Teaching Wharton MBAs, Dirty Money Edition

Last week I taught an intensive course on anti-money laundering to students who could have been on vacation instead. It was the best teaching experience I have ever had.

As mentioned previously, last week I taught an intensive course on money laundering in the global economy to a group of MBA students (both full-time and executive MBAs). It was, hands down, the best teaching experience of my career, and I have never had a bad one.

What made it so worthwhile is worthy of some reflection. It speaks to what makes Wharton MBA students so extraordinary to teach.

What we learned together about anti-money laundering

I structured the course around a series of topics, exercises, news items, guests, and almost constant debate. Every class started with five students who shared a news item of relevance to money laundering and government efforts to shut it down. We discussed how real estate purchases can evade AML rules, and efforts by government to combat it; an uncomfortable alliance between China and the US to combat money laundering for very different reasons, but with the same ultimate goal; private equity efforts to combat money laundering…regulation; and so much more.

Substantively, the experience reaffirmed the view I already had, that anti-money laundering is a unique and extraordinary window into many problems of finance, politics, geopolitics, and humanity. Many of the students felt it too.

Teaching Wharton MBAs

But this post is not about AML — I’ll save that for later (and there will be many of these, buckle up). It’s about the unique experience of teaching Wharton MBAs. I structure almost all my teaching as a kind of Socratic antagonism, as described in an earlier post. In my business ethics courses, that means a Socratic dialogue. In these courses that deal with financial regulation, I find the best approach to constantly ask students to provoke each other and to disagree. We hold Oxford Union-style debates, with a resolution (including, this week: “The only use cases for cryptocurrency are speculation and money laundering,” which was defeated; and “The USD sanctions regime promotes global instability,” which carried.) I sometimes rely on students to voice their own views in these debates, but sometimes I assign those positions and ask them to debate the views, fiercely, no matter their own views.

Wharton MBAs show up for it. They are prepared, engaged, demanding, teachable, and hilarious. Some comments I heard this week changed my incorrect views about topics I thought I understood well (some technical details involving Bitcoin, for example). Some comments I heard provoked drive-home reflections that are turning into new research papers. And many comments and discussions just reoriented my thinking about humanity.

More than socially overcommitted recruiting junkies

I am, admittedly, “ride or die” when it comes to teaching MBAs. I love it and love them. When I first took my job as a business professor — not something I planned or expected, coming into the academy as a legal scholar and historian — a friend and crusty veteran of business school teaching told me that MBAs came to the classroom full of incorrect opinions and unwilling to do the work to change them.

I have found almost exactly the opposite. Students who might have been in Cabo during their fall break opted instead to spend the week getting into the weeds on a technical subject like anti-money laundering, for four or five hours a day, and did so with a stamina and ingenuity that surpassed even my high expectations.

People come to get their MBA for all kinds of reasons. We are not gatekeepers to a monopolistic guild, as is the case with law schools. We are not a discipline that trains in a single field, as is the case for PhD programs. But in my experience, the canard that students get an MBA for the networks and parties just isn’t true.

Of course, I didn’t see the students who chose Cabo instead.