This fall Pepperdine School of Law welcomed Gregory McNeal as an associate law professor along with his impressive knowledge on global and domestic security.
His involvement in various departments of U.S. national security provides a fresh perspective on this widely debated matter including the controversial new “pat down” procedures at airports.
He has only been at Pepperdine for one semester but he has made a notable impression on his students.
“He is so full of energy… said criminal ethics student Tiffany Apel. He has a way of engaging the entire class keeping the material complex enough to maintain our interest but explains it well enough so that no one gets lost in his lectures.”
A native of New Jersey McNeal earned his undergraduate degree in international relations from Lehigh University followed by a masters with distinction from American University. After he served in the Army McNeal received his law degree from Case Western Reserve University with an honors concentration in international law.
In law school McNeal became his professor’s research assistant in international criminal law and upon graduation he landed a job with the United States Department of Justice where he co-directed a counterterrorism program.
Currently he is a doctoral candidate at Penn State.
McNeal’s area of expertise is relevant to this heightened time of national controversy concerning the Transportation Security Administration’s implementation of Advanced Imaging Technology.
Dubbed the “naked body scanner” and “electronic strip search the AIT produces a naked” X-ray image of the passenger’s body. And for travelers who “opt out” of this system TSA agents will perform an “enhanced” pat down using their palms and fingers to search passengers’ genitals and other sensitive areas.
“These are really bad choices to put people in McNeal stated. Searching everyone is going too far.” However McNeal note that the same privacy groups who were opposed to the scanners and pat downs are also opposed to letting homeland security share information about passengers with TSA.
He explained that the information would include a passenger’s home address telephone number e-mail and travel history— details that airlines have already processed and have readily available.
“The custom service has information about people who might be suspected terrorists. Those people can be searched at the border when they enter the United States he said. But that information cannot be provided to TSA to single people out for additional screening because privacy groups have said this is an invasion of privacy.
“That’s not racial profiling [and] it’s not religious profiling. It’s using information to connect up travel patterns and phone calls between suspected terrorists and unknown people and isolate people and scan them and search them.
“That’s something we do at the border but we can’t do at a TSA checkpoint because of the opposition of civil liberties groups.”
As an outcry against the new security procedures groups such as We Won’t Fly are prompting travelers to “Stop flying until the scanners and gropers are gone.”
But McNeal believes these attempts only bring more attention to the issue and does not present a solution. He urges travelers to lobby Congress appealing that TSA should be using passenger information to screen suspicious people.
Although the United States has continually pushed for higher security in airports mass transit systems remain vulnerable to attack.
“We’re either going to face the circumstance eventually where there’s enhanced scrutiny to use those forms of travel or we need to start developing bigger intelligence pictures about individuals trying to connect information about phone calls their transactions and whatnot McNeal said.
The hardest to prevent is the person who’s not on our radar screen who today decides to commit an act of terrorism perhaps inspired by online terrorists websites or radicalized in some way that we don’t have information about…That’s part of living in a free society is that there are always vulnerabilities.”
Although the recent terrorism developments have kept McNeal busy he prioritizes his role as an educator. “I think this is my calling he said. I would sit in class thinking ‘I can do that— and do it better.”
He remembers his undergraduate days and advises students find the balance between work and play. “It’s easier to say other things are easier [than studying and doing work] McNeal admitted. I was involved in five organizations as an undergrad and I thought I could get away with OK grades. But later I had to work a lot harder…It comes back to bite you.”
But it seems that McNeal has a natural skill in teaching. “It is evident that he spent a good deal of time putting the syllabus together as he draws his material from many different sources— law review articles cases textbooks newspaper articles online blogs and video— which is rare for law school classes student Jessie Johnston explained. Most professors just use a textbook and go over cases.”
Before teaching at Pepperdine McNeal visited the campus as a keynote speaker. But it wasn’t just the breathtaking views and reputation of the school that attracted him to Pepperdine. “I went to get more coffee and lunches in one day at Pepperdine than I did in the past three years when I taught elsewhere. If they treated their guests like this I could only imagine how they treated their colleagues and students.”
And like Pepperdine’s mission of “strengthening lives for purpose service and leadership McNeal desires to serve his students and colleagues. He explains that his faith and family are part of what grounds me. “Everything I believe is all drawn from Scripture he added. It allows me to admit when I’m wrong and to live in humility [by] understanding that I am fallible and all my accomplishments are not of me.”
McNeal gives practical advice to undergraduate students considering graduate school. “Don’t put your dreams on hold he said. If you know you want to be a lawyer go to law school right away. But graduate school is not the place to figure things out.” Otherwise he suggests students either work or serve the community upon graduation.
Although McNeal says that finding the work-life balance is still difficult for him students appreciate his dedication to teaching. “He has a strong integration of academic expertise with real-world experience student Chris Rhyme explained. He brings selected texts to life and challenges students to wade into the hard realities of ethical criminal practice.”
Rhyme along with McNeal’s other students agree that “in a nutshell [Professor McNeal] is a likable relevant and interesting professor who promises to be a student favorite for years to come.”