Bryan Russell has been a professor of philosophy for eight years. He has been teaching at Bakersfield College for almost two years. Russell also taught at colleges in Arizona and at Georgia State.

Russell has a brown belt and normally does jiu-jitsu three times a week, but is currently in recovery from knee surgery.

“Since I was 18 I’ve been doing jiu-jitsu, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, with Dan Camrillo when my knee isn’t injured. I just had surgery on my knee,” he said.

Russell guesses that he moved his knee wrong when he was doing jiu-jitsu.

He said, “I guess I was in the operating room for a couple of hours, but the recovery is going to be six months.

“I had surgery right before school since the Friday before this semester.”

Jiu-jitsu was not the only thing he started practicing when he was 18.

He stated, “I’ve been vegan since I was 18 years old. The thing that made me vegan – I was watching a documentary about factory farms and felt horrible for the animals, but since then I have done a lot of research.” Russell teaches Philosophy B9, which is a course about the theories of the moral status of animals. He also teaches Philosophy B7, Introduction to Logic. The class focuses on the evaluation of arguments to figure out if they are good arguments or not.

“[The class] comes in really handy especially when you’re watching politicians talk. You can learn how full of shit they are. So it actually makes it worse trying to listen to politicians and salesmen and stuff like that because you realize all their arguments are crap,” he explains.

Russell got married last October and is expecting a child in six months.

His hopes and goals are not farfetched as he has already accomplished most of what he has wanted to do with his life.

He said, “As far as career-wise, I’m sort of exactly where I always wanted to be. When I was a student I just wanted to be the person who was getting paid to teach.

“Like, I loved going to school so much I just wanted somebody to pay me to do it. And that’s sort of what I got now, so I’m good. I don’t have any aspirations for like being a dean or president or anything like that.” Russell wants to get a black belt in jiu-jitsu and win a tournament with that belt.

He also wants to have one child.