Bill de Blasio is heading back to Boston.
The Red Sox-loving, Massachusetts-raised 109th mayor of New York City will return to the Cambridge environs of his youth in the fall to serve as a visiting fellow at Harvard University, the school said Wednesday.
The role will involve the two-term mayor making several visits to campus for seminars and events at Harvard’s Institute of Politics, according to the school.
De Blasio, a 61-year-old Democrat who left City Hall at the end of 2021, spent much of this summer campaigning to represent New York’s 10th Congressional District, which covers his home Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope.
But he dropped out of the race last month, bowing to poor poll numbers, and has since been planning his next move. (He declined to disclose his choice in the House race as he entered the Park Slope Armory polling site during early voting; Dan Goldman won the race.)
As he exited the race in July, de Blasio said, “Public service is what I want to do, and that can take all sorts of forms: nonprofits and any number of good causes.”
“I’m going to see what makes sense,” he told the Daily News then. “I just know it won’t be electoral politics.”
At least for now, it seems a spell in academia made sense to de Blasio.
“I am happy to join the IOP to help inspire our nation’s next generation of leaders to find ways to serve in politics and public service, and to build a government that serves working people,” he said in a statement.
The interim director of the Institute of Politics, Setti Warren, expressed delight at bringing the former New York City mayor to Harvard’s campus.
Warren, the former mayor of Newton, Massachusetts, said in a statement that de Blasio’s experience with local government and national political campaigns will “provide invaluable insight” to the Harvard students.
“We are excited to welcome Mayor de Blasio to campus as we look for pathways forward on the challenges facing our democracy,” Warren said in the statement.
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