Clean-up on Aisle Six
For years I have wanted to teach ethics in my business school course roster. For one reason or another, mostly, I imagine, because ethics is like Sociology… what could be so hard about it? Two years ago, I was given the chance and embraced it wholeheartedly. Setting up a course is always a lot of work. This is especially so when there is no defined curriculum. In my thirteen years of teaching at the graduate business school level, I have NEVER been given a defined curriculum. That is less strange when you are teaching bespoke electives as I did at Cornell. But here at USD, I have generally been asked to teach required courses in the case of Advanced Corporate Finance and Law, Policy & Ethics. One is required for a finance concentration and the other is simply a required course for the MBA degree. In both cases, I was given complete freedom to design the course in whatever way I wanted. The only thing I couldn’t change was the course title for some reason. I’m guessing that is how they wanted to define the curriculum. When I started teaching in 2007, I asked an old professor of mine who was still in harness, how much preparation was needed to build a course. He estimated that for every hour of lecture time there was approximately five hours of preparation required. So, for a sixteen-week course of two credits (my ethics course is only two credits), that’s 160 hours of preparation. That may have been the case for an experienced professor, but at the time, I estimated that it took me twenty hours per hour of lecture or more like 640 hours. I am much more experienced now, so I will agree to ten hours of prep per hour of lecture, so 320 hours for a new course and then 160 hours for a refresh or update of a previously aired course. Any way you look at it, a lot goes into it.
This semester is the third time I have taught Law, Policy & Ethics and I feel like I have learned something each semester and made the course better and better. I feel very confident in the list of core issues we cover. I am very sure that they are all very much on-point as significant issues in the current environment. I am less sure that I haven’t missed something important, but I suspect that in three semesters, I must have stumbled over any idea worthy of adding to the list. What has changed the most is the method of teaching. Some has been based on class size, some on personal evolution and some based on the reaction of the students. I really wish I could say teaching is easy or that it comes naturally to me, but it really doesn’t. It’s hard work. My first semester I had 34 students, then 17 and now 47. The first time through I hit on using movies for the basis for our case discussions. I very quickly added movies to the syllabus. By the second semester, the movies formed the basis of the course themes but became less than perfect for the purpose at hand. Then, this semester, the movies have fallen into a secondary position as the size of the class has made direct debate too difficult with 47 students. I’ve now used live debate, a new system called Packback for AI-driven and graded debates and Blackboard Discussion Forum, and I cannot say for sure what works best for this purpose.
Despite all my efforts and an abundance of classroom experience keeping students engaged, this has neither been easy nor particularly successful. I take teaching very seriously, so I do not say that easily. I am usually a very confident speaker and teacher. I am confident in my experience and knowledge and I am equally confident in my presentation and group dynamics skills. But this time feels different. The sheer number of students is less the issue even though 47 is a large class for this sort of “soft” subject matter. When I taught the hedge fund course, The Search for Alpha, there were as many as 110 in class, all with laptop computers open and available to research and fact-check anything I said. And still I was not cowed. That course was about knowledge and experience and I feel I had the edge in both to give me the assurance that I had something of value to give those students. This course is somewhat about experience, but very little about knowledge. The exception is that awareness of the current events governing our lives every day in our tumultuous world have currency in their example of issues at the intersection of law, policy and ethics. But the real challenge for this course is the ambiguous art of influence. To influence students to think deeply about the world around around us, human nature and the righteous path for the benefit of our society as we choose to define it…that is no mean feat.
When examining the previous syllabi for this course, I was reasonably impressed with the litany of stakeholder and conflict of interest notions listed. Those seemed quite relevant to modern business life and yet more definitional than truly thought-provoking. What did little to impress me was course time dedicated to the philosophical basis for ethical decision-making. A study of the great thinkers in the ethical sphere simply did not strike me as particularly helpful or interesting to modern business students. Perhaps in an undergraduate humanities-driven program, but not in anything resembling the practicum that is supposed to be a graduate business program. I therefore defined my objective for the course to be to teach students the value of civil dialogue around complex ethical issues. That requires a combination of the wisdom and respect to listen to alternate views, and the discipline and foresight to be judicious in what you say and how you say it so as not to offend the sensibilities of others on delicate issues. My thinking has been that to teach those two characteristics would be a meaningful accomplishment, especially if it were focused around the most meaningful topics that confront us as a country/world and people. Getting from here to there would be the issue.
Yesterday was our eighth class of the semester, which is comprised of twelve classes, and it proved to be a disaster. The topic was, in the broadest sense, individual liberty versus the common good. Specifically, it was about whistleblowing and whether it is good for business and society or not. It is a complicated concept because it causes great disruption and while potentially corrective, it also has a good chance to reward the whistleblower with irreparable harm to his career, his company, his family and himself. But the bigger issue for people to grapple with is that of the libertarian ideal that undergirds the American psyche and the notion of the common good. There are few issues which can raise hackles with Americans more than that one.
It has become clear to me that my class has views as diverse as any group of Americans you might encounter. Add to that the normal gathering of foreign graduate students from a diverse array of countries, and you have a very potentially volatile concoction. That is where class number eight came off the rails. The students, probably goaded by the controversial topic, got themselves twisted into several knots and started in on each other. This was exactly contrary to the goals I had set for the class. All I could think was that if I was at Costco, the store manager would be announcing that there was a need for a clean-up on aisle six. So, as the store manager of our classroom, I have written to the class and asked that we all work harder on our primary goals of mutual respect. We will see next week if we can clean things up on aisle six.