Friday photos: Doug Cullinan
How about this blast from the past?
I caught up with a pal from long ago: Douglas Cullinan. Doug and I had next-door offices in Graham Hall at Northern Illinois University in the mid-1970s. Pat and I (and our daughter) moved to Virginia; Doug and his family moved to North Carolina. We and (and our families) kept up with each other, getting together frequently over the years. I got this photo during a 2026 visit together with about a dozen others friends.
Many readers of Special Education Today will recognize Doug’s name because of his outstanding academic work on the behavior disorders of children and youth. In the NIU days, Doug and I worked with our colleague—and pal—Michael Epstein on a couple of projects. One of the projects was a series of studies about cognitive tempo in children with disabilities (Epstein et al., 1977). Another was funded by a grant that Mike received to demonstrate applications of precision teaching and direct instruction with elementary students with learning disabilities (Lloyd et al., 1980). Another resulted in an introductory text book about behavior disorders (Cullinan et al., 1983) that Doug continued to update (e.g., Cullinan, 2007).
Mike and Doug continued to collaborate on many topics. In addition to conducting a host of studies about EBD (e.g., Cullinan et al., 1992, 2004), they developed the Scales for Assessing Emotional Disturbance (originally Epstein & Cullinan, 1998; Epstein et al., 2002) and co-founded and -edited the Journal of Emotional and Behavioral Disorders. Doug also collaborated with other leaders in special education (readers will recognize the names of some of them, including Jim Kauffman, Susan Osborne, Ed Sabornie), publishing valuable studies about the characteristics of students with disabilities (e.g., Sabornie et al., 2005.
When Doug and I were young professors at NIU, we sometimes played basketball together in the NIU gym that was just across the street from Graham Hall. There were 12-20 guys from the faculty and the local community who routinely met for brief games (“skirmishes” might be a better word) on the hardwood floors in the gym. After about 40 minutes, we could use the gym’s showers and return to our offices in time to continue preparation of our afternoon and evening classes. At that time I was dang near as tall as Doug. Because of differences in how close we were to the camera’s lens, the accompanying photo exaggerates the difference in our heights at this time, but you can see that I have shrunk (or Doug has grown) since those long-ago days of hoops. I still look up to him, and not just because of the difference in heights.
References
Cullinan, D. (2007). Students with emotional and behavioral disorders: An introduction for teachings and other helping professionals. Merrill.
Cullinan, D., Epstein, M. H., & Lloyd, J. W. (1983). Behavior disorders of children and adolescents. Prentice-Hall.
Cullinan, D., Epstein, M. H., & Sabornie, E. J. (1992). Selected characteristics of a national sample of seriously emotionally disturbed adolescents. Behavioral Disorders, 17(4), 273-280.
Cullinan, D., Osborne, S., & Epstein, M. H. (2004). Characteristics of emotional disturbance among female students. Remedial and Special Education, 25(5), 276-290.
Epstein, M. H., Cullinan, D., Pierce, C., Huscroft-D’Angelo, J., & Wery, J. (2020). Scales for assessing emotional disturbance. Austin, TX: Pro-Ed.
Epstein, M. H., Kauffman, J. M., & Cullinan, D. (1985). Patterns of maladjustment among the behaviorally disordered. II: Boys aged 6-11, boys aged 12-18, girls aged 6-11, and girls aged 12-18. Behavioral Disorders, 10(2), 125-135.
Epstein, M. H., Cullinan, D., & Lloyd, J. (1977). Reliability of the Matching Familiar Figures Test with learning-disabled children. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 45, 56-60.
Kauffman, J. M., Cullinan, D., & Epstein, M. H. (1987). Characteristics of students placed in special programs for the seriously emotionally disturbed. Behavioral Disorders, 12(3), 175-184.
Lloyd, J., Cullinan, D., Heins, E. D., & Epstein, M. H. (1980). Direct instruction: Effects on oral and written language comprehension. Learning Disability Quarterly, 3(4), 70-77.
Sabornie, E. J., Cullinan, D., Osborne, S. S., & Brock, L. B. (2005). Intellectual, academic, and behavioral functioning of students with high-incidence disabilities: A cross-categorical meta-analysis. Exceptional Children, 72(1), 47-63.