IOP Announces Fall Roster of Residential and Visiting Fellows

A former interim Senator, a former U.S. Labor Secretary, and a former Los Angeles mayor will highlight the Institute of Politics’ fall roster of residential and visiting fellows, which was announced Monday.

William “Mo” Cowan, the Democrat who represented Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate for several months this year after John Kerry vacated his seat to become U.S. Secretary of State, will host a weekly study group for students and members of the Harvard community as one of the Institute’s six residential fellows this fall.

Hilda L. Solis, who served as U.S. Labor Secretary from 2009-2013, and Antonio Villaraigosa, who served two terms as mayor of Los Angeles, will each spend several days at Harvard this fall as visiting fellows.

“It’s a great group of fellows with a lot of different experiences,” IOP Director C. M. Trey Grayson ’94 said in a phone interview Monday. “It’s a well-timed class with a range of backgrounds.”

Among others, Grayson highlighted the technological background of residential fellow Ginny Hunt, who works in civic innovation and strategy at Google

Rounding out the roster of residential fellows are four other prominent faces in journalism, government, and politics. They include Sasha Issenberg, a political journalist; Karen Gordon Mills ’75, who recently announced her resignation as administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration and has previously served on the University’s Board of Overseers; Beth Myers, who served as Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign manager in 2008 and as an adviser to his campaign in 2012; and Ana Navarro, a political commentator on CNN and CNN en Español who served as the national Hispanic co-chair of Jon Huntsman’s 2012 presidential campaign.

Issenberg, a columnist for Slate who also covered the 2008 presidential election in The Boston Globe’s Washington bureau, said in a phone interview Monday that he hopes to use his time at the IOP to show students more about the science and infrastructure behind campaigns. Issenberg said he will bring in practitioners from the campaign trail as guests for his study group.

“What I hope I’ll be able to do, and with the help of people who have been inside campaigns as guests in my study group, is to show people who may have seen campaigns from one perspective...see the whole body of knowledge that sits behind that and understand how the tactics that they saw were developed,” Issenberg said.

In addition, Grayson said he is excited about the perspectives that this semester’s three Hispanic fellows—Navarro, Solis, and Villaraigosa—will bring to the IOP. Navarro expressed similar enthusiasm in a phone interview Monday.

“It’s important to have more diversity in politics and in academia,” Navarro said. “I look forward to the opportunity of bringing the perspective as an immigrant and Hispanic growing up in the United States and working in politics.”

As in past years, at least one of this semester’s fellows will balance her commitments at the IOP with other professional obligations. As a fellow, Navarro will continue her CNN commentary by working from a studio at the Kennedy School and sometimes returning to Washington, Grayson said.

“It will be neat to have her doing that commentary and then go back to her study group,” Grayson said. “That’ll be kind of special.”

—Staff writer Madeline R. Conway can be reached at mconway@college.harvard.edu. Follow her on Twitter @MadelineRConway.