Prominent Accounting Scholar Herbert Miller Dies

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Herbert E. Miller, who was a prominent academic and co-author of a popular accounting textbook series, died Dec. 21 in Athens, Ga., after a long illness. He was 98. During a long and well-rounded career, Miller taught for more than 30 years at the university level, partnered with Harry Finney on the three-volume Principles of Accounting textbook series from 1951 to 1965, and served as a standard setter and an Arthur Andersen partner. He crusaded for the establishment of schools of accountancy at the university level. After leaving Arthur Andersen when he reached the firm’s mandatory retirement age, he became the first director of the J.M. Tull School of Accounting at the University of Georgia in 1978, serving five years before retiring. James Don Edwards, a prominent educator and former Financial Accounting Foundation trustee who was a longtime colleague and friend of Miller, said Miller was respected by leaders in public accounting, business and industry, and academia. “He was held with such great dignity and respect, and when he spoke, the community listened to him,” Edwards said. “He did not speak too often. He spoke when it was something of substance and an issue about which he felt passionate. He felt passionately about the development of a conceptual framework from which accounting standards can be established and about schools of accounting. He thought accounting was a learned profession.” Miller grew up in the small town of DeWitt, Iowa, and received the AICPA’s Elijah Watt Sells gold medal for posting the highest score on the CPA exam in May 1945. He served as an accounting educator from 1937 to 1970 on the faculties of schools including the University of Minnesota, University of Michigan, and Michigan State University. He was president of the American Accounting Association in 1965–66, and chaired that organization’s Committee on the

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