Irwin L. Goldstein
SIOP President 1985-86
I was born on October 4, 1937 in New York City, the first child of Benjamin and Molly
Goldstein. My father had escaped from Russia and came to the United States in the late
1920's. My mother was born and raised in Hartford, Connecticut. Her parents had also left
Russia, fleeing from the persecution of Jews which one generation later led my father to
also leave his homeland. The fourth member of our immediate household was my sister who
was born in 1944 when I was seven years old.
Shortly after my father's arrival, the great depression became a reality, leaving my
father to attempt to earn a living by working in New York City candy stores. For the
uniniated, a New York candy store is a unique work organization which led to many early
educational and work experiences for me. A candy store serves as the local neighborhood
gathering place for workers who would stop by in the morning and evenings to buy the
earliest and latest editions of newspapers as well as fill up on cigarettes and cigars.
During the day, the store served as the local gathering place for mothers and their
children who stopped for candies, sodas, ice cream and magazines. For me, the candy store
was an important part of my life. In my early years, I would follow my father around in
the store, enjoying being a part of the neighborhood. I learned to read by playing with
comic books and eventually I worked for my father thereby learning about work and earning
summer pay. All of the neighborhood knew I was Ben's son, both an advantage in meeting all
sorts of people, and a disadvantage in that everyone knew where to go when I misbehaved
either in school or on the street.
Even though my father had been admitted to College, he lost his opportunity for an
education because as the major wage earner for his family, he took on the responsibility
of bringing his mother, father, brothers, and sisters to New York from Russia. These
events touched me in a variety of ways. First, because my father had lost his opportunity,
he was totally dedicated to both my sister and I gaining a complete education. My sister
graduated from City College of New York. She later earned a masters degree, and is a
biology teacher in the New York City public school system. There was never any question
for either of us about going to college, or following college with advanced education.
Every conversation about education in our home emphasized its importance.
Another important factor in my early experience was that my father's entire family
lived close by resulting in a wonderful extended family of aunts, uncles and cousins. My
cousins all went on to interesting careers as architects, medical doctors and
psychologists. My cousins and I, as a result of our early experiences together, are closer
today than most brothers and sisters resulting in all of us having an extended family even
though we all live quite far from each other. Also, as a result of the persecution of many
of my mothers and fathers family for being Jewish, all of our families sought out the
synagogue as a place of education and support. Whatever free time my father had was spent
in leadership positions in the synagogue community. My father and mother felt that it was
a blessing to be able to give to the community and I have never forgotten the joy of that
lesson. Finally, because my father was in a retail business and worked very long hours, my
mother took on most of the responsibility for providing daily nourishing love and
direction.
My educational accomplishments during elementary school and junior high school were not
anything to write home about. I was much more successful as an athlete than as a student,
and my parents would often "visit" with me at the local ballfields to remind me
it was time to go home and relate to the textbooks. I also had an active role in synagogue
and school activities and was elected to a number of positions including being elected
president of my junior high school. Even more important, when I was 15 years old, I was
lucky enough to meet the young lady, Micki Isaacson, who would become my wife and best
friend.
Life changed dramatically for me when I took a intelligence test and somehow qualified
for Stuyvesant High School. Stuyvesant over the years has graduated more students who have
earned Westinghouse Scholarships, M.D.'s, Ph.D's, and Nobel Prizes than any high school in
the nation. In every class, the teachers reminded the students that they were going to be
the first group to embarrass Stuyvesant High School. I was not ready for Stuyvesant. In
the middle of the first semester, my mother and father were told that if I could not
perform better, I could return to my local high school. So began the three most difficult
academic years of my life. When I graduated, I was the last person in the top half of the
class. On the other hand, I knew how to study and learn and I had successfully completed
advanced courses in science and math competing against some of the finest students in the
country. My view of school had changed from fear of being unable to achieve to the joy of
learning.
