Reclaiming our history: the National Career Development Association journal editors (1911-2011).(Editorial)

As part of some other historical research I am conducting, I developed a list of all the editors of the journal of the National Career Development Association (NCDA)--The Career Development Quarterly (CDQ)--and thought it would be a valuable archival piece to include for the historians of our profession in my last issue as editor of our journal.

In 1911, the progenitor of CDQ--the Vocational Guidance News-Letter--was founded under the editorship of Frederick J. Allen. From that beginning, the listing at the end of this editorial identifies the chronology of the changes in CDQ, both in journal names and in journal editors.

In 1952, 'The Personnel and Guidance Journal (PGJ; now called the Journal of Counseling & Development [JCD]) became the journal of the new American Personnel and Guidance Association (APGA; now the American Counseling Association), with the National Vocational Guidance Association (NVGA; now the NCDA) as one of its four founding divisions. Through an agreement between APGA and NVGA, the NVGA journal (then called Occupations: The Vocational Guidance Journal) along with its editor (William D. Wilkins), editorial board, and staff, became the operational foundation of the new PGJ. This was a political decision made to support the new professional association and the broadened mission of that new PGJ.

However, the 1952 NVGA board of directors also wanted to maintain its own journal, a journal devoted to career counseling and career development. When the operations side of Occupations was transferred to the new APGA, the historical mission and purpose of the journal were taken over by The Vocational Guidance Quarterly ( VGQ). Thus, VGQwas a direct descendant of Occupations. A new editor was selected for VGQ(Max V. Baer, who was also serving as NVGA president) along with an editorial board that included many of the editorial board members from Occupations, and the NVGA journal continued to be published without missing an issue.

The complicating factor in all this is that, although the new APGA journal continued the volume numbers of Occupations beginning with Volume 31 (Ginter, 2002), it has not continued the history, mission, and purpose, nor docs it even always acknowledge its lineage. In fact, as recently as 2006 in Volume 84, Number 2 of JCD, the historical listing of editors of that journal (Former Editors of JCD, 2006, p. 255) only begins with William D. Wilkins in 1952.

We, the CDQ editorial board, feel strongly that CDQ must reclaim its past and acknowledge the historical contributions of all its previous editors. We do not quibble with the dual branched heritage of JCD and CDQ and would encourage JCD to acknowledge its historic roots, but we are also clear about the lineage of our journal. Our current volume number may be only 56, but we know that the historical reality is much different, and so we publish here the list of the editors of the journal of NCDA--CDQ--from its true and proper historic beginning, 1911.

Furthermore, there is precedent to renumber journal volumes ...