Cynthia Stevens Kent

Criminal justice students at the University this semester get the opportunity to learn from Cynthia Stevens Kent, a state district court judge retired for 24 years and practicing attorney.

This will be Kent’s third semester to teach at the University since spring 2014 when Interim Chair of Social Sciences Dr. Barbara Hart needed someone to fill in for a professor returning to China.

Kent previously taught criminal law, criminal evidence and criminal procedure in both the fall and spring semesters of 2014, and now returns to teach three sections of criminal procedure this semester. 

Two of the classes are in person at the Tyler campus and another broadcasted with the video conferencing tool Zoom, to the Longview campus.

Kent is serving as an adjunct professor, someone that teaches one or two classes per semester, while continuing her private practice as an attorney at the local law firm, Kent, Anderson and Bush. 

Kent and Hart taught a criminal justice class together for graduate students several years ago and remained in contact.

“She [Kent] has more experience than anybody,” Hart said. “In our program we like to have professors with professional experience because it’s a better combination of preparing the student in the classroom for what he or she is going to face in the professional world.”

Throughout her career as both an attorney and judge, Kent said she has also spent time at several judicial and law educational institutions both in Texas and across the country. 

 She taught at Texas College for five years, National Judicial College and the Texas College for New Judges.

At the National Judicial College, Kent taught criminal procedure, criminal evidence and made capital murder seminars put on by the college.

 She taught capital cases, criminal evidence and civil matters at the Texas College for New Judges.

After teaching mostly judges and people familiar with the law, Kent feels that teaching at a college level has allowed her to learn more about teaching a different kind of audience and getting more perspective from them as well.

“It’s a real challenge and very exciting to teach college students,” Kent said. “It makes me feel younger; they’re asking questions that lawyers or judges might not ask, but that’s good because it not only gets me to explore things out of the box to explain things to them, but it reminds me that not everyone is as comfortable in the areas of law that judges might be after so many years on the bench.” 

For senior criminal justice major and pre-law minor Loretta Guzman, having Kent as a professor has allowed her to gain more perspective on the classroom topics since she would like to follow a path similar to Kent’s and become a lawyer.

“She has more experience to contribute to whatever she’s teaching so you can understand her more and you can see yourself in that position,” Guzman said. “I want to be a lawyer. She says email any questions you have so she’s very accessible with her to get whatever information you need.”

The students enrolled in Kent’s courses are mostly juniors and seniors since they are upper-level undergraduate classes, and she thinks they are responding well to the teachings.

“They’re intellectually curious and so they have a lot of excellent questions, interests in various areas,” Kent said. “I think that they’ve received me as an instructor very well, and I hope I’ve given them a lot to think about and hopefully taught them a lot as they look at their criminal justice career in the future.”

In terms of teaching style, Kent said she uses primarily lectures and PowerPoint to teach the class, but engages students with role-playing demonstrations, such as courtroom situations. 

Hart said that one of the first things she hears from students is that Kent is demanding in the classroom, and feels that standards will be kept high for the program.  

“It would be such a privilege to be a student in Judge Kent’s class,” Hart said. “You just don’t get that type of expertise in a regular classroom. She is probably the most organized woman I know. She provides precise information for students, very careful outlines and very well ordered.”

Although Kent brings a large amount of experience to the classes, she does not think being in the field is necessary to teach for college-level students.

“I think my years and decades of experience as a trial judge and doing a large number of felony criminal cases brings a lot of experience and context to the students about how criminal law works actually in the field, in the courtroom,” Kent said.