FACULTY SPOTLIGHT: Kathleen Hidy

Sep 2, 2019

From Law to Teaching: Xavier ‘Purpose’ Just Felt Right

Kathleen Hidy was well into her career as a lawyer when she discovered another passion: The opportunity to share her knowledge of the law with both business students and law students.

For years she’d served as an adjunct professor when she was a corporate litigator in Cincinnati, and in 2011, she became a teaching professor at Xavier. But she felt the pull to teach full time, and in 2017, she became an assistant professor of legal studies.

“It is a joy and privilege to introduce students to the United States legal system, which is an intricate and complex system rooted in history and evolving in real time through legislative, executive and judicial action,” Hidy says. 

After graduating law school from Columbia University, Hidy became a corporate litigator in Philadelphia. She has held two federal court clerkships and now teaches a course for undergraduates called The Legal Environment of Business. At the  graduate level, she teaches Business Law and Ethics to students studying for a Master of Business Administration.

“In both the undergraduate and graduate courses I teach, I awaken students to the relationship between law and ethics and the impact ethics has in the business environment,” she says.

It was her background in Catholic education that shaped her worldview and continues to shape her teaching philosophy today.

“My entire educational background prior to graduate school was an immersion in the Catholic worldview, which makes bold claims about the dignity of each person and the meaning and purpose of each person's journey through life,” she says. “I was attracted to Xavier's Catholic Jesuit mission and identity and the mandate I have as a professor in a Jesuit university to incorporate this worldview into my educational approach.”

Hidy says she enjoys seeing her students develop into independent and rigorous thinkers who can examine arguments and use logic to explore and test theories, evaluate evidence and assess the validity of sources. Only then can they make reasoned and evidence-based judgments on legal and ethical issues impacting business organizations today.

And like other professors in the Williams College of Business, Hidy makes sure to utilize experiential learning in her classes. 

“My undergraduate students engage in simulations involving ethical dilemmas arising in business contexts,” she explains. “They also ‘virtually’ meet my MBA students who share real-world strategies the MBA students use as young professionals to pursue ethical excellence in their professional lives.”

She said that at the MBA level, the students do multiple simulations involving building ethical corporate cultures, risk mitigation strategies for product liability and intellectual property corporate planning, ethics policies for marketing and advertising, and diversity and discrimination policies.

“Each MBA student also creates an Ethics Toolkit to guide them in their professional endeavors and to alert them to character weaknesses or vulnerabilities,” she says.

It’s a focal point of the Jesuit mission, Hidy says, as she is helping prepare business professionals for ethically challenging situations in the workplace. When she’s not teaching, you’ll find her traveling with her family, hiking or reading.

So what does Hidy say to those business students thinking of coming to Xavier?

“I think it is a unique opportunity to join a community of scholars who pursue academic excellence and strive to develop professional expertise in the field of business studies,” she says. “All in the context of asking the most important (and often-ignored) questions about meaning and purpose.”

Learn more about Xavier's Business majors and the MBA program.

By Ryan Clark, Senior Digital Strategist, Office of Marketing and Communications