NYU Appointment Cheers Caribbean Community

Spotlight: Peter Blair Henry

By Jody Rathgeb

      Jamaicans, the Jamaican diaspora – and indeed, nearly everyone with drops of Caribbean sunshine in their blood – have been abuzz with joy that “one of ours” has been named as the new dean at the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University.

      Peter Blair Henry, a Jamaican-born professor of economics at Stanford University, will take on his new position on Jan. 15, 2010. He is NYU’s first black business school dean.

      Henry needn’t have broken a race barrier to be remarkable. His resume shows him to be a rare combination of former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, basketball great Patrick Ewing, and maybe even a bit of runner Usain Bolt – all with Jamaican roots of their own. Among other accomplishments:

• At Stanford, he is the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of International Economics, the John and Cynthia Fry Gunn Faculty Scholar, and associate director of the Center for Global Business and the Economy at the Graduate School of Business.
• He has national positions at the Brookings Institution, the Council of Foreign Relations and the National Bureau of Economic Research. He led President Barack Obama’s transitional team reviewing the International Monetary Fund and has since been appointed to the Presidential Commission on White House Fellows.
• He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, and while in graduate school at Massachusetts Institute of Technology he served as a consultant to the Governors Bank of Jamaica and the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank.
• During his school years, he played both basketball and football as well as garnering recognition as a top-flight honor student. He received a BA in economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a BA in mathematics from Oxford and a Ph.D. in economics from M.I.T.

      Henry became a U.S. citizen in 1986, but his Caribbean roots have served him well in his research, which focuses on emerging markets and the impact of economic reform on people in developing countries. Among his many papers and studies is “Institutions vs. Policies: A Tale of Two Islands,” written with Conrad Miller and published in the American Economic Review, which compares the experiences of Barbados and Jamaica as each country became independent of Britain.

      Kudos for Henry have come from many quarters. NYU President John Sexton called him “a superb and high productive economics scholar, a natural leader, a community-builder, and a manifestly good person.” Congratulations have been posted on the bonitajamaica blog, which promotes tourism, and he was the subject of one of Sheaon Reid’s “Caribbean Talk” blogs in the Palm Beach Post. Island People United joins the praise.

(Sources: New York University, Stanford Graduate School of Business, The Network Journal)

 

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