Today, Dean Jeremy Weinstein called the Harvard Kennedy School community to action in a turbulent world: “The problems of governance have never been more urgent.” Fortunately, he continued, “for an institution like this one, the opportunity to do something about them has never been greater.”
The call came in the opening letter of HKS 2036: Leadership for a New Era, a strategic vision for the Kennedy School to meet this complex moment with clarity and ambition. Weinstein launched the strategy at an end-of-year event for faculty and staff, which accompanied the launch of a report, a website, and a refined mission statement.
HKS 2036 is the culmination of an 18-month process led by Dean Weinstein with the partnership of students, faculty, staff, alumni, and other stakeholders. It arrives at the School’s 90th anniversary, and it draws inspiration from HKS history.
Since its founding, the report says, the Kennedy School has risen to the challenge of changing times. Established in the 1930s to train public servants for a professionalizing public sector, the School added research centers and deepened its policy expertise in the 1960s and 1970s as the scope of government grew. In the 1980s, HKS embraced the intersection of public and private sector leadership in response to growing concerns about government effectiveness. With the rise of globalization in the 1990s, the School began to attract an increasing number of public policy leaders from around the world, transforming into an international institution.
“We are now facing another one of those inflection points,” the report contends.
From deepening polarization to diminished trust in government and democracy to the upheavals of rapid technological change, the report argues that “the way we govern no longer matches the way we live.” This moment again demands that HKS evolve to meet the challenges of the day, and HKS 2036 is how the School intends to do it.
Four goals for the future
The School’s strategy aspires to deliver on four imperatives for the future:
- Creating a path to public service for all
- Helping governments deliver for the people they serve
- Harnessing technology for the public good
- Forging principled, effective leaders for polarized times
In his remarks to staff and faculty, Weinstein said that each imperative “responds to powerful forces shaping public life—forces that will only intensify in the coming years.”
“Public service is being devalued at the very moment when we need more talented people to choose it,” Weinstein said. “Governments are struggling to deliver on the basics that people expect. Technology is reshaping every domain of public life faster than our institutions can keep up. And our societies are more polarized than at any point in recent memory.”
“The problems of governance have never been more urgent. And for an institution like this one, the opportunity to do something about them has never been greater.”
The four imperatives tackle each of these challenges in turn.
The School will focus on growing its resources for financial aid to “create a path to public service for anyone with the talent to lead—wherever they live, whatever their means, whatever their circumstances,” Weinstein said. In addition to focusing on financial aid, HKS will explore new flexible pathways for learning that may include more educational opportunities that don’t require students coming to Cambridge.
To help governments deliver for the people they serve, the School will launch a “50 state platform” to tackle the problems that Americans care most about. It will do this “by working directly with governors and their leadership teams, and supporting them with HKS research and insights, executive education, and access to talent.” HKS will also deepen its investment in helping cities govern effectively worldwide, grow its recently launched R&D arm, Harvard Impact Labs, and convene leading scholars and practitioners to develop new frameworks for international cooperation on security, trade, and development.
And in this time of rapid technological change, HKS 2036 emphasizes the importance of training leaders with a “triple fluency” in technology: “in technology itself, in the systems that govern it, and in the ethics and leadership needed to debate and determine its future.” By infusing technology in the curriculum, launching a new technology concentration, and considering a new technology and policy degree program, the School plans to train 600 public sector technologists and 6,000 technologically-minded public leaders over the next decade. HKS will also drive essential conversations on how AI can be governed for the benefit of society.
Finally, the School will prepare people to lead effectively through polarized times. “Our aim is to build a community that reflects the range of people and views that exist in the real world,” Weinstein said. “This means holding ourselves to the standard of free and rigorous inquiry and teaching the practical skills to lead when people don’t share the same values, viewpoints, or even facts.”
HKS will pursue this goal by recruiting faculty, staff, and students who demonstrate excellence and bring a range of backgrounds and perspectives to campus. And it will continue to cultivate a culture of free inquiry by encouraging debate in the classroom, inviting a broad range of speakers to campus, and teaching evidence-backed skills for leading across disagreement.
The path ahead
At the end of Deans Weinstein’s letter in HKS 2036, he acknowledges that the way forward will be challenging.
“I am not promising the work ahead will always be easy or comfortable,” he writes. “But that struggle is part of what makes the work exciting and meaningful.” And he finds optimism in the broader HKS community.
To galvanize that community, HKS 2036 emphasizes two commitments. For those who are currently at HKS, the School will invest in strengthening its core foundations—research, teaching, and the faculty and staff who make it all happen. And for HKS's worldwide community of more than 30,000+ degree program graduates and 50,000+ executive education alumni, the School will foster a lifelong connection to HKS that begins when someone arrives and deepens throughout their careers.
“With that powerful community,” the report closes, “there is nothing we cannot achieve. This is the path to our second century. The next ten years will define it. The work is already underway.”
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Photographs by Barry Donahue and Martha Stewart
