University May Expand Latin-American Studies

A heightened emphasis on Inter-American affairs, may well be leading to a new University center with a unique approach. Faculty interest has accelerated, according to Reginald R. Isaacs, Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning, in finding a means to establish a real cultural give-and-take throughout the hemisphere.

Isaacs has been seeking to contact people in every branch of the University whose training and interests apply to Latin American problems. Professors and students in such diverse fields as architecture, sociology, nutrition, and medicine have both a great deal to learn and to contribute in Latin America, he is convinced.

What Isaacs thus hopes will evolve is not a group of experts studying one area along the lines of the Russian Research Center and similar research institutions, but an organization designed to facilitate such programs as exchanges of professors and graduate students.

"I don't want to overuse the word `image'," Isaacs commented in discussing his travels in Latin America for the United Nations and the State Department, "but I think our academic people might create a better picture of the United States than some of our businessmen have."

Pusey Agrees

President Pusey, who on February 7 will ask the Council of Deans for reaction and suggestions, agrees that the University is in a position to aid Latin American development significantly. He has encouraged Isaacs and Ernest R. May, associate professor of History and chairman of the Committee on Latin-American Studies, to formulate the mechanics of expanding the University's program in this area.

May, whose committee is presently seeking to fill the Bliss Professorship of Latin American History and Economics and to distribute the Bliss fellowships, considers the assembling a core of specialists and scholars in the field as a fundamental first step.

Further moves toward broadening the program of inter-American studies will include the establishing, next fall, of a series of weekly seminars, and the training of teachers on the post-doctoral level.