Summers Set To Visit South America

University President Lawrence H. Summers is set to embark next week on the most high-profile trip a sitting Harvard president has ever taken to South America.

Summers plans to stop in Santiago, Chile and Sao Paulo, Brazil during his three-day trip. He will give a major speech in both cities and plans to visit with students, faculty, alums, government officials and other local leaders, according to Gutman Professor of Latin American Affairs John H. Coatsworth.

Coatsworth, who directs the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, helped plan the trip and will accompany Summers. The trip is also sponsored by the Rockefeller Center.

Coatsworth said next week’s trip was mapped out with the dual purposes of furthering Harvard’s efforts to globalize and reaching out to Latin America.

“This is part of his effort to promote the internationalization of the University and to involve foreign alumni in that effort,” Coatsworth said. “It also corresponds to Larry Summers’ conviction that Latin America is very important to the U.S., and specifically to Harvard.”

Summers, who is scheduled to depart Cambridge Monday night and return Friday morning, plans to spend Tuesday in Santiago, and Wednesday and Thursday in Sao Paulo.

While in Santiago, Summers is scheduled to have lunch with Chilean President Ricardo Lagos and the members of his cabinet. Summers is also slated to meet with the 12 to 15 Harvard students, including 7 or 8 are undergraduates, currently in Santiago for a seminar. He will discuss their study-abroad experiences with them, Coatsworth said.

Summers will also be joined in Santiago by Dillon Professor of International Affairs Jorge I. Dominguez and Fasid Professor of International Development Andres Velasco, Coatsworth said.

While there will be no additional faculty in Sao Paulo, Summers will visit with rectors from a number of local universities and hold an approximately 30-person class for graduate students at schools involved in an exchange program with Harvard. Three of those students have studied at the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Summers will meet with yesterday. But he added that development was not the purpose of the trip.

He said he would be taking a look at the Rockefeller Center’s year-and-a-half-old regional office in Santiago, which coordinates study abroad and other University efforts in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia and Peru. Seven or eight undergraduates are currently studying in Santiago through the program, Harvard’s only official study abroad center, according to Rockefeller Center Associate Director Ellen Sullivan.

“I wanted to have a chance to visit a study abroad success, given that many students are studying and giving the work that the Latin America center is doing in its Santiago office,” Summers said.

Coatsworth said the Santiago office might well serve as a model for future University study abroad programs.

“One of the questions on his mind will be, ‘Is the David Rockefeller Center in Santiago a model that could be replicated in other parts of the world to promote the globalization of the university?’” Coatsworth said. “I assume the answer is ‘yes.’”

While Summers said he plans to expand study abroad, he said it remains to be seen exactly what the University will do to further that goal.

“Part of what I’m taking a trip like this to do is to learn more about what many people see as a more positive example,” Summers said. “I think we need to strengthen study abroad. There are many ways of doing it—just what the right way is something we’ll all have to think about over time.”

Coatsworth said the Sao Paulo portion of the visit was also included because the Rockefeller Center “has given top priority to the development of Brazilian studies at Harvard.” He added that this has begun through film series and encouraging faculty and student research.

“Brazil is one half of Latin America, and it’s the most understudied part [by scholars] in the U.S.,” Coatsworth said.

Summers said the visit also highlighted his own interests. He added that relations with Latin America need to be improved and said he hoped this trip could help.

“Latin America has also been a major area of interest of mine, going back for the last 15 years, since my time at the World Bank, and it’s a period when Latin America is not getting the attention it should be getting from the U.S., so I was also eager to renew some past connections and be involved in the dialogue about the future of the Americas,” Summers said.

Coatsworth said the impetus for this trip came from a series of discussions he had with Summers about the importance of the region.

The conversations, Coatsworth said, “had both to do with the David Rockefeller Center’s contributions to his efforts to globalize the University and to how Summers could express his conviction that Latin America is important—both to Harvard and the U.S.”

Coatsworth said the University also aims to facilitate connections between Latin American alums and Harvard students.

“One of the things that President Summers wants to do is to thank the alumni who have been so helpful in the past and urge them to be committed to Harvard’s globalization,” Coatsworth said.

Next week’s trip comes just four months after a major alum conference in London that Summers attended along with many other top University administrators. Summers said the internationalization of the University would likely mean he would travel more than his predecessors, though he added that his trips would likely be shorter than those taken by previous University presidents.

“I think that one of the really important transitions underway is towards becoming a more global university,” he said. “Inevitably, that will mean that University leaders will travel more widely than they have in the past.”

The University also has a role in helping to smooth ties between the region and the United States, Summers added.

“Relations between nations are not just relations between governments,” he said. “Leading institutions have an important role to play in forging connections, and certainly Harvard, which is very respected and recognized through the world and Latin America, can make an important contribution. That’s part of the thrust of my trip as well.”

—Staff writer Stephen M. Marks can be reached at marks@fas.harvard.edu.