He was a graduate of Joseph E. Brown High School in Atlanta. At Princeton, he found his lifelong calling when he majored in sociology and anthropology. He was a member of ROTC and Court Club and active in the University Press Club and the Princeton Symposium on World Affairs.
Hugh received his doctorate in sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1968 and two years later joined the Department of Sociology at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He taught at Nebraska for 42 years, retiring as professor emeritus in 2012. His scholarly writing focused on social deviance, the sociology of religion, and quantitative methodology. His co-authored book, The Currents of Lethal Violence: An Integrated Model of Suicide and Homicide, received the Distinguished Book Award in 1995 from the Mid-South Sociological Association.
In his spare time, drawing on his interest in quantitative methods, Hugh became an expert in the field of sabermetrics, the analysis of baseball through statistics. In a similar manner, his longtime interest in deviant human behavior fed a love of mystery stories, particularly those about Sherlock Holmes.
Hugh was predeceased by his wife, Susan Bailey.