Excellence Across the Board

McCombs professors excel in divergent realms of teaching and research,
using one to inspire and inform the other.

by Pam Losefsky
“HE WHO DARES TO TEACH MUST NEVER CEASE TO LEARN.”

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Finding the Sweet Spot

Striking a balance between teaching and research is an important philosophical issue, says Fredrickson, who publishes extensively on strategic decision processes, strategy implementation and executive leadership. “For me, the tasks are so different—teaching is very social and research is very solitary. So, each one provides a counterbalance to the other,” he says.

While some professors work best by divvying up their research and teaching activities into different semesters, others find that conducting both at once is more energizing. “It takes a long time for research ideas to incubate, to design a study, execute it, shepherd it through the review process,” Fredrickson says. “But with teaching, you know when you walk out of the room if you did it well. One is immediate and intense, and the other is a long-term process.”

Still, it’s a constant juggling act. “No one likes to walk into a classroom twice a week and crash and burn,” he admits.
“That could lead you to turn all your attention to teaching and drive out the time for research.”

Prentice also likes to interweave both activities throughout the year. “There’s a real rush to teaching—it’s motivating to see the light go on in a student’s eyes—there’s no better feeling than to be able to impart something that’s useful and interesting,” he says, adding, “and it’s fun!” But Prentice also relishes the opportunity to feed his own intellectual curiosity. “I love sitting in a library and learning stuff and forming opinions about the direction the law ought to be taking,” says the securities law, accounting ethics, insider trading and securities fraud expert.

Students often play an important role for researchers: they ask tough questions. Brown says the drive to solve mysteries is a great motivator. “Many teachers do research because they have a natural interest in answering questions to which they don’t immediately have the answers,” says Brown. “I’ve pursued and published research ideas that began as questions in class that I couldn’t answer.”

For Lisa Koonce, who teaches financial accounting standards and analysis, it was when she modified her research agenda to dovetail better with the classes she taught that she really felt a surge of synergism. “I changed my research stream from auditing to financial accounting, and it has been a tremendously rewarding endeavor,” she says. “It’s now much more seamless to go from my research to my classroom, and I love it. I really, really feel like I know what I’m talking about.”

What Are You Talking About?

Knowing what you’re talking about is the bottom line for a teacher—giving all the more credence to the idea that researchers can make the best teachers. Fredrickson believes a good teacher, first and foremost, has expertise on the topic—and the best way to gain such expertise is to be at the forefront of the discipline, pushing its boundaries. “If you can’t show students that you’re the topic expert, you’ll have no credibility,” he says.

Second, a good teacher has an interest in and enthusiasm for what she’s doing; and third, she has a genuine interest in the students. “Two of those three things are attitudes,” he points out. “Students become aware of it if you don’t have time for them or if you don’t care that they can’t figure out what’s going on.”

Koonce’s former students back up Fredrickson’s intuition. “What I really found amazing about Dr. Koonce is how much effort and selflessness she put into teaching her classes,” says Jana Nurmukhanova, MPA ’07, a former teaching assistant for one of Koonce’s classes and now an analyst with McKinsey & Co. in New York. “She always tried to make class fun and the concepts easy for us to understand, bringing in research and real-life examples,” Nurmukhanova says. Teachers who can do that will have a lasting impact on the way their students think.

Vice Provost Givens says that when professors are out in the world, doing the kinds of things they’re trying to teach their students, the students always benefit. “As opposed to reading a book about a topic—say immigration—if a professor has been talking to the key players in the debate, gathering data at a national level, and so forth, he can offer a very current, up-to-the minute perspective,” Givens says.

Training undergraduates to do research is also an important part of their learning process, Givens points out. “When our research faculty can engage students directly in research, students have a better understanding of the field.”

What’s more, research-oriented instructors have a level of discipline and rigor that differentiates them. “It’s about being able to define questions and find solutions,” says Brown. “It’s about being able to convey a theoretic foundation.” Brown believes theory sometimes gets a bad reputation. “Students think of theory as being less valuable than concrete things,” he says. “But I feel the opposite—nothing will put them in better stead for their professional lives than understanding the theoretical underpinnings.”

What Brown tells his students is that there are only half a dozen important ideas in investment management, but that they will be repackaged in a million ways. “If you understand those fundamental ideas, you can reverse-engineer the packaging of anything and figure out what’s at the core,” he says.

Fredrickson’s corporate strategy class imparted that kind of understanding to Bill Gurley, MBA ’93 and general partner with Benchmark Capital in Menlo Park, Calif. “I am thrilled that I had such a strong professor for what I consider to be the seminal course in the MBA program,” says Gurley. “This is where it all came together—marketing, HR, sales, finance, everything.”

Not for the Faint of Heart

While many things have changed at universities over the last century—progressive pedagogies, technology-enabled classrooms, distance learning—very little has changed in terms of publishing academic research. There are only a handful of top-tier publications in each discipline, often publishing once a quarter or even less frequently, with a limited page count. Peer reviews and successive edits can drag on for months or even years. An online clearinghouse called the Social Service Research Network (SSRN) enables researchers to publish working papers before they’ve been accepted to a journal—this lets ideas circulate more quickly than in earlier years. But the journal submission process, and ultimately what a researcher is judged on, has not changed at all.

Fredrickson illustrates: “My department recognizes only five A-level journals in management—those that are of highest quality and also topically appropriate to our discipline. There are tens of thousands of members in the Academy of Management, and for them, these journals are their only outlet—the competition is incredibly fierce,” he says. The average acceptance rate for these top-tier publications is about 7 percent.

When you’re right on the cusp of getting tenure and you get a bad review, it can be devastating. “And it never stops—I’ve been at this for 25 years, and it’s less consequential now when I get a bad review, but it still happens,” Fredrickson says. With such stiff competition to publish, successful scholars must develop a thick skin and a will to persevere, both in the laboratory and in the classroom.

They can leap breaches of logic with a single theorem, persuade three disparate peer-reviewers to issue a publish recommendation and entice a roomful of bleary-eyed freshmen to show up for an 8:00 a.m. class.Today’s academic heroes are equal parts super teacher and lifelong learner, taking on the responsibility to open the minds of tomorrow’s thinkers and leaders.

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