J. of Acc. Ed.

28 (2010) 13–25

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

J. of Acc. Ed.
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jaccedu

Teaching and Educational note

Will more liberal arts courses fix the accounting curriculum?

Stephen D. Willits ⇑
Bucknell University, School of Management, Lewisburg, PA 17837, United States

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: The appropriate curricular balance between general and account-
Available online 13 December 2010 ing education has been long contested and needs resolving as evi-
dence suggests the model used at most schools is broken. One
Keywords: suggested fix would devote more of the accounting curriculum to
Accountants’ general education
liberal arts courses to produce accountants who could, for example,
Liberal learning
think critically and communicate effectively. However, ample evi-
Accounting curriculum
dence indicates that classical ‘‘liberal education’’ scarcely exists
today, and what is offered in its place is often counterproductive,
at worst, or adds little value at best. This paper reviews the current
state of liberal education and concludes that what is actually deliv-
ered today by many arts and sciences colleges does not achieve the
claimed benefits of a liberal education. Thus it falls on accounting
educators to structure courses in ways that will make them exer-
cises in liberal learning. The paper also discusses several strategies
for enhancing the value of the general education component of
each student’s education.
Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

Since 1883, when Wharton offered the first collegiate accounting course, accountants (both prac-
titioners and academics) have struggled to gain acceptance by the academy, worked to enhance the
profession’s status, and debated the amount and composition of the education that aspiring account-
ing professionals should receive (Langenderfer, 1987; Van Wyhe, 1994). The appropriate amount of
education now seems determined—at least for the time being—with the near universal adoption of
the 150-h requirement. However, the appropriate composition of the curriculum (general/liberal edu-
cation vs. accounting/business courses) and the ideal approach to accounting courses (conceptual/
principles-based vs. technical/rules-based) remain contested issues as are matters of pedagogy and
intellectual content (Van Wyhe, 1994). These issues become particularly significant given that ‘‘there

⇑ Tel.: +1 570 577 3166; fax: +1 570 577 1338.

E-mail address: swillits@bucknell.edu

0748-5751/$ - see front matter Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.jaccedu.2010.11.001
14 S.D. Willits / J. of Acc. Ed. 28 (2010) 13–25

is substantial evidence that the accounting education model used at most schools is broken or obso-
lete’’ (Frecka, Morris, & Ramanan, 2004, p. 69). This ‘‘broken model’’ viewpoint is widely accepted and
has resulted in numerous suggestions for its ‘‘repair,’’ with a common solution being that more of the
total accounting curriculum should be devoted to study of the liberal arts (AICPA, 1988; Waddock,
2005; Wetnight, 1958). This paper examines the support for this proposed solution, considers its likely
efficacy, and discusses several strategies for enhancing the value of the general education component
of each accounting student’s education.
According to the AICPA (1988, p. 9), ‘‘education for professional accounting should be composed of
three segments—general education, education in business administration, and accounting education.’’
In regards to general education, the AICPA went onto say (p. 10), ‘‘the profession requires that its en-
trants be men and women whose education has provided them with the foundations for lifelong learn-
ing, development, and growth.’’ The AICPA stressed that education should develop analytical abilities,
problem-solving skills, judgment, and integrity and should include coverage of ethics, written and oral
communication, and economics. Although written in the context of the AICPA’s push for the 150-h
requirement, this educational prescription is not new. For example, McCrea and Kester (1936, p.
106) wrote of ‘‘the appreciation by professional accountants of the need for better and more broadly
trained men to handle successfully the increasingly important tasks which accountants are being
asked to perform.’’ Merino (2006) notes that from the earliest days of accounting being taught in uni-
versities, practitioners have expected such education to provide a broad foundation. Summarizing
statements by influential practitioners of the day Marino writes, ‘‘college curricula were expected
to produce analytic students with creative, independent thinking skills. In short, these practitioners
agreed that the fundamental objective of any program, liberal arts or commerce and business, should
be to prepare a young man to think for himself’’ (Merino, 2006, p. 367). Thus, the academy has known
for approximately a century what practitioners (and clearly many academics as well) believe to be the
desired outcome of a college education.