I took another exam and qualified for Queens College of what is now known as the City
University of New York. I would have preferred to go out of town to school, but I chose
not to apply because I knew that it would be very difficult for my more than willing
father and mother. After the camaraderie of Stuyvesant, I found Queens College to be
unfriendly and not particularly challenging. The final straw came in my third semester
when I visited the Psychology Department only to be told that advising was not available
until I was a junior. I called a close friend of mine, Larry Schiff, who was attending
Baruch College which at that time was the downtown business school for City College. He
described the kind of attention he was receiving at City College and arranged for me to
visit with Professor Angelo Dispenzieri. The following day Angelo spent three hours giving
me career guidance and counseling and advised me not to transfer because I would lose
credits.
The next day, much to the horror of my parents, I filed transfer papers and I began my
fourth semester at downtown City College. I did not realize it at the time I transferred
but even though Baruch was the business school, it had a complete undergraduate Psychology
Department with an Industrial Psychology specialty. Years later, Baruch was to become a
separate college of the City University of New York. At the time I transferred, they had
on their faculty many early industrial psychologists including Benjamin Balinsky, Milton
Blum, Angelo Dispenzieri, and Mortimer Feinberg. Also, since City College was an
undergraduate teaching institution without graduate students, they cherished their
undergraduate students and provided exceptional laboratory experiences, jobs, and every
kind of educational opportunity.
Angelo was my first mentor. I think he was surprised that I took the chance of
transferring, but I also think he decided to watch over me. He was an exceptional teacher,
and he provided continual opportunities to work closely with him on research projects. The
faculty took great pride in their students and at the same time offered an extremely
demanding and rigorous curriculum. The course in History and Systems and the Experimental
Laboratory Course were infamous for their difficulty but every one of us who completed
those required courses looked back with a sense of accomplishment. Also, as I look back on
it, those courses and many which followed in graduate school led to my thinking of
psychology in terms of being a broad discipline, rather than narrow specialties, and
eventually led to my research perspective having a larger framework than just I-0
Psychology.
My class of psychology majors consisted of about 15 students every one of whom went on
to graduate school. I can not help but be indebted to the New York City School System
which provided a superb high school and college education at basically no cost. For
parents like my own, who were struggling economically to survive in their new homeland,
the school system was a real blessing. If my class was faced with the present harsh
realities of the costs of education, I am not sure how many of us would have made it to
the careers we are in today.
My years at Baruch passed swiftly and I now knew I wanted to be an industrial
psychologist. On the basis of the advice of the Baruch faculty, I applied to graduate
schools. I was offered admission to a number of schools including the University of
Maryland, New York University, and Lehigh University. It was a very difficult choice
because New York University had offered me a full fellowship to study with Ray Katzell and
my relationship with my wife to be made me want to stay in New York. However, the faculty
at Baruch strongly advised me to attend graduate school out of town. They felt that
students who had stayed in New York were taking a very long time to receive their degrees
and they had sent several students on to Maryland who had successfully completed that
program. The one thing which I had not realized at the time was how little the faculty
tended to know about the characteristics of various graduate programs and what was
happening on the national scene in graduate education. Thus, I missed the chance to work
with Ray Katzell and I arrived at Maryland to discover that it did not have an I-O
program.
Maryland had in its earlier history faculty such as Ed Ghiselli and a short time before
had a strong program in applied psychology with faculty including Jack Jenkins. However,
when I arrived, the program was much more an experimental psychology program than an
applied program. Maryland, in those days, also had a philosophy of admitting large classes
and losing large number of students along the way to the Ph.D. In addition, it had a very
poor relationship between its department chair and faculty. As a result, I would not call
it a high morale/high satisfaction department. However, at the time I attended, it did
have an outstanding faculty who offered a wonderful education. Thus, I had the privilege
of learning statistics from T.G. Andrews, sensory and perception from Hersh Lebowitz,
learning and motivation from Lew Gollub, Matt Yarczower and Bill Verplanck, physiological
psychology from Joe Brady, applied experimental from Nancy Anderson, and social psychology
from Elliot McGinnies. Again, I was learning to be a psychologist first.
