Ralph Larkin

Ralph Wild Larkin (born May 27, 1940) is an American sociologist and research consultant. He is the author of Suburban Youth in Cultural Crisis, Beyond Revolution: A New Theory of Social Movements (1986), and Comprehending Columbine (2007). He obtained his bachelor's degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara and received a master's degree in education from California State University at Northridge.

In 1969, Larkin received a Ph.D. in the sociology of education from the University of California, Los Angeles, subsequently teaching sociology at Rutgers University, Newark, in 1973. He met fellow sociologist Daniel A. Foss while teaching at Rutgers, and they later partnered in researching social movements. They co-authored a book together on social movements, and have jointly published studies in academic journals including Theory & Society, Sociological Analysis, and Social Text. Larkin is a senior research associate and adjunct professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, and owns his own consulting firm called Academic Research Consulting Service.

Early life and education Larkin was born in Los Angeles, California, on May 27, 1940, and obtained his bachelor's degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1961. They later wrote a more focused article dealing with Guru Maharaj Ji and his followers, which was published in Sociological Analysis, and a piece dealing with the vocabulary utilized in these social movements, in Social Text. Larkin and Foss' research has later been cited by books on both the 1960s subculture, and on movements of social change such as the middle class youth movement and other forms of counterculture and subculture.

Teaching Larkin taught in the Department of Sociology at the Newark College of Arts and Science and in the Graduate Sociology Department of Rutgers University, and was also a research associate at the Center for the Study of Evaluation, University of California, Los Angeles Graduate School of Education. After the publication of his work Comprehending Columbine (which discussed possible cultural and societal causes for the Columbine High School massacre), Larkin was contacted by the press for comment on the massacre, and discussed a judge's decision to seal information and tapes containing information about the killers. "The judge said the tapes were incendiary. We have plenty of things already that stimulate violence," said Larkin. Larkin was an adjunct professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. He ran his own consulting firm called Academic Research Consulting Service for 25 years.

School Rampage Shootings Following the Publication of Comprehending Columbine, Larkin published several articles about school rampage shootings, most notably, "The Columbine Legacy: Rampage Shootings as Political Acts, which provided data that offered an alternative explanation to the causes of school shootings against the dominant notion that the ultimate cause was mental illness. Although some rampage shooters demonstrated serious psychological problems, by defining school rampage shootings as merely "the kids were crazy," the social contexts of school shootings were ignored, even when shooters claimed their acts were motivated by revenge. The Columbine shootings were a cultural watershed because Klebold and Harris were media savvy and broadcast their intentions and reasons. The Columbine shootings were a consequence of conflict between outcasts and elites within the high school, where "jocks" ruled the halls and persecuted those who did not live up to a hypermasculine ideology that was tacitly supported by the school administration, dominated by former coaches. Subsequent rampage shooters and would-be shooters studied and imitated the Columbine shootings, making the political dimension increasingly obvious. In addition, to "The Columbine Legacy," Larkin (2011) wrote, "Masculinity, school shooters, and the control of violence," which chronicled the crisis of masculinity generated by the social movements of the 1960s and early 1970s, the cultural reactions against the rising masculine alternatives generated by the woman's and gay rights movements, and how the problematization of masculinity influenced the rise in rampage shootings, especially in the US. Drawing from his research on Columbine, he wrote, "Legitimated Adolescent Violence: Lessons from Columbine" that described how the social structural dimensions of a school and community can result in blindness to the predation of low status students and tacit acceptance of violence down the school social hierarchy. Finally, he analyzed how Elliot Rodger studied and learned how to become a rampage shooter before he terrorized a student enclave at the University of California, Santa Barbara, killing six persons and injuring several others before succumbing to a self-inflicted gun shot.

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