©
2002 The Edwardsville Journal of Sociology, Volume 2 back to ejs volume 2 http://www.siue.edu/SOCIOLOGY/journal
Q and A with Professor Hugh D. Barlow
We recently sat down with Dr. Hugh Barlow,
Professor and Chair of Sociology at SIUE, to learn more about his professional
activities. We also wanted to hear his views on criminology, sociology, and
academe more generally. Before we get to the interview, let's learn a bit more
about Dr. Barlow:
Barlow was born and raised in the UK. His
father was a high school teacher at King Edward's School, Birmingham, where
Hugh attended from 1957 to 1964. As Barlow tells it, he enjoyed sports - rugby
and track and field particularly -- far more than academics but somehow managed
to scrape through his Advance level exams and gain an entry to Southampton
University, where his sister had earlier attended. While studying economics and
sociology at Southampton, Hugh joined the British Universities North America
Club, and visited the United States in the summer of 1965. His appetite
whetted, Barlow decided to attend graduate school in the U.S. He chose the
University of Texas, Austin, and arrived one year after Charles Whitman's
shooting rampage from the library tower.
Barlow received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees
in sociology from UT. In 1971 the sociology job market was weak and he felt
lucky to find a position as a founding member of the sociology faculty at
Sangamon State University (now the University of Illinois - Springfield). In
1973 Hugh moved to Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, where he has
remained ever since. He is very grateful to SIUE for allowing him to take various
leaves over the years: he has taught at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee,
and at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He has also been a
Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Criminology at Cambridge University.
Dr. Barlow has served for 14 years as the
chair of the SIUE Sociology department. This year he will step down and become
the Director of Criminal Justice Studies. During his tenure at SIUE, Barlow has
published several books: Eight editions of the highly acclaimed Introduction to
Criminology (the 2002 edition is co-authored with Dave Kauzlarich);
Understanding Delinquency (1993 -- co-authored with Theodore Ferdinand);
Criminal Justice in America (2000), and Crime and Public Policy: Putting Theory
to Work (1995 - an anthology of original essays). Professor Barlow has also
published journal articles on the topics of racial profiling, homicide and
assault, small business crime, biographical analysis of a crime hot spot, and
earthquake preparedness. He has also written major review essays for the
Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, including a seminal and widely-cited
critique of Gottfredson and Hirschi's A General Theory of Crime.
Professor Barlow has taught courses on criminology, criminal justice, victimology, the atomic era, social theory, and the senior seminar for sociology majors. He was instrumental in bringing the Criminal Justice Studies major to SIUE in 2002, and now serves as its director and academic advisor. Barlow has also been very active in professional scholarly associations. For his accomplishments as editor of the Criminologist, Hugh was awarded the Herbert A. Bloch Award in 1993 from the American Society of Criminology.
Now on to the interview with Professor
Barlow.
ejs: Who do you most admire as a criminologist?
Barlow: There are many criminologists that I
admire; These five would be at the top of my list: Richard Quinney, John
Braithwaite, Gil Geis, Jack Gibbs, and Austin Turk. These scholars have each
produced path-breaking work in the field. They are also greatly concerned with
improving the human condition (which is less well known about one of them), and
with maintaining the highest standards of scholarship. I am also greatly
impressed by the works of Frank Cullen, particularly his work on the Ford Pinto
case, but also his contributions in theory. I also like the way in which he has
involved his graduate students in his work: Frank is a model for other senior
scholars. Robert Agnew (who, as it happens, served as one of my teaching
assistants at Chapel Hill), is another criminologist who has made a tremendous
mark on the field with his reformulation of strain theory. I could go on. We
are lucky, I believe, in having many fine scholars in this field.
ejs: You
have written several textbooks in the areas of crime and criminal justice. What
got you started on this venture? How has it affected your career?
Barlow: I embarked on textbook writing at a relatively young age (29) largely
because an idea I had for a book on punishment was rejected by publishers I
approached at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in
Montreal in 1974. Instead, they encouraged me to write a text. Since I was
teaching Introduction to Criminology at the time and could not find a book that
matched my approach and interests (one by Bloch and Geis came closest), I took
up the challenge of writing my own.
And a challenge it certainly was. With
textbook writing in criminology you have to do two things well: (1) communicate
with an audience that generally knows nothing about the field, but has many
opinions about its subject; and (2) write authoritatively on topics that you
know may little about because they are not in your area of specialization. It
was a pleasant surprise when my book when into a second edition, and then a
third. I was especially pleased when a reviewer of the first edition (1978)
singled my book out as the first to deal with date rape in a serious way.
