Stickney Wins Distinguished Doctoral Alumni Award

The gifted teacher and researcher of accounting, was honored by his alma mater, the College of Business at Florida State University.

If you’ve ever studied financial accounting, there’s a good chance Clyde Stickney was involved.

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The Signal Companies’ Professor of Management, Emeritus, Stickney taught accounting at Tuck from 1977 to 2003, and has authored seven editions of his classic text, Financial Reporting, Financial Statement Analysis and Valuation: A Strategic Perspective, as well as 11 editions of his managerial text, Managerial Accounting:  An Introduction to Concepts, Methods, and Uses.

Fittingly, Stickney recently won the 2012 Distinguished Doctoral Alumni Award from Florida State University, where he earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degrees in accounting between 1965 and 1970.

“For many years,” said Frank Heflin, the Arthur Andersen Professor of Accounting at the FSU College of Business, who nominated Stickney for the award, “untold thousands of students from most of the top MBA programs learned their accounting from Clyde’s books.”

One of those students happened to be senior associate dean Robert G. Hansen, the Norman W. Martin 1925 Professor of Business Administration at Tuck. He used Stickney’s managerial accounting book as an undergraduate at Northern Michigan University in the late-1970s, before he even knew that Tuck existed. “And then I came to Tuck and there he was,” he said. Today, the book sits on a shelf in Hansen’s office, filled with the marginalia of an eager economics student.

At Tuck, Stickney was loved by students, not only because he was caring and gentlemanly, but also for his ability to teach arcane, non-intuitive accounting principles. “I think Clyde takes the top honor for teaching accounting at Tuck,” Hansen said. “Accounting is hard stuff, but Clyde had a way of putting it into an approachable, sensible context.” This skill was especially helpful when Stickney taught newly graduated liberal arts college students in Tuck’s Business Bridge Program.

Stickney was also lauded for his research, which delved into multiple aspects of financial statements and how differences in accounting methods affected price-to-earnings ratios and the evaluation of corporate strategies.

Since he retired in 2003, Stickney has been living in his native Florida, teaching adults at his church and doing genealogy research.