Professor Michael H. Posner, the director of a new human rights center at the NYU Stern School of Business, spoke to Bloomberg Businessweek last week about the center’s plans to open this fall. Stern will be the first business school to create an institute of this kind. “Human rights and business” courses now join standard graduate business school curriculum and human rights will become a highly visible component of the Stern MBA.
In his interview, Posner explained how Stern will integrate the center into its MBA program. First, under Posner’s guidance, Stern has developed new coursework and will conduct research into the meaningful ways in which business and human rights intersect. Second, the center will act as a forum for discussing issues and events related to human rights and business; Posner has already scheduled one such discussion this September, when the Stern community will gather to review the garment industry in Bangladesh in the wake of a tragedy this April in which a factory collapsed and 1,100 workers lost their lives. Third, Posner projects that the Center will become a news, information, and activism outlet for human rights and business challenges.
Professor Posner comes to Stern with 30 years of policy making, advocacy, and research experience in the arena of human rights. Beginning in 2009, he served in the U.S. Department of State as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. Before working at the Department of State, Posner headed Human Rights First, a global organization that works to advance universal human rights. NYU Stern, by hiring Posner and creating the Center, has made a marked commitment to ethical commerce. If Posner’s long-term vision comes to fruition, NYU Stern’s human-rights center may prove to be the first of many such programs established at business schools.