What the Obama Presidential Center Means for Harris Students

Ranjan Daniels, Senior Associate Dean of Student Recruitment and Global Outreach, reflects on his visit to the Obama Presidential Center. 

If you are studying public policy at the University of Chicago, you already know that Hyde Park is a special place to do it. Students from around the world gather here to develop solutions to the most vexing problems facing humanity—and you do so within walking distance of where Barack Obama taught constitutional law, campaigned for the Senate, and built the political relationships that carried him to the White House. That history is easy to take for granted, until something makes you see it differently.

The Obama Presidential Center, which opened to the public on Juneteenth, is that something.

I toured the Center with my family shortly after it opened. Over the past few years, we had watched its construction with interest but weren't sure what to expect. I grew up in Hyde Park, walked these same blocks long before any of this was imaginable—before a South Side community organizer named Barack would become a household word, let alone the subject of a presidential center on the very parkland where I played as a kid.

For current and future Harris students, the Center will enrich your education, sharpen your sense of purpose, and deepen your connections to the city of Chicago and a global network of policy leaders. Walking through the galleries, I was struck by how vividly the Center captures what Harris faculty, students, and alumni believe: that policy is not a technical exercise conducted at a distance from human lives, but the mechanism by which societies decide whose lives improve or whose are left behind. Obama Foundation CEO Valerie Jarrett put it plainly—the Center is built on the conviction that ordinary people can do extraordinary things when they understand the history they are part of and act accordingly.

That conviction has a direct institutional expression at Harris. The University of Chicago Obama Foundation Scholars Program—a joint initiative of the Obama Foundation, Harris Public Policy, the Booth School of Business, and the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice—brings together graduate students with track records of community-engaged work and equips them with the interdisciplinary tools to take that work to scale. The program's premise mirrors the Center's: that big problems are not solved within a single discipline or sector, and that lasting change requires fluency across policy, business, and social work.

The Obama Presidential Center is not a monument to a finished project. It is an invitation to organize, collaborate, and develop transformative policies that improve lives. If you came to UChicago because you believe rigorous analysis in service of human dignity is worth a career, the Center will remind you why.