Harvard's Drew Gilpin Faust says history should make us uncomfortable

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. My guest, Drew Gilpin Faust, is best known as the first woman to be president of Harvard, a position she held from 2007 to 2018, and for her books about the Civil War. Having just read her new memoir, I understand why the Civil War is her subject and academia her home. She grew up in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley in the '50s and '60s, where she was groomed to be a proper Southern lady, which she resisted every step of the way. Her grandmother acted like the Civil War was just yesterday, and she was commemorating the South the way it used to be. In preparing Faust to be a lady, her mother insisted that Faust wear a skirt to dinner. Faust knew she needed to escape these norms, and her way out was boarding school in New England. And after that, it was on to Bryn Mawr College in a suburb of Philadelphia. Most of the Ivy League schools didn't even admit women at that time. She became a student activist and a civil rights and anti-war activist during the war in Vietnam.

Her memoir is called "Necessary Trouble: Growing Up At Midcentury." Necessary trouble is a quote from John Lewis, who she knew and who approved of her using his expression as the title of her book. In the prologue, she writes that her formative years were at a time when, quote, "ideas and even movements were emerging to challenge assumptions about race, gender and privilege my parents and grandparents had believed to be immutable. It was a time that inaugurated many of the changes and divisions we grapple with still. The strangeness of that world can perhaps encourage us that at least some things have changed for the better in the course of my life. And at a time when we see many of those advances challenged or even overturned, it can remind us why we don't want to live in such a world again," unquote. Faust is a research professor of history at Harvard. In 2018, she won the $1 million John W. Kluge prize for achievement in the study of humanity, administered by the Library of Congress. The prize recognizes work not covered by the Nobels.

Drew Gilpin Faust, welcome to FRESH AIR. Welcome back. So like I said in the intro, I can understand why you became a historian of the Civil War. You were, in some ways, still living through it because of your grandmother and because of where you lived. Would you describe your grandmother's feelings of connection to the Confederacy?

DREW GILPIN FAUST: Well, thank you very much for having me back. It's great to be with you, Terry. My grandmother was born in the 1890s in Knoxville, Tenn., and that was a time when there were a lot of people alive who had experienced the Civil War and remembered it. And I think she was imbued with many of those attitudes. She spoke of Sherman as a very unattractive man, as if he were someone she'd met on the street. And so her views about the Civil War were very much a product of her time and place. And they also included a set of views about race, which were kind of romanticizations of race relations in the South, a kind of "Gone With The Wind" rendition of faithful servants and benevolent masters, a portrait of slavery that's completely at odds with what we know it to have been - a exploitive and cruel system in which Blacks and whites were set apart and offered very different expectations and circumstances in their lives.

GROSS: A plaque that she commissioned for the cemetery - for a historic cemetery kind of exemplifies what you're saying. It read, to the glory of God and in remembrance of the many personal servants buried there. Faithful and devoted in life, their friends and masters laid them near them in death with affection and gratitude. Their memory remains, though their wooden markers, like the way of life of that day, are gone forever.

What do you find most troubling and most baffling about the wording of that plaque? I mean, servants? They were slaves.

FAUST: Well, yes, they were slaves, but servants was the kind of euphemism that was so often applied in these romanticizations of the old South. But there's one phrase in particular that's so striking. Just three words - friends and masters. Isn't that a contradiction in and of itself? That - this was domination. This was not the equality that is the foundation of friendship.

GROSS: You took some weekend trips to Civil War battlefields with your family. What were you told about the war on those trips?

FAUST: We grew up with the view of the war as a lost cause that was noble and Robert E. Lee as the embodiment of an American hero. When we were little kids, we played endless games of Civil War battles in the woods around our house. I was the second child in a family of four. I had three brothers. And my oldest brother, who was kind of the ringleader of all our activities, always was Lee, and I was always Grant. And it was a very long time before I came to realize that, actually, Grant had won the war.

Civil War battlefields were a destination on weekends, often, and we were told that these were the places where the glorious triumphs of the Confederate spirit - even if sometimes not Confederate troops - had taken place. And we had names of places all around us that were from the Civil War. We lived on a farm, and the driveway opened onto Lee Jackson Highway, named for the two very prominent Civil War generals. So it was everywhere. It was everywhere, as if history was very much a part of our present. And the Civil War centennial that began to be celebrated in 1961 was, of course, a part of this - preparing for it and seeing the reenactment, attending reenactments of battles like Antietam. That was very much a part of my experience, as well.

