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Q and A with Professor John E. Farley

Dr. John Farley is Professor and from 2002-2005 Chair of the Sociology and Criminal Justice Studies Department at Southern Illinois University – Edwardsville. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan. He has served as President of the Midwest Sociological Society, the Illinois Sociological Association, and the SIUE Faculty Senate. He is the recipient of a number of awards including the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. University Humanitarian Award and the SIUE Outstanding Scholar Award. He has published numerous articles focusing on race and ethnic relations, urban sociology, and social responses to disaster predictions. He recently published the 5^th edition of Majority-Minority Relations. Dr. Farley will retire from SIUE in 2006.

CF: What was the department like when you first arrived in 1977?

JF: I think at that time, we had about 9 faculty members in sociology. We were combined sociology and social work. I think we had about 9 sociologists and 4 social workers – although one of the sociologists was hired as an administrator and they claimed we didn’t have that line.

I think that in many ways the situation was quite different. We weren’t as diverse as we are now. There was one woman and one African American when I came. We actually went through a period after that in which we were all white males.

The work situation was a lot different – the classes were smaller, the teaching load was lighter. We were on a quarter system at the time. We taught 2 courses per quarter, which I think made it easier to get research done than it is now with 3 courses per semester. We had quite a highly published faculty, which I think has been a tradition that has pretty much continued throughout the time I was here. Jim Henslin was here. I guess Down to Earth Sociology must have been in about its 2^nd or 3^rd edition then. Bob Lauer wrote a social problems text and co-authored a social psychology text with Warren Hendel who was chair when I was hired – although then a social worker, Dick Swaine took over as chair.

We were coming off a period of very high enrollment. We had had a peak in the early 1970s – around 200 sociology majors – but both the number of sociology majors and the enrollment in the university was beginning to decline, which was something that continued into the 1980s. The university, when I came here, was about 11 or 12,000 students. It eventually shrank below 10,000 and then has risen again up to the current figure of 13,500.

CF: What was the research like that faculty were doing? Was there a specific area of focus?

JF: No, I think it was then – as it probably is now – driven to a considerable degree by individual interests. Henslin was doing research on the homeless, and in general was doing a lot of research of a qualitative nature.

Lauer as a I recall was – and this may have been a little while after I came here – he and his wife did a project where, in contrast to trying to understand divorce, they took the approach of trying to understand what led to long-term successful marriages. So they studied people with long-term successful marriages and tried to compare and contrast them to people who did not have long-term successful marriages. One of the interesting things they found, by the way, was that not everybody who had long-term marriages was happy with it. They thought that the people who had been married for 20 years would be pretty happy with each other, but they found that 10 to 15 percent of the time, that wasn’t true. The great majority of the time, it was true though.

Warren Handel was looking at – sort of one of the early people who got into this agency – structure issue. He was trying to develop some theoretical work around that issue, which eventually led to a publication in the American Journal of Sociology.

My research when I came here – my dissertation research had focused on how people adapted to different kinds of housing settings in urban environments – high density versus low density, apartment versus single family houses, so forth. But when I came here I discovered rather quickly that there hadn’t been much research on housing segregation here and got interested in studying that partly because St. Louis, being one of the most segregated places in the country. That phenomenon was understudied in the St. Louis area. They hadn’t done as much research here as some other places. I remember one of my colleagues at an urban research center we had on campus at the time saying, “Ah, nobody’s interested in that segregation stuff anymore,” which he later admitted to me was one of the most incorrect statements he’d ever made. That was back about 1979 or 1980 that he said that. Obviously he’s been proven wrong.

CF: What were the students like?

JF: I guess in some ways they were a lot like they are now. They were actually more of a commuter population than they are now. That’s still the majority, but it was a big majority then because the only housing that we had on campus at that time was Cougar Village, which at the time was called Tower Lake Apartments. They changed the name of both the housing and the lake, I guess, about 10 years ago.

They were probably a little bit more activist than they are now – although we still have some activist students on campus. There was a group called National Town Meeting that was probably the main activist group on campus. Bob Blain could tell you more about that than I could because he was the advisor and was kind of intimately involved in forming it. They had the idea of putting Congress on television and giving everybody a little button to push whenever there was a vote. People would push all these buttons and it would tell Congress what to do on a particular issue they were voting on. It was sort of a mass democracy kind of scheme. I’m not quite sure why they thought people would have time to sit hours on end, watch Congress on television, and do this, but it was sort of a nice ideology of direct democracy, even if it may not have been entirely workable. They were also involved in social issues such as the anti-war movement, worker rights, legalization of marijuana, things of that nature.

