Law, Ethics, and Memes: Chad Cumming’s Classroom Revolution

In this engaging episode of The Adjunct Files, FGCU adjunct Chad Cumming shares his unconventional journey from tax accountant to attorney and educator, blending real-world experience with a passion for teaching. Chad discusses how he brings business law and ethics to life for his students—using memes, current events, and historical context to foster critical thinking and adaptability. From startup stories to classroom strategies, this conversation highlights the power of authenticity, autonomy, and embracing ambiguity in higher education.

Theme music composed, performed and produced by James Husni. 

Adjunct Nation is a collaborative podcast under the auspices of The Lucas Center for Faculty Development at FGCU.  You can learn more by clicking on this link:

https://www.fgcu.edu/lucascenter/

Transcript

Welcome to the Adjunct Files.

We're a growing, diverse community who face challenging work in an ever-changing, higher

education landscape.

Your co-hosts for this podcast are with you in this.

I'm John Roth, Adjunct since 2015 and now a coordinator for Adjunct Faculty at Florida

Gulf Coast University.

I'm Maggie Hohne, Adjunct since 2022 and currently work in the Office of First Year Seminars.

Together we hope to have conversations to empower, support, and elevate Adjunct Faculty.

This conversation today is one to do just that.

Welcome back everybody.

John, how are you?

Good.

I think overall we're in, man, we're in the middle of this semester almost.

It's crazy.

It's going so fast this semester.

Everything's going well.

Yes, I would agree.

We have a fantastic group of students.

Campus has been very busy with all the events going on.

It's always nice to see students out on the library lawn, free food, some games.

Free food.

That's always good.

We've got a great guest today, another Adjunct at FGCU, Chad.

Please introduce yourself.

You are in business law.

Business law and ethics, John, that's right.

Currently, I only teach one section.

Dr. Benford would love to load me up.

I tell her, ask me again in maybe a year and a half when I'm not quite so busy with my

firm.

Outside of FGCU, I have a law practice in Benita Springs, primarily business, tax, commercial,

and some real estate law.

My favorite part of my week is coming to campus and getting to interact with my students.

That's on Monday.

Monday's start off great and then it's kind of all downhill from there.

Is it a three-hour block that you do?

It is.

It always shocks me the number of students who come into the three-hour class and say,

wait, you teach for all three hours?

What's wrong with you?

I say, well, first off, that's my job.

Second, that's what you're paying for.

It's a one-hour meeting a week, three-hour session.

Those can be great, but they can also be exhausting for my feet, especially.

Yeah.

Well, great.

Tell us a little more about yourself, Chad, and just your background and that how you

got connected to FGCU, et cetera.

Sure.

Okay.

Graduated college in 2013 from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.

My undergrad was an accounting.

I liked it so much and they had such a beautiful campus that I stuck around at a master's in

tax.

That was 2014.

Went to work out in the so-called real world for quite a while.

Started off at PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Doing tax accounting.

Left that to do a startup called Food on the Fly.

It was basically DoorDash in airports for people making connecting flights.

Really interesting because I can bring some of that experience into the classroom.

Ultimately, did not work out, but makes for a great story.

That led me to work for American Airlines and their finance department for a few years.

Got tired of that.

Some of the internal politics, which is really never to my taste, went to work for JP Morgan

in banking for a bit, had what I, endearingly, call my quarter life crisis.

So late 20s, I said, this is not what I was put on earth to do.

I pivoted.

I went to law school at Ave Maria down in Naples.

I pushed up there, opened my practice past the bar here in Florida.

But I was a glutton for punishment.

So went to University of Miami, got another law degree.

About that time I started teaching here.

So it was kind of, I don't know if I could say this, it was a Hail Mary when I submitted

my application on the FGCU site.

Well, especially from Ave Maria.

Exactly.

On the FGCU site, I think I submitted my, it was just one of the evergreen postings.

And about eight months later, I heard back from Tonya Benford.

She said, hey, class starts next week.

That sounds about right.

I said, hey, let's do it.

Yeah.

It's been a thrill a minute ever since.

Well, we're going to have to talk about that first semester.

But before we get there, Maggie, my goodness, it sounds like 50 years worth of experience

in 10.

Yes.

I'm speechless.

So bachelor's in accounting, master's in tax, a law degree, and then tax law.

Real estate law.

They call it the LLM.

This sounds very fancy.

It's really not.

It's just another, another, I like being a student.

