Historian, activist and former Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust saw early in life while in college in the Philadelphia area that higher education plays an important role in democracy, writes Hilary Burns for The Boston Globe.

Faust, who was the president of Harvard University from 2007 to 2018, attended Bryn Mawr College for her undergraduate degree and then received her doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania.

In a recent memoir, she writes that her experiences as a student activist throughout the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s offer lessons for students on today’s campuses who are dealing with similar issues.

From protesting segregated schools in the South while she was a child in Virginia to knocking on doors to protest the Vietnam War as she got older, Faust always believed strongly in fighting against injustice. And she said that she sees the same drive to vote, organize, and protest in young people today.

“I feel that young people today are also so much more sophisticated than we were in that they have a much more complex view of how change happens,” she said in an interview at her home on Cape Cod. “They have much more doubt.”

In the 1960s, she said the protestors “thought [that] a couple of years of protesting the war and we’d overturn Lyndon Johnson, and we would have accomplished our goal.”

Young people today, however, “understand what a long haul they’re in [and the] different ways they have to approach the problem. They are more realistic than we were,” she said.

The title of her memoir is “Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury.” Read more about the book in The Boston Globe.

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