Forge Principled and Effective Leaders for Polarized Times

Societies have always been plural, composed of people with different values, interests, and visions of the common good. That is the permanent condition of self-governance, and the work of public leadership has always been to make decisions with genuine input and consent from people who disagree, to forge agreements that different constituencies can live with, and to keep the basic compact of collective life intact. When leaders cannot engage and work through disagreements, they get papered over, festering and hardening into the kind of polarization that makes governing nearly impossible.

For much of its history, the Kennedy School trained leaders as though the central challenge of governance was expertise and that the salient disagreements were mostly about means, which could be resolved through better analysis and administration. This school’s influence on the world was profound, but many of our achievements rested on a foundation of shared premises that were never as settled as they appeared. The Kennedy School’s commitment now is to bring all of what we do—the research, the teaching, the engagement with the world—to the task of governing well amid fundamental disagreement, not in spite of it. 

This kind of governing requires both skill and disposition: the practical tools and know-how to engage people whose premises you don’t share, and the willingness to sit with and work through conflict. If we are to adequately prepare leaders, then the faculty, students, staff, curriculum, and intellectual life of the school must reflect the range of views that they will encounter in the world, including ones that are uncomfortable or unfamiliar. A community that has sorted itself on one part of the ideological spectrum cannot prepare leaders for the reality of a noisy, fractious society.

The standard to which we hold ourselves is both free and rigorous inquiry. Free means we don’t pre-screen for widely accepted conclusions. Rigorous means that all arguments are not equally strong, but must be held to a consistent standard of evidence and reasoning. Taken together, free and rigorous inquiry enables people to seriously consider views they disagree with, scrutinize them with intellectual honesty, and come out of that process having actually learned something. This is the muscle that public leadership—and democracy itself—requires. 
 

Initial priorities

• Recruit faculty, staff, and students who bring a genuine diversity of experiences, backgrounds, and perspectives so that our community reflects the range of people and views graduates will encounter in the world.
• Cultivate a culture of free and rigorous inquiry by promoting honest debate and rigorous disagreement in our classrooms, research centers, and public forums — and by making HKS a destination for thinkers who challenge conventional wisdom.
• Teach students the skills to lead across disagreement and navigate genuine value conflicts by growing our faculty in leadership and ethics and by hosting public debates from which our students can learn.