So somewhat surprisingly after my last adventures at the American New Faculty Consortium (see my old CAReditorsteve blog for posts about that adventure) I received an invite last fall to be a “Senior Faculty” Leader at the American Accounting Association’s New Faculty Consortium.  Here, every AACSB accredited university program can send a new faculty member to get “indoctrinated” into the world of being a faculty member – US style.

My last visit was somewhat controversial as I took on the myth that all new faculty are created equal.  I asked: do you really believe a Wharton new faculty member who graduated from Stanford has the same set of issues and challenges that a Mississippi State faculty member has who graduated from Jackson State?  Yet this was the rhetoric at Consortium – “all men are created equal” aka as in the US Constitution (leaves out a few groups but . . . . ).

I advocated that faculty had to figure out what their strategy was if their main job was not (as the Wharton/Michigan/Stanford new faculty job is) to teach their one preparation in one term at the MBA level and get their five to eight top 3 (or maybe top 4 or 5 or 6 if you are lucky) journal papers published in the next five years.  Well, as you might guess, I was not invited back the next year!!!!

So stay tuned, and we will see if anything has changed.  The program has a reduced set of voices in the plenary setting (I do not get to address the plenary – no surprise there) but has set up greater diversity in the smaller breakout groups.  Furthermore, there is some sense of realism in the program that did not exist a decade ago.  So . . . . .