Columbia Mayor Steve Benjamin awarded Harvard fellowship
Columbia’s outgoing mayor will be stepping into a big new role when he leaves office in early January.
Steve Benjamin has been named a senior leadership fellow by Harvard University’s T.H Chan School of Public Health. Benjamin will teach a course during the spring 2022 semester where he will “share his approach to tackling a different challenge, including the COVID-19 pandemic, gun violence, climate resilience, and racial justice,” the city announced in a news release Monday.
Benjamin has served as Columbia’s mayor since 2011. He is the city’s first Black mayor and has tied the South Carolina capital to a number of national organizations, including the National League of Cities and the U.S. Conference of Mayors.
“The historic moments that we’ve been through, and living them in real time ... having a front row seat as the mayor of a major American city, it seemed to be a wonderful time to share those lessons learned with some of the most talented, brightest minds the world has to offer at Harvard,” Benjamin said, referencing the social unrest that followed the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer and the ongoing public health crisis of the pandemic.
Columbia’s response at the onset of COVID-19, as well as Benjamin’s efforts to ban firearm bump stocks in Columbia and to improve relationships between law enforcement and residents are all mentioned as reasons the city’s top executive was chosen for the fellowship, according to press releases from both Benjamin and Harvard.
The public health school’s current senior leadership fellow, Dr. Subramaniam Sathasivam, is a former member of the Malaysian Parliament and most recently served as Malaysia’s Minister of Health. Before that, former Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin held the title.
Benjamin said he is honored that work he’s championed is being recognized in such an elevated way.
“I work very diligently and intentionally to put Columbia on the world stage,” Benjamin said. “So it’s humbling, but also flattering that folks would respect the work that we’ve done here.”
This will not be Benjamin’s first time in front of a college classroom. He’s taught the course “Columbia, South Carolina: Building a Great City” at the University of South Carolina Honors College and Columbia College. But this will be his first time in front of master’s and Ph.D. level students.
Benjamin will develop his own course for the Harvard fellowship with the help of a university teaching fellow. He hopes to focus his lessons both on specific challenges Columbia has faced and on abstract ideas about leadership and moral courage.
The city’s response to both the public health and economic consequences of COVID-19 will be included in a lesson, as will details on how Columbia faced massive flooding in 2015 and broad strategies for governing a capital city amid protests at the State House.
Beyond specific examples, Benjamin hopes to imbue a sense of humility among the future policymakers who take his class.
“It may sound odd, but you have to become good at not knowing. You have to commit yourself to being lifelong learners. And we also have to realize that we all suffer from some degree of experiential blindness,” Benjamin said. “If we’re going to lead, we have to be able to sit in someone else’s seat, or stand in someone else’s shoes, which requires us to constantly learn.”
Benjamin will teach on the Harvard campus in Boston. His teaching fellowship will run from Jan. 24 to March 11, 2022, and he plans to travel between Boston and Columbia often.
This story was originally published December 20, 2021 at 10:32 AM.
