Jacinda Ardern Takes Up Lecturing and Mentoring Role at University of Sydney

Former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern has taken up a role at the University of Sydney, where she will give lectures and mentor students after relocating to Australia earlier this year.

Ardern started this month. Her work will center on empathetic leadership, social cohesion and civic trust. The university said she will be based in its school of public health, where she will explore ways to tackle global health challenges with a focus on equity, inclusion and wellbeing.

She will host guest lectures and masterclasses and take part in mentoring. The university made clear, however, that the position is not a full-time teaching job.

"I'm delighted to be joining the University of Sydney," Ardern said. "I've found myself especially focused on the question of leadership since leaving office, and how we can better support and encourage the kind of leadership needed to tackle our many global challenges."

Vice-chancellor Mark Scott said he had long admired the courage and humanity she brought to public life. "Dame Jacinda led New Zealand through events of profound consequence and her leadership demonstrated that empathy and resolve do not compete with one another; each can strengthen the other," he said. He added that students would meet not only a former prime minister but also "a thoughtful teacher with a great deal to share about public leadership and service."

Ardern spoke about leadership in an ABC Conversations interview in July. She said she believed people were looking for empathetic leadership, even though many world leaders embody a "dominant style" of leadership. In her view, voters who back parties on the fringes of the mainstream are often not endorsing an ideology. Research suggests, she said, that they are voting against a status quo they feel no longer serves them. "So I think all the signs actually point to people wanting something different than what they're getting now," she said.

Ardern retired from politics in January 2023 after more than five years as prime minister and Labour party leader. During that time she led New Zealand through the Christchurch terrorist attack, the Whakaari volcanic eruption and the Covid pandemic. In 2017, at age 37, she became the world's youngest-serving female leader, and she later became the second world leader to give birth while in office.

Since leaving office, Ardern has held fellowships at Harvard University focused on public leadership and technology governance. She published her memoir, A Different Kind of Power, in 2025.

Ardern, her husband Clarke Gayford and their daughter Neve moved to Sydney earlier this year. They bought a property in the city's northern beaches for $5.3m.