2. Wanted: ‘‘Renaissance Man’’

Conventional wisdom holds that a 4-year liberal-arts education produces a sort of ‘‘Renaissance
Man,’’ albeit one that knows little or nothing about business and accounting. To address this latter
shortcoming for aspiring accountants, business and accounting courses were added to the curriculum,
but at the expense of liberal arts courses. Thus, an accounting curriculum resulted that typically was
approximately 40–50% general education, with the remainder split between business and accounting
courses. Unfortunately, widely expressed concerns suggest that this model typically falls short of pro-
ducing the desired Renaissance Man/accountant, and thus needs to undergo a major restructuring
(AECC, 1990; Demski, 2007; Arthur Andersen et al., 1989; Bedford & Shenkir, 1987; Zeff, 1989).
To explain why the prevailing accounting education model was failing to deliver, its critics levied
two major charges with one being that accounting courses were too ‘‘rules-based.’’ For example, per
McCrea and Kester (1936, p. 114), ‘‘in the past in too many schools—and to too great a degree at the
present time—accounting has been taught more from the standpoint of the mechanics or technique of
the art rather than from that of the science on which the art rests.’’ More recently, Zeff (1989, p. 204)
offered a similar opinion: ‘‘Accounting is not presented as an interesting subject that figures impor-
tantly in the calculations of managers, investors and creditors, and government policy makers, but in-
stead as a collection of rules that are to be memorized in an uncritical, almost unthinking way.’’ In
other words, students were not becoming ‘‘liberally educated’’ via their accounting courses.
The other charge was that the accounting curriculum contained too little general education with
the accounting ‘‘knowledge explosion’’ often cited as the culprit. As Williams (1990, p. 2) observed,
‘‘as the body of accounting and business knowledge has expanded, more and more professional edu-
cation courses, particularly technical accounting courses, have been required thereby reducing the
time available for general education courses.’’ But the profession’s call for broadly educated accoun-
tants (AICPA, 1988) implies that more, rather than fewer, general education courses should be part
of the accounting curriculum. This prescription should come as no surprise because the liberal arts
promise training in broad, general skills (Bowles, 1998). But the AICPA did not want liberal arts
 S.D. Willits / J. of Acc. Ed. 28 (2010) 13–25 15

courses added at the expense of the technical portion of the curriculum (recently enhanced in re-
sponse to the accounting knowledge explosion) and saw the only way to increase general education
being to expand the total curriculum, hence the ostensible push for 150-h. The jury is still out, how-
ever, on whether increasing the number of liberal arts courses in the curriculum (or teaching account-
ing courses from a more conceptual perspective) will result in a significant increase in the number of
broadly educated individuals joining the profession.

3. Liberal education’s purported benefits

Liberal education fosters the qualities that prepare graduates to live productive lives (Berkowitz,
2006; Newman, 1852; Schneider, 2005) or, as the Association of American Colleges and Universities
(AACandU, 2007, p. 11) puts it, liberal education describes ‘‘the kinds of learning needed to sustain
a free society and to enable the full development of human talent.’’ Gardner (2005, p. 98) states that
a liberal-arts education:
. . . exists to convey to students the most important intellectual knowledge and skills that have
been developed to the present moment; to develop in students deep disciplinary knowledge in
at least one area; to foster critical thinking skills, on one hand, and the issues facing contemporary
society, on the other; to prepare students—in a broad rather than narrow sense—for civic life and
productive work.
Arts and sciences colleges—as the traditional purveyors of the ‘‘liberal arts’’—have long touted lib-
eral education’s benefits. The business world, affected by rapid change, increasing globalization, and
growing complexity now also embraces a broader liberal-arts education for aspiring executives
(White, 2005). Given that a liberal education is supposed to produce the same qualities as those de-
sired in accounting professionals (e.g., the ability to think critically, solve problems, communicate,
be culturally aware, etc.) it is easy to see why calls for ‘‘liberalizing’’ accounting education are increas-
ingly heard (Nellen & Turner, 2006). But is the reality of what is delivered by many arts and sciences
colleges today in keeping with the rhetoric; or, to put it another way, are today’s students widely reap-
ing the claimed benefits of a liberal education?

4. Consumer warning: its not your great-grandfather’s liberal-arts education anymore

Over the past half century or so, significant trends in higher education have resulted in arts and
sciences colleges today delivering a very different education than that of the 1800s, yet they still claim
to deliver on liberal education’s traditional promises. Harry Lewis, former dean of Harvard College,
writing about the changes that have occurred in America’s premier universities, ‘‘Old institutional
structures survive, but many have lost their meaning. The curriculum is richer than ever, but it is
no longer wrapped around any identifiable ideals’’ (2006, p. xii). Sykes (1990, p. 68) claims that ‘‘a
moral and intellectual vacuum’’ exists at the heart of the American university. Or as John Tagg
(1998, p. 304–305) opines:
Colleges . . . hold the place of liberal education, of education for liberty, of the kind of experience
through which children grow into citizens, through which men and women learn the exercise of
freedom that is tempered by choosing responsibility. I say that colleges ‘‘hold the place’’ of liberal
education today because I cannot say that they serve the function. But they remain the institutional
focus of the ideal, which survives as an ideal.
Lang (2008, C1) cites Tim Clydesdale’s study of teenagers and their first year college experiences:
Most of the mainstream American teens I spoke with neither liberated themselves intellectually
nor broadened themselves socially during their first year out . . . and actively resist efforts to exam-
ine their self-understandings through classes or to engage their humanity through institutional
efforts such as public lectures, the arts, or social activism. . . . Only a handful of students on each
campus find a liberal-arts education to be deeply meaningful and important. . .
16 S.D. Willits / J. of Acc. Ed. 28 (2010) 13–25

So what factors would cause such claims to be made and are they germane to the role of the liberal
arts in the education of accountants?

