John Pease (sociologist)

In February 2009, Pease was awarded the Inspire Integrity Awards, a national award that recognizes professors for inculcating integrity in their students. The Award was provided by National Society of Collegiate Scholars, an honor society at 235 universities including the University of Maryland.

Pease continues to work as an associate professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and contributes to the university's newspaper, The Diamondback, with editorials and occasionally, one of his Sara Bellum stories. On Friday, April 11, 2008, the Board of Regents awarded Pease with their highest honor given to faculty within the 2008 University of Maryland System; the faculty Award for Excellence in Mentoring.

Currently, Pease routinely teaches four undergraduate courses: an introductory course to Sociology, Poverty in America, Social Stratification, and Inequality in American Society. He is known for his off-beat sense of humor and quirky habits, and is rumored to know the story behind the "Legend of Sara Bellum," about a girl who died from lack of studying. (Mysteriously, there is actually a marker of "Sara Bellum's" final resting place on campus, though no one has taken responsibility for it.) Many students enjoy his lighthearted take on the course material, and some claim that his course is the reason why they have become sociologists. Pease was a recipient of the CTE-Lilly Fellows program in 1997-1998 from the Center For Teaching Excellence in addition to receiving the University of Maryland's Distinguished Scholar Teaching Award. He is an active member of the university's Campus Senate and a critical strategist in focusing on the most cost-effective ways of providing an increasingly higher level of education for all students, keeping in mind the students who suffer from economic hardships as he once did.

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.

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.

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.

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.