I believe that affirmative action has changed the shape of and the landscape of higher education in a way that we need to continue. The past is with … - Drew Gilpin Faust

As you leave UM to take up your work as nurses, engineers, teachers, scholars, scientific researchers, writers, caregivers, remember that you have learned much more here than what was required to qualify for your degrees. Remember the broader responsibilities that the learning and education you have received entail and share that commitment with the world. Remember that facts and truth matter, and must undergird any just and enduring society. Remember the human connections and contrasts that created the context in which learning thrived. And remember the combination of respect and resilience that the natural environment has required of you and let those qualities serve as touchstones in all you do in life. Remember to be Canes even as you leave this place to serve and uplift a wider world. Congratulations and godspeed.

My PhD dissertation and first book were about the proslavery argument. You might say I wanted to understand inhumanity—how men and women throughout history have persuaded themselves to defend ideas, practices, societies, governments that we of a different era see as indefensible. I wanted to know how humans can become blind to evil. Perhaps if we could understand their processes of denial and rationalization we might gain insight into our own failures of vision, the shortcomings of our own time.
History, in other words, can expand our awareness of ourselves. It releases us from the confines of our own individual lives; it offers us other ways of seeing that cast our assumptions into relief. It reminds us of choices people have made—or not made—and thus illuminates realms of possibility. It shows us that things have been otherwise and reminds us they can be different once again. By documenting contingency and agency, history undermines any acceptance of crippling inevitability. And contingency means opportunity. It means that we can change things and that what we do matters. To my mind this may be history’s most important lesson.

Technology has the potential to positively transform access to education, and to shape how teachers teach and students learn, but there is still much we don’t know about how that transformation will take shape... Distance education can never fully replace the types of interactions that occur when teachers and learners are together in one physical location. Place-based and residential education will always have an irreplaceable role. But even on our campus, learning in classrooms is being transformed by digital tools. For instance, many Harvard faculty are “flipping” their classrooms by having students watch their lectures online and using traditional lecture time for more interactive learning. That is increasingly the case not just at Harvard, but in classrooms across America.