GROSS: When did you start challenging that version of history?

FAUST: The complexities of race were very evident all around me. And from a very early age, I could see how unfair it was. I was a child who wanted things to be fair and often felt that things for me, as a girl, weren't fair because my brother could do things I couldn't do. And so I think I saw a certain empathy or felt a certain empathy with others around me who had much greater unfairnesses to face. But history and the nature of history, that only began to come clear when I became a reader and a student and also when the historiography began to change, when historians themselves began to challenge this portrait of the war more actively than the kind of haze that surrounded many treatments of it in the '50s.

GROSS: Your own home was segregated because you had Black people working for the family as cooks and maids. So describe the segregation within your home when you were growing up in Virginia.

FAUST: We had - always - Black cook, who was inevitably a wonderful cook, so we ate extremely well with the virtuosity of these individuals. We also had people who helped out around the house. There was a Black man named Raphael who drove us to school and to scout meetings and did odd jobs around the house. But they always entered the house by the back door. They really never came beyond the kitchen unless they had work to do in one of the rooms in the house, and there was a bathroom near the kitchen that was their bathroom. And I used it once, you know, just not thinking or knowing or being aware. And my mother reprimanded me and said, no, no, no. That's for Victoria and Raphael not for you. And you shouldn't invade their privacy. That's how she framed it. She did not frame it in a racial way, but it was unspoken and understood that those divisions existed.

GROSS: Well, let's take a break here and then we'll talk some more. If you're just joining us, my guest is Drew Gilpin Faust. Her new memoir is called "Necessary Trouble." We'll be right back after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF KEVIN EUBANKS' "POET")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Drew Gilpin Faust, author of the new memoir "Necessary Trouble: Growing Up At Midcentury." It's about growing up in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, being groomed to be a Southern lady and how she escaped the norms about gender, race and class that she refused to uphold by going to boarding school in New England and to Bryn Mawr College. Drew Gilpin Faust was also the first female president of Harvard University, a position she held from 2007 to 2018.

Your mother was from New Jersey, but when she married your father, who was from Virginia, she moved to his home. And did your mother buy into Southern womanhood? Is that - because she was raised in New Jersey so she wasn't a part of that. It's not like she was an enlightened feminist or anything, but - you know, far from it. But she wasn't brought up in Southern traditions.

FAUST: That's true. And she always hated the South, I believe, and wanted us to get out of there when we went away to school. And she, I think, chafed at a lot of the restrictions and kind of rules of Southern society. And one thing that she certainly disagreed with was the notion of any kind of frailty or helplessness on the part of women. And she would object to people holding doors or carrying packages, so, you know, grocery packages - she would do it herself.

And yet this was side by side with a view of women as second-class human beings. And she often said to me, it's a man's world, sweetie. And the sooner you figure that out, the happier you'll be. So she had a view of womanhood as subordinate. But I think the Southern lady ideology went a step too far for her. And she was also uncomfortable with race. She'd not grown up around Black people. She didn't understand the implicit rules and I think objected to having to live in a society that was structured in such a rigid way.

GROSS: She had very little freedom because her husband's mother, your paternal grandmother, kind of ruled over her both in terms of finances and other things. And your mother was famous in the area for being an excellent horse rider. And in the early 1940s, she worked for a service where on horseback she would help nurses and midwives be where they needed to be and get what they needed to deliver babies. But she gave that up when she had children. She gave up horses.

And I think your feelings about your mother's life are very similar to a lot of women who grew up in the era when you did - people, women who became, like, you know, second-wave feminists, that they think that their mothers would have been a lot happier had feminism happened during their mothers' lives, had they read Betty Friedan, who in "The Feminine Mystique" wrote about the restrictions on women in the '50s and early '60s and how they were expected to limit their lives to wife and mother. Not that those roles aren't fulfilling, but one shouldn't be confined by them either. So talk a little bit about how you wish your mother had been - had had the language and the ideas to have more control of her life and to broaden her life.

FAUST: I think it's really astute to say that my mother lacked freedom, just as she was denying it to me. She was a very unhappy woman, and she died at age 48. And so she had a very short life. And she really found no joy in pursuing the things that she loved most. She gave them up because of things she thought she ought to be doing. And those included wifehood and motherhood.

