School of International and Public Affairs Acting Dean John Coatsworth has been in the news recently for his invitation of Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Columbia. We asked him about his first few weeks heading SIPA, the resources it needs, and his thoughts on the event that made world news last week. Here are excerpts of some of his answers:

How would you rate the Ahmadinejad event? What do you think we've learned from the man's visit?

I think the event provoked debate and discussion on important issues—what we mean by free speech, as well as Iran and U.S.-Iranian relations. I learned how important it is to stick to your principles, and avoid answering hypothetical questions based on improbable premises.

What was it like, standing on stage with him, albeit with a significant distance between the podiums? Do you recall any specific moments?

I found the whole experience challenging. His memorable answer on the absence of gays in Iran provided a welcome moment of unintended humor.

The visit has been called a victory for free speech. Was it also a victory for Mr. Ahmadinejad?

I do not see it as a victory for anyone. I wish we could have gotten past the more confrontational issues to discuss more the terms on which Iran would find it possible to accommodate our interests and concerns.

Can you tell us more about the envoy to Iran, as proposed by Mr. Bollinger and offered by Mr. Ahmadinejad?

No follow-up yet that I know of.

Now that you’re here to stay, you’ve probably gotten to know the neighborhood. What are SIPA’s new leader’s favorite neighborhood spots?

I’ve often had lunch at the Amsterdam Cafe or Le Monde on Broadway. I haven’t, I must confess, done any systematic investigation of the nightlife. But if you come back in a year maybe I’ll have something else to suggest!

You spent 12 years as the founding director of the David Rockefeller Center of Latin American Studies at Harvard. What brought you to Columbia after your semester-long sabbatical?

I stepped down as director of the David Rockefeller Center. I planned to do so for some time and … I accomplished about as much as I could accomplish in that role at Harvard, and I was looking for new challenges. So I came to Columbia and found it to be such an attractive and interesting place in the city that I was born in and have always loved to visit—it was difficult to say no.

What are you the most looking forward to in heading SIPA?

I’m just beginning to learn what a dean needs to know about the school and I can see that it has lots of challenges that it will need to face in the next two years. But what’s exciting is that the school has a good foundation. It has a strong faculty, it has a student body that is very committed to the school’s mission, which, broadly speaking, is to make the world a better place, and it has a wonderful staff, so I think this is a great institution and it has a great future.

What are the biggest challenges facing SIPA in the years to come?

I think our major challenges are, first, financial. SIPA needs more resources to do what it’s already doing better. Space, because we’re running out of space in this building, and the building was built for a much smaller, permanent population. We have a challenge in attracting the very best students who want to come here because our fellowship resources are so much smaller than the schools with whom we compete. And we have a challenge in maintaining the academic quality of the institution, and to do all of those things is going to require a full-time dean who’s going to devote his or her full attention to the school.

You said you were planning to look at the current curriculum and other programs that haven’t been evaluated in a long time. What sort of changes do you foresee making?

My predecessor, Lisa Anderson, had been planning on doing a review of the curriculum, which has developed very rapidly over the last 10 years, just to make sure that all of our concentrations are as strong as they need to be, to see if whether the architecture of our concentrations—if 12 is the right number, for example—meets the needs of our students as well as it should. I will be appointing a faculty committee that will be reviewing the curriculum and the concentrations. The regional institutes are reviewed on a sort of five-year clock. SIPA’s research centers, however—some of them are two, three years old—haven’t yet been reviewed.

What differences do you see between Harvard and Columbia?

Harvard is an institution that has at its disposal immense resources to do whatever it seeks to accomplish. So the first thing I noticed about Columbia was that this is a much more efficient and streamlined institution. To give you a good example—the total endowment of this School of International and Public Affairs is somewhere in the range of $30 million. The total endowment of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard is close to $900 million, and the two schools are about the same size in terms of faculty and students. I’m sure the Kennedy School is terrific, but it is not 30 times as great as SIPA. And I think that may be true of much of the rest of Columbia. This place manages to do a lot more with a lot less than Harvard does. I think there’s something about being leaner and meaner that produces some benefits. So I’ve enjoyed being here in part because the University is so well run and in part because the city is so entertaining.

The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars at Princeton is in the metropolitan area and is also an excellent international affairs school. How do you see that institute in comparison to SIPA and how do we match up to them?

The Woodrow Wilson school is very small in comparison to SIPA, and has immense resources. So every student who is admitted to the Woodrow Wilson school has a full scholarship. SIPA can’t afford to do that. So we are at a distinct competitive disadvantage in the sense that we don’t have the resources to make it possible for all our students to have a free ride. Having said that, we have some amazing strengths—one of them is that while this is an international affairs school, it’s also a public policy school. If you’re interested in international affairs but you want to be sure that you have training in management, statistics, economics, in policy-making that will give you a skill set that will make you employable around the world in addition to whatever expertise you are able to acquire in international affairs—this is really the place to come. Also, we have the enormous advantage of being in New York rather than an hour away. So many students come here—even at a financial sacrifice—because they want to live in New York. And then we have huge faculty that’s a match for Princeton and some areas we overmatch them, so I think we’re quite competitive. We’re not competitive in fellowships or financial aid, but we’re more than competitive in every other way.

In addition to heading the Rockefeller Center, you also spent time with the Council on Foreign Relations, the Tinker Foundation, and Harvard’s Committee on Human Rights Studies. How do you see these influencing or informing your leadership of SIPA?

I’ve had a life-long interest in human rights issues and that comes from having gone to graduate school at a time when most of Latin America was falling victim to military regimes that systematically violated the human rights of citizens, from helping refugees resettled in the United States from some of these countries and testifying as an expert witness in immigration trials, in immigration court proceedings when people were applying for political asylum, and from working in whatever way I could to promote transitions back to democracy in the region. So my human rights interest come from having grown up, in a sense, in a really dreadful era in the history of Latin America and seeing people that I knew—researchers, professors, social scientists, students, and other people—brutally mistreated by these authoritarian regimes.

Looking at the larger academic world, and also the public eye—where are Latin American Studies today? The U.S. is obviously very connected to Latin America in many ways. With the rise of China and South East Asia, are some worried about the place of Latin American studies?

I’m not worried about the place of Latin American studies because the region is fascinating and important, and somebody’s got to study it. In a sense, since the Cold War, Latin America has become more important to the United States. It’s certainly more important economically than the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe once were—and in certain respects it’s more important than China has become. I believe it has now surpassed the European Union as the major trading partner of the United States. It’s a region that has a much greater investment stake than most other parts of the world. And we have still, I think, more important trade relations with Mexico than we do with China, so it’s a part of the world that’s economically extremely important to the United States. In the post-Cold War world, economics tends to matter more than security issues—putting aside the question of terrorism and the Middle East. The United States is becoming a Latin American country. So, in a sense, when we study Latin America we’re studying ourselves—or our future, or at least a part of it. Immigration is such an important phenomenon in the United States that it’s becoming more and more obvious we need to know something about the cultures and societies and histories of the places that so many million Americans are coming from.