At the end of this semester, Covenant will not only say goodbye to the graduating class of 2023, but also a handful of faculty and staff who are either retiring or taking new positions elsewhere. Dr. Daphne Haddad, Dr. Tom Neiles, Dr. Heath Garris and Courtney McKenzie are all moving on to new adventures in retirement or career advancement.
For Haddad, who has been teaching at Covenant since 1996, this process has been gradual. After teaching middle school for over fifteen years, Haddad began working in the education department at Covenant and has taught a variety of courses, from Global Trends to Teaching in a Pluralistic Society to Intercultural Experience. She officially retired in 2017 but continued to teach part-time.
In the last few years, Haddad’s work has been primarily focused on the Arabic program, which at one point was a sequence of seven courses. In the past few years, it has been scaled back until “Earlier this semester, I was told that this was the last semester of Arabic,” Haddad said.
Because of her own international background, Haddad has a heart for international students.
“I like to hang out with International students … when the international freshmen students arrive … they all come to my house for dinner,” she said. “That started a tradition of getting to know international students and letting them know that my house is there.”
Even though she will be teaching less next year, Haddad intends to continue opening her home to international students and teaching sections of Intercultural Experience. She also looks forward to traveling, reading and planning for future May Term trips.
For German professor Dr. Neiles, leaving the college is bittersweet as it also marks the end of the German program that he spent most of his career building and investing in. Like Haddad, he was simply informed that his position would no longer be available. “I know these are hard times for the college. Decisions needed to be made. But it was hurtful to me that I wasn’t consulted at all, that I wasn’t included in the discussion.”
Nevertheless, Neiles looks back on his past 23 years of teaching at Covenant with appreciation. He hopes that his students have “enjoyed being stretched, being able to speak in another language, and being able to express themselves.”
In turn, Neiles said that his students have taught him about “The simple things in life. Enjoying being together, having meals together, [and] their appreciation of the simple things.”
As Neiles has more time at home, he hopes he can also take time to appreciate the simple things. But he has every intention of staying busy: for example, he hopes to translate his dissertation from French into English. He also enjoys gardening. “I call it playing in the dirt,” he laughed. “Retirement for me doesn’t mean sitting back. I want to do things. Sure I’m going to rest, but I’m also going to do things.”
For costume designer Courtney McKenzie (‘18), leaving Covenant is about moving on and taking new steps. She has worn a variety of hats in the theater department and art department since being hired after her graduation in 2018 while her costume shop serves as the relational center of the theater department.
While McKenzie has worked on nearly every theater production since she arrived as a student, her most recent project was also the most ambitious of her career: costuming “Hello, Dolly!” with 140 total looks for over thirty actors. “Getting that together was absolutely nuts,” she said. “But also very cool, and I’m very proud of it.”
During her time at Covenant, McKenzie has worked with a variety of work-study students, who have all taught her to stay flexible and roll with the punches. “I hope that students come away from their time with me feeling supported,” she said.
McKenzie plans to move closer to home to live with her sister and jump into a new phase of life. As much as she has enjoyed her time at Covenant, she concluded that “life is about shifts. You can shift and you can shift back … I’m more looking forward to it than I am stressed about it.”
After seven years of teaching at Covenant, environmental biology professor Dr. Garris is also moving on to new career-advancing opportunities at the Au Sable Institute, an organization that Covenant has partnered with for several years located in Mancelona, Michigan.
Because Covenant is one of the institutions that works with Au Sable, Garris does not feel like he’s going far from home. “It felt like the right move to continue to serve within creation care as a Christ-honoring vocation for Covenant students, and students more broadly,” he said. “The beauty of this transition is that I still will see every Covenant College Environmental [Biology] major, because they all go through Au Sable.”
Garris is passionate about lifelong learning and gets particularly excited about student-faculty research. “I like the idea of students and faculty coming alongside one another and working with an expert in a narrow subdiscipline, as students, together,” he said. He hopes to encourage this kind of research as he moves into his new position at Au Sable.
Whether it is asking questions about biological death in light of the new creation or preparing to study the ecological features of Didymosphenia geminata, (conventionally known as “rock snot”), Garris views all of his work, at Covenant and elsewhere, with an eternal perspective. “In the new heavens and the new earth, we still have a job of learning things, which is job security for academics.”
While these are by no means the only four faculty and staff moving on from Covenant following this semester, they represent a selection of the individuals who are tackling new adventures in their professional and personal lives.