Accounting in Texas
From Generation to Generation, Excellence
Adds Up
by Dorothy Brady
Such national prestige might not come as a surprise. A few years ago, in the aftermath of several prominent auditing scandals, you could hardly get through a day without seeing or hearing a McCombs accounting professor: there was Michael Granof weighing in on the op-ed page of the New York Times and Bill Kinney quoted in the L.A. Times. Obviously, ours is an outstanding accounting faculty—which helps us attract top students, creating a self-perpetuating cycle of excellence.
But how did accounting at The University of Texas at Austin get so good in the first place? Historically, Texas has been known as a haven for entrepreneurs, mavericks and other independent minds—not necessarily an oasis of law and order.
According to Ross Jennings, chairman of the Accounting Department, an independent streak and accounting acumen are far from mutually exclusive. In fact, he says, the entrepreneurial spirit of our faculty has always played a key role in the department’s success.
“Our professors aren’t content for our program to be the best in the state, but constantly make contributions that raise our profile on the national level,” he says.
Accounting greats like John Arch White, Glenn Welsch and Ray Sommerfeld, he adds, infused the department with that spirit early on. These three, all legends in the field, are representative of the way overlapping generations of accounting faculty have built upon the success of the colleagues who came before them. White, who was on the faculty from 1929 to 1966, Welsch, from 1952 to 1985, and Sommerfeld, 1963-1993, established the program’s reputation through their success as educators and scholars and turned eyes toward Texas through their service to national associations.
They Wrote the Book
Accounting students worldwide have pored over textbooks written by White, Welsch or Sommerfeld. Each man authored the definitive textbooks of his time, and their names became synonymous with accounting education. White began the tradition in 1938 when he co-authored “Elementary Accounting.” Then, in 1968, he joined with colleagues from the next generation, Charles Zlatkovich, an esteemed accounting professor who taught at UT Austin for 43 years, and Welsch, to write “Intermediate Accounting,” which has been published in nine different languages.
Welsch authored or co-authored scores of textbooks, including “Budgeting: Profit Planning and Control,” which was translated into eight languages. Professor Emeritus Ed Summers, who was Welsch’s student and later his colleague, says, “These books didn’t catch on slowly. They and their supplements spread like so many academic rabbits until there was scarcely a university anywhere that didn’t use at least one of them.”
More recently, Ray Sommerfeld revolutionized how universities teach about taxes by writing 11 textbooks on the subject. “Ray was a pioneer in teaching and writing about taxation, with an emphasis on concepts, planning and the policy reasons for legislation,” says Anna Fowler, the John Arch White Emeritus Professor in Business. Such was his impact on tax education that the American Tax Association created the Ray M. Sommerfeld Outstanding Tax Educator Award to honor his contributions and accomplishments.
Giants in the Field
White, Welsch and Sommerfeld also extended the good reputation of accounting at UT Austin through their service to national organizations. To give one prominent example, White served as president of the American Accounting Association (AAA) in 1956, followed by Welsch in 1964 and Sommerfeld in 1986.
They also made substantial contributions to professional organizations. Welsch served on the council of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) and was one of two educators on the AICPA’s Accounting Principles Board (APB). The AAA, AICPA and the APB each honored him with awards for outstanding contributions to accounting education.
As the top tax scholar and teacher in the country, Sommerfeld served as an advisor to the Internal Revenue Service, participated in various tax policy commissions and committees of the Accounting Education Change Commission and the AICPA, and was a consultant to industry and practice.
Shaping the Texas Curriculum
Through their textbooks, White, Welsch and Sommerfeld affected accounting curricula at universities worldwide. At the McCombs School of Business, their impact was more hands-on.
“Part of the unique culture of the McCombs accounting department is the faculty’s active involvement in the continuous innovation of the curriculum,” says Bob May, former dean of the McCombs School and former chair of the Accounting Department.
As the first department chair in 1947, White began the practice of fostering a two-way conversation between professional accounting and academe by inviting top experts from firms like Haskins & Sells to share their practical experience with Texas accounting students. Furthering the cooperation between industry and education, Welsch was a member of the committee that established the school’s first advisory council in 1958.
