Former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to temporarily join Harvard

According to Kennedy School Dean Douglas Elmendorf, former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who guided her nation through a tragic mass shooting, will temporarily join Harvard University later this year. Ardern, a leading figure on the left and a role model for women everywhere, has been given two fellowships at the Harvard Kennedy School. Beginning this autumn, she will work at the school’s Centre for Public Leadership as a Hauser Leader and the 2023 Angelopoulos Global Public Leaders Fellow. “Jacinda Ardern showed the world strong and empathetic political leadership,” Elmendorf said in a statement, adding that Ardern will “bring important insights for our students and will generate vital conversations about the public policy choices facing leaders at all levels.” Ardern, who had only just turned 37 when she took office as prime minister in 2017, startled New Zealanders by announcing in January that she would be leaving the position after more than 5 years because she no longer had “enough in the tank” to carry out her duties. Her management of the coronavirus epidemic, which was originally praised but afterwards criticised by people opposed to mandates and laws, was only one of the growing political challenges she was experiencing at home. She claimed that she views the Harvard opportunity as a chance to both learn and teach people about her experience. “As leaders, there’s often very little time for reflection, but reflection is critical if we are to properly support the next generation of leaders,” she said. Ardern’s time at the Cambridge, Massachusetts, university will also include a stint as the first tech governance leadership fellow at the school’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. The centre has been an important partner as New Zealand worked to confront violent extremism online after a white supremacist gunman killed 51 people at two mosques in the city of Christchurch in 2019, Ardern said. The gunman live-streamed the slaughter for 17 minutes on Facebook before the video was taken down. Two months after the shooting, Ardern launched the Christchurch Call with French President Emmanuel Macron. The initiative’s goal is to eliminate terrorist and violent extremist content online. More than 50 countries joined the initiative, including the United States, Britain, Germany and South Korea, as well as technology companies like Facebook parent company Meta, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, YouTube, Zoom and Twitter. “The Center has been an incredibly important partner as we’ve developed the Christchurch Call to action on addressing violent extremism online,” Ardern said, adding that the fellowship will be a chance not only to work collaboratively with the centre’s research community but also to work on the challenges around the growth of generative AI tools. Jonathan Zittrain, a co-founder of the Berkman Klein Center, said it’s rare for a head of state to be able to immerse deeply in a complex and fast-moving digital policy issue. “Jacinda Ardern’s hard-won expertise — including her ability to bring diverse people and institutions together — will be invaluable as we all search for workable solutions to some of the deepest online problems,” he said in a statement. Ardern said she planned to return to New Zealand after the fellowships. Read all the Latest News , Trending News ,  Cricket News , Bollywood News , India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.