INDUCTION CITATION
by
Thomas J. Burns
Professor and Chairman
Committee on Accounting Hall of Fame
Faculty of Accounting & Management Information Systems
The Ohio State University College of Business
Among the few most influential teachers of his generation, he has been a dominant force in changing the traditional courses in internal accounting from cost accounting’s overemphasis on accumulation and calculation of product costs, to managerial accounting, which explores the uses of costs for various purposes. A chief vehicle for this change has been his text, Cost Accounting: A Managerial Emphasis, first published in 1962. in writing this text, he was heavily affected by the paperback published earlier at the University of Chicago, by his mentor William J. Vatter. In turn, Vatter had been much influenced by earlier, University of Chicago faculty, Billy Goetz, James 0. McKinsey, and certainly J. M. Clark.
As a student, he has always responded to demanding and motivating teaching, starting with his mother who gently cor-rected his language at mealtime; the nun, Sister Olive, in 7th and 8th grades; especially stern Inez Strohm in high school, who taught him English (his best subject) and literature; his first accounting instructor at Marquette, Herman Loebl; those at Harvard who taught management and control (and from which he received an MBA); and, of course, Bill Vatter at the University of Chicago (where in order, to teach, he entered the doctoral program), who showed him what a stimulating educational environment can be.
This patrician professor was born into a blue collar Milwaukee neighborhood of what was then called a mixed marriage. There were two children; his sister is a decade younger. His mother was Irish Catholic and his father was Swedish Lutheran. The father worked for over 40 years as a mail clerk on the Milwaukee Road. The son grew up within sight of a major set of railroad tracks and a large A. O. Smith factory.
When he was seven, he wanted to be pope but became dis-couraged over how Pope “Chuck” would sound. When he was eight, he decided to become a major league baseball player (after his father, an avid sports fan, took him to Sunday double-headers with the Brewers). His hero was Lou Gehrig (whom his father teasingly called a “bum”). He still remembers his ecstasy at his first big league baseball game with the Yankees and the White Sox, Gehrig hit two home runs in his first two times at bat, singled and walked. At nine, he reluctantly gave up this goal when he found he didn’t play well enough. Thereafter, he lacked a goal until his junior year at Marquette; where, after tutoring accounting to basketball players and disabled veterans, he discovered that teaching was what he wanted.
After high school, he went immediately into the Army (during WW II). Because of a shortage of engineers, the Army sent him to
1Each of these faculty members made memorable contributions to the literature especially J. M. Clark in his Studies in the Economics of Overhead Costs, first published by the University of Chicago Press in 1923 and reprinted in 1971.
take pre-engineering at Ripon College and then on to engineering at Texas A&M. After leaving the military and graduating from Marquette University and a period of working many twelve-hour days at a Big Eight firm, he took a teaching job of 30 classroom hours a week with Spencerian College, a for-profit business college. Always a cautious person, he thought if he could like teaching with such a schedule, he would have found his calling. And, of course, he had.
In 1955, he earned his Chicago doctorate with a dissertation on the uses of financial statements;2 however, there was one delay. His wife, Joan, upstaged him by giving birth to their first child, their only son, Scott, on the very same morning his oral defense was scheduled.
Despite the fictional advice of Thomas Wolfe, he went home again, first with Marquette University and then with the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He taught a wide variety of courses to a wide variety of students and worked with a wide variety of colleagues, including the stimulating Jim March3 and the co-author of his first text, Jerry Leer. He even conducted a small CPA practice.
But in 1959 he was lured back to a tenured post with the University of Chicago. His many challenging colleagues included Sid Davidson — the leader, Nicholas Dopuch, David Green and, of course, George Sorter.4 In 1965, he joined the Stanford Faculty.
His doctoral thesis, Implications for Accountants of the Uses of Financial Statements by Security Analysts, written in 1955, was published by the Arno Press in 1975. His first text was CPA Problems and Approaches to Solutions, in two volumes, co- authored with Jerry Leer. Since 1978, he has been the consulting editor for the Prentice-Hall series in accounting. For this publisher, he is the now author of four texts: Cost Accounting: A Managerial Emphasis, Seventh Edition, 1991 (with George Foster); Introduction to Financial Accounting, Fourth Edition, 1990 (with Gary L. Sundem), Introduction to Management Accounting, Eighth Edition 1990 (with Gary L. Sundem), and Accounting, 1989 (with Walter T. Harrison, Jr.).
