Applied Liberal Arts Courses Bring Industry Professionals to Classroom

Building off of the past two decades of the Executive-in-Residence Program, this fall marked the introduction of the Professors of the Practice Program, created by President Emeritus Ronald D. Liebowitz and directed by Distinguished College Professor David Colander. This program offers an opportunity for professionals to come in and teach courses on a variety of applied liberal arts. While the Professors of the Practice program offers a wide range of interdepartmental courses, a subset are notably business oriented, including courses that teach accounting, management and in the future, finance.

According to Colander, business and accounting oriented courses having deep roots in the history of the College, roots that extend to ties with the Economics Department.

“If you go back a long history to the 40’s and 50’s, DK Smith, who is remembered by a lot of alumni, taught accounting for a long time but as economics became more of a social science and more formal, it moved away from that relationship. That occurred in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s,” said Colander.

“We tried to maintain that connection between the real world and economics and still be the best economics department we could be. But most economics professors were not trained in business so we moved essentially away from that.”

That being said, the department still maintained a number of professors designed to teach the real world applications of economics including recently retired Emeritus Faculty Fellow at the Center for Education in Action, Scott Pardee. Pardee, who had a background in finance and had been a Senior Vice President at the Federal Reserve, took over from the previous professor who had been teaching an academically focused Corporate Finance course. As traditional economics courses moved away from a financial focus, Pardee started to teach courses that  were primarily designed to send people to Wall Street.

“[This trajectory] really didn’t fit what a lot of people in the economics department thought should be taught; they had no problem with students learning corporate finance as an academic subject, but they didn’t see it as a step directly to Wall Street,” Colander said. “You want students thinking about the broader issues as well as learning the specifics of finance and accounting. So as I have tried to reintroduce the courses, the goal  has been to see that they have  a liberal arts connection.”

Liberal Arts and the Workplace

Some of the business specific courses in The Professors of the Practice Program are being offered in response to a widespread student interest in finance, and the need to fill the void left by Pardee.

“Alumni and Trustees said we should be offering courses [in finance], so we looked for somebody who could provide the general accounting and finance backgrounds,” Colander said. Then we thought about what other possibilities there were, and we talked to and drew people from MiddCORE and connected with the center for social entrepreneurship about where we could find individuals.”

“We’re lucky that we have found some great practioners who understand the need to maintain a liberal arts perspective in the courses,” he continued.

From a business and finance perspective, three courses stick out in the course catalog including: INTD 0220 “Management, Enterprise and Business,” INTD 0221 “Enterprise, Social Entrepreneurship and the Liberal Arts,” and INTD 0316 “Accounting, Budgeting and the Liberal Arts,” and INTD 0317 “Introduction to Finance” will be offered in the spring of 2016.

Beyond the core courses, Colander spoke to a few courses to be occasionally offered under this program. One such course, INTD 0251 “Sounds of Childhood,” taught by Professor of the Practice Erin Davis, focuses on early childhood development and podcasts while Professor of the Practice Roger White is offering a course teaching the basics of putting together a literary magazine in INTD/HARC “Producing a Literary Magazine”.

Professor of the Practice Michael Schozer, who has an extensive background in financial services, teaches the accounting course offered this semester.

“The accounting and budgeting course is not narrowly teaching only accounting specifics; rather it has a focus of thinking more broadly about how accounting sets the framework through which one thinks,” said Colander.

Schozer spoke to two ways that the liberal arts perspective is incorporated into his curriculum: projects and guest speakers.

“One of the team projects students can choose is to be Medicins Sans Frontieres,” Schozer said. “A contagious disease outbreak has occurred and the team needs to forecast the outbreak, estimate response costs, develop a response budget and make a presentation to potential funders of the response.”

“In terms of guest speakers, we will be looking into financial issues in public finance, with a focus on the City of Chicago,” he continued. “What role does accounting and disclosure play in allowing municipalities to get into financial trouble, are there hidden costs and obligations that are not fully disclosed to the public, and what role do politicians play in that disclosure?”

