I’ve been exposed to many professors over the years, and I have come to a definitive conclusion: They’re all insane. I mean this in the most fabulous way possible, as I think of some of them as insane in a Albus Dumbledore- or Gandalf-esque amusing, genius-type way, which translates into them prancing around the room yelling Anglo-Saxon poems at their students or telling the same joke three times. There’s something about having studied the same subject for about a thousand years that makes them incredibly interesting, incredibly cool and incredibly deranged.

In a nutshell, I love them.

I’m not referring to graduate students, as they sort of shuffle around the room in a poorly dressed, unassuming or, conversely, overconfident way that seems to whisper, “Like me and give me a good review, despite the fact that I secretly hate you all.” Professors, on the other hand, are badass. They wear sweater vests. They’ve got tenure. They know a thousand facts about one specific subject, and they’re going to attempt to shove them into your brain whether you like it or not. It’s cute when they start talking in that hyperactive way, getting excited about the new dietary guidelines, some scientific discovery or a new way of tracking the demography of Tunisia.

There are two types of professors: the ones who want to engage you in the subject and the ones who would talk about it to an empty classroom. I love them both, the first for being brave enough to try to teach that leggings-clad girl who has blatantly been tapping on her BlackBerry for the past hour, and the second because their love of the subject matter eclipses all else, and we students are coming along for the ride. They don’t need drugs; they’ve got Census Bureau statistics, Celtic coins, sociobiology and telescopes. They’re high on life.

That’s not to say I necessarily like them all because some of them (math professors) think it’s funny to make us buy four $100 textbooks, which I don’t purchase and subsequently have to creepily strain my neck to look at the stranger’s book next to me.

And some of them (business professors) do feel the urge to tell us their life stories as if we should bow down to their inflated egos when they just wasted 20 minutes of class time yelling about what great CEOs they were before they sacrificed it all to enlighten the uneducated masses.

And some of them make us sit through three-hour classes when they could have condensed all of their information into one hour and let us leave early. Others give me a B on my paper because it’s “too journalistic” or tell me that as a sociology major, I will never understand philosophy.

But I do respect them. It takes a lot of time and effort to become a professor and a lot of unconditional love for the subject matter. Hell, some of them even wrote the subject matter. Some of them even care what we think, poor souls, or care about us personally as students, which has to be fighting a losing battle if ever there were one. You’ve got to respect that level of dedication and madness.

So put down the BlackBerry, close the laptops and bear witness to the insanity.

Bethany Wynn is a senior sociology major. She can be reached at wynn at umdbk dot com.