Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist has been named inaugural Director of the Master of Priority Studies, the School of Emergent Priorities' flagship graduate program.
Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist, who studies how a priority gets a budget line before it gets a definition, now leads a program that gave itself both
Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist has spent his career tracing the moment a University priority acquires a budget line well before anyone has finished scoping what the priority actually is. This week the School of Emergent Priorities handed him a program built on exactly that gap: Dr Lindqvist becomes the inaugural Director of the Master of Priority Studies.
A program earns its first cohort long before its second-year electives are settled. I have spent a career describing that gap from the outside. Running one from the inside is a different vantage point on the same phenomenon.
— Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist, Director, Master of Priority Studies
The Directorship is new: the program has admitted several intakes without one, its oversight distributed informally across the teaching team until now. The School says Dr Lindqvist’s research on commitment durability — how a funding decision can outpace the definition meant to justify it — will shape the program’s next curriculum review, due to report within the current teaching period.
“Kwame has told us for years that a resourced priority outruns its own paperwork,” said Professor Verity Marris, Director of the Trajectory Analytics Group. “Handing him a program is either the fastest way to close that gap or the best possible case study for keeping it open.”
The Master of Priority Studies continues enrolling for the current teaching period; further curriculum detail will follow under the new Directorship.