Common Learning
I am sitting in an atrium on the University of San Diego campus in the building in which my course on Law, Policy and Ethics is assigned to meet. The building is called the Learning Commons and I am happy to report that at 6:40pm on a Wednesday night, there seems to be a lot of activity. This is distinctly different from last semester, when my course met in the Joan Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice building just across the way. It seems that Peace and Justice head home early and the building was pretty empty at this time of night in the middle of the week. Not so with the Learning Commons, which seems to be jumping with activity.
My experience of teaching the Graduate Business program at USD has been quite different from teaching at Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management, where I taught for a full decade as a Clinical Professor of Finance. At Cornell I literally knew everyone and everyone knew me. As a dual degree graduate and a very engaged and active alumnus, one who was a long-time Chairman of the Advisory Council, I knew the administration and staff well, I knew many of the professors since some who had taught me were still there, and I knew scads of alumni who passed through since I had been actively involved in soliciting donations from all of them and getting them further engaged in the school. I maintained a shared office in the building and I had (still do for another little bit) a house just off campus where the school held many a function on our outdoor backyard. Going there to teach on any given day was always very familiar to me. I was actively involved in selecting, funding and designing the building and its state-of-the-art. My bearded face was in bronze relieve in that atrium (one of fifteen since the founding of the school 75 years ago). Here at USD I am just a nameless, faceless, adjunct lecturer and this Learning Commons atrium is almost emblematic of my presence (or lack thereof) here at University of San Diego.
To a certain extent, none of this is a function of either Cornell or USD, but rather a function of circumstances and time and place. The truth is that I am increasingly distant from Cornell for reasons which are too complicated to review again here, not the least of which is that I am choosing to locate myself in San Diego and travel back in that direction only irregularly (actually, at this point, more or less annually in the summer when most of the business school is out doing internships or the such). The USD reality is that the campus is thirty miles away and we don’t tend to hang out in the City of San Diego too much, so I have simply not been on campus too much and really don’t know it much at all. This isn’t helped by the fact that the business school is in the midst of building a new building and in the interim, we are teaching anywhere on campus where a room is available. It also isn’t helpful to the purpose of connecting myself with the school that my designated course time has become Wednesday nights between 7-10pm, not exactly a time when many other faculty are around to meet casually.
Being assigned a specific time and day slot for my teaching is generally an issue of convenience, but convenience can be a distraction. Kim and I figured that my teaching at USD might be a good way to expand our social network. At this point as I wrap up my second year of being listed as a faculty member, I have only met in person with the Associate Dean who hired me and the then new Dean. I have literally not met any of the other members of the faculty. Technically I work for the Chairman of the Finance Department and the Chairwoman of the Ethics Department. I have met neither in person, while I have talked to both on the phone and done plenty of emailing with them. I have gotten good evaluations from students, but my interaction with the University is limited to a weekly evening gathering with students and….nothing more. I arrive about 20 minutes early and leave after class ends. That, and submitting grades, is the full extent of my involvement to date. Its convenient (parking is pretty easy in the evening), but not terribly engaging other than the actual class work.
So you might be wondering why I do this. At Cornell I was paid 5-6X what I am paid to teach at USD, so its not the money, to be sure. And we have established that the social side of the connection is pretty much non-existent. The prestige of being a professor could be worthwhile except I carried the title of Clinical Professor at an Ivy League University, where here at USD, a nice private school of Catholic heritage, I am, to the best of my knowledge, simply a member of the faculty. So it must be something else. I think tonight’s class has informed that issue very clearly.
Tonight I chose to invite Steve Larsen, a serial Silicon Valley CEO and entrepreneur (not to mention an AFMC motorcycle riding buddy for the past 25 years) to do a guest lecture on business ethics. He chose to do the Theranos case and the discussion of the “fake it till you make it” model of business development that has tended to pervade Silicon Valley since the days of Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison. Theranos” founder, Elizabeth Holmes has gotten lots of profile the last few years as the first woman to crack the Unicorn glass ceiling and then, the first woman to get indicted and convicted of the “faking it” felony with regard to misrepresentation to investors. It was a great case with which to kick off the ethics debates we will be having over the course of the semester.. This class is populated with exactly 50% women. Steve spent a good deal of time teasing out the issue of whether Holmes was a victim of societal misogyny, which was an actively debated concept.
Engagement and active class participation are normally desirable goals in a graduate class. In a business ethics course they are even more critical to the learning process since you cannot really teach ethics as much as you can force students to contemplate the ethical conundrum in its various dimensions and force them to see as many sides of the issues as exist. To do that requires students to want to engage and participate. I have structured the course to encourage just that by making 30% of their grade a function of impromptu participation, 35% from actively managing the debate of one of six assigned cases, and the last 35% from the final exam, which will be a list of seven questions that come from the debates.
In twelve years of teaching I have never seen so much student engagement as we had during this debate. 90% of the class participated actively with truly excellent comments both pro and con the defense of Elizabeth Holmes. I was hugely impressed with the students and their openness. Steve picked a winning case and did a great job of setting up the conflict, which really gave the students fresh ethical meat to chew on. This was an UNcommon learning experience…in a good way.