On Staying with Our Students

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-1722.2009.00066.x
• Author: Marianne Jennings
• Date: 01 January 2009
• Published date: 01 January 2009

Perspectives on Teaching

On Staying with Our Students

Marianne Jennings

I just completed my thirty-first year of teaching business law and ethics.

When I began my stint in the academy, Michael Milken was nowhere near

Wall Street and junk bonds. He hadn’t even earned his MBA at that time.

Neither had Jeffrey Skilling. Andrew Fastow was just starting college. Ber-

nie Ebbers was coaching basketball. We did not know who Charles Keating

was, and savings and loans (S&Ls) were steady and certain institutions run

by pillars of the community. As for derivatives, dot-coms, telecoms, special

purpose entitles, and mark-to-market accounting, well, they were un-

knowns. How business has changed in my three decades of teaching! Yet,

as I slog through the materials on subprime mortgages, collateralized debt

obligations (CDOs), and other nightmares on Wall Street I find a theme:

the names change, but the guilty behaviors are always the same. In the

words of the great Yogi Berra, ‘‘It’s de

´ja

`vu all over again.’’

This Wall Street meltdown, with its indictments, investigations, and

subpoenas, is the fourth major business financial collapse I’ve witnessed.

To be sure, this time around we have one that is a doozy, much bigger,

dollar-wise, than the S&Ls, the junk bonds, the dot-coms, and the collapses

of the Enron era. But the story really is the same: those involved were

pushing the envelope in terms of compliance with the law, and the result

was deception. Financial instruments, analysis, and reporting through

omission or a tendency to gloss over the details did not tell the whole story.

The basic virtue of forthrightness was missing. I find myself saying the

same thing about the scandals that I hound undergraduate students who

can’t carry concepts past the last test with. How many times do we have to

go over this before it sinks in and you can apply it?

Therein lies both the challenge and the reward of teaching. We want

our students to leave our classes with something that they cannot shake.

We hope that they recall a case. We wish that they would remember a

principle. We strive to introduce some cognitive dissonance that stays with

them and haunts them a bit when they are asked to do something in their

business careers that probably crosses a line or two. You never know, as

r2009, Copyright the Author

Journal compilation rAcademy of Legal Studies in Business 2009

241

Journal of Legal Studies Education

Volume 26, Issue 1, 241–243, Winter/Spring 2009