4.1. Today’s liberal education lacks coherent purpose

Ronald Barnett (1990) claims that, historically, higher education promised a freeing of the mind but
asserts that this emancipatory element is being undermined by modern developments in philosophy
(e.g., relativism, critical theory, post-structuralism) that put in doubt classical liberal higher educa-
tion’s underlying assumption that objective knowledge and truth are attainable. In other words, the
Enlightenment’s search for truth by exposing error is over. So if discovering truth no longer serves
as the unifying theme of the liberal arts curriculum, what, if anything, replaced it? Per some authors
(e.g., Berkowitz, 2006; Bloom, 1987; Hittinger, 1999), the brief answer would be ‘‘nothing.’’ For exam-
ple, Bloom (1987) argues that the liberal arts curriculum is incoherent and in crisis, contending that
there is no vision of what comprises an educated person. In a similar vein, Berkowitz (2006, p. 47–
48) notes that administrators and faculty lack a coherent idea about what constitutes an educated hu-
man being and ‘‘many professors in the humanities and social sciences proudly promulgate in their
scholarship and courses doctrines that mock the very idea of a standard or measure defining an edu-
cated person and so legitimate the compassless curriculum over which they preside.’’ Of course many
faculty members and academic administrators see the decline of general education requirements at
leading institutions of higher education as progress, believing that the new curriculum liberates stu-
dents from the confines of the traditional curriculum’s emphasis on the study of enduring works of
philosophy, sacred texts, and literature (Wilson, 1998).
The impacts on general education curricula of these modern ‘‘developments’’ in philosophy have
been profound. For example, Kirp (2005) describes the premises behind Brown University’s widely
emulated curriculum that abolishes distribution requirements, reduces the number of courses re-
quired to graduate, and eschews majors in favor of individually tailored concentrations1:
The new guard [i.e., postmodernists] trashed the fundamental belief that their calling was to trans-
mit knowledge to the next generation. On the contrary, they insisted, all knowledge was relative
and no approach to the universe of wisdom was better than any other; for that reason, requiring
students to learn any given body of knowledge was arbitrary. More pointedly, it reflected the impo-
sition of Dead White Male orthodoxy, or embodied neocolonialism, or enshrined heterosexism, or
racism, or . . . –the litany of postmodern pejoratives is seemingly endless. Since no one could say
with confidence what the young needed to know, these professors argued, why not turn the keys
of the asylum over to adolescents? (Kirp, 2005, p. 120–121).

In a similar vein, Harvard implemented a new curriculum where nothing was held to be more
important for Harvard students to learn than anything else (Lewis, 2006). The upshot of these new
curricula is that students face a bewildering variety of departments and courses and receive no official
guidance about what they should study, so they find it is easiest simply to make a career choice and go
about getting prepared for that career (Bloom, 1987). Along the way, students can opt to use elective
courses—or general education requirements—to pick up a little culture, etc. if they are so inclined.
Such curricula stand in stark contrast to those at the relatively few colleges and universities that still
require a ‘‘traditional’’ liberal arts core (e.g., Columbia University, Hillsdale College, Gutenberg College,
Houston Baptist University).
Some of the curricular disarray found in colleges today results from the lack of a clear understand-
ing of what education means; i.e., what is the purpose of college, and what do students need to know
(AACandU, 2007). To avoid affirmatively addressing these questions, many colleges and universities
instead opt for a ‘‘distribution requirements’’ approach to general education (American Council of

1
Brown claims their new curriculum (which Kirp derides as the ‘‘No Curriculum’’) is ‘‘structured in such a way as to teach
students the lessons of choice and responsibility.’’ The idea of ‘‘choice and responsibility’’ also appealed to many professors,
especially in the humanities and qualitative social sciences. The No Curriculum is ideologically compatible with these faculty
members’ rejection of the Enlightenment, or modernist, commitment to the search for truth through the exposure of error, in favor
of the relativism of postmodernity.
 S.D. Willits / J. of Acc. Ed. 28 (2010) 13–25 17

Trustees and Alumni, 2004). Indeed, Lewis (2006) states that ‘‘breadth’’ and ‘‘choice’’ have become
goals in themselves.2 Lewis goes on to say:
When colleges talk about how broadly students will be educated or how much they will enjoy their
freedom of choice, they conveniently avoid saying much about what students will learn. And
breadth and freedom in academia are like lower taxes in politics—it is hard to be against them, even
if they come at the cost of important sacrifices.