Management and Enterprise

The management course is taught by Dr. Amitava Biswas. Colander spoke to the importance of management as what he calls one of the ultimate liberal arts.

“You think of deans here, or the President — what they’re doing is management. Most students will end up managing no matter what they majoring in. In order to manage students  need communication and teamwork skills. You need a whole variety of skills which are really what we are teaching in the liberal arts,” said Colander.

This course focuses on both the history and development of management theory, and then bridges off into practical management techniques. Biswas noted that beyond Colander’s contributions in helping students see connection in management to the liberal arts, they are also hoping to discuss cross cultural management and business ethics in the class.

As in the accounting course, Biswas will bring in a bevy of guest lecturers. A recruiter from McKinsey & Co. has already spoken to the class about management consulting. Cairn Cross, founder of Fresh Tracks Capital, (the largest venture capital fund in Vermont) will lecture on entrepreneurial management style.

There is also a lab component to the class in which students engage in Harvard Business School case studies and present analyses to their peers. Biswas views this as a way to teach students the succinct style of communication valued in business while also encouraging them to think creatively about real world problems that organizations encounter.

Biswas has encountered his own learning curve as a new teacher. At first the way he ran his class resembled the way he had operated in the professional world: he communicated in a style that emphasized conciseness and clarity, but did not know how inspire discussion for its own sake.

“[Discussion is] a lot of fun. It makes the class much more lively,” said Biswas. “I think I’m going to be a lot better of a teacher this year than I was last year. I really appreciate the talent that it takes to be an effective teacher, I’ve seen how difficult it is … There are so many resources that are available at Middlebury to help somebody like me, who has a limited teaching background, be a better teacher. It’s fantastic.”

Biswas graduated from Stanford Medical School, but forewent a traditional career in medicine after he was recruited by McKinsey. In the last 15 years he worked extensively in Southeast Asia, advising corporations looking to expand in the region and assisting startups in need of professional management.

Biswas sees liberal arts graduates as being progressively more attractive hires for consulting firms. Though the soft skills learned in a non-technical course of study — writing, reading, analyzing — are not as useful in entry level positions in the business world, he argued that they become increasingly important in senior roles.

“The way I see what I’m doing in my management class is not so much that I’m trying to get across a set of information that nobody else is giving you. What I see myself doing is trying to show how the things that you’ve been doing in your liberal arts education is actually very relevant to the business world that you could be going into,” said Biswas.

More Options for the Student

Colander stresses that these are not pre-professional courses.

“Most everybody finds themselves in a situation where they have to lead people, they have to solve problems, they have to manage people and they have to fit together — well that is what these courses are — they are applied liberal arts courses, not in any sense pre-professional,” said Colander.

“I emphasize that these courses are applied liberal arts courses, the lab courses of the liberal arts. They are pre-professional or direct skill training in the same way any course is; they  teach students to communicate, to work together and to write — those are the skills any job wants people to have — so in just about every liberal arts course we’re teaching skills.”

The courses are offered as interdisciplinary in order to keep them from being narrowed into specific departmental silos. In terms of the future development of the program, Colander sees the potential of a certain subset of these courses comprising some sort of minor. However, he notes that it is not for him to decide. In addition, Colander envisions a potential stipulation preventing people from minoring in this area if they were already an Economics major.

Colander said, “The goal is to give students the option of majoring in whatever area they would like to — art history, music, history, sociology. All too often students choose to major in economics not because they love economics, but because they see it as a signal to employers that they are interested, and have the skills employers are looking for.”

He emphasized that a minor in these Professor of the Practice courses would ofter students an alternative to majoring in economics in that you could take these courses and combine them with any of our majors and still signal to employers that you have an interest and some training in the skills they consider important.

“The reality is that  most businesses want people who are broad, diverse and have different interests; that’s why the recruit at liberal arts schools,” said Colander. “They see too many Economics majors;  a student with a different major who has also taken courses in finance, accounting, management is in many ways more interesting to them.