Then I came to this little Presbyterian college. The guys in the dorm were having a discussion — it was a debate, really — about the degree to which the Apostle Paul’s understanding of human nature had been influenced by Platonic thought. I thought, man, they’re not having these conversations at North Carolina and Duke.

On March 16, 2012, Dr. J. Derek Halvorson was selected as the sixth president of Covenant College. Halvorson’s tenure will begin July 1.

Halvorson is currently the president of Providence Christian College in Pasadena, Calif. He graduated cum laude from Covenant in 1993 with a Bachelor of Arts in history; he earned his master’s degree from the University of Arizona and a doctorate from Loyola University Chicago, both in history. Halvorson and his wife, Wendy, are the parents of a son and a daughter.

ByFaith editor Richard Doster spoke to Halvorson about his preparation for this new role and his expectations for the college.

As you look over your life and career, how have you been prepared for this job at this time?

My time as a Covenant student gave me an appreciation for the value of a Christian liberal arts education. That, since, has been a driving force for me. My brief career in the financial markets gave me some understanding of how business works; it also gave me a facility with numbers. I was always pretty good at math, but I had never really applied it until then. Suddenly I found myself managing P&L and budgets. I then went to graduate school and got further academic experience. That included time at the University of Arizona, a tier-one research university. There were 40,000 undergrads there, and I saw what a research university is like. I also spent time at Loyola, a medium-sized, urban, Catholic research university. Those experiences not only gave me formal, professional training, they gave me a deeper appreciation for what I had experienced at Covenant.

While I was in graduate school I stumbled across an article by Alexander Astin, one of the dons of American higher educational research and theory. Astin argues that the residential liberal arts college is the most effective model for changing students — not just for disseminating data or teaching skills, but for changing the way people think and live. As a secular researcher, he makes the case that a relatively small, tight-knit residential community — where the conversations that start in classrooms spill over into dining halls and faculty offices and dorm rooms, and where the people you live with are also the people you study with and eat with — is a powerful, formative context. That’s what I experienced as a student at Covenant College.

Before I chose Covenant I remember visiting the University of North Carolina. I went to a class, to a huge sociology lecture where the students peered down at a professor no one knew, where the professor didn’t know the students, and where the students didn’t know one another. It was a lecture hall full of individuals who’d come to have some information thrown at them. Later that night the guys I was staying with had me pumping the keg at a student mixer.

The next day I was at Duke. This time I went to a literary theory class. The guy up front was very intelligent, but the students seemed disengaged. Later, it was back to the dorm for drinking games.

Next, I visited Navy. While I was there the guys I stayed with didn’t crack a book, but they did sneak off campus to watch hockey and drink beer. I began to sense the prevailing themes of American higher education.

Then I came to this little Presbyterian college. The guys in the dorm were having a discussion — it was a debate, really — about the degree to which the Apostle Paul’s understanding of human nature had been influenced by Platonic thought. I thought, man, they’re not having these conversations at North Carolina and Duke. I’m 17 years old, and I don’t know much about college, but I do know that college is supposed to be about the life of the mind, and these guys are serious about it.

While I was finishing my doctoral dissertation at Loyola University Chicago, I came back to Covenant and started doing marketing and communications. It wasn’t what I really wanted to do, but it was paying the bills, and I could get some time off to write. It occurred to me then that I’d probably be a better faculty member if I understood what the marketing people do. After that I stumbled into major gift fundraising. Again, this wasn’t what I planned to do. In fact, I had resisted fundraising for a long time, even though I’d been encouraged to consider it. Eventually, I grew comfortable with the way Covenant thought about raising money. I certainly believed in the mission of the college; so I thought, well, if I can help out while I wait on that academic job, I’ll do it. I ended up enjoying the work because it gave me an opportunity to talk about Covenant.

It was during that stretch that two people, Joel Belz and Frank Brock, both told me they thought I could be a college president some day. I was in Asheville on a fundraising trip, and I stayed at the Belzes’. Joel sat me down at his breakfast table, and he said, “Derek, I think you’ll be the president of Covenant College someday. I want you to have that in the back of your mind as a possibility.” He went on, explaining that he thought God had gifted me in certain ways and given me certain experiences that would make me a good fit for that sort of role.

That was flattering, but if you’re an academic you’re supposed to teach for 15 or 20 years and then become a department chair and then a dean and then a provost, and then you become a president. That’s how it works, or at least that’s how it used to work.

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