New Rockefeller Center Is a Winner

"There was a hole in Harvard's globe of international and area scholarship," said Jeremy R. Knowles, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Now, thanks to the generosity of David Rockefeller '36, whose $11 million gift will inaugurate the Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, this lacuna will be filled.

The Rockefeller Center, located on the sixth floor of Coolidge Hall, will "complement the half-dozen existing international centers and will have some 100 faculty members affiliated with it at any given time," said John Coatsworth, Monroe Gutman professor of Latin American Affairs and the center's first director.

Harvard has at its various schools more than 300 students and 81 faculty members whose primary focus of study is Latin America. The absence of a University-wide center for Latin American studies has inhibited meaningful and comprehensive synthesis. Now area-scholars can benefit from the cross pollination afforded by exposure to others who work in similar fields.

The center, in order to publicize its mission and activities, plans to publish a newsletter, a University-wide list of courses on Latin America and Latin American issues as well as a directory of faculty, fellows, visiting scholars and professional staff who are studying or conducting research in the field. While this is an excellent idea, we hope that any directory will also include students in the field, their bios and research interests, as does a similar publication put out by Harvard's Center for International Affairs.

Another of the Rockefeller Center's stated objectives is to attempt to attract more talented Latin American students to Harvard and to provide them with the necessary financial aid. We hope, too, that attempts are made to attract visiting faculty from various Latin American universities. This will provide a more comprehensive, nuanced approach to the study of Latin American issues as well as allow for a measure of reciprocity.

In addition to inviting other international faculty, we also urge the center to invite practitioners--diplomats and government officials, as well as others from the private sector--whose expertise can help bridge the gap between theory and practice.

Harvard, with its extraordinary resources, is uniquely situated to provide a leadership role in the inescapable broadening and deepening of hemispheric ties.

At the recently-concluded free trade summit in Miami, the first such regional summit meeting in 27 years, hemispheric leaders agreed to have a treaty in place and implemented by the year 2005.

Key Latin American figures such as Argentina's Minister of Economy, Public Works and Service, Domingo Cavallo, and former Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari are Harvard graduates. They've embraced, and with a degree of success implemented, liberalization and the discipline imposed by its corollaries.

These men provide successful examples of Harvard's important role in the institutional channeling of ideas.

It's not often that the University administration receives unqualified praise on this page. But we enthusiastically endorse these specific measures to accommodate the internationalization of the University.