Gary John Previts

In 1939 his father, Julius A. Previts, received a master's degree from Teachers College, Columbia University and was a faculty member in the Cleveland Municipal School District.

Previts is married to Frances Anne (Porubsky) a graduate of Notre Dame College, South Euclid, Ohio.

His most frequent coauthor is Professor Dale L. Flesher, of the University of Mississippi an accomplished, brilliant and hard-working scholar.

In addition to faculty mentors noted above, he studied historical topics with Professor William Woodruff, while at the University of Florida.

Vangermeersch, who spent his career at the University of Rhode Island, pioneered many important studies and published extensively, leading up to his coeditorship of the 1996 Garland volume, "The History of Accounting: An International Encyclopedia."

Previts attended the first American Accounting Association doctoral consortium at the University of Kentucky in 1971 and met many of the up-and-coming academics of that era at that event.

Upon his first academic appointment at the University of Alabama, Previts was mentored by S. Paul Garner, who along with W. Baker Flowers and Robert Sweeney, two other doctoral alums of the University of Texas at Austin, were supportive of historical work, at a time when a focused mania for quantitative – empirical archival work was burgeoning.

At Alabama Previts and Paul Garner were involved in supervising the dissertation of Barbara Dubis Merino, who later, with Previts, co-authored the first two versions of a history of accountancy in the United States, first published by Ronald Press in 1979 and then revised and published by The Ohio State University Press in 1998.

Previts was appointed a full professor on the CWRU faculty in the summer of 1979, with very mixed feelings about leaving Alabama colleagues, friends and neighbors.

Yet he perceived an opportunity to work to develop the accountancy programs at CWRU, a member school of the Association of American Universities (AAU), which Andrew D. Braden, who was approaching retirement, had been overseeing for many years.

With his research at CWRU, he focused on development of accounting thought and institutions, regulation and analysis of corporate disclosure, and education policy.

Timothy Fogarty who came to the faculty a decade later was a constant source of intellectual activity, and provided a sociological perspective to accounting research.

While they were not campus colleagues, Previts learned much from observing them at a first gathering with both at the AAA meetings at the University of Kentucky mentioned earlier.

During this period, Richard Mattessich shared with Previts the writings of Percy Williams Bridgman (1882–1961), in particular, the paper in "The Yale Review" during WW2 wherein Bridgman defined his view of the scientific method as “doing one's damndest with one's mind, no holds barred.” This view, and pragmatism opened in Previts' mind, an appreciation for the need for entrepreneurial intellectual activities, not merely compliant doctrinaire approaches to truth seeking.

And more recently, having read James Fenimore Cooper's The American Democrat (1838, p. 42), he recognized the premise that the right to own private productive property did not extend to ownership of human beings.

Further reflection upon the notion of implied inalienable rights led to papers published in "Research in Accounting Regulation" in the 1990s about an important "right to information" needed to insure that the investing public as ultimate capital providers of the late 20th and 21st century were given relevant and timely information on the use and performance of their capital in institution driven equity markets.

In particular he found the work of Charles Francis Adams and McCraw's view that effective regulation involved developing a rationale for the "public use of private interests" to be meaningful.

Along with other key individuals including Dr. George Krull, Dr. Tracey Sutherland and Dennis Reigle, he assisted in the formation and oversight of the operations of the Pathways Commission, formed by the AICPA and the American Accounting Association [AAA], an activity which was chaired by Professor Bruce Behn, University of Tennessee 2010-2012.