DAVID GERGEN, who played a pivotal role in shaping leadership education at Harvard Kennedy School, and was a trusted adviser to four U.S. presidents, died this July at the age of 83. Gergen served in the White House during both Republican and Democratic administrations, commanding bipartisan respect. At Harvard he cofounded the Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership (CPL), where he spent more than 20 years training the next generation of public leaders and was a professor of public service.
Over the years, CPL has supported more than 1,100 students who have received fellowship funding to grow as service-minded leaders. Gergen’s legacy at HKS also lives on through the David Gergen Summer Fellowship Program, which supports students undertaking 10-week summer internships in public service or the nonprofit sector.
Read more tributes to David Gergen.
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Preparing students for office
WHAT DO THE MAYOR OF BOSTON, the minister of foreign affairs of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and a justice of the Supreme Court of Nepal have in common? Before they ran for office, they went through HKS’s “From Harvard Square to the Oval Office” program.
For more than 20 years, the “From Harvard Square to the Oval Office” program has trained Harvard graduate students to run for political office. The nonpartisan Oval Office program, housed in the Kennedy School’s Women and Public Policy Program, which started with the aim of encouraging more women and nontraditional candidates to explore politics, has trained over 900 Harvard graduate students and affiliates from across the political spectrum to run for office in the United States and around the world.
More than 70 former participants in the Oval Office program currently hold, or have previously held, elected or appointed positions in 23 countries and territories: Argentina, Australia, Bhutan, Croatia, The Czech Republic, The Democratic Republic of the Congo, France, Georgia, Ghana, Haiti, India, Israel, Japan, Liberia, the Navajo Nation, Nepal, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Singapore, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, for example, participated in the Oval Office program in 2011, when she was a graduate student at Harvard Law School. “I would have had nowhere to start without this program,” Wu has said. Despite initial nerves, Wu said she “immediately realized that this was not only going to be a training program but a network of support, of friendship, of sisterhood.”
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Banner image by Tom Fitzsimmons; faculty portrait by Martha Stewart; inline image by Stuart Cahill/Boston Herald/Getty Images