Blog

The Record You Keep Comes With You

Jul 7, 2026

A piece by Tawnya Means this week has had me thinking. She tells the story of Christopher Noe, an MIT Sloan lecturer who handed an AI a stack of his old teaching notes and got back a draft that seemed, in his words, to read his mind - down to an ice-breaker question and a tax aside he had never actually typed out. As a professor of business, I’ve had this experience, too, and I want to build on one thread in the article rather than add another round of applause.

Grades are not prices

Apr 7, 2025

In a recent EconTalk episode, Daisy Christodoulou explored the challenges of educational assessment, drawing provocative parallels between grades and prices. She suggested that grades, like prices in a market, help allocate attention, shape incentives, and guide decisions. It’s a striking analogy—and one that resonates with the broader themes of the episode, which reflected deeply on tradeoffs, transparency, and the limitations of rule-based systems. But as I sat with the idea, I found myself questioning whether the price metaphor truly captures what grades are—or what we need them to be. This essay is a reflection on that metaphor, and an argument for thinking about grades and educational feedback in a different way.

Entrepreneurship is About Skills, not Personality

Nov 16, 2024

Want to be an entrepreneur? You need to know business (and a whole lot more)

Too often, business and entrepreneurship are portrayed as starkly different pursuits—business as a predictable, rule-bound domain and entrepreneurship as a thrilling, boundless journey fueled by creative risk-taking.

Why business at Oberlin?

Sep 26, 2024

I have been asked on several occasions, “why a business program at Oberlin College and Conservatory?” I suppose for those familiar with Oberlin’s long standing association with the liberal arts, performing arts, and social progressiveness, the idea of standing up a business program seemed surprising.

What will be different about Oberlin business?

Sep 26, 2024

Business education is often patterned after an MBA model. But that isn’t optimal at the undergraduate level. Undergrads often lack the lived experience that MBA students bring to their graduate classrooms. As such, the principles introduced in class stick less since students don’t have an experience-based reference.

What is the difference between the Financial Economics and Business majors?

Sep 26, 2024

Oberlin is launching two majors – the first one is Financial Economics, a major in the Economics department. The second is the major in Business. Not surprisingly, the close relationship between these two topics have students frequently asking me, “what’s the difference?”