Also aware of the growing importance of academic research to the school’s reputation, White actively sought and received financial support for research from industry and public accounting. In the 1970s and 1980s, when the department’s highest priority became the recruitment of research faculty, Welsch played a key role in the hiring of new faculty members from research-oriented universities like Stanford, Cornell and Ohio State.
Capitalizing on Texas’ reputation for excellence in accounting developed by White, Welsch and their colleagues, Ray Sommerfeld saw an opportunity to create the top tax program in the United States at Texas. “Under Ray’s guidance, UT Austin trained the first generation of tax educators, who then fanned out across the country and sent their best students back to us,” Summers says.
First and Foremost
Throughout all this, White, Welsch and Sommerfeld never forgot their first obligation as educators—to their students. “These scholars realized what was important, from the standpoint of the profession, for students to know as entry-level professionals. This knowledge influenced what they taught and how they taught,” Fowler says. “Whenever I encounter students who studied under any of them, they always comment favorably about how these men have contributed to their professional success.”
National and local teaching honors for the three professors abounded. Perhaps the most telling evidence of their skill in the classroom is the fact that former students endowed professorships in each of their names.
Filling Big Shoes
White, Welsch and Sommerfeld are only three of the cadre of great McCombs accounting faculty of the past, including C. Aubrey Smith, Charles T. Zlatkovich, and Charles Griffin, whose imprint on the program is powerfully evident today. “Each of these gentlemen had the charisma and the ability to instill confidence in themselves as educators and, by extension, in the reputation of the Department of Accounting as a center of excellence,” says Fowler.
Today’s McCombs accounting faculty members exemplify that characteristic. Professor William Kinney, who is considered the foremost expert on auditing and assurance services in the U.S., says the changes in auditing standards evoked by recent scandals have prompted him to emphasize the basics. “The recent crisis in confidence in accounting has refocused teachers on the timeless fundamentals of relevant accounting methods, reliable auditing and unquestioned professional integrity,” Kinney says. Given the rapidly evolving nature of the profession and accounting scholarship, one of the faculty’s main concerns has always been keeping students abreast of the latest developments.
In Professor Connie Weaver’s innovative undergraduate tax class, students survey their peers about opinions on proposed tax legislation and then make a presentation on how these taxpayer attitudes might affect future tax policy. “By engaging undergraduates in academic research early on, we hopefully will generate their interest in pursuing a postgraduate accounting degree,” she says, thus assuring a continuous flow of successful accounting professors.
The outstanding quality of McCombs accounting students, says Professor Lisa Koonce, impacts the teaching methods employed. “With our high-caliber students, our job is to provide the basic foundation of knowledge, intrigue them with key questions and ideas, and then stay out of their way—they will run with it.” And the preeminent status of our program continually draws these academically talented students—not just from the U.S., but from around the world. Case in point: MPA student Angeliki Kasi says, “My professors in Greece strongly recommended that I pursue this master’s program because of its worldwide reputation.”
The Legacy Lives On
The current accounting faculty is committed to maintaining and extending the accomplishments of those who built that reputation, and the best emissaries of our success are our program graduates. Investment analyst James Pai, PPA ’03, says his UT accounting education gave him a distinct advantage that will endure throughout his professional career. “Graduates from other schools generally seem to be less prepared, both coming into the real world and in regard to passing the CPA exam. I think you’ll find that even more of the future partners in public accounting firms, CFOs in industry, or just general business leaders will be from UT.”
Jennings agrees. “This spring, we celebrated the graduation of 301 MPAs and PPAs, joining the thousands of graduates who went before them,” he says. “As those alumni take jobs across the country and grow into the next generation of business leaders, they are not only examples of the hard work of our current faculty, but they are also a living legacy of the generations of previous faculty who built our program.”
For information on specific programs at the McCombs School, consult our contacts page. For media information, contact the Communications Director by phone at 512-471-3314 or by email at CommunicationsDirector@mccombs.utexas.edu.
