Victor Strecher graduated from Michigan State University’s School of Criminal Justice in 1953 and earned a Master in political science in 1957. In 1968, he received his PhD in Sociology from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. After his graduation in 1953, Strecher joined the MSU campus police unit as a detective. During this time, he also served as an assistant professor in the School of Police Administration and Public Safety until 1959 when he traveled to Viet Nam as the police advisor to the government of South Viet Nam. Strecher came back to the US in 1961 and began work on his PhD in St. Louis while serving for five years as the director of the Police Academy at the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department and for two years as the director of the Law Enforcement Study Center Social Science Institute at Washington University in St. Louis.

In 1968, Dr. Strecher returned to MSU to serve as a professor in the School of Criminal Justice. Then in 1971, he was chosen by the American Council on Education as a Fellow in the Academic Administration Internship Program. The fellowship gave him the opportunity to learn how to run a university from the inside by observing a university president and other high academic officials.

Through a grant from the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) in 1973, the Criminal Justice Systems Center was created at MSU, and Strecher found himself working with Ralph Turner researching manpower development and educational programs available to personnel in criminal justice agencies.

Dr. Strecher left MSU in July 1976 to serve as director of the School of Criminal Justice at Arizona State University. In 1978, he became Director of the Institute of Contemporary Corrections and the Behavioral Sciences at Sam Houston State University and retired from SHSU in 1995. He received the ACJS Police Section O. W. Wilson Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Policing.