Becoming a Business Professor

I joined the Wharton faculty in 2015. I didn't mean to.

At Wharton, I teach courses in business ethics, financial history regulation, and antimoney laundering. It is unusual for someone with my training - with a JD-PhD in financial history – to be a business professor. At Wharton, there are three tenured faculty members with a PhD in history, so far as I know (there are over 250 tenure-track professors, so it’s hard to track). Herb Hovenkamp and John Zhang are the other two, but Herb is primarily at the law school where historians are relatively common and John has TWO PhDs, with economics as his primary field. Among the top business schools — call them Wharton, Harvard, Stanford, and Chicago — scholars with JDs are rare. Wharton is the only of the top business schools with legal scholars in a dedicated department.

This post — part of the Tuesday series on business schools and business education — tells the story of how I became a business school professor.

In the beginning

I date the beginning of my academic career at 2007, the year I entered Stanford Law School as a student. I knew I wanted to be an academic and didn’t want to do anything else. My college years were happiest when I was writing my undergraduate thesis on Brazilian immigrants in Boston in the sociology department or writing big papers on the reception history of the Holocaust film genre or analyzing Lusophone diaspora literature. I almost went straight to graduate school, first in Portuguese literature and then in economic sociology, but took a beat to teach public school for a couple of years in New York City. I loved the job but knew I really wanted to do research. Law school and legal academia seemed the right approach, something connected enough to the real world that I loved in inner city New York public schools but tweedy enough to satisfy my bookish instincts. I thought I would be a scholar of immigration law, the subject of my undergraduate thesis and the topic that occupied my attention so completely teaching the children of Dominican immigrants in Washington Heights.

I treated law school the way many people treat a PhD program, taking a dozen writing seminars and focused on writing. I was mentored by incredible scholars like Ron Gilson, Larry Kramer, Jonathan Zittrain (who visited from Harvard that year), Anat Admati, Dick Craswell, Al Sykes, Bob Weisberg, Mike Klausner, and Barbara Fried.

It was also a time when the world was on fire. I took a finance course in the spring of 2008, learning the relatively simple mathematics of asset pricing and the time value of money. By then I thought maybe I would be a constitutional law professor, but the line at office hours for the con law professors was a mile long and Ron Gilson tells me I was the only student who applied to be his research assistant my 1L year. I figured I would do Delaware Corporate Law as my field since (1) I was interested in just about everything at the time and (2) the competition didn’t seem very fierce.

The shift toward banking and financial regulation

That finance course changed everything. The professor asked us during those heady times of the Bear Stearns bailout to read a business paper, between the New York Times, the Financial Times, and The Wall Street Journal and come ready to talk about it. We spent maybe half of each course debating the news. In case my students are wondering, this practice is why I have always begun every course with a discussion of how class principles apply to what they are reading in the rest of the world.

I learned more in that class than almost any other I have ever taken, but not really about the capital asset pricing model. The most important lesson I learned was that very few people knew much of anything about the legal authority, governance structure, and sheer power and independence of the Federal Reserve. During law school I wrote and published my first articles about issues in financial law that were tangentially related — about university endowments, about how regulators think about fat-tail risk, about bank capital (and alternatives to bank holding companies) —but I was mostly focused on the Fed.

I had so many questions. Why was it organized in a quasi-federalist fashion, but with the sub-sovereign entities that split state lines? What was the relationship between and among the Federal Open Market Committee, the Board of Governors, the Chair, the Reserve Banks, including when monetary policy and regulatory policy merged so completely? Was there a limit to what they could do in a crisis? Did historical memories of inflation or depression bias their thinking? How could they claim “independence” when the consequences of actions and inactions reverberated so profoundly throughout the polity? These and many other questions consumed my attention during my law school years.

I realized quickly enough that I needed more training, that my questions were more than just legal ones. Originally, I thought the answer was to retrain as an economist, but my mentors in economics – Anat Admati and Paul Pfleiderer especially – talked me out of this. In their views, it would take a lot of time for me to retool as a mathematician and the questions that motivated me about banking and central banking had even less to do with the traditional issues in economics than they did with law.  

Becoming a historian

That is how, a few years later, I ended up as a history PhD student at Princeton, splitting my time between the History Department, advised by Julian Zelizer and Harold James, and the Economics Department, advised by Alan Blinder. (My full experience in the history academy will be the occasion for separate posts and only after receiving permission from my therapist.)

 While at Princeton, my wife, Nikki, decided to pursue graduate training in landscape architecture and applied to the top programs in her field. I reached out to the law schools at each of these programs to gauge interest in off-market opportunities, whether tenure-track or as a fellow. I never went on the job market in a formal way.

Most of the law schools didn’t write back; I got one callback but no offer. But my friend David Zaring reached out to ask if I would consider making a move to a business school. Penn was at the top of Nikki’s list and Penn Law’s hiring committee had already passed on my candidacy, so we thought it was off the list. Wharton intrigued me, despite the fact that David and Vince Buccola were the only two people I knew at the school and I did not know that there were legal scholars at business schools at all until a few weeks before (I thought both David and Vince were at the law school.)

Nikki, naturally, was admitted everywhere. And in the end, I received precisely one offer: from Wharton’s Legal Studies and Business Ethics Department.

Coming to Wharton

At the time, some of my mentors strongly advised me to sit out the offer and try again after I had defended my dissertation so that I would be more legible as a legal historian in a law school. That was sound advice and probably would have resulted in a law school offer, but two factors dissuaded me, one professional and one personal. Professionally, I am a historian, but not really a legal historian as those lines are conventionally drawn, focusing as I do on finance and politics.

Personally, Nikki’s program would take three years. I was 35 years old. I didn’t want to wait those extra years as our kids were getting older and we were accumulating ever larger quantities of debt, more by the month. It was time for me to move on, even though I had no idea what Wharton would mean for a scholar like me. I accepted the offer, Nikki enrolled, and we were off to Philadelphia. In the event, likely I thought, that I did not gel as a business professor, we would try again on the lateral junior job market after Nikki graduated.

Life and fate intervened when, a few months into this plan, we learned we were miraculously pregnant with our third child and Nikki decided to return to full-time parenting and, in time, teaching English as a Second Language teaching (her first professional love). We bought a house and made Philadelphia our home.

Now I had to figure out how to actually be a business professor. That is a story for another day.