The W. Michael Hoffman Center for Business Ethics at Bentley University is turning 50 this year. That’s worth pausing on.
Founded in 1976, the Hoffman Center is one of the oldest and most respected business ethics institutes in the world. Think about what 1976 looked like: Watergate was barely in the rearview mirror, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act hadn’t been signed yet, and the idea that a university would dedicate an entire center to business ethics was ahead of its time.
They were right to do it early. The world caught up.
On October 15 and 16, 2026, Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts is hosting a two-day celebration. The festivities begin Thursday evening with a reception and dinner ($50 to attend), followed by a full conference and reception on Friday. If you work in ethics, compliance, or business leadership, this is not an event to miss.
Ethics doesn’t sell itself. It never has. Getting business leaders to take ethics seriously — really seriously, not just as a line item in a compliance budget — takes sustained effort by people who believe the work matters even when the headlines don’t demand it. That’s what the Hoffman Center has been doing since Gerald Ford was president.
Their mission is simple to state and difficult to execute: align effective business performance with ethical business conduct. Not one or the other. Both. The “and” in that sentence is where most organizations stumble.
As a member of the Center’s Advisory Board, I’ve seen firsthand how seriously they take that mission — bringing together academics and practitioners through programs like their Brown Bag Research Series and ethics@work, where real dilemmas get examined by people who live them.
Fifty years of that kind of work deserves a celebration. I hope to see you there.
The Ethical Leader 