Ira Jackson (he/him/his) is a Visiting Lecturer, co-teaching this fall with Prof. Chris Winship Sociology 1119, "leadership and social change, using Boston as a case-study of issues of race, class and social justice." Ira has served in a wide variety of leadership positions in the public, private, academic and nonprofit sectors. He has been dean of both a business school (Peter Drucker School of Management at Claremont Graduate University, where he was also a Professor of Management) and a school of public policy (John W. McCormack Graduate School of Global and Policy Studies at UMass Boston). He has been extensive experience in a variety of roles in higher education at four private institutions of higher education (Harvard, MIT, Claremont Graduate University and Brandeis) and two public institutions of higher education (Arizona State University, where he was President of the ASU Foundation, and the University of Massachusetts Boston, where was Vice Provost). In government, Ira served as a top aide to the first African American mayor of a major city on the East Coast (Kenneth Gibson of Newark), chief of staff to the mayor of Boston (Kevin White), and Massachusetts Commissioner of Revenue under Governor Michael Dukakis. In the private sector, Ira served for a dozen years as Executive Vice President of BankBoston, where he led a successful effort to establish an inner city bank-within-the-bank designed to meet the needs of inner city residents which was given the Ron Brown Award for Corporate Social Responsibility from the Conference Board at the White House. At Harvard, Ira was Senior Associate Dean of the Kennedy School during its formative growth years, where he launched the training program for newly-elected big city mayors at the Institute of Politics and created the Forum, which has become part of the soul of the school. Later, he returned to Harvard to serve as Director of HKS' Center for Business and Government. More recently, Ira conceived with others and continues to co-host an annual strategic planning retreat involving civic leaders from across Massachusetts called The Commonwealth Summit, and with two colleagues, founded The Civic Action Project that trains graduate students in the applied skills needed to be effective change agents, and offers a unique cross-training program for senior leaders in business and government that Ira leads called the CAP Collaborative. Ira is a creative and collaborative problem-solver and institution builder and works at the intersection of business, government, academia and civil society, building innovative partnerships and programs that advance equity, efficiency and legitimacy. He is active in civic life and teaches, writes and consults on strategy, leadership and social change, with a focus on corporate purpose and issues of race, class and social justice. With Jane Nelson, Ira is the author of Profits with Principles: Seven Strategies for Managing for Value with Values (Doubleday), and he serves on the Global Advisory Council of APCO. He is a graduate of Harvard College and received his MPA from HKS and graduated from the Advanced Management Program at HBS.

Ira is also currently a Research Fellow at the Mossavar/Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School.  His research focuses on successful public/private partnerships that work and why, building upon the success of MA becoming the Silicon Valley of life sciences, and looking out to see whether that model can be replicated in other areas, including tackling intractable social issues such as closing the racial wealth gap and early childhood education.