1991 ACCOUNTING HALL OF FAME INDUCTION: RAYMOND J. CHAMBERS

INTRODUCTION by Murray Wells
Board of Nominations
Chairman and Professor, University of Sydney

I first joined the Department of Accounting at the Univer-sity of Sydney in 1967 and have remained a colleague and friend of Ray Chambers ever since. Indeed, it has been a rare privilege, not only to stay in the same university for nearly 25 years, but to work with Ray throughout that period.

During the 1970s and into the 1980s, the University of Sydney experienced one of those unusual occurrences in Uni¬versities, there emerged a genuine community of scholars. Ray’s masterpiece, Accounting, Evaluation and Economic Behavior (and it is a masterpiece), had been published in 1966 and his stream of journal articles, reports and monographs gathered pace. His ideas were introduced into the undergraduate as well as the postgraduate teaching. They were exciting, vibrant times, and they led to the emergence of the Chambers School of Thought.

To the outside world, that School epitomized the arguments for using market selling prices in financial reporting. That was, of course, a key element — an unavoidable conclusion of Cham¬bers’ Theory. All of us then, and most of us still, believed in the need for a financial accounting system based on market selling prices. But what Ray’s work stood for, above all, was rigor. His papers and books still stand for all time as classic examples of tightly reasoned, rigorous, logical expositions. And that, above all, is his contribution to accounting.

Not as well recognized, but just as important, is another feature of Ray’s contribution, its breadth. We tend to think of Ray in terms of the advocacy of market selling prices, Account¬ing, Evaluation and Economic Behavior, or CoCoA. But the recent publication by Garland of Ray’s collected works, covering five volumes, gives an entirely different impression. There we can see Ray’s understanding of, and experimentation with, many ideas that enjoy much greater popularity today. I am sure he would not want to claim responsibility for much of what passes for research in accounting today. But his writings do embody such ideas as the firm as a nexus of competing de¬mands (or “contracts” in today’s language), of the effect of infor¬mation on the stock market, on the use and abuse of language, the self-protection of practitioners, the impossibility of auditing conventional numbers and many other topics now common in the accounting literature.

The other extraordinary feature of Ray’s career was his con¬tinued relationship with the accounting profession. Throughout the whole of time that he was criticizing, cajoling and persuad¬ing the profession to do better, he remained an active player in professional affairs, culminating in his election to President of the Australian Society of Accountants, one of the largest ac¬counting bodies in the world.

Some time after his term of office, one of Ray’s successors in the Presidency of the Australian Society of CPAs (as it is now) told me that the Society’s motto, which is simply “Integrity”, was never better personified than in the form of Ray Chambers during his period of service to the Society.
Colleagues, few things have given me more pleasure and I have had no greater honor than to be invited to induct Ray Chambers into the Accounting Hall of Fame. Not many of us have the opportunity to honor our mentors in so tangible a form. I am therefore immensely grateful to the faculty at Ohio State for inviting me to carry out this task and I have great pleasure in reading the formal citations for Raymond John Chambers.