A Rant on Teaching

Since I decided what I wanted to do when I grow up, I have had many conversations with people about what I wanted to do when I grow up. Inevitably, most of them ask if I am ever going to go out and actually be an accountant before I teach accounting. I reply that I am not. This seems to not go over so well with some people. Now, you may say as you are reading this, “they are so right—how the heck can you teach something you have not done?”

I have thought about this a lot. First, let me start by saying that I am not doing something at all unique. Many, many people go straight from an undergraduate degree to a PhD and then teach very successfully for the rest of their life. Many professors at our nation’s most elite universities will have never had a “real” job. But, is this something that should be done?

Thinking about it, I will not be teaching how to do what accountants do. Accounting professors don’t teach what accountants actually do. Accountants actually go from place to place talking with people and making sure financial statements are correct using methods that vary from place to place, they use software (which varies depending on which accounting firm you work at) to fill out tax returns and deal with their clients figuring out where there is ambiguity in those returns, they design and manage systems that track costs, figuring out ways to make the system more efficient, and so on and so forth. Accounting professors, on the other hand, teach the basic principles of financial accounting, auditing, the rules behind taxes, and the basic thought process and rules of managerial accounting.

No accounting firm hires someone expecting they will know how to do the job—they hire people assuming they have the basic framework with which to learn how to do the job, and they gain that framework through their professors.

Thinking even more, is it necessary to have done something to teach how to do it? How many bishops, pastors, or priests talk with people with serious moral problems and coach them through overcoming those problems, never having had the problems themselves. Having never had problems with his wife (or even had a wife), is a Catholic priest qualified to help one of his parishioners overcome marital difficulties?

In the end, succeeding in academia has little to do with applied experience, but with creativity and success in developing new knowledge. Unfortunately, few outside of the field understand how professors are incentivized, and how little their incentives have to do with having worked somewhere in the real world.

I would propose that an outsider to academia suggesting that someone go work in the real world before going and teaching at a university is exactly like my recommending to my auto mechanic that he go get a PhD in mechanical engineering so he can better do his job. His job is not to “understand” exactly how minuet little things work or be able to come up with better ways of doing them. His job is to make a broken car work, and a PhD has nothing to do with his ability to do with that. Likewise, a professors job is not to be able to actually do real tasks in the real world, but rather, teach about the basic framework in which those tasks are done, as well as empirically and theoretically improve that framework through original research.

So, in conclusion, I will not be working for an accounting firm before I teach accounting. I don’t really think I need to. That, and there is probably no firm that would hire me.