NCC professor retires after 39 years

By Emmy Maschke

One conversation with Ray Anschel and it’s apparent he loves the English language. For the past 38 years he has been devoted to English and teaching at NCC, but at the end of the 2007 fall semester Anschel retired.

To put that into perspective that’s one year after NCC was established that Anschel started teaching English. It was a junior college then.

As he enters retirement his teaching career is not quite over. A continuing education course is just one of his new endeavors.

“I’ve got some writing I want to do, and I have got a young horse that needs more time and more training,” Anschel said with excitement in his voice. He admits he has much to learn, from his students and Shadow, his horse.

“Working with this new horse I’ve learned a lot about teaching by being a student,” he added. As he concludes a long and distinguished teaching career at NCC, Anschel has not finished his journey which carried him from Manhattan, New York to Minnesota.

Anschel grew up in Manhattan in a German-Jewish neighborhood along-side Irish-Catholics. The German immigrants in his neighborhood including his family came to this country for one reason, to escape Nazi persecution.

The neighborhood Anschel grew up in was called the Washington Heights Inwood area. “I lived in what used to be called the city neighborhood. It was ethnically divided. That’s where I spent my formative years,” Anschel said. Today that neighborhood is mainly Dominican.

When Anschel came to Minnesota for graduate school in 1968, he was looking for more trees than buildings. He enjoys the outdoors where he can see sky. “And like any kid I didn’t understand what New York really had to offer. As an adult you realize this is a heck of a city. It’s fascinating in that regard,” Anschel said.

During graduate school he wasn’t completely convinced he wanted to teach English. “Medicine was always in the back of my head, when I came out here for graduate school, I still hadn’t shaken it.”

While doing his graduate work, he was also making up the requirements for medical school, working as an orderly at the U of M hospital.

It was the teachers that opened his mind to different books and ideas that finally convinced him to teach English. “I thought how neat it would be to sort of read books and talk about them with students,” Anschel said.

After finishing graduate school Anschel had three job offers, University of Missouri, University of Hawaii and NCC. Hawaii’s funding fell through and he wasn’t impressed with the University of Missouri. “I liked it here, I like the people, so I thought I’d give Normandale a shot,” Anschel said.

It was supposed to be a short term job. He stayed for 38 years. Chuck Chalberg, a history professor, also started that same year. Chalberg has so many books in his office it’s reminiscent of a Barnes and Noble. He and Anschel became longtime friends. “We were both rookies together,” Chalberg said.

Anschel and Chalberg team-taught a class on literature during the Vietnam Era, which was an idea that came from a sabbatical proposal.

Both Chalberg and Anschel thought NCC would be temporary for them. “We came here probably anticipating, initially, that we would not be at a community college,” Chalberg said.
When Anschel started in 1970, NCC was one building called the commons which was where the book store is now. Included in that area was the cafeteria and the lounge for students, faculty and staff. All the teachers shared an office and there was only one phone. As the school grew the faculty went to private offices.

The commons was a place where people needed to criss-cross, share information, stop to have coffee and chat. “Academia would sit and chat with colleagues, yeah I’ll miss that,” Anschel said fondly.

He will miss his colleagues but Anschel loves being in the classroom the most. He enjoys interacting with students during a discussion in class. He has a rough exterior, tough to get through, but listening to him talk about students and teaching it is clear he cares for his students.

In class it’s apparent Anschel is a deep thinker. He forces his students to think as well, about the books assigned. “It’s two things, being able to put worlds before students that they may not have known about or paid much attention to. And then watching what happens when a student begins to discover,” Anschel said.

He enjoys teaching literature the most, exploring humanity and relationships through books. Shakespeare was his favorite class to teach. “It gives us the chance to be better then we were last year,” Anschel said.

Over 38 years Anschel has had many opportunities to better NCC. He was very active on campus, taking a couple turns as faculty president and chair of the English department.

But it’s being in the classroom and the students he will miss the most along with class discussions. “When everything seems to work the way you had hoped, there’s engagement, there’s conversation, there’s give and take. There’s disagreement and there’s the stuff we learned from students because of the perspectives they bring that I don’t have,” Anschel said.

For Anschel, several former students have come back on the scene years later. One is a practicing attorney in the Twin Cities and several became high school teachers.

A teacher seldom sees the finished product of the student. “When building something like a bathroom, I can step back and say, ‘hmm, good job.’ In teaching, except for the ones that come back or demonstrate a change over a course of a term … there’s something tangible, there’s a certain delight,” Anschel said.

Anschel is far from finished teaching. He is now going to teach to a different type of student. This spring he’s teaching a continuing education course. The course is three two-hour classes that have in-class discussion prior and subsequent to seeing a play.

His desire to teach Shakespeare and literature is far from over. He will continue teaching in a small capacity. Anschel doesn’t see this as retirement. It’s a whole other world to be explored.

Anschel’s love of English is definitive upon first meeting him. And he will continue to share that love with those in his classroom, whether at NCC or elsewhere. “I feel a little like Frodo at the end of Lord of the Rings, I’ve been part of a world and part of an age and part of a sensibility whose time is being modified,” Anschel said.