Addressing Human Rights In Teaching and Research.
By Michael Posner
In the early 1950s, the Ford Foundation made a major investment in business education. Its investment was driven by the foundation’s view that the study of business was integral to maintaining peace and prosperity through its capacity to promote democracy and economic development.
But at the time, the foundation’s assessment of the state of business education was unfavorable. In a memo, the foundation described business schools as “unimaginative, non-theoretical faculties teaching from descriptive, practice-oriented texts to classes of second-rate, vocationally minded students.”
Subsequently, the foundation commissioned economists James Howell and Robert Gordon to conduct a comprehensive 1959 study of business education in the United States. In it, Gordon and Howell proposed a model of education that places greater emphasis on theory, becoming “a process of self-development, in which the student develops the capacity to see the relevance of what is being learned and to build on this knowledge an ability to deal with problems that he will meet in later years.”
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Michael Posner is the Jerome Kohlberg Professor of Ethics and Finance, Professor of Business and Society and Director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights.