See You Around Campus
It is the first day of school and I have on a suit and a nice dress shirt (no tie, thank you, for even on Wall Street, ties are very passé and mark you as an anachronism). But I believe this is my second time wearing one of my 15 remaining suits in the past two years. You know the two reasons for that. The first is COVID. I have had to give court testimony probably twenty times, and for that I wear a shirt and tie usually (the judicial system and their sense of needing hierarchical respect is way behind Wall Street, which long ago acknowledged respect for nothing but dead presidents), but no suit and not usually even long pants (thank you, Zoom video mute). But I am starting to teach my new course tonight and it’s called Advanced Corporate Finance….oooooooooh! If it sounds intimidating, it’s supposed to. I am anything but an intimidating teacher of finance. My students at Cornell for ten years (I was an, ahem! Clinical Professor of Finance) called my courses Storytime With Rich, which I took with great pride. When they had to come up with a doppelgänger for me, they didn’t choose Gordon Gecko, they chose Peter Griffin of Family Guy, who I admit does share a certain likeness to me, but I like to think I have a tad more substance than Peter.
I came early today and brought my brown bag dinner sack dutifully prepared by Kim. Unlike my mother who would throw in an old banana and mushy apple, Kim has a nice roast beef sandwich, some Ruffles chips, some Cheez-It crackers, And a bag of Mint Milano cookies. It’s a feast for a king and I wish I had somewhere to enjoy it. I was able to park easily below the building and that was my major concern that drove me to come early. But the room where I’m to teach is busy with some investment course that runs until 10 minutes before my allotted time of 7:00pm. That’s right, I will be teaching from 7:00 – 9:50pm every Wednesday until early December. I haven’t yet decided if I like that or hate that. On the plus side there’s the ease of parking and being post-rush hour. On the negative side, it is late and everyone including me will be weary. But then again, on the plus side, I figure no one will care or notice if I end early and I might even get points from the students for that sort of “efficiency”. We will presume it has nothing to do with laziness. There is nothing lazy about a topic like Advanced Corporate Finance.
For eleven prior years I have taught at the graduate business school level, but I have never taught a “required” course, just electives. One might think that means I have to teach off of some strict agenda or at least issues list, but that’s not the case. I have been told that I have COMPLETE freedom to design the course however I wish. I know how this works and it’s all about student course evaluations. But business school students want something out of their expensive post-graduate education. Yes, they want a degree, but I’ve always found that they also want an education. Most of them are old enough to be paying for this on their own and they want their money’s worth. So, my goal tonight will be to get to know my students and figure out what they want for their money (only a small fraction of which ~12%, comes to me). I’ve lined up 11 amazing finance professionals to talk to the class over the semester. One of my jobs is to make sure they realize what a lucky bunch they are to be hearing directly from the horses mouths (meaning my guest speakers) the latest thinking about how companies finance themselves.
This is a magnificent campus and that from someone in who’s veins the Cornell red runs deep. I am inclined to say that Cornell is one of the two prettiest campuses in the East (the other being University of Virginia, in my opinion) and that USD might be the prettiest in the West. I have not done a definitive sampling, but I’ve seen USC, UCLA, Stanford and Berkeley and I feel like this little gem of an historically Catholic University, with its location on a bluff facing the Pacific Ocean just north of San Diego, may well be the prettiest. I am not academician or even academic administrator enough to discuss the other strengths of these fine institutions of higher learning. I know that USD does not stack up at the top in general academics compared to those other places mentioned, but it sure gets my vote on looks alone.
What I enjoy about teaching here versus the Ivy Halls at Cornell, is that the students seem so very well grounded in a holistic sense. I’m sure they are as ambitious as eastern MBA candidates, but I somehow feel that they have found better balance and perspective. That said, I will probably still have the normal classroom distribution of front and back row sorts that exhibit the full range of attentiveness, engagement and work ethic. Maybe they’re no different at all and it’s just that I have California sun stroke helping make me think they’re different.
I am teed up to teach the course I have wanted to teach for a long time next semester. Technically, it’s called Law, Policy and Ethics, but I intend to make it into the ethics of finance. What will be interesting will be whether my experience with this Advanced Corporate Finance course and that Ethics course will make me want to teach either again next year (presuming they want me to do so). I taught my courses at Cornell for 8-10 years each, but I was much younger then. I am curious to see how I will feel about it all now and in this setting. The setting is not only being in California rather than Ithaca, but also being retired rather than in full harness of my career.
So, I wrote that waiting for my course to start and now its the morning after. My reaction to the teaching experience is mixed. I liked the students (there were 12 of the 17 registered students there…two had advised me of their absence and three were MIA). What I didn’t like were two things…trying to teach through a mask, which was even more difficult than I thought, and the truly marginal state of the podium and lectern and its related IT. This room was sort of a breakout seminar room and had no proper podium so someone had bought the smallest, cheapest podium they could find and wired it up for a laptop and screen projector. It had been unplugged by the prior lecturer so, naturally, it didn’t work and the IT guy had to come and fix it. Furthermore, the Zooming from that small lectern and with that small laptop simply didn’t work right. So, this morning at 4am (yes I was up worrying about the teaching configuration) I emailed the students and the powers that be that for 6 of the next 12 classes, the ones where I would have guest lecturers online, I wanted to do them on a Zoom basis exclusively and NOT in person. I would do the other 6 in person and with my guest lecturer in tow. And use no Zoom.
So, while I didn’t know it when I started and titled this story, I will only see you around campus half the time. The other half the time I will do the lectures and host my guest lectures from the comfort of my office at home where, thankfully, I can do so NOT through a cloth mask while sweating profusely underneath and watching the damn thing suck in and out with every breath. It takes a lot more breath to expel that much hot air to students in two hours and fifty minutes.