In her new coming-of-age book, former Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust assures readers that she has never been the sort of radical who is obsessed solely with the righteousness of her cause and the villainy of her opponents. She explains that in her youth she was inspired by Albert Camus to devote herself to combating evil, first and foremost the evil within herself. The rest of the book, however, is a series of relentless attacks on the evil done by others — segregation, racism, sexism, prudishness, the Vietnam War — and is seldom interrupted by consideration of her own sins.
Hubris, the first of all sins, wafts through the pages. Faust displays no humility in denouncing her mother and the society of the 1960s for encouraging women to maintain traditional feminine dress and decorum, abstain from premarital sex, and focus on home rather than career. She celebrates her liberation from such norms without any recognition of the unintended consequences. Nothing about higher rates of divorce, single parenthood, abortion, or mental illness resulting from sexual “liberation,” or the proliferation of campus sexual assaults facilitated by unfettered dormitories. (As Harvard president, Faust did have to acknowledge an “alarming frequency” of sexual assaults on her campus.)
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