Drew Faust on Activism, Affirmative Action, and U.S. History

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, INTERNATIONAL HOST: Now, our next guest is a trailblazer who served as the first female president of Harvard University. In her new memoir, Drew Gilpin Faust, shares her experience grappling with race and gender in the Jim Crow era. She joins Walter Isaacson to discuss her life and the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn affirmative action.

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WALTER ISAACSON, HOST: Thank you, Christiane. Drew Faust, welcome back to the show.

FAUST, AUTHOR: Thank you, Walter. It’s great to be here.

ISAACSON: In this wonderful memoir, you described growing up in the ’50s, in this very privileged, but not excessively wealthy rural county in Virginia. Describe it to me.

FAUST: It was a county in the Shenandoah Valley. It had originally been settled, interestingly, by the kind of younger sons of tide water gentry in the 18th century, the younger sons who couldn’t find the appropriate property and the tide water carters and boroughs and so forth moved up to this county. So, it had certain aspirations of gentility, long enshrined in the history of the county. It was about 20 percent black. So, I grew up in an environment where I was constantly interacting with black people, but always in situations of tremendous inequality. They were the farm workers, the maids, the people who worked in white households. So, I did grow up in a world that was southern, even though it was not all that far, it was about 60 miles west of Washington, D.C. It’s now become something of a kind of exurban Washington community, not really a commuting community but just one step beyond that. But in my day, it took forever with the roads that were in existence to get to Washington. So, we didn’t feel that we were part of kind of orbit around Washington. We were a rural community of farms and a little tiny village that had about 200 people in it named Millwood and another little tiny village in the county named Voice (ph) and then, all these farms and fields around them.

ISAACSON: You write about your epiphany on race being intertwined with one about gender and being a girl and a family of boys. Your father, Mr. Gilpin, you know, was a military and so was a lot of the family. Tell me about when you first made the connection between what you saw as gender discrimination and racial discrimination.

FAUST: I think that connection came along with the epiphany when I felt that unfairness expressed itself in a variety of forms, different but analogous. And when I was growing up, I was made so clearly aware that, as my mother put it to me, it’s a man’s world, sweety, and the sooner you figure that out, the happier you’ll be. So, the kinds of constraints that I faced were obviously very different from the kinds of constraints that black residents of my county experienced. But I felt that we were similarly marginalized or similarly pushed aside in the centrality of white men in that society, and the openness that white men had to opportunities and freedom of choice and so forth, that I would not have. I was expected to be a lady. I was not expected to work outside the home. I was expected to marry and have children and to learn to behave in certain decorous ways that were completely at odds with my spirit. I was not particularly well behaved in those dimensions.

ISAACSON: Nowadays, we have this sort of nostalgia about the ’50s and even as reflected in our make America great again type politics. We need to go back to those values. Your memoir is both an antidote to that false nostalgia about the ’50s, yes, and in some ways it’s also a pay into some of the things that happened in the ’50s and ’60s. Explain that duality to me.

FAUST: I wanted to offer a portrait of the ’50s that was more complete than I feel most people younger than I understand. And a lot of what I wanted to show was just how awful the ’50s were, the extent of constraints on African-Americans, on women, on everybody really, as the rules were so ridged in terms of family life and expectations of young people in particular. And I also wanted to portray some of the other things about the ’50s that seem just unimaginable now. I went through Life magazine for the ’50s, read it cover to cover and was so astonished to see some of the products being advertised that I remember, haven’t (ph) existed for years and years. But you see things in Life magazine like food, what people ate. And, for example, advertisements saying, put 7Up in your baby’s bottle and the baby will drink it faster, or a picture of a woman smoking while she’s delivering her child. Things that are so beyond any possible occurrence in our world today. So, the ’50s are a foreign country in so many ways. And I think the nostalgia for them is misplaced because it does not take into account of how constrained everyone’s lives — life was under this regime of expectation. But it also is a time when young people are beginning to challenge that and to see the misrepresentations of the lives that they are expected to lead. And so, the ’60s, as they’re commonly known as a time of rebellion and a time of change, begin, in my mind, in the 1950s and I try to show that in my book.

