New Tricks, Old Lessons

"You’re going back to school, Ron, and to the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, no less? And at age 70? Hitting the books when your Notre Dame classmates are hitting the links? Taking blue book exams again 40 years after you took your last University of Louisville law school exam? Answering questions rather than asking them as you did for 24 years in the House of Representatives? What’s going on here?”

I raised a lot of eyebrows—and sparked a lot of questions—when I announced last spring that I was going back to school.

And now that I have completed my one-year Master in Public Administration program at the Kennedy School of Government (KSG), I get asked, “What are you going to do with that degree, Ron? What did you learn this past year, if anything?”

Answering these questions has been difficult because, unlike the bulk of my Kennedy School classmates—some of whom are younger than me by four decades—I did not come to KSG to burnish existing skills to do my current job better, nor to learn new skills in order to break from the past and embark on a new career.

Rather, I came to KSG to learn more about myself and the broader world around me. As I figured it, if the Kennedy School led me to another career—my fifth—so much the better. But the point was to learn and to grow and to develop as a person and as a dweller on this shrinking planet called Earth.

At the Kennedy School, I learned how to think more broadly. During my career in the House of Representatives—representing Louisville, Ky., my hometown—my first responsibility was to my constituents, though I always kept in mind the needs, as I saw them, of the nation and the world on issues such as immigration, gun control and tobacco.

At the Kennedy School, by contrast—where 42 percent of my classmates come from 80 nations of the world—I learned to address the issues globally and internationally first and, after that, regionally and locally. I learned how people from disparate backgrounds and from warring nations can work together and trust when their governments stand aside. What a godsend it will be when my classmates become the leaders of their respective countries. The world will at long last have a true chance to achieve peace.

The intellectual, social and geographic center of daily student life at the Kennedy School is the John F. Kennedy, Jr. Forum.

This is a vibrant venue, through which students wend their way to nearby classrooms and in which they converse, lounge, eat, discuss and argue the issues of the day. In the Forum it is literally impossible not to think globally about the issues since the people lunching together routinely come from many continents and several countries and speak a variety of languages.

Sometimes, these wide-ranging discussions are a bit uncomfortable, both for U.S. students and for the foreign contingent. But it is good when our foreign student-friends ask tough questions about the legitimacy, balance and correctness of U.S. foreign policy. If American students are unable to answer their inquiries satisfactorily, maybe our nation’s policies need to be re-examined.

In this, the Kennedy School has fulfilled its mission of making people think and of challenging their long-held premises.

At the Kennedy School I learned how to write and speak more effectively. The writing required of me at the Kennedy School was different than what was required of me in decades on Capitol Hill: There I was surrounded by talented writers and researchers who would prepare the first drafts of position papers or speeches, which I would extensively edit. By contrast, here at the Kennedy School, all the writing was mine from start to finished product. I admit that it took time to wean myself from the reflex of expecting a rough draft to appear magically on my desk ready for my energetic editing. At the Kennedy School, if the paper appeared on my desk, I was the one who had placed it there.

Despite my having lived a political life of public service for nearly thirty years, I learned a lot more about politics and public service at the Kennedy School.

I learned from professors who were not only skilled and talented classroom teachers, but who performed real life public service as consultants to federal, state and local governments and as members of governmental panels and commissions. This gave their classroom lectures added dimension and gave me a new perspective on what I had done for many years.

Now, newly-minted Harvard degree in hand, I will return to Kentucky to family and friends, and to a house and yard which need serious attention.

But more importantly, I will use my new Kennedy School skills and my training and my new worldwide network of student-friends in some further, but yet unknown, form of public service.

Here I am reminded of the famous Athenian Oath. I intend to use my renewed dedication to public service derived from my year at the Kennedy School of Government to leave the world better than I found it.

Romano L. Mazzoli, who graduates from the Kennedy School of Government this month, served 12 terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and one in the Kentucky State Senate.