Promoting Integrated Teaching and Critical Thinking for Remodelling Financial Curricula: The Way Forward to Exposing the Hidden Causes of Financial Volatility

Beyond the consensus regarding deregulation, wealth gaps and greed as root causes of financial crises, the chain of causes should include the transfer of knowledge and values, namely, education in finance. Significant responsibility for the harmful behaviour on financial markets, encouraging speculative management and neglecting social or temporal considerations, lies in academia. Dominated by short-term applications of financial techniques in finance curricula and salary increases as criteria for rankings, the academic world must recognize its part in the hidden causes of past financial crises as well as the ongoing financial and economic volatility. Without in-depth revamping of financial curricula in universities and business schools, with genuine emphasis on governance, regulation, ethics and sustainability, speculative bubbles and financial crises are doomed to reoccur. Integrated Finance Teaching should be the norm for both demanding students and responsible faculty. Quantified financial techniques should be coupled with a “soft” qualitative approach to financial transactions, to cast light on the social and environmental consequences of free-wheel market finance. Integrated Finance Teaching, thus, should incorporate a strong critical thinking component to balance “hard integrated teaching” based on statistics and modelling, and a “soft integrated teaching”, to make finance professors and students accountable as responsible citizens.