Jeffrey Von Munkwitz-Smith recently retired as Assistant Vice President and University Registrar at Boston University. This article provides a commentary by Von Munkwitz-Smith on an address given by Lotus Delta Coffman (then president of the University of Minnesota) in 1926 at the annual meeting of the American Association of Collegiate…

The author offers his perspectives about the experiences that are associated with being a college or university counseling center director.

In many STEM-related fields, graduating doctoral students are often expected to assume a postdoctoral position as a prerequisite to a faculty position, yet there is no such expectation in mathematics education. This phenomenon is likely due in large part to an abundance of faculty positions; however, it may also result from the field's…

What do college presidents do, anyway? There was a time when American college presidents were looked to for intellectual, and even political, leadership. One of the most famous examples is Woodrow Wilson, who, as the head of Princeton University, was recruited to become governor of New Jersey in 1910 and, just two years later, was the successful…

Though research tells that principals are key in raising student achievement, principals remain unsung heroes for the nation's children. Because they work on the front lines of education--student by student and class by class--to lead schools in preparing students for successful lives, it's possible to miss the entire significance of the…

While some presidents are almost as overpaid as their basketball coaches, most campus administrators are not. Instead they work hard at complex and demanding positions and are often paid less than managers with comparable responsibilities in other lines of work. Assessments of compensation typically invoke criteria of fairness and performance.…

Provides a definitive guide to the tools and terms of competency modeling, the idea of testing for competence rather than intelligence. (JOW)

Discusses the impetus for considering new terminology for the field of communication. Presents four categories to consider as alternative labels to describes what many "technical writers" actually do: information developer of functional analyst, interface professional, project manager, and information manager. (SR)

Presents a successful, systematic, legally defensible training needs assessment (TNA) and discusses the importance of conducting one. Includes sample materials. (JOW)

A career pathing approach to needs analysis brings together the organizational, work, and individual demands of career management. Needs analysis focuses on descriptions of work requirements that reflect what people actually do, and how they act. (CPAD Network, 1190 South Bascom Avenue, Suite 211, San Jose, CA 95128) (SK)

Presents evidence that the absence of an absolute standard of job worth does not preclude employers from developing their own standards for comparing jobs to reduce pay inequities in their work force. States that efforts to establish job evaluation should focus more on removing systematic biases from the evaluation process. (Author/CH)

Addresses selecting among and using the numerous quantitative job classification procedures, with a focus on the decision-making tasks and practical difficulties that confront users of each. (Author/ABB)

Presents a four-step model for learning task analysis that is based on empirical and theoretical footings: (1) identification of instructional goals/tasks, (2) specification of behavioral contributors, (3) classification of contributors into learning domains, and (4) application of varying analytical procedures to tasks in each domain. (Author)

Although job analysis has been a cornerstone of human resource development systems, many professionals view it as cumbersome and often abandon the process. It is necessary to know what a job is before one can intelligently hire, train, and evaluate the person who does it. (Author/JOW)

Discussion of performance improvement focuses on work processes. Highlights include a definition of process; types of process steps, including operational and nonoperational; desired process characteristics, including high reliability and low variability; a comparison of two different processes; and suggestions for process improvement, including…