Steven D. Crow is retiring as executive director of the North Central Association’s Higher Learning Commission, after a 25-year career with the largest of the nation’s six regional accrediting agencies.

Mr. Crow served previously as an administrator and faculty member at Bowdoin College, Vanderbilt University, Bates College, and Kalamazoo College. In recent years, he helped guide the response by accreditors to the recommendations of the education secretary, Margaret Spellings, and her Commission on the Future of Higher Education, which pressed accreditors to increase their use of standardized student assessments to measure colleges’ performance.

Mr. Crow argued that many accrediting agencies already were measuring colleges based on their bottom-line performance, and warned against initiatives that would put the federal government in the position of guiding those assessments. —Paul Basken