Our central purpose is to prepare students for academic careers through a balanced and integrated approach to the study of research, theory, justice systems, and educational issues. Rationale Informed opinion, including that of the Council of Graduate Schools of the Association of American Colleges and Universities and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, indicates that many Ph.D. programs are imbalanced, and they do not adequately prepare students for academic life as college and university professors.
Many programs narrowly focus on training researchers.
More broadly defined aspects of scholarship, especially the link between teaching and research, seldom get the attention they deserve. Our objective is to provide solid instruction in all aspects of scholarship. In 1994, our faculty passed a resolution to broaden the emphasis of our Ph.D. program. The purpose of the proposal was to move away for the traditional model of a Ph.D. as exclusively a research degree, which is based on the model developed early on in German universities, to a program that incorporates some of the ideas represented in the Preparing Future Faculty program promoted by the American Association of Colleges and Universities and supported by the Pew Foundation. It is expected that most students entering the Ph.D. program in Criminology will have already completed a master's degree in either Criminology or a closely related discipline.