Dr. Cheryl Lynn Allen, of Atlanta; GA, passed away on Monday, January. 29, 2018. Dr. Allen is a native of Chattanooga, Tennessee and the fourth of five children born to the late Dr. Oscar and Elizabeth Rucker Allen, who were both educators in the Chattanooga Public School System. Cheryl was a 1977 graduate of Brainerd High School where she excelled both academically and athletically. She earned a  Bachelor of Arts degree in 1981 from Clark College and a Master's in Business Administration from Atlanta University in 1983. Dr. Allen earned her CPA accreditation in 1986, and a doctorate in Accountancy from the Terrry College of Business at the University of Georgia in 1998. 

Dr. Allen began her professional career as an auditor with the public accounting firm, Ernst and Whinney, CPAs (now Ernst and Young CPAs) in the Atlanta office, and is certified as an accountant (CPA) in the state of Georgia. She joined the faculty of Morehouse College as an instructor after spending five years with Ernst, where she remained for 25 years, successfully achieving the rank of full professor and the first female dean of the Business Administration and Economics unit of the College. Dr. Allen contributed throughout her career to the accounting profession and to the academic community through her volunteerism, commitment, and dedication to small business, community outreach, neighborhood development and mentoring. Dr. Allen also currently serves on the SAGE peer review board and serves as a member of the City of Atlanta Audit Committee. Other service to the profession included serving as a reviewer for the AICPA Legacy Scholarship committee, a three-year appointment to the Minority Initiatives Committee for the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), serving as chair of the faculty subcommittee for two of the three years, and elected president and council representative for the Diversity Section of the American Accounting Association (AAA), the national association of accounting academics. 

Dr. Allen’s past community service includes her three-term service on the Board of Directors of the Sweet Auburn Curb Market, financial advisor to the Southside Community Development Corporation, and financial consultant to the Atlanta Committee for Public Education, the Historic District Development Corporation, and the Atlanta Neighborhood Development Corporation. Dr. Allen completed competitive faculty fellowships with Morgan Stanley Bank, New York, and The Boeing Company, Seattle Washington.  She was a charter member of the African-American Accounting Doctoral Association (now AHNADA) founded and sponsored by the accounting firm KPMG and the PhD Project, an AICPA Doctoral Fellow, and a Kettering Public Scholar. She was a member of the national fraternities of Beta Alpha Psi, (accounting), Beta Gamma Sigma (business), and Omicron Delta Kappa (leadership). She was a former member of the Orchard Knob Missionary Baptist Church, and a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Incorporated. She is survived by a loving and devoted family, brother, Michael R. (Charleen) Allen; sisters, Dr. Vikki Allen, Valeria Allen, and Jennifer (Charles) Gore; loving aunt, Mrs. Mary B. Tull, aunt Willena Samples, of Nashville; and uncle Jimmie (Linda) Allen. 

Cheryl Allen (PhD 1998) - Terry College of Business, Newsroom (2013)

Executive assistant Pat Allen-Jackson ushers a visitor into a large, comfortable office with a maroon Morehouse blazer hanging on the back of the door. Large windows reveal a commanding corner view, overlooking Morehouse’s football stadium, the new Ray Charles Performing Arts Center, and, in the distance, the other colleges in this nexus of historically black educational institutions: Clark-Atlanta, Morris Brown, and Spelman, the latter the female “sister” college to Morehouse’s male student body, the two long considered among the HBCU elite, an African-American Ivy League.

This is the domain of Cheryl Allen, the first female dean of her department, the “interim” part of the title a nod to her willingness to come back to work with the proviso that her health — she recently suffered a collapsed lung — comes first. So far, she says, the only problem has been the fact that she is literally tethered to her desk by an oxygen tank. Soon, however, she’s talking excitedly about more portable options available as she’s weaned off the device, including one that “looks just like a backpack.” She becomes so animated that you can easily imagine that device as a jetpack, simultaneously oxygenating and propelling her over the neighboring campuses, as she points out the places where she has spent most of her adult life: 16 years at Morehouse, with a BA from Clark and an MBA from Atlanta University, before the two colleges merged.

