Criminology, criminal justice, and sociology lost a great spirit last week when Joan McCord passed away at her home on February 24. To those who knew her, it would come as no surprise that Joan died with a book and a book chapter in press; she was also supervising three doctoral dissertations at Temple.

Her resume is an essay in sterling accomplishments, and one would imagine it to be the result of a near perfect academic life. She co-wrote, edited, or co-edited twelve volumes starting in 1956 on topics ranging from delinquency to alcoholism to violence in the inner city to criminological theory to crime prevention. Her journal articles, and book chapters totaled an astonishing one hundred and twenty seven, some co-written with the greatest minds in our fields--both present and past. In the later years of her career, she traveled and lectured extensively, and she received numerous prestigious awards, including the American Society of Criminology’s Sutherland Award and the International Society of Criminology awarded her the Prix Emile Durkheim Award. She worked with the National Academy of Sciences on law and justice issues, and in 2002, the Society on Adolescence awarded her its Social Policy Best Journal Article Award.

Her most prescient and timeless body of scholarship revisits Hippocrates’ classic caution: “As to diseases, make a habit of two things—to help, or at least to do no harm.”

Her now classic evaluation of the Cambridge-Somerville Project detailed how an array of well intentioned social work interventions not only do failed to prevent delinquency but, in fact, harmed those who received the services. In that classic piece of painstaking evaluation research, she found that the boys in the control group actually fared better long term than their counterparts in the treatment group nearly twenty years after the ambitious project ended. It was to be a lesson she never forgot. She became a passionate advocate for true experimental design in a way that current scholars, absorbed by new issues and concerns, may have a hard time embracing. Her insights, though, are critical, and I would argue particularly relevant at a time when many politically popular programs that claim to incorporate “best practices” are being crafted by our colleagues (some of whom are making a considerable amount of money in the bargain), often with less than disinterested evaluations somewhere in the mix. In times like these, the humbling lessons learned from her evaluation of the Cambridge-Somerville Project are ones we forget at our peril.

In 1987, Joan McCord was elected the President of the American Society of Criminology—in her own words, “the first woman to have the honor” (McCord, 2002: 105). Herein lies the story within the story. The last real conversation I had with Joan, she urged me to read an autobiographical essay that she’d just finished, “Learning How to Learn and it Sequelae.” I wish I’d taken her advice then, for the chapter displayed a side of Joan’s life I would never have guessed based on a reading of her resume.

In that essay I learned that the perfect academic life that Joan dreamed of as a young woman was not hers without a great deal of struggle. She writes of meeting her husband of many years while still in high school in Arizona; together they attended Stanford, married while undergraduates, and, upon graduation “agreed that I would support [my husband] while he got his credentials before going on for my own.”

Despite her love for philosophy, she put her own career on hold, traveled with her husband to Harvard, and took a position teaching sixth graders in Concord, Massachusetts in the mid-fifties. As a relentless scholar, while teaching she began a focus on youthful aggression that would result in her first book. Ultimately, she followed her husband back to Stanford, where he finds a teaching position. Hoping to study philosophy there, she received a fellowship. He, though, objected to her attempts to have a career, and at the same time “began drinking heavily and became abusive.” It was during this period that “not wanting to be in the middle of a domestic argument, the Stanford philosophy department withdrew its financial support for me.” (McCord, 2002: 101). About all these experiences, she would write, “I sometimes wonder whether women today realize how different it is both to have support from other women and to have a legal system that allows for their independence.”

Ultimately, McCord sought a divorce, and “needing to support myself and two sons,” she could not continue her studies. She took in boarders, tought tennis, and tutored--esperiencing a dramatic loss in status from faculty wife to single mother. But, true to form, she persisted, got another fellowship, this time in the social sciences, and, in fact, made the study of “the impact of status” the material for her Ph.D. dissertation. She graduated in June of 1968, a time “before there were any legal barriers to discrimination against women, so it was particularly difficult for me to find employment” (McCord, 2002: 103). Ultimately, she finds a position at an engineering college, Drexel, though an old friend from Harvard. She would spend nearly twenty years there—and true to form she flourished.

The rest of the tale takes us to where we began; with her amazing life as an academic. At the end of her essay, she concludes with advice for a next generation of scholars. Her words not only sum up her life but also provide us with very wise counsel:

I would urge women to obtain credentials so they can find interesting things to do, activities that will not be heavily dependent on events over which they will have little control. I would not trade being a mother for any opportunity at all, though I recognize that a state for being a parent is far from universal. I would suggest to anyone considering academe, male or female, that it is better to work on projects you believe to be important than to select with an eye to winning praise or prizes.” (McCord , 2002: 107)

Aloha, Joan

Meda Chesney-Lind

University of Hawaii at Manoa

March 2, 2004.

References:

McCord, Joan. 2002. “Learning How to Learn and Its Sequelae.” In Lessons in Criminology. Gilbert Geis and Mary Dodge (Eds.). Cincinnati: Anderson Publishing.