Call him Doctor! 83-year-old receives his doctorate from LSU

17th December 2018   ·   0 Comments

By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer

Succeeding at college certainly isn’t easy. Papers, exams, 8 a.m. classes, long trudges across campus and occasional all-nighters can rattle and stress even the hardiest student. But when Johnnie Jones first started taking classes through LSU, he had to do so with a war going on around him.

As a U.S. Marines Corps squad leader in Vietnam in the 1960s, Jones undertook correspondence classes from the university, squeezing in class work whenever and wherever he could while the conflict in Southeast Asia raged.

“Even though I was in combat,” Jones said, “there were moments when there was some quiet time occasionally. At the time when I was not out on patrol looking for the enemy, so to speak, I was in the books.”

Jones ended up retaining that grit throughout his life. Whatever he did – including receiving an undergraduate degree in sociology from the University of Hawaii and 25 years working for the state Department of Corrections – he brought a steely determination to the task.

Now, at 83 years old, his LSU journey has come full circle. Roughly a half-century after he took those first LSU courses while stationed in the jungle halfway across the world, Jones received his doctorate during LSU commencement exercises last Friday.

Jones is far from done, too – with a doctorate in human ecology in hand, he now hopes to enter law school. Although he has no plans to become a practicing lawyer, Jones simply wants to continue learning. If he can get into a law program, the octogenarian said, he’s prepared for some quizzical looks from potential classmates who are 60 years younger than him.

“I have no intentions of being an attorney,” he said. “I simply want to go to law school for the knowledge, and I’m sure that there will be students in the class that will think that I’m nuts, but so what.”

The Mississippi native volunteered for the Marines at 18, having taken some community college classes before he shipped out. After leaving Vietnam, he finished his USMC service while stationed in Hawaii. While in the Aloha State, Jones earned his bachelor’s from U of H.

After applying for grad school, Jones selected and enrolled in the LSU Social Work program, eventually earning a master’s in 1975 and finishing all but nine hours of course work for a doctorate.

However, the offer of an excellent job in the Department of Corrections was too good to pass up, especially now with a family and young children to provide for, so he spent a quarter-century working for the state, a tenure that concluded with him serving as warden at a women’s prison.

“During that time, you couldn’t work full-time and attend school full-time,” he said, “so I had to give up my studies. That was pretty tough.”

Because of his corrections career, the seven-year time limit to earn a doctorate expired, and Jones was forced to start his doctorate program all over again.

Then, toward the conclusion of his second go-round, health troubles threatened once again to nix his educational aspirations. The medical crisis forced him to drop out, but a sympathetic professor intervened to get Jones an extension that subsequently allowed him to wrap up his dissertation without having to start from square one yet again.

Now that he has finished his dissertation – which concerns racism, religion and the experiences of Black families – his educational life has finally reached a conclusion. Or maybe not.

“I suppose if a medical school would accept me I would attend,” Jones said jokingly. “I’m going to be a student as long as I have the mental and physical capability. When I expire, if you will, I’m sure I will be a student.”

Having lived for 83 years and experienced all that he has – including combat during the Vietnam War, where his life, and the lives of thousands of others, were always at stake – Jones can look back and reflect on his accomplishments and living life to the fullest.

“Every person regardless of his station in life, or his or her limitations, should seek to be the best he or she can really be,” he said. “And you spend your time living not thinking about dying. Death will take care of itself.”

This article originally published in the December 17, 2018 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.