CF: What would you say has been the most significant change in your tenure here at SIUE?

JF: I think the most significant change is probably the diversification of the faculty. We, today, have a faculty in our department that I think a narrow majority are women – or about half and half. We went through a long period of time when we didn’t have any women and we didn’t have any minorities on the faculty.

You got to understand that between when I was hired in 1977, and we started being able to hire again around the early 1990s, there was a period of at least 15 years when we only made one hire. We had only one chance to make a hire. That was Marv Finkelstein. We had a couple of positions where people resigned or retired, and the university was in financial crisis and sociology enrollments were low so we didn’t get replaced.

The other thing that I would put right there is probably – a change of equal importance is going, not directly from the time I was hired but not too long afterwards, from a period where we didn’t have enough students to be able to support and sustain our programs to the situation we have now where we have more students than we know what to do with and we’re struggling to accommodate the demand. We hit a point in the 1980s, which I somewhat attribute to the conservative atmosphere of the Reagan Administration because this was a national trend but it seemed to be more pronounced here, we went from 200 majors in 1970 to some point in the 1980s when we only had 20 undergraduate majors. Now for the last 10 years, we’ve been fluctuating between 90 and 130. We’re about in the middle of that range now.

Also, there was an effort on the part of the university in the mid-1980s to get rid of the graduate program because of low enrollment. Two things saved our graduate program. One of them was that we got the university to agree to bring in a consultant before they made any decision about the program. The consultant said, “It’s a good program – leave it alone, but the program needs to do some things to get more students.” The other thing that happened about the same time was Bob Blain got the idea to bring in international students. We had a large number of graduate students who were very good students, very successful students from China, and that kind of boosted up our graduate program long enough until we were able to recruit more students locally. Those two things sustained the program.

Another thing that was helpful in terms of the undergraduate program was – after Marv Finkelstein came – establishing the applied specialization in employment relations. That was really when our enrollment started turning around. It’s been increasing basically since maybe – or increased from about 1985 up until the late 1990s. It’s kind of fluctuated irregularly since then but at a consistently high level. I think going in that more applied direction was very helpful.

And as is usually the case we also got some help from the national trends, because sociology enrollments began to climb again in the mid-1980s, and have been pretty robust since that time. It seemed like the ups and downs were more extreme here than they were nationally, and I’m not entirely sure what the reason for that is.

CF: Where would you like to see the department in the next 10 years? Where do you think it will be? What do you think are the upcoming challenges to the department?

JF: I think that maybe the biggest challenge is sustaining the historic ability of the department to be – I think for a small department at a regional university – really strong in the area of research. Teaching loads are heavier now. Class sizes are larger. Budgets are being cut – or at least they’re not being increased to accommodate the increase in enrollment that we have, so we continue to be asked to do more with less. I worry about what that means for the future of research productivity for the department. I think that’s one of the things that has made this department an attractive place for faculty and has helped us to maintain a consistently strong faculty and a good national reputation – even if sometimes we’re not as well thought of locally as we are nationally. I do think – I think we’re thought of as a very productive department within the university, but I worry that with the declining budgets and enrollment pressures and so forth that it’s going to be hard to sustain that research in a way it’s been in the past.

CF: What’s been your favorite class to teach?

JF: In some ways, although it’s exhausting to do it, I think maybe the most fun to do is teaching the urban sociology class as a summer workshop, because we can do things like a 5 hour neighborhood tour of St. Louis, taking the class to Cahokia Mounds, play a simulation game that takes 4 hours to play. I think a lot of times the semester-long format is pretty restraining, so I like the creativity that you can do with 2 week workshops. The other thing about workshops is that they’re absolutely exhausting, so in some ways, for me, it’s a love-hate relationship. I love what you can do, but it’s like two weeks of total intense 24/7 pressure, so it’s very exhausting but I think in the end it gives students a better experience than what they can get in one hour segments in the classroom. That’s probably been the most fun to teach in spite of the pressures.

I also – some people might think this is a little bit strange to say I enjoy, but I enjoy teaching the graduate statistics course. I like the challenge of helping students see that they really can do statistics when they think that they can’t. That course is kind of fun too.

CF: How has your research changed from your dissertation work to what it is now?

