Section II: Renewing Centers for Professional Development

What do we know about infusing life into professional development programs? This is something we have struggled with throughout the fifteen (+3) year history of the contemporary professional development movement in postsecondary education. The question is especially pertinent during a time when retrenchment has lost its shock value and has become a tired, but accurate, descriptor of what most POD members live with daily. Is there programmatic life after retrenchment? If so, what can be done to ensure it and give it meaning

Empowerment in Academic Cultures: Whose Responsibility is It?

I. Introduction II. The Theme Encapsulated III. Taking the Cultural Perspective IV. Development and the Disempowering Paradigm V. Taking Up the Empowering Paradigm VI. A Note on Leadership Reference

Executive Director\u27s Message, Winter 1980

I suppose it is appropriate-symbolic, really-that this issue of the Quarterly is a double one. It would be convenient to gloss the matter over, to hype the fact that this is POD\u27s first double issue. Make the most of it; let everyone know how innovative we are. That would do an injustice to the deeper truth and to the frayed nerves of Glenn Nyre, who has been ready to go to press for a long time. No. The fact is that the Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education is still struggling to keep its head afloat in a rising sea of costs. Therein lies the symbolic nature of the double issue of PODQ. Those who speak for instructional, organizational and professional development in the collegiate world and the instruments through which they address the transitional, nay, transformational issues the academy faces are marginal. This is so culturally as well as fiscally

POD Network News, April 14, 1980

1. 1980 Annual Meeting 2. Membership 3. Core Committee Departures and Arrivals 4. Core Committee Meeting Results 5. POD Quarterly 6. Regional Meetings 1980 Conference Material

Section III: Professional Development Interventions

The successful pursuit of our business requires skillful interventions-in professional habits of mind and action. In truth, in peoples\u27 lives. Probably more thought has gone into this issue than into any other aspect of professional development work. Interventions are the stuff of ethics, even when-as is usual in the case with the articles in this section-the focus is almost exclusively on techniques. The sensitivity to contexts, to rationale for choice, to outcomes, to people displayed by each author affirms the ethical dimension of specific interventions. Considered thus, the choice of techniques is important indeed

Section I: The Keynote Address to the 1983 Annual Conference

It is a special thing to introduce Gene Rice and the substance of remarks he made to POD\u27ers gathered last October at Arlie House. Gene is a special person. He models the best qualities of the academic humanist: the personal presence of a Friend, the sensibility of a Jeffersonian, the rigor of a Talmudic scholar, and the vision of an ethnicist. And all of this is a contemporary twentieth century person. He\u27s been with and of POD since the network\u27s first days. And across that span, Gene\u27s wisdom, bred equally of careful research, hands-on professional development experience and a lively intelligence, has commanded respectful attention

Executive Director\u27s Message

I know that each Executive Director of POD has felt a surge of excitement at the prospects of managing the affairs of the Network for a year. And each would describe the complex bundle of that sensation in a distinctly personal way. For me, the excitement has to do with three clear themes. (Cartoon by Robert M. Diamond, page 205

Executive Director\u27s Message, Summer 1980

It is just a week after the conclusion of a day and a half semi-annual Core Committee meeting as I write this message. I\u27m drawn to reflect again on the values that make POD something special for me. Core Committee meetings provide the grist. In particular, my thoughts swarm around the kind of decisionmaking process we\u27ve agreed to observe. Instead of opting for majority rule, or expert dominance, or some such crystalline process, we opted for the consensus model. I said my thoughts swarm. And so they do, as what follows below reveals clearly. Forgive the whimsy. Think, please, about the affirmation. I trust the members of the Core Committee will forgive me for using their process as a point of departure to think about more general principles

Executive Reticulater\u27s Message

The important news of POD is all around what I write here. Elections for new members of the Core Committee will be in process or completed by the time this issue hits the street. Planning is well underway for an exciting Annual Conference in Berkeley, California next October 14-16. The Task Force on Membership is working diligently on membership retention and growth and mix. A Research Committee operates. So, too, a Professional Relations Committee. And Regional Representatives. And an Executive Committee. We\u27ve even a journal, by Juno! The important message in all this is that POD is working relatively efficiently as a formal organization. But, is POD a Network as advertised? And can it exist as a network given its formal life and structure? These are pertinent questions. Thoughtful persons on the Task Force on Membership have raised them. Like many people, they associate the concept of networking with informal relationships independent of any organizational base. Clearly, in this view of things, POD looks much like a typical professional association. So, they doubt the concept\u27s validity for us

The POD Delphi Study, 1978

What a supreme irony-and a surefire sign of irrelevance-were the Professional and Organizational Network in Higher Education (POD) to become stagnant, maladaptive, and unresponsive. To stave off these beasts of bureaucratization, the POD Core Committee has regularly utilized some form of membership survey to guide program planning. The most recent attempt at such a democratic strategy began over a year ago. The impetus for the decision evolved out of the Committee\u27s 1977-78 deliberations on defining the mission of POD. Given the charge in October, 1977 to draft such a statement and to manage the Core Committee\u27s decision-making process with respect to it, the authors (Buhl and Scholl) quickly realized that a simple statement, however directional, was not likely to communicate terribly effectively what the organization was about or where it should be heading. It needed some sort of elaboration in terms of underlying values and of recognizable milestones along the way to realizing them. These ought, of course, to be widely shared (even consensually defined) values and markers. The idea of using the delphi process was not especially creative, though it had more than a bit of justice in it: POD itself was the product of some focussed talks among three handfuls of higher education developers (about 30 of them) in 1975. Those discussions were informed by a pre-meeting delphi process involving participants in projections about the future of organizational, faculty and instructional development (1). To augment the Core Committee\u27s decision about a mission statement with another delphi was simply to round out the circle. Hopefully, this route will be traversed in one way or another from time to time in the future. May the paralyzing predators find other organizations to devour! (1): Surveys of interests for program planning were conducted in early and late 1976, and the evaluation of the 1977 National Conference included a survey of conference program preferences. See the article POD: The Founding of a National Network, POD Quarterly (Spring 1979) p. 12, for reference to the May, 1975 conference at Wingspread, Racine, Wisconsin