Teaching Corporate Governance in an MBA Class: An Academic Note*

Abstract

Corporate governance is a new and emerging discipline in academia. The discipline of corporate governance has increased in importance, driven mostly by multiple financial scandals. These scandals have motivated regulators and the business community to require business professionals who are properly trained in various aspects of corporate governance. The problem, however, is that corporate governance covers many different subjects, such as finance, strategy, and law. This problem of multidimensionality of corporate governance is coupled with the fact that it is a field of study that has rapidly changed to keep up with changing regulations and the changing needs of the business community. These problems make the task of teaching corporate governance challenging for educators. Notwithstanding these challenges, business programs for MBA and CPA students are incorporating corporate governance into their programs. Therefore, our objective is to provide reflections on our three-year experience of teaching corporate governance. We highlight the challenges that we experienced, such as the diversity of the clientele and the multidisciplinarity of corporate governance, and we discuss how we addressed these challenges. We also identity opportunities we used to develop our teaching approach, such as team teaching and using data from real companies. We present our reflections with the help of education frameworks that should help the community of educators if faced with challenges similar to ours.