Sydney School of Accounting: 50th anniversary

              12 The Accounting Historians Notebook, April 2011
Sydney School of Accounting: 50th Anniversary
Frank Clarke, Graeme Dean and Murray Wells*
The ‘Sydney School of
Accounting’ is the enduring lega-cy
arising from the tenure of Ray
Chambers in the Department (now
the Discipline) of Accounting in
the University of Sydney. Ray-mond
John Chambers (1917–99)
was born and educated in New-castle,
New South Wales, before
being awarded a scholarship to
study economics at the University
of Sydney, from which he gradu-ated
in 1939. He was the first full-time
lecturer in accounting at the
university (in the Department of
Economics), becoming senior lec-turer
in charge of accounting in
1953, at a time when evening
classes were the norm. In 1960 he
was appointed to the university's
Foundation Chair of Accounting
in the newly created Department
of Accounting, a position he occu-pied
until his retirement in 1983.
The appointment presaged the rise
of accounting there to a standing
equal to that of the traditional aca-demic
disciplines. Consistent with
Cardinal John Henry Newman’s
dictum that the function of a uni-versity
is to expose ‘false doc-trines
and profess the truth’, he set
about establishing a cadre of
scholars wedded to the discipline
of accounting and dedicated to the
pursuit of evidenced-based re-search.
Of that cadre which hus-banded
the Sydney School, eight-een
eventually became professors
of accounting in Australia, the
United States and the United
Kingdom.
Chambers’ intellectual
school was forged during a dy-namic
period described by Cham-bers
and Dean (1986, ‘General
Preface’) as ‘one of substantial
business growth, of conglomera-tion
on a large scale by mergers
and takeovers, of intense multina-tional
corporate development, of
increasing use of modes of organi-zation
and methods of financing
that were novel at the beginning
of the interval … The accountan-cy
profession grew in scale and
changed in style under the influ-ence
of such things as these.’1 By
the 1970s the department had
* Frank Clarke is Emeritus Professor, (Continued on page 13)
University of Newcastle and Honorary
Professor, University of Sydney; Grae-me
Dean is Professor of Accounting,
University of Sydney; Murray Wells is
Emeritus Professor, University of Syd-ney
1 R Chambers and G. Dean (eds) ,
Chambers on Accounting, Vol. I: Ac-counting,
Management and Finance,
Garland, 1986.