Every time curricula are redesigned, it is more difficult to prioritize any field of knowledge over any
other. Typically students are required to distribute their course selections across odd categories
such as ‘‘Quantitative Reasoning’’ and ‘‘Social Analysis’’ in Harvard’s current curriculum. The more
those categories result from academic border skirmishes rather than an overarching vision, the
more likely they are to be ugly compromises, forged out of what Harvard students accurately called
a ‘‘tangled web of earnest, academic motivations.’’ The professors doing the design may be content
with defending their own turf. But the students, who during their journey through the college cur-
riculum have to visit the homelands of many professors, wonder at the end of the trip what is was
about (p. 24–25).
Note that Bloom, Berkowitz and others previously cited are not skeptical about the relevance to to-
day’s students of a classical liberal education, but rather collectively express doubts about whether
such an education is being widely delivered by colleges and universities in the US. In other words, be-
cause the cachet of a ‘‘liberal education’’ persists, many colleges and universities are employing a bait
and switch tactic when it comes to liberal education. For example, Mathews (2005, p. 47) asserts that
while many colleges publicly affirm their commitment to giving their students ‘‘a rich dose of the ma-
jor subjects of human inquiry,’’ a careful analysis of graduation requirements at these schools often
reveals a gap between the rhetoric and the reality. Delucchi (1997, p. 423) claims that:
Over two-thirds of the colleges dominated by professional majors highlight liberal arts in their aca-
demic mission statements. . . . As a promotional device the liberal arts claim does not necessarily
reveal the actual motives that shape curricula, instead it highlights the repertoire of accepted
rationales for a higher education. Thus . . . skepticism about claims for a liberal-arts education is
appropriate.

As Sykes (1990, p. 14) observes, ‘‘a student’s exposure to intellectual history, philosophy, religion,
literature, science, and mathematics is often a matter of pure chance.’’ Thus, while a solid liberal edu-
cation may be attained at a given university through careful and thoughtful course selection, merely
meeting general education requirements is no guarantee of that outcome. Consequently, accounting
educators cannot blindly assume that their institution’s general education requirements will meet
the profession’s demands for liberally educated accountants.

4.2. Professionalism/specialization is on the rise, even in the liberal arts

The idea of a liberal-arts education being exclusively for ‘‘men of leisure’’ (elites) who can afford
the time in study of ‘‘useless matters’’ has been supplanted with a concept of the university as a place
of universal education where ‘‘everyman’’ can rise above his straits via education (AACandU, 2007).
So there is now a focus on winning jobs rather than gaining knowledge (Labaree, 2006). In other
words, higher education’s purpose has shifted from preparing people to be good citizens to improv-
ing the lot in life of its partakers as education promises every sort of advancement to those who, on
the basis of their sex or race or age or disability, have not been able to partake in the benefits of our
society (Gregorian, 2005). This shift in educational objectives has been behind the rise of profession-
alism and vocationalism in higher education. The downside of this shift toward the professional is
that the change has replaced broad liberal curriculum with narrow vocational curriculum (Labaree,
2006).

2
Lewis (2006) astutely notes that these goals are rather inconsistent as students generally have to be forced to take broad
programs.
18 S.D. Willits / J. of Acc. Ed. 28 (2010) 13–25

Another explanation for the shift towards professionalism of the American university is its vulner-
ability to the market. Universities compete with each other over talented students, funding, status, etc.
Because students have increasingly expressed a preference for getting a good job over getting a liberal
education, universities have responded to what their ‘‘customers’’ want.3 Some certainly view this ris-
ing consumerism in higher education as a positive development. As Merino (2006, p. 375) notes: ‘‘Market
discourse suggests competition will result in greater educational quality and lauds consumerism, depict-
ing students as knowledgeable consumers. Its advocates contend that a market approach will lead to a
higher quality product.’’
Moreover, donors and research funding agencies have demonstrated their own preferences for use-
ful education and useable knowledge (Labaree, 2006). So it should come as little surprise that institu-
tions of all persuasions are at least paying lip service to preparing their graduates for their ultimate
careers. Even the business press is commenting on this increased professionalism among liberal arts
colleges, noting that a growing number of liberal arts colleges are responding to students’ desire to
become grounded in finance and business during their undergraduate years. Business Week quotes
Claremont McKenna’s president:
We aren’t in any way reducing our commitments to the liberal arts. We believe that is the best edu-
cation for leadership. We are saying that we are a real world college and don’t just work in theory.
We are doing a disservice to students if we are not offering them core competencies like account-
ing, leadership, and finance today (Damast, 2008).

Regrettably, the teaching and learning process is dramatically distorted when students’ attention is
focused on the extrinsic rewards that come from acquiring an academic credential which thus under-
mines the incentive to learn (Labaree, 2006).4
So education is increasingly approached as a way to get ahead in society and acquiring useful or
usable knowledge is often viewed as the appropriate education to achieve that end. Unfortunately, this
rising culture of credentialism and consumerism diminishes the perceived importance of liberal edu-
cation which ‘‘consumers’’ often perceive as useless (i.e., students do not see a connection between
general education courses and the skills or knowledge needed for successful careers). Although one
might postulate that this is a logical reaction to the state of liberal education on many campuses, stu-
dents also often fail to see an immediate payoff to studying enduring works of literature, philosophy,
science, etc. so merely requiring a traditional liberal arts core would do little to combat rampant
vocationalism.

