As an alumnus of the College and a longtime faculty member, it is a privilege for me to serve as dean of the Harris School. Our mission at Harris is to serve society by advancing analysis- and evidence-informed policy through rigorous research; educating serious-minded and effective policy leaders; and engaging with the public on pressing societal issues. Thousands of alumni around the world advance this mission daily in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors.

Following a decade of extraordinary growth, Harris is today home to nearly 60 tenure-track faculty, more than 1,200 graduate students, and one of the largest undergraduate majors on campus. Our expansion catalyzed a new level of eminence and impact, enabling the creation of major initiatives in policy areas including energy and environment, education, democracy and effective government, health, economic and political development, public safety, social policy, and conflict. We have an equally ambitious plan for our next decade.

Our unique Cyber Policy and Tech and Society initiatives are positioning Harris to become the leading policy school for issues at the nexus of technology and society. This year our work on artificial intelligence and elections was covered in national media including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and ABC’s 538 Politics podcast. Harris faculty are also at the forefront of developing and assessing technological approaches to addressing societal challenges, exemplified by the Behavioral Insights and Parenting Lab’s educational technology work, the Crime Lab’s police training research, and faculty studies on artificial intelligence in health care decision-making.

Reflecting our location on Chicago’s South Side, Harris is setting the agenda in urban policy. The Center for Municipal Finance (CMF) is the world’s premier source of expertise on state and local fiscal issues; it produces influential research, including work that prompted nationwide property tax assessment reforms. CMF led the inaugural Harris Policy Innovation Challenge, where student teams from across the University designed and pitched solutions to Chicago’s vexing $35 billion in unfunded public sector pension liabilities. The winners received tremendous press coverage and presented to the Civic Federation, with Chicago’s CFO, budget director, and comptroller in attendance. At the UChicago Urban Labs, housed at Harris, intellectual leaders in applied social science collaborate with governments and nonprofits to experimentally evaluate policy interventions aimed at critical urban policy challenges. The Crime Lab is leading innovative training and research to curb gun violence.

The Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility and the Inclusive Economy Lab (IEL) are shaping global conversations about inequality. The Stone Center conducts foundational research on wealth mobility and hosts critical public conversations on topics including affirmative action, wealth inequality, and the history of inequality. The IEL engages deeply with Chicago and Cook County to evaluate programs addressing urgent economic inequality issues.

The Center for Effective Government is bringing rigor to national discussions about democracy, particularly through the Democracy Reform Primer Series. Each primer clarifies the intended purpose of a proposed reform and critically evaluates what the best research has to say about it. The primers cover term limits, filibuster reform, public election funding, ranked-choice voting, redistricting, election timing, and more.

Principle informs everything we do at Harris, and the UChicago tradition of academic freedom, free expression, and institutional neutrality plays an essential role. Last fall marked our first-ever student orientation event on this proud tradition. I was delighted to engage with Harris alumni on this subject at Alumni Weekend in May and look forward to integrating these values even more deeply into our culture in the coming years. While these principles lay a foundation, we are hard at work developing programming to more intentionally build a community in which we practice civil discourse: listening charitably, speaking frankly and empathetically, and truly seeking to understand those with whom we disagree. These skills—combined with the capacity to proceed with 
rigor, open-mindedness, skepticism, and pragmatism—are the hallmarks of a great policymaker.

Ethan Bueno De Mesquita, AB’96, is the dean and Sydney Stein Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy.