A Fighting Chance

I still remember sitting down with the first stack of questionnaires. As I started reading, I’m sure I wore my most jaded, squinty-eyed expression.

The comments hit me like a physical blow. They were filled with self-loathing. One man had written just three words to explain why he was in bankruptcy:

Stupid.



Stupid.



Stupid.



When writing about their lives, people blamed themselves for taking out a mortgage they didn’t understand. They blamed themselves for their failure to realize their jobs weren’t secure. They blamed themselves for their misplaced trust in no-good husbands and cheating wives. It was blindingly obvious to me that most people saw bankruptcy as a profound personal failure, a sign that they were losers through and through.

Some of the stories were detailed and sad, describing the death of a child or what it meant to be laid off after thirty-three years with the same company. Others stripped a world of pain down to the bare facts:

Wife died of cancer. Left $65,000 in medical bills after insurance.



Lack of full-time work—worked five part-time jobs to meet rent, utilities, phone, food, and insurance.



They thought they were safe—safe in their jobs and their lives and their love—but they weren’t.

I ran my fingers over one of the papers, thinking about a woman who had tried to explain how her life had become such a disaster. A turn here, a turn there, and her life might have been very different.

Divorce, an unhappy second marriage, a serious illness, no job. A turn here, a turn there, and my life might have been very different, too.

You’re Not That Funny

One early spring morning in the mid-1980s, a shocking rumor floated around the UT faculty lounge: There had been a total of seven failing grades handed out in the preceding term, and they had all come from one professor. I didn’t say anything, but I knew who the professor was. I’d taught two large classes, and a few knuckleheads had thought they could skate through without working hard. They had miscalculated. In fact, exactly seven of them had miscalculated.

I took teaching seriously. The students who showed up in my classroom would soon graduate and go out in the world with incredible power, perhaps more than they realized. They would handle other people’s money, other people’s businesses, other people’s lives. On the first day of class, I always made the same promise: If the students worked hard, I would bust my tail to teach them the material. And though I never doubted for a moment that they could learn it, I was dead serious about the “students work hard” part.

By now I had been teaching at UT for a while, and I thought it was going pretty well. I was starting to feel more confident. When the public schools were closed one day, I decided to take seven-year-old Alex with me to my class. I settled him in the back row with a new Star Wars sticker book, and then I taught a great class—hard work, but plenty of lively exchanges and some jokes to keep everyone engaged.

After class, Alex and I were walking hand in hand down an empty hallway back to my office. The afternoon sun was slanting in through the windows, and I thought it was a perfect mother-son moment. I was smiling and relaxed. “So, sweetie, what did you think of my class?”

Alex paused a long time, clearly considering his words. Finally he said, “Mom, you aren’t that funny.”

I felt stabbed in the heart. Before I could think, I cried out, “But, sweetie, they laughed.”

This time he didn’t hesitate. “They had to, Mom.”

Huh. I guess I still had a lot to learn.





Punch Back

Over time, I started wrangling with a number of academics and others about banks and bankruptcies. Whenever I heard someone claim that the bankruptcy courts were loaded with cheaters and lazy slugs who wanted the easy way out, I started fighting back. This was not a good way to make friends, but to me that didn’t seem especially important.

I started giving more speeches. I was invited to participate in a panel discussion at a gathering of bankruptcy judges in Chicago to talk about how the courts should treat small businesses that go bankrupt. One of the other panelists was a well-known judge who essentially declared that when small-business owners hit financial trouble, they should just turn their businesses over to the bank.