Most of all, the program had a new faculty member who arrived the day I arrived, Nancy
Anderson, who cared a great deal about young students, and who guided much of my research
including my doctoral dissertation on information processing. My masters thesis was on
conformity in groups directed by McGinnies, and my research assistantships were often in
Matt Yarczower's animal lab where I spent many hours with rats, pigeons, and baboons.
Thus, while Maryland was not what I would call a happy place, its halls were filled with
debates about theory and empirical research. Verplanck's year long history and systems
course on the philosophy of science was a legend among graduate students and after he
left, the next class of students wanted to pay to have him fly back and teach the course.
In addition, the debates over behaviorism and Hull and Spence were in full bloom. You
could not help but be caught up in the joy of science. As I think back, it is probably the
case that my early interest in experimental learning had a lot to do with my eventual
interest in training systems.
While there were many daily anxieties, my graduate education was completed swiftly,
although stories of the number of times I needed to take a second foreign language
examination in German were both legendary and true. Several other events occurred while I
was at Maryland. The most important thing that happened was that after a year and a half
of being separated from Micki, we were married. Separated is, of course, not a good
description because I was spending most of my weekends traveling back and forth, studying
on the train, between Maryland and New York. It was, in those days, hard to convince
either parents it was a good idea to marry while I was a graduate student without any
income. However, I think that everyone decided they were better off if we were married
than they were listening to both of us being so unhappy all the time. Our relationship of
love and support made graduate school and everything that followed seem much easier.
The other really important event was that Jack Bartlett arrived during my last year in
graduate school to form an I-O program. It was too late for me as a student to study I-O
at Maryland, although I did take some course work. More important we became friends, a
friendship which would grow to last a lifetime. Also, between Jack and Nan, they strongly
recommended me to Ohio State University where I was offered a position as an assistant
professor of psychology and a research associate in the Aviation Psychology lab. Micki and
I will never forget the evening after I accepted the job at Ohio State. We partied in
Jack's house while Nan, Jack and his wife Gloria, and other "Buckeyes" ran
around the basement dancing, singing and cheering to all of the Ohio State football songs,
with special renditions of "I don't give a damn for the whole state of
Michigan." It was quite a send off.
Finally, in my last several months, I also learned how far I had to go. Up to that
time, I thought I had learned to think and write logically. However, when I handed in my
dissertation, Matt Yarczower invited my wife and I to visit him at Bryn Mawr where he was
on sabbatical leave from Maryland. Little did we know that the purpose of the social visit
was for Matt to take the next two days going through my thesis, word by word and line by
line, showing me I did not know the first thing about writing a paper. Events which I will
describe below confirmed that he was correct.
We arrived at Ohio State to begin my first academic job and I was in a state of awe. On
this faculty in I-O Psychology and applied experimental psychology were among others, Bob
Wherry Sr., Jim Naylor, George Briggs and Bill Howell. I was about to experience my second
education. While teaching and being involved in research in the Aviation Psychology Lab, I
soaked up everything that could be learned about I-O Psychology. My research was in what I
would call my first phase. That is, I was becoming an engineering psychology or human
factors person.
The lab was filled with ongoing research on complex vigilance studies, command and
control simulations involving Bayesian decision theory, and team training. The lab was an
incredibly exciting place with theoretical discussions concerning the usefulness of
Bayesian theory, or the difference in theoretical and empirical evidence between simple
and complex vigilance studies, being a daily occurrence. The lab was designed for each
person to initially work on a number of projects, almost like a post-doc with strong
encouragement to develop your own lines of research. There could not be a better learning
experience. Bill Howell was an exceptional mentor for young psychologists, providing
continual learning experiences and strong personal support. When Bill red-lined my
write-up of my doctoral dissertation, which I was preparing for submission, I knew that I
really did have a lot to learn. Many years later, when the first edition of my training
book was published, I received a note from Bill telling me that I had really learned to
communicate. That was a proud moment for me. I think I also tend to be more sympathetic to
students who often have some of the same early difficulties.
