Renowned Columbia University Professor to headline Sterling Bank Leadership Series

Professor Howard French, author, photographer, former foreign correspondent for the New York Times and current Professor of Journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, will headline the fourth edition of the Sterling Leadership Series (SLS).

This year’s SLS, themed, ‘Born In Blackness: Truth, Lies and X,” is billed as a hybrid event and will be held on November 23, 2022.

The American journalist and academic has been an instructor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism since 2008.

Prior to re-entering the ivory towers, Professor French was an instructor in Cote D’Ivoire in the 1980s before becoming a reporter and international correspondent for the prestigious New York Times, where he wrote extensively on West and Central Africa.

Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of Sterling Bank, Dapo Martins, said, “The Sterling Leadership Series is a platform to bring together a diverse group of opinion leaders and global thinkers to share their views and experiences to shape perspectives on key issues, and inspire others to contribute to the reimagining of a more stable socio-political environment in Nigeria in particular, and the African continent in general.”

Speaking on the inspiration for this year’s theme, Mr Martins said, “As a people, we tend to focus on today as our major challenge,” noting that, “Most Gen X, millennials and Gen Zs are out of sync with history because the few that are informed have an easy tendency to neglect the actual reasons behind today’s actions, and are conditioned to quickly forget the past. This creates a worrisome loop in which we are set to repeat history’s mistakes, time and time again.”

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He said the discourse would spotlight how Nigerians and Africans came to start thinking the way they currently do, the effect of this thinking on behaviours exhibited today, their journey to the present, the shift in thinking required to start taking tomorrow back today.

The previous and highly successful editions of the SLS have featured prestigious speakers such as Nobel Laureate and poet, Professor Wole Soyinka; former Minister of Communication and Technology, Dr Omobola Johnson and former Managing Director and CEO of Unilever Nigeria Plc, Yaw Sarkoh.