Dr Sally A. Aisbitt (28/2/1963–17/8/2006)—A Personal Tribute
Sally Aisbitt was a greatly valued friend and colleague, a superb academic, and quite simply the most conscientious and most committed person with whom I have ever had the privilege to work.
I first met Sally when she came for interview for a lectureship at the Open University (where, at that time, I was Professor of Accounting). I can still remember vividly how she calmly answered every question asked from the vantage point of a single chair in the middle of an otherwise empty room with the interview panel facing her from behind a seamless row of classroom desks some 10 feet away. Not once did she get flustered, and not once did she give reason to doubt that she was the person we wanted to appoint. That was Sally. Calm in a crisis and calm under stress, and this was very much how she was with those of us who knew her when she learnt of her impending death from cancer earlier this year.
After graduating in 1985, Sally spent eight years in the profession before joining the University of Teesside (1993–2000), following which she moved to a lectureship at the Open University. Such was her prowess that the university rule-book was, effectively, rewritten when she was promoted to Senior Lecturer in less than two years. Such things simply did not happen at the Open University in those days.
Sally's principal task at the Open University was to assist me in developing the new level three accounting course B680: Certificate in Accounting. This was a one-year part-time distance learning course involving, in its first year, over 700 students (many of whom had no academic qualifications whatsoever and no prior knowledge of accounting), any or all of whom could be on-line requiring assistance from either myself or Sally 24/7, 365 days of the year.
To this day, I do not know how we coped in 2001–2002. Sally was frequently to be found, sitting at home on-line at 1a.m. on a Sunday dealing with students' queries or handling the problems with the on-line assessment system that had been developed especially for the course. We had many late-night telephone conversations concerning how to cope with those issues.
It was a learning experience for us both, par excellence, and Sally, despite her lack of previous experience in an electronic teaching environment, took to it like a duck to water. When I left the Open University in 2004, I did so knowing that the pedagogical principles and practices we had together built into the course in her first year with us were in safe hands.
Sally's curriculum vitae makes astonishing reading. In her 13 years as an academic, all spent in institutions where teaching is the key job requirement, she presented 23 conference papers, many in mainland Europe and North America; co-edited one book on international accounting; wrote and updated a chapter on international reporting in an annually published book on financial reporting through 10 editions; published nine refereed journal articles (all since 2001); six book reviews; gave seminar presentations in Paris, London, Norway, and Australia; and had only just completed a sabbatical of six months as Visiting Scholar in the University of Sydney. She was also Associate Editor of Accounting in Europe and a member of the Editorial Board of Accounting Education: an international journal.
Her commitment to teaching and research was clear for all to see. Steve Zeff, one of the most renowned accounting academics of our time, felt moved to write to the Editor praising the research, writing, and informative nature of an article Sally published in 2005 in this journal entitled “International Accounting Books: publishers' dream, authors' nightmare and educators' reality”.
Sally was quiet and unassuming but she really made people sit up and notice once they came into contact with her and her work. She will be sorely missed.