Allen never expected to find herself working in academia, much less in a key leadership role at Morehouse. “Education wasn’t on my radar,” she says. She and her sisters all found themselves inspired by a female accountant’s visit to Cheryl’s Chattanooga high school bookkeeping class, and eventually they all entered the field. At first, she thought only of becoming a CPA. “I like processes,” she says. “I like the way you can connect this part and that part and get the outcome. You can backtrack, figuring out what you did wrong along the way. I like the mystery there. It’s like telling a story.”

Still, she found herself vaguely dissatisfied after being recruited for what some might consider a dream job, with Ernst & Whinney (now Ernst & Young). After five years, uninterested in joining the firm as a partner (“I didn’t want the responsibility of others making a mistake. But I had a warped sense of what it was to be a partner”), she decided to talk over her options with a former professor. At the time, Dr. Willis Sheftall occupied the same post she currently holds at Morehouse. The assistant who ushered Allen into his office was the same Pat Allen-Jackson who sits outside her office today.

After hearing her career quandary, Sheftall leaned back into his chair. “I know where you should be,” he told her. “Here.” Nonplussed, she said she wasn’t interested. “At least fill out the application,” he insisted, thinking she would be perfect for a Morehouse teaching post that had just opened.

Though others seemed impressed when she became a professor at the prestigious college (particularly her math teacher father, who was “beside himself” with pride), she says her background at Clark and Atlanta left her well prepared and unintimidated. When she first started at Morehouse, she would pile on duties and ask for more. “I had four classes, and at least 250 students,” she says. “I was just crazy.” But soon she found herself facing another challenge: Sheftall had warned that despite her CPA at the time being considered a terminal degree for teaching, “You will need a Ph.D. for where we’re going to be.” That proved prescient. Recruited again, this time she chose UGA. At 32, however, she felt a little out of place among her Terry Ph.D. colleagues. Especially after her first econometrics class.

“I remember I walked straight over to one of those little pubs in downtown Athens,” she says, “and I sat in a booth. I felt like my eyes were still glazed over. I thought, What have I gotten myself into? I have quit my job, and I have no idea what this man is talking about. So I had a beer,” she says, laughing, “and had to make myself a plan.”

She had to forget some courses that would get her back on track. “If you let your ego get in the way,” she says, “it will stop you.” Allen became known as the “five to 5” person, breezing in at the last minute just as professors were about to dismiss class, with questions to ask or copies to make. “They were the kind of professors who wouldn’t disown you,” she says. She recalls the first people she met on campus, including a pair of Terry professor couples — Ken and Jennifer Gaver, and Michael and Linda Bamber — who made a big difference in her academic life.

Michael Bamber, her dissertation chair “helped me through my whole process,” she says. Linda Bamber often read her work, and sometimes administered tough love. Allen recalls, chuckling, that Linda Bamber once wrote only one sentence on one of her more labored papers: “Have you ever seen anything like this?” Allen shakes her head. “I had to say, um, no. But I learned. This is growth.” Michael Bamber, she said, kept countering her offbeat paper topics with “Tell me where the accounting tie is.” Eventually, she found that tie: “Telling the story about what happened in management.”

Today, she is in a position to impart not only knowledge, but wisdom. For Allen, it’s still all about the ghost in the machine. “It’s the intangibles that make the difference in accounting,” she says. “I have students who can do accounting in their sleep. But it won’t help them if they can’t be on time . . . if they cut corners . . . if they don’t have integrity. The intangibles tell the story more than anything.”

She also strongly endorses a liberal arts environment: “We need to continue being well-rounded, and support creativity.” In a meeting that morning, she says she encouraged her staff not to embrace a new technology for its own sake, but to first consider, “How does this affect their learning?”

Morehouse just celebrated its 145th anniversary. With that kind of history, “You think you have the solutions to make it all work,” says Allen. “That’s not all there is to it. You can have all the credentials in the world, and not move one student.”


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