A Fighting Chance

Teaching Without a Textbook

If I’d been smart, I would have kept teaching the classes I already knew how to teach. But my curiosity got the better of me, so before we moved to Austin, I called the dean at the University of Texas and offered to teach a course I’d never taught before: bankruptcy.

Why the interest in people who go bankrupt? When a family files for bankruptcy, they are essentially admitting that they’re dead broke and unable to pay their bills. There are a few twists and turns in the law, but basically a family keeps a small stake and then gives up pretty much everything else they own—their savings, their stocks and bonds, sometimes their home or their car. In return, the family’s old debts are wiped out and they get what they most need: a fresh start, a chance to start over without a pile of debts pulling them down.

When a family goes bankrupt, it is a moment of great defeat and, often, personal shame. For many, it is like going before a judge and declaring to the world that they are losers in the Great American Economic Game. I wanted to know what drove them to the edge of disaster and why they had tumbled over. I wanted to know who those people were, what they did, and exactly what had gone wrong.

I think I was looking for an answer to a question I couldn’t quite ask out loud, maybe because it was a little too personal.

I felt like my family was mostly safe now. Bruce and I didn’t have secure jobs yet, and sharing the responsibility for two children, three old people, and an aging dog required patience and some creativity, but I knew Bruce had my back and I had his. But I also knew what it was like to be afraid, to fear that whatever you had built could be taken away. Bankruptcy was a terrible admission of failure, and I wanted to believe that everyone who filed had done something terrible or stupid or had lazed about and never tried to make anything of themselves. I wanted to know that the work-hard-and-play-by-the-rules people might not get rich, but they didn’t need to be afraid. And I wanted to know that they never, ever went bankrupt.

Teaching bankruptcy in the early 1980s presented a special challenge. A new bankruptcy law had recently gone into effect, the first major reform since the Great Depression. The new law did a lot to strengthen bankruptcy protection for families in trouble, and help them get back on their feet.

The difficulty was how to teach this new law. I thought it was pointless to teach the old law, but nobody had yet published any good textbooks that addressed the new one. When the dean at UT took me up on my offer, I faced a little panic over the corner I’d put myself in: for the next year, while trying out for a job, I’d be teaching a class I’d never taught before, with no textbook to show me the way. Not smart. Exciting, but not smart.

My solution was to teach the bankruptcy class by turning it into something like a giant game of Jeopardy! I gave everyone a copy of the new law, and I took the class through each section, teeing up the issue: If [a phrase in the law] was the answer, then what was the question? In other words, what problems did the lawyers and senators think they were solving when they wrote these new laws? It wasn’t the standard way to teach a class, but I’m pretty sure that everyone learned the statute inside and out.

Not long after I started my new course at UT, one of the world-famous professors who had advised Congress about the revised code happened to visit the university, and he agreed to talk to my bankruptcy class about the new law. Dr. Stefan Riesenfeld was in his seventies, bent and small, with wispy gray hair circling his balding head. He was a learned man—he spoke four languages, had written or edited about thirty books, and still had a thick German accent that made him seem like a perfect copy of the brilliant scientist from every 1950s sci-fi movie. He was tough and direct, famous for yelling at students, “You have mashed potatoes for brains!” and other forms of encouragement.

Dr. Riesenfeld gave a few opening remarks to my class, talking about his work on the new laws and describing conversations with well-known members of Congress. When a student asked about the families in bankruptcy, he explained that the people who filed were mostly day laborers and housemaids who lived at the economic margins and always would. He seemed to suggest that a lifetime of poor choices had landed these folks in bankruptcy courts, and these people had little in common with my students and their friends and neighbors.

Then I asked the obvious follow-up question: How did he know that people in bankruptcy existed mostly at the economic margins and would always be there?