She was an accomplished horsewoman - rode sidesaddle, of all things. I cannot imagine how she stayed on the horse. I see pictures of her. I never saw her on a horse. She had completely abandoned it by the time I was conscious. And so seeing these pictures of her and thinking, how did she do that? - and knowing that she enjoyed lots of other things - sports in particular, her friends in New Jersey and so forth - she came to Virginia and more or less consigned herself to be in a place that she didn't like and giving up the things she loved most.

I do think Betty Friedan describes her life so well. I doubt she ever read Betty Friedan. The book came out just a couple of years before my mother died in the early '60s. But Betty Friedan's idea of a forfeited self, of - that's a quote that she uses, a phrase she uses - it so describes what my mother did with her children. She sacrificed herself, she thought, for us. But we would have much preferred if she'd gone out and been her own person. And we even talked about that. I remember talking with my older brother, can't she find something to do so she's not always intruding on our lives? And can't she find something to do that would make her a happier person? But she didn't. And I have always wondered if, in part, that derived from the fact that she never had a decent education. She was a very poor student. I sometimes wonder if she might have had some version of dyslexia.

Two of my brothers have had that, and we know how to handle that in the education system nowadays. And one of those brothers is a lawyer, and the other has a Ph.D. So they managed to transcend their dyslexia. But my mother had no such opportunity, and she never even finished high school. So I think she didn't have a kind of self-reflective ability that could say, you know, this is what's wrong with my life, and I'm going to change it, or this is something I want to do, and I'm going to pursue it. She never had that kind of analytic capacity, and she acted more by instinct than she did by intellectual or rational analysis.

GROSS: So you went to boarding school and then to Bryn Mawr, and you were able to become the person who you wanted to be by getting away from your family. The woman who was the head of the boarding school that you went to seemed like a very strong, independent woman. But you got very mixed messages from her about womanhood. Because she was a very strong role model, but she didn't believe in the equality of men and women. Can you talk about that a little bit?

FAUST: Well, what she said and what she did were so opposite that we could take different messages from her and I think find inspiration in the ways we chose to interpret her. She was a woman who had gone to college at Radcliffe during World War II after having many children. She did extremely well, graduated magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and then went to teach at Concord Academy and was soon asked to be the head of the school. And she was a person who felt that there should be no constraints on her in terms of driving a tractor to clear an area to put a skating rink or going up to New Hampshire with others to dismantle an old church board by board and then reassembling it - and I mean literally, on the ladder with a hammer - reassemble it at Concord to be the chapel.

She set a model of strength in her leadership of the school. She was very much her own person. She went around followed by little pack of miscellaneous dogs who attended chapel and assembly with us. And she spoke to us often about morality and strength and being ourselves. And yet at the same time, she was reminding us that women should be subservient to their husbands' careers, that it was not their purview to challenge the separate role of men who were the powers in society. Rather, we should be training children and others to have the moral compass that was ours because we were not in the daily fray of leading the world as our husbands would be.

So a chilling message on one level, but what she demonstrated to us in the way she led her life was so at odds with what she was saying that for me at least, it was watching her that made me think a different set of roles for women was possible.

GROSS: So we've talked a little bit about the restrictions you were up against at home and how you weren't taught about the larger social structure that prevented women from becoming the equals of men in the world. Let's talk about how you became an activist. What do you consider to be, like, your first awakening to the possibility of activism?

FAUST: My first awakening to the possibility of activism came when I was 9 years old. And I was driving home from school with a Black man who worked for my family, Rafael, and I heard on the radio about the conflicts that were going on in Virginia in the wake of the Brown v. Board decision about school integration. And Virginia was a hotbed of resistance to that decision, led by Senator Harry Byrd, who was in fact a quite close neighbor of ours - lived in our county. And he said that rather than integrate schools, Virginia should close its schools under a program that he named Massive Resistance.

So in 1957, when I was 9 years old, I was hearing about some of the conflicts surrounding the gubernatorial election of that year, I believe it would have been, and around the question of school integration. And I suddenly recognized that my school was all white, not by accident, but by law and by explicit decisions. And suddenly I realized what it meant to be white. And I saw much more clearly the foundation of the inequities that surrounded me. And so I went home, and I decided to write to the president and to urge that schools be integrated and that he do everything possible to bring about change in race relations.

