Despite a high level of student interest, some criminal justice educators say their subject remains the stepchild of traditional academia, encountering resistance from the old guard and pressure from university administrations that want "cash cow" programs high on enrollment, but low on substance.

"Criminal justice is a cash cow for most administrations," said Dr. Tom O'Connor, a criminal justice professor at the University of North Carolina Wesleyan. "Some schools take the revenue they make from criminal justice and they don't reinvest it back into the department. They use it to salvage another department that has been foundering."

Criminal justice has become so attractive to students, some universities group the subject with less popular academic departments in order to boost the enrollment, according to O'Connor. More students mean more tuition money. But James Alan Fox, a nationally renowned criminologist from Northeastern University, said he would prefer not to sacrifice quality for quantity.  

"It is important in a criminal justice program to maintain standards," he said. "If there is pressure [from the administration] to be a cash cow and accept students who aren't qualified, it does a disservice to the field."

Fox said that while he was dean of Northeastern's College of Criminal Justice, he easily could have doubled the size of the program by lowering academic standards, thereby doubling tuition revenue.

"I had a tremendous number of applications but I was opposed to expanding the department [and taking in less qualified students]. I wasn't under pressure to expand at Northeastern ... but I think the situation may be different at other universities."

While Fox may have a unique situation at Northeastern because of his program's size and notoriety (approximately 1000 students majoring in criminal justice), professors at smaller schools may have a more difficult time getting through to the administration.

"I know that most people would be surprised at the lack of resources it [criminal justice] gets at some places," said O'Connor, whose school, UNC Wesleyan, has a much smaller enrollment than Northeastern. "A criminal justice class sometimes needs a laboratory and the type of equipment that any chemistry class would require. But in criminal justice, you have to fight for every piece of equipment you get... It's a shame."

Professor Philip Reichel of the University of Northern Colorado said that practitioners of more traditional academic disciplines, who often hold the purse strings when it comes to departmental funding, have a tendency to see criminal justice students as law enforcement officers in training, when in fact, there is much more to it.

"There is still a kind of cop shop image among the more traditional disciplines," he said. "Not many people realize how diverse criminal justice really is: psychology, corrections, victims services, forensics, regular law enforcement."

Professor James LeBeau of Southern Illinois University in Carbondale said many people who study more traditional disciplines have the misconception that criminal justice is always taught with a vocational approach.

"There is an applied component aspect to what we do that includes fieldwork," he said, referring to the various internships SIU students obtain at prisons and law enforcement agencies. "But, students also get it [criminal justice education] in the form of a liberal arts education. I don't teach you how to be a cop. I teach you how to think."

Schools like SIU and Northeastern may not teach students how to search prison cells or make arrests, but professors at both institutions say students learn more about the nature of the American justice system, the concept of public safety, and the overall human condition by taking classes in a liberal arts framework that stresses reading and writing.

"There is a big difference between training and education," said Fox, who advocated Northeastern's liberal arts approach. "We don't teach a class in traffic control... we are training leaders and decision-makers... you need a broad-based education."

The common misconception of criminal justice as nothing more than law enforcement training sometimes leads to prejudices among professors who teach in more esoteric disciplines, according to LeBeau.

"I once dealt with a sociology professor who would berate criminal justice students," he said. "The student who told me about it has since gone to do graduate work in the Ivy League, so it wasn't academic [criticism]. Some people take an extreme leftist perspective and see us as fascists because, in criminal justice, we look at things that make people uncomfortable. That is a lot to put on the shoulders of a college student."

The prejudicial attitude among the old guard has faded in recent years as a result of criminal justice educators asserting their independence from the traditional disciplines and demanding their own academic departments, according to LeBeau.

"In criminal justice we can view things synoptically," he said. "Traditional disciplines are very narrow and we bring a different perspective to them... criminal justice needs its own department."

But even at Northeastern, where criminal justice has its own college and accounts for nearly 10 percent of the university's student population, outside observers might get the impression that the school's administration is not allocating enough resources to its most popular subject.

"We are the largest major and have about 1,000 students and faculty is in the low 20s," said Fox, who lobbied the administration for funds to enlarge the faculty several years ago. "It does seem a little lopsided. Part of it is historical and part of it is that the cost it takes to deliver the education is [lower than other fields]. Our department is in a growth mode right now and we just launched a Ph.D. program last year."

While Northeastern did hire more criminal justice professors in 2003-2004, when compared to the large number of students, the number of instructors teaching criminal justice appears disproportionately small. Still, the program continues to thrive as one of the best in the country, following the general trend of growth in the field.

Employment experts have been categorizing criminal justice as a growth area ever since the Homeland Security boom following 9/11. And, due to the popularity of various forensic television shows, professors say students have been applying to criminal justice programs in record numbers. This exponential increase in enrollment has become known as "the CSI effect."

However, those students who are attracted to criminal justice only for its glamorous reputation do not last very long, according to Fox, who said that most students deciding on a career in the field do so partly because they believe it has more immediate positive impact than other subjects. Fox himself studied math in college before deciding on a career in criminology.

"It is a fascinating discipline with very real world applicability," he said. "The notion of justice... there is a feeling that what you are doing has some real social meaning."