By Li Han

Staff Writer of the Tsinghua News Center

Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust visited Tsinghua on March 26 and delivered a speech in the Tsinghua Global Vision Lectures series.

Tsinghua University President Gu Binglin discussed wider cooperation with Harvard in economics, management, the humanities, mathematics, and the environmental sciences with President Faust and her delegation. Tsinghua Vice President Xie Weihe also participated in the discussion. After their discussion, President Gu and President Faust planted a tree in the Friendship Garden as a symbol of Tsinghua’s ongoing friendship with Harvard.

In her speech “'Illuminating One's Bright Virtue': Higher Education in a Changing World”, President Faust talked about the transformations and changes which are taking place in higher education and emphasized the importance for a university to teach its students “to pursue truth”. She said that Harvard encourages students to pursue truth themselves through the research process. She said that the search for truth in the 21st Century demands that students cross not only disciplinary borders but also national ones. She noted that Harvard now encourages its students to study abroad in the course of their study at Harvard. Harvard, for its part, now welcomes more international students to Harvard as well.

Drew Gilpin Faust became Harvard’s 28th President on July 1, 2007. An historian of the Civil War and the American South, President Faust is also the Lincoln Professor of History in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Previously she served as founding Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, a post she assumed on January 1, 2001.

(Photo by Guo Haijun)