Harvard Kennedy School
The John F. Kennedy School of Government, commonly referred to as the Harvard Kennedy School, is the graduate school of public policy of Harvard University, a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States.
The Harvard Kennedy School offers master's degrees in public policy, public administration, and international development, four doctoral degrees, and various executive education programs. It conducts research in subjects relating to politics, government, international affairs, and economics. the Harvard Kennedy School has an endowment of $1.7 billion. It is a member of the Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs, a global consortium of schools that trains leaders in international affairs.
The primary campus of the Harvard Kennedy School is on John F. Kennedy Street in Cambridge. The main buildings overlook the Charles River and are southwest of Harvard Yard and Harvard Square, on the site of a former MBTA Red Line train yard. The School is adjacent to the public riverfront John F. Kennedy Memorial Park.
The Harvard Kennedy School alumni include 21 heads of state or government from around the world. Alumni also include cabinet officials, military leaders, heads of central banks, and legislators.
History
Founding
The Harvard Kennedy School was founded as the Harvard Graduate School of Public Administration in 1936 with a $2 million gift from Lucius Littauer, an 1878 Harvard College alumnus, businessman, former U.S. Congressman, and the first coach of the Harvard Crimson football team.The Harvard Kennedy School's shield was designed to express the national purpose of the school and was modeled after the U.S. shield. The School drew its initial faculty from Harvard's existing government and economics departments, and welcomed its first students in 1937.
The School's original home was in the Littauer Center, north of Harvard Yard, which is now home to Harvard University's Economics Department. The first students at the Graduate School were called Littauer Fellows, participating in a one-year course listing which later developed into the school's mid-career Master in Public Administration program. In the 1960s, the School began to develop its current public policy degree and course curriculum associated with its Master in Public Policy program.
Renaming and move
In 1966, three years following the assassination of U.S. president and 1940 Harvard College alumnus John F. Kennedy, the school was renamed in his honor.In 1966, concurrent with the school's renaming, the Harvard Institute of Politics was created with Neustadt as its founding director. The Harvard Institute of Politics has been housed on the school campus since 1978, and today sponsors and hosts a series of programs, speeches and study groups for Harvard undergraduates and graduate students. Along with major Harvard Kennedy School events, the Institute of Politics holds the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum, named in honor of John F. Kennedy Jr., in Harvard Kennedy School's Littauer Building.
By 1978, the faculty, including presidential scholar and adviser Richard Neustadt, a foreign policy scholar and later dean of the School, Graham Allison, Richard Zeckhauser, and others consolidated the school's programs and research centers at the present Harvard Kennedy School campus. The first new building opened on the southern half of the former Eliot Shops site in October 1978. Under the terms of Littauer's original grant, the current campus also features a building called Littauer.
Rebranding and campus expansion
In late 2007, the Kennedy School of Government announced that while its official name was not being altered, it was rebranding itself as Harvard Kennedy School effective Fall 2008. The goal was to make clearer the school's connection with Harvard. It was also thought that the new branding would reduce confusion with other entities named after Kennedy, including the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. and the Kennedy Library in Boston. The rebranding had the support of John F. Kennedy's brother, U.S. Senator Edward M. Kennedy, and Caroline Kennedy, the former president's daughter.In 2012, the Harvard Kennedy School announced a $500 million fundraising campaign, $120 million of which was to be used to significantly expand the Harvard Kennedy School campus, adding 91,000 square feet of space including six new classrooms, a new kitchen, and dining facility, offices and meeting spaces, a new student lounge and study space, more collaboration and active learning spaces, and a redesigned central courtyard. Groundbreaking commenced on May 7, 2015, and the project was completed in late 2017. The new Harvard Kennedy School campus opened in December 2017.
From 2004 to 2015, the Harvard Kennedy School's dean was David T. Ellwood, a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services official in the Bill Clinton administration.
