A Little Personal History

Life as a Song Leader

From the age of 14 to 22 I traveled throughout the eastern half of the United States as a song leader for a national youth organization. My primary purpose was to offer leadership training seminars to other young people, join them after meal time, and teach and lead them in song. The purpose of the singing was two fold. First, it was an attempt (and a successful one, fortunately!) to bring everyone together in a spirit of cooperation and joy. These were wonderful years for me, implanting a life-long (so far!) interest in travel, a love of music, and developing skills which were later to be incorporated in my teaching and service work.

The second purpose had to do with the zeitgeist (spirit, meaning) of the times in which I was living. It was the late 1950s and the decade of the 1960s. I was singing about the need for people to "come together." The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was very active during that period of time and he had a significant impact upon the way I looked at the world and human relationships.

One of the most popular songs at that time, the era of "folk music," was "We Shall Overcome." Many other songs spoke to the need for people of all races and ethnicities to accept one another. Those were formative years for me, and their impression is still reflected in my thoughts and actions to this day.

Getting Serious

In 1967, at 23 years of age, I graduated with a Masters degree in Sociology from the Department of Sociology at the University of Missouri (Columbia campus). I was attending the university on a research scholarship which involved me in studying life satisfaction among rural elderly Missourians.

A few months before I graduated I was invited to do my doctoral work in the Department of Sociology at Washington University (St. Louis). At that time it was one of the premier sociology departments in the United States with a faculty consisting of Lee Rainwater (author of Vertical Ghetto), Irving Louis Horowitz (who inherited all of C. Wright Mills' work), Joseph Kahl (social stratificationist), Nicholas Demarath (social theorist), Alvin Gouldner (social theorist), Helen Gouldner (social psychologist), and Bill Yancy (inner-city studies).

I accepted a scholarship from the Midwest Council for Social Research on Aging (based in Kansas City, MO) and moved to St. Louis, my home town. The years at Washington University were exciting, very enlightening, and somewhat traumatic. A month before I graduated (in 1970) the department exploded. Laud Humphreys, author of Tea Room Trade and one of my cohorts in the graduating class, carried out field research which, when his methods were made public, caused unresolved and unrestrained conflict among the faculty. Nearly half of the department left the same year I graduated.

For my scholarship, I conducted field research in social gerontology for the Medical Care Research Center, a division of Barnes/Jewish Hospital - part of Washington University's Medical School. It appeared as though I was going to become a specialist in social gerontology, but that's not how things turned out.

My First Teaching Job

I received my PhD at the ripe age of 25, little older than many of my future students. Having been born and raised in St. Louis, I preferred to stay in the area, if that was possible. The degree from Washington University was very helpful in that, out of 16 interviews granted, I was offered jobs at 9 different universities. I accepted an offer from the Department of Sociology at the St. Louis campus of the University of Missouri (UMSL) because it would allow me to stay in my home town.  I began by teaching Sociological Methods, Introductory Sociology, Social Problems, and Gerontology.

"Would you like to do something really interesting?"

While teaching introductory sociology one evening, an adult/returning student approached me and asked "Would you like to do something really interesting?" How could I refuse an offer like that? I accepted the offer, not knowing what it was, and, much to my surprise, a police patrol car came to pick me up at home that night. As things turned out, he was a Deputy Chief of Police in St. Louis.

I was hooked. After a fascinating tour of duty that night, I accepted repeated offers to join him at work and, in all, spent nearly 2,000 hours on patrol over the next two years. It was so interested, in fact, that I began reading what little literature there was on crime and delinquency. It was, after all, 1972 and crime had not yet surfaced as a major social problem in St. Louis nor in the United States.

I wrote a proposal for a course on juvenile delinquency and submitted it through channels at the university. It was approved and I was off and running. I later developed a course on criminology and another on corrections.

A Parting of Ways

The tenure committee in the Department of Sociology at UMSL was intent on having everyone in the department emphasize publishing. Although I had only been teaching for two years, I knew my cup of tea was teaching, discovering new ways to communicate, developing contacts in the community which would support field trips, bringing community practitioners into the classroom and interviewing them, etc. I was not interested in publishing at that point in my career. While at Washington University, a paper I had written for Dr. Horowitz was published in the International Journal of Gerontology (now the Journal of Applied Gerontology) and, while I was excited about that, I did not think it was what I wanted to emphasize in the initial stage of my career.