Not surprisingly, since I teach.

So there you go.

That's crazy.

That's amazing though.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I'm still speechless.

That's just, that's like a lifetime's worth of everything.

In like 20 years.

In like 20 years.

You know what?

I get nine hours of sleep a night.

I'm not bragging, but it's true.

He is very efficient with his time.

That is what it comes down to.

And that's what I tell my students too.

You make the A on the first day of class because by the time you walk in the door for the

first time, you either have self-discipline.

And of course, you can build that over time and you have a structure and you have a routine

or you don't.

So it can be said for anybody.

Wow.

I'm curious.

What made you pivot from like the tax accounting side to the law side?

Well, I'll tell you a secret Maggie tax is really boring.

What?

Yes.

But what?

But it's lucrative.

Yes.

So I still get to do that in my day to day practice.

But one of the, and this is something else I tell my students, one of the problems with

tax law is that there is no overarching, there's nothing metaphysical about it, there's nothing

abstract about it, and there's no consistent theme because when one party comes in, they

change everything that the last party did and vice versa.

So you get this.

You're just on a roller coaster.

You're just on a roller coaster and there's no deeper meaning, which might sound too spiritual

this early in the day, but I needed that deeper meaning.

Yeah.

Yeah, that value and purpose.

Yes.

It sounds cliche, but it's totally true.

You know, you start off your 20s thinking, it's just a job.

I'm just getting a paycheck.

But by the time you get to the end of that, you realize, well, yeah, paying the bills

is great, but I need that one cost.

I need to, yeah, exactly.

I need a reason.

Yeah.

Because you're spending more time at work than almost anything else.

Yes.

My first job after grad school in 2015, which wasn't that long ago, but feels like a long

time ago, I did during tax busy season, 86 hours in one week.

And I said, yeah, this is not it.

There's got to be a better way.

Why you only had to do that for 50 more years?

Yeah.

And you know, they make it sound like it's just like a week, a year.

No, it's most of the year.

They leave that part out on the recruiting.

But that's okay.

That's life.

Well, let's get to that.

Sure.

So with the first semester you taught, you were given the course a week ahead of time.

Four or five days.

Yeah.

Oh, while you were still a student.

Yeah.

Yourself and running your own practice.

But it was fun.

I have to.

Oh, of course.

It sounds like that's who you are.

It can be very difficult to start like, and you probably understood Canvas a little as

a student, right?

But it's different as a instructor.

It is.

But it's still recent enough for me that when they say, oh, Canvas didn't work.

I said, no, no, no, don't try that line with me.

I used Canvas.

I know what Canvas says.

Do not quote the spells to me, child.

I was there when they were written.

I was in the room.

Yes.

Give us what that was like.

That first time you walked into the classroom.

And what was the class?

Yeah.

So I teach a BUL 3130.

It's business law and ethics.

And that's the fun part of the class, not that the rest of it isn't fun.

Walking in, John, it will sound so disingenuous when I say this.

But fake it till you make it.

Came in mind.

You can't.

I knew I couldn't let them smell the fear.

Don't let them smell fear.

So I pretended I hyped myself up.

Not to stroke my own ego, but I went through my accomplishments.

I said, I did that.

I can do this.

The first weekend leading up to class that was very busy, right?

Because starting from scratch.

Right.

Were you given a cell or a syllabus?

I got a syllabus.

That's it.

But it was OK.

And then from there, we now have about 1,200 slides for the semester, which sounds like

a lot because it is.

That you made.

Yes.

But I would much rather make my own slides because when you first off, you know when

you get the textbook, they give you the slides.

There's maybe two bullet points on there.

They're focusing on the things that aren't interesting that are going to put the students

to sleep.

But yes, to answer your question.

Well, so this is a general theme I wish.

There were a few people listening in from, I don't know what area.

Yeah, because I have been told back a number of times because I get told off, oh, I'm

not sure.

But that's an exception.

No, most of the time adjuncts get every.

It's like, and I keep hearing stories about, oh, I had a week ahead of time and I got a

syllabus and that's it.

So not that there aren't areas that have course coordinators and provide a shell.

Not only a shell, they provide the not only the syllabus, the book, the slides, everything,

there are those.

I wish that was more standard.

At least you have something to start.

Sure.

There's no threshold that everybody follows.

Yeah.

