GGU Tax and Accounting: a part of San Francisco History

The Gold Rush era begins, and people from around the world flood into the Bay Area in hopes of finding their own personal gold mine.

California becomes the 31st state admitted to the union.

A Rush to Learn
Two years after the country’s first YMCA opens in Boston, Mass., the brand new San Francisco YMCA offers its first lecture series as an alternative to the “raucous life” on the Barbary Coast, focusing on practical subjects like English, gold assaying and bookkeeping. Special attention is given to finding instructors with real-world experience in the subjects they are teaching — a tradition that continues today at Golden Gate University. “The school itself thrives on practitioners who are willing to effectively donate their time teaching,” says Ted Mitchell, GGU graduate and instructor since 1972. “We have people who are doing it teaching it. I think that’s a fantastic option.”

YMCA Night School to Evening College
Merging its assorted lectures into formalized evening classes, the YMCA Night School opens and three years later becomes the Evening College, serving 355 students. Courses include typing, commercial art, singing, photography, gold assaying, German, shorthand, geography, mechanical drawing and architecture. This success helps lead to the opening of a brand-new five-story building on Mason and Ellis complete with a gymnasium, auditorium and classrooms. Nearly 10 years later President Theodore Roosevelt travels to San Francisco to celebrate the repayment of the mortgage in full, and even lights the match that sets document ablaze.

GGU’s Legal Beginnings
The law school is created making it the university’s first official degree-conferring program and California’s first evening law school. By offering classes at night, the college opens legal studies up to the masses. Four students make up the law school’s first graduating class.

The Great Quake
The biggest earthquake on record in Bay Area history levels the YMCA Evening College along with most of the city. Classes are held under YMCA tents.

Taking Account
Four years later, a new YMCA building, at the corner of Golden Gate Avenue and Leavenworth Street, is dedicated, where the college will reside for the next 58 years. The School of Accountancy, a four-year evening program, opens.

By Any Other Name…
The YMCA Evening College becomes Golden Gate College.

Crash Courses
Following the Black Tuesday stock market crash, the city along with the entire country slips into the Great Depression. The school reorganizes and makes cuts, scaling back from five administrative positions to just two. Students such as Edward S. Ageno attend accounting classes in the evening while working during the day to support their families. Acknowledging the role Golden Gate played in Ageno’s success, The Ageno Foundation later gives $5 million to the university; the Edward S. Ageno School of Business is dedicated in 2000.

A School Flying High
Golden Gate opens its Graduate School of Accountancy to help men and women become qualified to find work in this highly practical field. The San Francisco City Charter is ratified, and Amelia Earhart becomes the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.

Strike While the Iron is Hot
Building on the stellar success of the evening school, Dean Myron M. “Mike” Strain and Director Nagel T. Miner begin the university’s first day accounting school. The Great Maritime Strike and the San Francisco General Strike of 1934 closes down shipping yards along the coast.

The Golden Gate Bridge opens after six years of construction.

A World at War
By 1941, the Schools of Accountancy, Traffic and Insurance have developed into strong schools with solid reputations. Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the school adjusts its services to fit the needs of a student body called up to fight the war. Day work is transferred to the evening division so the few who were not serving abroad could study at night while in training at their jobs during the day.

Dawn of a New Day
The War finally ends. Golden Gate’s full-time day school begins and includes everything from beginning accounting to allied subjects (business law, finance math, economics, English) to graduate courses.

Getting in on the Act
Interest in accounting education is greatly stimulated by an Act defining Public Accountants and requiring practicing public accountants to be certified by the Board, or “grandfathered” in. The Act increased the number of people who selected accountancy as a career and also came at a time when a great numbers of veterans were being discharged from military service with GI educational benefits.

GGU anticipates this demand and decides to open a “from-scratch” full-time undergraduate and graduate degree program. The school makes it possible for a student to accomplish in two years and eight months what would ordinarily take four years at other schools. Students are encouraged to work during the afternoon as a way to link academic theory with practical experience.

To Market, To 537 Market…
The school’s rapid growth requires the use of a new location at 537 Market St.

World War II peace treaties are signed.

Accounting Enrollment Tops the Charts
Accounting school enrollment reaches nearly 4,000. The school has become a byword for competent, well-trained accountants.

Heads of the Class
Charles G. Steele is awarded the Elijah Watts Sells Gold Medal for earning the highest score in the United States on the CPA exam and later becomes CEO and chairman of the board of Deloitte, Haskins, and Sells. Frank Weinberg, another GGU student, placed among the top 10 in the nation. Edmund Celeski and Weinberg both began teaching after graduating in the 1950s and taught a generation of accountants at GGU, becoming two of the school’s most venerable and beloved professors. The Weinberg-Celeski Fund is later created.

