The importance of a liberal education to the tax professional.

• Author: Nelson, Davis W.

The Importance of a Liberal Education to the Tax Professional

Just what does it take to be a tax professional? Certainly, knowledge of tax rules and principles sufficient to meet compliance demands are essential. At a more advanced level, the understanding of the tax law and experience necessary to engage in effective tax planning are also required. Such expertise--to a greater or lesser degree--is indisputably essential in the tax field. The foregoing exhortation suggests that, although professional training and experience are necessary to achieving competency in a chosen profession, they alone are insufficient.

Most tax professionals would agree. Traits of a more general nature--many products of a liberal education--may also be considered significant. Good judgment, creativity, and the ability to work with people (variously called interpersonal or interactive skills), along with numerous other qualifications, would be on most tax professionals' lists of desirable traits. How are such traits to be acquired? Where are they to be found? If the days of formal schooling be many years in the past, is it too late to acquire and nurture them?

The premise of this article is essentially the same as that expressed by John Stuart Mill, the great English philosopher, in the excerpt quoted above from his address upon election as a rector of St. Andrews University in 1867: a general, liberal education, begun in school and continued throughout life, will lead to a more successful and rewarding professional career. The tax professional is peppered daily with offers to enhance technical knowledge and skills through reading, seminars, and professional meetings. When it comes to general education, however, we must all be autodidacts--that is, self-taught. This article will not show you how to acquire a general education; that is not its intent. Rather, it is intended to convince you of the importance of such an education and inspire you to continue its pursuit.

The Barbarism of Specialization

The above heading is taken from a chapter of a masterly essay on life in the Twentieth Century that has particular relevance for the modern tax professional. I know of no better way of explaining its use here than to quote from that essay.

[The scientist who] is only acquainted with one science, and even of that one only knows the small corner in which he is an active investigator . . . even proclaims it as a virtue that he takes no cognizance of what lies outside the narrow territory specially cultivated by himself, and gives the name of "dilettantism" to any curiosity for the general scheme of knowledge. (2)

The author of the foregoing quotation, Peter Drucker, returned on other occasions to note and deplore collateral effects of the peculiar modern phenomenon of professional specialization. The citizen, he has said, is the new barbarian and this new barbarian is above all the professional--the engineer, the physician, the lawyer, the scientist--more learned than ever before, but at the same time more uncultured. The consequences of the phenomenon--to the professions and to the world--are incalculable.

After a few years' experience in the field, most tax professionals come to understand that which they may have only superficially acknowledged at the outset of their careers: formal training begins, but does not complete, the specialized education of the professional. No schooling prepares one for all the demands of modern professional practice. (3) Corporate tax departments and law and accounting firms generally recognize the deficiencies of new personnel and have institutionalized programs offering a carefully balanced mixture of continuing professional education and work experience designed to overcome those deficiences. The new professional receives constant encouragement and support with regard to continuing professional education, but receives not the slightest encouragement to continue general intellectual development beyond the stage of adolescence. Employers may deplore, but do nothing to remedy, the situation. A byproduct of employers' emphasis on professional development, to the virtual exclusion of overall intellectual development, is inevitably another victim of the barbarism of specialization.

The educational establishment in the United States also does little to remedy the defects of the professional's education. Most of us are products of the "electives" system that prevails at most colleges and universities. (4) The electives are, in large part, specialized courses taught by specialists attempting to make proselytes for their narrow view of the world. Students proceed through the system, in the words of one commentator, as--

Window shoppers in the marketplace of ideas, tourists in the world of thought who know the names of everything and the significance of nothing, their transcripts read like little black books. Wooed by experts, seduced by specialists. . . . (5)

Likewise, premature specialization offers many off-ramps from the road to a sound general education. College undergraduates often begin taking courses in their chosen "majors"--business, accounting, economics--as early as their freshman year. This is the educational equivalent of attempting to build the superstructure and foundation of a building simultaneously. As a result, the ranks of the new barbarians grow.

The Liberal Arts

A recent survey concluded, somewhat charitably, that tax executives from large corporations believe there is room for improvement in the skills of their staffs in the areas of written and oral communication, problem solving, and similar abilities. (6) These skills are not directly addressed during the course of professional training and are only indifferently taught in the public schools and institutions of higher learning. Although the survey did not inquire whether the tax executives were surprised with the generally poor level of development of these skills, a negative response to such a question could have been expected.

So Linowitz, noted lawyer and former ambassador, recently delivered an address at the Cornell Law School in which he described the...