And so we're going to try to get a little more of that because it's not fair to you or your

students, even though you are, I can tell you're a gifted person to have in the classroom

and somebody that is passionate about this stuff, it's still not fair that you're walking

in with five days of, I just got this together in five days and here we go.

That's just a lot.

Well, and Jill, like you're teaching an upper level course.

So you're teaching juniors and seniors.

As I remind my students.

So it's a little different than teaching what I teach the student life skills courses where

I can go a little more off the cuff.

It's a little less structured, more conversational base, but when you do all.

I still do that though.

So we'll come to that.

Yes.

It's just a little different.

And I feel like it's a whole added layer when you teach those upper level courses as

well in terms of just like the intensity, the structure, and it's specifically within their

major.

So there's a little more guardrails on there.

It is, but given the course substance, and this is where a lot of the magic happens,

so to speak, business law, I mean, we're covering a lot of spicy stuff.

We're covering what is discrimination?

Why do we have any discrimination laws?

Why are those federal laws not state laws?

What about the environment?

What about immigration?

Students love to ask about that one.

I wonder why.

And to use your term guardrails, yeah, there are definitely guardrails on the conversation,

but I love when they ask that because first it lets me know somebody's awake, which is

nice.

And second, it's hard to think of a topic that I can't take in somehow tie it to what

we're talking about.

So even if they want to go a little bit off topic, great.

My job, and I tell them this on the first take, my job is not to read the book to you.

You can read your in college.

Otherwise you wouldn't be here.

My job is not to read off the slides to you.

You have eyes.

You can read the slides.

My job is to tell you how what you're reading in the book is actually quite different from

what happens in the real world and to get them to do critical thinking.

Exactly.

Well, that's AI, right?

And we have, oh, I can just put it in Grog or chat GPT.

I said, well, how do you know if he's telling you, I don't know why I assume it's a he.

How do you know it's telling you the truth?

Because it knows how to lie and it does.

And it does.

All the time.

It can hallucinate.

And it's biased.

Extremely biased.

Because who's the one coding?

Yes.

I will, I kind of a night owl sometimes.

So I was up at two in the morning arguing with Grog the other day and I sent it into

a hallucination.

So it's fun to turn the tables from time to time.

Watching AI just crash out.

That would be wonderful.

Just get it to do a kind of a doom scroll type loop on itself.

It got so upset it closed the conversation.

I've never had it do that before.

So it makes me a little scared for what the future holds.

They're going to remember your IP address.

Then there's a bomb coming your way.

Exactly.

He's on the list.

Skynet.

You're the first victim.

I always say please and thank you though.

I wanted to remember.

Just in case.

Exactly.

So then you must have with that ethics portion of it, it must be a field day to teach this

class in 2025.

It is.

Like in a good way.

In that day.

It is.

It is.

So one of the topics we talked about is, you know, is there a particular assignment?

There are several.

But one I assign is a semester writing assignment.

And I tell them at the outset, don't use chat GPT.

I will fail you.

I use chat GPT.

I know how it writes.

It's very distinctive.

It's not a particularly good writer.

It's a tool.

Even with GPT-5.

I'll try to stay on topic.

That's okay.

Go ahead.

You know, GPT-5 was so hyped up.

But when it came out three weeks ago, I remember thinking this thing is stupider than 4-0.

The one that came before it.

And there's a bit of a backstory.

We actually get into that in class.

5 was actually not ready to be released.

5 was on track for January 2026.

But Sam Aldman was getting so much pressure from his board of directors to release something

now that Elon Musk had.

GRAK 4.

It's just whatever.

Just put a ribbon on it and send it out.

And that's what happened.

But this assignment.

I asked them to put themselves in the shoes of an in-house attorney who is reporting directly

to the CEO of a social media company.

And the fact pattern is that on the way to work that day, you hear on the radio that

a politician has announced that if elected, she would enact a law banning social media

usage by persons under the age of 18.

And then we go through a whole, we go through a whole analysis and it's really fun.

And they say, well, this would never happen.

I said, well, no, you need to watch the news.

There's a bill on the floor of the Florida State House right now that does exactly that.

Australia's already done it.

The UK either has done it or is in the process of doing it.

So finding the ripped from the headline stuff and working that's the fun part.

But I think that that's something that they appreciate, even if they haven't told you

to your face.

But bringing that, this is happening in the real world.

We're going to simulate that this is us in the future.

How do we handle it and track it in a low stakes environment?

I have a 5.0 on rate my professor.

I don't know if that's good or bad.

