I teach classes in education finance, both PK-12 and higher education. It’s not an easy subject to teach, particularly if you’re not really down with hierarchical modes of teaching/learning, grades, and capitalism generally. But I had a breakthrough the other day in my higher education finance class that I wanted to write about.

Let me tell you how I set this class up. It’s technically called Financial Administration in Higher Education. Here’s what we do. (Note: this class meets once a month, on a Saturday, from 9-5pm all day. That’s because these students are working professionals.)

We focus on a real-world situation of a local university’s fiscal crisis. I think looking at university budget crises provides an excellent structure for seeing financial practices and concepts in the wild, specifically by putting them into the context of a story: this university folded. Why?

I’ve taught the course twice thus far, and we’ve used the case of New Jersey City University as our study. There’s a lot to say about the situation that befell NJCU in 2023, but needless to say it was forced to merge with Kean University.

In the class, I assign two documents: the 2023 certified audited financial report (CAFR) and the most recent bond statement from 2021. Students are assigned 3-5 pages of these documents. They have to do an assignment called a “document critique,” where I ask them to examine their pages, find graphs, phrases, number changes, and other points of interest. Then they have to put together a presentation on these points of interest, focusing on financial terms, specific numbers, and how they manifested in the NJCU crisis.

I think of the class time using two models. The first model is how we used to sing karaoke in Ecuador (and, so I understand, throughout Latin America). Instead of going to the front of the room to sing your song, you stay where you’re sitting and the mic gets passed to you. You sing where you sit.

In class, students “cut to the chase” of their presentations and talk through their slides from where they sit. I have them spend time at the beginning of class boiling down their presentations to the most important stuff: key financial terms, numbers driving their insights, and how this impacted NJCU. I also ask them to have an “organizing principle,” whether it’s an argument, theme, question, or image. They don’t need to talk more than 10 minutes.

But the other image is how TMZ makes their celebrity reporting videos. The reporters are all sitting around their newsroom, like a workshop, and talking through the things they’re finding, while the host/head dude elaborates, asks questions, emphasizes, etc.

While students are giving their critiques, I interrupt them and emphasize things, explain stuff more, provide more context, and exclaim. So there’s that workshop vibe, but also a kind of collaborative-gossip energy.

But that’s half the pedagogy. It’s too much to have presentations like this all day, you have to mix it up. People get a little bored/lost. So I assign two theoretical/philosophical/critical finance studies readings for each meeting. Right before lunch, and at the end of the day, we get all the chairs and tables into a circle, and have a student-centered discussion about one of the theoretical pieces.

I’ve assigned Varoufakis’s introduce to political economy/critique of neoclassical economics via Rawls, Bay and Schinkus’s manifesto for critical finance studies, Langdon Winner’s famous chapter on technological politics, as well as a philosophical essay on Derek Parfit’s critique of personhood over time and its implications for pension policy. I do other stuff on temporality and debt (Wozniak), the municipal money chase (Sbragia), along with critical analyses of discounting (Doganova).

The idea is to go abstract, think big, and then chew on the minutiae of the financial policies we’ve examined during the critiques, thinking about finance in its full political economy. Also, instead of me going on and on, students get to address one another and get lost in some concepts.

I think put together, the course tries to teach finance from the bottom up. Rather than having overbearing quizzes, abstract terminology, and myopic technical content be front and center, students construct their own understandings of financial practices in the context of a narrative, with one another in a workshop, with the opportunity to understand what’s happening in finance conceptually.

It’s taken me two iterations of the course to get it down with all the spinning plates, but so far this semester, the students are really enjoying the vibe of the meetings. I think it’s a style that I’ll use moving forward.