The paper by Tony Tinker, the comments of Abe Briloff and those of Sikka and Willmott, and the reply by Tinker and Carter comprise an experiment by Accounting and the Public Interest to facilitate debate about public interest accounting and the forms of scholarship that might be appropriate to it. Of course, not all experiments are a grand success, but most provide some insights (even if only the rationalizations for their failures) that make having done them worthwhile. My assignment is to draw some implications of this exchange for public interest accounting scholarship. The implications I see are quite obviously my own, drawn from the refraction of the papers through my particular presumptions and biases. Tinker’s paper and the accompanying comments were prepared before the events of recent months, which include: the demise of Andersen as a “public accounting firm”; the bankruptcies of Enron and WorldCom; the arrests of WorldCom’s CFO Scott Sullivan, ImClone’s Samuel Waksal, and Adelphia’s John Rigas and sons; the criminal investigations of AOL, Computer Associates, Enron, Global Crossing, and Qwest; the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002; and the resignations from the three top jobs of public oversight of the financial reporting system. This gives me a real advantage. At no time in my 30-year career as accounting student and academic has there been a context providing a better opportunity for such a debate to have an effect on the U.S. accounting academy and the place of public interest scholarship within it. Tinker’s initial paper, “Beyond the Brilovian Critique: Traditional vs. Organic Intellectuals in Critical Accounting Research,” is a timely and significant contribution to the public interest accounting literature. Certainly Briloff has been the most notable and admirable of our kind for his analyses of the shortcomings of “The Profession.” But if we look at the history of the profession in the U.S., there is reason to be pessimistic that it will ever be a profession in the Durkheimian functionalist sense of being an activity that is truly crucial to human welfare. The profession has always had to be goaded and cajoled into acting as if it wasn’t singularly concerned with the narrow economic interests of its members. Its history is closely tied to the history of the speculative bubbles the U.S. has experienced. It was born of the Gilded Age when the Progressive movement, symbolized by Teddy Roosevelt, advocated the creation of a public accounting profession to facilitate ameliorating the excesses of the Trusts. The profession’s role was conceived as a regulatory one, that is, to ensure transparency so that faith in the regulatory apparatus of market discipline would be restored. Forgetting that the “free market” is “the most elaborately constructed and regulated social