Interview

Consortium President Valerie Hans interviewed the UW Program director
Michael McCann:

VH: What led you to revamp your program from one that predominantly
emphasized criminology to the current emphasis on law and society?
MM: There were two motivations, one local and institutional, the other more intellectual. On the first count, our longstanding criminal justice program (Society & Justice) had lost its founder to retirement, its core affiliated faculty to other commitments, and its staff to budget cuts by the early 1990s. Because the remaining skeletal program had been “forced’ into the administrative domain of Political Science, I led a campaign to either abolish the old program or to fund a major renovation. Second, a new group of scholars interested in comparative law and society studies had developed on our campus, with little interest in or connection to traditional behavioral criminology. We thus proposed to the administration to replace the old program with a completely new type of interdisciplinary cutting edge law and society program, connecting undergraduate, graduate, and research enterprises. We had just about given up after a few years of advocating action on these options when we won a campus competition for new programs, providing us new faculty lines and seed funding to build anew. This was a rare and exciting opportunity for a group of us to channel our intellectual interests into constructing a brand new program.

VH: A lot of students come to college very interested in crime and
criminal justice. What does your program offer to them?
MM: We have struggled with this issue as our faculty, curriculum, and students have changed in profile. One of our three subfields is “Crime, Social Control, and Justice.” Students can still receive credits for taking one of our many fine Sociology classes on criminology or deviance in this track. But our own offerings focus more on the macro-politics of “law and order” as well as the institutional dynamics of criminal justice institutions – police, lower courts, juvenile justice, prisons, private security companies, insurance providers, and the like. Along with our subfield core course, we feature highly popular classes such as: “Policing the City,” which looks broadly at interlocking social control mechanisms in urban contexts; “Drugs and Society,” which studies the politics and enforcement of drug policy practices; “Miscarriages of Justice,” addressing systematic injustices of wrongful conviction in our justice system; “Philosophy of Punishment,” a theoretical inquiry into the subject; and “Violence and Social Control in Latin America,” which links growing violence in democratizing societies to state violence, social retribution, and human rights issues; and much more. Our classes are less about deviant or criminal behavior and much more about the construction of crime discourse, the politics of crime policy, the complex interrelationship of social and state violence, and the practices of criminal justice enforcement and contestation in comparative, cross-cultural perspective. This has attracted a wider variety of students than the old program; students who want to focus on criminology and deviant behavior are directed to a track of fine classes in the Sociology program.

VH: What do your majors like the most about your program?

MM: Students seem to like everything about the program. In particular, they find our courses to be innovative, interesting, and taught by dynamic teachers; the mean student evaluation for our dozen primary courses was nearly 4.5 on a 5 point scale last year. Students also report that they like the diversity of subfield concentrations, the senior seminar options, the mandatory internship, and the opportunities for engaging in research projects with the faculty. Most also appreciate the “small program experience” and easy access to our faculty, which are rare on our huge campus. The human rights offerings, which are new on our campus, are also very popular. The one thing students do not like is the difficulty of enrolling in many of our courses, which fill up quickly.

VH: What do UW law and society majors do after graduation?
MM: That is difficult to answer, or even to project, for our students in our very new program. The reason is that our student constituency is already very different from the old Society and Justice student group, and we see continued change in the mix of student profiles entering the major. The one constant career aspiration, the aim of around 30%, is law school; fewer students are interested in federal and local law enforcement than before, although that probably will continue to be about 20% of our students; increasing numbers of students are headed for careers in public policy, non-profit advocacy groups, human rights activism, academic teaching or research, and the business world. We hope to track these changing career paths in the future.

VH: In your recent hires, you have chosen faculty who are broadly
trained in the interdisciplinary field of law and society, rather than
trained in one of the traditional disciplines. Why? Is this the wave of
the future?

MM: We did indeed aim to hire faculty with interdisciplinary training and interests. Our goal was not just to produce a new mix of traditional disciplinary scholars, but to look for scholars inclined toward synthesizing analytical frames, methodologies, and understandings from multiple disciplines that articulate with the law and society tradition. This means that most of our faculty are orphans or refugees from our home disciplines to some degree, even though most of us are (or are on the way to becoming) quite respected in our home disciplines as well. We believed this would facilitate much richer intellectual exchanges, sharing of interests, research collaboration, and coherent curriculum development. This plan has worked well. I personally love the prospect of regularly integrating insights of geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, and the like into my intellectual repertoire, and my interdisciplinary colleagues both make that possible and enjoy the same integrative approaches in turn. The effort has encountered two challenges, however. First, we had some initial difficulties in finding the types of scholars we wanted, as most disciplines discourage boundary-breaking scholarship in graduate school. Second, a couple of our interdisciplinary scholars have had some trouble fitting comfortably into disciplinary home units. These challenges underline the fact that, despite much current talk about interdisciplinarity, disciplines still rule on university campuses and will constrain currents flowing in other directions. But the development of a truly interdisciplinary faculty with fluid, integrative, boundary-crossing interests has been a very intellectually exciting experience at UW, and I hope scholars on other campuses find success in similar pursuits.

VH: What would you say is the biggest challenge facing your program?
Facing you as the director of this program?

MM: We have faced, and mostly overcome, many challenges on the way to our present status. Our most consequential challenge for the undergraduate program is containing its growth, given the rapid increase in student demand. But this should not be difficult to achieve. Our most daunting intellectual and institutional challenge today is moving forward with developing a graduate program and research center that is as dynamic, innovative, and successful as our undergraduate program. Research and graduate education are ends in themselves, but they will also further enhance the undergraduate program in a host of ways. The biggest challenge for me as a director is finding time to keep my research agendas alive and still have time for sleep. This challenge should be easier to negotiate as our terrific younger faculty take over leadership of the program in coming years.

VH: What advice would you give to faculty at other institutions who are
considering starting a law and society program? And/or revamping a
criminal justice and criminology program?

MM: I think that the most important element is the development of an intellectual vision that unites the existing faculty group and informs future faculty hiring and curriculum development. Our program building has required an immense amount of work, but the intellectual rewards have made it very worthwhile. Given the rich diversity of intellectual pursuits in the law and society tradition, there is much potential and need for proliferation of uniquely imagined programs around the nation (and the world). If scholars want to create or revamp criminal justice programs in this spirit, I wish them well.