RESPONSE
by
Yuji Ijiri Robert M. Trueblood University Professor

Carnegie Mellon University 1989 Accounting Hall of Fame Inductee

Induction into the Accounting Hall of Fame is indeed accounting’s highest honor. In my case, this great honor has even greater significance because I receive it from the hands of my mentor for more than half my life, William Cooper. In addition, as the Robert M. Trueblood Professor, I take great pleasure in causing Bob, the thirty-fourth Hall member, to be “reinducted” into the Hall of Fame.

There are many people to whom I would like to express my intellectual indebtedness. But I must reluctantly omit these acknowledgements to keep my presentation short, following the advice of the Hall of Fame Committee Chairman, Thomas Burns, who was my boss when I worked as a grader at the University of Minnesota.

Nevertheless, I would at least like to acknowledge the four institutions I have been fortunate enough to be associated with since I came to this country in 1959: the University of Min-nesota, Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford University, and the American Accounting Association. Each has played an in-dispensable role in shaping my career, and I would follow exactly the same path again if the clock were turned back 30 years.

I must in particular acknowledge Carnegie Mellon and its Graduate School of Industrial Administration, where I spent two and a half years as a student and twenty-two years as a faculty member. I have indeed been steeped in the interdiscipli¬nary spirit of Carnegie Mellon.

(The trouble with this spirit is that I now seem to have a disease called “acquired interdisicplinary syndrome.” It gives me an illusion from time to time that everything in life is related to accounting and vice versa. However, one of the toughest things that I still cannot quite make the connection with accounting is “love.” In fact, my lifetime challenge is to explore what this thing called love has to do with this thing called accounting.)

Yet interdisciplinary work could very easily have been neglected or rejected in accounting. Here, I am convinced that every evaluation says just as much about the evaluator as it does about the evaluatee. In this sense, this honor signifies the openness of the accounting discipline and the accounting pro¬fession — openness toward foreign thoughts.

In addition, this honor also signifies the openness of the United States toward foreigners, especially in academia, with-out which I would certainly not be here today. I hope that this openness will spread throughout the world, as we are now in the age of globalization, country-wise, discipline-wise, and profession-wise.

“Globalization,” however, does not mean just superifically mixing foreigners or foreign thoughts. They must be amalga-mated and integrated. To do so, we must first search for their common roots and rebuild a new structure from there that is big enough, deep enough, and general enough to accommodate them all.
This continual process of reexamining and restructuring from the foundation is what makes a country, a discipline, or a profession strong, creative, and, above all, adaptive to change — change in the environment as well as change in values, which seem to be most imminent today in accounting and in the world.

And for this very reason, I look forward to participating in the process of “globalization.”

THE ACCOUNTING HALL OF FAME

Year Member
1950 George Oliver May*
Robert Hiester Montgomery*
William Andrew Paton
1951 Arthur Lowes Dickinson*
Henry Rand Hatfield*
1952 Elijah Watt Sells-
Victor Hermann Stempf*
1953 Arthur Edward Andersen*
Thomas Coleman Andrews*
Charles Ezra Sprague*
Joseph Edmund Sterrett*
1954 Carman George Blough*
Samuel John Broad*
Thomas Henry Sanders*
Hiram Thompson Scovill*
*Deceased
1955 Percival Flack Brundage*
1956 Ananias Charles Littleton*
1957 Roy Bernard Kester*
Hermann Clinton Miller*
1958 Harry Anson Finney*
Arthur Bevins Foye*
Donald Putnam Perry*
1959 Marquis George Eaton*
1960 Maurice Hubert Stans
1961 Eric Louis Kohler*
1963 Andrew Barr
Lloyd Morey*
1964 Paul Franklin Grady*
Perry Empey Mason*
1965 James Loring Peirce
1968 George Davis Bailey*
John Lansing Carey*
William Welling Werntz*
1974 Robert Martin Trueblood*
1975 Leonard Paul Spacek
1976 John William Queenan
1977 Howard Irwin Ross*
1978 Robert Kuhn Mautz
1979 Maurice Moonitz
1980 Marshall Smith Armstrong
1981 Elmer Boyd Staats
1982 Herbert Elmer Miller
1983 Sidney Davidson
1984 Henry Alexander Benson
1985 Oscar Strand Gellein
1986 Robert Newton Anthony
1987 Philip Leroy Defliese
1988 Norton Moore Bedford
1989 Yuji Ijiri
*Deceased