RETIREMENT SEASON: FAREWELL DR. ANDERSON

Q. What will you miss most?

A. Oh, that’s easy. It’s the people, the students, and the employees. Because education is such an inherently human endeavour, you get into it for the people. You want to help people; you want to be part of the community. You can't be in education for 35 years and not love being around the students, and I will miss that. And then of course the colleagues. Many of them I’ve been around for decades, and they are not only colleagues but also great friends.

Q. If you were a student at Luther, what kind of student would you have been?

A. It’s funny, when I went to high school, I wasn’t any of the things that would characterise the kind of student I would want to be now, which is interesting. I was shy in my school days. I went to Sheldon. You just went to your classes and went home. I played football, but that was about it. In a big school you’re kind of a number, right? If I went to Luther, and my brother and my sister came here, I think what I would want to do is embrace all the opportunities here, both in the classroom and out. I would want to take at least some IB, if not the whole thing. I’d want to join sports clubs and cultural clubs. I’d want to come to events. I would want to be part of the community here. When you come in through the doors and you see an activity, you can feel the community, even if you can’t describe it, and to me that would be something that I would want to be a part of if I was to go back four or five years to my high school years. [Laughter] More like decades.

Q. Do you think that your time and career at Luther has helped you grow individually?

A. Absolutely. It has been one of the best things about the journey. I’ve learned so much. So much from the students, from my peers, from the experience, from the wider community, all those connected with the school, the alumni, the board, the parents, all the various people with whom we are connected every day.

Even now I just learn stuff you’d never anticipate and again that's what you want in school. You want to be in an educational environment in which everybody is learning all the time. If you stop learning you’re dead, right? It is a lifelong pursuit. It is an old cliché (is there any other kind of cliché other than old?) that learning is for life. Sometimes cliches are cliches because they’re true.