“We want to make sure that the resources and the structure that connects all of the innovations that are made in HarvardX, the support of those innovations, are adequately supported in a way that both leverages and feeds back into the existing systems here at Harvard,” Lue said.
BRINGING IT BACK HOME
While edX is working to bring Harvard to the world, Harvard affiliates are going abroad and bringing their experiences back home.
Harvard may have avoided creating a second campus outside of Cambridge, but it has put down roots in nine countries globally through its schools and research centers. Harvard Business School alone has constructed, since 1996, centers for research in Argentina, China, France, India, and Japan.
Jorge I. Dominguez, a government professor and Harvard’s vice provost for international affairs, described these research centers as essential in part because of their ability to ensure that Harvard affiliates have a global perspective. These sites, he said, “advance the research of faculty and in a number of instances of students.”
The “Harvard Worldwide” website, launched in 2008, lists a slew of Harvard professors who conduct their research internationally, for example. Graduate School of Education professor Fernando M. Reimers has traveled to Egypt, Morocco, Oman, Dubai, and Abu Dhabi to research programs that educate individuals about entrepreneurial skills like management and teamwork. He brings the findings from his travels back to Harvard, where he teaches an Education School class on entrepreneurial education.
In an email, Reimers praised Harvard’s approach to international initiatives thus far for “invit[ing] all of us in this university, where many global initiatives already exist, to become intentionally global.”
Students are also finding ways to have global experiences. According to Dominguez, half of undergraduates leave the College with significant international experience. Under the Field Immersion Experiences for Leadership Development program, created in 2011, all first-year Business School students must travel to a country with an emerging market. The School of Public Health has partnered with the government of Botswana since 1996, sending Harvard affiliates abroad to research the spread of AIDS in the country.
Those who have traveled internationally generally say they enjoy their experiences and bring a more global perspective back to Harvard’s campus thanks to their travels. Their time abroad aligns with the mission outlined in a letter Faust wrote in the September-October 2012 issue of Harvard Magazine, in which she laid out Harvard’s approach to international issues and its commitment to creating a student body aware of its “global context.”
“Harvard will become more intentionally global in the years to come, uniting and leveraging its extraordinary intellectual and programmatic strengths to ensure that our teaching and research have the optimal potential to make a positive difference,” Faust wrote. “What we do next will have an impact not just on the University’s future, but on the world’s future, a future in which knowledge and education will play an ever more important role.”
—Staff writer Amna H. Hashmi can be reached at amnahashmi@college.harvard.edu. Follow her on Twitter @amna_hashmi.
—Staff writer Cynthia W. Shih can be reached at cshih@college.harvard.edu. Follow her on Twitter at @CShih7.