Professors Who Really Cared: Dr. Anita Cooper

Yesterday, I wrote about how the two great groups of relationships you gain from Bible college are the students and the professors.  Over the next couple of days I wanted to share just a couple of my stories about the wonderful professors of Columbia International University.

While I'm writing about two specific professors, my guess is that if I had guest writers I could come up with a person to share a story about every professor.

Anita Cooper

Dr. Cooper was the advisor for my major, Bible teaching.

My wife and I got married a year and half before I graduated from college.  Not knowing the area well we ended up renting an apartment in the bad part of town.  As we stayed there, we should have been able to pick up on some of the signs.  Six months into our stay, there was a drug related stabbing across the street from our unit.  Unfortunately we didn't take that as a warning sign.

One week before our first anniversary we went to visit family a couple hours away for the weekend. We returned home two days later to discover our apartment had been robbed, and it was  bad. We weren't sure what we were going to do, but we just knew we couldn't stay there.

I don't recall exactly how things unfolded, but Dr. Cooper offered to let us and our dog to stay at her home while we looked for a new place to live. Originally this wasn't too big of a deal because she was going to be out of town for two weeks. Then we went into a third week, and she chose to stay at a friends house rather than kick us out.  All of this happened over Christmas break.

When the new semester started we were finally ready to move into our new apartment. She literally canceled class one day, and instructed everyone in the class to go to my old apartment and help me pack everything up and move.

To this day, Dr. Cooper is a big hero in my family.



What stories do you have about great professors from Bible college or seminary?