The Citizen

Archon Fung

by Tim Coates, MPP2
Senior Staff Writer

The Kennedy School is filled with star professors.  Every semester students scramble, connive and beg to breathe the same air as these intellectual heavyweights, and sometimes they don’t meet our heightened expectations.  

But sometimes KSG pleases and surprises, offering us professors who teach seriously, advise conscientiously, and whose research reminds us of the intrinsic value of public service. Archon Fung, Associate Professor of Public Policy, is one such teacher, as the consistent popularity of his section of API 601 The Responsibilities of Public Action demonstrates. 

“I love teaching that class,” he says. “I really like every year seeing a big cross-section of the incoming MPP class.  I think it’s gotten more important and more fun over the years.”
Fung was born in Somerville, Massachusetts. His father taught chemistry at Tufts University. When Fung was three, his father took a position at the University of Oklahoma, moving the family to the heart of Republican America.  

“I really appreciate growing up in a Red State.  I think it gives a little bit of a reality check,” Fung says. “We tend to lose sight of what’s important to a lot of other people in America.”   
This concern with regular people and their capacity to act in democracies animates Fung and informs his alliterative elective course, PAL 218 Putting the Public Back into Public Policy.

“The reason I went into looking at public policy and political theory in the first place was always a set of concerns about democracy, and the sense that everyone talks a good game around democracy. And yet, you look around the world that we have and we’re so far from realizing anything like democracy,” Fung says.  “I think that it’s worth a lot of energy, and a lot of people are working on it, and more people should be working on how can we make good on our commitments to democracy and  
democratic governance.”  

Much of this motivation stems from living for almost four years on Chicago’s south side while completing his PhD research on the effectiveness of public participation in policies on policing and public schools – a time when, he jokes, he did not meet Barack Obama. The experience was formative.  

“I’d never really spent a lot of time in poor neighborhoods or minority communities,” Fung says.  

Living in Chicago’s poor neighborhoods, Fung developed an appreciation for an apparent ‘sixth sense’ in the residents.  He recalls boarding a city bus en route to a neighborhood meeting.  
“I’m Asian American, and everyone else on the bus was African American. I got on the bus and the bus driver looks at me, gives me the once over, and says, ‘where are you from, Harvard?’  And I thought, that’s pretty good, MIT’s only a couple blocks away.”
Fung’s concern for democracy and civic engagement translates directly to the classroom.  He’s an apt choice to teach a class challenging students to confront the ethical dimensions of public policies.

“Students initially have some resistance to API 601,” he says, “because they don’t see the take home skills they can use immediately in their career.  But I think it’s very, very important to teach it.”

After eight years of teaching API 601, Fung has an incisive perspective on MPPs. “Each class is definitely unique,” he says. Loath to make generalizations about class trends, he does think that students today are expressing more difficulty with the notion of self-sacrifice.

“It’s always a hard conversation, as it should be.  But I think it’s become even harder for people to imagine self-sacrifice for the sake of justice. I hesitate to speculate why that is, if it’s correct.”
Talking to Fung is like chatting with a friend – the conversation is freewheeling and easy. Mountains of books have made his desk their home, and a wall of colorful, hand written post-it notes provide cryptic clues to his next book. But, in all, his thoughts don’t appear to stray far from philosophy, revealing his unrelenting curiosity about democracy.

“It’s really important to go and look at experiences all over the place, especially among people who are very different from you in every regard,” he says. “Because, in a way, that’s how to take democracy seriously.”

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