So I, from an early age, wanted to intervene in the world as I saw it and to fix it. And that, I believe, was my kind of attitude and outlook from a very, very young time. But I was able to find my letter to Eisenhower in the Eisenhower Library so I could reunite myself with the 9-year-old version and see what it was I said and remind myself of the arguments I had made in trying to convince the president.

FAUST: Were you proud rereading that letter?

FAUST: I am proud of that letter. In some ways, I feel that I need to continually try to live up to that idealistic little girl. She believed so fervently. It was so much her own idea. No one around me espoused those views. My parents were very conservative, very conventional. And yet there I saw an injustice, and I spoke. And I hope I can continue to see that as an inspiration and a model and continue to bear out what she represented.

GROSS: Well, let's take a break here, and then we'll talk some more. If you're just joining us, my guest is Drew Gilpin Faust. Her new memoir is called "Necessary Trouble: Growing Up At Midcentury." We'll be right back. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF CHRIS THILE AND BRAD MEHLDAU'S "TALLAHASSEE JUNCTION")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with Drew Gilpin Faust, author of the new memoir "Necessary Trouble: Growing Up At Midcentury." It's about growing up in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, being groomed to be a Southern lady and how she escaped the norms about gender, race and class that she refused to uphold by going to boarding school in New England and to Bryn Mawr College. She became a student activist and a civil rights and anti-war activist. Years later, in 2007, she became the first woman to serve as president of Harvard, a position she held from 2007 to 2018. She remains at Harvard, where she's a research professor of history. Faust is also the author of several books about the Civil War, including "This Republic Of Suffering: Death And The American Civil War."

When you were in boarding school, you took a trip through the South in an integrated group of students sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group based in Philadelphia that, you know, advocated for peace. And the goal of that trip was to learn more about the people, the problems and the possibilities of our nation. What did you witness during that trip to the South that made the biggest impression on you? Because you grew up in Virginia, but you were on a mission this time around and exposed to different things than the things you were exposed to as a child.

FAUST: The summer in the South in 1964 involved several locations - Farmville, Va., Orangeburg, S.C., Birmingham. We spent a little time in Atlanta. And in each instance, we were living with African American families who were activists in whatever particular protests were going on in those towns. And they were all kind of hotbeds of civil rights activism. Farmville was the location where the public schools had been closed for four years in accordance with the massive resistance plans of Senator Harry Byrd, who said he would close the Virginia schools rather than integrate them. And so a group of young people - particularly young people there - had gone to the streets, had taken up other ways of protesting this denial of education.

In Orangeburg, much the same - not that the schools were closed, but it was 1964, when the Civil Rights Act had just been passed a couple of weeks into our initiative. And that provided that public accommodations should be - must be integrated. And so in Orangeburg, we worked with young people, again, there who were testing the compliance with this law. And, for example, we'd go, Blacks and whites, to the A&W Root Beer and try to get served when A&W had not served Black people before at all. And so we were testing the compliance.

And then Birmingham was the summer after the protests - the big protest against Bull Connor, the famous, iconic dogs attacking protesters. And it had also been the place where four young girls had been killed in a bombing of the church - of a church in Birmingham. And we stayed in the families of the people in the community, including where those young girls came from, including one family that was the parents of - one of the members of our group stayed with the parents of one of the girls who'd been killed. So I felt so close to the realities on the ground, seeing who was sacrificing themselves, seeing the kinds of outrageous responses that some of the white people we talked to expressed and feeling a great kinship with the real engine of the movement, which was young people.

GROSS: So one of the young people who you met, an African American young man, you attended a barbecue in his family's backyard. And soon after you left, the family's house was bombed. That must have sent a message to you about what was really going on. Was anybody in the family hurt, and what was your reaction? What impact did it have on you to learn that the family's house was bombed after the barbecue?

FAUST: Well, George was from Birmingham and lived in a community where many houses had been bombed over the years. It was known as Dynamite Hill in popular parlance because of the attacks that had been made on it. The bomb that erupted or went off in George's house was quite a small one. No one was hurt. It didn't blow up the whole house. And so it was - I mean, not that any bombing is minor, but in the great list of bombings in Birmingham, this was a small one. And yet it was one that happened in a place that I had been in. It wasn't one that I was looking back on, hearing last year this house was bombed or at one point this other house was bombed. Instead, it was very vivid, and it involved someone that I had become very close to and liked a lot. And so it just underscored the presence - the continuing presence of this evil of racism and violence.

