New Delhi: ‘People are not synonymous with their governments’, James Robson, the director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute has said as he delivered a keynote address here on ‘The Enduring Importance of Cross-Cultural Exchanges Between Institutions of Higher Education for the Future of Asian Studies’.
Universities, he argued while speaking at event organised by the Institute of Chinese Studies at India International Centre on Wednesday, have long served as “crucial bridges” of dialogue and scholarship when politics fail to do so.
Robson, the James C. Kralik and Yunli Lou Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University and the director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute, used the institute’s approaching centennial to assess how academic exchange between Asia and the West first took shape and how it might survive the tensions of today.
The lecture traced the unexpected origins of Harvard’s ties to Asia, including some moments that now seem almost improbable. “If there are any Yale graduates out there,” Robson joked, “don’t listen.” Yale, he noted, did offer Chinese in 1878, “but nobody signed up for the class”.
Robson then turned to the Harvard-Yenching Institute itself, founded in 1928 with the fortune of Charles Martin Hall, the inventor of the modern aluminum refining process. Hall, Robson explained, had left explicit instructions that his estate be used to support the liberal arts in Asia, but “not be used for any missionizing.’”
One of Hall’s key advisers, Hu Shih, insisted that the institute remain entirely independent from any university. Robson said that advice remains invaluable:
“Because we are legally and financially independent, housed at Harvard but not governed by it, we enjoy the advantages of the university without being subject to its vulnerabilities.”
That independence has helped the institute survive political upheaval, from the closure of its Asian partner colleges during World War II to more recent visa complications in the United States under the Trump administration.
“Today, as Harvard University has come under attack by the Trump administration, I look back to Hu Shih, and I say thank you very much because we are legally and financially separate from Harvard, but we’re housed on the Harvard campus. And so we get the benefits of Harvard University, but are not constricted.”, he added.
He then added that the real vulnerability we face lies in the visa process.
“As the administration grows more xenophobic and restrictive—adding yet another list of countries to the travel ban—the pressure inevitably reaches us. Visas are our lifeblood. Our mission depends on scholarly exchange and on bringing researchers like all of you to campus. If we lose that ability, what are we?”, he said.
But he then added that tensions have always accompanied exchanges between Western and Asian scholars. He said the history of academic cross-fertilisation is full of disruptions—wars, political upheavals, and the shutdown of sister institutes and centers for reasons far beyond academia.
Yet the Harvard-Yenching Institute has managed to survive for nearly a century, adapting even during periods when normal operations were impossible.
In 1966, for example, the American Council of Learned Societies attempted to invite a group of Chinese scholars to a conference on Daoism. The reply they received from a Red Guard team at the Academy of Sciences in Beijing was blunt, he said.
“We the Chinese people are very dubious about your purpose and intention,” it began. “At present, the People’s Republic of China has only Mao Zedong Thought. All other sects are big poisonous weeds… If you dare to play any schemes and tricks, we will certainly smash your dog head.”
Ironically, he noted, the institute’s visiting scholar programme was created in 1952 in response to Chinese universities being shut down.
“Fortunately, this year nearly all of our visiting scholars arrived without issue—only one scholar from China was delayed due to a social media screening problem. We’ve made a conscious effort to make this feel like a normal year, to encourage everyone to tune out the political noise and focus on their work,” he said.
Harvard, rather, became the first U.S. university where Chinese was actually taught, beginning in 1879 when Ge Kunhua arrived. “He had one student who signed up for his class. So, that was the beginning.”
By the early 20th century, Chinese students were arriving in significant numbers. “Between 1909 and 1929, we know that there were at least 250 Chinese students who earned a Harvard degree,” Robson said. “Nearly half of them went back to China,” many to leading roles in higher education.
Harvard’s earliest sustained connections with Asia, however, emerged not through language instruction but through botany.
Plant collectors in Japan, China, and Southeast Asia built scientific networks that later became academic ones. Robson described Arnold Arboretum director Charles Sprague Sargent who “got along with plants better than people”, as Harvard’s first faculty member to travel to Asia. Another collector, Ernest Henry Wilson, became famous for discovering a massive Japanese cryptomeria whose “Wilson Stump” remains a curiosity for its heart-shaped interior.
The narrative eventually went through baseball diplomacy, he said. In 1921, Waseda University played Harvard in Cambridge; Harvard won. When Harvard visited Japan in 1934, it was “completely destroyed”, though Japanese hosts “out of their politeness, still gave the winning trophy to Harvard”.
The footage of that trip resurfaced years later, “retrieved” from the Harvard Archives by the U.S. military “when they were getting ready to invade Japan.”
He closed with a metaphor from the Arboretum: a rare hybrid tulip tree created by joining Chinese and American species that diverged millions of years ago. The result, he said, was “something new and beautiful”, a reminder of what cross-cultural scholarship can still accomplish.
ThePrint is a digital partner for this event.
(Edited by Ajeet Tiwari)
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