In the 25th Annual John T. Dunlop Lecture, Kenzie Bok, Administrator and CEO of the Boston Housing Authority and former Boston City Councilor, will bring together her experiences as a pioneering public housing administrator and intellectual historian to explore the past, present, and future of public housing in the US. She will discuss how justice, fairness, and the role of government have shaped public housing—and how those ideas must evolve to meet today’s intertwined challenges of affordability, climate change, and inequality. Following the lecture, Chris Herbert, the Center’s Managing Director, will moderate a conversation with Bok and Bernardo Zacka, an associate professor of political science at MIT, whose interests include the moral dilemmas that public service workers encounter when enacting public policy and how the architecture of welfare offices can shape interactions with citizens.
The John T. Dunlop Lecture honors a labor economist who played a central role in the creation of our Center. A longtime member of the Harvard faculty, Dunlop was dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences from 1969 to 1973, served as US Secretary of Labor in the Ford administration, and worked for every US president from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Bill Clinton. He was also a mediator in numerous labor-management disputes, where he was known for developing innovative, multi-party agreements.