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Dean Jeremy Weinstein on Wednesday issued a call to action for the Harvard Kennedy School community amidst ongoing turbulence worldwide.
“The problems of governance have never been more urgent,” he said in the opening letter of HKS 2036: Leadership for a New Era — a strategic vision for the Kennedy School. And fortunately, he continues in the letter, “for an institution like this one, the opportunity to do something about them has never been greater.”
HKS 2036 is the culmination of an 18-month process led by Weinstein with the partnership of students, faculty, staff, alumni and other stakeholders. Launched at an end-of-year event for faculty and staff, the new strategy aims to meet this complex moment with clarity and ambition.
HKS 2036 includes a report, a website and a refined mission statement. It arrives in unison with the School’s 90th anniversary, and 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 an increasingly professionalized public sector, the school added research centers and deepened its policy expertise throughout 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, HKS 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.
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.”
