Aug 25, 2000 - Or as a senior professor, your work experience may not be quite that relevant ... suggest that these kinds of questions have grown more common in .... My strong advice is to keep this shortârefer the students to your website,.
August 25, 2000 PRESENT VALUE: AN INFORMAL COLUMN ON TEACHING “’If you are so smart, why aren’t you rich?’ and other brash questions to the teacher” ROBERT BRUNER Darden Graduate Business School University of Virginia
The new term begins. You introduce yourself, describe the course, and pause to invite questions before starting to teach. It’s a moment of buoyancy; you’re ready to begin work. Then a student asks a brash question. “What qualifies you to teach this course?” Or “Have you personally done any of the deals (financings, investments, etc.) this course covers?” Or “Have you worked in this industry?” Or, “Do you consult in this area?” Or, “What practical work experience do you have?” Or the showstopper, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” A stillness falls over the room as everyone recognizes that a not-so-subtle challenge has been issued. If you are a newly minted Ph.D., there may not be much work experience to discuss. Or as a senior professor, your work experience may not be quite that relevant or recent. You are on the spot to justify your presence. You briefly contemplate a response that is comparable in rudeness to the query. But instead you search for the right words. What should you say? This would be an amusing vignette except that my conversations with numerous instructors suggest that these kinds of questions have grown more common in recent years. And they are serious events. The instructor’s response will set a tone that echoes throughout the entire course, and perhaps shows up in the final evaluations. The incident and the possible responses say a lot about the fundamental challenges an instructor faces in gearing students to become their own best teachers. Underlying the question are notions that reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of the learning enterprise, a quest for control, and a search for meaning. Any effort to respond to the question must be rooted in an understanding of these issues. First, the question implies that the instructor determines the quality of the learning experience. But instead, the classroom process—especially where cases are discussed—is much more like a community experience. Everyone bears responsibility. It is the role of the instructor wisely to frame questions and shape the engagement with important ideas. From a student-centered point of view, it would be more appropriate for the student to have asked the other students what kind of learners they are. Second, the question embeds a challenge to the instructor’s control. “Who is in charge here?” the student seems to ask. Fashionable among many degree students is the idea that they are customers, and that the school is a supplier. Business schools teach the primacy of customers. Therefore students assume that their expectations must govern. Of course, one good metaphor deserves another: perhaps students are merely work-in-process inventory
2 ultimately to be consumed by the businesses, governments, and society that need their skills—this would imply that they are to be marched sheepishly toward graduation. For instructors who derive some energy from their students, this is not a very appealing model. I prefer a third metaphor: partners. The truth is that instructors and students really need each other, and need a high level of cooperation in order for the learning enterprise to sparkle. Instructors need to listen to students the way any sharp businessperson would listen to a market. Under the partner view, the instructor is an artful leader; students are thinking, responsive followers. Students must let teachers lead. Third, even affirmative responses to the question (“Yes, I have done those deals, worked many years, and above all, am rich”) would imperfectly predict the quality of learning that the student will experience. The skills that enable one to do very well in a particular line of business or finance may map poorly on the requisites necessary to teach well. That some students might care more about business credentials than about learning suggests that it is still true that a prophet has no honor in his own village. Fourth, the question betrays a degree of incredulity or mistrust in the educational process. This may be a sign of the times. Consumer research, for instance, on “Generation X” suggests that consumers born since 1965 are less brand-loyal and more transaction-oriented, that is, much more careful to scrutinize whether value received equals or exceeds the price in this transaction (i.e., class session, or course).i Baby boomers, and their parents are much more relationship-oriented, more prone to trust that through repeated engagement with a brand (a professor, a curriculum, or a school), value received will equal or exceed price. If one trusts the process, then one is likely to believe that across a variety of courses and classes, the education will indeed come together. But if one demands no downside variance at every transaction, then one becomes a tough customer. Finally, the question is motivated at least in part, by a desire for meaning. The student seems to ask, “Will the hours of preparation, the personal denial