Musical machines - Princeton Alumni Weekly - Princeton University

O
n the evening of October 27—just two days
before Hurricane Sandy made landfall on
the East Coast of the United States—I was
flying with a Princeton delegation to spend
the week of fall break visiting alumni groups, university
and government officials, and secondary schools in Latin
America. The delegation included Professor of History
Jeremy Adelman, who chairs the Council for International
Teaching and Research, Professor of Anthropology João
Biehl, who hails from Brazil and co-directs our Program
in Global Health and Health Policy, Vice President and
Secretary Robert Durkee ’69, and Assistant Vice President
for Alumni Affairs Margaret Miller ’80.
The impetus for our trip was to sign a strategic
partnership agreement with the University of São Paulo
(USP), arguably the best university in Latin America. This
partnership recognizes and will build upon the growing
number of collaborations between our faculty and those at
USP in fields as disparate as astrophysics, global health,
sociology, and Portuguese literature. The partnership
will accelerate the flow of Princeton students studying
in Brazil and attract Brazilian students to our campus.
Cementing a strategic partnership with University of São Paulo
Rector João Grandino Rodas on October 31.
These exchanges are already under way; this past summer,
Princeton students honed their Portuguese language skills
in our new language program in Rio de Janeiro, and others
took part in a summer Global Seminar on “History, Culture,
and Urban Life: Rio de Janeiro and the Imaginary of Brazil”
taught by Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese
Languages and Cultures Bruno Carvalho.
We began our travels in Santiago, Chile, where we
watched on television with horror and no small amount of
“survivor’s guilt” the devastation of the coastal areas of New
Jersey and New York brought on by the hurricane. Phone
calls to campus told a tale of careful planning, immense
THE PRESIDENT’S PAGE
A Fascinating Fall Break
JOÃO BIEHL
dedication, and a little luck that brought the University
through the storm relatively unscathed. I have often said that
I am never more proud of Princeton than during a crisis, for
that is when the effectiveness, loyalty, and dedication of our
staff become visible for all to see. We were also lucky that it
was fall break, with the vast majority of students away, and
that the 150 trees we lost did very little damage to buildings.
In Santiago, in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and
in Buenos Aires, Argentina, we were generously feted by
engaged groups of alumni who were eager to hear news from
campus. They were pleased to learn about the expanding
engagement of the University with Latin America and had
good suggestions for how we could be even more effective in
the future.
Another of my goals for the trip was to understand why
Princeton attracts so few undergraduate students from Latin
America. Toward that end, we visited secondary schools
to speak with students, teachers, and guidance counselors
about Princeton. The schools ranged from a private
international school in Santiago that caters to the children of
expatriates, to a public high school in São Paulo whose choir
serenaded us with “Old Nassau,” which they had learned
from a YouTube video, to a public military college in Rio.
We learned that none of those schools was sending large
numbers of students abroad and that the tradition has been
to delay going abroad until graduate school. It is probably no
coincidence that the best universities in Latin America are
publicly financed and are either very inexpensive or free.
I shouldn’t leave you with the impression that the trip was
all work and no play. One afternoon, we visited AfroReggae,
an innovative social organization located in one of Rio’s
slums, called favelas. The organizers use the creative power
of the arts to draw impoverished youth away from lives of
violence and drugs and keep them in school. The day we
visited, the center was humming with the music of drummers
beating on empty oil cans, an amazing rock ’n’ roll band, and
a troupe of modern dancers, as well as the clicks of students
doing their homework online. As Brazil continues to grapple
with social and economic inequality, AfroReggae provides a
fascinating model for the future.
At the other extreme, Professor Adelman led us on a
sobering tour of the Naval Mechanics School in Buenos
Aires, where an estimated 5,000 victims of Argentina’s
“dirty war” were questioned before they were “disappeared.”
It is now a human rights museum, a testament to man’s
inhumanity to man. Perhaps most haunting to me was
imagining men and women being tortured in the same
building where naval officers and their families were living.
It has been a long time since a Princeton president
traveled to Latin America, but thanks to the warm welcome
and the opportunities that we explored, my successors will be
traveling south more often in the future.
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