New Professorships for HKS

The Ash Institute at the Harvard Kennedy School will endow new faculty positions and provide Kennedy School students with scholarships, grants, and internships as part of a new initiative, the Kennedy School announced last week.

The Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation will endow about five to six new professorships over the next few years, according to Executive Director of the Ash Institute Marty Mauzy.

It will also provide $10 million in new scholarships for its Mason Fellows, working professionals from developing nations who are students at the Kennedy School.

Additional funds will also support students who are applying this spring for other graduate programs, Mauzy said.

“We’re able to take our basic mission, which is a profound interest in the power of governance and to solve real problems, and build to create these professorships and provide significant support to students,” Mauzy said.

In enacting these changes, the institute is refocusing its mission on providing real-world solutions to problems facing democratic governance, officials said.

“We aim to turn the Institute into the world’s leading center for understanding the reciprocal relationships between the quality of the institutions and practices of democratic governance and the persistence of urgent social problems,” Ash Institute Director Anthony Saich, who is currently in China, said in the press release.

The institute is not using new funding to enact the initiative. Instead, it will alter the distribution of its endowment, which is based on grants from the Ford Foundation and Roy and Lila Ash.

“It’s a strategic redirection of the resources,” Mauzy said.

In addition to revising its own mission, the institute will refocus two of its other related programs—Innovations in American Government and the Global Innovators Network—to the current global climate, according to Mauzy.

“What is innovative has changed since the program was started 20 years ago,” Mauzy said. “We just want to make sure that the Innovations program is ready to support the new directions that are going on in the world.”

The initiative, though only directly restructuring the Ash Institute, may also have consequences for the entire Kennedy School.

“This new initiative advances changes which will revolutionize the scope and academic capacity of Harvard Kennedy School,” said Dean of the Kennedy School David T. Ellwood in the press release.