Professor Bruce Schumm
Department of Physics
Lead Reviewer CCGA
Office of Vice Provost
Academic Initiatives
1111 Franklin Street
Oakland, CA 94607-5200
August 19, 20005
Dear Professor Schumm:
Enclosed please find my review of the UC-Davis/California State University at Fresno proposed PhD program in criminal justice. Please excuse me for missing your deadline by a few days. I had to attend to the unexpected passing of a loved one—my computer.
Let me know if you have any further questions about my report.
Sincerely yours,
Todd R. Clear
Distinguished Professor
Executive Officer
Review of
UC-Davis/California State University at Fresno
Proposed PhD Program in Criminal Justice
August 19, 2005
1. Quality and academic rigor of program.
Your letter asked me to compare the program to “the best programs” in the country. This is a bit difficult, because the thrust of the program proposed is different from the usual criminal justice programs. The Davis-Fresno program is decidedly behavioral science in its focus. The primary emphases are placed on victimology, forensic psychology, and forensic science. Other alternative foundations for the study of criminal justice (most notably, law and social science) are found mentioned in some of the course descriptions included with the curriculum, but they are not separate courses and they are not given nearly the same significance as behavioral science approaches, which form the basis for the required courses in each specialty. This makes the program different from the other PhD granting programs in criminal justice (and certainly criminology).
This year, the US News & World Report ranked criminology and criminal PhD programs in its annual graduate rankings. Among the top programs were: Maryland, Albany (SUNY), Missouri (St. Louis), Cincinnati, Rutgers, and University of California at Irvine. All of these programs, while they offer courses in victimology and psychology of crime, take much more of a social science orientation to the training they provide. Thus affects both the content of required courses and the nature of the research methods emphasized. Students graduate with a strong grasp of social and policy aspects of crime and justice rather than behavioral aspects. None of these programs emphasizes the topics that Davis-Fresno proposes to emphasize.
This is both a strength and a weakness of the Davis-Fresno proposal. It is a strength, in that the best Crim/CJ PhD programs tend to develop a “niche,” an area in which they are particularly strong. For example, Maryland is exceptionally strong in criminological theory, Albany is known for its justice policy and practice work, Rutgers has a world-class crime-prevention emphasis, and Cincinnati is strong in corrections. Thus, the Davis-Fresno proposal’s emphasis on victimology would create an immediate niche as a program that specializes in an area to which no other program gives the same level of priority. This is a weakness, in that content most other CJ programs offer—law, courts, corrections, policing, CJ policy—is either downplayed or absent in this proposal.
Graduates from this program will have strong and in-depth training in areas that most other programs in criminal justice give less attention to—regarding victimology, for example, I know of no other program that requires the course, and regarding behavioral science, even the strongest programs offer but one course or two. On the other hand, the most prominent employment alternatives for graduates are as entry-level faculty in undergraduate criminal justice programs. These usually have a traditional social science and policy/practice curriculum—police, courts, and corrections—and the fact that these topics are covered only as aspects of but one larger course leads me to wonder if graduates will be asked to teach in areas for which their preparation is weak. The heavy emphasis on behavioral science in this curriculum must be seen as a strength, however, because most CJ PhD programs do not offer meaningful concentrations in this area.
The forensic science concentration is also a strength, because the demand for forensic science is growing but feeder programs remain in the science disciplines. A specialty in forensic science will attract students. Specialists in forensic science claim that students need more than one course in each of the cognate areas (chemistry, biology, and physics), but I have not seen any standards that would suggest the curriculum in Davis-Fresno is insufficient in its coverage of these topics.
2. Adequacy if faculty
The curriculum vita I reviewed demonstrated a range of expertise, but again with a focus on behavioral science training over social science training. The faculty research interests match well to the program’s curriculum.
