Going Global: Harvard’s Stamp Abroad

The sun never sets on the Harvard empire.

In less than a decade, the University has burst beyond its Massachusetts home to establish academic outposts in over a dozen cities across the globe. The Veritas insignia now appears in such far-flung locales as Berlin, Dubai, and Santiago.

But despite the enthusiasm for expansion abroad, an anxiety lingers that Harvard will find itself overextended—perhaps endangering its elite status.

“We don’t want to get into a situation like McDonald’s with a lot of subcontractors [where we] can’t control the quality,” says Sultan of Oman Professor of International Relations Joseph S. Nye Jr, who was dean of the Kennedy School of Government (KSG) from 1995 to 2004.

“There are an infinite number of people who are inviting us to do that,” Nye adds.

And while many laud Harvard’s intellectual appetite for exposure to other cultures, some fear that Harvard’s efforts to facilitate international experiences could ultimately detract from the education provided at home.

“We shouldn’t fall into the trap of thinking that every time someone gets their passport stamped some great educational advance has been achieved,” says Interim President Derek C. Bok.

Unlike some universities, which open full-time graduate schools in other countries, Harvard’s centers abroad make no attempt to replicate the Cambridge experience—neither its facilities, faculty, nor students. Instead of offering Harvard courses, the University’s international outposts focus on faculty research, the facilitation of undergraduate study abroad, and post-graduate studies.

“This was not a principle objective—to establish learning [centers] that would be mini Harvards,” says Harvey V. Fineberg ’67, who was Harvard’s provost when the University began contemplating international centers in the late 1990s.

And though Harvard has set its sights on the rest of the world, it has not created a central plan for increasing its presence abroad. While most of Harvard’s outposts consist of a single office with one to five staff members, the University has set few boundaries for how these and future offices can expand in the future.

“I am personally very comfortable in envisaging that there would be offices of different types,” says Vice Provost for International Affairs Jorge I. Dominguez. “There would be no attempt of having a simple cookie cutter of saying they have to be all alike.”

THE SEEDS OF TIME

Harvard’s effort to establish a more international presence found its most visible advocate in former University President Lawrence H. Summers. But Harvard’s attempts at internationalization started long before Summers and even before his predecessor Neil L. Rudenstine.

In 1959, Renaissance historian Bernard Berenson, Class of 1887, bequeathed his Italian estate at Villa I Tatti and library collections to his alma mater. The villa now houses the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, Italy, as well as Berenson’s 130,000 volumes and more than 300,000 photographs.

But the University never considered opening centers modeled on the opulent Italian villa. And other early efforts at internationalization also failed to provide a successful model. A 1973 Harvard Business School educational program in Switzerland fell by the wayside due to lack of enthusiasm, and the Harvard Institute for International Development became embroiled in controversy due to an investment scandal in Russia surrounding Harvard economics professor Andrei Shleifer ’82.

Not until 1997, under then-President Rudenstine, did the University first contemplate establishing outposts across the world to facilitate research and enhance the classroom experience in Cambridge.

“What we were seeing in the 1990s was an intensifying of intellectual activity and what you might call regional studies,” Fineberg says. “In parallel with that, we were seeing some faculty have more intensive international and educational research.”

Bok agrees that Harvard has witnessed an increased interest in its global position.

“In the 15 years since I was here before, the faculties have gone from being very cool to very receptive to experiences abroad,” he says.

BE NOT AFRAID OF GREATNESS

The Harvard Business School led this internationalization initiative by establishing the Asia-Pacific Research Center in Hong Kong in 1999. The Business School has since opened centers in Paris, Mumbai, Tokyo, and Buenos Aires.

“These are almost like our embassies of the school,” says Krishna G. Palepu, senior associate dean for international development at the Business School.

Other Harvard schools soon followed suit, founding sites abroad but avoiding attempts to create replicas of Harvard.

“In any given month, I would have three offers from some foreign school or university to set up a Kennedy School in that country,” Nye says about his tenure as KSG dean.

The University has offices in South America, Asia, western and eastern Europe, and the Middle East. While each of these centers support faculty research, undergraduate and graduate study abroad, or international conferences, none of them teach courses.

The centers offer support for students who study abroad, helping them find home stays and deal with logistical issues. But the centers do not actually offer classes, instead placing the students in local universities.

“I think it is a statement of humility on our part,” Palepu says about the Business School’s centers for faculty research. “We wanted the rest of the world to think that we are there to learn, and not to teach and preach.”

While Harvard faculty do not teach courses abroad and students do not take classes from Harvard faculty at these international outposts, the University says that the physical presence of these offices aids in its intercontinental goal of connecting Harvard affiliates to their peers in other countries.

