About

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Neil Gross, a sociologist best known for his work on policing, higher education, politics, and pragmatism, is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology at Colby College in Maine. His new book is Walk the Walk: How Three Police Chiefs Defied the Odds and Changed Cop Culture (Henry Holt, 2023).

A frequent contributor to the New York Times, Gross holds a bachelor’s degree in legal studies from UC Berkeley and received his PhD 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 chose 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.