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John J. Sweeney Named Harvard Fellow
1/26/2010
John J. Sweeney, AFL-CIO President Emeritus and Chairman of the Board of the AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust (HIT), has been named a resident fellow for the spring term at Harvard’s Institute of Politics, part of the John F. Kennedy School of Government. As a resident fellow, Sweeney will participate in the intellectual life of the Harvard community and lead study groups on a variety of topics designed to inspire young people to enter into careers in public service. His work with students will draw on his more than 50 years of service to the labor movement.
Sweeney is one of six resident fellows participating in the Institute’s spring term. He will be joined by Manny Diaz, former mayor of Miami and former president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors; former Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, also a former U.S. Conference of Mayors president; Michèle Pierre-Louis, former prime minister of Haiti; former Congressman Ernest Istook of Oklahoma; and Mary Catherine Andrews, former director of the White House Office of Global Communications.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, also a member of the HIT board, congratulated Sweeney on the appointment, saying that, “the Harvard Resident Fellowship offers John Sweeney an excellent opportunity to educate the nation’s next generation of leaders on the critical importance of unions. He will be a superb ambassador in representing union workers and their families.”
Harvard’s Institute of Politics opened in 1966 with a mission “to unite and engage students, particularly undergraduates, with academics, politicians, activists, and policymakers on a non-partisan basis and to stimulate and nurture their interest in public service and leadership.”
