In the summer of 2015, Nathan Alleman invited me, his former history teacher, to breakfast at a local restaurant in Harrisonburg. Twenty-two years after graduating from EMHS, Dr. Alleman, now from Waco, Texas, wanted to sit down and thank the faculty in his high school for teaching him how to think critically. It’s a rare moment in a teacher’s career when a former student from over two decades earlier seeks out a venue just to say “thank you.”
After graduation from EMHS, Nathan studied at Temple University, and then transferred to and graduated from Messiah College. His major was Philosophy, with two minors in communications and peacemaking. Alleman found a “wonderful synergy between these three seemingly unrelated areas.” Nathan says that together they gave him a new set of lenses and new languages for understanding the problems of the world. He had no idea where his college studies would take him but he attests that they have served him well in ways he could not have anticipated.
For several years after graduating from Messiah College, Nathan served with Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) in Chicago and Hebron, Israel. Standing and speaking for minority cultures in these two settings helped him understand the way God works in the world and how the kingdom of God is advanced.
After working with CPT, Nathan worked in student life residence at Grove City College and Eastern Mennonite University. Nathan discovered he enjoyed mentoring students, but he also became fascinated with the way universities were set up and run. From these practical student life work environments, Nathan went on to teach and earn his doctorate at The College of William and Mary, graduating with a Ph.D. in Educational Administration.
Nathan joined the Baylor University faculty in 2010. Professor Alleman admits that “Educational Administration” may be the least thrilling combination of words possible, but he finds it exciting to help students in graduate classes develop new perspectives on themselves and their world.
Nathan and Karen, and their daughter Annabelle, live in North Waco, Texas, part of an intentional Anabaptist community called Hope Fellowship. They have chosen to be part of a multi-ethnic and multi-economic neighborhood where they are not sheltered from the daily struggles that face many residents. “Learning to be Jesus in this setting,” Alleman notes, “starts for us in seeing people in need as our neighbors rather than as service projects.”
During our breakfast meeting last summer, Dr. Alleman said that the gift EMHS gave him had little to do with his GPA. Now with tenure at Baylor, the largest Baptist University in the world, Nathan concluded that “at each subsequent level of education I have become more aware of how well I was prepared to critically reflect on the world around me and on my own beliefs as well. These ‘higher order thinking skills’ are what I challenge my graduate students to develop and apply in their work as university administrators. That my foundation in these abilities,” Dr. Alleman concluded, “began in high school was an amazing advantage.”
