Ignatieff returns to Harvard
Former federal Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff is returning to Harvard University full-time, leaving Canada three years after his failed bid to become prime minister.
Ignatieff has been named the Edward R. Murrow Chair of Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School — effective, ironically, on July 1, Canada Day. He will serve as a faculty affiliate at the Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.
Ignatieff will teach courses such as Responsibility and Representation: Meeting the Demands of Political Life; Sovereignty and Intervention; and Human Rights and Foreign Policy.
His departure to the U.S. and Harvard on a full-time basis is certain to have federal Conservatives arguing that their attack ads against the then-Liberal leader in the lead-up to the 2011 federal election — using the themes “Just visiting” and “He didn’t come back for you” — were bang-on.
The Conservatives, at the time, criticized Ignatieff for having lived outside Canada for more than 30 years as a professor, author and journalist, before returning to the country to jump into federal politics. For his part, Ignatieff went to great effort to underline his bona fides as a Canadian with global experience.
“The Kennedy School is an exciting and dynamic place where our future leaders are engaged in the very real process of gaining a greater understanding of the challenges they will face and the tools they will need to confront them,” Ignatieff said in a news release issued Tuesday by the school.
“I am thrilled to join the full time faculty at HKS (Harvard Kennedy School) and to serve as an affiliate of the Shorenstein Center.”
Since 2012, Ignatieff has split his time as a professor between The Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto and the Harvard Kennedy School.
A distinguished author, he previously served as director of the Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy between 2000 and 2005, before jumping into Canadian federal politics in 2006, when he captured a seat as a Liberal MP in Toronto.
After a failed Liberal leadership bid in 2006, Ignatieff eventually went on to capture the party reins (first on an interim basis and then permanently), serving as Liberal leader from December 2008 to May 2011.