Kennedy School Review

BY WILLIAM DENN At a friend’s wedding a couple weeks ago, I exchanged introductions with a woman seated next to me. Upon learning that I was an active duty soldier, she said, “Thank you for your service.” She was sincere, but awkwardly confessed that she didn’t quite know what to say when meeting soldiers who […]

BY TAYLOR WOODS It has been a love-fest on the campaign trail this year. During weekends in October and the days leading up to Election Day, I’ve been a volunteer canvasser knocking on doors for Mike Michaud’s run for governor of Maine, US Senator Jeanne Shaheen’s reelection campaign in New Hampshire, and Wendy Davis’s run […]

BY MIGUEL GUEVARA On September 26th, students from the rural teacher training college of Ayotzinapa traveled to Iguala – 120 miles south of Mexico City. The students needed to raise money for a trip to Mexico City, and consequentially asked drivers from Iguala for donations to fund their trip to the capital. While the students’ […]

BY MELISSA SANDGREN Megan Smith grew up around engineers. Her grandfather helped build roads and bridges throughout the early 20th century and contributed to large portions of the transportation system in Indiana. Yet, when the young Smith enrolled at MIT in the early 1980s to study mechanical engineering, the question her grand- father asked her […]

On Thursday, October 2, 2014, Vice President Biden addressed an audience at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government on a range of foreign policy topics. As a special feature, the Kennedy School Review has collected student perspectives on some of the policy issues the vice president covered in his remarks. ———————– The Islamic State of […]

BY JACOB SHELLY When President Obama stood outside the Blue Room on September 10th to announce a major expansion of airstrikes in the Middle East, he explained that he had no other choice. The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), he warned, poses a threat to the entire region — including American citizens, personnel, […]

BY JOHN BERTETTO On 23 July 2014, Isaac Lara wrote a piece that appeared in the Kennedy School Review titled Crime Square: How Advances in Criminal Justice Policy Can Improve Public Safety in New York City. Mr. Lara suggests that reductions in crime may come via Place Theory, and suggests a three-pronged approach: (1) increasing […]

BY BRIAN CHIGLINSKY, PANGYRUS This article is being published in collaboration with Pangyrus.   Sendhil Mullainathan had studied poverty for years, and something haunted him in nearly every study. Born into a small rural village in India, the Harvard behavioral economist and winner of the MacArthur Fellowship—commonly known as a “genius grant”—was inherently skeptical of […]

  One student prepares to run for elected office. Another has just finished an internship in a federal courthouse. A third is taking a college course on Kierkegaard. These students are eighth graders. Education can be transformative. And it can be transformed. RETHINKING EDUCATION REFORM Education reform has been an ongoing effort for the past […]

BY ELIZABETH BENNETT Rwanda is the only country in the world where more women than men serve as elected officials. For a small, land-locked nation in the middle of sub-Saharan Africa, that’s an impressive distinction. But when you consider how far the country has come over two decades, it becomes downright astonishing. For Rwandans, the […]

BY ADAM BANASIAK We usually find gas in new places with old ideas. Sometimes, also, we find gas in an old place with a new idea, but we seldom find much gas in an old place with an old idea. Several times in the past we have thought that we were running out of gas, […]

BY JULIA FETHERSTON ADAM SMITH WOULD HAVE BEEN mystified by the bankers, government officials, analysts, and activists assembled in the City of London for the inaugural G8 Meeting on Social Impact Investment, a meeting convened at the behest of U.K. Conservative Party Prime Minister David Cameron. Smith, the pioneer of free market political economy, wrote […]