Undergraduate / A welcome from the undergraduate chair
As Undergraduate Chair of the department, it is my pleasure to extend warm greetings to you and invite you to explore our Web site to learn more about educational opportunities in the rapidly growing criminal justice field. Members of the faculty strive to create an atmosphere of cooperation and collaboration with other faculty as well as students. We take pride in providing a unique, hospitable, and productive environment for undergraduate and graduate study in criminal justice.
Our approach to problems of crime and justice is an interdisciplinary one and this is reflected in a faculty with academic and professional backgrounds in a variety of fields including criminal law, criminology, psychology, sociology, geography, history, and research methods. The Department provides significant programmatic and academic flexibility for criminal justice majors, as well as for students seeking to fulfill an elective requirement, or students who have not made a career choice and are primarily looking for an excellent liberal arts education. To give students the skills to succeed in criminal justice and related fields, the structure of the undergraduate program is guided by six general liberal arts competency-based outcomes: critical analysis, disciplinary knowledge, effective communication, understanding human and cultural diversity, problem solving, and technological literacy.
Please explore our Web site for detailed information about our departmental core courses and large selection of elective course offerings, faculty profiles, undergraduate awards, major and minor requirements, and much more. Be sure to find out about the undergraduate criminal justice association, known as the Criminal Justice Society. This group of criminal justice undergraduates is very active on both our Main and Ambler campuses and is a valuable source of important information and events, career opportunities, and professional networking.
I hope that what you see in our web pages and related links leads you to share the excitement among our faculty and students about what Temple’s Department of Criminal Justice has to offer. We hope you will join us and lend your own special talents and energies to the task of increasing our understanding crime in order to do a better job of preventing and controlling it and securing justice for defendants, victims, and society.
Alan Harland, Ph.D.
Undergraduate Chair, Department of Criminal Justice