Keeping Up
I speak often about teaching and what it means to me. But now that I’ve done it at the graduate level for thirteen years, ten at Cornell and three so far at USD, I am approaching an inflection point and decisions will need to be made. Last week I bumped into the Chairman of the Finance Department, who is my boss for the Advanced Corporate Finance course that I have taught for two Fall semesters now. I asked if he wanted me to teach it again this Fall and he said he needed to do some review of the demand for the course, the course evaluations and the general curriculum lay of the land. That was a perfectly normal answer this early in the year and I read nothing into it one way or another. I know my evaluations for the course were good, not as great as the prior year, but still good to excellent, so I don’t think there will be a performance concern. I believe the biggest issue is that school curriculum tends to migrate and it would not surprise me if he is thinking about whether the finance program at USD should have an advanced corporate finance course anymore as one of its requirements. Having taught the course for two semesters, and never really having aspired to teach it in the first place, I would be fine if not asked to teach it this Fall for whatever reason. I believe I am only one or two sessions of the course away from not wanting to keep repeating the process anyway, so one semester sooner or later really doesn’t concern me too much. I am also not so very invested in teaching that course that it would wound me to stop doing so.
Ethics is a different matter. It has been a harder road to feel good about the ethics course, which I am now teaching for the third straight semester. I had always aspired to teach business ethics for some reason, and have learned just how challenging it can be. I feel like I have found my groove now, so assuming this semester goes well (hard to predict with the large class size of 48 students) I would probably rather be asked to teach it again than not. I guess that means I am a bit more invested in the course and am not as done with it as I am with corporate finance. The truth is that it has been a good experience teaching these courses at USD and they have been different enough from my teaching experience at Cornell to have added another dimension to my teaching experience. I’m not sure why that matters if I am inclined to wrap up my teaching career, but I guess we are all collectors of life experiences one way or another and I do seem to like having that added dimension to my repertoire.
One of the biggest benefits of teaching that I have found…and the one that is much more true of the curriculum I have taught at USD than that which I taught at Cornell, is that it is helping me keep up with the changing world. I want to use a few examples from both of my courses. In the advanced corporate finance course I spend the first third of the course on fundamentals culminating with valuations, which are the basic fodder of corporate finance. The middle section is on the hard core issue of financing public and private companies, which I consider to be the most important thing these students need to take away from the course to be competent in the finance field. The last part of the course is on new age finance like FinTech, DeFi and Blockchain, all of which are very new and very controversial because they rely on a very much more “democratic” form of finance that is based largely on technological advances that can disintermediate the traditional finance channels. I feel that I would be doing my students a disservice if I did not show them what I consider to be the future of finance in addition to the methods that are here and now.
These new age methods only came into existence at the very end of my career and were never really a big part of what we used. I think I have had enough exposure to some of them (particularly the early stages of FinTech) to have incorporated some of these techniques in my mainstream work. But mostly, these are leading edge concepts that are still very much in development even now. I listen to old time friends of mine who say some version of “It’ll never fly, Orville” about them, which is really just their way of saying that they don’t really get it and are glad not to be required to know these new ways. Life moves on and new tools are invented all the time. Sometimes the skills of the old craftsmen remain valuable and sometimes they go out of date. That’s all there is to it. I’m not sure it feels too good to think that the way you did business is old fashioned and out-of-date to the point of being useless. What I think feels worse is to be seen as defensive and unwilling to understand new techniques, especially silly since the fundamentals of finance don’t really change, just the tools and perhaps some of the terms.
You would think that this was all different in a course on business ethics and that ethics are timeless, but nothing could be further from the truth. Since ethics is a situational discipline, it is constantly evolving just like society evolves. This is somewhat easier to see if you recognize that our fundamental economic rubric of capitalism is really not so very old. Some say it has existed since the early part of the Nineteenth Century and others believe that it really didn’t become true capitalism until about 1900 once the Industrial Revolution had taken full hold. The point is that in the history of mankind, capitalism is a young approach to business and that means that the finer points of things like business ethics, something that logically evolves with some aging of the system, are especially young. In some ways, we are just now coming to grips with the ethics of doing business.
When I think about my topic list in ethics for the semester, I see topics that were barely visible to me three years ago. Things like social media, artificial intelligence, program trading, new age globalization and ESG (environmental, social and governance) policies. And as these concepts are evolving, so must their regulatory frameworks and the manner in which corporate policy approaches them. In some ways, I feel that it is easier to drift out of date of ethical issues in business than it is to loose your grip on the methods of financing.
That makes me very happy that I have, through my teaching, been able to extend my relevance by keeping up with the latest debates and thinking about issues that are shaping the world today. I don’t honk of that as a necessary carer ingredient since I don’t really think in career terms any more, but I do think of it in terms of my more holistic self. I’m not trying to impress people at cocktail parties or write searing essays that will get published and noticed. I am just trying to force myself into a mode where keeping up is just like staying alive. I want to know the world around me as it changes. I want to be able to talk about these things with my kids if they want advice about navigating these waters. But mostly, keeping up is just about being an active part of the human race as it thrusts itself forward into the unknown of the future.