Statement Regarding the Invitation to Chelsea Manning

By Douglas W. Elmendorf

Douglas W. Elmendorf is Dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where he also serves as the Don K. Price Professor of Public Policy. Doug Elmendorf served as the director of the Congressional Budget Office from January 2009 through March 2015. Prior to joining CBO, he was at Brookings, where he was a senior fellow, the Edward M. Bernstein Scholar, and the director of The Hamilton Project. He was previously an assistant professor at Harvard University, a principal analyst at CBO, a senior economist at the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, a deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the Treasury Department, and an assistant director of the Division of Research and Statistics at the Federal Reserve Board. In those positions, he worked on budget policy, health care issues, the macroeconomic effects of fiscal policy, Social Security, income security programs, financial markets, macroeconomic analysis and forecasting, and other topics. Doug Elmendorf earned his Ph.D. and A.M. in economics from Harvard University, where he was a National Science Foundation graduate fellow, and his A.B. summa cum laude from Princeton University.

On Friday, Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government withdrew its invitation to Chelsea Manning to serve as Visiting Fellow. Below is a copy of the statement released by Douglas W. Elmendorf, Dean of the Kennedy School.

On Wednesday, the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School announced that Chelsea Manning would be one of roughly ten Visiting Fellows this fall. We invited Chelsea Manning because the Kennedy School’s longstanding approach to visiting speakers is to invite some people who have significantly influenced events in the world even if they do not share our values and even if their actions or words are abhorrent to some members of our community. We do this not to endorse those actions or legitimize those words, but because engaging with people with fundamentally different worldviews can help us to become better public leaders. Because controversy pervades many questions in politics and public policy, some speakers are controversial. While we do not shy away from that controversy, we insist that all speakers take questions, and these questions are often hard and challenging ones. Hearing a very wide range of views, regardless of what members of our community think about the people offering those views, is fundamental to the learning process at the Kennedy School.

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