By: Annetta Miller
Joe Yocum, an adjunct professor and coordinator in the criminal justice program at Hamilton College - Lincoln, is called
Sheriff Joe by most of his colleagues. In addition to his teaching duties, Joe is Sheriff of Seward County, Nebraska, a rural county located near Lincoln. But along with his sheriff’s hat and his teacher’s hat, Joe also wears another hat: that of a Kaplan University Gift of Knowledge (GOK) student.
GOK offers substantial discounts to employees who want to start or continue their education while working for KHE. With the help of the program, Joe received a Master’s of Science in Criminal Justice on August 4th, graduating with a 4.0 grade average.
Online Success Story
Says Joe, it has been great for me. I couldn’t go to a traditional daytime school because of the requirements of my job, so the flexibility online education offers held a big allure. It was easy to come home from work at ten o’clock at night, read through my assignments, converse with my fellow students, and complete my class work. The instructors that I had the pleasure to work with were just phenomenal. They guided me, coached me and encouraged me throughout the entire process.
In his Hamilton College job, Joe is an adjunct professor and coordinates eight criminal justice adjuncts, each of them with a particular expertise. We have specialists in white collar crime, criminal law, juvenile delinquency, and many other fields. I’m surrounded by an incredible group of people. Most of them are current police officers who are older and responsible, and have a great deal to share with the students.
Real Life Lessons
In his role as sheriff, Joe supervises fifteen deputies who work to protect the citizens of Seward, a county comprised of several small villages, most of which lack their own police forces. As with many rural areas in the Midwest today, Joe says, Seward battles its share of methamphetamine dealing as well as the crimes related to it. Dealers like rural areas, because there are fewer people around and it’s easier for them to hide what they’re doing, he says.
He loves to fill his classes with real-life stories from his 25 years in law enforcement.
For example, to teach about police investigations, he tells students about the time he was called upon to investigate a case of a partially decomposed body found along the roadside. Working closely at the scene with CSI technicians including entomologists, he assisted in identifying the body as that of a truck driver that had been reported missing a week earlier. As a result of canvassing the rural area, he narrowed down the time of death that ultimately helped investigators identify suspects involved in the gruesome murder. The two suspects were later caught and pleaded guilty to killing the trucker at a truck stop and dumping his body in Seward County.
Joe, whose KU Academic Advisor was Tim Fritz, says he is not content to stop with his master’s degree. He’s hoping that KU will one day offer a doctorate program, and when they do, he’s signing up. A doctorate, he says, would allow him to expand his expertise and teach graduate courses at Hamilton. I look forward to learning with KU in the future, he says.