Accounting professor Arline Savage, Ph.D opens a new website., has been selected to receive the UAB President's Award for Excellence in Teaching for her exceptional accomplishments in teaching. She will be honored at a UAB ceremony this fall.
A native of South Africa, Savage has taught a wide variety of courses across multiple countries, including South Africa, Canada and the United States. She is the Collat School of Business's Sallie W. Dean Faculty Fellow in Accounting and has been a Deloitte Faculty Fellow. She received the Ernst & Young Leader in Ethics Award, the Ernst & Young Outstanding Educator Award, the Fluor Corporation Excellence in Teaching Award, and the Loudell Teaching Award in recognition for her teaching excellence.
Savage is beloved by her students and recognized by her peers as a leader in accounting education research. Long before the pandemic, Savage adopted hybrid learning as a classroom innovation and actively experimented with crowd-based classroom technologies to gain experience with instructional approaches. She prepares students for the future needs of business with a focus on professional ethics and data analytics. She also takes an active role in encouraging women to pursue opportunities to become accounting educators.
"Arline demonstrates with passion the Collat School of Business's values and ideals in every aspect of our responsibilities as educators – from designing curriculum and creating education content through her research to disseminating critical concept and offering career advice to our students," Paul Di Gangi, Ph.D., wrote in his nomination of Savage.
Savage is recognized internationally for her prolific research in accounting education. She is currently ranked 12th in the world over the last 12 years and 26th of all-time. She has published more than 40 academic and professional publications as well as two scholarly books and two textbooks. She is a Past-President of the Accounting Information Systems Educator Association and founding Editor-in- Chief of the AIS Educator Journal. Arline serves on the editorial boards of the two highest ranked accounting education journals, Issues in Accounting Education, and the Journal of Accounting Education.
But it is Savage's personal attention to her students, her fastidious class preparation and her methodical teaching style that has had a lasting impact on her students.
Accounting student Carissa Ann Peters took a fraud examination class taught by Savage. "Something happened to me that semester that I never thought possible," she wrote in a letter supporting Savage's award nomination. "She made me fall in love with accounting all over again in a way I did not know existed and I have never been so inspired."
Collat alumnae Alicja Foksinska is collaborating with Savage on an accounting-information systems textbook. "Throughout the 15 months that I've worked on this project, Dr. Savage became more than a textbook colleague, she became a mentor to me," Foksinska wrote supporting Savage's nomination. "While building a diverse and robust co-author team, she has exemplified professionalism, critical thinking, and kindness during key decision points to ensure the textbook would deliver for its intended audience – the students and the businesses that will hire them."
Savage received her bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in accounting from Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in 1977, 1996, and 1999, respectively. She began teaching at UAB in 2012 and previously served as chair of Collat's Accounting and Finance Department.