Sociologist, former patrol officer featured at next Author Talk at LaGrange Memorial Library

Published 9:18 am Sunday, January 14, 2024

A sociologist and a former patrol officer is the next speaker in the Author Talk series sponsored by Friends of LaGrange Memorial Library.

Neil Gross, a professor of sociology at Colby College in Maine, is best known for his work on policing, higher education, politics and pragmatism. His latest book is ”Walk the Walk: How Three Police Chiefs Defied the Odds and Changed Cop Culture.”

The event at 10:30 a.m. Saturday, Jan. 20, is in the community room at the library at 115 Alford St. and is held in conjunction with Racial Trustbuilding. It is free and open to the public.

A frequent contributor to the New York Times, Gross holds a bachelor’s degree in legal studies from the University of California Berkeley and received a doctorate in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Before joining the Colby faculty in 2015, Gross taught at the University of Southern California, Harvard, the University of British Columbia and Princeton.

After college, Gross served as a police officer in California and attended the University of Wisconsin for graduate school in part because one of the leading scholars of police reform, Herman Goldstein, taught there at the time. Gross’s academic interests led him in other directions for more than two decades, but he never gave up the goal of doing research that might help improve American policing and advance the cause of justice.