Letter from Jon Davis

Chairman, Department of Accounting & Information Systems

It has been a good year for the Department of Accounting & Information Systems.

We started the year with three priorities. First, we wanted to begin to grow the size of the professional programs (undergraduate enrollments are restricted in the School of Business so we can’t increase program size by increasing undergraduate admissions). Second, we wanted to better articulate our development priorities. Finally, we wanted to explore external programs that could generate revenue for the department to help us maintain the margin of excellence that we have achieved (in the most recent Public Accounting Reports survey, UW-Madison was ranked among the top 10 accounting departments). Over the course of the year, we’ve made substantial progress on all three priorities.

We kicked off two programs at the start of this year designed to increase our enrollments. One of these programs, the graduate-only Master of Accountancy (or GMAcc) degree, is designed to provide entrée into the accounting profession for students who did not pursue accounting as an undergraduate. This year we admitted a small group of students as a pilot test for the GMAcc program. Our enrollment goal for next year is 15 students and we are now implementing a marketing plan to reach this goal. This year we also initiated the formation of articulation agreements with other Wisconsin universities so that the best and brightest accounting undergraduates around the state would have the opportunity to pursue internships and graduate study in UW-Madison’s integrated five-year professional program. We have admitted a small group of students this fall through these articulation agreements and we’ll be working on both increasing the number of universities and the number of students involved in this program over the next few years. Overall, our enrollment goal is 200 to 225 students per class by 2011 (up from 150 students currently). More details on the GMAcc program is provided later in this newsletter.

On the development front, we entered the public phase of a $13 million development campaign in May. A group of alumni have stepped up to help with this campaign and they aim to raise $6.6 million by December 2008. To date, I’m happy to announce that we’ve received over $2.7 million in gifts towards this goal. For those readers who have generously supported the campaign to date, I’d like to express my heartfelt thanks for your gifts. This support from our alumni will make a real difference in the department’s margin of excellence in the years to come.

Finally, as you’ll see elsewhere in this newsletter, we continue to investigate the professional and executive education space in an attempt to identify programs that could contribute to the department’s revenue base. One of the first of these programs, which we will try to run this year, is a tour of China, let by Professor John Eichenseher and Ann O’Brien. Both John and Ann have taken student and executive groups to China in the past and they are enthusiastic about taking some of our alumni on the road. We are also investigating a variety of CPE programs that would be offered by the department through the Wisconsin Alumni Association and other entities to various constituencies in Wisconsin and the upper Midwest.

Aside from making substantial progress on our strategic priorities, we had a number of other successes to celebrate during the last year. We were reaccredited by AACSB and our internship programs and ethics and writing initiatives were identified by the visitation team as best practices for other universities. The AACSB visitation team also lauded the improvements in our doctoral program. We were also lucky to hire two new faculty in a very tight labor market. Shana Clor-Proell, a newly minted PhD from Cornell, will be teaching intermediate accounting this Fall. Lynette Stolarzyk, who joins us with an LL.M. from Georgetown, is a senior lecturer and director of our professional programs. In academic competitions, we’ve also done very well over the last year, winning the PricewaterhouseCoopers xTAX championship (for the third time in five years), taking third place in the KPMG Audit Case Competition and making it to the finals (top 5) in the Deloitte Tax Case Competition (for the fourth time in five years).

If you happen to be visiting Madison, be sure to stop by the School of Business to see how far the new addition to Grainger Hall has come. Also, be sure to stop by the Department and say hi!