In 2015, Douglas Elmendorf, a former director of the U.S. Congressional Budget Office, was named both dean of the Harvard Kennedy School and the school's Don K. Price Professor of Public Policy. Elmendorf announced in September 2023 that he would step down as dean at the end of the academic year 2023/2024.
In July 2024, Jeremy M. Weinstein, a political scientist at Stanford University and former chief of staff to the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, succeeded Elmendorf as dean.
Academics
Degrees
The Harvard Kennedy School offers four master's degree programs. The two-year Master in Public Policy program focuses on policy analysis, economics, management, ethics, statistics and negotiations in the public sector. There are three separate Master in Public Administration programs: a one-year Mid-Career Program intended for professionals who are more than seven years removed from their college graduation; a two-year MPA program intended for professionals who have an additional graduate degree and are more recently out of school; and a two-year international development track focused on development studies with a strong emphasis on economics and quantitative analysis.Members of the mid-career MPA class also include Mason Fellows, who are public and private executives from developing countries. Mason Fellows typically constitute about 50 percent of the incoming class of Mid-Career MPA candidates. The Mason cohort is the most diverse at Harvard in terms of nationalities and ethnicities represented. It is named after Edward Sagendorph Mason, the former Harvard professor who, from 1947 to 1958, was dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Public Administration, now known as Harvard Kennedy School.
In addition to the master's programs, the Harvard Kennedy School administers three doctoral programs. Ph.D. degrees are awarded in public policy, in social policy in conjunction with Harvard's departments of government and sociology, and in health policy in conjunction with FAS and the Harvard School of Public Health.
Joint and concurrent degrees
The Harvard Kennedy School has a number of joint and concurrent degree programs within Harvard and with other leading universities, which allow students to receive multiple degrees in a reduced period of time. Joint and current students spend at least one year in residence in Cambridge taking courses. The Harvard Kennedy School joint degree programs are run with the Harvard Business School, the Harvard Law School, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and concurrent programs are offered with the Harvard Divinity School and the Harvard Medical School.Beyond Harvard, the Harvard Kennedy School has concurrent degree arrangements with other law, business, and medical schools, including the Stanford Graduate School of Business; the MIT Sloan School of Management; the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College; The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania; the Columbia Law School; the Duke University School of Law; the Georgetown University Law Center; the New York University School of Law, the Northwestern University School of Law; the Stanford Law School; the University of California, Berkeley School of Law; the University of Michigan Law School; the University of Pennsylvania Law School; the Yale Law School; and the UCSF School of Medicine.
Abroad, the Harvard Kennedy School offers a dual degree with the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.
HKS courses
The Harvard Kennedy School maintains six academic divisions each headed by a faculty chair. In addition to offerings in the Harvard Kennedy School course listing, students are eligible to cross-register for courses at the other graduate and professional schools at Harvard and at MIT Sloan School of Management, Fletcher School at Tufts University, and the MIT School of Architecture and Planning. MPP coursework is focused on one of five areas, called a Policy Area of Concentration, and includes a year-long research seminar in their second year, which includes a master's thesis called a Policy Analysis Exercise.International collaboration
The university is an active member of the University of the Arctic. UArctic is an international cooperative network based in the Circumpolar Arctic region, consisting of more than 200 universities, colleges, and other organizations with an interest in promoting education and research in the Arctic region.Rankings
The Harvard Kennedy School has routinely ranked as the best, or among the best, of the world's public policy graduate schools. U.S. News & World Report ranks it the best graduate school for social policy, the best for health policy, and second best for public policy analysis. In 2015 rankings, the Harvard Kennedy School is ranked first in the subcategory of health policy and second in the category of public policy analysis and social policy.The Harvard Kennedy School's foreign affairs programs have consistently ranked at the top or near the top of Foreign Policy magazine's Inside the Ivory Tower survey, which lists the world's top twenty academic international relations programs at the undergraduate, Master's, and Ph.D. levels. In 2012, for example, the survey ranked the Harvard Kennedy School first overall for doctoral and undergraduate programs and third overall in the Master's category.