GROSS: Do you think the barbecue that was integrated that you went to had anything to do with the bombing?

FAUST: I wondered that. I wondered if it just seemed too flagrant. We had various reactions to our presence as an integrated group in the course of the summer. In Orangeburg, we got chased by some young white men - teenage guys - who found us at a kind of a little inlet in the - in a river going swimming. It was a kind of swimming hole. And we were there in an integrated group. And, of course, in the ideology of the South, young Black and white people of opposite sexes being together was just the most flagrant violation of racial norms because of the fears of what was called miscegenation, race mixing. And we were together, Black and white young people, boys and girls, the whole summer.

Another time I was walking down the street - this was also in Orangeburg - with George, and a car full of white teenage boys came by and started throwing bottles at us. And George had an immediate reaction. He, like, dragged me to the side of the road, knew exactly where the Black community was, which wasn't very far from us. And he said, you know, we're going there immediately. And that was kind of the safe space in which we would be protected from these assaults. So violence was just a little bit beneath the surface. Though, of course, we didn't experience anything like what was happening the same summer in Mississippi where so many of the Freedom Summer volunteers were beaten or, in the case of Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney, were killed. The young people who disappeared in the summer of 1964 and then were found buried, dead, murdered in August of the year that we were also in the South.

GROSS: Well, I think it's time that we have to take another break. So let me reintroduce you. If you're just joining us, my guest is Drew Gilpin Faust. Her new memoir is called "Necessary Trouble." We'll be right back after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF JULIAN LAGE'S "IOWA TAKEN")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Drew Gilpin Faust, author of the new memoir "Necessary Trouble: Growing Up At Midcentury." It's about growing up in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, being groomed to be a Southern lady and how she escaped the norms about gender, race and class that she refused to uphold by going to boarding school in New England and to Bryn Mawr College. She became a student activist and a civil rights and anti-war activist. And years later, in 2007, she became the first woman to serve as president of Harvard. She is currently a research professor at Harvard. She's also the author of several books about the Civil War.

You had idealized the Civil Rights Movement and became a part of it in whatever way that you could. But then when Black Power and other more militant approaches were taking the place of peaceful resistance and white people were rejected from SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and they even took nonviolent out of their name, you felt that the script for - and I'll quote you here - you felt the script that - for your morality play was being abandoned, and it was no longer clear where a white person like you could fit in with the movement's changing direction. And you say there was no inspiring demonstration for me to attend, no organization to join, no specific piece of legislation to champion 'cause by this time, the Civil Rights Act had already been signed.

Do you feel like your understanding is different now than it was at the time of how and why the Civil Rights Movement was changing and why a group like SNCC didn't really want white people in it anymore, and why the emphasis on nonviolence was being changed and moving more toward a more militant approach to civil rights?

FAUST: I certainly understand it better now, given that there's been so much historical work done on it, and I've had a chance to read very broadly and understand more than what my simple perspective was at the time. But even at the time, I could see reasons for the change. One was after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, the issues that remained - the economic equality issues, the question of segregation in the North, which was an unequal treatment in the North, which was much more by fact than by law, those were very difficult challenges to confront, and the movement faltered in doing so. And I could also understand why Black Americans felt they should be the leaders and the substance and the effective force in change and why white people would be relegated to the sidelines.

GROSS: When the student activist group SDS was founded, a group that became more radical with time, their founding statement was the Port Huron Statement. And you found that to be a pretty exciting statement. So you were very pro-SDS early on in its history. And one of the things in the Port Huron Statement was the concept that the idea of the university - and remember, this is a student group - the idea of the university was an ideal environment to function as a force for change. What appealed to you about that idea? And do you still feel that way, having lived your professional life in universities, including as president of Harvard? Does that idea still appeal to you?

FAUST: The Port Huron Statement, which was issued in 1962 by SDS, is such an idealistic statement about the promise of America, the promise of participatory democracy, and how to achieve that. And its comments about universities are powerful ones. I found it inspiring at the time. I was in college and imagining what I might do from that perspective. But I've always felt, in the years that have followed, that universities are about change. Education is about making people different, making them greater versions of themselves, providing them with capacity. Universities are also about discovering new knowledge, sharing new knowledge. How do we make the world better? We want to make people better through education. We want to make the world better through research. That's what universities are about. And so how can they spread that message in the most effective way?