It probably means I'm too easy.

No.

No.

No.

In that light, what have you heard that they do appreciate about your course?

Sure.

So going back to the fact that this particular section is three hours once a week and that

obviously gets pretty monotonous.

We'll go off on tangents.

I think it was Sigmund Freud who said tangents that I'm greatly paraphrasing here.

Tangents are to be expected and anything else that doesn't involve that going off topic

once in a while.

That's neuroticism.

We want to stay away from that.

So we'll go in.

I'll say, actually, this is a great point.

We'll start off every class with somebody give me something that you've seen in the

news related to business law.

First off, it starts off as conversational rather than me just dictating.

It wakes people up.

Second, it's a great opportunity for them to get easy participation points.

We'll take, last week, there was a big Google antitrust ruling and I said, well, great.

That's chapter 23 that comes later in the semester, but let's talk about it now.

Allowing digressions and not being fixated on getting through the slides.

The slides are there as a means to an end.

They're not an end unto themselves.

But there's so many of them.

There are 120.

What did you say?

Yeah, it's about 1,200.

Obviously, that's a whole semester.

That's not per class.

That's almost 100 a week.

It's a little over 100 a week.

But I tell the students.

I would throw up.

I tell the students, here's the important slide.

I put stars.

Here's the important slide.

If you want to go deeper, that's great.

Knock yourself out.

Here's what I need you to know for the exam.

So I don't hide the ball.

Yeah.

Wow.

That sounds so fun.

I want to take all these classes.

I'm going to take all these classes.

I already have degrees, but I love to learn.

Just like you.

So I'm like, if there's no tests, it does listen to this like a conversation.

Exactly.

So tell me who are your students in this course?

A lot of hospitality majors primarily.

Interesting.

And so for them, very few, for example, accounting majors.

So it's interesting.

The business law and ethics, the business law, the business law, the business law, the

business law, the business law and ethics courses roll up to the accounting department

within the business school.

But I actually hope Dr. Benford's not listening.

I actually kind of like that because then, although I'm also a CPA myself, CPA's can

be a little boring sometimes.

Not all of them and not all the time.

So getting this more diverse group of majors who may not have any background on this, especially

my international students, we start off the semester.

And you know what, John, we talk about civics.

I give basically a high school civics lesson over the course of the first class and a half.

Because first off, I don't know if they're still teaching it even here in the United States.

I kind of doubt it from the level of preparedness that I see.

Right.

But second, I don't want to assume that everybody has that same background.

And so we talk about the three branches of government and we talk about federalism and

why do we even bother having 50 states?

Why not just have one big state?

And we keep those same big picture currents throughout the semester because it's so much

more important for me that they can understand the big picture.

I don't want the memorizing minutiae.

Right.

They know how to look things up.

And it'll change by the time they actually get out.

I told them that this last week, quote, whatever job you think you're training for today will

not exist in five years.

That's the bad news.

But the good news is we're all in the same boat.

So it's okay.

Yeah.

That's so true.

It is true.

I'll tell you, I know some attorneys, oh, hey, I will never replace me.

Hey, hey, I's already replaced me.

Right.

And I'm exaggerating a little bit, but that's that's happening.

Yeah.

I feel like it's a blessing and a curse because I might allow free you all up on some of the

little tedious things that need to be done.

You know, back in the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes, the economist, predicted in the future with

automization, we would all work five hour work weeks, right?

And that never came to pass.

We just do more work.

So we'll find some way to fill the time, I think.

That's the sad thing.

This is something I brought up at a message recently.

What we have done for all of the increases in technology is not trade it for time or

leisure.

Exactly.

We have traded it for higher productivity and money.

Yes.

Not all cultures have done that.

That's true.

But boy, it's like, so we're working longer hours now, even with all the technology and

expected more, I think almost everybody at the university, it feels like they have two

or three jobs for the price of one.

Right?

Anyways, side point, but no, no, no, that's.

That's.

That's in that too.

It's like you're doing that in top of everything else.

I think it's important to the, you're acknowledging it.

John, I thought that it is going to change in the job market.

It's going to look completely different.

All right.

My angel, one said that honesty is a very expensive gift.

Therefore, you cannot expect it from cheap people.

So I use that on my forehead.

A lot of my job, both in the classroom and out is telling people things they don't necessarily

want to hear, but that they need to hear.

Right.

You need to be informed because then you can make those decisions.

Sure.

Yeah.

