THE ABSTRACT

From The Chair

Dear Friends,

It is hard to believe that we just wrapped up a very busy year, the first official academic year post pandemic. By all accounts, it was one of the busiest years, enriched with on campus activities, speaker visits, curriculum innovations, faculty and student traveling, and strategic planning. The College hosted the AACSB accreditation team in March 2023, for the once every five-year visit, and the Academic Council has since been working on developing an improvement plan as was recommended by our peer review colleagues. The faculty were also immersed in the national search process for the new dean of the College of Business (COB). Dr. Seung Bach, the interim dean of the School of Business and Public Administration at California State University, Bakersfield, is joining us on July 1st. We welcome Dr. Bach and hope for productive collaboration when it concerns promoting the accounting program. Our department would like to express gratitude to Dean Brenda Flannery who is leaving her role after serving as the dean of the COB for the last 12 years. Dean Flannery has been a big supporter of the department, each and every student who walked in our doors, and every faculty member who were part of the College during her term. I am personally grateful to Brenda for her recommendation three years ago for me to step in to the department chair role, as she envisioned professional growth for both me and my colleagues, and I am glad to say that she was right in her visionary endorsement.

As of June 2023, I will have completed my first three-year term as the department chair. Although this was the busiest period in my life (not counting my Ph.D program studies), I greatly enjoyed working with students, faculty, and other constituents of the department. I was re-elected by my colleagues for a second chair term with an intention of assisting the new dean with the transition process. We overcame many challenges and accomplished a lot in the past three years: our students have received outstanding internship and job offers; significant scholarship funds were raised and awarded to students; the faculty members attended numerous conferences, presented their research findings and published articles in reputable journals. Our most notable achievement to date, however, was faculty’s outstanding contribution to students’ growth and development as well as exceptional quality of teaching that was recognized at the national level. The faculty members participated in the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and events, and our department was the first and only University unit to successfully close the equity underperformance gap in a core course taken by a large population of students, specifically, introductory financial accounting. We hosted the KPMG partner panel on campus, for the first time, and students had a bus tour organized to visit several accounting firms’ offices in Minneapolis. Dr. Pike has been recognized as an Outstanding Educator by the Minnesota System’s Board of Trustees, and Beta Alpha Psi, led by Assistant Professor Sean Fingland, received a national award for their presentation. You will find truly inspirational stories featuring the accounting faculty members’ outstanding work with students in and outside a classroom in this issue.

We bid farewell to business law faculty member, Professor Vicki Luoma who retires at the end of this academic year. We are grateful to Professor Luoma for her 20 years of teaching and service and wish her all the best in coming years.

Despite a successful year, we face challenges that are common to other accounting programs in the region and nationwide. These include the declining interest in accounting as a profession and faculty turnover. As compared to many accounting programs, we believe we are well positioned to meet the challenges ahead. Through being student focused, we will meet the challenges of enrollment management and address the needs of the accounting profession. Through doing so, we will prepare our students for the CPA Evolution launch and provide them with the skills necessary to be successful in the future.

Overall, we have important work to do in the coming year, which includes nationwide faculty searches and curriculum innovations. My colleagues and I wish all of you a great summer and we hope to see you next Fall!

Kind regards,

Oksana Kim, Ph.D., FCCA Chair, Department of Accounting & Business Law

The Allen Lenzmeier Accounting Professor of Leadership & Diversity President, Midwest Section, American Accounting Association