Harvard Kennedy School

Harvard Kennedy School was founded in 1936 with a $2 million gift (equivalent to roughly $30 million in 2010) from Lucius Littauer, an 1878 Harvard University alumnus, businessman, former U.S. Congressman, and Harvard's first football coach.[9] The school was originally named the Harvard Graduate School of Public Administration. In 1966, three years following the assassination of former U.S. President and 1940 Harvard College alumnus John F. Kennedy, the school was renamed in Kennedy's honor.

Harvard Kennedy School's shield was designed to express the national purpose of the school and was modeled after the U.S. shield.[10] 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.

In 1966, the School was renamed for former President John F. Kennedy. By 1978, the faculty, including presidential scholar and adviser Richard Neustadt, foreign policy scholar and later dean of the School Graham Allison, Richard Zeckhauser, and Edith Stokey, 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.[11] Under the terms of Littauer's original grant, the current HKS campus also features a building called Littauer.

In 1966, Harvard Kennedy School founded the Harvard Institute of Politics with Neustadt as its founding director.[12] Harvard Institute of Politics has been housed on the Harvard Kennedy 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 its events are held at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum, named in honor of the late John F. Kennedy Jr. in Harvard Kennedy School's Littauer Building.

Belfer Building at Harvard Kennedy School

In 2012, 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 Kenedy School campus was opened in December 2017.[13][14]

From 2004 to 2015, Harvard Kennedy School's dean was David T. Ellwood, a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services official in the Clinton administration.[15]

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.[16][17]

Harvard Kennedy School offers four master's degree programs.[18] The two-year Master in Public Policy (MPP) program focuses on policy analysis, economics, management, ethics, statistics and negotiations in the public sector.[19] There are three separate Master in Public Administration (MPA) programs: a one-year Mid-Career Program (MC/MPA) 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 (MPA/ID) focused on development studies with a strong emphasis on economics and quantitative analysis.

Members of the mid-career MPA class are 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, Harvard Kennedy School administers four doctoral programs. Ph.D. degrees are awarded in political economy and government in conjunction with Harvard University's departments of economics and government in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), in public policy and 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.

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. Harvard Kennedy School joint degree programs are run with Harvard Business School, Harvard Law School, and Harvard Graduate School of Design, and concurrent programs are offered with Harvard Divinity School and Harvard Medical School.

Beyond Harvard, HKS 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, Columbia Law School, Duke University School of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, New York University School of Law, Northwestern University School of Law, Stanford Law School, University of California, Berkeley School of Law, University of Michigan Law School, University of Pennsylvania Law School, Yale Law School, and UCSF Medical Center.[20]

Abroad, Harvard Kennedy School offers a dual degree with the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.

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 the MIT Sloan School of Management, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy 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 (PAC),[21] and includes a year-long research seminar in their second year, which includes a master's thesis called a Policy Analysis Exercise.[22][23]

• Mark Schuster (MPP '88) – dean and founding CEO, Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine

• Donald Heathfield (real name: Andrey Bezrukov) (MPA '00) – KGB and SVR operative until his disclosure in the United States in 2010.