Former Congressman Gunning for KSG Degree at 70

On the second floor of Lowell House, a new student is unpacking for the coming year. He unwraps a computer keyboard from the T-shirt that swaddles it and apologizes for the mess of clothing draped over his bedframe. Some snack food—two packages of Ritz crackers, a row of oranges—adorns the mantle of the common room. Several toiletries stand like chess pieces on the linoleum floor tiles, and the open door to a coat closet nearby reveals a jumble of cardboard boxes.

When he arrived the day before, the student explains, the room was completely empty.

“We walk into this dorm room and there’s nothing whatsoever in the common room. Not a thing. Zero. No bedclothes on the bed.”

Within weeks, thousands of undergraduates will encounter similarly barren suites. But seeing the sparsely furnished dormitory room for the first time heralded the return of a lifestyle Romano L. Mazzoli has not known for half a century.

The former member of the U.S. Congress is returning to school at 70.

This fall he will start a 10-month program at the Kennedy School of Government (KSG), putting him on track to receive a Master in Public Administration (MPA) degree exactly 50 years after he received his undergraduate diploma from the University of Notre Dame.

The Kentucky Democrat—whose 24-year Congressional tenure included stances against both President Nixon’s Vietnam policy and abortion, denunciation of special-interest campaign financing and sponsorship of the Immigration Reform Act of 1986—spent three months last year as Visiting Fellow at KSG, where he led a discussion group on immigration.

That brief experience inspired him to enroll in the mid-career MPA program this year, he says.

“During my experience last year, I had wonderful, very positive and very contemporary relationships with the College students,” he says Tuesday, a day before his program’s orientation. “I’m hoping that experience will be similar to whatever I start tomorrow.”

The mid-career MPA program generally attracts students with a extensive professional experience after graduation. Few, though, can claim a career as extensive as Mazzoli’s.

“We get a lot of students here who have been out in the world, usually in government or government agencies. They’ve been out of school for a few years,” says KSG spokesperson Doug Gavel. “Obviously, the congressman is an exception.”

The average age of students in the program is 39, a year younger than Mazzoli’s youngest child. Mazzoli—who will be the oldest student ever to graduate from the Kennedy School, according to Gavel—admits he’s slightly nervous about studying beside peers 30 years his junior.

“It’s like anything else in life. You don’t want to be sticking out there like a sore thumb,” he explains.

But at the same time, Mazzoli, a spry and loquacious white-haired man whose shirt pocket dons a notepad covered in phone numbers, says he hopes to make an asset of his age.

“Because I’ve been around the track a few times—I’ve had the wind kicked out of me quite a few times in life and bounced back a bit—I’ll be able to give people some reactions to some of the things going on in their lives,” he explains. “I’m looking forward to that.”

And Mazzoli speculates that his unusual educational decision may portend an imminent trend.

For the “baby-boom” generation, rapidly approaching retirement age, life after a career could entail similar pursuits, he says.

“They’ll be more vibrant in their mental acuity, in their accomplishments, and they’re going to be very restive about being resigned to the scrap heap, about being put off to the side as extra baggage or detritus,” he says. “They’re going to be looking at things like this.”

A New Rep. in the House

Unlike most of his soon-to-be peers, Mazzoli will be enrolling in the program exclusively for personal, rather than professional, enrichment. He says he plans to do non-profit or advocacy work upon returning to Kentucky.

And the veteran of national politics says he wants to embrace everything the University has to offer, awkwardness and imperfections included, as a test of his resilience—a conviction countenanced by his decision to live at the heart of undergraduate life.

“This is what I call the intellectual equivalent of the Full Monty,” he says of his and his wife Helen’s decision to spend the year in Lowell. “If you’re going to do this thing, you do it the whole way.”

Since his discussion group met a couple of times in the Lowell House common rooms last year, he has fallen in love with the College’s residential system, which he calls “the Alpha and Omega of all things Harvard.”

Immediately after deciding to enroll in the master’s program, he applied for an apartment in the house he knew best.

“Lowell was kind of in my blood,” he explains.

Acquaintances in Louisville were shocked, he remarks.

“People say, ‘You know, it’s one thing about going back to school. Maybe we can grab that, maybe we can hang onto that. But you mean you’re going to live in a dorm?’”

“I say, ‘Well, you know, Harvard calls them houses,’” Mazzoli grins.

Shortly before he left, a family friend left a pair of ear plugs on his front porch as a going-away gift. He says he may find them necessary over the course of the year.

He describes the moment when he and his wife entered their scarcely furnished Lowell rooms after two days of driving their U-Haul truck as the first “fiery test” of their commitment to the year-long endeavor.

“How many people our age, when you think about it, would be able to walk in without turning around and going to the nearest Holiday Inn?” he asks.

“I know it sounds crazy but to me, that was part of what I was coming for—to be put in an unfamiliar setting and say, ‘Ron, are you still able to accommodate the unexpected? Are you still able to cut your mustard, as we say back home in Kentucky?’”

Turning the Tables

Since his Congressional term ended in 1995, Mazzoli has taught at the Brandeis School of Law in Louisville, Ky., where he graduated first in his law class 43 years ago.

This year, he notes, the academic shoe is “on the other foot.”

“Now I’m going to be sitting down, not standing up. I’ve going to be listening and taking notes, not giving the lecture and having the notes in front of me taken. I’m going to be expected to do certain things that, in the past, I’ve expected others to do,” he says. “I hope I’m prepared for it. It’s sort of an open question—am I really prepared to shift gears?”

He expects his teaching experience to inform his outlook as a student—though to what extent he is unsure, he says.

“The proof will be in the pudding,” he says. The real test will come “three months from now, when we have mid-semesters and the teachers work us over with blunt instruments.”

Mazzoli says he is concerned about the master program’s quantitative demands. He explains that he has not worked rigorously with numbers since his own undergraduate experience.

His greatest fears for the coming year are academic rather than social, he says, largely because of the comfortable environment he found at Harvard during his fellowship last year—an environment in which age difference melted away.

Mazzoli brims with stories about students with whom he interacted closely during time in Cambridge—the KSG student aspiring to a career in public office, the history concentrator with whom he discussed the merits of historical study for a political career, the recent graduate interested in defense whom he met that morning. He remembers each of their names.

“Little episodes like that are just what this amazing university is about,” he says. Mazzoli explains he is looking forward to a rich social life beginning over the course of the coming year.

“It will be a wonderful opportunity to be with younger people. Out of that group of 200 people will come mayors and governors and people who will establish businesses. And I hope over many years to come I’ll be able to say, ‘I was in the Kennedy School with that person’ and be able to call and say, ‘Hey, Pete, congratulations,’ or ‘Mary, I just read about your election. It’s wonderful.’”

Settling In

Later this month, Mazzoli and his wife will move into a sightly larger apartment—including a study and a kitchenette—below their present suite.

They will have access to the Senior Common Room, a community meeting place where resident scholars and students alike can meet and interact—and a venue where the former representative hopes many of the relationships he seeks will take shape.

“I think we’ll be able to have genuine friendships,” says Mazzoli, who reports eating pizza and going on outings with his students last year.

As he prepares for orientation the next morning, Mazzoli confesses that, even with 70 years of life experience behind him, his excitement for the new day—and the year to come—is tinged with apprehension.

One thought sustains him, though.

“Maybe some 40-year-old is feeling tonight the same way I’m feeling,” he says.

—Staff writer Nathan J. Heller can be reached at heller@fas.harvard.edu.