But I think too, it would be a disservice of us to not tell them that.

Sure.

Because we hear from our parents, what do you mean you can't get a job?

I just walked into the first building with my resume when I graduated and this happened.

Things are so different now.

Right.

And I think too, especially in your field right there.

Blue collar jobs will be the last to be fully automated because until Elon has his robots

that cut here perfectly, you can't get that from AI or an oil change or somebody to come

fix my AC.

Exactly.

How do you teach a class with the understanding that whatever job they think they're going

to have in five years probably will be obsolete?

How do you train people in the area of business law or any other real subject so that they

can critically think on the fly for what we don't even know?

And to be adaptable to that change because they're not going to be in the same position

for 40 years doing the same thing anymore.

No, not at all.

Like it's going to change probably every year.

So how to keep those skills?

So yeah, so those are like those transferable critical thinking, teamwork, leadership, asking

the right question skills.

Those are hard to assess.

They are.

The writing assignment portion is how I do that from a more pragmatic standpoint.

But John, do your point.

And I tell them on the first day, like I said, I'm not here to ask you to memorize facts.

That's very boring.

Please don't do that.

Please don't memorize the names of cases.

Those are not on the exam.

I probably inject a lot more history into my business law course.

I mean, we're looking, we look at the Federalist Papers in the first class and we make the

point.

Look, the founding fathers, they came up with this document.

Actually, they came up with the articles of Confederation.

Why did that go away?

That's a whole other story.

They didn't necessarily get it right.

And if you ever read the writings of Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, oh, I got to drop my

favorite quote of all time on you.

I have to do it.

Okay.

Yes.

Thomas Jefferson, the night before signing the Declaration of Independence.

So the evening of July 3rd, 1776, he wrote to Ben Franklin because the founding fathers

were all enmeshed in doubt.

They didn't know with certainty that they were doing the right thing.

They were actually pretty candid about that in their writings.

And Ben says, well, what if we're doing the wrong thing?

Should we question this?

And Thomas Jefferson responds, and I love this, question with boldness.

Given the existence of a God, for if there be one, he must better prefer the homage of

reason to the ignorance of blindfolded fear.

I bring that up to my students pretty early on.

It's actually on the landing page for my Canvas course.

And I say, first off, don't assume just because I'm standing at the front of the classroom,

I know everything.

I hate to do two quotes in one sentence, but it's Socrates said the only thing I know is

that I know nothing.

Right?

I don't say that.

I'm thinking.

That's for the second day of class.

That's for the second session.

So first, why do I say all of this?

Because I try to make the point as we go through the course just because this is the way things

are.

They don't have to be this way.

And if you don't like the way things are, the first step to changing them is to know

what is the status quo.

I say, for example, do we have to have a written constitution?

And the students say, yeah, of course it has to be written down.

I would say, are you aware that one of the oldest representative governments in the world,

England, does not have a written constitution?

It's just floating around in the ether.

And they say, oh, I didn't know that.

Furthermore, do we have to have a Supreme Court?

Yeah, of course.

I say, are you aware until about 2010, England didn't even have a Supreme Court back in the

day.

And I'll go quickly off topic before we get back to it.

But your, your trial or your court of final resort was the House of Lords, all of the

aristocrats who probably knew nothing about your day to day life as a peasant, even in

your, you know, 2010.

So how do I train them for a job that doesn't exist?

I want them to get really comfortable with ambiguity.

I want them to lean into the conceptual.

I love when they argue with me.

I tell them, I would hate if you ever agreed with me just to seem agreeable.

Some of my best students are those that disagree with everything I say.

I love it.

So does that answer your question?

That gets a good portion of that.

We need to be doing more of this.

100%.

But I also, I love what you do about framing the class in the context and doing that historical

work because I feel like that like one students actually understand the foundation and why

we're in the mess that we're in.

Yes, exactly.

It helps make it not so conceptual.

Like who did this?

It's all right here.

We know exactly what happened.

Who did what?

We just, how are we going to apply that moving forward?

Yeah, absolutely.

From a more practical standpoint, I love sharing anecdotes.

For example, when I was, and this is the ethics part of the course, several different parts,

but this is just one, when I was doing my startup several years ago, that was back in

2016, 2017, I had opportunities to go roll this out at airports.

And I could have made frankly a lot of money doing that.

Every major airport, and I'm not going to name names, but every major airport, somebody

would come to me who was pretty high up in the decision making and said, hey, we'll

roll out the red carpet for you.