JF: It’s gone a lot of different directions. I think the work that I started here studying housing segregation – that became sort of my dominant line of research. I’ve continued to do research on that right up to the present. I’ve still got one unfinished project in that area. That didn’t have anything to do with my dissertation. That’s probably been a consistent direction through most of my career that hasn’t had much to do with my dissertation – probably the area in which I’ve made the – maybe the biggest contribution.

I think something important to say about that is I learned a lesson about applied sociology in the process of doing that, which was it’s not enough to just put the information out there. I naively thought when I was a junior faculty if we got enough information out about how segregated the St. Louis area is that people would want to do something about it. I discovered that if I wanted people to do something about it I would have to make that happen myself to some degree. After about 10 years of doing this research I became involved in an effort to establish a fair housing organization in the St. Louis area. I think sometimes that doing that probably had more impact than the research did itself.

There’s a lesson there that no matter how compelling your findings may be, if you want action to be taken on the basis of the findings, you’ve got to get involved in that. I think that’s actually a change that’s happened in sociology as a discipline – in this department too – but in sociology as a discipline as a whole now compared to then. Applied was almost a dirty word. Social activism was almost a dirty word, although that was what attracted most of us to sociology. I think our graduate schools largely tried to socialize it out of us. I see much more support for that in the discipline now – the ASA presidencies of Joe Feagin and Michael Burawoy, among others, have really emphasized that. I think that the discipline has moved in that direction quite a bit.

The other change in my research was that I’ve taken a couple of forays into disaster research, which really has nothing to do with either my dissertation or my interest in race relations. Back in 1990, I believe it was, I had just finished revising my introductory textbook for a second edition and one of the things that I had become aware of in the course of doing that revision was that I, in the first edition, along with a lot of sociology, didn’t quite get it right on the collective behavior. I had some very helpful comments from Clark McPhail at University of Illinois. The point of these comments was that a lot of the sociological literature – especially textbooks and theoretical literature and things written by non-specialists – exaggerates the extent of collective behavior. When collective behavior occurs, it’s usually on a more limited basis and not as usually irrational as it’s portrayed as being in the sociological literature. I made some substantial revisions in the introductory textbook as a result of that.

Right after that, we had a significant outbreak of collective behavior in this area when Ivan Browning, a climatologist as he called himself with a degree in economics, predicted that this area was going to have a damaging earthquake on December 2^nd or 3^rd of I believe it was 1990, that was supposedly going to be triggered by an unusual lunar gravitation pull because of the way that the moon, and the earth, and the sun were going to be aligned, which sounds very convincing. But he wasn’t the first person to come up with this idea and the scientists had looked at it before and found it didn’t really have any correlation with earthquakes. But he made this prediction, and he was erroneously reported by the press as having accurately predicted the Loma Prieta earthquake in San Francisco in 1989, which he actually didn’t. He gave a speech in San Francisco by coincidence where he predicted that somewhere in the world there would be a damaging earthquake within 3 days of the day that turned out to be when the Loma Prieta earthquake happened. But, by chance he had given the speech in San Francisco. He then claimed to have predicted that earthquake. Actually he never said there was going to be an earthquake in San Francisco. Predicting an earthquake within a 3 day framework somewhere in the world is pretty safe because there’s an earthquake stronger than 6.0 on an average of once every 3 days, so chances are you’re going to be right if you say that. He got really lucky and just happened to occur where he gave the speech, not where he said it was going to be. Because he was reported as having predicted this earthquake, people took him very seriously. The scientific community at first didn’t want to say anything because they mistakenly – this was a big mistake that they made – they mistakenly thought if they said anything it would give him credibility. Basically, he had the press for the first several months. Well, people began to get quite worried about this.

One day at lunch, a group of us were sitting around and I made the comment that from what I could casually see, this seemed to be involving a larger number of people than what the literature usually says get involved in collective behavior, and it would be interesting to do a survey. There were two people at the table by coincidence who knew somebody at the phone company. They both said, “The phone company is going bonkers over this.” They were completely freaked out because they were afraid that this kind of earthquake would wipe out their system. Then you couldn’t have a proper emergency response. They were doing things like making plans to have their trucks outside the garage on the day it was supposed to happen, and so on and so forth. They said, “We think the phone company might be interested in this.” I said, “Go talk to your contacts and see what you can find out.” Well, in the end we got some money from the phone company to do a survey. We actually decided to ask the phone company to give us money to do a survey before the predicted date of the earthquake and then a follow up afterwards in the St. Louis area. Their response to the request was, “If we give you a little bit more money, will you also do the survey in Sikeston and Cape Girardeau?” So of course we said sure. That was how we got into it.