4.3. Changing nature of universities and their objectives

Today’s system of higher education traces its origins to the post-WWII period which saw a major
surge in college enrollments that crested in the 1960s and 1970s (Anderson, 1992; Sykes, 1988). Much
of this growth took place in public colleges which were able to thrive only by growing; i.e., offering
more classes (their product) to more students (their customers). In this system, the basic unit becomes
the three-credit course; courses only have transferable value in the form of completed credit hours.
Accordingly, for almost any college student today, the essential meaning of ‘‘being a student’’ is accu-
mulating credit hours (Tagg, 1998) as opposed to getting an education.
This system (1) creates problems for the instructor, who is only responsible for his or her course,
and the student, who sees each course as one more box to check off en route to getting a degree
and who comes to see the diploma—rather than the quality of leaning it represents—as the key to
his/her future (AACandU, 2007), and (2) leads to distribution requirements which are the easy way
(for both students and faculty) out of the imperative for general education. Professors can take
credit for contributing to the breadth of undergraduate education while teaching from their home
bases. But distribution requirements induce students to treat them as the rules of a game they are
challenged to win by seeking out the easiest courses in each division (Lewis, 2006). Because no one

3
Pleasing ‘‘customers’’ also extends to what universities do not require. For example, many students do not want to be forced to
learn a foreign language so many universities dropped their language requirement.
4
Any faculty member that has ever been asked, ‘‘Do we need to know this for the test?’’ has witnessed this phenomenon.
 S.D. Willits / J. of Acc. Ed. 28 (2010) 13–25 19

is responsible for delivering a coherent whole, the parts of this ‘‘education’’ do not fit together
(Sykes, 1988).
The organizational dynamic in higher education compounds the ‘‘coherence problem’’ as the aca-
demic department is the dominant unit of college faculties. These (often insular) departments hire
their own faculty and gain size/power/resources by getting more students into their classes. This is
most easily done by offering general education survey courses that garner large enrollments. But se-
nior faculty at most institutions prefer not to teach these courses, so they end up being taught by grad-
uate students or part-time instructors, thus freeing senior faculty for research endeavors (Anderson,
1992).5
Collectively, these developments in higher education result in an institution that satisfies nobody.
As Tagg (1998, p. 301–302) notes:
College faculties complain bitterly, often about the administration, but most often about the stu-
dents. History and philosophy professors complain that students can’t write. English professors
complain that students know little about history and culture. Science professors complain that stu-
dents have only a rudimentary grasp of mathematics. And everyone complains that students can’t
think. . . . Yet nothing seems to work, because the deficiencies that plague students are almost by
definition problems that cannot be addressed in any three-unit class. But three-unit classes are
all there are; they are what college is made of.
Hence the dilemma facing accounting faculty: we voice similar complaints about our students yet
seem as powerless to fix the problem as our arts and sciences colleagues, and besides, our students are
taking general education courses specifically to rectify these deficiencies. Thus it has been easy for
accounting faculty to ultimately dismiss the matter as someone else’s problem.

4.4. Concluding thoughts on liberal arts education’s demise

Liberal-arts education—or what many universities today offer in its guise—has its share of critics
(e.g., Bloom, 1987; Sykes, 1988, 1990). But unlike accounting education, where leading members of
the academy at least openly express a need for improvement, vocal critics of liberal education seem
relatively rare and appear to be widely ignored, yet the criticisms they offer are powerful. Bloom’s
classic, The Closing of the American Mind, was published in 1987, yet 20 years later his criticisms of
higher education seem just as relevant and charges that higher education is ‘‘off the rails’’ are still
being made (Riley, 2009, W16). As Peter Berkowitz (2006, p. 48) recently wrote, ‘‘universities and col-
leges put out plenty of glossy pamphlets containing high-minded statements touting the benefits of
higher education. . . Seldom, however, do institutions of higher education boast about how the curric-
ulum cultivates the mind and refines judgment. . . because university curricula explicitly and effec-
tively aimed at producing an educated person rarely exist.’’ Tagg (1998, p. 295, 297), commenting
on a 1993 study by Alexander Astin entitled, ‘‘What Matters in College: Four Critical Years Revisited,’’
writes:
Astin’s research reveals what colleges actually do bears little resemblance to what we would be
likely to extract from college catalogs or commencement speeches. . . . Institutions espouse high-
sounding values, of course, in their mission statements, college catalogs, and public pronounce-
ments by institutional leaders. The problem is that the explicitly stated values—which always
include a strong commitment to undergraduate education—are often at variance with the actual
values that drive our decisions and policies.
Even Derek Bok (2006, p. 1–8, 310–312), former president of Harvard and generally supportive of
undergraduate education’s current status, describes an alarming array of failures in undergraduate (as
opposed to only accounting) education:
Many seniors graduate without being able to write well enough to satisfy their employers. Many
cannot reason clearly or perform competently in analyzing complex, nontechnical problems, even

