Most crisis management courses teach leaders how to resolve a crisis. This course is different.

Drawing on more than 27 months of uninterrupted lived experience, Senior Fellow Penny Pritzker presents a radical alternative framework: the managed non-resolution. Participants will learn how to acknowledge a crisis without addressing it, apologize for a crisis without accepting responsibility for it, and commission a study of a crisis without reading it.

The case is real. The institution is real. The crisis, the instructor wishes to note, is still ongoing. She considers this a feature.

• Module 1: The Pre-Statement Statement
  Communicating concern before you have decided what you are concerned about. Workshopping phrases such as “we are monitoring the situation” and “this is not who we are.”
• Module 2: Context-Dependent Responses to Unambiguous Questions
  In December 2023, Harvard’s president was asked by a United States Congresswoman whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated Harvard’s conduct policies. The correct answer was one word. This module examines the decision to use 183 words instead, none of which were that word. Participants will study the role of the provost, who helped craft the response and was seated directly behind the president during its delivery, visible in every news photograph of the moment, and who now runs the university.
• Module 3: The Plagiarism Discovery
  Timeline management when a second crisis arrives during the press conference about the first crisis. How to issue a statement of support, followed by a statement of modified support, before finally accepting a resignation you announced you would not be accepting. The module covers the forty-four days between these events. The instructor will explain what she was doing during this period. She was monitoring the situation.
• Module 4: Sequential Apology Architecture
  Pacing, spacing, and knowing when to issue the apology for the previous apology. Guest lecturer: the author of Harvard’s third public letter on antisemitism, who will explain why the second letter made the third necessary, and preview the fourth. The guest lecturer has asked that their identity not be disclosed until the fourth letter is released. The fourth letter has not been released.
• Module 5: The Strategic Committee
  Convening as action. Deliberating as response. Forming a committee to study how the previous committee should have been formed. This module includes a workshop on the Presidential Search Process Committee, which was formed to recommend reforms to the process by which the Presidential Search Committee will be formed, and which reported its findings to a committee.
• Module 6: Managing the Gap Between Your Values Statement and Your Values
  Advanced workshop. Prerequisites: Modules 1 through 5. Bring your institution’s most recent values statement and one example of conduct it did not prevent. Participants without an example will be provided one.
• Module 7: Federal Funding as a Relationship
  How a $2.2 billion funding freeze can be reframed as an opportunity for dialogue, reflection, and the filing of a federal lawsuit. Special session: explaining to your development office why the largest donors are leaving while assuring them that the community has never been stronger.
• Module 8: To Be Determined. Case Ongoing.
  The instructor considers this almost a full circle. She has not defined the circle.

Penny Pritzker is Senior Fellow of the Harvard Corporation, a position she has held since 2022 and continues to hold. During her tenure, she has: chaired the search committee that selected Claudine Gay as Harvard’s president; overseen Gay’s resignation forty-four days after the congressional testimony; managed Harvard’s response to the largest campus antisemitism crisis in its modern history; presided over a $2.2 billion federal funding freeze; formed a committee to study how to conduct a presidential search; replaced that committee with a larger committee; and concluded the search by extending the contract of the man who was there at the beginning.

Ms. Pritzker brings to this course a practitioner’s perspective. She is still practicing.

• Draft a statement expressing deep concern that commits to nothing
• Distinguish between a values statement and a value
• Respond to a yes/no question at length, with feeling
• Recognize the moment when no further action is warranted and act accordingly
• Convene a committee that will convene another committee
• Lose $2.2 billion and describe it as a dialogue