By ERIC DASH


BETHLEHEM, Pennsylvania - Midway through one of his undergraduate seminars on mergers and acquisitions at Lehigh University’s business school, John R. Chrin reached a topic he knew intimately.

As his students dissected the case study, “Investment Banking in 2008: A Brave New World,” Mr. Chrin couldn’t help adding his personal twist to a discussion of Bear Stearns’s collapse. “I remember sitting there with the finance chief and the C.E.O., Alan Schwartz,” he said. “They could not open for business on that Monday. That’s why the government was so hopeful for someone to do a deal.”

Last year, Mr. Chrin was a senior investment banker at JPMorgan Chase, advising his boss, Jamie Dimon, the chief executive, on the daring takeover of Bear. Today, he has the ear of 25 deal-makers in training in Finance 372, a course that mixes the basics of mergers and acquisitions with war stories from the financial crisis.

“It’s an opportunity to recharge, give back and bring a little bit of what I have learned,” said Mr. Chrin, perhaps the only professor at Lehigh who comes to class in a bespoke navy blue pinstriped suit.

Mr. Chrin, Lehigh’s global financial services executive in residence, is one of a handful of top deal-makers who have traded the boardroom for the classroom: Gregory Fleming, Merrill Lynch’s former president, is coteaching a course on the causes of the financial crisis at his alma mater, Yale Law School; Thomas Russo, Leh man Brothers’ former chief legal officer, taught crisis decision-making at Columbia Business School in New York.

Universities have long brought in business leaders to inject real-world know-how into their lesson plans. But they have redoubled that effort amid the fallout from the financial crisis.

The Wharton School, in Philadelphia, arranged a series of “24-hour teach-ins” over the last year, and during the spring semester brought Wall Street alumni to campus for a class on the crisis. This fall, Dartmouth University in New Hampshire introduced a seminar on crisis economics, co-taught with Michael G. Stockman, a former Wall Street risk manager.

Meanwhile, business school deans are trying harder to reach out to corporate leaders and alumni to give their students a hand in one of the toughest job markets for Wall Street in years by broadening their contacts. Faculty members are relying on practitioners to keep their research current on fast-moving policy topics, like financial regulatory reform.

Jeffrey Garten, the former dean of the School of Management at Yale, said bringing in more experts from business and government was crucial to helping financial leaders of the future avoid past mistakes. “There is a crying need for more understanding,” he said.

That is one reason Mr. Chrin, who graduated from Lehigh with an engineering degree in 1985, came back to campus as a teaching fellow this fall.

He hopes students will gain a better understanding of investment banking. For one of their final grades, they will have the option of analyzing the Bear Stearns sale. “If they want to do that one, that’s fine,” he said. “I have a little more experience on that.”

Life in academia is instructive for Mr. Chrin, too. He said his time on campus had made him “way more empathetic to how people can get really angry with the outright levels of pay” on Wall Street.

Next semester, Mr. Chrin said he would also teach a freshman course on business ethics and might assist with faculty research. In the meantime, he has told students that he will be as available to them as he once was to top clients. He did not announce office hours on the first day of class. Instead, he gave out his phone number.

“I’m a banker, so feel free to call me,” Josefa Palma, one of Mr. Chrin’s students, said he told the class. “I’ll always have my cellphone.”


John R. Chrin, who was involved in a failed takeover deal of Bear Stearns, now teaches finance at his alma mater, Lehigh University.