The business department will be offering a new course over Jan Term that will examine the ongoing global financial crisis.
Walter Hutchens, associate professor of economics and business, will teach the 300-level course, which is called Global Financial Crisis.
Whitworth will be one of the first universities in the country to offer a course on the global financial crisis, Hutchens said.
Global Financial Crisis will be a seminar-style course where the instructor is learning with the students.
“I would say my role is more like a DJ where I’ll try to coordinate the playlist,” he said.
Teaching the course in a format where the professor lectures for three hours a day from Monday to Friday would be ineffective, Hutchens said.
“That would be robbing both to the students and me – and for this topic, impossible, because the subject is changing too fast,” he said.
Hutchens said the course will be open to all students, not just students in the business department.
The only prerequisite will be instructor permission in order to limit class size, he said.
"You can’t have a course too big or the discussion quality will be diminished," Hutchens said.
Hutchens said it would be considered negligent to not offer a course like the one scheduled for Jan Term.
Most professors who teach business courses have deemed it important to talk about the financial situation, he said.
“Everybody has sort of shoved their syllabuses aside this semester and said, ‘This is too big, too important; we have to talk about it,’” he said.
Students will examine five broad questions throughout the course, including what the origins of the crisis are, who deserves the blame for it, specific effects of the crisis, what should be done to avoid a similar situation in the future, and what can be learned from historic and contemporary parallels, Hutchens said.
Having broad questions will allow students to have a deeper understanding of the financial crisis, rather than a very basic idea of it, Hutchens said.
“I think that the people that participate in it will have a very rich understanding of what’s happening and what it means,” he said.
Whitworth is not invulnerable to the effects of the crisis, Hutchens said.
As the crisis starts to hit the larger economy, and not just the financial economy, some people may be laid off from their jobs, he said.
“People might say, ‘You know, I think it’d be great for my child to go to community college or a public institution for a year or two and then transfer to Whitworth,’” he said.
If that turns out to be the case, enrollment numbers could go down and Whitworth could see a freeze in enrollment, Hutchens said.
He said if most people at Whitworth are asked what the financial situation means for the university, they’ll say it’s fine. Companies such as Washington Mutual said they were fine before they went under, he said.
“I don’t mean to suggest that Whitworth is in a crisis, but if you call up somebody and they give you a chipper, optimistic outlook, that’s their position, but that’s probably not the reality,” Hutchens said.
He said he has talked to students at Whitworth who have lost funds from private loans.
“I think people have been thinking that it’s something that’s happening on Wall Street and not Division Street, but it’s coming,” Hutchens said.
Contact Melissa Challender at melissa.challender@whitworthian.com.
New Jan Term course to examine global financial crisis
Published: Sunday, November 9, 2008
Updated: Saturday, February 28, 2009
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