5
There is a growing contradiction between teaching undergraduates and producing research (Smith, 2003).
20 S.D. Willits / J. of Acc. Ed. 28 (2010) 13–25

though faculties rank critical thinking as the primary goal of a college education. Few undergrad-
uates receiving a degree are able to speak or read a foreign language. Most have never taken a
course in quantitative reasoning or acquired the knowledge needed to be a reasonably informed
citizen of a democracy. And those are only some of the problems.
Thus, there seems to be ample evidence that classical ‘‘liberal education’’ scarcely exists today, and
what is offered in its place in all likelihood is counterproductive at worst or adds little value at best.6
As an interesting aside, Bowles (1998, p. 15), reporting on an AT&T program in the 1950s that assigned
promising middle managers to the University of Pennsylvania to engage in ‘‘humanistic studies,’’ stated:
‘‘Initially the liberal arts were seen as a way to compensate for the scientific and technical lead that the
Soviet Union appeared to hold over the United States during the 1950s.’’ But he then notes that this AT&T
program was cancelled when industrial psychologists suggested that it ‘‘made workers more knowledge-
able about and tolerant of alternative social and economic systems, including socialism. Workers also
showed less commitment to ‘getting ahead’ in business. As a result, executives saw costly humanistic
training as a threat to the free enterprise system.’’ So maybe there is yet another reason to question
the suitability of liberal arts courses as a foundation of accounting education.

5. Accountants, ostriches, and liberal education

Since its early days, accountancy has struggled to attain the professional status of law and medicine
(Van Wyhe, 1994) and requiring more education for CPA licensing has been seen as an important
means to this end (Langenderfer, 1987). Note, however, that this push for more education has not nec-
essarily been directed at greatly expanding the number of required accounting courses in the curric-
ulum. Rather, an education model for accounting similar—albeit compressed—to those of law and
medicine built on 2 years of liberal arts preparation seems to be widely favored (Bedford & Shenkir,
1987; Glover, Blankley, & Oliver, 1995; McCrea & Kester, 1936; Williams, 1990).7 The 2-year general
education program was intended to develop students’ abilities to integrate knowledge from various dis-
ciplines in order to identify, formulate, develop and distribute information for decision making (Bedford
& Shenkir, 1987). In short, the idea was that students acquire the required foundation to develop appro-
priate communication, analytical, reasoning, and interpersonal skills along with the understanding nec-
essary to function in a diverse global society (Glover et al., 1995).
If this 2-years of general education is meeting its objectives, one might presume that all accounting
faculty need do is add a layer of technical material on top of students’ liberal arts base and all will be
well. (After all, is not teaching writing, critical thinking, etc. what liberal arts faculty are supposed to
be doing?) As Van Wyhe (1994, p. 62) observed:
It was believed that public accounting could be saved from all its sins and weaknesses by liberal
education. The messianic fervor of this faith in the humanities was, or course, perfectly in keeping
with the times [referring to the 1950s; e.g., Nye, 1958], but it is striking nonetheless. It was heard
over and over again that liberal education, almost magically, produced a person with powerful ana-
lytic skills, deep maturity of judgment, unshakably high ethical standards, and a pleasing person-
ality. Could there be any question that an accountant should be college-educated with a course of
study filled to the brim with liberal arts?
I would hasten to add to Van Wyhe’s observation that this same faith in liberal education is still
expressed today as illustrated by Nellen and Turner (2006, p. 117) when they refer to the ‘‘importance
of reinvigorating liberal education for all college students.’’
What is particularly amazing is that after a century of failed efforts to instill in graduates the char-
acteristics the profession desires, and in the presence of ample evidence that liberal education in its

6
Peter Berkowitz (2006, p. 52–53), ‘‘In fact, universities can cause lasting harm. In many cases, the mental habits that students
form and the ideas they absorb in college consolidate the framework through which as adults they interpret experience, assign
weight to competing claims and values, and judge matters to be true or false and fair or equitable. A university that fails to teach
students sound mental habits and to acquaint them with enduring ideas handicaps its graduates for both public and private life.’’
7
Williams also suggests that one appropriate use of the extra time afforded by adopting the 150-h requirement is to increase
liberal arts coursework, but provides no specifics on what this increase would entail.
 S.D. Willits / J. of Acc. Ed. 28 (2010) 13–25 21

current incarnation is not delivering on its advertised promises, that liberal arts courses are still seen
as the magic elixir for accounting education’s ills. Moreover, little (if anything) appears in the account-
ing literature that expresses serious reservations about what currently passes for ‘‘liberal education.’’
Given accounting education’s shortcomings, maybe this dearth in the literature stems from unwilling-
ness on the part of those who live in glass houses to throw stones at others across campus. Or it may
be that accounting academics have fallen into the same pattern that affects the rest of the academy:
too much specialization and time/energy devoted to research resulting in not enough attention being
paid to teaching and our collective responsibility to educate our students. In any event, what matters
most at this point—if Renaissance Man is ever to be produced—is that a challenge be mounted to the
conventional orthodoxy concerning the relevance and effectiveness of general education courses in
the educational process.

