Deloitte & Touche Foundation Receives Million-Dollar Gift from Former Chair

The Deloitte & Touche Foundation recently announced that it has received a $1 million gift from J. Michael Cook, former chair and CEO, Deloitte & Touche LLP, and former chair of the Deloitte & Touche Foundation. The donation will endow the American Accounting Association (AAA) Doctoral Consortium, which the Deloitte & Touche Foundation has sponsored since 1971 and whose mission is to give advanced doctoral students a chance to meet and exchange ideas with distinguished faculty in a collegial setting.

The consortium is an annual conference hosted by a committee of accounting education faculty. The AAA selects the resident faculty, which then invites top scholars to present perspectives from their areas of research and interest. Students from more than 90 colleges and universities are invited to take part in the conference, which was held in early June in Tahoe City, Calif.

“Attending the Doctoral Consortium is one of the most memorable experiences in an academic’s life,” said AAA President Mary Stone. “This is true for the distinguished faculty presenting their research at the consortium as well as the participating PhD students.”

According to Mark Chain, current chairman of the foundation, academics participate in the consortium on their own time, demonstrating the value they place on improving teaching excellence, developing innovative curricula (such as modifying course content to serve employers’ needs), and promoting research that improves the practice of accounting in business. “We find that academics tend to overlook the need to develop future teachers,” said Chain, “and the consortium emphasizes addressing that need.”

The Deloitte & Touche Foundation is a nonprofit, tax-exempt arm of Deloitte & Touche founded in 1928 and funded by contributions from active and retired partners of Deloitte & Touche. It spends approximately $8 million each year on programs dedicated to improving the quality of education in universities nationwide.

The CPA Journal is broadly recognized as an outstanding, technical-refereed publication aimed at public practitioners, management, educators, and other accounting professionals. It is edited by CPAs for CPAs. Our goal is to provide CPAs and other accounting professionals with the information and news to enable them to be successful accountants, managers, and executives in today's practice environments.