Obituary for Professor Richard (Dick) M.S. Wilson

We are sorry to announce that Prof. Richard (Dick) M.S. Wilson, Emeritus Professor of Business Administration and Financial Management at Loughborough University, died unexpectedly on 18 January 2023, at the age of 76,

Prior to joining Loughborough, Dick held professorships at Keele University, Queen’s University Belfast, and Nottingham Trent University, as well as many visiting professorships at universities around the world. During his career, he made an outstanding contribution to the discipline of accounting and to the community of UK accounting academics for whom, among many things, he served on the Executive Committee of the British Accounting Association (BAA) for over a decade from 1994; on the Executive Committee of the Conference of Professors of Accounting and Finance (CPAF); and, between 2001 and 2005, he served as Chair of the Committee of Heads of Accounting (now the Committee of Departments of Accounting and Finance). 

Dick Wilson learnt his craft in the renowned Sheffield School founded by Tony Lowe in 1971. Particularly known as a trailblazer and leader of accounting education research and scholarship, Dick wrote or edited more than 50 books, contributed chapters to many others, and authored numerous journal articles concerning accounting education. Furthermore, he fostered and championed active engagement between academia and the accounting profession concerning the shared objective of developing effective accounting practitioners for the future. He was deeply passionate about promoting life-long learning and the message that accounting education prepares students to become accountants, it does not teach them to be accountants. Throughout his academic career, Dick was dedicated to nurturing a collaborative community of accounting education researchers and scholars. In the early 1990s, he launched four initiatives that between them secured accounting education as a distinct field of scholarship within the then BAA (now BAFA). In 1994, he founded the first Special Interest Group of the BAA: the Accounting Education SIG. At around the same time, he founded the Accounting Education Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam University and utilised the core of that team when he set-up the SIG. To further stimulate interest in accounting education, he secured funding from the UK Department for Education and Employment (DfEE), for a Discipline Network in Accounting Education. By that Government-funded initiative, he created a large network of like-minded accounting educators in the UK and Ireland through a series of three grant-funded workshops, held over two days at the University of Sheffield in December 1994, and February and May 1995. Each of these events had over 80 attendees, comprising a mixture of academics and others from industry, the Government, and the profession. Attendance was free. In 1997, he stepped-down from his role as chair of the SIG, thereafter devoting his time spent on promoting good practice in accounting education, and its dissemination, to the journal he had founded in 1992, Accounting Education: an international journal. 

Dick served as the sole editor of the journal for 30 years, stepping aside as editor at the end of 2011 to become Editor-in-Chief, which he saw very much as an advisory role. He marked that occasion for his successor with a celebratory breakfast at a garden centre near Dick’s home at which the incoming editor was passed a dossier prepared in Dick’s inimitable style, containing an impressive collection of “tricks of the trade”. In 2014, he relinquished his formal position and assumed a consultancy role, in which he kept abreast of what was being published and advised the incoming editor and subsequent co-editors whenever he identified something he felt could be improved or changed for the better. Among his other related activities, in 2005 he secured recognition of the journal as the education journal of the International Association for Accounting Education & Research (IAAER), a status it still holds today. A year earlier, Dick was a founding member of the Consultative Advisory Group of the International Accounting Education Standards Board (IAESB), on which he served for three years.

For many PhD candidates in the field of accounting education, Dick was the supervisor of choice. He also examined numerous PhD theses in this area, and mentored many of those who took over the institutions that he created. As external examiner/assessor at 30+ universities in the UK and overseas, he was able to influence accounting education practice in a diversity of settings. In 2006, Dick received the Outstanding contribution to Accounting Education Award from the BAFA Accounting Education special interest group. In 2007, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from BAFA and, in 2012, as a nominee of BAFA, he was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences – the highest recognition available for social scientists in the UK.

As a champion for the cause of accounting education, Dick was without equal. He played a very influential role in the career and lives of so many in the accounting discipline, particularly those within the accounting education community, and we owe him an enormous debt of gratitude. None of us who knew him will ever forget his enthusiasm, drive, and leadership, or his conviction that we, as educators, had a responsibility to our students to make their education something truly meaningful that would remain with them throughout the rest of their lives.

We extend our deepest condolences to Gillian, Dick’s beloved wife.

May he rest in peace.