# 20 Years of the Brazil Office: Reflections from Jason Dyett, Former Brazil Office Executive Director February 23, 2026 In this interview, Jason Dyett, who served for nearly ten years as the Brazil Office’s founding Executive Director, revisits its early days and celebrates the achievements that have marked its two-decade trajectory. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. **1. If you had to describe the birth of the Brazil Office in one image or scene, what would it be—and why does that moment still stay with you?** ![bo openning](/sites/g/files/omnuum12451/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/2026-02/2006-06%20Office%20launch%20%28with%20JPL%29.JPG?itok=SaGu_Dyg) The inauguration of the Brazil Office in 2006An image of the Brazil Office’s glass and wood jumps into my mind. From the get-go, the Brazil Office was about people - students, then faculty, then everyone else. So, it may seem strange to focus on infrastructure. Twenty years on, the same floor-to-ceiling, transparent glass walls still let in lots of welcoming light and give little reason to close office doors. The heavy wooden table in the conference room and the varnished wooden posts that bring the glass panels together give a taste of Harvard, but with an edgier, more contemporary feel. I’ll never forget the office construction process – from the great taste and tireless design efforts of Tomás Amorim, to the immediate consensus he, Lorena Barberia, and I had around being open, transparent, and in a place that’s accessible to students via public transportation. The fact that we (read a Big-tent, international DRCLAS “we”) got from location selection to construction to inauguration in six months reflects an amazing aligning of stars. The Harvard President, DRCLAS Founding Director (John Coatsworth), and a committed, strategic-thinking anchor donor (Jorge Paulo Lemann) put the foundation in place. Then dozens of people worked, mostly in harmony and in selfless ways, to make the office real and to answer the basic, initially difficult question, “What does Harvard want to do in Brazil?”. It’s impossible to overstate the importance of Claudio Haddad and local Brazil Office Advisors who personified the best of Brazil and the best of Harvard. They helped us navigate significant initial landmines of bureaucracy, ego, and competing agendas that can keep well-meaning efforts from reaching their 2nd, let alone 20th anniversary. **2. The Brazil Office began operating before many of the basic structures - legal, financial and administrative— were fully in place. How did leading under that kind of uncertainty shape both your decisions and the Office’s culture in those early years?** People who know Harvard and Brazil well are familiar with the sayings, “Every Tub on its own bottom” and “Brazil is not for beginners.” The first one reflects Harvard’s highly decentralized nature and the need for each administrative unit (or “Tub”) to sink or swim on its own. The latter underscores Brazil’s reputation as a formidable bureaucracy with a complex tax regime and a slow-moving legal system. DRCLAS is great because it takes on the challenges of collaborating across Tubs in places where the University can play a positive role and is, administratively speaking, a beginner. ![jason and drew](/sites/g/files/omnuum12451/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/2026-02/2011%20%E2%80%93%20Visit%20of%20President%20Drew%20Faust%20to%20Brazil.JPG?itok=Dv_fQLBP) President Drew Faust and Jason during her visit to Brazil in 2011In my early 30s, I was fortunate, and young, to have the opportunity to serve as the first Executive Director of the Brazil Office. I knew a fair amount about Harvard, having grown up around the University and worked my first post-college job at DRCLAS in Cambridge (1994-1996). I’d also lived and worked in São Paulo for five years in start-ups before coming back to DRCLAS to help launch the Brazil Office. So, I knew how little I knew about two huge, complex, exciting places that were coming together. And I appreciated how much I would depend on others’ knowledge and goodwill, how important it would be to listen to people with more expertise than me, and how the place I where I could most add value was in bridging the gaps between them. **3. At what point did you feel the Brazil Office stopped being an experiment and became a legitimate institutional presence, and what had to change for that transition to happen?