Word: lettering
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...Harvard as Dean of the newly created Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Drew Gilpin Faust gave a speech to the entering class. She told the story of a young woman named Sarah Pellet who in 1850 had the audacity to ask for admission to Harvard University. In his rejection letter, President Jared Sparks, Class of 1815, assured her that the College was only acting in her best interest: “I should doubt whether a solitary female, mingling as she must do promiscuously with so large a number of the other sex, would find her situation either agreeable...
...James B. Conant, Harvard’s 23rd president. He left instructions that it should be opened by the Harvard president at the outset of the next century “and not before.” I broke the seal on this mysterious package to find a remarkable letter from my predecessor. It was addressed to “My dear Sir.” Conant wrote with a sense of imminent danger. He feared an impending World War III that would make “the destruction of our cities including Cambridge quite possible...
...going to get through the next fifty years.” But as he imagined Harvard’s future, Conant shifted from foreboding to faith. If the “prophets of doom” proved wrong, if there was a Harvard president alive to read his letter, Conant was confident about what the university would be. “You will receive this note and be in charge of a more prosperous and significant institution than the one over which I have the honor to preside ... That ... [Harvard] will maintain the traditions of academic freedom, of tolerance...
Conant’s letter, like our gathering here, marks a dramatic intersection of the past with the future. This is a ceremony in which I pledge—with keys and seal and charter—my accountability to the traditions that his voice from the past invokes. At the same time, I affirm, in compact with all of you, my accountability to and for Harvard’s future. As in Conant’s day, we face uncertainties in a world that gives us sound reason for disquiet. But we too maintain an unwavering belief...
...Perhaps most telling was an anecdote Faust used to close her speech. She read from a recently unearthed letter from former Harvard president James B. Conant ’14 written 50 years ago and marked for the University President at the outset of the 21st century "and not before...