Zeff Earns Honor from International Association for Contributions to Accounting Education

Zeff Earns Honor from International Association for Contributions to Accounting Education

BY DANA HOYLAND
Rice News Staff
November 18, 1999

In his 22nd year at the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management, Stephen Zeff is still doing the two things he loves: mentoring students and researching the ways in which countries set accounting standards. For his dedication to teaching and for his research in the area of international accounting, he recently was honored with the 1999 Outstanding International Accounting Educator Award by the International Accounting Section of the American Accounting Association.

Each year, the award is made to an individual who has made a substantial contribution to international accounting education through research and teaching as well as through involvement in activities of international professional and academic organizations.

Zeff, the Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Accounting, found his way to teaching quite by accident.

While finishing his undergraduate degree in accounting, one of his professors asked him to teach several sections of a freshman accounting class. Zeff found that each class was fun because each held such a wonderful variety of students. After that experience, “I’ve never looked back,” he said.

“I love sitting down with students and helping them think through what they want to do with their lives,” he said.

One of the students Zeff has mentored is Tim Griffy, who earned a bachelor’s degree in managerial studies in ’79 and a master’s in accounting in ’80 from Rice. Now an area managing partner for Ernst & Young, he said Zeff had a “dramatic impact on my professional career choice.

“His finest hours as a professor are not as a lecturer–although he was one of the best I ever had at Rice and certainly the best accounting professor–nor as a researcher. His best ‘work’ was the informal advice and ad hoc counseling that Dr. Zeff always took the time to do. He truly relishes the relationships and the people more than any other aspect of being a professor.”

In the area of accounting research, especially the setting of international accounting standards, Zeff is considered a pioneer. He began doing research in the ’60s, a time when not many people cared about international accounting standards. Now his work is among the earliest research in that area.

In conducting research, he has visited several countries, sometimes staying for as many as 14 months at a time, including Australia, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. He lectures in Spanish when in Spain and Latin America. Zeff also has served as a visiting professor to many universities, including the Harvard Business School, Northwestern and several universities abroad.

Zeff has authored and edited more than 20 books and 90 articles. He served as the president of the American Accounting Association and as editor of its journal, The Accounting Review. In 1988, he received the Outstanding Accounting Educator Award from the American Accounting Association and has received several awards during his tenure at Rice, among them the Mentor Recognition Award and the George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching (’83, ’84, ’86 and ’93).

Currently, he is the book review editor of The International Journal of Accounting and is the international research adviser to the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland, the oldest professional accounting body in the world.

His book “Henry Rand Hatfield: Humanist, Scholar and Accounting Educator” will be published next year, 37 years after he began his research.

It is clear that the students of Rice have made as much of an impact on Zeff as he has made on them: “There’s an expectation that you’re going to be a responsible, effective teacher–not just from your faculty colleagues, but from your students–and you don’t want to let them down,” he said.