Oration title: Securing the Public’s Health and Safety: A Challenge to Democratic
Self-Governance.
Mark H. Moore is the Research Professor of Public Leadership and Management. His current primary focus is studying the processes that enable social innovation and change to occur in response to changing political, economic, and social conditions.
He began his career at the Kennedy School as a member of the inaugural class of the Master’s Program in Public Policy, and was subsequently awarded one of Harvard’s first PhDs in public policy in 1974. In 1978, he was appointed the first Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice Policy and Management, and used that position to launch the Kennedy School’s Program on Criminal Justice Program. At that time, he was also asked to lead the Kennedy School’s “strategic management cluster,” which was tasked with developing a distinctive approach to public management that could integrate the school’s interests in policy analysis and improving government policy-making processes with the more traditional concerns of public administration. He was also appointed to chair the newly created Faculty Committee on Executive Programs through which the concepts being developed could be tested for utility and value with practicing public executives.
In 1998, Moore was appointed Hauser Professor of Nonprofit Organizations, and served as the first Faculty Director of the newly created Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations. The aim of the Center was to focus Kennedy School attention on the important role played by civil society actors in shaping government’s (and therefore society’s) overall capacity to identify, understand, and ameliorate pressing social problems. In 2007, he took up a half time appointment as a professor at the Harvard Business School. In 2008, he served in a half-time position as the Simon Professor of Organizations, Management, and Education at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education to help that school design and launch a special program for educators, administrators, and social entrepreneurs seeking to close the “achievement gap” in American education.
In 2014, Moore returned to the Kennedy School on a full-time basis to work on its Social Innovation and Change Initiative.
His publications are spread across three broad fields. In the field of public management, his works include Creating Public Value: Strategic Management in Government; and Recognizing Public Value. In the field of criminal justice, his works include Dangerous Offenders: The Elusive Targets of Justice; Beyond 911: A New Era for Policing; and From Children to Citizens: The Mandate for Juvenile Justice. In the field of social innovation, he is trying to catch up with the modern age and is developing digital materials to support the course on “Sparking Social Change.”
Moore holds a B.A. from Yale University (Summa Cum Laude and Honors with Exceptional Distinction in Political Science and Economics), and an M.P.P. and Ph.D. from the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.
What I am planning to talk about is how best to understand and resolve some key philosophical, ideological and partisan tensions that arise in using state authority to protect individual liberty on one hand, and to improve individual and aggregate health and safety on the other.
