Harvard Kennedy School is committed to advancing the public interest by training enlightened leaders and solving public problems through world-class scholarship and active engagement with practitioners and decision makers. This commitment, we believe, includes teaching our students to lead effectively across lines of difference.
Our faculty, students, and staff are exposed to and learn to understand a broad array of ideas, insights, and cultures. Gaining this exposure involves attracting outstanding people from diverse backgrounds and traditions. The Kennedy School does not discriminate against any person on the basis of race, color, creed, national or ethnic origin, age, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, marital or parental status, disability, source of income, or status as a veteran in admission to, access to, treatment in, or employment in its programs and activities.
The Kennedy School actively pursues the expansion and maintenance of an atmosphere that welcomes new ideas—even unpopular and controversial ones—and encourages an effective and active exchange of views in an environment of mutual respect.
Harvard Kennedy School is committed to recruiting a highly diverse group of faculty, students, and staff. We work to ensure that our appointments and selection procedures consciously identify and evaluate people from underrepresented groups. We also actively strive to remove sources of unconscious bias.
The Kennedy School’s curriculum deals with issues of diversity and encourages students and faculty to talk openly and effectively about difficult and highly charged issues. The School provides professional support to faculty as to how to teach these issues effectively. We emphasize the powerful benefit of the exchange of ideas. The School enlists students in efforts to make classrooms and classmates more welcoming of the ideas and insights that students from different backgrounds and perspectives offer. And we seek to correct situations where full and open exchange of ideas has been limited.
One of Harvard Kennedy School’s greatest assets is its breadth of talent in the community. The School is consistently working toward increasing that diversity further and taking full advantage of the opportunities for training enlightened leaders and solving critical public problems.