It is not easy to characterize the quality of a faculty without evaluating citation indices, which I did not do. However, a recent study of career productivity of criminal justice and criminology faculty (Justice Quarterly 18-4, 2001) found that the median professor at PhD-level programs averaged about two journal publications per year and one book every 6 or 7 years (one-fourth of the papers were placed in high-prestige journals).“Stars” (the top pentile) produced at (essentially) twice that rate, with an even greater frequency in high-prestige outlets. Evaluated from this frame of reference, the CVs in the packet probably run about average for the field’s PhD level programs. There are obvious “stars” (Goodman, for example) and there faculty who fall below the median. My sense is that the overall scholarly productivity of the faculty is a bit lower than the highest ranked PhD programs in criminal justice/criminology, but certainly equal to the mid-level program faculty and above that of the lower-ranked programs. Overall, I can well imagine this faculty mentoring doctoral-level work and serving as productive role models for people studying toward the PhD.
I have an observation and a related concern about the faculty, taken as a whole. My observation continues this theme of the behavioral science emphasis of the program. The faculty professional activity—where they publish their work and the conferences they attend—reflects the psychology (or, in some cases, forensic science) orientation, as might be expected. For the most part, there appears to be plenty of activity in scholarship. But not much of it takes place in criminal justice professional organizations or journals. The two main scholarly organizations for criminal justice and criminology are The American Society of Criminology, and the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences. There is little presence of the Davis-Fresno faculty presenting papers at the annual meetings of these two groups or in their journals (Justice Quarterly, Criminology, Criminology & Public Policy, and Journal of Criminal Justice Education), and there is, as best I could tell, no presence on committees and boards of these two groups. While one cannot fault a psychologist for presenting her work at the APA meetings or their regional affiliates, or publishing in psychology journals, it is problematic to think of a PhD faculty in criminal justice that is, as a whole, not active in the criminal justice scholarly organizations. My concern relates to how the program develops its reputation in the field, and how its students get socialized into the discipline.
There are quite active criminal justice scholars in the two California university systems. At Irvine, San Francisco, San Diego, San Bernardino, and elsewhere, there are faculty who are well-established in criminology and criminal justice professional circles. Whether some of these could be incorporated into the Davis-Fresno group, or whether new recruitment can target more traditionally active criminal justice or criminology scholars, some way of growing the activity-level of the criminal justice faculty in the mainstream criminal justice scholarly arena is needed. Otherwise, it will not be easy to make the mainstream CJ profession apparent to the students of this program. So long as this program seeks to offer the PhD in criminal justice, I feel very strongly that it needs to prepare its students, as graduates, to be active in the criminal justice scholarly organizations, not just the related disciplines in behavioral and forensic science.
3. Students
What is proposed here is a mostly part-time, mostly regional student body with an emphasis on training people who are already professionals in criminal justice. My experience in three other PhD programs in criminal justice makes me confident that there will be plenty of candidates for this kind of study in the Davis-Fresno metropolitan area, and the quality of the talent pool will also be quite satisfactory. Several of the current PhD programs in criminal justice operate quite successfully with this kind of student body. As the program’s behavioral science emphasis gets more well established with time, the program will likely also attract a (small) national pool of students interested in a program with an emphasis that is not available (except as an elective) at alternative programs.
I feel quite strongly that the work, the topics, and the strength of the knowledge base for new scholarship warrant a PhD degree rather than some alternative doctoral-level designation. Indeed, it would damage the program’s competitiveness to do otherwise.
The two concerns that arise from a mostly part-time programs serving mostly in-service students are (a) time-to-degree, and (b) career impact after degree. Part-time programs tend to keep their students in matriculation for a decade or more, and often find it very difficult to get them through the dissertation stage. Long time-to-degree programs tend to produce graduates whose careers focus on being educators rather than scholars. With a handful of exceptions, people who take a decade or more to finish their work seldom have careers that include high impact scholarship. This is not a comment on the intellectual capacity or motivational level of these students, or the value of their careers. It is just a comment on the nature of the outcomes that these programs tend to have, so that the people who fund these programs will not have unrealistic expectations.
4. Logistics
Among the 31 PhD programs in criminology/criminal justice, there are several that share program assignments across faculty from multiple departments. They seem to run well enough and to have mastered the logistics of shared faculty assignments. This could also be true of Davis-Fresno.
The resources seem adequate, with one caveat. I do not know the configuration or adequacy of lab space and technical support for the forensic science students. This is a specialized need that goes beyond my expertise, but if the science facilities are adequate at Davis-Fresno, and they are made available to the forensic science students, then I imagine this will not be a problem.
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