She's a historian who's trained to examine the past, but Harvard's Drew Gilpin Faust says in interview that she personally prefers looking forward not backward

EXCERPT

DUBNER: What is something, President Faust, that you believed for a long time to be true and then decided that you’d either been wrong or otherwise somehow changed you mind?

FAUST: Wow, I don’t know how to answer that.

 DUBNER: I mean, is there any either political, or economic, or educational issue or even dogma that you really subscribed to, but then came to thinking, you know what…Maybe it was something that over time…I don’t mean it needs to be a Road-to-Damascus conversion moment, but something that you really reversed field. Or you may be just an extraordinarily intellectually consistent person.

FAUST: No, I doubt that’s the case. I think I’m a person who doesn’t look back a lot, I’m always looking forward, and so I don’t identify and say “whoops, I changed my mind there.” But I need to think about this, because I don’t want to come to see myself as somebody who never can change. So you’ve asked an important question that I will ponder. But I can’t think of an answer.

DUBNER: It’s a deal. Okay. And if you had a time machine, when would you travel to and why, and what would you want to do there?

FAUST: I would like to go to the period that I’ve written about and see did I get it right, did I get it wrong? Partly because one of my approaches to history has been very much through the lens of anthropology, of trying to understand the culture and the broader set, not just to chronicle events, but to really understand how people saw their world. And so f I could time travel to the early 19th century or to the Civil War era I’d get a sense of whether I’d gotten it right and that would be intriguing to me.

DUBNER: And I know you’ve written that history is inherently tricky in that we rely so often now and then on individual stories, and yet individual stories can be nothing more that anecdotes that might be anomalous. So the job of a historian is to square those stories with the aggregate. I’m curious how you would apply that to the modern world these days. You know, you’re one person, I’m one person, everybody listening here is one person with their own sets of opinions and perhaps biases and so on. And yet we need to kind of think through our own prism, but toward the greater population. Do you think that problem that you identified as an historian is a big problem in kind of public civic life today and why there’s so much sort of…

FAUST: That’s such an interesting question. That’s such an intriguing question, which suggests its own answer, I believe. Part of why I love history is it takes it outside ourselves and at its best enables us to look through other people’s eyes. And that enables us to understand what’s contingent about our choices and our existence. And we need to do that in our own time as well. We need to bridge beyond ourselves and take advantage of stories to serve as a road to other people, as a pathway to being able to look at the world through their eyes and to understand where they’re coming from, why they might differ with us on matters of policies, or practice, and have the stories empower us to be more than simply locked within our own selves. So that seems to me an important part of what stories can do for us now.