“I had an opportunity to come back to Covenant in 2003 to work in the advancement office, which was a little bit confusing for me because I really wanted to be a history professor. I felt I would be a better educated professor if I understood what happened on the external side of college,” Derek insists.

The 2012 election that took place recently did not take millions of dollars of campaign funds for candidate Dr. Derek Halvorson. In fact, when the position of the president of Covenant College on Lookout Mountain became available, Derek did not expect to be occupying the not so-oval-office.

“I didn’t think Dr. Nielson would be going anywhere soon. He made the announcement a year in advance and I got a lot of phone calls and emails asking if I was going to come back to Covenant. But I thought Covenant would have such a strong candidate pool that I would not make it to the short list,” Derek says.

He was born in Atlanta but grew up in the San Francisco Bay area as well as Charlotte, N.C. Derek first came to Covenant as a high school senior when searching prospective colleges.

“I was a finalist for a Morehead Scholarship at the University of North Carolina, had a full tuition scholarship at Duke and had an appointment to the United States Naval academy,” Derek states. With a smile he continues, “…and then I had a scholarship of a little Presbyterian college on top of a hill outside of Chattanooga.”

At the time, Navy was the hardest school to get into in the country. Derek turned down Duke, North Carolina and Navy to come to Covenant in 1989.

His father, Steve Halvorson, was a bond and commodities trader working at several large banks, while his mother, Dr. Marni Halvorson, was an educator who recently stepped down as head of a prep school in Charlotte. His parents’ career paths would lead Derek and his three younger brothers unknowingly heading in the same direction.

Derek says, “My brother, Hans, is a professor of philosophy at Princeton. One of my younger brothers, Kurt, is managing a $26 million portfolio in LA and the youngest brother, Hoyt, is managing the Frist family money in Nashville; so two of us went into education and two of us into finance,” Derek says.

All of the Halvorson young men ended up attending Covenant College here in the South. “Mom was a California girl and Dad was a Wisconsin guy, so I am not really a Southerner,” admits Derek, and he quips, “I didn’t try fried okra until I got out of college.”

Having a grandfather and uncles who were officers in the Navy, Derek had ideas of joining as well. “Mom’s dad also became a pastor after the military and my dilemma was could I be a military chaplain and carry an assault rifle?” Derek laughs. “I wrote to the chaplain at West Point when I was in 6^th grade and proposed that question and he was very gracious to write me back!”

Bagging groceries at Harris Teeter grocery store in North Carolina was the first job Derek had before coming to Covenant on the McClellan Scholarship.

“I’d like to think I picked up a genteel Southern accent while growing up in North Carolina.”

“I would have loved to have been a professional soccer player, too. I played in high school and college and a little while after; I played for Chattanooga Railroaders which was sort of the predecessor to CFC here in town,” Derek asserts.

The deciding factor for Derek to attend Covenant was when he visited and stayed in the dorm with students and heard them carrying on a debate that took place in class.

“I could tell that Covenant was serious about undergraduate education. When I visited North Carolina and sat behind a 500-person sociology lecture peering down at the professor way down in the auditorium, I realized the students didn’t know the prof and the prof didn’t know them – and at Duke the prof was more interested in talking about his own research and his own work and didn’t seem nearly as interested in helping students learn,” Derek reveals.

He knew that Covenant was a place where faculty invested in the students and manifests those students who were getting excited and ready to learn.

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