6. Enhancing the value of general education

The ideals of a liberal education are as relevant as ever and society would be richer if the education
accountants (and other professionals) received inculcated these ideals and thus reaped liberal educa-
tion’s purported benefits. Indeed, the AACandU (2007) recommends that the essential aims and out-
comes of a liberal education be emphasized across every field of college study, earlier stating:
Liberal learning is not confined to particular fields of study. What matters in liberal education is
substantial content, rigorous methodology and an active engagement with the societal, ethical,
and practical implications of our learning. The spirit and value of liberal learning are equally rele-
vant to all forms of higher education and to all students (AACandU, 1998).

Accounting educators would do well to heed this call and structure courses in ways that will make
them exercises in liberal learning by helping students to develop critical thinking, problem solving and
communication skills, and ethical reasoning. But the focus of this paper has been the general educa-
tion component of the accounting curriculum and enhancing its value to our students poses serious
challenges which may be met in several ways, including (1) doing the best we can with the status
quo, (2) bringing the liberal arts ‘‘in-house,’’ and (3) hoping that traditional liberal education will be
rekindled in American colleges and universities.

6.1. Doing the best we can

Many students are vocationally minded and do not see the value of their general education course-
work. Instead, they see these courses as boxes to check off en route to a degree, and opt to check them
off as painlessly as possible. As accounting educators, we can try and counter this tendency by selling
the importance of general education to our students (Nellen & Turner, 2006) and use our role as fac-
ulty advisors to help students sensibly navigate the general education morass (assuming we get to ad-
vise them before they take their general education courses). For example, suppose that your
institution’s general education curriculum requires all students to take a lab science. While your adv-
isees may gravitate towards ‘‘baby biology’’ because this course is reputed to be an easy lab course,
physics may be a much better vehicle for them to develop their problem solving and analytical skills
so advise them accordingly. In the minority of schools that have well-designed general education
cores that focus on great books, or take some other time-tested approach, this task is easier or may
not even be necessary.
In other universities, putting together a recommended/required general education core for accoun-
tants should help.8 This is not an easy task as it requires the author(s) of the core to decide which courses
to include (with probably little assistance from the arts and sciences faculty who are sure to resent the

8
The feasibility of this suggestion depends on how much flexibility exists in fulfilling a given university’s core requirements. For
example, Bucknell’s general education curriculum requires that accounting students take two social science courses. While the
university offers a number of classes that meet this requirement, accounting students may be better served by a course offered by
the International Relations department than one in, say, Sociology.
22 S.D. Willits / J. of Acc. Ed. 28 (2010) 13–25

invasion of their turf—especially by people they view as their inferiors (Hatfield, 1924)), and this selec-
tion should be done with some consideration of the approach each likely instructor will bring to the
material (for example, Economics 101 will probably be much different if taught by a monetarist than
if taught by a Marxist). It does not take much to imagine the enormity (and probable futility of this task)
and so most rational accounting academics quickly conclude that this is a path they do not wish to travel.
I strongly suspect that this is why general education prescriptions like those previously cited (the stu-
dent should complete 2 years of courses in liberal arts, natural sciences and mathematics, languages,
and computer and applied sciences) are about as specific as can be found in the accounting literature;
many sources merely state that students should spend 2 years taking liberal arts courses, apparently just
hoping for the best—or cynically assuming that it makes no real difference what general education
courses students take so why bother to develop a list.

6.2. Doing it ourselves

There is some precedent for bringing courses into the college of business when it is believed that
they cannot, or will not, be taught elsewhere in the university in a manner that is relevant for business
students. For example, statistics, information systems, and business communications courses are
taught in some business schools. If it works for a few selected courses, why not an entire core curric-
ulum? Fiscal and political realities probably make this ‘‘solution’’ impractical or impossible, but some
may find it an intriguing concept nonetheless.9
A related approach would require accounting educators to become more aggressive in ‘‘managing’’
the liberal arts portion of the curriculum. Van Wyhe (1994, p. 170) cites Kermit D. Larson of the Uni-
versity of Texas who, when speaking at a conference on professionalization of the accountancy curric-
ulum in 1976, sketched out a ‘‘brave new world of accounting education, in which the fate of
accounting would be in the hands of accountants. They would even control the liberal arts and sciences
and bend them to their will (emphasis added).’’ He then quotes Larson as saying that the new approach
would
‘specify much more completely and integrate much more carefully the background course work,
the generally relevant, and the specifically relevant subject matter from related disciplines such
as law, philosophy, mathematics, statistics, economics, psychology, sociology and political science.
. . .The underlying intent of this objective is to dare lay hands upon the content of the liberal edu-
cation, and to partially constrain it so that an increased percentage of it will have either general or
even specific relevance to the professional competence areas of accounting.’

