A. Rief Kanan, the winner of this year’s Dr. Emanuel Saxe Outstanding CPA in Education Award, has always had one foot in the academic world and another in the business world—a balancing act that has benefited both his students and the companies he works with.

An Orange County, N.Y., native, Kanan has been an accounting professor since 1983, serving as an adjunct before entering academia full-time in 1997. He actually discovered his knack for teaching, however, at Arthur Young, where he launched his career. He led numerous seminars at the firm, following his managers’ encouragement to develop his “front-of-the-room skills.” This gave him the confidence he needed to take on occasional adjunct professor work at Fairfield University. Soon after, he was contacted by an acquaintance—an accounting professor at SUNY New Paltz—who said that the school desperately needed someone to teach intermediate accounting.

“The rest is history,” Kanan said.

Kanan, who spent much of his career in corporate accounting, said that he is in a unique situation as an educator, because he has been engaged with a number of business ventures as well. The work, he said, overlaps in interesting ways.

For example, Kanan is the founder and director of the Business Institute, an organization run through the SUNY New Paltz School of Business that has as its mission to connect faculty, students and business leaders so that they can learn from each other. The Institute fields direct inquiries from the business world and matches companies with students or faculty members who might be able to help with various projects. It also holds conferences and seminars, and conducts its own research. 

One project that the Business Institute is currently working on is creating a CEO Index, which Kanan said, is meant to be a “temperature taking” of business owners, in order to develop a general picture of the overall economic health of the Hudson Valley and Mohawk Valley areas.

In addition to his work at the Institute, Kanan is an active executive coach, mainly through Vistage International, a company that offers peer advisory group services to high-level business officers. While he often does one-on-one coaching, his main role at Vistage is as a facilitator, helping executives come together in groups to work through business issues. “It can be a lonely sort of environment at the top of most entrepreneurial companies,” he said. 

Kanan explained that these projects outside the classroom are essential for him to maintain his perspective and stay grounded in the real world. Though he’s found that having a business-world viewpoint is unique in academia, it actually allows him to better instruct his students, he said.

“I think if you talked to my colleagues in the faculty they would say one strength I bring to meetings and projects and committee work and recruiting … is a practical outlook that’s rooted in what’s really going on out there,” he said.

Kanan brought up strategic management as an example of how academia must keep in step with the business world at large. Though company strategy is generally not something that comes to mind when people think of accountants, he believes that the profession needs to play a greater role in it.

Because of his extensive involvement with the business community, he said, he has been able to get the companies he works with to engage the students in his strategic management cases class and provide an overview of what goes into a strategic assessment at a midmarket enterprise company. This pairing helps businesses as well, he added.

“They get to work with young, aggressive, open-minded and unbiased M.B.A. students, and the students get a chance to go in and do a strategic assessment,” he said.

Rebecca J. Hasbrouck, a former student of Kanan’s and a fellow member of the NYSSCPA’s Mid Hudson Chapter, remarked that students appreciate his ties to the “real world.”

“Any student who has had the opportunity to learn from Professor Kanan [at SUNY New Paltz] can recount stories he told during the course sessions in which he applied real-life experience  to the topic at hand,” she said.

NYSSCPA Past President Gail M. Kinsella, who served as chair of the committee that selected the Society’s award winners, said she had been impressed by the impact that Kanan has had on students.

“Rief Kanan has a terrific reputation of sticking up for students and helping them understand what they need to know. He pushes them, but, at the same time, supports them,” she said. “His acumen and the length of time he has committed himself to educating in the profession and bringing new CPAs to the market are astounding.”

In describing his own teaching style, Kanan said that it falls somewhere between a technician and a salesman. When he’s teaching intro-level courses, he’s in a complete salesman mode, trying to get across to students how important the accounting profession is to companies around the world, whether or not those students choose to pursue the discipline as a vocation. He also takes the salesman approach in his work with the Mid Hudson Chapter’s Career Opportunities in the Accounting Profession (COAP) program.

Indeed, Hasbrouck added, “Former high school participants of the COAP program who are now in college and beyond still say that Professor Kanan was a significant help in their selection of a college major and, further, a career path.”

For the more advanced accounting students, Kanan said he takes on more of the technician role. He encourages them to seek many different kinds of input and to leverage whatever they can to make it in the business world, stressing the importance of communication skills.

Kanan also spurs them on to not only become accountants, but accountants who are engaged with the profession, particularly when it comes to joining the NYSSCPA.

“If you’re going to be a part of the profession, be a part of it. [Membership in the Society] was, in my mind, an automatic,” he said.