Liberalising the Accounting Curriculum in University Education

Alan Sangster, Richard M.S. Wilson

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138192812
• eBook ISBN: 9781317979845
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book presents the views of accounting educators, accounting education policy-makers, and accounting practitioners from across the world on the challenging topic of liberalising the accounting curriculum within university education. Accounting is a relatively new subject within universities and has been absorbed into a high level of education without any real attempt to do so within the traditional ethos of a liberal arts education.

In this book, the logic of teaching using the liberal arts is described and contrasted with the practical vocational training approach of teaching which has formed the foundation of accountancy courses for many years. A proposal to change this established practice, by integrating the liberal arts into the university accounting curriculum, is followed by a series of short chapters which address the relevance, validity and worthiness of the proposed approach. Comments and counter-arguments are then discussed before further chapters illustrate how the proposed change may be achieved in a variety of different contexts – ranging from that of the global financial crisis (which began in 2008) to the inclusion of ethics and sustainability within the accounting curriculum.

This book will aid those teaching accounting in universities to improve the design of their accounting degree programmes by moving away from an excessive emphasis on technical skills towards a broader consideration of a liberal contextualisation of the accounting curriculum.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Accounting Education: an international journal.

INTRODUCTION

Liberalising the Accounting Curriculum in University Education

RICHARD M. S. WILSON

Loughborough University, UK

ALAN SANGSTER

Griffith University, Australia

Knowledge is a defining characteristic of a profession but, given the ever-increasing knowledge base, curricula in professional disciplines are becoming overcrowded (Paisey and Paisey, 2007). This is not a recent phenomenon: the accounting curriculum has long been considered overcrowded as educators follow the demands of the profession for more coverage of ‘x’, whatever ‘x’ happens to be at any particular point in time. In the U.K., for example, 25 years ago it was the teaching of computer programming. Today, it is accounting standards, and arguably highly-relevant subjects for students and their future employers (such as double-entry bookkeeping) are disappearing from syllabi and being relegated to appendices in textbooks. Others, such as accounting systems, e-business, and continuous monitoring, continuous auditing, and continuous reporting have never managed to get past ‘first base’.

Similar issues apply worldwide with curriculum content being very much directed by what ‘needs’ to be learnt (normally based on external factors, such as the demands of the accounting profession) rather than by reasons of pedagogy relating to what may be done with, and within, the curriculum to develop reflection, critical thinking, and the ability to think ‘outside the box’ on the part of our students, and so better prepare them for lifelong learning.

One traditional means of developing these skills in students is through the provision of a Liberal Arts Education. The Liberal Arts represent a college or university curriculum aimed at imparting general knowledge and developing general intellectual capacities in contrast to a professional, vocational, or technical curriculum. In the medieval European university the seven liberal arts were grammar, rhetoric, and logic (the trivium) and geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy (the quadrivium). In modern colleges and universities the Liberal Arts include the study of literature, languages, philosophy, history, mathematics, and science as the basis of a general, or liberal, education. (Encylopœdia Britannica, 2010).

This is not to be confused with The Humanities: grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy—the studia humanitatis of Renaissance Italy, which today has moved to comprise of literature, language, philosophy, the fine arts, and history.

However, the Liberal Arts curriculum is sometimes described as the study of three branches of knowledge (Encylopœdia Britannica, 2010):

(i) the humanities (literature, language, philosophy, the fine arts, and history);

(ii) the physical and biological sciences and mathematics; and

(iii) the social sciences.

It is the first of these three branches that is the main focus of this volume on Liberalising the Accounting Curriculum in University Education.

Many writers over the past 16 centuries have expounded the merits of a Liberal Arts education. For example, Cardinal John Henry Newman (1801–1890), in a series of addresses published in various forms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, wrote of the emancipatory benefits of such an education:

[The purpose of a Liberal Arts Education is to] open the mind, to correct it, to refine it, to enable it to know, and to digest, master, rule, and use its knowledge, to give it power over its own faculties, application, flexibility, method, critical exactness, sagacity, resource, address, [and] eloquent expression … (Newman, 1852, p. 148).

Furthermore, in a different address, many years before the Accounting Education Change Commission advocated ‘learning to learn’ in 1990 (“Accounting programs should prepare students to become professional accountants, not to be professional accountants at the time of entry to the profession … developing in students the motivation and capacity to continue to learn outside the formal educational environment”), Newman stated the benefits of a Liberal Arts education for lifelong learning:

A habit of mind is formed which lasts through life, of which the attributes are, freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom… (Newman, 1852, p. 127)

For a long time it was considered, and still is by many educators, to be extremely beneficial for someone to experience an education of this type and then to move on to train for a career after leaving university. Indeed, in the U.S.A., over 500 Liberal Arts Colleges exist for undergraduate study where, typically, at least half of the four-year curriculum is devoted to study of the Liberal Arts. Similar colleges also exist in Europe and the rest of the world, although they are more often at secondary school (high school) level rather than at undergraduate level, and singularly absent from higher education.

Looking more closely at the U.S.A., approximately a quarter of the 120 or 150 hours of study required of accounting graduates by the local state Certified Public Accountants (CPA) bodies are on accounting topics, a similar proportion on business-related topics, and another 25 per cent on liberal arts topics such as written communication, social/behavioural sciences, mathematics, biological/physical sciences, historical perspectives, arts and humanities. The concept of a broad educational foundation upon which the specialism of accounting is developed appears to be thriving in the U.S.A., but this is not generally the case elsewhere. Perhaps this is partly the result of the history of accounting education in different countries. The U.S.A. has a longer history of university accounting education than the other English-speaking countries of the world, and the structure of its accounting degrees can be traced back to a curriculum oulined by the American Institute of Accountants (now, the Certified Public Accountants) in 1938 which recommended a 120-hour curriculum, half in accounting (30 per cent) and business (20 per cent), and half in the Liberal Arts:

The [accounting] graduate [of this programme]… will not have received training purely as a technician but a broad and liberal education in which an understanding of professional technique will be rooted deep in an appreciation of the broader social significances of his profession (Miller, 1938, p. 193).

