College President’s Series:
President Jeremy Travis,
John Jay College of Criminal Justice
By Joan Baum, Ph.D.
Jeremy Travis, in office barely six months as John Jay College of Criminal Justice’s fourth president, talks with the consummate ease and reflective intelligence of a long-time member of the CUNY administration. Perhaps that’s because the issues that matter to him have been his passion all his professional life—strengthening research and education policy in the criminal justice system. His credentials are awe inspiring but no less so than his vision for John Jay. A cum laude J.D. from New York University School of Law, with an M.P.A. from NYU’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service (not to mention a B.A. from Yale), President Travis could boast—though that’s not the way with this extremely articulate, focused scholar-intellectual—a long list of prestigious and influential positions. These include being Senior Fellow at the Justice Policy Center at Washington D. C.’s Urban Institute, director of the National Institute of Justice under Clinton, Deputy Commissioner for Legal Matters for the New York City Police Department, Chief Counsel to the U.S. House Judiciary Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, when it was chaired by Charles Schumer, and special counsel and advisor to various law enforcement agencies in the city and state. He clerked for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, worked for the Legal Aid Society and spent six years at the highly regarded Vera Institute of Justice, managing demonstration programs on bail reform, judicial decision making and victim-witness assistance. He cites Benjamin Ward, former NYC Police Commissioner, as an especially important mentor, the one who turned him from considerations of private practice back to city government and urban issues in criminal justice. The resume discussion could go on but President Travis prefers to talk about initiatives for John Jay. He’s delighted, he says, to cap his career at a college he sees potentially as “the premier research institution on criminal justice in the world.”
He notes the timeliness of moving the John Jay mission ahead: crime at its lowest in decades, incarceration rates at their highest, consideration of new terrorism policies following 9/11, and continuing community problems that wind up as criminal justice problems, such as addiction. Central in all his efforts, he says, and reflecting Chancellor Goldstein’s emphasis on CUNY as a renewed intellectual force in higher education, will be an aggressive pursuit of government and private funding to assist in the strengthening of the science side of forensics at John Jay. A new and enlarged Office for Professional Studies will integrate the college’s continuing education, training and certificate programs with graduate offerings, combining policy and practice that will more readily signify John Jay as a “scholar-practitioner institution.” His determination to have research at John Jay play an even greater role than it does now will soon be realized in two new centers he has just established: one on crime patrol strategies, the other on race, crime and justice. “We have the unique opportunity to do this right.”
Though the new concentrations will involve expanding the Ph.D., all levels at the college will benefit from a sharper focus on science. Remember Janet Reno? She had a degree in chemistry, he points out. And yes, the president concedes with a knowing smile, that students are attracted to John Jay often because of what they see on T.V. especially the role of DNA. He is delighted, however, to know that at John Jay students will have even more opportunity to pursue forensic science and forensic psychology and learn, for example, how to separate solid science from “junk” science, which unfortunately insinuates itself as so-called evidence in too many legal proceedings. If students say they want to be lawyers, they will also find a much more rigorous and real-world curriculum. President Travis has an impressive way of turning questions about curricula into broader considerations about policy. Will John Jay continue to address problems of reentry for newly released prisoners? Absolutely. The need to attend more effectively to education, particularly of the young people in prison, is a main interest and one that is at the center of his soon-to-be-released new book, But They All Come Back. Talk about policy and practice, here’s a cool, dynamic college president who does it all.#
.jpg)