From Class Rooms to Class Zooms: Teaching During COVID Times!

This change will come with pain, felt disproportionately by the tenured faculty and administrators, who have benefited the most from the existing model, with the question of tenure itself being debated. As someone with tenure, I believe that no one is entitled to a job for life, and arguing that tenure is needed to allow researchers to express themselves freely sounds good, but is disingenuous. Much of academic research is so abstract and separated from reality that it is unlikely to be read, let alone be the basis for a firing.

It has always been true that learning is not restricted to classrooms, and that your education may begin in a classroom, but it finds its grounding when you practice it in the real world, warts and all. There is almost nothing I teach in my classes that is timeless or profound, and I have learned that there is so much more that I do not know about the topics that I teach, than I do. I don’t believe that I have either the knowledge or the intellect to answer every question that I am asked, but my job in teaching is to expose the process by which I try to get an answer, misguided and incorrect though it may be. As I have said repeatedly, and in many contexts, I would rather be transparently wrong than opaquely right, and I hope that if you take one or more of my classes, you will not only learn from my mistakes but also develop your own processes for answering the big questions in finance. Good luck and Godspeed!