Peter Lowentrout, CSU Long Beach
Published in Exchanges, Winter, 1996

I began my service as a firefighter in the late 1970s when I grew frustrated over the cloistered life I was leading as a graduate student pursuing a Ph.D. in religion/social ethics at the University of Southern California. I was studying social ethics, sure enough, but not doing it much. When I had the opportunity to join a fire department, I jumped at it. For, if firefighters do anything, it is to help people in a very hands-on way. Today, I am a professor of religious studies and a captain on the Orange County Fire Department (OCFD), one of the largest (and youngest) fire departments in the United States. And over the past eight years, I have been able to blend both vocation and avocation as a founding member and current vice chair of OCFD's Affirmative Action Committee.

When they think of firefighters at all, I have observed, many of my university colleagues have rather cartoonish views of them: lowbrow, bigoted, white, male, clubby. But I have found the OCFD is as progressive an institution as the university, and more quickly able to implement institutionally its concern for the good. This is reflected in the generally positive response of rank and file firefighters in the OCFD to the department's fair and sometimes corrective hiring practices and to hiring and promotion without regard to race, gender or sexual orientation. These practices are not simply explained by the top-down command structure that lightly overlays the administration and life of the department.

One reason for the progressive and flexible character of the OCFD is that firefighting is very much a helping profession. Another is that, in my experience, firefighters -- particularly those who rise in the ranks -- have a great deal of natural empathy. Also, the modern fire department's hiring process selects not just for intelligence but for common sense and tolerance. Successful fireground management requires a quick, well-rounded intelligence able to compass both the abstract and the particular, both theory and practice. Firefighting also requires an ability to communicate well and work effortlessly with others -- both in emergency situations and in the firehouse, where firefighters live in tight quarters for much of their lives. The job thus tends to select for intelligent, empathetic people who have common sense and can tolerate difference with greater ease than most. As a result, I have found the OCFD to be a place where just and reasonable changes can be made with relative ease.

As a member of the department's Affirmative Action Committee, I have had the opportunity to help create one of the first pregnant firefighter policies in the United States and to serve on a department-wide task group reworking our sexual harassment policy. From my experience as a teacher and lecturer, I was able to help construct our Fire Academy's human diversity curriculum and shape the department's periodic field training in human diversity and sexual harassment. I have served as a peer counselor, acting as informal intercessor in confidential, day-to-day problems that crop up in station life. I serve on the editorial subcommittee that writes the monthly affirmative action column in Fireline, a fire service journal published by the OCFD and distributed nationally. Finally, I have been part of the committee's and the department's aggressive outreach to all communities in Orange County as an affirmative action employment recruiter.

I have enjoyed fire fighting greatly over the years. It has been a tonic at those times when my work as a teacher-scholar has seemed to me too distant from the toil and tumult beyond the academy. My service on the Orange County Fire Department has given me a greater parallax on administrative process, institutional life, and perhaps even life itself, than would have been the case if I were simply a professor.