** The Brazil Office has clearly grown beyond its proof-of-concept phase, though it’s exciting to see that it continues to experiment with challenging new programs and to support meaningful, uncertain research. For me, the Brazil Office became a legitimate institutional presence when the number of Harvard faculty who have a lasting and unquestionable commitment to work on and in Brazil hit a tipping point. It’s hard to pinpoint when that happened. Students are leading indicators. Faculty are lagging ones but are more important indicators of institutional progress. In the 10 years I was in the Brazil Office, the number of Brazilian students at Harvard more than doubled. Growth of faculty, particularly tenured ones, however, was far slower and more complex. In the mid-1990s, Brazil wasn’t on the map at Harvard or even at DRCLAS. By 2006, when the Office was established, there was a nascent Brazil Studies Program on campus, a brief history of Visiting Scholars from Brazil, and a few tireless professors (Frances Hagopian; Kenneth Maxwell) who weren’t Brazilian, didn’t have the ideal tools to influence outcomes, but were pushing to make room for more professors from Brazil at Harvard in the second half of their careers. ![jason and frances](/sites/g/files/omnuum12451/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/2026-02/1%20%28156%29.jpg?itok=JRf_jCtT) Brazil Office's 10th AnniversaryNow, there are multiple Brazilian professors with tenure at Harvard who are in their prime. There are robust research funds. There are more non-Brazilian faculty interested in Brazil. If you forced me to put a date on when the Brazil Office stopped being an experiment, I’d say it was when Marcia Castro received tenure. She embodies the type of partnership with the Brazil Office that brings together the strengths of faculty leadership in Cambridge and Boston, continuous research and program development in Brazil, and equitable partnerships with Brazilian universities, researchers, and public and private institutions. I’m also very impressed and happy that the Office has continued to retain key staff talent and find ways to generate new opportunities for post-graduation student fellows. The Brazil Office in São Paulo and Brazil Studies program in Cambridge also have ironed out kinks and operate very smoothly together. **4. What impact of the Brazil Office are you most proud of — but that rarely shows up in reports or public narratives?** I am most proud of the Brazil Office’s impact on how the University engages with Brazil. Until you commit to continuously being somewhere, it’s tough to make a convincing argument that you’re in it for the long haul. Now that DRCLAS has been in Brazil for 20 years, it’s shown that Harvard has a unique level of ongoing commitment to the country. To me, the highly collaborative nature of the programs the Brazil Office has co-created is simply the right way to do things. This “how” was learned together with, and to a large extent from, our partners in Brazil. The fact that the Brazil Office is often the minority partner in initiatives in Brazil where strong local universities, NGOs, public sector partners, and donors have more central roles should be a source of pride, not something to change. **5. Are there values or principles from the Office’s beginnings that you hope will still guide it 20 years from now?** ![jason and david rockefeller](/sites/g/files/omnuum12451/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/2026-02/Captura%20de%20tela%202026-02-23%20155224.png?itok=wR3CtRqu) David Rockefeller's visit to the Brazil Office in 2006Yes. I hope the two guiding questions we relied on from our first days back in 2006 continue to be central to future decision-making. They are: 1) Why is this opportunity relevant to Harvard’s core research and teaching mission? and 2) What value will it deliver to Brazil? The first question guards against using the powerful Harvard brand to open doors that should not be opened. The second guards against an extractive international approach that does not promote sustainable partnerships or recognize the central role Brazilians have rightly had in the Office’s existence, success, and purpose. **6. Looking ahead, what risks do you think the office must continue taking if it wants to stay true to its mission, and relevant, over the next 20 years?** To stay as relevant as possible, the Brazil Office should prioritize the half of DRCLAS’ mission that’s focused on “bringing more of Harvard to Latin America”. While the other half of DRCLAS’s mission, “bringing more of Latin America to Harvard”, remains critically important, the headwinds on that front are strong and the value of researching and studying beyond Cambridge and Boston will likely grow. **7. Is there anything else you’d like to share that feels important in this 20th-anniversary moment?** The 20th anniversary of the Brazil Office obviously comes at a time when trusting the U.S. as a foreign partner or as an international destination for higher education is increasingly challenging. Over the next 20 years, it would be fantastic to see the Brazil Office succeed in helping to expand the flow of Harvard faculty and students to Brazil who know very little about the region for sabbatical stays or study abroad of a semester or more. That would take lots of stars aligning, time, work, and local partnerships. It’s the kind of thing the Brazil Office could uniquely help pull off. Share on:- [ Facebook ](#) - [ Twitter ](#) - [ Linkedin ](#)