But listen, this is just how it works.

You have to give us a check or you have to give us money.

You know, if you don't do that, you're not going to plan.

I said, well, that's wonderful, except that's a felony, bribing a federal official or a public

employee.

And thank you for your time.

Have a nice day.

And my students were like, oh, that didn't really happen.

And they're like, believe me, I sure you, it did.

So the ethics part is interesting.

Just yesterday, we were talking about, we have a quadrant system.

We have four quadrants.

You know, what is legal and what is also ethical, what is illegal and also unethical.

And then you have what's legal, but unethical and what's unethical, but legal.

We spent a lot of time on that one.

Awesome.

And the reason we do that is because a shockingly high percentage of my students, when I ask

them, what is the law?

That's whatever the legislature says.

No.

It's actually not.

And so that's where we can go off on this tangent and start saying, you know, how do

we want to change things?

Yeah, you're identifying their preconceived notions of the process and what it actually

entails.

I don't use the word implicit bias because that some people will just go off and attend

you with that.

But that's exactly what we're doing is we're unpacking that circuitously.

It works here, but not here.

Right.

Exactly.

But why?

Why does it work here and out there?

And part, yeah.

So yours is like a civic government, business ethics, all kind of.

I don't know if it's supposed to be, but that's the way I teach it because I think.

But if that's the foundation of your course and everything you talk about builds off of

it, that's important.

It helps them understand the context of what you're actually talking about.

It's a context.

Every nothing exists in a vacuum.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like this isn't for funsies because I like to hear myself talk for three and a half hours

about the federalist papers.

Although I do know some people.

I mean, I'm sure you do.

And I'm sure you do.

You probably had some people like that.

But for the most part, and we're 18 to 22 year olds, that's not what we like to talk

about all the time.

That's true.

And that's fair.

It's a hard subject.

But you expose students to so much.

I'm not here, as I say, I'm not here to tell you what to think.

I'm just here to invite you to think.

How has it been to be here as an adjunct?

How long have you been here?

So going on my fifth semester, I think.

Two and a half years.

Two and a half years.

Yeah, two and a half years there about.

Yeah.

How has it been?

And how can we improve the adjunct experience?

What has your experience been?

Well, first off, let me start off by saying this.

I like it so much that I've encouraged my mom, who's also an attorney.

Actually, she's the other half of my law firm.

Oh, wow.

To come be an adjunct too.

So she's actually interviewing.

So let's start off with that.

Obviously, on the whole, extremely positive.

What I liked, and going back to something we were discussing, John, at the beginning

of the podcast, is I liked being thrown in the deep end.

If somebody had given me, here's your slides.

Don't deviate from these.

That's not allowed.

That's the other extreme, which I don't think we want here either.

But for other adjuncts that I know that are not quite as adventurous or as entrepreneurial

or as go get them, they're looking for a little more.

And rightly so, I think, of just give me at least the foundation so that I can grow from

that.

Well, I'm thinking too, and then we'll come back to your point, but just you have been

in school for so long.

Yes.

I do two masters in a law degree.

That's a lot.

It is.

So you are kind of already in that school routine of, okay, this class is, I have my

objectives, like you're kind of already in that mindset, I feel like while you're still

in your profession?

Yes.

But along those same lines, the reason I called it the so-called real world earlier is that

as much as we think about academia as being radically different from the real world,

it's really not.

You have a boss.

It's actually better in college because you are your boss.

You decide the project plan to complete the deliverable, which is your transcript, hopefully

with a 4.0.

Let me give you a counterpoint.

So University of Miami Law School, they reached out to me last year asking would I teach a

remote distance learning program for the law school?

And I said, well, that's interesting.

Let me hear about it.

And they said, well, you don't really have to do anything.

You just show up.

We design all your slides for you.

And we do all the assignments.

They said, that's wonderful.

That's not a fit for me.

I wish you all the best.

So to your point, what would I be concerned about here is if it did, and it's not this

way, but if it were to become a very top down, regimented, you spend 6.5 minutes on paragraph

three of page 417.

Yeah.

That's not me.

It's not me at all.

They get because you like that autonomy to be able to design and but it's all let's

be honest.

The people who write textbooks, I want to be nice with my words there.

How do I want to say this?

They live in a bubble.

Right.

And if I don't have the freedom to say, well, here's what your textbook author says.

And here's reality.

