Dr. Marvin Anderson passed away Tuesday. He was by far the longest serving president of Southwestern Adventist University, in Keene, Texas, serving in that office for seventeen years, from 1984 to 2001. He was the president when I graduated and for many years thereafter.
He was a business teacher, and very oriented toward business management and entrepreneurialism. The book on Marvin Anderson was that he was no one’s idea of an intellectual—serving as an academic dean under Marvin was frustrating, and he went through several in his tenure—but his business and management acumen kept the university on a sound financial footing. Even today SWAU has no significant debt, in contrast to schools like La Sierra, which issued millions in tax-free municipal bonds, forever entangling it with the public weal.
Keeping a small school like SWAU—its enrollment has seldom been above 1,000—open for business and education and all the other things that happen on a campus is no small feat and cannot be taken for granted. The death of Atlantic Union College, the severe struggles of Columbia Union College (now Washington Adventist University) and the closing of the liberal arts portion of Newbold show what a delicate thing is a small private, religiously affiliated college. So Anderson’s success in maintaining the financial health and viability of the school should not be underestimated.
One of Anderson’s many accomplishments was to build a new library, the Chan Shun library. He also established varsity sports teams, starting with basketball—the SWAU Knights—for the first time in the school’s history, a step many conservatives were critical of.
A sad postlude to Anderson’s many accomplishments is that he appears to have died as a result of medical negligence. Although he lived in Keene for more than a decade after retiring from the SWAU presidency, he and his wife Dee Anderson (who also taught for several years at SWAU) moved to southern California a few years ago to be closer to their children and grandchildren.
Last month, his daughter, Amy Anderson Campbell, took Marvin to the Loma Linda University Medical Center to check him out after a blow to the head raised the specter of a sub-dural brain bleed. An IV was inserted into his foot, became infected, and the infection was not treated for several days, apparently sending Dr. Anderson into a downward spiral from which he never recovered.
Amy Campbell is very upset, and is not staying quiet about it.
Here’s a thought: rather than venture into the wilder seas of gender re-assignment surgery—which can never turn a man into a woman, or a woman into man, and hence can never be anything but mutilation—maybe LLUMC should concentrate on basic medicine and patient care?