Bioethics & Philosophy 

I was extremely lucky to have been a student of this extraordinary educator back in 2013-2014. She changed my life in so many ways; extremely humble, down-to-earth, extremely energetic, charismatic woman. She should be the Department Chair of the Philosophy Department at Rice or at any other elite American institution; she merits the highest salary there (at least 250K per year!); she is in the top 1% of all professors in terms of professor quality at Rice. Other humanities/history professors at Rice simply & complacently sit down in a desk for the entire lecture segment and languidly regurgitate a rehash of what was on the readings; Ms. Jennifer does the exact opposite; she actually ignites the cut-&-thrust of a debate to whet student's interest in this increasingly vital field to Philosophy to really get students to think critically about these 'grey', 'thorny', 'slippery', or 'middle-of-the-road' bioethical issues that are extremely difficult to pin down or resolve. Most of the humanities in the USA should really shift to this 'dialectical' mode of teaching because it promotes democracy and allows every color and timbre to be heard from a non-ethnocentric viewpoint; philosophy classes are different from history or science classes because in ethics & moral philosophy there will always be different perspectives to tackling an issue or framing an argument; it harks back to this notion of 'antipositivism' or 'interpretivism'; we should really be thinking in hues of color and never in black & white. This bioethics field can only be expected to surge exponential in the coming decades as new unthinkable technologies are developed; we are at the pinnacle/watershed threshold of achieving the craziest & most advanced technologies to tackle some of the most fiendish problems in the medical field such as cancer, degenerative diseases, & other once-thought-to-be incurable diseases. These hard-to-disentangle questions are vital today; with the exponential surge of new gee-whiz medical technology revolutionizing the political climate of industrialized & third-world nations; every human being merits to have his rights respected and most of these issues bleed into thanatology, spirituality & religion too; we all merit a right to die peacefully & with our ethical rights not ever infringed on; we all merit a voice as how to how medical personnel should handle our health lest we fall into stupor unconscious or unable to make rational decisions for our own health. Philosophy is tragically an extremely (& aggressively) a White male-dominated field as is most of academia and the realm of tenured positions at universities (even though I am a male, I do reckon that women, even white women, need far more positions in academia & other fields; it is never healthy for any society to discriminate against any ethnic group or gender, we must forgo these extremely toxic, lethal, chauvinistic, supremacist proclivities); she adds texture, diversity & a voice to the politically enfeebled woman and the endangered colored minorities. She instantly appeals to marginalized colored minorities because you can just tell right away that she genuinely cares about them not just in the classroom but also with her work outside the classroom. Her style of teaching is more like that of a world-beater licensed attorney playing the Devil's Advocate game; this is why students gave her extremely high professor evaluations (I have never read such deliriously rave professor evaluations across my entire time as a Rice student!); she doesn't smugly sit in a desk but commands full authority over the classroom and really fleshes out these complex issues in a very dialectical, (never tendentious) way; every second of lecture class is worth sitting in because she makes the best out of every second in the classroom. This is how teaching in any academic setting should be done; with gusto, and with fire & vitality; never in a pedantic, wishy-washy, insipid, or half-hearted, half-baked way. Professors at any American university are lucratively paid price-gouging rates for presenting a few lectures during the week; they need to really make the students feel like they are like oxygenated gasoline on pyrotechnic fire when it comes to the level of passion they impart in the classroom. This is exactly what this lecturer, Ms. Jennifer, imparts to her students. All the students were hypnotized & bewitched by her contagious energy, vitality, and how she handles a dialectical conversation of bioethical questions in a formalized setting; she truly merits a much higher paycheck in my opinion. Incredible human being all-around; she is exactly what the top universities around the world and in the USA merit. She is a needle in an effete pile of lackluster haystack!

The best lecturer at Rice University. May Christ bless her! Such a humble person!