As I reflect on those days at Ohio State, I feel that it really gave me both the
training to be an I-O psychologists and the training to turn ideas into research. Also,
because of its long history, Ohio State had a particular I-O tradition that is hard to
explain but which you felt a part of the moment you stepped into the Department. The halls
were filled with the thoughts and work of persons like Shartle, Fitts, Pressey, Toops,
Burtt and Wherry. The "youngsters" on the faculty were persons like myself, Jim
Naylor, and Bill Howell. There was a sense of pride that you were part of that Department
and once you were there, either as a faculty member or student, you were considered part
of that tradition. In both Maryland and Ohio State, I was extremely fortunate to be
surrounded by exceptional people who were not only very thoughtful but also very helpful.
They were also all driven to be excellent contributing psychologists and ideas, and
debates about theories and research flowed through the halls. I now felt a part of that
tradition.
In hind sight, I should have stayed at Ohio State. However, during three very
productive work years, we were still lonely for the east coast. I had published a series
of studies on complex vigilance, and information processing issues involving displays with
large amounts of relevant and irrelevant information. Bill Howell and I were planning a
book. Then, in our third year in Ohio, our son Harold had been born and the feeling that
we were far from home intensified. Ohio State University had been wonderful to us but I
went on the job market. There was not much available except that Jack Bartlett was
building the I-O program at Maryland. He wanted me to come back as both an engineering
psychologist and I-O psychologist in his new program. Even then, it was unusual to hire
your own graduates. It always seemed ironic to me that Jack was able to hire me because I
did not receive the I-O training at Maryland where I had gone for my I-O training in the
first place. Even after Maryland made me an offer, I was uncertain about accepting.
Suffice it to say that Maryland's department chair and his relationship with faculty
worried me. After watching Bob Wherry as Chair, Jim Naylor as Assistant Chair, and Bill
Howell as Director of the Lab, I had learned what support could really mean to young
faculty. Then, a month after turning down Maryland's offer, Jack Bartlett called again to
offer the job because the chair had resigned. My wife said "I don't know about you
but I am going upstairs to pack" and so we returned to Maryland.
The first three years at Maryland were a disaster. It totally shaped my life in
understanding everything that should not happen in an academic Department. As a matter of
fact, it was the perfect learning experience for me in what not to do in working with
faculty and students when I became department chair. The faculty did not feel like they
had a role in anything that was important to the Department. As a result, there were
bitter battles, and various persons who were selected in an acting role to be chair did
not serve the Department well. Then, Charlie Cofer came from Pennsylvania State University
only to resign six months later because he did not feel the administration was supporting
the Department. Given the fact that the previous chair felt he was a representative of the
administration, and saw his job as controlling the faculty, the university administration
was not sure what to do with the Psychology Department. In the midst of this chaos, two
senior faculty died of heart attacks increasing the sense of depression.
My career was in shambles. It was impossible to get work done at Maryland and the only
thing that saved me was the research program I had begun at Ohio State, and my continuing
association with faculty at Ohio State. Bill Howell and I coedited an engineering
psychology textbook and I set up a laboratory to continue my engineering psychology work
on vigilance, and information processing. I had also become fascinated by research in the
area of training systems which actually fit well into both engineering psychology and I-O
psychology. However, a totally chaotic department and a brand new research area were too
much to try to overcome. I prepared to leave as did nearly all of the young faculty. In my
second year at Maryland, my daughter Beth was born and that pretty much confirmed my
decision to leave. Raising two young children and attempting to build a career in such a
non-supportive atmosphere was simply too much.
