Conference Presentation, Fireside Chat
Harvard’s former president Drew Faust on making “necessary trouble”
- Future generations of young people will not recognize the world of the 1950s and 60s, necessitating memoirs to demonstrate the significant changes that have occurred since the speaker's childhood.
- Despite societal despair suggesting nothing has changed, the speaker asserts that substantial transformation has taken place since her early years.
- Unstable political situations in Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany are predicted to result in further conflict and division over the following decades.
- These geopolitical shifts are expected to lead to terrifying and tragic outcomes, including the splintering of Yugoslavia with death in the Balkan wars, and the eventual division or reunification of Czechoslovakia and East Germany.
- The expansion of college degrees to nearly 40% of American adults over 25 by 2020 is projected to increase diversity while creating challenges for higher education institutions in managing conflict and difference.
- The current state of war is anticipated to create a difficult order for universities, requiring them to integrate students whose relatives were killed or kidnapped by opposing forces into shared spaces.
- Societal division is expected to be reflected on college campuses, placing a "huge amount" of pressure on institutions to foster dialogue across deep differences in an environment described as "so divided."
- Unlike the speaker's era when no one fought on opposite sides of ongoing wars, today's campuses face the reality of students directly impacted by relatives killed or kidnapped by opposing sides in current conflicts.