Surely, this is the model of university accounting education to which we should all aspire - yet, despite many convincing claims for the benefits of a Liberal Arts education, there appears to be a growing groundswell of opinion that these colleges may be in decline and that the concept of a Liberal Arts education may be elitist and no longer as valid in the twenty-first century as it was previously.

For example, in January 2010, Times Higher Education devoted its cover feature to the state of Liberal Arts education (Reisz, 2010). In it, grave concern is expressed for the noticeable shift away from The Liberal Arts that has occurred over at least the past 30 years:

Classical liberal-arts education has been under assault for several decades, by a congeries of forces seeking to undermine and demonize the best that has been thought and said…. Our universities have brainwashed a generation of culturally illiterate zombies…. The humanities and arts are being cut away…. We seem to be forgetting about the soul and therefore risk failing to inculcate core values of empathy and respect [in our students and] we face a worldwide crisis in education that… [is] likely to be… more damaging for democratic self-government than the global economic crisis of 2008.

Lending support to the first part of this thesis, a few months later one U.K. university announced that it was ceasing the provision of philosophy at undergraduate level (Lowe, 2010).

Business schools, by their very nature - given their professional/vocational focus, have never been hotbeds of Liberal Education, not even in their infancy in Renaissance Italy. There are some exceptions: in the U.K., for example: Keele University has an elective Year Two module on Accounting and Philosophy; the University of Northampton offers a joint degree in Accounting and Philosophy; and The University of Cardiff Business School offers undergraduate modules in Business History, Economic History, and Japanese History. In addition, many U.K. universities have joint honours degrees combining a foreign language with one of an array of different business school disciplines, including Accounting.

These are, therefore, uncertain times for the Liberal Arts and the undergraduate accounting curriculum is generally (other than for some minor examples, such as those given above) already full to capacity. Yet there will always be proponents of the integration of the Liberal Arts and this volume is no exception. It contains a Forum and six additional chapters that focus in different ways directly on the Liberal Arts.

The first chapter is the Forum in which Roger Lister proposes liberalising the accounting curriculum through the exposure of students to literature, echoing the claims concerning the use of literature in the curriculum by many voices from the past, such as the poet John Milton (1608–1674) and Edward Copleston (1776–1849), Provost of Oriel College, Oxford and Bishop of Llandarf, who wrote:

In the cultivation of literature is found that common link, which, among the higher and middling departments of life, unites the jarring sects and subdivisions into one interest, which supplies common topics, and kindles common feelings, unmixed with those narrow prejudices with which all professions are more or less infected. The knowledge, too, which is thus acquired, expands and enlarges the mind, excites its faculties… and thus, without directly qualifying a man for any of the employments of life, it enriches and ennobles all. Without teaching him the peculiar business of any one office or calling, it enables him to act his part in each of them with better grace and more elevated carriage; and, if happily planned and conducted, is a main ingredient in that complete and generous education which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously, all the offices, both private and public (Copleston, 1852, p. 198).

If a Forum is to serve a useful purpose, it should develop our understanding of the issues raised. There is no doubt that this Forum has done so. In making his case, Lister targets the generally acknowledged soft skills gap in accounting graduates, suggesting that literature is their only possible saviour from the vagaries of the labour market, and suggests a contentious, challenging, and thought-provoking way to make this come about.

When he first read an early draft of this chapter, one of the Editors commented to the other that it was one of the most interesting scholarly papers he had read in the past 30 years. It was never going to have an ‘easy ride’ against such a diverse group of Commentators, and it certainly did not. All the Commentators had something to add to the debate and a rich pool of advice lies within the Commentaries in this volume. Lister’s Rejoinder adds much to the debate and leaves issues unanswered and opportunities beckoning that will test the strength of will of even the bravest among us.

We are convinced that all who have been involved in this volume have been enriched by the experience; and we are sure that anyone reading through it will not regret a moment spent in doing so. It will be an illuminating, sometimes frustrating, at times entertaining but, overall, rewarding activity.

The Forum consists of Chapter 1, 11 Commentaries, and a Rejoinder. Despite the unanswered questions and lingering doubts concerning the practicalities and appropriateness of what Lister suggests, a vehicle is proposed in the end of the Rejoinder that certainly merits consideration.

This is a truly international book. Professor Lister is based in England, the authors of the 11 Commentaries are based in eight different countries, and some of the authors of the other six chapters are from yet more countries. The overall geographic distribution of authors is:

Australia 2

Canada 2

England 4

France 1

Italy 1

Jordan 1

New Zealand 5

Northern Ireland 1

Scotland 1

U.S.A. 6

The first of the chapters that follow the Forum is by Jesse Dillard and Mary Ann Reynolds (both from the U.S.A.). It takes a social constructionist stance and proposes the use of story writing by students to develop a broader awareness of the world around them and to recognize issues they must be prepared to face which are not within their current view of the world.

It is a thought-provoking piece on how to extend the soft skills of our students through creative writing, a branch of the Liberal Art of Literature, which leaves the reader in precisely the same position as the students who were involved with the writing experience described in the paper. There is a sense of ‘what?’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• 1. Introduction: Liberalising the Accounting Curriculum in University Education
• Part I: The Lister Forum
• Part II: Commentaries
• Part III: Rejoinder
• Part IV: Views on the Accounting Curriculum
• Index