3March had five children, Horngren comments about two in his “Response.” 4He had taught Sorter his first accounting course in 1953. He remembers him as a stimulating student. Sorter is currently the Vincent C. Ross Professor of Accounting at New York University. Green is currently a Vice President of the City University of New York and Professor of Accounting at the Bauch College of the same institution. Both Green and Sorter earned the Ph.D. degree from the University of Chicago also. Dopuch, a University of Illinois Ph.D., is currently the Herbert and Dorothy R. Moog Professor of Accounting, Olin School of Business, Washington University, and was on the University of Chicago faculty from 1961 to 1983. Davidson, a Hall of Fame member, is the Arthur Young Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Accounting (the first Arthur Young Professorship
After twenty-five years at the Stanford Business School, during which time their MBA program has achieved the top ranking, this professor has led the world in developing managerial accounting not only in his classes but especially with his writing. Moreover, with the help of his senior colleagues, particularly Bob Jaedicke and Bob Sprouse, he has also fostered two generations of academics who have achieved much eminence in their own right, first Chicago-bred, Joel Demski, his former student, and Bill Beaver; and later, George Foster, Jim Patell and Mark Wolfson.
He analyzes himself as a teacher as follows: “My strengths include: tight organization, full preparation, patience, avoidance of sidetracks, enthusiasm for subject, starting and stopping classes on time, no browbeating of students, and knowing names of students.” He goes on to include his self-assessed weaknesses: “little flexibility, erratic abilities to listen to student comments, relatively little time spent reading papers and providing feedback, and little time devoted to getting acquainted with students personally.” He reports he is not a “Mr. Chips” possibly because his class size is about sixty and other professional obligations mount.
He has further been a national leader in such organizations as the American Accounting Association (a member since 1957 and a past president), the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (on the Accounting Principles Board from Opinion 13 through 31) and the National Association of Accountants (espe-
at any university) and a former Business School Dean at the University of Chicago. Along with Horngren, Davidson, Dopuch and Sorter have received the American Accounting Association’s Outstanding Accounting Educator Award.
5 Jaedicke, who retired this summer as Dean of the Business School, continues as the William R. Kimball Professor of Accounting. Sprouse, who left Stanford to join the Financial Accounting Standards Board when it was founded (becoming the Board’s Vice Chairman), is now the Distinguished Accounting Research Professor at San Diego State University, his alma mater. Both Jaedicke and Sprouse earned Ph.D. degrees at the University of Minnesota. Leaving Stanford in 1985, Demski is now the Milton Steinbach Professor of Information and Accounting Systems at the Yale University’s School of Organization and Management. Beaver is the Joan E. Horngren Professor of Accounting at Stanford. Both Beaver and Demski earned their Ph.D. degrees at the University of Chicago and have received the American Accounting Association’s Outstanding Educator Award. Foster, who earned his Ph.D. degree at Stanford, is currently the Paul L. and Phyllis Wattis Professor of Accounting there. Patell, who earned his Ph.D. degree at Carnegie Mellon University, is the Walter Kenneth Kilpatrick Professor of Accounting at Stanford. Wolfson, a University of Texas Ph.D., is the Joseph McDonald Professor of Accounting at Stanford.
cially its CMA program)6. Widely honored, he usually wins awards the first time they are offered; he also holds two honorary doctorates.7
He is devoted to his family: wife, four children, three grandchildren, and his sister. All live on the west coast. He calls his wife, Joan, his “balance wheel.” In a unique gesture, he funded a Stanford accounting professorship in her name, even if she didn’t ever remember what the initials “APB” stood for.
He is a fan of Bay area sports teams. However, his interest in the Giants and the Athletics has never been what his father’s would have been.
Always the consummate academic, always the model for each of us, he is a most worthy successor to that line of inspirational professors who have been inducted into the Hall. He unsmilingly believes that teaching is a noble profession and the harder you work, the luckier you get. He is the 50th inductee into the Accounting Hall of Fame.
CHARLES THOMAS HORNGREN
6A CPA, Horngren served on the Accounting Principles Board for six years, the Financial Accounting Standards Board Advisory Council for five years, and the Council of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants for three years. For six years, he served as a trustee of the Financial Accounting Foundation, which oversees the Financial Accounting Standards Board and the Government Accounting Standards Board. In addition to being a member and past president of the American Accounting Association, Horngren has also served as Director of Research and currently serves on the Accounting Education Change Commission. Horngren is also a member of the National Association of Accountants, where he was on its research planning commission for three years. He was a member of the Board of Regents, Institute of Management Accounting, which administers the Certified Management Accountant examination.
7He received the American Accounting Association’s Outstanding Accounting Educator Award in 1973 when the Association initiated an annual series of such awards. In 1985 the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants presented its first Outstanding Educator Award to Horngren. The California Certified Public Accountants Foundation gave Horngren its Faculty Excellence Award in 1975 and its Distinguished Professor Award in 1983. He is the first person to have received both awards. He received an honorary DBA from Marquette University in 1976 and an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from DePaul University in 1985.
