School Daze
It’s early August and despite my every effort to the contrary, I cannot make myself into Rod Stewart. My Freshman Fall at Cornell was heavily dominated by Rod’s rendition of Maggie May, which came out in July, 1971 on his Reason to Believe album. You may recall that for him it was “late September and I really should be back at school…” Well, for me at age 68, it is a case that it’s early August and I really do have to finalize my plans for getting back to school. I too have a reason to believe that this shit doesn’t just happen by itself, even if you have taught the course before. This will be my third year of teaching as an adjunct professor at University of San Diego. I will be teaching two courses I have already taught before at USD, a course in Advanced Corporate Finance, which is a required course for the finance concentration and Law, Policy and Ethics, which is a required course for all MBA students.
My challenge is quite different for the two courses and I suspect I will overshoot on both. I was very strongly rated by students in the Advanced Corporate Finance course last Fall, so I do not want to fall off the high standard I set for myself with that first go-around. I used eleven guest lecturers last year and have shifted to nine guest lecturers this year. The difference is that I have removed an entire topic from the agenda, and that is the topic of Special Acquisition Corporations (SPACs) which were all the rage last year, literally dominating the financial landscape. Since then, a combination of adverse market reaction and regulatory scrutiny have cast those blank-check vehicles into dysfunctionality, even so far as to making them somewhat smarmy. They always seemed smarmy to me, but as Chuck Prince famously said, when the music is playing you have to get up and dance, so I had my students learn the SPAC steps like they were at Arthur Murray’s learning the Cha-Cha. This year, no SPACs and that eliminates several of my guest lecturers. I repurposed one of the SPAC lecturers, but he is a special case.
That is my good buddy and Welsh Boyo, Michael Walsh. Michael is a consummate banking professional who still works for Deutsche Bank, a place I left over twenty years ago. He is the head of Global Sponsor Finance, which means that he runs around the world hustling deals with clients and financial sponsors wherever, whenever and however they can be arranged. Last year, I couldn’t get anyone to talk to the issue of Leveraged Buyouts (LBOs) because everyone was so cathected on SPACs, including Michael. This year, Michael will be talking to the overall anatomy of a deal and he will use a live LBO that he has been working on real time. Students learn the most from such situations. Like butchering, financial engineering is never without its blood and guts getting spilled and it is valuable for students to see it in real life. None of it usually happens in a sterile theater, but rather in the mud of the field, and few know the muddy quadrants of the world better than Michael.
The subject of my ethics course has been raised in several stories I have written, but I am now at the point of needing to lock down the syllabus, so the time for conjecture is past. I have reached out to the administrative staff of the school and found out the rooms I will be teaching in. Both are in the brand spanking new building that the business school just added. That building is being dedicated this week and I seized upon that notice to see if I should attend. My relationship with the school consists of three academic relationships; one with the Associate Dean of MBA Programs and one each with the Chairmen of the two departments in which I teach, Finance and Ethics. As it turns out, none of them are going to he dedication, so I see no point in going myself. I literally know no one at the school other than the students I teach and the two or three administrative people who help me wend my way through the administrivia of teaching. The notion that this would give Kim and I another social network in San Diego has simply not panned out. Without an office on campus and with the added constraints that COVID has presented over the past three years, its not so surprising, but nonetheless mildly disappointing.
I have a strange feeling about this coming semester. I feel like my efforts on the ethics course will almost certainly result in a meaningful improvement in the ratings. I have paid a lot of attention to changing things to meet the concerns even though I suspect those were very much bespoked concerns based on the individuals involved. But if I was really the source of the negativism, I am aware of the issues and am now sensitized to what may have caused them. There will be no mandated evaluations in my classes any more. I am working with the help of a new AI technology to make participation grading more objective, and I am inclined to be focused on letting students exchange their views and guide their own conversation about ethical issues. I, in turn will try to orient my input less to the back and forth of the ethical issues and more to the application of those sorts of issues to real-life business situations. I would not be surprised to see my ratings for the course go up appreciably.
Meanwhile, I believe I am adequately aware of the tendency to rest on my laurels given the high rating of the course evaluations last year. The course needs some content altering, which I am doing, but while I am tending to more or less keep the assignment format the same, I want to come up with some improvements nonetheless. I doubt I will keep the Uber-strong rating I enjoyed last year, but I certainly don’t want the ratings to dribble off either. I refuse to get lax on this course because Advanced Corporate Finance is a real meat and potatoes course finance students and needs to be a strong mainstay of their curriculum.
My big issue for this Fall will remain whether I want to continue to teach these or even other courses at USD. I was very connected at Cornell and I think that gave me legs in staying the teaching course for several years when I was perhaps ambivalent about the courses on the roster. I have never had the opportunity to feel connected in that way at USD (that may be a case of me not taking enough responsibility for that myself) and it is unclear to me how that will or won’t affect my thinking about sustainability. The bigger issues are simply whether I enjoy teaching the same courses year in and year out, whether my stories and style resonate with students (one of the causes for concern over my ethics course rating this past semester), and whether the constraints on my lifestyle and/or travel are operative concerns.
There is a part of me that would like to be free of all obligations (teaching two courses this Fall is about as engaged as I would want to be) and, at the same time, I am happy that I have something to keep me engaged. I call that my own personal school daze. That is my conundrum and I suspect that this Fall’s course ratings will have meaningful input into that question.