Existing curricula for finance were argued to be relatively insular and artificially constructed, mainly due to their focus on a purely technical toolset. An old-style textbook approach would appear to be modelling a financial manager along with financial resources and real resources to generate wealth for shareholders. The model is piecemeal and abstract from values and human interactions. This creates the freedom to both use and misuse the results and neglects the possibility that these may determine how the results change. A cycle of increasing misuse (e.g., increasing inequality of wealth, increasing tax evasion) becomes possible thereby that does not seem to be compensated by the effects of a cycle of increasing use. Both possibilities exclude reaching balances that the participants choose themselves, as individuals, rather than having these imposed upon them. Including this experience into teaching would lead to the kind of debate and logical reasoning that seems essential in a pedagogical tool-set. There may be several reasons that this does not happen, but the argument in the paper is that it may be due to the privatization of higher education that has encouraged “tangible” and technique-laden courses that “sell” better than those which offer a value-oriented stance and require more complex studies. Hitching the offerings to exemptions from professional accounting bodies “brands” courses and offers greater legitimacy and social power—but does not support students to contribute to society. The result is that instead of a differentiation of offerings, rather similar educational products have evolved that are heavy on technique and singular in their use of paradigm. Keasey & Hudson (2007) provide another explanation: economists prefer to maintain the subject’s momentum and hegemony by creating new puzzles from data. The judgment presented in this paper is that there are enough new puzzles (or black swans) to realize that the old approach is not working. A third reason may be related to changes in the overall system, i.e., the way society is focusing on knowing of things rather than values.
A number of suggestions for improvement have been proposed in this paper. These include taking into account the processes that human interactions make possible, rather than only the structures and patterns of social systems treated as non-living. While negative black swans may not be predictable, resilience can be inculcated by searching for sustainable interactions.
As agents of change, universities are expected to positively shape new generations and act as a “conscience to the profession” (Lorsch, Khurana, & Lo, 2008; Podolny et al., 2009). The financial sector has suffered its worst crisis since living memory and has not fully recovered since 2008. This has led to many calls for reform (Carney, 2014; Gendron & Smith-Lacroix, 2013; Sullivan, 2009). In this paper, the salient features of the finance curriculum in UK universities are described. It is argued that they are largely similar and based on MFT. Relevant literature is presented to show that MFT is dated and relies on technical neoclassical models rather than on the empirical inclusion of the social medium and the use of a sustainable lens. Capra (2005) is introduced as a possibility for improvement.
The current crisis has resurrected issues relating to the success of MFT. Some of them were raised almost thirty years ago by Bettis (1983) who questioned the way finance theory sits alongside other subjects such as corporate strategy and public policy. It would appear that MFT has perpetuated models that benefit only finance researchers and have limited employability at best and erroneous repercussions at worst when put to a practical test. The past thirty years have witnessed governments, businesses, and even public organizations bowing to ideologies and their technical models that focus on maximizing purely financial values over social and environmental ones, without providing a sufficient understanding of the relevance of the latter. The result has proved unstable and dangerous and has been shown to lead to catastrophic consequences (Reinhart & Rogoff, 2009). Financial practices have initiated a widening between the incomes of the wealthy and the poor, reaching levels that preceded, for example, the crashes of 1929 and 2008, and to serious instabilities in public programs of pensions, health, and education (Carney, 2014).
