After working for Carter, Champion returned to Harvard to serve as the Executive Dean of the Kennedy School of Government (KSG) until he left temporarily to become chief of staff to former Mass. Governor Michael Dukakis in his failed bid for the presidency in 1988.

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Patricia A. Graham, Warren professor of the history of American education, says her appointment as the director of the National Institute of Education (NIE) was influenced by her acquaintence with Champion, who was directly involved in filling the vacant positions within HEW.

Before her move to Washington, Graham served as dean of the Radcliffe Institute and vice president of Radcliffe College.

At the time of Carter’s election, she was actively involved in developing the details of the 1977 Radcliffe “non-merger merger” agreement with Harvard.

Graham worked to create an agreement that would make Harvard responsible for the undergraduate education of women while permitting Radcliffe to keep its endowment and real estate.

During these negotiations, Graham met Champion, who sought to bring Radcliffe’s endowment under Harvard’s control.

“Though we were on different sides of the negotiations, we had come to respect each other,” Graham says.

At the NIE, Graham ran a $70 million agency responsible for educational research.

The agency was new and had a troubled political history. But Carter’s administration substantially increased NIE’s budget to fund research on the effects of race, gender, and social class on academic achievement.

“I learned an enormous amount at NIE, and when I resigned, I wrote President Carter saying that I had not worked this hard since the first year I taught,” Graham says.

In 1981, when she returned to Harvard, Graham was appointed dean of the Graduate School of Education, a position she still holds today.

“Working for my country’s government and trying to make it serve its citizens better is an opportunity I cherish and for which I am extremely grateful,” Graham says.