Harvard Kennedy School

• 1. Introduction

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  Harvard Kennedy School sits on a stretch of Cambridge riverfront that was once a train yard for the MBTA Red Line. Today, those former rail yards are home to one of the world's most influential graduate institutions for public policy, with an endowment of $1.7 billion and alumni who include heads of state, Nobel Peace Prize laureates, central bank governors, and a Secretary-General of the United Nations. The school's formal name is the John F. Kennedy School of Government, and its origins trace back not to any president or politician, but to a man who once coached football. How did a single philanthropic gift in 1936 become the institutional training ground for so much of the world's governing class? And what controversies has that global influence brought with it?

• 2. A Football Coach's Legacy

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  Lucius Littauer was an 1878 Harvard College alumnus, a businessman, a former U.S. Congressman, and, notably, the first coach of the Harvard Crimson football team. In 1936, he gave $2 million to establish what was then called the Harvard Graduate School of Public Administration. That figure is equivalent to roughly $43 million as of 2023. The school's shield was designed from the outset to reflect a national ambition, modeled after the U.S. shield itself.

  The founding faculty were drawn directly from Harvard's existing government and economics departments. The first students enrolled in 1937 and were known as Littauer Fellows, enrolled in a one-year course that would eventually become the school's mid-career Master in Public Administration program. The original building, the Littauer Center north of Harvard Yard, was the school's home until the campus eventually moved south to the Charles River. That first building now houses Harvard's Economics Department.

• 3. Becoming Kennedy School

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  Three years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, who had been a 1940 Harvard College alumnus, the school was renamed in his honor in 1966. The renaming was more than symbolic. Concurrent with it, the Harvard Institute of Politics was created, with Richard Neustadt as its founding director. Neustadt was a presidential scholar and adviser who would later become a foreign policy scholar and dean of the school.

  By 1978, Neustadt and colleagues including Graham Allison and Richard Zeckhauser had consolidated the school's programs at the current riverside campus. The first building on that new site opened in October 1978, on the southern half of the former Eliot Shops site. The Harvard Institute of Politics has been housed on the school campus since that same year. It runs the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum, named for the former president's son, in the school's Littauer Building.

• 4. A Modern Rebranding

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  In late 2007, the school announced that while its official name would remain unchanged, it would rebrand publicly as Harvard Kennedy School starting in fall 2008. The stated purpose was to make its connection to Harvard clearer and to reduce confusion with other Kennedy-named institutions, including the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. and the Kennedy Library in Boston. The rebranding carried the support of Senator Edward M. Kennedy and Caroline Kennedy.

  A $500 million fundraising campaign followed in 2012, with $120 million earmarked to expand the campus by 91,000 square feet. The project added six new classrooms, a new kitchen and dining facility, offices, meeting spaces, a student lounge and study spaces, and a redesigned central courtyard. Groundbreaking took place on the 7th of May, 2015, and the expanded campus opened in December 2017.

  In July 2024, Jeremy M. Weinstein, a political scientist from Stanford University and a former chief of staff to the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, became the school's dean.

• 5. Who Studies Here

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  The school offers four master's degree tracks. The two-year Master in Public Policy focuses on policy analysis, economics, management, ethics, statistics, and negotiations. The Mid-Career Master in Public Administration is a one-year program for professionals at least seven years out of college. A separate two-year MPA is for those with additional graduate degrees. A fourth track, the MPA in International Development, emphasizes economics and quantitative analysis for students focused on development studies.

  Within the mid-career MPA class sits a distinct cohort: the Mason Fellows, executives from developing countries in both public and private sectors. They typically make up about half of the incoming mid-career class and form the most nationally and ethnically diverse cohort at Harvard. The Mason name honors Edward Sagendorph Mason, who served as dean of the school from 1947 to 1958.

  Doctoral students can pursue Ph.D. degrees in public policy, in social policy jointly with Harvard's government and sociology departments, or in health policy jointly with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Harvard School of Public Health. Joint degree programs extend to Harvard Business School, Harvard Law School, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Harvard Divinity School, and Harvard Medical School, and concurrent arrangements reach as far as Stanford, MIT Sloan, Yale Law, and the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.

• 6. Research and Rankings

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  U.S. News and World Report has ranked the Harvard Kennedy School first for social policy and first for health policy, placing it second in public policy analysis. In 2012, Foreign Policy magazine's Inside the Ivory Tower survey ranked the school first overall at both the doctoral and undergraduate levels in international relations programs, and third in the master's category.

  The school's 14 research centers span a broad sweep of topics: the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics, and the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, among others. Most centers offer research and academic fellowships through which fellows can lead study groups and engage with students.

• 7. Controversies on the Charles

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  On the 13th of September, 2017, the school offered a fellowship to Chelsea Manning. Two days later, on the 15th of September, that offer was publicly rescinded after CIA director Mike Pompeo canceled a planned speaking engagement at Harvard and sent a letter condemning the university for the award.

  In 2021, an investigative report by the student group Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard found that several of the school's centers had received funding from fossil fuel companies for climate initiatives, and alleged that some centers had taken steps to conceal that fact. A year later, in 2022, the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy invited Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch, to join as a senior fellow. The school rescinded that invitation because Human Rights Watch's 2021 investigation of Israel's treatment of Palestinians had concluded it met the threshold for the crime of apartheid. After condemnation from faculty, students, and the American Civil Liberties Union, the dean reversed that decision and reinstated the invitation to Roth.

• 8. The Alumni Network

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  Over 63,000 people have graduated from Harvard Kennedy School. Among them are 21 heads of state or government from around the world, including two Nobel Peace Prize laureates: Juan Manuel Santos, former president of Colombia, and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, former president of Liberia. Ban Ki-moon, who completed an MPA in 1984, went on to serve as Secretary-General of the United Nations. Paul Volcker, who took an MA in 1951, chaired the U.S. Federal Reserve.

  The list extends to current sitting leaders as of the school's most recent alumni records, including Maia Sandu, president of Moldova; Daniel Noboa, president of Ecuador; and Lawrence Wong, prime minister of Singapore. Pierre Trudeau, former prime minister of Canada, received his degree in 1945. Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, earned his MPA in 1967. Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative and author of Just Mercy, graduated with an MPP in 1985. Rick Doblin, founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, earned his Ph.D. in 2001.