Since leaving the House in 2007, Republican Mark Kennedy of Minnesota has been busy — in addition to giving strategic advice to business, he helped start the Economic Club of Minnesota, has been lecturing at universities and has even led a University of Pennsylvania research team on high-speed rail. It has been a career transformation for the CPA who held executive positions at Accenture and Pillsbury Co., and he made another last week when he became executive director of George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management.

(TOM WILLIAMS / CQ ROLL CALL )

The school, started in 1987, teaches politics as an applied field rather than as a social study. It has been without a full-time leader since the founding dean, F. Christopher Arterton, went back to teaching in 2010.

Kennedy for six years represented a suburban Minneapolis district that elected Republican Michele Bachmann in 2006. He says his dual background in business and politics offer what the university needs. “The biggest challenges we face in society are not because we don’t have the right answers or we don’t have policy solutions to them,” he says. “It’s that we can’t reach agreement on a solution. Too often we have the least preferred ‘no’ answer because we can’t reach political agreement.”

Kennedy, 54, was a staunch conservative and outspoken supporter of President George W. Bush, a position which contributed to his failed Senate race against Democrat Amy Klobucharin 2006. He bucked his party on some big issues, voting against Bush’s 2001 education bill and his plans for oil drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.