At that point, the young faculty met with the administration and suggested they choose
someone from inside who was dedicated to the development of the Department. These
"young turks," as we were referred to by the disillusioned senior faculty,
suggested that unless the problems were resolved, we were going to leave. Much to our
surprise, the administration listened and chose Jack Bartlett who proceeded to drive an
extremely hard bargain with the university. Suddenly, we received financial resources, new
positions and other support. Suffice it to say that Maryland's emergence as a Department
began with Jack Bartlett and most of the faculty here today would not recognize (nor want
to recognize) the old Department. Jack was merciless with the administration in demanding
support. It was perfect timing because Maryland was beginning to think about its own dream
in being an outstanding university. Jack was a tough task master and demanded excellence
but his idea was to support faculty and help them develop. It became easier to recruit
faculty and students wanted to come to Maryland. Also, the faculty totally redesigned its
undergraduate and graduate programs resulting in decisions such as only accepting graduate
students it expected to earn the Ph.D. The Department was beginning to become a place to
be, and had a group of faculty who really wanted it to be both a good environment to work
and an excellent Department.
Jack also was committed to building the I-O program. As a result, we expanded to what
is now five faculty. Along the way, Jack recruited and hired outstanding young I-O
psychologists such as Peter Dachler, Ken Smith, and Ben Schneider. Ben requires a special
word. He was completing his Ph.D. with Jack at the time I arrived back at Maryland as a
faculty member. Ben then went on to Yale's organizational behavior program and, several
years later, Jack recruited Ben back to Maryland. After a number of years, Ben left to
accept an endowed chair at Michigan State University. In the meantime, after about ten
years, Jack decided it was time to rejoin the faculty full time and give up being
Department Chair. Several years later, in 1980, I became chair. The first thing I did
after becoming Department Chair was to recruit Ben back to Maryland. It may have been the
best thing I have ever done.
Then, Jack Bartlett passed away from a heart attack while teaching a class to the whole
I-O group. It took years to even begin to get over the tremendous sense of personal loss.
However, at work, Ben became the leader of the I-O program. He also became my closest
friend and valued colleague, a combination that few people have been fortunate enough to
have. Ben's drive and caring about I-O Psychology had established a "climate"
within our program. As a result, the halls filled with the same theoretical and empirical
debates about I-O Psychology that I had enjoyed so much as a young experimental
psychologist. By 1988, exciting young faculty like Katherine Klein and Paul Hanges had
joined us and Rick Guzzo was also being recruited. I guess my real feelings about how
special a place Maryland had become are expressed by what happened when my own son,
Harold, decided he was interested in I-O Psychology. Maryland was one of a number of
places that recruited him. I am sure that it is not very wise for a son to attend a
graduate program where his own father is on the faculty. on the other hand, Maryland was
really an exciting place to be and Harold decided he wanted to study with Ben. If it was
me, that would have been my choice, and so Harold is now here studying with us. It was
quite a dramatic change from the institution that I attended as a graduate student
thinking it had an I-O program. These positive changes have also permitted me to develop
in a number of ways.
Most important for me in returning to Maryland from Ohio State was the chance to focus
on training systems and finally become an I-O Psychologist. Jack gave me my first insights
into doing research in work organizations. Up to that point, all of my work had been in
laboratory facilities. He encouraged me to develop my interests in training systems. A few
years after Jack became Department Chair, I went on sabbatical leave and wrote the 1974
edition of my training text. Much of my original interests were fueled by McGehee and
Thayer's classic volume on training systems. My love affair with training systems and how
they fit in organizations has continued with some shifts in emphases. Originally, my main
interests were in how you design needs assessment systems to determine training needs.
Since training needs assessment and job analysis for selection systems overlap, Jack often
found places for me to explore those ideas in organizations where he was also working.
This included our first large study together with one of the local police departments. We
also teamed with Marv Dunnette & Leaetta Hough in a study for a federal government
agency. That experience was one of my first opportunities to be involved in research
involving teams of I-O psychologists which as I will describe below became very rewarding
from both a professional and personal viewpoint.
