The American Association of University Instructors of Accounting: The First Five Years

• In Event: Academia: History and Applications, the old and the new

Abstract

While the use of accounting is common in everyday life and its foundation dates back to the Fourteenth Century, the role of a professional accountant only became prevalent in the business world in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century. As a result, universities began offering courses in accounting to train professional accountants. However, there were several problems, the first of which was there was no place for the instructors of accounting to discuss curricula, teaching methods, and accounting research. A second difficulty was the variations in accounting curricula used in the university courses. To offer a solution to the first problem, in 1916 several accounting instructors formed the American Association of University Instructors of Accounting (AAUIA), the professional organization of accounting academicians. This paper surveys the “Papers and Proceedings” of the first five annual meetings of the AAUIA and considers the AAUIA’s efforts to standardize accounting curricula, as well as the AAUIA’s other foundational objectives.

Author

• Emily Kathryn Hornok, University of Mississippi