The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 44, No. 2 - 118

Craig W. Beebe * Torry Brouillard-Bruce * Carolyn Golz * Stephen K. Harrison * Shigeo J. Iwamiya

duties, and describe performance accurately"
(p. 76). Through his research, Englin's contribution to the field includes a call for managers to identify role-specific tasks and outcomes
and to incorporate those intentionally into staff
supervision and evaluation.

Housing operations often navigate

FORWARD: CONTEMPORARY
PERSPECTIVES ON
PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCIES
IN STUDENT HOUSING

educational center .

Researchers in the 1980s advanced the concept
of student affairs competencies, but during the
1990s and early 2000s they focused increasingly on student housing, introducing new ways to
conceptualize professional competence. Porter
(2005a) contributed directly to the practice of
competency development with her dissertation,
which would inform an updated slate of NHTI
competencies (Porter, 2005b). Porter (2005b)
expanded the scope of SHO competencies from
50 to 57 and framed them within Sandwith's
(1993) Competency Domain Model, premised
on the notion that administrators at different
levels of an organization require mastery of an
escalating hierarchy of competencies.
Rather than understanding competencies themselves as entailing levels of expertise
(Brandel, 1995) or contextualizing competencies purely in functional terms (Dunkel & Schreiber, 1992; Ptomey, 1990), Porter (2005a)
merged the two frameworks to identify competencies as hierarchical in terms of the conceptual frameworks required of administrators as
they progress in their careers. Rather than low,
mid-range, and high (Brandel, 1995) or important, very important, and essential (Englin,
2001), Porter (2005a) framed housing profes-

118

a fine line between being a
revenue-generating auxiliary
and a developmentally focused

sional competencies in both descriptive and
functional terms. In order of complexity, Porter's (2005a) five domains were technical, administrative, interpersonal, leadership, and
conceptual/creative. The technical domain, for
example, encompassed the foundational knowledge that an SHO must possess, while the conceptual/creative domain included higher-order
processes that often require an SHO to understand the interconnectedness of multiple institutional functions as they relate to the success of
the housing department.
Building on the emerging research and
the success of the revised NHTI competencies
(Porter, 2005b), the Association of College
and University Housing Officers-International (ACUHO-I) established a task force responsible for identifying the core competencies
required of student housing professionals
that would serve as the strategic basis for
ACUHO-I's educational initiatives moving
forward. The result, the body of knowledge
(Cawthon et al., 2012), stands today as the association's strategic platform and also as the
definitive document outlining college and
university housing professional competencies in the United States and abroad.

T h e J o u r n a l o f C o l l e g e a n d U n i v e r s i t y St u d e n t H o u s i n g

The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 44, No. 2

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 44, No. 2