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Power couple retires after pioneering in Cambridge

July 01, 2017 - 7 minute read


Bachmans standing

CUI professors Jim and Susan Bachman capped long, illustrious academic careers by becoming the inaugural directors of CUI’s Cambridge program in the United Kingdom for the past two years. There they guided and mentored CUI students at Westfield House, owned by the Lutheran Church of England, a big manor with offices, classrooms, a residence hall and a nearby chapel.


For Jim, it was a homecoming. He attended Cambridge University as a Fulbright scholar from 1968 to 1970 and took a degree in theological studies. This time, as a professor, Jim taught enduring questions in history and Susan taught English. Their fields of study intersected as students learned English in the context of history and vice versa with the added benefit of lectures from leading scholars just footsteps away.

“Students got a good sense of history and English, with the advantage of resources you can get no other place on earth,” says Susan, a professor of rhetoric and former director of the Concordia Cambridge Program.


Both Bachmans grew up in vibrant Lutheran traditions, Jim in the Midwest and Susan in Alabama. By age 12, Jim “had been so immersed in the church’s life that it was becoming a focus for me to become a pastor,” he says.

He went off to Lutheran boarding high school, planning to enter seminary and the ministry. Instead he won a full-ride scholarship to Valparaiso, and there met Susan, a vivacious fellow underclassman and granddaughter of a Lutheran pastor. Susan had entertained ideas of being a brain surgeon because “it was the hardest thing,” but found her expertise in languages instead. 

"I have often wryly thought that teaching reasoning and critical thinking in some ways that kind of teacher is a brain surgeon,” she says.


She went to Valparaiso on a generous scholarship and fell in love with a math and philosophy major (Jim) who told her, “Oh, by the way, I want to be a pastor,” she says. Jim learned he had received a Fulbright scholarship while on vacation with Susan’s family in Florida, and that night, he and Susan walked the beach and mapped out their future together.

That involved Jim shipping off (literally, on an ocean liner) to Cambridge and Westfield House, while Susan, who excelled in English and German, studied abroad for a semester in Germany. Once or twice he hitchhiked down to see her. They were separated for seven months until their wedding.

“We still have those packets of letters we sent,” Susan says. “We numbered them because they got crossed in the mail and the stories didn’t make sense.”


After finishing up at Cambridge, where Susan took educational offerings as well, they returned stateside for Jim’s first call as a parish pastor in a small town in northern Florida. Susan’s familiarity with Southern culture “was very helpful in our first years of ministry,” he says. The congregation grew from 29 members (including babies and children) to 160. To supplement his income, Jim became more deeply involved in the local college, teaching and chairing the department of computer education, as one of the few people around who had built his own computer. (Both Bachmans are HAM radio operators.)

After ten years, he received a call from the district president asking him to be the Lutheran campus pastor at Florida State University in Tallahassee, and while there to earn his PhD in whatever subject he wished.

"I had handed to me an opportunity to develop my academic interests,” Jim says. He chose philosophy and learned that “doing both keeps you grounded."

Concordia Irvine was looking for Christian couples who had professions and families

Campus ministry gave me a well-anchored place from which to appreciate what’s valuable in philosophy and be quite clear about some of the stupidities in philosophy. In many ways, I was trained in helping myself and others clarify what’s going on in serious, complicated arguments and perhaps find ways of making progress. That’s a helpful skill, anyway.”


The 1972 Olympic games in Munich caused a boomlet of popularity in learning German, and Susan, a new mother, was invited by the University of Florida at Gainesville to teach conversational German. 

“The first night scared me to death,” she says. “But it was absolutely thrilling and made think, maybe I can continue and do master’s work.” 

Soon she was teaching one college course, taking two others and driving five days a week with a one-year-old in the back seat.

“It was the hardest academic work I had done. All the lectures were in German,” she says. “I bought a new tape recorder for $300 and asked the professors if I could record the lectures. … I remember sitting in my study learning Gothic verbs and hearing Jim and [their young son] Nathan learning English in the hallway. But I very much learned I loved the classroom.”


After Florida, they returned to Valparaiso where Jim took an endowed chair in health ethics and became an advisor to the Human Genome Project. The federal government had allocated huge sums to mapping the human genome, and legislation mandated that ethicists explore the ethical-political-social implications of the research.

“It was a smart thing to say, We can’t just do straight scientific research and assume everything will stay ethically sound,’” says Jim. “It was a very enlightening thing to be involved in. I’d done plenty of philosophical ethics, but getting focused on practical questions of the health world was my task.”

He and the group grappled with issues such as, if it’s possible to find out early if someone is afflicted by a terrible disease, what if insurance companies get hold of this result? Can they discriminate based on knowledge of someone’s genetic future? Is there a right not to know your genetic future? Should parents be forbidden from testing their children? What if a child reaches adulthood and doesn’t want to know? When is knowledge a valuable thing and not a valuable thing?


The Bachmans came to CUI at the invitation of then-president Jack Preuss, who had seen them teach at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis.

"Concordia Irvine was looking for Christian couples who had professions and families," says Susan. “We came and each had our own areas of work. We have written chapters together, given talks together and done much of our research together.”

“We’ve been very fortunate that things worked out for us to collaborate,” adds Jim. 

Jim says his most fulfilling work at CUI was developing programs to prepare men to become pastors.


“It’s very satisfying to work with men who have a vocation in pastoral ministry and help them prepare for what they’re getting into,” he says.

He points to “ten years in downhome, very practical congregational ministry in the ’70s that kept me grounded. If you’re serious about the Christian faith, that’s ultimately where the action is. If you’re fundamentally concerned with how God is redeeming the world, it’s around the community that gathers around baptism, Communion and the preaching of the Word. Nothing you do in the classroom can be like what’s being done in a congregation.”

Other highlights were developing the philosophy department, watching students get PhDs at various places, and recruiting and developing theology faculty members. When the Bachmans arrived in 2000, there were four theology faculty; by 2011 when Jim stepped away from serving as dean of Christ College, there were nearly twenty.

The church and academic excellence have always been central for us


Susan flourished as a professor of English, department chair and director of the honors program for seven years. Much of her academic career has been about developing strategies to help students thrive. 

"Pedagogy was a big thing for me, to make sure students didn’t come out of class disappointed, like I had been” in some settings, she says. “I had been bored out of my mind in my literature and history classes. I figured it had to be done better. By trial and error I figured out what would be enjoyable.”

She focused on rhetoric and logic the art of verbal persuasion and the art of drawing correct conclusions, respectively which was the subject of her dissertation. That and her effective classroom techniques helped strengthen the English department, especially in the subjects of critical thinking and reasoning. She calls working at CUI “a Godsend.”

 “Concordia Irvine was wonderful for us because we had always taught at different institutions,” she says. “It was a huge blessing and a joy.” 

During her tenure at Concordia, she is happy to have led an ethics bowl team to victory in the quarterfinals against teams like the University of Chicago and Villanova, and developed the honors program so that students were giving talks and writing scholarly papers.


In Cambridge, the Bachmans enjoyed watching CUI students “have enough courage to cut loose from the ordinary in Southern California to spend a semester here interacting with students at Cambridge. They went home with much larger vision of what higher education can be,” says Jim.


Newly retired, Susan looks forward to a favorite hobby, bread-baking, for which she has won many awards and taught classes. They also plan to host retreats, seminars and gatherings of scholars at their home, “to be a gathering place for people who care about matters in the church and in academia,” says Susan. The church and academic excellence have always been central for us and motivated Jim and me.”

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