Most valuable player

It takes an exceptional person to be an exceptional teacher.

It takes someone like Jana Raedy to teach, manage a business school’s operations, oversee an array of departments and mentor students — all at the same time.

If a business school’s dean is its CEO, Raedy is UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School’s COO and CFO in one. As associate dean of business and operations since 2022, she is in the thick of it all every day, whether pushing forward huge projects, like the under-construction Steven D. Bell Hall scheduled to open in 2025, or analyzing the School’s operating budget.

There’s more because Raedy always has taken on more. She led the Master of Accounting (MAC) Program from 2011 to 2021 and was instrumental in launching the online MAC format in 2014.

As the Ernst & Young Scholar in Accounting, her research has focused on international financial reporting and the intersection of book and tax reporting, with work published in major journals such as the Journal of Accounting Research and The Accounting Review. She is the author of the textbook “Intermediate Accounting,” now in its third edition.

“I like solving problems, but it’s never, ever just me solving problems alone,” she says. “We have good leaders and good people here wherever you look. If I didn’t have that, I couldn’t do what I do.”

“We’ll work through it.”

Accounting is the language of business, and Raedy has long been fluent.

Since joining the faculty in 1997, she has never stopped teaching, even when shifting to roles in administration. She has taught such essential MAC courses as financial reporting and financial accounting research.

At the 2022 Weatherspoon Awards, Raedy received the Roy W. Holsten Exceptional Service Award, the Business School’s highest recognition of influential leadership for faculty and staff.

Raedy’s strong relationships with top accounting firms means UNC Kenan-Flagler MAC students and graduates have strong relationships with them, too.

“I feel called to teaching,” she says. “I would not be happy if I didn’t teach. It would be like working at a restaurant and not serving food,” she says. I love interacting with our students. I love watching the light bulbs come on. That’s the good stuff.”

Raedy describes herself as “very introverted and very shy,” but her office is especially inviting. Two Carolina blue rocking chairs face her desk. On top of it is a usually full candy dish.

Every day of the week and often back-to-back, she meets with leaders across the School, including the units she manages: information technology, facilities, finance and marketing and communications.

“I’m a person of action, but I’m not high-stress,” she says. “Things resolve. With everything I do, I try to bring in a mentality of, ‘We’ll figure this out. We’ll work through it.’”

Students visit her, too. Raedy doesn’t have any social media accounts, but she is often mentioned on her students’ pages.

“The most amazing fact about Dr. Raedy is how she personifies what she teaches,” Lek Sacramento (MAC ’22) shared in a post-graduation post on LinkedIn which included a selfie with Raedy in her office. “Despite being such a seasoned academic, she’s also steeped in humility. She listens and even accepts the positions of students who do not necessarily have her ‘model’ answer.”

Lek Sacramento (MAC ’22) with Jana Raedy

Amy Baker (BSBA ’93, MAC ’93), a global client service partner at Ernst & Young, said Raedy was a mentor when she served as an adjunct professor.

“Jana’s energy, enthusiasm and genuine care for students, their skills, their depth of knowledge of the importance and responsibility to the markets were always evident,” she says. “Our accounting profession is better every day because of Jana.”

Genuine care

From the moment Raedy stepped on the UNC Kenan-Flagler campus, she was deeply invested in the accounting program. Since then, it has grown into a top-ranked program with both on-campus and online formats.

MAC students range in age and experience and goals. Some join the program right after undergrad while others are mid-career or transitioning to a new field. Some have years of accounting experience; others have never read The Wall Street Journal. Raedy has worked with them all.

“I love the fact that our MAC classrooms have this diversity of backgrounds. For example, we often have at least one music major,” says Raedy. “Music teaches you to think a certain way. It forms who you are in a certain way. Our students learn to think about not just different things, but they also learn to think differently. You don’t always find that in a MAC Program, but you find that at UNC Kenan-Flagler. I always tell students who may feel overwhelmed at first, ‘No, you can actually do this.’”

Raedy entered college without a clear career goal. She grew up on a farm, primarily beef and corn, in Hillsboro, Ohio, and pursued a major in agricultural economics with a minor in music performance at the University of Kentucky. She was a first-generation college student and one of the very few women in the ag econ program at the time.

On a whim, she sat in on an accounting class, then another. Soon she added accounting as a second major, tutored other students and started teaching when she stayed at Kentucky for her master’s in ag econ. Raedy then worked as a CPA and a small business consultant in Kentucky.

“I think accounting has a bit of a bad reputation as just bean-counting or number crunching, and that’s part of it,” she says. “To me it was a lot more than that. When I started as a CPA, I remember helping businesses figure out their business strategies so they can move forward. It was just so much bigger than writing down some numbers on a piece of paper.”

After about two years as a CPA, teaching called her back. Raedy completed her PhD at Pennsylvania State University, interviewed for teaching positions at 14 schools and had multiple options.

“UNC Kenan-Flagler as a whole felt more collegial and less cutthroat other schools. That’s the thing you hear all the time about Carolina,” she says. “At the time, there was a group of accounting faculty and researchers just at the very top of their game. There still is.”

And there will always be students who realize just how important Raedy’s classes are to their careers. They have long reached out to their former professor to make a frank confession.

“An email I often see is something in the vein of, ‘Wow, did I hate your class when I was there because it was so hard,’” says Raedy. “And then that’s followed up with, ‘and there was no single class that better prepared me for what I’m doing right now.’”

That is always just what Raedy wants to hear.