Faculty Profile John Seley

Growing up, John Seley (Urban Studies) had often visited firehouses with his father, Dr. Gabriel Seley, a surgeon who later became Chief Medical Officer for the FDNY. Years later, returning home to New York after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania and teaching for a while in Minnesota, he complained to his father that he’d never actually been on a fire engine.

“My father said, ‘Come on,’” recalls Seley. “And he took me to his local firehouse, which was a block away on East 75th Street. He asked if I could ride with them and they said ‘Sure. Come in tomorrow night.’ They weren’t going to refuse the chief medical officer,” he confesses. Read more.

“So, here I was, this kid with no experience, and I went in the next night. They put me in a coat and helmet and said, ‘You sit there.’ The very first run we had was a second alarm I remember to this day on 93rd Street. I was so amazed by the whole thing: traveling with the lights and siren going to the fire and watching everything that was going on. I said, ‘You know, I think I’m going to try this a little more.’”

A little more, he explains, was joining the city’s auxiliary firefighter-training program. “I went out to the Fire Academy on weekends and got trained, and then they let me ride.” This was with Engine Company 44 on Friday nights and weekends, when it wouldn’t interfere with his teaching responsibilities.

“It was just a totally different experience to me, having been an academic up ’til then. . . . I fell in love with the whole idea. These guys were great guys, and most of them are still friends.”

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John Seley certainly puts the lie to the maxim often quoted by the education-averse: “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.”

To be sure, Seley has been teaching for many years. A professor of geography, urban planning, and environmental psychology at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center, he has previously taught at Princeton, Cornell, and Columbia and was affiliate faculty at the Naval Postgraduate School. But combining that academic resume with the experience he has gained as a member of the firefighting community has made him uniquely qualified to do an important service for the people of New York City.

“I would describe my role as that of someone with academic and firefighting experience who is trying to aid the FDNY in addressing critical fire and emergency response issues,” says Seley from a chair in his office at FDNY’s Brooklyn headquarters.

That role has a title: Chairman of the Fire Commissioner’s Advisory Council. It’s a group he and Fire Commissioner Daniel A. Nigro founded that functions as a think tank. Its 15 members—current and former leaders of the department—perform studies and create reports on key aspects of FDNY operations and administration, including training new firefighters and fire inspectors and designing a management structure. Most recently, it developed a plan to modernize the department’s field technology capabilities.  

The council was created in 2014 following Nigro’s appointment as fire commissioner. He asked Seley to head his transition team to help select new leadership for the FDNY. Nigro had already formed a strong opinion of Seley’s qualifications from other work Seley had done for the department. This included research work for the Center for Terrorism and Disaster Preparedness, for which Seley received training as a Hazardous Materials Technician II. Nigro had also chaired the board on which Seley served, Friends of Firefighters, a nonprofit organization that addresses physical and mental health needs.

In accepting the commissioner’s offer to head the transition team, Seley suggested convening an advisory council for the task. Seeing how well the council members worked together and what a wealth of experience they had, Seley then suggested to Nigro that the council become permanent. No other NYC department had such a group—and certainly no other city’s fire department—but Seley was aware of a similar group that advised the head of NASA. “I suggested to the commissioner that we should have a permanent Commissioner’s Advisory Council. He agreed and said, ‘You should head it.’”

Nigro then made his request for Seley’s service in writing to CUNY Chancellor James B. Milliken, who welcomed it and observed in his responding letter: “I speak on behalf of CUNY when I say we are very gratified that his [Seley’s] knowledge and experience will be of assistance to your office and to the people of the City of New York.”

Milliken continued to support Seley’s work at the FDNY for the 2015-2016 academic year. Seley has continued in his role while on academic sabbatical over the past year.

Three years on, Commissioner Nigro has nothing but praise for Seley: “John has been a fantastic addition to my administration here at the FDNY. His strong academic background­—and great devotion to the Department and the life-saving work our members perform—made him the ideal chair for my advisory council.”

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While Seley’s areas of academic expertise are compatible with exploring the issues the council confronts, it’s his firefighting knowledge that informs their application in his role as chairman. “I know a lot about what happens in the field. And that helped me in making recommendations in terms of what I think would be more or less acceptable by firefighters.”

Like many in the FDNY, Seley witnessed firsthand the devastation of 9/11 that claimed the lives of 343 firefighters. He was among those who worked “the pile,” and is reluctant to speak about that and those he knew who were lost there. Nonetheless, that experience remains ever-present in his memory and that of the other council members as they work to produce recommendations in the best interests of the nearly 15,000 members of the FDNY.

In explaining how the council works, Seley says, “When you try to introduce a new project, you want to make sure that it’s piloted in the right place and that the right people are involved. From day one, we’ve always involved people in the field in the research. Everyone on the council has either been in or is still in the fire department.

“It’s a very unique culture, the fire department,” he continues. “Each firehouse is a separate entity; it’s like a big family. Everyone talks to each other as brother and sister. And they share lots of information—not just about emergency response, but about their daily lives. They’re pretty sensitive to what goes on in the world.

“Everything we do in the council is proprietary and we have only one client,” he says, noting the extreme confidentiality of the council’s reports and recommendations, which are given only to Nigro, who decides whether to share them.

Subjects have ranged from the extremely urgent, such as the need to improve communications, as dramatically brought home on 9/11, to the almost amusingly surprising. Seley recounts, for example, a report the council produced about the education of probationary firefighters. Like many of society’s time-honored institutions, the FDNY was having difficulty communicating with Millennials. The instructors typically were seasoned firefighters in their 40s, and the new recruits were 19 to 25.

Not averse to following someone else’s lead if it produces a desired result, the council took heed of an NFL practice they learned about in the Wall Street Journal. Rookies for the San Francisco 49ers were failing at the traditional practice of memorizing stacks of playbooks in preparation for weekly three-hour meetings with their coaches. The solution? “They gave them all iPads with video,” says Seley, “and they now never have a meeting of more than half an hour.

“We brought in an expert on Millennials and a Millennial to talk to the instructors,” he continues. “We ended up creating a two-day class.  Working with Millennials was part of it. These were things the instructors weren’t familiar with but, with a changing fire department, they needed to understand. And that class has become permanent. So now two days before each probationary class goes into the academy, the instructors have this two-day class. And all new recruits get iPads.”

The class also included a session on stress management.  The FDNY has become a leader in addressing this concern by bringing in outside experts.

This problem-solving process, Seley believes, illustrates how his teaching, research, and firefighting experiences complement each other in addressing issues before the department. “But it isn’t just me,” he’s quick to add. “It’s these 15 other people [the council] with maybe hundreds of years in combined experience, and we get together every week for three hours to discuss these issues. We’re all volunteers. No one is paid. It’s really a labor of love.”