In the face of the continuing decrease in the eighteen-year old population and the political and social demands of university reform, the need for and the importance of Staff Development (SD) have been increasingly recognized. Despite this recognition, however, there are many unresolved issues concerning SD, including the questions of how opinions and interest related to SD emerged in contemporary Japan, how effective SD programs to train managerial and business staff in universities can be realized, and how a systematic curriculum can be formulated. In this paper, the author takes up 5 stages of SD as currently realized in Japanese universities, and examines the merits and demerits of each stage. He identifies the minimum essential SD learning items as knowledge and understanding of the university system and of one’s own university as well as of higher education policy. Adopting the perspective that it may well be possible to locate the objectives of SD within the framework of training in planning ability, the author asks whether it might not be necessary to tailor SD programs to a staff member’s life stage. He also argues for the desirability of merging FD with SD, as is done in the British system, and evaluates the various traditional ways of implementing SD in Japan. Finally, he makes some suggestions concerning the topic of how to create personnel training courses for staff members while maintaining the integrity of their professional ability.

　 This paper attempts to make a meta-evaluation of hitherto existing studies of university administrators and their functions, a field of study that has achieved prominence in recent years, identifying, as higher education research topics, issues related to this field, and locating these within a structured framework. The paper points out that, within the context of the development of the modern Japanese university system, three kinds of structures have arisen, namely a differential structure dividing core executive officers in the form of bureaucrats from university-appointed staff, a two-level structure dividing university administrative staff and Ministry of Education officials, and a dual-element structure comprising university presidents on the one hand and the heads of university secretariats on the other.

　 Following the campus strife of the 1960s, proposals made within the context of the democratization of university administration with the aim of overcoming the third of these structural dualities, namely the dual-element structure referred to above proved incapable of realization. Further, against the background of the 1990s, typified by such factors as the declining birthrate, the study of private university administrators made its appearance as an issue, while on the other hand, the study of national university administrators began to be developed on the basis of the findings of the report made by the University Council in 1998.　 However, problems that have been identified with regard to the study of national university administrators include the fact that on the one hand, it has emphasized expansion of the roles of administrators and enhanced specialization on the basis of an antagonistic schema that pits educational staff against administrators, while on the other hand, it has failed to take account of the organizational structure of national university administrative personnel. This paper identifies both research-oriented issues aimed at the development of research on university administrators, and issues related to the study of university administrators aimed at the development of higher education research.

　 It is said that universities have already entered the stage of universalization, and it is in this context that emphasis is being placed on the necessity of staff development (SD). However, it is impossible to avoid thinking that the reality of SD is nothing more than the continuous implementation of training programs and that it has an inbuilt bias in favor of promoting skill improvement. Writing from the viewpoint of a university administrative staff member, the author proposes a redefinition of the purpose of SD as “the ability and skill development of university administrative staff members who are able to manage the various tasks that have to be undertaken in order to realize university reform.” With this objective in mind, the author raises the issue of the need on the one hand, for universities to institute bold and positive empowerment of their staff, and on the other, for administrative staff members themselves to get to grips with SD through autonomous and systematic actions.

　 The paper introduces the latest policy trends in SD, based on consideration of the proposals put forward by the SD Program Advisory Committee of the Japan Association of the University Administrative Management, and initiatives carried out by university-affiliated associations as well as case studies of a number of universities. It concludes by referring to the tasks facing universities in terms of getting to grips with SD in the future.

　 Expectations are rising that Staff Development (SD) of university administrators and other staff can be seen as a key means of realizing radical reform and enabling universities in Japan to cope with the worsening of their management environment. Within academia, SD has been recognized over the past 10 years as an important field of study, and the results developed in the course of this studyhave played an important role in providing encouragement, and at times in giving theoretical support to arguments, or in satisfying the thirst for learning among eager university administrators. At the same time, social awareness of the need for SD has risen, and what is now in the process of developing is a demand for SD to provide responses to problem areas with a high degree of individual specificity.

　 However, the reality is that at the present time, SD is no more than one device which has the potential to increase the level of efficiency and sophistication of university management. What should happen is that persuasive discussion concerning the fundamental usefulness of SD is developed, and that clarification is provided on how to use SD efficiently for the training of high-level administrative staff, but in fact, as a result of an “authoritarian type of thinking,” SD discussions make hardly any attempt to deal with these issues. Only recently, at long last, has the importance of linking SD to performance, including graduate school education, been acknowledged and a start made on trying to formulate policies to achieve this aim.

