Helping the counseling profession meet its future without losing its heart.

The professor people stay to talk to afterward.

Dr. Michael Jones is a counselor educator, licensed professional counselor supervisor, and tenured professor who has spent his career where the counseling profession is headed next. He was teaching telemental health ethics a decade before the pandemic made it urgent. Today he brings that same early clarity to artificial intelligence, helping counselors engage new tools without surrendering relational integrity.

The headline is literal. In his online classrooms, class ends the way good gatherings end: with the After Party, an open, unhurried space where students stay on after the formal hour to keep talking. It looks casual. It is purposeful, relational-cultural theory put into practice, built on the conviction that connection is what makes learning hold. He wrote about the model in the SACES Newsletter, and faculty across programs have adopted it for their own courses.

His scholarship and speaking center three commitments: ethical grounding, cultural responsiveness, and practical literacy with the technologies entering the counseling room. He is co-editor of Mental Health and the Black Man: A Mixtape Experience of Hardship and Harmony, a former president of both SACES and the Arkansas Counseling Association, and a longtime voice in national conversations on ethics through service on the ACA Ethics Committee.

He is a tenured professor of counseling. For an African American man in the academy, tenure remains rare, and Dr. Jones names that openly rather than treating it as a footnote. His scholarship on the absence of Black men in counselor education began with a question he has carried his whole career: who gets to sit in rooms like this one, and what it takes to hold the door open behind you.

Twenty years of clinical practice sit underneath everything he teaches. That work now shows up differently: in the counselors he supervises toward licensure, in the doctoral students he brings onto publications as first authors, and in the faculty he mentors into leadership. He teaches what he has done and what he is still doing, just from a different chair.

His range is wider than one field. Before the Ph.D. came a seminary degree in pastoral counseling and years of ministry, and that thread still runs through his work on faith and mental health in the Black church. On the other side sits the technologist: a summit host, AI ethics curriculum builder, and consultant to universities thinking through what these tools mean for how we teach and care.

And then there is the laughter. On TikTok he is The Black Mr. Rogers, where more than 40,000 people show up for family-friendly comedy from a man who takes his work seriously and himself considerably less so. It isn't a side project; it's the same instinct that fills his keynotes and classrooms. Humor is how he lowers the temperature in hard conversations, and audiences who come for the laugh tend to stay for the substance.