Gov. School Holds On to Kennedy

In politics, image is all-important—and no place should know that better than a school of government.

The John F. Kennedy School of Government, which has been known for decades as the Kennedy School of Government, recently changed its shorthand moniker to the Harvard Kennedy School in order to emphasize its Harvard affiliation.

But this attempt to rebrand the government school isn’t the first. In 1981, former Dean Graham T. Allison Jr. tried to eliminate the name “Kennedy” from the school’s name, an effort that many perceived to be a way to distance the school from a liberal family during an era of ascendant conservatism.

That plan was ultimately vetoed by then-University President Derek C. Bok, but not before it incensed the liberal Democrats who controlled the Cambridge City Council.

Irish and Italian politicians, angered by the Kennedy School’s decision, retaliated by changing the name of the street fronting the school from Boylston St. to John F. Kennedy St. so that the name “Kennedy” would still appear on the school’s stationery, according to The New York Times.

The decision by the city council to protect the Kennedy name was part of a desire to distance the left from anti-Catholicism, according to Cambridge political analyst Glenn S. Koocher ’71.

“Bigotry against Catholics was the anti-Semitism of the left and that kind of played out in Cambridge a bit,” said Koocher, who is a former Crimson writer. “So naming the street for Kennedy was a City Council action to say we’re on board with supporting the Kennedy concept as well.”

Current Kennedy School Dean David T. Ellwood ’75 said that the reception to the most recent name change has been very positive.

“I have heard from literally hundreds and hundreds of alumni and others and so forth and I would say 99.8 percent are positive,” Ellwood said in a phone interview. “No one has said it is retreating from the Kennedy name, and of course the Kennedy family knows about it.”

Some professors, though, have been more critical of the name change, suggesting the difficulty of working into one name “Harvard,” “Kennedy,” and what the school actually teaches.

“And now of course, we are HKS, in parallel with HBS and HLS,” Kennedy School professor Dani Rodrik ’79 wrote on his blog. “HBS teaches business, HLS teaches law, and we teach...Never mind.”

—Staff writer Lindsay P. Tanne can be reached at ltanne@fas.harvard.edu.