ISAACSON: What I — you know, have nostalgic feelings about the ’50s, I think of the civility that happened back then and the politeness that happened then. But then a phrase in your book popped out at me, which was that you write that, prejudice was hidden beneath a surface of politeness and civility. Peel that onion back for me.

FAUST: Well, the civility that was a part of interactions in my experience in Virginia was one that it was a veneer. For example, if civility is a mask for unfairness or subordination, how deep is that civility? And in much of the south, less on Virginia, Virginia tried to operate its racial prejudice through what it called the Virginia way, which was to try to extract consent and submission from black Virginians, rather than have direct confrontation. But of course, in much of the south, lynching (ph) still continued in these years, violence was a part of interactions in southern society. And so, that civility had its limits and it existed in parts of society that were privileged enough to afford to seeing civil, except when they needed not to.

ISAACSON: Here’s another sentence from your book, nearly a century after Appomattox, Virginia was still breathing the air of war and defeat. And it really ties into when you were growing up, when I was growing up, we Lee Circle, you had monuments of Robert E. Lee. It was all Robert E Lee and that lost cause. What do you feel now when people are trying to change the way we teach history back to almost this notion of the lost cause, we’re seeing all sorts of history curriculums being attacked?

FAUST: It’s terrible, Walter. It’s terrible because we’ve spent half a century trying to get to a better truer notion of our history. And my career as a historian has paralleled those years of exploring African- American history, finding the sources that will show us a more complete view of what that era was like. Understanding what Lee was like as a slave holder, for example, and that’s part of it too. And to just erase all of that and say, it never happened, it didn’t exist, and we’re going to go back into this rosy view of our past, that leaves us ill-equipped to understand the present. We have to confront that history, to see who we are now. Because who we are now is about where we come from. And if we deny where we’ve come from, we mislead ourselves and end up undertaking actions and policies that are destructive rather than constructive in getting the United States to a more perfect union at a better place.

ISAACSON: You write about that March of 1965, spring of 1965, the civil rights marches that ended and what became known as Bloody Sunday. And your book really has a turn there where you decide you’ve got to go, and you go down there. Describe that.

FAUST: I was in college at the time. And I had been involved in the south, the summer before. So, I had gotten to know a lot of young people who — African-Americans who were involved in the movement. And so, what I was seeing on television seemed very real and personal to me. Not that the individuals I knew were on television but I knew people so like them, and it felt very immediate to me. So, when I saw the videos of Bloody Sunday, of John Lewis and others being hit on the head and knocked to the ground and tear gassed because they wanted to go across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and march for voting rights, I just felt it was a moral challenge to me as a person that when you see this and do nothing, you somehow degrade your own humanity. So, it was, of course, about the rights that I wanted African-Americans to have. But it was also a question for me of who I am and who I would be. And so, I went and brought a car, together with my boyfriend, and we drove down to Selma and we marched the — with the next march. There was a follow-up march. And so, we joined that. And I skipped various obligations in college, including a big, big paper for freshmen that was kind of a cap stone for the freshman year, and I just wrote some nonsense and left it for a friend to type and left for Selma. I had one wonderful professor, a sociology professor I went to see and said I’m going to cut your midterm. And he was very paternal. He was very concerned. He said, do your parents know about this? I sort of said, are you kidding? Of course not. He said, I want you to call me every 24 hours while you’re down there so I know whether to send in the cavalry. And I said, what does that mean? And he said, I don’t know, but call me. So, he was aware of what I was doing. And when I came back, my paper had indeed been a disaster.

ISAACSON: Your paper, you say in the book, was on Camus —

FAUST: Yes, it was.

ISAACSON: — a bunch of lessons you could have had for that trip.

