“How many people our age, when you think about it, would be able to walk in without turning around and going to the nearest Holiday Inn?” he asks.

“I know it sounds crazy but to me, that was part of what I was coming for—to be put in an unfamiliar setting and say, ‘Ron, are you still able to accommodate the unexpected? Are you still able to cut your mustard, as we say back home in Kentucky?’”

Turning the Tables

Since his Congressional term ended in 1995, Mazzoli has taught at the Brandeis School of Law in Louisville, Ky., where he graduated first in his law class 43 years ago.

This year, he notes, the academic shoe is “on the other foot.”

“Now I’m going to be sitting down, not standing up. I’ve going to be listening and taking notes, not giving the lecture and having the notes in front of me taken. I’m going to be expected to do certain things that, in the past, I’ve expected others to do,” he says. “I hope I’m prepared for it. It’s sort of an open question—am I really prepared to shift gears?”

He expects his teaching experience to inform his outlook as a student—though to what extent he is unsure, he says.

“The proof will be in the pudding,” he says. The real test will come “three months from now, when we have mid-semesters and the teachers work us over with blunt instruments.”

Mazzoli says he is concerned about the master program’s quantitative demands. He explains that he has not worked rigorously with numbers since his own undergraduate experience.

His greatest fears for the coming year are academic rather than social, he says, largely because of the comfortable environment he found at Harvard during his fellowship last year—an environment in which age difference melted away.

Mazzoli brims with stories about students with whom he interacted closely during time in Cambridge—the KSG student aspiring to a career in public office, the history concentrator with whom he discussed the merits of historical study for a political career, the recent graduate interested in defense whom he met that morning. He remembers each of their names.

“Little episodes like that are just what this amazing university is about,” he says. Mazzoli explains he is looking forward to a rich social life beginning over the course of the coming year.

“It will be a wonderful opportunity to be with younger people. Out of that group of 200 people will come mayors and governors and people who will establish businesses. And I hope over many years to come I’ll be able to say, ‘I was in the Kennedy School with that person’ and be able to call and say, ‘Hey, Pete, congratulations,’ or ‘Mary, I just read about your election. It’s wonderful.’”

Settling In

Later this month, Mazzoli and his wife will move into a sightly larger apartment—including a study and a kitchenette—below their present suite.