Gotta love it! as I predicted last February, the standard two year invite to the American Accounting Association’s New Faculty Consortium would not be extended to me (again I might add)!! One year and your gone, despite outstanding participant reviews both times I have been invited (2011 and 2018). As some of you know the same thing happened when I was CAR editor back in 2010-11 – indeed they cancelled the journal editor’s panel the next year so as to not have to invite me back. See careditorsteve blogs in early 2012 that documents the fun back then!

Why? I tell it like it is, or at least, as I see it. I say nothing that I have not written in these columns, but these columns are seen as a threat by many in the establishment of the AAA and its related Big X funders. I never have figured out exactly what I say that is so threatening? Is it

1. Advocating a big tent for accounting research using all that social sciences have to offer not just the narrow perspectives of financial economics?

2. Recognizing that all PHD grads, hence new faculty, do not have equal chances of success and thus need to think about how they can be successful without buying the elite ” kool-aid” definition of the American 3?

3. Reminding new faculty that our role as educators requires us to develop independent evidence and examine current institutional structures with professional skepticism! Be it the Big X, the PCAOB, the SEC, the IAASB etc. . . . . Society is not served well by a bought and paid for academy.

4. Rolling back the lid on the black box about how the journal editing process works.

My guess is that number 3 is the big one. Indeed last year I warned the NFC Chair that he might want to reconsider my invite! In the end he said to his everlasting credit, that he was ” old enough” that it did not matter if inviting me caused him some problems.  Brave lad, but not often found in the US academy where observation 3 might well be more true than we want to admit.