I'm just standing here reading at that point.

And that's a waste of everyone's time.

Right.

Yeah.

It's a deep professionalization.

Thank you.

That's a great way of saying of the profession.

Go back to what did you like?

So you liked the freedom and the support I'm hoping from your department, but also what

else can we improve here?

You also liked the in person.

You liked it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You said that was a big one earlier.

I don't think we're recording, but.

No, no, it's it's it's the biggest one.

We're human beings.

We were not designed to sit in our separate caves and communicate remotely with smoke

signals.

You know, let's be candid.

I'm young enough.

And you mean you obviously know as well, what does it look like when somebody's texting

under the table?

Like I'm not blind.

I can see that.

And it's 15 times worse on zoom where everyone has their camera off.

I've had to teach a couple of sessions when we had the hurricanes.

Right.

Right.

And I'm sure that the retention rate for that material was close to zero.

So of course I added some more on the test to make up for it.

Make sure you do the readings.

Exactly.

And I tell them what I'm not your mom.

I'm not your dad.

You decide.

Do you want the A?

That's great.

I would love to give you all A's if I could.

There's no mandatory curve in the business college.

I don't know about the other colleges.

But the zoom takes so much out of it.

And I I have clients.

Hey, we'll just do a zoom.

No, no, no, no.

You're three blocks away.

I'll come to I'll make a house call.

I can see your car parked in front of your office.

You mean me half way in Japan.

They actually have a huge problem with this with with their youngest generation.

I mean, their their birth rate, their reproduction rate is now like 0.7 because it's way below

the replacement rate of 2.1 because everybody's so they've got their phone in the screen the

whole time and I'm guilty of that as well.

To an extent, but society.

There are more it's it's depersonalization and at a more fundamental level, it's treating

people as objects and not as people.

Yeah.

So interesting.

So if you see you prefer to just exclusively teach in person.

If they really needed me to I'd make an exception.

But the person is fine.

I don't think it's a smart.

It's that's cool.

So what else did you did you like about FGCU or what would you like to see improve for

adjunct faculty support?

I will say this.

The onboarding is pretty seamless.

I do like that.

That's improved a lot.

Let me tell you.

No, nobody loves the seven hours of, you know, trainings, but that's going to be anywhere,

right?

But getting my ID, getting my parking.

So I'm not stressed out about those things so I can focus on the substance.

That was very smooth.

I really liked that.

Awesome.

That's improved because it wasn't.

Let me tell you, it hasn't.

We've done a lot of work over the last 10 years.

Well, it's it's obviously paid off because my experience was smooth as this glass.

Awesome.

Any any improvements you'd like to see?

You know, at the risk of sounding cliche, I don't know that I have anything concrete

I could give you, John.

Just making sure as we've already said a few times is there's got to be a balance between

regimented, uh, of the words here.

And here's what you have to teach versus here's your syllabus, you know, have a great

semester.

That's where the focus should be.

How much do you feel part of the FGCU community?

Totally.

I love them.

Awesome.

I at first, I will say this.

I was annoyed in the beginning of how many emails I got about things that had nothing to

do with me.

And then I realized, no, wait, that's not a bug.

That's a feature, right?

To get you involved and okay, here are the faculty events.

Here's what the library is doing.

So I can mention those things.

When I first came here, I had no idea what service learning hours were.

Now we talk about them in every class.

So I do feel part of the community.

I feel if I wanted to, I could be even more a part of the community.

So it's not like I'm being held back in any way.

Awesome.

And as far as you said, you have been asked to teach more or they'd like you to, but you

got to balance your life out a bit.

I would love so, so I'm, so I'm growing my firm in the future.

I will have underlings.

We call them associates.

I like underlings.

And then maybe.

Minions.

Hey, I liked your idea about interns.

Interns.

Maybe when I have that time.

Sure.

I have the really robust accounting background, not to self-aggrandize.

And so actually when I first came in, it's, hey, can you teach business law and also

intro to financial accounting and also.

Yeah, managerial.

And intro to min.

I'm like, well, yeah, absolutely I could.

I would need an extra 10 hours in the day and I don't control that.

But you know, I would love to do that in the future.

That's a question of when, not if.

And would you ever consider a full-time position?

Yeah, I would.

I don't know if I'm supposed to say that.

So we'll just keep that between us and your listeners.

No, that's okay.

He's really encouraging Maggie to hear the experience he's had and the go get a go get

him attitude that he's displayed is amazing.

