Business School

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As I have previously mentioned, unlike law schools, business schools appear to hire virtually year-round.  While most of the business schools have filled their open positions by this late date, there have been some recently posted positions. 

Bentley University (full-time, non-tenure track) (posted 3/9/15)

Central State University (assistant) (posted 3/5/15)

Lincoln Memorial University (assistant, instructional faculty) (posted 4/1/15)

Quinnipiac University (full-time, non-tenure track) (posted 4/7/15)

Saint Mary’s College of California (full-time, visiting professor) (posted 4/9/15)

Sam Houston State (tenure-track assistant) (posted 5/19/15)

University of Houston-Clear Lake (tenure-track assistant) (posted 2/24/15)

University of Louisiana-Lafayette (assistant professor) (received 4/21/15)

University of Wisconsin – La Crosse (tenure-track assistant) (priority 3/23/15)

University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee (full-time, non-tenure track) (posted 3/19/15)

Western Carolina University (assistant, non-tenure track) (posted 3/6/15)

Many thanks to Marc Edelman (Zicklin School of Business, Baruch College, City University of New York) for guest blogging with us in March.

His posts are linked to below:

March Madness Is Coming — And Legally Speaking, It Is Madness

Should Law Professors Abstain From Online NCAA Tournament Pools?

NCAA Claims To Put Education Ahead of Profit. Really?

The “Daily Fantasy Sports” Marketplace Is Booming, But Is It Legal?

WCU

Western Carolina University has posted an opening for an assistant professor of legal studies.  More information is available here. The position is fixed-term and non-tenure-track, though it comes with the title “assistant professor.” 

Last year, I greatly enjoyed my time presenting at Western Carolina University. WCU is in a beautiful part of the country, about an hour from Ashville, NC. WCU has a strong group of legal studies professors and has one of the nation’s few Business Administration and Law degrees at the undergraduate level.

I’ve updated my list of legal studies professor positions in business schools. Many of the positions have now been filled, but I placed the newer postings in bold font. 

I’ve enjoyed getting to know a bit about University of Pennsylvania Psychology Professor Angela Duckworth’s work on “grit.” Duckworth and her co-authors call grit “perseverance and passion for long-term goals,” and they claim that grit can be predictive of certain types of success.  

Can we, as educators, teach grit? If so, how? Duckworth asks, but doesn’t fully answer these questions in her popular TED talk. She does, however, think Stanford Psychology Professor Carol Dweck’s work on growth mindset, which I wrote about a few months ago, offers the most hope.

Do readers have any thoughts on this subject? Feel free to leave a comment or e-mail me your thoughts.

My seventy business associations students work in law firms on group projects. Law students, unlike business students, don’t particularly like group work at first, even though it requires them to use the skills they will need most as lawyers—the abilities to negotiate, influence, listen, and compromise. Today, as they were doing their group work on buy-sell agreements for an LLC, I started drafting today’s blog post in which I intended to comment on co-blogger Joan Heminway’s post earlier this week about our presentation at Emory on teaching transactional law.

While I was drafting the post, I saw, ironically, an article featuring Professor Michelle Harner, the author of the very exercise that my students were working on. The article discussed various law school programs that were attempting to instill business skills in today’s law students. Most of the schools were training “practice ready” lawyers for big law firms and corporations. I have a different goal. My students will be like most US law school graduates and will work in firms of ten lawyers or less. If they do transactional work, it will likely be for small businesses.  Accordingly, despite my BigLaw and in-house background, I try to focus a lot…

I have just returned from Dublin, which may be one of my new favorite cities. For the fifth year in a row, I have had the pleasure of participating as a mentor in the LawWithoutWalls (“LWOW”) program run by University of Miami with sponsorship from the Eversheds law firm. LWOW describes itself as follows:

LawWithoutWalls, devised and led by Michele DeStefano, is a part-virtual, global, multi-disciplinary collaboratory that focuses on tackling the cutting edge issues at the intersection of law, business, technology, and innovation.  LawWithoutWalls mission is to accelerate innovation in legal education and practice at the same time.  We collaborate with 30 law and business schools and over 450 academics, students, technologists, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, business professionals, and lawyers from around the world. We seek to change how today’s lawyers approach their practice and how tomorrow’s lawyers are educated and, in so doing, sharpen the skills needed to meet the challenges posed by the economic pressures, technologization, and globalization of the international legal market. We seek to create the future of law, today. Utilizing a blend of virtual and in-person techniques, LawWithoutWalls offers six initiatives: LWOW Student Offerings,LWOW Live, LWOW INC., and LWOW Xed…

Every semester, in an attempt to learn my students’ names and a bit about them, I ask my students to fill out a student information form with a few questions. This semester I added the question: “What do you think makes a professor effective?”

The vast majority of the responses fell into one of the four categories below (listed in order, from most to least responses):

  1. Real world experience/real world examples
  2. Fairness in grading 
  3. Clarity in teaching 
  4. Approachability and accessibility 

I am teaching over 100 total students (undergraduate and MBA) this semester, and nearly every student mentioned something that would fall into at least one of those four categories.

Perhaps these responses do not surprise readers, and they were not incredibly surprising to me. The ordering, however, was a bit surprising, and I am not sure I would have expected to see “approachability” in the responses as much as I did. In any event, the responses were helpful in confirming that my time “staying current,” meeting with local attorneys/business people, and consulting is well spent – at least in the eyes of my students. 

Is there anything in the students’ responses that is surprising to readers? Is there anything missing…

One of my new year’s resolutions for 2015 is to fast from e-mail every Saturday. Now that I have posted this, my co-bloggers and readers can keep me accountable. Currently, I probably check my e-mail 20+ times a day, every day — a habit formed during law firm life.  

I thought about fasting from the internet/electronics entirely on Saturdays, and I am still going to try to avoid the internet/electronics on Saturdays as much as possible, but I wanted to set a realistic goal. 

An acquaintance of mine in New York City, Paul Miller, went without the internet for an entire year (with less promising results than he had hoped). While I remember a time before the internet — and a time when the internet was so slow it was almost useless — it is hard for me to imagine going without the internet for a week, much less for a year.  That said, I think it healthy to loosen the electronic leash a bit every once in a while.  

I’d also like to cut back the number of times I check e-mail and the amount of time I spend responding to e-mails in general. If any readers…

We are all familiar with a distinguishing features of investing in operating companies and investing in mutual funds: sale of stock in operating companies and redemption at NAV (net asset value) in mutual funds.  An interesting article (Mutual Fund Liquidity and Fiduciary Conflicts of Interest)1 was recently brought to my attention which argues that the liquidity costs of the redemption model disadvantages long-term investors– those investors who stay in the fund.  

Redemption of mutual fund shares requires the fund to maintain liquidity (uninvested assets) in order to supply the NAV to any departing investor.  The required liquidity extracts a small cost on the fund for each exit.  This cost, small when evaluated for a single trade, becomes significant in the aggregate.  Trading and liquidity cost estimates range from $10-17 billion annually, costs that are born exclusively by the investors who stay in the fund. This means that long-term investors, particularly those investors who are relatively locked into their mutual funds such as retirement investors (a group I refer to in my scholarship as Citizen Shareholders) are subsidizing the dominance of the exit strategy for other retail investors.  This has deep implications for the arguments advanced by…