Burke Uses Washington Experience at K-School

Sheila Burke, executive dean of the Kennedy School of Government, offers students the wisdom she garnered during a full and varied professional career.

Experience in the arenas of health care and politics renders Burke uniquely qualified to encourage the aspirations of her Kennedy School students, particularly towards a career in public service.

"Public service is absolutely a worthy calling," Burke says.

"It, as much as anything else, is a function of who you work for, so that at the end of the day, you feel good about what you've done," she says, "and I've been extraordinarily blessed with Bob Dole and now Joe Nye, [the dean of the Kennedy School]."

In her role as dean, Burke is now very enthusiastic about overseeing the expansion of the Kennedy School with the opening of an office in Washington by early summer.

"The D.C. location will be a University resource that lets people get closer to politics, though it will not replace the outreach and advance work that we do here," Burke says.

On campus, Burke sees success in the school's efforts toward achieving a balance of divergent political views, especially with the addition of former Sen. Alan K. Simpson (D-Wyo.) as the director of the Institute of Politics.

She praises Kennedy School Dean Joseph S. Nye Jr. for his achievements in faculty recruitment, stressing that "the diversity of interest among students [creates] a need to supplement the faculty."

Burke began her professional career as a nurse in New York, but it was her decision in 1977 to take a post as an adviser on health care issues in the office of then Sen. Robert Dole (R-Kan.) that led to her political involvement.

She was hired by the senator in 1977 to what was to be a year-long position, but ultimately stayed on for 20 years. Burke worked with Dole through his unsuccessful presidential bid in 1996.

Although a Democrat when she came to Washington, she promptly switched party allegiances and climbed up the ranks. The first woman on Dole's staff, Burke rose to become the first female chief of staff in a Senate office.

From her years on Capitol Hill, Burke recalls with particular satisfaction her efforts to secure hospice service for Medicare patients and to guarantee for the elderly an all-inclusive range of benefits outside of nursing homes.

"Public service makes you feel like you've made a difference in people's lives," Burke says of these accomplishments.

But not all of her labor proved rewarding. Burke singles out the 1994-1995 health care debate as a "terribly difficult, frustrating" experience.

She foresees "an awful lot of shuffling around in the industry" before the nation arrives at piece-meal solutions to "the quandary of the role of managed care."

Burke calls President Clinton's suggestion of extending Medicare coverage to men and women under the age of 65 "crazy."

"The goal of including more people is right, but the President's plan makes no sense given the added costs and strain on the program," Burke says.

Her criticism of Clinton extends to his current legal trouble.

She was in Washington when a sex scandal forced the resignation of Sen. Bob Packwood (R-Ore.) and remembers "far less tolerance for Packwood than there appears to be for Clinton."

But the Lewinsky affair, Burke says, exemplifies the "scrutiny" that surrounds political figures, making it "harder and harder to get people to leave private life for public service."

For Burke, working first in government and now at the Kennedy School, to which she commutes from her Washington residence, has required balancing family and professional obligations.

"Anyone who works, and especially the commuter, faces a daily sense of guilt that he or she is not spending enough time either at home or at the office," Burke says.

"But, at the same time," she adds, "you just have to get up and do what you have to do even though it's hard."

As a Washington insider for many years, Burke witnessed the development of the Hill into a more amenable climate for women.

"There's still an old-boys' network in Washington," she says, "but in the 20 years I was there I saw more and more women serving as mentors for other women and developing their own networks."

Overall, the adjustment from the pressure-filled environment of Capitol Hill to Harvard's academic climate has proved smooth for Burke.

She says that while she "does not have as much contemplative time" as she had hoped, she is stimulated by "extraordinarily bright people constantly challenging" her.

The most drastic difference between her experiences in Washington to Cambridge, Burke admits, relates to the pace of decision-making.

"If Dole said do X, it got done; if I said I wanted Y, it got done," Burke says. "Academic decision-making is more consultative."