Drew Gilpin Faust is the 28th President of Harvard University. She is also the Lincoln Professor of History in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and author of several books. Since assuming the presidency in 2007, she has overseen the expansion of financial aid, development of edX, and launch of the Harvard Campaign.
Harvard Political Review: At the end of your speech outlining Harvard’s upcoming capital campaign, you said you hoped for a Harvard “as good as it is great.” Other than financial aid, what are some things Harvard does that are good as opposed to just great?
Drew Gilpin Faust: A lot revolves around the kinds of ways that knowledge can make a difference to improve people’s lives. As you say, financial aid is part of that because we hope to bring people here who have talent, but may not have the wherewithal, to afford it. So we make possibilities available to them in their lives.
But we also undertake research and teaching in a whole series of areas directly related to improving people’s lives
in the world. The School of Public Health, for example, has an enormous impact on longevity and on quality of life. If
we look at life expectancy in the last century, it improved 30 years. Twenty-five of those years can be attributed to innovations in public health.
So dealing with air pollution, or maternal and child health, or approaches to child vaccination in countries around the world are such important interventions. And when we train professionals in public health and global health—global health being a campaign priority—this has an enormous impact on the world.
Education is another example. The Graduate School of Education is bringing K-12 education and better approaches to teaching and learning to people around the country and world.
So all of those kinds of ways in which research, and then the training of people who are going to work in the field in these areas, can make for better societies and have an impact are critical parts of the good that Harvard does.
HPR: In striving to balance the “good” and the “great,” how do you reconcile tensions between the two, especially in the capital campaign? How do you think about research that isn’t as impactful on people’s lives?
DGF: There’s a lot of knowledge that we want to develop and train people to know about that doesn’t have an immediate impact. For example, studying the classics. But it’s part of the heritage of who we are as human beings. It’s part of how we think in a long-term way. It’s part of learning to look beyond your own world, see its contingency, and understand that things have been different and could be different again.
So even though we can’t say that someone who studies the liberal arts is going to immediately save lives or achieve some- thing as measurable as longevity, these subjects are nevertheless extremely important to our heritage as human beings and to how we define what matters to us as a society.
HPR: You talked in the same speech about Harvard leading a revolution in pedagogy. If you were teaching undergraduates now, how would you organize your course differently to reflect or further that same revolution?
DGF: One of the things I feel very aware of is how antiquated my teaching tools are and how—when and if I go back into the classroom—I’m going to have to revisit everything that I used to do. And partly that’s because so much is available now to enrich a class, from using visual materials and archival materials that are available online, to almost achieving time travel by bringing objects and other aspects of the past directly into the classroom.
For example, the AfricaMap is a digital construction that takes a map of Africa and imposes all kinds of information
on it. I taught a course on the history of the American South when I was on the faculty, and I would talk about the origins of the slave trade and where people came from. I could use the AfricaMap to show villages, population movements, artifacts associated with different peoples, and changes in population in Africa over the course of the slave trade.
When I started teaching, I would talk to my students, use slides in a parcel slide projector, and occasionally bring in historical objects. Now think of what I can have in my classroom. So how would I redo everything based on that? I haven’t yet figured it all out, but I would certainly look forward to it.
HPR: If you were teaching a large videotaped lecture class, would it still be important to you that students attend lectures?
DGF: I’d ask myself whether I would want a large lecture class
in the first place, or whether I would have students watch videotaped materials beforehand, and then come to class and have group activities, discussions, or debates. So that would be a big question: “Should I have a flipped classroom?”
But it’s so interesting you ask this question, because I was a pioneer of a very strange sort in videotaping lectures and delivering them to students. In the fall of 1981 when I became pregnant, there was no maternity leave at the University of Pennsylvania and I had to figure out what I was going to do in the spring term. Was I going to quit, stay home, and not get paid? So I videotaped eight weeks of my lectures in order to have three weeks of them available at whatever time my child was born.
Videotaping these lectures was a real transition for me in terms of using more visual materials. Because as the camera was aimed at me I thought “Why me? Why is it looking at me?” I ought to have materials from books at the time and photographs and objects and so forth. I really began to think about how students learn visually in a classroom.
And one day when the baby was born, the students knew that this was the plan and came to class and instead of me they got the videotape for the next three weeks. So that was my MOOC.
HPR: There has been a lot of discussion about Jodi Kantor’s piece in the New York Times about shifting gender dynamics at Harvard Business School. Do you think there are lessons to be applied to the rest of the university?
DGF: I think a really important thing that happened at the business school was that they articulated a concern and gave people permission to talk about their own perceptions of the challenges and potential solutions. They made it a matter of community attention, and I think that was fundamental to the kind of changes that took place.
Often in an organization when there is a problem, people don’t want to talk about it. Just opening up a subject often has a really positive effect in and of itself. First of all, people can be honest and really look at the issue in a way that’s constructive rather than worrying about it in a way that doesn’t have any action associated with it.
HPR: What do you wish you had done more of as an undergraduate?
DGF: I went down to the Yale inauguration and the new president plays in a bluegrass band. It’s a pretty fabulous band. The music is great and I’ve always loved bluegrass. I just loved the notion of the joy he gets out of playing with a group of musicians. And aside from piano lessons when I was ten years old, I just never played. So I would have liked to have spent time in college playing music.
This interview has been edited and condensed.