The Universe Speaketh
All throughout my youth, I enjoyed school and learning. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t cry when it was time for school letting out for summer or the holidays. But I was clearly on the side of liking the learning process. I cannot remember all of my teachers through my grade school years, but I at least remember Mrs. Hunt, who was my fifth grade teacher in November, 1963 because I remember when the school principal came in during class to tell her that President Kennedy had been shot and killed. I distinctly remember her breaking down in tears and the principal having to calm the class and explain that this was a big event for our nation and that many people would be shocked and upset by it like Mrs. Hunt had been. They say you always remember where you were when you heard about the Kennedy assassination, and I do…I was in Mrs. Hunt’s classroom. They also say you remember when you heard about the Challenger disaster and I remember that too in January, 1986. I was standing in the midst of the Japanese Garden on our executive floor at Bankers Trust talking with Joe Manganello, my boss and the bank’s Chief Credit Officer. Joe was not a teacher per se, but I think its fair to say that I learned as much from him as I did from anyone during my banking career. I have always had great respect for teachers. One of my favorite expressions during my many years in the lucrative banking business was to say that the day any of us added as much value as a fifth grade teacher was the day I would listen to some whining employee’s complaints about his bonus.
All during my career in banking, I maintained a strong rapport with my Alma Mater, Cornell, on the theory that nurturing that relationship was both good for our firm and good for Cornell by providing it another channel to send good students out into the banking world. During those years I didn’t just maintain a relationship with the placement office, I made a point of reconnecting with many of the faculty members, ostensibly because they knew where to find the best candidates for us. But I also had a fundamental desire to get closer to these professors, many of which had been my teachers when I was in business school. There was Hal and Sy and Jerry and Maureen and Bob and Vithala, and especially Joe. These were the guys (and gals) who taught me business and finance, which, for better or worse, is my area of principle expertise as I get to the later stages of my career. I cultivated those relationships by offering them my services as a practitioner who was willing to speak to their students about how to translate what they were learning in the classroom to what was happening on the mean streets of finance. I became a regular guest lecturer. I know that some people do those things for ego or networking or resume-building, but I like to think that I did it out of a deep-seated respect for the process of teaching.
I learned early on in life that the very best way to hone your expertise and skill was to teach that material to someone else. It requires you to contextualize the information and forces you to think about it in a 360-degree manner. When you take on the task of teaching something to someone else, the natural instinct is to fill in each and every gap in your understanding and to go so far as to anticipate questions that will likely be asked of you. The process of preparing to teach is one of the most intensive learning processes I can imagine. If you do it right, you actually internalize the lessons and make yourself that much more of an expert. I found that process extremely helpful as I built my managerial career because my chosen profession prized content and domain knowledge and that was what came out of the teaching prep process.
In 2007 when I hit the infamous wall that everyone jokes about hitting at some point in their life or career, it didn’t take long to wonder if there was a future for me in teaching. In a heartbeat, I got a call from my old professorial pal Joe, who was the Dean of the business school at Cornell. Whether out of kindness to a fallen comrade or to take advantage of and access practicum skills for his school, he asked me to consider going up to Cornell to teach. I jumped at the chance for many reasons, but the foundational reason was that I had always fancied myself a teacher at my core and this was the moment of opportunity to test those waters for myself. I accepted a half-time position and was told to take a semester to audit courses and advise students while I considered what I wanted to teach. He advised me to find gaps in the curriculum that particularly suited my interests. It was a very enlightened approach that I appreciated a great deal.
They say that those who can’t do, teach, but that really slights the excellent teachers of the world. Sometimes people choose to teach more than default to teaching. One of my son Thomas’ friends is a grade school science teacher. His father is a well-respected economics professor at NYU and he grew up understanding the value of teaching for teaching’s sake. I remember my mother earning a few extra bucks teaching a course or two to undergraduates at the University of Wisconsin while she wrote her dissertation. Teaching was a serious business to me and always will be. I do not take the challenge of doing it well lightly.
At Cornell, I found several good ideas to teach that seemed to resonate with students and the faculty alike, so I designed several courses. The first was a hedge fund course, a topic that everyone wanted to know more about. I also put together a course on securities finance because it was so misunderstood (more correctly stated, it was simply NOT understood). And then I added a course on pensions since it was already an interest to me and I felt there was a decided and critical gap in the course offering since pensions are too specific to get much coverage in the finance discipline. Hedge funds teaching was like offering kids candy. Everyone wanted a piece because they wanted to be billionaires. That class became the biggest enrollment class at the school, probably for all the wrong reasons, but popular nonetheless. Securities finance was more esoteric, but serious investment people took the course because they knew they should. As for pensions, everybody pretty much wants to avoid the topic if they can. Pensions enjoy the same degree of excitement that insurance or accounting generate. It doesn’t take serious students long to understand why they are important topics, but serious students are more the exception than the rule, even in the Ivy Leagues.
After ten years of teaching at Cornell and attaining the status of Clinical Professor, I retired until moving out here to San Diego. I then sought out places to teach again and hit on the University of San Diego. I have now taught there for three academic years and refocused my interests on project financing (jiving with the local interest in real estate), corporate finance (a subject matter in short supply out in this area) and ethics (something everyone knows has become a sine qua non of business education). Where I was deeply connected at Cornell, COVID prevented me from integrating into USD in the same way. I enjoyed the teaching nonetheless, probably because I appreciate the teaching process. But a few months ago when I finished the spring semester, I got the impression that this new penny of a teacher was more tarnished than shiny and that the curriculum and the department heads were moving on to the next thing or the next available adjunct. I was not on the roster for this Fall for one reason or another and I told Kim that it might be the end of my teaching.
Today, I went online to get a USD tax form and found that my email and access had been turned off by the IT department. When I asked, I was told my access had been revoked as a matter of administrative policy and that I would have to be rehired to get access. I took that to mean that my prediction was accurate, so I wrote a nice thank you to the three administrators who had connected with me over the three years and said that they knew where to find me if they wanted more of me. As they say, the universe speaketh and it behooves us to listen when it does.