A favorite professor retires
at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies

Verna J. Willis was appointed associate professor emerita in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies effective September 1, 2004, upon her retirement in August. Willis had joined Georgia State University in 1988 to initiate what became an internationally recognized degree program in human resource development, which she chaired until 1996.

"Verna Willis has been a respected and productive member of our faculty in the area of human resource development," wrote department chair Lloyd Nigro in announcing her retirement. "She is greatly admired and held in great affection by her past and present students."

Willis graduated with a Ph.D. in Instructional Systems Design and Management from State University of New York at Buffalo in 1977. She says that she learned about the HRD position at Georgia State University while working on a technical assistance project for the Research Foundation of SUNY in East Java, Indonesia. "It looked like a job with my name on it," she says. "In those days, there were few HRD faculty, and it was even rarer to find a program with a practitioner angle. No one offered a Ph.D. in HRD."

More than 600 students have gone through the HRD program since it began under Willis's direction. Among her many honors and achievements, Willis says she is most pleased with the contributions her students are making in Atlanta and around the world. "Many of our alumni have faculty positions in colleges and universities from here to the United Kingdom. One alumnus recently won an award for outstanding teaching. Our graduates are present in most major corporations here; and these are just a few examples of their contributions," she says.

Willis may be best known for her contributions to the study and practice of Action Learning in HRD. In 1991, she wrote an article proposing the need for corporations to add the position of Chief Learning Officer, which would focus human assets in the same way a CFO focuses on capital assets. She developed Action Learning exchanges and technical assistance projects between Georgia State University and a university in Romania. Her 2003 book with Robert Dillworth, Action Learning: Images and Pathways, was nominated for the HRD Book of the Year Award; and she was appointed to the editorial board of a new journal, Action Learning: Research and Practice, where she authored the lead article for its inaugural issue in 2004.

Willis has moved her "base of operations" to her home in Orchard Park, New York, from where she says she hopes to do more international work. She recognizes and thanks Lloyd Nigro, Dean Bahl, Robert Moore, Paula Stephan and the faculty and staff at AYSPS for their support through her tenure at Georgia State University. "Without their help and belief in what I was doing, I simply could not have gone forward with these programs.

"It has been a great 16 years. I wouldn't have missed it for anything," she says.