Page 652 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
Being off to a good start was especially important to me. I wanted to have a full house, and I knew that students were permitted to exercise an “add/drop” option at any time during the first three weeks of each semester (!), so, if things didn’t go well, I could lose part (all!) of my audience. While I was concerned about the add/drop period, I also saw it as an opportunity not just to expand the enrollment but also to make a very non-professor-like proposal to the assembled audience. It tran- spires that Brooklyn Law School, showing a modicum of understanding, paid a ludicrous ten-dollar “bonus” to its faculty members for each examination in excess of fifty that they would be forced to grade. Accord- ingly, I explained the system to my prospective scholars, added the fact that I had five children who were dependent on me, and then offered a bounty of five dollars per new enrollee to any of them who could dem- onstrate that he or she was responsible for convincing a peer to enroll in Real Estate Finance—provided, of course, that the net enrollment was increased thereby. This apparently improved the good start, and that pleased me.
Finalizing Matters
But the good start was somewhat short-lived. To be true to my belief that it was imperative for commercial lawyers to understand what their clients understood, I had decided to bite the bullet, and, after explaining the plan and approach for the semester, I told the class that we would examine the concerns of the various participants in real estate transac- tions, with an emphasis on the perpetual issue of “who got what money and when” in a universe in which decisions were made solely with the goal of maximizing gains (or minimizing losses). Unfortunately, I thought that it was therefore necessary first to explain debt and debt service (interest and principal payments, self-amortizing loans) and then to address how real estate people use the cash flow that a project was projected to generate in order to “leverage” their investments through borrowing. My goal was to demonstrate that the greater the
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