“We are really interacting with the local communities. It is not imperialism; it is really about educating faculty and students,” says Erin E. Goodman, the program officer at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, which established its first regional office in Santiago, Chile in 2002. The center now serves Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Peru, and Uruguay. It opened an office in 2006 in São Paulo, Brazil and has plans for a third office in Mexico.

The Harvard Medical School has also established a presence abroad with the Harvard Medical School Dubai Center Institute for Postgraduate Education and Research, and an administrative office in China.

The institute in Dubai is run by Harvard Medical International, a non-profit subsidiary whose goal is not to build Harvard infrastructure internationally, but rather to build global healthcare infrastructure, says Amanda Pullen, a vice president at Harvard Medical International.

“There are very few times when one would get the opportunity to get engaged in designing a health care center almost completely from scratch,” Pullen says about the Dubai center, which is already in operation despite an expected completion date of 2010. The Dubai center offers postgraduate training and continuing medical education programs, and the center is currently constructing a 350,000-square foot facility that will include an auditorium, case method rooms, simulation center, and 30,000-square foot library, according to the center’s Web site.

The center’s education programs are for students who have already completed medical school and need to maintain their certification or gain specialization training.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

But as Harvard has extended its reach beyond the banks of the Charles, it has grappled with the question of how to protect its name and values.

In September 2004, the University created a task force to review University policies and practices concerning international projects and sites. Led by Dominguez, the task force released a report in the spring of 2005 that outlined goals that new international sites should try to fulfill. The task force suggested several designs for the sites and their governance systems, but did not mandate that the outposts resemble these schemes.

The report listed half a dozen inevitable risks to expansion, including “the protection of Harvard’s name and identity.”

“One of the things that one is always concerned about at Harvard is misrepresentation or opportunism of individuals who would like to portray themselves as more connected to the University than they actually are,” Fineberg says. “That was one of the background concerns of the roles of these centers not overstating what they were and what they represented.”

Nye echoes Fineberg’s concern about maintaining control of the quality and values of these outposts as they align with Harvard.

“Everyone would want to borrow the Harvard label; it’s a great brand,” Nye says.

As Harvard Medical International considers its future, Pullen says that while it will continue to partner with other countries, it will not establish Harvard facilities similar to what it has in Dubai.

“The University doesn’t gear itself as creating Harvard-labeled infrastructure” Pullen says. “It sees its role as being in Massachusetts rather than in building other people’s buildings.”

And former president Rudenstine argues that working collaboratively with host countries rather than producing crimson clones is most helpful to both Harvard and the other countries.

“That in the long run is probably going to be the best benefit to those countries rather than trying to establish universities,” Rudenstine says.

ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGE

In all of Harvard’s endeavors crisscrossing the globe, the University has provided flexibility to the centers, departments, and faculty establishing outposts outside the United States.

Without favoring one model, the 2005 task force envisioned four types of international sites that vary in their degree of inter-school cooperation.

Many of Harvard’s current outposts show the varied, flexible approaches that the University has permitted for centers’ expansion abroad. The goal of the Berlin office, created by the Center for European studies, is to facilitate transnational discussion. Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies in Nafplion, Greece, coordinates study abroad, faculty research, internships, and summer school. The Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard, which in the early 1990s had an office in Moscow, Russia, now has a single woman working from her home to help with logistics, research support, and visas.

“The landscape of international outposts is as varied as the landscape of the centers at Harvard,” says Coolidge Professor of History David Blackbourn, who is the director of CES. “They should all be different and appropriate to particular people who have put their imprint there.”

Dominguez rejects the idea of having “cookie-cutter” sites that all look alike.

“Harvard is a complex, diverse institution,” he says. “It would be a very narrow-minded, counterproductive approach to say they must all be alike.”

While President-elect Drew G. Faust has yet to set a path for how Harvard will globalize in the future, she wrote in an e-mailed statement that the internationalization of Harvard is an “important priority,” to which she has directed a “good deal of attention” this spring.

And though Harvard’s schools, centers, and faculty members have chosen their own roads for internationalization, and despite the lingering questions about the most suitable path for continued expansion, there is little doubt that Harvard’s global presence will continue to grow.

“If you want to continue to attract the best students from around the world and the best faculty from around the world, and continue to be at the center of the great intellectual debates, it’s not going to happen automatically,” Palepu says, “unless we embrace globalization and take advantage of these strengths.”

—Staff writer Madeline W. Lissner can be reached at mlissner@fas.harvard.edu.