Harvard. Duke. Yale. These schools do not require students to take a history course – Fairfield does.
Roughly 700 people filed into the Quick Center to attend a $50 history lesson taught by two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning writer David McCullough.
While many non-history majors feel that mandated history classes are unnecessary, the so called “master of narrative history” disagreed.
He said that Fairfield’s emphasis on history is a necessary component in the education of a human being.
“If you have no idea about how we received the privileges that we enjoy today, then you are taking them for granted,” said McCullough on Thursday night as the first speaker in the 2007-2008 Open VISIONS forum.
In addition to praising Fairfield’s decision to mandate history classes, McCullough said that history needs to grow in popular culture.
“Young people go to Australia to go skydiving and have no idea where Australia is,” he said.
“There is a very serious problem putting our country at risk,” said McCullough to the mostly senior audience. “We are raising generations of Americans who are historically illiterate.”
Fellow historian and University President Fr. Jeffrey von Arx echoed his values in historical education and called McCullough a “model for Jesuit values.”
In introducing a fellow “Yaley” to the Fairfield community, von Arx said, “David McCullough has painted unforgettable portraits of great historical figures.”
Open VISIONS officials said that the decision to recruit McCullough to speak was an easy one.
“I was very pleased when our producer, Elizabeth Hastings, told me ‘OK … we are all set – Mr. McCullough will be taking the ferry from Martha’s Vineyard to join us next October,'” said Phillip Eliasoph, director of the Open VISIONS forum.
Eliasoph said that McCullough was a logical choice because last year’s audience members were continuously moving him toward the top of their wish list to speak this year.
According to Eliasoph, the idea to bring McCullough to Fairfield was in cooperation with the Fairfield Museum and History Center, alongside director Mike Jehle, for what Eliasoph described to be a “town-wide celebration of history.”
“He has a great gift of breathing life into the past,” said Jehle. She added that McCullough has exemplified how history gives us a responsibility to uphold the past.
Many students agreed with Eliasoph’s and Jehle’s decision to invite McCullough to campus.
“He was very thought provoking,” said Jessica Brooke ’11. “He had an interesting view and approach to history that I had never heard.”
Matt Brennan’10 agreed that McCullough has a unique approach to history. “I thought that other students would find him interesting because he is more comical than the average professor,” he said.
Brennan said that after hearing McCullough, he now feels that history should play a bigger role in our society.
McCullough offered this solution: “When a father takes his son to a baseball game the son becomes interested because he sees how much it means to his father. We have to do that with history.”
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