When Robert Penn Warren resigned from the University of Minnesota to go to Yale in 1951, the university offered the position to Tate. Tate was one of six U.S. delegates in 1952, including William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, and W. H. Auden, to the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Paris. Later that year he was sent by the State Dept. to the UNESCO Conference on the Arts in Venice; in Rome he had an audience with Pope Pius XII. He was a Fulbright Lecturer in Rome, 1953–54, and was the first Writer in Residence at the American Academy there. He was awarded honorary Litt. D. degrees by Coe College (1955) and Colgate University (1956).