Textbook writing did wonders for my name
recognition, but much less to advance my scholarly reputation. I believe that
my texts are scholarly since I review, frame, and integrate a tremendous body
of research and because I try to present material in an original way. For
example, my chapter on general theories of crime in the criminology text was a
first, and in my criminal justice text the chapter on public policy and
theories of crime is also innovative. The chapter on the sporadic delinquent in
my delinquency text is another innovation, and also one that I find is cited
from time to time in scholarly articles.
Textbook writing does not bring the same
kind of professional recognition that follows successful grant writing and
scholarly publications in peer-reviewed journals. Yet I believe that textbooks
are just as important in the overall scheme of learning, perhaps even more so:
They bring new ideas, issues, and debates to the attention of the next
generation of scholars; they serve as reference materials for students doing
research as well as for established scholars; most important, they help stimulate
interest in the field, including the desire to learn more.
I am therefore proud of the professional
recognition (which is not the same as sales) that my texts have brought me. The
fact that I moved much of my time and energy into this area necessarily reduced
the amount I could spend on original research. Nevertheless, I have been able
to conduct research, some of which has been published in refereed journals. I
am proud of a piece of work I did in the early eighties that looked into the
factors that accounted for the turning of assaults into homicides. The research
followed 187 assaults involving deadly weapons from the time they happened to
the eventual outcome (nearly half turned into homicides) and I gathered
detailed information from police, EMS, hospital and (where relevant) medical
records. Among other things, I found a 20 minute threshold for overall EMS
response times, supporting the Vietnam War "scoop and run" strategy
for soldiers wounded in the field. The results were noticed by the national
Institute of Mental Health, which invited me to talk about the research at a
special workshop. Part of the study was eventually published in the journal
Medicine and Law (1988). I am also proud of my work on small business networks
of collusion published in Crime, Law, and Social Change (1993). This has been
reprinted twice, most recently in Crimes of Privilege (Oxford University Press, 2001) edited by Neal
Shover and John Paul Wright.
ejs: What
are your favorite classes to teach and why?
Barlow: I have three classes I particularly enjoy: Introduction to Criminal
Justice, Victims and Society, and The Atomic Era. The last course is team
taught with a physicist and a German scholar. We explore the historical,
social, political, cultural, and scientific forces behind the development and
use of the atomic bomb. This interdisciplinary course grew out of a grant I
co-authored that was funded by NSF, NEH, and FIPSE. It's a great opportunity to
show the interplay between the humanities and the sciences, and I am always
amazed at how little students know of the subject; they leave educated, but not
necessarily fortified.
The Introduction to Criminal Justice course
is fun because the material is relevant for the daily lives of many of my
students, and I enjoy the classroom discussions that result. I also use active
learning techniques in the course and have students do group projects in which
they stand in the shoes of the various CJ stakeholders and suggest how they can
more effectively impact crime and improve the system of justice. The
victimology course is also an active learning class, and we include a site
visit to the Holocaust museum in Creve Coeur, MO, as part of the course
assignments. The course covers a variety of topics, with victimization by race,
gender, and class the unifying theme. The students always comment on how much
they learned in this course, and while they usually say they enjoyed it, the
day-to-day experience of studying victimization can be pretty grim.
ejs:
As a university professor and department chair,
explain your take on the relationship between teaching, research, and service.
Barlow: I believe that a good
professor is well-rounded, that is, accomplished in all three areas. I have the
pleasure of chairing a department in which most of the faculty fit this
description. Certainly, teaching is not the only reason for being, although
students are the reason most of us are here. At universities the best teachers
are often the best researchers, and vice versa. Why? Because both activities
involve hard work, a critical mind, knowledge of the cutting edge, and the
ability to communicate. Service usually plays second fiddle to teaching and
research, but this is often a function of time rather than inclination. I am
often surprised and always delighted when my colleagues tell me about all the
things they are doing in campus, community, and professional service. I believe
that every member of the university faculty should have an active service
agenda. This is one way we can give back to the communities that have and
continue to succor us. The actual balance that a faculty member maintains among
all three cannot be set in stone, for it is likely to vary from semester to
semester, perhaps even from week to week. This is one of the challenges of life
in academe. At SIUE teaching is the core activity, and faculty assignments
reflect this. The faculty member who does well in the classroom and also is
productive in scholarship and committed to service gets my vote as the standard
we should all strive for.
Editor’s
note: Follow the links below for more information
on Professor Barlow’s books:
Introduction
to Criminology, 8th Edition (2002), with Dave Kauzlarich.
http://vig.prenhall.com/catalog/academic/product/1,4096,0130851248,00.html
Criminal
Justice in America (2000).
http://vig.prenhall.com/catalog/academic/product/1,4096,0130832715,00.html
Crime
and Public Policy: Putting Theory to
Work (1995).
http://www.perseusbooksgroup.com/perseus-cgi-bin/display/0-8133-2678-8
Understanding
Delinquency (1991), with Ted Ferdinand.