The emptiness of faculty offices. The emptiness of young minds.

The emptiness of faculty offices. The emptiness of young minds.

I made a mistake coming out of retirement to teach one section of financial markets and institutions. First there is the cultural divide. None of the students were alive when Bill Clinton was president. They were in the second grade when I retired in 2011. In the main, they have little knowledge and no intellectual curiousity. Don’t get me wrong there are several very strong students in this class of 59 but as a group, not so much. After the first exam, 17 students failed to pick up their exams. Consistently there are around 40 students who regularly attend. So I thought the other 19 had dropped. Then I gave the second exam and the room was again full. WTF? I said “Where did all of you come from?” Then in the class when I handed back the exam, 16 did not pick it up (one had dropped). Maybe it is because the lectures are recorded, that those students do not see the need to attend class. Nevertheless, I had given all the exam takers and extra 5 points because their previous scores were so low and I took those points away from those who cut the class. One whined that since I didn’t take attendance it was unfair to punish him. I told him “tough”. I make the class entertaining. I relate the dry text to everyday events. We are covering international financial markets and Trump’s tariffs are perfect lecture material. They now can make sense out of what is going on. How can that be boring?

Their attendance or lack thereof is what’s happening in our society today. When Trump’s appointees arrived at their offices, they found that most of the employees were missing – working from home. They were ordered to return. But millions of feet of office space sit empty and those who are paying rent are wasting their money. The same is true at the university. When I go up to the finance department offices to pick up exams and quizzes, I have never seen one faculty member or one office door open. I remarked this to the secretary and she said that the faculty seldom come in. The courses are now online. All the students have laptops. Professors all give multiple choice true false exams because its so easy to import questions from the test bank into the exam. The computer gives the test, monitors the test and grades the test. So why should a professor spend all weekend grading papers (like me)? As a result, the students don’t understand anything. They just recognize stuff. 

For the first time that I can remember, I am actually depressed. I could not work in that environment. When I was working I never had a bad day. I was surrounded by smart people doing smart things. Being around smart people made me smarter. I knew every faculty member and co-authored with several of them. Students would come by sometimes to talk about class but often just to pick your brain on some topic of interest. It was always stimulating. I generated more ideas that I could exploit. Doctoral students would ask if they could see my idea cache. When I gave papers in our seminars, one faculty member asked me where did I get my ideas. I loved it. Now all that is gone. Everyone is working from home – or so they say. There is no faculty interaction. There are no students in the halls. Nothing. I now feel like a stranger in a strange land. All of this reminds me of Asimov’s Naked Sun and Caves of Steel that I read in high school. I am going to re-read those novels in which everyone is isolated from everyone else and conduct relationships via what would now be the internet. I would miss the interaction between faculty and between faculty and students. I believe that this exacerbates the lack of intellectual curiosity amongst the students. I guess I can understand that they have never heard of Paul Volcker, Milton Friedman and Gladys Knight and the Pips but Ron DeSantis, Scott Bessent and Elizbeth Warren? What rock are they living under?

Never again. Come Spring I am going to read, write my blog, have lunch and breakfasts with interesting people, go to the farm, smoke cigars, hunt, fish, ride motorcycles, camp and generally chill.

I had once said that there are three types of people in the world: the 3 percent that make things happen, the 7 percent who know what’s happening and the 90 percent who haven’t a clue what’s happening. I thought that the availability of free information would move many in the 90 percent into the 7 percent. I was wrong. Those percentages seem to be immutable regardless of information available. Malcolm X once said “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” This generation would likely ask “Who is this X person? Does he work for Elon Musk?” If the purpose of education is to replace an empty mind with an open one, then we have failed.