Message from Dean Jeremy M. Weinstein
Dear Harvard Kennedy School Community,
Welcome to the fall semester. It has been wonderful to see so many students, staff, and faculty—new and returning—in the halls over the past week. Your energy and enthusiasm make this place feel very special.
At a moment of continuing uncertainty for the university, I have spent a lot of time this summer thinking about our community. HKS was the place where I finally found my people: my closest friends, my best professional colleagues, and in a happy turn of events, my wife. Although we came from different places and had different professional and academic goals, we were bound together by a set of common traits: a deep concern for social problems, a commitment to rigorous inquiry, an instinct to take action, and a belief in the higher calling of service.
The power of our community and our shared values set HKS apart. Members of our faculty experienced that community firsthand this summer by hosting over a dozen events with alumni in cities ranging from Los Angeles to Seoul and Lagos to Rome. With the support of summer fellowships from the Rappaport Institute, Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, and more, hundreds of our students made a tremendous impact through direct government service. Here in Cambridge, I had the privilege of celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Greater Boston Applied Field Lab with alumni in June, welcoming the MC/MPA class in July, and speaking at the Mason Fall Launch in August, giving me the opportunity to interact with both our extraordinary graduates and the next generation of HKS students.
I hope you will join me in efforts to strengthen our community this academic year. First, we must continue to cultivate a culture of openness and intellectual curiosity that embraces respectful disagreement. Earlier this week, our first-year students completed an orientation training on effective disagreement, sourced from the critical work of our Candid & Constructive Conversations initiative. I encourage everyone—faculty, staff, and students—to check out CCC programming this coming year, to participate in the Middle East Dialogues, to come to the IOP Forum, and to stay tuned for a new series that we will soon launch on disagreement and dialogue. All of us at HKS will learn more and grow closer if we feel free to ask challenging questions and engage in real, open dialogue.
HKS is also working hard to bring even more exceptional leaders into this community who share our commitment to service. In July, we announced the American Service Fellowship, a new scholarship program for those with at least seven years of public service experience. We are using the launch of the fellowship program to promote HKS in all fifty states, so that public servants of all backgrounds and geographies know they have a home here in Cambridge. I encourage you to share this initiative broadly in your networks, so we can attract fellows from all walks of life, including those who have served in local, state, and federal government, veterans, law enforcement, and educators, among others.
We will continue to do all we can to support international students during this period of change and challenge. As I said in the spring, those of you who come to HKS from abroad teach us more about the world than we can ever hope to teach you. We have worked intensively this summer to develop contingency plans for our international students, adapted to obstacles by welcoming students to orientation via Zoom, and launched a program for a small cohort of returning students at the University of Toronto’s Munk School. We are working hard to ensure that HKS remains a global school, comprised of the world’s most engaged and innovative changemakers.
Finally, we are looking toward the future in a way that aligns with HKS’s core values. Over the past year, faculty, staff, students, and alumni explored important questions about the Kennedy School’s next decade as part of our vision and strategy process. Their conversations have spurred a series of ambitious ideas that will help broaden our educational reach and scale our real-world impact. We look forward to sharing these ideas with the community in the months ahead and launching several pilots this coming year.
Whether this is your first semester at HKS or your fortieth year, please know that we are so glad to have you in this community. I look forward to getting to know you and working together in the year ahead.
Best,
Jeremy