When I enter Professor Casstimothy Jones’s office, he immediately offers me his own chair at his desk, and switches to the less comfortable one across from me. The chair that I take is the padded, swivelly kind that my teachers had throughout grade school. I sit down and resist the urge to spin in the chair.

“I’ve never interviewed anyone before,” I tell him. It’s an unnecessary statement, something I say in the hopes of justifying the awkward and scattered interview I’m sure will follow. 

He laughs comfortably. He has an infectious smile, a white mustache and beard. His circular, plastic-framed glasses give him a vaguely eccentric look– they’re the type of glasses I can picture someone my age wearing, a gangly film major smoking Camel cigarettes. “I’ll try to help,” he says.

Professor Jones is known for his gregarious and caring nature, and for helping all students feel at ease in his classroom. Though I am talking to him after class hours in his office, his earnest and welcoming demeanor is the same. He asks me not to use his real name in my piece. “If you need a name for me, I’ll use one of my alternative identities,” he says. “Casstimothy Jones. C-a-s-s-t-i…. I really can’t spell outloud, my dyslexia starts to go like this on me.” He makes a motion with his hands that indicates confusion. 

Without hesitation, he starts to tell me about his childhood in Seattle. “I was adopted,” he says. “My mother was the one who wanted me, and my father didn’t want me. So I grew up in an interesting family situation.” His tone as he says this lacks any hint or resentment, suggesting he has long since come to terms with his upbringing. 

A precocious child, often told that he was “too smart for [his] britches”, Jones quickly grew bored of school and began to question authority. He tells me about a teacher in high school who taught the class about a coal miners’ strike during which police shot several strikers.

 “I just stood up in class and I was furious,” he says. “I said, ‘that’s not right, they cannot shoot workers.’” He pauses, the anger of the injustice to the strikers clearly still fresh to him. “I mean, my parents were workers. We were workers, we weren’t owners, we weren’t anything else. So I was sent to the principal’s office for speaking up about the coal miners’ right to strike.”

Decades later, the everyday injustices of the world still spark a deep passion and frustration in Jones. At Wesleyan University, where he teaches in the Psychology Department, he is known for discussing systematic oppression and prejudice in his classes. In his class on Harry Potter, he joins the students as they pick through themes in the books relating to gender, race, and class. He often talks about his white male privilege, and encourages the class to speak openly about anything from the sexist portrayal of Ginny Weasley in the movies to the themes of racism and blood purity. 

In Harry Potter class, students often start discussing the books before class has even started. Jones says the class is best when the conversation is open and completely directed by the students. In one class, as students settled into their seats, Jones directed their attention to two students who are debating Dumbledore’s motives in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Instead of interrupting the conversation, Jones let the class build off of it, leading to an organic hours-long discussions in which there were rarely fewer than three hands in the air.

It is clear that, despite his appearance– Jones is a white male with a well-paying position at a reputable university– he has faced his fair share of obstacles in reaching this level of success. During his senior year of high school, he applied to private colleges, despite a lack of support from the school guidance counselor, who advised him to stick to the local community college. He received a scholarship that allowed him financial independence from his parents, but found when he arrived at Whitman College that his working class upbringing had followed him. “I did not know how to write at all,” he chuckles. “Somehow they assumed you knew how to write.” Uninterested in the Whitman social scene, which was dominated by dating and fraternity parties, he used his time to study, “like eleven hours a day, seven days a week.”

During the summers he had a job in the factory where his parents both worked. “That always renewed my sense that I never wanted to work in a factory.” He asks me if I’ve ever worked in a factory, and I shake my head. I’ve never met anyone my age who has worked in a factory, though I’ve met plenty who haven’t worked at all. “It’s– basically what you are is a part of a machine, that they haven’t invented a machine for yet.”

Jones’s distaste for factory work clearly translates to his political beliefs and teaching methods. He is determined to treat every person in his classroom as an individual with valuable opinions, and condemns dehumanization and objectivization in all of its forms.

Already quick to question what he was taught in classes, Jones became even more disillusioned when, during his last two years of college, he started to hang out with people who shared and even surpassed his distaste for authority and social norms. There was Michael, who drank a lot and liked to fight, and Susan, who didn’t take a single note for four years and was proud to graduate second from the bottom of their class. “She was actually smarter than I was,” Jones says. “It was the opposite of me, I was this diligent note taker. And here she was, like ‘I don’t care’. It was this entirely different world view. And that was pretty neat.”

Jones says that he was drawn to strong, feminist women like Susan– women who you could just hang out with. “You didn’t have to try to have sex with them,” he says. “Can you imagine that? It was like a revolution, like ‘Oh, you want to talk? Yeah I’d like to talk.’ Just talking. That was actually breaking down sexual barriers.”

As his college graduation grew nearer, the Vietnam draft hung over Jones’s head. He was hoping that his severe allergies would keep him from being drafted. When his doctor’s notes were ignored, he had to come up with another plan.

“I came up with the bright idea– it gets sort of gory here– of cutting off a finger, because if you cut off a finger, they couldn’t draft you. Any of the first three fingers down to the knuckle. I said, well, I’ll just get an electric saw and cut through a finger. Susan said, ‘I don’t know, we better talk to Michael.’ So we went and visited Michael, and Michael said, ‘yeah that’s a really dumb idea, cutting off your own fingers, you’re gonna screw it up.’ And I go, ‘well then what am I gonna do?’ And he said, ‘I’ll cut them off for you.’ So we come up with this elaborate plan, we even took a test drive to the hospital, and on one wonderful day, Michael, Susan, and I all did this together. I just held a wedge over my fingers, he hit the top, fingers popped off, we went to the hospital.” He smiles, and does not mention the tremendous pain that this experience must have involved.

