After 36 years of teaching and 21 years of teaching at Millikin, Dr. Anne Matthews is retiring to start a new chapter of her life.
Students and faculty are mourning the loss of Matthews’ presence at Millikin.
Matthews describes her feelings surrounding her retirement as a “bad breakup.”
“It feels like a bad breakup,” Matthews said. “This is great, but I have to go do something else. So I feel all the feels, I mean everything. So, it’s sometimes melancholy and depressed, but also excited.”
Matthews is a well-known and well-loved professor, but at first, she had no interest in teaching. However, her love for teaching grew once she stepped into her first class.
“I walked into my first classroom, in my second year of graduate school, and I was a mess,” Matthews said. “And then we started talking, and that was it.”
She got her PhD in 1995 and started her first teaching job at the University of Missouri.
She eventually left the University of Missouri and briefly worked as a tech writer for IBM.
After she got let go from IBM, Matthews was employed at an HBCU in Tennessee for two years. Once those two years passed, a job at Millikin opened up.
“I read the job description [and was] like, ‘That’s me.’” Matthews said.
She knew Millikin was the place for her.
“It took me a couple of steps to land where I really felt at home, and that’s been here,” Matthews said. “I’ve been here for 21 years, and I got here, and I’m like, ‘I’m never leaving.’”
Matthews is leaving many legacies behind. An important legacy she is passing off is the Long Vanderburg Scholars Program.
“I worked at an HBCU for a couple [of] years, which is where I got immersed in African American literature and also working with underrepresented students, so that was a whole new thing that I was able to bring to Millikin,” Matthews said.
These skills are what helped Matthews develop the Long Vanderburg Scholar Program into what it is today.
Being an LV Scholar is a large accomplishment on Millikin’s campus, and Matthews is the director of the program.
“[The LV Scholars] are the doers, the advocates, and the activists here on campus, and I think they really are relishing that role and looking forward to taking that into bigger spaces,” Matthews said.
This program is named after Millikin’s first two African-American graduates, Fred Long and Marian Vanderburg. To be selected to be a part of the Long Vanderburg Scholars Program, students must show evidence of leadership, commitment to diversity, and community service participation in high school and/or local community organizations.
Although she didn’t start the program, Matthews helped build it into the impressive program it is today.
“[The Long Vanderburg Scholars Program] started out as not really a program at all,” Matthews said. “Underrepresented students would get the scholarship, and that was kind of about it.”
Former Millikin faculty member Linda Slagell put together a committee to turn the Long Vanderburg Scholars Program into something more than a scholarship.
The program started as a one-credit roundtable the LV Scholars had to take every semester. Since then, the program has morphed into an exceptional program that encourages leadership abilities, service that impacts the campus and local area communities, and the exploration of personal and social identity development.
“We got to grow the program in a way that was really good for the students, especially because it gave them not just an academic grounding but [also] gave them a community,” Matthews said.
But Matthews did not update the program alone.
“In 2019, Dr. Ngozi Onoura and I were tasked with reimagining the LV program,” Matthews said. “We worked closely together for two years on creating a more robust curriculum that complemented the social justice focus of the students’ service and leadership. The new program launched in 2021.”
Journalism professor Dr. Scott Lambert and theatre professor Jeff Farber will be taking over the LV Scholars Program in Matthews’ absence.
Not only is Matthews involved with the LV Scholars, but she also teaches many honors classes.
“When I got here, the Honors Program was not at all on my radar,” Matthews said.
But early on in her employment at Millikin, she was asked to teach an honors class and took the opportunity.
“With honor students, I almost feel more like a facilitator,” she said. “It almost felt like I was teaching more like graduate students.”
But Matthews cherishes and enjoys teaching all kinds of students, whether they are traditional students, honors students, or LV Scholars.
Senior creative writing major Rochelle Pense has taken many classes with Matthews. Although Pense isn’t an LV Scholar or an honors student, she enjoys how Matthews teaches her class and how she sets her expectations for each student.
“If you had a class with her before, she knows what you’re capable of,” Pense said. “She does kind of have an expectation for you because she knows what you’re capable of.”
Regardless of her expectations for each student, Matthews prides herself on teaching with compassion.
“I’m a first-generation college student, and so I walk in—and maybe it’s kind of why I’m partial to freshmen—I walk in and I see me, and I walk in and I think, ‘Okay, what did I need when I first walked into my classroom?’ and I needed somebody like me,” Matthews said.
From her first class, Matthews knew she loved teaching because of the students.
“I realized that teaching for me was about the relationship with the students more than anything else, and that helped a lot; it helped me figure out who I was and how I wanted to be in this position,” Matthews said.
Students and her co-workers admire her ways of teaching.
“I think she has that natural affinity for connecting with people, no matter who they are [or] what background they’re from, and I aspire to [be] that, and I try and aim [for] that, but I think she’s over and above a lot of different professors that I’ve seen,” English professor Dr. Tony Magagna said.
Not only is she a loving professor, but she is also greatly skilled in her teachings.
Dr. Michael Hollis-George arrived at Millikin the year before Matthews arrived. Hollis-George admires Matthew’s way of teaching and her sheer knowledge of what she teaches.
“She is one of my pedagogical heroes,” Hollis-George said. “I am in awe of what she does in the classroom [and] what she does with her students.”
The Director of the School of Writing, Languages, and Cultures, and English professor, Dr. Julie Bates, has worked alongside Matthews and praises her ability to accept and change and use it as an opportunity to grow as a teacher.
“She’s been a great model of how to keep innovating through every step of your career and what an impact it has when you have that love for literature and teaching and all of the things she has a love for and the way she passes it along to students, even if they’re not English majors,” Bates said.
When you work anywhere for 21 years, there are bound to be some ups and downs during your time. But even when adversity came her way, Matthews stayed positive.
“She was never negative about anything,” Hollis-George said. “She was always looking at what the next step could be, at what the opportunities were when these things arose.”
Millikin is going to have an impossible task when Matthews leaves: they have to replace her.
“There’s no one like Anne Matthews, so I don’t think we can find the perfect replacement, unfortunately, but we’re going to do our best to bring in a number of people who can fill in some of those holes that she’s leaving behind,” Bates said.
After retirement, Matthews and her husband are planning on moving to California. In her free time, she is planning on doing nothing.
“For me, doing nothing means sitting out on the patio with a cup of coffee and playing New York Times puzzles on my phone,” she said.
But once she gets her much-needed rest, she plans on exploring different parts of herself.
“Maybe I get a part-time job at Target,” Matthews said. “I’m also thinking, given the new administration that is about to take place on January 20th, and given that this new president has openly decided to target California, [I’m] thinking I might get involved politically in some way, not in any kind of official capacity, but I’ll show up to meetings, I’ll show up for protests, I’ll carry signs.”
Even in retirement, Matthews is looking for a way to better the world.
“I feel like we’re all going to miss her very, very much, but I’m holding on and almost living vicariously [through] that sense of, like, here’s somebody who’s literally turning a page, and we’re so used to thinking about retirement as the end of something, and it is, but I think she’s doing it right in my mind, where it’s not just the end of something; it’s the beginning of something completely different,” Magagna said.
