Do the Right Thing: The “Research” Curriculum

Abstract

The idea initially occurred a short time after reading the Presidential Address (1) as the poignant words and phrases continued to echo throughout my subconscious: ...the sheer excitement of intellectual inquiry in is our responsibility to care for, to expand, to deepen, and to share this of scholarship with our students ...it is time for to accounting to scholarly leadership ...put a scare in the employers, the administrators, the publishers, your colleagues, and each and every one of us And to be honest, at this point, that is still all it is; a single, solitary idea. Yet if embraced, it would fundamentally transform the traditional undergraduate accounting curriculum. It is the following: Design the undergraduate accounting curriculum around the following materials: Working papers (i.e., the academy's leading-edge of scholarship) Journal articles (i.e., the academy's vetted of scholarship) Consider: * Isn't it within these materials where the true intellectual inquiry in accounting takes place, and where such inquiry is evidenced? If so, is it not incumbent upon the accounting academy to share this inquiry, this body of scholarship, with our undergraduate students? * If those of within the academy are unwilling or unable to access and share this of scholarship with our students, what does it say of as scholars, or of the scholarship itself? Indeed, what does it say of accounting's legitimacy within a university? * Would this idea not radically reinvigorate accounting scholarship? Would it not enable to reassert our scholarly leadership? Would it not put a scare in the employers, the administrators, the publishers, your colleagues, and each and every one of us? Again, consider: * What would the employers say? Would they see graduates of such a program as sufficiently and appropriately educated to do the work needed to be done in their organizations? In the public accounting firms? In corporations? In the public sector? Educated to make an immediate contribution, a long-term contribution? Looking back on their own careers and university education, would the leaders of these organizations have approved of such a curriculum? Then again, how much curriculum guidance should we take from the employers? * What would the administrators think? Could today's Business School Deans and Accounting Department Heads support this initiative? To make the undergraduate accounting curriculum more academic? What outcomes might accrue? A backlash from students, from employers, from alumni, from the Circle of Donors or the Friends of the Department, from the accounting faculty itself? What happens to those not into research? How much should the accounting curriculum be affected by the administrators' concerns? * What would the publishers think? How would the textbook, and its traditional three-year cycle, fit with this new model of undergraduate accounting education? Would it become obsolete? Could there still be a role, some profit to be made, in packaging more real-time, academic materials? How much should the accounting curriculum be affected by the publishers' concerns? …