Translating Ideas into Action | Your Giving Matters

{ PUBLIC POLICY }

December 13, 2020

As a preeminent scholar of Aegean prehistory, Malcolm H. Wiener AB ’57, JD ’63 has studied and written extensively about the rise and fall of ancient civilizations. As a philanthropist, he has catalyzed critical research and policy work at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) to address the greatest challenges facing the modern world.

For more than 30 years, the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy has been a crucial component of HKS’s mission to improve public policy and leadership so all people can live in societies that are more safe, free, just, and sustainably prosperous. Extending this legacy, Wiener and his wife, Carolyn, recently renewed their commitment to enhance the center’s reach and impact with a new gift through the Malcolm Hewitt Wiener Foundation.

“The deepening divisions in our country and the complexity of the problems we face are proof that the center’s work has never been more critical,” says Wiener, whose longstanding support for Harvard has included funding for faculty chairs, teaching spaces, and programming at HKS, as well as the University-wide Initiative for the Science of the Human Past.

Wiener Center faculty have been an influential voice in domestic policy since the late 1980s, playing a pivotal role in framing discussions around issues such as welfare reform and community policing. More recently, new faculty have joined the center, working on a range of urgent topics including education, economic mobility, health inequality, immigration, globalization and international trade, criminal justice reform, racial discrimination, labor markets, and the future of work.

The Wiener Foundation’s latest gift will help launch new faculty at the center and amplify their research by sharing insights from their scholarly work with policymakers and the public.

“The Malcolm Hewitt Wiener Foundation’s generous gift will allow the center to greatly increase the impact of our work through an innovative program of data visualization and to support cutting-edge social policy research that changes people’s lives for the better,” says David Deming PhD ’10, director of the Wiener Center, professor of public policy at HKS, and professor of education and economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Malcolm H. Wiener AB ’57, JD ’63 and His Wife, Carolyn Wiener — MALCOLM H. WIENER AB ’57, JD ’63 AND HIS WIFE, CAROLYN WIENER

“The Malcolm Hewitt Wiener Foundation’s generous gift will allow the center to greatly increase the impact of our work through an innovative program of data visualization and to support cutting-edge social policy research that changes people’s lives for the better.”

—DAVID DEMING PHD ’10, DIRECTOR OF THE WIENER CENTER

By investing in strategic communications, the Wiener Center will be able to reach a wider audience and more effectively translate academic research into concrete policy action. For example, a new research paper by a faculty member could be accompanied by a non-technical executive summary, a data journalism article including graphics and other visualizations that illustrate key findings, and a public website with open-access copies of the paper and underlying data.

“Since its inception, the Wiener Center has been committed to combining outstanding scholarship with practical impact,” says Douglas Elmendorf, dean of HKS and Don K. Price Professor of Public Policy. “The generosity of Malcolm and Carolyn Wiener enables our faculty and students to conduct path-breaking research and communicate their findings to practitioners in order to address the most pressing public challenges of our time.”

Policy Positions

Backed by research and expertise across a range of disciplines, Wiener Center faculty are contributing to the conversation and informing policy on timely social issues.

In addition to serving as director of the Wiener Center, David Deming PhD ’10 is a principal investigator at the CLIMB Initiative—an organization that seeks to study and improve the role of higher education in creating social mobility in America. As the pandemic forced colleges and universities to shift to remote teaching, Deming penned an economic analysis in the New York Times arguing that technology will make in-person education more valuable than ever and calling for broader access to high-quality on-campus learning.

“It is wonderful that technology has enabled millions of students to keep learning even when direct contact is impossible,” Deming writes. “But once this crisis ends, we will be better off if technology frees up precious class time so that educators and students can engage deeply with each other and build personal connections that will last a lifetime.”

New research by Wiener Center faculty affiliate Desmond Ang, assistant professor of public policy at HKS, suggests police killings have a geographic and demographic ripple effect, negatively impacting the educational and psychological well-being of nearby Black and Hispanic high school students. Analyzing data from a large urban county in the Southwest, Ang found that Black and Hispanic students who live in the immediate vicinity of such incidents experienced significant decreases in GPA, were more likely to be classified with “emotional disturbance,” and were ultimately less likely to graduate from high school or enroll in college. By contrast, he found no significant impact on the academic performance or mental health of white or Asian students.

“I think my findings highlight the need to think seriously about the potential social costs of policing when deciding on law enforcement policies,” Ang says.

Wiener Center faculty affiliates Marcella Alsan AB ’99, MPH ’05, PhD ’12, professor of public policy at HKS, and Crystal Yang AB ’07, JD ’13, PhD ’13, professor of law at Harvard Law School, collaborated with the National Commission on Correctional Health Care to conduct a survey on the effects of the pandemic on correctional facilities in the U.S. Among the initial findings, correctional staff had a higher infection rate than inmates and many facilities lacked access to testing and PPE.

“Our findings suggest that as the pandemic continues to spread, policymakers should implement criminal justice policies that can protect the health of inmates and correctional staff without endangering public safety,” says Yang. Responses could include releasing medically vulnerable inmates, limiting pretrial detention for individuals charged with nonviolent or misdemeanor offenses, eliminating nonviolent minor arrest warrants, and increasing the use of summons in lieu of arrests for nonviolent offenses.