Quotes by Drew Gilpin Faust

“Look to the past to help create the future. Look to science and to poetry. Combine innovation and interpretation. We need the best of both. And it is universities that best provide them.”

“I lived in a world where social arrangements were taken for granted and assumed to be timeless. A child's obligation was to learn these usages, not to question them. The complexities of racial depo...”

“I think the most important leadership lessons I've learned have to do with understanding the context in which you are leading. Universities are places with enormously distributed authority and many...”

“When I was growing up in Virginia, the Civil War was presented to me as glorious with dramatic courage and military honor. Later, I realized how death was central to the reality. It was at the core...”

“I often read nonfiction with a pencil in hand. I love the feel, the smell, the design, the weight of a book, but I also enjoy the convenience of my Kindle - for travel and for procuring a book in s...”

“The ability to recognize opportunities and move in new - and sometimes unexpected - directions will benefit you no matter your interests or aspirations. A liberal arts education is designed to equi...”

“The seductiveness of war derives in part from its location on this boundary of the human, the inhuman, and the superhuman. It requires us to confront the relationship among the noble, the horrible,...”

“Technology has the potential to positively transform access to education, and to shape how teachers teach and students learn, but there is still much we don’t know about how that transformation wil...”

“My PhD dissertation and first book were about the proslavery argument. You might say I wanted to understand inhumanity—how men and women throughout history have persuaded themselves to defend ideas...”

“Tomorrow, we will continue to be called upon to build trust in our actions, our words, and our purposes, to do good in the world. Tomorrow, we will endeavor to be that reliable compass that steers ...”

“As you leave UM to take up your work as nurses, engineers, teachers, scholars, scientific researchers, writers, caregivers, remember that you have learned much more here than what was required to q...”

“The story of Virginia compels us to recognize how important it is that we open our eyes and actively resist the assumptions and traditions that would obscure our vision. To imagine we are or can be...”

“I am not the woman president of Harvard. I am the president of Harvard.”

“I believe that affirmative action has changed the shape of and the landscape of higher education in a way that we need to continue. The past is with us. We can't pretend that it's not, even as we m...”