Gonsler Interview

Morningside University Professor John Gonsler shares how his life went from dealing with convicted felons to teaching college students.

John Gonsler has been a criminal justice professor at Morningside University for two years. Being a college professor was not Gonsler’s first career path and hadn’t thought about it until after he started applying to master’s programs. “It was like my fifth back up profession,” Gonsler admitted.

Before becoming a professor, Gonsler had experience working as both a police officer and a correctional officer.

He worked as a law enforcement officer for two years in Genesee County, Flint, Michigan. After working under a sheriff who was “dirtier than a pig’s dick”, Gonsler decided that being a cop wasn’t for him.

Although working as a correctional officer was also not what Gonsler wanted to spend his life doing, he had some interesting stories to share from his six months working at a medium-security prison in Indiana.

His stories ranged from a man putting dead birds in the communal hot pot to “give them a bath” to an inmate making a shiv with Gonsler’s name carved into the handle. When asked if this scared him, he responded with, “I’m from Flint, people have threatened to give me before” and “I was quite flattered.”

Life as a correctional officer wasn’t the only time he experienced interesting things with criminals. When Gonsler was getting his Master’s Degree, he was writing his thesis about serial killers. For this, he wrote letters to 25 serial killers for research and there was only one that wrote him back.

This serial killer was Ted Kaczynski, the unibomber. Gonsler and Kaczynski were pen-pals for eight months and Gonsler received five hand written letters. When talking about the letters, Gonsler commented, “He has the neatest handwriting I have ever seen in my life.”

Professor Gonsler shared many life experiences and he uses these in his teaching style as well. Gonsler hopes that students find what they really want to do and what they really don’t want to do based on what he teaches them in his classes. He wants to “teach them about themselves and not just the profession.”

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