Harvard Broke Rules to Welcome Back Biden Aides

Plus: interest rates will stay put, Fed officials suggest

“By vote of the Corporation, leave for more than two successive years is not possible,” Harvard’s policy says. But Biden aides are nevertheless warmly welcomed back to their old professorships after four years.

Back in 2018 when Richard Pipes died I mentioned an interview he gave in which he explained why he left the Reagan administration. “Harvard only gives you two years leave of absence, so when my two years were up, I returned," Pipes said.

That was the 1980s, when Harvard, apparently, still believed in holding professors to a primary commitment to academic life at Harvard—to scholarship.

The standards have apparently changed, to judge by recent developments. The Harvard Kennedy School’s new dean, Jeremy M. Weinstein, announced in January that Nicholas Burns, who since 2021 had been the U.S. ambassador to China under President Biden “will rejoin the Harvard Kennedy School faculty.” From the Harvard Kennedy School announcement:

In addition to resuming his professorship at HKS, Burns will also join the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard as a faculty affiliate.

Before his appointment as U.S. envoy to China in 2021, Burns taught for 13 years at the Kennedy School as the Roy and Barbara Goodman Family Professor of the Practice of Diplomacy and International Relations. He founded and led the Future of Diplomacy Project in the School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and was faculty chair of the School’s programs on the Middle East and South Asia.

This guy wasn’t even ladder faculty, he was “professor of the practice,” which is lower status, though most students don’t understand the difference, and Harvard still let him be in charge of “the School’s programs on the Middle East.” Yet after four years in the Biden administration, it’s “resuming” time in Cambridge for Professor/Ambassador Burns.

Likewise, Samantha Power, who was Biden’s USAID administrator from 2021 to 2025, also gets welcomed back to Harvard after four years. From the May 16, 2025, Harvard announcement: “On June 1, Samantha Power will return to Harvard Kennedy School as the Anna Lindh Professor of the Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy and to Harvard Law School as the William D. Zabel ’61 Professor of Practice in Human Rights. Power, who recently served in the Biden administration as the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), was most recently on the HKS and HLS faculty from 2017 to 2021….From 2017 to 2021, Power was the Anna Lindh Professor of the Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy at the Kennedy School—where she was affiliated with the Carr-Ryan Center and the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs—and a professor of practice at Harvard Law School.” Another “professor of the practice.”

Will Harvard be welcoming any members of the Trump administration as professors of practice after they serve four years in a Republican administration? Pipes had to return to Cambridge after two years, because the people running Harvard at the time—Derek Bok, Henry Rosovsky—probably believed it did not serve the institution well to leave a position vacant for such a long stretch. Who would teach the courses?

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences has a policy still online: “Consistent with the FAS’s policies concerning all leaves (see FAS Appointment and Promotion Handbook, Chapter 3), leaves for public service, which are unpaid, may not be granted for more than one year at a time. Ordinarily, faculty members should not be out of the classroom for more than a year at a time. It is possible on occasion to request a second year of unpaid leave for the purpose of service in the public interest. By vote of the Corporation, leave for more than two successive years is not possible. Resignation from the Harvard appointment is the only alternative to returning to University service after more than two consecutive years of leave. With regard to the frequency with which public service leaves may be taken, or intervals of time between such leaves, it is ordinarily expected that FAS faculty members will demonstrate their primary commitment to Harvard in a sustained fashion, over the course of multiple years.”

So you have a written Harvard policy—still up online—that “By vote of the Corporation, leave for more than two successive years is not possible,” a policy that apparently applied to Richard Pipes serving in the Reagan administration. Yet when Kamala Harris loses the election, Nicholas Burns and Samantha Power waltz right back to Cambridge to be “resuming” and “return” and “rejoin.” Even if they were not technically on leave during the interim, it sure looks like someone was holding spots for them—the same spots they left.

It is this sort of thing that gives rise to a widespread impression that Harvard is less about teaching and research and more a kind of holding spot for Democrats during periods when they are out of office. These aren’t six-month fellowships at the Institute of Politics. These are jobs with the word “professor.” For Harvard to make the announcement now, in the midst of a high-profile conflict with the Trump administration and while it’s claiming that life-saving medical research is in jeopardy because of cost cuts, is particularly boneheaded. Why not just tell Samantha Power to go get a job at Tufts or at the Council on Foreign Relations for a while until Harvard ousts Penny Pritzker, settles with the Trump administration, and lifts its hiring freeze. Were there nationwide searches for these positions open to all comers? How’s Harvard going to fix its viewpoint diversity problem if it restocks its faculty ranks with the same people?