Former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot will be shipping up to Boston soon as the recently defeated pol reflects on her city’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic via a fellowship with Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Beginning in August, Lightfoot will hold the Richard L. and Ronay A. Menschel senior fellowship post where she will lead a course on public decision-making for students exploring the intersection of government bureaucracy and public health affairs.
Eric Andersen, director of the Senior Leadership Fellows Program and studio programming at the school, spoke with the Chicago Sun-Times about the decision to bring on Lightfoot.
“We reached out to Lightfoot because I think as mayor and as a leader she faced many pressing public health issues, most notable navigating the pandemic. We believe our students will benefit from her experiences, insights and knowledge of leadership decision-making,” Anderson said.
The school added in a statement that the Menschel program “offers a rare opportunity for those who have recently served in top-level positions in government, multilateral institutions, nonprofit organizations and journalism to spend time at the school mentoring and teaching students who aspire to similar roles. Lightfoot will hold regular office hours to meet with students, faculty and staff during her time on campus.”
In May, Lightfoot was denied a second term for the mayorship after failing to advance from the Democratic primary, a result she blamed on racism and sexism. Her latest move returns the attorney and one-time professor to the classroom for eight weeks while her wife and daughter remain in Chicago.
“I want to take advantage of the other opportunities that will surely present themselves, both to participate as part of the campus community and then contribute in other ways, too,” Lightfoot told the Sun-Times.
During her tenure, Chicago became known for its extended lockdown of public schools as the city acquiesced to demands from the teacher’s unions to keep students at home. As the pandemic eased, mass shootings across the city reached their highest rates since the 1990s. The city’s wealthiest billionaire announced in July of 2022 that he was relocating to Florida, dealing the city a massive loss in income revenue.
