Carlo Favero, In Between W.B. Yeats and Joe Isaac

Ask him about his teaching philosophy and he'll quote W.B. Yeats: "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire". Carlo Favero, Director of the Department of Finance, learned it when he was a DES student.

"The courses that really helped me to grow as a student", he remembers, "put me in a state of absolute despair over the inability to figure out what was going on. I want to put my students in a similar state, while giving them the tools to get out of the impasse by themselves. Sometimes teaching is too structured: it helps shared knowledge at the expense of those who want to try new paths".

He reached the decision to pursue an academic career during an econometrics summer school in England. "I still remember professors on the verge of retirement who had as only concern to convey to students the excitement of research. It left a mark on me: throughout my professional career, I have been struggling to modernize the Italian academic model, in an attempt to make it similar to the Anglo-Saxon one". He went from the London School of Economics to Oxford University following the path of the distinguished economist David Hendry. He came back to Bocconi in 1993.

He has also worked alongside many institutions, from the Italian Ministry of Economy to the European Central Bank. "I value the role of research in policy-making".
He is also one of the founding members of the Bocconi basketball team, I Pellicani, "which is also a fine way to know better and to assimilate students". As the team coach, he came in touch with the former American professional basketball player Joseph Warren Isaac. He keeps the e-mail message that Isaac jokingly sent him after realizing that this Italian coach was an academic in the first place: "Ciao Carlo. Your credentials are impressive. I am shocked. Complimenti. It just confirms my philosophy, that any asshole can get a doctorate".