Leonard Hausman Oral History

Leonard Hausman was born in January,1942 to Minnie and Max Hausman, both immigrants from Berlin, Germany. Hausman grew up in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn and attended Brooklyn Technical High School before enrolling at Queens College. While at Queens College, Hausman volunteered with the Virginia Student Help Project in 1963, which was an intensive education effort in Prince Edward County, Virginia where public schools were closed for five years in massive resistance to integration.

Hausman graduated from Queens College and went on to receive a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1967. Following his graduate studies, Hausman taught at North Carolina State University, where he was an assistant professor in the Economics Department. Hausman continued on to the faculty at Brandeis University where, between 1970 and 1988, he taught economics and assembled colleagues from several of the leading universities in the Boston area, several major firms in the US in banking, insurance, and computers, and from the US Government, to offer executive education in Beijing for five summers. Among his many accomplishments throughout his career, Hausman launched the first major programs at MIT with countries in East Asia, including education programs in China with the management schools at its leading universities. From 1988 to 1993, Hausman founded and led the East Asia Management Studies Center at the Sloan School of Management at MIT. In addition, between 1988 to 1998, Hausman taught economics and founded and directed the Institute for Social and Economic Policy in the Middle East at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, which at that time was the largest program on contemporary affairs in the Middle East at any university in the world.

Hausman is the co-author and editor of Securing Peace in the Middle East: Project on Economic Transition (MIT Press, 1994), along with Stanley Fischer, later to be the deputy head of the Federal Reserve Bank in the U.S., Anna Karasik Thurow, and Thomas C. Schelling, a Nobel Prize winner in economics. He currently works at Boston Healthcare Ventures and resides in Boston. From that position, he leads many business projects between Israeli firms and firms in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, and the UAE. He also leads healthcare projects between high quality institutions in the US and companies in China.