popular setting. I’m always heartened by people who can make the case that it’s important to be smart in a country where anti-intellectualism is such a powerful force, and Faust does that elegantly here. She’s obviously very intelligent, but doesn’t come across as pompous or elitist. I also like the implicit political message of her conversation: that in the Civil War, Americans came to believe that their government(s) had specific obligations to them, particularly if they were being asked to make certain specific sacrifices (e.g, their lives) for it (them). It’s clearly not a partisan point, just a matter of fact, but it does have some interesting relevance given that one of our political candidates just wrote off almost half the citizens of the country….

I wish that Faust could talk with such straightforward, comfortable fluency and candor about issues in higher education—we still haven’t seen that from her—but maybe she’s getting there.