　 On the other hand, the level of understanding of the present state of SD, an indispensable issue when thinking about the role that SD should play in the future, cannot be said to be adequate. For example, university administrators are faced on the hand with demands to raise the level of efficiency and sophistication in dealing with traditional routine tasks, and on the other, with new demands to develop skills in such areas as planning, project management, problem identification, and others. Caught between these two sets of opposing demands, administrators are being torn apart. As with other issues referred to above, it can also be said in relation to these important new trends that they are hardly understood at all by traditional discussions on SD.

　 In the context of difficult circumstances of this kind, this paper reports on an intensive investigation and analysis of a pioneering training project implemented in Japan. The results can be defined as the identification of the possibility of a new framework, namely on-the-job development×development (OJD²), within SD, taking the form of a new kind of project management, whereby the implementation of tasks functions as training, so that an increased level of efficiency and sophistication are realized together, and at the same time, the new practical abilities demanded of the person carrying out the tasks are gradually enhanced. The paper also shows how a management style is already being developed in the form of a functioning business process training program in its entirety in advanced university environments as an extension of this kind of initiative.

　 With the aim of obtaining some insights that can contribute to the professional development of non-academic staff responsible for the support of teaching, learning and student life in Japanese universities, this paper takes as its main theme the systematization of a professional development curriculum for student affairs professionals in the U.S. universities over the past 20 years. The objectives of such systematization are on the one hand, to identify a professional development curriculum as a quality assurance model (QAM), and on the other hand, to clarify both new developments in PD in the context of influences exerted by recent reforms in the U.S. university education, and changes in specialization.

　 The professional development of student affairs professionals has become one of the most important tools used to provide a framework of quality assurance for their work. QAM is based on the perception that lifelong learning forms the background to student affairs from the entry level to the upper levels. It also has to perform a balancing act between on the one hand, the professional standards or ethics formulated by professional associations, and on the other, the selfmotivation of professionals operating within a harsh job market environment.

　 More specifically, several professional competency models can be identified in each student affairs program, depending on such factors as the level of the staff involved and their academic background. In the 1980s, however, higher education reform underwent a paradigm shift, moving in the direction of support for learnercentered education in the context of student affairs. The mission of student services was changed so as to focus on improving and enhancing student learning, and this resulted in the integration of professional competencies. The skills and knowledge needed to enhance student learning have become an important part of these competencies, among which counseling, advisory and leadership skills in support of student learning now play a central role in student affairs professionals.

　 The process of establishing a PD curriculum in student affairs offers many suggestions to the PD process in Japan. Firstly, Japanese non-academic staff are called on to rethink their professionalism and their work. Secondly, they have to recognize that the reform focusing on learner-centered exerts a major impact on the nature of PD and on all their jobs and organizational structures.

　 Staff Development (SD) is a topic that has become the focus of heightened attention. In the background to this trend is the fact that administrative and managerial staff have come to be regarded as major actors in the management of higher education institutions, and that professional associations and graduate school courses targeted at such staff have been established in rapid succession in recent years. The papers presented in this special issue take up various aspects of SD, aiming to clarify the problems relating to SD activities and to discuss the future direction of SD studies as a topic of higher education research.　 This paper begins by giving a description of the purpose of SD and the background context, as mentioned above, and then goes on to examine the content of each of the 5 specialist papers and to clarify the challenges facing future research. It concludes by discussing the necessity for the further development of SD studies as academic research which embodies two-way communication between research and practice.

　 Using data from 185 U.S. universities, this paper sets out to provide an empirical analysis of the extent to which an IR office is required for the provision of management support functions. The paper hypothesizes, on the basis of previous studies, that the working experience that a president has had, prior to appointment, within the university concerned, has the effect of increasing the channels through which the president can accumulate information necessary for management decision-making within the organizational structure. Using this hypothesis as a basis, the paper examines the relationships between on the one hand the working experience of the president within the institution and, on the other, the size of the IR office as well as the circumstances of the establishment of management information systems. The main conclusion of the paper is that, in the U.S., the wider the range of channels feeding information to the president at the top of the university, the stronger the tendency for the IR office to be reduced in size or for an information management system to be dispensed with. This result suggests that in many universities in which top management is recruited from within the institution concerned, there is not necessarily a need for an IR office acting as a specialist management support structure or for the training of specialist IR staff, and that it is desirable for an IR office to concentrate its functions on collecting and circulating empirical data.