By Kate Selker
Toward the end of Alex Green’s final term at Harvard Kennedy School, a classmate turned to him and asked, “Why are you here?” He wasn’t being unkind, Green says—just curious. “You’re not like the rest of us,” the classmate continued. “You’re this bookstore writer guy. Why would you come here?”
Green was indeed a writer and bookstore owner, not an aspiring diplomat or politician. But he knew why he’d enrolled. “I wanted to know how to ask better questions,” he explains.
By his own account, Green had already been “surrounded by” questions as a writer and in running a bookstore. He’d also been connected to HKS—a customer introduced him to James Sebenius, a Harvard Business School professor who also teaches at the Kennedy School.
Green began supporting Sebenius by researching and writing case studies for Harvard’s Project on Negotiation. “Having had the bookshop and having done the Project on Negotiation work—everything there hinges on questions,” Green explains. But he wanted to know what he didn’t know to ask.
At HKS, Green dove into the most challenging classes he could find. “I don’t think I’ve ever worked so hard in my brain—and it was awesome,” he says.
In his final term, Green took a course in op-ed writing. This, too, was about his questions. “Whatever answers I got to those questions,” he said, “I would need to begin to communicate in ways that could lead to some kind of understanding and change.”
Since graduation, he’s done just that. He’s asked question after question—and in doing so, he’s excavated an untold history, changed Massachusetts legislation, and prepared new classes of HKS questioners as an adjunct lecturer in public policy.
“It is the way to see fundamentally different viewpoints—to ask whether you’re missing something, or whether you’re getting the full story.”
After graduating, Green began teaching high school history. For one lesson, he took students to explore a nearby graveyard—and discovered unnamed, numbered graves. Green and his students asked who was buried there and how they’d died. This question would set off a decade of Green’s investigation.
Many of the graves, he learned, belonged to students of the Fernald School, a state institution that operated from 1848 to 2014 in Waltham, Massachusetts, for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
As Green and his students dug deeper, they hit walls; Fernald’s files were sealed state records, with bureaucratic safeguards that made them inaccessible even to family and descendants. Even crayon drawings were locked away. But Green persisted, talking to former staff and family of students to uncover the grim truth: Fernald staff had abused, experimented on, and neglected many students, and some had died of those harms.
Green was determined to make the story known. He advocated for Massachusetts to unseal Fernald’s documents. He rallied a diverse coalition of 25 major disability rights, advocacy, and legal organizations alongside thousands of people from across Massachusetts—including Fernald survivors, descendants, and loved ones, as well as people with disabilities, parents of children with disabilities, and legislative leaders.
Green also wrote landmark legislation that created a disability-led commission to explore institutionalization in the state. And in 2025, his coalition’s advocacy paid off: Governor Maura Healey signed a law expanding access to historical files of people who had been institutionalized.
As Green advocated, he continued honing questions at the Kennedy School. In 2019, he began teaching at HKS. One of his courses covers strategic communication for policy and politics. “The course could easily be retitled ‘The Art of Asking Questions,’” he says.
As an alum, he says, he’s seen that “we do make a difference when we come out of this school. And because we make a difference, we have a substantial responsibility to others.” Meeting that responsibility “begins with questioning,” he says. “It is the way to see fundamentally different viewpoints—to ask whether you’re missing something, or whether you’re getting the full story.”
While teaching, Green kept sharing the story of the Fernald School. His biography of the school’s founder, A Perfect Turmoil, won a National Book Critics Circle award for books published in 2025. In the book, Green suggests our modern world is not so different from Fernald’s—pointing to the people with cognitive disabilities on death row, or the 9-year-old who was chained to a radiator in his Massachusetts classroom amidst a mental health crisis in 2023.
“All over the country, the same is true and worse,” he writes. “Little of it is a surprise.” But he keeps asking questions.
