James L. Murdock has been named as the 2004 recipient of SCUP's Distinguished Service Award. Jim currently serves as the Assistant Dean for Finance and Planning of the University of Michigan Business School in Ann Arbor. He has been employed by the university since 1975, when he first served as an administrator of the U of M-Flint campus for eleven years. He began working for the Business School on the Ann Arbor campus in 1987.

Jim has been a SCUP member since 1987 and has distinguished himself within SCUP in many capacities. He served as Treasurer and a member of the Board of Directors from 1994-1997. He was a member of the 1995 Search Committee for the Executive Director position of SCUP that recruited and brought Jolene Knapp, the current Executive Director, to that position. He has been a session presenter at several regional and national conferences and was the Conference Chair for SCUP-35, the Annual International Conference and Expo that was held in Denver, Colorado in 2000. He has served as a member of both the Finance Committee and the Marketing Committee. Because of his experience in the business school, Jim was asked to chair SCUP's Business Plan Task Force that developed a Strategic Plan Implementation process for the management use of the Board of Directors and the SCUP central staff.

"Jim Murdock has been the person SCUP turned to when we waned to be sure things would get done thoroughly, without a fuss and in a timely fashion," says former SCUP President Cal Audrain. "It was my good fortune, during my year as president, that Jim accepted the job of conference chair for SCUP-35. I knew that he would provide a quality conference and he did."

He received his BA in economics from Muskingum College in New Concord, Ohio, his MBA from the Wharton Graduate School of the University of Pennsylvania, and achieved Ph.D. candidacy in the Ph.D. program of the Center for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Michigan in 1975.