I am an individual with an unwavering commitment to Christian higher education that spans 20 years. More precisely, I am an educator who holds an unwavering commitment to Union University that spans from 1982 to the present. I believe in what we do at Union and that what we do here matters.

I recall early on standing before a class of nursing students in classroom D-3 in the Penick building (our only building then) introducing them to a new disease called AIDS. I compared the disease to a new disease that emerged during my nursing school days, Legionnaire’s Disease, and told them that soon medical science would understand cause and effect, would identify through culture and sensitivity testing a treatment regimen and would, soon, eradicate this strangely-acquired and confusing syndrome.

Across the years since I have thought often about the HIV lessons I have taught and the HIV patient encounters that have taught us, student and professor together administering care to acutely ill and dying men, women and children. The lessons were exceptionally successful teachinglearning experiences that went far beyond showcasing the scientific method or rationalizing treatment regimens, as intriguing and challenging as those lessons were. HIV was one of my first teachinglearning opportunities. It instructed me as the teacher and forced me as a Christian to look deeper, think more carefully and respond more rightly to hard issues and to the unknown. It showed me the significance of the Christian teacher role in higher education. What caring for HIV patients taught me back then is exactly what I have been trying to teach my students ever since, that in the midst of the confusion, fear and uncertainty that this life promises to provide, we have a source of Truth that brings clarity of thought to confusion, peacefulness and calm to fear and hope in a certain future to hopelessness in an uncertain today. That source of Truth is Jesus Christ, our redeemer and friend.

The subject matter has changed over these 20 years. When organ transplantation emerged during the late 1980s as a viable option for many rather than an experimental trial for a few, students and I spent long hours considering the value and cost of human life and the effort that should be made to save it. We prepared ourselves to support the patient’s right to decide end-of-life care as Advanced Directives came into focus in the early 1990s. In the late 1990s we focused our attention and planning on issues of health and safety in the face of violence among teenagers in our schools. Today we explore SARS and the threat of bio-terrorism, readying ourselves to be a part of the solution when that threat becomes reality. If I am able to serve 20 years more, the subject matter will change even more rapidly than we now envision. Yet, the Truth that bears on the subject matter I love to teach has not changed over these 20 years, nor will it change in the years to come, no matter what the current focus or threat. The students I will teach at the end of my career will hear the same application of Truth that was relevant to the HIV issue at the beginning of my career.

I have chosen to make my life’s work Christian higher education at Union University. I don’t find myself in a classroom nearly as often these days but rather across the table from prospective faculty members who are interested in making their life’s work Christian higher education. Rather than searching for God’s Truth as it relates to the subject matter in which I have prepared myself, I am searching for faculty who will do the same in their subject matter. I am searching for ways to support our current faculty and staff by creating the environments they need to foster their own exceptionally successful teaching-learning experiences in an ever-evolving faith-based, academic learning community.

I expressed to nursing students in 1983 a confidence that AIDS would be a short lived uncertainty. That confidence was misguided. But preparing young men and women to live and serve in an uncertain world by challenging them to explore how our Christian faith can assist them in looking deeper and thinking more carefully and responding more rightly is not misguided. In fact, Christian higher education is well-advised and wise. I have seen its fruit in the lives of Union University graduates, not just as they are graduating but as their lives are being played out over the years since graduation. I call it a competitive advantage in the pursuit of genuine living, living whole and fulfilled lives of service that bring glory to God.

That’s why I believe in what we do here at Union and why I believe that what we do here matters. What are my thoughts on being an educator in Christian higher education? Too significant a responsibility for the complacent, too commanding a call to leave unheeded.

Dr. Sanderson is provost of Union University and a professor of nursing. You may write to Dr. Sanderson at unionite@uu.edu.