Later, my interests shifted to the problems of how to conduct evaluation research on
training systems in work organizations. A lot of these ideas were stimulated by John
Campbell's early comments about the lack of empirical research on training systems. By
that time, I had also been strongly influenced by Peter Dachler, Ken Smith and Ben
Schneider, all at Maryland, who thought in large scale systems terms. So, I began to think
of training systems as interventions into organizations and asked what kinds of evaluation
models could be designed to help researchers collect information about the impact of a
training program within an organization. This led to the 1986 edition of my training book
which not only focused on needs assessment systems but also on intervention systems and
evaluation models.
In addition, I began to think about training from a societal focus which led to
discussions of training and second careers, aging and training, socialization and training
and fair employment practices and training. Some of this work appears in the 1986 volume
and some in more recent articles and review chapters. These later influences are
especially prominent in the edited training text for the 1989 SIOP Frontiers
volume in which I had the opportunity to invite many thoughtful authors to discuss these
issues. During all of this work, there were two persons, Paul Thayer and John Campbell,
who strongly encouraged me and continually offered their insights. Paul Thayer's original
work with Bill McGehee originally sparked my interest in this field and Paul always had
new ideas to offer. John Campbell's wrote the first annual review chapter on the topic of
training and his perceptive comments on research areas requiring attention sparked the
interests of many of us. Regardless of how busy they were, both Paul and John were always
willing to provide insightful and helpful comments on my books and articles. My hope is
that my research and writing stimulates young investigators in the same way that Paul and
John stimulated me.
As my research into training systems expanded, some of the areas of emphasis led me
into other areas of I-O Psychology. This was especially true of the work in needs
assessment/job analysis and evaluation methodology. I continued to be fascinated by how
you could work with an organization when everything was not "good enough" to run
a traditional study. Thus, I enjoyed asking questions like how could you use a content
validity methodology to allow you to explore issues regarding the validity of selection
systems. Often, that question was asked because sample sizes were not large enough, or
because you could not collect criterion data for a criterion related validity study. I
thought about it as gathering information that permitted inferences about the validity of
your interventions. That also resulted in asking questions about what types of job
analysis methodology were needed to support a foundation for the content validity of
various interventions ranging from entry level selection system to a promotion system to a
training system.
Some of this work was especially relevant to issues regarding fair employment practices
and Title VII. Thus, I found the issues that we were concerned with to be interesting to
both I-O Psychologists, and to attorneys who wanted our opinions about various ways of
determining the validity of interventions that had been shown to have adverse impact. I
have also enjoyed the opportunity to work with the many bright attorneys
because they made me think about the public interest aspects of our field. The problems of
discrimination in the workplace became a salient issue for me and I must thank the many
attorneys I have worked with, especially those from the U.S. Department of Justice, for
expanding my education. I found their questions forced me to expand the systems focus of
my own thinking. Some I-O Psychologists felt that court cases negatively affected the
advancement of our field. I feel otherwise. To me, this research was right at the
intersection of practice and science and it tested our ingenuity in developing new ideas
and approaches.
Thus, over recent years, I have found myself involved in various large scale projects
in both public and private sectors where we attempted to advance the state of the art.
This included research conducted with Dick Barrett, Wiley Boyles, Wayne Cascio, Joyce
Hogan, Bill Macey, Erich Prien, Jim Outtz, Paul Sackett, Neal Schmitt, Ben Schneider,
Shelly Zedeck, and John Veres. In addition to challenging us to come up with new ideas,
these studies also gave our academic program at Maryland many opportunities to provide
research training in the field for our graduate students. It was quite an opportunity for
them, but also for the faculty because it was a real example of how research and teaching
went hand in hand. In addition, there is something special about the I-O community in that
many of us who worked together also became friends and shared many social and family
events together.
