Glenn Welsch loved The University of Texas, where he earned his Ph.D. and spent
thirty-two years teaching all levels of accounting classes. He built his home
on fill excavated from a building site on the UT campus and with bricks taken
from a building being torn down. He painted his restored 1912 Metz burnt orange.
He wore burnt orange clothing on any appropriate occasion. He literally surrounded
himself and his family with UT’s earth, walls, and spirit. From deep in
his heart must have come the words he spoke so many times, “The University
of Texas has given me everything I have. The University of Texas made possible
everything I did. Whatever I’ve done, it was because of The University
of Texas.”
J
Indeed, Glenn Welsch did do a lot. The potent combination of his personality
and the UT environment bettered the lives of all it touched. When he retired
from full-time UT employment in 1986, he could look back on a career many of
his colleagues admired, and none have matched.
Glenn Welsch was born in Oklahoma in 1915 on land homesteaded by his family.
On that supposedly-faded frontier, the horse and buggy were still acceptable
means of transportation. Plows pulled by horses still busted the sod. Outside
the few Oklahoma cities, people ate mostly what they grew. Walking along the
dusty streets could be found many of the Indians and Indian fighters of the Red
River War who fought there only forty years before. This frontier life delivered
lessons of poverty (the four men in the Welsch family had to sleep in the one
bed, Glenn’s older sister was placed with another family), misfortune (the
280-square-foot Welsch family home burned down twice), tragedy (his mother died
when he was only three years old), family (due to a stroke, his father had limited
stamina; Glenn and his brothers had to work together to run the farm), and love
(which kept them together). Those lessons left their mark on Glenn’s character.
Glenn Welsch was a member of “the greatest generation,” serving in
the Signal Corps with the 45th National Guard Division in both Europe and the
Pacific during World War II. Prior to military service, he earned a bachelor’s
degree from Northwestern Oklahoma State College in 1935, then taught typing and
bookkeeping to high school students in Alva, Oklahoma. In 1942, at Fort Monmouth,
New Jersey, Glenn married Irma Richards, an Oklahoma beauty who loved riding
horses.
After leaving the military, Glenn briefly sold insurance, and then earned a master’s
degree from Oklahoma State. He entered The University of Texas business doctoral
program during the postwar education boom in 1949. Guided by legendary accounting
faculty professors George L. Newlove, C. Aubrey Smith, and John Arch White, Glenn
earned his doctorate in 1953 and immediately became their faculty colleague.
By 1958 he was a tenured full professor and the accounting department chair.
This office and that of Associate Dean for Graduate Studies were his only two
administrative positions (other than extensive committee service) at UT.
Glenn Welsch’s first love always was teaching. He had a talent for teaching,
and teaching rejuvenated him. When he found himself under pressure, he didn’t
seek a reduced load. He looked for more teaching to do. Glenn could pace the
presentation of abstractions, interspersing ideas with anecdotes, humor, questions,
overhead transparencies, pop quizzes, and personal philosophy. It was not unusual
for him, even in the large classes he consistently taught, to know his students
by name instantly, wherever they sat. Students quickly came to feel that Glenn’s
regard for
them individually exceeded that for any other student.
Glenn’s teaching brought him recognition. He quickly received the Jack
G. Taylor Award for Teaching Excellence. The American Accounting Association,
American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, and the Texas Society of
Certified Public Accountants all recognized him with Distinguished Accounting
Educator awards. More importantly, everyday in the classroom he won his most
important awards, the ones that made all the others possible—namely, his
students’ respect and attention.
Glenn’s opening statement to his classes (and to almost everyone else with
whom he had an ongoing relationship) ran like this: “My success depends
on how effectively I help you succeed. I’ll tell you the truth and I expect
the truth from you. I’ll do my best; I expect you to do your best. Help
me and I’ll help you.”