In time, I was invited to an annual meeting of the Tenure Committee and was asked how I would ideally divide my work time. I said "I'd spend about 75% on teaching and related activities, 20% on service and the remaining 5% on research." I went home that night and, over the course of the next week, sent over 130 letters to other departments in hopes of finding another job.

As it turned out, that was a timely thing to do. My hunch was right. I received a notice in the mail a few days after the meeting with the Tenure Committee stating that my contract at UMSL would not be renewed the following year. Over the course of the next few weeks nearly 80% of the departments to which I wrote responded to my inquiry about a job. I interviewed with several of them, had four offers, and accepted one from Ball State University (Muncie, IN).

"Can you help us build a criminal justice program?"

The department of Sociology and Social Work at Ball State was active, diverse and clearly emphasized teaching over publishing. I didn't mind doing research - I still find that activity very rewarding. But the pressure to publish was now off, and I was relieved.

I was also set free to create a criminal justice program. I wrote several new courses and, with the aid of two other faculty (Lionel Neiman and Steve Brodt), we built a criminal justice program within the department. The Social Work faculty left to create their own department.

With over 900 majors in the department, 400 left to go with social work. The then seven full time faculty teaching criminal justice (including myself) left to create their own department (Criminal Justice and Corrections - CJC). We had built a strong and popular program, but sociology was left with only 50 majors and about 10 faculty.

In time, the new CJC department attracted 450 majors, nearly 400 minors and about 100 Associate of Arts students - the second or third largest undergraduate program at Ball State. I was reading everything on criminal justice and criminology I could get my hands on, spent one-fourth of my time teaching in the Indiana State Penitentiary (for a period of six years), took consulting positions with the state's Department of Corrections and our local police department and got as involved in criminal justice as I could.

"Can you help build a criminal justice program for us, too?"

It took seven years (from 1972 to 1979) to build the criminal justice curriculum within the Department of Sociology at Ball State. The Criminal Justice and Criminology (CJC) Department was created in 1979 and moved to a building away from sociology. I took the position of Administrative Assistant of the department and also served as Internship Supervisor. After three years in those positions I returned to teaching full time.

In 1983 I spent a semester in London teaching for Ball State in its London Program and became hooked on traveling in Europe. Since that time I've lived in a number of cities throughout Europe for a total of about 4 years (London, Rome, Paris, Venice, Amsterdam, Vienna, others).

Since the early 1970s I have been presenting papers at most of the annual meetings of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (ACJS), at a few of the American Society of Criminology (ASC) meetings, and at various regional sociology and criminal justice meetings. While attending the 1986 annual meeting of the ACJS in Orlando, Florida, I was approached by the then Head of the Department of Sociology at Missouri State University (Missouri State). I met with him and was surprised to find that Missouri State had no criminal justice program. They were interested in hiring someone to create one. I was told the sociology program was suffering - enrollments were down from over 200 majors in the mid 1970s to only 41 in 1985 and that there were 9 sociology faculty on staff. The department wanted to build two "applied" programs, one in criminal justice and another in social gerontology.

I accepted an offer to visit the campus and, when an employment offer was officially made, I accepted it. I joined the faculty in 1986 and began the task of building an interest in a criminal justice program among students, faculty and administration. With the help of several other sociology faculty, I designed a curriculum, created several new courses, prepared the needed paperwork and, in time, took the position of Coordinator of the new Criminal Justice Studies (CJS) program.

By 1996 we had 450 students in the CJS program. We had created a Minor in CJS rather than a major on the belief that, with this design, graduates of the program would major in another field (i.e., communications, psychology, political science) and would be stronger criminal justice professionals for it. It worked. Graduates had no trouble finding jobs in the field and I knew that, if they left the field for any reason, they had another degree upon which they could rely to build an alternate career.

Many of the CJS students chose sociology as their major and, as a result, the number of sociology majors increased to 225. The pressure was on and the faculty of 9 sociologists became 10, then 11 and capped out in 1995 at 16. Times were very good.

"I think it's time for me to move on."

By 1997 I was ready to move on. I resigned as Coordinator of the Criminal Justice Studies Program so that I could return to fulltime teaching, research, and community service. Since that time I've created two new courses (The Gang Phenomenon, Juvenile Delinquency and the Juvenile Justice System) and finished a four year research project on street gangs.

Vita  | AdviseNet | CRM | Missouri State | E-mail Dr Carlie