GROSS: You became disillusioned with SDS in the long run. How did they lose you?

FAUST: SDS became increasingly militant as the Vietnam War unfolded and the resistance to the Vietnam War seemed to be making so little headway in the national political environment. And SDS became not just militant, but, in some cases, violent and confrontational. And that is never who I was. I've always been very devoted to the principles of nonviolence. And so SDS became much too extreme, even though I shared many of its frustrations about the Vietnam War.

GROSS: In college at Bryn Mawr, you became vice president and then president of your class and then head of the students self-governing council. And, of course, you went on to become the first woman to be president of Harvard. So let's jump ahead to that era. You were president when Harvard was sued for discriminating against Asian students for holding them to a higher standard. And that suit became part of the larger affirmative action suit that the Supreme Court recently heard, which resulted in the end of any form of race-based admissions. The majority opinion, which was written by Chief Justice John Roberts, said that Harvard's policy and the University of North Carolina's race-conscious admissions policies violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. You testified in defense of Harvard's use of race-conscious admissions in 2018. How did you defend it then?

FAUST: Well, first, let me say that the whole question of discriminating against Asian Americans was found to be groundless accusation in the findings of the lower court. And the actions taken by the Supreme Court are not intended to address matters of fact. If they wanted to challenge that finding, that we did not discriminate against Asian Americans, they would have had to send the case back to the lower court. So I think that's not well-understood, that their - the Supreme Court decision is not about our treatment of Asian Americans. It's about the constitutionality of race-based admissions.

On affirmative action, I believe in it. I believe that it - a recognition of a history in our country that has long tentacles into the present. I believe that affirmative action has changed the shape of and the landscape of higher education in a way that we need to continue. We are not at a place yet where if we abandon it, as we must, we won't find ourselves backsliding. If you look at the places where affirmative action has been prohibited, at states where it's been prohibited - Michigan, California - you'll see a sharp decline in the numbers of African American students present in the public university system. So I worry a great deal about the future of higher education.

I think it's telling that the Supreme Court, listening to the pleas from the solicitor general of the United States, did not overturn affirmative action in the military academies, West Point, Annapolis and so forth. The solicitor general argued that affirmative action was essential to establishing a diverse officer corps and that a diverse officer corps is essential to the safety of the nation, as we learned when it was not diverse in Vietnam. So if affirmative action is necessary for an effective military, why isn't it necessary for an effective medical establishment or legal establishment or business community? That, to me, said a lot, that they made that decision.

GROSS: You were a beneficiary of affirmative action as a woman. Tell us about that.

FAUST: I was. I entered graduate school in 1970, which is just about when the affirmative action policies were beginning to be enforced by, if you can believe it, the Nixon administration. And the University of Pennsylvania, where I was a graduate student, was subjected to a lot of pressure to expand the numbers of women and African Americans. By the time I finished my degree in 1975, the department in which I'd received it, American civilization, had been told that if they were willing to hire a woman, they could have an extra position. And so I was hired as a result of that, which was a direct outcome of affirmative action.

GROSS: And how did that affect your opinion of affirmative action? I mean, Clarence Thomas benefited from affirmative action, but he opposes it now.

FAUST: I felt that it was an example of just an opening that said, think about doing this. Here's a woman. She's qualified. We're not going to make you pay a price in losing a position. You know, you think she's good enough, try her out. And so they tried me out and I remained on the faculty for 25 years, ended up with an endowed chair and, I think, made important contributions to the University of Pennsylvania, as it made contributions to my scholarly career. So I believe that I'm an example of how and why affirmative action works.

GROSS: Let me reintroduce you. If you're just joining us, my guest is Drew Gilpin Faust. Her new memoir is called "Necessary Trouble: Growing Up At Midcentury." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF BRIAN ENO AND JOHN CALE SONG, "SPINNING AWAY")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Drew Gilpin Faust. Her new memoir is called "Necessary Trouble: Growing Up At Midcentury." She was the first woman to be president of Harvard University, a position she held from 2007 to 2018. She's still at Harvard as a research professor.