necessary to get through the work, the group projects, quizzes, and exam all make sense? Will all this prepare me to become something I want to be?” The instructor could say, “probably yes.” But ultimately no direct response offers much comfort. By focusing on the instructor’s credentials, the student is seeking some added assurance that the experience will be meaningful. I think this angst is the heart of the problem. As a result, the good news is that the instructor should never take the rude question personally. The bad news is that making meaning takes a lot of effort and careful thought. One cannot make meaning for the students; they must make it themselves. From an understanding of the drivers of the question, one can begin to craft a response. Above all, neither avoid the question, nor attack the questioner. The question is telling you something; view it as information. Also, view this as an opportunity to meet a challenge and assert your intellectual command of the classroom. I think that the best response to the question about credentials consists of some or all of the following: 1. A direct question deserves a direct answer. One can reply describing one’s degrees, research in the area, work experience and private consulting, and one’s years
3 teaching. My strong advice is to keep this short—refer the students to your website, for instance, for more detail on your work and C.V. But the more time you spend describing your credentials, the more you legitimize the wrong focus. For newly minted Ph.D.s, keeping it short will not only be desirable, but a necessity. 2. Tone and delivery count for a lot here: you (and no one else) are in charge in this classroom. If necessary, a little practice in front of a mirror will help you develop a voice and demeanor that will convince the student that you really mean business. Also, watching a seasoned colleague’s delivery often affords an invaluable model. 3. Remind the students that your course is a community, an educational enterprise for which the success rests on the shoulders of all. The instructor will play an important role, not the least of which is to demand steady and high performance for the good of the commons. Indirectly this says that it is not the instructor’s credentials that matter so much, as the effort and quality of interaction of all. 4. Segue into any comments you can offer about the possible importance of your course to a student’s professional development. The subject may be a gatekeeper for students seeking to enter a specific career. The topic area may be especially timely in light of current events. Specific skills gained in the course may assist students in professional exams (CFA, Series 7, CPA). Aspects of the course may help explain mysterious behavior of managers or financial intermediaries. All of these points may have been made in your syllabus, but one can confidently expect that most of the students will not have absorbed those points before the start of the course. The instructor simply needs to sell the relevance of the course and learnings. By the end of your response, you have spent 20% of the time talking about yourself, and 80% of the time talking about the relevance of the learning experience and how to make it a success. If one believes that meaning and command are the key issues, then this is probably the right balance. In a series of superb essays, the economic historian, Donald McCloskey, addressed the brash question, “If you are so smart, why aren’t you rich?” He argued that the role of the scholar and critic was entirely different from the role of the entrepreneur; the role of the scholar is to hold a mirror up to society that it might know itself better. McCloskey wrote: Harry Truman had it about right. The expert as expert, a bookish sort consulting what is already known, cannot by his nature learn anything new, because then he wouldn’t be an expert. He would be an entrepreneur, a statesman, or an Artist with a capital A. The expert critic can make these non-expert entrepreneurs more wise, perhaps, by telling them about the past. But he must settle for low wages. Smartness of the expert’s sort cannot proceed to riches. Economics teaches this.ii The brash question is unanswerable in ways that will be satisfying to the student. Instructors are smart but not rich because they choose to be. The best response is to deal with the underlying drivers of the question: misapprehensions about the learning process, a quest for control, and ultimately, meaning about the struggle to teach oneself.
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Past columns by Robert Bruner may be found by search at the SSRN website at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/search.taf or by going to his Author Page at SSRN at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=66030
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For a sampling of this research, see Karen Ritchie, Marketing to Generation X Lexington: Lexington Books, 1995, and J.W. Smith and A.S. Clurman, Rocking the Ages: The Yankelovich Report on Generational Marketing, New York: HarperBusiness 1998. ii Donald N. McCloskey, If You’re So Smart: The Narrative of Economic Expertise, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990, page 134.
Copyright © 2000 by Robert F. Bruner and the Trustees of the University of Virginia Darden School Foundation.