Stealing the Giants
Despite his other achievements as mayor of San Francisco, Golden Gate accounting alumnus George Christopher (BA 30) says he’ll always be remembered for one thing: luring the Giants away from New York to his adopted hometown.

Student to Teacher
One of the pillars of GGU’s professional education programs, AJ Johnson (MBA 70) comes to Golden Gate as a student, goes on to teach, chair, and later serve as dean of the School of Accounting. “It was the highlight of my life,” says Johnson, who devoted a great deal of time to his students. One of Johnson’s favorite parts of his job was networking on behalf of the student body. He was known for taking the time to really get to know his students and then matching them with his extensive contacts in the Big Eight accounting firms. “It gave me a good feeling, because it was what GGU was all about: serving students and helping to shape their lives,” he recalls.

New Age Dawning
Hippies take over the Haight, and the once-working-class neighborhood soon becomes the center of the city’s psychedelic drug culture. This mix of drugs and rock ’n’ roll — combined with the invention of the birth-control pill — help usher in the sexual revolution. GGU has a minor revolution of its own, moving out of the YMCA building and cutting its ties with the organization at 532-536 Mission St., purchasing its own building.

A Welcomed Tax
The school starts offering an MBA in Tax, the first institution on the West Coast to do so. John Cordell Williams (MBA 73) and Bill Taggert spearhead the new degree track, which is modeled after New York University’s LLM program. Its almost-instant success owes in part to the fact that it allows CPAs to apply their continuing education courses toward an actual degree. Williams is named dean of the MS Tax program and Taggert takes the reins at the LLM program. “The program exploded in 1973,” recalls Williams. “We branched out to Los Angeles, Sacramento and Seattle.”

What’s in a Name
Golden Gate College becomes Golden Gate University.

Finding Balance
Women compose 21 percent of accounting students, growing to 55 percent within less than a decade.

Joe Walsh becomes dean of the School of Tax. “I was able to continue John Williams’ practice of recruiting exceptionally high-quality adjunct faculty members. My vision was to make us one of the best tax schools in the nation.” During Walsh’s tenure, all the adjunct faculty came together to update and standardize the course materials, which ensure the high academic quality of the program. Today, the Golden Gate University School of Taxation remains the largest and one of the most respected graduate tax programs in the country offering its students the gold standard of comprehensive online and in-person tax education.

Logging On
With the launch of the World Wide Web, the masses can now log on. GGU begins to offer online-education options in 1995; In 1997, Golden Gate opens its CyberCampus, which quickly wins national recognition as a model for online education. The online component of the school continues to grow by leaps and bounds serving thousands of students each year, and this year was ranked among the top 10 online universities internationally. “I have students from all over the world — Canada, Mumbai, Hong Kong, Russia — because I teach online,” says David Hardesty (MBA 85) who has been an online instructor at GGU for the past decade.

Planning the Work and Working the Plan
Barbara Karlin is named dean of the School of Tax where she implements its day program. Under her watch GGU begins to offer its MS Tax degree online beginning in 1997. Karlin taps Canning to be the associate dean and together they design a business plan, boost enrollment and form the school’s first advisory board comprised of San Francisco tax professionals. Karlin later becomes the university’s vice president of academic affairs, a role she continues today.

Relationship Ready
Mary Canning becomes the dean of the School of Taxation and is later named the dean of the School of Accounting. Canning works tirelessly to take the school’s industry relationships to a new level — she oversees the launch of the online and full-time day programs, forges new relationships with downtown professionals, increases the number of soft skills courses and adds continuing education offerings presented by practicing, expert professionals. “When anybody says tax or accounting, they should immediately be thinking of GGU,” she says.

Private Eyes of Corporate Culture
Paul Regan (MS 79) pioneers the field of forensic accounting. Corporate fraud is on the rise, and Enron goes down. Regan gives three days of testimony as an expert witness in federal court against Kenneth L. Lay, Jeffrey K. Skilling, Andrew S. Fastow, et al., explaining the ins and outs of the top Enron executives’ financial schemes and manipulations that inflated the company’s stock prices. Three years later, he presents an opportunity to Canning, who develops a forensic accounting program months after the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) designates “certified financial forensic” (CFF) as a specialty credential. The program’s curriculum is created by a newly appointed advisory board of professional experts. Available entirely online, GGU’s innovative program has received national recognition.