“I felt really good,” he says. “It was the first time I’d actually been free– I was free from Vietnam.” 

Since he couldn’t work in the factory anymore, he started looking through the phone book for a job. He knew that he wanted to do something that helped people, so he called the Salvation Army and got a job as a social case worker. “I didn’t do much,” he says, “but I got to work with people; I got to do something that was helpful. I was like, ‘whoa this is pretty neat.’ I thought, I kinda want to keep doing something like this.”

He applied to Psychology Graduate schools, and got into Harvard. “High school and college were bad, Harvard was laughably awful,” he says. “The faculty there were the most arrogant people I’ve ever met. Their idea of giving a class was to basically lecture on their research. Those lectures were boring. It was all sort of about how special they were. I said, this is no way to teach!”

His abhorrence of the stuffy and dry teaching methods of the Harvard professors inspired him to accept a position teaching a section of a class during his second semester. He tells me that as soon as he entered the classroom as a teacher instead of a student, he knew exactly what to do. “I just felt at ease,” he says. He taught every semester after that.

Today, Jones’s teaching is anything but stuffy– in fact, he’s pretty eccentric. In one class, we spend at least an hour talking about the phallic symbolism of wands in Harry Potter. We watch a video in which a man reads from one of the books, replacing the word “wand” with “penis”. After class, Jones forwards us a Harry Potter themed condom ad that perfectly supports his sexual reading of the books. “Protect your ‘wand’ from ‘Hogwarts’ when entering her ‘Chamber of Secrets,’” the ad reads. Admittedly, it’s an unusual email to receive from your professor, and I’m reminded of the unabashed forthrightness that sets Jones apart from other professors.

Jones is modest about his achievements in life, often writing them off by saying that it was a “different time”. He attributes his offer to teach at Wesleyan to the strong economy at the time, and to the Wesleyan professor who knew his advisor at Harvard. That was in 1973, and he’s been teaching at Wesleyan ever since. In his first year as a professor, he tried to base his classes on lectures, even though he hated lecturing. Eventually, the lectures sparked discussions, and he started spending more class time letting his students voice their opinions. Students would come to his office after class just to sit and talk. Jones loved it. “To find work that I wanted to do and looked forward to doing– that was something that I never expected to find in life,” he says.

As Wesleyan got more diverse, Jones felt that it was his responsibility to learn about the histories and writings of every group that was represented in his classrooms. “When I got here it was an all male school,” he tells me. “Can you imagine? It was really bad. We would actually have discussions, and people would say, ‘what would women say about this?’ and a man would say what women would say about it.” He laughs; the idea of a classroom men speaking for women is ridiculous, yet an unfortunate reality.

Not long after Wesleyan started admitting women, Jones had a discussion with a student that launched him on the path towards feminist ideology. A woman came up to him after class and asked if they would be reading anything by women. “I got flustered and defensive,” he says. “I was like ‘these are the authorities in the field’ – male bombast, stupid male bombast. And then finally my denial faded, and I said, ‘by next class I’ll have something that is by women.’” With the help of a lot of reading recommendations from Susan, Jones “got a real education in feminism and in the male privilege world that [he’d] been living in.” He smiles– clearly this most recent part of his life is the part he is most proud of. “That really helped me not be such an asshole.” When I ask him if his awareness of his own privilege informs his teaching, he responds resolutely.

“Oh yeah. One, I know how guys think. I also know that I have an infinite amount of privilege, and I know that it is the responsibility of everyone with privilege to use that privilege to expose privilege and to try to create a far more open atmosphere. I want to use my privilege to make other people feel more comfortable who don’t have privilege. That’s all I try to do. I try to use my power to create a space where people who have been held down can feel a little freer.”

At the end of the interview, I read him a quote from a student on ratemyprofessor.com, a website where college students can “review” their professors. “It is a testament to [Casstimothy Jones] that, despite his immense intellect, his kindness shows through first and foremost,” the student wrote. Before I am even done reading the quote, Jones is laughing. 

“That’s very sweet,” he says. “I’m not necessarily a very kind person. But I do want to be a very good teacher, and that means that students come first to me. They’re more important than the subject matter, they’re more important than getting through the syllabus. They’re certainly more important than my research. My attitude towards teaching– it happened with, I don’t know, 10,000 conversations with 10,000 students. And wanting to be a person that they felt comfortable with, and that wrong or right didn’t matter, when they needed to talk. And it also came a little bit from looking around at other faculty and thinking, wow I don’t think many of them really care about who their students are. That was not the kind of teacher I wanted to be.” 

He pauses to open the door for one of the many students who comes by his office every day, for a chat or with a question from class. I take the moment to look around the room– I’ve been so engrossed in his story that I’ve barely registered my surroundings. The wall behind his desk is covered in notes and pictures. He has a Harry Potter calendar; the picture for October is of Sirius Black. After telling the student to come back in ten minutes, he returns to his chair and sits, crossing one leg over the other. He’s wearing hiking boots with purple laces, and thick woolen socks underneath; the air is just starting to turn chilly.

“In the end,” he says, “I’m here to help students grow in some way. I garden. My whole acre that I garden on, I don’t tend to prune stuff. The trees get big and gangly, and that’s sort of like what I want to be with students. Grow however you want to grow! I’m just here to help it along, that’s all.  I’m sort of just good earth, good fertilizer and water. And if I’m kind, it’s because plants grow better if you’re kind to them.”