When Glenn Welsch wasn’t teaching, he was writing. His living teaching
legacy includes thousands of today’s CPAs and business leaders who received
at least part of their education from Welsch-authored textbooks. His dissertation,
which described corporate budgeting practices in the U.S., became a popular textbook
that after many editions was still in use at the time of his death and has been
translated into seven languages. With colleagues Smith and White, he authored
a long-running series of intermediate accounting text editions and supplements.
With Harvard professor Robert Anthony, he authored a popular introductory accounting
text. In 1996, these textbooks claimed a combined total of twenty-three editions,
and colleagues at over sixty universities had assisted in their preparation.
Glenn’s texts became widely adopted because students and faculty liked
them. Glenn’s textbooks made the adopting professor look good to students.
These textbook successes and his personal philosophy of working with others caused
his American Accounting Association Colleagues to elect him their 1969-1970 president.
In the early 1970s he served a term on the Accounting Principles Board (APB),
a precursor of the Financial Accounting Standards Board and the Public Companies
Accounting Oversight Board. From his own pocket, he would pay the expenses of
younger accounting faculty to accompany him to APB meetings, where they could
see firsthand the development of accounting principles. On leaves of absence,
he was the first person to hold the Blough Chair at The University of Virginia
and the Prickett Chair at Indiana.
On the UT campus, Glenn gained the trust and never lost the confidence of the
six UT presidents (Smiley, Wilson, Hackerman, Rogers, Flawn, and Cunningham)
and four College of Business Administration (CBA) deans (Spriegal, White, Kozmetsky,
and Cunningham) who served during his faculty years. As a result, Glenn served
as chair or member on a number of result-oriented college and university committees.
These included committees that produced the four-point GPA system, the calendar
that ends the fall semester before Christmas, the first modern UT MBA program,
the Executive MBA Program, the building complex housing the McCombs School of
Business, and more. At UT, Glenn was the first faculty member to hold the White,
the Peat Marwick, and the Bayless endowed positions.
In the Department of Accounting, Glenn made himself available for all efforts
that promised to improve accounting education. As a colleague who would help
a faculty member with almost any project, he earned our deepest respect and gratitude.
As a student adviser, he took the time to relate personally to every student
for whom he was responsible. As a fundraiser, he saw to the endowment of three
professorships honoring colleagues (White, Smith, and Zlatkovich), none of which
he ever held himself. After his retirement, he even contributed to the endowed
chair named in his honor.
Glenn and Irma Welsch enjoyed a lifelong relationship, ended only by their deaths
in 2004; first Irma’s, and then Glenn’s a few months later, on October
27, 2004. They had three children: sons, Linden and Andy; and daughter, Mary
Ann.
At Glenn’s 80th birthday party in 1995, Glenn heard for the first time
Dromgoole’s poem about the bridge builder. Glenn said later that he saw
himself in that poem (as did many others). It goes:
The Bridge Builder
An old man, going a lone highway,
Came at the evening, cold and gray,
To a chasm, vast and wide,
Through which was flowing a sullen tide.
The old man crossed in the twilight dim
The sullen stream had no fears for him.
But he turned when safe on the other side
And built a bridge to span the tide.
“Old man,” said a fellow pilgrim near
“You are wasting strength with building here.
Your journey will end with the passing day;
You never again must pass this way.
You have crossed this chasm, deep and wide—
Why build you a bridge at the eventide?”
The builder lifted his old gray head:
“Good friend, in the path that I have come,” he said,
“There followeth after me today
A youth whose feet must pass this way.
This chasm that has been naught to me
To that fair-haired youth may a pitfall be.
He, too, must cross in the twilight dim;
Good friend, I am building the bridge for him.”
—Will Allen Dromgoole
Glenn Welsch spent his long life building those bridges for other people, so
they could be better prepared to pursue their dreams and lifelong journeys. The
bridges he built at UT fostered innumerable successful careers and greater appreciation
of the important things in life: energy, passion, loyalty, and love. Glenn built
similar bridges for so many of us who studied and worked on his beloved Forty
Acres. The UT community is therefore an important part of his legacy, and we
all join in saying, “Glenn, we love you and we miss you.”