Another important part of my life as an I-O Psychologist has been my interaction with
Division 14 and SIOP. Again, I owe my introduction to Jack Bartlett who introduced me to
Lyman Porter who was about to become President. As a result, I was invited to serve on the
Education and Training Committee. A few years later, I was given the assignment to help
develop an individualized continuing education plan which would permit our members to earn
continuing education credits. I ended up on the American Psychological Association
Committee on Continuing Education and eventually we designed a plan which was appropriate
for our membership. As a result, I was invited by Division 14 to serve on the Executive
Committee as Chair of the Education and Training Committee. The opportunity to meet and
interact with very thoughtful I-O Psychologists discussing the most critical issues facing
us as a science, and as a profession is still a special thrill for me. Many years later, I
still look forward to seeing the many friends I have made as a result of attending those
meetings. It was even possible to joke with Ray Katzell over the fact that I had turned
down a fellowship to study with him in order to attend Maryland's non-existent I-O
program.
During my years on the executive committee, I have worked on a number of important
topics such as the task force's analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of Division
14 becoming an incorporated society now known as SIOP. I also developed one of the first
cost analyses comparing the cost for Division 14 members in belonging or not belong to
APA. However, the two opportunities that I think about the most are our annual meeting and
the Frontiers Series. As a member of the Long Range Planning Committee, I was
involved in the original suggestions about having such a meeting and I was given the
opportunity to perform an analysis to determine whether it was possible. In 1983, on the
basis of questionnaire results and analyses of other scientific society meetings, I made a
proposal to the executive committee to have an annual meeting and we formed a Society
Conference Committee to make it happen. By 1984, we had designed a structure which
included: myself as overall conference chair; a workshop committee chaired by Stan
Silverman; a registration committee chaired by Ron Johnson; a program committee chaired by
Rich Klimoski; and a local arrangements committee chaired by Bill Macey. We all worked
very hard to make it happen and the sense of both excitement and anxiety over having a
conference was at times overwhelming to everyone. As kind fate would have it, I had the
honor of being elected President for 1985-86 with the Society's first conference scheduled
for April 10-11, 1986. Thus, I resigned as chair of the committee but had the thrill of
being President during the first meeting. Fortunately, Stan Silverman took over as chair
of the Committee and his organizational skills along with the extremely able committee
members made it all happen. I will never forget the estimates we were all making about who
would come to this conference. They ranged from virtually no one to some small number. We
were astonished when 600 persons showed up in Chicago and the annual conference was born.
It was a pleasure to continue to serve on the Conference Committee signing up the next
five cities and wondering how much it would grow during that time period.
While the conference dominated our thoughts, there were many other exciting happenings
during my term as President. The first volume in the Frontiers series was
published with Ray Katzell as series editor and Tim Hall as volume editor. I was
especially excited by that occurrence as I had the privilege of being selected to serve
with Ray Katzell's as a member of the editorial board for the series. During that term, I
edited the third volume on training. After Ray completed his term, I was further delighted
when I was elected by the board to serve as its second series editor.
During my term as president, we also held, with the leadership of Ralph Alexander and
his committee, our first doctoral consortium, and we published the third edition of the
Principles with Neal Schmitt and Bill Owens as co-editor. There was also the continuing
tensions with APA and whether we would remain a part of APA but the completion of that
story did not occur during my term as President.
At this time, I am still actively involved in my work and in SIOP activities. I am
preparing a chapter with Shelly Zedeck and Ben Schneider on content validation for a
volume of the Frontiers Series edited by Neal Schmitt and Wally Borman. My
handbook chapter on training has just been sent off to Marv Dunnette. I am completing a
term as Council Representative to APA and I am looking forward to my term as series editor
of the Frontiers Series. So, how do I finish this auto-biography? I am really not
sure because I still feel that I am in the midst of a very exciting career and life. The
whole thing has been a joy and if I had it to do all over again, I would choose the same
career and hope for the same opportunities.
Professor and Chair
Department of Psychology
University of Maryland at College Park
October 1990
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