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{shortcode-21cc3534b02e5a90dd1b6e61be0fe28423896a7e}s a student in the Harvard Kennedy School’s Mid-Career Master in Public Administration program, Melissa A. Hortman lived two lives.
In one, she was an active Democratic state representative and raising a family in Minnesota. In another, she was a star graduate student — staying late after class, attending office hours, scheduling chats over coffee, and mentoring her up-and-coming classmates.
HKS lecturer Richard Parker, who taught Hortman in an economics course, said Hortman would come up to him as often as twice a week to ask for additional readings and resources — but not to grandstand.
“There are a lot of self-interested people who come up and ask you questions as a professor,” Parker said. “She was the gold standard. She was the real deal. She was learning something new. She was learning a new way of seeing the world that she wanted to live in and she wanted to affect.”
And Hortman did just that. After graduating from the MC/MPA program in 2018, Hortman returned to Minnesota, where she was elevated to speaker of the House of Representatives in 2019. As speaker, she championed bipartisan police reform in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, shepherded a bill to keep abortion legal in Minnesota, and led the push for paid family and medical leave.
Hortman, 55, and her husband, Mark Hortman, 58, were assassinated at their home early Saturday morning. They are survived by two adult children.
The man suspected of shooting Hortman, Vance L. Boelter, was taken into custody by law enforcement on Sunday after a two-day manhunt.
Early in the search, officials found a list of about 70 potential targets — including prominent Democratic lawmakers and abortion providers — that set the state on edge.
“This tragedy is part of the reality of what it means to serve the public and the people bravely,” said Timothy P. McCarthy, a Harvard lecturer who taught Hortman at HKS. “And we’re living in a time where that has become perilous, and yet the bravest among us — and Melissa was — do it anyway.”
Hortman was born and raised in Minnesota. A graduate of Boston University and the University of Minnesota School of Law, Hortman started her career as an attorney. She then transitioned to politics, having worked for both Al Gore and John Kerry in college.
Upon returning to Minnesota, Hortman was twice unsuccessful in bids for the state legislature. On her third campaign in 2004, Hortman triumphed, flipping her home district to the Democrats. She would spend the rest of her career in the statehouse.
But after nearly six terms in the legislature, Hortman decided to go back to school, enrolling in an HKS program designed for mid-career professionals to sharpen their skills. She took courses in fall 2016 and fall 2017, between legislative sessions, before receiving her diploma the next spring.
She was remembered by classmates and professors as the very best of HKS — serious about learning, but even more eager to bring lessons from the classroom back to Minnesotans.
“She was, in some sense, exactly the person that I would have wanted to have as a student at the Kennedy School, someone who was bright, who was idealistic, who saw the public sector as a place to do work,” Parker said.
Morgan S. Brown ’06, a friend and HKS classmate of Hortman’s, said that Hortman embodied “humility and curiosity.”
“Coming back to a mid-career graduate program, I think is demonstrating that, ‘I don’t have it all figured out, but there’s more that I can learn,” Brown said. “And maybe there’s something in there that can help somebody else. She really did it from a very selfless place.”
McCarthy, who taught Hortman in a class on effective communication, recounted an office hours conversation with Hortman where she expressed a desire “to find her voice again.”
“She always knew what mattered to her. That was clear from the very minute I met her,” McCarthy said. “She just needed some space to work it out.”
It didn’t take long for Hortman to find that voice. She made her presence felt in the legislature, where she was known both for moments of progressive virality — like when she called out her white colleagues, accusing them of ignoring women of color — but also for pragmatic deal-making.
Just a week ago, Hortman was the sole Democrat to support a budget that slashed healthcare for undocumented immigrants. The compromise with her Republican colleagues, which she told reporters she made reluctantly, helped avert a government shutdown.
Throughout, McCarthy stayed close with Hortman, watching his former student steer Minnesota through a period of unprecedented crisis and partisan divide.
“She found an even bigger version of her voice in that time,” McCarthy said. “Moments of crisis and tragedy make or break us, and they made her. I was so, always, so proud of her.”
But even before she left HKS, Hortman was unnerved by the dangers of being an outspoken public official.
HKS lecturer Robert W. Livingston, another one of Hortman’s instructors, recalled a conversation with Hortman in the fall of 2017. Hortman already seemed “unsettled by the increase in brazen hostility that she faced in the wake of the 2016 presidential election,” Livingston wrote in a statement.
“In 2017, she had already been in politics for well over a decade,” Livingston wrote. “But she noted a palpable shift in climate and incivility after Trump’s election.”
In an email exchange after their conversation, Hortman thanked Livingston “for listening to me talk about how hard it is to be a political leader today in Trump’s America.”
“Since the 2016 election, sometimes I feel the weight of the world more heavily on my shoulders than I have in 13 years of public service, and it was good to talk about that,” Hortman wrote at the time.
But with classmates, Hortman never let it show, according to Brown. Instead, she prioritized building relationships — and especially, mentoring other female elected officials.
“I think everybody in the class felt like they had a personal connection with Melissa, or a personal moment where she’d helped them, or she’d given them advice,” Brown said.
“I hope her time at Harvard was very helpful for her, but I have absolutely no doubt that it was helpful for all of us who got to interact with her,” he added.
HKS spokesperson Daniel B. Harsha wrote in a statement that Hortman’s death was a “devastating loss for the HKS community.”
“Melissa was a dedicated and inspiring public servant,” Harsha wrote. “She will be missed by faculty, staff, and so many alumni who studied with her during her time on campus.”
Miriam T. Aschkenasy, a classmate who was considering a run for elected office, cited Hortman as a mentor and a “valuable resource.”
“She helped me really understand that you just, if you want to get the work done, then you’ve got to get the work done, right?” Aschkenasy said. “It’s not about the fanfare. She was never about the fanfare.”
Vermont state senate majority leader Kesha Ram Hinsdale, a classmate in the MC/MPA program, was “instantly drawn” to Hortman when they met and said Hortman “modeled what a leader should be like and look like.”
“I remember meeting her, talking to her, and thinking, ‘Wow, she’s just a powerful presence,’” Ram Hinsdale said.
When Ram Hinsdale learned of Hortman’s assassination on Saturday morning, she had second thoughts about attending a protest that day — maybe she would be better off staying home and installing a security system, Ram Hinsdale wondered.
But then she imagined what Hortman would have done.
“She’d say, ‘Shed some tears, hug your kids, and then go be with the people. Make a difference. Raise your voice. Do not let them win. Do not let them silence you,’” Ram Hinsdale said. “And so that’s what I did.”
—Staff writer Elise A. Spenner can be reached at elise.spenner@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X at @EliseSpenner.
—Staff writer Tanya J. Vidhun can be reached at tanya.vidhun@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @tanyavidhun.
