The lingering effects of university budget cuts and a surge in student interest in the criminology and criminal justice major may force that department to make the campus’s most popular major a limited-enrollment program, department officials said.
Campuswide funding reductions nearly five years ago have continued to restrict the department’s ability to expand its faculty and provide funding for graduate fellowship programs, Criminology and Criminal Justice Department Chairwoman Sally Simpson said.
“We want to be good citizens to the campus and we’ve been good citizens,” she said. “But if we just keep getting larger and the resources are scarce, it is likely that we may move in some kind of direction to enable us to service our own majors.”
With the surge of criminology and criminal justice majors and nonmajors vying for the same courses, the department is also considering reducing class sizes and adding faculty members to accommodate the needs of both undergraduate and graduate students, she said.
However, Simpson said they are still considering whether they want to make the whole major limited-enrollment or just courses that are listed as electives for non-criminology and criminal justice majors.
Simpson said the recent popularity of criminal investigation television shows such as CSI have helped increase undergraduate numbers from 900 in 1989 to 1,700 today. However, what students learn in class is far from what is depicted in CSI, she said.
“TV shows are so popular, I think it may account for some of the increase in students,” Simpson said. “But I have to say that our department has been very proactive to let them know what it is that we actually do: an academic program that emphasizes statistics and research.”
Graduate student David Foster, who is a lecturer for CCJS 100: “Introduction to Criminal Justice,” said many students come into class with a misconception of what they will be studying.
“Most of my students take criminal justice classes not really knowing what it is,” Foster said. “They see CSI and they say, ‘This is great,’ and they think they will be doing crime scene investigation, and we’re talking about data and writing papers and they think, ‘When are we going to shoot guns?'”
Professor Gee Cosper, who teaches the popular course CCJS 330: “Contemporary Criminological Issues,” said that interest in his 50-seat class was so high eight years ago that he was forced to create two sections of 75 students each.
“I like the cap of 50 students in a class because they all get to participate, and when we start going to 75 and more, we lose that ability to communicate and get these students to get into debates with other students, or with me,” Cosper said. “In each class, in each semester, it is an ongoing waiting list of about 20 to 50 students.”
Simpson said an increase in the number of faculty could help the department shrink classes and allow all students to participate in classes they are interested in. This strategy would work especially well for introductory lecture classes, which can range from 100 to 400 students, Foster said.
“I would push very strongly to enlarge the faculty, but that is a campus decision,” Simpson said.
She said the high student-to-faculty ratio should merit more funding from the university.
Denise C. Gottfredson, director of graduate studies, said the graduate program also suffers from a lack of sufficient faculty, even though it was ranked No. 1 in the nation by U.S. News & World Report in April 2005.
And despite receiving nearly $2 million in federal, state and local government grants and contracts last year, the department can only use that money to fund research projects and pay for graduate assistants.
“We have a pretty thin faculty for the amount of students that we have, and that has always been a problem,” Gottfredson said. “We have always had to struggle to offer the number of courses we want to offer.”
Simpson and Foster said faculty who receive federal research grants from the government help alleviate the negative effects budget cuts have on the undergraduate and graduate programs.
“In our field, you are going to be working with [the government] or for them,” Foster said. “We are a science … so everything we get is from the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Justice, the Department of Justice, things like that.”
Contact reporter Roxana Hadadi at hadadidbk@gmail.com.
