Dr. Gregory Howard
I
am a cynic in that I privilege self-control and
independence, and these are traits that have been strongly
encouraged throughout my intellectual preparations. I
graduated with a bachelor of arts degree from the
interdisciplinary Program in Social Ecology at the
University of California at Irvine. I later matriculated at
the State University of New York at Albany in the School of
Criminal Justice where I studied criminology and planned
change. During my extended studies at Albany, I was involved
in evaluations of criminal justice interventions, crunched
numbers for the Rochester Youth Development Study, worked as
a consultant at the United Nations Office in Vienna with the
Centre for International Crime Prevention, and co-founded
and edited the Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular
Culture. I also wrote a dissertation titled “The Social
Career of Environmentalism” with which I earned a Ph.D.
before becoming an assistant professor of sociology at
Western Michigan University.
Presently, I am an associate professor engaged in two main
lines of research. Along with a graduate school chum and a
number of promising undergraduate students in the sociology
department, I am exploring the capacity of evolutionary
theory as a framework with which to achieve the hitherto
unrealized interdisciplinary promise of criminology. In a
somewhat related line of inquiry, I am examining
surveillance, civil liberties, and terrorism with a
comparative perspective.
I was engaged by the Department of Sociology primarily to
teach criminal justice courses and, in line with that
expectation, I have covered at the undergraduate level
“Introduction to Criminal Justice” (SOC260), “Criminal
Justice Process” (SOC363), and most recently “Advanced
Criminology” (SOC466). With respect to graduate instruction
in criminology, I have delivered courses on “Comparative
Criminology” (SOC663), “Deviance” (SOC631), and “Theoretical
Issues in Criminology” (SOC660). I have also offered
graduate classes in “Environmental Justice” (SOC590), “Human
Rights and Civil Liberties: Studies in Comparative
Sociology” (SOC675), and “Surveillance and Society”
(SOC590).
Consistent with my interdisciplinary commitment, I have
chaired or served on a diverse range of thesis and
dissertation committees. At the doctoral level, I have
supervised an ethnographic account of interspecies
encounters at a cat hospital and have contributed to an
investigation of truth claims about online education as well
as a study of the interplay between biography and history in
a deindustrializing Levittown, Pennsylvania. With master’s
students, I have supervised projects concerned with
environmental sociology, technology and time, the peddling
of credit cards amongst college students, and the discourse
of the Partnership for a Drug Free America on its webpage. I
have also been a member on committees providing guidance to
studies of football yobbery, the Nightmare on Elm Street
film series, and the International Criminal Court. Finally,
I have been pleased to chair investigations by
undergraduates interested in Buddhism and deviance,
rehabilitation in the juvenile courts, and the prospect of a
universal DNA database.
As a student, researcher, teacher, and advisor, I believe
that my primary responsibility is to nurture what Ralf
Dahrendorf has termed “the social function of the fool” –
“to doubt everything that is obvious, to make relative all
authority, to ask all those questions that no one else dares
to ask.” I think this role is consistent with the injunction
penned by Walt Whitman, and adopted by Edward Abbey: “Resist
much, obey little.”
“It’s more convenient for me to stick it out for a while, to
try to make an honest living introducing a little philosophy
into the heads of engineers, druggists, future politicians.
Don’t think for a moment that I imagine myself as some sort
of anarchist hero. I don’t intend to fight against
Authority, at least not in the open . . . . When they tell
us to say ‘I recant everything’ I’ll just mumble something
out of the corner of my mouth. When they tell us to stand at
attention and salute I’ll cross the fingers of my left hand.
When they install the Dictaphones . . . and the wire-tapping
apparatus and the two-way television I’ll install defective
fuses in the switchbox. When they ask me if I am now or ever
have been an Untouchable I’ll tell them that I’m just a
plain old easy-going no-account Jeffersonian anarchist. That
way I should be able to muddle along for a decade or so,
maybe long enough to retire on half pay, dig out the old
irrigation ditch and raise cucumbers and sweet corn”
Paul Bondi, philosopher-prisoner, in Edward Abbey’s (1956)
The Brave Cowboy