The Santiago Center serves, however, more than just undergraduates. The office sends third-year HMS students to a local hospital to practice and train treating Spanish-speaking patients. And the Design School has begun a new program that focuses on the teaching of design and development of low-cost housing through The Santiago Center. The office also collaborates with individual members of the faculty on a number of projects, from museum exhibits to academic field conferences.

Dwight Perkins, the director of Harvad’s Asia Center, says that the success of the Santiago Office—in addition to the underlying need to support students and faculty abroad—has spawned serious discussions throughout the University about erecting more centers in other parts of the world, as well as growing and integrating Harvard centers already in existence. Perkins says it is too early to tell whether the Asia Center—currently only operative in Cambridge—will expand its program to service students and faculty abroad.

“Certainly if we were to set up such an office it would be closer to the Chilean model,” he says.

PARTNERSHIPS IN ASIA

Meanwhile, other Harvard centers are sprouting up across the globe.

In February, the Harvard Business School (HBS) will open up its fifth research center in Mumbai, India. The center will gear towards faculty research on the local economies of India, Sri Lanka and Pakistan.

And within a year, the South Asia Initiative (SAI), which is affiliated with the Asia Center, will establish its international presence in Mumbai, India with an office physically adjacent to—but substantively separate from—the HBS center.

The integrated Mumbai Center—a small group of offices covering no more than 2,000 square feet—is the fifth international center to spring up from the HBS “Global Initiative.”

The initiative promotes research that is international in scope and impact, according to Senior Associate Dean of International Development John A. Quelch.

Quelch says that while he respects the mission of the Dominguez task force, he finds that it does not address “one fundamental issue.”

“There is a difference between a global university and an American university that likes to consider itself global,” Quelch says.

He says that while Harvard is on its way to becoming the former, it still has a long way to go.

Centers such as the ones in Mumbai, says Quelch, can motivate faculty to focus their research abroad. He says there is tremendous opportunity for research to make a larger impact if the faculty conceives it with the world—and not simply the United States—in mind.

“In a global university,” he says, “the core essence of everyone on faculty embodies the global perspective.”

Another major step in Harvard’s transition from “an American university that likes to consider itself global” to becoming an actual “global university” is expanding its study abroad programs.