Several prominent Faculty members are pushing University President Lawrence H. Summers for the creation of a Center for Latino Studies and the group, including members of the Inter-Faculty Committee on Latino Studies, will meet this morning with newly arrived Provost Steven E. Hyman to discuss the matter.

But Summers is far from jumping on the band wagon, Faculty members said over the weekend.

The Inter-Faculty Committee on Latino Studies submitted a proposal for the center to the newly-selected president last June.

Summers has yet to respond formally to that proposal but has led several professors to believe that he does not support the idea, according to John H. Coatsworth, Gutman professor of Latin American Affairs.

Coastworth said the recent controversy between Summers and the Afro-American Studies department has made him—and his colleagues—question Summers’ commitment to diversity and concerned about the future of Latino Studies at Harvard.

In October, Assistant Provost Sean T. Buffington ’90 rejected a proposal that a center be constructed as an arm of the David Rockefeller Center, Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, chair of the Inter-Faculty Committee told The Boston Globe last week.

Suarez-Orozco declined to comment when contacted by The Crimson, citing today’s meeting with the Provost.

Coatsworth said that when he met with Summers over the summer, Summers was reluctant to endorse the creation of a Latino Studies center.

“He expressed some worries about a proliferation of centers and institutes

that once established are hard to get rid of,” Coatsworth said.

“I haven’t funded any new initiatives, pending the arrival of the Provost,” Summers said in a recent interview with The Crimson.

The Provost oversees all inter-faculty initiatives.

Any initiative to establish a Center for Latino Studies would have to be discussed by the full Faculty given the current Faculty policy on ethnic studies, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Jeremy R. Knowles said in an interview with The Crimson Friday.

“The long-standing policy of the Faculty is well documented on the webpage for Ethnic Studies,” Knowles said. “I support the view that the study of ethnicity should be broadly and not narrowly conceived.”

Coatsworth said he and his colleagues feel that the field of Latino Studies is one which requires immediate attention.