Dear JBU professors,
First off, I would like to congratulate the professors who do an excellent job of teaching and give us students the spiritual guidance that we need. I tip my hat to the professors, adjunct teachers and tutors who have molded us and shaped us into the educated men and women that we are today. To you, I give my deepest gratitude.
Yet I have a bone to pick with certain professors here at JBU. To you professors that patronize, criticize and presume that your students are imbeciles, I say, “Enough!”
I have met some professors here at John Brown University who treat their students with patronizing criticism. There are some professors here who think their students are apathetic to learning, and that they don’t give a care about their education. I would disagree.
Sure, I sympathize with professors because there are some students here at JBU who waste thousands of dollars each year at this university and haven’t learned squat. These students plan to one day walk out of this university with diplomas in their particular fields of study. Yet if they don’t have the education behind their diplomas, their degrees are only worthless pieces of paper.
I have met these students. These are the students that sleep in class, the ones that talk to each other while the professor is lecturing, the ones that don’t do their homework and the ones that listen to their iPods in class instead of listening to their professors.
I agree that these students are fools. Yet there is still a vast number of us students who want to be educated, who want to grow in wisdom and who desire to gain knowledge. We work hard to become educated, but you think we’re imbeciles. You think that we don’t care, but we do.
I have learned in Evangelical Theology that the word philosophy is a word that is made of two Greek words: “to love” and “wisdom.” Philosophy literally means to love wisdom, and there are hundreds of students here that love wisdom and care about their education.
I am one of them. I am a philosopher. I am literally a person who loves wisdom.
To those students who waste their time here at JBU, I would say go get a job, join the army or do something productive instead of spending your time studying folly.
To you professors who think your students are morons, I say gulp down a cup of humility, because your students are actually smarter than you take them to be. Do not be so arrogant as to think that just because you have doctorates, you must be smarter than your students and therefore cannot learn from them. I have met quite a few students here at JBU who are actually smarter than their professors.
So I say it again: gulp down a cup of humility.
Yours truly,
Jake Hook