Starting to Serve

Kennedy School Dean Albert Carnesale says he is excited by President Neil L. Rudenstine's vision of heightened University-wide cooperation and public service.

In fact, Carnesale sees the Kennedy School playing a central role in each of the five interfaculty programs outlined thus far under Rudenstine's plan.

"One of the things that's attractive to me about them is that...every one of them is important to the Kennedy School and the Kennedy School is in the middle of them," he says.

Rudenstine says Harvard should become an international focal point for discussion and debate in the five areas of study: health policy, public education, the environment, ethics in the professions and the brain, the mind and behavior.

Rudenstine wants the programs to encourage faculty members from across the University to work in collaboration with each other, and thereby boost the efficacy of their research and teaching.

Ultimately, the president suggests, a primary goal of the efforts should be to develop solutions to major societal problems.

"I think, myself, that you can't look out and see the public school systems in the shape they're in and--if you have a school of education and you're interested in public life in the society you live in--you want to have a response," Rudenstine says. "You can't look at the environmental problems as we have now without have some sort of response."

According to Carnesale, the Kennedy School will be at the forefront of that effort, advancing practical means of implementing the answers developed by researchers in other parts of the University.

"I believe that one of the important roles of the Kennedy School should be to help bring to bear upon public policy problems the resources of Harvard University," Carnesale says. "That synthesis should be what we specialize in."

Carnesale cites the University Program in Ethics and the Professions as an example of such a program head-quartered at the Kennedy School. The program, headed by Whitehead Professor Dennis F. Thompson, brings people together from all over the University to study ethics and its applications in business, law and medicine, among other areas.

Interactions with governments and public policy institutions in the United States and beyond, says Carnesale, is something in which the Kennedy School has experience. And providing a forum for discussion of policy concerns is already one of the school's specialties, he says.

"Our reputation is probably shaped more by that than by the scholarly work done by our faculty and by the education of our students," he says.

The dean says that while Rudenstine's vision of service will form an important part of the Kennedy School's mission in the future, its serving as a "mechanism by which [the] University provides service to the public" is not new to the school.

Under the tenure of Rudenstine's predecessor, former President Derek C. Bok, the Kennedy School expanded rapidly, and Carnesale says he does not see Rudenstine's aims as constituting a dramatic change for the school.

"I don't think it's a shift," he says. "I do think it's an extension."