50 years and counting Jackson Toby is still going strong Archived article from Sep 7, 2001 By Douglas Frank   Jackson Toby, professor of sociology and former director of the Institute for Criminological Research on the New Brunswick campus, is taking a well-deserved break from teaching -- after a half century on the job -- to see if retirement suits him. An unpaid leave this year, he hopes, will give him "another opportunity to make an agonizing reappraisal of what I want to do," he said in a recent Focus interview. Jackson Toby, who joined the Rutgers faculty in 1951, is known to generations of students as a lecturer of uncommon views. Photo by Joseph Somers At 75, Toby has been teaching since he arrived on the Banks, armed with a Harvard doctorate, in September 1951. With 50 years behind him, he may well possess the longest teaching career of anyone at Rutgers, and he's not really sure he wants to leave the classroom. Toby could still be found most weekdays last spring working on his unconventional opinions from his office in Lucy Stone Hall, holding office hours, teaching criminology or lecturing in one of the introductory sociology sections, where enrollment for his class once topped 450 students. One of his students from the early 1950s, Gene Young, remembers the sociologist as a "very animated lecturer who knew his stuff and presented it in a way that was easy for students to understand." Young went on to an administrative career at Rutgers, from which he retired in 1990. "When my former students started retiring, I knew I was getting on in years," reminisces Toby. "I did undertake an academic career without any intention of doing anything else. But I guess I never thought I'd be staying at Rutgers for 50 years." With his trademark wry humor, Toby denies being 75 years old, however. "I'm really only 18, but I'm imprisoned in the body of a person who's 75. I'm trying to get out, but it's very difficult," he observes. Toby stays in shape, both physically and mentally, by pacing up and down the aisles of Rutgers' classrooms, regaling students with stories of crime and punishment. Young notes that Toby insisted on the installation of a portable mike system in Scott Hall so he could get closer to his students. "He captured students' attention and kept them thinking. Thousands of students who had him as an instructor are the better for it and remember Rutgers with affection," notes Young. But popularity, with either students or professional colleagues, is not something Toby ever worried about much, particularly when propounding his outspoken views. His opinions, based on a sound foundation of facts, more often favor those who enforce the law rather than those who break it. "That's right, I'm politically incorrect," he admits. "When we don't know what to do with criminals, and they keep doing terrible things, we incarcerate them, because we don't have the skills to change them," he maintains. "I don't believe people are forced to be criminals. I believe they choose it. And we don't know how to make them stop. We can put them in a rehabilitation program and force them to learn how to lay bricks. But we can't force them to prefer laying bricks to burglarizing homes." That, he believes, requires coercive methods, "and I'm not suggesting that we use them." But even using "nice methods -- basketball courts, swimming pools and weight-lifting equipment in the reformatories -- you don't do so much reform." Toby has some equally out-of-the-mainstream thinking on the current problem of how to deal with school violence. In an April 2001 opinion article in The Weekly Standard, Toby argues that children who are miserable at school should be given more options, even if it's flipping hamburgers. "For those old enough to drop out and go to work, make it legitimate to stop school for a while and try a job in the real world," writes Toby, suggesting that fast-food restaurants such as McDonald's, which demand punctuality, quality control and good customer relations from employees, are more successful at helping workers to go on to better jobs than most government training programs. "Instead of locking the high school doors to prevent students from leaving and thereby inviting violence, we ought to let those who leave know that the doors are open when they are ready to return," he concludes. Over the years, Toby has written other opinion pieces on such hot topics as boot camps for violent students, teenage curfews, stolen-car joy rides, mass shootings, the rise and fall of crime rates, excessive leniency for youthful offenders, racial profiling and vandalism rampages. During his lengthy career specializing in criminology, particularly juvenile delinquency, he's written several books, a host of journal articles and other scholarly pieces continually expounding unconventional but well-reasoned arguments. One article he wrote in 1989 on disaffected high school students resulted in his being interviewed on the "Today Show" by Jane Pauley and on CBS-TV by Charlie Rose, his "15 minutes of fame," as he puts it. He had never thought of writing for a general audience, however, until January 1973, when he decided he wanted to "throw some cold water on the widespread liberal mantra that all it takes to rehabilitate delinquents is money." So he sent a piece to The New York Times and was surprised to find that the editors ran it. Over the next 10 years, The Times published 13 more of Toby's opinion pieces, and then, in 1983, he published an Op Ed piece in another paper, the Los Angeles Times. For the next 27 years, he pursued this "quixotic effort to enlighten the American public," publishing more than 40 opinion pieces in large-circulation newspapers like the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Post as well as The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and some smaller newspapers. These publishing efforts have been matched over the years by his love of teaching and a genuine concern for his students. "Now with e-mail," Toby says happily, "I have a lot of contact with students. Even though they don't come to my office hours, they are in touch with me." E-mail, in fact, has given him a different approach to encouraging his students. "I send out e-mail messages to students who do extremely well on the first hourly exam that I give, warning them that if they keep on doing what they have been doing they may get an 'A' in the course. I thought that it was good to be symmetrical. Warnings go out through the university for those who are in danger of failing, but I think my warnings are better than their warnings." Toby admits to thinking about retirement. "My initial attitude was that, well, I made 50 years; if I can't make another 50 years, what's the use? But now, I think maybe I can make another 50 years," he says with a hint of a smile.

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