Uncertainty South of the Border: Latin American Studies at Harvard

Plagued by a shortage of faculty and what some students complain is a lack of direction, Harvard has fallen behind other universities in Latin American Studies. But with increasing student interest and 20 years of rapid growth in the field, some hope that the College will be able to shore up a traditionally weak area.

Although several other universities now offer undergraduate degrees in Latin American Studies at Harvard, the discipline is split among several departments loosely organized by the Committee on Latin American and Iberian Studies (CLAIS).

Students say the subject deserves its own department, but administrators say no change is likely soon and professors argue that the existing system allows more flexibility. For especially interested students, the committee offers an interdisciplinary certificate in Latin American Studies, which includes a senior thesis on a specific country.

Interest in Latin America swelled suddenly after the Cuban revolution, says Smith Professor of the French and Spanish Languages and Literatures Juan Marichal. But because academics had relatively ignored the region previously, there was a dearth of qualified scholars, and Harvard was unwilling to rush into the field by appointing poorly qualified people, professors say. Only now are enough topflight people emerging to make beefing up the faculty possible, they explain.

The lack of qualified people is reflected in the University's inability over the past several years to name a Gutman Professor of Latin American Studies in the Economics Department, but professor are now hopeful that an appointment can be made soon. "Latin American studies at Harvard will tremendously improve with the appointment of a Gutman Professor," Marichal says.

Last year's appointment of Joachim Francisco, Smith Professor of Portuguese Language, and Christopher Maurer, assistant professor of Spanish language, were an important step, professors say.

Until recently the most prominent places for Latin American studies have been Brown, Stanford, the University of California, the University of Texas and Yale, with many of the most prominent scholars in the field sequestered at those schools, a situation which professors say has hampered faculty recruiting. "The University has the responsibility of appointing the wisest, most brilliant and most productive teaching scholars it can find, and if all of them are off in one corner or another, it makes the job more difficult," says History Department Chairman John Womack Jr. '59, a Latin America specialist.

Professors say they are responding to growing student interest in the field by offering more courses, working to expand the faculty and offering more CLAIS-sponsored forums. Also significant, they say, is a Tinker Foundation grant used for undergraduates and graduate students to fund travel and study abroad. Last year 25 students and professors used the money to visit Latin America.

But students still complain that there aren't enough courses within the individual departments to give a complete survey of Latin America and continue to call for an interdisciplinary concentration. "I'd be majoring in Latin American history if there were enough courses to take. Unfortunately, the only survey course on Latin America is taught only by Womack," says Francis X. Rocca '85. Womack is a Marxist and announced at the first meeting of History 1760 this year that he would teach the course from that perspective. "There should really be a more evenhanded treatment of the subject," says Rocca.

Some students have called the Latin American certificate "meaningless" and administrators at other universities say it has limited value for people applying to graduate school, but professors defend its worth. "I am thoroughly against the proliferation of area studies departments," says SueCline, assistant professor in Latin American history. "The Latin American program has always been fairly loose and has always afforded a lot of flexibility."

Establishing an interdisciplinary concentration would necessitate a radical change in the administration's philosophy concerning Latin American studies, "a development which I don't see happening. Harvard has had a strong reputation as a bastion of Anglo-Saxon history with a bias in European studies," says James Brennan, a Latin American history graduate student.

Marichal says such a program would be a "concept which the Faculty would find difficult to accept, and one of which they just would not approve," because it would be against Harvard's tradition of diversified education to specialize in one area.

Womack says universities tend to emphasize methods of analysis and quantification rather than the fields in which they are applied. He also blames the lack of qualified professors and teaching assistants on graduate schools accepting fewer students who have concentrated in one specific area.

Second-year law student Raul M. Sanchez, who has Latin American studies degrees from Princeton and Stanford, agrees that, "it's useful to be anchored in one type of methodology."

There may also be some resistance among the CLAIS members to switch to an interdisciplinary concentration, as such a move might take them away from their current departments. "The members of the committee don't want Latin American studies to be a department because I think they feel that their own disciplines are pretty well taken care of," says Lili Wadsworth, assistant to the chairman of the committee.