Date: Thu, 15 May 1997 07:10:53 -0600 (MDT)
Message-Id: <1.5.4.16.19970515091027.30d7407e@pop.uvm.edu>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
To: socgrad@csf.colorado.edu
From: TR Young <TR.Young@uvm.edu>
Subject: Richard Quinney
Cc: ahs-talk@ncsu.edu
I have recieved news from Richard Quinney.  He will retire
from Northern Illinois as of 31 December this year.  But,
with a bit of luck, he will not retire from the quest for
knowledge, wisdom and a being-at-home-in-the-world...which
is his present and future work.

Richard is undecided about how he will pursue this larger,
wiser goal.  I will write to him today suggesting he adopt
my game plan...to visit, meet and get to know as many faculty
and students in as many places as possible the next 10 or
20 years...as health and energy permit.  For me, such visit
is enlivening.  While I am always glad to come home again; and
while moving and settling into new places with new challenges
is a high-energy process, still the students I meet make it
all worth while...all the small problems.

I expect that Quinney would find the same joie d'vivre as do
I find on such new faculties.

For my generation, Richard has been inspiration.  He gave to
American Criminology, a larger and more sociological dimension.
While others were teaching a narrow and one-sided social psychology,
Quinney was looking at the larger political economies in which
law was produced, policing was pre-shaped and prisons were
built.  While most criminologists subscribed to punishment
as the solution to crime, Quinney taught that the proper
path toward a low-crime society involved peace-making more than
infliction of pain.

So...my suggestion to those of you on the three networks to which
I send this post, is that you consider the possibility of inviting
Richard Quinney to join your faculty for a semester and to share
his gentle wisdoms with your students; graduate and undergraduate
alike.  

For that to happen, a faculty needs to know that Richard has gone
beyond criminology...such a faculty would have to be a bit more
flexible in course design and course content than would be the
case for most visiting professors.  Quinney uses photography as
both a means and a method to the knowing of a social life world.
Quinney is now more oriented to the sociology of peace than that of
crime and punishment; to a knowledge process aimed more at '...empathy
and caring than explanation and mastery.'  In responding to a 
friendly critic, Richard has accepted that the old, now-of-date
mission of the knowledge process; that of a spectator approach, of 
'...knowledge at a distance...' was more a source of alienation
and despair than affirmation and joie d'vivre.  He now sees '...
knowledge as a practical social skill...' more so than as an
intellectual enterprize.   As do I...as do all affirmative post-
modern scholars and writers.

I have good reason to think that Richard would be most receptive to an
invitation at a university with a rich cultural and artistic community
from which to draw inspiration and to which to give of his own talent
in such endeavor.  Most universities support a creative spirit such
as his; most would find him, as do I, a national treasure from which
to upon and to which to make contribution.  I expect that good weather
and adequate accomodations would have especial appeal to Richard and
his wife.

If one is a graduate student, one might print out this post and give
it to the proper committee or to a friendly faculty person.  I think
you might find such an effort to be a source of satsifaction for the
rest of your life.

                                                   TR Young
TR Young
Sociology
U/Vermont
TR.Young@uvm.edu