Malcolm Dean (HF 1966-68)
was no stranger to employment and travel when he started his Harkness Fellowship. He was trained as a journalist by Kemsley weekly newspapers for four years, and spent a further three working his way around the world reporting in Canada, the West Indies, Australia, and South East Asia. On his return in 1964, he joined Reuters before taking up a fellowship at Ruskin College, Oxford. The first year of his Harkness Fellowship was in Chicago, the second working in Congress as a speechwriter to a senator and then a congressman.
Joining the Guardian in 1969, he worked his way up from roving reporter to social affairs leader-writer and then associate editor. He launched the paper’s hugely successful weekly Society section in 1979, which he edited for most of its 21 years, covering all aspects of social policy.
He was a special adviser to the Secretary of State for Health and Social Security in the last year of the 1974-79 Labour government, served on more than a dozen national social policy working parties, chaired a Joseph Rowntree Foundation commission on older people, and was a trustee of six charities, including a founding trustee of the Young Foundation
Malcolm retired from the Guardian in 2006 to take up a fellowship at Nuffield College, Oxford, for 11 years. He spent the first two years researching and writing his book ‘Democracy under Attack: How the Media Distort Policy and Politics’.