And something I think students, I'd love to see students model.

I agree.

And I think it's also unique to you have all the educational qualifications.

You've worked at some very, very big name firms.

Sure.

You've dropped.

And yeah, you decided to start your own firm.

So you're also an entrepreneur.

So you might lose so much sleep over it.

Well, he's getting nine hours every night.

Oh, right.

You are getting nine hours.

But it's very impressive.

And I think that it's nice for the students to see.

The range.

Yeah, if you work hard, it is possible.

But things need to be an alignment.

You need to be passionate.

You left an entire industry to go into law.

That is.

Like got off the highway.

It's okay.

One of the qualities that I've noticed from, I was going to name him politician, but I'm

not going to do that.

So I'm going to name an entertainer instead.

Even my Gen Z students know who share is the entertainer.

Okay.

Yes.

Why?

I am a rich man.

Because that's a great meme.

Oh, I teach using memes.

I will find memes during the week.

And I will put them on canvas.

Awesome.

Talking to people.

Some of the best advice I ever received, which I'll tie it back to in just a moment.

What you were saying, Maggie was, you have to meet people where they are.

Right.

So if my students learn better with memes, that's great.

I'm on TikTok, probably almost as much as they are.

Although it's for marketing purposes.

But one of the things that I have found, this is just my take that defines really successful

people, not that I'm calling myself successful, but just others, is a willingness to continually

start over.

It's not, I finally made it.

Now I can rest on my laurels.

It's okay, I figured this out.

Let me go start doing something I know nothing about.

Mm-hmm.

I try to instill that.

That's difficult to get across to 20 and 21 year olds.

But I try to make the point.

Right.

Well, I think too, it's hard potentially for them to see because when you're in it, it

is just homework and tests as far as I can see.

So it's hard to kind of conceptualize that, what do you mean?

I'm going to be starting over.

I'm going to get this degree and do all these things and then I'm going to be like just

kidding.

Soarin Keir's guard, the skidding and like, said, the greatest irony in life is that

it must be lived forward, but it only makes sense in reverse.

Right.

Life must be lived in retrospect.

Yeah.

You have to know where you're ending up and what the altimates are before you can even

begin.

Yeah.

And I think it helps to just put into perspective because you're still relatively in the relatable

to them in terms of age.

I try to be.

Like it's not, yeah, I got my degree in the 70s and it's tough out here.

Oh, come on now.

Watch now.

There's nothing wrong with that.

There's nothing wrong.

That's more experienced.

But it's different.

But they have that balance.

They have faculty who have all that historical experience and then out there right now.

I'm just old enough to remember when we didn't have cell phones and we didn't have internet.

All we had was TV.

It still blows my mind every time I started a new semester that none of my students have

those memories and trying to explain what the world was like.

Pre-iPhone.

When, hey, I was in line in 2007 on day one for the first iPhone.

So I'm not, I'm not Ted Kuzinski.

I'm not anti technology.

Like we were talking about with the slides.

That has to be a means to an end, not an end unto itself.

There's a time and place for it all.

This has been great.

Yeah, I think he's a Renaissance man.

Thank you.

Yeah.

I've been called worse.

I'll take it.

It's a compliment.

But no, this has been fantastic and your experience is great.

We didn't ask, but are you originally from Florida?

I know you said you went to SMU.

So originally from Oklahoma.

I'm the one cousin that went off to the big city.

Okay.

I love my extended family.

They're all farmers.

So I go back home and we have, they tell me about the latest developments in agriculture

and I tell them the latest political scandals and we all get caught up.

So it's great.

It's, it's that balance.

It is, but I know I love them.

I, I don't mean to make fun of them at all.

Yeah, no, but we're very happy to have you here.

Thank you.

Southwest Florida.

Very happy.

Local business owner.

Hey, it's no.

She's just here.

It's great.

I tell everybody Southwest Florida is the new center of the universe.

Come on down.

We're open for business.

You know, who wants to go to Dallas or New York?

They're on the way out.

Come down here.

We, we've better weather to boot.

Florida's popping.

Yeah.

Well, thank you so much, Chad.

Thank you.

This was awesome.

And Maggie, as always, such a good co-host.

Yes, it's been great, Sean.

Thank you.

Thanks again for listening and hope you come back for another episode.

Bye, y'all.

Bye.

Bye.

Bye.

Thank you.

The theme use section was composed, performed and produced by James Husny.