Since you are a historian, I have to ask you about Ron DeSantis and his administration, and what they've been doing with education in Florida. His administration blocked a new advanced placement course of African American studies, preventing it from being taught in high school, accusing it of being historically inaccurate and saying that it was a Trojan horse for indoctrinating left-wing ideology. The Florida State Board of Education's new standards for social studies included controversial language about how, quote, "slaves developed skills which in some instances could be applied for their personal benefit."

And in the section about various duties and trades performed by slaves, the curriculum was supposed to explain that slaves developed skills which could be applied for their personal benefit, including agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing and transportation. That sounds great, developing those skills, and you don't even have to pay tuition for it, you know? I mean, like, that is so not like what slavery is. Can you talk about your reaction when you read this?

FAUST: It's preposterous, and it's extremely distressing. It's a complete distortion of the past which is undertaken in service of the present, of minimizing racial issues in the present, by saying everything's been just great for centuries. Slavery was not just great. It was oppressive. It was cruel. And it involved exploitation of every sort - physical violence, sexual exploitation. We know that.

We have pieces of paper where slave owners wrote it down. I did a biography of a South Carolina planter who recorded in detail what his mastery of slaves entailed. And there are dozens and dozens and dozens of studies that showed this. It is so distressing because it is so politically motivated, and it is going to undermine the education of the entire state. It's going to undermine the legitimacy of institutions of higher education that are going to be limited in what they can teach. And it's dishonest.

During my years as a historian, we've seen a revolution in our understanding of the past of the South, which is an area of my expertise, and of race. And it's based in rigorous research that is being turned back here, as if not only are we going back with Roe, not only are we going back by challenging the Voting Rights Act, we're going to go back by pretending that the history that we have learned is also going to be rejected. This is a tragedy.

GROSS: What's your understanding of where this is coming from in Florida, this, you know, cleansing and euphemizing of the reality of slavery and trying to bake that into the curriculum? Do you think that that's coming from just wanting to hold on to the Confederacy, or do you see it as more just politically motivated, wanting to, like, rally DeSantis' base?

FAUST: I would guess it's politically motivated, that - this notion of we shouldn't - history shouldn't make anybody feel bad about anything is to say that history is going to be marginalized because we don't like the idea that there are things that happened in the past that have an influence on the present that affects how we address the present. It's a betrayal of the commitment to truth and to fact. And it so undermines the ability of people in the present to understand who they are. How do we have history that's not uncomfortable? How do we have any kind of education that doesn't make you in some way uncomfortable?

Education asks you to change. The headmistress of my girls' school, many years ago, said to us, have the courage to be disturbed, to learn about the Holocaust and see what evil can mean, to learn about slavery and think about exploitation that is empowered by an ideology of race that we haven't entirely dismantled. Understand what people did in the past so that you can, in the present, better critique your own assumptions, your own blindnesses, and make a world that's a better world. If we don't acknowledge those realities, we are disempowered as human beings.

GROSS: You quote the historian John Hope Franklin, who was African American, as saying, good history is a good foundation for a better present and future. That's a great quote.

FAUST: John Hope Franklin is a hero of mine. And there's another quote I have in - at the very beginning of my book that comes from James Baldwin, who writes, the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly. The past is with us. We can't pretend that it's not, even as we misrepresent it or try to erase it.

GROSS: Drew Gilpin Faust, thank you so much for talking with us.

FAUST: Thank you.

GROSS: Drew Gilpin Faust's new memoir is called "Necessary Trouble: Growing Up At Midcentury." Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, we revisit the legacy of the late hip-hop pioneer Christopher Wallace, also known as Biggie Smalls. Journalist Justin Tinsley, author of a new book about Biggie, will join us to talk about Biggie's life in the context of not only rap, but the wider cultural and political forces that shaped him, including Caribbean immigration, Reagan-era politics, the war on drugs and mass incarceration. I hope you'll join us.

(SOUNDBITE OF KEITH JARRETT TRIO'S "GROOVIN' HIGH")

GROSS: To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at @nprfreshair. FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham with additional engineering today from Tina Kalakay. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Salit, Phyllis Myers, Sam Briger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Therese Madden, Ann Marie Baldonado, Thea Chaloner, Seth Kelley, and Susan Nyakundi. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. Our co-host is Tonya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.

(SOUNDBITE OF KEITH JARRETT TRIO'S "GROOVIN' HIGH")

Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.