Criminology department created

The University launched the Ivy League's first undergraduate program in criminology last Thursday, creating a new major in the College of Arts and Sciences to complement the masters and doctoral programs already available at Penn through the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology.

"We really began thinking about it seriously in the fall," School of Arts and Sciences Dean Samuel Preston said, noting that expanding the school with the criminology department was "far and away the most attractive" means of meeting increased student demand for social science programs.

"The number of majors in the social sciences is up by 46 percent in the SAS in the last decade," Preston said. "In the same time, the faculty side had shrunk a little bit."

To be chaired by Jerry Lee Center director Lawrence Sherman, the department will also take a bite out of the shortage of courses satisfying the College's quantitative reasoning requirement.

"At least one, and perhaps three or four courses [will be offered] that would satisfy the quantitative skills requirement -- for example, studying crime mapping" Sherman said, noting that "very complicated statistical models are used" to predict and prevent crime.

President of the International Society of Criminology and past president of the American Society of Criminology, Sherman said that the University's commitment to multidisciplinary, interschool cooperation jives well with criminology's interdisciplinary nature.

"Criminology, I think, is very similar to medicine, to agriculture and even engineering," Sherman said, adding that "one thing we hope to develop very early is a strong relationship with the Law School, in which we have Law professors teaching undergraduate courses."

Sherman also noted that School of Social Work Dean Richard Gelles and Wharton Legal Studies Professor William Laufer are already involved with the criminology program.

"That's something that you find at Penn that you wouldn't find at Harvard or Princeton," he said.

Penn's commitment to the discipline, the three year old Jerry Lee Center aside, is not new Preston said.

"The most distinguished criminologists of their generation one or two generations ago were at Penn," Preston said. "We already have the tradition, it just hasn't been elevated to the status of a department until now."

Though major requirements have not yet been decided, the College may graduate its first criminology majors in as few as two years, according to Sherman.

"We will need at least a year to get a major approved, but we're expecting that students would be able to graduate as early as a year after that," he said.

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