Remarks at Awarding of the Radcliffe Medal to Neil Rudenstine
September 26, 2024
As Delivered
Drew Gilpin Faust
It is a wonderful privilege to have this opportunity to pay tribute a person who changed the shape of Harvard University – – not to mention my own life. In the last years of his presidency, Neil committed himself to uniting Harvard and Radcliffe in a manner that would strengthen them both. As he explained in a speech to a 1999 reunion class, he intended to “carry to fulfillment the long, hundred-year process of bringing Radcliffe and Harvard to the point where they are to be formally and legally merged. The Institute will be an integral part of the University.” Today and tomorrow we celebrate just that: the powerful and now remarkably taken-for-granted presence of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study as an essential component of Harvard. In that same speech Neil made gentle reference to “any number of storms” and to the “many slings and arrows” that Radcliffe had borne in its century long relationship with Harvard. In private he described it to me a bit less delicately: when he arrived as president in 1991, he said, he was astonished to find Mass Hall and Fay House regularly lobbing cannon balls at one another up and down Garden Street.
Neil was determined to change this, and tonight we honor him because he did. The seeds he sowed, the future he made possible has yielded this vibrant entity of scholarship and engagement that is now 25 years old. (25 years!!?– where did that go?) Countless fellows have had their lives changed by their experience as part of the Radcliffe community; countless students and scholars have discovered treasures in the Schlesinger that have yielded both answers and new questions; countless individuals both in person and online all over the world have attended lectures and symposia and been able to participate in Radcliffe’s intellectual feast. And members of the Harvard community and beyond have been compelled to expand and even rethink their perspectives, their assumptions and their scholarly work because of Radcliffe’s defining commitment to advancing the study of women, gender and society.
Neil’s vision for Radcliffe reflected an approach to universities and to leadership that characterized his career well before the Harvard-Radcliffe negotiations. The mission of the university, he has written – – invoking a poem by Robert Frost – – is to point our thoughts upward—to enable us to pursue the biggest imaginable questions in our teaching and research. We should be stargazers reaching across disciplines and administrative galaxies asking questions and making intellectual connections that others may not see or dare. This is why the new entity was to be devoted to Advanced Study—to the pinnacles of learning and discovery. What an important gesture: Neil would give the newest of Harvard’s schools – -the one many originally discredited because it was associated with women, those decidedly second class citizens – – the assignment of taking on such an important aspect of the University’s work. What we could now regard as Radcliffe’s indispensability has resulted from the intellectual excellence and accomplishment Neil had envisioned as its purpose. Nobel Prizes, Pulitzer prizes, – – even the discovery of the Radcliffe Wave! Not a bad start in its first quarter century. When I arrived, many people regarded the Institute with skepticism. No one doubts Radcliffe now. Neil gave Radcliffe an identity that required it to embody the university’s highest intellectual aspirations, an identity that all but compelled the rest of the university to respect and embrace it. No more cannons on Garden Street.
Neil’s creation of the Radcliffe Institute involved another set of commitments that had defined his time in higher education. During the two decades at Princeton that preceded his presidency here and then during his leadership of Harvard, Neil Rudenstine was unwavering in his commitment to opening the opportunity and promise of higher education to those who had long been denied such access. He has written with passion and compassion about the blindnesses imposed by the rigidly separate and hierarchical racial arrangements of the American society of the 1940s and 50s in which he came of age. He was determined to work for a different and better world, whether through his strong advocacy for affirmative action, through his support for scholarship on the Black experience or through his frequent public statements on issues of racial justice and inclusion.
Given his dedication to these principles, I think it must have been hard when he moved into Mass Hall in 1991 to witness another variety of marginalization and exclusion in front of his eyes every day on Garden Street. The anomalous status of Radcliffe and the anomalous status of women at Harvard cried out for a resolution—one that would make female undergraduates full citizens of the College, one that could promote greater visibility for women scholars and encourage the hiring of greater numbers of women to the faculty, one that would make the study of women’s lives central to the Harvard’s intellectual community. Mary Dunn—the last president of Radcliffe College and the first acting dean of the new institute, as well as a former director of the Schlesinger Library and president of Smith College, hailed Neil as a “wonderfully patient listener” during the lengthy Harvard-Radcliffe merger talks. But the key to the success of the negotiations, she observed, was “his superb sense of history and justice.” For me that sums up so much: he had to understand and acknowledge the history of women at Harvard to be able to build on that past as the foundation for a new narrative for both Harvard and Radcliffe. And this new history would be founded not in exclusion but in the justice realized through the Institute’s dazzling opportunities.
Thank you, Neil, for envisioning and enabling the gem whose birthday we celebrate today. And thank you for taking me along for the ride.