A life spent studying how people connect.

John was born and raised in Centralia, in the northwest corner of Washington State. After community college there, he earned his B.A. at Pacific Lutheran University, an M.A. at Northwestern, and, in 1970, a Ph.D. at the University of Southern California. That year he accepted an almost-hometown position at the University of Washington, where he taught communication for 32 years.

John’s twin loves, interpersonal communication and philosophy, led him to study how people communicate in families, dating relationships, and work groups, and to help them understand how the quality of their lives is directly related to the quality of their communication. That conviction runs through his first book, Bridges Not Walls (1973), now in its eleventh edition, and its companion Together: Communicating Interpersonally. In Language as Articulate Contact and Beyond the Symbol Model he argued that language is not a system of symbols we use to represent the world, but a set of practices we inhabit, the main way we become human.

In 2001 John became Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of Dubuque, Iowa, retiring from that role in 2010 and a second time in 2016. His later work connects his lifelong focus on personal communicating with diversity, equity, and inclusion, first in Personal Communicating and Racial Equity (2017) and then in Dismantling Racism One On One (2023), one of the few antiracism books focused on interpersonal rather than systemic racism. Today he volunteers with Inclusive Dubuque, the Multicultural Family Center, My Brother’s Keeper, and the Rotary Club of Dubuque, and he and his wife Becky enjoy their four children, five grandchildren, and great-granddaughter.