On Wednesday's Amanpour & Co., PBS again pushed the left's false narrative that the Republican Party was trying to ban and erase slavery from American history classes. This time Walter Isaacson tapped former Harvard University president Drew Gilpin Faust to be the purported expert for their smear campaign.
As Faust appeared to promote her book, Necessary Trouble and spoke about her history of supporting the historic Civil Rights Movement, Isaacson brought up the issue of the teaching of history and suggested that conservatives want to hide the truth about the slavery era from children. He posed:
Here's another sentence from your book. "Nearly a century after Appomattox, Virginia was still breathing the air of war and defeat." And it really ties into when you were growing up -- when I was growing up, we had Lee Circle. You had monuments of Robert E. Lee. It was all Robert E. Lee and that "lost cause." What do you say now when people are trying to change the way we teach history back to almost this notion of the "lost cause"? We're seeing all sorts of history curriculums being attacked.
Reacting to his cue, Faust agreed with the premise of his question:
It's terrible, Walter. It's terrible because we've spent half a century trying to get to a better, truer notion of our history. And my career as a historian has paralleled those years of exploring African American history -- finding the sources that will show us a more complete view of what that era was like -- understanding what Lee was like as a slave holder, for example. That's part of it, too.
She added:
And to just erase all that and say, "It never happened, it didn't exist, and we're going to go back into this rosy view." That leaves us ill-equipped to understand the present. We have to confront that history to see who we are now because who we are now is about where we come from. And if we deny where we've come from, we mislead ourselves, and we end up undertaking actions and policies that are destructive rather than constructive in getting the United States to a more perfect union and a better place.
In his last question of the interview, Isaacson brought up affirmative action and gave his guest an unchallenged forum to give her views on why she opposed the Supreme Court decision that ended race-based college admissions. She lamented:
I was expecting the decision that came down, but it just felt like a gut punch nonetheless. I worry a lot about how we can continue this progress that we've seen since the time I was at graduate school, and I worry that we will lose both the educational contributions that affirmative action has made by bringing so many outstanding individuals into our communities, and also I worry about what it means about us as a nation and the kind of fair chance and openness we give to a diverse group of applicants, especially given the inheritance that we've been talking about -- the legacies of discrimination and slavery that still persist in our society.
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Amanpour & Co.
August 30, 2023WALTER ISAACSON: Here's another sentence from your book. "Nearly a century after Appomattox, Virginia was still breathing the air of war and defeat." And it really ties into when you were growing up -- when I was growing up, we had Lee Circle. You had monuments of Robert E. Lee. It was all Robert E. Lee and that "lost cause." What do you say now when people are trying to change the way we teach history back to almost this notion of the "lost cause"? We're seeing all sorts of history curriculums being attacked.
DREW GILPIN FAUST, EX-PRESIDENT OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY: It's terrible, Walter. It's terrible because we've spent half a century trying to get to a better, truer notion of our history. And my career as a historian has paralleled those years of exploring African American history -- finding the sources that will show us a more complete view of what that era was like -- understanding what Lee was like as a slave holder, for example. That's part of it, too.
And to just erase all that and say, "It never happened, it didn't exist, and we're going to go back into this rosy view." That leaves us ill-equipped to understand the present. We have to confront that history to see who we are now because who we are now is about where we come from. And if we deny where we've come from, we mislead ourselves, and we end up undertaking actions and policies that are destructive rather than constructive in getting the United States to a more perfect union and a better place.
(...)
ISAACSON: You're a beneficiary of affirmative action. I think you probably got your University of Pennsylvania tenured professorship early on partly because of affirmative action bringing more women into the faculty? Is that right? And how does that shape your view on what's happening now to affirmative action?
(Faust recalls that affirmative action benefited her)
FAUST: ...So I'm very much a product of affirmative action. I don't think that's the only reason that I support affirmative action, but I have seen throughout my time on both the Penn faculty and the Harvard faculty a transformation in the makeup of university communities and a diversification of student bodies and faculty that has important social justice implications, but important educational implications as well because we learn so much more if we have a variety of people around us and not just a homogenous group reinforcing its own understandings and its own experiences.
And so I believe that universities are much richer environments in their intellectual capacity -- in what they teach individuals about how to lead a life and what they enable us to contribute to American society and the world because of affirmative action. So we were very active in fighting against the lawsuit -- the SSFA lawsuit that just resulted in the Supreme Court decision overturning affirmative action while I was president at Harvard. Our opposition to that case -- that suit -- began, and we mounted our defenses, and we testified at the lower court trial, and I attended the oral arguments a year ago October on Halloween last year at the Supreme Court.
I was expecting the decision that came down, but it just felt like a gut punch nonetheless. I worry a lot about how we can continue this progress that we've seen since the time I was at graduate school, and I worry that we will lose both the educational contributions that affirmative action has made by bringing so many outstanding individuals into our communities, and also I worry about what it means about us as a nation and the kind of fair chance and openness we give to a diverse group of applicants, especially given the inheritance that we've been talking about -- the legacies of discrimination and slavery that still persist in our society.
ISAACSON: Thank you so much for being with us, Drew Gilpin Faust.
