Laurence Barton more commonly known as Larry Barton is an American risk management consultant, author and professor. He served as the president of The American College from 2003 to 2013. Concurrent with his role at The American College, he is an expert guest speaker at The FBI Academy and at The U.S. Marshals Service.
Barton is considered an expert in threat assessment and workplace violence prevention and mitigation. Since 1987, he has worked as consultant with many organizations for mitigating threats in their workplace. He has written five books and has contributed chapters to several others. Since 2005, he has been on the editorial board of Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management and, since 2007 on the Editorial Board of Violence and Gender.
Early life and education
Barton graduated from Arlington Catholic High School in Massachusetts in 1974 and received his AB in Speech and Communications from Boston College in 1978. In 1979, he joined Boston College as adjunct professor of communications. While working at the Boston College, he enrolled for Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy (M.A.L.D.) in International Business at Tufts University, completing his degree in 1981. In 1983, he received his Ph.D. from Boston University in International Relations and Public Policy.
Career
Barton continued teaching at the Boston College till 1986 and joined the Harvard Business School as lecturer in Management Communication in 1987. While he was teaching at Harvard Business School, he noticed that during the market's crash, many of his students who were Wall Street executives remained stoic. Their response to the market crash, impressed Barton and he decided to study how executive teams responded to crises. Subsequently, he started focusing his research and work on crisis and threat management. He left Harvard in 1989 and joined University of Nevada, Las Vegas as associate professor of Management. He received three First Interstate Bank research grants on crisis management. After leaving UNLV in 1993, he joined Pennsylvania State University in 1994 as associate professor of Management and Organization.
In 1995, Barton joined Motorola as Vice President of Issues Management and later joined the company's semiconductor products sector where he managed regional teams in London, Geneva, Hong Kong and Tokyo. In 1999, he left Motorola to join DeVry University as the president and chief academic and business officer and served there for two years, when in 2001, he joined the Heald College as president and CEO.
Barton joined The American College in 2003 as the President and CEO. He was later endowed the O. Alfred Granum Chair at the institute. He became a frequent, highly ranked guest speaker in workplace violence prevention and crisis leadership at The FBI Academy starting in 2007 and at The US Marshals Service in 2013.
Since 1987, Barton has also worked as threat and workplace violence consultant. As a consultant he was worked with numerous companies, non-profit institutions and law enforcement agencies on issues involving threats by employees and other stakeholders of the organization. He has served on the editorial board of the Journal of Business and Economic Perspectives at the University of Tennessee since 1995 and Gender and Violence since 2013.
In January, 2017, Barton was named Distinguished Professor of Crisis Management and Public Safety at the University of Central Florida (UCF) where he leads academic and public/private partnerships on issues of concerns to corporations, law enforcement agencies and non-profit institutions. today.ucf.edu/ucf-hires-crisis-management-public-safety-pioneer. Also, see http://www.nicholsonstudentmedia.com/life/ucf-distinguished-professor-brings-decades-of-public-safety-experience-to-campus/article_ecc272be-1f31-11eb-a906-033051b52e84.html
In 2011, he received his Chartered Advisor in Philanthropy from The American College. today.ucf.edu/ucf-hires-crisis-management-public-safety-pioneer