Drew Faust is the first sitting president of Harvard University to have visited South Africa. This is an edited version of her speech at the University of Johannesburg’s Soweto campus
It is a long journey here, a journey that gives me new perspective on a nation I care deeply about — a nation colonised by the Dutch and the British, once mired in injustice, whose independence and freedom have inspired the world; a nation of complex racial and ethnic heritage, whose aspirations and transcendent achievements defy the legacies of oppression that still challenge its progress; a nation whose people could once only imagine the day that their president might have an indigenous African heritage, and for whom that day came.
I refer, of course, to the United States of America. As Robert Kennedy knew, when he said something like this at Cape Town in 1966, our nations have travelled two separate roads, with very different histories of transformation.
But we also recognise that in those stories lies a common struggle for liberation, for universal rights before the law, and for human dignity against the evils of slavery and apartheid.
And so, if the journey to Johannesburg is a long one in miles it is, for countless Americans, a short one in emotional resonance.
I am one such visitor. I have spent most of my life studying the history of the American south, and the long, slow struggle of American society towards greater freedom.
African history, as part of that story, is central to my life as a scholar and to my understanding of who I am — born and raised in a segregated state of Virginia, where Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that ‘all men are created equal”, yet himself owned slaves; where, during my childhood, the senator of my home county urged that Virginia close its public schools rather than integrate them.
Harvard, too, has shared in that past — with lives lost among students and faculty in our Civil War, and its own struggle, over four centuries, to open the university to all students of merit, no matter what their backgrounds.
And so it is deeply meaningful for me today, personally and as the president of Harvard, to affirm the bonds that for more than half a century have linked Harvard to South Africa, and this continent — and to pledge to you our long-term commitment to extend those bonds.
To learn from you as you learn from us, and together create a more collaborative future. That is why I want to speak today about education.
About the role of education as a force for liberation in both of our societies.
Think of the countless examples.
Think of the prisoners on Robben Island, routinely denied postgraduate study, and requesting books and journals that were often prohibited.
Think of American freedmen, who, after centuries of being denied literacy in slavery, made schooling a centrepiece in the exercise of their hard-won freedom.
Think of the thousands of school children who marched to Cape Town’s City Hall this September, politely demanding libraries, classrooms, and, as one ninth-grader said, ‘more information and knowledge”.
Think of WEB du Bois, Harvard’s first black PhD, who proclaimed: ‘Of all the civil rights that the world has struggled for, for five thousand years, the right to learn is undoubtedly the most fundamental.”
Du Bois had to struggle for his own education and, in 1891, finally persuaded a scholarship committee that there was a black person worthy of sending to graduate school.
‘I find men willing to help me use my hands,” he wrote, ‘… but I never found a man willing to help me get a Harvard PhD.” Finally, that changed. But change is neither immediate nor total.
For each moment of exhilarating transformation there are a thousand daily realities, travelling a slower road, far behind our ideals.
There is a reason that we still call our ‘reconstruction” after the American Civil War an ‘unfinished revolution”. It took us 100 years to ensure black Americans the right to vote, and to begin to create integrated schools. And we still have vast inequities.
In South Africa I know that 1994 can seem like a very long time ago.
‘Like life,” as Martin Luther King put it, ‘— racial understanding” — and I would add, all understanding — ‘is not something that we find but something that we must create … in persistent trying, perpetual experimentation, persevering togetherness.”
‘Persistent trying” and ‘perpetual experimentation” are the things universities do so well.
Every year I tell Harvard’s incoming freshmen that they are entering a research university, and they should know what that is — a peculiar, hybrid sort of place, dedicated to free thought and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, and at the same time devoted to the public good, and that while both of these aims draw upon a vast store of knowledge, they also require unconventional and speculative thought, tested and prodded through disagreement, discussion and debate.
This year Cambridge University is celebrating its 800th birthday. Just how a great university remains a source of discovery and creativity for nearly a millennium, ‘changing all the time”, as one observer noted, ‘yet maintaining something — at its heart”, is a rather humbling mystery.
But Cambridge, he said, is also a place that reflects the ‘contradictions and never-resolved tensions” out of which it has emerged over those eight centuries.
And this, it seems to me, captures the strength of all great universities, which hold in creative tension the arguments and impossible contradictions of their societies.
That strength is evident in the University of Johannesburg, which, by melding four diverse universities into one, inhabits a distinctive democratic ‘South Africanness”.
You have a mixed faculty of varied races. That took Harvard 350 years. You have a mixed student body with a balance of women and men. That took Harvard almost 340 years.
Universities help create new ideas and better societies because we are free, because we challenge assumptions and challenge ourselves.
Many of us here today have had to raze barriers and break new ground, to create a more open society and system of education.
Harvard’s interest in Africa is long and deep — from the archaeology and anthropology of more than a century ago, to early research in nutrition, to mapping the Milky Way from our observatory in Bloemfontein in the 1950s.
Soon after, Harvard Business School formed connections with the University of the Witwatersrand as it created its own business school. Another thing that connects us, and a very moving one, is the power of our students to effect change. When Robert Kennedy spoke to students at the
University of Cape Town as attorney general in the summer of 1966, he said that from a thousand small acts would come ‘a tiny ripple of hope”. And he added, ‘it is young people who must take the lead”.
I do not need to tell you that they did — nowhere more stunning than here in Soweto in the uprising of 1976, when thousands of learners took to the streets demanding fair education, and created a turning point for change.
As we engaged in the fight for civil rights in the US, the African and especially South African struggle for freedom inspired students on both continents.
A Harvard student led the Boston Committee against apartheid, and for college students across the US divestiture from investments in South Africa became the civil rights issue of the 1970s and 1980s.
‘Students — are generators of ideas,” says a current Harvard senior from Ghana — ‘because we are not corrupted by the limitations of the real world, because we can imagine solutions.”
We know he is right. After three years of floating ideas and tracking down experts, many of them here in Africa, he and his freshman roommate from Indianapolis helped bring clean water to a Ghanaian village — an experience that transformed their own lives as much as the villagers’.
While there is still far to go, there has also been great progress — especially since that day in Cape Town, when Kennedy went on to call upon ‘common qualities of conscience and indignation” to ensure equal opportunity for the ‘disinherited”, not only in South Africa but in places like Watts and the South Side of Chicago.
He could not have known that at that moment, on Chicago’s South Side, lived a two-year-old girl who would soon become an outstanding student at Princeton and Harvard, a lawyer and eventually the first lady of the United States.
Universities, our nations, our globe, face great challenges, as formidable as any in human history — crises in environment and public health, education and our economies, basic needs and human rights. Amid these challenges, as your great Constitutional Court Justice Albie Sachs has put it, we must remember the moments when we ‘link up the ordinary details of life with the great events of our history” — the moments when we feel the power of transformation.
We felt it on that brilliant September day in 1998 when Nelson Mandela came to Harvard to accept an honorary degree.
Twenty-five thousand people packed into the campus space between our library and Memorial Church, with New England church bells pealing and African drums beating.
I cannot tell you how many who witnessed it have told me it was the single most moving moment they have experienced at Harvard.
We felt it again last fall in the US, as South Africa did in 1994, when at some point in November’s presidential election, no matter what our party or political persuasion, all Americans realised the world of our past had irrevocably changed. This generation must carry such moments into the future.
You must believe, as Mandela said, in your ‘capacity to make history”. We in the US and you in South Africa have been granted a very special moment in the history of the world and in its progress towards freedom. It is our challenge to make the most of it.