The survey did confirm that it was more widespread than most of the previous incidents have been. We found about 20 or 25 percent of the people really believed. There was maybe 40 percent that were inclined toward disbelieving it, but then there was this other 35 or 40 percent that was somewhere in between. They sort of believed it but not totally believed it. So you could say that to some degree the majority of the population was impacted by this, which is far more than is usually the case.

We found out in the course of doing this that lots of other people did the same thing as we did was put together studies in a hurry to study this event. I eventually became aware of 4 or 5 other places – eventually more than that – but at this point about 4 or 5 other places, so I went to the Dean at the time and said it would be interesting to have a conference and bring together all the people that have done these surveys. It so happened that it was near the end of the fiscal year and he had some money sitting around. He actually gave me quite a bit of money. We were able to actually pay a lot of people’s way to come to this, so we ended up having a conference here. We got Ralph Turner as the keynote speaker, and had about a dozen people here that had done different kinds of projects related to this prediction and eventually published the proceedings in a revised form in the International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters.

In the course of this, I found out if you ever want to meet a bunch of sociological proselytizers, get involved in the disaster research community because they’re a small group of people and they love it when they get a new recruit. They’re all trying to get you involved and keep you doing this kind of stuff. Immediately I start getting invited to all of these other conferences.

In the course of a conference I was at at UCLA, I found out that the National Science Foundation had some money available for earthquake research because suddenly it was a hot topic because of the Loma Prieta earthquake and the Browning prediction and so forth. I ended up getting a grant from NSF and we in the end did a total of 5 surveys so we had actually 7 years of time series data on attitudes towards earthquake risk in the St. Louis metropolitan area. It turned out to be kind of a long term research involvement that was totally unlike anything I did before. It might have never happened if we hadn’t all had that conversation at that lunch table one day.

I think one of the things I’ve learned in my career is that serendipity conversations can really lead to big opportunities. That’s not the only time that I’ve had something like that happen.

Since this flurry of activity, there’s been very little attention to it and there really needs to be more attention.

In some of the work on collective behavior, generally there’s a theme that outbreaks of collective behavior correlate with times of war. If you remember, this was right before the first Middle East war after Iraq invaded Kuwait. I felt like there probably was some kind of connection. I wanted a question in the survey that asked people, “How likely do you think it is that there will be a war with Iraq?” Some of the other people that were involved – because it was a team project, pretty much everybody at that table was involved in it, although I ended up staying involved in longer than the rest of them – several of them thought I was nuts putting that question – “that doesn’t have anything to do with earthquakes.” But I stood my ground and insisted on that question being in the survey. It did in fact predict – even after controls for other variables – it was a significant predictor of whether or not people thought an earthquake was likely.

I do think that to some degree it’s sort of a generalized fear. People are afraid of one thing, they’re going to be afraid of another thing. If fears in society are heightened, it may stimulate unrelated fears. Another thing I wrote about sometime – and again some people think this is a crazy argument – but if you look at outbreaks of racial violence in the United States, there is a striking correlation between when they occur and periods of war. Like 80 to 90 percent of the major outbreaks of racial violence in the United States have been during or just before a war. It’s a very strong correlation. There are some reasons for that – not just the sort of social psychological one of fear and prejudice increasing during war, but also war causes certain kinds of social dislocations that may lead to racial violence. It’s a very strong correlation, and there’s correlations with other kinds of collective behavior too. I think actually if you know the collective behavior literature it’s not that crazy an idea that this would be correlated to fear of war. We certainly found that it was.

CF: What are your plans for retirement?

JF: My wife and I have a condo in Santa Fe, New Mexico and we’re going to spend a lot of time there. I intend to do a lot of things that don’t have anything to do with sociology like fishing and skiing. I also hope to do research and writing that’s just what I want to do, and I don’t really have to worry about whether anybody’s going to pay me to do it or not. If somebody does, that’s great. One thing that I’ve thought that would be fun to do is to write a weekly or bi-weekly column for a newspaper or something like that – sort of try to put sociology in the public eye. That’s something we probably don’t do enough of as sociologists.

John E. Farley’s email address is jfarley@siue.edu