HKS Program Change Singles Out Fellows from Developing Countries

It comes as no big surprise to many students at Harvard University that the administration has come under increased scrutiny by the United States Department of Education for a lack of transparency with regards to funding, or now, two leading advisory board members have resigned from the Institute of Politics amid tensions within the Harvard Kennedy School. After just one semester at Harvard, I’ve witnessed a student union strike for fair work conditions such as pay equity, health insurance, and better protections against harassment and discrimination, and protests calling for Harvard’s leadership in divesting from fossil fuel investments for climate justice. To add to this list of moral grievances, the Kennedy School is undermining a pivotal component of the Mid-Career Masters in Public Administration program, exclusively targeting students from developing countries — almost half the entire cohort.

At stake is an integral part of the MC/MPA program, the Mason Fellows Summer Seminar. The Edward S. Mason Program, designed for students from developing countries, is a big deal; it boasts a prime minister, presidents, and leaders of multilateral institutions among its alumni. It’s the program that brought me to the Kennedy School.

The two-week Mason Fellows Seminar has been hosted upon the fellows’ arrival at Harvard and orients us before a subsequent five-week MC/MPA Summer Program, which includes the larger MC/MPA cohort, including students from developed countries. Quietly, however, the HKS Five-Year Academic Calendar has been updated — no longer showing the Mason Fellows Seminar in Summer 2020. Instead, the Seminar appears to have been swapped to a mere week-long “Fall Launch,” and relegated, like an afterthought, to the end of the summer. This is not what’s best for the integrity and excellence of Harvard's MC/MPA program.

The Mason Fellows Seminar is an incredibly valued period allowing students coming from some societies, where there is no freedom of speech nor right to assemble, an opportunity to find their voice. Mason Fellows can come from autocratic regimes, places where electricity and drinking water are not available 24 hours a day, and in some cases, places where having certain sexual orientations is a crime punishable by death. The opportunity for fellows to come together before the academic year begins is invaluable for both their experience and the campus community to which they contribute.

My Mason summer experience helped me cultivate relationships, exposed me to different backgrounds and experiences, and introduced me to public policy issues from leading Harvard professors. By contrast, the twice-as-long, cohort-wide MC/MPA Summer Program that followed was banal with the majority of the time spent on introductory subjects in economics and statistics, much of which could have been delivered through HarvardX, the open online learning platform. In fact, one could argue using HarvardX would allow more of the Mason Program pedagogy and benefits to be integrated into MC/MPA summer program.

In the same week that the Kennedy School announced it was searching for ways to “make progress in the areas of diversity, inclusion and belonging,” administrators signaled no interest in changing their course on the MC/MPA summer program changes. This was despite a meeting MC/MPA student leaders held with administrators, including Kennedy School Dean Douglas W. Elmendorf, to initiate a process of engagement to best inform how all MC/MPA summer programming could be improved. The irony that, at a time when the Kennedy School searches for ways to make progress in belonging, inclusion, and diversity on campus, an exemplary program specifically designed to foster these values — not to mention paid for by Mason fellows themselves — has been gutted, is not lost on me. Actions taken by the Kennedy School suggest what we’re hearing is just empty rhetoric. The proposed changes in MC/MPA summer programming are actually a step backward for diversity and inclusion and demonstrate Harvard’s inability to navigate diversity settings effectively.

Such apathetic decisions towards the Mason Program which values diversity and inclusion are not those of the Harvard I had envisioned when I was writing my application. I envisaged a scholastic year under the tutelage of leading thinkers and subject matter experts in the international development and public policy space. I envisaged myself learning new and innovative methods to analyze and propose solutions for today’s issues. I envisaged a cadre of fellow students with a strong desire to learn and who come from varied backgrounds and experiences. I did not envisage being enrolled in a scholastic enterprise that only professes the merits of transparency and open data, participatory and inclusive processes to manage change, and using information and knowledge to inform decisions, while not actually practicing them.

My time at Harvard will come to an end in May, and without action to reverse course by the Kennedy School Administration, this will be the last MC/MPA class benefiting from a Mason cohort to benefit from the two-week induction period. Established some 60 years ago, the Mason Fellowship sought to bring developing country leaders to Harvard to “address the world’s most compelling development challenges.” Halving the introductory seminar undermines that goal. Perhaps in some areas Harvard can walk-the-walk, but when it comes to issues like equity, diversity, transparency, and informed, inclusive decision-making you should only do as Harvard teaches, not as it practices.

David A. de Bold is a Mason Fellow in the 2020 cohort of the Mid-Career Master in Public Administration program at the Harvard Kennedy School.