FAUST: So, when I came back and got these terrible comments on the paper from my professor saying, well, you may have made the right decision to go to Selma but it had disastrous consequences for this paper. I sort of felt proud. I thought, Kamoo (ph) would approve. He would have much rather have bad paper written by someone who went to Selma than a good paper written by someone who stayed home.

ISAACSON: The marches in Selma, of course, led by John Lewis. You ended up getting to know him pretty well. I think you probably gave him an honorary degree when you were president of Harvard or something. And the title of your book, “Necessary Trouble,” comes right from him. Tell me about your relationship with John Lewis and why you chose that title.

FAUST: I got to know John Lewis when I was president of Harvard. And he got involved in a number of activities with me and with Harvard. Possibly the most notable was when he came to dedicate the plaque that we put up on our 18th century building where African-American enslaved people had worked for Harvard presidents. And it was the kind of first significant step in Harvard’s movement towards acknowledging its past with slavery. And he came again when I was — my last commencement. He was the commencement speaker. And he got up at the commencement and — in the — you know, his opening words when you thank people. He turned to me and he said, thank you for making necessary trouble. And when I was thinking about this book and what to call it, I thought, those words are perfect encapsulation of what I talk about in this book, which is, I just had to burst out of what was expected of me as a young woman and segregated Virginia. And I had to make necessary trouble to survive. And so, I thought it would be an ideal title for the book. But I asked him if it would be OK if I called the book that, and he, of course, being the gracious person that he is, said he would be honored. So, I fell as if I had his blessing in choosing this title. But it was also to pan to him, it’s to honor him, but it also so perfectly captures how I see the years that I chronicle in the book.

ISAACSON: You’re a beneficiary of affirmative action. I think you probably got your University of Pennsylvania tenured professorship early on partly because of affirmative action, bringing more women into the faculty. Is that right? And how does that shape your view on what’s happening now to affirmative action?

FAUST: I was a graduate student at Penn between 1970 and 1975, and that was an era in which affirmative action was really first being implemented. So, between the time that I entered, and I had not one female professor while I was in graduate school. And the time I left, in ’75, with my degree, there were widespread efforts at Penn to increase the numbers of women on the faculty. And so, when I was eligible for a job, my department, which was the Department of American Civilization, was told they could have an additional line, an additional position if they hired a woman. And so, they hired me. And that enabled me to start my academic career and to spend 25 years, very happy productive years on the Penn faculty. So, I’m very much a product of affirmative action. I don’t think that’s the only reason that I support affirmative action, but I have seen throughout my time on both the Penn faculty and the Harvard faculty a transformation in the makeup of university communities and a diversification of student bodies and faculty that has important social justice implications but important educational implications as well. Because we’ve learned so much more if we have a variety of people around us and not just a homogenous group reenforcing its own understandings and its own experiences. And so, I believe that universities are much richer environments in their intellectual capacity and what they teach individuals about how to lead a life and what they enable us to contribute to American society and the world because of affirmative action. So, we were active in fighting against the lawsuit, the SSFA lawsuit, that just resulted in the Supreme Court decision overturning affirmative action. While I was president at Harvard, our opposition to that case, that suit began, and we mounted our defenses and I testified in the court, the lower court trial, and I attended the oral arguments a year ago, October, on Halloween last year, at the Supreme Court. I was expecting the decision that came down, but it just felt like a gut punch nonetheless. I worry a lot about how we can continue this progress that we’ve seen since the time I was in graduate school and I worry that we will lose both the educational contributions that affirmative action has made by bringing so many outstanding individuals into our communities and also, I worry about what it means about us as a nation in the kind of fair chance and openness we give to a diverse group of applicants, especially given the inheritance that we’ve been talking about, the legacies of discrimination and slavery that still persist in our society.

ISAACSON: Thank you so much for being with us, Drew Gilpin Faust.

FAUST: Thank you, Walter.