Teaching to Teach
I have been teaching at the graduate business school level since 2007. That represents fifteen years or approximately 20% of my life (deducting a bit for the interregnum between teaching at Cornell and University of San Diego). I have taught a variety of subjects including hedge fund investing, securities finance, pension funds, project finance, advanced corporate finance and now business ethics. This semester I am teaching a course called Law, Policy and Ethics and it is probably the most fun course I have ever taught. Why is it so much fun? Because it is less about passing on facts or knowledge and more about teaching students how to think about the world. I have never had a course that is so well attended. I usually incorporate some portion of the course score to participation and while that usually runs at 20% or so in other courses, I set it a bit higher at 30% for this course to encourage engagement. So far, as I get close to wrapping up the semester, I would say that I am running at about 90% attendance, which is amazingly high. What is even more amazing is that I have been recording participation quite carefully and I would suggest that it is running at about 80%. These students are not participating for the grade for the most part, but because they are engaged in the conversation. The topic of ethics can be made interesting enough for that to happen and I seem to have hit on the formula that works to do that.
I have used movies as the medium for debate and while I have assigned readings from half a dozen or so notable authors on the subject of business ethics, I believe the movies have brought the topic to life for the students. I would guess that the average age of the class is about thirty-something (on the earlier side) and these students respond very well to the visual medium of movies. Also, besides being less dry than assigned readings, movies tell a story and those stories are the case studies that we debate. I have gone to the trouble of setting up an ethical topics framework on which the movies and topics hang, and that makes me feel that this is all quite understandable to them topically and that the movies are not random. The course starts with an ethical framework which establishes why ethics is important and the framing of ethical issues, including the foundational causes of ethical dilemmas. I have claimed that those causes are money, power (control), ego (love/emotion) and fear. I have yet to come across any other root causes, but have told the class that I am open to adding to the list if they come up with something that makes sense.
The seven fundamental ethical topics I have focused on are:
1. Stakeholders (employees, owners, customers, suppliers and competitors)
2. Markets (the free market system as the basis for capitalism)
3. Reputation (institutional, corporate and individual and its importance)
4. Regulation and other societally-induced guardrails
5. Globalization (how ethics differs around the world and whether it is absolute)
6. ESG (Environmental, Societal and Governance issues that now dominant corporate policymakers)
7. Individual liberty versus the common good
I have managed to find interesting movies to portray each and every one of these topics. Those have included The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, The Big Short, Margin Call, Atlas Shrugged, The Social Dilemma, Blood Diamond, G.I. Jane, The Social Network, Flowers in the River and Elysium. I did much of the movie selection on an impromptu basis and feel now that I can even improve on this list the next time I teach the course. There are so many great movies to choose from that present this sort of ethical dilemma for consideration.
That brings me to my own personal conundrum of the moment. As I have taught this course I have found myself hoping that I will be asked to teach it again next Spring. I am anxious to take what I have learned about teaching this course and apply it to honing and improving the curriculum. That’s not unusual in teaching from what I have seen and it goes to the notion of course lifecycles. Most content-driven courses certainly have a natural lifecycle since the relevance of topics in business are constantly evolving. I think that is less so in a broad arena like ethics, but certainly there are more rather than less topical examples that can bring home the ideas. Think of that as updating the case studies. I’m sure Harvard professors know that students can relate better to telecom and high tech examples than to buggy whip examples even if the core concept underlying the cases is the same. I think when it comes to using movies, it is actually useful to use a blend of new and old movies to help imbed the very notion that ethics doesn’t really change with the times even if the examples get more modern or even more complex. I figured that after the course evaluations were in from the students, I would find out if they wanted me to teach the course again next spring. That way I would teach another year of advanced corp[orate finance in the fall and ethics in the spring.
Yesterday I got a surprise email from the head of the ethics department. She asked me to consider teaching a section of this ethics course in the fall. That was both good news and still presented a small conundrum to me. I will be teaching the advanced corporate finance on Wednesday nights and she has asked me to consider teaching the ethics course on Tuesday nights. Naturally I am honored that she would ask me even before the course evaluations (which I think will be quite positive) are in, but I now have to consider whether I am ready to ratchet up my teaching schedule. On the one hand, the most cumbersome aspect of teaching is that it ties me to San Diego for a block of time. Retirement isn’t necessarily about being footloose and fancy free, but it is sometimes nice not to be bound by anything. On the other hand, teaching gives my week some structure and purpose and that is a good thing in retirement. I committed to the Fall semester teaching already, so in some ways, this wouldn’t tie me down any more than I already am. There is also the fun factor I feel for this particular course. There is minimal work in preparing it and the act of teaching it is equally minimal, especially since I’ve now done it once.
The other question I find myself asking is whether I will suffer from diminishing returns if I teach these courses too many times. I think the answer is definitely yes for advanced corporate finance, but I suspect that is much less so for ethics. As an example I spent the first 30 minutes of class this week talking to the students about the ethical issues surrounding the Elon Musk bid to acquire Twitter and take it private. It’s funny, because when we watched and discussed Ayn Randy’s Atlas Shrugged, I posited the hypothetical question of whether Elon Musk is today’s version of John Galt. I did that before he made his bid for Twitter, and I feel it was particularly prescient though Musk’s proclivity for controversial libertarian views made it less shocking. I enjoy these discussions with the students and it is that sort of current events banter that makes this course so much fun to teach.
So, I have agreed to keep teaching ethics into next semester and that is making me a bit less retired and a bit more of a teacher. The act of teaching is therefore teaching me how to teach better and better and I am therefore enjoying it more and more. Let’s hope the students are getting more and more out of my teaching myself to teach cycle.