New IOP Director Plans to Expand Diminished Senior Advisory Committee, Backs Close Integration with HKS

Harvard Institute of Politics Director Betsy Fischer Martin plans to expand the Institute’s Senior Advisory Committee, she said in an interview — but stopped short of saying she would restore the authority the body lost six years ago, when Caroline B. Kennedy ’80 resigned as its honorary chair.

Her plans come as the committee has contracted and grown less engaged with the institute. The board, which counsels the IOP on programming and civic engagement, has nine members, down from 14 when former director Setti D. Warren was selected in 2023. Only two members attended a meeting last year in person, with the rest joining over Zoom.

“I expect that we will also be adding to it because I’m a strong believer in more voices are better,” Fischer Martin said.

“The unique thing about the IOP is that we have tentacles into so many incredible professions and talent,” she added, describing an “an expansive board” that could help the institute with ideas, referrals, and support.

She also said she wants the committee to be an ongoing source of feedback rather than a body that hears from the institute only at periodic meetings.

“A strong advisory committee is one that is not just presented with an annual review once a year, but that there is a dialogue, and so I fully expect the advisory committee to be a dialogue in this process,” Fischer Martin said.

Asked whether she would restore the committee’s power, Fischer Martin emphasized the limits of its role.

“I think the senior advisory committee, and the key word is advisory, is really important to the IOP,” she said.

The committee once held influence over the institute’s budget, staffing, and choice of director. That changed in February 2020, when then-HKS Dean Douglas W. Elmendorf presented Kennedy with a governance proposal curtailing its authority. Kennedy, who had spent six years as the committee’s honorary chair, resigned in a letter to him.

She later wrote to then-University President Lawrence S. Bacow that the IOP is “not holding itself to a high-enough standard, not innovating, and not executing its existing programming as well as it should.” Kennedy was the last direct descendant of John F. Kennedy ’40 — in whose memory the IOP was founded in 1966 — involved in the institute.

Fischer Martin, a former executive producer of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” said she wrote to Caroline Kennedy shortly after taking over as director, though she did not side-stepped answering whether she would seek her return to the committee.

“The second email I sent when I became the director was really to her to introduce myself,” Fischer Martin said.

“We had her on Meet the Press several times, and we have a lot of common friends together, so I’ve had very positive interactions with her,” she added. “We are very aligned on the mission of what the IOP stands for, and I think that alignment is really the same as the Kennedy School.”

In a statement after the interview, Fischer Martin said those conversations have continued.

“I have enormous respect for Ambassador Kennedy. She has such a deep history with the IOP and its mission, and our students have so much to learn from her experience and her own public service. I’ve been very glad to be in conversation with her about the IOP and I’m grateful that those conversations are continuing,” Fischer Martin wrote.

Fischer Martin also said she does not view the seat left by Alice E. Stewart as a vacancy that must be filled. Stewart, a CNN political commentator and two-time IOP resident fellow who joined the committee in 2021, was among its most prominent conservative voices and was credited with drawing Republican speakers to campus. She died in May 2024.

“I don’t really think of it as a spot, per se, because I think that the advisory committee needs to be more of a breathing organism within the institute,” Fischer Martin said. “Expanding those voices on the committee is going to be something that I’d really like to try to do.”

Fischer Martin’s commentary comes amid a broader struggle for power between Kennedy School leadership and the IOP’s Senior Advisory Committee. Harvard Kennedy School Dean Jeremy M. Weinstein took a hands-on approach during the search for a permanent director last spring, and Elmendorf named Warren to the post in 2023 over objections from student leaders and committee leaders. Interim co-directors Beth E. Myers and Ned C. Price, who led the IOP after Warren suddenly died in November 2025, said they were seeking new appointments to the board, but none were announced during their tenure.

Fischer Martin said she sees the institute as closely integrated with HKS, pointing to the school’s faculty, research centers, and administrative infrastructure as resources the IOP relies on.

“I really feel that the Institute, when it comes to HKS, is completely integrated and part of it,” she said. “We rely on the infrastructure here – we rely on the incredible talent that exists in the faculty here and the centers here.”

She described Weinstein as a close collaborator who supports the institute’s direction.

“Jeremy is my boss. We have had a great relationship. We’re very in sync about the direction of the IOP, the importance of it, and he is fully supportive of everything that we’re doing here,” she said.

—Staff writer Jen L. Phan can be reached at [email protected] and Signal at jenphan.74. Follow her on X at @jenllphan.

—Staff writer Mirei S. Saneyoshi can be reached at [email protected] and Signal at mireisaneyoshi.09. Follow her on X at @mireisaneyoshi.