While many accounting educators may support Larson’s vision—at least in principle—campus polit-
ical realities seem to have rapidly caused this notion to die.

6.3. Letting others do it

Bloom (1987, p. 380) raised doubts about whether liberal education can be rekindled in American
universities when he concluded:
It is difficult to imagine that there is either the wherewithal or the energy within the university to
constitute or reconstitute the idea of an educated human being and establish a liberal education
again.

Bloom’s concerns appear well founded in that two decades later general education curricula are
still seen as incoherent (Berkowitz, 2006). In 2004, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni
(ACTA) issued a report, The Hollow Core: Failure of the General Education Curriculum, which was based
on a 50-college study. The Hollow Core ‘‘proves that even our most prestigious higher education insti-
tutions—the Ivy League, the Seven Sisters, and some of the leading state universities—are no longer
requiring those subjects that every educated man and woman ought to be studying: composition,

9
Such an approach may also impact AACSB accreditation.
 S.D. Willits / J. of Acc. Ed. 28 (2010) 13–25 23

US government or American history, economics, foreign language, literature, mathematics and natural
or physical science’’ (ACTA, 2004, foreword). The report went on to call for reform of the general edu-
cation curriculum; i.e., abandon the prevalent smorgasbord approach and reinstate a core curriculum.
Apparently such calls were heard, or at least heard by some.
Major initiatives are underway that, if successful, should restore some lost glory to the humanities
and social sciences. These efforts are being led by the AAC&U through its Liberal Education & America’s
Promise (LEAP) campaign (started in 2005) to highlight the importance of liberal education for all col-
lege students. The AAC&U represents over 1100 colleges and universities of all types and sizes and is
solely focused on the quality of student learning. The AAC&U states that ‘‘there has been a near-total
public and policy silence about what contemporary college graduates need to know and be able to do’’
(2007, p. 1) and intends its report to fill that void. The report lists several essential learning outcomes
(knowledge of human cultures and the physical and natural world, intellectual and practical skills,
personal and social responsibility, and integrative learning) and ‘‘disputes the idea that liberal educa-
tion is achieved only through studies in arts and sciences disciplines’’ (p. 3). If the AAC&U is successful
(i.e., its efforts result in a significant improvement in the general education courses accounting stu-
dents take), then these courses may begin to contribute to developing the skills, traits, and knowledge
the accounting profession desires. This would be the best possible solution to the ‘‘general education
problem’’ and would free accounting faculty to concentrate solely on how their courses contribute to
liberal learning. It is too early to tell whether the AAC&U’s efforts will result in putting the postmod-
ernist genie back in the bottle. Because doing so would require (1) a reversal of decades of ‘‘breadth
and choice,’’ and (2) a major change in philosophy among arts and sciences faculties, widespread re-
turn to a general education core curriculum in American higher education is likely to be years away if
it happens at all.

6.4. Not doing anything

Of course, accounting educators can continue in their ‘‘ostrich mode’’ when it comes to general
education and continue to believe that whatever happens in the two or so years accounting students
typically devote to liberal arts courses genuinely adds value. This may not be a viable option if for no
other reason than this: professional and regional accrediting bodies are now emphasizing liberal
learning in their standards (AACSB International, 2008; Nellen & Turner, 2006) and requiring schools
to assess student learning. Thus, it appears to be just a matter of time before the AACSB will want
institutions to demonstrate that their students can communicate, solve problems, think critically,
etc.10 Consequently, accounting academicians are really left with no option but to ‘‘liberalize’’ in some
appropriate manner the way accounting education (in its totality) is delivered. Barring improvements
in general education which—at least in the short run—are unlikely at many colleges and universities,
accounting faculty must determine ways to accomplish the shared objectives of a liberal education via
the part of the curriculum they can control: accounting courses.

7. Conclusion

This paper’s objective has been to build a case for an answer of ‘‘no’’ to the question raised in its
title. Clearly the answer would be different if general education programs around the country deliv-
ered on liberal education’s promises, but most apparently have not for quite some time. Unfortunately,
the status quo leaves accounting educators between the proverbial ‘‘rock and a hard place.’’ Either we
acknowledge that general education on many campuses (contrary to its supporters’ claims) does not
produce the types of well-educated graduates the accounting profession demands and find ways to
address the problem or we are doomed to endure another century of grousing by the profession to
the effect that accounting graduates do not possess the skills needed to succeed as accounting
professionals.

10
It is one thing to merely state that a university produces well-educated graduates; it is quite another to have to effectively
prove this claim.
24 S.D. Willits / J. of Acc. Ed. 28 (2010) 13–25

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