{"id":815,"date":"2012-03-03T19:12:13","date_gmt":"2012-03-04T00:12:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/?p=815"},"modified":"2012-03-03T19:12:13","modified_gmt":"2012-03-04T00:12:13","slug":"james-q-wilsons-hats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/2012\/03\/03\/james-q-wilsons-hats\/","title":{"rendered":"James Q. Wilson’s Hats"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Whenever I\u00a0get\u00a0to teach a criminology seminar<\/a>, I\u00a0always assign a little James Q. Wilson<\/a> in the very first week. Not his influential\u00a0writing on policing, mind you, but his powerful 1975 critique of academic criminology in Thinking about Crime. <\/em>With his death this week, I’m Thinking about Wilson. Though we came from very <\/em>different places, his work\u00a0reshaped my\u00a0approach and orientation as\u00a0a social scientist,\u00a0public criminologist, and TSP editor.<\/p>\n

In that book, Professor Wilson argued\u00a0powerfully and convincingly that (a) we lacked strong evidence about the most\u00a0critical\u00a0questions about crime policy; and, (b) we then fell back on our views as private citizens when we were consulted as crime experts:<\/p>\n

[W]hen social scientists were asked for advice by national policy-making bodies they could not respond with suggestions derived from and supported by their scholarly work … as a consequence such advice as was supplied tended to derive from their general political views as modified by their political and organizational interaction with those policy groups and their staffs (p. 49) … <\/em>I am confident that few social scientists made careful distinctions, when the chips were down, between what they knew as scholars and what they believed as citizens (p. 68). <\/em><\/p>\n

During my first heady days of graduate school, I was simultaneously\u00a0encountering similar ideas from Max Weber. But the spot-on power of James Q. Wilson’s\u00a0polemic hit\u00a0me like a line drive to the chest.\u00a0I immediately recognized myself as the sort of mushy-headed liberal who sought\u00a0a Ph.D. credential\u00a0as a bully pulpit for\u00a0offering well-intended but\u00a0baseless policy pronouncements.<\/p>\n

After digesting Thinking about Crime<\/em>,\u00a0though, I\u00a0resolved to conduct<\/em> the sort of research that would provide a sound evidentiary base for policy. I cannot claim complete fidelity to this approach (nor, I suppose, could Professor Wilson), but it led me\u00a0to research questions where I could\u00a0make myself useful\u00a0(e.g., employment and crime, felon disenfranchisement).\u00a0<\/p>\n

I’ve also\u00a0taken to heart Professor Wilson’s admonition to distinguish\u00a0the research-based opinions we present as experts from those derived from our private beliefs as citizens. My friends and students recognize this as the “hat” issue: I’ll\u00a0offer a private opinion on anything from\u00a0Tony Lama boots\u00a0to the Fed’s\u00a0quantitative easing policy, but I try to be a little\u00a0more circumspect when wearing the expert hat (which happens to be a brown fedora<\/a>).<\/p>\n

While I’ll stipulate to some important “Yeah, buts” here (recognizing \u00a0instances where\u00a0we all stray from\u00a0our high-minded ideals), Thinking about Crime <\/em>still\u00a0functions as\u00a0both critique and call to action — for individual careers and for whole disciplines.\u00a0Engaging pressing policy questions can give added meaning and purpose to our work. But such engagement is most legitimate and authoritatitive when it is founded on a real base of knowledge, interpretation,\u00a0and analysis.<\/p>\n

The good news is that “what we know as scholars” has changed much since Professor Wilson wrote in 1975. Social scientists are today assembling a more powerful,\u00a0relevant, and solidly\u00a0credible evidentiary base; we are thus better able to offer policy suggestions “derived from and supported by our scholarly work,” while also bringing much-needed global and historical perspectives\u00a0to contemporary debates that\u00a0would otherwise\u00a0be framed too narrowly.<\/p>\n

The ongoing challenge, for our\u00a0careers and\u00a0our disciplines,\u00a0is to\u00a0find new and effective ways to\u00a0bring\u00a0this knowledge and perspective to light. Hence, our mission<\/a> at TSP: to bring social scientific knowledge and information to broader public visibility and influence. And regardless of your opinion on James Q. Wilson’s\u00a0scholarship or\u00a0his\u00a0political inclinations, he\u00a0stood as\u00a0a\u00a0highly\u00a0visible and remarkably influential\u00a0public intellectual.<\/p>\n

photo by <\/span>lokarta<\/span><\/a> (creative commons license)<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Whenever I\u00a0get\u00a0to teach a criminology seminar, I\u00a0always assign a little James Q. Wilson in the very first week. Not his influential\u00a0writing on policing, mind you, but his powerful 1975 critique of academic criminology in Thinking about Crime. With his death this week, I’m Thinking about Wilson. Though we came from very different places, his work\u00a0reshaped […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":816,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/files\/2012\/03\/hats.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=815"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":825,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815\/revisions\/825"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}