John Pease

John Alan Pease (born March 8, 1936) is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and co-chair of the department. He is also recognized as an advocate for strengthening academic standards, mentoring students, and making higher education affordable to students who come from less privileged backgrounds. To University of Maryland students of the late 1980s, his name was familiar to frequent readers of the school newspaper, The Diamondback, as an author and chair of a comprehensive review of the state of affairs in undergraduate education at the university, dubbed the "Pease Report", which included recommendations for improvement in affairs affecting students and faculty of the University of Maryland. Pease has received a number of teaching awards during his tenure at the university. Early years John Pease was born March 8, 1936, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and was one of fourteen children. His family lived in Kalamazoo, where his father was employed by the railroad. He was raised soon after the Great Depression, in a family which, like others of the times, had become frugal, and as the first of his family to graduate college, he jokes that he developed an interest in attending college only after he found that it was where all the girls from school had gone. After enrolling in college, he found another passion; curiosity towards social stratification, whether based on gender, race, financial station in life, or other imposed separations between people and similar issues. His studies turned towards Sociology and Anthropology. Education Pease worked his way through college, attending Western Michigan University, earning a B.S. in 1960, and then moved to East Lansing, Michigan, attending Michigan State University, and earning a M.A. degree in 1963, and a Ph.D in 1968. He accepted a position as a professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park in 1967 where he currently continues to teach.