Mayor to Mid Career
Losing his reelection may be the best career move Jim Montgomery ever made

IN APRIL 2005, after serving eight years as mayor of Taylorville, Illinois, Jim Montgomery lost his reelection. On his last day in office, as the final box was being packed, the phone rang. It was a call that would drastically alter his life. Little did he suspect that in three months, he and his family would relocate more than a thousand miles to live in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The story begins nearly 15 years earlier when Montgomery learned of the Senior Executives in State and Local Government Program while working for State Senator Penny Severns S&L 1989. Fourteen years later, the Kennedy School came to his attention again after a friend, Sue Klinkhamer, the former mayor of St. Charles, Illinois, and a July 2004 State and Local alumna, recommended the program to him. She had attended the program on a fellowship from the Fannie Mae Foundation and was eager to assist Montgomery in the application process, speaking on his behalf to both the director of the program and Fannie Mae.

Montgomery applied. Then he put it out of his mind and turned his attention to reelection. So when a call came from a Fannie Mae Foundation representative on Montgomery’s last day in office, his first feeling was one of concern. “I was told I had been accepted to the program and awarded a Fannie Mae Fellowship. I asked if they knew I had just lost my election,” said Montgomery. (They did.) If Fannie Mae knew, Montgomery wondered, did Harvard know he had lost too?

As it turned out, there was little reason to worry. “He became more interesting to us,” says Paige Ennis, director of the State and Local Program. “In Executive Education, we love working with people in transition.”

Early last summer, Montgomery packed his bags and arrived in Cambridge for the start of the three-week program. In a break from class, Montgomery attended an information session on the Mid-Career Master in Public Administration (MPA) degree program. When Ennis asked if he had any interest, Montgomery answered yes.

Ennis took immediate action. She spoke to Bill Apgar, the faculty chair of the State and Local Program, who, having known Montgomery for only a couple of weeks stated, “We’ve got to figure out how to get this guy in here.”

Within days, Montgomery was meeting with the director of admissions. He also got the support of his classmates in the State and Local Program: each one of them had signed a letter of recommendation, an unprecedented move the school had never seen before. Within a week, Montgomery flew home to Illinois, completed the MPA application, obtained additional letters of recommendation, and took his GRE. In early July, he learned he had been accepted.

For most anyone else, the transfer to Massachusetts from Illinois would have been a daunting task, but Montgomery pulled it off. In less than a month, incredibly, his family — his wife, Elizabeth, and their children, Ellie, Maddie, Evan, and Thomas — packed their bags and moved with him: a new home and a new school for everyone. — AC